1971 music – 50th Music Anniversaries and Other Musings

February 1971 – Crazy Horse Debuts

February 1971: Crazy Horse – Crazy Horse

Some of the most enjoyable discoveries for me as a music fan are the ones that come about by chance. With Crazy Horse, it happened a number of years back while wading through used discs in a store I no longer recall. There appeared before me a title which simply read Crazy Horse. I wondered to myself, “As in Neil Young & Crazy Horse?” It hadn’t occurred to me that the group had recorded albums without Neil, but here was evidence they had. Noticing the release year and recognizing two of the track titles as songs performed with Neil (Dance, Dance, Dance & Downtown) it was an obvious purchase, and I was not disappointed. The core band that emerged from ashes of The Rockets – Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina, plus Jack Nitzsche and Nils Lofgren – first as backing band to Neil Young on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and in a more limited role on After the Gold Rush, released their eponymous debut 50 years ago this month.

One thing that stands out to me when perusing the liner notes is that the name Neil Young appears only twice, first with sole songwriting credit on Dance, Dance, Dance, and then with a co-credit along with Danny Whitten on Downtown – a song that would eerily reappear on Young’s Tonight’s the Night album a few years later as a live track featuring Whitten, who’d passed away in 1972. From a music standpoint, Crazy Horse is a damn fine rock album from start to finish, and I wonder if the band’s best-known status as “one of Neil’s bands” helps or hinders the album’s place in the pantheon of albums from the 1960’s and 70’s.

Neil Young News: A Conversation with Ralph Molina | North of the Internet — Molina & Talbot

I’d known about the sad demise of Danny Whitten strictly within the context of his involvement with Young but listening to this album brings home just how talented he was, especially as a rock vocalist. He wrote five of the eleven tracks, and all but three feature him as lead singer. Among my favorite Whitten vocals are the opener Gone Dead Train (subtly driven by Jack Nitzsche’s piano), Look at All the Things (which could’ve been a blueprint for much of their work with Neil), Nitzsche’s Carolay (which hints at Jack’s experience as conductor/arranger for the now late Phil Spector), and his signature song, the sad ballad I Don’t Want to Talk About It – a track made somewhat famous when recorded by Rod Stewart in 1975. This original is enhanced by the sweet slide guitar work of guest player Ry Cooder, who also appears on Whitten’s Dirty Dirty and Nitzsche’s Crow Jane Lady.

Then-nineteen-year-old Nils Lofgren contributed two tracks, including one of my favorites on the album, Beggars Day, which features a much more gravelly, experienced sounding vocal than might be expected from someone so young. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Joe Walsh in his James Gang days. Even the guitar solo is familiar in that regard. Crazy Horse is a no-frills rock band, and saying anything else about this album would just be unnecessary hyperbole. If you like the Horse with Neil Young, listen to this album. The louder the better.

Tracklist

Side One:

Gone Dead Train
Dance, Dance, Dance
Look at All the Things
Beggars Day
I Don’t Want to Talk About It

Side Two:

Downtown
Carolay
Dirty, Dirty
Nobody
I’ll Get By
Crow Jane Lady

-Stephen

https://www.allmusic.com/album/crazy-horse-mw0000113305

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_(album)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don%27t_Want_to_Talk_About_It

February 1 – When Ginger Baker Battled Elvin Jones

2/1/71: Ginger Baker vs. Elvin Jones

Nothing happenin…Cat’s got delusions of grandeur with no grounds. They should make him an astronaut and lose his ass! – Jazz great Elvin Jones on Ginger Baker

In an industry teeming with characters, Ginger Baker stood out. Whether it was his trademark red lion’s mane back in the day or his pissed off at the world countenance as seen in the fantastic 2012 documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, one could never rightly suggest he lacked self-confidence or balls or however you want to put it. Baker always considered himself to be a jazz drummer who played in rock bands – although he did consider Cream to be a jazz group – and he aimed to prove that as fact with his post-Blind Faith project Ginger Baker’s Air Force, which combined rock, western jazz, and Afro-jazz influences. Word of Baker’s jazz bravado seeped into the jazz scene.

When a journalist played the lengthy Blind Faith track Do What You Like for jazz great Elvin Jones, a veteran drummer who spent a career as side man for the likes of Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, and perhaps most notably John Coltrane, Jones was not impressed and he made it known. As chatter between the two increased and a “battle” was on the horizon, Jones is alleged to have told an audience at one of his shows that “Baker had better put his drums where his mouth is.”

Ginger Baker vs Elvin Jones, Lyceum 1970 – SMART

The great drum-off took place at London’s Lyceum Theatre during the Air Force tour on this day 50 years ago, when Jones joined the ensemble on Aiko Biaye and a thirty-two minute Do What You Like (YouTube link above), trading drum licks with Baker. On the latter track, the soloing begins at roughly the nine-minute mark. When the drums ceased to pound, there were smiles and an embrace. Jazz journalists called it a Jones victory while rock scribes felt Baker more than held his own. Perhaps as much as anything, the “challenge” further cemented the legend of the jazz drummer in the wrong genre where, by the way, Baker was also the greatest – at least in his own mind.

Baker would later challenge another jazz great, Art Blakey, but late in life would scoff at the notion of the events being anything other than duets which took place in the spirit of mutual respect and admiration. Either way, the colliding of two worlds certainly spiced up the music scene.

Ginger Baker and Art Blakey in 1973:

-Stephen

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/ginger-baker-elvin-jones/#:~:text=Ginger%20Baker%20never%20wanted%20to,no%20small%20amount%20of%20bravado.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8532290/ginger-baker-dead-jazz-drummer-rock-reputation/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvin_Jones

https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/famed-drummer-ginger-baker-talks-about-playing-alongside-legends-getting-older-and-his-cantankerous-reputation/Content?oid=1834231

January 1, 1971 – It’s About the Music, Maaan!

Happy 1971, friends! This is the fourth year for my blog, chronologically speaking, but since I mostly skipped the year 1969 it’s basically my third. If I were a baseball player, I’d be a streaky hitter and semi-reliable fielder. When it comes to my blogging I’m either all in or struggling to turn on my computer. I don’t know why I’m so consistently inconsistent, but writing helps keep my brain synapses firing and I mostly enjoy the process. I continue to love music from the now mostly bygone era of 50 years ago, and I’m still hearing some recordings from that era (and earlier) for the first time, so I’ll continue to babble about them in these pages.

Ted Sizemore – Society for American Baseball Research

By 1971, most of the dayglow optimism of America’s youth as found in popular music had been scraped off and painted over in various shades of gray. Songwriters were creating more introspective music reflective of that come down. Vietnam still raged on, and America’s racial and economic divide showed no sign of improving despite earlier socio-political efforts to that end (I found that filed in a folder labeled “The more things change…”). Hard drugs were taking a toll everywhere, from everyday young folk to soldiers returning from Southeast Asia, and of course on the music scene. As Joni Mitchell would lament in June of that year, “Acid, booze, and ass, needles, guns, and grass, lots of laughs…”

Some of the most popular music of the still new decade – often forgettable in any era – was vapid bubblegum dreck for people who didn’t want to know “what’s going on” in the first place.* As depressing as all this may sound, 1971 is the heart of my favorite ten year span of music. And beginning with album releases at the end of the second month of that year I can finally say I was alive when they came out. Let’s set the stage, shall we?

Bands that said sayonara in 1971: Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Country Joe & the Fish, Derek & the Dominos, Fotheringay, Free, The Mamas & the Papas, The Monkees, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, and Sounds Inc.

New acts in 1971: Big Star, Billy Joel, The Charlie Daniels Band, The Eagles, Foghat, Jo Jo Gunne, Loggins & Messina, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Manassas, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, The Motels, New York Dolls, Paul McCartney & Wings, Roxy Music, Sister Sledge, Split Enz, and Vinegar Joe (Robert Palmer).

Cosmic American Blog: Split Enz: Two Finns From New Zealand

There’s really nothing earth shattering about the first collection of bands listed above. Booker T. & the M.G.’s ended up re-forming, Derek & the Dominos & Fotheringay were basically one-off groups anyway, albeit with very well-known leaders who continued on, and a couple members of Free would form one of the biggest acts of the 70’s with an updated Free sound. The new acts contained part of the origins of glam, punk, disco, and new wave (and a former Beatle who dabbled in some of those genres at various points in the ensuing years), not to mention one of the most influential groups of all time when it came to future bands, yet who remain one of the most underappreciated groups ever to enter a recording studio when it comes to the masses.

So, here’s to 2021 being a better year than 2020. I hope you continue to stop by for a reminder of what was good in music 50 years ago as we once again ring in the new year of 1971. Cheers!

-Stephen

*Sometimes I don’t mind vapid bubblegum dreck.