My Vinyl Collection 163
Steely Dan (2), Steppenwolf, Rod Stewart (5) Stalwart stylists stand strong. From both sides of the pond. Music history from the shelves. 33 rpm. Vinyl. Alphabetically listed.
1140. Steely Dan, Greatest Hits 1972-78 (1978)
1141. ——————-, Gaucho (1980)
A duo/band, broke up in 1981, then back together for a comeback career in 2000. The greatest hits from my shelf haven’t held up well, “pretentious” is the word that comes into my head. Or, how about … nice at the time but not today.
Two Against Nature, the eighth studio album, first in 20 years, was the comeback. Won four Grammys: Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Engineered Album – Non-Classical, and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (for the single "Cousin Dupree"). Sold over a million copies.
1142. Steppenwolf, Steppenwolf (1967)
“Born to Be Wild" is the walk-on song for the arrival of the bikers. Most notably featured in Easy Rider (1969). "Born to Be Wild" is also described as the first heavy metal song. Maybe? It can at least make the claim that the use of the term "heavy metal” makes its first appearance in rock music in the Steppenwolf hit.
"Hoochie Coochie Man" is also here, also notable, crossing the Muddy Water growl with the wires of rock and roll, bringing folk magic hoodoo into the white crowd. The stop-time riff from “I’m A Man” is used here to great effect in a way that pushes the line down the road in a movement of genres, blues, R&B, jazz, and rock.
And don’t forget Steppenwolf’s contribution to the Hoyt Axton anthem "The Pusher,” the walk-on for TV and movie drug trafficking. And a song that is well chosen indeed, drawing a line in the sand as it does between the smokers of weed and the shooters of horse.
John Kay is the leader. Born Joachim Fritz Krauledat in 1944 in East Prussia. His father killed fighting in Russia a month before John's birth. He and his mother flee to what would soon be East Germany, then, when the boy was four, he and mother make their way west, escaping in a midnight border crossing.
John thus grew up in Hannover, West Germany, listening to U.S. Armed Forces Radio. From the rock music of the USA, he grabbed the dream of personal freedom in American culture. In ’58 the teenager emigrated with his mother and stepfather to Toronto where he spun the dial, finding rock, R&B, country and gospel on late-night AM stations.
Steppenwolf was formed in L. A. In ’67. Kay was signer and leader and the rest of the five piece was made up of two guys Kay knew from Canada and two others recruited through ads in the music press. Today, John Kay is the last original member standing in a band that has sold over 25 million records and has seven gold albums and one platinum album, with seven Top 40 hits.
1143. Rod Stewart, An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down (1969)
1143. —————, Gasoline Alley (1970)
1144. —————, Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)
1145. —————, Never a Dull Moment (1972)
1146. —————, Atlantic Crossing (1975)
The first four Rod Stewart LPs (all fortunately sitting well worn on my shelves) are a forest of brilliant lights, plucked from the limbs of R&B, rock and pop balladeering. Stewart’s voice has just the right amount of gravel at this starting point in his career, and his timing at the start of the seventies couldn’t be better.
Just listen to these LPs. Fifty-four years is an illusion. Time now or then, the blink of a note.
Stewart led a “well-shod gathering” for the first four records, a band that thrust the English rocker into musical orbit, to a career that has amassed 120 million records sold. Ten No. 1 albums in the UK, 16 Top Ten singles in the USA, four No. 1. Knighted by the queen in 2016.
Listen to “Maggie May” from the dawning of the seventies, when the war was almost over and personal matters needed attending. Wake up, Maggie, I think I got somethin' to say to you/ It's late September and I really should be back at school/
I know I keep you amused, but I feel I'm being used/ Oh, Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more/ You led me away from home/ Just to save you from being alone/ You stole my heart and that's what really hurts
So many meanings from a No. 1 song. Roll out of bed, be yourself, figure out what happened in the sixties. Figure out what will happen to yourself next. I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school/ Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playin' pool/ Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helpin' hand/ Oh, Maggie, I wished I'd never seen your face.
Rod tells his story of “Maggie May.” “At 16, I went to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the south of England. I snuck in with some mates via an overflow sewage pipe. And there on a secluded patch of grass, I lost my not-remotely-prized virginity with an older (and larger) woman who'd come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can't tell you - but old enough to be highly disappointed by the brevity of the experience.” This was July 1961.
The song came together when the guitarist Martin Quittenton, a member of an innovative rock/R&B outfit Steamhammer, played some chords that caught Rod's ear during a visit to Rod’s London house. Rod remembered Beaulieu 10 years prior and began humming “Maggie Mae” an English folksong about a older prostitute robbing a young sailor. This turned into a college kid smitten by an older woman.
The mandolin here is distinctive, played by Ray Jackson, the harp and string player for Lindisfarne, one of the rock bands that launched in sixties in London. He’d been hired by Stewart to use on another of the album’s songs, “Mandolin Wind.”
“Maggie May” was the first hit in the rock era to use a mandolin solo, No. 1 in the UK and the USA at the same time. And it’s still the biggest selling mandolin-based hit ever recorded.
And Stewart, now 79, is still pouring it on, the gravel-steeled voice running deeper in the creek bed, gold flecks in the pan. He’s coming to the States in July, starting at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas for a nine shows.