Top 5: Complications and Hazards

This week’s Top 5 consists of five music-blog posts I’ve collected over the last few days that you really ought to read, if you haven’t already.

I’ve been a fan of the Stepfather of Soul for a long time. When I started this blog, Jason Stone was one of the first people I contacted for advice. Last fall, Jason got an e-mail from a nurse who had found him via Google, hoping he could help her get more information about a patient in her care who said he was a singer named Lattimore Brown. What made this unusual is that most soul-music experts believed Lattimore Brown had been dead for 20 years. Jason passed the message on to Red Kelly at The “B” Side, who had been writing about Brown’s former record label. Red contacted a friend who had once worked with Brown, and together, they went to Mississippi to see if Brown was who he said he was. It’s a story you should read, even if you’ve never heard of Lattimore Brown before now, because getting Brown his history back is a triumph for a couple of dedicated music bloggers. (Part one here, part two here, part three here.)

At Popdose this week, I wrote about July 16, 1971, and that summer’s extraordinary crop of AM radio classics. One song I didn’t mention—because it’s not so much classic as it is head-scratchingly odd, and after a couple of listens, profoundly annoying—is “Do You Know What Time It Is” by the P-Nut Gallery, which celebrates the old Howdy Doody TV show of the 1950s. The song was a modest hit nationally but a Top-10 smash on  WLS. I started researching it, but then I found that The Great Vinyl Meltdown had beaten me to it only a couple of weeks ago. Go read, even if you don’t care about the song. It’s music blogging at its best, because it’s about far more than just music.

Also at Popdose, Jon Cummings greeted the arrival of the deluxe 30th-anniversary CD/DVD edition of Billy Joel’s The Stranger with something less than open arms. Jon claims the album is an artifact of the moment in 1978 when the baby boomers went soft, giving up world-changing in favor of self-help programs. Like almost everybody else, I dug The Stranger back in the day, but I never perceived it as having much to do with the 60s—to me, it seems as firmly anchored in the 1970s as anything in my collection. Regardless, I found Jon’s perspective interesting even as I disagreed with some of it.

As a bit of an iconoclast myself (I have argued on this blog, for example, that Tommy James and Three Dog Night should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), I enjoy the “Pissing Off the Taste Police” feature at Any Major Dude With Half a Heart. The latest edition discusses John Denver. I never bought a John Denver record (the handful that sit on a shelf a few feet from my desk belong to The Mrs.), but I dug a few: “Back Home Again” is one of the best songs anyone ever wrote about returning to a place you love; the Number-One hit “I’m Sorry” slops over from simplicity to inanity, but something about it works nevertheless. Perhaps it’s that Denver seems so pathetic that you find yourself rooting for his girl to accept his apology. It might also be that “Back Home Again” and “I’m Sorry” are two more songs that sound like autumn to me–but July 18 is too damn early to be thinking like that.

Earlier this week, I wrote three posts about our recent trip to California. At about the same time, (Tuesday, actually) Whiteray at Echoes in the Wind went looking for California’s soul. He says, “There are, I am certain, many good things about the Golden State yet today, but its complications and hazards – as viewed here from the Midwest – seem to outweigh the benefits of living there.” But distant looks can be deceiving. If I could live in a place as beautiful as Santa Barbara, I’d risk the earthquakes and the forest fires.