Prove It Every Night

In 2007, when we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a few writers noted that while it’s respected as the greatest Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper is not as beloved by fans as some others, such as the White Album or Abbey Road. It seems to me that Bruce Springsteen’s in a similar boat. Born to Run is respected as a landmark, the breakthrough hit by a major artist, the record that got him on the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously—but Darkness on the Edge of Town inspires true love among fans. Now there’s a document of that love: Photographer Lawrence Kirsch collected fan stories, photographs (taken by fans and his own work), and memorabilia for The Light In Darkness, a book celebrating the album and the tour surrounding it.

In an e-mail, Kirsch told me, “Having attended so many Springsteen concerts since 1975,  I kept meeting fans that all had this incredible sense of shared community. Whether I met them in person, at concerts, through written correspondence or later via e-mails, we all had the same thing in common, this undeniable love and appreciation of Bruce Springsteen’s music. What I thought was missing was a touchstone that fans could contribute to, call their own, and ultimately turn to understand that they were not alone in their passion for this great  songwriter and human being. The cliché I read many times is ‘For the fans, by the fans.’ But is there a more qualified fan base to write about their hero? Since the very beginning, Bruce’s personal interaction with his fans is legendary, both during his concerts and his down time, when he walks the streets as a normal citizen of where ever he may be.”

The stories written by fans, a few bloggers, and some critics include “I was there” tales of particular nights on the road, focusing on some of Springsteen’s most famous shows on the Darkness tour, such as the Agora Club in Cleveland and the Roxy in Los Angeles. Fan-submitted pieces also offer perspectives on the album 30-plus years after its release, some written by fans who hadn’t been born when it came out. (One of the contributors is Dave Lifton of Popdose, who reviewed the book when it first appeared.) The memorabilia—ticket stubs, concert posters, newspaper ads and clippings—offers an evocative look back at the way rock used to be. (A Springsteen show for $6.50? Count me in.) The photographs are gorgeous, capturing Springsteen and his bandmates at a time when they—and we—were young and had the whole world in front of them to conquer.

The Light in Darkness is a limited edition paperback volume, available only online. If you snapped up The Promise, the box set devoted to the Darkness album, you’ll probably dig this book too. To read more about it and get your copy, click here. Order it by the end of this coming weekend and save on the shipping.

Here’s “Prove It All Night” from the Agora show, broadcast live on the radio on August 9, 1978. Lifton calls it “The Night Rock Achieved Perfection.”

A Musical House

I grew up in a musical house. One of the bedrooms is still known as the “piano room,” where my mother’s upright piano has sat since the day my parents moved in, before I was born. I started piano lessons when I was eight, and I learned how to read music a little bit, which helped with my abortive career as a middle-school saxophone player. One of my brothers played guitar, eventually took up the trombone, and played in the band all through high school.  But there was more music in my house than that. Mom and Dad bought records, sang in the church choir (despite Dad’s inability to carry a tune), and Mom frequently played the piano for fun.

This time of year, Mom would play Christmas songs, often from The Christmas Carolers’ Book in Song and Story. Mom and Dad bought Christmas records, too, and we liked to put a big stack of them on the console stereo, filling the house with music while we put up the tree, or decorated Christmas cookies, or just for atmosphere. When I moved out on my own, I started buying Christmas records. The Temptations Christmas Card was first, in 1982. I collected a few vinyl albums during the 80s, most notably the soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas and Phil Spector’s Christmas Album. Once the CD era began, I started buying more; in the download era, my Christmas library has exploded.

Although I am as irreligious as anybody you know, I like Christmas music, even religious Christmas music. I find no inconsistency in this, because I believe that even without Christianity, we would have something like the Christmas season anyhow—a time for expressing our love and appreciation to the people closest to us through acts of generosity and kindness. It would still be a season fired with magic, in which we’re showered with good things for the simple reason that we’re part of a human community. Because happiness has always moved human beings to song, we’d still have music that expresses those emotions. The symbols found in the songs might be different, but the joy would be the same.

What I believe when it comes to Christmas is this: the best “things” with which we are showered in this season are not material objects. Sometimes, the greatest gifts of the holiday season are not presents, but presence. That idea inspires a song that we have posted to kick off the holiday season at this blog since 2008: “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” There is no mightier version of it than the one by Ross Bon and the Mighty Blue Kings. Here’s a live performance from 2009.

More More More

Odds, ends, bits, pieces, seeds, stems, etc:

In the summer of 2010, I researched the history of the Wadena Rock Festival, which brought Woodstock to northeast Iowa in 1970. Last month, I exchanged a bit of e-mail with a reader who was there.

She came to the festival with a group of people from Kansas City who had heard about it on KAAY’s legendary Beaker Street show. When they arrived, they sneaked in through a hole in a fence and were promptly met by “these awful ‘rangers’ on horseback,” she remembers. “They intimidated us, made fun of the guys’ long hair and made sexual comments about the girls. That was frightening, like they would give us a pass if we did something with them.” She remembers the open-air drug market, and a gas mask-style bong somebody bought, as well as performances by Chicken Shack, Rotary Connection, and Johnny Winter. “It was blanket-to-blanket, wall-to-wall people,” she says, although her most vivid memory is of a cloud of Frisbees being thrown in the air at one point. “I was afraid of getting hit by one and not knowing how to throw it back because I was by then in an alternate universe (inside and out).”

In our various festival posts, we noted how brief the era of impromptu mass festivals was. It wasn’t just that authorities used existing regulations or created new ones to stamp them out—rather like authorities today are trying to scuttle the Occupy protests going on around the country, it occurs to me—but that the energy that inspired the festival era dissipated quickly. (It seems likely that the two factors are related, which doesn’t bode well for Occupy.) In any event, “I knew the party was over in 1972,” our reader friend reports. “I went about the business of life, completing my college education and moving out to California.” But the energy lingers, too: “The rocker hippie is still in all of us,” she says.

On Another Matter: Regular readers of this pondwater know that we’re all about 1976, and so we noticed that Andrea True died earlier this month at age 68. Her song “More More More” reached #4 that year, and it can still bring back the humid early summer nights on which it first lit up the radio. What’s not widely known is that the Andrea True Connection hit the Hot 100 three other times in the next two years, although only “New York, You Got Me Dancing” made it back into the Top 40. I’m a fan of “Party Line,” too, mostly because it sounds like six extra minutes of “More More More.” An obit full of fascinating details about True’s career is here.

On Another Other Matter: The announcement that Bob Seger is releasing yet another compilation featuring the same songs he’s reissued umpteen times before and again ignoring his early catalog generated a collective “oh fer chrissakes” from those of us who dig the early stuff. Our friend Jeff at AM, Then FM, decided to create his own Seger compilation, with a little help from some friends. What I hope is only part 1 is here.

On Yet Another Other Matter: I have started a new feature over at WNEW.com called “World’s Worst Songs,” in which I am trying to prod the readership into action by saying uncomplimentary things about songs and bands people like. The feature launched a couple of weeks ago with Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” and took on the Beatles’ “Mr. Moonlight” this past weekend. I hope you’ll keep an eye out for these posts via my Twitter feed or at the site, and comment if you’re inclined to.

A Buffet in Between

Over at WNEW.com today, I briefly retell the story of the Thanksgiving morning, 30 years ago now, on which I got a phone call from an angry listener near the end of my radio show, demanding to know why I hadn’t played any Thanksgiving songs. It was mainly because there aren’t very many. Halloween has produced its fair share of songs, and Christmas is responsible for thousands of them. But Thanksgiving rarely represents much of a muse for songwriters. I’m not sure whether that’s a cause of Thanksgiving becoming a mere speed bump on the way to Christmas, or an effect of it.

There are lots of songs that invoke thanks, and I list a few in my WNEW post. But there are not very many that deal specifically with the Thanksgiving celebration itself. The day’s iconography, turkeys, corn shocks, and Pilgrim hats, doesn’t lend itself to imagery like Christmas does. Watching football does not inspire songwriters like happy children’s faces do. The Macy’s parade lacks the thrill of Santa coming down the chimney. Nothing rhymes with cornucopia.

That is not to say nobody ever tried. Singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has two songs that fit this day. “Suddenly It’s Christmas” humorously captures the too-early start and too-hectic nature of our modern Christmas celebrations. And although I am long past weary of the difficult-family-relationship trope in popular culture, “Thanksgiving” offers a vivid description of an unhappy family, and happier times.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all, and thanks for your continued support of this Internet feature.

Happy to Be Here

We have been in pre-holiday mode around the house this week. Regular readers may remember that pre-holiday mode is not much different than our regular mode, except that we don’t feel guilty about the remunerative labor we should be doing but are not. For example, I spent a whole morning screwing around with this post, because this Thanksgiving marks the 40th anniversary of an odd event that’s fascinated me for years.

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving in that year, a guy named Dan Cooper got aboard a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon, for a 30-minute flight to Seattle. After takeoff, he told a flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase. He asked for $200,000 and two parachutes. The plane landed in Seattle, Cooper got what he wanted, and the plane took off again. Cooper instructed the pilots to head generally southwest toward Mexico City, but at the minimum air speed and at no more than 10,000 feet, and to leave the rear door open and the exit stairway down. About 30 minutes after takeoff from Seattle, the pilots felt a bump, apparently caused by the weight shift when Cooper jumped out of the plane and into history.

You do not remember when Dan Cooper hijacked the plane and jumped out. The guy you remember is named D. B. Cooper. The process by which Dan Cooper—the name under which the man’s ticket was purchased—became D. B. Cooper is unclear. Walter Cronkite called him “D. A. Cooper” in a broadcast the next night, but by the time the wire services picked up the story on November 26, D. B. is how he was known, and it’s how he’s been remembered ever since. D. B. Cooper is a better name anyhow, more befitting the enigma to which it’s attached.

Cooper became famous as someone who had audaciously outwitted everybody and got away with it.  But as much as we’d like to think that he made it to Mexico and spent the rest of his life happily drinking margaritas and banging senoritas, that’s not the way to bet. The FBI has insisted for 40 years that he probably didn’t survive the parachute jump, and about $6,000 of his cash was found along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington, in 1980. But nothing like a body has ever been found. Several people have been fingered as, or claimed to be, Cooper, but the FBI’s case file remains open.

Like other folk heroes, D. B. Cooper was honored in song. Within a couple of weeks of the hijacking, a songwriter in Washington state named Judy Sword wrote “D. B. Cooper, Where Are You?” Singer-songwriter Tom Bresh cut a version of it that got a wee bit of airplay without charting early in 1972. In 2000, singer/songwriter Todd Snider put himself into the middle of the story on a song from his album Happy to Be Here. The performance below is from 2008.

There will be a brief post here tomorrow, so stop back.

The Rangers Waltz

Imagine that you are a young person of high-school age growing up in rural Wisconsin during the late 1940s. Your social life consists largely of piling with your friends into somebody’s 1930s-vintage roadster and heading to a game or a dance. Dance bands would not be playing rock ‘n’ roll yet; neither would they be playing the nascent R&B form, not in the lily-white regions of the upper Midwest. They wouldn’t be jazz bands, either—the swing era was over and bebop was not music for dancing. In the upper Midwest, the top dance bands would play mostly old-time music: lots of polkas and waltzes, with a few mazurkas and schottisches thrown in for the dancers who really knew their stuff. The stars who filled the halls included Frankie Yankovic and the Yanks, Whoopee John, Lawrence Duchow’s Red Raven Orchestra, Louie Bashell and His Silk Umbrella Orchestra, and others forgotten now. When I began plundering my father’s record collection over 40 years ago, they were among the artists I found there.

I am told that as a toddler, I referred to old-time music as “cow polkas,” and there was a good reason for that. Our hometown radio station played old-time music in the early morning (on a show called “Chore Time”) and in the early evening, so we would often hear it blasting on Dad’s barn radio. Mom liked it too, and if the TV was on after supper, it usually went off at 6:00 so she could hear the old-time show. Once I discovered my own music on WLS, old-time music seemed pretty square. But I was still absorbing a lot of it by osmosis, and 40 years ago this fall, one song in particular would have been impossible to escape: “The Rangers Waltz” by the Mom and Dads.

The Mom and Dads were not strictly an old-time group—they were a dance band from Washington state: Doris Crow, Quentin Ratliff, Leslie Welch, and Harold Hendren. They prided themselves on being able to play any sort of dance music, from swing to old time and maybe even a little denatured rock ‘n’ roll by the time that became a thing. But in 1971, they had an honest-to-god pop radio hit.

Allmusic.com says that “The Rangers Waltz” was their very first recording. I suppose it could have been, although given their deep roots in the Northwest, I am guessing they had been playing it for a long time before they committed it to vinyl. The story goes that a radio station in Montana was the first to play it, and the group became popular in Canada as a result. In the States, “The Rangers Waltz” spent five weeks on Billboard‘s Bubbling Under chart, reaching #101 on January 1, 1972. Much of the airplay it got in America came on country stations, although it didn’t crack the country top 40.

The most amazing chapter in the Mom and Dads’ story would happen a few thousand miles from Washington state, however. “The Rangers Waltz” was released in Australia in 1972, and it was a monster. It clocked in among the top singles of the year down there and became, according to a 1974 article in Billboard, the largest-selling single in the history of the Australian music biz up to that point. It was so big that the Mom and Dads were booked on a tour of Oz, although they were reportedly reluctant to go, for a couple of reasons. They had no interest in what a record-label executive called “the glamor places,” and Doris Crow was 69 years old at the time.

The Mom and Dads recorded a lot of albums over the years, until Leslie Welch died in 1983. And somewhere in the house I grew up in, on a shelf or in a box, tucked away and long forgotten, is a copy of the album containing “The Rangers Waltz,” a song my mother adored 40 years ago and could not get enough of. Here it is. The video will give you a headache, so just click, listen, and remember a time when this sort of thing was also pop music.