As Tom posted, Chick Correa died this week. We’re of a similar age, so we’re both wowed (I suspect) about how big an audience jazz music had at some shows in the mid 70s. When in the mid 70s we were going to shows featuring Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra in arenas, not clubs.
And Chick Correa’s life story is mixed in with that cultural moment.
I don’t know the details of the way jazz embraced rock in the 70s, or maybe rock embraced jazz. I do have all the records. Chick Correa was a piano player then who played on the big jazz albums of that time and made his own albums, which got into a lot of Scientology stuff (which isn’t totally disqualifying) but makes you look more closely.
But let’s get back to the music. This is a track Correa plays electric piano on, one of his first with Miles, in which Miles adulates his second wife, a giant soul performer and personality, Betty Davis. I didn’t know this one (there is a lot of music out there).
Meet me in the middle of the day Let me hear you say everything’s okay Bring me southern kisses from your room
Back in 1979, singer-songwriter Steve Forbert had a Top 20 hit with “Romeo’s Tune” from Forbert’s second album, Jackrabbit Slim.
The sweet love song is driven by a lively piano riff played by Bobby Ogdin who was the pianist in Elvis Presley’s TCB band.
But the final arrangement of the song didn’t come easy. It was originally slated to be on his debut album, but he wasn’t satisfied with the recordings from those sessions and decided to hold it back. Over the next year, he tried various arrangements before he came up with the final with help from the album’s producer, John Simon.
Simon was responsible for producing several of my favorite records – The Band’s Music from Big Pink, The Child is Father to the Man by Blood Sweat & Tears, and Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel. He also produced the hit “Red Rubber Ball” by The Cyrkle (written by Paul Simon).
Forbert dedicated the song to Florence Ballard, of the Supremes, on the Jackrabbit Slim album cover, though it isn’t about her. He has often said that the track is about girl he knew when he was a teen but has never identified her by name.
On a side note, Forbert played Cyndi Lauper’s boyfriend in the video for her song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Meet me in the middle of the night Let me hear you say everything’s alright Let me smell the moon in your perfume
This next installment of Rock in Films covers the late ‘60s psychedelic films.
By the late 60s, filmmakers began to incorporate rock music into their movies’ soundtracks and plots. Director Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was one of the best and first to utilize rock effectively. The story takes place in “Swinging London” where a photographer inadvertently captures a murder on film and uses his images to try to solve the crime.
The film’s soundtrack was scored by Herbie Hancock, but there is a club scene that features a live performance by The Yardbirds, with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitars, doing “Stroll On” (better known as “Train Kept A Rollin’”).
Riot on Sunset Strip (1067) is a cheesy film that attempts to convey the essence of the LA/Hollywood scene around the time of the ’66 LA riot. It has all the clichés of the day, including a film portrayal of an LSD trip. But it also has numerous club scenes that feature some of the best garage/psych bands of the time, including The Standells, Chocolate Watchband and The Enemies (a band that featured Cory Wells, later of Three Dog Night).
Psych-Out (1968) was a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Susan Strasberg. Susan’s character arrives in SF looking for her brother. Although deaf, she is befriended by a hippie commune. Again, there is film portrayal of an LSD trip. The soundtrack includes music by The Seeds and Strawberry Alarm Clock. There’s a ballroom scene where Nicholson’s band, Mumblin’ Jim, performs. In reality, it is the Strawberry Alarm Clock with Nicholson pretending to be part of the group.
(Sorry Lawr!)
Nicholson wrote the screenplay for The Trip (1967), a film that portrays a television commercial director’s experience with – you guessed it – an LSD trip! The movie stars Dern, Strasberg, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Of course, Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson would be back at it a couple of years later to film the much higher quality Easy Rider, but that’s a subject for another post.
The film’s music was provided by Mike Bloomfield and the Electric Flag, with only one on-screen performance that I don’t think was the Flag. It may have been Gram Parsons’ International Submarine Band (did they have a lefty guitarist?) who were originally tapped to provide the soundtrack before getting replaced by Bloomfield. Here’s the psychedelic club scene of the band playing “Fine Jug Thing,” complete with strobe lights, and painted women.
The Monkees decided to upend their squeaky clean, pre-fab four TV image through a film vehicle called Head (1968). Nicholson was involved in this project too, as co-writer and co-producer with Bob Rafelson. Though the flick has an incomprehensible plot, it does have a few gems on the soundtrack including “The Porpoise Song,” and “Circle Sky” that was performed in a concert scene for Head.
Some of us are living in a city that relies on mass transit, the subway and the bus (and for some of the Dolls, the Ferry). But those things are gone for those of us who don’t have to go riding, riding, riding.
So much is lost because of the pandemic and the way we respond to it.
I wonder if we’d be better off if we didn’t shut down, or we did as we did. I know my mother, in an assisted living facility is alive. For those in Sweden, which didn’t shut down, many more are dead.
So, do your best. Right?
For me, Little Richard, was a guy on late nite commercials. Great songs, like those of the Big Bopper. But familiarity meant we cared less, partly because all we got was the big songs.
But as I grew up, I found other stuff. I wrote about one of those here. Listen to this!
Not a rocker, exactly, but as great as a transitional blues-rock-soul cut as you can imagine. When Little Richard died today I went back to his first album, which finally was released after something like six big hit singles (it was a different world then, or come to think of it maybe it was the same world then with the different one sandwiched in between).
I won’t argue this was the best, but listening to it I’ll say rock hasn’t moved an inch.
Today I learned that the great Bill Withers died at the age of 81. His family released a statement that said it was due to heart complications. At least it wasn’t Coronavirus related! In his honor I’d like to repost a SotW that I wrote about him on December 22, 2012.
I’ve always loved the Bill Withers’ song “Hope She’ll Be Happier” that was on his first album Just as I Am. So without a lot of fanfare, here it is:
This album is
the one with “Ain’t No Sunshine” on it.
It’s really a very good record with some great musical accompaniment
from the Memphis boys down at Stax records and other top notch players like
Stephen Stills, Jim Keltner and Chris Ethridge.
The song is
very simple – a nice guitar figure is repeated over a passionate vocal
delivered in the style of a black spiritual.
The lyric is about a man who is in great pain over losing his woman. He can’t quite come to grips with the reason
she left but hopes she will ultimately be happier with the new guy.
This song
leaves me in the same emotional state I find myself in after hearing Leonard
Cohen’s “Halleluiah” – especially the wonderful Jeff Buckley version.
Now there’s one more thing I need to share and that’s the version Withers’ recorded in Africa when he visited with the James Brown headlined 3 day festival that came to be known as “The Rumble In the Jungle.” The 1974 concert is available on DVD under the title Soul Power. Withers’ performance of “Hope She’ll Be Happier” at this concert will take your breath away.
In this
version it’s just him, his guitar and his voice. But it’s powerful.
There is this place in Soho, in New York City, that has more than three million vinyl records for reference by researchers and movie studios and whatever. Really.
They’re being priced out because it’s valuable space and old records aren’t returning the $ per square foot that’s possible.
So, the Times wrote about this.
Good, interesting story. But here’s the deal. Why is this massive collection housed in NYC, where rents are big. That’s legacy thinking. My advice, send the albums to Pennsylvania somewhere, or the Catskills, and have a smaller public facing NYC exhibition space to draw folks in.
Everything worthwhile doesn’t have to be huge. It just needs enough support to sustain.
And since Mr. George built a little bit of his fortune on records, here’s a great one (though not rock):
The earliest history of Rock and Roll
covers the period when Alan Freed coined the term for the R&B records he
was playing for teenagers in Cleveland on WJW radio. And one of the most important R&B groups of
that era was the “5” Royales. The group
was led by songwriter/guitarist Lowman “Pete” Pauling, who penned songs that
would remain important for many decades, including:
Think – also recorded by James Brown and Mick Jagger
Dedicated to the One I Love – Shirelles and Mamas and Papas
Tell the Truth – Ray Charles and Ike
& Tina Turner
But besides being a great songwriter, Loman was a terrific early electric guitar player. I wanted to select a song that would highlight his playing, so I’ve chosen one of the group’s lesser known records, “Say It.”
“Say It” follows a predictable R&B
formula, with piano triplets leading the way.
But its fuzzed out licks probably influenced more than a few ‘60s garage
band guitarists. Check out the insane riffs
that open and end “Say It!”
Another, more popular “5” Royales track that features Lowman’s Les Paul is “The Slummer the Slum.”
Lowman’s guitar stabs are the prototype
for Steve Cropper’s approach on Booker T & the MGs’ “Green Onions.” Then at about 40 seconds, Lowman rips off a
wild solo and does it again at around 1:35.
If you haven’t had exposure to Pauling beyond this post, please read the excellent article by Lisa O’donnell from his hometown Winston-Salem Journal.
