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the agony of phil spector
I can listen to six hours of Phil Spector recording sessions, some of which amount to take after take of Spector instructing the lead singer of The Crystals on how to sing the opening lines of ‘Uptown;’ I’ve listened to 28 consecutive takes of the instrumental track of a minor Spector production, ‘Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love,’ and about 17 vocal takes of Tina Turner getting louder and raspier as she tackles ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Say what you will, he has made some incredible records.
Watching the documentary ‘The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector’ by Vikram Jayanti, you will get the idea that Spector whipped up those incredible records in his own kitchen, unburdened by anyone else’s participation. You will wait in vain for the names Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich or Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil to come up as Spector explains how he wrote all those songs, but as far as he’s concerned, the songwriting credit is “I.” I know his name is on a lot of them as a co-writer, but those songwriters wrote a slew of classic songs without the name ‘Spector’ tacked on to the credit. Spector without any of them? Not so many. Draw your own conclusion. For him to even imply sole credit for writing ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ and ‘River Deep Mountain High’ and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ is laughable. The movie comes complete with subtitles (by Mick Brown) explaining to us how the songs reflect Spector’s creative and personal state of mind, but it strikes me that ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ (Goffin & King) and ‘Crippled Inside’ (John Lennon, with no co-writer credit that I can see) don’t tell us all that much about Phil.
Who also fails to mention that the early records were arranged by Jack Nitzsche (and in the case of ‘Lovin’ Feeling,’ Gene Page), and that the musicians were ridiculously talented. And here is a Phil Spector documentary in which the name ‘Ronnie Spector’ is never mentioned, even while Phil goes on and on about how he labored over ‘Be My Baby,’ and that its (allegedly unauthorized) use in ‘Mean Streets’ was responsible for the careers of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Most people would agree, I believe, that Ronnie’s vocal has something to do with the record’s wonderfulness. Spector’s version of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah,’ another record he crows about, is also sung by singers (Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans).
The omissions are Spector’s fault, of course, but they’re also Jayanti’s (and Brown’s). Javanti also focuses heavily on the first Spector murder trial (I assume you’ve heard about it? One of those loaded guns he used to intimidate people finally went off), flipping back and forth between forensic evidence and vintage performance footage in a random way. We don’t get to see or hear anything about Spector’s career after he ‘saved’ ‘Let It Be’ and went on to work with Lennon and Harrison. Nothing about his projects with The Ramones, or Dion, or Leonard Cohen, all of whom found his working methods pretty unbearable (all three albums are hit-and-miss, to be kind).
I don’t expect I’ll ever get tired of playing Spector’s records. One thing the movie does do is play a whole lot of them in their entirety, including a demo of ‘Spanish Harlem’ that I never heard before (the movie does not point out, however, that Spector didn’t produce the Ben E. King record), and the Shindig performance of ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ by The Righteous Brothers is a gas, but listening to Spector kvetch about being under-appreciated while ignoring all his very significant collaborators is simply agony.
the nocturnal adventures of sky saxon
On 1966′s ‘A Web of Sound,’ the second album by The Seeds, the one with ‘Mr. Farmer’ and ‘Rollin’ Machine,’ there is a track called ‘Up In Her Room,’ which, along with the opus on side 2 of Love’s ‘Da Capo,’ marks a turning point in the annals of garage-rock, where it wasn’t enough to simply snarl for three blistering minutes, but to keep up with the Stones (in particular, “Goin’ Home” from ‘Aftermath’), bands felt compelled to indulge themselves, at some length. ‘Up In Her Room’ is The Seeds’ variation on ‘Gloria’ (so many roads lead back to her), except she (unnamed, but apparently experienced: she’s ‘everybody’s girl’) does not come knocking on his door. At her place, the narrator has sex, and smokes a couple of cigarettes. He enjoys the sex. And the band plays on. And on. You could say that The Seeds were the proto-Doors, with all that swirling organ, and hypno-guitar, and the hedonistic pretensions of the lead singer, except that I dig The Seeds more than The Doors, who never made a single as good as ‘Pushin’ Too Hard,’ who never captured a vibe as sexy as ‘Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,’ whose poetic aspirations made their longer pieces not nearly as much dumb fun as ‘Up In Her Room.’
(Oh, all you Morrison fans out there who want to berate me, the way Billy Joel fans have, for being not sufficiently in awe of his immense talent, so ahead.)
I’m not saying that The Seeds were a great band, or that Sky Saxon was anyone’s notion of a first-rate singer. But I got a real kick out of those first two albums (‘No Escape’ and ‘Evil Hoodoo’ are other tracks worth checking out), and when I heard that Saxon had passed away, I thought of when I bought ‘A Web of Sound,’ and brought it over to my friend’s house to play it, and how we thought it was so cool and subversive and titillating. So, R.I.P., Sky.
summer means fun…sometimes
I suppose I should be grateful that I was whisked away from the hot city during the summertime as a kid, but lately I’ve been harboring some resentment, because in my mid-teen years, when I was most consumed by music and starting to go to shows, the most exciting stuff went on from July 4th through Labor Day, and I was sequestered in a bungalow colony. So I didn’t get to see all the amazing shows at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, and most egregiously, I missed the Rheingold Central Park Music Festivals of 1966 and 1967.
In 1966, here are just a few artists who were in Central Park, for $2 a show, while I was miles away: The Four Tops, Jackie Wilson, King Curtis, The Animals, The Young Rascals, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Otis Redding, Muddy Waters, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Thelonious Monk, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (w/Mike Bloomfield)…
And the following year, just as an example, and not even including August:
June 23 – Louis Armstrong
June 26 – Stan Getz/Joe Williams
June 30 – The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
July 3 – Nina Simone
July 5 – The Young Rascals (with ‘surprise warm-up act’ Jimi Hendrix)
July 7 – Phil Ochs/Spanky & Our Gang
July 8 – Duke Ellington
July 12 – Stevie Wonder/Esther Phillips
July 19 – The Four Seasons
July 21 – Leonard Cohen
July 26 – Smokey Robinson & The Miracles/Tammi Terrell
July 28 – The Byrds
So that’s just a little over $20, plus subway fares. I am so pissed.
Especially because I never got to see The Animals (until their ’80s reunion tour), Otis, or King Curtis (everyone on the ’67 list I saw eventually, except for Stan Getz, Tammi, Jackie Wilson, and Spanky, and I’m not 100% certain about Jackie Wilson, ’cause he’s in a Brooklyn Fox program for a show I saw, only I don’t think he performed on the day I was there; I believe that was the day Sam Cooke headlined, so I’m not complaining…).
Missing Otis is my one big regret (hey, that’s almost a Cole Porter song!). Of all the Shows I Wish I’d Seen, way at the top is Otis Redding with Booker T. & the MG’s. I’ve seen footage from their concerts, including, of course, Monterey and the European Stax-Volt Tour, and I think my head would’ve exploded with excitement if I’d been in a room where that music was being played. By the time I got to see B & The MG’s, drummer Al Jackson was gone, and although I still can’t imagine a better group of players than Booker, Cropper and Dunn, it wasn’t quite the same.
I saw Booker T. the other night, doing a club date in NYC. No MG’s, sad to say. And no DBT’s either (the Drive-By Truckers backed him on his new album, and on some recent live gigs). But there he was, and he breezed through most of the album, and also gave us ‘Green Onions,’ ‘Hip-Hug-Her,’ ‘Melting Pot,’ and ‘Time Is Tight.’ I count any night where I get to hear Booker T. Jones play ‘Time Is Tight’ live as a memorable one. But damn, I wish I’d seen the original quartet behind Otis in the summer of ’66.
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genius in a box
We were at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, the year Billy Joel was inducted (I know, you’re asking: Why?, but whatever…), and the thing about Joel getting in was that he asked Ray Charles to be his inductor. Ray Charles accepted (again: Why?), and he came out to do his presentation, and in the midst of it, I turned to my colleague and said/asked: “He’s the greatest living American musician, isn’t he?” While Joel was giving his acceptance speech, we mulled it over and agreed that, yes, we were in the room with the Greatest Living American Musician, and we had another glass of wine.
The last time I saw Mr. Charles was at the Songwriters Hall of Fame dinner, honoring Van Morrison. Charles and Morrison did a duet on “Crazy Love,” and it didn’t matter that Ray’s voice was kind of shaky. This was mind-blowing.
I’m not sure why we were so narrow that earlier night. American? Maybe we just didn’t want to deal with that whole slate of U.K. contenders, or split hairs about Canadians, or wrestle with the idea of Joao Gilberto, or maybe we were drunk. Really, who even came close at that point? Ray Charles could pretty much do anything: R&B (he practically invented it), jazz, pop, country, standards. I mean, genius, right?
My office window looks out on 56th Street between Broadway and 8th. Right across the street, I can see Patsy’s, the famous Italian joint, and right above Patsy’s was Atlantic Records. So I can pretty much look right into the windows where all those classic records were made, except there isn’t anything there now. I’m thinking about this because the other day I was in the Virgin Megastore. Virgin is going out of business, and everything is On Sale, so I finally bought that 7-CD, 1 DVD boxed set of everything that Ray Charles recorded for Atlantic in the ’50s. It was like $112. It’s a monumental thing.
It’s all here, the classic singles, the collaborations with Milt Jackson and David ‘Fathead’ Newman, the live concert at Newport, the essential “Genius of Ray Charles” album, a whole disc of Charles working out arrangements on piano and other rarities.
I don’t know, exactly, how I came to own the Atlantic 45 of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” why a nine-year old white kid would even want to possess this, where I heard it (my parents had a Belafonte album with a batch of Ray Charles songs, but it wasn’t on that, and they had no Charles LPs), what radio station might have played it. It wasn’t rock & roll as I was beginning to know it, and it wasn’t like my parents’ adult-pop (Sinatra, etc.), it was something deeper, there was something in his voice that moved me. That was my first exposure to Ray Charles, and I worked backwards to “I Got A Woman,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” and What’d I Say.”
All I wanted to do as an A&R guy was a simple jazz-trio album of Ray Charles doing standards. Like the Nat King Cole ‘After Midnight’ album. In the ’90s, I reached out to his management with the concept, and some song ideas, and never heard back. Later on, he did that duets album that won all those posthumous awards, and that had some ok tracks on it, but it wasn’t the last act I’d have preferred.
I don’t customarily recommend spending more than a hundred bucks on a collection of music, but if you’ve gotten a tax refund, go ahead and splurge. Worth every dime.
life, on shuffle (#4)
#4 – Don’t Worry Baby – The Beach Boys (Capitol)
I don’t know what it is about car songs. I’ve never been behind the wheel of any vehicle, never even ridden a bicycle, but I find the whole rock fixation with automobiles, from Chuck Berry to The Beach Boys to Springsteen, fascinating. It’s so detail-oriented, and poetic, and mythic. And emotional.
The language and the references mean nothing to me, but ‘No-Go Showboat,’ ‘Little Deuce Coupe,’ ‘Hey Little Cobra,’ ‘Shut Down,’ ‘Dead Man’s Curve,’ ‘You Can’t Catch Me,’ ‘Chevrolet Chevelle SS396,’ ‘Ballad of a Bonneville,’ ‘427 Super Stock,’ ‘‘Jaguar and Thunderbird,’ ‘Drag City,’ are filled with excitement. The singers go on with manic specificity about the features of these cars, bragging like rappers about what’s under the hood (or not: ‘No-Go Showboat’ is about a car that just sits there). And we get geographical information as well:
I flew past LaBrea, Schwab’s, and Crescent Heights
And all the Jag could see were my six taillights
He passed me at Doheny then I started to swerve
But I pulled her out and there we were
At Dead Man’s Curve
Where we went away for the summers, in my early adolescence, was a jukebox in what we called the ‘casino.’ Three songs for a quarter. In the summer of ’64, the girls played The Dixie Cups’ “People Say” a lot (and The Jelly Beans’ “I Wanna Love Him So Bad”).
I played The Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me,” and The Beatles’ ‘I Should’ve Known Better,’ and both sides of the hit single by The Beach Boys, “I Get Around” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” Everyone loved the A side. What was not to love, except maybe Mike’s cocky lead vocal? I gravitated towards the flip side, which seemed to me then, and still does, as incredibly romantic (I was crushing hard on the older girls, whose dancing in their two-piece bathing suits to ‘My Boy Lollipop’ and ‘Bread and Butter’ made me dizzy). It’s a song about a drag race.
“I guess I should’ve kept my mouth shut
When I start to brag about my car
But I can’t back down now
Because I pushed the other guys too far
She makes me come alive
And makes me wanna drive
When she says, ‘Don’t worry baby
Everything will turn out all right’”
An ordinary pop song called ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ would have the boy reassuring his girlfriend. Brian Wilson and Roger Christian turn it around, and Brian’s vulnerable falsetto makes it so touching: he has to go out there and race, and he’s scared, and she gives him confidence. And the music! It’s the first, to my mind, of Brian’s great ballads, the first that points to what would emerge in full on ‘Pet Sounds.’ Brian says in interviews sometimes that he offered it to The Ronettes, but Spector turned it down; I can’t fully buy that, but you can hear the Spector touch, especially in Hal Blaine’s drumming (he plays basically the same pattern he’d play on The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’).
Later versions of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ changed the lyric to eliminate the car race element, thinking perhaps that it’d be more universal that way. The Tokens, Bryan Ferry, and others sing it like that. But that’s just dumb. The race is the whole point, the metaphor for challenge, and self-doubt, and the healing power of sex and affection. It’s the ‘High Noon’ of pop, and who would remake ‘High Noon’ without the gunfight?
Springsteen understands this. In a Creem review long ago, I made a little joke about his obsession with cars, and how mytho-poetic he got every time he put the key in the ignition, what a major production every road trip was. ‘Doesn’t he ever get in the car just to get a pack of cigarettes?,’ I wondered. But I get it. I can trace the line from ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ to ‘Drive All Night’ and ‘Racing In the Streets,’ and I’m sure he can too.
the heat was hot: notes from stagecoach 2009
On the big video screens flanking the ‘Mane Stage,’ Miranda Lambert turned around to face her rockin’ band and wiggled her butt to kick off a raucous version of the Faces’ ‘Stay With Me.’ A few tunes later, she got the whole crowd singing along to Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock and Roll.’ In the 1960s or 70s, Lambert would’ve been an across-the-board rock star, on the cover of Rolling Stone, touring with the Allmans or Skynyrd. In 2009, she is only played on country stations, and opens for Kenny Chesney. I’m not sure this is progress. I am on record as thinking ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and ‘Gunpowder and Lead’ are great songs, and she killed them.
Little Big Town, the Fleetwood Mac of Country Music, did an actual FM song in their set, ‘The Chain.’ Again, the audience was loud and appreciative. This crowd kind of rocks, actually, but with a twang element. The women wear bikini tops and short-shorts, with cowboy hats and cowboy boots. You wouldn’t think this’d be a sexy look, but it is. And when they dance to, say, an Earl Scruggs bluegrass rave-up, it’s pretty cute. Maybe half the men are shirtless, also with the cowboy hats, but not as many boots. So equal opportunity for girl-and-guy watching.
Speaking of Scruggs: seeing him at Stagecoach is like seeing Louis Armstrong at a Jazz Festival. I mean, think about it: he was playing banjo in Bill Monroe’s band in the late 1940s. Which is amazing. A lot of the people watching him recognized the theme from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ from ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ Scruggs played sitting down, like the old jazz guys at Preservation Hall, but he could have played in a hammock for all I care. He’s great.
We also got to see Lynn Anderson sing Joe South’s “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden.”
In one of the tents, there was a Poco show. When Buffalo Springfield broke up, Richie Furay, one of the lead singers (the one who wasn’t Stills or Young) formed this country-rock band, and for the Stagecoach set, Furay rejoined his old band, along with original steel-guitar player Rusty Young, and Timothy Schmidt and Jim Messina. So this was an Event. And I got to see Furay, Messina and Young do “A Child’s Claim To Fame” and “Kind Woman” from the final Buffalo Springfield album, and that made me really happy. They also did some Loggins & Messina and Eagles stuff, I think, but I’d already cut across the field to see Miranda at that point.
Another highlight: the swinging Hot Club of Cowtown. 95% of the other people at Stagecoach (including my date) were seeing Kid Rock in that timeslot, so the HCoC played to maybe 45 people, but they were tres cool. Many more people went to see Kevin Costner and his band, which just goes to show you.
We got there too late on Sunday for the BBQ competition. Nevertheless, some of the vendors were nice enough to give me free samples of pulled pork. No complaints
one more sunday night (1977)
Intrigued by a New York Times article about the Grateful Dead, I went online and streamed a concert from May 8, 1977, which is supposedly The Best Dead Show Ever. You’d think it’d be hard to quantify something like that. I mean, what if someone who really, really loved the Grateful Dead didn’t consider it a Great Dead Show unless the band played “Dark Star,” “New Speedway Boogie,” and “Box of Rain,” or at least two out of of those three, or maybe “Uncle John’s Band” or “Bertha” or “Sugar Magnolia”? What if you think that Bob Weir should never try to sing “El
Paso”? What if you think the Dead went downhill after Pigpen died? See what I mean? No matter how well the band played that night at Cornell, you’d walk away thinking, hmmm, that was ok, but maybe the eighth best Dead Show you’ve ever seen.
My Dead Years were 1969-1972, but hey, I’m an open-minded kind of guy, and I haven’t listened to them much lately, so the article gave me the excuse to go to archive.org and see what all the excitement is about
What can I say? It’s a Dead Show all right. But I’d forgotten how Weir should not only not sing “El Paso,” but how he always used to botch “Mama Tried,” and how no matter how much Deadheads like it when the band plays “Dancing In The Streets,” Motown is another musical area the Dead should stay well clear of, and absolutely not explore for longer than 16 minutes, as they did that night. It’s almost like a disco-jam-band version. There’s a song called “Lazy Lightning” that is completely disposable. You know how the Dead would go off for a few minutes and talk amongst themselves, like infielders gathered on the pitcher’s mound when it’s second-and-third with one out? From the sound of this recording, there was a lot of that.
There’s a nice “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire On The Mountain”/”Estimated Prophet” run in the middle of the set, and I like the songs from Garcia’s first solo album (“Loser” and “Deal”). And the set does gain momentum as it goes, reaching one of those acidy peaks in a “St. Stephen”>”Not Fade Away”>”Morning Dew” pre-encore trilogy. I suppose this is a representative 1977 gig, with Garcia hitting some high heights, but I’m not hearing why it should rank so supremely in the hearts of the faithful. Is it heresy to suggest that no show with the Godchauxs could possibly be considered The Best Anything? Donna’s vocals never add much, and sometimes she just floats around trying to find a place to sneak in.
I’d chalk it up to that you-had-to-be-there syndrome, but most of the people testifying weren’t. They’re listening to the same soundboard mix that I am. I was there at the equally-storied Fillmore East concerts in February 1970, and I guess if I were forced to pick (by whom, exactly, but you know what I mean…), those are the ones I’d put in the Dead time capsule.
gloria, itunes, & the complexities of variable pricing
You can now purchase The Shadows of Knight’s version of “Gloria” on iTunes for 69 cents, but you have to be careful, because while it’s available for that price on the album “Dark Sides,” the exact same recording is still listed for 99 cents if bought from the “Gloria” album. I’m all for the ‘variable pricing’ concept, but I shouldn’t have to comparison-shop on iTunes to see if I can find an album where this particular ‘Gloria’ is 30 cents cheaper.
Not to mention all the other ‘Gloria’s out there. The long list of Glorias.
What do we know about her?
From most accounts, the one thing we can say for certain is that she stands 5′ 4″ “from the head to the ground” (The Blues Magoos, Jimi Hendrix, and a few others, don’t even bother sharing that information). Beyond that, she is something of a mystery. Is she the same Gloria (“it’s not Marie”) that The Cleftones, The Passions, The Escorts and The Cadillacs sang about in the ’50s? That Gloria was unattainable (“she’s not in love with me”), but the Gloria we’re talking about, the one that Van Morrison immortalized in what is maybe the greatest rock and roll song, will come knocking at your door around midnight. Some narrators (Jim Morrison, not surprisingly, and Hendrix) feel compelled to share some explicit details of the encounter, but most feel it is sufficient to let us know that she made them feel so good: the only thing that is spelled out for us is her name, invariably.
Jimi Hendrix’s “Gloria” may even be a pseudonym. He asks her her name, she says it makes no difference, but “you can call me Gloria.” Is she, in this telling, a hooker? A groupie?
Famous embellishments: T-Bone Burnett, singing it at the Bottom Line, says that when she knocked on his door, she knocked like Al Jackson, the legendary anchor of the Stax rhythm section. Rickie Lee Jones, singing it straight, at Red Rocks, makes it a girl-on-girl thing…she stops the action in the middle to tell us how she first heard the song when she was 12. It becomes a memory play, a flashback.
Patti Smith started “Horses” with her radical variation on the theme, with the girl leaning on a parking meter, and ending up where all Glorias end up: knocking at her door at midnight. Springsteen used it, live, as a bridge between “Not Fade Away” and “She’s The One.” The Gants, The Trashmen, The Shadows of Knight, The Standells, all tried to imitate Van Morrison’s suggestive leer and replicated that same snaky guitar riff….even the Grateful Dead took a shot, with regretable results. She is, seemingly, irresistable.
At Bonnaroo a couple of years ago, Tom Petty expanded on the story. He starts out as most of her suitors do, giving her height (why that’s her most notable characteristic is strange, but part of her allure), and then goes on to recount how they met (on an “uptown street”). He asks her name, and she demurs, brushing him off. He persists, flashes his rock star credentials, and “everything began to change.” And something “profound” happened: the wind began to say her name…and the whole audience starts to chant “Gloria!” And the performance ends. Even now, more than forty years after we were introduced to her, everybody knows her name.
the existential dilemma of julius la rosa
I consider myself something of an expert on the rock cinema of the 1950’s and ‘60s, but until the other night, I had never seen a snappy little item called “Let’s Rock,” and I can’t say my life has been enriched by the experience. And yet, in its almost platonic-ideal of awfulness, it is worth investigating. It is, I hasten to add, quite short, maybe 80 minutes, so it is not a big investment, time-wise
Of those eighty minutes, twenty or so are taken up by conversations between a pop crooner (Julius La Rosa) and his manager (Conrad Janis), about whether La Rosa should stop trying to get on the charts with pretty ballads, and succumb to the pervasive trend of rock’n’roll. La Rosa is adamant about sticking to the ballady stuff. Then he meets a ‘kooky’ songwriter (Phyllis Newman) who also tries to persuade him to give this rock’n’roll thing a shot. So what we have is basically half a movie where people are trying to talk Julius La Rosa into cutting a rockin’ song. Spoiler alert: at the end, he does.
Along the way, he goes on the Wink Martindale TV show, and Wink won’t let him lip-sync the A-side of his new single. Which I don’t blame him, because it’s terrible. He also attends what is supposed to be an Alan Freed show, only Alan Freed isn’t in this movie, so some other deejay/host introduces us to: Danny & The Juniors singing “At The Hop,” and The Royal Teens doing “Short Shorts. On stage with The Royal Teens is a girl in short shorts, singing the song’s hook. The hook, as you probably are aware, is “we wear short shorts,” and she’s only one girl, so it’s the royal “we,” I’m guessing, unless she’s speaking on behalf of all girls with decent legs.
Backstage at the rock show, La Rosa chats with Danny & The Juniors, who also ask him when he’s going to hop on the rock bandwagon. Geez, can’t this guy get a break?
La Rosa is all bummed out, what with his single bombing, and the Juniors bugging him, so he goes to the nightclub where Phyllis Newman works as a check-out girl to pay the bills until her songwriter career takes off. It is the most underpopulated nightclub you have ever seen. Maybe six people in the audience. Della Reese comes out and sings one song. A blonde who has that bullet-breasted ‘50s Mamie Van Doren look hits on La Rosa, and he’s on the brink of scoring, but he has a change of heart at the last minute.
Oh, I forgot that the manager tells the singer that Billboard and Cash Box have trashed the new disc, because ballads aren’t scoring any more, and La Rosa asks him what the trades are flipping over these days, and we cut to Paul Anka, ‘teen sensation, singing…a BALLAD. Just as bad as La Rosa’s, in fact. Worse, maybe.
Roy Hamilton is in the movie, singing a song that isn’t “Don’t Let Go,” but is supposed to remind us of “Don’t Let Go.”
And that’s about it. It looks like the movie was shot in like three or four days, and I’m not sure what the point is. Compromise your artistic principles? Get with it, daddy-o?
achieving total heaviosity
When I finally made it uptown to the Beacon for one of the Allman Brothers Band’s 40th anniversary shows, I had already heard about what’d been going on up there. Visits by Boz Scaggs, Levon Helm, Eric Clapton, Southside Johnny, etc. And there were rumors of Bob Weir and Phil Lesh showing up for some sans-Jerry-&-Duane tributeish jamming (that didn’t happen until the last night of the run). So my plus-one and I settled into our seats on stage right (about 15 feet behind Gregg) for what turned out to be a night of vintage Dixie Rock on the Upper West Side.
I go back with the ABB a long, long time. Bill Graham put them on the bill at the Fillmore East a LOT, and my friends and I would take the subway journey down from the Bronx for the late shows. Which often became very late indeed. I was in the theatre the night (2/11/70) The Dead and The Allmans shared the bill (along with Love), and at the end of the Dead’s late set, most of the Allmans, along with some of the guys from Fleetwood Mac (including Peter Green) joined the Dead for some spacey “Dark Star” and a version of “Turn On Your Lovelight” that went on for more than a half-hour. When we left the Fillmore, snow was falling and the sun was rising and we got back to the Bronx long after 7:00 am.
I’ve never seen a guitarist better than Duane. He could make the longest improvisation seem thought-out, tasteful and soulful; he could whip out short, precise phrases (that seven-note fanfare that starts off “Layla” is his) or take solos on winding roads, and no matter how many times you heard the ABB play the same songs (they didn’t have the most vast repertoire in ’70-’71), the shows never became repetitive.
The ABB have a vast repertoire now, and over the course of the March shows at the Beacon they played over 100 different songs. On Friday night, the night I went, Jimmy Hall from Wet Willie sat in on “The Sky Is Crying,” “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” and “Keep On Smilin.” Then Kid Rock came on for a couple of tunes, including the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See.” And after the intermission, the band started the second set with an abbreviated (and quite moving, I have to admit) “Freebird.”
So a short history of Southern Rock, and Gregg was in good voice, and if Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks aren’t the equal of Dickey and Duane, they are too close to make a damn’s worth of difference.
It was only midnight when I hailed a cab on Broadway (the days of getting home at 7:00 am are way behind me), and the band was still wrapping up “Southbound,” with another night to play.
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