As her New York Times obituary notes, Connie Francis is mostly remembered for dreamy ballads like her first million seller, Who's Sorry Now (no question mark in the title). She did occasional rockers like "Lipstick On Your Collar" (video above, with an introduction by Dick Clark). She grew up in Newark's The Ironbound, a neighborhood that was probably grittier in her childhood than now as, like many inner city areas, it is undergoing gentrification. When Bobby Darin decided Connie was his Dream Lover, her father showed him the door at gunpoint.
"Lipstick On Your Collar" is my favorite of her many hit songs. I like it because it shows her tough side. I like it for the same reason I like Doris Day as Calamity Jane.
Farewell, Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero from The Ironbound. You gave much to many. You also endured much, both emotionally and physically, but you always prevailed. Maybe you and Roberta Flack can thrill the heavenly host with a duet.
The past few months have seen the passing of three musicians who profoundly influenced the development of rock music: Jerry Lee Lewis, Jeff Beck, and now David Crosby, who died Wednesday at the age of 81. The clip above, made in 2018 when Crosby was in his late 70s, shows him, along with mandolinist Chris Thile, doing "Déjà Vu", the title song of the first (1970) album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
I first became aware of David Crosby in 1965 when I was nineteen and a student at the University of South Florida, and heard on the University Center café jukebox the Byrds' cover of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man". What excited me was the "jingle jangle" of Jim (later called Roger) McGuinn's Rickenbacker guitar and the group's celestial singing harmony. I didn't know it at the time, but it was Crosby's high tenor and precise melodic sense that gave the harmonies their special quality.
Crosby later became my least favorite Byrd. What precipitated this was "Mind Gardens", to me at the time (1967) the one great blot on the Byrds' otherwise superb fourth album Younger Than Yesterday. My musical taste at the time was broad, encompassing classical, baroque, folk, country, bluegrass, blues, and soul, along with rock. Thanks to the Beatles I was beginning to appreciate Indian raga, and to Dave Brubeck jazz. "Mind Gardens", though, was a step too far for me at the time. Crosby's solo vocal and the instrumental accompaniment didn't follow any convention I could understand; it simply sounded discordant. Despite its ultimately optimistic lyrics, it seemed to me to lead nowhere.
Jon Pareles, in the New York Times, provides a list of what he considers Crosby's "Fifteen Essential Songs". About "Mind Gardens" he writes:
"An artifact of psychedelia's experimental heyday, 'Mind Gardens' is a parable about protection and openness, with an Indian-tinged vocal line rising above a multi-tracked droney web of guitar picking: acoustic and electric, picked and sustained, running forward and backward and completely reveling in disorientation."
Now, with the benefit of half a century plus more of living, which have included a generous share of disorientation, I've come to appreciate "Mind Gardens", along with other Crosby songs like "Everybody's Been Burned", also from Younger Than Yesterday, which ends with the lines, "But you die inside/ Every time you try to hide/ So I guess instead I'll love you."
... when Neil Armstrong took "one small step... ." At 10:30 P.M. EDT on July 20, 1969 I was at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, Pennsylvania, prone on the ground next to an M-60 machine gun, with my poncho draped over me as it was raining steadily. I was there with other members of my ROTC summer training platoon, waiting to ambush an "enemy" convoy that never showed up. It was near the end of a field exercise that lasted several days and was the capstone of our training. We may have known of the launch of Apollo 11 before we boarded the helicopters that took us to the training area, but we didn't know of the successful moon landing until we returned to our barracks, and our radios.
There were other events I missed during my time at IGMR. Jimi Hendrix played "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. On my way back to Tampa, I stopped to visit a friend in Richmond. She said something about Chappaquiddick, and I said, "Chappa who?"
Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
Erratum: when I first wrote this, I put the date of the moon landing as 1979 instead of '69. My bad, and I've corrected it.
My first Dylan album was The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his second after his eponymous debut, which I acquired shortly after. Freewheelin' included the first song of his I knew, "Blowing in the Wind", which I first heard by Peter, Paul & Mary. See and hear an early live performance of that song, which captured like no other the mid-sixties longing for a better, more just world, below:
I wanted to do a TBT about Sir George Martin, who died last week, but responsibilities to work, family, and the Brooklyn Heights Blog got in the way. My natural first impulse was to use something he'd done with the Beatles, since his career was so intertwined with theirs. In the Rolling Stone piece linked above, Sir George is quoted as saying he had initial doubts about the four Liverpudlian lads, but that one of the things that impressed him was that "there was more than one person singing." There were harmony vocals in doo-wop and girl group pop at the time, but straight ahead rock, with the exception of the Everly Brothers, was dominated by solo singers.
I was delighted to discover the clip below, which documents a meeting of Sir George and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Sir George credits the Beach Boys as an influence on the Beatles; surely there was a complementary one in the opposite direction. The Beach Boys' early work was built on Chuck Berry riffs and vocal harmonies from quartets like The Four Freshmen, whose music today would be classified as "easy listening". The Beatles were influenced by Berry (they covered "Roll Over Beethoven") and other American rock and rockabilly stars, but also by skiffle--the Beatles grew out of a skiffle group led by John Lennon called the Quarrymen--and by something that didn't come to the fore until Sgt. Pepper, the British music hall tradition.
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In the video, Brian begins the conversation by talking about songwriting; about how songs seem to burst from his chest. Then they repair from the piano to the mixing board, where Sir George plays with the knobs, first reducing the song "God Only Knows" to its bare essential: Brian's vocal. Sir George then plays with the knobs some more, adding bits back in and changing the balance, until he creates a mix that Brian credits as better than the one that was used on the Beach Boys' most critically acclaimed album, Pet Sounds.
Oh, and I do love Sir George's early 1960s red Caddy convertible.
Photo: By Adamsharp (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Just over a year ago, inspired by Moira Redmond's Clothes in Books, I posted "Clothes in pop music, part 1, 1955-63". Since my last post went to 1963, why am I calling this one, which goes into 1972, "the Sixties"? I don't believe "the Sixties" as we Americans understand the term in either cultural or political senses coincides with the decade beginning 12:00 a.m 1960 and ending 11:59 p.m. 1969. Some people, I think, would begin the Sixties with the election of John F. Kennedy (November 8, 1960), others with his assassination (November 22, 1963). Some other arguable starting points are Dwight D. Eisenhower's valedictory "Military-Industrial Complex" speech (January 17, 1961), The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (July 2, 1964) the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 2, 1964), or--from a musical perspective--the first arrival of the Beatles in America (February 7, 1964). I've decided to go with the date of the assassination. While the election of JFK heralded a change, his assassination was an event that tore the fabric of the culture; one that, I think, would not be rivaled again until the Watergate scandal and resignation of Richard Nixon. As you can see above, several other transformative events came shortly afterward, in 1964.
I'm not sure where to mark the beginning of the Sixties from a fashion perspective. Certainly Jackie Kennedy had an influence on women's couture, one aspect of which is mentioned in one of the songs below. For me, the most noticeable change came in the later Sixties, in the aftermath of the British Invasion, when Mod fashion began to make inroads here. What I remember are bright floral and paisley prints, wider lapels on men's jackets, and wider ties. Thanks to the Beach Boys, there was also a surfing influence, with baggies, Henley collared shirts, and huarache sandals.
The other question is: When did the Sixties end? My answer is August 9, 1974, the date Richard Nixon resigned. Others, perhaps less politically and more musically oriented than me (though I think of myself as very musically oriented) might argue for the time the Beatles broke up, an agonizing, slow motion affair that may best be dated to April of 1970, when Paul McCartney announced he was leaving. Coincidentally, it was in the spring of 1970 that I experienced what I consider my quintessential Sixties moment. I was walking across the Cambridge, Massachusetts common and encountered five or six girls, about eight or nine years old, playing ring-around-the-rosie. What they were singing, though, was "Christ, you know it ain't easy/ You know how hard it can be/ The way things are going/ They're gonna CRUCIFY [all fall down] me."
Anyway, on to the songs:
In 1964 Frankie Valli and the other Jersey Boys had a number one hit on the Billboard pop chart with "Rag Doll." According to the song's Wiki it was written by group member Bob Gaudio, who "was inspired by a dirty-faced girl who cleaned the windshield of his automobile for change." When Gaudio reached into his wallet for a dollar (a very generous tip in those days), he found he had nothing but twenties (evidently the singer-songwriter thing was working out well), and gave her one, to her amazement. "I'd change her sad rags into glad rags if I could" is for me one of the more memorable lines from the early, pre-British Invasion Sixties.
Also in 1964, bluesman Tommy Tucker released "Hi-Heel Sneakers," which he wrote under his birth name Robert Higginbotham, misspelled "Higgenbotham" on the record label. The song would be covered many times, including by the Beatles and the Stones. Yes, footwear counts.
"Baby's in Black" was recorded in 1964, but released in 1965 as part of the album Beatles for Sale, which was released in the U.S. as Beatles 65. I've long been unsure if the song was about a woman mourning a deceased lover, or dressing in black to signal to an ex that she's available again. It's the former.
As I recall, Jackie Kennedy popularized the pillbox hat. Bob Dylan had some fun with it in 1966, on this track from his album Blonde on Blonde.
1966 was a fertile year for songs about millinery and clothes. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels had a major hit with the pedal-to-the-metal rocker "Devil with a Blue Dress On."
Footwear joins the fray in '66 with Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walking." It was also a good year for tough woman songs (this and the one before).
Tough guy songs, too. According to the song's Wiki the Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was written by Ray Davies after he had gotten into a "terrible brawl" with a fashion designer (and his girlfriend!) following a discussion in which Davies derided the designer's obsession with style and in which
I was just saying you don't have to be anything; you decide what you want to be and you just walk down the street and if you're good the world will change as you walk past. I just wanted it to be the individual who created his own fashion.
A very, I would say, Sixties sort of statement.
Does eyewear count? I say, "Yes!" When I first heard "Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)" on Boston's WRKO in 1968, the DJ called the group "John Fred and his Louisiana Playboys." Jello Biafra covers the song on his recently released album of New Orleans R&B, Walk on Jindal's Splinters.
This achingly sweet, autobiographical song topped the country chart in 1971. According to the song's Wiki, Parton wrote it in 1969 while on tour, riding in Porter Wagoner's bus. Wagoner was host of a weekly TV country music show that was the launching pad for Parton's career. A college roommate told me he had gone to a Grand Old Opry road show in Orlando and heard the following during Bobby Bare's set:
BARE: Y'all watch Porter Wagoner?
AUDIENCE: [Lots of cheering, clapping and whistling.]
BARE: Yeah, I like him, too. But you know who his sponsor is?
AUDIENCE: [Lots of chuckling. Wagoner's sponsor was a patent laxative called Black Draught.]
BARE: Yeah, well, I think I could do something like that. It'd go like this: Folks, this is the Bobby Bare Show, brought to you by Ex-Lax. Now we're gonna have some good old country pickin' and singin' and some old-time fiddlin', but first a word from our sponsor. Folks, you ever have one of those nasty old coughs, the kind that just hangs on and hangs on? Next time you get one of those coughs, take Ex-Lax. It won't cure your cough, but it'll make you too SCARED to cough.
AUDIENCE: [Laughter and groans.]
I'll close with a song by the Hollies, made long after Graham Nash left the group to join CSN&Y. The singer is Allan Clarke; unlike other Hollies songs there are no backing vocals because Clarke intended it for a solo album. It charted at number two in the U.S. in September of 1972, shortly before Richard Nixon was elected to his second term. This was followed by the revelation of the Watergate break-in and by the ensuing efforts to cover it up that would lead to Nixon's resignation two years later.
In my previous post I promised that my next one would cover the time from 1963 to the present. I'll confess to having been unable to think of any pop songs after 1972 that are about or refer strongly to clothes. I suspect that this is because I haven't followed "pop" as much as I used to, and "pop" has fissioned into so many branches--disco, metal, punk, rap, reggae, indie, etc.--all of which I've followed to some extent, but none as thoroughly as the pre-seventies "top forty." If anyone can think of any songs from after 1972, or any from the period (1964-1972) covered in this post, that should be noted, please let me know.
It was ninety degrees in the shade yesterday, so this may seem an obvious choice. Maybe too obvious. Still, I like the song. It's worn well.
In the photo at left the band are (from bottom to top): John Sebastian, Zal Yanovsky, Joe Butler, and Steve Boone. Yanovsky left the band in 1967 and Sebastian in '68, both to pursue solo careers. Yanovsky died in 2002. The group disbanded in 1969, but in 1991 Boone and Butler, along with Jerry Yester, who had replaced Yanovsky in '67, re-formed the band. The Lovin' Spoonful continue today with Boone, Butler, Yester, Mike Arturi, and Phil Smith.
Note: when I first posted this, I misidentified the order of the band members in the photo, and misspelled "Yanovsky." My friend and rock maven extraordinaireMichael Simmons set me straight, and I've corrected the post accordingly.
We're staying in the magic year 1967 this Thursday. Procol Harum, a band named for a cat, had a huge hit that summer with "A Whiter Shade of Pale", with a J.S. Bach inspired melody by Gary Brooker, played on Hammond organ by Matthew Fisher (Fisher would later successfully sue Brooker for partial credit for the music), and surrealistic lyrics by Keith Reid, listed on their album jackets as a band member with the designation "poet."
Procol Harum's follow-up to "Whiter" was a song called "Homburg", but for a while WRKO, the Boston AM top forty station I had on my clock radio (yes, sometimes that fall I was awakened by the Strawberry Alarm Clock) was playing an instrumental with the title "Repent Walpurgis." When I first heard a DJ announce it, I thought he said, "Repent While Purchase," which made no sense, even in Procol Harum's psychedelic terms. I learned the true title when I bought the group's eponymous first album, on which it's the final cut. I knew that the eve of May Day is sometimes called "Walpurgis Night," but I wasn't sure who Walpurgis was. It turns out that the event is named for Saint Walpurga, an English born nun who became an abbess in Germany and was later canonized.
Like the melody for "A Whiter Shade of Pale," that of "Repent Walpurgis," composed by Matthew Fisher, is influenced by J.S. Bach (as is Garth Hudson's organ intro to The Band's "Chest Fever"), and also by the French organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor.
Today is the summer solstice, and time for what Andrew Hamilton, in his AllMusic group bio, calls "one of those songs you only have to hear once for it to live rent-free in your mind forever." (Others that, for me, fit this category are "Believe Me" by the Royal Teens and Uska Dara by Eartha Kitt.)
Thanks to Dermot McEvoy for sharing the song, and for pointing out that the group took their name from lead singer and songwriter Thomas Earl Jameson, who shared his surname with a popular Irish whiskey. Dermot concluded: "If this song doesn't make you smile you are beyond help."
This is a mini iPod log. On my walk Saturday morning, I heard two songs that were both staples of the late night DJs on WBCN, Boston's first "underground" FM rock station, in the spring of 1968. I was then on the shank end of my first year of law school, and had just endured my first Massachusetts winter after many years of living in Florida. It was a hard winter, even by New England standards, and when, around the end of April, the last of the snow had melted and it seemed that every tree on the Cambridge Common had erupted in riotous bloom, I was ga-ga with spring fever. This coincided with, and facilitated, my falling hopelessly for a pretty classmate who was never to be my lover but nonetheless unwittingly shaped the course of my life.
Under these circumstances I was especially sensitive to the music I heard, and many songs from that time have become madeleines for me: Judy Collins' cover of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now"; the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today"; Jesse Colin Young's solo version of "Four in the Morning" (an hour at which I occasionally heard it while cramming for exams); the Free Spirits' (a short-lived rock group that included jazzman Larry Coryell and drummer Bobby Moses) "Cosmic Daddy Dancer"; and, perhaps most poignantly, another Joni Mitchell cover, Tom Rush's "Urge for Going." This seemed an odd song for springtime, with its tale of impending winter, but it fit the mostly low key mood of the late night playlist. Two days ago, as occasional brisk gusts hit the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, I felt the stilted shiver of the spine at the words:
So I'll ply the fire with kindling, pull the blankets to my chin;
I'll lock the vagrant winter out, and bolt my wandering in.
At 66, these words have a different meaning than they did at 22; especially with the lines that follow:
I'd like to bring back summertime, and have her stay for just another month or so.
A little bit further along I heard another song from the BCN spring of '68 playlist that I find haunting, "Wind" by Circus Maximus, a band founded by guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Bob Bruno and Jerry Jeff Walker. If you quite naturally think of Jerry Jeff as part of the Willie 'n' Waylon Texas cosmic good ol' boy phenomenon of the seventies, it's surprising to know that he had been part of a band that produced a lush, Southern California romantic version of West Coast psychedelia. You can hear it in the video above.
On my almost daily walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park and back yesterday, I saw a car of a kind I hadn't seen in years: a Sunbeam Alpine. An Alpine, in light blue, was my second car. I had it from 1965, during my first year of university, until 1971 when, in what retrospectively seems an act of insanity, I traded it in for a Chevy Vega.
Sunbeam was a marque of the English Rootes Group, which also made cars under the Hillman, Humber, and Talbot names. The Alpine shared its chassis with the Hillman Husky, a small station wagon or, in British parlance, an estate. This made it quite sturdy but, by sports car enthusiast standards, the chassis was a bit hefty for the Alpine's four cylinder engine. I found mine peppy enough.
My friend Michael Simmons wrote this piece for the New York Times "Local" blog about Tuli Kupferberg, the East Village Other, and those special late '60s years when he was in middle school and I was in law school.
I wasn't in the East Village, or Haight-Ashbury during that time, but I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was a scene of sorts. I'll never forget going to J.Press on Mount Auburn Street to buy a suit in the spring of 1970 (still very much part of the '60s in my opinion) the day after a big antiwar riot. When I got there, the windows had all been smashed and replaced by plywood, but a sign taped to the door said "We're open." As I was trying on a jacket, I said to the middle-aged man who was helping me, "It looks like you bore the brunt of the attack yesterday." "Oh, yes sir, " he said. "I was here through the whole thing. These people were the very scum of the earth. You could tell by the way they were dressed."
I also remember balmy spring weekend afternoons on Cambridge Common (see photo, taken in 2010; the place never changes), listening to long forgotten bands like Walk on Water, Clear Light (all the way from L.A., and with an album on Elektra!), and The Ill Wind. Perhaps my quintessential memory from that time was the Sunday morning on the Common when I saw five or six girls of about age nine or ten, probably Harvard faculty brats, dancing in a circle and chanting, "Christ ya know it ain't easy, ya know how hard it can be; the way things are going, they're gonna CRUCIFY me!" (all fall down).
