Category: 1975-1979

“All-American Alien Boy” (1976) – Ian Hunter * Written and produced by Ian Hunter * 45: “All-American Alien Boy” / “Rape” *  Album: All-American Alien Boy * Label: CBS

In the mid-seventies rock-record lexicon of musical symbols, “New York City” and “America” translate to “saxophone.” Quick cross-references include proud LA via NYC transplant John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” (1974, Bobby Keys on tenor), David Bowie’s “Young Americans” (1975, David Sanborn on alto), and Ian Hunter’s “All-American Alien Boy” (1976, Sanborn again).

The Hunter track, the title entry for his second LP, memorializes the UK glam rocker’s move to “tube [subway] city” and packs in plenty more lyrical quirks and neologisms typical of a fresh expatriate, bubbling with the same fascination for big-city USA that we had read about in his 1974 book Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star. “Don’t wanna vote for the left wing, don’t wanna vote for the right,” he sings, in symbolic solidarity with the apolitical party rockers of Cleveland and Detroit that had always embraced him and his group Mott the Hoople. Let’s note, though, that he’s packed a “bulletproof vest” with unpleasant prescience in a song that also name checks Lennon as a fellow alien.

The overlong album version of “All-American Alien Boy” is the one you want, not the shortened UK single, because it includes the unusual sound of Jaco Pastorius delivering one of his trademark curlicue bass solos over a workhorse rock beat. Hunter would later say, in Bill Milkowski’s 1995 bio of the bassist, that Pastorius’s Weather Report fame made him inaccessible after this. It’s OK, because as good as it sounds here, Hunter’s brand of street balladry never called for such virtuosity.

 

“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant” (1976) – Andy Irvine and Paul Brady * Traditional Arrangement with Additional Lyrics by Paul Brady * Produced by Donal Lunny * LP: Andy Irvine/Paul Brady * Label: Mulligan

“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant,” which goes back to 1840s Ireland, falls into the category of anti-war songs espousing violent catharsis, a la Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (1984). Here’s a synopsis of the tale it tells: The singer and his cousin Arthur McBride go out for a Christmas morning constitutional only to get aggressively recruited for enlistment by a sergeant, a corporal, and a “wee little drummer.” (You can get a visualization of such a recruitment scene, complete with drum, in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) The meeting simmers into words, boils into rapiers and shillelaghs, then goes kaboom with Arthur and the singer delivering the final “hard clouts.” The soldiers’ rapiers get thrown in the sea, the drum gets kicked like a football, and the war mongers get left like “wet sacks” in return for spoiling an otherwise lovely outing.

The song goes back to 1840s Ireland, but came to Brady’s attention through a 1973 reprint of A Heritage of Songs, a book by a Maine collector named Carrie Grover. Although the track appeared on a now-classic duo album with Andy Irvine, it’s all Brady on voice and guitar. Many covers using his reworked version of the lyrics happened in its wake, including one by Bob Dylan in the early ’90s. 

“Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978) – Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * Written by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce * Produced by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * LP: Waylon and Willie * Label: RCA Victor * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#42); Billboard Country (#1); Billboard AC (#33)

By 1978, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had turned their reputations as country music outsiders into marketable assets. Although the “outlaw” tag arose out of their (and others’) unwillingness to comply with the wishes of Nashville record industry sheriffs, they also played up a grizzled, maverick persona that found a theme song in Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Released around the time the Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII, a cultural association that certainly helped fuel it (think about the problematic relationships between moms and football), the record also invited other fantasies and projections among audiences. Many a doctor and lawyer surely listened with wistful escapism, while the word “cowboys,” for others, served as a code word for any occupation lacking in societal respect. Most crucial among these, for the sake of Jennings and Nelson, were the ones who heard it as “mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be DJs.”

“The Torture Never Stopped” (1976) – Frank Zappa * Written and produced by Frank Zappa * LP: Zoot Allures * Label: Warner Bros.

“The Torture Never Stopped” reaches you like an exercise in willful discomfort. Zappa bombilates right in your ear about a ghastly dungeon scenario which seems like the ideal plot device for a man with a Ph.D. in scatalogy. Here’s another possible raison for its etre you may have come up with: he’s counteracting San Francisco’s Grateful Dead, an ensemble that the Los Angeles king Mother likely didn’t like. Their 1975 Blues for Allah album brought forth “The Music Never Stopped,” which had this for an opening line: “There’s mosquitoes on the river, fish are rising up like birds.” Here’s the opening line on Frank’s: “Flies all green ‘n buzzin’ in this dungeon of despair.” But it turns out Zappa was already performing this live with Captain Beefheart before the Dead album came out. (You can hear on The Muffin Goes to College how morbidly gleeful Van Vliet sounded in contrast to Zappa’s official version.) Biographer Barry Miles tells us that “The Torture Never Stopped” is actually a direct response to Zappa’s 10-day sentence, in the spring of ’65, in the San Bernardino County Jail. He wound up there for an alleged pornographic recording he’d made, and the experience quite possibly unleashed the outraged and outrageous libertine persona that held forth for the rest of his prodigious career.

“Los Oprimidos” (1978) – José-Luis Orozco * Trad. * LP: Canta 160 Años Del Corrido Mexicano y Chicano * Label: Bilingual Media Productions

Before he recorded this 1978 album, and especially after, Mexico City’s José-Luis Orozco established himself as a gathering force of Mexican folk song. A one-time member of his home city’s boys choir, the musically-inclined Orozco emigrated in the late 1960s to California, where he evidently realized he couldn’t separate his tendencies toward musical and social consciousness. He began teaching, collecting songs, and recording while working on degrees at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Multicultural Education. We know him now as the simpatico, kid-friendly Smithsonian Folkways resource for Mexican-American folk song, so the shadowed and serious young man on the cover of his first record, José-Luis Orozco Sings 160 Years of Mexican and Chicano Corridos, is an eye-catching contrast. The back cover introduces him aptly as being attentive to how “social contrasts and social struggles are universal realities which transcend borders and nationalities.” The album’s opening corrido, “Los Oprimidos (The Oppressed),” dates back to 1821, immediately after the Mexican War of Independence. It’s a song that acknowledges that conflict’s overall collective effort, and also the galvanizing spirit of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the “priest of Guanajuato” and spiritual father of Mexico, but concludes that the suffering of the “sad Indians,” the Native Americans and Mestizos who had already lost so much, is not likely to ebb.

“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.) 

“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. 

“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.