40 Year Itch : Can You Dig It? Yes I Can

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One of the albums we had growing up was Chicago At Carnegie Hall, a four disc set running nearly three hours. ( And the best selling "box set" in history until Springsteen came around with his Live 75/85 album). Naturally we never listened to Carnegie Hall. Who has time to pull out four separate discs out of a box? And once you put on Side 1 haven't you really committed yourself to listening to all eight sides? You can't walk out of The Godfather after the wedding scene!

 

Even for a band whose previous albums were all double records, four discs should equal at least two years off. And Chicago deserved a break. But keyboardist, vocalist Robert Lamm, known affectionately by deep dish Chicago fans as the heart of the band, stepped up and wrote eight of the ten songs featured on Chicago V including the #3 hit "Saturday In The Park" , the Top 40 "Dialogue" and a sweet deep cut "All Is Well". Chicago V went to #1 in both the Pop Charts...and the Jazz Charts.



I know it's unfair to say that the horn charts on Chicago V are far too busy for my ears. Busy horn charts are the raison d'etre of Chicago. And I like raisins. But given the choice I will still stick with Blood Sweat and Tear's 1968 album  Child Is The Father to The Man, another album we grew up with and played quite a few times even though the album cover gave us nightmares.



The Rolling Stone review from a bored James Issacs wasn't very favorable:

The band lumbers through the bulk of the album like a mastodon with shin splints. I wonder if Chicago devotees would desert the boys if they decided to abandon, or at least altar, their formula and challenge themselves a mite.

40 Year Itch: Wings Over Europe

On July 9, 1972 Paul McCartney and Wings began a 26 date European tour with a concert in Chateauvallon, France. They drove across the continent in a psychedelic double decker bus McCartney helped paint.

They played no Beatles songs (unless you count the Little Richard cover "Long Tall Sally" and "Matchbox", a Carl Perkins tune) but fans heard "Bop Bop", "Mumbo", "Smile Away", "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" and future singles "Hi Hi Hi" (which would be released in December) and "My Love" (a #1 hit released in March of 1973).

The band tuned up for the tour with a series of unannounced concerts at UK colleges. For the European tourbook McCartney said in an interview:

We made it a policy to do new stuff rather than mums-and-dads-things. We figured the students were hip enough and if they didn't like it, sod 'em. Even new songs like "My Love" went down a bomb. In one place I caught a couple necking in the front row on that one, so we must have been giving off good vibes. I'll sing for that! It should be easier next time we go out live. What was new stuff will be recorded and known.

 

The only setback for Wings occurred August 10 in Gothenburg Sweden when Paul and Linda were both arrested for possession of marijuana. They were fined $1200.  All of which makes Paul's tourbook joke about his weight ("2 Stoned") a bit more ironic.

Something else from the European tourbook. Click to enlarge.

40 Year Itch : Pouring at Pocono

Danny Hutton and Michael Allsup of Three Dog Night  in the deep mud of Pocono Raceway

Forty years later what most attendees remember about the Poconos Raceway concert on July 8 and 9th of 1972 is the rain. A cold torrential rain. And the resulting giant mud pit.

UPI reported the Long Pond Pennsylvania concert was "the biggest and most peaceful rock festival since Woodstock" with more than 200,000 people braving the elements to see some of the biggest rock acts in the world. Because of the rain, the concert schedule got pushed back. Edgar Winter got on at 11PM but Emerson Lake and Palmer took the stage at 4 AM . Faces with Rod Stewart appeared at 5 AM. Three Dog Night took the stage in the bright morning sunshine. Michael Allsup writes in his online autobiography:

As I recall, weather caused slow turnover time between bands and the rain made it unsafe to perform. The concert went way into the night. In fact, we didn't go on until about 6 or 7 in the morning. There was a sea of people that "stayed the course" and spent the entire night camping there. Kind of a "Woodstock" feel to it. A huge audience. 

 Tickets cost $11. Both Black Sabbath and Badfinger cancelled.

There were drugs of course but the biggest problem was traffic. There are stories of a 75 mile back up on Interstate 80. Hundreds of drivers abandoned their cars. The bands came in by helicopter. Some fans even parachuted into the concert. One man, below,  apparently lost his clothes. But I feel most sorry for the spectators behind him.

40 Year Itch : Johnny You're Too Bad.

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The Harder They Come, both the low budget film and the hit filled soundtrack, brought reggae to the world. Both featured Jimmy Cliff, a songwriter whose performance in the 1969 song "Many Rivers To Cross" inspired director Perry Henzell to cast him as Ivan, a country boy turned Kingston criminal. (Since then "Many Rivers To Cross" has been covered by artists as diverse as Harry Nilsson, UB40 and even Cher whose version crept into the UK Top 40 in 1993). The movie was a hit and Jimmy Cliff  became a worldwide star.

Check out the record next to Jack's turntable

 "It changed my life dramatically. Because I'm the kind of person who likes to hang out and observe what's going on in the streets, or in certain places. I used to do that a lot. But having to become an international superstar, I can't do that comfortably! But it's all positive, you know."

 The soundtrack, released in the UK on July 7, 1972,  featured Cliff but its producers went back several years to fill it with some of the best reggae, ska and rock steady music. For myself and a lot of people, The Harder They Come and a Bob Marley and the Wailers album ( for me it was a found cassette of Rastaman Vibration) were all the introduction we needed to fall in love with reggae music.




 There are two selections from (Toots and) The Maytals circa 1969: "Pressure Drop", listed as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone Magazine and "Sweet And Dandy".

 

 Desmond Dekker's "007 ( Shanty Town)" was a Top 15 hit in the UK in 1967 and a rude boy anthem.
DJ Scotty rapping over Keith and Tex's "Stop That Train" is another memorable song. The Slickers' "Johnny Too Bad" is essentially the plot of the movie wrapped up in a three minute song. Until NWA came along it might have been the baddest gansta song around.



This album provided me with some much needed tropical heat on some very cold winter days when I felt lost in Reno Nevada after high school. The song "You Can Get It If You Really Want" had a message I really needed to hear. I studied at the University of Nevada, got back on track and accepted by Tulane. I play this one for the kids in the car, hoping its optimistic message sinks in with them.

 

40 Year Itch : "Fingers", Lake and Palmer

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You would think between Emerson, Lake and Palmer someone would hold up his hand, stop the music and say "You know this is really starting to sound a little pretentious to me".

Apparently it never happened.

To this day Greg Lake praises ELP. Especially Trilogy, released July 6 1972.

He told VintageRock.Com

I do like Trilogy. It is my favorite ELP album. ..It won’t hurt you. Pour yourself a glass of wine, sit back and enjoy. It was about taking people on a journey. That was the thing about ELP — we tried to take people on a musical journey.








Trilogy does offer a journey but, with the exception of Lake's gorgeous "From The Beginning", I'm not sure it works with a mellow glass of wine. It's so...busy. A lot of that is Keith "Fingers" Emerson's doing. The winner of NME's 1972 Pop Poll for "Instrumental Personality", Emerson assaults listeners with his intricate keyboard work on tracks like "Living Sin" and the crowd pleasing Aaron Copland cover "Hoedown". That he could perform these solos while leaping on top of  organs is amazing but why not leave just a bit of breathing room for the other musicians to shine?


By the time "Abaddon's Bolero" comes on with its cheesy synth sounds, you may find yourself missing the intergalactic battles between armadillo tanks from 1971's Tarkus.

40 Year Itch: Your Mouth is Your Religion.

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Stuck in a wheelchair after being shoved offstage by a fan in London , Frank Zappa spent most of 1972 trying to recover from the various injuries: a broken rib, a fractured leg ( that would never heal correctly leading to chronic back pain for the rest of Zappa's life) and head wounds.

Waka/Jawaka , released July 5, 1972, sounds like a response to the many fusion excursions Miles Davis had been on recently. Maybe it's a bridge between Hot Rats and The Grand Wazoo which would be released just five months later. Zappa's fronting a "big band" with multiple horn players of which trumpeter Sal Marquez takes the most solos. There are two long cuts. Side One is take up by the 17-minute "Big Swifty". Side Two has two short cuts: "Your Mouth" and the country-tinged "It Just Might Be A One-Shot Deal" featuring vocals from Marquez and Janet Ferguson. Zappa has crushed his larynx in the fall. When he finally did return to singing his voice would be much lower...almost a growl.

Rolling Stone critic Rob Houghton took his sweet time reviewing the album. In an October issue he finally wrote: 

   

    Maybe Frank Zappa is just getting mellow for the first time in his career. Or maybe it's just a phase. Either way, while Waka/Jawaka may lack the brilliance of Hot Rats, or the capacity for irritation that existed on some of the Mothers' material, it's a distinctive album. Which, in his case, is either a sign of maturity, or evidence of exhaustion.

I find myself listening repeatedly only to the title track. A foreshadow of much better things to come in December's Grand Wazoo.

40 Year Itch: Land of McDonalds' & The Ice Capades

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"American Gothic ...remains a largely unrecognized work of genius, one of the most unfashionable and uncompromising American albums ever."

-   George Durbalau, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die

There are far easier records to fall in love with than David Ackles' American Gothic, released July 4, 1972. And yet some critics absolutely adored this album. A man from the Sunday Times compared the album to Gershwin, Dylan and Sgt.Pepper. Too much? 

Ackles thought so. To Melody Maker's John Tobler Ackles said: "Yes, sickening. How can that be? All it is is an album, one record album of a handful of songs. They can only be so good, right? They can't be any better than that. To have people fall down and say 'This is a whole new direction to music' is embarrassing because I can't support that; my music can't support it; nothing can support it."

The album is a multi-dimensional portrait of America. There are heavy drinkers ("American Gothic"), divorces ("Waiting For The Moving Van") and a ten minute epic about a western family ("Montana Song").

All sung with a great deal of theatrics. ( Ackles was a child actor). The music is orchestrated with the help of Elton John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin who was interviewed in the liner notes of the 1999 re-release.

"It was totally his idea; I was almost just a monitor, his crutch, and his support system. He knew very much what he wanted, and I had certainly never worked with a real orchestra before. I'd been in the studio with Elton, and I was familiar with strings in the sense that I'd seen our sessions run that way, but I certainly wasn't very familiar on how to sort of record them. Luckily, we had a very, very good engineer, Damon Lyon-Shaw. A lot of the credit must go to him, because he sort of guided me in a lot of what went down."

Among Ackles's biggest fans were Elton John and Elvis Costello who said upon Ackles's death: "It's a mystery to me why his wonderful songs are not better known."

 People who know far more about music than I do have tried to make comparisons...to Tom Waits, Randy Newman and Scott Walker. But I hear Jim Steinman, the producer and lyricist behind Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart".

In any case start with "Oh, California!" and if you want to hear more and are up for a challenge, buy the whole album. It's a grower.