We’re in pre-holiday mode again around here. Granted, that isn’t much different than our regular mode. The big difference is that we worry less about the remunerative labor we should be doing but aren’t.

I was thinking the other day about Thanksgiving of 1966, the year I was in first grade. That was the year I got kicked in the shin on the playground and somehow got an infection, and had to spend hours sitting around with my leg elevated and hot towels on it. I missed a couple of days of school, and I couldn’t go to Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s, either. My mother stayed home with me and my baby brother, placating my disappointment with board games and kindness while my father went to the dinner, taking my four-year-old brother along.

My family would alternate Thanksgivings, spending Thursday with one set of grandparents and Sunday with the other, flipping the order the next year. On my mother’s side there were cousins to play with, including a girl cousin one year older, on whom I had a tremendous crush. When we celebrated on my father’s side, it was in a lower key—he’s an only child, so no cousins. But time with my grandparents was never wasted, although honesty compels me to report that I may not always have felt that way then. Now, of course, it’s a different story, with all four of them gone.

I’ve got no good radio tales about Thanksgiving, at least none that I haven’t told before, but who knows—after tomorrow, I might have some more. I’ll be on the air Thanksgiving Day for the first time in at least 12 years, hosting Magic 98’s Thanksgiving Special from 6 to 9 in the morning (US Central). That gives me plenty of time to head home, pack the car, and get to my brother’s house just in time for kickoff. The Packers are playing the Lions, and dinner’s not until after the game. Our family’s not the only one scheduling the day around the game, for this is Wisconsin, and it’s what we do.

If everybody shows up, there will be 11 around the table—Mom and Dad, their three boys, three wives, and three grandchildren. One of my nephews is in first grade, like I was the year I missed Thanksgiving with my bad leg. And the world keeps turning, year by year.

Lest you think I’m rushing the season, I want you to know that the following (which I’ve posted before) isn’t a Christmas song, really, although it comes from one of the best Christmas albums you’re ever going to hear. It’s about being reunited with our loved ones, and how much that matters.

Enjoy your holiday, and thanks for reading this blog.

“Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday”/Mighty Blue Kings (buy it here)

There’s a thin line between history and oblivion. Cross it, leave a mark, and even if it’s a small one, it will stand for all time. One of those lines is the last slot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Lately we’ve been looking into some of the records and performers who just squeaked past it. This is the second part of the list of one-hit wonders whose only chart hit peaked at Number 97.

“Tell Her”/Dean Parrish (7/23/66, two weeks on chart). Parrish made some singles in the mid 60s and worked as a session player, allegedly alongside Jimi Hendrix, Santana, and Bob Marley, before beginning an acting career. Britain’s Northern Soul fans discovered his work in the mid 1970s, although he was supposedly unaware of his British popularity for quite a while, and it would be 2001 before he performed over there. “Tell Her” was a hit in the States as “Tell Him” by the Exciters; Parrish turns it into show-band boogie.

“Dommage, Dommage (Too Bad, Too Bad)”/Paul Vance (10/8/66, two weeks on chart). Vance has appeared in this feature before, as co-writer and performer of “The Chick” with Lee Pockriss. “Dommage, Dommage” was recorded as a demo to be shopped to other performers, but the response from the people at Scepter Records was so strong that the label decided to release it. A version recorded by Jerry Vale rode the chart at the same time, eventually reaching Number 93.

“Fortune Teller”/The Hardtimes (1/7/67, two weeks on chart). In 1964, the Rolling Stones did “Fortune Teller,” a song written by one Naomi Neville, actually a pseudonym used by Allen Toussaint. The Who recorded it too, on the Live at Leeds album. The Hardtimes were from San Diego, and they became one of the house bands at the Whisky a-Go-Go in Los Angeles before making a single album, Blew Mind. They frequently appeared on Dick Clark’s TV show Where the Action Is, where they performed “Fortune Teller.”

“She’s About a Mover”/Otis Clay (9/7/68, three weeks on chart). One of Chicago’s great deep soul singers, Otis Clay cut his version of “She’s About a Mover” at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals shortly before joining up with producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records in Memphis. The Sir Douglas Quintet did the most famous version of “She’s About a Mover”; Clay’s most famous song, which didn’t chart for him, is probably “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” which was covered by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.

“Home to You”/Earth Opera (4/26/69, one week on chart). In the late 60s, a Boston-based record producer named Alan Lorber started hyping the city’s “sound” as a marketing concept. “The Bosstown Sound” became the target of derision after its first wave of releases proved to be less-than-great, but the fact remains that Boston produced a fair amount of interesting music in the late 1960s. Earth Opera made some of it, featuring bluegrass whiz Peter Rowan, an alumnus of Bill Monroe’s band, and David Grisman, later famed for his collaborations with Jerry Garcia. The rambling “Home to You” is a countryish rock number that leads off their second album, The Great American Eagle Tragedy—which strikes me as mighty good.

“Big Bruce”/Steve Greenberg (8/9/69, three weeks on chart). This is a parody of Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” and you might be able to guess precisely how the parody unfolds without ever hearing the record, provided you remember how the name “Bruce” was once so frequently used in popular culture as shorthand for being light in the loafers. (Before Bruce Springsteen’s leap to stardom made the name respectably masculine.) “Big Bruce” may have seemed hilarious 40 years ago, but now it’s just stupid.

In the next installment, whenever we get around to it: one of the stranger TV-star hits of the 70s and Britain’s answer to Janis Joplin.

One Other Thing: The Mrs. and I spent much of last weekend hanging with whiteray and the Texas Gal in the wilds of central Minnesota. Photographic evidence of Blog Summit and Beer Spree II is still in the camera, but whiteray’s narrative of events is here. Many thanks for the hospitality as always, you two.

“Home to You”/Earth Opera (buy their two albums in one package here)

Hello again, music lovers. It’s time for another edition of whatever we’re calling this feature in which we look at records that peaked near the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100. This time, it’s Number 97. Between 1961 and 1977, 19 records topped out at 97. We’ll take six of them today and the rest at some future point.

“Here’s My Confession”/Wyatt (Earp) McPherson (5/29/61; two weeks on chart). Talk about obscure: Wyatt (Earp) McPherson was an R&B singer who was born in 1931 and died in 1978, and “Here’s My Confession” was on the Savoy label. But that’s all I know, so if you know more, help a brother out.

“At the Shore”/Johnny Caswell (8/3/63, one week on chart). Caswell is a Philadelphia singer who recorded a handful of sides by himself and with a group called Crystal Mansion, which made the Hot 100 a couple of times. “At the Shore,” inspired by the surf craze, was written by David White, a member of Danny and the Juniors who also wrote their most famous song, “At the Hop.”

“Big Party”/Barbara and the Browns (5/2/64, two weeks on chart). Three sisters and a brother from Memphis, Barbara and the Browns were a gospel group trying the secular market. “Big Party” was cut for a small Memphis label and leased to Stax for national release. A few other singles recorded at Stax and featuring Stax musicians including Steve Cropper failed to go anywhere, and the Browns ended up back on the gospel train.

“Lover’s Prayer”/Wallace Brothers (9/5/64, two weeks on chart). The Wallace Brothers were actually cousins. Nashville DJ John R became their patron, and they released several singles starting in 1963 and an album in 1965. Their producer, Cleveland Warnock, says that at one time, the mother of one of the Brothers had signed them to six different contracts, which led to a great deal of confusion and eventually, the end of their recording career. “Lover’s Prayer,” as best I can tell, was recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

“Teasin’ You”/Willie Tee (3/27/65, two weeks on chart). Born Wilson Turbinton, Tee was a New Orleans pianist who signed with the Nola label, and was produced by soul master Wardell Quezergue. “Teasin’ You” is a savory slice of Southern soul that should have charted a whole lot higher. Tee recorded into the 80s, then was discovered in the 90s by British soul fans and hip-hop artists, who sampled songs he cut with the Gaturs and the Wild Magnolias. He died in 2007.

“If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go”/Ron-Dels (7/24/65, one week on chart). The “Del” in “Ron-Dels” is Delbert McClinton, who wrote “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go.” Allmusic.com describes it thusly: “a country-flavored beat ballad strongly reminiscent of the Beatles’ similar material from 1964 and 1965.” And it is.

“Teasin’ You”/Willie Tee (buy it here)

Despite the joke about Wisconsin having two seasons—winter and road construction—there are actually five:  winter, spring, summer, fall, and the gun deer-hunting season, which begins on Saturday and runs nine days. Even for those who don’t hunt, and I don’t, deer season is one of those rituals by which we order our lives. Everybody knows somebody who’s going, and we all hope they’ll drop a couple of venison steaks on our doorstep when they get back.

(Back in the early 90s, a bunch of us tailgated before a Packer game in Milwaukee with venison bratwurst that had been walking around in the woods three weeks before. It might have been the most quintessentially Wisconsin experience of my entire life.)

If you drive out into the rural areas this weekend and next, you’ll see guys in blaze orange getting in and out of pickup trucks in various places, especially at the state’s many rural taverns, which will be festooned with beer-company signs saying “Welcome Deerhunters.” You might not think it’s a good idea for a hunter to throw down a couple of Leinenkugels at lunchtime before returning to the woods with a high-powered rifle, but we manage to live with the contradiction up here just fine.

(If it’s really cold, some of the guys won’t be drinking Leinenkugel’s. Wisconsin is the nation’s largest per-capita consumer of brandy. I used to think everybody drank brandy until I tried ordering one in Chicago and the waitress looked at me like I had two heads.)

It occurs to me that “tavern” is an old-fashioned word you don’t hear much anymore, particularly in the leafy suburbs of Madison where I live, but it’s an evocative word that connotes a particular sort of place. Taverns don’t have video walls, live DJs, stuffed potato skins, or crop-topped servers named Kelli. Taverns have one or two TVs, always over the bar—which is a place inside a tavern at which you sit and not a word for the tavern itself—and a jukebox which inevitably includes two dozen current hits, three or four polkas, and that 45 with “Happy Birthday” on one side and “The Anniversary Waltz” on the other. There might be a pool table or a pinball machine, but if those games don’t suit you, there may be some old guys playing euchre around a table in the back.  (In my hometown, the old guys sometimes play jass, a Swiss variation on whist.) The bartender is often the guy who owns the place; the waitress is either his wife or his daughter.  The menu consists of burgers, cheese sandwiches, frozen pizza, and chili in season.

If you want dessert at a tavern, smokes are available behind the bar. Or at least they will be until the statewide smoking ban goes into effect next July. The end of the smoky tavern will be a victory for public health, but a small loss to the cultural landscape. The Tavern League of Wisconsin, historically one of the state’s most powerful lobbies, fought the legislation, and then for a version of it that would do the least possible damage to tavern owners’ businesses. Saving the local tavern is an important task for the League. The taverns that dot the rural crossroads of Wisconsin are social centers, and many have existed in one form or another for a hundred years or better. Often, they’re the last vestige of what was once a village or town.

When I lived out of state, which I did for 18 years, the call of this place was never stronger than in the fall. Now that I’m here, there’s no place else for me to be.

“Home at Last” (live in Boston 2009)/Steely Dan (bootleg)
“The Hunter”/Albert King (from the legendary Born Under a Bad Sign, on which King is backed by Booker T. and the MGs; buy it here)

October 11, 1969: The Wisconsin Badgers, riding a 23-game winless streak, get a late touchdown pass from Neil Graff to Randy Marks and beat Iowa 23-16. It’s the first win for the Badgers since the 1966 season finale, a streak eased only by a tie with Iowa in 1967.

November 23, 1974: The Badgers meet Minnesota in their traditional season finale. Wisconsin tailback Bill Marek rushes for 304 yards and five touchdowns as the Badgers destroy the Gophers, 49-14. The Badgers end the ‘74 season with seven wins and four losses, their first winning season since 1963.

I saw both of those games. They weren’t on TV, and I didn’t have a ticket—but they were on the radio, and that was enough.

Bob Miller was the play-by-play man who described the Iowa game. Two weeks later, I’d hear him call the tense final minutes of the game against Indiana, as Wisconsin fought to protect a two-point lead. I can hear him even now, repeating the score over and over again: “Wisconsin 36, Indiana 34.” Miller wasn’t long for Wisconsin sports after 1969. In 1973, he became the play-by-play voice of the National Hockey League’s Los Angeles Kings, a post he still holds today.

By 1974, my voice of the Badgers was Earl Gillespie, a Wisconsin sports legend who broadcast the Milwaukee Braves on radio from 1953 through 1963 before going into TV. By the 70s, he did Badger games on a statewide radio network, and his voice was as much a part of my youth as those of Larry Lujack, Fred Winston, and the rest of my Top 40 heroes. His color man was Ted Moore, who had a significant claim to fame of his own as the man at the mike during the Green Bay Packers’ glory years of the 1960s. Together, Gillespie and Moore provided the soundtrack for several years of autumn Saturdays.  Gillespie would say “First down for Bucky Badger!,” and introduce commercial breaks by saying, “Now before the next kickoff, listen to this.”

Those early 70s Saturdays had their own rhythm. Games almost always kicked off at 1:00. Around halftime, East Coast scores would come trickling in, from places like Harvard and Holy Cross. At halftime of home games, the broadcasters would always pause so the fans at home could hear the fans at the game sing Wisconsin’s traditional song, “Varsity.” And late in the season, the games would end as night began to fall. So it was on the day Marek blew up the Gophers—although his touchdown record has been tied, no Wisconsin running back has ever gone for more yards on a single day.

Not even Rufus “the Roadrunner” Ferguson, my first Badger hero. He almost did it, however, during the first Badger game I ever attended at Camp Randall Stadium, against Syracuse on September 23, 1972. He went for well over 200 yards rushing in a 31-7 win, and would have cracked 300 if a long touchdown run hadn’t been called back by penalty. It was the only time I ever saw him play—at least with my own eyes. The Badgers were never on television in those days, so all most fans knew of Ferguson came to us over the radio.

I’ve been a Wisconsin football season-ticket holder since 2004. One of my favorite memories from more recent seasons is from the day the Roadrunner came back to Madison. During a halftime ceremony in his honor, he broke out his famous touchdown dance, the Rufus Shuffle. The ovation threatened to shake the old stadium to the ground—a greater ovation, I think, than the one received by a more recent Badger hero, Ron Dayne, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1999. Or at least I think it was greater. Maybe it seemed greater to me because Ferguson was a hero to the 12-year-old me the way Dayne couldn’t have been to the me-pushing-40.

Some people say baseball is the best sport on the radio. They could be right. But when I think of my favorite radio sports broadcasts, they’re all football games.

Also: Today at Popdose, there’s another edition of One Day in Your Life.

“Sweet Thing”/Rufus (buy it here)
“Harlem Shuffle”/Foundations (this track seems to be out of print, although there’s a bunch of Foundations music here)

I’ve got a few things on my mind today but nothing that adds up to a whole post, so here’s the odds and ends.

The news that the Who (or what passes for it these days as long as Keith Moon and John Entwistle remain dead) might be playing at the Super Bowl halftime this year is baffling. (The NFL isn’t confirming it, yet.) The NFL has been going with safe classic rockers ever since Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, but at least people like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen have scored hit singles within the last decade or so, and the Rolling Stones are recognizable to fans under 40. The Who, not so much. How much do you want to bet they got the gig because Aerosmith wasn’t available?

The Mrs. and I watched Saturday Night Live over the weekend for the first time in a while because Mad Men star January Jones was hosting. We don’t expect much from SNL anymore, but we were surprised at how dreadful this episode was. Throughout its history, SNL has frequently been juvenile, but last weekend’s episode was aimed almost solely at 11-year-old boys who think that fart jokes and gay panic represent the height of humor. Jones was awful, too—she seemed scared to death at the start, while in succeeding sketches, she plastered an inappropriate smile on her face and just stood there looking pretty. Afterward, we needed to watch a couple of episodes from the first-season DVD collection to hose out the taste.

Rosanne Cash has announced a handful of tour dates in support of her album The List, including a February 10 show in my much-missed former hangout, Iowa City. And so there’s a road trip in my future.

After I mentioned Elvis Costello’s racist slur on Ray Charles here last week, a couple of readers noted that it wasn’t a case of a punk looking for publicity, which is how I remembered it. So for this week’s Rock 101 at WNEW.com, I looked into it.

The Daily Mirror is a feature on the Los Angeles Times‘ website that looks back at vintage stories and columns from the paper. Here’s a spin around the LA radio dial from November 1969. Key line: “Most FM announcers sound as if they’re bored—and underpaid, which is true. People covering a funeral display more verve.”

Also worth reading is another commentary on an American Top 40 countdown, this one from November 1972, at SHH/Peaceful. Apart from being mighty entertaining, these chart reviews are always a good reminder that my taste isn’t the same as everyone else’s. But seriously, dude, how can you not like this?

Everybody hates something, and often, our choices are highly personal. Nevertheless, there’s a certain consensus about the most reviled Top-40 hits of all time: “Muskrat Love,” “You’re Having My Baby,” “Run Joey Run,” and “Seasons in the Sun” would make most people’s lists, I think. And “You Light Up My Life,” too. In my experience, that’s one people tend to forget.

“You Light Up My Life,” recorded by Debby Boone, daughter of Pat, was released on August 16, 1977. (That’s the same day Elvis Presley died, although the autopsy showed no correlation.) Its chart debut came on September 3 at Number 71, and it embarked on a respectable-but-not-spectacular climb up the chart. The week of October 8, however, it took an enormous leap from 15 to 3, and the week after that, “You Light Up My Life” hit Number One, where it would stay for 10 weeks, the longest stretch at the top for a single song since 1956. It also hit on the country chart, reaching Number 4.

Week after week during the fall of 1977 other songs stormed the castle, but none could take it: “Keep It Comin’ Love” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon, “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave, and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle all peaked at Number Two, Carly and Crystal for three weeks each. Finally, during the week of December 17, the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” reached the second spot, and it took out the queen on December 24, 1977.

“You Light Up My Life” would remain in the Hot 100 until late February 1978. In the final accounting, it’s the Number One song of the 1970s. It was nominated for Record of the Year at the Grammys (and Boone won Best New Artist); it also won the Oscar for Best Original Song.  But the odd thing about “You Light Up My Life” is that it vanished from history almost as soon as it left the charts. The song was disappeared, like a Soviet official who was declared a nonperson and never officially existed. (Or like George W. Bush to the Republicans now.) Oldies stations don’t play it; easy-listening stations don’t play it—and if I’m recalling correctly, it stopped getting much radio play almost from the moment it left the charts. It’s as if collective embarrassment over our embrace of such bland schlock caused us to repress the memory entirely.

It’s arguable that the same impulse repressed Debby Boone’s career. She was unable to follow up on her mega-hit, returning to the Hot 100 only twice, with “California” and “God Knows,” both in 1978. She did a bit better on the country charts over the years, even reaching Number One with “Are You On the Road to Lovin’ Me Again” in 1980.  Eventually, she moved into Christian music (no surprise given that she had imagined the “you” in “You Light Up My Life” to be God), acted on the stage, raised a family, and wrote children’s books.

The song’s blandness and Boone’s faceless performance of it made it ripe for cover versions, and for a particular sort of cover version at that: Every easy-listening artist you can name recorded it, including Engelbert Humperdinck, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, the Ray Conniff Singers, and Mantovani. It’s also been cut by Leann Rimes, Kenny Rogers, Whitney Houston, and the Irish group Westlife, who turned it into a boy-band ballad for the generation whose parents were pre-teens in 1977. In 1979, the Three Degrees did it for a British TV special. Adding a little soul helped it a lot—hell, adding a harmony vocal line helped it a lot.

In the end, perhaps the only way we can explain the unprecedented success of “You Light Up My Life” is what explains many strange excesses: It was the 1970s. We couldn’t help ourselves.

One of my favorite posts in the history of this blog appeared three years ago this week, about the darkness audible on Top 40 radio in the fall of 1969 via the WLS chart from the week of November 10. There are other ways to look at the same week, of course—how dark could it have been if Sesame Street premiered on TV? Here’s how it sounded at WKNR in Detroit, the fabled Keener 13, on the survey dated November 13, 1969.

8. “Down on the Corner”-”Fortunate Son”/Creedence Clearwater Revival (up from 13). Has there ever been a better two-sided hit single? If we had a contest to figure it out, this one would definitely make the semi-finals, at least—with several other two-sided CCR singles.

16. “Get It From the Bottom”/Steelers (down from 7). The Steelers were a Chicago group that started out recording on the local Crash label, owned by DJ Al Benson. Even after Crash crashed in 1967, the Steelers carried on. “Get It From the Bottom” was good enough to get national distribution from Columbia, although it was popular mostly in the Midwest. The Steelers are still performing around Chicago, apparently.

25. “Midnight Cowboy”/Ferrante and Teicher (up from 28). WKNR lists two versions of this movie theme, by John Barry, who wrote it, and Ferrante and Teicher, who had a Top-10 national hit with it. There’s a hallucinatory quality to the F&T version, although most of the atmosphere comes not from the famous twin pianos but from Vincent Bell’s guitar and those ghostly choral voices. The vibe is nicely captured in this YouTube video, which features scenes from the Dustin Hoffman/Jon Voight film.

26. “The Music Box”/Ruth Copeland (up from 29). One of the first releases on Holland/Dozier/Holland’s Invictus label was by Ruth Copeland, a white girl from England whose debut album was recorded at the same time and features many of the same musicians as the debut album by Parliament. It’s weird stuff; the band is great, but Copeland’s performance is frequently over-the-top strange—like the sobbing that takes up the last 45 seconds of “The Music Box,” which is unobjectionable up to that point despite the presence of a children’s chorus.

Keener LP #3: Rock and Roll Music/The Frost. Another Detroit-area legend. The group’s leader was Dick Wagner, who would go on to play with Lou Reed and Alice Cooper, among others. (He started the band after the demise of the Bossmen, another Detroit band that had included Mark Farner, who later founded Grand Funk Railroad.) Rock and Roll Music was the group’s second album, recorded live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, which hosted shows by Cream, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, and even John Coltrane in the 60s along with the full roster of Michigan acts, including the MC5, the Stooges (both of whom were house bands for a while) and the Rationals.

When it comes to Detroit music in the 60s, Motown was just the beginning, and not enough people know that.

“The Music Box”/Ruth Copeland (buy it here)

At this blog, I pride myself on offering not merely entertainment, but anything else you, the esteemed blog reader, might need. I have limits, however. Here’s a short list of six things I’ll do, and four things I won’t.

“I’ll Make Love to You Anytime”/Eric Clapton. From Backless, an album that many critics consider lifeless to the point of needing electroshock, but one I once dug quite a bit. (I’ve listened to a lot more Clapton in recent years, and I like Backless a lot less now as a result.) On this track, Clapton does not merely channel J.J. Cale, he does an impression of him.

“I’ll Remember April”/Miles Davis. The records Miles recorded for Prestige in the early 50s are about as good as he ever got. This is from Blue Haze, released in 1954 from sessions in 1953 and 1954. This track and several others feature Horace Silver on piano; Charles Mingus provides piano on one track.

“I’ll Understand”/Soul Children. An early single by the group Isaac Hayes and David Porter formed at Stax after their primary project, Sam and Dave, left the label. The group’s J. Blackfoot claimed Porter discovered him singing outside a liquor store on McLemore Avenue near the Stax studios, which is an R&B story if ever there was one.

“I’ll Close My Eyes”/Jimmy Smith. This was the flipside of the single release of “Organ Grinder Swing,” which crept to Number 92 on the Hot 100 in October 1965, a beautiful late-night ballad with Kenny Burrell on guitar.

“I’ll Always Love You”/Spinners. An early track from 1965 by the group known in England as the Detroit Spinners.

“I”ll Be Around”/Spinners. On the radio this week in 1972, when they were still known in England as the Detroit Spinners.

“I’ll Never Sail the Seas Again”/Detroit Emeralds. A group not known in England, or anywhere else to my knowledge, as the Emeralds, and also not from Detroit.

“I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”/Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. I have a couple of friends who are pained greatly by the knowledge that I generally have no use for Elvis Costello. It’s an opinion that goes back to the 1970s, and one that was reinforced by his early slur on Ray Charles, done in a craven attempt to get publicity. I gotta admit, however, that I admire quite a bit of what I’ve heard from him in recent years, especially this version of the Dionne Warwick classic, from a 1998 collaboration with its co-author.

“I’ll Never Be the Same”/Nat King Cole Trio. Recorded long about 1943. The trio at this time featured Nat at the piano, Oscar Moore on guitar, and Johnny Miller on bass, although this particular track is a piano solo.

“I Will Not Dance”/Chi Coltrane. Also on the radio during this week in 1972 was Chi Coltrane’s indelible “Thunder and Lightning.” She never did anything else quite as good, but she’s still gigging, and her website’s got the pictures to prove it. Here she is on German TV circa 1973:

One More Thing: You have probably noticed the Christmas-themed TV ads already. Some of our favorite blogs are getting ready for the holiday, too: AM, Then FM is seeking requests for this year’s Three Under the Tree, and Popdose is preparing another dose of Mellowmas. We’ll do something around here, too. But not for a while yet.

I should start keeping track of the number of e-mail solicitations I receive each week asking me to review new music. It’s a lot, and most of them I ignore. For one thing, this is not the sort of blog that deals much in new music, and even if it was, many of the solicitations I get involve genres I’m not interested in—Balkan techno, for instance. Yet every once in a while, something in a press release catches my eye and makes me want to lend an ear—so lately, I’ve been listening to an album by a guy named Stephen Luke.

Luke’s album is called No Man’s Land, and his story is rather interesting. He played guitar in bands around Cincinnati as a young man, but like many musicians, gave up sustained gigging to raise a family. Relatively late in life, he accidentally cut two tendons on his left index finger while trying to open a box with a knife. His physical therapist recommended the guitar as a way to rehab the injury, and Luke found his interest in music rekindled. He fell in with a fellow Cincinnati musician, blues guitarist Kelly Richey, and says, “She took me from pitiful to powerful in about six months.” She ended up producing No Man’s Land.

I make no apologies for failing to be musically adventuresome at my advanced age. Balkan techno may be all that and a bag of chips, but I ain’t going there. Any new music I’m going to like will be inspired by the sort of stuff I’ve been digging for years. Stephen Luke’s music clearly is. (The fact that he’s about as advanced in age as I am certainly helps.) Luke’s press release compares him to James McMurtry, Steve Earle, Tom Petty, and John Hiatt, and says he’s influenced by Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Bob Dylan. That’s about right, but you’ll have to tell me what you think. Snag the tune below, and listen to some more of Luke’s music here.

Worth a Look: Although I should be working on stuff that gets me paid, I have been killing time over at Vinnie Rattole’s website for the last couple of days. The site wasn’t created as a music-themed blog, although it’s become one recently—Vinnie has downloadable scans of interesting musical ephemera, including the comic-book adaptation of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, vintage copies of Hit Parader and Circus from the early 80s, and the famous KISS comic book series. What you might remember about the latter is that the ink used for the first issue was said to have contained vials of blood from each of the band’s four members. According to Vinnie, “An unsubstantiated rumor claims that there was a mixup at the printer and the bloody ink was instead used for an issue of Sports Illustrated.” Which is too awesome not to be true.

“Hurricane”/Stephen Luke (buy it here)