10 SONGS: 4/21/2020

10 Songs is a weekly list of ten songs that happen to be on my mind at the moment. Given my intention to usually write these on Mondays, the lists are often dominated by songs played on the previous night's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. The idea was inspired by Don Valentine of the essential blog I Don't Hear A Single.


This week's edition of 10 Songs draws exclusively from the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 1021.

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD: Flying On The Ground Is Wrong



During this week's show, I mentioned that "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" was the first Buffalo Springfield track I ever owned, courtesy of a 1970 budget sampler album called Do It Now, which I snatched from the fifty-cent bins at Mike's Sound Center in North Syracuse in 1977. Upon further review, I don't think this was quite my first Buffalo Springfield acquisition; I'm pretty sure I already owned my copy of the weird 2-LP sampler Heavy Metal, which contained a unique extended version of the group's "Bluebird." It's also likely that I picked up my copy of another sampler album, The Super Groups, during one or another of my spring '77 raids on the battered two-for-a-buck selections at Mike's Sound Center, and The Super Groups included Buffalo Springfield's "Mr. Soul" and the more familiar, shorter version of "Bluebird." So, "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" was, at best, the second Buffalo Springfield tune added to my library, and maybe the third. Sorry. You just can't trust DJs.



I've talked a little about those few visits to Mike's Sound Center in previous posts, especially in my reminiscence about snagging my cherished copy of The Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. there. I may yet re-visit the subject of that store in greater depth. In that spring of '77, I was a senior in high school. My interest in '60s music was voracious, fueled by...man, by anything I could get my hands on, any book I could read, any record I could hear, any vintage TV performance I could somehow manage to see. One evening, Syracuse University put on a presentation called Rock Of The '60s, a can't-miss chance to see clips of The Hollies, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Kinks, The Who, The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and more, culminating in a Dave Clark Five newsreel, The Beatles' "Revolution" video and their 1966 live TV performance in Japan. It was quite a program, and it also included Buffalo Springfield singing two songs on Hollywood Palace, "Mr. Soul" and "For What It's Worth." I'm sure I already had that Heavy Metal album and its nine-minute "Bluebird" by then, but that night at SU was when I became a Buffalo Springfield fan.

Buffalo Springfield guitarist Neil Young, formerly of The Mynah Birds

Oh, and I first read about Do It Now in either The Glass Teat or The Other Glass Teat, two collections of essays by Harlan Ellison. My copy of Do It Now is long, long gone, but I really oughtta write a full retrospective of that album for my Rescued From The Budget Bin! series. It was a hell of a set, odd and eclectic, with all the pristine sound one would expect from a Ronco Records product advertised on TV. And even if it didn't provide my first Buffalo Springfield track, it was pretty damned close.



THE DAMNED: Wait For The Blackout



The Damned famously began as a punk group, and they were the first British punk group to release an album, 1977's Damned Damned Damned, which beat Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols to retail by about ten months. I had an unusual introduction to The Damned, but I became a fan. And while I often tended to prefer punk groups when they were still punk groups, there's no question that "Wait For The Blackout" (from the group's 1980 psych-pop classic The Black Album) is my favorite among The Damned's catalog o' wonder.

THE DRIFTERS: Sweets For My Sweet



I have to presume that I knew The Drifters' original 1961 version of "Sweets For My Sweet" from somewhere, from oldies radio or whatever, when I was (in theory) growing up. It was a peripheral awareness, and not really a part of my ongoing pop consciousness. My go-to Drifters track was "On Broadway," and that's about it.



In the early '80s, I picked up a cut-out copy of a 1975 sampler LP called The Pye History Of British Pop Music : The British Invasion. I already owned a lot of its tracks, so looking back I've gotta presume I was drawn to it by The Foundations' "Build Me Up, Buttercup" and "Baby Now That I've Found You," and by the presence of a track by The Searchers, which was their cover of "Sweets For My Sweet."



I loved The Searchers, but my Searchers collection at that point fell well short of perfunctory. I had, I think, the Meet The Searchers and Take Me For What It's Worth LPs and a "Love Potion Number 9" 45, all on the Kapp Records label, and probably their then-recent Love's Melodies album on Sire. I picked up Love's Melodies in large part to finally possess a copy of someone performing "September Gurls;" my first Big Star purchase would have followed shortly thereafter. I did not own a Searchers best-of set. I hadn't heard their take on "Sweets For My Sweet" prior to buying this Pye sampler, but the track blew me away, especially with its falsetto backing vocals. Love at first spin, and I did buy Rhino Records' Searchers' Greatest Hits collection not long thereafter.

Within just a few years after that, I heard The Drifters' "Sweets For My Sweet" again, probably via an oldies show on Buffalo radio. And it just hit me, square, the way a pop song on the radio should. As much as I loved The Searchers' version, I now loved The Drifters' original even more. Nowadays, I go back and forth between which version is my favorite, generally opting for Drifters but cherishing The Searchers almost as much. Sweet.



THE FLIRTATIONS: Nothing But A Heartache



My sister had the Deram Records 45 of The Flirtations' 1969 soul-pop explosion "Nothing But A Heartache," and I had ample chance to listen to it over and over throughout the early '70s. The song rates a chapter in my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), and here's a little sample of what that says:

Like Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You," The Flirtations' "Nothing But A Heartache" is a noisy explosion of girl-group popcraft, trading the romantic, near-orgasmic bliss of Dusty's record for a lover's lament that is still no less magnetic, no less exuberant, even as the singer pines for an unattainable lover, a clueless cad who, apparently, doesn't want to be with her.

I say to hell with him.



"Nothing But A Heartache" was only a # 34 hit on the Hot 100, but it remains a surefire top-of-the-pops in my mind. There's a fantastic expanded CD version of The Flirtations' Sounds Like The Flirtations album, and while nothing else eclipses "Nothing But A Heartache," it's still puzzling that the group didn't have continued and greater success. And The Flirtations' holiday offering "Christmas Time Is Here Again" (not the Beatles song!) is an essential, underrated Yule tune. 



GEORGE HARRISON: What Is Life


Existential power pop! My favorite George Harrison track, whether solo or with that old group he was in. 



JUSTINE AND THE UNCLEAN: Vengeance



Driving and insidiously catchy. Sweet Cookie! The confident rhythm of this 2020 single by Justine and the Unclean brings to my mind both “Me Being Maximum” by Agony Aunts and "Get Your Own" by Alice Peacock, its “vengeance” lyric conjures The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” and it sounds like none of those. But it absolutely rocks, and I need to check out more of this combo’s material. I already know that related act Justine's Black Pearls do a mighty fine cover of The Searchers' "Needles And Pins" on their forthcoming album Cheap Vacation, and it all sounds custom-made for rock 'n' roll radio (and, of course, for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio). Sweeeet cookie!



GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS: Midnight Train To Georgia



Another song that will be featured in The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Here's an excerpt:

As listeners, as fans of pop music, it may be difficult to imagine the divine alchemy that transformed this unremarkable country tune into an all-time classic, a giant of pop soul. The percussive opening snaps and swings, establishing a groove that will pummel any impending impasse with extreme prejudice. The music sways, a luxurious flow of pure beauty, pristine wonder, a glimpse of Heaven shining on the Georgia clay. Gladys Knight sings, and my God, what kind of fool would even think of trying to deny her whatever she wants? The Pips support her with irresistible vocal fills and choreography that you can somehow, some way, see on your radio. It may be a miracle...

...But, even above all of these irresistible elements, "Midnight Train To Georgia" belongs to Gladys Knight. Her mastery of this song is complete and unquestioned, even as she sings of capitulation, of a woman surrendering her own dreams, retreating with her lover. As noted in a previous blog entry about the definitive rock 'n' roll jukebox: Lyrically, the tale verges on heartbreak: the girl is giving up everything else in her life, because the jerk she loves can't hack it in The Big Time, and she'd rather live in his world than live without him in hers. Knight's commanding delivery makes it sound like a celebration. Maybe it is.

Oddly enough, I initially did not like "Midnight Train To Georgia" at all. It was still a relatively current hit when I suddenly changed my mind about it, prompted by a TV appearance of Gladys Knight & the Pips singing (or maybe lip-syncing) the song. Something previously outta-whack inside me musta just clicked--I know it did!--and I've loved this record ever since.



NICK LOWE: So It Goes



A recurring point in my writings about pop music is my gratitude for people and things that went before, friends and periodicals and radio stations that turned me on to some specific sound or some particular purveyor of that sound. I consider myself lucky to have been the right age and in the right place at the right time to experience so much transcendent music. This pervasive thankfulness goes from the serendipity of having older siblings during the British Invasion to the happy coincidence of discovering a tabloid rock rag called Phonograph Record Magazine at the precise moment for those pages of newsprint to introduce me to punk rock. And it includes a lot of radio stations.

One such station was WOUR-FM in Utica, NY, whose signal was readily accessible in the Syracuse market. After years of devoted AM radio worship, I grew disenchanted with Top 40 around 1976, when I was 16. I certainly couldn’t give up on listening to the radio—let’s not get crazy—so I migrated to freer-form airwaves. WOUR looms largest in my legend for providing me with my first spin of The Sex Pistols in the summer of '77. But before that, amidst the wealth of introductions to songs and/or artists both new and old--Graham Parker's "Hotel Chambermaid," Greg Kihn's "For You," The J. Geils Band's "Musta Got Lost," Michael Nesmith's "Rio," Joan Baez's "Time Rag," The Kinks' "No More Looking Back," The Yardbirds' "Heart Full Of Soul," The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's "The Intro And The Outro," and so much more, WOUR played "So It Goes" by Nick Lowe.



"So It Goes" was the first single released by the upstart British label Stiff Records, a U.K.-only issue in August of 1976. WOUR jumped on that import single, and I heard it a lot, loving it more and more each time. It wasn't released in America until Lowe's debut LP Pure Pop For Now People (or Jesus Of Cool, as it was named in its native England) came out in 1978, in the spring semester of my freshman year in college. By then, it was a golden oldie to me, but still as current as the rest of my beloved new wave. And so it goes.

So it goes: Valerie Perrine in Slaughterhouse Five. Somebody will get it.

MONDELLO: Sherilyn



Mondello is John Moran's one-man band, which means John is The Smart One, The Talent, The Fool, Special, and The Bass Player. Onederful! This track from Mondello's 2019 album Hello, All You Happy People is a love song to actress Sherilyn Fenn. Well. Who could blame him?

If it wasn't written for her, we'll pretend it was.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: Who Loves The Sun


Who loves the sun? Who remembers the sun...?! I pray we'll all see it again soon.

"Who loves the sun?" is a Loaded question. THANK YOU! THANKS! We're here every day.

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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 128 essays about 128 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).