The best music blogs feature interesting perspectives and good writing—but we can’t fairly deny the main reason most people frequent them: mp3s. I haven’t been posting many lately; I’ve been spending my time instead gassing about radio topics and YouTube videos, but I intend to make it up to you with this Forgotten 45 mp3 post-o-rama-spectacular.
“Young Hearts Run Free”/Candi Staton. When Candi Staton was 17, she was going to run off and marry Lou Rawls, only to be talked out of it by her mother. She later married soul singer Clarence Carter. She began scoring hits on the R&B charts in the late 60s, including covers of “In the Ghetto” and “Stand By Your Man,” but it would be the summer of 1976 before she climbed into the Top 40. “Young Hearts Run Free” was one of the last Southern soul records to grace the pop chart—a bit of a throwback even then—and it remains a great example of the sound that came out of Rick Hall’s great FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, during the high soul days.
“Noah”/Bob Seger System. A couple of weeks ago I posted a 1969 Bob Seger single, “2 + 2 = ?” and “Death Row.” Both songs were unlike the Seger we would come to know in the 1970s. So here’s another from 1969, but one that sounds more familiar: the title song from his second album. Noah is one of the stranger albums in Seger’s catalog, because it featured a second lead singer. Stories vary on what happened: Either Seger’s longtime producer, Punch Andrews, brought Tom Neme into the band, or Seger himself hired Neme, either because he believed he couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time, or because he’d had some sort of breakdown and wanted the help. Neme was featured on one side of Noah. Some sources claim that Neme tried to take over as bandleader after that; others, including Neme himself, say that he was merely filling a void that Seger himself was unwilling or unable to fill. In any event, Seger briefly quit the band entirely shortly after Noah was released, but quickly returned to fire Neme and restore the natural order. “Noah” is one of the few songs Seger wrote for the album.
“Tarkio Road”/Brewer and Shipley. Like plenty of aspiring musicians in the 60s, Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley moved to California, fell in with the L.A. scene, and made a couple of albums. (They also made some high-profile friends out there: Jerry Garcia, Paul Butterfield, and the Jefferson Airplane’s Spencer Dryden would perform on their albums in the early 70s.) But in 1969, they moved home to the Midwest. Fooling around backstage before a show one night, they knocked off a song called “One Toke Over the Line,” which turned into a Top-10 hit. The followup to “One Toke” was “Tarkio Road,” inspired by their frequent trips to a college in Tarkio, Missouri, not far from their Kansas City-area base. It was released in the summer of 1971 but didn’t make the Top 40. Brewer and Shipley are said to have made it onto another famous list in 1971: the Nixon Administration’s “enemies list.” It makes for a good story, but I can’t find their names on any of the published lists. Similarly, they’re often cited as one of the artists accused of performing drug-oriented music by Vice President Spiro Agnew, but Agnew made his most famous comments on the subject months before “One Toke” reached the radio.
As is my custom when I post a number of tracks, I won’t be leaving these up for very long. Grab ‘em while you can.
“Young Hearts Run Free”/Candi Staton (buy it here) (Warner 8181, chart peak #20, August 21, 1976)
“Noah”/Bob Seger System (out of print) (Capitol 2566, did not chart)
“Tarkio Road”/Brewer and Shipley (buy it here) (chart peak #55, June 20, 1971)
Filed under: Forgotten 45, Tracks
“Young Hearts Run Free” Candi Staton is now a favorite on many adult easy-listening radio stations.