Music Sunday: The "I've been off reading music books" edition

So.

Due to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances, I was mostly away from Music Sunday for a couple of weeks. But, I'm back, and in the meantime I've been reading books about music.

No, really. Since the middle of January I've read four music-related books and am now working my way through the fifth. The ones I've finished reading are:

1) 27: A History of the 27 Club Through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, by Howard Sounes (2013, Da Capo Press; 359 pages)
2) Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life, by Tim Riley (2011, Hyperion; 765 pages)
3) Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles 1965 Tour that Changed the World, by Larry Kane (2003, Running Press; 272 pages)
4) Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, by Eric Burdon with J. Marshall Craig (2001, Thunder's Mouth Press; 326 pages)

And right now I'm reading Beatles vs. Stones, by John McMillian (2013, Simon and Schuster; 304 pages).

These are all good books, although I suspect that Sounes just wrote 27 so that he could write about Amy Winehouse. Still, he does a good job covering the lives and deaths of the other 27 Club members that he highlights. Riley's book is long, but it is comprehensive, perhaps a little too comprehensive in its detail about recording sessions, but that is a minor quibble. I very much liked the way that Riley seemed to go out of his way to not forgive the times that Lennon acted like an ass, but also gave context as to why he might have been acting that way and also related that Lennon also had times when he was kind and generous and thoughtful. I've read other biographies of Lennon and have found that some writers either try to make him a saint or make him a demon when in fact he seems to have been a very complicated man. Kane's book was more historical in nature and, despite the title, covers both the 1964 and 1965 American tours (he was the only American journalist who traveled with the band the full length of both tours). He also goes out of his way to show that the members of the Beatles were full human beings rather than cutout cardboard figures. He didn't try to whitewash flaws out of existence, but he didn't try to portray any of them, or the support staff who toured with them, as completely flawed. And Burdon's memoir...well, it must have been good, because I more or less read it in one sitting. It seems to jump around in time a lot, but that is a minor quibble. I like that he doesn't approach his life the way some rock stars do, trying to play down the adventures and misadventures of their lives, but plainly says, "these are the things I did, and I might regret some of them now but I'm not going to deny them at this point."

The book I'm reading now, Beatles vs. Stones, is more academic in tone, but that's to be expected since McMillian is an historian and an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. So far (and I'm on page 109 at the moment) it seems to me he's leaning more toward being as Stones fan than a Beatles fan even though he declines in his introduction to say which band he favors although he admits that he does have "a preference for one group over the other" (p. 5).

At any rate, these books highlight the lives of people who have made some classic music, and since it is Music Sunday, of course I'm going to share some if it with you. I will say that I have probably shared some of these songs before, but all these people have made music that stands up (I think) to repeated listenings.

But, I'm going to start out with something I know I haven't share before, because I didn't know it existed until a couple of days ago. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s probably knows the Three Dog Night version of Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not To Come". That 1970 cover went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. But the first recording of the song was by Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1966, although it was never released as a single and ended up on the 1967 album "Eric is Here", and the band playing behind Burdon is not the Animals, but the Horace Ott Orchestra. This original version is edgier than the more commercial-sounding Three Dog Night version:



Here's a live performance of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" from Burdon and the Animals at Wembley Empire Pool at the New Musical Express poll winners' concert on April 11, 1965:



I found a clip of the Beatles singing "All My Loving" at the Hollywood Bowl concert on their 1964 tour of the United States. This show took place on my 8th birthday, I lived in Southern California at the time, and even at the age of 8 I was very bitter that I didn't get to go to the concert:



One of the notable details in this early clip of a live Rolling Stones performance of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" is that there look to have been a lot more males in the audience than in audiences for the Beatles' shows. And, if that young gentleman in the audience shown near the end of the song is any indication, some of them were as emotional about their favorite band as the girls were. This was the first single by the Rolling stones to go to number 1 in the United States:



Jim Morrison was not only a singer, but a poet as well. His poetry has gotten mixed reviews over the years, but I quite like some of the things he wrote. A few years after Morrison's death, the rest of the Doors got together and put some of his recorded poetry on record along with music. This cut from the resulting album, "American Prayer" (released 1978, with the spoken word parts recorded in 1969 and 1970), called "Stoned Immaculate", shows a crossover between what the Doors recorded as a band and what Morrison was doing with the written word:



Since I'm running out of room for today's post, I'll just end with this, my favorite Janis Joplin song. Don't get me wrong; I like all of her work. However, this song just seems...perfect. So, here is Janis, and "Mercedes Benz", from the album "Pearl" (1971):

Music Sunday: The Boss Radio Edition

I've been waiting until about the time I went on hiatus here to write this Music Sunday blog post.

Unless you grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, you might not have any idea about what I want to share today and why I'm so happy about it. It could be a matter of "you had to be there" to really appreciate it. Nevertheless, I'm going to share anyway.

A few weeks ago, having nothing better to do with my time (or, at least, being bored with the things I should have been doing), I sat down to see what was on the radio. Except for one FM oldies station and the local NPR outlet, I've sort of given up on radio the past few years because the stations we have around here are pretty drab. I don't like the formats of the FM stations, or they just play music that I'm not particularly enthusiastic about, and all I can find on AM has been right-wing talk radio and sports-talk stations. So I'd just gotten to where I don't even go there anymore.

However, on this particular evening, looking on the AM dial, I discovered that my town has a station that has reinstituted the "Boss Radio" AM Top 40 format that was so popular around the time I was first getting into music in the Sixties. I say "reinstituted" because the station, KYNO, was apparently one of the first stations to adopt the format back in the day. Another of the first stations to adopt the format was KHJ in Los Angeles, the station I grew up listening to before FM radio was a thing. Sadly, the station I discovered is not really true Boss Radio because it isn't really local, but more a syndicated robo-station. But it still plays the old music, tunes you aren't likely to run into on most classic rock stations. Oh, they play the Beatles and the Stones and so forth, but they also play the songs that are, perhaps, a little too much of their time to have remained as popular as the classics.

For example, there is "Love is Blue", from 1968 and a French bandleader named Paul Mauriat. This is an instrumental that is one of my favorite pieces of music from the time. Apparently there were also versions with lyrics, but I like this, as I first heard it, just fine:



And then there's this, from 1964 - The Dave Clark Five and "Glad All Over":



It's kind of funny to me that in the comments section where I found this clip on YouTube, there's an argument over whether this kind of music, and this song in particular is good or "crap", or whether what is crap is what passes for pop music now. While I will admit that I'm more in the corner of 60s pop over some of the music that is more current, I've never really understood why people will argue over this sort of thing. I don't see music, most of the time, as bad or good, but rather in terms of whether or not I like it personally. The same thing was true back in the day, and there were arguments like this then, as well. Probably will be, as long as music exists, and while I generally tend to share the music that I like here, I'm never going to insist that everyone should like it or that people who don't like the same kind of music I like are wrong.

But, I digress.

And, anyway, music in the Sixties wasn't just mindless pop. Some songs were topical, and some were fairly controversial. There was, for example, "Love Child", by Diana Ross (although the song was billed as by Diana Ross and the Supremes, session singers rather than the other members of the group sang the background vocals). In 1968, when this song came out, it was still not considered polite to discuss the subject of children born out of wedlock, no matter which side of the argument was being aired. But, it was and is a great song:



Another song, not especially controversial in itself, although it takes on fairly gritty subject matter, but which became an anthem for US forces fighting in Vietnam, was "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", by Eric Burdon and the Animals. This live performance of the song is from the Richmond Jazz Festival in England in 1965:



But, the truth is that the Sixties were also the time of "bubblegum" pop, and one wonders how songs like this one, "Simple Simon Says", by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, ever reached the charts, much less hit #4 in the US and #2 in the UK and sold five million copies after it was released in 1967:



I guess a catchy tune will get you a long way, and I kind of think of this as the Sixties version of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", which also has a catchy tune and pretty much no substance to it.

But, like I said, for me music comes in two flavors, music I like and music I don't like as much, and I really do like a lot of 60s pop and rock, and it is fun hearing some of these songs again. Even the ones, like "Simple Simon Says" and "Elenor", by the Turtles (who seem to have had a talent for taking just about any song and making it silly - not necessarily a criticism, but just an observation):

Music Sunday, Part Two

Well, it looks like YouTube is working again, and so here is the rest of this week's installment.

As I said, The Animals are one of my favorite British Invasion groups. This is one of their first songs, released in 1965, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place". I'm not sure where this live performance comes from, but it must be from right around the time the song came out:



There were actually two versions of the song, and this is the UK version, with the words, "Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'...", rather than the "See my daddy in bed a-dyin'", as it appears in the US version. The source I was reading wasn't really clear on why there are two versions, but I think it is an interesting bit of trivia.

Also from 1965 is "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood". This is a cover, as the song was first recorded by Nina Simone in 1964. This is another live performance clip, this time from an actual concert rather than from a TV appearance, in which Eric Burdon gets a little dramatic mid-song:



This early line-up of the band had broken up by fall of 1966, but by the end of the year, a second incarnation of the band, still fronted by Eric Burdon, had formed. Besides the changes in personnel, the music was a bit different, as well.

In 1967, this new line-up produced a couple of songs very much influenced by Burdon's time in California. First, this live performance on a CBC television show of "San Franciscan Nights". This is a really interesting performance in that it is clearly truly live, and not lip-synced. I like this song a lot anyway, and I really like this performance of it:



Also in 1967, came "Monterey". The Animals performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, and this song came directly from that experience. This live performance looks like it came from the same CBC TV broadcast as the previous one:



And, just because I can...

In 1970, Eric Burdon recorded a song with War called "Spill the Wine". It is a surrealistic song that I loved when it came out when I was in the eighth grade and that I still have a huge amount of fondness for today. And so, here it is, in all it's glory: