Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Innocence I don't normally think of myself as a YouTube kind of person, but I went looking for something the other day and while I was there I came upon these little audiovisual artifacts. More to the point, the computer I normally use to write on needs a major overhaul, and this is about as much as I can manage from a laptop. These videos can be kind of ephemeral on the web, but while they last here they are. The Stone Poneys put out three LPs in the late '60s and are largely remembered only for having launched the career of Linda Ronstadt. They had one hit single, “Different Drum,” which still gets airplay now and then, but I've always had a soft spot for this desolate little song, which originally appeared on Evergreen Vol 2 in 1967. It's credited to Al Silverman and Austin DeLone, about whom I know absolutely nothing. Incidentally, I think Ronstadt makes a mistake in the first verse of this live version: “Are there anymore like me?” should be “Are there anymore like you?” which is how it was on the record and which makes more sense. Melanie Safka, who used just her first name professionally, had a string of hits in the early to mid 1970s. I think the first one I heard was probably her cover of the Rolling Stone's “Ruby Tuesday,” which was infinitely better than the stilted and bloodless original (sorry, Mick). She had a sort of cleaned up hippy image, as if she wanted to buy the world a Coke, but though her songs bordered on kitsch at times some of them actually were quite good. This one may or may not have to do with sex, politics, nickelodeons, and gambling, but I think it's probably just about the record business: I've always liked these lines: You know, I don't know so many thingsMelanie is still around and has continued to record, but she apparently wasn't regarded as a marketable commodity after the late seventies. Finally, James Taylor when he still had hair and maybe even mattered. In the early seventies every acoustic guitar player wanted to master this arrangement (I never came close). The song originally appeared on what is in my opinion his best record, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, which was released in 1971. He made one more interesting (if not entirely successful) album, One Man Dog, the following year. In the years since then he's made a lot of records, become if anything a better singer, and written a good number of well-crafted songs, but I don't think anything he's done in all that time can match the music he made when he was still just young, awkward, lonesome James. As far as I can figure all three of these singers were between 22 and 24 when these performances were recorded. January 26, 2009 [ Permalink ]
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