DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

Ray Benson is a national treasure, whose outfit, Asleep at the Wheel, has been spreading the Texas swing gospel for a long damn time. The album from which this recording derives was my gateway drug into a giddy universe of intoxicating joy.  It came out in 1993, and before that time the name of Bob Wills had reverberated around the corridors of my memory, but with this collection of loving renditions of some of his classic hits performed by a line up of Country music’s finest practitioners (Marty Stuart, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton…the list goes on, including a surprise appearance by Huey Lewis) the barn had been burned down for good.

I could have chosen any of the cuts, but “Big Ball’s in Cowtown” is my choice because it makes me smile every time I hear it, starting with the title. I’m not a cowboy (not even an Urban one) and I don’t dance, but what the hell. I can picture the whole town gettin’ dressed up, coming down to the dance hall ready to celebrate life to the outer reaches, and I want to be right there with ‘em.

Bob Wills formulated the recipe for a magic potion, mixing country with Jazz, and the world owes him a debt of thanks. Ray Benson has dedicated his life to it, and I’m grateful.

This essay is one in a series celebrating deserving artists or albums not included on NPR Music's list of 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women.

Nancy Sinatra, the force who brought "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" to life, was never meant to sing the song at all. The late Lee Hazlewood, a songwriter and producer for the likes of Duane Eddy, had written the single and intended to sing it himself. But once Sinatra heard it, she immediately had a better idea. "He said, 'It's not really a girl's song. I sing it myself onstage.' I told him that coming from a guy it was harsh and abusive, but was perfect for a little girl to sing," Sinatra told Los Angeles Magazine last year. The song soared to the top of the Billboard pop charts, scored Sinatra two Grammy nominations and has been covered dozens of times by the likes of Loretta Lynn and a baby-faced Nick Cave.

The 1966 hit became an anthem for women who refused to be walked all over, and who threatened to do the very same if crossed. It also proved that Sinatra and Hazlewood collaborations were pure magic, a fact writ large on their first collaborative album, 1968's Nancy & Lee. Composed of covers and Hazlewood-penned tunes, Nancy & Lee is a linchpin of horn-driven, off-kilter, sing-speak '60s pop. While Hazlewood's lysergic jilted cowboy baritone purrs throughout the album, and Billy Strange, of the famed Wrecking Crew, lends a hand arranging and composing the songs here, Sinatra's crystalline pipes, made all the more wonderful because of her expressive singing style, make it glisten.

The way Sinatra so nonchalantly sings "go ahead, see if I care" on the album's Johnny and June Carter Cash cover "Jackson", you can almost see her shrugging. On the twinkling closing track "I've Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me)," Sinatra admits: "Well I pushed him off the ladder of success," giggling; Hazlewood chimes in and says: "That's true!" (The vinyl version of the album features Sinatra and Hazlewood in a Q&A, in which they're asked: "Does 'Lady Bird' contain political overtones?" The two reply: "The only overtones 'Lady Bird' contains are the high notes Lee misses and Nancy laughs at").

What stuns about Nancy & Lee, though, is how Sinatra and Hazlewood masterfully marry sunshiny orchestral elements with lyrics that dig at something darker about the human condition, ranging from fleeting lovers and feeling so devastatingly lonesome that another romance seems outside the realm of possibility. On the swelling "Sundown, Sundown," Hazelwood growls: "There's no one in this world for me / There's never gonna be." Then Sinatra comes in, sweeping Strange's orchestral arrangements — and listeners — off their feet as she croons: "Sundown / I miss you, sundown / I need you sundown / Come on, come on, come on, come on back to me."

Love is always just out of reach on Nancy & Lee; no one is anyone's baby. It's a sweet, elusive dream thing that lives on only in song. Loving feelings are lost, and in "Summer Wine," characters wake up with their pockets empty, head swelled and with only a fading memory to remind them of the one who got away. The album's core is the

Preston, the bass player in my garage band THE NERVE recently suggested that this song would be a good one for the band to try. I remembered it fondly and I felt good singing it, and we started to work it into our repertoire. Jimmy Hall, the original lead singer on the track said that the first time Ricky Hirsch, the guitarist for Wet Willie, played him the signature riff, “it felt like a sunny breeze on a beach.” 

I agree, and apparently a lot of other people thought so, too, because it made a comeback during the pandemic: “keep on smiling through the rain, laughing at the pain, rollin’ with the changes, ’til the sun comes out again.” Right? We all needed to remind ourselves that there would be a light at the end of that dark tunnel. There is a great YouTube clip from three years ago with Jimmy singing it with the band Blackberry Smoke, on the 50th anniversary of Capricorn Studios, and the man sounds better than ever. 

In 1974, when it debuted, it was produced for Macon, GA’s Capricorn Records (the same folks that brought us The Allman Brothers), by the legendary Tom Dowd, who came up with the “stop time” bridge - that lifts the song into the final heavenly chorus. It made it to #10 on the national charts, and earned its wings as a perfect feel good Sunny Song.

The Agony, Inspiration and Exultation Of Charles Allan Rich - 
December 14, 1932 – July 25, 1995.
Never Forget To Remember Such Brilliance.
Enough Said.
Listen In Friends.

When people think of Joe South, they generally think first of Games People Play, one of the most successful protest-related songs of the late 1960s, with its distinctive electric sitar accompaniment, played by the singer and composer himself, and a bitingly prescient lyric directed at pseudo-hippy types who "while away the hours / In their ivory towers / Till they're covered up with flowers / In the back of a black limousine."

South, who has died aged 72 of heart failure, won a Grammy for that million-seller and went on to write many other fine songs, including Walk a Mile in My Shoes, Down in the Boondocks, Hush and (I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden.

A member, like Eddie Hinton, Dan Penn and Troy Seals, of a generation of US southern white boys who grew up listening to rhythm and blues, South was a fine guitarist who became a popular session man, performing on a series of important records, starting with Sheila, a hit in 1962 for Tommy Roe, a fellow native of Atlanta, Georgia. In 1966 he played bass guitar on much of Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde, and the following year he created the shivering, menacing bottom-string guitar licks that opened and underpinned Aretha Franklin's classic Chain of Fools.
It is South's playing that gives a clue to the spontaneity of the Blonde on Blonde sessions, which often lasted late into the night. The musicians were obliged to follow Dylan wherever his songs led, resulting in the occasional mistakes and missed changes – as when South fails to spot Dylan's chord shift in the second verse of Visions of Johanna, taking half a bar to adjust under the line about the nightwatchman clicking his flashlight.

South was born Joseph Souter and was given a guitar by his father at the age of 11. He built a small radio station on which he played his own songs and had modified his name when, still in his teens, he had his first minor hit in 1958 with The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor, co-written with the Big Bopper (JP Richardson) to capitalise on current novelty hits. The following year Gene Vincent recorded two of his songs, I Might Have Known and Gone Gone Gone.

He had made a successful career as a session musician in Muscle Shoals and Nashville when Games People Play brought him to international attention. Its title borrowed from a successful book on transactional analysis by the psychiatrist Eric Berne, the song took an unusual approach to the social tensions of the day, more oblique and unpredictable than other Dylan-influenced protest songs which topped the charts. But when it won a Grammy for best song of 1969, his problems began.
"The Grammy is a little like a crown," he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. "After you win it, you feel like you have to defend it. In a sense, I froze. I found it hard to go back into the recording studio because I was afraid the next song wouldn't be perfect."

None of South's subsequent records made the top 20, but Walk a Mile in My Shoes was recorded by Elvis Presley (and later by Bryan Ferry and Coldcut), Hush took the British progressive rock band Deep Purple into the top 5 in the US and Canada in 1968, and the lilting Rose Garden gave the country singer Lynn Anderson a worldwide hit in 1971. He also produced records by the singer Sandy Posey and the folk-rock duo Friend and Lover.

With the single “I Only Want to Be with You” (1963), Springfield went solo and made her way into the heart of “Swinging London.” Part cartoon, part unresolvable desire, part bruised despair, she peered through heavy mascara and a stack of peroxided hair while singing with breathy sensuality. Bringing a fragile uncertainty to her cover versions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that had been hits in the United States for Dionne Warwick, Springfield had a string of British hits. The commercial high point of her career, though, was the ballad “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (1966), which topped the British singles chart and reached number four in the United States.
In the late 1960s Springfield began to take herself seriously as a soul diva. In 1965 she hosted a television special that promoted Motown artists, including the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas, to British audiences, and she often performed American rhythm-and-blues songs in her own subsequent TV appearances. She signed with Atlantic Records in 1968 and cut her Dusty in Memphis (1969) album in the famed American Sound Studios with producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin. The album brought her critical acclaim and an international hit with “Son of a Preacher Man.”

Springfield continued to record into the 1970s, but her career was derailed by poor management and struggles with drugs and alcohol. By the middle of the decade, she was working as a session singer in Los Angeles. Repeated comeback attempts failed until she teamed up with the Pet Shop Boys on the single “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” (1987); after it became a hit, the duo wrote and produced other songs for her that were included on her album Reputation (1990). By the 1990s Springfield had become a camp icon. After she resettled in England, she battled cancer and in 1998 received the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire). She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

I guess it’s time to share my John Prine story - my “encounter with greatness.” Stop me if I’m repeating myself. It was 1971, my freshman year at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. A group of us heard that John Prine was going to be playing at Grinnell - a smaller, hipper school, and we decided to make the trek, and sleep over in our sleeping bags. 

John was appearing - for free - in the cozy common area. He was sitting on an ottoman, crouched low - and we sat around him on the floor, acolytes to the Buddha. It was very intimate, very informal. His first album had recently been released, and I was already in awe of the master. 

After the set, he excused himself and retreated to the restroom, where he was followed and cornered by a couple of my buddies. They told him that their friend wrote songs, and he needed to hear them. He emerged from the toilet, made a beeline for me, and asked me to play a few for him. I so wish they had been worthy of such an honor, but they were childish. True to his character, though, he was nothing but kind and gracious; his advice was to go to Chicago to try my luck as he had done. “However, as you can see, ” he quipped, “I’m playing for free, myself.”  One of my fondest memories.

Here is John’s song about a vastly different encounter, which changes the course of the protagonist’s life. Enjoy!

This is the unlikely musical tale of a 1950's Italian kid from New York City not named Dion DiMucci.
We're talking about John Henry Ramistella.
This artist has been inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame but the big door prize still eludes him.
It's possibly the contention that a career delivering mostly vivid, colorful cover versions of brilliant material makes him a melodic figure of less import.
I vigorously disagree.
He was a different kind of pioneer and If anyone belongs in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's Johnny Rivers.
The omission is glaring.
- Rich Buckland

"The Whisky was a smash from opening night," Rivers says. I brought my following from Gazzari's." Rivers and his famous red Gibson ES-335 guitar symbolized the Strip's new youth-oriented atmosphere. They weren't at the Whisky long when he and Adler thought of cutting a live album. Another L.A. club owner loaned Rivers and Adler money to hire Wally Heider's remote recording unit. "We recorded this album two nights in a row and took it to every record company in town. None of them wanted it," Johnny recalls.

Liberty Records executive Bob Skaff liked the tape and convinced reluctant Liberty President Al Bennett to release it on Imperial Records. Bennett had purchased Imperial from founder Lew Chudd, and ran it as a small, semi-independent label. To release Rivers' recordings, he and Adler formed Dunhill Productions with Bobby Roberts (an ex-member of The Dunhills, a tap dancing group that inspired the name) and Pierre Cossette (now producer of the Grammy Awards show). This eventually evolved into Dunhill Records, home to L.A rock legends The Mamas & The Papas, The Grass Roots and Steppenwolf.

Adler and company were disappointed that the album would appear on what they considered a secondary label. But not Johnny. "When they said 'Imperial Records.' I just jumped up and went 'YEAH! YEAH!' Because I grew up with nothing but Imperial Records, Bobby Mitchell, Fats Domino, and Ricky Nelson, and I thought 'What a cool label!'" Both Rivers and Adler came to see Imperial's smallness as a plus. "it gave Lou and me the autonomy to pick our own singles and work closely with the promotion men and marketing people," Rivers says. "I think that had a lot to do with why we had so much success, because we had a real good handle on it.".
-Johnny Rivers

https://punkgirldiaries.com/mary-weiss-shangri-la/

"Oh, no, Oh no, Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Remember (Walking In The Sand)".  

The song and it's production were the child of a music business misfit named George "Shadow" Morton"  But it was the urgent hurt of Mary Weiss that has lived within me going on 55 years. 

I recall ruminating upon hearing her plea in 1964, " This must be what love really  is". 

 The melancholy of "Remember"  surrendered to another George Morton composition in December of '64, sung as only Mary and her partners could. 
It was called "Give Him A Great Big Kiss" and made me feel better about young love and the sacred abyss she had us both falling into only four months earlier.  
Teendom was just around my Queens, NY street corner and hope was in the gusty New York wind.  

In retrospect Mary Weiss was my first true infatuation. The emotions were real, especially for a kid who cried over Jackie Wilsons "Lonely Teardrops" at age 7.  Rock and Rhythm and Blues produced awakenings and sensations with no age restrictions.

After 4 marriages I still have similar questions posed by The Shangri-las and The Supremes .  I owe a great deal to those remarkable women and their sacred voices. If we are fortunate, The eternal flame of yearning begs new understanding with each sunrise. 
Just give the one you love a Great Big Kiss and always Remember. 
Always.
-Rich Buckland

k. d. Lang was my wife’s lesbian crush. She made the pilgrimage to see her perform live twice in quick succession, during those heady days when the gender-fluid superstar first altered the zeitgeist with her meteoric power. k.d.’s vocal prowess was undeniable, and other-worldly. And, coming from the hinterlands of Canada she seemed to me, in 1989, like an alien from another planet. When I saw that sexy photo spread she did with Cindy Crawford for Vanity Fair, I got the message, the rhetorical question was posed so loudly and clearly: how could anyone resist such universal charisma?

The eponymous Big Boned Gal of this country swing tune is an anthemic standard bearer. She is Rosie the Riveter for a rising tide of all sexually ambiguous creatures, no matter what body they happen to have been born into. “Be proud, darlin’s,” it proclaims. Strut your stuff, and they will all bow before you. Kathryn Dawn Lang OC AOE was always uniquely and proudly herself - unapologetic, with a honey toned, multi-octave instrument, and the soul to persuasively woo everyone across the Kinsey scale.

She says she may be done, now. “The muse is eluding me,” she says. I hope not. She recently appeared at a tribute to another master vocalist, her former duet partner Tony Bennett, who himself stayed his musical course for 8 decades. Maybe Tony’s muse will inspire her to do the same.