Category Archives: Music

The Mighty 1090

I worked the midnight shift as an orderly at the local hospital during the summer of 1971, often stayed up late or all night when I wasn’t working so I could maintain the same biorhythm.  Sometimes I’d listen to the radio, which in the mid-1960s, fed us a steady diet of three-minute paeans to love, life and the pursuit of the fairer sex. The main sources of pop music in our central Illinois town were Chicago AM stations WLS and WCFL. WLS was the favorite with a host of memorable jocks: Art Roberts, John Records Landecker, Dick Biondi, Clark Weber and the irascible Larry “Uncle Lar’” Lujack.

Pop music started to change during the late 1960s to heavier stuff like Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Steppenwolf, The Hollies, The Kinks and The Who. Two of The Turtles joined Frank Zappa and the Mothers for a raunchy concert at the Fillmore East.  Even the Four Lads from Liverpool had gone to the dark side of drugs, mystical music, and infighting. John Lennon took a lot of shit for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. We scoured the White Album’s inserts for clues to Paul McCartney’s “death.”

A few of my friends and I were the “goddam hippie-freaks,” as if small-town America had hippies in the early 1970s. High school dress codes banned long hair and beards. Girls still had to wear skirts, even during a -20° windchill winter.  There was no heavy drug use (at least of which I was aware). One of our classmates was found sitting up in a sleeping bag in a garage, dead after sniffing airplane glue. Don tried putting peyote buttons in a Dairy Queen strawberry milkshake only to promptly puke it up. Herb bought a test tube of marijuana – mostly stems and seeds – which we stared at intently while huddled in the back of his dad’s Econoline van. I imagined the police would bust in on us at any moment and we’d spend the rest of our lives doing hard time in Stateville among murderers and thieves.

Our band of gypsies gravitated towards less conventional groups, the stuff one would never hear on Top 40 radio: Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Santana, Traffic, The Band, Grateful Dead and Hendrix. While our classmates listened to The Who’s Tommy, we were splitting our eardrums listening to Live at Leeds, Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, and Roger Waters’ piercing scream in “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” from Ummagumma.  In 1969, Jefferson Airplane’s rebellious Volunteers was the first rock album to get “motherfucker” past the censors (although the OCR of Hair beat them by two years).

A year later, Paul Kantner released Blows Against the Empire, with collaborators Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and others. The album was a counter-culture fantasy about hijacking a star ship and leaving the earth for utopian pastures, getting a Hugo Award nomination.

One night, while fiddling with the tuner on my compact stereo, I stumbled across a world of music, largely foreign to small-town Midwestern ears, on a radio station out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

KAAY 1090AM is a 50,000-watt radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas. I could only pick up after 10 pm when all the smaller stations shut down for the night. Hearing it for the first time reminded me of when I discovered Radio Havana in 1967 on a leather-clad shortwave transistor radio my grandfather had given me. (Ironically, KAAY also reached Cuba, subverting the “ideological purity” of a generation of Cuban youth. Fast forward 50 years and the Stones play in Havana.)

From 10pm until 2am Clyde Clifford (real name: Dale Seidenschwarz), a laid-back guy with a smooth baritone voice, hosted Beaker Street on “The Mighty Ten Ninety.” It was four hours of “underground” music: much longer tracks; complex musical structures instead of the three-chord formula of pop music; and sometimes controversial subjects. The show’s intro – click here– used a segment of Jimi Hendrix’s If Six Was Nine. Later the intro used a snippet of “House of the Rising Sun” done on a MOOG synthesizer.

Beaker Theater followed at 2 am, broadcasting old radio plays. The only one I remember was a dramatization of Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” a short story about a civilization on a planet with six suns goes mad when an eclipse that occurs once every 2000 years brings total darkness, something they’ve never experienced. (Click here to listen.)

The KAAY managers were too cheap to pay both a DJ and an engineer, so Clyde did both, broadcasting Beaker Street from the station’s transmitter site in Wrightsville, AR instead of the studio in downtown Little Rock. Between song tracks Clyde played ethereal background “music” from “Cannabis Sativa,” by Head, to cover the transmitter’s sounds. Occasionally it ran for several minutes, leading me to believe Clyde had either nodded off or was taking a bathroom break.

Beaker Street introduced me to obscure groups and albums. Spooky Tooth. The Flock. Hawkwind. Bloodrock. King Crimson. Black Oak Arkansas. Black Sabbath, long before Ozzy became an addled old man yelling “Sharon!” Sometimes I’d tape parts of the show with my cassette recorder. The nature of analog tuners meant the signal would periodically drift in and out, interrupting the track, but that was part of the charm when I listened to the tapes years later.

One of my favorites is Jamie Brockett’s “Legend of the USS Titanic.”  It’s a completely bizarre fictional account combining historical fact (Jack Johnson, was a turn-of-the-century black boxer), blatant inaccuracies (there was no U.S.S. Titanic), racial stereotypes (“Jews from Miami trading wives and Cadillacs and diamonds”), and modern drug culture (a dope-smoking first mate who carries around “four hundred ninety-seven and a half feet of rope”). The track, running a then unheard-of 13½ minutes, explains the ship sank after the captain, stoned out of his mind, went mano a mano with the iceberg.

Many people remember Welsh guitarist Dave Edumuds for his 1971 AM hit “I Hear You Knockin’.” I remember him for Love Sculpture’s album Forms and Feelings.  A heavy metal version of “Mars,” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, segues into an “amphetamine-fueled rave-up” of Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” which concludes with the last few bars from The William Tell Overture. (“Mars” wasn’t on the original U.K. Parlophone release of Forms and Feelings due to a dispute with the Holst estate, but was included in the U.S. Parrot release.) I kicked myself for not buying the album when I first saw it in the early 1970s before it went out of print. I spent the next four decades years looking for either an LP or CD version, finally acquiring the latter in 2008.

But one song was totally unlike most of what aired on Beaker Street. Late one night I heard “White Bird”, a haunting song by an obscure group with the unlikely name It’s A Beautiful Day. It was exquisite; I would think about it when I stared out of an empty hospital room window during my 2 am break. I began a frantic search for the album, eventually finding it at Arlan’s discount store in Peru, IL, about 30 miles from home.

Clyde left Beaker Street in 1972; the program continued with other personalities until it was taken off the air in 1985. The show was resurrected in 1995 on various Arkansas FM stations before taking another bow in 2011.

Now die-hard fans congregate on the Beaker Street / Clyde Clifford Fans Facebook page, reminiscing about the music that defined us and decrying what passes for contemporary music now. One can now listen to Beaker Street on Friday nights at 9pm Central on the Arkansas Rocks Radio Network.

Some would argue our music was better than what came before and after, but that would be missing the point. Every generation continues the tradition of adding onto that invisible road, paved with infinite combinations of just twelve notes, stretching back millennia. Our music was just a scenic turnout along the way.

Favorite Albums From High School
Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
The Who – Live at Leeds
Paul Kantner – Blows Against the Empire
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails and Just for Love
Derek and the Dominos – Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed
Pink Floyd – Ummagumma
The Band – Music from Big Pink
Jefferson Airplane – Volunteers
The Doors – Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (2-LP compilation)

Beaker Street Staples
Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth
Black Oak Arkansas: Lord Have Mercy on My Soul
Chambers Brothers: Time Has Come Today
Spirit: Animal Zoo, Morning Has Come
King Crimson: The Court of the Crimson King
The Flock: Green Slice / Big Bird
The Animals: Sky Pilot
Spooky Tooth: Tobacco Road, I Am The Walrus
Vanilla Fudge: You Keep Me Hanging On
Mason Proffit: Two Hangmen
Bloodrock: DOA

Featured image: © Can Stock Photo / photoslb

Sounds of summer

To everything there is a season and to every season there is music. Memorial Day Weekend kicks off the summer season. Here’s my list of tunes for the hottest time of the year. Be sure to check out the L.A. Woman video.

Summer in the City – The Lovin’ Spoonful. This was one of the first songs I heard on AM radio after emerging from the cultural isolation of small-town Arizona. The minor chord was unsettling; the jackhammer and ‘60s car horns, unforgettable. The windows were open at night because we didn’t have air conditioning and I could hear the rumbling shock wave of railroad cars coupling in the big train yard by the glass factory. Those were good factory jobs – allowed a lot of people to buy homes. 

Chain of Fools – Aretha Franklin. A cloudy, sultry summer night. There’s lightning in the distance near Chicago. The static interrupts the Queen of Soul as she sings I ain’t nothin’ but your fool / You treated me mean / Oh you treated me cruel.Thunderstorm canstockphoto5305187

Pleasant Valley Sunday – The Monkees.Another Pleasant Valley Sunday / Charcoal burning everywhere.” Kids running around the grass barefoot; dogs and burgers on the grill; the grown-ups in lawn chair with cans of Falstaff. Things would go to shit within a year – ghettos exploding; the cops going berserk in Grant Park in ’68 and a war that would take 58,000 sons and daughters.

Sunshine Superman – Donovan. Midsummer. A 1930’s era bungalow with the windows wide open for a breeze. A mother in a black floral print pinafore apron, the kind with the frill around the arms, presses clothes with a heavy Sunbeam Ironmaster, the one with the black handle and the braided cord. She dampens the clothes with water from a glass pop bottle corked with an aluminum sprinkling head. That’s the image I see when I hear this song.

Bad Moon RisingCreedence Clearwater Revival. High school kids in our rural Illinois town made money during the summer break by detasseling corn.  This is one of the songs they listened to in the car on the way to the fields.20150725_194221

Twistin’ By the Pool – Dire Straits.  In 1963 our parents listened to Nat King Cole sing Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer. Twenty years later we listened to this with our kids. Sunglasses, bathing suits and the Euro beat. Annette and Frankie would fit right in.

School’s Out – Alice Cooper. Back in 1969 our parents thought Alice Cooper was dangerous. I should have known something wasn’t right when The Jet Song from West Side Story showed up on the third track. This son of a preacher man is a Republican, lived in Phoenix next to Barry Goldwater and gave up booze for golf (he has a four handicap). He’s been faithfully married to the same woman since 1976.

L.A. Woman – The Doors. Drivin’ down your freeways / Midnight alleys roam / Cops in cars, the topless bars. The dark side of the City of Angels.

Hey Frederick – Jefferson Airplane. Nicky Hopkins’ emphatic piano, Jorma Kaukonen’s piercing guitar, and Grace Slick’s sultry voice and erotic lyrics caressed my adolescent anger. Nicky has been gone 22 years; Grace and Jorma are now in their mid-70s and I’m a grandfather.

Blows Against the Empire – Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship. This Hugo Award nominated concept album featured David Crosby and Graham Nash, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, and David Freiberg from Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Grace Slick, Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen’s younger brother Peter. It was a story of counter-culture people hijacking a starship and traveling out of the solar system in search of Utopia. Almost half a century later it reminds me of Berniebots. One of my favorite pieces, “Let’s Go Together,” starts at 8:14. The You Tube single version is an alternate take and kinda sucks.

Spoonful – Cream. Some of us defected to the dark side, leaving Top 40 for music our parents thought was dangerous drug music. Wheels of Fire-Live at the Fillmore fell into that category, with that psychedelic gatefold sleeve and Eric Clapton’s searing guitar. I bought the cassette version and would drive dark country roads listening to it on my portable player that looked like Dr. McCoy’s tricorder.

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – “I. Ron” Butterfly. Four of us high school misfits would sit around our dining room table solving the world’s problems, listening to this with the record changer’s overarm extended so it would play over and over. It likely drove the parents nuts, but they never let on. (Click on “I.Ron” if you’ve never seen The Simpsons’ version.)

Lord Have Mercy On My Soul / When Electricity Came to Arkansas – Black Oak Arkansas. Way back when, before 24-hour news cycles and talk radio, most of the small AM stations shut down at 10pm. This allowed me to pick up “The Mighty 1090,” KAAY-AM from Little Rock, Arkansas, playing longer tracks from relatively unknown rock artists: It’s A Beautiful Day, Bloodrock, Spooky Tooth, The Flock, Love Sculpture, Sisyphus, Hawkwind, Jamie Brockett, and Black Oak Arkansas. Nothin’ like a little redneck raunch ‘n’ roll to get you goin’.

China Grove – Doobie Brothers. The semester is over. All my earthly possessions are in the back of my 1973 Gremlin as I’m headed out of Champaign on I-74.Gremlin

Whipping Post – The Allman Brothers Band. Nothing says hot summer nights in the South like the Allmans’ music. The Fillmore recording segues into thirty-four minutes of Mountain Jam. It doesn’t get any better than this.Swamp sunset

Us and Them – Pink Floyd. Every so often a remarkable work appears. Dark Side of the Moon is unarguably one of the best rock albums of all time; this is one of the best tracks. So light one up and have a great summer.

Gremlin Photo (C) Paul Niedermeyer, Curbside Classic. Used with permission.
Thunderstorm and Bayou sunset (C) Canstock Photo
Cornfield – my photo

Whales and Meisterbrau

Franklyn MacCormack hosted the “All Night Showcase” on Chicago’s WBBM and WGN radio stations between 1959 and 1971. This was back when the now-defunct Northwest Airlines was known as Northwest Orient. (“Northwest Orient *gong* Airlines”) He played “mood music:” the soft, sultry tunes Rock Hudson would have played while gently but relentlessly pursuing Doris Day in Pillow Talk. MacCormack also read poetry on the air, told stories and extolled the virtues of the show’s sponsor, Meisterbrau beer, in his comforting baritone.

You’re probably wondering why a rebellious teenager steeped in Jimi Hendrix and Led Zep would be familiar with the old fart’s genre, but my musical tastes had always been fairly broad. And that’s not the point of this tale.

I’d gotten my driver’s license in September 1970 and, after a few month of driving around town with a parental co-pilot, I was allowed to take the car by myself. There was no published list of rules for me to follow; no advice given before I took off.  I knew there would be hell to pay if I screwed up. Fear can be a great motivator.

One evening in January, 1971, some of my friends and I imagined we were adult enough to explore finer dining than the local burger drive-in offered, and do so without thoroughly embarrassing ourselves in the process.

So we met at The Red Door Inn, a restaurant about 30 miles away. It had subdued lighting, candles on the table and real cloth napkins. Our wallets were a bit light—part-time jobs for teenagers don’t pay that much—but we pretended we were adults out on the town. The highlight of the evening was watching small birthday cakes topped with a single sparkler being delivered to surprised diners, mercifully without having to suffer through a lame, off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Eventually we had our fill. We said our goodbyes in the parking lot and went our separate ways. A light snow started to fall as I pulled out of the parking lot.

This was a few decades before a new Interstate 39 would make the drive back to Route 18 a straight shot, cutting the time in half. For some inexplicable reason known only to God and my young self, I thought that taking the back roads along the hypotenuse of the triangle would get me home much faster. I’d done it on a bicycle with a couple of friends the summer before; how hard could it be in the middle of the winter in the dark? Pretty hard, actually.

The pavement ran out about ten minutes later. I was now on a rural dirt road in the family car, a big-ass Chrysler New Yorker with rear-wheel drive that was not known for stability on slick roads. The snowfall became a little thicker, muffling the sound of the gravel under my tires. The back end started to slide back and forth. I couldn’t see the shoulder anymore and worried about ending up in a ditch. If that happened a quick death would be preferable to the slow end that would inevitably reward my survival.

I slowed to a crawl and stopped sliding. I turned the radio on to WBBM for company. Franklin MacCormack introduced a tune my friends would have derided as more appropriate for an elevator full of old people, but it was preferable to the relative silence of my isolation. My grip on the steering wheel tightened. Will he live or will he die? Details at 10!

MacCormack’s soothing voice followed the song’s end, waxing poetic about nothing of substance. There was a brief moment of silence, then an ethereal sound drifted in, like a faint echo, rising and falling. The songs of humpbacked whales began to fill the darkness, not something one expected driving along barren cornfields in Illinois. One of the most beautiful voices God ever created started to sing:

Farewell to Tarwathie, Adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimmond, I bid you farewell
I’m bound off for Greenland and ready to sail
In hopes to find riches, in hunting the whale

The snowfall seemed to soften as the voice swelled. The darkness outside became a comforting blanket, swaddling an infant in Mother’s arms. The gravel road turned to blacktop; the lights of home appeared in the distance. I don’t remember the rest, only that I knew I would be safe.

Fareweel Tae Tarwathie is an early 19th century Scottish whaling song. Farewell to Tarwathie,  is from Judy Collins’ 1970 album Whales and Nightingales.

Great Covers

It’s a new year and I’m not feeling particularly eloquent yet.

Some well-known songwriters penned hits for other singers or groups. Carole King wrote Little Eva’s hit, “The Locomotion;” Carole King, in turn, did Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Other classics have more obscure roots. Blues singer Memphis Minnie wrote “When the Levee Breaks” in 1929; Led Zeppelin reworked it in 1971. The 1990s heralded the rise of tribute bands and albums, often as good as, or even better, than the originals.

So here are some of the most famous, or infamous, covers of tracks we all know.

WoodstockCrosby, Stills, Nash and Young. We all grew up with this song, but Joni Mitchell wrote it after talking with her then-lover, Graham Nash, about those three days of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Her version, on Ladies of the Canyon, is rather dreary; CSNY made it rock!

Singin’ the BluesBlack Oak Arkansas. Originally made famous by Marty Robbins and Guy Williams in 1956, this incongruous version is on BOA’s 1971 debut album, between Hot and Nasty and Lord Have Mercy on My Soul. “Jim Dandy” Mangrum’s distinctive voice would make Axl Rose sound like Pavarotti.

GloriaJimi Hendrix.  Written by Van Morrison and a hit for The Shadows of Knight, Gloria has been reworked by many groups, including Patti Sm
ith’s punk version that begins, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” I heard this extended version driving home at 3 a.m.after delivering a baby. The censors weren’t around then….”even though she didn’t like homemade sin, and her breath smelled like wut pussy.”

Are You Experienced?Belly. From Stone Free, the 1993 Hendrix Tribute CD, this version of the title track from Jimi Hendrix’s debut album gets an alternative rock makeover by Tanya Donally. Play this sucka’ LOUD!

With A Little Help From My FriendsJoe Cocker. Cocker took Ringo Starr’s tepid little tune from the (IMHO)  over-rated Sgt. Pepper’s album and injected it with soul. It didn’t hurt to have Jimmy Page on guitar. John Belushi did an epileptic but dead on tribute to Joe Cocker in this unforgettable version on Saturday Night Live

Twist and ShoutThe Beatles. Recorded by the Top Notes in 1961 and the Isley Brothers in 1962, John Lennon goes all-out on this one.


Shout
Otis Day and the Knights. Even though DeWayne Jessie lip-synced Lloyd Williams’ vocals for this Animal House classic, he really could sing. His older brother Obediah, a.k.a. “Young Jessie,” sang with The Coasters before moving to jazz. Jessie went on to an almost 40-year career as Otis.

MiserlouDick Dale and the Deltones. An
obscure tune from Egypt or Asia Minor got a surf-rock makeover in 1962 and cinematic notoriety in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Dick Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour and heard his uncle playing Miserlou on the oud. Who said nothing good ever came out of the Middle East?

Heat WaveLinda Ronstadt. Just the memory of her in that Cub Scout uniform still gives me goosebumps.

Country RoadsToots and the Maytals. Welcome to Jamaica, mon; have a nice day! All the women I knew in high school who were John Denver fans thought this was sacrilege. I thought it was perfect!

Who Do You Love? I’m torn between this one,
George Thoroughgood and the Destroyers’ Sam Adams Beer commercial version, and the six-part live performance by Quicksilver Messenger Service, from the Happy Trails album.

Crimson and CloverJoan Jett and the
Blackhearts
. Leather and heavy metal turned this adolescent Shondell’s classic into a heavy-metal lesbian love ballad.

SpoonfulCream.  Written by Willie Dixon and
recorded by Howlin’ Wolf
, Eric Clapton and Co. turned this into a seventeen-minute jam session on the epic Wheels of Fire album.

Viva Las VegasZZ Top. Substitute Texas blues-rock for Elvis Presley’s samba and you get this. Thank ya, thank ya verramuch.

I Got You, BabeBeavis and Butthead. Cher’s voice only got better during the intervening three decades since she and “some dork” sang it in 1965. Why Cher would associate with two animated imbeciles defies all logic but I, for one, am grateful and amused.

Tracks (C) original performers.
Image (c) Can Stock Photo