Rolling with it

Steve Winwood showed Mozartian skill playing the keyboards at age four, by the time he was 14 he was playing and singing in a professional band, the Spencer Davis Group.

Gimme Some Lovin, which he wrote, played organ and sang lead entered the Billboard chart at #100, hitting #7 for two weeks in early 1967. Seemingly recorded with no thought towards sound balance, its loud, sweaty party rush doesn't give the listener a chance to catch their breath. 

Cue the Summer of Love footage of dancing hippies as an artistically restless Winwood left Spencer Davis to form Traffic. The band spent several months woodshedding in a rural cottage without electricity; when they needed to plug in electric guitars they ran an extension cord to a neighbor's home. 

Traffic's 1967 album Mr. Fantasy is a whirlwind of flutes, sitars and psychedelic effects, a perfect soundtrack for the times. Winwood's voice kept things close to earth and the band remembered that extension cord for the guitar workout Dear Mr. Fantasy, a cut presaging the sound of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. 

Traffic's promotional video for Paper Sun, the single off Mr. Fantasy is a strange one, filmed at the British Museum of Natural History. 

Only year later Winwood was on the run again, joining with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker to form Blind Faith, whose debut was opening for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Following a brief tour of the U.S., they imploded. 

Winwood declined an offer to join Crosby, Stills and Nash – having survived the ego trips and drugs that sunk Blind Faith, he could be forgiven for not wanting to join another volatile environment. He did a memorable jam with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland’s Voodoo Chile and played keyboards on the B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in London session albums before reforming Traffic. 

Traffic 2.0 was a staple of FM radio; John Barleycorn Must Die (1970) and The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (1971) charting at #5 and #7 in the U.S. respectively. They were versatile enough to be heavy (Pearly Queen), jazzy (Low Spark, Glad) or rustic folky (John Barleycorn). Winwood broke up the band in 1974 and did keyboard session work with Lou Reed, Toots and the Maytals and George Harrison, including playing the synthesizer on Marianne Faithful’s Broken English single. 

Then, while many of his contemporaries stumbled about figuring how to update their sound, Winwood had a career renaissance. His album Arc of a Diver (1980), was a one-man production, performing all the singing and instrumentation, as well as engineering himself. The record included the single When You See a Chance (#7). 

Back in the High Life (1986) went triple platinum, with the single Higher Love reaching #1 and earning Winwood Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Roll with It (1988) and its title track (a rewrite of Junior Walker’s Shotgun; Holland, Dozier and Holland received writing credits) hit #1 on the album and singles charts. 

Smug rock fans felt Winwood's embrace of synth-pop was a sellout, a betrayal of artistic integrity. It's the sound of a virtuoso musician understanding and adapting, something he's done countless times during his career. 

Seeing Winwood today in concert is a thrill, having listened to his music for nearly 60 years. But Winwood, as with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, any artist with that kind of long-tailed legacy, is also holding up a mirror as we see ourselves in them, all of us trying to come to grips with our own mortality. Same as watching a Robert Redford film or a video of Mark Volman goofing around with the Turtles. Best to just roll with it. 

Salt and Pepper/One More Time

 (This post is part of the 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

It’s late 1967 and Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, several years removed from their Rat Pack/Ocean’s Eleven heyday, are skimming off what they can from the excesses of Swinging London, zipping around Soho on matching motorbikes, hitting the trendy discos in Nehru suits and patched jeans, discovering marijuana and taking full advantage of their fame with the local “birds.”

The duo was in town to star in (and co-produce) the comedy adventure Salt and Pepper, playing owners of an eponymous Soho nightclub who find themselves embroiled in a coup to take over the British government.

Salt and Pepper is yet another late-sixties spy movie, borrowing bits and pieces from everywhere: Goldfinger, Help!, Batman, even Hope and Crosby if you can imagine them smoking, boozing and leering their way through one of their road pictures.

(Davis and Lawford are constantly lighting cigarettes and pouring drinks; one could be led to believe that they serve as mnemonic devices to assist them in remembering their lines).

Directed by Richard Donner (Superman, The Omen, Lethal Weapon) whose credits up till then were primarily in television (Davis worked on an episode of The Wild, Wild West that Donner directed), Salt and Pepper tries hard to come off as being with it, including a groovy musical number with Davis “soloing” on an electric guitar that isn’t plugged in. (For what it’s worth, Donner had previously directed six episodes of the Banana Splits Adventure Hour).

Sometimes it takes more than just long sideburns and bellbottoms to be hip.

Filmed on a reconstructed Soho on a backlot of Shepperton Studios (after gawkers prompted the police to shut down production), Salt and Pepper had a strong initial showing at the box office, good enough for United Artists to greenlight a sequel, imaginatively titled One More Time (1970).

Salt and Pepper can be fast-paced fun. One More Time is only for the morbidly curious.

Shot on location in Herefordshire and London, director Jerry Lewis (yeah, that Jerry Lewis) uses the opportunity to essentially resurrect Martin and Lewis – Lawford the suave, tuxedoed straight man and Davis, an underrated actor who deserved much better, the mugging goofball literally channeling Lewis is some scenes.

Lewis takes a lightweight plot – Salt and Pepper bust a diamond smuggling ring – and milks it into an hour and a half of double takes, surreal visual gags and scenes that drag on forever, none very funny: a soused Davis can’t figure out a teapot, Davis sneezes hard enough from a dose of snuff to knock people down, etc., etc.

Strange moments abound. Like how did Lawford, brother-in-law to John and Robert Kennedy, allow this scene?

The most bizarre moment, below, comes out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. I’d imagine that Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were filming nearby and somehow coerced into these uncredited cameos. Davis’ reaction is straight out of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Following One More Time Lawford, pushing fifty and with serious substance abuse problems, saw his career tumble into a patchwork of television guest shots and B-movies. Davis had two moments of career glory left, his Rhythm of Life number in Sweet Charity (1970), then an unlikely #1 hit with the noxious The Candy Man (1972).

Their bad habits eventually killed them both, Lawford at 61, Davis at 64. Even the coolest and slickest fade away.

Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Wings for wheels

In September 1975, I bought two albums at Korvette’s: David Crosby and Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water and Born to Run.

During the first half of the 1970s, anything bearing the Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young, especially Young) brand was an automatic buy for me. Wind on the Water didn’t disappoint; it’s easily the duo’s best album despite its front cover yacht rock vibe (and Nash looking alarmingly emaciated). Carry Me, Crosby’s song about loss, was one of his strongest. Their eco-prog To the Last Whale was properly elegiac, the perfect soundtrack for a Jacques Costeau documentary. 

But finding turntable time for Wind on the Water was difficult given how obsessively I played Born to Run. 

It’s one of the great rock records (ironically, it’s not the best record of 1975; that honor goes to Blood on the Tracks; honestly, Born to Run may not even be Springsteen’s best album). Yeah, his lyrics can be purplish at times, Jungleland is a tad overwrought and most of its songs have been long over-exposed. (If you listened to WNEW-FM between 1975 and 1985 you heard the song Born to Run nearly as many times as Springsteen has played it live – 1,875 times). 

But with fifty years perspective, it becomes more obvious than ever that Born to Run is the sound of an artist pouring everything into his personal vision. 

By 1975, more "traditional" rock and roll and soul music were beginning to fall by the wayside as the kids clamored for Kashmir and Wish You Were Here, but Springsteen unapologetically took bits and pieces from the 25-year history of rock – Bo Diddley, Phil Spector, The Locomotion, Duane Eddy, the urban vibe of West Side Story – and customized into a contemporary street racer. 

He made Clarence Clemons’ saxophone the centerpiece at a time when, aside from the occasional Stones record, it wasn’t a popular instrument. And this wasn’t that wimpy soprano sax sound popularized by the Saturday Night Live opening theme, Clemons played it with balls and urgency. His solo in Jungleland still raises the hair on the back of one’s neck, a mini-epic itself, like Clare Torry’s vocalizing on Pink Floyd 's The Great Gig in the Sky. 

I always had some problems squaring with Born to Run’s characters. They hung around parking lots and deserted beaches, seemed preoccupied with their cars and had limited prospects for the future. Unlike them, I didn’t feel trapped in my hometown, for which I’d always had a corny civic appreciation. 

It took a while to realize it, but in 1975 I was like them. I was ready for . . . something. Frustrated with still living at home and going to school, navigating a confused personal life, often feeling inarticulate, unsure and unstuck. 

Under those emotional conditions, you could listen to Crosby and Nash and still feel the same way when the record hit that final runout groove. Listening to Born to Run brought a different reaction, a shared common ground of hope.

Help!

Absent the happy glow of Beatlemania, Help! has not aged well.

Help! premiered sixty years ago this summer, an anniversary that has allowed the internet to resurface all that stuff about it being a James Bond spoof (aside from some incidental music that comes close to the 007 theme, it’s not) or that the band were the new Marx Brothers (no, but taking that premise further, John = Groucho, George = Chico, Ringo = Harpo, leaving poor Paul as Zeppo).

The breathless enthusiasm and charm – especially the charm – that made A Hard Day’s Night such fun has, just one year later, vanished in the haze, leaving the band seemingly disinterested in their own movie, vacantly working their way through a live-action Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Maybe the most memorable scene in Help! is the Beatles’ groovy pop art pad, four outside entrances that lead into one room, the perfect metaphor for this brotherhood – four individuals so close that at one point they investigated buying an island off Greece and building four separate compounds on it for their family and friends.

Paul waves hello from his door

But one scene, one word really, undermines that groovy feeling. A cage falls from a ceiling to trap Ringo. George says, “I’m off,” and runs out the door. Someone (it sounds like Paul) says, “Typical.” Kind of a cutting comment and typical of what exactly? Was George always running off in real life whenever a religious cult trapped Ringo? Stupid scriptwriting that betrays the band’s entire ethos.

I’m guessing the band was too stoned or tired to fix it. Or that they even noticed.

Filling the gaps and moving things along is a veteran supporting cast: Leo McKern before he became a household name (at least in the homes that favor PBS), Eleanor Bron, and Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear as mad scientists, forerunners of Dr. Forrester and Frank on Mystery Science Theatre.

The musical sequences hold Help! together. The threatening outdoor weather during I Need You and The Night Before. The dramatic backlighting on You’re Going to Lose That Girl, Ringo’s cigarette smoke giving it a noirish atmosphere. The band looking miserable “romping” in the snow during Ticket to Ride (a sequence that could have served as a pitch for entire Monkees TV series). An added plus is seeing them perform in cool mod clothes and not their usual suits.

You're Going to Lose That Girl

The rain falls on Salisbury Plain

Two other scenes have taken on a kind of prescient eeriness over the years. The fight in the Beatles’ home with the cult members and mad scientists feels a little disturbing today given all the knife flashing and gun wielding, then remembering what lies ahead for George and John.

Second, when the band disguise themselves with fake beards and glasses, we get a glimpse into the near future, George looking disturbingly as he would on the Sgt. Pepper album and John circa his Abbey Road look.

A look into the future?

With the release of the Help! soundtrack, Rubber Soul, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper and Yesterday, 1965 marked the point where the Beatles’ uncanny musical maturation spun into orbit. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep a similar pace when it came to video. Which is all right. That would be asking a lot of any four performers.

Exit strategy

The black-topped spine of New Jersey is the Garden State Parkway, 172 miles of roadway connecting the border of New York State to Cape May across the bay from Delaware, with some 86 local exits in-between, leading to this oft-repeated line: 

PHIL: I’m from New Jersey.

LIL: Really? What exit? 

If it’s possible for any highway in New Jersey to feel more like a golden road paved with promise and freedom, it is the Parkway, as it’s known to the locals, the route taken to the Jersey Shore, where the light and the pace were different than anywhere else in the state. Hot fun in the summertime. 

Driving down the Parkway to the Shore always felt like an event, WABC on the car radio – the only station with a signal strong enough to stretch across the entire trip, as landmarks flew by. The Union Water Tower, billed today as the World's Tallest Water Sphere. The giant beer bottle overlooking the Pabst brewery in Newark. The Driscoll Bridge spanning the Raritan River, a Mason-Dixon line separating the Shore communities from the rest of the state. 

During the night ride home there was the Sayreville drive-in movie visible from the highway, a glimpse of Paul Newman or Lee Marvin silently mouthing dialogue. The families sitting on their front porches in East Orange, homes facing the Parkway, like living on a NASCAR racetrack infield. 

And the exit signs. Coming home, evocatively named shore towns like Spring Lake and Ocean Grove fell behind, their places taken by grey and gritty Freehold and Perth Amboy, a changeover reminiscent of the last days of summer giving way to school. Belmar, another shore town, sharing an exit with its ugly sister Trenton. 

I’ve been making the trip down the Parkway a lot lately, visiting a parent who has suddenly become vulnerable and diminished, driving while getting my mind wrapped around what seems like a slowly unfolding situation that potentially could change overnight. 

The drive-in and the beer bottle were demolished long ago, WABC as we knew it is gone. What endures are the exits, the on and off ramps. The Parkway is dark at night. I can only hope that I get off at the right exit.

Yesterday once more

The ‘50s revivalism in the 1970s felt insincere, almost a parody. Pompadours, poodle skirts, Thunderbird convertibles and carhops on roller skates. Grease. Sha Na Na. Happy Days. Lame pastiches like Loggins and Messina’s Your Mama Don’t Dance and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock. The Carpenters’ maudlin doo-wop tribute Yesterday Once More.

But trends come and go and as the sun began to rise over Reagan’s America came the inevitable ‘60s revival.

Tie-dye came back into fashion. The improbable return of Monkeemania. Soap operas about photogenic upwardly mobile ‘60s survivors like The Big Chill (and its subsequent two-volume soundtrack), Thirtysomething and Almost Grown (and the much more realistic Return of the Secaucus 7). Career encores for John Fogerty and Dennis Hopper.

One aspect of the revival that’s relevant this month was the introduction of Nick at Nite. Older TV shows could always be found on television, mostly on independent stations and scattered throughout the morning or afternoon – I always associated I Love Lucy with sick days from school since it aired weekdays at 9 a.m. In July 1984, Nickelodeon borrowed the oldies radio strategy and launched Nick at Nite: block programming of old television programs, focused mostly on sitcoms.

Watching Hazel or Mister Ed from an adult’s perspective didn’t improve them much and your attention was bound to wander during the hour-long Route 66 but having all these old shows bundled together without having to change the channel was a novel concept for its time. If My Three Sons wasn’t your thing, stick around for Car 54 Where Are You. Or the occasional obscurity like Camp Runamuck or Lancelot Link.

As cable TV gained footing, and in desperate need of 

content, WTBS and the USA Network went the same route and programmed Saturday afternoon marathons of ‘60s adventure programs, like The Wild, Wild West, I Spy, Outer Limits and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., often with commentary from the shows’ original casts.

You could fall asleep watching the marathons, dreams narrated by the jazzy banter of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, James West fighting off ants with human faces, Ilya Kuryakin morphing into the scientist with six fingers and the overgrown cranium.

Today, of course, all this stuff is readily available online. What’s missing is the kick of nostalgia and the thrill of rediscovery that was a big part of the ‘60s revival.