Lookin' Out My Back Door

One of my great regrets in life is never seeing Creedence Clearwater Revival live in concert. I absolutely loved their music when I was growing up, and, in fact, the song Green River was one of the first 45s I ever bought. John Fogerty’s one-of-a-kind voice, his signature guitar sound, and his talent as a producer – well, it all made for some great records!

Without a doubt, my favorite CCR album was Cosmo’s Factory. And, as a teenager, I spent hours not only listening to the music, but also staring at album cover, which, for some reason, really captured my attention. It was so random: John Fogerty seated on a motorcycle; drummer Doug Clifford perched atop a ten-speed bike; bassist Stu Cook and guitarist Tom Fogerty just sort of lazily lounging around. I remember thinking at the time, “If this is what rock and roll musicians do when they’re just hanging out – then sign me up!” (The the title of the album, by the way, refers to the Berkeley, CA, warehouse where the band rehearsed, nicknamed “The Factory” by drummer Doug Clifford, a.k.a. Cosmo. Yeah, that’s right. Cosmo. Just like Seinfeld’s Kramer!)

In the band I played with in high school, not only did we do a cover of the quintessential CCR hit, Proud Mary (along with every other band in the world!), but we also did a version of Lookin’ Out My Back Door – a great tune with some pretty off-the-wall lyrics!  Of course, not having the vocal range of John Fogerty, I had to pretty much squeak out, best I could, the song’s lofty refrain: Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door. I got it, though. Although, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that now!

On a side note, Fogerty recently donated his “slugger” guitar (a guitar that’s shaped like a baseball bat) to the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, NY, performing during the induction ceremonies his baseball classic, Centerfield, one of my all time favorite tunes…

Air Supply? You've Got to be Kidding!

I have a friend who recently shared with me that she really likes the music of Air Supply. “What?” I exclaimed! “Air Supply? Are you kidding? How could you possibly like Air Supply?” She went on to say that she knows by heart all the words to their songs, has her iPod loaded with almost every tune they ever recorded, and absolutely is a dyed-in-the-wool fan. I looked at her with just one thought on my mind: Unbelievable! (Not really, I just like giving her a hard time!)

Australian-based Air Supply was a veritable giant in the soft rock business back in the early 80s, producing such classics as All Out of Love, Lost in Love, and Two Less Lonely People in the World. The group’s signature sound was a result of the collaboration between songwriter Graham Russell and lead singer Russell Hitchcock, who met in the mid-70s while performing in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Back in the early 80s, when Air Supply came on the music scene, I was working at a small hardware store in Wilmington, Delaware, where all day long we listened to an adult contemporary radio station. And no exaggeration, I bet that station played an Air Supply song about once every hour – placing them high in the rotation with other soft rock superstars of the day like Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers. Boy, those were the days!

I remember the first time I heard the Air Supply song, The One That You Love, and wondering if the lead vocal was sung by a man or a woman. (Check out the player below.) The voice sounded so high – at least for a man! Now granted, there have been plenty of males in the pop music industry with high voices – running the gamut from Neil Sedaka and Wayne Newton, to Steve Perry and Vince Gill – but something about Hitchcock’s voice seemed different to me. So much so, that I wrote a song parody, which included the following lines:

Here I am, the one that you love, waiting for my voice to change.
Understand, the one that you love, sings in a woman’s vocal range!

These days Russell and Hitchcock can be seen in a 30-minute infomercial, pitching a soft rock CD set for Time-Life. You know, they both look pretty good – unlike oldies icon Bobby Goldsboro (Honey, Watching Scotty Grow), who I also saw not long ago in an infomercial for Time-Life, wearing, without a doubt, the worst hairpiece I’ve ever seen in my life! But more on that another time….

What do you think? Am I being too hard on these guys?

Tommy James and the Hanky Panky

I remember being a young boy at summer camp in 1966 when the Tommy James and the Shondells’ song, My Baby Does the Hanky Panky, was a huge hit. I owned a little black AM transistor radio that I carried around with me most of the day, listening to a local top 40 station that seemed to play the song at least once an hour, along with other pop hits of the day like Little Red Riding Hood and Sweet Pea. Being just nine years old at the time, I thought the phrase “hanky panky” referred to a dance – you know, sort of like the hokey pokey. I was so naïve!

I do recall, however, just how much I liked the song – its overall twangy-ness, the steady, rocking rhythm of the instruments, the slightly out-of-tune background vocals, the crappy guitar solo – it was all good! I just never gave any real thought to the underlying meaning of the words, that’s all. Still, it was a pretty good tune.

Several years later, when I was in the sixth grade, some friends of mine and I formed a band to perform at a school talent show, and we chose to play another Tommy James’ hit, Crimson and Clover – yet another song the meaning of which completely eluded my still young and naïve brain! How good we all must have looked wearing our bellbottom pants, polyester shirts and matching neck scarves. Sort of a Greg Brady thing, I guess.

The coolest thing about doing the song, Crimson and Clover, was that in order to get the warbly effect for the vocal at the end of the song, we had to borrow from a friend a guitar amplifier that had a tremolo unit built in. (Actually, it was a small, internal fan placed in front of the speaker.) By attaching a microphone to the amp, we were able to copy perfectly the sound on the record: Crim-im-im-im-son-on-on-and-clo-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-er-er… O-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-an-and-o-oh-oh-oh-ver-er-er-er! The only difference was that our singer sang the song an octave higher than Tommy James! Sort of a Peter Brady thing – but hey, we were just 12 years old…

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Baby!

When it comes to drum solos in rock music, few are more memorable than the one offered up by Ron Bushy on Iron Butterfly’s 1968 classic, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. (Check out the player below.) The 17-minute long song (which basically repeats the same two-bar riff over and over again) was a “must play” at parties and school dances in the late 60s and early 70s, and featured a long, extended solo for Bushy, one of the first of its kind on a rock album.

According to legend (which is sort of like rumor, only with a little more credibility), the title of the song, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, originally was supposed to be In a Garden of Eden, but, during the recording of the song, the group’s somewhat inebriated keyboardist and singer, Doug Ingle, mumbled his way through the lyrics so that they came out sounding to Bushy like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” The band actually liked that name better, and so it stuck. Another version of the story suggests that it wasn’t Ingle, but Bushy who was intoxicated, and, unable to hear the lyrics correctly, named the song according to the words he thought he had heard. (Of course, I guess it’s just slightly possible that both men were intoxicated – although what would the likelihood of that be!) Either way, it’s makes for a pretty good story.

During my high school years I played drums in a local rock band, and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was one our favorite songs to play at school dances and coffee houses, giving me a chance to show off a little bit – something that drummers seldom do, being that we are such shy and modest people, avoiding the limelight at all costs. (Seriously, most drummers I know have egos the size of Texas, and love to draw attention to themselves, which is one of the reasons why we’re willing to drag all of that equipment around!)

Back in 1969 I was fortune enough to hear Iron Butterfly live in concert at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, about 30 minutes from where I grew up. I remember well Bushy’s drum solo, which was loud and impressive, and must have lasted a good half an hour! I also remember the smoke at that concert being so thick you couldn’t even see the other side of the arena. Remember those days? I guess it was cigarette smoke, but now that I think about it…