Cookin’ With Leftovers
I always have a few drafts on file—ignored fragments or one-paragraph ideas that never spawned a second paragraph. Every now and then I go through the file, piece the fragments together, toss them with some scraps of new material, and voila! Instant post.
For example, last winter I was all ready to write about one of the great one-hit wonders, Teegarden and Van Winkle, but whiteray over at Echoes in the Wind posted on them while my draft was still in the can. Several months having passed, which is equivalent to a year or two in Internet time, it’s probably safe to mention them here, so off I go.
David Teegarden (drums and vocals) and Skip Knape (keyboards, bass, and vocals) were a couple of Tulsa guys who migrated to Detroit and made five albums. Around the time of the fourth one, they fell in with Bob Seger. Both played on his 1972 album Smokin’ O.P’s.; Teegarden became a member of the Silver Bullet Band and played on Stranger in Town and Against the Wind. And that’s all I know about them, other than the fact that “God, Love, and Rock and Roll” is one of the more obscure Top 40 hits of all time. I still have the 45 I either got for Christmas or bought around Christmastime in 1970, and it’s on a couple of vinyl anthologies I own, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else. T&VW’s failure to return to the charts might have had something to do with their choice of followup single, which was called “Stoned on the Love for Jesus. ” A trade-magazine ad for the single said it “reveals that getting stoned doesn’t always depend on what you put in your pipe.” Although it was released smack in the middle of the Jesus Movement of the late 60s and early 70s, it also landed at the precise moment the Nixon FCC was cracking down on drug-related lyrics.
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the multi-day festival has made a comeback in recent years: Coachella and Bonnaroo have become a very big deal, as has SXSW in Austin. While doing research one day last year, I came upon this astounding newspaper ad for “the 1st annual 3 day Midwest Rock Festival” at State Fair Park in Milwaukee. It starred, among others, Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin, Joe Cocker, Jethro Tull, Delaney and Bonnie, John Mayall, the MC5, the Bob Seger System, Johnny Winter, and Jeff Beck.
Wow.
For what it’s worth, bootlegs of the Zeppelin and Blind Faith portions of the event are fairly easy to find online: the whole Blind Faith show is here on a single, low-fi mp3. There was a second festival in August, billed as Phase II, which had a lineup featuring far fewer Hall of Famers, but including Taj Mahal, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Illinois Speed Press, and Soup (who would, eight years later, play the post-prom party at my high school).
So there are the leftovers. Here are a couple of tasty new links for you to sample over at Popdose: a review of Don Felder’s book, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles, which is apparently not as scandalous as it started out to be, thanks to the legal settlement that permitted it to be published in the first place, and Jason Hare’s latest Chart Attack, which goes back to this week in 1985. I’ll have more to say about that week next week.
“God, Love, and Rock and Roll”/Teegarden and Van Winkle (out of print)
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »