Author: Kim Simpson

“Wanted” (1975) – The Osmonds * Written by Alan, Wayne and Merrill Osmond * Produced by Mike Curb * 45: “Havin’ a Party” / “Wanted” (UK only) * Label: MGM/Kolob

“Wanted” is a hidden Osmonds goodie, released only as the B-side for the 1975 UK single “Havin’ a Party.” The A-side, moderately successful over there, had appeared on Love Me for a Reason, which was their panicky answer to the poor sales of their ambitious The Plan. “Wanted,” which had a 1975 copyright, happened to be one of their best recordings. It’s a song sung by Wayne that moves back and forth between chugging “Crazy Horses” rock and mid-seventies soul-in-the-Milky-Way dreaminess and features a sublime-sounding guitar solo. Considering songs like this, and others that Wayne had more prominence in (and also his underutilized lead guitar chops), it seems that he took quite a few, maybe more than we realize, for the team. The difference between this strong track and the weak 1975 Proud One album is staggering. The “Crazy Wayne” joke-teller stage role he filled for the rest of their years possibly masked a frustrated penchant for interesting musical expression. The scene in the bio drama Inside the Osmonds (2001), where the otherwise quiet soldier Wayne— dressed as a crab for the Donny and Marie show—tells Merrill that his chances for a legitimate recording career had officially been dashed, might be one of its truest moments. If the family’s perception of commercial expediency buried additional tracks like this, that’s a very sad thing. (Adapted from my Osmonds mega-post at Early 70s Radio.) 

“Plastic Fantastic Lover” (live) (1969) – Jefferson Airplane * Written by Marty Balin * Produced by Al Schmitt * LP: Bless Its Pointed Little Head * Label: RCA Victor

Not one of rock’s classic live albums, Bless Its Pointed Little Head is still memorable for the following: that hangar-esque ambience you also heard on the Jefferson Airplane’s first two studio albums; the introductory King Kong clip of Carl Denham saying “It was beauty killed the beast” to an audibly gratified Fillmore West crowd; the trippy cover and title; and the very end, when Grace Slick says, “I guess you can move your rear ends now.” But as Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, would point out, there’s atomistic, shape-forming activity going on beneath it all. They’ve named the album, in fact, after the final line in beat poet Philip Whalen’s “Homage to Lucretius,” where he writes of peeing on a snowbank and seeing it transmogrify into a yellow crystal cone, thus prompting the words “Bless your little pointed head!” In his Nature of Things, Lucretius does, indeed, refer to cones with pointed heads, and also to “trapezoids, rhombs, and so on” that atoms capriciously compose. In the album’s best track, Marty Balin sings of a lover’s “trapezoid thermometer taste,” and praises her pliable plasticity. So there you go.

“Las Cuatro Milpas” (1927) – Sexteto Habanero * Written by Eduardo Vigil Y Robles * 78: “Las Cuatro Milpas” / “Mujeres Que Gozan” * Label: Victor

This, the most hypnotic of the earliest recordings of “Las Cuatro Milpas,” raises origin questions. The lyrics to a verse of it (the title of which translates to “the four cornfields”) appears as a “revolutionary song” in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939), sung by Earle the Mexican in the guise of a romantic song aimed at Faye Greener. It’s a song of longing for simpler, more abundant times, and it fits alongside that Hollywood novel’s themes of deception and upheaval. The three earliest recordings date to 1927: One by Cantantes de la Orquesta Tipica Mexicana (Victor), with only B. De Jesus Garcia credited as arranger; one by Magarita Cueto Y Juan Palido con The Castilians (Columbia), with only Eduardo Vigil y Robles credited as composer; and this one by the Cuban Son ensemble Sexteto Habaneros (Victor), with no one credited as composer. An online bio of Eduardo Vigil y Robles in Spanish identifies him as the music director of Latin American recordings at Victor between 1924 and 1929. Why, then, did the two Victor recordings not credit him as composer? And why are the lyrics to this Sexteto Habanero version different from the others?

“I Go to Sleep” (1966) – The Truth * Written by Ray Davies * Produced by Jeff Cooper * 45: “I Go to Sleep” / “Baby You’ve Got It” * Label: Pye

“I Go to Sleep,” an ode to what Virgil called “the sweetest gift of heaven,” was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies and is one of his most musically crafty affairs.  Its verse melody descends helix-like into a chorus that would suit Henry Mancini’s Experiment in Terror soundtrack, while the middle eight contributes the sort of xenochronic surprise that only skillful songwriters can pull off. The Kinks never recorded it, with just a rough piano demo by Davies surviving. A good number of other artists, though, from Cher to the Applejacks to the Pretenders, made fumbling attempts.  The best versions, not surprisingly, were overseen by show band arrangers. Peggy Lee’s may well be the best, with its lush, sleepwalking tiptoe aura conjured up by Sid Feller, the man who produced Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country Music. But a version by the Truth ties for first place and perhaps has the edge for achieving a proper mod rock iteration of the song. The Truth, not to be confused with the ’80s mod revival band, were the British duo Frank Aiello and Steve “Gold” Jameson, an escapee of the pogroms in Ukraine. The arranger was Johnny Harris, who later led the show bands for Tom Jones and Paul Anka and, as his autobiography boasts, had the opportunity to refuse Elvis twice. The Truth, whose work is now collected on the 2015 compilation Who’s Wrong, had a flair for cover versions, also doing the Beatles’ “Girl” and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” more than justice. Jameson, who recorded one solo LP in 1973, is now a Borscht Belt nostalgia comedian going by the name of Sol Bernstein.

“The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” (1964) * Written by Don Altfeld, Jan Berry, and Roger Christian * Produced by Jan Berry * LP: The Little Old Lady from Pasadena * 45: “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” / “My Mighty G.T.O.” * Label: Liberty * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#3)

Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” rode in the slipstream of a commercial campaign featuring Kathryn Milner as a high-speed Dodge driver. Lyricist Roger Christian did penance for his role in the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down”—where he had depicted a Chevy outpacing a Dodge—by celebrating Dodge’s popular ad mascot. The mythical “old widow in Pasadena” with a set of barely-driven wheels in the garage was by then a California car lot cliché, but where are its origins? Perhaps the first mention of it appears in the 1953 theatre cartoon Magoo Slept Here, in which the near-sighted hero boasts of getting his antique TV (actually a washing machine) from an “elderly lady in Pasadena.” A different archetype in the song is Jan Berry’s bored, vibrato-free Cali-teen drawl, which you later hear in everything from early Black Flag to Green Day to Blink 182.  Wrecking Crew regular Tommy Morgan is likely playing the harmonica, giving it a backwoods flavor that also summons the familiar character of Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies. (Dean Torrance’s “Blue Fox” sweatshirt advertises a Tijuana bar with a sleazy reputation, foretelling the duo’s 1967 rewrite of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” as “Tijuana,” which turns her into a narcocorrido metaphor.)

“Mobile” (1955) – Julius LaRosa * Written by Robert Wells and David Holt * Orchestra conducted by Joe Reisman * 45: “Mobile” / “I Hate to Say Hello” * Billboard Territorial Best Sellers: #9 (Kansas City)

Julius LaRosa was an Italian-American singer from Brooklyn who, fresh out of the Navy, became a TV darling on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. His popular run as a regular on “the old redhead” Godfrey’s show started in 1951 and ended in 1953 when, after an on-air performance, Godfrey announced to the audience that that was the last they’d be hearing of LaRosa. Nevermore to be known, after this surprising incident, as quite so affable a fellow, the host had apparently felt his protégé was getting too big for his bowtie. Here was a precedent, then, of an orange-hued entertainment figure attaching himself to the catchphrase “you’re fired.” (Hear Stan Freberg lampoon him on “That’s Right, Arthur,” an unreleased track that aired only once on the radio in 1956.) After the firing, LaRosa had a #2 hit with “Eh Cumpari,” one of the era’s great red sauce celebrazione records. In late ’54, LaRosa offered up a track called “Mobile,” a title that certainly roused anticipation for a pop canzone treatment of Verdi’s famous “La donna è mobile.” It turns out, though, that the song didn’t salute Italia so much as Alabama. Nifty enough tune, but unexpected. The chart placements fizzled out by 1962, and you have to wonder if a little topical discipline could have prevented that.

“Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu)” – Hector * Trad arr. by Hector * 45: “Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu)” / “Kadonneet Lapset” * LP: Kadonneet Lapset * Label: Love Records * Charts: What Finland Plays #9

Finland’s Hector released his first single in 1965 and persists as one of his homeland’s most durable singer-songwriters. (His real name is Heikki, and the nickname he adopted is an exoticization in a country that doesn’t typically employ the letter C. He does sing only in Finnish, though.) A certain stylistic unorthodoxy adds to his appeal, with his original songs adhering to no strict formulas (save for the ever-surfacing Finnish taste for fifties rock ‘n’ roll). He’s also translated numerous songs from English (mostly) and other European tongues. His debut 45 translated Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” thus establishing cultural criticism as one of his more discernible trademarks. His 1978 “Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu),” possibly his most beloved track, revamped the Fugs’ 1965 “Nothing.”  Those folk rabble-rousers had presented it first as an amusing dada/Eastern spiritualism lark based on the Yiddish shtetl song “bulbes” (potatoes), in which Monday is nothing, Tuesday is nothing, Wednesday and Thursday are nothing, etc. Hector turns it into an expression of Finnish despair. Reflecting his homeland’s unprecedented late seventies rise in unemployment (1.6 in 1974 to 7.3 in 1978), he retitled it “Nothing (The Unemployment Archive)” with additional lines tying one’s sense of “nothing” and “nowhere” to the state of not working. Scottish band the Shamen did a scowling version of “Nothing” for a 1988 John Peel session, giving it its first overdue punk iteration. So there are your three faces of “Nothing”: mischief in ’65, misery in ’78, and menace in ’88. 

“Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (live)” (1994) – Bob Dylan * Written by Bob Dylan * LP: MTV Unplugged (1995) * Label: Columbia

MTV’s still-extant Unplugged franchise, with its “hey what would it sound like” premise, now seems a little quaint, but during its ’90s heyday it rolled out a lot more keeper versions of tracks, hit singles, and platinum albums than you may remember. Bob Dylan did two tapings for the series in 1994, then culled tracks for a single disc with quickie cover art that appeared the following year. It captures him right after an insular trad-folk phase on the way to a new creative awakening in 1997, and is more worthwhile than its used CD bin veneer wants you to believe. His stinging anti-war rarity “John Brown” makes you wonder if the Iraqi Kurdish confict had gotten seriously under his skin. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (on the European edition) hijacks “If Not for You,” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” preserves for posterity the comically garbled and hurried delivery he’d been treating live audiences to (“theyllstoneyou-abblablloo”). With “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” he reclaims the 1973 original from the realm of the maddeningly rote cover exercise. He changes up vocal cadences and brings its conflicted essence back to the fore, even adding words to the refrain, “knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door, just like so many times before” in a weary way that reminds his prospective interpreters that to be on heaven’s door is to be, in fact, almost dead.

“Dolorita” (2007) – Puerto Plata * Traditional * Produced by Benjamin de Menil and David Wayne * CD: Mujer de Cabaret * Label: Iaso

If you’re familiar with the story of bachata music in the Dominican Republic, how the dicatator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (assassinated in 1961) played a part in developing an ongoing popular conception of guitar music as being inferior to the accordion sounds of merengue típico, it’s difficult not to approach Puerto Plata’s music away from that context. José Cobles is his real name, having adopted the resort town he was born in as a stage moniker, and his vocals and guitar graced his very first internationally-distributed album, which happened in 2007 when he was 83 years old. (But that’s Dominican guitar wiz Edilio Paredes handling those lead parts.) It took that long for musicians like this to finally gain acceptance? Surely there’s more complexity to his timeline than this, but what if we just zero in on the music, which Puerto Plata actually transports from an era predating the popular emergence of bachata. That’s definitely something to think about as you marvel at its effervescence. [Cobles passed away on January 4, 2020 at the age of 96.] 

“I’m a White Boy” (1977) – Merle Haggard * Written by Merle Haggard *  Produced by Fuzzy Owen and Ken Nelson * LP: A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today * Label: Capitol

Behold Merle Haggard’s “white album.” By 1977, his war-boostering reputation, propped up by “Okie from Muskogee” and the “Fighting Side of Me,” had been nuanced to a putty-like consistency by a listenership too smitten by his deep talent and otherwise humanistic lyrical track record. Word on the street even had it that he’d considered releasing an original cut called “Irma Jackson,” a mixed-race romance track predating “Brother Louie,” as a follow-up single to “Fighting Side.” None of this makes “I’m a White Boy,” which crouches as an album-ending addendum to the album-opening “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” easy to fathom. No country singer, even “Welfare Cadillac” Guy Drake, came closer to spelling out the racial aspects in welfare state contempt. “I don’t want no handout livin’ and don’t want any part of anything they’re givin’,” Haggard sings. “I’m proud and white and I’ve got a song to sing.” Do some reading – you’ll see that all published treatments of this inconvenient track either tiptoe or hurry by.