40 Year Itch : Free To Be You And Me

On March 11, 1974 Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack performed "When We Grow Up" on the ABC television special Free To Be You And Me.

40 Year Itch : To Blast Away The Clouds

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    Though it did nothing in the US, Alice Cooper's "Teenage Lament '74", from Muscle of Love,  hit the UK Top 20 despite competition from various other teen songs including "Teenage Rampage" by Sweet, "Teenage Dream" by T Rex,  "Judy Teen" by Cockney Rebel "Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)" by Wizzard, and eventually "Teenage Idol" by Elton John. Among the ladies singing back-up: Ronnie Spector and Liza Minnelli.This would be the last hit for the original Alice Cooper band.

40 Year Itch : Slow Hand Row

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I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion. That kind of marriage has so far only come up with ponderous results. We play rock and roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz

-Walter Becker, Rolling Stone, August 15, 1974

  So maybe it's not fusion. But from the opening notes of  Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan certainly flirts with jazz . Those first notes of the Top 5 hit "Rikki Don't Lose My Number" borrow the Samba piano sounds of Horace Silver's "Song For My Father". At the end of Side One you encounter  a cover of Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" and, on Side Two, a salute to bebop giant Charlie Parker on "Parker's Band". (There's even a short "quote" from Parker's "Bongo Bop")

   Having played the studio musician/professional songwriter ( for Barbara Streisand no less)  route and already been bored by it all, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen discovered a passion for composing and arranging their own tunes. Mixing things up with lyrics that are sarcastic, ironic, world-weary and romantically disillusioned. On "Rikki" you get a Samba beat, a California pop sheen and the first perfect guitar solo of 1974 courtesy of  Jeff "Skunk" Baxter.

I'll tell you what I like about our group...outside of our technical accomplishments it's that our music scares me more than anybody else's. The combination of the words with the music--like a cheerful lyric and a sad or menacing lyric, or vice versa--I find that irony frightening.

--Donald Fagen, Rolling Stone, August 15, 1974

Of course the critics ate it up. Robert Christgau gave an A+ rating to only two albums in 1974: Pretzel Logic and the New York Dolls album Too Much Too Soon. When the Pazz and Jop critics poll for 1974 came out, Pretzel Logic finished second to Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. 

But fans also bought the album which went Gold in three months. Pretzel Logic would be the last of the "band albums". The 1974 tour would be Steely Dan's last for nearly two decades. From Katy Lied on, Steely Dan's Becker and Fagen would rely on session musicians.

40 Year Itch: Just Starfish on the Beach

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  On March 2, 1974 Terry Jacks began a three week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with a tune he first suggested the Beach Boys record. They did, but never released it.

Originally written and recorded in 1961 by French artist Jacques Brel, "Le Moribund" ( or "The Dying Man") had already been covered by the Kingston Trio in 1964 with English lyrics translated by poet Rod McKuen.

After getting permission to revise the lyrics at the end, Terry Jacks recorded "Seasons in the Sun" in his home city of Vancouver. It sat on a shelf for more than a year before he finally released the single in Canada where it topped the charts first.

From Canada the song swept around the world--a number one hit in both the US and the UK. And then. And then Terry Jacks vanished. In 1983 he told Rolling Stone magazine: 

I got an awful lot of strange letters from that record. They had a contest at a school in Miami about how this person died. They knew when Terry Jacks was born and when he died. Nobody heard from me again, see?

Terry Jacks in Paris, January 2014

    That's been the way Terry's wanted it. Outside of some environmental work, he's become a self described "recluse" in his home country. He performs now and again in Europe and has made enough money off of "Seasons in the Sun" to spend winters in Hawaii and the rest of his time on the beautiful Sunshine Coast of Vancouver Island.

One footnote: Nirvana memorably covered "Season in the Sun" with Kurt on drums.

40 Year Itch : The Grammys

Alice Cooper and Stevie Wonder

     On March 2, 1974 Stevie Wonder won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year (Innervisions), Best Pop Vocal Male ( "You Are the Sunshine of My Life") R and B Performance Male ("Superstition") and R and B Song of the Year ("Superstition").

     Among the highlights of the night was the Jackson 5 ( with little Randy now filling in for Jermaine) singing the nominations for best R and B Performance by a Group:

Little Richard and Chuck Berry also sang the nominations for Best R and B Male Performance. Stevie Wonder gave the Grammy to his mother.



Just weeks from her divorce from Sonny, Cher showed up wearing an outfit that drew a lot of flashbulbs.

Best new artist went to Bette Midler. She beat out Deodato, Maureen McGovern, Marie Osmond and Barry White.

Other big winners included Charlie Rich and  Roberta Flack for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

  The biggest surprise may have been Aretha Franklin winning Best R and B Performance by a Female with the Quincy Jones produced "Master of Eyes". It was not a huge hit.

40 Year Itch: Those We Missed Feb '74

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They were one of the biggest bands in America and by the sounds of this album, they weren't going to do anything to jeopardize that. What's surprising is America didn't fall for all of the "Long Train Runnin'" sound alikes on Vices, they made deep cut "Black Water" (US#1) and the Chicago-by-way-of-Steely-Dan single "Another Park, Another Sunday" (US#32) the hits.

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Produced by George Martin, the third album from those whimsical British melody makers, Stackridge,  carries on where one of 1972's true nuggets, Friendliness, left off. It's like discovering XTC years before they existed. The band still tours.

{out of print}

Former Fairport Conventioneer , Southern Comforter and Plainsinger Ian Matthews sounds comfortable on this California-set collection of mostly covers. David Lindley is in the house on Matthews's cover of Jesse Winchester's "Biloxi" and that's Jeff "Skunk" Baxter on the Tom Waits cover "Ol'55".

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Well we know what side of the abortion debate these soft rockers stand on. I hate them for setting the standard for church rock. Seriously, every time I'm at a service and somebody pulls out a guitar I know I'm in for some lesser Seals And Crofts -styled proseltyzing . At least someone brought in a drum set for "King of Nothing".

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Dense progressive jazz and oddly sung English lyrics are what you get from the Finnish group Wigwam .

[out of print]

Legendary keyboardist Ahmad Jamal's Jamalca features soft jazz takes on recent soul hits by The Spinners, Sylvers and Marvin Gaye. 

40 Year Itch: Keep My Wheels A-Rolling

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   Before Hootie, South Carolina's most famous contribution to rock and roll was Spartanburg's Marshall Tucker Band. When the hard-touring MTB sat down to write the lyrics for their sophomore album, A New Life, it sounds like they looked out the windows of their tour bus and started name-checking Houston, Texas, Arkansas, Texarkana, Georgia, Denver, and South Carolina. Write what you know.

     As on the debut album, the Tuckers borrow from both country and swinging jazz (especially on "Southern Woman"). There's even a moog on this album. Charlie Daniels sits in on "Blue Ridge Mountain Sky" but it's Toy Caldwell's guitar that truly shines throughout. Might be their best!

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There's nothing special about The Charlie Daniels Band's southern boogie fest , Way Down Yonder, which got pulled from the Kama Sutra catalogue and was then re-released by Epic in 1977 as Whiskey. The Charlie Daniels Band classic, Fire on the Mountain, would come out in November of 1974