1971 Tape songs:
A B
Heart
of the Country Peace Like A River
Me
and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
Orleans
The
Wind Military Madness
All
I Want What’s Goin’ On
Wild
Night The Prisoner
Whatcha
See Is Whatcha Get Hobo Blues
Tuesday’s
Dead Wounded Bird
One
Toke Over the Line Vincent
Arkansas
Traveler Wailing Wall
I
Wanna Grow Up Mother
and Child Reunion
To Be A Politician
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Oh
Mommy Indian
music excerpt
It
Don’t Come Easy Blowin’
In The Wind
Beware
of Darkness The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised
While
My Guitar Gently Weeps Long
Ago and Far Away
1971
Tape/CD Notes
The tape (recorded on August 1st and 5th, 2001) is now a CD, minus four songs and plus two songs. I had to leave out some songs in order to transform the cassette into a single CD, since the cassette is about 94 minutes of music and only 80 minutes can be put on a CD. After deciding the songs to take out, I had some extra time left and put two short songs at the beginning and the end of the CD, and I switched the order of the sides, with side B of the tape being first on the CD. Also, since one channel on my reel-to-reel went out when I was originally recording What’s Going On, I re-mixed it directly from CD onto the master CD I used for making the copies. Otherwise, I left the original mix as it was.
The four songs I left off the CD are The Prisoner by Gil Scott-Heron, Vincent by Don McLean, Wailing Wall by Todd Rundgren, and Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get by the Dramatics. The first three of these are about listening or the lack of it, with Wailing Wall allowing a hint of optimism ("nobody listens/and nobody seems to care/ but every day/you'll find them there/and . . ."). I had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—where wrong is being done by both sides—in mind when I combined the songs Vincent and Wailing Wall (which is on Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren). I replaced these two with Babylon, the last song on Don McLean’s American Pie album. Also, as a further tribute to George Harrison, I put the Bangladesh Benefit Concert version of Here Comes the Sun at the end of the CD.
Apropos of the song Babylon, here’s the dictionary entry for Zion, taken from several dictionaries. I had definition 3 mainly in mind when I decided to record the song, although I was also influenced by the front page news on October 22 showing the Israeli bus in flames (this time the gas tank exploded, which is not usually the case in the suicide bus bombings). zi·on also Si·on n. usu cap [from Zion, height in northeastern part of Jerusalem, Palestine, that was once the site of Solomon’s Temple and the seat of government of the kingdom of Judah and that was later identified with Jerusalem and Palestine as the birthplace and spiritual center of Judeo-Christianity and the earthly abode of God. . .] 1. a. The historic land of Israel as a symbol of the Jewish people. b. The Jewish people; Israel. 2. A place or religious community regarded as sacredly devoted to God. 3. An idealized, harmonious community; utopia <sought to set up perpetual Zions in the backcountry--W. H. Hale>. (History question: Where was Babylon located?)
Peace Like A River, Hobo’s Blues, Mother & Child Reunion, and Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard are from Paul Simon, released in February 1972 but copyrighted (and recorded, I assume) in 1971. Stephane Grappelli co-wrote and plays fiddle on Hobo’s Blues. The percussion on “Me & Julio” (the most prominent thing being a talking drum, I’m guessing) is played by Airto Moreira. All songs on the album are good, and most are even relevant to these times and to middle age craziness. See http://www.paulsimon.com/ for more info, including lyrics to all his songs.
Orleans is a traditional song that I suppose comes from France, since it’s in French. This version belongs to David Crosby’s would-be eponymous LP, If I Could Only Remember My Name, which is a better photo album than song album—inside there are 24 excellent photos of various Grateful Dead/Jefferson Airplane/Quicksilver musicians and hangers-on, including photos of Crosby, Nash & Young but not Stills.
Military Madness and Wounded Bird are from Graham Nash’s Songs For Beginners. Nash, by the way, was born on February 2, 1942 in (as you would expect) Blackpool, England. The song Willy on Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon is about Nash, whose nickname is/was Willy (I heard this tid-bit on KUT radio November 7, 2002, which was Mitchell’s 59th birthday). Also, Nash’s song Our House on Déjà Vu is about Joni Mitchell. I would guess the love songs on Songs For Beginners are also about Joni Mitchell, written in the aftermath of the couple’s break-up. Lyrics for the song Willy can be found at http://www.jonimitchell.com/ Note added Saturday December 7, 2002: Nash was in Austin and interviewed yesterday on KUT (http://www.kut.org/). He had good things to say about Mitchell, and said he’d written many songs about her, including Our House. But the interviewer couldn’t remember which song Mitchell was supposed to have written about Nash--although he’s the same guy who’d gotten a phone call on November 7 telling him Willy is about Nash! Nash has both a new book (interviews with writers of famous songs, I think) and a new album out. I recorded the KUT interview, which is about an hour’s worth of talking and a few songs sung by Nash in the studio. Let me know if you want me to send you a CD copy of the recording.
I recorded What’s Going On from the CD Soul Train 1971. Marvin Gaye co-wrote the song with Reynaldo Benson and Al Cleveland. (If you’ve got a copy of the tape, Whatcha See is Whatcha Get, by the Dramatics, also came from this CD. It’s the only CD I used in making this 1971 tape/CD. All other songs are from LPs, except for Wild Night, which is from a cassette tape of The Best of Van Morrison, released in 1990.)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey and Heart of the Country are from Paul and Linda McCartney’s RAM album, which also features David Spinoza, Hugh McCracken and Danny Seiwell (all on guitar, I believe, and Spinoza also plays on at least one of the other songs in this 1971 collection—“Me & Julio” on Paul Simon).
The Concert for Bangladesh album turned out to be the source of six songs on this CD. I hadn’t expected that to be the case after I bought the album from Papa Jazz Record Shoppe (yep, I was still shoppe-ing there) in the summer of 2001. (Another history question: whose radio ad in Pine Bluff in the early 70’s said “Where you shop does make a difference”? Maybe it even said, “Remember, where you shop does make a difference.” So true, I found recently when I was buying clothes, which I do as rarely as possible. I should have remembered…) Anyway, the songs on the CD from the Bangladesh Benefit Concert are Bangla Dhun (an excerpt, and not really a song), Blowin’ in the Wind, It Don’t Come Easy, Beware of Darkness, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Here Comes the Sun. This is another album, like Paul Simon, that was recorded in 1971 and released in early 1972. Much info can be found on the Web, including the site http://www.bangladeshshowbiz.com/concert_for_bangladesh/concert_for_bangladesh_main.htm
Gil Scott-Heron went to prison in November 2001, due to being charged with possession of cocaine and his refusal to agree to treatment as an alternative to prison, due to his claim that he is not an addict. His song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is on Pieces of a Man, recorded on April 19th and 20th 1971. The Prisoner (on ’71 tape) is also on this album. Musicians are: Bernard Purdie, drums; Ron Carter, bass; Burt Jones, electric guitar; Brian Jackson, piano; Hubert Laws, flute and saxophone; Johnny Pate, conductor; and Scott-Heron, of course, doing the vocals.
Long Ago and Far Away is on Mud Slide Slim. Joni Mitchell sings back-up vocal. Jumping ahead slightly in the order albums are recorded on the CD (okay, I did that already by mentioning Wild Night above), I'll put in a note about Joni Mitchell’s song All I Want, which as you probably know is on Blue: James Taylor plays guitar on this song. Stephen Stills also plays guitar on one or two songs on Blue, but not on All I Want.
I was among those who thought poorly of Cat Stevens for his reported comments regarding Salman Rushdie and Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. As the NY Times letter I photocopied for the 1971 tape collage indicates, however, and as Cat Stevens has repeatedly said, he didn't claim that Rushdie should be murdered for blasphemy. Anyway, Stevens' two songs from Teaser and the Firecat on the 1971 Tape/CD are The Wind and Tuesday's Dead. Lyrics can be found at http://catstevens.com/ . Some lyrics from Tuesday’s Dead:
Whoa, Where do you go? When you don't want no one to know?
Who told tomorrow--Tuesday's dead
Oh preacher won't you paint my dream, won't you show me where you've been
Show me what I haven't seen to ease my mind.
Cause I will learn to understand, if I have a helping hand.
I wouldn't make another demand all my life.
What's my sex, what's my name, all in all it's all the same.
Everybody plays a different game, that is all.
Now, man may live, man may die searching for the question why
But if he tries to rule the sky he must fall.
Now every second on the nose, the humdrum of the city grows
reaching out beyond the throes of our time.
We must try to shake it down. Do our best to break the ground.
Try to turn the world around one more time.
Yeah, we must try to shake it down do our best to break the ground
Try to turn the world around one more time.
Brewer and Shipley were (and may still be) West Coast musicians who had several albums released in the early seventies. One Toke Over the Line and Oh Mommy are from Tarkio. Jerry Garcia plays pedal steel guitar on the album. (Yeh, I wrote “pedal steal” in an earlier version of these notes, the reason most likely being that a guy named Sneaky Pete plays pedal steel guitar on both Blue and Byrdmaniax [see below], but his name is spelled Sneeky Pete in the former album’s musician credits.) 1971, by the way, is when airline hijackings to Cuba became so common that airport security started to become an issue. Also, the only attack on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (so far) occurred in 1971--thus the lyrics in Oh Mommy about not speaking Spanish on a plane and not polishing off the Liberty Bell
The Boggy Road to Milledgeville (Arkansas Traveler) is on David Bromberg’s epynomous LP, which also includes a humorous song by Bromberg and George Harrison called The Holdup (which also is on a later Bromberg album, possibly a live album).
I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician, by “McGuinn/Levy © 1971 Blackwood Music, Inc./Patian Mus./Jackalope Mus. (BMI),” is on The Byrds’ album Byrdmaniax. Roger McGuinn was the main singer/guitarist for The Byrds, but there’s no indication in the album notes of who “Levy” is. Byrdmaniax is not a very good LP, and was maybe The Byrds’ last one. Did they do anything really good after David Crosby left? I don’t think so. I thought I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician became relevant after the 2000 presidential election, and I think it seems even moreso now. (RT in Columbia SC and JKW in Austin will no doubt disagree with that assessment…)
Have I forgotten anybody? E-mail me with info or comments. You can also look forward (?) to a 1972 CD soon--the last one in this prolonged recording project, which I originally intended to be just a 1969 tape.
Best holiday
wishes! DWT December 8, 2002
(corrections
or additions done afterwards are in red)
