Know By Livin’

I can’t remember the first time I heard Blood Sweat and Tears’ “And When I Die.” It must have been sometime in the early 1970s, when BS&T was still frequently on the radio.

I’m not scared of dyin’ and I don’t really care
If it’s peace you find in dyin’, well then, let the time be near

That seemed pretty odd to me. How could someone be unafraid of dying—and even go as far as to wish the time was near? I tried not to think about what it implied.

Eventually, BS&T ‘s music got too old for Top 40 and A/C and they were relegated to oldies stations, and apart from “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and “Spinning Wheel,”  their songs were rarely anthologized. I’ll bet I went a decade or more without hearing “And When I Die.” But then came the day I heard it again.

If it’s peace you find in dyin’ and if dyin’ time is near
Just bundle up my coffin ’cause it’s cold way down there
I hear it is cold way down there, yeah
Crazy cold way down there

I was past 40 years old now, much different from the person who’d first heard the song, and I couldn’t believe how different it sounded to me.

And when I die, and when I’m gone
There’ll be one child born in this world to carry on, to carry on

It was like learning that a knick-knack that had sat on a shelf for years was actually a valuable relic. It took on a significance I never knew it possessed.

Now troubles are many, they’re as deep as a well
I can swear there ain’t no heaven but I pray there ain’t no hell
Swear there ain’t no heaven and I pray there ain’t no hell
But I’ll never know by livin’, only my dyin’ will tell, yes only my dyin’ will tell, yeah
Only my dyin’ will tell

When I was first hearing the song, I still believed in Heaven, Hell, God, all of it. By the time I reached my 40s, I believed in none of it—but I also believed, as I do today, that we’ll never know by dying. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said something like, “Where we are, death is not; where death is, we are not.” I don’t believe we’re going to perceive what’s happened to us, or even that something has happened to us. We’ll just go and be troubled no more, and that sounds like peace to me.

Freed from the need to live in preparation for where we think we’re going after life is over, why wouldn’t we want to get the most out of the only world we know?

Give me my freedom for as long as I be
All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me
All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me
And all I ask of dyin’ is to go naturally

The phrase “no chains on me” is a phrase of the time in which Laura Nyro wrote “And When I Die,” although the sentiment is timeless.  And the wish to go naturally is something that’s existed in all of us since each of us figured out that there are nastier ways to go.

But the most profound wisdom in “And When I Die” is this:

And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone
There’ll be one child born in our world to carry on, to carry on

So there I am, a man in his 40s, hearing a familiar song transformed, and being transformed by it. Why yes—if it’s peace you find in dying, well then, yes, let the time be near. All I ask of dying is to go naturally. And when I’m gone—when each of us is dead, dead and gone—there’ll be one child born in the world to carry on. The children that follow us might tread more lightly than we, they might be wiser than we, and they might acquire the vision and the wisdom to solve the problems our generation lacks the will to face.

Far from being odd—or scary, or delusional, or demented—”And When I Die” is actually a damned optimistic song.

Out of My Mind, Back Soon

It had to happen, I suppose. I write a post praising XM Radio’s Deep Tracks channel and almost instantly I find out that many longtime and former XM subscribers think that channel (and XM in general) is not nearly as good as it used to be before the merger with Sirius. (I concur on some of this, actually—the XM classic jazz and blues channels are not nearly as good as their Sirius equivalents. ) Beauty, beholder, yada yada yada—and a reminder that every era is eventually going to seem like the good old days to somebody.

On to the business of the day: In my other life (as distinct from the ones lived in this blog and on the radio), I’m a freelance writer, and right now I’m a freelance writer on a deadline, which leaves me less time to fool around here. I hope to pull something together over the weekend to appear here Monday. To get you there, and maybe beyond there if need be, here are a few things worth reading at sites worth checking out in detail.

30 Days Out has some suggestions for future Super Bowl halftime shows. All of them should happen, but only one of them has a realistic chance—because there’s no more natural venue for that band than the overblown spectacle that is the Super Bowl.

Songs of the Cholera King talks about unusual associations evoked by pop songs. We may never know why certain songs strike us as they do, and we can’t always figure out why they stay with us—but that’s part of the fascination of listening.

I’ve recently started reading The Love Hate Society regularly, and you should too. The top post over there today is about songs that didn’t win the Best Song Oscar, compared to the crap that did.

If you are on Twitter, you should start following Richard Metzger, who is forever posting fascinating links to Dangerous Minds—or just hie thyself over to Dangerous Minds on a regular basis, however you choose to get there. Start with this oddball 1967 clip from I Dream of Jeannie starring Boyce and Hart—and Phil Spector.

That’s all I’ve got, and all I’ve got time for. Now, a word from our sponsor:

There’s more about the game here, and more along the lines of that video here—more than enough to entertain you for as long as necessary.

Serendipity From the Sky

I put the satellite radio back in my car a few weeks ago. My presets were right where I left ‘em, although the channels are different since I dropped my subscription at the end of 2008. When Sirius and XM merged, duplicated channels were taken off the service. Most of the channels I listened to regularly as a Sirius subscriber have been replaced by XM channels.

After the merger, the Sirius deep-cuts classic rock channel, called the Vault, was replaced by the XM Deep Tracks channel—which is vastly superior. The Vault provided plenty of depth, but without breadth. More than once I would exasperatedly tune away as the channel played yet another tune by the Who, David Bowie, or the Doors, who often seemed to be the only artists on the channel. Deep Tracks, meanwhile, goes all over the place—in the last few days I’ve heard people like McKendree Spring, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and lots of others whose names I know but whose music I do not. The selection is deep and wide, but not self-consciously obscure—it doesn’t shy away from onetime hit singles that have been forgotten, or the ignored tracks from famous albums. (It served up some of the most amazing Christmas music I’ve heard on the radio, ever.) Deep Tracks also features Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour and Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure show, and the entrancing on-air work of Earle Bailey, a 40-year veteran of album-rock radio who’s also the channel’s PD.

Last Friday was Richie Havens’ 70th birthday, and Deep Tracks treated listeners to a birthday salute featuring several songs, some better known than others. First up was “Handsome Johnny,” from his 1967 debut album Mixed Bag. It’s a powerful anti-war song famously performed at Woodstock.

The Deep Tracks set also featured “Nobody Left to Crown,” from the 1977 album Mirage, a song I’d never heard, which includes the following bit of wordplay:

Home, home on the range
Where the fear and the antidotes play
Where seldom is heard an encouraging word
And our leaders do nothing all day

The set closed with Havens’ version of “Here Comes the Sun”—which I bought on a 45 in the spring of 1971 before I knew the Beatles’ version. It’s a beautiful performance; the radio version cut the introduction down to four seconds, but the 45 I bought starts with at least a minute of Havens’ percussive guitar before he begins to sing. Make me say so, and I’ll tell you I prefer Havens’ version to the one on Abbey Road. Here’s a live TV performance from 1971:

The Havens birthday set, which also featured several interview clips, is an example of the sort of serendipity that keeps Sirius/XM Deep Tracks listeners hooked. To a degree unparalleled by any station I’ve ever heard, you simply have no idea what’s coming next—and you want to stick around to find out.

They’re Playing Our Song Again

The first radio countdown I ever heard was the WLS Big 89 of 1970. I’d already discovered the station’s weekly Hit Parade surveys by then, but the idea of playing survey songs on the radio in reverse order was new to me. (Hearing the whole year’s top songs on a single show was riveting.) If WLS ever regularly counted down its weekly survey, I never heard it, although its great competitor WCFL did—for a brief time, Larry Lujack did it on his Friday afternoon show. I used to rush home from school to hear the end of it, and at least once, I gave my little brother instructions on how to tape it for me. And there was always American Top 40, when I could catch it.

Certain countdown moments remain remarkably sharp: seconds of reaction remembered an unconscionable number of years later. Shock when “You’re So Vain” topped the Big 89 of 1972, terrible disappointment when Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”  clocked in way down at Number 65 on the Big 89 of 1974, and downright anger when “Philadelphia Freedom” came in at Number 5 for 1975 and not Number One, as I expected. (“Love Will Keep Us Together”? Are you shitting me?)

To listen to any countdown week to week is to experience the life cycle of hit records in their natural habitat. You can’t do it with the weekly rebroadcasts of American Top 40, because the shows skip around from week to week, but also because the life cycle of the records on those shows is settled history. But when the countdown is truly new each week, like the Casey shows were back in the day, the chart habitat is as unpredictable as nature itself. In the summer of 1976, I rooted for “I’ll Be Good to You” by the Brothers Johnson as it rose up the chart, and I still remember the disappointment when, after three weeks at Number 3, Casey announced that it had fallen back to Number 9. I knew in that moment that it would never hit the top. Survival of the fittest.

Tom Wilmeth is a writer in the Milwaukee area, a longtime countdown addict who still listens to them today—a surprising number of them, across a surprising variety of formats. Rock ‘n’ Rap Confidential sent along Tom’s latest blog post in its intermittent e-mail missive last week, and if you’ve ever loved a countdown, you should go read it now.

Other Recommended Reading: If you’re interested in a virtual tour of the radio complex where I work, click here. Mid-West Family Broadcasting was recently featured as Tower Site of the Week by Fybush.com. (They are, among other things, the people who run the fabulous Tophour.com.) You’ll learn more than you might care to know about transmitters and stuff, but you’ll see that I work in a beautiful facility for a company with a distinguished history. (H/t to our friend Yah Shure, who loves all that transmitter stuff.)

A few words about the football are on the flip, if you care.

If It’s Too Cold, You’re Too Old

It may be my imagination, but the frenzy over the Packers/Bears NFC championship game on Sunday seems a little bit muted. After the 2007 season, when the Packers faced the Giants for the right to go to the Super Bowl, it seemed like Super Bowl week up here. Perhaps that was because everybody assumed the Packers were going to win the game before it happened—only they didn’t, and the Giants went on to win an unlikely Super Bowl title, beating the allegedly invincible New England Patriots. This time, nobody knows how the game is going to turn out. The most I can muster is quiet confidence, but I don’t know. Fans of both teams, if they’re honest, won’t be surprised either way, win or lose.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been plenty of woofin’ going on. WOGB, the oldies station in Green Bay, has dumped all of its records by Chicago from the rotation, according to Chicagoland Radio and Media. Politicians are making their wagers, and office workers are dressing in Packers or Bears garb today.

Digression: Do you wear your favorite team’s colors on gameday, whether you’re going to the game or not? The Mrs. and I got into the habit back in the 90s when we couldn’t get the Packers on local TV and had to watch the games at our neighborhood sports bar. She stopped doing it, however, due to a run of games several years ago. During that stretch, when she wore her gear, the Packers seemed always to lose, and when she didn’t, they won—so from that day to this, she doesn’t wear the colors on gameday, although she’s in them today.

If your team is out of it this weekend, how you react depends on who you are. If your team never makes the playoffs, you can watch for pure enjoyment of the sport and the spectacle. If your team got knocked out in this year’s playoffs, it can smart a little, but the games are watchable. And if you are a Minnesota Vikings fan, you suffer the torments of the damned. Normally, you would root against either of your most-hated rivals, but in this game, you can’t root against both of them. So what the hell do you do? I’ve heard that KFAN in Minneapolis, which would normally carry the national broadcast of the NFC championship game, was going to dump the game in favor of broadcasting one of the Vikings’ recent NFC title games. But the Vikes’ recent NFC championship game history has been awful—they haven’t been to the Super Bowl since 1977, their fourth trip in eight seasons back then. And since they lost all four of those, there’s little glorious history for KFAN to choose from. A blog post from a Twin Cities newspaper about the stunt has been pulled, so I suspect KFAN will probably carry the game after all.

Digression #2: Here is an explanation of why Vikings fans should root for the Bears. Short version: Because the Packers are more likely to defeat either the Steelers or Jets in the Super Bowl and the Bears are more likely to lose to either of them, a Bears win Sunday is the best outcome for Vikings fans. I admire the logic, if not the outcome.

On the flip, music, and my predictions, if you care.

Mephisto, Kirshner, and Me

When you are a kid, the hours after bedtime are uncharted territory. Back when bedtime was 8 or 8:30, my family would sometimes visit a cousin of my father’s, who had kids about the same age as we were. Our parents would play euchre and visit, we’d fool around doing kid stuff—and sometimes we wouldn’t get home until after midnight. Geek that I am, one of the memories I have of those nights is seeing what was on TV so very late—Surfside 6 and Hawaiian Eye, the sort of thing a small-market local TV station might have run after the late local news on a Saturday night around 1968 or so.

When I got a little older, late-night TV became part of the weekend routine. After the 10:00 news on Friday nights, the fun started with Creatures From Dimension 13, the umbrella title for the horror movies on a Rockford station. I saw ‘em all on Creatures From Dimension 13: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, all the classic Hollywood monsters. At midnight, you’d flip over to Channel 15, because if you were a kid in southern Wisconsin and you were up at midnight on Friday night, there was only one show you were going to watch: Lenny’s Inferno. The show had started as Ferdie’s Inferno in 1966, and changed its name sometime around 1970 or so. It was named in both cases for its sponsor, first Ferd Mattioli and later for his brother Len, owners of local TV and appliance store (now a chain) American TV. The show featured plenty of horror movies, but also episodes of Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and even Flash Gordon serials. It was hosted by the ghoulish Mr. Mephisto, who improvised humorous bits around commercial breaks, sparring with a disembodied voice that came from a box on his desk. The show ran until 1982.

There were other options on other channels. Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert was one—a show people are recalling this week with the news of Kirshner’s death at age 76. While The Midnight Special is more celebrated, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert was just as important in bringing rock to TV, particularly acts that weren’t going to make it onto prime time.

According to the episode list at IMDB, the show premiered in September 1973 with the Rolling Stones, the Doobie Brothers, and Earth Wind and Fire. Jim Croce was booked for an October episode but died in late September, so the show on which he was to appear was turned into a tribute to him. In the first season alone, the show welcomed a range of acts from Van Morrison, Johnny Winter, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to Foghat, Kansas (a Kirshner discovery), and REO Speedwagon; the latter three were  not yet the major stars they would become. But the show was even more eclectic than that: Steeleye Span, Weather Report, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, Fancy, and Fanny appeared in the first couple of seasons, the latter two on the same show, of course. The show’s most infamous guests appeared early in 1975—Black Sabbath, a band that was never going to get on TV anywhere else in the States, played for nearly half-an-hour. Sometimes acts performed especially for the show (Sabbath did), and sometimes the show featured performances filmed elsewhere.

Starting with the third season in the fall of 1975, the show booked fewer rock acts—it was more likely to feature pop and disco acts, although rock bands still appeared. There was also a weekly standup comedy spot. The show’s greatest coup in this period was to premiere a couple of clips from Led Zeppelin’s concert movie The Song Remains the Same, which may have been the first time Zeppelin ever appeared on an American TV show. But even if Rock Concert never again rocked as hard as it did during its first two seasons, it kept putting on acts you wouldn’t see anywhere else, until it went off the air in 1982.

I wrote about Kirshner at WNEW.com in November 2008, and was pleased to receive an e-mail from his assistant thanking me for the piece and promising to show it to him. I’ll say again that it’s an injustice that Kirshner isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a contributor. For the children of the 1970s, few did more for our rock and roll education.