40 Year Itch: Under the Sun

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   Alan Price, the former keyboard player with the Animals, followed up his O Lucky Man! soundtrack with Between Today and Yesterday, an autobiographical album he re-recorded four times before Warner Brothers finally released it. The album is broken up into two distinct sides. One marked Yesterday and the other marked Today. 

   "Jarrow Boy" was the UK#6  hit single but "Under the Sun" is the song that caught me by surprise on a drive home the other day. Price's voice breaks as he sings a lovely song of farewell. "Don't cry" he sings repeatedly. Dare you not to. Coldplay should cover this. This, unfortunately, is the only YouTube video with the song.

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40 Year Itch: Down in Groover's Paradise

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I has an opportunity to visit Dallas earlier this month. My conclusion: I never again want to get closer to Dallas than a flyover in a DC 9 at night. 

    But since my college days in New Orleans, when I'd run across the Vaughan brothers, Charlie Sexton, Zeitgeist,  True Believers and the long legged pianist Marcia Ball, I've always been curious about Austin. How did this city become a cultural oasis in the heart of Texas? 

    In a recent interview during the musical onslaught that is SXSW, KSJR-FM program director and Austin taste maker Jody Denburg told David Dye of the World Cafe about the early days of Austin's "great progressive country scare" that peaked in 1974 with the releases of Doug Sahm's Groover's Paradise and Willie Nelson's Phases and Stages. Other Austin artists included Roky Erickson , Jerry Jeff Walker., Michael Murphy and Asleep at the Wheel. They were drawn to the Austin by cheap rents, clubs like The Armadillo and 50,000 college students who wanted to hear good music and drink cheap beer.

   Denburg picked the title cut from Sahm's Groover's Paradise to play because it was "written about Austin. It sums up that time in Austin. Even the cover of the record...the black and white pencil artwork from Kerry Awn sums up that era in the 70's."

    For the album, his first for Warner Brothers, Sahm recruited the Creedence Clearwater Revival rhythm  section, drummer Doug Clifford and bassist Stu Cook. Aside from the laid back, good old  Texas-style country tunes, there's a Tex Mex instrumental called "La Cacahuata" ( The Peanut). 

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   But it was Willie Nelson who personified the era. His Fourth of July picnics were orgies of great music, good pot and topless chicks. Musically, Nelson wanted nothing to do with traditional country. He followed 1973's Shotgun Willie with the concept album  Phases and Stages, recorded in Muscle Shoals with R and B producer Jerry Wexler. Phases and Stages documents the break up of music star's marriage and contains the concert staple "Bloody Mary Morning".

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40 Year Itch: Checking in with the Pinner Pop Star

"I could fart and reach Number 1"
-Elton John

   At some point in 1974, probably when Elton's Greatest Hits, Caribou and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were all riding high on the US charts, Elton John's records accounted for 2 percent of the world's record sales.
   He spent much of March touring Australia and New Zealand
   His concerts opened with "Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" and closed with "Crocodile Rock" and "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting". Elton also introduced fans to a new song called "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me".
 


  Elton and his spectacular costumes ( like the black Lurex jumpsuit decked out in fluroscent balls) drew record crowds: 14,500 in Perth. 19,000 in Melbourne. 25,000 at Sydney's Randwich Racecourse . That's twice what David Cassidy drew.
  In April , after cancelling his British and European tours, Elton recorded "Pinball Wizard" for the Tommy soundtrack. In 1975 the single would peak at #7 in the UK .

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40 Year Itch: Ups and Downs

On March 16, 1974, beleaguered President Richard Nixon appeared at the inaugural show of the new $15 million Grand Old Opry where he praised country music, saying that it "radiates love of this nation and patriotism". He also played with a yo-yo and performed three tunes at the piano, including "Happy Birthday" to First Lady Pat Nixon.

    In fewer than 5 months Nixon would get drummed out of office thanks to the Watergate scandal.

 Minnie Pearl also performed on opening night.

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40 Year Itch: Can You Love A Virgin Man?

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  On his second album since retiring from the Miracles, Pure Smokey, Smokey Robinson finds some sweet grooves. Especially with the single "Virgin Man" which, in retrospect, may be the best song from 1974 you never got around to hearing. It hit #12 on the R and B charts but peaked at only #56 on the pop charts.         Robinson knew he was taking a chance writing a song called "Virgin Man" for the over-sexed radio listeners of the 70's.

"Virgin Man" was an idea that I wanted to write about because no one had. It's taken for granted when a guy reaches a certain age, he has "done it" and if he hasn't there's something wrong with him. That's just not true. It's a taboo subject. Maybe the public as a mass couldn't relate to it.

Smokey would get back to his hit making ways in 1975 with  A Quiet Storm and the single "Baby That's Back-atcha".

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40 Year Itch: Competing with the Joplin Poltergeist

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    When former Stones the Crow singer Maggie Bell finally released her first solo album, Rolling Stone Magazine made it the lead review of an issue that also included Van Morrison's It's Too Late to Stop Now and Deep Purple's Burn. Bell had won recent UK polls for best female vocalist and had often been compared to Janis Joplin, "among rock's most powerful necrophiliac myths" as writer Dave Marsh put in.

    With Jerry Wexler producing, Queen of the Night makes a strong case for Bell. Though my favorite cut is "As the Years Go By", Marsh prefers Bell's cover of the John Prine song "Souveniers".  Marsh goes on to say "If Maggie Bell makes another album this good, her problem will become living up to her own reputation".

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40 Year Itch: Gonna Rip It Up

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OK. So I was drunk. When it's Errol Flynn, all those showbiz writers say "Those were the days when we had Sinatra and Errol Flynn, socking it to the people." I do it...I'm a bum

-John Lennon

This week in 1974 John Lennon's lost weekend hit its low points. First, at a dinner in a Santa Monica restaurant with May Pang and Jesse Ed Davis, Lennon emerged from the bathroom with a kotex on his forehead. The three went to the Troubador where, even more drunk, Lennon asked a waitress "Don't you know who I am?" The waitress snapped back "Yeah, you're some asshole with a Kotex on his forehead."

On March 12, Lennon and Nilsson returned to the Troubador where they drunkenly heckled Tommy and Dickie Smothers in front of such luminaries as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Peter Lawford. They were ejected from the club and Lennon got into a tussle with a parking attendant as flashbulbs popped.

The next day Lennon and Nilsson sent the Smothers Brothers flowers and a note of apology. Actress Pan Grier also received a note:

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