40 Year Itch : Sauntering Around Like a European Elvis

For five weeks, Algerian -French singer Sharif Dean's "Do You Love Me?" was the #1 song in the Netherlands. This week in 1973 it also topped the charts in Rio.

The video, below, is a classic time capsule...with Dean sauntering around like a European Elvis and a Joe Flynn lookalike eating a younger woman's corsage.

Dean, a philosophy and literature major, wrote this song.

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40 Year Itch : The Inhuman Showman

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I don't think any album I've discovered this year has given me more pleasure than Human Menagerie, released in November of 1973. Not even Elliot Murphy's Aquashow. And that is saying a lot!

   The Cockney Rebel debut made no commercial impact in America.  The group's biggest hit, 1975's UK#1 "Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)", only managed to sneak into the Billboard Hot 100 for a week at #96. Well I'm here to tell you the Yanks missed out. Big time! 

Somewhere in the same rock and roll universe where the Bowies, The Roxys and 10cc roamed, you'll come across this treasure: an art rock band with an electric violinist ( Joey Ramone's twin?)  playing lead and a singer named Steve Harley (who clearly inspired Bob Geldof)  recounting the lives of friends and associates named Sebastian, Muriel, Loretta and Ruthy. There's a bit of a cabaret feel to the whole thing. And while it shouldn't work. At all. It does on most cuts. Brilliantly.

Harley began his career as a London busker in the 1970's. He tells Acoustic Magazine:

I would busk mainly with the songs I's been writing, which would later appear on the Human Menagerie album. I really enjoyed busking but I never made any money, though other people seemed to. I'd take their spot on the corner and yet I'd get nothing. And it was mostly because they would be doing folk music like "Blowin' in the Wind" while I'd turn up and sing "Sebastian" and "Muriel the Actor", the songs from the Human Menagerie album which no one understood or recognized. I did that for about a year while on the dole, knowing that playing music was a dream that I had to fulfill and something I never really had any doubt about, especially with the arrogance of youth.

Although Human Menagerie failed to chart, Cockney Rebel and, after a band implosion, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel recorded five albums and twelve singles that made the UK charts.

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40 Year Itch : This Week's New UK Hit Singles

   While David Cassidy held the top spot on the UK charts with his double A side single "Daydreamer/Puppy Song", some noteworthy challengers entered the charts on the week of November 10,  1973.

Debuting at #31, Barry Blue, songwriter behind Lynsey de Paul's "Sugar Me", follows up his #2 hit "Dancin' ( on a Saturday Night) " with "Do You Wanna Dance?" which would peak at #7 in the UK.




Debuting at #33, "Helen Wheels" --the first single from Paul McCartney and Wings' Band on the Run.

 

At #36 debuts Eddie Kendricks's American chart topper "Keep On Truckin"



At #47, Peters and Lee follow up their smash hit "Welcome Home" with "By Your Side", which would peak at #39




And finally Alvin Stardust makes his UK chart debut with "My Coo-Ca-Choo", a future #2 hit.

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40 Year Itch : Somebody Bite The Whip

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       When it comes to socially conscious soul music, Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and The O'Jay's Ship Ahoy, released November 10, 1973, stand head and Afro above everything else released in 1973. On songs composed and arranged by Philadelphia International's Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, The O'Jays tackle corruption ( "For the Love of Money" #3Soul/#9 Pop), pollution ("The Air That I Breathe") black-on-black crime ( "Don't Call Me Brother") and slavery ( on the cinematic title track). 

Originally intended for the Shaft in Africa soundtrack, "Ship Ahoy" uses sound effects of creaking boards, wind, sea and cracking whips to take listeners to the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Songwriter Gamble told Mojo Magazine the lyrics are inspired by a visit to West Africa that came several years before Alex Hailey's Roots.

Huff and I both went to Ghana, (to) the slave castle, We stood in the Door Of No Return that led you right to the slave ship and that was it for you, you were done… finished with your family, your children, your wife, just disconnected from life and you we were in chains and they sold you like you was cattle or a donkey or anything.

 Ship Ahoy also offers  plenty of sugar to attract record buyers. The first single, "Put Your Hands Together", has the same catchy, gospel feel as The O'Jays' 1972 #1 hit" Love Train". That song would peak at #2 in the Hot Soul charts and #10 on the Hot 100. 

     Then came "For the Love of Money" with its catchy bass intro and studio-engineered backwards spliced vocals. Thanks to Donald Trump, most people think the song glorifies wealth. It's actually a warning about that "mean mean green", quoting a Bible verse that reads "For the love of money is the root of all evil".

   "Now That We Found Love" became a  1978 European hit for the reggae band Third World. 

   Ship Ahoy is one of the indispensable albums of 1973. 

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40 Year Itch : The Rise of TK Records

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On November 10, 1973 Harry Stone's TK Records, out of Hialeah, Florida,  took out a small  ad in Billboard Magazine celebrating the success of some current singles on the Hot Soul Singles chart including one that peaked at #27 on the soul charts called "Blow Your Whistle" by a band called KC and the Sunshine Junkanoo Band.

Harry Stone had mainly been in the record distribution business when he lost one of his biggest clients during the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic merger. For his next move he turned to two guys in the Hialeah warehouse who didn't know how to read or write music: Harry Wayne Casey (aka "KC") and Richard Raymond Finch (a student recording engineer and self taught drummer). 

      As KC and the Sunshine Band they would record 15 chart hits including five #1 pop hits, the first three hitting the #1 R and B chart as well: "Get Down Tonight" (July 1975), "That's The Way I Like It" (October 1975), "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" (July 1976), "I'm Your Boogie Man" (February 1977) and "Please Don't Go" (August 1979), and "Keep It Comin' Love" (#2 pop and #1 Rand B in July 1977). They also wrote "Rock You Baby" a #1 1974 smash hit for George McRae who had all but given up his singing career to support his wife Gwen.

But even that was a year away. And nobody knew what was coming. So it's just a small ad ( made smaller because of my own technical difficulties)  and T.K. ( named after recording engineer Terry Kane who built Stone's 8 track studio) is just a small label.

 The other singles mentioned in the ad  are actually from other small labels Harry Stone owned. Gwen McCrae, on the Cat label, had a single called "For Your Love" which was stalling at #44. Her "Rockin' Chair" would be a Top 10 hit in 1975.

Latimore's cover of the classic "Stormy Monday" was on Stone's Glades imprint label . It would peak at #27 on the Soul charts.  In 1974 his "Let's Straighten This Out" would top the Soul charts.

   And at #78 another Glades artists, Timmy Thomas, who hit #1 on the Soul charts a year earlier with "Why Can't We Live Together", had released a new single from his follow-up album

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40 Year Itch : Can I Put My Hands On You?

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   Someone's got to come along and say to all of us "all of your ideas about rock and roll, all your ideas about sound, all your ideas about guitars, all your ideas about this and that are a load of wank!"
-Alex Harvey to NME



   Nearly 40 years old, Scotsman Alex Harvey had already played skiffle, R and B and in Hamburg clubs before meeting up with the members of  the prog rock band Tear Gas and forming SAHB, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. In November of 1973 they released their best album, the cult fave Next.

There is something exhilarating about listening to a band just going for it. To hell with people's feelings! To hell with good taste! So of course there is a song with the chorus "Ain't Nothing like a Gang Band to blow away the blues". And there's the unforgettable title track, a tango about visiting whore houses and contracting sexually transmitted diseases written by Jacques Brel ( whose "Le Moribund would be the following summer's big hit as Terry Jacks's "Seasons in the Sun"), performed with astonishing theatricality on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Watch the videos and just try to think of an artist who does a better job of inhabiting his songs.

  But the album's highlight is "The Faith Healer", which begins with two minutes of an electronic loop.  At the 1973 Reading Festival, Harvey's question "Can I Put My Hands On You?" was met with 30,000 fans raising their hands in a frenzy.

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40 Year Itch: Methedrine and Revolution

"The Pink Fairies make me sick"

Peter Jenner, manager of the Edgar Broughton Band

     In November of 1973 a French TV crew captured The Pink Fairies in all their messy, anarchic glory...stomping their way through what I have to believe is a version of "Uncle Harry's Last Freak Out" ( from their debut album) with former Pretty Things drummer Twink who had rejoined the band he founded for a brief spell. The Pink Fairies had their own sets of rules. They believed in free drugs, free condoms and , most revolutionary of all, free concerts that were often performed outside the gates of the big pop festivals.

  Made up originally of former members of The Deviants, Twink and Steve Peregrin Took of T.Rex on guitar, the Pink Fairies went through far too many line-ups for any sane person to keep track.

Perhaps more than the music it was the idea of the Pink Fairies, banned for life from the BBC,  that inspired future punk rockers. Henry Rollins even covered "Do It" , the opening track from the Fairies 1971 album  Never Never Land

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