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. . . ."  

Circa '72 tape pre-notes

Circa ’72 pre-recording notes.  Some additions and corrections: 10/16, 10/20, 12/4/03, 2/21/04, 8/15/04, and 6/20/05.

The 1972 CD is still a work in progress.  I tried several times during the summer and fall of 2002 to put a meaningful mix together, but it didn't happen.  The idea I have in mind is expressed by a sign on a display in the downtown Austin library, where I'm writing this.  The display is a photographic history of the library called "Where the past meets the future." 

Anyway, I realize now some of the songs I originally wanted to use are from 1973, so the CD will be a Circa '72 recording, with songs from both '72 and '73 on it.  

The photo of me shown above was taken in '72 or '73 by Carl Bell in his bedroom at 2105 Oak Street in Pine Bluff, where he had his equipment for recording albums onto 7’’ reel tapes and then onto 3’’ reels and cassette tapes to send to military hospitals in Vietnam starting in 1969, when his son Rick became an army surgeon in Danang.

My brothers and I and friends of ours, along with many other people, including the Raley brothers who owned Raley's House of Music, loaned albums to Mr. Bell.  Later on some of us helped him with the taping.  I started doing that when I got my Sony cassette deck and other good hi-fi equipment in the fall of '72 when I was starting classes at Hendrix College.   TAPES of Pine Bluff, as Mr. Bell (a friend of my Trulock grandparents) called his group, also sent tapes to other places during and after the Vietnam War—to Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, and other overseas locations where there were U.S. military bases with large hospitals. 

U.S. soldiers, by the way, quit fighting in Vietnam after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973.  American POWs came home; very heavy B-52 bombing of Cambodia took place from then until about August 1973 (helping inadvertently to set up the beginning of the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge terror and genocide in Cambodia from '75 through '79); and the South Vietnamese were left to fight on their own, which continued until April 1975, when the emergency U.S. embassy evacuation took place as the North Vietnamese Army finally took over Saigon and won the war.

(Corruption--mainly various illegal methods of keeping a lot of money in the hands of the people in power-- was widespread in the South Vietnamese government both before and during the war.    When the U.S increased its spending in Vietnam, this problem was only worsened.  In this respect, the people of South Vietnam were losing the war before it even started.)

Late in the summer of 1972, Rick Bell returned to Pine Bluff with his wife Lee, a nurse from Taiwan.  (He was divorced from his first wife, Julie, while he was serving in Vietnam.)  He works in Pine Bluff now as an emergency room physician at Jefferson Regional Medical Center.

The other photo was also taken at the Bell's house on Oak Street.  I should say that both Mr. Bell and his wife Jane were friends of my grandparents, and it may have been Mrs. Bell who took this photo of my grandfather, which has the date March 1973 written on the back.  Mrs. Bell gave me both these photos and several more when I had lunch with her in December 2000 at Fu Mae's on Main Street in Pine Bluff.  I'm not sure about the spelling of Fu Mae, but I really enjoyed that meal.  Fu Mae's unfortunately is closed now, and that was the last time I saw Jane Bell, although I talked to her on the phone once or twice afterward.  She died in August 2002; Carl Bell died in June 1994; my grandfather died a month after the photo was taken; my grandmother died in June 1972.    The photo of me had to have been taken between August 1972 and August 1973.  That's the only time I had my hair parted in the middle and the only time I wore a POW/MIA bracelet.  

Another historical note concerning this taping project is related to my semester-long tenure as a DJ at the campus radio station at Hendrix in the fall of 1973, which is when the radio station was first established.   I called my once-a-week, two-hour show Pat's Fish Market, which was the name of a fish market on Blake Street in Pine Bluff (they had some neat looking house plants in the window) but which I also chose because my best male friend during Jr High and high school was Pat Calkins (as of this March 2003 writing, he's still working on the restoration of the Pioneer Inn in Maui). 

As a DJ I learned to cue up a song on an album, an essential skill for starting a song on an LP at the moment you want it to start.  It's done by putting the needle on the groove at the beginning of the track you want to play, letting the song start and then immediately turning off the power to the turntable (automatic turntables are not made for doing this, but it can be done; DJ turntables have a simple on/off switch).  Then you rotate the turntable platter and album backwards until the needle is just at the beginning of the song, plus about half a turn so the turntable can come up to speed before the song starts.

So, in putting songs onto the reel-to-reel tapes from albums during this taping project of mine, I was cuing up one song as another one was playing--which is what makes it fun and challenging to make the master tapes because if I messed up the timing of the start of a song or didn't have it ready to go when the previous song was ending, I'd have to go back and start recording all the songs over again (or go back to wherever I'd left a gap between songs).   On Blowin' In the Wind, on the '71 tape/CD, I forgot to keep the fader positioned correctly and near the end of the song, you can hear me cueing up The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.  

In order to be able to create these segues ("segways") between songs recorded directly  from LPs, I bought a second turntable in the spring of 2001.  The 1969 and 1970 tapes were made using one turntable, a CD player, and, for a couple of songs, a cassette deck.

Okay, time for me to shut up and get back to work on the Circa 1972 CD.   The next thing you'll be seeing on this page is the list of songs in the order they'll appear.  I also have two comedy albums I'll be using some excerpts from: Firesign Theater's Dear Friends album, from '72, and a Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner album called 2000 & 13, recorded in August 1973.  (Mel Brooks is "the 2,013 year old man," interviewed by Carl Reiner.)

Adagio Cantabile  
from Pathetique piano sonata (excerpt)                        Beethoven
Live from the Senate Bar                                              Firesign Theater
(If you call that living!)
IF THE SHOE FITS                                                         LEON RUSSELL
A CHILD IN THESE HILLS                                              JACKSON BROWNE
VENTURA HIGHWAY                                                     AMERICA
TIME IS PASSING                                                           PETE TOWNSHEND
LISTEN, LISTEN                                                             SANDY DENNY  (FAIRPORT CONVENTION)
HYPNOTIZED                                                                  FLEETWOOD MAC
SUPERSTITION                                                               STEVIE WONDER
BIG BROTHER                                                                     "           "
FREDDIE'S DEAD                                                             CURTIS MAYFIELD
THE DIRTY JOBS                                                             THE WHO
HELPLESS DANCER                                                           "       "
A couple of conversations from
2000 and 13                                                                        MEL BROOKS AND CARL REINER
RIGHT PLACE, WRONG TIME                                           DR. JOHN
AMERICAN TUNE                                                             PAUL SIMON 
TIGHTROPE                                                                      LEON RUSSELL
SEND IN THE CLOWNS                                                     from cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music"
EVERYBODY PLAYS THE  FOOL                                      THE MAIN INGREDIENT
WAS A SUNNY DAY                                                          PAUL SIMON
ROCK ME ON THE WATER                                               JACKSON BROWNE
More from 2000 & 13                                                            MEL BROOKS AND CARL REINER
MAGIC MIRROR                                                                LEON RUSSELL
TOAD AWAY                                                                     FIRESIGN THEATER
Adagio Cantabile  
from Pathetique piano sonata (NO. 8, OPUS 13)                        Beethoven

Well, that's a possible line up, anyway, and there may still be some room left to squeeze in a few more songs. If you yourself want to make a suggestion for a song you want included, anonymous or not (as far as the notes and the CD are concerned), be my guest.   To help you make a choice, here's a link to a website with the top 100 songs of each year  and their lyrics:  (see the previous page for this link)
And, of course, you know my e-mail address.  So you like "Brandy" or "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia"?  Not a problem.  Make your request.
Okay, thanks for the requests.  I’m not sure about the request for “My Ding-A-Ling,” which wasn’t Chuck Berry’s finest moment.  But as Bob Dylan said about being so much older then and younger than that now, I have to admit I find it more humorous today than I did in 1972.  And that line about “future Parliament out there singing” has no doubt come true, so maybe it’ll fit in nicely after all. And yes, it could be dedicated to Bill Clinton (for what was not his finest moment). Anyway, time to wrap up these pre-notes and get to the taping, now that I’m getting settled in at a  new/old place and am feeling like doing some recording again.  Best wishes, DWT, 9/11/03.

(The above notes were mostly written in the first half of 2003, with a pause of several months between the next-to-last and last paragraphs.)

10/16/03.  The never ending pre-notes continue. . .   I’ve been having problems with my CD recorder for almost a year.  I sent it to the Philips factory service center in Houston during the summer and it came back with only one of the problems fixed.  Since I didn’t get it returned to them within the 30-day labor warranty period, it’ll cost a minimum of  $200 to have it repaired there now.  So the recording project is currently on hold because of technical difficulties. But I’ve gotten some advice from my contact at Matthews Electronics in Pine Bluff (chief subcontractor on NASA’s Orbiting Spunklab project) on what the problem might be, so I’m going to look into it and will be giving an update here soon.  Also, I’m still searching for a ’72 or ’73 recording of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” piano sonata, with the University of Texas music library being my best bet at the moment.   I do have a deadline in mind for finishing this project, by the way.  I’m planning on having the CD’s in the mail by Thanksgiving.  

10/20/03.  Nothin’ new to report, except to say that the recording is not really on hold, since I can go ahead and make the master reels anytime.  I even have a 1972 recording of the Pathetique piano sonata checked out from the Austin public library, but it becomes too scratchy sounding about halfway through, so I’m still looking for a cleaner copy of that (part of the “Beethoven Bicentennial” collection) or a BBC recording from ’72 with Stephen Bishop playing piano, which the UT music library has but which I have to go back during M-F business hours to find out if I can check out.  Check back later.

12/4/03.  I didn’t finish the recording as I’d planned to, but it keeps changing as I keep trying to record something I really like.  The UT library’s copy of Stephen Bishop playing the Pathetique is all I hoped for, except for one thing.  It can’t be checked out!  That’s why it’s in near perfect condition.  They have dubbing booths in the Fine Arts library, and I was able to take my CD recorder there and hook it up to the headphone jack of the built-in cassette recorder.  I’ll leave out the details of how I did that, but the problem now is that the recording’s dynamic range is so good that it overloaded the input circuit of the cassette recorder (a Sony) and the loudest split second of my CD recording is distorted. AUUUGH!  But, this is a hobby, so even the setbacks are part of the enjoyment.  A very small part as far as enjoyment is concerned, but if the result is good enough, it’s worth the effort.  I now plan to have the project finished on or by the 17^th, so I can mail out the recordings in time for Christmas.  And just a side note on a recent music release, namely The Best of R.E.M. 1988-whatever.  By far the best of R.E.M was what they did before 1988, when they were on IRS rather than Warner Brothers or whichever label they’re on now, so if you’re not familiar with their earlier songs, I recommend a Web search and listening.  Gardening at Night, Driver 8, Begin the Begin, Cayuhoga, etc.  (2/21/04:  there is the album REM Eponymous, a sort-of greatest hits of their IRS albums, but it has way too little on it.)  6/20/05:  Okay, let me belatedly thank Steve Holcombe, who made two 60 minute REM compilation cassette tapes for me in March 1989, a few weeks before he and I went to see REM at the Erwin Center in Austin; and also let me say that I do like Green, REM’s first Warner Brothers album, which came out not long before the REM ’89 tour.  

2/21/04.  I said a while back that I’d shut up and get to work on the tape.  Well, okay, time to do that.   No more will be written here until the tape is done, after I say these two things:  Thanks to David Potter for the Stephen Bishop album, which David’s son Geoffrey delivered to me on Christmas day; and, one of the physics professors I had at Hendrix College, Laymont Woodruff, an ex-military guy who nevertheless had a high-pitched, sing-song voice (and only a master’s degree, not a PhD) would occasionally when I was leaving his office raise his right hand as if in greeting and would say, “peace!”  I think he got that from Dave Garraway, the original host, in the 1950s, of the Today show, so that expression did not originate with the peace movement or hippies of the 1960s.  Peace!

August 15, 2004.  The never-ending pre-notes are now officially ending.  I recorded the two reel-to-reel tapes on July 17-18, then made the master Circa ’72 CD on July 31-August 1.  Not to say there won’t be more stuff added, such as this page of PBHS 1972 "Class Announcements."  (not added yet)

1971 collage

1971 CD/Tape song list and notes

                          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 59^th 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 19^th and 20^th 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)