(if the video doesn’t work):
I didn’t know who this guy was and I certainly had no interest in being forced to extend feigned cordiality to his interloping ass. My recently divorced mother had been set up with him by friends and had apparently found much to like. He was someone with whom she thought there could be a deeper connection and so for this, his first visit to our house to pick Mom up for dinner and a movie, she hoped for a mutually positive first impression with us kids. Before he came, Mom took 14-year-old me aside – possibly doing the same with my 12-year-old sister – and admitted to liking the gentleman, expressing her wish that I would like him too. Regardless, she asked me to be polite when he arrived.
With a surly attitude attributable to normal adolescent contrarianism but exacerbated by the then personally unrecognized yet nonetheless real hurt and jealousy roiling within a confused child of a breaking home, it was all I could do to stand there and shake the 30-something intruder’s hand and mumble a “Nice to meet you too.” Having complied with the letter, if most certainly not the spirit of my mother’s request, I quickly exited the uncomfortable scene for the reassuring refuge of my room and my music. I placed side two of Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle LP on the turntable and sought to escape from whatever incomprehensible bullshit was occurring upstairs.
Two songs in and after six or seven minutes of much friendlier exchange with my 8-year-old youngest sister and her visiting playmate, Mom came downstairs to open my door and say they were headed out. I don’t recall my exact response but am sure that today’s teenage equivalent would be along the lines of, “Fine, whatever.” As she headed back upstairs leaving my bedroom door open, Steve Miller’s version of “You Send Me” drifted out of the speakers. Just before they left, I overheard the stranger say something to my mom like “Do you think he has any idea where that song comes from?” As the front door closed, I heard Mom reply in a tone of sincere pride, “Oh, he knows. He knows everything there is to know about music.”
Nearly 40 years later I still remember the feeling Mom’s words spurred in me as if it were happening right now. My mommy understood me, was proud of me, and was not leaving me. I don’t know how I would have described it then but the sense of relief flowed over me like a warm wave. I may have even shed a few tears. Somehow in those few words offered to someone else, Mom had managed to reassure me that she would remain my protector and advocate even as our lives changed drastically and against my will. There would still be plenty of rocky road ahead to traverse, but from that fleeting moment forward, I never doubted that Mom would be there to support me through it.
THANKS MOMMY!!
===============================================
Now, the dark, hidden truth about the above is that I actually had no freaking idea where “You Send Me” came from. To the extent I thought about it at all, I figured it for a Steve Miller original. Oops.
There was no question that I needed to make Mom’s words true post-haste. Even in those pre-cellular, pre-internet days, it didn’t take long to uncover that Sam Cooke had composed and first recorded the song back in the late 50s. So, when just a few weeks later I spotted a used copy of the Cooke’s Tour album at a local thrift store, I enthusiastically handed over my 25 cents. The record didn’t include “You Send Me” but I felt confident that my owning it would forever preclude any doubt about my musical knowledge should I be tested on my mother’s matter-of-fact assertion.
In the end, no such challenge ever came. The interloper became my step-father before the year was out, staggeringly within one day of another invader, this one allowed in by my father, being declared my new step-mother. In hindsight, I can happily affirm that, for all the bumps, things turned out well. In fact, where most poor buggers have to make do with at best two parents to assist, love, and guide them into adulthood, I was blessed with four. And throughout all of it, music continued, and continues, to magically provide escape, embrace, and enlightenment just when I most need it.
===============================================
A quick note on Fly Like an Eagle: The cover of this excellent album from 1976 has to be among the most misleading ever when it comes to giving a sense of what’s inside. The gale-force electric guitar histrionics promised by the cover photo of Mr. Miller are nowhere to be found on the LP. Instead, Steve’s brilliance is demonstrated mainly in acoustic – and acoustic-style electric – playing on a set of grooving rockers, spacey interludes and emotive ballads, all of which evoke a warm, breezy California feeling for me. To be honest, the somewhat vanilla version of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” is probably the album’s least-impressive moment, although the acoustic guitar accompaniment still rates it a winner in my book. As the big hits “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” and “Rock’n Me” are well known and widely loved, I’d draw new listeners’ attention to “Serenade,” an acoustic-driven, mid-tempo melodic rocker with unique harmonized vocals that conjures a campfire-lit beach under a vast, star-filled sky.
Steve Miller Band – Serenade:
===============================================
A quick note on Cooke’s Tour: Sam’s first record for RCA Victor after a string of solo hits on Keen Records, this 1960 album has much more of a 1940s Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole traditional pop/orchestral feel than the soul/R&B of his late 50s hits. Marketed as an “adventurous travelogue,” the LP offers the singer’s take on a series of “international” songs such as “Under Paris Skies,” “Bali Ha’i,” “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way),” and “Galway Bay.” Despite the shift in style, there’s no mistaking Sam’s stunningly beautiful voice as he makes these far-flung songs very much his own. I’m especially fond of “Jamaica Farewell” with its softened (diluted?) Caribbean rhythm and Sam’s lilting vocal, which together wonderfully evince longing for a lost love. Best of all however is the album’s American offering, “The House I Live In,” which carries a message we statesiders would do well to remember in this divisive electoral year:
The house I live in
A plot of earth, a street
The grocer and the butcher
And the people that I meet
The children in the playground
The faces that I see
All races, all religions
That’s America to me
The place I work in
The worker at my side
The little town or city
Where my people lived and died
The howdy and the handshake
The air of feeling free
The right to speak my mind out
That’s America to me
Sam Cooke – The House I Live In:
I sat in my driveway in awe after arriving home as the album played the rest of the way through. What I was hearing was a revelation; I had no choice but to defer everything else and keep listening. I’d known the band Curved Air for a few years and, in the right mood, considered myself a fan of their early 70s output of folk-tinged progressive rock. But what was coming out of the speakers was something different. The songs were familiar, but were altogether sharper, more alive, and seemed to just plain rock harder. They were filled with zeal, anger, and raw energy, words that I would never have used to describe the Curved Air I had previously known. I was experiencing 1975’s Curved Air Live for the first time and the experience was good.
Recorded during a late 1974 tour that the original band members had been compelled to undertake following two years of separation in order to pay off a tax bill, Curved Air Live was not the sound of a joyful group reunion but rather of five supremely talented artists working out their individual issues together on stage. The reunion would last only for the tour and album release, but what a statement they would leave behind in this record.
That this is not your hippy uncle’s Curved Air of old is made clear from first track “It Happened Today” as it opens with tight, amplified keyboards replacing the piano flourish of the studio version and biting electric guitar and grooving bass brought far forward in the mix. When Sonja Kristina’s vocal kicks in at the half-minute mark, it carries none of the twee quaintness of the original. Instead we hear the slightly-gargled rasp of a woman on the verge, all antagonism and fury, and wonderfully so. Wikipedia cites Kristina as explaining that, at the time of this recording, she was in a distraught emotional state following the breakup of her first marriage, and this had provoked wild, raw singing. While sorry at the cause, I enthusiastically celebrate the result.
Second track “Marie Antoinette” probably represents the greatest, and most stirring, change in tone and feel from its studio version. The original is a fantastic progressive folk rock song that tells the tale of the French revolution over the top of some excellent bluesy electric guitar wailing by Francis Monkman. It looks back on a momentous historical event and imagines it from afar. The live take here casts off the sense of the past and instead transports the listener directly into the scene. The words are the same, but rawness and wrath now replace stoic storytelling. One feels the “anger, born of hunger” viscerally, no longer just listening in but shouting along:
“We are the people of France, we demand that the
Elegant blue-blooded leeches that bleed us
Are taught what it means to grow fat and not feed us
We are the people of France, you must heed us!”
The mainly instrumental “Propositions” is another one that becomes something new here. From Kristina’s gravel-voiced introductory shriek to the extended, echo-laden guitar and synth solos that double its run-time as compared to the original, this version leaves its earthbound, rollercoaster feel behind to launch itself into orbit on a Hawkwind-like rocket ride.
Curved Air’s best-known song, “Vivaldi,” is likewise transformed. The opening bombast is turned up tenfold, and leads into a hootenanny-worthy fiddle workout by Darryl Way in lieu of the classical violin of the studio version. This is followed by an extended, spacey electronic excursion in multiple parts, occasionally punctuated by hoarse yelping from Kristina and Way’s staccato violin bursts. Awesome!
The overall musicianship demonstrated on Curved Air Live is exceptional. In setting aside the focus on harmony and gloriously pompous crescendos, diminuendos and other prog/folk affectations that characterize their early studio albums, the band members are free to truly fly as instrumentalists here. Monkman lets escape the inner guitar hero that we always knew was lurking in the wings, with violinist/keyboardist Way and drummer/percussionist Florian Pilkington-Miksa also allowed ample space to shine. It is vocalist Sonja Kristina however who best takes advantage of the on-stage freedom to demonstrate her range, the precious chanteuse of the studio replaced by a take-no-prisoners woman with attitude.
The “folk” side of Curved Air is not to be found in this outlier offering. This is progressive hard rock. I’d recommend this even as a one-off exploration for rockers put off by the artifice and pretense of early 70s “art rock.” As for those who only know Curved Air from their studio output, prepare to spend some time dumbstruck in your driveway.
Marie Antoinette (live):