So Old It’s New ‘songs from 1973’ set list for Monday, March 27, 2023 – on air 8-10 pm ET

My track-by-track tales follow this bare-bones list.

  1. David Bowie, Let’s Spend The Night Together
  2. Bruce Springsteen, Spirit In The Night
  3. Dr. John, Such A Night
  4. Can, Moonshake
  5. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Give It Time
  6. The Who, Doctor Jimmy
  7. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Poison Whiskey
  8. Led Zeppelin, The Ocean
  9. Alice Cooper, Raped And Freezin’
  10. Thin Lizzy, The Hero And The Madman
  11. Steely Dan, King Of The World
  12. Queen, Great King Rat
  13. Black Sabbath, Sabbra Cadabra
  14. King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part 1
  15. Genesis, Firth Of Fifth
  16. Tom Waits, Ol’ 55
  17. Stevie Wonder, Too High
  18. The Doobie Brothers, Clear As The Driven Snow
  19. Frank Zappa, Montana
  20. Little Feat, Roll Um Easy
  21. Roxy Music, Editions Of You
  22. Elton John, High Flying Bird
  23. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Still . . . You Turn Me On
  24. The Allman Brothers Band, Come And Go Blues 

    My track-by-track tales:

  1. David Bowie, Let’s Spend The Night Together . . . One show can lead into another. I was going to play Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album last Saturday when I played Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon and The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup. The original premise was 50-year-old albums, ie released in 1973 but then came the tie-in with Toronto band Zuffalo, which is playing Dark Side, and their own stuff, on April 29 at Rhythm and Brews in Cambridge so out went Aladdin Sane, in came some Zuffalo. 

    Speaking of Zuffalo, they are having a ticket giveaway for their upcoming show which is sponsored by Radio Waterloo. For details, email gary@radiowaterloo.caAfter last Saturday’s album replay show, I still had 1973 on the brain so the result is tonight’s full slate of songs from that year including Bowie’s manic cover of this Stones’ tune. It appeared on Aladdin Sane, presaging Bowie’s full-blown covers album, Pin-Ups, that he hastily did to satisfy his record company’s demand for another album in 1973, to further cash in on Bowie’s commercial ascendance. Perhaps because he had already covered the Stones on Aladdin Sane, there were no Stones covers on the Pin-Ups album which included songs written or made famous by, among others, Them (Here Comes The Night), The Who (I Can’t Explain and Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere), The Kinks (Where Have All The Good Times Gone), Pink Floyd (See Emily Play) and Bruce Springsteen (Growin’ Up).

  2. Bruce Springsteen, Spirit In The Night . . . Speaking of Springsteen, and cover tunes . . . I played Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of this Springsteen tune, from his 1973 debut album Greetings From Asbury Park NJ a few weeks ago so I figured I’d go with the original today. The Earth Band had even greater success with another song from Springsteen’s debut, Blinded By The Light. It’s interesting how prolific artists were back then, just a different time. Generally it was an album a year but sometimes two and in 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival released three LPs, all of them – Bayou Country, Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys – among the band’s best. But back to 1973. Bowie released the two I’ve mentioned, one albeit a covers album. Springsteen’s debut was his first of two that year with The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle coming out in November after his debut in January. Later in the set I’m playing Elton John, who was on a 2-albums per year schedule for the first half of the 1970s.
  1. Dr. John, Such A Night . . . The hit single Right Place Wrong Time took the doctor’s In The Right Place album to his highest-ever placing, No. 24 on Billboard. Such A Night got its own share of exposure when Dr. John performed it at The Band’s The Last Waltz concert, which became a film and live album, and the song appears on various Dr. John compilations.
  1. Can, Moonshake . . . A somewhat rare, short but definitely catchy, propulsive track by the Krautrock progressive/experimetal band. From The Future Days album. It was released as a single and if you’re not into some of Can’s ‘weirder’ stuff, I’d recommend the more palatable The Singles compilation. The 1990s British experimental rock band Moonshake took its name from Can’s song. 
  2. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Give It Time . . . I was going to play Welcome Home from BTO II, which is a terrific musical voyage into hard rock combined with jazz and perhaps I should have, regardless. But maybe it should have been an instrumental because, while he’s a great songwriter and guitarist, I find Randy Bachman’s vocals wimpy and somewhat embarrassing. He should scream more, as he does, at least he’s credited as lead vocalist, in the chorus to Welcome Home although it sounds to me like C.F. (Fred) Turner does that part. Yes, I know, Bachman sang the hits Takin’ Care Of Business and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, and they work, but still. He’s not a good singer. So, here’s bass player Turner, clearly the best vocalist in the group, growling his way through this down and dirty ditty. 
  3. The Who, Doctor Jimmy . . . A tour de force from Quadrophenia, eight and one-half minutes of classic, angry, full-force Who.
  1. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Poison Whiskey . . . From the wall-to-wall great debut, Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-erd, which contained such well-known songs among the band’s output as Free Bird, Gimme Three Steps, Simple Man and Tuesday’s Gone, but also excellent deeper cuts like Poison Whiskey. While their first album wasn’t released until 1973, Skynyrd, under different names, had been around in various forms since 1964 including as My Backyard, featuring future stalwarts Ronnie Van Zant on lead vocals and guitarists Gary Rossington and Allen Collins. There’s really no such thing as overnight success, as most band histories show. 
  2. Led Zeppelin, The Ocean . . . My biggest concern with playing something from Zep’s Houses Of The Holy album is having YouTube or Facebook, when I put the song clip on my page, remove it due to the album cover featuring children. It’s happened before but usually takes some time before it does. And I do understand it to some degree, given some of Zeppelin’s history or alleged history with youth. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve had The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers ‘zipper’ cover removed before. Interestingly, Hipgnosis was nominated for a Grammy Award for Houses Of The Holy in the best album package category, now known as the best recording package, for ‘quality visual look’ of an album.
  1. Alice Cooper, Raped And Freezin’ . . . From Billion Dollar Babies, an album that is essentially a greatest hits record. Even the deeper cuts, like this one, are familiar to most people who grew up with the record. As often mentioned, it was seemingly on permanent play in my early high school days on our cafeteria juke box.
  1. Thin Lizzy, The Hero And The Madman . . . A spoken word, hard rock, prog rock, tempo changing guitar showcase, all in six minutes from the early Lizzy album Vagabonds Of The Western World. 
  2. Steely Dan, King Of The World . . . Pop/rock/jazz with a funky hook, from Countdown To Ecstasy, Steely Dan’s second album. A masterpiece, really, but such is the case with so much of Steely Dan’s material. Steely Dan has been described as slick and, being a raunch and roller at heart, I don’t usually like slick. To me, it tends to mean overdone production, like a lot of 1980s stuff where some decent songs are probably hiding somewhere in the synthetic syrup. Yet I like Steely Dan a lot. Perhaps noted music critic Robert Christgau put it best in Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums Of The Seventies. Steely Dan, he wrote about Countdown To Ecstasy but it could apply to all their stuff, has achieved a ‘deceptively agreeable studio slickness.” 
  3. Queen, Great King Rat . . . Queen, in all their prog/operatic/hard rock glory, from the self-titled debut. Eleven years later they were going Radio Ga Ga on The Works album. Catchy, yes, evolution of an artist, yes, more commercially successful, yes, tongue in cheek, probably, but, er, hmm. 
  4. Black Sabbath, Sabbra Cadabra . . . A hard rock proggish piece from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with Yes virtuoso Rick Wakeman making a guest appearance on piano and synthesizers.
  1. King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part I . . . Epic up and down, back and forth between mellow and aggressive title track from the Larks’ album. That first slow buildup to the heavy crescendo around the 4:45 mark of the 13-minute-plus instrumental gets me every time, just waiting for it to go over the cliff you know you can’t avoid if you keep listening. And who wants to stop listening to this brilliance? Guitarist/leader Robert Fripp has been the lone constant Crimson force in the band’s long history and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic is actually a multi-album suite amid ever-changing lineups, which is a feat in itself in terms of maintaining a vision. It started with Parts I and II on the original album. Then came Part III, 11 years later on 1984’s Three Of A Perfect Pair, followed by Part IV on the 2000 album The Construkction of Light and Part V, known as Level Five and/or Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part V, on The Power To Believe record in 2003. Space doesn’t permit, but lots of interesting reading – and listening – on it. 
  2. Genesis, Firth Of Fifth . . . Tony Banks with the beautiful piano intro to a song he masterminded but was originally rejected by the band when he submitted it for consideration for the Foxtrot album. He reworked it and it made the grade for the subsequent album, Selling England By The Pound. One of the classic tracks of Genesis’s truly progressive rock period, it also features singer Peter Gabriel on flute and a sterling guitar solo from Steve Hackett. 
  3. Tom Waits, Ol’ 55 . . . From Waits’s first album, Closing Time. The Eagles covered it on their On The Border album in 1974 and it was the B-side to that record’s third single, Best Of My Love. Waits disliked the Eagles’ version, at least according to a quote reproduced by Wikipedia from a 1975 interview where Waits called the Eagles’ take on his song ‘a little antiseptic.” Apparently, about a year later, Waits went further, slamming the Eagles in general. “I don’t like the Eagles. They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry. Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable and that’s about it.” 

    Ouch. I like the Eagles well enough, actually have all their albums, but I also understand Waits’s view. Live, for instance, at least while Glenn Frey was still with us, from what I’ve heard – evidenced by their 1980 live album and I’m not sure how much ‘fixing’ or overdubbing might have been done in production – the Eagles were almost too true to their studio albums. They didn’t stretch out, so to speak, as many if not most bands do when playing live. But from what I’ve read, that’s what Frey, a commanding force within the band along with Don Henley, wanted and presumably so do the fans attending the shows. That’s another discussion, of course. The artists that sometimes extend, even maybe rearrange their songs live can argue, as Joe Jackson, for one, has argued, that if you want the studio versions, listen to the studio albums. But it’s understandable if some if not many fans are disappointed after paying good money for a show, only to hear a favorite song they came to hear, drastically rearranged. But you also have to know your artist and how they tend to do things, and I think most fans do understand – or learn to appreciate – what to expect. As for Waits, I imagine he made at least decent royalties from the Eagles’ version of Ol’ 55, as he no doubt has from any number of covers of his songs that became bigger hits for others, Rod Stewart’s version of Downtown Train coming to mind.

    1. Stevie Wonder, Too High . . . Funky tune from the Innervisions album, could easily have been a single but Wonder was like Elton John at the time – his deep cuts were as compelling. And Wonder already had four hit singles from Innervisions, the chart placing depending on country: Higher Ground, Living For The City, Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing and He’s Misstra Know-It-All. 
    2. The Doobie Brothers, Clear As The Driven Snow . . . Wonderful, mostly acoustic track written and sung by guitarist Patrick Simmons, a founding and lone, constant member of the band throughout its long history. This one’s from The Captain and Me, the album that gave us Long Train Runnin’ and China Grove. 
    3. Frank Zappa, Montana . . . Wherein our man Frank moves to Montana to grow a crop of dental floss and become a tycoon of that industry. Tina Turner and The Ikettes, the backing singers for Ike & Tina Turner, help out on vocals. 
    4. Little Feat, Roll Um Easy . . . Next time I do a 1973-themed show I think I’ll just play the entire Dixie Chicken album. It’s that good. Linda Ronstadt covered Roll Um Easy on her Prisoner In Disguise album in 1975, with Little Feat’s Lowell George, the song’s author, playing slide guitar. I’m a big Ronstadt fan and she was a great interpreter, but I prefer Little Feat’s spare, acoustic original version. But it’s nice to have them both. 
    5. Roxy Music, Editions Of You . . . Early, brilliant, edgy Roxy, from the second album, For Your Pleasure. It is that, indeed. 
    6. Elton John, High Flying Bird . . . One of my favorite Elton John songs and a lovely way to close his Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player album. I played it years ago on the show to good reaction, and why not? It’s a terrific tune, apparently one of EJ’s favorites as well. So, while I don’t like to repeat myself or, at least, try to wait a long time between replays, now’s the time. 
    7. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Still . . . You Turn Me On . . . Beautiful piece and one of ELP’s most well-known. Yet the Greg Lake-penned tune wasn’t a single from Brain Salad Surgery as the band didn’t think it was representative of the album or the band’s manic dynamic sound. Somewhat strange, considering ELP albums are peppered with similar songs like Lucky Man, From The Beginning, C’Est La Vie and Lend Your Love To Me Tonight – all Lake compositions. “We’ve had success with Greg’s ballads,” drummer Carl Palmer says in the liner notes to the 1996 reissue of Brain Salad Surgery. “Without those, we probably wouldn’t have sold the amount of records that we have. The problem was, when we had something which was a commercial hit, it wasn’t dark. We had love songs that were hits, so it was a rather diverse situation. People were always waiting for the next (such ballad).”

      Not sure what the concern was. Dedicated ELP fans knew the band was about both the ‘dark’ and Lake’s ‘light’ ballads and such songs were hardly his only contribution. Casual listeners would likely buy a compilation featuring those ballads, anyway – and maybe get turned on to whatever extended, ‘dark’ pieces were also included.

       

    8. The Allman Brothers Band, Come And Go Blues . . . From Brothers and Sisters, the band’s biggest commercial success thanks to the No. 2 single Ramblin’ Man, written and sung by guitarist Dickey Betts. Come and Go Blues, written by Gregg Allman, was the B-side to the album’s second single, a 4-minute version of Betts’s seven-plus minute instrumental piece Jessica. 

      Looking up at the play list, what an amazing year 1973 was for music and obviously there’s lots I couldn’ fit in my 2-hour slot. But that could easily be said for any of the so-called classic rock years that started in the 1960s with the British Invasion, Bob Dylan and so on, through the 1970s which is generally the source period and/or artists, for my show. Old bands/artists, old tracks, old bands/artists, their new stuff, if they’re still alive, kicking and releasing new material has always been my mantra for So Old It’s New. Some years back, I started into a year-by-year series of shows, or segments within my shows, starting in 1964. But I only got to 1966, as I recall, before losing focus and straying into whatever else moved me at the time. So, a year-by-year series is worth revisiting, even sporadically, but at least somewhat consistently, particularly since I now have two shows per week, Mondays and Saturdays. We’ll see how it goes. So many ideas, so much great music, so little time.

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