Clear Sailin' (Chris Hillman - Richard Marx - Rick Roberts) - 4:31 rating: ***** stars
Chris Hillman's always struck me as having been The Byrd's forgotten secret ingredient. That didn't do him much good surrounded by the likes of Gene Clark, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, and Gram Parsons, but at least some of us noticed his talents.
His solo work is uniformly good, but to my ears mid-'70s country-rock quickly starts to suffer from a sounds-the-same slickness. That's certainly the case with much of 1977's "Clear Sailin'". Luckily the title track is one of the exceptions. Yeah, your life many not need another mid-tempo ballad, but this one has a beautiful melody and the lyrics are actually rather thought provoking. Nice guitar solo from John Brennan.
.
"Witchi Tai To" (Jim Pepper) - 2;55
While in college I heard this on some obscure radio station, but didn't hear who was performing it. Years later I heard a version of it on a Brewer and Shipley album that I bought at a yard sale. That let me track it back to the late Jim Pepper's original version, which in turn, allowed me to hear versions by Everything Is Everything and finally the "commercialized" Harpers Bizarre cover which was the one I'd originally heard.
The late Pepper was best known as a jazz musician. As a sax player he worked with an impressive array of jazz artists including Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. A member of the Kaw and Cree tribes, in the late-'60s Pepper began mixing Native American music and jazz. Having supposedly learned the song from his grandfather, "Witchi Tai To" was a nice example of the jazz and Indian influences hybrid.
The Harper's Bizarre version didn't include the extended Pepper sax solo, but featured a young Ry Cooder on lead guitar and is simply mesmerizing ... Yeah, it's little more than an extended Indian chant, but it's one of those efforts that's get under your skin and simply won't leave.
YouTube has a clip of the song at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1L9RPEM634
Nellie (Jerry Williams) rating: **** stars
Having stumbled across an interesting Jerry Lynn Williams solo album, I poked around and discovered his High Mountain Hoedown catalog. Wish I knew more about the outfit. What little biographical information I can find comes from a December 2006 article Nick Joe Paloski wrote for The Texas Monthly.
[Williams] tenure with Little Richard lasted nine months, and shortly after, he returned to Fort Worth, where he made it through a semester at Arlington Heights High School before snagging regular gigs at the Bayou Club and the Silver Helmet Club in Dallas, which was owned by several Dallas Cowboys players. “I was doing Otis Redding stuff three nights a week,” he remembered, “and within two weeks I had so many people in there that the fire marshal started showing up.” Then, in the late sixties, Williams discovered orange sunshine, tie-dye shirts, and the hippie lifestyle, so he formed a three-piece psychedelic blues outfit called High Mountain and went to L.A. to score a record deal with the ATCO label. It became another learning experience. The resulting album, High Mountain Hoedown, went nowhere, and the musicians got to split a paltry $10,000."
You
can read the full article at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/he-writes-the-songs/
Produced
by Charles Greene (best known for his work with The Buffalo Springfield),
1970's "High Mountain Hoedown" was one of those
albums that deserved a fate better than the total obscurity it has fallen
into. While there's little biographical information on the the band,
the line-up apparently featured Williams with support from drummer Rex
Ludwick (who went on to support Willie Nelson) and bassist Jerry
McDonald. Williams was credited with most of the seven original
tunes. McDonald wrote the county-ish 'I'll finish My Song'.
Musically the set was quite varied, which might be one of the reasons the
album didn't do very well. The collection found the trio taking stabs
at country ('I'll
Finish My Song'),
Poco-styled country rock ('Nellie'), and conventional hard rock ('Voodoo
Woman'), Round it out with a pair of Chuck Berry tunes ('Nadine' and 'Brown
Eyed Handsome Man'). Mind you, it wasn't a lost classic, but it's
still a fun set to spin. Shame Williams didn't turn in a couple of
additional rock-oriented performances.
As
good as the first two tunes on 1970's "High Mountain Hoedown" were, 'Nellie' was even better. To my ears, this was the kind
of country-rock tune that nobody seems to write anymore. The track had
everything you'd expect from a major radio hit - killer melody; sweet vocals;
tight drumming; and a refrain that simply wouldn't leave your
head. This one would have sounded dandy on a Poco albumm.
Home At Last (Donald Fagen - Walter Becker) - 5:35 rating: **** stars
The only band I've seen a dozen times, I'm surprised I haven't listed a Steely Dan track up to this point.
"Aja" came out when I was a freshmen in college. Rob, my first roommate, bought a copy of the album and played it day after day after day.
I'll readily admit to initially finding the jazzy grooves less than overwhelming, but in time I fell under the Steely Dan spell and perhaps because I was living hundreds of miles away from my family, this bluesy ballad became one of my favorite performances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW59IsQkGmA&list=OLAK5uy_k1bmKyX3ZwpFftKrooQJyw9CN1l3H6S4c
If I Could Give You the World (Carl Cutler - John Myers - Lyndsey Griffin - Floyd Lawson) - 3:10 rating: **** stars
Anyone who has
poked around the BadCatRecords website will realize I'm a big Motown
fan. That said, Hearts of Stone were one of those groups I knew
existed, but I had never stumbled across any of their releases.
Imagine my heart of joy when I scored a copy of their obscure 1970 album.
Hearts
of Soul trace their roots back to the early 1950s when teenager John Myers
and his brothers formed The Echoes.
Still in high school, by 1955 The Echoes were veterans of the touring
circuit, as well as having recorded some unreleased material and done
backing vocals for a number of artists. Their manager Fred Logan
arranged for an audition with Atlantic Records, but they ended up signed to
Savoy Records, which promptly insisted on renaming the group The 5 Pennies
(a curious choice given there were six members). With various
line-up changes, Myers and The 5 Pennies also recorded material as The
Chimes, and The 4 Jokers.
By
the mid-'60s Myers was living in Tampa, Florida where he formed The
Larks. The original line-up featured Myers, Clemon Davis (bass),
Lindsey Griffin (tenor and baritone), Rudolph Hill (tenor), lead singer
Floyd Lawson. By 1966 the group was known as The 4 Pennies, featuring
lead tenor Carl Cutler.
By
1970 they were performing as Hearts of Stone, which led to a recording
contract with Motown's V.I.P. subsidiary. Teamed with
producer/arranger/writer Henry Cosby, all hyperbole aside,1970's "Stop
the World - We Wanna Get On" stands as one of
the most overlooked albums on the Motown imprint. Featuring a mixture
of group originals (several co-written by Cosby) and an eclectic mix of
covers, these guys were simply stunning. Lawson may have been the lead
singer, but the other three members were equally talented and their group
harmonies were equally impressive.
I'll
readily admit it didn't have that instantly identifiable Motown sound, but
the breezy, mid-tempo
'If I Could Give You the World' was still
a wonderful performance. More shag, than Motown, it isn't hard
to picture yourself dancing to this one on a summer evening at a
beach. Besides, how many Motown acts can you think of who wrote their
own material? How many wrote material as good as this one?
Here's a link to a YouTube clip of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwzacpePlRI
