Song list and notes for Circa '72 CD

Circa ’72: Rockets and Dreams
   
1   Toad Away                        Firesign Theatre                   1:06
2   Garden Party                    Rick Nelson                           3:37
3   Pure and Easy                   Pete Townshend                   5:28  
4   If the Shoe Fits                  Leon Russell                          2:13
5   A Child in These Hills      Jackson Browne                    3:52
7   Ventura Highway             America                                  3:01
8   Sheraton Gibson               Pete Townshend                     2:31
9   From the Beginning          Emerson, Lake & Palmer     3:39
10 Send In The Clowns         Glynis Johns                           3:10
11 One Monkey Don’t
        Stop No Show Part 1      Honey Cone                           3:37
12 Same Situation                   Joni Mitchell                         2:36
13 Learn How To Fall            Paul Simon                            2:33
14 Sail Away                            Randy Newman                    2:44
15 Hypnotized                          Fleetwood Mac                     4:41
16 Phil                                      Carl Reiner                            1:01
17 Ancient Poetry                             and                                1:48
18 Fig Leaf                               Mel Brooks                            1:15
19 Right Place Wrong Time   Doctor John                           2:42
20 Superstition                         Stevie                                      4:24
21 Big Brother                         Wonder                                   3:27
22 Freddie’s Dead                    Curtis Mayfield                     3:11
23 The Dirty Jobs                    The                                          4:09
24 Helpless Dancer                    Who                                       2:16
25 Beethoven piano sonata # 8, Op. 13 in C minor “Pathétique”       
Stephen Bishop (Kovacevich) 1972 2nd movement excerpt 1:10
26 Rock Me on the Water          Jackson Browne                  4:15
27 Magic Mirror,                         Leon Russell                       4:35
28 Hope for Mankind                  Carl and Mel                      0:26

(note: some links below may be broken...)

Circa '72 CD Notes  (albums are from ‘72 unless specifically mentioned as being from ’73).

Toad Away is the opening track on Firesign Theatre's  Dear Friends album.   Firesign Theatre, or some remnant of it, is still in business, having released an album called Bride of Firesign in 2002.   Garden Party is on Rick Nelson's album Garden Party.    I bought both these albums used at Half-Price Books in Austin.  History question:  What 1950s TV show was Ricky Nelson in?

Pure and Easy and Sheraton Gibson are on Pete Townshend's solo album Who Came First.  Steven and I bought a copy of the album when we lived at the Riverhouse in the summer of 1973, but that copy disappeared long ago.  I bought a used copy in 2002 at Jupiter Records, a local record store in Austin that has now also disappeared or else moved to Burnet Road.

The big hit on Leon Russell's '72 album Carney was Tightrope, with Masquerade being a close second, but only as recorded by other singers.  I'd planned to use (and tried to use) Tightrope on this CD, but the only songs that seemed to fit were If The Shoe Fits and Magic Mirror.  I bought a used copy of Carney in 2003 at Been Around Records in Little Rock, owned by my former Hendrix College classmate John Harris.

A Child in These Hills and Rock Me on the Water are from Jackson Browne’s album Saturate Before Using eponymous first album.

The fill-in selection, the missing number 6 above, is a brief excerpt from Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, recorded in 1991, as best I can tell.  The CD I recorded it from is a 1997 compilation called Elgar: The Ultimate Collection.  I used this selection to cover over my mistake of not reversing the turntable platter far enough when I cued up Ventura Highway, which made the first guitar note of that song off-key. And because I graduated from high school in '72.

Ventura Highway is the opening song on America’s second album, Homecoming.  Well, I’m pretty sure it’s their second album.  Not nearly as popular as their first album, which included the song everyone at first thought was being sung by Neil Young: A Horse With No Name.

From the Beginning was written by Greg Lake, and is on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s album Trilogy.  Lake is the vocalist and guitar player on this album and was formerly a vocalist, bassist and co-songwriter with King Crimson.  Keith Emerson plays keyboards and Carl Palmer is the percussionist.  I didn't start this song from the beginning. I was trying to get it cued up while Sheraton Gibson was playing, spinning the ELP LP rapidly backwards with the needle in the groove and listening in the headphones for the beginning of the track, indicated by the backwards speeded-up noise turning to silence. That happened just as Sheraton Gibson was ending.  I positioned the fader on the mixer so that both sources were "live" and hit the switch to start From the Beginning. I didn't realize I had only turned the record back to the pause after the guitar intro on that song, so the guitar intro is left out. But I like it the way it turned out. Such are the thrills of segueing.

Send in the Clowns was written by Stephen Sondheim for the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, based on the 1956 Ingmar Bergman movie Smiles of a Summer Night.  The music and lyrics are © 1973.  The song was later performed and recorded by numerous singers including Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.  Sondheim himself, in an interview related to a 2002 revival of the play, said the song’s lyrics have a somewhat manipulative quality.  This recording is from the original Broadway cast album, with Glynis Johns playing the female lead of Desirée.  From the album’s liner notes, written by William Evans:

 “Fredrik makes his way to Desirée’s  bedroom, where she reveals her true reason for inviting him—her hope that they might be able to revive their love permanently.  But Fredrik, unable to give up his child bride, walks out, leaving Desirée alone (SEND IN THE CLOWNS).

“Meanwhile, Anne and Fredrika scour the grounds for Hendrik.  Anne finds him as he is suicidally rigging up a noose.  Realizing it is Hendrik she loves, not ‘poor old Fredrik,’ Anne decides to run off with him.

“Petra, the maid, having made love with Madame Armfeldt’s butler, Frid (George Lee Andrews), expresses her sense of romance in terms of the practical and real (THE MILLER’S SON).

“Fredrik finds himself being consoled by Charlotte about the loss of his son and wife.  The Count spots Fredrik and Charlotte embracing.  He storms out of the house to challenge Fredrik to a game of Russian roulette.  They go off to the summer pavilion, a shot is heard, and the Count returns with Fredrik slung over his shoulder.  Fredrik has ‘merely grazed his ear.’  The Count orders Charlotte to pack their bags.  At last, Desirée and Fredrik realize that they are meant to be together (Reprise of SEND IN THE CLOWNS).

“The comedy ended, Madame Armfeldt tells her granddaughter that the night has already smiled twice, once for the young and once for the fools.  ‘The smile for the fools was particularly broad tonight.’  To the accompaniment of the NIGHT WALTZ, the lovers dance through the silver birches as the night smiles down for the third and final time (FINALE).”

I recorded One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part 1 and Freddie’s Dead from the CD Soul Train: 1972, which also has Michael Jackson singing Ben (a song about a rat, from the movie of the same name).  Everybody Plays the Fool, by The Main Ingredient, is on Soul Train: 1972, too.  I was certain I was going to use this song on my Circa ’72 CD, but it didn’t seem to fit after all.  Instead I used two other songs: One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part I is one of them; Same Situation, from Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album, is the other. The songs on Court and Spark are © 1973.

There are several different songs with the title One Monkey Don't Stop No Show. Two that I know of are Joe Tex's version, and there's Big Maybelle's version on The Oxford American - Southern Music CD #15 Featuring The Music Of Tennessee.  That still doesn't explain the Part I designation in Honey Cone's song. 

Learn How to Fall is one of the lesser-known songs on Paul Simon’s 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.  Better-known songs from the album are Kodachrome, American Tune (I almost used it—the theme certainly runs throughout my CD) and Loves Me Like a Rock. 

Sail Away is from the album of the same name.  A couple of other fairly well known songs on this Randy Newman album are Political Science and You Can Leave Your Hat On.

Hypnotized is from Fleetwood Mac’s 1973 album Mystery to Me.  The members of the group at that time  (as listed inside the album cover) were Mick Fleetwood, percussion; John McVie, bass; Bob Welch, guitars, vocals; Bob Weston, lead guitar, slide; Christine McVie, keyboards, vocals.  Like most of the songs on the album, Hypnotized was written by Bob Welch.  The album was “Produced by Martin Birch and Fleetwood Mac.  Recorded on the Rolling Stones Mobile Unit.  Mixed at Advison, London."

Phil, Ancient Poetry, Fig Leaf and Hope for Mankind are from the album 2000 and Thirteen, an edited version of Mel Brooks’ and Carl Reiner’s conversational performance in front of a live audience of  “over 150 friends and associates” at The Burbank Studios in Los Angeles on August 25, 1973.  Brooks and Reiner introduced The 2000 Year Old Man to the world in about 1960 on their TV variety show.  (When Reiner refers to Brooks “living through two centuries” he means two millennia, but I didn’t even notice the mistake until I’d heard the conversation several times—until I was making the CD, actually.)  Including the track Hope for Mankind on my CD was something I hadn’t planned.  I used it simply because there was a little time still available on the CD.   I used the turntable on/off switch at the very end to slow down and stop the turntable rather than to start it as I’d done so many times during this project. 

Dr. John’s song Right Place Wrong Time is from the CD Soul Train: 1973.   Superstition and Big Brother are on Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book album.  The beginning of Big Brother is already mixed with the end of Superstition on the album, so this cool-sounding mix is not one I can claim for myself. 

Also ready-mixed are The Dirty Jobs and Helpless Dancer on The Who’s 1973 double album Quadrophenia.   Like Tommy, Quadrophenia is a rock opera.  Unlike the deaf, dumb and blind boy in Tommy, Jimmy in Quadrophenia is an all-too-typical-teenager struggling with allegiances:  parents vs. friends, home vs. escape, taking a demeaning job vs. fighting in the streets, love vs. hate in his relationship with the opposite sex; and throughout it all, of course, being supremely concerned with wearing the right clothes and having the right look.

Here’s the first paragraph of Jimmy’s long description of his messed-up life, included as part of the liner notes of the album, © 1973 by Pete Townshend:  “I had to go to this psychiatrist every week.  Every Monday.  He never really knew what was wrong with me.  He said I wasn’t mad or anything.  He said there’s no such thing as madness.  I told him he should try standing in a queue at Brentford football ground on a Saturday morning.  I thought it might change his mind.  My dad put it another way.  He said I changed like the weather.  One minute I’d be a tearaway, next minute all soppy and swoony over some bird.  Schizophrenia, he called it.  Nutty, my mum called it.”   At the end of this imaginative narrative, there is this disclaimer:  “No one in this story is meant to represent anyone either living or dead, particularly the Mum and Dad.  Our Mums and Dads are all very nice and live in bungalows which we bought for them in the Outer Hebrides.”

When I was buying a blank journal book at the Capitol Bookstore on Louisiana Street in downtown Little Rock in October 1982, the adagio movement from Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata began playing on the public radio station.  I didn’t know what it was at the time, but the girl behind the counter said, “Oh, I love this!”  After that I loved it too.  What we were hearing was the beginning of Adventures in Good Music, a radio program hosted by Karl Haas that opens and closes with the first minute or so of the Pathetique’s 2^nd movement.  I haven’t heard a version I like better than the one I put on the CD, and of course I wanted one recorded in ’72 or ‘73.  See the pre-notes for a description of where I got the album.  The sound quality in the final version on the Circa ’72 CD is lacking, but I finally decided that’s the way it should be.

_____________________________

The main reason I made these tapes and CDs is that I enjoy the process of mixing the ending of one song with the beginning of another.  In the summer of 1984 I bought the mixer I still use (a small DJ mixer from Radio Shack) and made a cassette tape I called the Peace Links Planetarium Tape.  The idea was that people would simply listen to the songs and think about what was being said.  Listening too often takes a back seat to watching and looking, which are necessary for survival but can lead to a superficial viewpoint of complex issues.  The information from the eyes gets in the way of information from the ears.  Like the Peace Links tape, the tapes and CDs in the Circa 69-72 project are meant as anti-videos, to be listened to for whatever effect might be produced.  Unlike the Peace Links tape, which I envisioned being played for seated audiences at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s planetarium, the Circa 69-72 music is meant for dancing and healing, as well as thinking and feeling.  

When I recorded the first side of the Circa '69 tape, in September 1999, I had just moved to Columbia, South Carolina.  I was living in a dorm room without a roommate in the graduate student wing of a big dorm on the University campus. I was far away from friends and family, so the historical connection was important to me for that reason.  But I also had the feeling that history was about to recycle itself in a very undesirable way, particularly with regard to the war in Vietnam. 

I intended to make only the 1969 tape, but after making the second side of it in March of 2000, I realized there were a lot of relevant songs from 1970, 71 and 72.  So sometime in the year 2000 I decided to continue making and sending out recordings for each year through 1972.  The '69 tape has a few songs from a year or so earlier on it, and I found when I started trying to make the '72 CD that I wanted to include songs from '73 also.  Thus the need for the "circa" designation in those titles.

I was in high school from the late summer of 1969 until May 1972, worked as a copy editor and reporter during the summer of 1972, and did my first stint at Hendrix College in the ’72-’73 school year.  I also started doing taping for TAPES in 1972—see Circa ’72 pre-notes.  The years 1969 through 1973 roughly correspond to the ill-fated reign of Richard Nixon as president (under threat of impeachment, he resigned in August 1974), the end of the reign of longtime FBI-chief/secret-drag-queen J. Edgar Hoover (he died in 1972), and the soul-searching that went on in America during the height of the Vietnam War and during the Watergate years.  And on the arts scene side of the human inequality:  Louis Armstrong died in 1971, Pablo Picasso died in 1973.

The years 1969 through 1972 are the only years people have visited the moon (so far as we know), and the moon is only the first step in the exploration of space by humans.  Unexpected developments in space flight propulsion are needed before space exploration becomes commonplace, but it now seems possible that private enterprise may send people to the moon in the not too distant future.

The biggest interest for me in making these recordings is the combined problems of war and love.  These are ever-present, worldwide issues, but they were at the top of the list of major themes in the United States during the late sixties and early seventies.  They were also major issues in my life back then.  For the U.S. and for me personally these are once again very problematic issues, mainly how to avoid or shorten wars and therefore avoid unnecessary killing and injustices, and how to put love into practice in everyday life.

August of 2001:  my reel-to-reel tape deck playing the '71 master tape during the making of a '71 cassette tape.  I was living in an apartment in Columbia, South Carolina at the time, with a fellow forty-something physics grad student named Ivan from Bulgaria .

I first visited Columbia in August 1972, with my brother Steven and our friend George Baker.  We had dropped off David Calkins (PBHS class of '69, and The Citadel class of '72) in Charleston and spent the night there after an approximately 15 hour drive from Pine Bluff.  Pat Calkins, my best male friend in high school, was living in Columbia and the trip's purpose was to drop off David for a friend's wedding in Charleston and to visit Pat.  After we had dropped David off and picked up Pat, we camped out for several days in the Smoky Mountains, around Gatlinburg, Knoxville, and Asheville. 

Then during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1973, Pat, Steven, I camped out in the Asheville, North Carolina area. Our first stop, after we got tired of driving on I-40, was Cedars of Lebanon state park in Tennessee. Once we got near Asheville, we asked about places to camp when we stopped at a country store. The old men there mentioned a place called the "Bear Waller."  In trying to find it, we drove Steven's little Datsun pickup up a dirt road on the side of a mountain and found a vacant, open old log cabin with a fireplace in it and a pond out front.  We stayed there with a nice fire going for two nights.  The man and woman who owned the property showed up on the second day in a car with a Florida license, but they were friendly and didn't tell us to leave, and didn't stick around very long either.  Maybe they were afraid of us?

Update: Pat reminded me that the couple, who showed up in a green Plymouth station wagon with a little dog or two if I remember correctly, had recently bought the property, so that was very likely their first time to see it.  They were apologetic to us for disturbing us Pat says. 

Also Pat reminded me that I had my banjo, which I'd bought for $35 from a girl at Hendrix who was from North Carolina.  I was learning to play Rocky Foggy Mountain Breakdown at that time by slowing the record down to 16-rpm's and using the notation for the song from Pete Seeger's banjo book.  No, I didn't have the record player on the trip--it was at the house trailer Mike Oldner and I were living in as sophomore students at Hendrix that semester.

But I had not learned to play worth a damn by Thanksgiving of that year, and Steven, who could play the guitar quite well by then, wasn't too happy to have me trying to play stuff on the banjo, as I recall.  Brothers (and sisters) can be peeved with each other for other, unknown, reasons, too.  I may have resented his guitar playing ability, who knows?  I do remember he played Neil Young's song Sugar Mountain the first night we were on the road, in our tent at the Cedars of Lebanon State Park. That was the first time I'd heard the song. That evening was a memorable and very pleasant moment in time.  "Oh to live on Sugar Mountain. . . ."