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

WHAT A CONCEPT!

OGDENS’ NUT GONE FLAKE by Small Faces (1968, Immediate)

You recognize the famous, round, Victorian, snuff tobacco tin cover? It was designed by Nick Twedell and Pete Brown, and announced to Acid heads everywhere that this album was going to be a trip to be reckoned with, and it did not disappoint. Thought by many to be the first Rock n Roll concept record, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was the premier British, hot house musical flower from that psychedelic garden, mixing British Music Hall with rocking blues - a recipe that also worked marvelously for Ray Davies and The Kinks. The Artful Dodger-esque ditty Lazy Sunday, brayed by future Humble Pie frontman Steve Marriott, became the big hit, and the album went to #1 in the UK. 

Side two is dedicated to a single, 19 minute, fairy tale opus, “Happiness Stan”, narrated by comedian Stanley Unwin in his own nonsense language. It recounts the story of a boy named Stan who goes looking for the other half of the moon when it’s on the wane.  He rescues a house fly that grows to enormous size, able to transport Stan to the place where he learns the meaning of life. Fanciful? But, of course, and delivered in an insouciant Cockney manner, abetted by processed vocals, keyboards, and guitars. Captain Billy has already covered The Faces with Rod Stewart, which showcases them as an unparalleled R and B outfit, but this thing was the apex of psychedelic “High” Art” - but, never taking itself too seriously. 

Ps: There was some controversy stirred up by genius entrepreneur manager-producer Andrew Loog Oldham, when he published an ad for the record which parodied The Lord’s Prayer - just another aspect of its hallucinogenic conception.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/the-gospel-according-to-mavis-staples

Mavis Staples has been a gospel singer longer than Elizabeth II has worn the crown. During concerts, sometimes, she might take a seat and rest while someone in her band bangs out a solo for a chorus or two. No one minds. Her stage presence is so unfailingly joyful—her nickname is Bubbles—that you never take your eyes off her. Staples sings from her depths, with low moans and ragged, seductive growls that cut through even the most pious lyric. She is sanctified, not sanctimonious. In her voice, “Help Me Jesus” is as suggestive as “Let’s Do It Again.” When she was a girl, singing with her family ensemble, the Staple Singers, churchgoers across the South Side of Chicago would wonder how a contralto so smoky and profound could issue from somebody so young.

She is eighty-two. While singers a fraction of her age go to great lengths to preserve their voices, drinking magical potions and warming up with the obsessive care of a gymnast, she doesn’t hold back. Time, polyps, and a casual disdain for preservation have conspired to narrow her range and sand down her old shimmer, but she is not about to hum lightly through a rehearsal. A little ginger tea and onward she goes. Singing is what connects her to the world.

Sly, sociable, and funny, Staples reminds you of your mother’s most reliable and cheerful friend, the one who comes around with good gossip and a strawberry pie. Her cheeks are round and smooth; her hair is done in a copper bob; her resting expression is one of delight. “She is a ray of sunshine,” Bonnie Raitt, her frequent touring companion, said. “She’s never cranky. She has an abiding belief in God and His plan and believes the world is moving toward a higher and more loving world.” Staples has spent the past few decades lending her voice to a startling range of collaborators: Prince, Arcade Fire, Nona Hendryx, Ry Cooder, David Byrne. Anyone who has something to say, she’ll help them say it, in an inimitable gospel voice. One collaborator, Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, said, “All day long, Mavis is having a good time. She’s excited about making music and just being alive. I hope I have that energy when I’m her age, but the truth is I don’t even have it now.”

And yet life has its way of wearing down even the most radiant spirit. For two years, during the worst of the pandemic, Staples stayed home in Chicago—she lives in a modern high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan—and was, like just about everyone else in the music business, unable to perform or record. She watched cable news and saw the ravaging effect that covid-19 was having on folks her age. She didn’t go out, and she let no one in. For company, she’d pick up her phone and check in with “the Twitter people.” The empty days went on and on. “Oh, man, I hated it,” she said. There was only one thing left to do. “I’d start singing around the house. Mostly our old stuff, the songs we started singing when I was a kid: ‘Didn’t It Rain,’ ‘Help Me Jesus.’ ”

The pandemic was the least of it. The passage of time has relentlessly winnowed the comforts of her old life. For decades, she performed in the cocoon of a family that was remarkably warm, loving, and coöperative. Compared with the Jacksons, the Turners, or the Beach Boys, the Staple Singers is a story free of dark drama. But now the other members of Mavis Staples’s family—her father, Roebuck; her mother, Oceola; her brother, Pervis; her sisters, Cleotha, Cynthia, and Yvonne—are gone. “It’s just me now,” she said. ..

NO ONE HIT WONDER

FULFILLINGNESS FIRST FINALE by Stevie Wonder (Tamla, 1974)

Thank the Lord for Stevie Wonder! He’s always been with me, energizing me with ecstatic revelations. His joyful music got me through adolescence and young manhood, providing spiritual sustenance and joy.  His massive cultural contribution cannot be done justice in a short essay - only obeisance. And, of course I’m hardly alone in that opinion. In 1975, at the 17th Grammy Awards, he was given his second consecutive Album of the Year prize for this record, which had topped the LP and Tapes charts, as well as the Soul.

Fulfillingness First Finale is the fourth of five recordings regarded as products of his “classic” period, starting with Music of My Mind, and culminating with Songs in the Key of Life. I distinctly remember the first time I heard TMOMM, and the phrase: “my woman wants to be a super-woman, but is that really in her mind?” Perhaps he was paying tribute to the indomitable Syreeta Wright, his life (briefly) and work partner (for 2 decades), whom he married in 1970 at the age of 20, and divorced 18 months later. But this “marriage of true minds” coincided with Stevie’s discovery of the synth - the instrument he turned into a household appliance.

Another thing to celebrate about Stevie and Syreeta is how they fought for and gained autonomy from Motown, the institution that had steered Stevie’s career since childhood, in 1971, with the album Where I’m Coming From. Musical restlessness and social consciousness drove them to tour with the Rolling Stones in ‘72, and embrace wider audiences across the musical spectrum. Listen to “Heaven is 10 Zillion Lightyears Away” with its folk rock chordings, and you feel the confluence of universal soul pouring out to embrace you.

One thing that blew my mind was to learn that, following a near-fatal auto accident which put Stevie into a coma - he created this monumental work. It makes sense that it has been noted to be a more reflective, personal statement. This is what artists do: convert the raw experiences of life into catharsis. 

"There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone My pen won’t pour out a lyric line when I’m gone So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here"

Phil Ochs

Mr. Bukowski exhaled more conspiratorial humanity within three minutes then most alleged philosophers emanated in a life span. 
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.

Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often featured a depraved metropolitan environment, downtrodden members of American society, direct language, violence, and sexual imagery, and many of his works center around a roughly autobiographical figure named Henry Chinaski. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.

AUSTIN CONSIGLIERE

OLD NO. 1 by Guy Clark (RCA, 1975)

Guy Clark’s farmhouse was ground zero for a whole generation of America’s finest songwriters. Check out the scene in the “Outlaw Country” doc, Heartworn Highways, with the babyfaced Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and Guy harmonizing and trading songs and stories at the kitchen table. This was a summit meeting of Towne Van Zandt’s Gospel spreaders keeping the flame of devotion burning- and Guy, Towne’s best friend, was John the Baptist. Or, watch that David Letterman clip, 24 years later, with Guy, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, Steve, and Rodney standing up there like Mount Rushmore, singing “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train”, and you realize that the gospel seeds that had been spread in the 70’s had flowered across the nation. 

Well, that signature song appears on this, Guy’s debut album, and it’s like encountering the Dead Sea Scrolls - the original rendition. Add to this the elegiac, definitive version of L.A. Freeway - the song Jerry Jeff made into a folk-rock hit - (with my high school buddy, Jon Simons on harp), and you begin to intuit that you’re listening to history being made - and, oddly, it still sounds brand new.

To quote the liner notes in Apple Music, a Guy Clark song…”isn’t as loose as Walker, or as poetic as Townes Van Zandt, but his songs were the best built.” In 2006, this professional luthier put out the album “Workbench Songs” who’s title characterizes his steady carpenter’s hand. It was nominated for best Contemporary Folk/Americana Grammy. By this time the much covered consigliere of Austin was a universally acknowledged master and national treasure. In 2019 Steve Earle recorded an album of his mentor’s songs and I made the pilgrimage to Amoeba Records to get my copy signed and my picture taken with the man who knew the man who wrote these songs. 

CHEERFULLY MORBID

GILBERT O’SULLIVAN HIMSELF by Gilbert O’Sullivan (MAM/London, 1971)

This unique artist scored a monster mega-hit with a song about suicide - “Alone Again (Naturally)” - How many times has that been done? The melody was so darn poppy and melodic that the tragic story outlines were impossible not to sing along with: “In a little while from now, If I'm not feeling any less sour, I promise myself to treat myself and visit a nearby tower, 

And climbing to the top will throw myself off, In an effort to make it clear to whoever

wants to know what it's like when you're shattered” Tra-La-La…..

Wow. And, this ditty went to #1 and sold 2 million copies, intimating that the American taste for the morbid runs deeper than our “Never Say Die” attitude may suggest. 

Raymond Edward O’Sullivan, who fashioned his “Newsies” look after 1920s film characters, had other hits before and since, but never any with the impact that this odd anomaly created. “Himself” is a strong album, featuring a range of virtuosity in percussive piano style - (self-taught), and original writing chops. He’s been compared to Paul McCartney and Randy Newman, but is definitely his own man. Maybe he’s a hybrid of the two: with the sweet melodic sense of Paul and the biting irony of Randy.

And, at 78 he’s still at it: He retains a loyal fanbase in Japan, and in 2022 he put out a new album entitled “Driven”. Indeed, he must be.  And, re-listening to this album 50 years later, his approach seems fresher and less coy that I remembered.  He may be due for a late-career resurgence, similar to Yusuf Cat Stevens.  I mused over the content of this song a lot at the time, and even though mortality wasn’t on my mind back then, Alone Again’s example of greater, more complex subject matter in songwriting raised my consciousness. 

"Palisades Park" (from Wikipedia)

Chuck Barris wrote a song about an amusement park and it was suggested he use the name of an amusement park as the title. One night he was in Manhattan when he looked toward the New Jersey Palisades Cliffs, on which the amusement park sat. That was when inspiration hit and the title was added. Years later the Palisades Amusement Park closed, on September 12, 1971.[2] A tribute to New Jersey's Palisades Amusement Park, it is an up-tempo rock and roll tune led by a distinctive organ part. The track also incorporates amusement park sound effects, including the sounds of screaming riders on the roller coasters, and the quoting of a slower version of "Entrance of the Gladiators", played on an organ imitating a hurdy-gurdy or calliope. In the song, the singer takes a walk after dark and discovers Palisades Park, where he meets and falls in love with a girl. Among the list of rides and attractions listed in the song are: Shoot the Chute, Rocket Ship, Roller Coaster, Loop the Loop, Merry Go Round, Tunnel of Love, and the Ferris Wheel.

Chart performance

Released by Swan Records as a B-side to "June, July and August," "Palisades Park" broke in when a Flint, Michigan radio DJ played it by mistake. It peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 23–30 June 1962,[3] On the Hot R&B Sides chart, the song went to #15.[4] "Palisades Park" was the biggest hit of Cannon's career.[5]

And, check out Freddy Cannon's webpage:

https://www.freddycannon.com/default.htm

“MY BIGGEST CRUSH”

EPISODE #2 -: BLUE by Joni Mitchell (1971, Reprise)

From the first ringing chords of the dulcimer, and that quavering, pain-wracked voice swooning, “I am on a lonely road, and I am traveling, traveling, traveling…” I was in love – madly, permanently enamored of Joni Mitchell. Everything about her – her unmatchable talent, her neurotic self-dramatizing, her doomed romanticism… turned me on. Not sexually. My love for Joni Mitchell was purely aesthetic, but it was undeniable and achingly real. And it set me on a self-destructive path, hooking up with a succession of difficult, complicated, brilliant women. Women I could never keep, women with whom I could never feel truly at home.

I’m a sucker for talented women. Often though, such talent leaves very little oxygen to share in any room. Eventually I got wise, and after awhile my love life yielded a happier ending. But, oh, the ecstatic misery of doomed romance!

Blue is counted as one of the greatest albums ever made. This is not an obscure choice, but my truth is my truth, and I must pay homage. Listening to songs like River (I wish I had a river I could skate away on…), A Case of You (I could drink a case of you…), California (Will you take me as I am, strung out on another man….?) conjure an emotional tidal surge with no boundaries, and I was pulled in by the heady undertow of yearning.

Biographers will tell you that James Taylor, Graham Nash, and Cary Raditz (Carey, get out your cane…) are the inspirations for these songs, but 50 years on they hardly matter. What counts is that eternal voice, intimately confessing her regrets and desires to you, the listener. And then, it’s just Joni and you, alone together, locked in an artistic embrace.

“BLUE”- JONI MITCHELL – 1971 – Reprise Records 1) All I Want 2) My Old Man 3) Little Green 4) Carey 5) Blue 6) California 7) This Flight Tonight 8) River 9) A Case Of You 10) The Last Time I Saw Richard

Mesmerized, O & E, episode 10
“To Be or Not To Be”

As O approached the portal back to the world of the living, he suddenly sensed that E was not behind him. He turned around — to see her immediately whisked back into the darkness of the Netherworld. At that moment he realized that his faith had been tested, and he had failed the test.

Now inconsolable, O realizes there will be no second chances, and he must face the rest of his life alone.