I'll be writing a little bit about the artists that have meant the most to me throughout my life, at first I was gonna just blog about a favorite artist at random, but then I thought it might be fun to list them in the actual order that I first fell in love with them! So if we're going back to the beginnings of a life full of musical appreciation, we've got to start back in the 1970's, where I first fell in love with records, though back then it was more about 45's than LPs, so though I'll later focus more on Favorite Albums, for the 70's we're going back to when the Single was the mighty media of choice!
Ever since I first heard the epic single "Band On The Run" as a wee lad back in 1973, Paul McCartney (or, rather, Paul McCartney and Wings. as the unit was called then) has been one of my very favorite artists, every subsequent single released was met with awe and affection, from the other Band On the Run singles like Jet to the singles from albums "Venus and Mars". "At The Speed Of Sound", "London Town" and "Back To The Egg", me and my siblings bought them all!
Paul McCartney and Wings gave me my first experience of having a "Favorite" artist, where you knew you were going to buy his newest 45 even if you hadn't heard one second of it! Simply the fact that it was PAUL MCCARTNEY was reason enough to get it, and I have to say that I've NEVER been disappointed! When I got older I would eventually venture into his amazing LP catalog, but as a young kid on a limited budget, collecting his singles was really the way to go!
They say music is the soundtrack of your life, and as far as these McCartney songs go, they're absolutely spot-on! Even listening to them now the songs remind me of specific moments in my life:
Band On The Run reminds me of my father's Workplace (and playing Kikaida with friends)...
Listen What The Man Said reminds me of swimming at Alal Moana beach Park (truthfully, many songs from the 70's do, since there was always a radio blastin' the tunes at the picnics...)
Silly Love Songs reminds me of crabbing with my Dad and little brother down at Waipahu Canal (is that place still even there, I wonder?)
Let Em In reminds me of catching butterflies at Liliokalani Elementary in Kaimuki... etc, etc! SO many memories...
Funny that all the time growing up, it didn't matter to me that this guy was part of the world renown supergroup the Beatles, and in fact all that registered to me was that this Beatles group was just the group he had been in BEFORE creating Wings!! LOLOL
Another group that Me and my siblings really loved growing up was the Bee Gees, I guess MOST kids in the 70's did, or at least had a couple of their singles, right? But this was yet another group that whenever a new single came out, SOMEBODY in the family would come home with the 45 that week! As for me, the first song I really loved from them was "Nights On Broadway" and "Jive Talking", then when "You Should be Dancing" came out, I think that's when we realized we liked everything those Gibb Brothers were doing! In fact, the Bee Gees were one of the few groups (along with the aforementioned Paul McCartney) where we'd listen to the B sides as well, and I remember one of our favorite tracks was the B-side to You Should Be Dancing called "Subway", man we just loved this song!!!
Back in the earlier 70's the eclectic Jeff Lynne Group ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA was more my brother's favorite group than mine, he was the one who brought home their earlier singles like "Evil Woman", "Living Thing" and "Strange Magic", but when they released the pop-perfect "Sweet Talkin' Woman" , that's when the fandom switched over to me, I became SUCH a fan of their singles after that, with songs like "Turn To Stone". Shine a Little Love" and "Last Train To London", heck even down to their later wackier projects like the XANADU releases and beyond! In fact, this is the ONE group that my childhood friends still associate with ME whenever they hear a song from them on the radio, I was THAT into them!
Way back in 1973, there was one song on the radio that me and siblings just loved, and that was Paul McCartney and Wings’ BAND ON THE RUN. we loved the catchy refrains, the three-part song changes, and the easy-to-understand story of a guy breaking out of jail. It was this knowledge of the story that led us to think Paul was singing “MAN on the Run,” and we would sing those lines as loud as we could whenever the song came on. My mother was quick to correct us, saying that the words were in fact, BAND on the Run, a fact that we just couldn’t believe. The song was about a guy in jail, right? and he broke out and now the cops are chasing him, right? so it had to be MAN on the run!
A few weeks later, we were out shopping with my mother and her friend and her kids, and when we heard the song blasting out of the record shop, we felt vindicated when her friend’s kids ALSO started singing “MAN on the Run, Man on the Run!” We triumphantly ran to our mother, saying, “See! See! Even THEY say that the song goes “Man on the Run!” My mother simply stated as-a-matter-of-factly,“I don’t care WHAT they’re singing, it’s BAND on the Run.”
Well, as we all know, dear old Mom was totally correct, a fact that we were forced to accept when we had the chance to buy the single one night at our local Woolworth’s- Right there on the label the title of the song was printed, and it was indeed BAND on the Run! I remember us playing that single over and over again, staring at the curious Apple logo on the record as it spun around, not knowing or caring that Paul McCartney had ever been a part of a group called the Beatles, only that he was part of this group called Wings, and they rocked! I remember me and my brothers and a couple of friends even created little skits to “act out” to the song, singing part one in jail, part two breaking out of jail, and part three with us running around the apartment like loons, playing cops ‘n’ robbers, all the while Band on the Run blasting out of our phonograph speakers!
We loved that darn song so much, that it was quite exciting and significant news when one day I came home from riding my bicycle, and my brother and his friend Miles called me over, and said, “Hey, listen to this song…it 's SUPER COOL!” Glancing at the single on the record player, I saw that they were playing the flip-side of Band On the Run, an ominously titled song called “Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five”. Maybe it was the title, but right away I got the feeling of the song’s grimness (if that’s a word), and even then I got the feeling like it was part of a bigger epic work. Plus, the song seemed LONG, and after awhile, I started fidgeting, wondering just what it was that my brother and his friends thought I’d think was so cool. “Wait a little…it’s coming!” they assured me. The song played on and became more and more dramatic, as synthesizers droned on louder and louder along with horns blaring, till it all came crashing to an incredible crescendo… and then, as the song droned to fade-out, the strains of Band on the Run chimed in! WHA!!! I stared open-mouthed at the guys, and they grinned back, proud of their discovery of the “hidden” Band on the Run track! “That WAS cool!!!!” I exclaimed, putting the needle back to the beginning of the single to listen to again. There it was again! This was genius! Pure Genius! “Holy Cow,” I thought, this is the coolest discovery of all time!
When we’d share the secret track to cousins and friends, it seemed to be an unspoken rule that you couldn’t just skip to the end…no, for the ending to have the cherished impact as intended, the entire song had to be played, much to the boredome of many of our friends! It was because of this that I really started listening to the song, I mean really listening, soaking up the melodramatic score while trying to understand the meaning of its cryptic lyrics.
Not having any idea of any connection to Orwell’s 1984 (or whatever McCartney’s actually referring to), I still got the gist of the theme when Paul sang lines like “Oh, no one ever left alive in Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five will ever do,” or, “I didn’t think, I never dreamed that I would be around to see it all come true”, that this was a song supposedly taking place after some devastating holocaust or something where not too many people had survived.
So the song gave me that uneasy feeling anyway, and when the Moog Synthesizer started underscoring the song after the first verse, the futuristic sounding instrument transformed the melody into a quasi-science fiction-ish drama soundtrack. When I would listen to the track, I’d close my eyes and picture in my mind great abandoned republics and huge, vast dead seas in strange worlds as the song unfolded, the tune was THAT rich with feeling.
And that end… It got to the point where it didn’t even matter that the snippet of Band on the Run was attatched to the end- No matter how many times I played it, that HUGE crescendo still was the most incredible finale I’d ever heard, and it blew me away EVERY TIME!
Well, we truly played that single to death, and there soon came a time when the 45 record just could not play anymore without jumping and skipping as soon as the needle hit the vinyl. When I really thought about it, it was a miracle that the single survived as long as it did in our destructive house. At this point the record really shoulda been tossed, but there was SO much sentimental attatchment to it, we kept it anyway, storing it away in our 45 record box as we moved onto the newer singles for our collection, like Ariel by Dean Freidman, I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC & the Sunshine Band and even later classics by Paul McCartney like Let Em In and Silly Love Songs!
At some point I made the very grown-up transition to buying albums instead of singles (or at least as well as), and I began to entertain the thoughts of buying some older Paul McCartney albums as well. The obvious first choic was the LP Band On the Run,a s it featured the single that started it all, but I was happily surprised when I found out that Nineteen hundred and Eighty-Five was given the highly respectable position of Album closer! I immediately bought the album (albeit a used copy, all my wallet could afford) and ran home to throw it on. The album was great, every song was fresh and just as groovy as the singles I already knew from them (like Jet and Helen Wheels), and when it finally got to the last song, I have to say…As soon as my ears heard that opening piano piece, I was instantly carted back to that childhood science fiction feeling I’d felt when I was a kid. It was no mistake- this was a grand, momentous song, and I was convinced that this LP was that epic drama that I’d always suspected Band on the Run and Nineteen Hundred & Eighty-Five was culled from. As the opening and closing songs of the album,it turned all the songs in between into parts of a greater work, the masterpiece that IS the"Band On The Run LP!
And HEY! Check out this COOL cover of Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five by Mexican Beatles Cover Band The Blue Meanies- They got it RIGHT!!! An AWESOME performance!!!
People tend to write off THE BEATLES LIVE AT THE BBC double album as nothing more than a bunch of recordings taken from a live Radio Show. Well…yeah, that’s what they ARE, but it’s more than that, too!
When the Beatles were clubbing and touring in their early days, most of their set consisted of covers of their favorite songs at the time, songs by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis, and others.
By the time the Beatles were releasing albums, their OWN compositions were filling the tracks, but they always put at least a couple of songs from their club sets onto their albums, songs like SLOW DOWN, BAD BOY, ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN, BOYS, A TASTE OF HONEY, BABY, IT’S YOU, LONG TALL SALLY, and YOU REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME.
On BEATLES LIVE AT THE BBC, you get to hear a whole plethora of songs they covered that never made it onto ANY of their albums. The thing about it is, these songs are performed REALLY TIGHT, and you can hear the joy in their voices as they sing- they really love these songs!
There are even a couple of songs (Keep your Hands Off My Baby, I Forgot To Remember To Forget) that actually sound pre-recorded, the performance is so tight. The cool thing about these covers is that they aren’t merely re-done, rather, they are taken and given a “Beatley” twist to them.
Songs like Elvis Presley’s “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry over You” has been given a Beatles “Wooooh!”, The Coasters’ “Young Blood” has John saying “What’s Your Name?” in his hilarious "simpleton" slur, and Chuck Berry’s “I Got to Find My Baby” has a real sweet Beatles riff towards the end of the song!
Even songs that DID make their way to Beatles Albums sound different and interesting: At this stage in the game, JOHN was still singing lead on “Honey Don’t” (which later went to Ringo on Beatles For Sale), and it is a real foot-stomper!
I always tell my friends that you could take the unreleased songs from the double album, and make ONE fine Beatles single album! By my estimation, the tracks to consider:
I Got A Woman (cool George guitar picking)
Too Much Monkey Business (George rocks in the middle!)
Keep Your Hands Off My Baby (pre-recorded? Background vocals sweet!)
I’ll Be On My Way (AWESOME Lennon/McCartney song never put on album!)
Young Blood (Awesome, Fun song with George lead)
A Shot Of Rhythm and Blues
Some Other Guy (Killer song, featured on the ANTHOLOGY special)
That’s All Right (Elvis song featuring a driving Ringo beat!)
Carol (nice George guitar talk-back to John’s vocals)
Soldier of Love (a bit of “Baby It’s You” here)
Clarabella (Paul doing his “Little Richard” style vocals here)
Nothin’ Shakin
Crying, Waiting, Hoping (cool version of Buddy Holly song)
To Know Her is to Love Her (early “This Boy” influence?)
Memphis, Tennessee (John doing Johnny Rivers!)
Lonesome Tears in my Eyes
Sweet Little Sixteen (I can’t believe this never made it to album!)
Hippy Hippy Shake I Forgot to Remember to Forget (awesome George vocal)
Ooh My Soul
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You (Elvis song turned Skiffle beat!)
I Got To Find My Baby (rockin’!)
Honey Don’t (John Vocal-kicks ass!)
Don’t Ever Change The Honeymoon Song (a real Paul-type song, nice!)
Yes, the quality here isn’t great, and in spots can be pretty thin (this is probably why they kept this from the public so long!), but these were radio broadcasts, and to hear new/unheard music by The Beatles is such a rare thing!
