At Sixty

"Society's Child" in 1967 made her famous -- and controversial -- at the age of 16.  But it was "At Seventeen" that won us over in 1975, the year Janis Ian turned 24 and won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance. Her album Between the Lines that year was a revelation, and we played the grooves out of it on our Pioneer turntable in a dive apartment in Ocala, Florida.

Check out the video above from the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test.  Then do yourself a favor and click on this link as well because Janis Ian, who turns 60 today, knows the truth and has the perspective we all seek in music and in life.

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth...

Hats off to Haggard

Are we rolling down hill like a snowball headed for hell With no kind of chance for the flag or the liberty bell
Wish a Ford and a Chevy
Could still last ten years like they should
Is the best of the free life behind us now
Are the good times really over for good

Things have been heading south since Merle Haggard wrote "Are the Good Times Really Over" back in 1981. Let's not even go into detail.

But you know what? Haggard turns 74 today and in another month he'll be back on tour, spreading his working man blues to audiences that can't get enough of a bad thing. And that's a good thing.

Haggard has cranked out more than 30 No. 1 songs and he's been in the Country Music Hall of Fame since 1994. And that stretch of time he did at San Quentin before he got his first recording contract? Hell, that was erased by a pardon back when Ronald Reagan was governor of California.

Everything is relative, and we have to believe that life has been relatively good to Haggard, despite the downtrodden tone and lyrics to most of his songs.  We love 'em all, but if forced to list our 10 favorites right here and now it would go something like this (some days we'd switch the order; some days we'd pick different songs):

1. Workin' Man Blues
2. I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink
3. Okie From Muskogee
4. The Fightin' Side of Me
5. If We Make It Through December
6. Mama Tried
7. Daddy Frank
8. Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star
9. Bar Room Buddies
10. Let's Chase Each Other Around the Room

UPDATE: Spooky, after posting today we received this email from Amazon.com:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
Customers who have purchased or rated music by Merle Haggard might like to know that 20 hits is now available. You can order yours for just $9.98 by following the link below.  20 hits by Merle Haggard, Price: $9.98

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000000DCG/ref=pe_5080_19476700_snp_dp

It's baseball season, let's play two (sets)

Meet a new Sanctuarian: Mike Tierney has lived in Atlanta for almost a quarter-century, which damn near makes him a native, though he refuses to snip his Kentucky roots. His life-long passion for live music has dwindled from bi-monthly concerts to quarterly, but he still regularly lends an ear to guitar-driven, bass-and-drums-pounding music, both fresh and venerable.

By Mike Tierney

Tuesdays with
Tierney has a
nice legitimate
ring to it, so
check here on
this day for the
latest from our
greatest Atlanta
contributor.

The Star Bar in the Little Five Points section of Atlanta pretty much meets the definition of a dive bar. It offers only two choices on draught that represent the extremes of the popular beer spectrum, Miller High Life and Guinness. (Most patrons opt for PBR in a can.) If you ever invited a hundred of your closest friends there, they would have to be thin or highly tolerable, given the compactness of the place.

Hardly the locale you would expect to see three-fifths of R.E.M. on what amounts to the Star Bar stage. That is, if you stood on tiptoe, the stage rising maybe a foot off the ground.

The occasion was the tour opener, as it were, for The Baseball Project, a side venture of various R.E.M.-ers and an underappreciated rocker named Steve Wynn, the force behind the '80s cult band Dream Syndicate.

Turns out, Wynn is a onetime aspiring sportswriter who found he shared a passion for baseball with R.E.M. guitarists Peter Buck and Scott McGaughey (who has yet to be designated an official member because management, a la Chuck Leavell with the Rolling Stones, stubbornly recognizes only the originals.)

Anyhoo, Wynn and his drummer/wife just released the second Baseball Project album (CD? record? collection of downloadable songs?) even as R.E.M. just unveiled theirs.

Instead of touring with Michael Stipe in large arenas, Buck and McGaughey are doing claustrophobic clubs with the vastly unerappreciated Wynn, who can string together basic chords like nobody's business.

Better yet, the songs spin narratives of real baseball happenings, from the recent to the distant past. They are rich in detail, often funny, always interesting. (One catchy number is "Ted F*@*ing Williams").

And ya gotta love a chick pounding the tom-tom and singing about the Minnesota Twins.

Oh, yeah, the reference to three-fifths. On the edge of the stage, hunched over a keyboard, was guest performer Mike Mills, an Atlantan who dropped by to see his pals and lend a valuable sound to the mix. (Confused? Understandable. With R.E.M., Mills plays bass, a duty that Buck has adopted with The Baseball Project).

The night delivered a batch of songs that brought smiles and tapping toes, not to mention lasting visual memories of a majority of the incomparable band from Athens spreading their wings.

The Baseball Project may be coming to a town near you -- in more spacious venues, to be sure, than the Star Bar. They are worth hearing, if not seeing.

In Memory of Berry Oakley

You will not find Berry Oakley's name on the Rolling Stone list of the 10 greatest bass players of all time, as chosen recently by the magazine's readers.  Listen to the Allman Brothers' album Live at the Fillmore East and please tell us why?

(Nor will you find James Jamerson of the Funk Brothers, Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone, Donald "Duck" Dunn or Bootsy Collins on this list.  We weren't even going to bring up Tina Weymouth, but we watched Stop Making Sense again last week and couldn't help ourselves.)

We take up defense of Oakley today, though, on what would have been his 63rd birthday.  As most of us remember he died in 1972 following a motorcycle accident within a few blocks of where bandmate Duane Allman was killed just a year earlier. Spooky stuff.

We loved Oakley's contributions to the Allman Brothers and believe he should be on anybody's list of favorite bass players.  We realize this is subjective stuff, but just follow "Whipping Post" through its 23:03 run and see if you don't agree.  "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" might also help convince you.

Here is the Rolling Stone list:

1. John Entwistle, The Who
2. Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. Paul McCartney, Beatles
4. Geddy Lee, Rush
5. Les Claypool, Primus
6. John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin
7. Jaco Pastorius, Weather Report, et al
8. Jack  Bruce, Cream
9. Cliff  Burton, Metallica
10. Victor Wooten, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

Throwing you a curve

By Al Tays


SSS contributor Al Tays is a native

Bostonian currently sampling the

Left Coast lifestyle. The highlights

so far: Discovering L.A. street dogs,

listening to Junior Brown's "Surf

Medley" while driving his Chrysler

Sebring convertible down the Pacific

Coast Highway, and taking his wife

to Vegas so they could get re-married

by Elvis. Meanwhile, Pumpkin the

cockatiel digs Charlie Parker.

Naturally.

 When you're new to a place as famous as L.A., there are lots of L.A. things to do. Which is how Mrs. Assistant Music Blogger and I found ourselves one day cruising the Sunset Strip, heading west and looking for Dead Man's Curve.

I bring this up because today would have been Jan Berry's 70th birthday. Unfortunately the "Jan" of Jan and Dean died in 2004 at age 62. He had been in poor health for years, the result of brain damage suffered in a 1966 car crash near -- but not at -- Dead Man's Curve.

Jan Berry and Dean Torrence were the guys who sounded a lot like the Beach Boys, doing songs that celebrated surfing and cars. They went to No. 1 with "Surf City" (written by Beach Boy Brian Wilson) in 1963, No. 3 with "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" in 1964 and No. 8 that same year with "Dead Man's Curve."

Not gonna lie -- I wasn't a big fan of "Dead Man's Curve." As a car song, I never thought it stood up to "Little GTO," "Little Deuce Coupe," "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" (what was with all the "littles"?) or "Hot Rod Lincoln."

But you'd be hard pressed to find a song with more lore. Berry crashed his Corvette (the two cars in the song were a Corvette Stingray and a Jaguar XKE) into a parked truck on Whittier Drive, a street that intersects Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

It's accepted that Dead Man's Curve is on Sunset -- in the song, the race starts at Sunset and Vine -- but exactly where is it? Sunset turns almost 90 degrees just west of Whittier, but is that Dead Man's Curve? When my wife and I drove Sunset all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway, we counted 11 different bends where we said, "This HAS to be it."

In researching this subject I found some support for Dead Man's Curve being just north of the UCLA campus, about a mile west of where Berry crashed.

Another part of the Dead Man's Curve story is its link to Bugs Bunny. (No, I haven't gone around the bend -- pun intended. Work with me here.)

On Jan. 24, 1961, Mel Blanc, the voice actor most famous for his cartoon characters, was involved in a head-on crash on Sunset. Blanc suffered a skull fracture and was in a coma for three weeks. According to his autobiography, some of the thousands of get-well cards he received were addressed simply to "Bugs Bunny, Hollywood, USA."

Some reports say the song was inspired by Blanc's crash, but I'm not buying it. Stories of tragic ends to drag races are as old as cars themselves, and I've yet to come across a definitive reference to Berry or the songwriter he worked with, Roger Christian, verifying a Blanc connection.

One last word about the song. Apparently Christian wanted the race to end in a tie, but Berry insisted on a crash. Spooky.

So let's end things here on a happier note. What do you think are the 10 best car songs of all time? Got plenty to choose from. Here's my list:

1. Mustang Sally, Wilson Pickett (love The Commitments' version, too)
2. Little GTO, Ronny & the Daytonas
3. Fun, Fun, Fun, Beach Boys
4. Little Old Lady From Pasadena, Jan and Dean
5. Cadillac Ranch, Bruce Springsteen
6. Maybelline, Chuck Berry
7. Low Rider, War
8. Hot Rod Lincoln, Commander Cody
9. Little Deuce Coupe, Beach Boys
10. Mercury Blues, David Lindley

Now show me yours. C ya next week.

What's going on

We couldn't believe our eyes upon gazing at today's Birthday Band.  This group is so impressive we decided to "tap" e-tarochi.com, our reliable source for all things astrological. Here's an excerpt from the website's profile for April 2:

Many good musicians, authors and artists are born on this day and so you too may be endowed with a sense of the aesthetic and artistic. You exhibit high imagination, idealism and are no doubt a dreamer who likes to fantasise. You will need a very strong sense of your own personal and domestic space. ... It is important for you to control your fiery emotions and direct that energy constructively.

Now it might just be a pile of hoo-hah, but this being the birthday of Marvin Gaye we can't help but wonder about the circumstances surrounding his death. We know he was fatally shot by his father during an argument on April 1, 1984, just one day short of his 45th birthday. Those are the facts, and we'll stick to them because today also happens to be the birthday of Jack Webb.

But they won't stop us from putting What's Going On in the player, listening to a sacred collection of songs and reflecting on a truly gifted artist. In the liner notes to the 1971 album Gaye thanks his parents "for conceiving, having and loving me," and adds "check out the Ten Commandments too. You can't go too far wrong if you live them, dig it. ... Thanks for life and loved ones. Thank you Jesus."

Marvin Gaye (1939-1984), Singer
I Heard It Through the Grapevine, What's Going On, Sexual Healing

Leon Russell (1942): Singer, keyboards
Tight Rope, Lady Blue

Glen Dale (1943): Guitar/vocals,  The Fortunes
You've Got Your Troubles, Here It Comes Again

Kurt Winter (1946-1997): Guitar, Guess Who
Share The Land , Bus Rider, Hand Me Down World

Leon Wilkeson (1952-2001): Bass, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Sweet Home Alabama, Gimme Three Steps, Free Bird

David Robinson (1953): Drums, Cars
My Best Friend's Girl, Shake It Up, Drive

Buffalo Springfield again

It ended for Buffalo Springfield on May 5, 1968 at the Long Beach Arena, barely two years after it had begun. With a lineup that included Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Jim Messina, there was definitely something happening there. But what it was, as the lyrics explained, wasn't exactly clear. Not at the time it wasn't.

"For What It's Worth" -- the band's signature hit -- topped out at No. 7 . "Expecting to Fly" from the self-titled debut album barely cracked the Hot 100 (No. 98). And the cultish "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" never never sniffed the charts. This was not a singles band. Nevertheless Buffalo Springfield generated three fine albums before its members splintered off to do much grander things.

And now, 43 years later, the band is back for six California shows and an appearance at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee. The lineup will include Young, Stills and Furay, along with bass player Rick Rosas and drummer Joe Vitale.

The schedule:

June 1, Fox Theater, Oakland, CA
June 2, Fox Theater, Oakland, CA
June 4, Wiltern Theater, Los Angeles, CA
June 5, Wiltern Theater, Los Angeles, CA
June 7, Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA
June 8, Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA
June 11, Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, Manchester, TN

Word is there will be a national tour cranking up in September. Here's hopin' ...