Song ID Blog

“A Good Year for the Roses” (1971) – George Jones * Written by Jerry Chesnut * Produced by Bob Moore * 45: “A Good Year for the Roses” / “Let a Little Loving Come In” * LP : George Jones with Love (1971)* Label: Musicor * Charts: Billboard country: (#2, entered 11/28/70 and peaked in ’71)

Daniel Johnston may have claimed that no woman could “make a George Jones” out of him, but his East Texas subject’s own self-pitying, heartbroken performance on “A Good Year for the Roses” could make a George Jones out of anyone. Put aside those aspects of the song (written by Jerry Chesnut) that come off as what Dave Marsh, en route to otherwise praising it, labeled unselfconscious chauvinism. (“After three full years of marriage, it’s the first time that you haven’t made the bed,” the Possum laments in his wobbly way.)

It’s the image of him sitting on the porch and watching his untended yard flourish that leads you to an assorted flowering of meaning. There’s that aspect of feeling immobile and letting the world do its thing—for better or worse—all around you; the tactic of distraction, allowing little cheerful things to crowd out the troubling ones; or this: that maybe the breakup was for the best and the blooms will, in the long run, continue attesting to that. (She did leave the baby too, right?) Whatever the interpretation, it’s a melancholy road to arrival.

Jones recorded two versions of the song, both produced by Bob Moore, in early 1970. The first one (a January session) clocks in at 3:12, has prominent piano lines in the intro, and a microphone pop on “funny.” The second one (February session) clocks in at 3:03 and is haunted by Pete Drake’s steel guitar and Bill Pursell’s winter piano. This was the radio version that reached #2 on the Billboard country chart and appeared on the 1971 George Jones with Love LP.

I mention this because that first version showed up, perhaps by accident, on a 1981 budget Gusto label cassette compilation called Golden Hits and reached the ears of many a listener. The discography in the 2009 Bear Family compilation A Good Year for the Roses: The Complete Musicor Recordings 1965-1971 (Part 2) overlooks this, rolling it out as a previously unissued first appearance. So goes life with country discographies, unkempt as George Jones’s lawn.

Elvis Costello reached the UK #6 singles slot with a genre-exercise rendition of this in 1981 featuring a Billy Sherrill production. Alan Jackson did a low-charting tribute duet with Jones in 1994.

“Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” (1985) – Daniel Johnston * Written by Daniel Johnston and Bill Anderson * Produced by Pam Peltz * Cassette: Continued Story

The suspicion is that when heartache happens to a Texas male, the mental George Jones jukebox lights up. That’s why the title of Austin savant Daniel Johnston’s “Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” looks like something defiant. But a listen reveals that it’s already too late. No, he hasn’t begun singing in the manner of the East Texas icon, nor is he necessarily drinking too much or missing important engagements. He’s just a woman-sick subject who’s trying to wrap the blues around his head, and he’s chanting those words as an incantation that might chase the existing affliction away.

Johnston, whose level of cult notoriety had upticked after appearing on IRS Presents The Cutting Edge on MTV in August 1985 (in a ragtag episode focusing on Austin), wrote the song with Bill Anderson of the band Texas Instruments, who also plays lead guitar on it. Musician Pam Peltz plays the role of the unattainable, inscrutable female. Stubbornly crude as it is, the track sounded to Johnston regulars like a beefy upgrade.

“As It Was in Ancient Times” (2007) – Village People Folk Band * Traditional * LP: As It Was from Ancient Times 

Now more familiar in Ukraine as a carol, “As It Was in Ancient Times,” true to the title, goes back to early pre-Christian days. It’s a solemn cosmogony song, speculating on how things got started. It frames the singers observing the blue waters and nearby fires, and deciding that the only way they are to create anything is to send someone down to the ocean floor, to gather the yellow sand, and to sprinkle it outward to bring us flowers and stars.

In the Christian era, it’s St. Peter who is given that particular assignment, and that’s the version we hear on this recent, ancient-sounding recording. The refrain “Oj Daj Bo’ ” is an entreaty to God, which likely appeared in the earliest versions. A word about locality to enhance these perspective-bound thoughts on deity, distance and time: The album cover specifies the music as coming from the right bank of Kiev which, on a map, is the West side. 

“Lookin’ In” (1971) – Bobbie Gentry * Written and produced by Bobbie Gentry * LP: Patchwork * Label: Columbia

“Mystique” became a key word for Bobbie Gentry when her very first (and biggest) single, the Southern-Gothic “Ode to Billy Joe” (1967), darkened the Love Summer sky with its moody account of an unclear event. Then, after a handful of distinctive albums, a popular run in Vegas, and a final public-eye appearance at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 1982, she vanished and became impossible to contact.

Her last proper album, 1971’s Patchwork, featured orchestral interludes and closed with a track called “Lookin’ In.” This turned out to be a suitable swan song of sorts. “I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out,” she sings, claiming full ownership for the state she was in and eschewing the notion of “sacrifice” as the “ugliest word” that keeps people from being who they’re meant to be. 

Maybe one of the best clues for explaining her eventual disappearance comes from former Capitol Records executive Ken Mansfield. He writes in his memoir Between Wyomings (2009) about traveling with Gentry and seeing how intensively she’d study Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel was Rand’s 1957 thousand-plus page opus about her “objectivist” philosophy, which boiled down to a belief in the complete, unregulated rights of the individual to pursue wealth and prosperity. There’s a key character in the book named John Galt, a genius innovator, engineer and philosopher who goes on strike, due to the inability of his world to allow him to work with no regulations and restraint. He also talks other innovators into joining him in his act of defiance. Makes you wonder, then, if Gentry simply pulled a John Galt.

“Do You Wanna Hold Me” (1983) – Bow Wow Wow * Written by Matthew Ashman, Dave Barbarosa, Leigh Gorman, and Anabella Lwin * Produced by Mike Chapman * 45: “Do You Wanna Hold Me” / “What’s the Time (Hey Buddy)” * Label: RCA * Charts: UK (#47); Billboard Hot 100 (#77)

Bow Wow Wow started out as an agitpop project for Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who oversaw releases rife with record biz flouts, provocative album covers, and lurid lyrics. By 1982 the four young Londoners had coalesced into a more self-contained musical prospect. Teenage singer Annabella Lwin, with her soaring voice and pow wow dance moves, possessed a “too old to be so young” (and vice versa) persona that was as crucial as it was troubling; guitarist Matthew Ashman had a flair for whammy statement riffs on his big Gretsch guitars; Leigh Gorman summoned thunderstorms on bass; and heartthrob drummer Dave Barbarosa, with his red melting kit, was rock’s high chief of Burundi drums.   

With “I Want Candy” (their hit Strangeloves cover), Bow Wow Wow found American audiences in the summer of ’82, via alternative radio formats and MTV. The video showed them surfside and looking convincingly So Cal, a half-clad conflux of mohawks, sandy hair, and brown skin. The following year they delivered an album called When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going, produced by the customarily band-sensitive Mike Chapman, and it couldn’t have been any better of a showcase for the four members’ strengths. The leadoff single “Do You Wanna Hold Me” joshed around with Californiana and Sergio Mendes vocals, finding a spot of eternal exotic sunshine in the pop ether with nothing but the essentials of hooks, voices, guitar, bass and drums.

We’re dealing with pop music, though, where full-realizations so often wreak full dissolutions, and that happened with Bow Wow Wow. They didn’t make it past the big tour, with its ritualized tests of a band’s mutual commitment. The three males tried a short-lived hiphop rock vehicle called Chiefs of Relief, while Lwin dabbled in the dance market. Ashman died young, reunion configurations came to pass, and “Do You Wanna Hold Me” sounds ever more poignant in retrospect. Who else was more qualified to deliver the opening line of “children I wanna warn ya,” than Annabella Lwin, a seventeen-year-old who, by then, knew a thing or two about exploitation and “illusions” and whose big moment was moments from fading?

“Once You Understand” (1972) – Lily Fields and the Family * Written by Lou Stallman and Bobby Susser * Produced by John Bennings * 45: “Once You Understand” / “Help Me Make It Through the Night” * Label: Spectrum

If the original “Once You Understand”—a #23 hit for a studio project called Think—told a tragic tale, with its generation gap unrest and drug-overdose ending, the soul cover version by Lily Fields and the Family managed to lighten things up a bit.  Produced by Spectrum label head John Bennings, this one featured a chugging, danceable backing track with the kind of kitchen table family banter that became more of a familiar sound a few years later when black family sitcoms such as Good Times had a regular TV presence. For the climax of this new version of “Once You Understand,” the father merely finds out his son is at the police station, and it feels like more of a punch line than a tragic turn of events. The record never charted, but samples of it turned up on Biz Markie’s “Things Get a Little Easier” (1989). Lily Fields put out a number of recordings in the late sixties and early seventies, but the strongest of these, called “Changes,”  sat unissued and unappreciated until Northern Soul excavators brought it to light in 2019.  

“Kissin’ Time” (1974) – Kiss * Written by Bernie Lowe and Kal Mann * Produced by Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise * 45: “Kissin’ Time” / “Nothin’ to Lose” * LP: Kiss * Label: Casablanca * Charts: Billboard (Hot 100 – #83)

It’s too bad that no single Kiss song featured alternate lead vocals by all four members. They were all so distinctive. The closest they got was “Kissin’ Time,” the Bobby Rydell cover that Casablanca Records head Neil Bogart insisted they do in April ’74 to spark radio action. (Rydell’s record had reached #11 in 1959.) Loaded up with large market city references and kissing contest promotional possibilities (which indeed happened), Bogart mailed out 45s and then made certain the track would show up on July reprints of the debut album they had already released in February.

The track sported vocal turns by Gene, Paul and Peter and embarrassed the group, but it shouldn’t have. It preserved the huckstery chutzpah of the original, and Peter’s bum-bum-diddit drums in the verses suggested both Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” and even cheeky Gene Krupa (“Disc Jockey Jump,” say). It also seems a tad appropriate that the introductory chart entry for the future lunchbox icons would have the sticky bubblegum residue of Neil Bogart—who’d brought the world “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Goody Goody Gumdrops”—all over it.

“New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones” (1981) – Fear * Written by Lee Ving * Produced by Fear and Gary Lubow * LP: The Record * Label: Slash

As mentioned in the previous post, saxophone sounds had a seventies heyday as signifiers of slick New York urbanity, and the Saturday Night Live theme song, with its riffing tenor, reinforced this. Because punk rock’s mission was to overturn all apple carts (and apples, for that matter, big and little), the antagonistic LA group Fear made fun of both New York and saxophones right there on SNL, smack in the middle of the sketch comedy institution’s living room. (“It’s great to be here in New Jersey,” said singer Lee Ving.)

This was on the 1981 Halloween night episode, a slot the band secured with the help of John Belushi, who had swooned over their anarchic shtick when he saw them in the Decline of Western Civilization movie documentary the same year. Their performance reeled with chaos and danger and transfixed American viewers. Appropriately enough, the guest host was Donald Pleasence, who had played the hapless US President who oversaw the devastation in Escape from New York that same year.

Fear’s notorious appearance was likely the direct catalyst for the reassuring 1982 CHIPS episode where Erik Estrada beats a menacing punk band not with a billy club but with vocals and dance moves in a talent show. The album version of “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones” is below, but you might as well just watch the SNL clip, which includes it as song #2 and features some surprisingly servicable skronk from band member Derf Scratch.