Everything Is Everything, "Witchi Tai To"

On America's infamous Tax Day, I'd like to remind everyone that to be taxed is a privilege. It is a remarkable achievement that the U.S. has been able to pave roads, deliver mail, put out fires, police streets, educate children, and in so many other ways "provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare" of its people. I fail to understand how all the Tea Partiers and people threatening to "go Galt" can claim to love America and yet hate Americans so. Seems to me that a truer patriotism is to help ensure that our fellow countrymen have a fighting chance of survival.

But let me offer something ameliorative rather than confrontational regarding the day when the big bill comes due. "Witchi Tai To" was a #69 hit in 1969 for Everything Is Everything, featuring songwriting and vocals from the late saxophonist Jim Pepper, who apparently said once that the seemingly Native American phrase witchi-tai-to doesn't actually mean anything. Still and all, it's a nice, soothing song that evokes the utopian we're-all-in-this-together warm fuzzy feeling that one only gets these days in San Francisco or on drug excursions.

Enjoy.

Brooklyn Bridge, "Blessed Is the Rain"

Rock 'n' roll heaven got a bit more crowded over the past week: first, Alex Chilton - who's a topic for another day - and today, Johnny Maestro, whose fame came in two acts spaced a decade apart. As one of the Crests, he scored at the end of the '50s with "Sixteen Candles" and other soppy oldies; a decade later, his then band the Del Satins got together with a group called the Rhythm Method (ahem) to form the Brooklyn Bridge. (So named because the 11-piece unit that resulted from the merger was said to be "as easy to sell as the Brooklyn Bridge.")

The BB are best known for their Top 5 rendition of Jimmy Webb's forlorn wedding-bell blues "Worst That Could Happen," but today I'd like to spotlight one of their forgotten follow-ups. From the same year, here's the big Bklyn bunch singing "Blessed Is the Rain", a #45 charter that deserved better. (Ignore the YouTube poster's mistitling of the song as "Yesterday the Rain.") RIP, Johnny.

The Music Scene Singers, "Sugar Sugar"

As Mike alluded in his response to yesterday's post, James Brown's stunning "World" performance came on a short-lived ABC show from late '69 titled The Music Scene. Wikipedia tells me that the show, though it was groundbreaking and featured several of the day's biggest musical performers, failed promptly - one, because The Young Generation wasn't considered a prime target market for advertisers, and two, because it clocked in at an unusual 45 minutes. (It was paired with another 45-minute show, a pre-Lost stranded-on-an-island fantasia called The New People.)

I need to learn more about The Music Scene - if only because the people behind it were daring/insane enough to turn the Archies' too-bubblegum-for-the-Monkees "Sugar Sugar" into a gospel- and daishiki-soaked soul shout from what I take to be the show's house band. In our continuing musical education, I present: The Music Scene Singers, "Sugar Sugar." I hope you're as fascinated as I was.

James Brown, "World"

I've been trying for a long time to track down a long-forgotten James Brown charting single from the fall of '69 that showed off his social consciousness rather than his funky strut. It wouldn't have been out of place on his Christmas albums that offered universal, nondenominational sermons on the need for peace and love, where it would sit alongside such songs as "Let's Unite the Whole World at Christmas" and "Hey America."

Making this tune even harder to find, beyond its being funk-free and thereby less radio-friendly for retro R&B stations, is that a search for "James Brown World" invariably points one to the far more famous "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." But at last, the object of my desire up on YouTube - in a very well lip-synched performance whose silent participants' studied, impervious disdain takes JB to a very new performative level. One might very well imagine James making this plea to the Americans who did not want health care to reach everyone in America. Or to these assholes.

In any case, I'm happy to at last present James Brown's "World," and hope that you find it as powerful as I do (despite its crappy production). As the man says: "Please, please give a damn."

Friday Funtime: Woodstock at 40

What does Woodstock mean to me, as someone who was not yet alive when it happened and who has never attended a music festival of remotely similar scope? Simple: Proof that such a gathering can be done. When we find ourselves isolated from our neighbors, our families, our cow orkers, we can remind ourselves that occasionally there are moments when more than a few - say, a hundred-thousand-plus - find themselves not isolated, not alone at all, for three days of peace and music.

It can happen.

PS: My gratitude to the kind people who made these clips available for us.

1. Richie Havens, "Freedom / Motherless Child"
2. Arlo Guthrie, "Coming Into Los Angeles"
3. Santana, "Soul Sacrifice"
4. Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze"
5. Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help From My Friends"
6. Sly & the Family Stone, "I Want to Take You Higher"
7. Jefferson Airplane, "Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon"
8. Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"
9. John Sebastian, "Darling Be Home Soon"
10. Country Joe and the Fish, "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"

Beach Boys, "Never Learn Not to Love"

This weekend marked the 40th anniversary of one of the more unfortunate episodes in the annals of pop culture: the Tate-LaBianca murders, committed at the behest of Charles Manson by his family of followers. Manson was for a time an L.A. outsider, a fringe musician who befriended the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and thereby persuaded the band to record his song "Cease to Exist." Retitled "Never Learn Not to Love", the song proved passable at best, salvaged only by the hypnotic monotone hum of Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine's backing vox and the saintly corrupted visage of Dennis himself on the stoned lead.

The murder of Sharon Tate and her friends and the LaBiancas tells us little about Manson himself but much about his Family, whose murderous members took years to develop genuine remorse for their actions. It is well to realize how readily some people will obey, whether the leader is Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Charlie Manson or your figurehead of choice. We're largely a nation of followers, merely in search of someone to lead us on. May we learn to not be so easily led down paths that conflict with our own codes of conduct. It may be too late for Atkins, Van Houten and Krenwinkel to absorb this lesson, but not for the rest of us. Never learn not to trust your internal moral compass.

Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, "Don't Give In to Him"

I was listening to some Gary Puckett and the Union Gap last evening.

Yes, I listen to that cornball. Gary and his band are the pork rinds of '60s pop: ridiculous and unhealthy, but enjoyable under the right circumstances. And I realized, in the midst of his medley of molestation - the "Young Girl" whom he woos as his "Lady Willpower" with an ultimatum and then "Is a Woman Now" after he pops her clutch - that there was a Top 40 hit of his that I'd never heard before.

YouTube to the rescue. Thank you, kachzvi, whoever you are, for posting a clip of "Don't Give In to Him," a #15 hit from 1969 that is rightly forgotten. It's not a bad song, just a bland one, something less than a footnote. At least it isn't creepy... Unless you take "You don't dare refuse him" as something more than an ultimatum.

In other matters, isn't Mr. Puckett himself something a dead ringer for Gary Cole?

Friday Funtime: First of May

It's International Workers' Day, but yours truly was unfortunately not at all laborious today and couldn't pull together the May Day set of celebrations of workers that he'd intended to post today. So make do with Dylan's ever relevant take on "Maggie's Farm," and enjoy this forgotten minor hit from the Bee Gees' early days. I'll try to be more on top of my game next week.

L&Gs, "First of May." (That's a live clip; here's the full studio version.)

(PS: "The apple tree / That grew for you and me" may be among the decade's 10 worst lines.)

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Baby, Baby Don't Cry"

Yup, it's a Miracles twin-spin this week. This one (Smokey having gotten his top-tier credit just after "I'm the One You Need") actually tells the exact same tale as "Come 'Round Here," only more gently and more persuasively. It's the same backstory: Smokey loves this girl whose guy is a no-good cheat, and his challenge is to persuade her that the guy is wrong not because Smokey wants her for himself but because she needs to be away from this other guy regardless of what she chooses for an alternative.

Which is too many syllables for a pop song, so Smokey, taking the lyrical matter for himself this time, constructs a more placid scenario in "Baby, Baby Don't Cry," which in 1969 brought the Miracles back to the Top 10 for only the second time since 1963, astonishingly (through no fault of the majestic and underappreciated "Going to a Go-Go" and "More Love," topics for another day).

Smokey again is content to stand at the sidelines - "Love is here, standing by" - but is more direct in his dismissal of his rival suitor. The confidence is palpable; Smokey never loses control of his voice in the way he did in the thrilling yelps of "Come 'Round Here." He knows that what he is speaking is the truth, and further, that she will get it this time. That she will get it this time.

And you root for him once again, the man whose love is so deep and so secure that he can fade into his chorus, "Love is here, standing by."

Eire Apparent, "The Clown"

OK, after all that Manilow sappiness yesterday, I'm posting this just because I want to give you fucking nightmares: Eire Apparent, "The Clown."

Isn't that the most horrid thing ever? (I don't know which is worse, that bad-trip montage of menacing clowns, or "When he goes to bed, he starts to pray / That he can have a child someday.") And to think that Jimi Hendrix produced.

Timi Yuro, "It Will Never Be Over for Me"

Oh, how happy YouTube has made me. As has someone from the I Love Music message board, through no fault of his own.

See, this guy I met at the EMP Pop Conference this year posts to ILM under the nom de poste "If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up." The fractured diction only added to the reference's delightful fervor, and I asked him about the source of the line (it was something someone had posted to a board, natch). But I realized tonight, when one of his posts came up on the board, that I have never heard a single note from Timi Yuro.

Geesh. Rectified that tonight, thanks to the ol' Tube. Started with "Hurt," a boomer in the Vicki Carr style, miles beyond Mama Cass into Ethel Merman territory, as command-to-attention voices go, but not my kinda songwriting. Then I got something swinging: "It Will Never Be Over for Me".

Whee!

That's really all I want to say about it - Whee! - but I'll add for scholarship's sake that the song is a 1969 Jerry Ragovoy production (same guy who coaxed great performances out of Howard Tate and a few others) , styled very much like the (contemporary?) "For the Love of Him" from Bobbi Martin. "Supper-club soul," an All Music Guide critic called it, to which I reply: "You say that like it's a bad thing."

Whee!

Nina Simone, "Suzanne"

Nina Simone was an astonishing interpreter of just about anything, and one of her absolute best efforts was this gorgeous and personalized take on "Suzanne", featuring some of Leonard Cohen's most effective and evocative lyrics, trochees at every line pushing the narrative forward. The tale tilts and turns, but I'm especially fond of the second verse, in which a forlorn Jesus, watching from his cross, resigns himself to being ever misunderstood. I can dig the feeling: "forsaken, almost human."

PS: Long weekend coming, so no Friday Funtime and no new posts till next week.