While I Am Picking On The Monkees......A Little Trivia

The music scene would have been quite different forty years ago today if fate had not intervened in 1966 when Stephen Stills auditioned for the Monkees. Stephen was rejected for the part due to his bad teeth.

Because of that rejection, 1970 produced two great albums: Deja Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (March 11, 1970) and Stephen's first solo album (November 16, 1970). Thank God for bad teeth.

Each of these albums will be discussed later this year on their release dates.

A Sad Day In Rock History

I should have written about this yesterday but just thinking about it made me tear up and I decided to delay writing about it till today. So here goes........

Forty years ago yesterday Davy Jones announced he was leaving the Monkees. Music would never be the same...........HA HA HA HA HA HA

Nobody cared then and nobody cares today. Sorry Davy but sometimes the truth hurts!

The Guess Who......American Woman

Artist: The Guess Who

Album: American Woman

Release Date: January, 1970

The Guess Who were a Canadian rock band that had been around in various permutations since the early 60s. What I consider to be the classic Guess Who lineup started to take shape in the mid to late 60s and was centered around Burton Cummings (lead vocalist) and Randy Bachman (lead guitar). After having a couple of minor hits with These Eyes, Laughing, and Undun in the late 60s the band finally hit it big with the American Woman album which featured songs with a harder rock edge. It was this sound that captured my attention as a 16 year old.

No Time was the first single released from this album and was the first record I ever purchased. It had a great guitar lead-in riff and a kick ass chorus that I could not get out of my head for months. American Woman, the first song on the album, had an even better guitar lead-in riff which propelled the song to number 1 on the American charts (note: the album version of the song had an inexplicable blues type lead in which was fortunately dropped on the single and greatest hits versions). The Guess Who were the first Canadian band to achieve this level of American success. The rest of the album was solid but sounds a little dated as I listen to it today. Even so, the Guess Who continue to have a soft place in my heart since they served as my introduction to the joys of rock music.

Unfortunately, like a lot of other things in 1970, the classic Guess Who lineup started to fall apart soon after finally achieving success. Randy Bachman left the group and formed Bachman Turner Overdrive (BTO) which had considerable success in the 70s. The Guess Who continued through 1975, achieved a few more hits, but never again achieved an American Woman level of success. I saw them in concert in 1973 and they were awesome. Randy Bachman was long gone but Burton Cummings was still the lead singer and he sounded great.

If you want to know more about the Guess Who or the American Woman album checkout Wikipedia or the following links:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:gifwxqu5ldde

http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/theguesswho/albums/album/116492/review/5942246/american_woman

The Rolling Stone review is noteworthy since it illustrates that album reviews were an art form back in the the late 60s and early 70s. Read it and you will see what I mean.

Note: As I started preparations for this blog I quickly discovered that identification of release dates for past albums would be a challenge. American Woman is a good example. Several sources, including multiple locations on Wikipedia, indicated that American Woman was released on January 1, 1970 (which I found to be doubtful). Other sites such as Emusic gave a less specific release date of January, 1970. I have finally decided that when exact release dates are unknown they are listed with just month and year. This sometimes gets inaccurately translated into the first day of the month.

No Time.....for moving to Alabama

At the beginning of 1970 more than music was changing in my life. On January 2 my family and I were in the process of moving from Battle Creek, Michigan to Huntsville, Alabama. This move was occurring in the middle of my Junior year of High School which meant that I would be attending my third different High School in as many years. As an Air Force brat from birth I was used to moving and changing schools schools but I was not thrilled to be moving to Alabama. All I knew about Alabama was what I had seen on TV news reports in the 60s. If you were alive then you should now be seeing George Wallace/Bull Connors in your mind, if you weren't alive in the 60s let's agree that my decision to focus this blog on music is a good thing.

Getting back to music, at 16 I had just gotten interested in music (I was a late bloomer). In the fall of 1969 I purchased my first 45 RPM single, No Time by the Guess Who. When you only have one record you tend to play it a lot and I listened to No Time so many times that I found myself not being able to sleep since I could not get the damned song out of my mind. Coincidentally, the Guess Who album that contained my single was was one of the first albums released in 1970. That album will be the focus of tomorrow's blog entry.

Happy New Year......1970 style

Welcome to Forty Years Ago Today! This blog will step through what was happening in the music scene 40 years ago (on a day to day basis where possible). It will discuss 1970: album releases; key events involving music and musicians; and political events, where they impacted music. All of the above will be filtered through my eyes and my musical likes/dislikes so no claim of even-handed, or comprehensive, coverage of the above topics is made.

To set the stage for future posts lets take a very quick look back at music in 1969. The musical creativity that had sprouted in the 60's came to a climax at Woodstock in August of 1969. It was a remarkable event on multiple levels and suddenly the hippie dreams of peace and love looked like they could be within reach through music. Unfortunately, the Woodstock euphoria was short lived due to the events at Altamont Raceway in December (look it up on Wikipedia). In the space of four months, the 1960's music scene had peaked and then imploded.

Forty years ago today, at the start of a new decade, it was anything but clear where music was headed. I hope you will join me as we step through 1970 during coming year. If my memory hasn't failed me, it will be an interesting ride.