Music Sunday (late): The "I've Seen Them Play Live" Edition

NOTE: I started writing this on Sunday. Events intervened. So, I'm finishing it on Monday. If events don't intervene again.

A few weeks ago on Music Sunday I wrote about having seen Elton John in concert at Dodger Stadium back in 1975 and what a fantastic show that was. Well, this morning as I was driving back from getting Sunday morning donuts and listening to the radio, I heard one of the songs he did during that show, "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting". Amazing concert experience, especially when all 66,000 people or however many were at the show were shouting "Saturday, Saturday, Saturday" along with him. I'm surprised we didn't cause an earthquake or something...or at least an insurrection from the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium because of all the noise we made.

But, hearing that on the radio this morning, I thought that today I would share some music from some of the acts I've seen live over the years. It isn't a huge selection, but I've been to some good shows. And I thought I'd start by waking you up with another live performance of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, from nearly ten years after my experience and a continent and an ocean away, as Elton John did the song at Wembley Stadium in 1984:



Personally, I thought that the Wembley crowd was a little lax on the chorus compared to those of us at the show in 1975.

One of the opening acts at that Elton John show in 1975 was Emmylou Harris. She had released her first solo album, "Pieces of the Sky" earlier that year, and one of the songs in that collection was "Boulder to Birmingham", which Harris wrote with Bill Danoff in tribute to Gram Parsons, who she had sung with for a couple of years, making two albums in the process. I can't remember for sure if she sang this song at that show, but it's a lovely song. This is a performance of it on German television in 1978:



The other opening act that day was Joe Walsh, who had recorded this song, "Rocky Mountain Way", with the band Barnstorm, in 1973. The live performance in this clip is from the early 1990s and features some other pretty good guitar players:



Speaking of the Rocky Mountains, I also saw John Denver in concert once. Yeah. Don't laugh. Really. Denver had the reputation of being a slightly, oh, cheesy, performer who wrote slightly cheesy songs. And maybe some of them were. I liked those songs. And I like this song, "Sunshine on My Shoulders". Yeah, I like songs that rock. I also like nice, quiet meditative music, which is what this live version of this song is:



I saw U2 in concert during their Zoo TV tour, on November 7, 1992. The opening acts were The Sugarcubes and Public Enemy. I had a great vantage point, maybe ten rows back from the stage, until I nearly got crushed during Public Enemy's performance, so I retreated back into the stands and watched U2 from there. I was kind of sad that I didn't get to see U2 closer up, but the show was just fine from farther away, too. Lovely. Transcendent. Which was a good thing, because I caught the cold from hell that night (outside, at night, in November, in Oakland - what else could have possibly happened?) and was sick until sometime into January. It was worth every second of being sick.

I'm sharing this clip of "One" not because it is my favorite U2 song, but because it is probably my favorite U2 video. But it is a great song, not so big as many of their songs, but small and intimate, as befits its subject matter:



There are some other bands and performers I've seen live that I could share, but this has grown out of all proportion already, and so I'm going to close with this clip from Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I've seen Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young) in different configurations, but never all of them on the same stage at the same time. This started when i was in high school and I saw Neil Young in concert at the Forum in Inglewood. David Crosby and Graham Nash were his special guests for that show (and Linda Ronstadt was the opening act). Then, about a decade later, I saw Crosby, Stills, and Nash at the Fresno Fair. A couple of years later, also at the fair, Crosby and Nash performed. Anyway, this is "Southern Cross":

Music Sunday: The 1971 Edition

Last week, because I had been doing some research into the 1970s, I shared some of the music that came out the year I graduated high school. This week, since I'm still stuck in the Seventies in my research, I thought I'd skip back a few years from high school and share some of the music that came out in 1971, the year I graduated from junior high.

This is going to be tricky. I sat down and did a little research and started making a list of all the music that I really liked that came out in '71. Turns out, it's a long, long list. 1971 was a really good year for music, at least as far as I'm concerned. Oh, there were some clunkers and some schmaltz. If you're of that time, as I am, you'll remember "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" and "Knock Three Times", both by Tony Orlando and Dawn, for example, which were omnipresent on the radio. But the good (or at least what I liked) far outweighed the bad.

What this means is that I'm going to have a difficult time choosing what to share here today.

A few songs will be eliminated simply because I've shared them here before: "Stairway to Heaven", by Led Zeppelin and "Behind Blue Eyes", by The Who (which I'm really tempted to share again anyway, because it is brilliant, but I won't) are just two of those. But that still leaves me with a long list of good music that I'd really like to share.

I think I need to start with Janis Joplin's version of "Me and Bobby McGee", even though I'm fairly sure I've shared it here before, too. This song, which was written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, has been recorded by just about everyone in the music business over the years, but this is the definitive version, I think. It was recorded in 1970, shortly before Joplin died, but it wasn't released until 1971:



Another song from 1971 that I've always loved (and which I also might have shared before) is The Doors' "Riders on the Storm". Legend has it that it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the day that Jim Morrison Died, July 3, 1971, and that it was the last song the four members of the band recorded together. I don't know how true any of that is. Either way, here it is:



In 1971, Elton John released the album "Madman Across the Water". It's a good album, but my favorite song among all the good songs it includes is "Tiny Dancer" which, incidentally, was part of "Almost Famous", a film I like a lot, too. Here is a live performance of "Tiny Dancer" from the year the song and the album were released:



Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" was a protest song that didn't sound like a protest song, musically speaking. It was reportedly inspired by police brutality witnessed by one of the song's writers, Reynaldo Benson, a member of The Four Tops, at an anti-war rally in Berkeley in 1969. Benson, Al Cleveland, and Gaye were credited with writing the song, which was named the fourth greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 and again in 2011. Here is a live performance of the song:



And here is another protest song, from what might be an unexpected source, Paul Revere and the Raiders. "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)", which was first recorded in 1959 by Marvin Rainwater as "The Pale Faced Indian" and was written by John D. Loudermilk, memorializes the "Trail of Tears", the forced relocation of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples from Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama to Oklahoma after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This song spent a week at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July, 1971:



Here, as a matter of historical interest and to show where the Raiders' song came from, is the Marvin Rainwater version:



This version didn't get much notice, but a 1968 cover by Don Fardon, who is English, managed to reach number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. It is, as you can see, very much like the later version by the Raiders, although some of the lyrics are different from both the earlier and later versions:



And, yes, that is what is known as a tangent. It's interesting, however, to see the evolution of what is essentially the same song through the years.

To bring it back to 1971, which was where we started, here is Led Zeppelin in a live performance of "Rock and Roll", which was released as a single in 1972 but was released on their fourth album in 1971:

Music Sunday: The 1974 Edition

I've been researching in the 1970s the past few days, and so I thought it might be time for some '70s music. '70s music kind of has a bad reputation in some circles because it was the decade of disco. It almost seems like that should be capitalized. Decade of Disco. With some echoes in there, or something, maybe a little reverb. And I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of disco.

On the other hand, a lot of non-disco music also came out in the '70s. The music of that decade was at least a diverse as that of any other decade. And a lot of music came from the decade. So, I decided to focus on 1974, the year I graduated from high school.

Yes. I know. I'm old. Still...

The first song I want to share was out early in the year, but the album (remember those) it was on, "Grievous Angel", by Gram Parsons, came out several months after Parsons's death. Pity. This song, "Las Vegas" (sometimes billed as "Ooooo, Las Vegas"), was co-written by Parsons and British musician Ric Grech, who played bass with Blind Faith, among other acts. It's a really good song, at least in my opinion. I wish Gram Parsons had stayed around long enough to make more music. I didn't know this song when it came out, but I've loved it ever since the first time I heard it:



Also out in January of 1970 was Gordon Lightfoot's album "Sundown". The album and the title song both reached number one on the charts in the United States, as did the second single from the album, "Carefree Highway". Both songs are good, each different from one another in theme.

Here is a live performance of "Sundown" from 1974:



And here is "Carefree Highway". Completely different vibe:



The Eagles had an album out in 1974, "On the Border", which included such hits as "Already Gone" and "Best of My Love". But there's another song on the album that I like at lot. This live performance of "James Dean" comes from the band's performance at California Jam on April 6, 1974:



"Already Gone", the first release from the album, went to number 32 on the US charts and "Best of My Love" was the band's first number one single. "James Dean", on the other hand, which was the second single released from "On the Border", only made it to number 77.

So far, the songs I've shared today come from similar roots. Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" is farther down the road into a different part of the 70s music scene. From the album "Caribou", this is one of my favorite Elton John songs, not least because of the absolutely amazing live performance I saw of it at Dodger Stadium on October 26, 1975. When the song began, it was still light. But the song was long enough that night that by the time it ended the sun had gone down and it was completely dark. Then, just as the last chord faded out, the stadium lights all came on. It was beautiful. This clip is not from that show, but from a show at Wembley stadium in London in 1984. I tried to find a clip from the show I went to, but if it exists, I couldn't find it.



And now for a little novelty...Ringo Starr had an album come out in 1974, "Goodnight, Vienna". One of the songs from that album was "Only You (And You Alone)", a cover of a song from the 1950s. As a promotional clip, Starr sang the song on top of the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, alongside a mock-up of a flying saucer and huge figures looking like Klaatu and the robot Gort from "The Day The Earth Stood Still". This came from the fact that the album cover recreated an iconic scene from that film. Finding this clip, which I didn't realize existed, tickles me because I can remember driving by on the freeway during that period and seeing the saucer and huge figures on the roof of the building, which had been put up as promotion for the album. Growing up in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s made for some trippy and unique experiences:



John Lennon also had a new album out in 1974, "Walls and Bridges". The song "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" was included, here in a live performance with Elton John:



For some reason, today's post has taken me most of the afternoon to put together. so I'll leave it at this for now. I might have more to share from the 1970s later on.

Music Sunday: The "What did he sing?" Edition

Misheard lyrics are one of my favorite things in the world. That might be because I've misheard so many of them through all my years of listening to music. So, I thought, on this day when I'm having technical difficulties with my computer and using my roommate's machine to write this, I'd quickly share a few of the most famous misheard lyrics I know - or at least the ones that are most famous among the people I know.

First, and maybe the most famous, is Credence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". You all know this one. The thing that amuses me most about it is that once he became aware of the legendary misheard-lyric status of the song, John Fogerty took to occasionally singing the misheard lyric, "there's a bathroom on the right", when he performs the song in concert.



And then there's this song, "Groovin'", by the Young Rascals, here in a live performance from 1967. Just listen to the song first:



And what did you hear? Did you hear the lyric, "Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly"? Or, did you hear, as I did for years and years, "Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie"? From the time I first heard the song until, oh, a few years ago, I always heard, the "you and me and Leslie" variation, and I always wondered, "and Leslie? How in the world does that work?" It especially mystified me as a very young teen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I had no idea about some of the alternative lifestyles some people participate in.

This next song contains another famous misheard lyric. It's "Secret Agent Man", by Johnny Rivers. This was the theme song for the television series, "Secret Agent", which was originally shown in the UK as "Danger Man" but was seen in the United States under the former title between 1964 and 1966. The problem here is that Rivers didn't enunciate carefully enough when singing the song, and the lyric "secret agent man" sounded like something else entirely, and for decades people have been hearing him sing the completely politically incorrect "secret Asian man" instead. Here is a live performance of the song from 1966:



Even the biggest acts in the world aren't immune from singing a misheard lyric from time to time. Here, Elton John performs his song "Bennie and the Jets" from the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" double album, released in 1973. I don't know how widespread this misheard lyric is, but I had a friend who swore up and down when we were teens that the lyric, "She's got electric boots, a mohair suit" was really "electric boobs". I even showed here the lyric sheet once, and she still didn't believe that John wasn't singing about Bennie's breasts. Here is an undated live performance of the song:



I started out with a classic misheard lyric, so I'll end with one as well. This song, "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix, gets mentioned pretty much every time misheard lyrics are discussed, so often, in fact, that sometimes I think more people hear him sing "'scuse me while I kiss this guy" than hear the correct lyric, "'scuse me while I kiss the sky." Here is Hendrix' performance of the song from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967:



What are your favorite misheard lyrics? Leave a comment and let me know.