40 Year Itch: Dum-Dum-Dum-Dum Sock It, Sock It

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"It pleased God to put a guitar in my hands and a song on the lips of my children and we aim to please God through our music"
-Roebuck "Pops" Staples

The Staple Singers began as a family gospel act and never completely left the church and its teachings behind ...even when they found success on the pop and R and B charts. From Bealtitude: Respect Yourself ,The Staple Singers has two big hits : the #12 pop/#2 R and B "Respect Yourself" and the #1 pop and R and B hit "I'll Take You There", which may be the best song to ever emerge from Muscle Shoals Studio.



The introduction was lifted by these good God fearing folks from the reggae artists Harry J All Stars UK hit "The Liquidator". But it was all in the name of getting us to heaven via the breathy, moaning vocals of Mavis Staples and that Eddie Hinton guitar solo has a grace all of its own...so what the hell.



That was kind of the point of what The Staple Singers did: spreading the good word about love. As "Pops" told Essence Magazine's Vernon Gibbs :

"We always tried to do material that was inspirational and uplifting in addition to whatever else it was, and I guess the deejays picked up on that...we've always tried to make music that is affirmative, happy music that makes a positive point. Our aim is to get across a message while we're entertaining people. We want people to enjoy the music, but we also want them to hear the lyrics and hear one message--love."

Bealtitide is a great album full of sanctifying soul. Our deep cut is "This Old Town" which basically says we're all the same and if you can't figure that our now, you will when you get to "the community just up the hill." And if that's not inspiring, maybe this woman's interpretive dance will do the trick.

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40 Year Itch : Song Sung Blue Hits #1

The Billboard Top Five
Week of July 1, 1972

1. Neil Diamond - Song Sung Blue
2. Sammy Davis Jr. - Candy Man
3. Billy Preston - Outa -Space
4. Bill Withers - Lean On Me
5. Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose - Too Late to Turn Back Now



Neil Diamond followed his chart topping hit with a series of "Hot August Nights" concerts at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles ( recorded for his live album) and then a 20-concert stand at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York.

Burned out, he announced he'd be taking a break from performing, telling the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: "I felt strongly about taking a sabbatical. I wanted a normal existence. I wanted to remove myself from celebrity status..to do things people take for granted, like driving my son to school and having breakfast with my wife. I wanted to re-establish personal relationships with family and friends...to be home for birthdays and Christmas. To make up for times I wasn't around...to stop seeing my life as a juggling act."

The break lasted just over three years.

As late as the 1990's there were always "Neil Diamond sightings" around the Aspen/Basalt area of Colorado, tho' nobody could be sure. If it was Diamond, it was a bearded, dressed-down Diamond.

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40 Year Itch: Like a Lazy Flowing River

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Named after a slang word for one of them marijuana cigarettes, The Doobie Brothers got their start as a Hell's Angels bar band. Their first album of country boogie failed to sell and Warner Brothers was tempted to drop the band when producer Ted Templeman stepped in to produce Toulouse Street. The album contains their first hit "Listen to the Music" ( US #11) as well as the Top 40 "Jesus Is Just Alright ( picked off from The Byrds' 1969 album Ballad of Easy Rider and backed by its B-side "Rockin' Down the Highway").




   Yes, you've probably heard all three of those songs far too many times. With the exception of "Listen To The Music" which I loved as a kid, I know I have. But the revelation comes in the deep cuts on Toulouse Street ( something I've found to be true on a lot of Doobie Brothers albums).



    Aberdeen, WA 's Patrick Simmons finger-pickin' acoustic guitar numbers like "Mamaloi" and the title cut and his playing on Tom Johnston's "Snake Man" and "White Sun" all sound great. The Doobie Brothers were on their way to challenging Chicago and The Eagles as the top American bands of the 70's.

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40 Year Itch Have Pity on the Stranger in the Cold

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A year before their partnership ended in an onstage explosion at Knott's Berry Farm, the brothers gathered at John Sebastian's house to record an album of dark and gloomy country tunes with a guest list of artists that read's like a who's who of 1960's rock: ex-Byrds, ex-Turtles, Burritos, Lovin's Spoonful and Delaney and Bonnie. The Everly Brothers' bandleader Warren Zevon was there with guitarist Waddy Wachtel and so was Ry Cooder. In a way this was their last opportunity to reinvent themselves. They plucked songs from Rod Stewart ("Mandolin Wind"), Kris Kristofferson ("Breakdown") and four from Dennis Linde whose "Burning Love" had spent most of 1972 in the charts thanks to Elvis Presley . Linde's  "Christmas Eve Can Kill You" is one example of the melancholy that infused the album.

Here's "Mandolin Wind" :



After the release of The Stories We Could Tell, in June of 1972,  the brothers went on tour in Europe with Zevon and Wachtel and found themselves playing all the old hits all over again. There was no re-inventing the Everly Brothers.

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40 Year Itch: Music For The End of the World

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Before Vangelis composed the soundtracks to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, he was Evangelos Odyssey Papathanassou, a keyboard wizard in a Greek 1960's rock trio called Aphrodite's Child. Their 1969 album It's Five O'Clock is a worthy listen.

For 666, released in June of 1972, Vangelis teamed up with poet Costas Ferris to retell the Book of Revelation. Within the 78 minutes of this epic double album, you get Greek choruses, schoolchildren reading scripture, the actress Irene Pappas in the throes of orgasm : "I am to come, I was", and a lot of very short instrumentals that aren't anywhere nearly as interesting as the band must have thought they were. In its entirety, the album annoyed me. But if you break it down to the best tunes, it's a ...revelation.



You get some incredible tunes: "The Four Horsemen" sounds like something The Flaming Lips would eventually do thirty years later. The catchy "Babylon" sounds like The Who (Guitarist Silver Koulouris steals the show throughout the album). And the single "Break" sounds like a Dennis Wilson song.

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40 Year Itch: Miles Visits The Corner

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"It was with Sly Stone and James Brown in mind that I went into the studio in June 1972 to record On The Corner, " said Miles Davis. "During that time everyone was dressing kind of 'out on the street', you know, platform shoes that were yellow, and electric yellow at that, handkerchiefs around the neck, headbands, rawhide vests, and so on. Black women were wearing them real tight dresses that had their big butts sticking way out back."

Miles hoped to attract a young black audience with this funky album that features the kind of ethnic polyrhythms that would become the signature of 1980's Talking Heads. Like Zappa's albums of the same period, Davis cut snippets of melodic instrumentation during jams and pasted them in the places he saw fit. Critics and jazz stations didn't know what to make of the album , which became one of Davis' worst selling of his career.Now 40 years later, an appreciation for On The Corner has surged forth. On the collaborative musical database site Rate Your Music, it is ranked as the 28th best album of 1972.

In October of 1972, Miles would break both his legs in a car accident which would lead to a temporary halt in his recording a year and the beginning of his life as a recluse.

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40 Year Itch: Can I Sit In Your Lap?

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Give it up for Leon Russell! He played on The Byrds' "Mr Tambourine Man", Herb Alpert's "A Taste of Honey", Bob Dylan's "Watching The River Flow",  organised the backing band for Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour, toured with The Rolling Stones and played at George Harrison's Concert for Bangla Desh.



Then in June of 1972, he released Carny, a #2 Billboard album that sold a million copies thanks to the Top 20 single "Tight Rope". Carny is far from a perfect album. (If "Acid Annapolis" comes on  while your iPod is in shuffle mode, I just hope you're not walking by yourself in the dark) But there are some great moments including "This Masquerade", which won George Benson a Grammy four years later, and our favorite  deep cut: "If The Shoe Fits".

   


 Sung from the point of view of one of those thousands of hangers-on/ groupies Russell must have met. Among the song's classic lines :

Can you do a benefit? Have you got any shit?
 Have you made your peace with Jesus yet today?
Would you like to be a monk? C'mon, lets go get drunk.
Do you think Paul McCartney is okay?
Can we crash here for just a few days?
We're from Rolling Stone, so it's okay.

Russell's recording career didn't flourish for much longer but his friendship with Elton John resulted in a recent comeback that made a very fine story on CBS This Morning:

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