40 Year Itch: Henry, The Hobo and 3 Friends

These are three albums released in April I failed to mention for one reason or another.[Purchase]Ex-Fairport Convention  Richard Thompson's first solo album has the distinction of being the poorest selling album in the Warner Brothers catalog. But if you judged album quality on sales you wouldn't be reading 1001Songs. Henry the Human Fly reveals all the witty playfulness and intelligence that would be the cornerstone of the 40 year career...

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40 Year Itch: Checking the Charts

Checking in with the charts at the end of of April 1972:USA #1 FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE Roberta FlackTop US DebutIT'S GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME The Carpenters R and B #1 DAYDREAMING Aretha FranklinAdult Contemporary #1 FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE Roberta Flack  USA #1 albumFIRST CHAPTER Roberta Flack WLS RADIO TOP TEN 1. The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face -Roberta Flack 2. Rockin' Robin - Michael...

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40 Year Itch: Maidens, Warriors and Sentinels

[Purchase]The year after Wishbone Ash won Melody Maker's Brightest Hope Award, they delivered Argus (on April 28,1972), their third album, a progressive rock classic, and the best selling of their career. Written for the most part on acoustic guitars, songs like "Time Was", "Sometime World" and the classic "Blowin' Free" all build up in intensity and let loose into full blown twin guitar jams --some of which rock out in the spirit of The Who. (Wishbone...

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40 Year Itch: Traffic Jams in Santa Monica

Recorded over two nights in January of 1972 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during a tour to promote Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, a Top Ten album. Tracks: "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" from Low Spark "Light Up or Leave Me Alone" from Low Spark "John Barleycorn" from John Barleycorn Must Die "Rainmaker" from Low Spark "Glad"  from John Barleycorn Must Die "Freedom Rider"  from John Barleycorn Must Die "40,000 Headmen" from Traffic "Dear Mr....

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40 Year Itch: A Majestic Live Album

[Purchase] The idea of a rock band playing with a symphony wasn't new. The Beatles had done it and so had the Moody Blues. Both The Nice ( Five Bridges) and Deep Purple (Concerto For Group And Orchestra) had recently recorded live albums with orchestras. Procol Harum's Gary Brooker attended the latter recording.'I went to see the Deep Purple thing at the Albert Hall, we'd done our bit at Stratford, I wanted to see how other bands approached...

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40 Year Itch : Big Star's Debut

[Purchase]When ex Boxtops crooner Alex Chilton teamed up with Anglophile Chris Bell,  one thing they shared in common was the love of a classic mid-60's pop song."I loved British music myself." Chilton said in a 1987 interview."When I first got interested in rock n roll, it was when all the British stuff first started coming out. ( From) '64 through '66, I thought music was great. But then in '67, when all the psychedelic Californian music started...

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40 Year Itch: Lennon's Feminist Anthem

[Purchase]A lot of men wanted to support women's rights. This single, released on April 24, 1972, probably wasn't the way to do it. The title is based on something Yoko said in 1969. Naturally the BBC banned the song. A lot of radio stations refused to play it and it became the lowest charting single of Lennon's career.The song may have been offensive to some people but it all fit into Lennon's view of revolution. Here's what he told Red Mole Magazine...

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40 Year Itch : Lean On Me

In "The Forty Year Itch" New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik pronounced a rule about American popular culture: "The Golden Forty Year Rule":The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. In the 1960's, the New Vaudeville Band's 1920-ish megaphone hit  "Winchester Cathedral" won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Recording while Paul McCartney dabbled in Roaring Twenties song craft with tunes like "Your Mother Should Know" and "Honey Pie". In the 1970's,...

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40 Year Itch: Leonard Walks Off Stage

[Purchase]On April 21, 1972 Leonard Cohen was wrapping up a difficult 20 city tour of Europe and Israel in Jerusalem. The entire tour was plagued by bad sound and Cohen's own doubts as a performer. Director Tony Palmer ( who had also shot Cream's farewell concert and co-directed Frank Zappa's 200 Motels) was given incredible access. He had already witnessed Cohen giving some Oslo fans their money back after a concert. ( Watch below)“He was very uncomfortable...

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40 Year Itch: Gumbo

[Purchase]"In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of the little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar."---Dr John in his autobiography Under a Hoodoo Moon   Gumbo is certainly among the first five albums anyone with an interest in New Orleans...

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40 Years Ago : An Acid Folk Masterpiece

[Purchase]   Clodagh Simonds and Alison O'Donnell were twelve year old students at the Holy Child Convent School in Dublin when they formed Mellow Candle. Among the first songs Simonds wrote was "Lonely Man" ( which appears on their cult-fave album Swaddling Songs). The lyrics reveal a precocious poet in training:     Lonely man looking for the day/     Damns the night whose stars have left him cold.(For some...

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40 Years Ago Today: Genesis Plays Rome

On an Italian tour to promote their third album Nursery Cryme , the members of Genesis were interviewed backstage at Rome's Piper Club moments before they took the stage. Peter Gabriel was still applying mascara during the interviews. A shaggy Phil Collins talks about the band being a democracy. ( He'd recently been given his first lead vocal on Cryme's "For Absent Friends") Mike Rutherford says the band prefers audiences that sit...

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40 Years Ago Today : The Dead Play Denmark

Here's a serious treat for all of you Deadheads:77 minutes of The Grateful Dead playing live at the Tivoli in Copenhagen Denmark on April 17, 1972.The video begins a song into the first set, missing out on "Cold Rain and Snow" ( Of course somebody's got it somewhere for download online)   So what we see and hear ( if I'm not mistaken) is:   Me and Bobby McGee   Chinatown Shuffle ( with vocals by Pigpen, just two months before cirrhosis forced him to retire from the Dead. He would die in March of 1973. Keyboardist Keith...

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40 Years Ago This Month: The Other Two

[Purchase]While Neil Young was celebrating two weeks at #1 with  Harvest and Stephen Stills was hitting his creative peak with Manassas , the less interesting half of the disbanded CSN and Y knocked out an album of nicely crafted songs and sweet harmonies.It hit #4 on the charts thanks to Nash's singles "Immigration Man" and "Southbound Train". As "Page 43" demonstrates,  Crosby was in his own songwriting world. No Verse...

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40 Years Ago Today: Amazing Grace Hits #1

[Purchase]After five weeks at Number One in the UK, it appeared Harry Nilsson's "Without You" was there for good. Some might have even suggested it would take a new T.Rex or Rod Stewart single if not an army to push Harry out of the way. Actually it was none of the above. All it took was the pipes and drums of a newly formed cavalry regiment made up of the Prince of Wales's Dragoon Guards and The Royal Scots Greys.. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards's moving rendition of "Amazing Grace" would stay atop the UK charts for five weeks and it would also...

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40 Years Ago Today; Tumbling Dice

When the Stones recorded "All Down the Line" at Nelcote, the sixteen room mansion Richards rented in the Summer of '71, engineer Andy Johns remembers Mick saying "This is a single. This is the single!" Johns thought Mick was out of his fucking mind:And I went out and said to him "You're wrong about this. This is not a single?" And he went "Really? Do ya think so?" And that was the first time I realized "Jesus , he'll actually listen to me".In the...

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Freak Out Friday : Matching Mole

[Purchase]As Roberta Flack's "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" topped the Adult Contemporary Singles chart for six straight weeks, an arguably even more beautiful song was released by a Canterbury Scene super group called  Matching Mole. The song is "O Caroline", inspired by British artist Caroline Coon, performed by former Soft Machine vocalist/drummer Robert Wyatt and former Caravan keyboardist David Sinclair. There are conflicting reports...

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40 Years Ago Today: The Jive Artist Hits His Peak

[Purchase]At the height of his creative powers and full of ambition, Stephen Stills teamed up with his friend, Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman, pedal steel guitarist Al Perkins and Jamaican bassist Calvin "Fuzzy" Samuels  ( among others) to record a double album full of great rock'n'roll steeped in country, blues, folk and even a little Latin. Though the album has fallen in and out of critical favor over the past 40 years, there's an argument...

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40 Years Ago Today : CCR Goes Out Ugly

[Purchase]Mardi Gras , the seventh and final Creedence Clearwater Revival album, sounds like a 28-minute "F---You" from John Fogerty to band mates Doug Clifford and Stu Cook. Tom Fogerty has already left CCR during the recording of Pendulum after a series of disputes about creative say in the band. With Mardi Gras, Fogerty seems to be saying "after all these years my songs and my singing have carried this band, here's your chance to see what we'd...

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Six Degrees of Separation: Tommy Keene to The Bangles

For this version of Six Degrees of Separation we're celebrating the jangly pop that made 80's college radio rule. 1. [Buy Tommy's Retrospective]From the back of the 9:30 Club, where we CMJ marathoners had gathered, the singer taking the stage looked suspiciously like Alan Thicke who was not the most popular late night talk show host in New Orleans at the time. ( I think that had something to do with the local CBS affiliate's decision to...

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40 Years Ago Today : Elvis On Tour

[Buy The Movie]"My daddy had seen a lot of people who played guitars and stuff and didn't work. So he told me, you should make up your mind about either playing guitar or being an electrician. I never saw a guitar player that was worth a damn."- Elvis Presley, opening lines of Elvis On Tour The concert footage in the 33rd and final Elvis Presley movie, Elvis On Tour, was mostly shot April 9, 1972 in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The King --who received...

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40 Years Ago: The Mac Gets Bare

[Purchase]At first, many of the songs on Bare Trees leave about as much of an impression as the nearly colorless album cover. But there are some great tunes here and, along with Kiln House, 1972's Bare Trees is one of the best albums from The Mac's Post Peter Green/ Pre Buckingham Nicks period.      22-year old Danny Kirwan dominates the album with five songs including the galloping title track which features the timeless...

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Funky Friday : Outa-Space

[Purchase]    By running the sound of a clavinet through a wah wah pedal, Billy Preston created the funky sounds of "Outa-Space", originally a B-Side to the title cut from his 1971 album I Wrote A Simple Song.    Of course any DJ that actually liked music flipped the disc over to play four minutes of pure funk. Re-released in April of 1972,  "Outa-Space" climbed all the way to #2 on the pop charts, went gold and won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance of 1972.( "I Wrote A Simple Song" stalled at #77.) The...

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Terry Hall ( Specials, Fun Boy 3) Picks His Top 10

Terry Hall made this list the March 18, 1982 issue of Smash Hits which I've discovered courtesy of Like Punk Never Happened. At the time the former Specials frontman was promoting the first Fun Boy Three album. 1. Question Mark and the Mysterians: 96 Tears - my favourite record of all time 2. Echo And The Bunnymen: A Promise - sing with feeling 3. Charles Aznavour : She - sung with a french accent 4. The Buzzcocks...

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40 Year Ago Today: ZZ Top Gets Muddy

[purchase]For their second album, released April 4, 1972, ZZ Top stuck to the blueprint that would make them rich and famous: hell-raising, blues-based, beer-soaked boogie. All that's missing is the two-foot Rutherford B Hayes beards, mirrored shades and whatever that twirling gesture was we saw in the MTV videos.In a 2005 interview with a New Yorker reporter, Billy Gibbons revealed that because of that beard, he has to drink beer through a straw....

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40 Years Ago This Month : Lou Lays An Egg

[Purchase]Largely made up of Velvets leftovers (including "I Can't Stand It" and "Ocean", "Lisa Says") Lou Reed was recorded in the same legendary Morgan Sound Studios where Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull and Paul McCartney had laid down tracks. Surrounded by English musicians ( including Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman of Yes and the same drummer who played on Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man"), Lou sounds tentative.The standout track is "Wild Child", a preview...

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40 Years Ago: "Oh Babe, What Would You Say"

[Purchase]As Norman Smith, he engineered all the Beatles albums though Rubber Soul. Unflappable, unhurried and always wearing a shirt and tie, he earned the nickname "Norman Normal" from a word-playing John Lennon. Smith also worked with Pink Floyd, producing Piper At The Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma. His job, apparently, was to keep them thinking more songcraft, less spaced-out atmosphere. With Pretty Things, he produced...

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