40 Year Itch: Try to Run, Try to Hide

[Purchase]

And so, finally  we come to 2066 And Then and their 1972 debut album Reflections On The Future.

Though only together for a year, this German hard rock band produced a hard rocking psychedelic marvel that would appeal to basement stoners who favor the riff rockers ( "At My H0me") and spaced out jams ( the 15 minute title cut) of Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly. The name of the band harkens back to the Norman Conquests and the Battle of Hastings. It's just a thousand years later...and then.

This band hits it on every level... from the exceptional musicianship to the husky, bad ass vocals. One of my favorite surprises in my year-long quest for great music from 1972.

Read More

40 Year Itch: A Marvel-ous Concept Album

[Purchase]

40 years before Disney bought Marvel for $4 Billion, a British prog rock band called Icarus released a tribute album to the great superheroes of Marvel Comics. So you have songs called "Spiderman", "Thor", "Captain America" and "Conan The Barbarian". The lyrics are a bit over the top for the most part --though I like "Hulk"'s chorus: 

Hulk is on the rampage/ Doesn't understand

Cuz underneath that thick green hide is a very mixed up man

And speaking of mix ups, when Marvel's chief honcho found out about the album he demanded Marvel receive 50% of the royalties. Instead, Pye Records pulled the album...making The Marvel World of Icarus a super rare, super album about super heroes.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Wonderful Urbanity

[Purchase]

In the video below, frequent Beach Boys/Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks doesn't really have a hell of a lot to say about his 1972 classic Discover America. So I'll try to fill in the blanks just a bit. Don't get thrown by the title. This is an album that will help you discover Trinidad. Especially the quaint , reportorial kind of folk songs made famous by calypso kings like Wilmoth Houdini and Attila the Hun. Songs like "Bing Crosby" and  "FDR in Trinidad" ( recorded on this album with the help of Little Feat) have lyrics that read like editorials in small town newspapers: 

We are privileged to see the democratic president of the great republic 
 With his charming and genial personality and his wonderful urbanity 
 We were struck by his modest style 
and we were intrigued by the famous Roosevelt smile



Discover America isn't all calypso and steel drums. There are covers of two Allen Toussaint songs and one by Little Feat. "John Jones" has hints of reggae. Would a major label ever distribute anything like this in 2012? Probably not. But I agree with AllMusic's decree that this is an "eclectic masterpiece of multi-cultural Americana.

 

Read More

40 Year Itch: Taxes, Death and Trouble

[Purchase]

The "Trouble Man" film score was one of my loveliest projects and one of the great sleepers of all our time. I'll probably be dead and gone before I get the probable acclaim from the "Trouble Man" album, musical track, that I feel I should get. And put to a symphony, if someone took my album and did a symphony on it, I think it would be quite interesting
-Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye followed up his Motown masterpiece What's Going On  with Trouble Man, a great soundtrack to a not so good blaxploitation movie starring Robert Hooks as "Mr T."( Yeah , I didn't see it either.)

Marvin Gaye had been cast in a 1971 film called Chrome and Hot Leather. But he was virtually ignored by the director. As Cameron Crowe describes it in a recent NPR interview , Gaye spent most of the time hanging out with the crew "learning the craft of the movie through the men who were shooting it and that is how you really discover the beating heart of a movie...what happened was he took, I think, this experience into the studio."

Saxophonist Trevor Lawrence, who played on the soundtrack, says Marvin was very hands on. Gaye is credited with vocals, drums, keyboards and piano. The drums are often looped. The keyboard is a mini moog . More than anything else, there's an alchemy at work--of jazz, orchestra and soul.This year Universal Music has re-released a special edition of the soundtrack.Most people agree it's worth checking out--tho'  Robert Christgau dismissed the album at the time with two lines:
         "Buy the single unless you like soundtrack albums. This ain't no super-fly shit"

Read More

40 Year Itch: Coming over Charaton Bridge

[Purchase]

Cult faves Gentle Giant--celebrated even today for their complex, sophisticated, eccentric recordings-- had to endure the most shaming indignity before heading out on the tour to support Octopus ( released in December of 1972). They had to open for Black Sabbath:

"It was perhaps the most ridiculous pairing of groups ever in the history of show business. For the most part we got booed off the stage... At a show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, we went on stage and the Sabbath fans were shouting "get off, we want Sabbath" and we were just getting set to play 'Funny Ways'. We pulled out the cellos and violins, and the crowd starting heckling immediately, but we were gradually starting to get past it, when someone threw a cherry bomb on stage. (Phil Shulman) made sure we all stopped playing and said we needed to get off the stage. As we were leaving the stage, Phil grabbed the mic and said to the crowd "you guys are a bunch of fucking cunts!", and the boo that went up after that was enormous! To this day I'll never forget it! We were sort of vindicated later on, as we thought we were never going to play Los Angeles again after the cherry bomb incident, but later on the Octopus tour we were able to sell out consistently there, so something clicked with the fans. “”Derek Shulman on Gentle Giant's failure to win over Black Sabbath's audience in 1972



For  the Gentle Giant novice, Octopus is the place to begin. It features all the odd, multi-instrumental, multi vocal adventures and  twee and twiddly moments that are the hallmark of this band of brilliant musicians... with the benefit of being extremely listenable.

                                                         Octopus, the US album cover

   One of the album highlights is "Knots" which kicks off with three part a capella vocals and then just gets stranger and stranger.



I suppose the oddest footnote to Gentle Giant is the fact that upon the band's break up, Derek Shulman became a big deal at Polygram Records. He's the guy who signed Bon Jovi.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Hi Hi HI Banned in the UK

[Purchase]

When the BBC banned the A side " Hi Hi Hi", released on December 1st, 1972,  for its sexually suggestive lyrics "get you ready for my body gun" ( as opposed to the obvious drug reference : "we're gonna get hi hi hi"), disc jockeys flipped the 45 and played the reggae toss off "C Moon". In the UK "C Moon" became a Top 5 hit. McCartney revisited the song in concert every so often including his surprise performance at Amoeba Records in Hollywood back in 2007.

Probably the most interesting thing about the song is who played the instruments. Guitarist Henry McCullough played drums. Drummer Danny Seiwell played vibraphone. Denny Laine played bass. Probably the least interesting thing about the song is its lyrics:

C moon C moon C moon is she

  C moon C moon C moon is me.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Focus III

[Purchase]

The greatest things Dutch guitar god Jan Akkerman ever did wasn't with Focus. It was refusing to play with Sting "because I didn't like his music".

Anyway, Focus followed up their international prog metal yodeling classic "Hocus Pocus" with this double album, Focus III, released in November of 1972. The yodeling is kept to a minimum tho I think you can hear some hints of operatic singing about two minutes into  "Sylvia", a major hit everywhere but in the US. To my ears this sounds like a really bad TV theme. An adventure show starring a lifeguard and his pet chimp. "Surf Chimp" I think we'll call it. Starring Jan Michael Vincent.

 

Read More

40 Year Itch: On Butterflies and Lilac Sprays

[Purchase]

In Kicking And Dreaming, Nancy Wilson tells the story of searching for Joni Mitchell on Sechelt Island off the British Columbia coast. This is years before she became famous herself. Nancy had read that Joni owned an 80 acre farm on the 15 square mile island. The journey proved fruitless. Islanders who could have pointed the way usually sent Nancy in the opposite direction.

Though I can't prove it, I always felt I recognized the backdrop of Joni Mitchell's For The Roses. It couldn't be anything but an island on the Sunshine Coast, a slightly sunnier cousin of Washington's San Juan Islands. And the nude gatefold pretty much seals the deal.

But enough about the cover. Released in November of 1972, For the Roses offers a transition between the stark instrumentation of 1971's classic Blue and the Tom Scott/ soft jazz explorations of 1974's Court And Spark. While it may be some people's favorite Joni Mitchell album, For the Roses doesn't work for me anywhere near as well as the two albums surrounding it. Naturally there are songs that sounds like Blue ( "Banquet", "For The Roses") and those that sound like Court and Spark ("Barangrill" and the US#25 hit "You Turn Me On ( I'm A Radio)" which even gives us a glimpse into the forthcoming boho hit "Help Me").



Two of the more interesting cuts, at least to me, are "Blonde in the Bleachers" and "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire". The first one may very well be a message to Graham Nash about those "sweet mysteries" groupies offer but about my half way in it becomes a message to groupies about Graham Nash and all of the other rock n roll men:
 You can't hold the hand Of a Rock'n'Roll man
 Very long
 Or count on your plans With a Rock'n'Roll man 
 Very long 
 Compete with the fans For your Rock'n'Roll man 
 For very long
 

 And the astonishing lyrics of "Cold Blue Steel" relate an urban nightmare from the perspective of a junkie:
 A wristwatch, a ring, a downstairs screamer 
Edgy-black cracks of the sky "Pin-cushion-prick- Fix this poor bad dreamer!"

 

  For The Roses isn't the first Joni Mitchell album you should buy, but you're missing out if you ignore it altogether.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Slayed?

[Purchase]

Yob-Rock at its finest. Though their impact on US charts was minimal. Slade owned the UK Charts between 1971 and 1976. They placed 17 consecutive singles into the UK Top 20 including 6 Number Ones. The ultimate Slade album is their UK#1  Slayed?, released in November of 1972. It features the chronically poor-spelling band's huge hits (UK#1) "Mama We're All Crazee Now" and (UK#2) "Gudbuy T'Jane" as well as "Look At Last Night", perhaps the band's most introspective song:

You'll be right here today/Gone Tomorrow

Maybe they'll care today/But not Tomorrow

Fate can be fickle with the famous. Three days after playing a sold out show in London, drummer Don Powell crashed his Bentley into a wall killing his girlfriend and nearly himself. As Noddy Holder said of that moment: "We were riding the crest of a wave, then a week later Don hjad his crash. He was given 24 hours to live. It all came crumbling down in one day".

Read More

40 Year Itch : An Ocean Full of Faces

[Purchase]

Seventh Sojourn, released on November 19, 1972 is the seventh and last of a stretch of gold albums released by the classic line-up of the Moody Blues before group members took a long sabbatical to pursue solo careers. Its late 1972 release helped ensure Seventh Sojourn would be the #1 Billboard album for weeks leading to Christmas.

The best known song on the album is the US # 13 single "I'm Just A Singer ( In a Rock n Roll Band), Justin Haywards's response to fans trying find deep wisdom in Moody lyrics.  Charles Manson was still in the news for the murders he and his followers committed in the belief that the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" was citing a race war. Of course, the worst thing Moody Blues lyrics could inspire would be some kind of  New Age retreat in an Arizona desert.

For the most part this is a pretty satisfying effort but will it make a Moody Blues believer out of you? There's a second single in "Isn't Life Strange" with  its Bee Gees reminiscent opening. The bass line to the lead off track, "Lost in a Lost World" might remind you of the Talking Heads version of "Take Me To The River". Our fave cut is beautifully arranged "The Land of Make-Believe".

Read More

40 Year Itch: You Hit Me With A Flower

[Purchase]

With his long overdue success finally attained, David Bowie also seemed to have picked up 3 "Get Your Idol Out Of Purgatory" cards. 

He used the first one on Mott The Hoople by providing them with a Top 5 UK hit in "All The Young Dudes". 

Another would be used on (Z)Iggy Pop by producing his final Stooges album, 1973's Raw Power. 

But his most memorable intervention was in the career of Bowie's idol and inspiration, former Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed. Just months after Reed released his mostly flat, poorly selling eponymous debut, Bowie and his guitarist Mick Ronson flew Lou out to London to record Transformer.

The album offers mostly two styles: a glammed-up update of the Velvet Underground sound ("Vicious", "Hangin' Round", "Wagon Wheel") with a few nods to gay life ("Make Up", "I'm So Free") and a New York-centric form of cabaret ("New York Telephone Conversation", "Goodnight Ladies"). 

         Then there are the three songs that anchor Transfomer. With syrupy string arrangements from Ronson, "Perfect Day" is a sweet ode to a day of bliss that may or may not be about heroin. "Satellite of Love", a Velvets leftover, is a song about jealousy, with David Bowie "bom'bom'bom-ing through much of it.. Eventually Bowie sings "Sata-Oooh" which must have seemed strange at the time. ( Apparently there were all kinds of yelling tirades and crying jags between Bowie and Lou.)

And then, buried at the end of Side A, there's one of the oddest songs to ever hit the Top Ten. 

With its double bass lines from Herbie Flowers,"Walk On The Wild Side" has this almost journalistic way of describing the characters Reed met at the Warhol Factory. The song was part of a musical based on Nelson Algren's 1965 novel A Walk On The Wild Side that Warhol has commissioned Lou to write

There's the famous drag queen Candy Darling who "never lost her head even when she was giving head."

There's Holly Woodlawn who came from Miami FLA, shaved her legs and then he was a she.

There's actor "Little" Joe Dallesandro who never once gave it away.

There's Sugar Plum Fairy Joe Campbell who went to the Apollo and you should have seen him go go go.

And finally there's Jackie Curtis who thought he was James Dean for a day.

 "I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn't met before, or hadn't wanted to meet" explained Lou. How that strategy produced a hit single is almost as big a mystery as how that song ever got played on the radio in the first place. And the colored girls who sang were called the Thunderthighs.

I don't know if Bowie and Lou Reed worked together a lot after Transformer. Lou yelled at Bowie so much, the latter could be found embracing the toilet in a foetal position. But it was a hit. So Ziggy's work was done. Now all Lou had to was carry around this "transformed" persona for the rest of his life.

Read More

40 Year Itch : The Jackson 5 Live in Paris

[Purchase]

The Jackson 5 spent the first half of November 1972 touring Europe to promote Lookin' Through the Window, the very first album I asked somebody to buy for me. By this point, Michael Jackson's voice had changed from boy soprano to tenor and his solo career was beginning to eclipse the band's. "I Wanna Be Where You Are" is one of the great singles of 1972.



Where are the sounds of screaming girls? Apparently in France, audiences come to concerts to hear the music.

Read More

40 Year Itch: The World Is A Ghetto

[Purchase]


"The World is a Ghetto" may have sounded like one of the most political statements of the years, especially coming from a band whose members had still vivid memories of the Watts riots. But War's 1972 album, which would go on to be one of the best selling albums of 1973, is a celebration of ghetto life. To mark the 40th anniversary of The World Is a Ghetto, here's an interview with one of the band's founders, the harmonica wizard Lee Oskar

.


Lee Oskar, a founding member of the 70's pop-funk-jam band War, grew up in Denmark where he was given his first harmonica on his sixth birthday.

Lee:
I remember the first time I breathed on it it would literally play me.
It would sound just like a symphony
I got hooked and that's where it all started

At 17, virtually pennyless, Lee moved to the US where his virtuosity on the harmonica and his easy-going nature eventually led to his friendship with Eric Burdon. Burdon had recently left The Animals and wanted to find a new band.

They drove around LA until they found a funk band in a dive bar. Together they would all form War. A strange name in the age of peace signs and flower power.






Lee:
Everybody walks around saying "Peace!" and I always said "Peace? Nobody is at peace within themselves. The war within ourselves is what makes us be creative" and somebody pulled that out of my conversation and said "Hey let's call it WAR!" and that's how I remember it coming about.

From the very beginning War discovered the songs that worked best were the ones that came out of long improvisational jams. That suited Burdon just fine.

Lee:
We would get on stage and we would basically improvise.
Eric might even set up a scenario "Ok guys, we're gonna go on a rocket ship and we're gonna fly to the moon and you're gonna be the captain"

In 1970, One of those jams landed at #3 on the U-S pop charts. It was called "Spill the Wine" and its chorus is one of those classics nobody knows the real words to.



Lee:
You spill the wine and you take the pearl.
Not girl.
Pearl. --which was acid back in those days so he was talking about spill the wine.Take the pearl.


After Burdon left, the band played on. War scored more Top Ten hits. Among them, "Why Can't We Be Friends?", "Low Rider",The Cisco Kid, and "Slippin' Into Darkness". All of them emerging from jam sessions.






Lee:
We were never successful when we tried to tell anybody what to play.
There would be an argument or fight or something.

The music stayed fresh even as the question the press asked Lee grew stale.He couldn't avoid being asked what was it like being the only white guy in a band of brothers.

Lee:
I didn't have a hang up about stuff that I noticed a lot of people had
I remember one time somebody yelled "Hey Brother!" like that and then comes up close to look at me and asks "Are you a brother?"
So there were all these clichés between white and black and all that and I hated that frankly.I thought it was pretty arrogant or whatever.



That wasn't his only frustration.
Lee had trouble finding good harmonicas.

Lee:
I would literally take every dime I had and buy every harmonica.
Hopefully I would find one out of ten that was good or something.
That was my passion: to be surrounded by my tools.

So Lee teamed up with a Japanese company to make Lee Oskar harmonicas.
How good are they?
Bluesman Junior Wells was buried with a tray of Oskar harmonicas.
Magic Dick of J Geils Band says "I just think, as a musical tool, they're a great musical tool so I can't think of a better endorsement to give them than that."

To listen to Lee play today is quite astonishing if you've never heard a harmonica played as a jazz instrument. He has, in his lifetime, expanded the possibilities of what conventional harmonicas can do.




But Lee isn't all business. He's always looking for a chance to play. Especially with other War veterans, who for legal reasons have to call themselves The Low Rider Band.

Lee:
The integrity of the music and the jam band that we've always been
That's still there
That's the real deal
That's what The Low Rider Band is.
Nothing homogenized.

Lee can even be found jamming around Seattle these days.
That six year old who got a magical harmonica for his birthday still needs to find a way...to play.

Lee:
I get grouchy if I don't eat.
I get grouchy if I don't play music.

Read More

40 Year Itch : Whole Oats

[Purchase]

Daryl Hall and John Oates, the #1 charting duo in rock and roll history, released their debut album Whole Oats on November 12, 1972. It didn't attract a whole lot of attention then but, in retrospect, maybe it should have. Produced by Arif Mardin ( who helmed great albums by The Rascals and Dusty Springfield), Whole Oats fills out the folksy sound these favorite sons of Philadelphia had created by plugging in funky guitars, horns and other instruments.

 "Fall In Philadelphia" sounds exactly like what Elton John was recording in his honky chateau on the other side of the Atlantic. The album opener, "I'm Sorry", is a bouncy pop tune that would have sounded right at home on AM radio. Overall, the album is a bit of a light weight. It would be followed up with Abandoned Luncheonette ( featuring the then flop single "She's Gone"). The third album, the Todd Rundgren produced War Babies, nearly killed their career. Then Atlantic Records re-released the single "She's Gone" in 1976...it hit the Top Ten...and the rest, as they say,  is history.

Read More

More Krautrock From 1972

Popol Vuh

  1972 was an exceptional year for Krautrock and for German rock and roll. And there is a difference. Krautrock is that experimental form of rock n roll based on the work of minimalists and mad scientist composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen. Bands like Can ( see yesterday's post) , NEU!, Popl Vuh, Faust, Kraftwerk, and Cluster are clearly Krautrock. The great Twenty Sixty Six And Then is probably just German  rock and roll ( as is Grobschnitt). Bands like Amon Duul, Embryo  and Guru Guru straddle the two. So if we can in the time we have left, we'll deal with the others later. This is just an overview of Krautrock circa 1972.

[Purchase]

For their debut album, former Kraftwerk members Klaus Dinger ( drums) and Michael Rother ( guitar) knocked out this influential album of experimental sounds and lyrics in just four days with the help of Can producer Conrad Plank. You can hear the future sounds of Bowie, Eno and Thom Yorke over the 4/4 Motorik beat that became one of Krautrock's trademarks. Fair warning: not everything is as enjoyable as "Negativland". Some of the stuff on this album will clear the room.



This is far more interesting than the drummerless sophmore effort Kraftwerk 2 despite the latter's astonishing 17 minute epic dronefest "Klingklang" which anticipates the sidelong title cut on 1974's Autobahn.

[Purchase]

After experimenting with ambient sounds, Florian Fricke shelved his synthesizers and created an album inspired by sacred music using organic instruments. There's an East meets West vibe here but for the most part Hosianna Mantra is as lovely and ethereal an album as you'll ever find.

[Purchase]

Faust has a notorious aversion to anything even slightly conventional. That holds true on the second album, So Far. After all, the most memorable English lyrics on the album are "Daddy, take the banana! Tomorrow is Sunday!" ( If you have a twitter account I dare you to tweet this line). I played the opening cut "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" to my 10 and 7 year old kids and they loved it.

Years before collaborating with Brian Eno, Cluster was a trio of German experimenters using electronic sounds to create ambient atmospheres. With their second album, you can drone out in your noise reduction headphones and try lip reading your children telling you how hungry they are. Or you can just close your eyes and float up into a psonic stratosphere in your own mind.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Ege Bamyasi

[Purchase]

This was the first Can LP I bought brand new (Torquay 1972) and it is still my favourite. 

-Julian Cope

There is probably no better introduction to the sonically trance-inducing, highly experimental world of Krautrock than Can's approachable fourth album. That's despite its fairly unapproachable name Ege Bamyasi --which means Aegean Okra in Turkish.

Thanks to a hit single, "Spoon", which hit #6 in the German charts and sold 300,000 copies, Can had enough money to rent out a large cinema in Weilerswist. They nailed 1,500 army surplus mattresses to the walls for soundproofing and began work on the album that would accompany "Spoon".

It wasn't an easy session. Guitarist Michael Karoli was falling ill to what would turn out to be a perforated ulcer. And keyboardist Irmin Schidt and vocalist Damo Suzuki were obsessively playing chess. Getting the album finished involved some chaotic, last minute recordings which may explain some of Suzuki's slap dash lyrics like "Hey you, you're losing, you're losing, you're losing, your Vitamin C".

For his part Suzuki says nobody should be looking for wisdom in his lyrics:

"I can't sing, so I use the voice as an instrument, " he told Mojo Magazine." I'm not interested in anything in particular, that's why I sing about nothing. I improvise melody and texture too...Sometimes it sounds like English, French or German, but really it is the language of the Stone Age."

The album did get finished on time. Ege Bamyasi to much critical acclaim at the time. Melody Maker called Can "the most talented and most consistent experimental rock band in Europe. England included." The album remains highly though of with even the vaunted hipsters of Pitchfork giving it a 9.8 out of 10.

CAN tells their own story--including how Damo first took the stage without ever rehearsing with Can-- here

Read More

40 Year Itch: A Good Place Now

[Purchase]

For those who think J J Cale is just too feisty, there's the 1972 album Bobby Charles recorded with members of The Band. Charles was just 17 when he wrote the Bill Haley and The Comets hit "See You Later Alligator" in 1955. He also penned the great Fats Domino tune "Walking To New Orleans".

 What did he do in the 60's? Nobody knows but he showed up in Woodstock NY in 1971 and recorded an album of down home laid back songs for Bearsville Records with Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Dr John, Mac Rebennac. There's at least a half of a great album here including the single "Small Town Talk" ( with Dr John's keyboards piping in beautifully) , "Tennessee Blues" and his masterpiece "I Must Be In a Good Place Now". Bobby Charles came out in November of 1972 and has remai9ned one of the great obscure albums of the 70's until it's recent re-release. Bobby Charles played on The Band's Last Waltz Show but it wasn't filmed. And then , once again, he vanished. Bobby Charles passed away in January of 2010.

Read More

40 Year Itch :We Can Share The Women

[Purchase]

Of course it's sprawling! Europe '72, released on November 5, 1972, is a three record set documenting the Grateful Dead's tour of Western Europe in the Spring of 1972.The Dead hauled around a 16 track recorded to capture the tour so songs are taken nine separate concerts. Double platinum, it remains the best selling of all the live Dead albums although it must be admitted, the band sweetened their performances in the studio, overdubbing harmony vocals in places.

Europe '72 showcases the band's Americana phase with songs like "Jack Straw", "Cumberland Blues" and "Truckin" but there's plenty of psychedelia as well ("China Cat Sunflower", "I Know You Rider").

Below is the Copenhagen show from which "Brown Eyed Woman" was taken:

Read More

40 Year Itch: A Royal Rock N Roll Wedding

[Purchase]

There are two stories that explain why superstars Carly Simon and James Taylor got married in Simon'[s tiny Manhattan apartment on November 3, 1972. There's the story the couple told Rolling Stone Magazine ( in which JT quotes the title of Carly's first hit)

ROLLING STONE: Do you want to talk about why you decided to get married?
 JAMES: That's the way we always heard it should be.
CARLY: I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we should get married, and James was kind of hesitant in his response. He said, "Oh well, there's really no reason to get married. We love each other and we've been living together." And then later on in the afternoon, James said, "You know I've been thinking about it and maybe we should get married." I said, "Well, what's happened between this morning and this afternoon?" He said, "This afternoon it was my idea."



And there's the more salacious version that involves Bianca Jagger calling JT to tell him Mick and Carly were having an affair in LA. He defended Carly and when she returned, he popped the question. Carly has said
"There's nothing that gets men so crazy as other men pursuing their women. Boy, did we decide fast!"

In any case, it was a small affair. There were only three guests at the wedding. Carly's songwriting partner Jake Brackman was best man for both the bride and groom. That night, during his concert at Radio City Music Hall JT announced the marriage to cheers of approval from the crowd.

That same month Carly released her third album No Secrets, a gold record that would top the album charts in the US for five weeks and wind up in the collection of my childhood home. It begins with a song, "The Right Thing To Do" , written directly for James, who had fallen back into a heroin addiction at the time so the line "nothing you can ever do will ever turn me away from you" has quite a lot of resonance.

There are songs that examine Carly's childhood ( "The Carter Family") and her relationship with her late father ( "Embrace Me Your Child" which James called the strongest song on the album) and songs that confess a bit more bed-hopping than even the most confessional of singer songwriters would usually admit to ("We Have No Secrets" and "Waited So Long"). And of course there was "You're So Vain" (discussed in a May post). All immaculately produced by Nilsson's main man Richard Perry.

Read More

40 Year Itch: Donovan's Intimate Performance

[Purchase]

On November 2, 1972, the BBC2 aired Donovan: An Intimate Performance featuring the singer. Sitting on a carpeted platform with two guitars and a harmonica, Donovan intimately performed:
01. Jennifer Juniper
02. There Is A Mountain
03. Catch The Wind
04. The Ordinary Family
05. Lovely Princess
06. People Call Me The Pied Piper
07. A Well Known Has-Been
08. Happiness Runs
09. Colours
10. Sailing Homeward
11. Cosmic Wheels/Maria Magenta
12. The Pee Song
13. Mellow Yellow

"The Pee Song", heard above, came from 1971's H.M.S. Donovan, his second album for children.
By the time the show aired this August 1972 performance, it had been nearly four years since Donovan had a Top 20 hit single in the UK.

Read More