REMEMBERING DENNIS EDWARDS

The last thing I want this blog to be is about people who died. But I do think it’s worthwhile to note the occasional passing of someone like Dennis Edwards, who died February 1 at age 74.

In the late sixties, with society reaching some sort of boiling point, James Brown recorded the revolutionary and unhinged seven-minute Cold Sweat. Otis Redding sang Dock of the Bay with lyrics that were contemplative, almost brooding. Sly and Family Stone, out of groovy San Francisco, were making a mess of everything, shifting from R&B to rock to doo-wop, sometimes in the same song.

Motown, once the hippest cat in the room, was slowest to change. Still capable of releasing great singles in 1968 – For Once In My Life, I Second That Emotion – it still hadn’t figured out how to capture the spontaneity of a James Brown record or write lyrics that reflected the black experience. With a few exceptions, like Gladys Knight’s raucous I Heard It Through the Grapevine or the Marvelettes’ nutty My Baby Must Be A Magician, the label was more Sidney Poitier than H. Rap Brown.

When David Ruffin left the Temptations to start a solo career, Motown used the opportunity to recast the group and brought in Dennis Edwards. A Southern soul shouter in the same league as Redding or later, Edwin Starr and Teddy Pendergrass, Edwards did all the choreographed moves Motown insisted on, but on stage he was placed apart from the other four singers. Clearly, he was the new point guard on this team. 

With Edwards in the lead, the new Temptations came out of the gate with Cloud Nine. Opening with a kaleidoscope of doo-wop voices and distorted guitar, Edwards sings, with urgency and passion, “Childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty,” and it’s like the scene in Being There when Peter Sellers, who has only known the inside of the mansion he grew up in, finally walks out the front door to find he’s been living in the middle of the inner city. Goodbye sweet soul, hello misery.

Here are some of Dennis Edwards’ greatest moments: counting down the start of Ball of Confusion with, “one, two, one, two, three, ow!” The frustrated “Ahhhhhhhh, Great Googa-Mooga can’t you hear me talkin’ to ya” that comes out of nowhere and serves as the bridge in the same song. The memorable opening line of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, which follows, on the album version, several minutes of percolating bass and strings, “It was the third of September/A day I’ll always remember.”

And let’s not forget Runaway Child and Psychedelic Shack and I Can’t Get Next to You.

The Ring was a boxing magazine and every month it ranked each weight class with, in order, the recognized champion followed by the top nine contenders. At one point, maybe because the heavyweight class was mostly black guys and I’m plagued by a need to organize stuff into lists, I thought about a monthly ranking of soul singers based on chart performance. From 1968 to 1972, Dennis Edwards would have either been my monthly champion or top contender. Like Ali, who spent a lot of time atop The Ring’s rankings, Edwards was the greatest. 

THE RUN-OUT GROOVE

Watching the CBS special on the 1968 “Game of the Century” between unbeaten UCLA and the University of Houston basketball teams got me remembering watching the game on the portable TV in my parents’ bedroom, probably on Channel 9 since the networks barely acknowledged the existence of college basketball back then.

Even for those days, the buildup was intense. UCLA had won 47 straight games and was ranked first, Houston second. Lew Alcindor missed the two games leading up to the showdown with a scratched cornea. And just to pump things up to an impossible level, the game was being played in the Astrodome. The Astrodome! Our minds reeled with the thought of a basketball court anchored in the infield with the fans, I don’t know, like five miles away from the court.

During the special, Elvin Hayes, the Houston center who completely outplayed Alcindor that night, reminisces that he and Alcindor were friendly and had once gone “record shopping.”

Record shopping.

I went record shopping with nearly every friend I had from high school on. With Mary when we were dating. After we got married. When I worked for the utility, I would take a company car and skip out for an hour or two to hit a record store across the road from one of our substations, where I’d park the car. Company business.

Check out the new releases, then the cut-out bins to see if anything cool had found its way there. And there was the internal discussion with the record hound in your head. Was this the time to buy the only Beatles record I was missing, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack? (not this time). This two-record greatest hits set by the Marvelettes, does it have “My Baby Must Be A Magician”? (buying it). Time to finally check out that Wes Montgomery Trio disc? (pass). Am I interested enough in this Springsteen cash-in, Welcome to Asbury Park, with songs by Jersey Shore artists, to buy it? (another pass).

When the first CD store opened around here (Square Circle at the Garden State Plaza in 1986) I entered cautiously and got the same feeling I have today when I drive through Hackensack. Everything is familiar, but somehow misplaced. There are houses and stores I recognize, but the context is out of whack. At Square Circle, albums were reduced to a size that fit in a coat pocket. And they were charging $18.99 for a disc? Seriously?

But it was more than just losing the end-product, the process was wrecked as well. Shopping for CDs had no mystery, no drama. All the stock was new, so you weren’t going to come across some weird, marked-down record like Drums of Passion by Olatunji. There were no CD 45s, no import section. The thrill was gone – and if you wanted the 45 version of BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone, you were going to have to look pretty hard to find it.

I’d hit the run-out groove, the dead space on an album between the last track and the label.

Those couple of years from the mid-eighties into the nineties marked a rocky transition if you were into these kinds of things. Ironically, there has been the comeback of vinyl albums, although I often suspect that story is more hype than anything. Their price today is pretty close to the $18.99 Square Circle once charged for CDs and those measly album displays in places like Barnes and Noble, and Bed, Bath and Beyond (Jesus, does anybody want to buy records there?) give them the feel of impulse buys, like the cold soda Home Depot sells by its checkout registers.

Too late for me. I moved on to CDs when their prices eventually dropped and the market for used CDs became a major retail sales driver. It was the music, the songs, I wanted, but when the record hound scratches nowadays, I just go online.  

Coming up: Part Two – the greatest record stores of all time.

PLUNGING INTO THE NEW YEAR

The WABC Top 100 of the Year, played exclusively from the day after Christmas to New Year’s, was the 100 songs you spent the last year cheering on, hating or tolerating just to hear what was going to come on the radio next.

I have a CD with parts of Bruce Morrow and Bob Lewis’ shows from New Year’s Eve 1967 and the fun is in how random the playlist is. There are no algorithms here based on time of day or demographics. Sometime after 1 a.m. Bob Lewis plays To Sir With Love (#1), The Happening (#19), Somebody to Love (#55) and Winchester Cathedral (#77). While counting down to midnight, Cousin Bruce played, in order, C’mon Marianne (#73), Sunday Will Never Be the Same (#56), Pleasant Valley Sunday (#34), Portrait of My Love (#96), Release Me (#63) and To Sir With Love (#1). (Admittedly those aren’t great stretches of music, but it gives you some idea of how sprawling the playlist was. And apparently WABC’s broadcasting license was at risk if they didn’t play the number one song at least once an hour.)

I played Top 100 bingo. On a sheet of paper numbered to 100, I filled in the blanks as I heard songs played during the week. You could get the top 20 pretty quickly, since they were played most often, but I don’t think I ever ended with a complete list; there were always a few elusive songs that only seemed to be played when my radio wasn’t on.

As somebody, somewhere in the tri-state area was taping WABC that night so it could be played back on a computer in 2017, my family was visiting our friends, the Kannars, for a New Year’s Eve party. That afternoon I watched Green Bay edge Dallas in the final seconds for the NFL championship, although today the storyline is more about the weather the game was played in. Forecasts in Green Bay called for highs in the 20s, but overnight the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees, from 13 above to 16 below. Factor in blustery winds, and wind chill dropped to 36 below zero at kickoff. (BTW, not a good month for Wisconsin weather. On December 10, Otis Redding was killed when his plane tried to take off in a sudden, fierce storm in Madison, 135 miles away).

New Jersey was having its own weather problems that night. Listening to the news on the WABC tape, it was snowing or sleeting depending on where you lived. The roads, said the newscaster, were “extremely dangerous.” When we left the Kannars’ party well after midnight, there were several inches of snow on the ground and no plows in sight as our Nova fishtailed home.

A day of eating crackers, dip and pepperoni put me in the bathroom when we got home and I promptly clogged the drain trying to flush too much toilet paper. It was nearly 2 a.m., tomorrow was a holiday, we had no plunger and only one toilet. A phone call to the Kannars. Yes, they had a plunger. My father and I were back on the road, where the plows still hadn’t come through. He didn’t seem happy with me as we swerved through the neighborhood. And while the party was long over, it didn’t stop him and Mr. Kannar from having a nightcap, while I sheepishly held the plunger and hoped to God it would work.

Finally back home, I anxiously stood in the doorway of the bathroom as my father plunged, then hit the flush lever. In the earliest hours of 1968, the reassuring whoosh of water making its way down through the house was a sound that was, for me at least, already at #1 for the year. 

LIVING WITH THE GIANTS, PART TWO

A couple of more adds to the last blog on favorite Giants from the past 50 years.  

FRED DRYER: The anti-Giant. On a team loaded with southerners and guys who worked as stock brokers or insurance salesmen in the off season, Dryer was a southern Californian who spent his time away from New York living in a van parked on the beach. He was vocal about the slipshod ways of the Giants organization, wouldn’t conform to front office dictates about hair and dress codes, and criticized the Giants’ sainted patriarch Wellington Mara. Whatever I said out loud, in my heart I knew the Giants were wrong in their inability to overlook the sandals and sideburns, and in letting that overrule the fact that Dryer was an exciting talent they could build their defense around. They traded Dryer as far from the beach as they could in 1972 (exiling him to the Patriots, back then the Siberia of the NFL). He went on to the Rams, All-Pro recognition and Hollywood.

HARRY CARSON: I’m sitting in a lounge area off the Giants locker room, working up the nerve to walk in, corral some player and interview him. And then Harry Carson walks in, sits across from me and starts talking, and talking, and talking, about how a chiropractor was helping him deal with his midseason aches and pains, and about a television interview he was going to be doing with Jayne Kennedy, and God knows what else. I only had to ask him a question or two and my article wrote itself. Thanks, Harry. (He was a pretty great player as well).

TERRY JACKSON: Jackson was starting at cornerback as a rookie when he came into Dresher’s Office Supply, looking to have business cards made. I played it cool, didn’t make a big deal about who he was and certainly didn’t ask for an autograph. We designed the card and I had the printer add an image of the Giants’ helmet, which he liked. Jackson said he would send some other Giants over for cards, but it never happened. I should have asked what he intended to do with the cards. Maybe use them to introduce himself to the opposing team on Sunday afternoon?  

GEORGE YOUNG: The Giants’ general manager credited with building the championship teams of the eighties hosted a luncheon for NJ business executives on the weeks following Giant home games and my Uncle Nick would occasionally attend and invite me. Young’s public persona, built up through appearances on Mike and the Mad Dog, was that of a sort of football savant/curmudgeon. In person he was a big, rumpled guy, who seemed to sweat a lot, but he possessed a dry wit and the luncheons were usually pretty entertaining. During one Q&A, Uncle Nick asked Young if the Giants were interested in signing a local-boy linebacker named Rob McGovern, whom the Patriots had cut that morning. Young seemed taken aback by the question, and after the luncheon he made a beeline to our table. “Is McGovern really available?” he asked. And how did Uncle Nick know? (He was friends with McGovern’s parents). Leaving the luncheon, I wound up following Young’s car out of the parking lot. At a light I could see him wiping down his face with a towel, probably wondering how the backyard grapevine worked better than the NFL waiver wire.

BILL PARCELLS: Two scenes that stand out. One is the December 1990 game when Parcells checked himself out of the hospital that morning to coach despite being in obvious pain from a dislodged kidney stone. It was a cold day and he looked absolutely miserable, but it was one of those moments of truth, of setting an example for the team. They won a division title that afternoon and Parcells checked back into the hospital after the game. The second was a soundbite on a TV interview in late December 1986. The Giants were crushing opponents and the Super Bowl just felt inevitable. An interviewer asked Parcells about how he was celebrating the holiday and he responded, “Christmas? I hadn’t noticed.” Right on, Bill. Let lesser coaches worry about decorating trees and buying presents. Here was a guy who was obsessed with winning a title. And he was a Giant.

LIVING WITH THE GIANTS

It’s been a rough year for the Giants, but nothing like the Seventies when they won only 50 out of 124 games.

I drove a Toyota Corona through most the decade. It probably wasn’t that great a car to begin with, since everybody back then called them “Toy-motors,” but I really beat the shit out of it. It was covered with dings and scratches, it tended to overheat in the summer and when it was cold, you needed to have the manual choke pulled out. Great tape deck though.

At some point a Giants bumper sticker came into my possession and I proudly stuck it to the rear bumper. If must have been summer, since I was driving with the window open, and while waiting for a light, another car pulled up next to me. I was likely staring at the engine heat gauge when the guy next to me yells, “The Giants? Ya gotta be kiddin’ me” and drives off with the light change.

I decided I wouldn’t wear my fandom on my sleeve anymore, while also acknowledging that this beat car I was driving was somehow a metaphor for the Giants’ current condition. When I got home, I peeled off the sticker and tossed it. .

After hitting the 50-year mark of being a Giants fan this past September, here are a few of my favorite players:

HOMER JONES: My first sports crush. Fast, 6-4 and a terror to cover. In these days of silly, often

fussy and pre-meditated touchdown celebrations, Homer invented the spike. When he crossed the goal line (as he did 14 times in 1968), he threw ball down. Nothing flamboyant, just a flick of the wrist, as if to say, “I don’t need this anymore.” I went to an autograph-signing session at Korvettes and stood in absolute awe while he signed his name for me. I still have it.

RON JOHNSON: Homer was traded to the Browns for Johnson and I learned that when one door closes, another opens up. Until Johnson arrived, the Giants relied on lumbering white fullbacks who, as they used to say, could be timed for the 40-yard dash using a sun dial. As luck would have it, Johnson worked in the same office building as my mother and Mom arranged for me to interview Johnson for the high school newspaper. He answered my well-meaning, if sometimes cringe-worthy questions (like did he know anything about homosexuality in NFL locker rooms; I really asked that) thoughtfully and honestly. A year or so later I saw him in the record department at Korvettes, flipping through jazz albums, thus concluding my Korvettes/Giants circle of life.

LAWRENCE TAYLOR: The absolute pleasure in knowing that the greatest defensive player in the history of the league was ours helped make all those losing years (almost) palatable.

ELI MANNING: Here’s the list of Giants quarterbacks for the ten years between Phil Simms and Eli: Dave Brown, Danny Kanell, Kent Graham, Kerry Collins, Kurt Warner, Jesse Palmer. Eli’s consistency and durability kept us from wandering the wilderness looking for a quarterback, a reality that has defined the fortunes of way too many NFL teams, sometimes for decades. Along with the two Super Bowl wins, Eli saved us from being the Jets.

ODELL BECKHAM: Non-Giant fans hate his haircut and histrionics. They’re also scared shitless when their team has to cover him.

Otis

How did two white 13-year olds in the middle of suburbia discover, and bond over, Otis Redding? Me and McKenzie did. It’s not like we heard him on the radio. Otis’ music played outside the Top 40, so WABC didn’t touch him. Neither did WMCA. We might have caught him on WWRL, between breaks in the storm of static that made listening to New York’s R&B channel a challenge, but I doubt it.  

What I think drew us in was an album cover. We had a habit of going to Korvettes or Modells, with their monster record departments, to flip through looking for records that struck us as “different.” We’d hold them up to get the other guy’s reaction, and sometimes buy them (49 cents from the cut-out bin) if they invoked the right response.

McKenzie bought a record by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; we liked saying her name, but didn’t care for gospel music. Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, a field recording of African chants and drums, worked for us. We played it to death and were thrilled when Santana covered one of its songs. Hey, someone else bought this record too.

The album cover that may have hooked us was Otis Redding’s Dictionary of Soul. As a recruitment poster for dopey, impressionable kids, it’s perfect. But the music, on that record and all the subsequent ones we bought, hit us square. Gutbucket blues. Imaginative horn arrangements. Otis’ voice, moving from pleading ballad to all-out roof raisers. Referring to himself in song in the third person – and as “Big O” yet. The “got-ta, got-ta” and “Lord have mercy” asides.

And the songs. Aretha had taken “Respect” to the top of the charts. The horn-driven “I Can’t Turn You Loose” (better known today as the Blue Brothers’ theme). Pain In My Heart, covered by the Stones. Otis mined Depression-era Tin Pan Alley for “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Try A Little Tenderness,” covered BB King (“Rock Me Baby”) and the Beatles (“Day Tripper”), then returned the favor to the Stones with “Satisfaction.”

We played Otis’ duet with Carla Thomas, “Tramp,” over and over. I had a friend who memorized some of Bill Cosby’s album routines, and he’d recite them as we walked home from school. “Tramp” was funnier than Cosby and not nearly as long-winded.

Otis’ fame grew beyond the two blocks in Hackensack where me and McKenzie lived. Otis played Scandinavia. The Hippodrome in London. The Monterey Pop Festival. The Whiskey A Go-Go. Then, with his star steadily on the rise, it crashed.  

McKenzie and I were having one of our stupid lover’s spats when Otis died. We weren’t talking and then we passed each other in the hallway between classes. We actually said, “Otis,” to each other almost simultaneously.

Otis died at age 26, one year short of membership in the half-baked concept of the “27 Club,” but he had the brightest future – and the clearest head – of anyone on that list. When his plane went down into Lake Monona in Madison, WI 50 years next month, we lost so much. He had just written and recorded an introspective song unlike anything he had done before called “Dock of the Bay.” He was said to be listening to Dylan and wanted to cover “Just Like A Woman.” He wanted to remake a bunch of his old songs, speeding up the ballads and down-shifting the fast ones.

I used to travel to Madison frequently for work. Once, we held an offsite at a conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a terrace that overlooked Lake Monona. Although the weather there is normally mercurial, it was a warm October day and I spent quite a bit of time on a bench staring out at the water. It felt like a pilgrimage.

McKenzie and I went our separate ways a long time ago. I’m sure that by now he’s forgotten about Olatunji and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But I’d like to think that if he ever finds himself in Madison, and the weather is right, that he would park himself on that same bench. The dock of the bay.

REVISITING THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

There was a time when Stephen Stills could have been king. He was the de facto leader of the Buffalo Springfield, a band that may not have sold a lot of records but, for all the right reasons, was considered by many the American Beatles.

After he folded the Springfield, Stills was chosen by Al Kooper to play on the Super Session album, his name on the marquee as large as that of Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. His genius was all over the first CSN album, writing or co-writing five songs, singing, playing lead guitar, bass and keyboards, and producing. As CSNY, they cut a second album with Stills contributing “Carry On” and “4+20.” CSNY played Woodstock and had the sense to get out of Altamount before the sun went down.

The crown was his for the taking. Then Stills started making solo records and some cracks began to show.

The songs on his first record seemed overshadowed by the list of pals who dropped by to play (Hendrix, Clapton, Ringo – referred to in the liner notes as “Richie”). Stills cut one song drunk and credited Jose Cuervo Tequila for the performance. He wasted his solo spot on Four Way Street with a dumb, piano-pounding rant, pretentiously titled “America’s Children.” His second solo album offered a few choice moments (“Change Partners,” “Marianne”) but you got the impression he was spending more time going over the contact sheets for his album cover shoots than writing better songs. (Stills’ album artwork generally portrayed him as the most interesting man in the world, riding horses, climbing mountains and gazing handsomely out a jet window).

Stills formed a new band called Manassas, with a double album that sounded like Buffalo Springfield 2.0 and it was easy to conclude that maybe being a member of a band was better for him than working solo. But by the CSNY reunion tour in 1974, his contributions almost seemed like an afterthought, marginalized by brighter, smarter work from his band mates. In 1976, he and Neil Young toured together, with promises of the old gun-slinging guitar battles of the Springfield; midway through the tour, Young quit, leaving Stills to ride it out alone.

His hubris drained, Stills began to seem more like a victim. He made a point of covering Young songs on many of his subsequent records, a decision that was always a head-scratcher. While Paul McCartney has spent the past decades explaining how he and John Lennon were creative and visionary equals, Stills spent nearly the same amount of time reminding us he couldn’t keep up with Young anymore.

Stills’ long road back to relevance took him here recently on tour with Judy Collins. While his voice comes off a little rough at times, it’s still strong and he’s kept his sense of humor. The show reinforces what we’ve always known. He has written some great songs: For What It’s Worth, Bluebird, Questions, So Begins the Task, Suite Judy Blue Eyes; and that he’s an excellent, underrated guitar player, economical and muscular. A long, trippy solo on Bluebird was a highlight, where his playing seemed to transcend the moment.

Sharing the stage with a sympathetic musician like Collins seems to suit him. He’s in a similar situation with his blues band, the Rides, where he and Kenny Wayne Shepherd take turns singing lead and soloing. Stills may no longer be the most interesting man in the world, but working as a cog in a larger musical machine plays to his many strengths.