Time Slips Away

The laptop music stash is up over 9,400 songs now, all on a little portable drive I can slip into a shirt pocket. (In many ways, the 21st century is really, really cool, although I don’t understand the attraction of Twitter.) Late yesterday afternoon while I was killing time waiting for The Mrs. to get home from work, I fired it up on “shuffle,” and here’s what came out.

“The Second Arrangement”/Steely Dan. From a collection of demos and outtakes made during the recording of Gaucho. The story is that much of the final version of “The Second Arrangement” was accidentally erased by an engineer before the album was completed. The full-band version of the song that’s found in the outtakes (posted below) has an abrupt ending, but I suspect it’s an earlier version and not the final one, which was supposed to have been three-quarters destroyed. The band didn’t recut it, and it was eventually replaced on Gaucho by “Third World Man”—the tune of which appears among the outtakes with different lyrics and the title “Were You Blind . . .”

“For All We Know”/Carpenters. I love those old-time Top 40 segues that go from one thing to something entirely different, although we’d probably have used a jingle back in the day.

“Passionate Kisses”/Lucinda Williams. The original recording of the Mary Chapin Carpenter hit from the early 90s.

“Fire Eater”/Three Dog Night. I have decided that the best way to hear Three Dog Night is in compilation form. Each of their studio albums from the first half of the 1970s, enormous sellers though they were, seems to have at least one track that’s either painfully dated or downright stupid. I’ve deleted a few from the drive, even though I like to keep complete albums together whenever possible. “Fire Eater” is not one of the casualties, however—it’s a hard-rockin’ fuzztone guitar and organ-driven instrumental from the 1971 release Naturally.

“I Never Cry”/Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper scared the hell out of American parents in the early 1970s, but if he’d undertaken a deliberate campaign to become less scary, he couldn’t have done better than to record “I Never Cry” and “You and Me” a few years later. I don’t know the reason for the change: Maybe it was his reinvention from bandleader to solo performer, or maybe it was just the alcohol. Here’s a live TV performance from the 70s, in which his shock-rock persona fails utterly to match the tone of the song, and he looks physically ill.

“Funny How Time Slips Away”/Al Green. Perhaps the second-most famous song from the pen of Willie Nelson next to “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away” has been recorded by non-country stars from Perry Como to Bryan Ferry, but nobody ever did it better than the Reverend Al.

“Whose Hands Are These”/Neil Diamond. From last year’s Home Before Dark, which takes Diamond about as far from “Cracklin’ Rosie” as it’s possible to go, but I like it.

“Godwhacker”/Steely Dan. From a bootleg recorded live in 2003, when the band was out in support of Everything Must Go—an album that has been pretty much ignored on succeeding tours in favor of oldies from the 1970s. God knows I love me some Steely Dan, but even I don’t really need to hear “Hey Nineteen” again. Here’s a live “Godwhacker,” also from the  2003 tour:

“Sunday Morning People”/Honey Cone. From a vast compilation of Honey Cone tunes going far beyond “Want Ads,” which proves that the Invictus/Hot Wax production machine manned by ex-Motown producers Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland was a mighty thing indeed. Even the album tracks were often deeply funky.

“I’m Not My Brother’s Keeper”/Flaming Ember. Another one from the Invictus/Hot Wax factory. Flaming Ember was a white group from Detroit who had a handful of records make both the pop and soul charts between 1969 and 1971. Their 1970 hit “Westbound #9″ was bigger, but this made the Top 40, too. YouTube DJ Music Mike has more.

“The Second Arrangement”/Steely Dan (bootleg)

There’s a Strangeness About This Day

You can have M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy, Cheers, Seinfeld, or any of the other contenders in the race for greatest sitcom ever if I can take Sports Night, the ABC series created by Aaron Sorkin, which ran from 1998 to 2000. It was Sorkin’s first series, in which he honed the dense and speedy style of television that flowered fully on The West Wing. If you can keep up with them (and not everyone can), his shows make for incredibly entertaining television that holds up over multiple viewings. And technique aside, Sorkin’s ability to create interesting characters is unparalleled—even his peripheral characters tend to be more fully drawn than the leads on many other programs. Sports Night was set behind the scenes of a nightly ESPN-style sports highlight show, but as the network promos had it at the time, “it’s a show about sports that isn’t really about sports at all.” Instead, it focused on the professional and personal relationships among the anchors, producers, executives, and assistants who made the show. It was frequently hilarious, but it could also be touching and thought-provoking—and, like its dialogue, would occasionally whiz from silly to serious at a pace that made some critics wince, but it’s one of the reasons Sorkin fans dig his work.

Sorkin frequently used pop songs to punctuate storylines, everything from Susan Tedeschi’s “It Hurts So Bad” to “Afternoon Delight.” An episode titled “Eli’s Coming,” broadcast for the first time 10 years ago tonight, is set on a Saturday afternoon, when the Sports Night crew is anchoring college basketball, but all is not well on the set and behind the scenes. Producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) is in trouble with co-anchor Casey McCall (Peter Krause) over an incident a few days earlier in which Casey felt she inappropriately placed her personal life ahead of her professional responsibilities. Co-anchor Dan Rydell (Josh Charles) can’t figure out why the woman he’s involved with is at the office on a Saturday, or why one of the other anchors keeps claiming he slept with her in Spain when he’s never been to Spain. And Isaac Jaffe, the show’s executive producer (Robert Guillaume), is late getting back from an out-of-town trip, and nobody knows where he is. As the complications multiply, the following scene ensues:

DAN: There’s a strangeness about this day.  Eli’s coming.
CASEY: Eli?
DAN: From the Three Dog Night song . . . Eli’s something bad. A darkness.
CASEY: “Eli’s coming, hide your heart girl.” Eli’s an inveterate womanizer. I think you’re getting the song wrong.
DAN: I know I’m getting the song wrong, but when I first heard it, that’s what I thought it meant. Things stay with you that way. . . . They say it’s always calmest before a storm, but that’s not true. I’m a serious sailor. It isn’t calm before a storm. Stuff happens. . . . Eli’s coming.

Sorkin, who wrote the episode and frequently isolated life’s little truths in quick scenes like this one, is absolutely right: We don’t always hear things the way they are intended, and right or wrong, those interpretations stay with us. A song can become a recurring nightmare if the circumstances are right. And by the end of “Eli’s Coming”—the best episode in the history of the series—Dan’s fears are confirmed.

The episode is on YouTube in three parts; part 1 is here and part 2 is here.  Dan’s speech about “Eli’s Coming” begins at about the one-minute mark of part 2. The payoff is in part 3 starting at the 6:15 mark. But watch the whole thing. You won’t be sorry.

I bought our first DVD player a few years back when Sports Night first came out on DVD. Last fall, it was rereleased in a new 10th-anniversary package that replaces the original bare-bones release. Even though I’ve seen the entire series all the way through at least four times, it’s still a blast to watch. No other show on TV has ever made me want to crawl through the screen and join its world more than Sports Night does. Like right here, from the first-season episode “Dear Louise.”

“And in that moment, Dan was reminded once again why he wanted to write in the first place. It’s for the same reason anybody does anything: To impress women.” True dat.

“Eli’s Coming”/Three Dog Night (buy it here)

Top 5: Don’t Know Much

It’s spring break, 1978, sometime around the end of March. A bunch of us are on a school trip to Quebec City, the culmination of four years spent studying French. Our group—maybe 20 of us, but I forget—are staying in a semi-rundown hotel, which we have to ourselves. There’s only enough hot water for a couple of showers each morning, and the competition for it quickly becomes fierce. The day after we arrive, it snows over a foot, and we learn that sidewalk shoveling isn’t as high a priority in French Canada as it is back home. Getting out is difficult, and I go nearly two full days without eating an actual meal, only snacks from a nearby grocery. My on-again, off-again girlfriend and I are both on the trip. It’s been a miserable spring—we’re unhappy together, we’re unhappy apart, and neither of us quite knows what to do about it. We are off again when the trip starts, but as the week goes on, the utterly predictable begins to happen.

I’ve brought a radio along—of course—and we’ve discovered a French-language Top 40 station on the AM band that calls itself Super Radio Quatre-Vingt-Douze (which is approximately how you’d say “the mighty 92″ en français.). It’s playing the Art Garfunkel/Paul Simon/James Taylor version of Sam Cooke’s “(What a) Wonderful World,” which we’ve adopted as our anthem for the week.

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took

Our first night in town, a few of us go to a restaurant and try to order in French. As soon as one of us stumbles, the waitress switches to English, and we are pretty much done speaking French after that.

Here are some other tunes on the radio that week:

“I’m Gonna Take Care of Everything”/Rubicon. In which Three Dog Night meets the Doobie Brothers. Group leader Jerry Martini had been in Sly and the Family Stone; bassist Jack Blades and guitarist Brad Gillis went on to form Night Ranger.

“The Name of the Game”/ABBA. More than any of the other songs on the radio that week, this puts me back into the room in that little hotel, which I shared with three other guys. The radio was on a lot, because there was nothing but French-dubbed black-and-white movies on the only TV channel we could get. (“The Name of the Game” is also a record very much unlike everything else ABBA did.)

“Falling”/LeBlanc and Carr. From the middle eight:

Fall and the springtime
Were like in-between times
You’re here and then you’re gone away
Oh I just wanted to say
Won’t you please, please stay

“The Circle Is Small”/Gordon Lightfoot. A song about two people who know they are breaking up but who can’t quite seal the deal. And so the radio comments on our lives while we’re living them, yet again.

If it had been utterly predictable that we’d get back together on the trip, it was just as predictable that we’d break up again when we got home, and we did. And not for the last time, either.

“I’m Gonna Take Care of Everything”/Rubicon (out of print)

Greatest Misses

On a freezing February night in 1986, Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to the Earth. We had dinner in the oven when The Mrs. suggested we go out to see it, so I said we should go later. Except we didn’t, not that night or any other night. And since Halley’s Comet isn’t due back until the summer of 2061, I’ll probably never see it now. Of all the big events I’ve missed, that one tops the list. But here’s Number Two on my list of Greatest Misses: A few years back, the Funk Brothers played Summerfest in Milwaukee, and I missed that, too.

The Funk Brothers, of course, are the studio musicians who played at Motown during its golden era. They were profiled in the 2002 film Standing in the Shadows of Motown, which finally gave them the wider recognition they’d been receiving from music geeks for many a year. With the death of drummer Uriel Jones earlier this week, the number of Brothers continues to shrink. There were more Brothers than the film profiled—biographer Allan Slutsky lists upwards of 50—but Jones was one of the three longest-tenured drummers of the bunch, playing from 1963 to 1972. He’s most famously heard on the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and some sources say he played on Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” as well.

What made Standing in the Shadows of Motown so touching was seeing the joy it gave the Brothers, many of whom had left the music biz behind years before, to be treated like stars at last. Uriel Jones was one of them. After Motown left Detroit for Los Angeles, he stayed behind and did some session work, most notably on Dennis Coffey’s 1971 hit “Scorpio,” but then Jones, who was only 37 years old in 1971, decided to find something else to do with his life. He eventually opened a home-remodeling business.

An edition of the Funk Brothers is still playing, although bassist Bob Babbitt and guitarist Eddie Willis are the only actual Brothers involved. They were in Milwaukee again late last month with Ray Parker Jr., who was briefly a session musician at Motown himself. But the odds that more than a couple of them will ever play together again are growing slimmer by the day.

And if there’s a show (or some other one-shot historical event) you’re sorry you missed, please note it in the comments below.

“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”/The Funk Brothers (bootleg)

Boomer

Sometimes, a blog post that starts out to be one thing ends up as something else. The other day I was in the car when “Judy Mae” by Boomer Castleman came on. A blogger’s subconscious is always scanning for topics, so I immediately started thinking that “Judy Mae” would be a good subject. Later that afternoon, back home at my desk, I started doing a little research on the song, a pure one-shot that peaked at Number 33 in Billboard during June of 1975. What I discovered was that while Boomer Castleman may have scored only once, he had more than one shot during an interesting career on the fringes of the bigtime.

Owen “Boomer” Castleman spent much of the 1960s in orbit around the Monkees. He had been in a band called the Survivors with Mike Nesmith, and was later employed as a staff songwriter at Colgems, the Monkees’ record label. Given the success of the Monkees, Colgems and Don Kirshner wanted to expand the Colgems brand to other audiences, so they created a band for Castleman and his songwriting partner, Michael Murphey. The Lewis and Clarke Expedition, with Martin as Travis Lewis and Castleman as Boomer Clarke, was intended to appeal to rock fans with its psychedelic edge and a few Native American elements. But their lone album, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, released in 1967, didn’t appeal much to anybody—at least not enough for people to buy it. Neither did it get much promotion from Colgems, which was consumed with the Monkees. The album failed to chart, as did a couple of singles that followed it, and before 1968 was long gone, so was the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. However, Colgems wasn’t ready to give up on Castleman and Murphey just yet. In 1969, the company developed a TV pilot called The Kowboys, which was an attempt to to bring young, Monkee-style chaos to the western genre. The pilot didn’t sell, although it was broadcast in July 1970.

Castleman continued his musical career as a session musician and singer after that, finally scoring his lone hit as a performer in 1975. He would produce Meri Wilson’s “Telephone Man,” a novelty record that was all the rage for about five minutes in the summer of 1977. Eventually, he operated a couple of record labels. Castleman’s erstwhile partner would score his own hit song in 1975: “Wildfire.” After modifying his stage name to Michael Martin Murphey, he would hit the country charts a few times in the early 80s as well.

Castleman was also a bit of a tinkerer, apparently. In the late 60s, he had come up with a device that allowed a guitar player to bend notes on an acoustic or electric guitar in the same way notes could be bent on a steel guitar. According to his website, the Bigsby Palm Pedal was invented by wrapping a coat hanger around a whammy bar and nailing it to the guitar.

So anyway, “Judy Mae.” It’s about a 17-year-old boy whose widowed father marries a younger woman and the fatal complications that ensue. And as it turns out, it’s only one of the things Boomer Castleman did.

“Blue Revelation”/Lewis and Clarke Expedition (out of print, but check it out here)
“Judy Mae”/Boomer Castleman (out of print)

Say the Name

I love me some Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds. It’s fun to say. It feels good rolling off your tongue. Go ahead, try it now. Pretend you’re a disc jockey: “Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds.”

Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds was (were?) a trio: Dan Hamilton, Joe Frank Carrollo, and Tommy Reynolds. They formed in Los Angeles in 1966 to record “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In),” an instrumental based on an Alka Seltzer commercial. The song was a one-shot hit in the States, but the T-Bones scored a couple other hits in Japan, and toured in both places before going defunct at the end of 1967. A couple of years after that, producer Steve Barri heard a songwriting demo that Hamilton, Carrollo, and Reynolds were shopping around Los Angeles and decided that the trio’s sound was right for a song his main project, the Grass Roots, had turned down. The song was “Don’t Pull Your Love,” written by the renowned team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. The reformed Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds took the slickly produced “Don’t Pull Your Love” into the Top 10 during the summer of 1971. (The success of it caused the Grass Roots to leap on the next Lambert/Potter song they were offered, which turned out to be “Two Divided by Love”; Lambert and Potter would also write “One Tin Soldier,” “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” and “Baby Come Back,” to name a few.) A debut album followed, containing a second single, “Annabella,” which missed the Top 40.

In 1972, Tommy Reynolds wanted out so that he could form his own band. He was replaced by Alan Dennison, but the group’s new record label didn’t want to change the name. So Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds it remained, even on their 1975 Number One hit “Fallin’ in Love,” and on “Winners and Losers,” a fine single that made it to Number 21 in January 1976. Finally, the record company relented and for the 1976 album Love and Conversation, the group was billed as Hamilton, Joe Frank and Dennison. It didn’t matter. The album wasn’t a hit, and the group disbanded for good in 1980. Dan Hamilton died in 1994.

Everybody knows “Don’t Pull Your Love” and “Fallin’ in Love,” and everybody should. They’re two of the finest examples of radio pop perfection the 1970s had to offer. “Winners and Losers” (hear it along with “Fallin’ in Love” here) is a record more people should be familiar with. But it’s “Annabella” that’s stuck in my head the longest. As a snapshot of AM radio balladry at a precise moment, the fall of 1971, you can’t do better.

“Annabella”/Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds (buy it here, but you’d better be really serious about having it)