Various Artists - Sounds Of The Seventies (1974 & 1975)

An old elementary school classmate of mine died a couple of weeks ago. I can't call him a "friend", per se, but he was an essential presence in my childhood experience.

I've mentioned in previous postings that my Navy officer dad's next duty station after the conclusion of our time in Wisconsin was serving as a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. We arrived there that summer, and settled into a two-story townhouse in military housing across from one of the main academy gates, directly behind the neighborhood pool and adjacent to the neighborhood of West Annapolis.

West Annapolis is about a forty square block area, bounded by Rowe Boulevard to the south, Weems Creek to the west, the Severn River to the north, and government property along its eastern edge. The neighborhood is pretty much cut off from the rest of the city of Annapolis proper due to its proximity to said "government property" - namely, the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy and the adjacent housing areas for officers and their families stationed there, where I lived. As such, West Annapolis has over the decades developed a somewhat insular, go-it-alone stance among the longtime residents there, not mixing much with regular Annapolitans and maintaining a cool attitude towards the "interloping" military families living just on the other side of the old wooded Baltimore & Annapolis Railroad right-of-way.

However, the young children of area officers had to go to school somewhere. And since the Naval Academy Primary School, a K-through-5 private school located across the Severn at the Naval Station, had limited enrollment, for many years the majority of kids living in Arundel Estates and Perry Circle (the military housing areas) were required to attend local facilities, the first and closest one being West Annapolis Elementary School (WAES). So in 1974, that's where the majority of my siblings and I began our latest academic year.

For the most part, relations between the local youngsters and the relatively more transient military offspring at the school were tranquil. I know that some of the West Annapolis boys and girls considered many from my area as "rich kids" and elitist snobs (believe me, we were most decidedly not!), while some of my Navy acquaintances thought many of the locals were lower-class lowlifes (again, not remotely true). But in those years, that tranquility was constantly being roiled by one boy, Frederick, the Terror of West Annapolis.

Frederick (or "Freddie" as he was more commonly known) was a short, wiry redhead with a fiery temper and rock-hard fists that he seldom hesitated to make use of, if the situation called for it. He was a year behind me in grade; however, for a few years in the early/mid '70s, WAES administration decided to experiment with a new teaching approach whereby instead of having the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grades in four separate classrooms, each classroom would contain a combination of ALL FOUR GRADES. So each individual teacher was were forced to provide instruction to all of the learning levels simultaneously, every day - which must have been a nightmare for them. In hindsight, it was a nutty idea, and I don't recall learning very much that year. WAES finally abandoned that practice before the 1970s ended, segregating the grades into separate classrooms, like most other schools in the nation do. But I went to school there through the brunt of this experimental period... and as 'luck' would have it, Freddie was one of my classmates.

Freddie's fearsome reputation, cultivated by classroom and schoolyard incidents that landed him in the Principal's office several times that year, and nurtured by juvenile word-of-mouth, was such that he became, in many of our minds, the pre-teen 'crime boss' and 'bete noire' of West Annapolis. Outside of attending school there, most Navy kids avoided the neighborhood, especially the area close by Freddie's house, lest they run afoul of "Freddie's gang" of area kids he reportedly controlled.

There used to be a little neighborhood store directly across the street from WAES, on the corner of Melvin Avenue and Annapolis Street about a block away from his home, called Waxman's Grocery. Mr. Waxman was the sour and crotchety proprietor of this old-fashioned one-room store, and he seemed to hate kids (many years later, I learned that Mr. Waxman's son, a WAES graduate, had been killed in Vietnam in his teens shortly after arriving over there as a new enlistee in the late 1960s... so it was then I began to understand Mr. Waxman's demeanor and feel some sympathy for him). Despite his cantankerous nature, children flocked to his shop after classes ended for the day, as Mr. Waxman stocked every brand and variety of popular candy then available - Atomic Fireballs, Mike & Ikes, Lemonheads, Pop Rocks, Marathon bars, Chunky Bars, you name it. The store owner was well aware of the individuals who kept him in business. The market was Ground Zero for the local Wacky Packages craze of the mid-70s; students would buy the packs by the dozen, trading the adhesive parody renditions of popular consumer products with others in the school or otherwise sticking them to their school folders and lockers.

Bubble Yum, the first soft chunk bubble gum, was released by LifeSavers (in limited quantities) in the Western U.S. in late 1974, and the company began a gradual national rollout later that year, with the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area serving as an early East Coast test
market. When it initially appeared, it was shipped to only a few stores in our area in very small quantities, and Waxman's Grocery, with its proven track record of moving vast amounts of confectionery product, was one of the stores selected. When Freddie and his boys discovered this, they staked out Waxman's for hours on end, watching for the delivery trucks and, by their presence, "discouraging" (so to speak) non-neighborhood kids from going there. Freddie's gang would buy up every pack of Bubble Yum available, at 30 cents for a pack of five pieces, then take them to school and resell them to children craving the new gum for upwards of fifty cents to a dollar for each individual chunk. Those guys ended up making a small fortune that winter and spring, until increased product distribution and availability put Bubble Yum in more local stores. But for a long while, they were the preteen Gum Mafia.

As much as I've detailed the fearsome, threatening antics and actions of Freddie and his gang here, I did have some normal interactions with him from time to time. More that once, I recall heading over to West Annapolis to hang out and play with him and his friends, and during the winter he and his crew gathered with the Navy kids sledding down Suicide Hill directly adjacent to Perry Circle, the only decent place to slide in the immediate area. In our few playtimes, a sort of detente existed between us, as it does between kids. Still, Freddie would sometimes suggest we do activities that I wasn't comfortable with, such as shoplift sweets at the local 7-11. In those situations, I would demur, then try to quickly and quietly remove myself from his presence and head back home, as the unspoken threat of drawing the ire of "Freddie's gang" was always present.

The mid-70s period was a transitional period for music. AM radio fare, consisting of lite rock, novelty songs and other lightweight fare, still ruled the airwaves, but harder-edged punk, reggae and hard rock music was bubbling just below the surface, ready to break out. Songs that were giant hits and schoolyard favorites during that time included "Up In A Puff Of Smoke" by an obscure (for the U.S.) British singer named Polly Brown:

For some reason, this song was HUGE as WAES - never did much for me, though (in a related story, Polly Brown never had another charting song in America...).

Another massive song from that time was "Billy, Don't Be A Hero" by Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods:

Although the premise was hokey and overly sentimental (a young woman begs her love not to go off to war, but stay and marry her; he goes anyway and, of course, buys the farm in his first battle), this song still went to #1 in America in the summer of 1974, selling nearly four million copies. However, it was hated as much as it was loved, voted No. 8 on Rolling Stone magazine's readers' poll of "10 Worst Songs of the 1970s".

What I didn't know at the time was that this song was a remake of a British hit from earlier that year. Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods were an obscure group of journeymen from Ohio who hadn't had much success in the prior ten years of their music career, until they glommed on to "Billy, Don't Be A Hero", originally penned by a British group, Paper Lace, who took their version to the top of the UK charts just three months prior. Understandably pissed at seeing their thunder and stateside glory stolen by Bo Donaldson et al., Paper Lace quickly released their follow-up single, which made it to US #1 six weeks later that midsummer, the group's first (and only) American hit - "The Night Chicago Died":

Children couldn't get enough of songs like this back then!

The potential menace of Freddie and his gang overall did little to affect the fun times I had living there in Annapolis.  There was a great group of kids on my street and up the hill in Perry Circle, and we were a close-knit bunch.  We would all hang together at the pool on warm days, playing Marco Polo and basking in the sun.  The winters were marked by building huge snow forts, from which we would choose sides and have intense snowball fights.  There were birthday parties, slumber parties, football games, and expeditions into the restricted areas near Shady Lake or through the old Civil Defense tunnels and shelters under the apartments.  During the holiday season, we would practice Christmas carols together, then put together a chorus and go door to door singing to our neighbors.  Or we would head over across the street through the Naval Academy gates, to play baseball on the diamonds there, hang out on the platforms and structures of the old Academy obstacle course on Hospital Point, or try to sneak into the "Midshipmen/Authorized Staff Only" areas throughout the Yard.  

After years of requests, I was finally awarded the paper route in my neighborhood, delivering the Evening Capital each night after I got home from school (I was one of the paper's youngest newsboys).  I worked that route like a dog, doubling the subscriptions on my street inside of a few months, and by Christmas that year I was making a fortune (well, a relative fortune for a preteen in the 1970s).  The Evening Capital provided me with a few extra over-the-shoulder newsbags, and there were always a few extra papers in my stack each day.  So with them, my friends and I devised a game called Dogfight: each of us would have a bag filled with newspapers tightly wrapped with rubber bands, then we would get on our bikes and ride circles around each other in a big field, whipping papers at other riders to see who we could knock off!  Sounds kinda brutal now... but it was a very fun, looked-forward-to activity, and I never recall anyone getting seriously hurt.

Great memories. 

Freddie and I weren't close friends, only casual acquaintances at best, and I didn't keep in close contact with him after I left elementary school and moved on to Bates Junior High across town the next year. I would, however, continue to hear stories about him from some of my younger friends who still attended WAES - from all reports, his attitude and demeanor didn't change an iota. And after my family left Maryland in the late 1970s, he all but completely faded off of my radar. I learned more about him in recent years through my contact via Facebook with his older brother, who I didn't know at all back during my Annapolis childhood but got to know later. Through him, I learned that after Freddie left high school, he served a short stint as an enlisted Navy man, then quickly returned to the Annapolis area, where for decades he worked as a local handyman and house painter.

My lone interaction with Freddie since the end of our school days together occurred a couple of years ago, when I repeated to his brother a funny (and probably apocryphal) story about a practical joke Freddie reputedly played on one of his West Annapolis cronies, that quickly made the schoolyard rounds. Freddie fired off a blistering response through his brother's thread, angrily denying the legend and castigating me up and down for even INSINUATING that it was true. Mind you, I was retelling the tale of a harmless and minor childhood prank that allegedly occurred... but still, almost fifty years later, it managed to set him off. Apparently, some things - and some people - never change. Freddie's brother is friendly, stable and accomplished, and managed to put together a pretty good life for himself and his family - in other words, the complete opposite of Freddie.

So, as such, I don't have any particularly deep feeling of loss regarding Freddie's demise - he was a bully, and sort of a dick, and from all reports and indications remained so up to his dying day.  I wasn't the only one with this reaction; for decades, I've remained in close contact with several of my old Arundel Estates childhood friends. Their feelings on Freddie's death can be summarized in a single comment one of them made to me: "He was the 'bogeyman' for a lot of kids back then." Can't really refute that assessment.

With that being said, Freddie was an integral part of that fondly remembered time and place in my life, and his presence and actions have done little to obscure the happy times I recall living in Annapolis as a child (prior to my return there as a Naval Academy midshipmen almost a decade later). If anything, Freddie was like a grain of sand in an oyster shell - an irritant whose presence still ended up creating something lasting and cherished.

So, in honor of his passing, and in homage to that time, here are a few music compilations from that period that will give you a sense of what was being listened to in the mid-70s. These are part of a forty-volume(!) series of recordings released by Time-Life Music between 1989 and 1999, covering the entirety of the 1970s. I only picked up a few of these, since I had other compilations that covered this same general time period. But the ones provided here, covering 1974 and 1975, are an excellent summation of music from that time.

In case you're wondering, here's the lineup:

Sounds Of The Seventies: 1974:

1. Can't Get Enough – Bad Company
2. Show and Tell – Al Wilson
3. Come and Get Your Love – Redbone
4. I Shot the Sheriff – Eric Clapton
5. Help Me – Joni Mitchell
6. I Can Help – Billy Swan
7. Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy) – Al Green
8. Rock the Boat – The Hues Corporation
9. Bennie and the Jets – Elton John
10. Midnight Rider – Gregg Allman
11. Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
12. The Loco-Motion – Grand Funk Railroad
13. Smokin' in the Boys' Room – Brownsville Station
14. Rikki Don't Lose That Number – Steely Dan
15. Rock On – David Essex
16. Midnight at the Oasis – Maria Muldaur
17. Kung Fu Fighting – Carl Douglas
18. Keep on Smilin' – Wet Willie
19. Then Came You – Dionne Warwick & The Spinners
20. The Bitch Is Back – Elton John

Sounds Of The Seventies: 1974 - Take Two:

1. Lookin' for a Love – Bobby Womack
2. You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
3. The Joker – Steve Miller Band
4. Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) – Aretha Franklin
5. Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe – Barry White
6. Mockingbird – Carly Simon with James Taylor
7. I've Got to Use My Imagination – Gladys Knight & The Pips
8. Sundown – Gordon Lightfoot
9. Everlasting Love – Carl Carlton
10. Shinin' On – Grand Funk Railroad
11. Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo – Rick Derringer
12. Takin' Care of Business – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
13. Rock Your Baby – George McCrae
14. Sideshow – Blue Magic
15. Haven't Got Time for the Pain – Carly Simon
16. Tin Man – America
17. Dancing Machine – Jackson Five
18. Jungle Boogie – Kool & the Gang
19. Nothing from Nothing – Billy Preston
20. I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song – Jim Croce
21. Radar Love – Golden Earring

Sounds Of The Seventies: 1975:

1. You're No Good – Linda Ronstadt
2. Jackie Blue – Ozark Mountain Daredevils
3. That's the Way (I Like It) – KC & the Sunshine Band
4. Must of Got Lost – J. Geils Band
5. Why Can't We Be Friends? – War
6. Sister Golden Hair – America
7. Philadelphia Freedom – Elton John
8. Black Water – Doobie Brothers
9. Love Is a Rose – Linda Ronstadt
10. How Long – Ace
11. Dance with Me – Orleans
12. Free Bird – Lynyrd Skynyrd
13. You Are So Beautiful – Joe Cocker
14. Feel Like Makin' Love – Bad Company
15. Lady Marmalade – Labelle
16. Pick Up the Pieces – Average White Band
17. Island Girl – Elton John
18. Some Kind of Wonderful – Grand Funk Railroad
19. The Hustle – Van McCoy & Soul City Symphony
20. Let's Do It Again – Staple Singers

Sounds Of The Seventies: 1975 - Take Two:

1. When Will I Be Loved – Linda Ronstadt
2. Bad Time – Grand Funk Railroad
3. Roll On Down the Highway – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
4. Movin' On – Bad Company
5. Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While) – The Doobie Brother
6. They Just Can't Stop It (The Games People Play) – The Spinners
7. L-O-V-E (Love) – Al Green
8. Shining Star – Earth, Wind & Fire
9. Get Down Tonight – KC & the Sunshine Band
10. I'm on Fire – Dwight Twilley
11. SOS – ABBA
12. Shame, Shame, Shame – Shirley & Company
13. Cut the Cake – Average White Band
14. You're the First, the Last, My Everything – Barry White
15. Low Rider – War
16. Fight the Power (Part 1 & 2) – Isley Brothers
17. Bungle in the Jungle – Jethro Tull
18. Only Women Bleed – Alice Cooper
19. Can't Get It Out of My Head – Electric Light Orchestra
20. Poetry Man – Phoebe Snow
21. I'm Not in Love – 10CC

Enjoy these discs, released in 1990 and 1991 (for the "Take Two" versions), and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email links below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Various Artists - Sounds Of The Seventies: 1974: Send Email
• Various Artists - Sounds Of The Seventies: 1975: Send Email
• Various Artists - Sounds Of The Seventies: 1974 - Take Two: Send Email
• Various Artists - Sounds Of The Seventies: 1975 - Take Two: Send Email

2020 In Memorium - #3: Toots Hibbert (Born 1942)

Frederick "Toots" Hibbert (1942 - 2020)

Back when I was working in the Washington, DC area in the mid/late 2000s, I used to spend a lot of time after work at a bar/coffeehouse called Tryst, in that city's Adams-Morgan neighborhood.  The big, comfortable, rustic old space it occupied was furnished with huge old mismatched tables, sofas and lounges all seemingly scrounged from a garage sale, and local art covered the unevenly painted walls.  Yeah, it was (ant still is) sort of a local

hipster's hangout, a place for people who thought they were cool/bohemian/arty to see and be seen in.  But it has a nice ambience, the staff was great, most of the customers were easy-going, and there was nice coffee and a decent bar/food menu available (one of my favorite drinks there was what they called a Dufrene, which was a pint of Guinness with a shot of espresso poured into it).  Plus, they had free wifi, so if you could find a seat at a table, you could basically sit there all evening, eating, drinking and browsing the Web.

Tryst would host various cultural events from time to time, including art openings, left-leaning political get-togethers and DJ nights - events that I usually tried to avoid, not that I was "anti-" any of that, but since the space required to set up these events would mean less available seating for potential customers, and I generally got there later than most. I hated having to stand around by the wall, strategically positioning myself to commandeer a seating as soon as a current occupant made the slightest indication that he or she was about to vacate.

Anyway, one night in the spring of 2006, they were having another DJ night at Tryst, but this time I had arrived there early enough to place myself at one of the coveted seats/tables. I was sitting there chilling out, with a Greek salad and a Dufrene in front of me, watching Fritz Lang's classic thriller M on my laptop and not really paying much attention to the record spinner, who seemed to be playing a lot of deep house and dub sides... when all of a sudden, one of the cuts he put on caught my attention - THIS one:

Although by that point in life, I was a pretty big ska and reggae fan, somehow I had no awareness of this tune the DJ played that night. I might have heard it before and it hadn't connected, perhaps... but no matter - it DEFINITELY connected that night. Before the song was half over, I rushed to the area in Tryst when the turntables were set up to learn the name of this great song and band.  It was "Funky Kingston", off of the album by the same name, by Toots & The Maytals.

Frederick Hibbert was born in 1942 in Jamaica, the youngest of seven children. His parents were both fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists preachers, so Hibbert's earliest singing experiences were with church gospel choirs. However, before he turned twelve, both of his parents had died, leaving him an orphan raised by his older brother John, who lived in Kingston in the soon-to-be-famous Trenchtown neighborhood, birthplace and crucible of modern Jamaican music.

There in Trenchtown, with his childhood friends Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias, Toots formed the first version of the Toots & The Maytals trio in 1961, when he was nineteen. The band's early ska/rocksteady songs, such as "Six And Seven Books Of Moses" and "Hallelujah", were rooted in Hibbert's religious upbringing. But the band quickly moved on from those themes and expanded their repertoire. By the mid-60s, Toots & The Maytals were one of the biggest bands in Jamaica, with producers clamoring to work with them and the group producing hit after hit, including "Bam Bam", "54-46 That's My Number" (inspired by Hibbert's 18-month stretch in prison for marijuana possession) and "Do The Reggay", the first song to refer to (and subsequently coin the term) "reggae", the then-new music genre that continues to this day.

 

Toots & The Maytals had released several albums in Jamaica during the 1960s, but by the early '70s they - and reggae music in general - were still relatively unknown in the rest of the world. That international perception began to change in 1972 with the release of the film The Harder They Come, an underground hit in the UK which featured two Maytals songs in the soundtrack. Attempting to strike while the iron was still hot, producer Chris Blackwell hustled the band into Dynamic Sounds Studio in Jamaica, and by the early spring of 1972 had released Funky Kingston, the group's first international album, in Britain and other Commonwealth countries. In 1975, a revised version of Funky Kingston was released in the States, retaining only three songs from the 1972 release and adding six from the Maytals' immediate follow-up album In The Dark, along with the single version of "Pressure Drop" from The Harder They Come soundtrack.

Here's the lineup on the original release:

1. "Sit Right Down" — 4:44
2. "Pomps And Pride" — 4:30
3. "Louie Louie" — 5:46
4. "I Can't Believe"
   
5. "Redemption Song" — 3:26
6. "Daddy's Home" — 5:05
7. "Funky Kingston" — 4:54
8. "It Was Written Down" — 3:04

And here is the track listing on the U.S. release:

1. "Time Tough" — 4:23
2. "In the Dark" — 2:48
3. "Funky Kingston" — 4:54
4. "Love is Gonna Let Me Down" — 3:15
5. "Louie Louie"
6. "Pomps and Pride" — 4:30
7. "Got to Be There" — 3:06
8. "Country Road" — 3:23
9. "Pressure Drop" — 3:46
10. "Sailin' On" — 3:35

Both versions were celebrated, and the album is credited with breaking reggae internationally. The US version is ranked at #380 in Rolling Stone's 2012 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and rightfully so.

The original Toots & The Maytals continued on as a unit until the early 1980s before breaking up, with Hibbert having a long subsequent career as a solo artist, collaborator with the likes of Willie Nelson, Gov't Mule, The Red Hot Chili Peppers (among many others), and reviving the Maytals from time to time with new members.  Toots performed right up to the end, with his final appearances in the spring and summer of 2020, just before he took ill.

 

Frederick "Toots" Hibbert died of complications from contracting the COVID-19 virus in a hospital in Mona, Jamaica on September 11th, at the age of seventy-seven.

 

In honor of his life, I present to you both versions of the seminal album Funky Kingston:

• The original version, released on Dragon Records (a subsidiary of Chris Blackwell's Island Records) in April 1972; and
• The U.S. version, released on Mango Records in mid-1975

Enjoy and pay tribute to one of the founding fathers of reggae! And as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Funky Kingston (Original 1972 Jamaica/UK Release): Send Email  

• Funky Kingston (Revised 1975 US Release): Send Email

Paul McCartney & Wings - Venus And Mars Outtakes Are Alright Tonight, Vol. 1 & 2

Happy 75th Birthday, Sir Paul! Many, many more!

I was too young to absorb the Beatles in real time, so the first Beatles-related release I was conscious of as a kid was McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", a single from his first solo album Ram, released in August 1971.

I can't tell you why I enjoyed this tune so much as a child - maybe it was the sound effects (thunderclaps, ringing phones, seagulls), that made it seem more like a Yellow Submarine outtake (I'd just seen that movie for the first time that year, as part of a summer film series for kids sponsored by the local elementary schools - I saw Willy Wonka and The Phantom Tollbooth for the first time that summer as well).   After that limited exposure to McCartney's work, I wasn't really aware of anything regarding his music for another three years.

I remember when Band On The Run came out - my older cousin had a copy of the LP, and he played it for me during a visit my family paid to his in 1974. I was fascinated with the "jailbreak" cover! Outside of Paul McCartney and his wife, I didn't know or recognize any of the other people featured on the front of that album. But it didn't matter - I thought that everything about Band On The Run - artwork and music - was great. My favorite songs at the time, outside of the title track, were "Mrs. Vandebilt" and "Helen Wheels" - they remain some of my favorite Paul tracks to this day. By the time I got to experience the album, it seemed that a vast majority of Americans and the world seemed to think as positively about this disc as I did. I had no idea until much later how much work and effort went into making this album the runaway hit it became.

Due to the mixed critical and commercial reception of the group's first two albums, 1971's Wild Life and 1973's Red Rose Speedway, buyers were initially reluctant to shell out their hard-earned cash for Band On The Run, only to get burned again by yet another weak Wings release.  So, despite some positive reviews from influential music writers and publications, early sales performance of this release in December 1973 was good, but not great.  The album rose slowly on the US Billboard charts to a peak of #7 in early February 1974, before beginning to slowly slide back down the list.

To counter this perceived public lack on interest, Apple (well, specifically, Capitol Records, Apple's US distributor) embarked on a very planned and methodical marketing campaign - quite possibly the first one ever considered necessary for a Beatles-related release. Essentially the brainchild of Capitol's marketing head, Al Coury, Coury goosed LP sales by strategically releasing album singles at key points during the year, initially over McCartney's objections.  The first single Marketing released was "Jet" b/w "Let Me Roll It" in late January 1974.

The song quickly shot into the Top Ten in both Britain and America, where it remained until late spring, and rekindled public interest in the album - Band On The Run began moving up the charts again, and reached #1 US for a week in mid-April. When album sales began declining again that month, Coury arranged for the release of the next album single, the title track "Band On The Run" b/w "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five". This single was even huger than the previous release; "Band On The Run" topped the American charts by June, and dragged the album along with it - the LP hit #1 again for three weeks that same month. Band On The Run topped the US album charts yet again in July. All told, the release was at or near the top of the charts for almost the entirety of 1974, staying in the Billboard Top Ten from January to late November. Its reception made McCartney the most commercially successful of the solo Beatles from that point on (believe it or not, but George Harrison was eating Paul's lunch on that measure in the early '70s).

After this year of great success, both McCartney and Capitol Records were eager to keep the money train rolling. Wings' lineup was augmented with new members during mid-1974 (Geoff Britton on drums and Jimmy McCulloch on lead guitar joined Paul & Linda McCartney and guitarist Denny Laine), and after some early session work in Nashville and London in the fall of 1974, the band headed to Sea Saint Studios in New Orleans in January 1975 to complete recordings for the next album. The Louisiana sessions were progressing fairly well, except in one area - some animosity had arisen between Britton and McColloch during the Nashville stay, and by the time they reached New Orleans, they fucking HATED each other. Fed up with the tense atmosphere, Britton suddenly quit the band in the middle of their Sea Saint session - he'd been a member of Wings for less than six months. McCartney scrambled to find a replacement, quickly auditioning a suitable alternate, American drummer Joe English. Despite that brief hiccup, the main album tracks were all laid down less than a month after arrival in New Orleans. Some rerecording and overdub work was completed in California a couple of months later.

The album Venus and Mars was released in late May (two weeks after the release of the lead single, "Listen To What The Man Said") to a public still hungry for Wings product, and in the afterglow of the positive vibes for the last album. Both the single and the album topped the US charts, with the latter selling over 4 million copies worldwide. However, the overall critical reaction to Venus and Mars was much more subdued and muted than for Band On The Run; the LP was generally viewed by music writers as a step back by the band. Still, it sold - which was all Capitol cared about.

The commercial success of this album served as the impetus for McCartney and Wings to embark on a year-long worldwide concert tour, Wings Over The World, where the band played over sixty arena-rock shows in eleven countries on three continents. In all, more than a million people attended those sold-out concerts, further establishing McCartney's reputation as a commercial juggernaut.

The tour even resulted in a companion album, the triple-disc Wings Over America live release, another Number One record for the band in early 1977.

Generally, I tend to agree with the critics regarding Venus and Mars. Outside of "Listen To What The Man Said", I've never found the music on this disc to be as immediate or compelling as that of the previous album. It's not as though McCartney was resting on his laurels here, after the huge success of Band On The Run - there was some thought and hard work put into these selections. I don't know whether it was due to the band turmoil during the recording, or label pressure to start milking Paul and his band as a financially-viable hit machine . . . but for me, there's something missing in the overall album.

However, some folks regard Venus and Mars as equal to, if not superior, to Band On The Run. I'll let you all be the judge of that, by giving you a glimpse into the creative effort behind the making of this album. Here are an assortment of demos and rehearsal tracks from the Venus and Mars sessions in 1975. According to bootlegzone.com, The 910 (a key publication on unreleased Beatles recordings) states that the source of this music is an unnamed person (presumably in the production crew) who surreptitiously recorded and retained a low bias cassette dub of some early takes and some later, more polished remixes.

Here is an excerpt from the liner notes on the 2005 release of this bootleg, containing a bit more info:

"The music was culled from sessions that took place between January and April of 1975, first at Sea Saint Studios, New Orleans and later at Wall Heider Studios in Los Angeles. The majority of the sessions feature the fifth Wings line-up of Paul/lead vocals, guitar, bass; Linda/piano, synth, backing vocals; Denny Laine/guitar, bass, backing vocals; Jimmy McCulloch/guitar, backing vocals (lead on Medicine Jar); and Joe English/drums (it is unknown whether this music features any of Geoff Britton on drums)."

In terms of track listings, here's the lineup for both discs:

Disc 1

1. Venus And Mars (instrumental)
2. Rock Show
3. Love In Song
4. Letting Go
5. Medicine Jar
6. Venus And Mars (reprise)
7. Listen To What The Man Said, Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People, Crossroads Theme
8. Venus And Mars
9. Rock Show

Disc 2

1. Love In Song
2. You Gave Me The Answer
3. Magneto And Titanium Man
4. Letting Go
5. Medicine Jar
6. Venus And Mars (reprise)
7. Spirits Of Ancient Egypt
8. Call Me Back Again
9. Listen To What The Man Said
10. Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People
11. Crossroads Theme
12. Lunch Box/Odd Sox

For your consideration, here are Vols. 1 and 2 of Venus And Mars Outtakes Are Alright Tonight, a rare and hard-to-find selection of rough cuts, rehearsal tracks and unreleased material from Wings' sessions for the album of the same name, first pressed by bootleg label Starlight Records in 1990 and subsequently released on CD by equally shady German record label No Pig International in 2005. Have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.

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Kiss - Alive! (RS500 - #159)

The summer of 1975 was a golden time for me. I had just finished elementary school in Annapolis, MD, back in the days when summer vacation was almost a full three months (is it just me, or are school years getting longer and longer now?). My siblings, family and I took full advantage of that time off (my dad was a professor at the Naval Academy, so his summers were relatively light). That summer was the year both Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens Williamsburg opened, and we went to both amusement parks in their inaugural seasons. The neighborhood I lived in was full of kids, and we all spent plenty of time together - playing 'guns' in the woods on the hill behind our houses, or climbing the fence at the edge of the housing area and going down to explore around Shady Lake, or "borrowing" Big Wheels and having races down Suicide Hill (complete with spectacular wipeouts - amazingly, no one got really injured). That was the year I learned to swim at the local pool, and my friends and I would spend all day there, splashing in the water while the big hit of that summer, Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom", played almost nonstop in the

background. Then we'd line up at the pool snack bar to buy Starburst fruit chews and a new kind of gum that had just come out earlier that year, Bubble Yum. It was a great summer, the best I'd ever had at that point.

Then in September, the school year began, and I found myself being bused downtown daily to Wiley H. Bates Junior High School. Thus, the horror began (cue screeching violins) . . .

Bates Jr. High was a crumbling, decrepit boneyard of a facility, located on Smithville Street in a lower-middle class section of Annapolis. The school was full of streetwise kids from other, tougher areas of the city - kids who wouldn't think twice about skipping class, mouthing off to teachers and administrators, or kicking your ass after class for no other reason than that they felt like it. The counselors and other admin personnel there reflected that sort of mean-spiritedness; the head counselor, who I'll call Mr. C., was infamous for the paddle that he kept in his office and reputedly used liberally on the 'bad kids'. A lot of the teachers there didn't seem to give a crap, or at best were just going through the motions of educating their class. I will never forget the science teacher I had that first year (we'll call her Mrs. G.) - I endured her borderline-insane classroom tirades and actions on a daily basis, and learned absolutely nothing in that class, other than that some people were crazy as loons.

The very air of that building reeked of menace, and trouble seemed to lurk around every shaded corner of those dark and filthy halls. After spending my previous year of school in the relative calm and nurturing atmosphere of West Annapolis Elementary, coming to Bates Jr. High was like entering Purgatory - not just for myself, but for many other 'good' kids who didn't come from that rough background. I hated almost every minute of the two years I was there, and was very happy when my dad was transferred to Massachusetts and took me away from there.

[Side note: For some reason, some folks in Annapolis have a warm spot in their hearts for that shithole. The city finally closed the school in 1981, and for years it stood empty - a bleak, vermin-infested brick tombstone in the center of that neighborhood. If I had been in charge of things, I would have personally slammed the cast-iron wrecking ball against those walls within two minutes of them nailing the doors shut. But somehow, someone conned their congressman or something into having the place listed on the National Register of Historic Places (for God knows what reason), saving it from becoming landfill. Today, the building has been turned into senior housing and a boys and girls club. That's great, but they still should have torn the bastard down. If my words sound harsh, so be it - I had a miserable experience there.]

That's not to say that EVERYTHING was bad about the school. A few of the teachers worked really hard, and really seemed to care about their profession and their students. I was lucky enough to study under a couple of them, including Mr. Myles for social studies (hands down, one of the best teachers I ever had) and Mrs. Mallow, who saw something in me that caused her to give me a coveted part in the school play, embarking me on the first step of a lifetime in the lively arts.

I also had a superb music teacher, whose name escapes me at the moment. The great thing about his class was that every Friday, he would allow one of his students to bring in any album of their choice, which the class would listen to for the entire period. He didn't care what it was - Cheech & Chong, Iron Butterfly, Sly & The Family Stone - if a student brought it in, he would play it. So I got to hear a lot of stuff in there I had never had the opportunity to hear before.

One Friday, it was a long-haired tough kid named Albert's turn to bring his record in, and he brought Kiss's double-disc live album Alive!, released on Casablanca Records in September 1975. At that point, all I knew of Kiss was that they were the band that had the black and white painted faces, and played music I really wasn't interested in. At that time, the big hits were AM radio fare, by musicians like the Captain & Tennille ("Love Will Keep Us Together"), Glen Campbell ("Rhinestone Cowboy") and KC & The Sunshine Band ("Get Down Tonight"). Keep in mind that during this era, lightweight musical garbage like "Billy Don't Be A Hero", "The Night Chicago Died", and "Junk Food Junkie" were HUGE hits, and very popular, especially with kids. And when you were a nonrebellious kid at that time, that was the sort of stuff you listened to and liked.

So hearing Alive! for the first time was an ear-opener for me. I wasn't (and still am not) a big hard rock fan, but on that day I really got into many of the songs, including "Firehouse" (with that cool blaring siren at the end, whipping the crowd into a frenzy) and of course "Rock N Roll All Night". But the thing that really got to me was the album cover itself. In Alive!'s cover picture, the band strikes some of the most insane, mind-melting rock poses EVER! It almost seems like they're actually in motion if you stare at it too long. The outfits, the platform shoes, the smoke, the band positioning - this is damn near the perfect rock album cover. I knew kids who used to spend hours in front of the mirror, trying to exactly emulate Gene Simmons' or Peter Criss' stances.

Overall, I enjoyed this album very much, a rare moment of sunshine breaking through the eternal black cloud hanging over Bates Jr. High. I liked it enough that I remembered it as I got older, and years later made a point of buying it for my own collection. Alive! is well deserving of its place in the Rolling Stone 500 - however, if there ever was an Album Cover 500, this one would surely be in the Top Ten!

Rock on!

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