Posts about Shawn Phillips have rolled through this blog at all three of its locations often enough that his name is among those on the right-side indices both here and at the EITW Archives site, but I noticed the other week that I’ve never shared – either as an mp3 in the early days or as a video – the suite that opens Phillips’ 1970 album Second Contribution.
There’s something – I’ve never been quite sure what – about that four-song sequence, and in fact the entire Second Contribution album, that says to me “Early Seventies” in a way that not much, if any, other music can. My early Seventies – from 1970 to 1974 – bridged the years between high school and the first few years of college, and the ideas and images that flit through my mind when I hear that four-song suite range from used record shops hiding treasures in ramshackle buildings; sunlit bicycle rides with girls I knew in both high school and college; my first beer, my first beard, my first kiss and a few other firsts; and the general sense of (sometimes amiable) confusion among me and my friends about what we would do with our lives in a world that was changing faster than we (and our parents) could truly comprehend.
I’m pretty sure that I first heard Second Contribution on Rick’s turntable not long after the record came out. I certainly knew the album well from hearing it at his place by the spring of 1972, when Phillips performed at St. Cloud State the week I was grounded (a tale I told not long ago). And whenever I heard Second Contribution or the later albums Collaboration and Faces (both of which I also heard at Rick’s, I think, as well as at parties around campus), I told myself I needed to find those albums, especially Second Contribution.
That took years, though. There was so much other music I wanted to explore, and even with used records at the various shops in St. Cloud being priced cheaply, there was only so much cash at hand. And life moved along, taking me from St. Cloud to Denmark and back and then on to the Twin Cities and back and then eventually to Monticello and a job as a reporter. And one Saturday in 1981, as I browsed a bin of used records at a flea market, I came across a copy of Second Contribution. When I got it home and onto the turntable, however, there was a fair amount of noise covering the quiet introduction of “She Was Waiting . . .” The rest of the record was okay, though, and I reveled in the remembered sounds and the images and ideas they brought back. Sadly, the Other Half was not impressed, and I played the record rarely for the rest of our time together.
I tried to upgrade the quality of my Second Contribution vinyl a couple of times during my years in Minneapolis as the 1990s turned to the 2000s, but no matter how good the records looked, Phillips’ quiet starting vocal was buried in hiss. Then, one day in late 2005, as I wandered through our local music emporium looking to spend some Christmas money, I found the album on CD, and later that day, I heard the album’s quiet and haunting opening moments the way they were recorded, just like I’d first heard them on Rick’s turntable so many years earlier.
And the entire album, especially the four-song opening suite offered below, still sounds to me like the early 1970s felt.
We all, through the courses of our lives, lose people whom we love: Parents, maybe spouses, sometimes children, certainly friends, and often lovers. When the lost one is young, the loss carries with it as well the loss of possibility, of what that young person could have built with his or her life. All of us left behind grieve the absence, yes, but we also grieve for the spouse never chosen, the children never born, the jobs never won, the music never heard. And we learn that with the passage of years, grief does become less acute, but we also learn that – like a radioactive isotope with its half-life – grief never really goes away.
Text adapted from a May 2013 post.
Music: “We” by Shawn Phillips, 1972.
As I did the dishes Thursday afternoon, I kept track of the tunes coming from the little mp3 player so I could post the list on Facebook. I no longer offer Dishwashing Music daily, but I do so maybe twice a week these days, usually when the player gives me an intriguing set of songs.
Thursday’s set was just that: “It Don’t Come Easy” by Ringo Starr, “Get Together” by the Youngbloods, “Pain” by the Mystics, “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, “No Time” by the Guess Who, “The Boxer” by Simon & Garfunkel and “The Ballad Of Casey Deiss” by Shawn Phillips. I chose to highlight the Shawn Phillips track, as I hadn’t heard it for a while.
And as I searched at YouTube for a video of the tune and then listened to it to make sure it would work for my post, I wondered idly when Phillips – a Texan who currently lives in South Africa – would make his way back to Minnesota for some performances. He came through St. Cloud a few years ago, and I somehow missed it. Shaking my head regretfully, I finished the Facebook post and went on with my afternoon.
The Texas Gal came home, and I walked across the street to check on the mail. When I came back in, she was on the phone with someone. That someone said something funny and she laughed, and as she did, she handed the phone to me. The caller, it turned out, was my long-time pal Rick, calling from the southern Minnesota town of Kenyon, where he and his family moved a couple of years ago.
After some pleasantries, he told me the news: Shawn Phillips was playing a concert Saturday (today) in the small town of Zumbrota, about seventeen miles east of Kenyon. “Zumbrota?” I asked.
That’s true, and it’s part of Phillips’ continuing affection for Minnesota, which for some reason was one of the few places – along with his native Texas – where his records sold well and his concerts were well-attended back in the early 1970s, when his unique combination of rock and folk brought him some attention and some sales.
Phillips’ chart presence was not massive: Between 1971 and 1976, four of his albums reached the Billboard 200; two others bubbled under, including my favorite, 1970’s Second Contribution; two of his singles reached the Billboard Hot 100 during those years, and two others bubbled under. Nevertheless, whenever he came through St. Cloud in those years, tickets to his shows were hard to get.
I tagged along to the party with Rick and came home sometime after midnight, drunk and ill. My parents, to understate things, were not amused. I was grounded for the next week: Home from college right after work each day, no evening excursions, no friends visiting, no phone calls. Well, I deserved some kind of discipline, and I could still see my (potential) girlfriend during the day. The only thing that would really hurt would be missing Shawn Phillips.
I got my tickets to Rick. I think my folks called him, and he came over and picked them up. He says I dropped them to him out of my bedroom window, which is a far better tale, so we’ll go with that. I don’t know who used the ticket that would have been mine. As it happened, KVSC, the college radio station, broadcast Phillips’ show from Stewart Hall, so on the night of the concert, I was able to hear his performance. But it would have been far better to be there. So, yes, Rick was correct as we talked on the phone two days ago: He owed me a ticket to a Shawn Phillips concert.
Zumbrota, however, is 130 miles away, a lengthy drive for me. I’d stay a night in a hotel in Kenyon owned by one of Rick’s in-laws, and hotel stays present their own challenges for me. And I’ve just barely gotten over whatever bug it was that laid me cross-wise this past week. So for reasons of budget and health, I had to decline the offer. Rick understood. We talked a bit about an upcoming Strat-O-Matic get-together in St. Cloud, and then I told him to enjoy the Shawn Phillips show. And I told him that the long-standing debt is no longer on the books.
All of that, then, made it easy to find a tune for this morning. Here, from Shawn Phillips’ 1970 album Second Contribution, is “The Ballad of Casey Deiss,” and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
As you might recall, we spent a little bit of time last Saturday poking around a music survey released on March 15, 1974, by radio station KUPK of Garden City, Kansas. The thirty-record survey showed some familiar records, mostly at the upper end, and a fair number of records not so familiar. Four of the records on the KUPK survey, I noted, didn’t even dent the Billboard charts or its Bubbling Under section, and I chose one of those four – “Roll It” by Nino Tempo & 5th Ave. Sax – for our Saturday Single.
No. 12: “Star” by Stealers Wheel, No. 29.
No. 16: “On A Night Like This” by Bob Dylan, No. 44.
No. 19: “I’m A Train” by Albert Hammond, No. 31.
No. 20: “Music Eyes” by Heartsfield, No. 95.
No. 22: “Roll It” by Nino Tempo & 5th Ave. Sax, did not chart.
No. 23: “Skybird” by Neil Diamond, No. 75.
No. 24: “Loving Arms” by Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge, No. 86.
No. 25: “You’re So Unique” by Billy Preston, No. 48.
No. 26: “When The Morning Comes” by Hoyt Axton, No. 54.
No. 27: “All The Kings And Castles” by Shawn Phillips, did not chart.
No. 28: “Stone Country” by Johnny Winter, did not chart.
No. 29: “Invisible Song” by the Rainbow Canyon Band, did not chart.
No. 30: “Pepper Box” by the Peppers, No. 76.
Seven of those records were unfamiliar to me, though I knew most of the performers and one of the songs. I’d never heard of the Rainbow Canyon Band (listed only as “Rainbow Canyon” on the KUPK survey) or the Peppers. And I’ve known the song “Loving Arms” for years, but I’d never heard Kris and Rita’s cover. So after sharing “Roll It” last Saturday, I went and found videos of the six remaining unfamiliar records. Then, even though the Shawn Phillips track was one that I knew, I posted a video of it because it was one of those listed that did not chart in Billboard.
The Rainbow Canyon Band, according to the YouTube poster, was a well-known Cleveland group that came to the attention of James Gang drummer Jim Fox, who produced “Invisible Song” and brought James Gang guitarist Tommy Bolin to the sessions. The Peppers, according to Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, were an instrumental duo from Paris; “Pepper Box” was the duo’s only charting single.
As I noted last week, I’m not a chart maven; I do have a sense that the KUPK survey is odd in hosting so many singles that out-perform their national ranking. And I noticed a couple of other things that intrigued me about the KUPK survey.
First, in addition to the “Pop & Contemporary” listing, the survey – seen here – had a ten-record listing for easy listening and a twenty-record listing for country, so just from those three lists, it’s evident that the station had vastly different sorts of programming for different day-parts, something not at all rare for small town stations (and, by our estimate based on the 1970 and 1980 censuses listed at Wikipedia, Garden City had about 16,000 residents in 1974).
After pondering that, I took a closer look at the “Pop & Contemporary” listing, and I was struck by the volatility of the survey. Of the thirty records listed, sixteen were new to the survey that week, including two in the top ten: Blue Swede’s “Hooked On A Feeling” and Rick Derringer’s “Rock & Roll, Hoochie Koo.” I’d love to have seen the KUPK surveys from the week before and the week after, but unfortunately, the March 15, 1974, survey is the only one from KUPK available at the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, and a quick Googling found no others (although I did learn that the Davis Sisters of nearby Meade, sponsored by KUPK, won the 1973 Kansas State Fair Talent Contest).
As it happens, KUPK radio is no longer on the air; KUPK-TV is a satellite station of KAKE-TV in Wichita, about two hundred miles away; a segment of KAKE’s nightly show originates from a newsroom at the KUPK studios. I assume that arrangement dates from the Garden City station’s founding in 1964, as the call letters KUPK, according to Wikipedia, are meant to symbolize Kup-Kake.
So what does all this mean? I have absolutely no idea. It’s just interesting stuff – interesting to me, anyway – from forty years ago. And we’ll close this morning with what’s likely my favorite record of the thirty listed on the KUPK Music Survey from mid-March 1974: “When The Morning Comes,” on which Hoyt Axton got some help from Linda Ronstadt. As noted above, the record – from Axton’s 1974 album Life Machine – went to No. 54 on the Billboard pop chart (and to No. 10 on the country chart).
This morning’s task here at the EITW studios was to sort the 73,000 or so mp3s on the shelves, looking for titles with the word “white” in them. That’s in preparation, of course, for the ninth and final chapter of the adventure we call Floyd’s Prism, which has thus far covered the seven colors of the spectrum and black.
Our sorting got complicated right away. First of all, there are many tracks in the collection by both the Average White Band and Tony Joe White. And then, not only does the RealPlayer sorting function take into account title, artist name and album title (or record label, if the mp3 was better known as a single), but it also sorts for the various notes appended to the mp3s by their creators.
And when I turn my records into mp3s, I have the habit – most of the time – of appending a note that says “Ripped from vinyl by whiteray.” So there are many, many mp3s that show up in the search that have no connection to “white” in their titles, their artists or their album titles or record label names. I don’t recall ripping a live version of Gregg Allman performing “Dreams” during a 1974 concert in Boston, but I’m glad I did. I remember ripping in its entirety the 1982 album Chipmunk Rock, and I sort of regret that (but only sort of; it is a little bit of a hoot to hear Alvin, Simon and Theodore take on Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and other tunes of that vintage).
Anyway, I’m sorting things out, looking for titles with “white” in them. I’ll have plenty to choose from, so I thought that as I sort and research, I’d offer a preview of sorts today. Here’s the title track to Shawn Phillips’ 1973 album, Bright White.
I’ll be back Saturday with a single, and we’ll dig into “White” next week.