Escort Mk2 RS1800 1975-1977

Casting about for a topic for this post, I thought about famous birthdays. Gordon Lightfoot’s birthday was Tuesday, and I have plenty of Lightfoot tunes in the stacks and in the folders. But another day would be better for that, as there is a tale connected that I’m not yet prepared to tell.

I thought about writing about the books on my reading table, as I do occasionally. But I started a book yesterday that’s fascinating, and I want to finish it before I write about it. So that will have to wait.

We’ve had an odd November: sunny and warmer than one would expect. But I wrote about my fascination with autumn not that many days ago, and a post about the weather itself should wait until we have some truly remarkable meteorological happening.

I glanced at the front page of the Minneapolis paper: Budget cuts, a fatal bus crash, health care advisories and so on. Nothing there I care to write about.

It’s just one of those days. So here’s an appropriate selection of titles.

A Six-Pack of Nothing
“There’s Nothing Between Us Now” by Grady Tate from After the Long Drive Home [1970]
“Ain’t Nothing Gonna Change Me” by Betty LaVette from Child of the Seventies [1973]
“Nothing But A Heartache” by the Flirtations, Deram 85038 [1969]
“Nothing Against You” by the Robert Cray Band from Sweet Potato Pie [1997]
“Nothing But Time” by Jackson Browne from Running On Empty [1977]
“Nothing Will Take Your Place” by Boz Scaggs from Boz Scaggs & Band [1971]

One of the things I love about the world of music blogs is finding great tunes by folks who I’ve never heard about before. It turns out that Grady Tate, according to All-Music Guide, is a well-regarded session drummer who’s done some good vocal work as well. I’d never heard of the man until I somehow found myself exploring the very nice blog, My Jazz World. The brief description of Tate’s album After the Long Drive Home and the accompanying scan of the album cover drew me in, and I’ve spent quite a few quiet moments since then digging into Tate’s reflective and sometimes stoic album.

I’ve tagged Betty LaVette’s gritty piece of southern soul, “Ain’t Nothing Gonna Change Me,” as coming from 1973, as that’s when it was recorded. But the story is more complex than that. LaVette recorded the album, Child of the Seventies, for Atco in Muscle Shoals. But AMG notes that after a single from the sessions, “Your Turn to Cry” didn’t do well, the label shelved the entire project. It took until 2006 and a release on the Rhino Handmade label for the album itself to hit the shelves. The CD comes with bonus tracks that include LaVette’s cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” which was also released as a single. (My thanks to Caesar Tjalbo.)

A listener without the record label to examine would be excused from thinking that the Flirtation’s driving “Nothing But A Heartache” came from Detroit. The bass line, the drums and the punchy horns all proclaim “Motown,” but this nifty piece of R&B came out of England on the Deram label. The Flirtations, however, had their roots elsewhere: Sisters Shirley and Earnestine Pearce came from South Carolina and Viola Billups hailed from Alabama, so the record’s soul sound is legit, and it sounded pretty good coming out of a little radio speaker, too. The record spent two weeks in the Top 40 during the late spring of 1969, peaking at No. 34.

For Sweet Potato Pie, Robert Cray and his band made their way to Memphis and pulled together an album of blues-based soul. The combination of the Memphis Horns, Cray’s always-sharp guitar work and a good set of songs made the album, to my ears, one of Cray’s best. “Nothing Against You” is a good example of the album’s attractions.

“Nothing But Time” comes from Running On Empty, one of the more interesting live albums of the 1970s: All of the songs were new material, with some of them being recorded backstage, in hotel rooms or on the tour bus instead of in concert. As it happened, the album’s hits – “Running On Empty” and “Stay” – were concert recordings. But I’ve thought for a while that the recordings from the more intimate spaces – “Nothing But Time” was recorded on the tour bus as it rolled through New Jersey (you can hear the hum of the engine in the background) – might have aged a little better. That thought could stem from weariness after hearing the two hits over and over on the radio over the years; I do still like some of the other concert recordings from the album.

To my ears, Boz Scaggs’ slow-building and echoey “Nothing Will Take Your Place,” carries hints of the sound that would propel him to the top of the charts in 1976 with Silk Degrees. I guess it just took the mass audience – including me – a while to catch up with him.

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On an otherwise dull day at work, this sweet little item came across the wire: Bob Seger is coming out with a new CD chock full of some of his earliest songs.

That’s great news for those of us who have long preferred the young, spirited, in-your-face Seger of the late ’60s and early ’70s to the more familiar, more mainstream latter-day Seger.

Brian McCollum, writing in the Detroit Free Press, says it’s “a lineup of hard-to-find album cuts.” For most folks, probably. But not for those of us who are crate diggers, nor for those of us who grew up in the upper Midwest and heard Seger on the radio in those early days. He was well known regionally but hadn’t made it big nationally.

I have two of the three “long unavailable” LPs from which the new “Early Seger, Vol. 1″ is drawn. I’ve seen both at Amazing Records, my local vinyl record shop, in the last month.

The 10 cuts on the CD are a mix of tunes from “Smokin’ O.P.’s,” “Back In ‘72″ and “Seven,” all fine Detroit rockers released from 1972 to 1974. “Smokin’ O.P.’s” is mostly covers, the others mostly original material. There also are four unreleased tunes, one from 1977 and the others from 1985.

Seger also is apparently reviving a vintage Detroit label. “Early Seger, Vol. 1″ is being released on Hideout Records, once the home of crunchy Detroit rock, some it put out by Seger.

Seger remains loyal to his roots. At first, “Early Seger, Vol. 1″ will be sold only at Meijer’s stores starting Nov. 24. (Meijer’s is a big grocer and retailer in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.) Then it’ll be available at Seger’s Web site on Nov. 30. There might be a wider release early next year. But know this, too: Seger sells nothing digitally.

So here’s a sampler of early Seger … but not from the new CD. Perhaps from future volumes of “Early Seger,” which certainly seem possible.

“Vol. 1″ has a re-recorded version of this tune: “Long Song Comin’,” Bob Seger, from “Seven,” 1974. It’s out of print.

“Vol. 1″ also has Seger’s ever-so-slightly superior original version of this tune: “Get Out of Denver,” Dave Edmunds, from “Get It,” 1977.

But “Vol. 1″ doesn’t have this tune: “Love The One You’re With,” Bob Seger, from “Smokin’ O.P.’s,” 1972. On which Seger steps aside and leaves the lead vocals to Pam Todd and Crystal Jenkins.

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IMDB link  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075617/

IMDB ratings  6.1/10   1,399 votes

Release Date : 23 December 1977 (Finland)

Genre : Music

Plot: Movie detailing ABBA’s mega-successful tour of Australia during mid-1977. While it mostly contains back-stage footage and as well as ABBA’s famous songs such as “Dancing Queen”, “Tiger”, “Name Of The Game” and “Eagle” among others sung filmed during their concerts in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, it has the sub-plot of young country and western radio disc-jockey, Ashley, whose boss orders him to have a deep interview with ABBA and the problems he has trying to reach them as he forgets his press pass and ABBA’s main bodyguard, (Tom Oliver) is determined to stop him…

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ok, so the title is silly. ok so it was filmed low budget. ok so some fat comedian made fun of it. forget all that. the point is, this film is a work of abstract art.

the film was made for NO money over a long period of time by a man and his friends. the creator wasnt pulling  a Roger Corman and trying to make a film for as little as possible to maximize profit, and he wasnt pulling a Quentin Tarantino by trying to make a bad movie. he was just making a film that he really wanted to make. in the same way that Jackson Pollock was just making art that he wanted to make.

that aside, the film takes a strange and almost unsettling idea and creates a puzzling film out of it. for those of you who want to buy a copy, go to amazon HERE, or for a pretty heavy overview of the plot just go HERE.

the magic of this movie is the way that George Barry takes the story and just runs with it. he doesnt let there be enough time to question the ghost of the artist, trapped in pain behind his own painting (a beautiful statement on artists being bound to their creations even after death), or the bed’s seemingly other dimensional stomach. he simply uses his shoestring budget and a massive sense of creativity to craft a movie that raises more questions than the average ‘intellectual drama’. the question of the extend of a demon’s power is brought up. also the question of who creates life. the bed is not only born of a demon’s hands, but it comes to life fully after the demon has sex with a woman on it. it is as though the bed is the demon’s own child. the film also makes you wonder just what the bed feels. the bed is portrayed as something with emotions, but no real way to show them. it shares some level of a link with the ghost trapped within the painting. and it seems to have kept the ghost around. the ghost himself says that it may be because he was sick and dying when the bed ate him, but i think it may very well be that the bed was lonely. the bed does give the ghost lavish gifts that it takes off of it’s victims. rings, nail polish and such.

some of the acting is poor. some of the film stock is poor. and all of the ideas behind the film are weird. but there is a true art, and an attention to detail within the work.

i will defend this film against mockery. it can not be said that it was lazy, stupid, not thought out, or poorly made. this film is an interesting experience, and i cant recommend it enough.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film stars Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and Cary Guffey. It tells the story of Roy Neary, an Indiana electrical lineman, whose life changes after he has an encounter with an unidentified flying object. However, the United States government is also aware of the UFOs as is a team of international scientific researchers.

Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science fiction film. Though Spielberg receives sole credit for the script, he was assisted by Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins and Jerry Belson, all of whom contributed to the screenplay in varying degrees.

The title is derived from astronomer/ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the third kind denotes human observations of actual aliens or “animate beings”.

Filming began in May 1976. Douglas Trumbull served as the visual effects supervisor, while Carlo Rambaldi designed the aliens. Close Encounters was released in November 1977 and was a critical and financial success. The film was reissued in 1980 as Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition, which featured additional scenes. A third cut of the film was released to home video (and later DVD) in 1998. The film received numerous awards and nominations at the 50th Academy Awards, 32nd British Academy Film Awards, the Saturn Awards and has been widely acclaimed by the American Film Institute. In December 2007 it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in National Film Registry.

Here are the top-30 movies from the 70’s. This decade is the best one. I always said that the best movies were made in the 70’s. Take a look for yourself and hit that video store on the way home. Ladies and gentlemen, the best movies from 1970-1979…

1. The Godfather part II (1974) Director: Francis Ford Coppola
2. A Clockwork Orange (1971) Director: Stanley Kubrick
3. The Godfather (1972) Director: Francis Ford Coppola
4. Jaws (1975) Director: Steven Spielberg
5. Barry Lyndon (1975) Director: Stanley Kubrick
6. Annie Hall (1977) Director: Woody Allen
7. Chinatown (1974) Director: Roman Polanski
8. The Deer Hunter (1978) Director: Michael Cimino
9. The Exorcist (1973) Director: William Friedkin
10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Director: Milos Forman
11. Apocalypse Now (1979) Director: Francis Ford Coppola
12. Marathon Man (1976) Director: John Schlesinger
13. Manhattan (1979) Director: Woody Allen
14. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) Director: John Landis
15. Papillon (1973) Franklin J. Schaffner
16. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Director: Steven Spielberg
17. The Tenant (1976) Director: Roman Polanski
18. Deliverance (1972) Director: John Boorman
19. The French Connection (1971) Director: William Friedkin
20. Taxi Driver (1976) Director: Martin Scorsese
21. Love and Death (1975) Director: Woody Allen
22. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Director: Sydney Lumet
23. Five Easy Pieces (1970) Director: Bob Rafelson
24. Serpico (1973) Director: Sydney Lumet
25. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) Director: Robert Benton
26. All the President’s Men (1976) Director: Alan J. Pakula
27. The Last Detail (1973) Director: Hal Ashby
28. Midnight Express (1978) Director: Alan Parker
29. Three Days of the Condor (1975) Director: Sydney Pollack
30. Play It Again, Sam (1972) Director: Woody Allen

THE TRAILERS FOR THE TOP 3 BEST MOVIES OF 1970-1979

Everybody hates something, and often, our choices are highly personal. Nevertheless, there’s a certain consensus about the most reviled Top-40 hits of all time: “Muskrat Love,” “You’re Having My Baby,” “Run Joey Run,” and “Seasons in the Sun” would make most people’s lists, I think. And “You Light Up My Life,” too. In my experience, that’s one people tend to forget.

“You Light Up My Life,” recorded by Debby Boone, daughter of Pat, was released on August 16, 1977. (That’s the same day Elvis Presley died, although the autopsy showed no correlation.) Its chart debut came on September 3 at Number 71, and it embarked on a respectable-but-not-spectacular climb up the chart. The week of October 8, however, it took an enormous leap from 15 to 3, and the week after that, “You Light Up My Life” hit Number One, where it would stay for 10 weeks, the longest stretch at the top for a single song since 1956. It also hit on the country chart, reaching Number 4.

Week after week during the fall of 1977 other songs stormed the castle, but none could take it: “Keep It Comin’ Love” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon, “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave, and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle all peaked at Number Two, Carly and Crystal for three weeks each. Finally, during the week of December 17, the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” reached the second spot, and it took out the queen on December 24, 1977.

“You Light Up My Life” would remain in the Hot 100 until late February 1978. In the final accounting, it’s the Number One song of the 1970s. It was nominated for Record of the Year at the Grammys (and Boone won Best New Artist); it also won the Oscar for Best Original Song.  But the odd thing about “You Light Up My Life” is that it vanished from history almost as soon as it left the charts. The song was disappeared, like a Soviet official who was declared a nonperson and never officially existed. (Or like George W. Bush to the Republicans now.) Oldies stations don’t play it; easy-listening stations don’t play it—and if I’m recalling correctly, it stopped getting much radio play almost from the moment it left the charts. It’s as if collective embarrassment over our embrace of such bland schlock caused us to repress the memory entirely.

It’s arguable that the same impulse repressed Debby Boone’s career. She was unable to follow up on her mega-hit, returning to the Hot 100 only twice, with “California” and “God Knows,” both in 1978. She did a bit better on the country charts over the years, even reaching Number One with “Are You On the Road to Lovin’ Me Again” in 1980.  Eventually, she moved into Christian music (no surprise given that she had imagined the “you” in “You Light Up My Life” to be God), acted on the stage, raised a family, and wrote children’s books.

The song’s blandness and Boone’s faceless performance of it made it ripe for cover versions, and for a particular sort of cover version at that: Every easy-listening artist you can name recorded it, including Engelbert Humperdinck, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, the Ray Conniff Singers, and Mantovani. It’s also been cut by Leann Rimes, Kenny Rogers, Whitney Houston, and the Irish group Westlife, who turned it into a boy-band ballad for the generation whose parents were pre-teens in 1977. In 1979, the Three Degrees did it for a British TV special. Adding a little soul helped it a lot—hell, adding a harmony vocal line helped it a lot.

In the end, perhaps the only way we can explain the unprecedented success of “You Light Up My Life” is what explains many strange excesses: It was the 1970s. We couldn’t help ourselves.

Same as it ever was?

I’m old: I have several silver hairs sprouting up around my temples just like Earth-2 Superman, pop music makes me angry, and if I don’t get to bed before 11 PM, I tend to be forgetful at work the next day and wander away from my cubicle.  And, like most old people, I am of the firm conviction that everything was way better when I was younger.  The rock stars wore more makeup, the movies had more space ships, and the tv shows had more hair.  Hell, even the bad things were somehow cut from a finer cloth than the bad things we’re stuck with today.  When I was younger, bad things were bad in a way that had meaning and gravitas.  These bad things–like the nuclear threat presented by the Soviet Bloc, and the belligerent wholesomeness of The Lawrence Welk Show– represented the culmination of a generation’s worth of massive-scale ideological brinksmanship from which there could be no turning back.   I’m talking about a time when the “zealot” pigeonhole was big enough to house more than just a contingent of Middle Eastern malcontents; back in the day, bad things and their respective attendants truly believed in their causes.  And they meant business.  With this historical perspective in mind, I really have a hard time taking Carrie Prejean seriously.  After all, I remember Anita Bryant.

Anita Bryant: now there’s a bitch to contend with.  I stumbled upon Bryant in an article in Time about her campaign to “Save Our Children From Homosexuality” when I was 8 years old.  I didn’t know what homosexuality was.  I did know I liked Nova from Planet of the Apes a whole bunch.   And Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels.  And that one girl in my class who was really good at dodgeball.  I wasn’t able to make the connection between myself and the people Anita Bryant sought to oppress, but nonetheless, I came away from that Time article feeling a mixture of anger and indignation.  I didn’t know much about hatred or intolerance back then, either, but thanks to Anita Bryant, I found myself on the fast track to learning.  Who the hell did she think she was, taking rights away from people and telling them how to live, I smoldered.  And right there, on the spot, I made that most sacred of grade school vows: ”Anita Bryant is not the boss of me!”

Anita Bryant was hard-core.  She didn’t just want to “protect marriage” from the “gay menace”; she wanted to legalize discrimination against gay people in regards to housing, employment, and public accommodation.  In other words, Anita Bryant wanted a world in which the difference between hobo and homo amounted to a handful of tattered accessories and a certain way of walking.  And she wanted that world badly enough to found and head up an organization (hysterically named Save Our Children) to create that world.  Bryant was a Disney villainess of a sort:  a larger than life persona with arched eyebrows, cold eyes, and a strangely wolfish smile who carried within her cloaks the threat Your Children Are Not Safe.  And as such, her tactics played to the darkest fears of middle America: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.” 

Anita Bryant got results.  She was able to rally up enough hatred and terror to not only make legal gay oppression in her home of Dade County, Florida, but to create an environment in which homophobia maintained a 31-year stranglehold on the rights of gay people to adopt children in that state.  Because of Anita Bryant and her efforts with Save Our Children people lost jobs, they were prohibited housing, and thousands of children were denied safe and loving homes.  That bitch was no joke.

Which brings me to Carrie Prejean.  Granted, the cultural landscape has changed significantly since I was a kid, and despite my geriatric gripes, it has changed for the better.  While things are far from perfect, at least the trumped-up allegations that Bryant used to trumpet in the mainstream media have toned down to hissed innuendoes from the fringe.  The battle field is no longer one upon which we are forced to struggle for our basic rights to work for a living or maintain a roof over our heads, but to obtain the same protections and rights for our committed relationships and families that are enjoyed and sometimes taken for granted by straight people.  So a new age brings forth a new beauty queen to try to be the boss of us.  But Carrie Prejean is no Anita Bryant.

Carrie Prejean is an opportunist.  She became famous because she made the statement “…I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there.”  (I can almost envision Anita Bryant looking up from the green glow emanating from her enormous caldron, snarling “‘No offense?!?’”)  Carrie Prejean did not found the National Organization for Marriage.  She doesn’t lead it.  She is employed by it.   In essence, anyone who focuses their frustration on Carrie Prejean is as misguided as those dorks who confused Joe Camel with the tobacco industry. 

Carrie Prejean has no strength in her alleged convictions.   Witness her pathetic display of ignorance and immaturity on The Larry King Show this week when asked why she had settled her “religious discrimination” lawsuit against the Miss USA pageant.  As if it wasn’t lame enough to back down from the question “Why settle since you had a fight to carry on?”, Prejean had to take it one step further into Wussy Wonderland by pussing out and pouting instead of taking a call from a gay viewer.  She is not a crusader.  She is a paid spokesmodel who couldn’t hold up her side of a debate if it came equipped with E-Z grip handles.  Based on this week’s performance on King, I’d say the powers that be over at NOM are probably regretting their investment even more than the Miss USA pageant regrets buying Prejean’s breast implants.  At least the implants are doing their job.

Carrie Prejean has allegedly written a book.  The volume is a testament to Prejean’s mastery of the literary arts in that it clearly has a front cover, a back cover, a dust jacket, and pages that are made of paper.  Furthermore, it demonstrates Prejean’s level of commitment as a gay rights opponent as its title, Still Standing,  bears more than a passing resemblance to “I’m Still Standing”, the 1983 hit song by gay marriage activist Elton John.  I can’t wait until Prejean’s Still Standing hits the cutout bin so I can buy it; my copy of Chastity Bono’s Family Outing is lonely and hasn’t had anyone call it “Daddy” since my copy of The Total Woman was consumed by feminist termites.

I could go on.  And on.  The point is, Carrie Prejean is a joke that practically writes itself.  If she’s the worst that the opposition has for us, the future of Gay Marriage in America is far brighter than she is.

01 – Norman Connors – You Are Everything.mp3
02 – Norman Connors – Once I’ve Been There.mp3
03 – Norman Connors – Destination Moon.mp3
04 – Norman Connors – Romantic Journey.mp3
05 – Norman Connors – Last Tango In Paris.mp3
06 – Norman Connors – For You Everything.mp3
07 – Norman Connors – Thembi.mp3
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http://www.easy-share.com/1908433930/Romantic_Journey.rar