Just like the summer of 1967, great music was everywhere during the Madisonville Summer of Love in 1971. Via the Record Club of America I was able to catch up on some really incredible stuff I’d missed the first time around. Buffalo Springfield comes immediately to mind. I had its Retrospective: The Best of…album and listened to it throughout the summer. I’d heard For What It’s Worth and had seen the band perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show, but when I got a taste of the other music I was knocked to my knees. The songs Rock and Roll Woman, Mr. Soul, Kind Woman, and On the Way Home inspired my greatest appreciation, but Bluebird and the mind blowing Broken Arrow rank, in my mind, among the best of a type of rock that, presents a band in the studio role of chamber orchestra, turning the five piece and sidemen into double their number through overdubbing. The Moody Blues, using the studio and a Mellotron, took the idea a step further by producing the sound of an entire orchestra, not unlike the Phil Spector Wall of Sound (King Crimson went so far as to use multiple Mellotrons and a horn section and a piano to bring that concept to the live stage [check out the new surround sound mix of Lizard to get an idea of what the band was after]).
Albums from former members of Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills and Neil Young, also soaked up a goodly amount of my listening time. Stephen Stills produced the great radio hit Love the One You’re With, and also contained one of the last studio performances by Jimi Hendrix, and overall was backed by some of the best singers and musicians from American pop music (and Ringo, too). The song Black Queen, with Stills singing while accompanying himself on guitar, knocked me over, too. Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, on the other hand, employed a more campfire/folkish approach to achieve its effects (though on songs like Southern Man, Young churned out some fairly gritty, almost freeform guitar). Of course both Stills and Young played in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young which was another group I’d been listening to for awhile. I owned the first two albums, and borrowed Four Way Street for an extended period. Billy D had a copy of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name, and I really got into that weird musical combination of the highly structured vocals smacking into the incredibly loose arrangements and execution of the accompaniment. Crosby employed members of The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, Santana, all of CSNY, and singers to make the record happen. I think it’s a masterpiece.
My pal Luke came into the equation when he mail ordered a Warner Brother’s/Reprise sampler entitled The Big Red Ball. The album was released to promote new acts (it sold at the bargain price of $2 for a two record collection), with an emphasis on progressive music from folk influenced acts like Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor, to hard rockers like Neil Young, The Faces, and Fleetwood Mac (and the nine minute version of Mac’s song Oh Well), to wild fringe acts like Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, The Mothers of Invention, and Ed Sanders (with his great anthem to American values, Iliad), and even an edited jam of Turn On Your Love Light by The Grateful Dead. It was just the sort of album to attract The Crabs (its songs reaching out like inviting pubes) who latched onto it and the anarchy it promoted (strange, since the release was designed to stimulate capitalist responses [which, at least in my case, was successful] that it contained such subversion) without hesitation. The Crabs passed the album from member to member as though it contained secret instructions for the destruction of the status quo. Rocked, too.
Another bombshell whose fragments hit The Crabs was Hooker N Heat. Not only did John Lee Hooker’s singing and playing prove to be highly influential to me and my crew, but his commentary between the songs on that release is nearly as important as the music, and perhaps more influential than almost anything else to a troublemaker like me. After living in a family where women ran everything, I was glad to hear old John Lee say, “You talk too much, woman.” Now there’s a man who knows something, I thought. Everything John Lee said was a revelation, a mind blowing expression of common sense and life experience. Quoting John Lee after a night of hard living, I once told my grandmother, “Whiskey and women’s just about wrecked my life.” “You better stay away from em, then,” she said without batting an eye. I guess there’s plenty of wisdom to go around.
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