Category: 1975-1979

“Musandine” (c. 1978) – Donald Kachamba’s Kwela Band * LP: Simanje-Manje and Kwela from Malawi * Label: Popular African Music

The Kachamba Brothers—Donald (pennywhistle) and Daniel (guitar)—are a useful starting point for exploring the music of Malawi, which tends to maintain an irrepressibly cheerful sound. The Kachamba family benefited from the attentions of Austrian ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik, whose writings and films eventually made it possible for them to tour worldwide. The genre the Kachambas helped concoct is known as kwela, or “pennywhistle jive.” “Musadine” is a track that appeared on a 1999 German CD reissue of their 1978 Simanje-Manje and Kwela from Malawi album, first released on the Kenyan A.I.T. label.

“Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away)” (1977) – Bee Gees * Written by Barry Gibb and Blue Weaver * Produced by Barry Gibb, Albhy Galuten, and Karl Richardson *  LP: Bee Gees Greatest (1979)  * Label: RSO

For the 1979 Bee Gees Greatest compilation, the Brothers Gibb included their own previously unreleased 1977 recording of “Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away),” which younger brother Andy had taken to Billboard‘s #2 slot in late 1978. Their own version has an easier sound and arrangement, truer to the chorus’s bossanova breeziness that deserves more presence. For the Andy version, writer/producer Barry tacks on an unnecessary bridge that calls for more vocalizing that strays further from that precious chorus, while the outro’s closing yacht ride gets spoiled by too many falsetto seagulls. So the Bee Gee one is the best version, and the era’s fusion masters (imagine Joe Sample or Bob James or Ramsey Lewis using the chorus as more of a central hook) missed an opportunity with it. But Andy’s version does anticipate the ’80s, the era of big bloated radio ballads that counted overstructuring as a virtue.

“Alberta” (1977) – Opo * Traditional arrangement by Opo * LP: Opo 2 * Produced by Job Zomer * Label: Stoof

Dutch version of a traditional song that Leadbelly had recorded as early as 1935 and which Bob Dylan credits to himself on his Self Portrait album. Opo transforms it into an expression of desperate desire. The singer is Lenneke De Vries, who, like many folkies from her era, sounds refreshing and clear in the context of the croaky and flip hipster present. By the final verse, when she sneaks into the brass bed from Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and the mandolin strums like a palpitating heart, you’ve stopped what you’re doing and gaze off, listening with longing of your own.

“Shot By Both Sides” (1978) – Magazine * Written by Howard DeVoto and Pete Shelley * Produced by Mick Glossop and Magazine * UK 45: “Shot By Both Sides” / “My Mind Ain’t So Open”

Debut single by Howard Devoto’s post-Buzzcocks quintet built on a snarling ascending guitar riff that would work well as a US crime show TV theme. The single version strikes harder than the version on their Real Life LP.  In his Heart of Rock and Soul, Dave Marsh points to Bruce Springsteen’s opening riff for “Roulette” (recorded in 1979 and released as a 1988 B-side) as a “Shot By Both Sides” mimic, but it’s really just vaguely similar. DeVoto’s former Buzzcocks bandmate Pete Shelley, who also used the main riff for that group’s “Lipstick,” gets co-writing credit.

“Whistling Milkman” (1976) – Dave Evans * Written by Dave Evans * LP: Take a Bite Out of Life * Produced by Stefan Grossman * Label: Kicking Mule

The British guitarist Dave Evans found a following among U.S. fingerpickers through two albums on the Kicking Mule label: the all-instrumental Sad Pig Dance (1974) and the half-vocal Take a Bite Out of Life (1976). What set Evans apart, first of all, were his ten fingers, which accommodated his fully-constructed guitar arrangements like the gears and wheels of a clock. Evans’ left hand worked just as hard as the right hand did – no ten-minute unfretted musings passed for compositions in Evans’s world. His tunings, too, varied extraordinarily while his handmade guitars rang with a sweet warmth you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere. His “Whistling Milkman,” which I’m linking to here, could have made for a cheerful children’s TV show theme. (The song appeared on Take a Bite Out of Life although the video link attributes it to a later reissue of Sad Pig Dance that included instrumentals from its successor.) By the early eighties Evans had gone off to Belgium to devote his life to lutherie.

“Why Don’t Somebody” (1977) – Crazy Cavan ‘n’ the Rhythm Rockers * Written by Cavan Grogan and Lyndon Needs * LP: Our Own Way of Rockin’ * Produced by John Schroeder * Label: Charly

This Welsh group helped rally a seventies Teddy Boy revival in the UK which was also catching fire across mainland Europe. The late fifties Teddy Boy look was a suitable fit for the glitter-rock years, when layers of long hair could fold up into a greasy, stringy pompadour worn with an Edwardian gold lamé jacket and leather pants. Throughout most of that complicated decade, the English speaking world already nursed a general case of fifties nostalgia, but by the latter part of it into the early eighties, the “rockabilly revivalism” of groups like Crazy Cavan ‘n’ the Rhythm Rockers developed into more of a distinct genre that bordered on orthodox religion.

“Disco Inferno” (1976) – The Trammps * Written by Leroy Green and Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey * 45: “Disco Inferno” / “You Touch My Hot Line” * LP: Disco Inferno * Producer: Baker, Harris and Young Productions * Mixed by Tom Moulton * Label: Atlantic * Charts: Billboard disco (#1, 1977); Billboard Hot 100 (#11, 1978)

First released in 1976, the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” with its sonically expansive Tom Moulton mixing treatment, had already hit #1 on the Billboard disco chart before getting a recharge from its appearance on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. In his Heart of Rock and Soul (1989), Dave Marsh writes of hearing the record at the height of its spring 1978 popularity at the New York Yankees’ batting practice on opening day and finally catching the vision of disco: “Reggie Jackson stepped to the plate… [and] began sending balls flying out of the park… Reggie was crushing the ball as well as he would six months later against the Dodgers in the last game of the World Series, when he hit three that counted. [Marsh forgot that Jackson had actually done this in the ’77 World Series.] [Y]ou could feel Reggie get pumped right along with the music… Jackson made me feel the vitality of the music as a bubbling stew of drum and bass, building and building and boiling over and building again til you were wrung out and breathless” (pp. 59-60). That “til you were wrung out” element is an important part of the disco story. The Trammps gave it its perfect anthem, bearing a title that played off of both The Towering Inferno—the 1974 film that contained a burning discotheque scene—and of Dante’s Inferno, which tells of a special hell reserved for the hedonists “who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites.” And yet the song itself still shows no signs of burning out.

“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” (1978) – Rod Stewart * Written by Rod Stewart and Carmine Appice * 45: “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” / “Scarred and Scared” * LP: Blondes Have More Fun * Produced by Tom Dowd * Label: Warner Bros.

With “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” Rod Stewart materialized as a fully-committed creature of mass appeal, becoming a paridigmatic music biz example of one who surrenders all hip credibility to do so. Although the chart-topping song rode the disco bandwagon with abandon, another aural aspect qualified it as classic late-seventies time capsule fodder: the opening five notes in its main synthesizer riff sounded like a reshuffling of the alien tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This association had preteens hooked – if only subconsciously – the moment they heard those notes streaming through their transistors. The popularity of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” eventually brought attention to its chorus’s similarity to a song called “Taj Mahal” by Jorge Ben – a Brazilian radio hit Stewart admitted to having heard in Rio de Janeiro. A reroute of “Sexy’s” profits to UNICEF averted a legal mess. In his autobiography, though, Stewart admitted to intentionally mimicking the string arrangement in Bobby Womack’s “If You Want My Love (Put Something Down on It)” (1975) for his opening synthesizer riff, knowing that arrangements couldn’t be copyrighted.