70s Favorites: Underrated artists

Music from the early 1970s is my happy place. I made an iTunes playlist that consists entirely of music from that era that I listen to whenever I’m down or discouraged (which has been a lot, lately.) It’s funny, because I’m old enough to remember some of the music from the early 70s that I currently listen to when it first came out, but not all of it. My older brothers and sister didn’t listen to anything wilder than Simon & Garfunkel or The Carpenters – four artists I do like – so it was up to me to discover Who’s Next and Exile on Main Street on my own, which I did toward the end of the 1970s, when most of the contemporary music on the radio sucked.

 What I like most about music from the early 1970s is the quality and the diversity. Some of my favorite bands were at their creative peak, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, The Stones, and The Grateful Dead. Classic country by people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Buck Owens are a big part of my love for music from that era, as well as some superlative soul music by Marvin Gaye, Al Green, The Chi-Lites, and Stevie Wonder, among many others. But they weren’t the only game in town. Lesser known performers (for their era), such as Gram Parsons, Little Feat (a great, influential band that deserved to be bigger), Ry Cooder, and John Prine also put out some wonderful music. In the fall of 1973, Bruce Springsteen released one of his earliest and best albums, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, to fairly dismal sales. And there is a 1973 jazz/blues album by veteran performers Big Joe Turner and Count Basie entitled The Bosses that I absolutely love.

 Anyway, I was listening to my early 1970s playlist in my car yesterday, and Ry Cooder’s version of the Civil War anthem, “Rally ‘round The Flag” caught my ear. Cooder is an amazing guitarist, and he turned that old song into a slow blues, and it’s pretty great. I actually discovered the album that it’s from, Boomer’s Story, in 2007, thirty-five years after it was originally released. Ry Cooder has done some incredible music over his long career, but it doesn’t seem like many people have heard of him. Cooder digs up old songs and reimagines them in different musical genres. On Boomer’s Story, Ry Cooder performs an excellent instrumental version of James Carr’s late 60’s soul classic, “Dark End of The Street,” as well as the WWII chestnut, “Comin’ In On A Wing and a Prayer,” in a way that makes you think the guys in the plane probably didn’t make it. Like I said, good stuff. I was even lucky enough to find an original 1972 vinyl pressing of Boomer’s Story at Randy’s Records a few years ago.
 

So today I am paying tribute to the early 1970s by posting some albums that most people probably have never heard, but if you care about good music at all, you should. If you were fortunate enough to hear Ry Cooder’s Boomer’s Story, Big Joe Turner and Count Basie’s album The Bosses, Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken, Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel, and John Prine’s Sweet Revenge when they were first released, I congratulate you on your superb musical taste, and I’m kind of jealous.

Excitable Boy

 

Late spring 1978, and there was an incredible new song playing on the radio. It was called “Werewolves of London,” and my late brother Phil and I fell in love with it immediately. It hit all the right notes with us: werewolves, rocking guitar (provided by the legendary Waddy Wachtel, we later learned), howls, and the deep baritone voice of singer Warren Zevon. My other late brother, Ray, informed us that he had heard the whole album playing in a record store in Provo, and everything else on it was just as good as “Werewolves.” Ray said the album was named Excitable Boy.

 

That was it. I had to have it. My fourteenth birthday arrived and Phil gave me Excitable Boy, in LP format of course. Ray was right; the whole album WAS just as good as “Werewolves of London.” There were songs about a headless, well-armed, zombie mercenary soldier named Roland, a psycho killer who does unspeakable things to his prom date (with back-up vocals by Linda Ronstadt), and an innocent man hiding in Honduras (because he went home with a waitress who turned out to be a Russian spy) who needed lawyers, guns, and money to get himself out of his predicament.

 

Excitable Boy blew my fourteen-year-old mind, and I had to share the album with my late best friend Don. Warren Zevon hooked him, too. I then scrounged the money together to purchase Zevon’s other album (he only had two at the time), his self-titled debut that he had released in 1976, and it was even better than Excitable Boy. I became a life-long Zevon fan, and his music seldom disappointed me. I even saw him live in concert in 1988 at the Utah State Fairgrounds, when he opened for Los Lobos (now THAT was a damn good show.)

 

Zevon died of mesothelioma in 2003 at the too young age of 56 (the same age I am now), but not before releasing one last classic album, The Wind. Also before Warren died, David Letterman devoted one whole show to an interview with and music by Warren Zevon, where he revealed the most important lesson he had learned about life, the immortal words “Enjoy every sandwich.”

 

Thanks, Warren.