Gordon Lightfoot's forgotten country-rock classic

Vox Populi, the people have spoken, and even though they didn't speak in masses, they did wish for more Gordon Lightfoot, and more Gordon Lightfoot there will be. But before I get to A Secret Life In Song, the outtakes and rarities companion piece to the recently finished A Life In Song career retrospective, let's take a quick turn into this, Lightfoot's for long years most mysterious and long-forgotten album, which also turned out to be one of his absolutely best. Because or despite being a country rock record, that is the question...

So, why is Old Dan Records so damn mysterious? Mainly because it had been out of print forever, the only album from his mid-70s heyday to have vanished...and pretty much vanished without a trace. When I got into listening to Lightfoot, I knew there was a record named Old Dan's Records because Gord's Gold featured the album's title song and Gord's Gold Vol. 2 featured "It's Worth Believin'" as one of its CD bonus tracks. Two odd choices, finally, as the first one was always an album track and thus never a hit, while the latter was a single b-side, albeit a charting one. As a matter of fact, "It's Worth Believin'" is Lightfoot's first entry in the country charts, which makes sense, since it comes from the only album of Lightfoot that can honestly be called a country record. But the real lead single, country-rock corker "You Are What I Am" is strangely mistreated, never showing up on any greatest hits or anthology package, despite being a top three hit in Canada (and number one in both the adult contemporary and country charts), but yeah, it didn't do well in the States, only scraping in the AC Top 40, while follow-up "Can't Depend On Love" did even worse, only charting in Canada. Weirdly enough, the b-sides did better, as "That Same Old Obsession", "You Are What I Am"'s flip, also hit number three in Canada and also went top three in the Canadian adult contemporary charts, and it has effectively replaced the former as the representative single from the album, having shown up on Songbook. 

As Lightfoot's worst seller from his commercial heyday, it's not entirely surprising that Reprise let it fall out of print, and then it was simply never issued on CD until 2002 when I picked it up. The vanishing act was so complete, that the printed Allmusic Guide from 2000 has two separate feature length reviews for the same album (one for Sit Down Young Stranger and one for If You Could Read My Mind), while Old Dan's Records isn't even listed in his discography, whereas every other album is. When the album finally made its CD debut, there were no liner notes or such to explain its disappearing act, either. But my, am I glad I picked it up, if only out of old habit. 

Because, well, the album is excellent, and among Lightfoot's most consistent. Lightfoot was in fine form with this batch of songs, from his typical love ballads, to the uptempo hoedowns. Old Dan's Records might be a transitional album - in all senses of the word - but that makes it important, showing the way to Lightfoot's most comercial sound reached a year and a half later on Sundown. This is the first album where Lightfoot employs a drummer, and uses bundles of steel guitar. Both would be big parts of his sound going forward for the next years. So why did Gordon Lightfoot cut a country rock record? Let's flash back to late 1971. 

Lightfoot had been going hard after the success of If You Could Read My Mind, perhaps too hard, ignoring a constant ringing in his ears for months. Then half of his face went numb, and he was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy, severely impacting his ability to sing, as his mouth was also partially paralyzed. Luckily, the tracks for Summer Side Of Life were already in the can, so Lightfoot could rest up and get better, for once not supporting an album with a tour. But he of course had the time to write new songs, then decided to head back to the studio to record them. But, given his situation, he wanted to record closer to home, literally, booking time in Toronto's RCA Studios while hooking up with local bluegrass group The Good Brothers, whose contributions on banjo, autoharp and steel guitar are all over Old Dan's Records. 

Old Dan's Records is a very fine album with exactly one flaw, the proverbial fly in the ointment: "My Pony Won't Go" should have been called 'This song won't go' as it is simply a slog. When I figured I might muck around with the running order a bit, there was simply no good place to put it somewhere. So it went elsewhere. Lightfoot was a strict 10-songs-per-album guy, but fortunately there is an excellent outtake cut during the Old Dan's Records sessions that can more than take its place: "Too Much To Lose" was first demoed in 1967, as Lightfoot wrote it for inclusion in the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke, but it didn't get picked up. As Lightfoot reminisced for the Songbook liner notes: "I guess after that I didn't want it either." That didn't stop him from having another go at it during the Toronto sessions, and it's a sprightly, beautiful, oh-so-slightly countryfied folk song, truly the bridge between Summer Side of Life and Old Dan's Records. And yet it was inexpliocably left in the can. Again. 

Not here at One Buck Records, though, of course, where it is not only restored, but elevated to side opener for the second half of Old Dan's Records. The rest is simple resequencing. I love "Farewell To Annabel", but it was an odd choice for an album opener. The singalong title track always seemed like a better and more rousing opening. However, the back half ran really well, so the last three songs are unchanged. Sometimes you need to tweak a lot, sometimes you need to tweak only a little. The swap of a single track made a very good album even better. This really is Gord's country gold, so dig in. 

Johnny Stew Strikes Again!

If you were wondering why in my write-ups for the man, I occasionally refer to Lindsey Buckingham as Liddy Buck, it's all Johnny Stew's fault. Johnny Stew, as in John Stewart of course, godfather of modern folk rock with The Kingston Trio, folk-country rocker as a solo artist during the 1970s, then mainstream pop/rock champion for about a hot minute at the end of the decade. And who helped him (back) into the spotlight? Why, Liddy Buck, of course, willing to help out his idol from his teenage days. Buckingham produced Bombs Away Dream Babies, played a ton of guitar on it and added his vocals (together with Stevie Nicks') to "Gold", which dutifully became a Top 5 hit. 

If giving John Stewart some mainstream recognition from a crowd to whom he would more like a has been, Buckingham clarified his stance on his real solo debut with the song "Johnny Stew" (which I'm not a fan of). Stewart did him one better with one of my favorite sub-subgenres, the answer song. Stewart's number, "Liddy Buck", is a fantastic imitation of its subject circa Tusk - you could easily slot this into the Tusk line-up and, besides the slightly unusual lead vocals, everyone would take it for one of Lindsey's follies. There are a couple of other numbers, notably "High Flying Eagle" that have the same echo-y bouncy rhythm that Tusk era Liddy Buck was in love with. So Johnny Stew Strikes Again takes the idea of "Liddy Buck" to album length, by trying to pull the most New Wave-ish sounding tracks from Stewart's archives and imagine what a Stewart New Wave-ish answer to my Lindsey Buckingham alt album Not That Funny would look and sound like. 

Like fellow friendly neighbourhood bloggers Jonder and Koen I'm fascinated by artists who weren't initially New Wave trying their hand at a New Wave-ish sound, as evidenced by my comîlations on Martin Briley and Randy VanWarmer. Let's quickly temper expectations here, though. Sequencer or reverb neo-rockabilly guitar, Stewart is of course resolutely fok-rock, so he doesn't all of a sudden try to sound like Ric Ocasek or something. But the very 80s instrumentation and arrangements are clearly New Wave-adjacent, and it's interesting how Stewart takes a 19th Century traditional song like "Molly And Tenbrooks" and gives it new wheels for the 1980s. This is both synthetic and authentic-sounding at the same time, which is no small feat. Check out the update of the old Kingston Trio stalwart "The Escape Of Old John Webb" for more proof of that.

True to form, most songs have a 'get in, do some damage and get out' attitude, so only the two side openers crack the four minute mark, and most songs don't even make it to the three minute mark, having the whole album clock in at less that half an hour. So Johnny Stew Strikes Again is short and sweet, a solid blast of something that sounds both strangely familiar and excitingly fresh at the same time...

Days Of Thunder, The Driver And The Last Note Of Freedom

Yup, as foretold in the write-up to Reid's Digest - The Music Of Terry Reid, we're not quite finished with Mr. Reid yet. I'm going to deep dive a bit into what basically amounts to a tiny footnote in Reid's long and storied career - but you know what they say: to some it's a tiny footnote, to others it's an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Actually, no one ever says that, because I just made it up, but yeah, even an ultimately insignificant thing can be of great interest to, well, me, and possibly by proxy some of you. Or I'll waste my time writing this, because a ton of you don't even bother with the write-up and go straight to check out the download. Anyway, it's not like you can stop me or anything, so here goes.

Thursday I talked about my first run-ins with the music of Terry Reid, but the biggest surprise was, when I finally checked out the rest of his discography about eight years ago or so. When I got to The Driver - the album - and to "The Driver" - the song - my mind was blown, almost as soon as the first notes came up. Waitaminute, I said to myself, that's the opening of Days Of Thunder's 'title song' "The Last Note Of Freedom", as sung by Mr. David Coverdale. I hadn't known until then that there had been a first stab at a title song for the movie courtesy of Mr. Reid, nor was I ready for the song itself. Having been brought up with "The Last Note Of Freedom" for , oh, the last 30+ years, "The Driver (Part 2)", as its called on the album blew me away with its enigmatic, elliptic lyrics. Just take the opening stanza: "Wake up alone and find / it's the wheels just rollin' in my mind / Can't stop to think or see / is this really what God cut for me?" And from there, the song gets only more mysterious with its reference to "the old boys / runnin' in the night / cross the borders, between their own headlights". What. The. Hell. 

The perfect cover art for Reid's album...you can almost imagine the movie in your head. In black and white, of course. 

The story of the twice done title song of Days Of Thunder became a little bit clearer after the internet snooping. Reid had bumped into Trevor Horn around 1987, and, maybe surprising given hi proclivities as artist in The Buggles (and BugglYes), Horn was a fan of Reid's work and told him he's love to work with him. Horn then also introduced Reid a year and a half or so later to a young German composer who had recently hit town to take over the baton from former German Hollywood transplant Harald Faltermeyer and was starting to make a break in movie scoring. Little did Reid or Horn know at the time that younh Hans Zimmer was to become one of the most well-known and dominant film scorers of the last two and a half decades. Zimmer and Horn had worked together almost a decade earlier, when Horn was in The Buggles and Zimmer did some collaborative work, even briefly showing up in the hugely influential "Video Killed The Radio Star" video clip. Zimmer had just had his Hollywood breakthrough with the lauded score to Rain Man, and was now developing the music for another picture starring Tom Cruise, the stock-car racing action drama, or, as it was informally known 'Top Gun with cars'. 

Zimmer had just worked up a keyboard melody as the title music for Days Of Thunder, and proposed Terry Reid write some lyrics for it and finish the song. Which he did, cue "The Driver", produced by Horn. To say that this was not what the soundtrack producers were expecting is probably an understatement. "The Driver" uses Zimmer's melody effectively, but the song is decidedly not what you'd want as a lead song for a big, dumb summer blockbuster. It's too interior, too enigmatic, and frankly, way too weird. So "The Driver" got rejected for consideration as the Days Of Thunder title song in a somewhat fitting, if sad, twist that recalls Reid's career. So, it was back to work for Zimmer. He had relished the chance to work with Jeff Beck for the Thunderv score, so the new title song was clearly going to have a more hard rock bent. New lyrics were commissioned by noted Shakespeare-ian British scribe William Broad a.k.a. Billy Idol, and The Cruiser himself asked David Coverdale personally if he could come in and sing the new title song, "The Last Note Of Freedom". 

Also b& w, but no film with this. At least none I'd want to watch.

Now, music snob logic would dictate that I hate the dumb hard rock "Note" and favor "The Driver". But here's the twist: I love "The Last Note Of Freedom". As an example for L.A. AOR rock of the late EIghties, you can hardly do better. Beck riffs on guitar, Coverdale wails on vocals - it's all good! My favorite moment is actually the quietest in the whole song, when midway after a dramatic break, the music comes on as an acoustic guitar strum and Coverdale sings "You know the suffering will end, my friend, when the last note of freedom is rung throughout the land." The suffering will end, my friend, I always found that little phrase comforting. The ladmittedly sometimes jibberish lyrics of "The Last Note Of Freedom"- other than working in the movie title in one of its lines - are not about racing and could just as well be used for a historical drama about struggling for freedom. The fit is of course in the music and the sound of "The Last Note Of Freedom". That song sounds like it belongs in a Tony Scott film - it's big and brash and shiny and built for maximum effect. "The Driver", inversely, is none of that. Reid's song sounds like it should accompany a Monte Hellman film, an updated version of his cultish Two Lane Blacktop (starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) maybe, an existentialist, downbeat drama about a guy broken by his obsession with driving. Come to think of it - I'd watch that movie. Yo, Cruiser, you want another run at an Oscar - how about The Driver, where Cole Trickle is now an old, washed-up, borderline sociopathic guy who can't go without racing, even at senior age, somehow looking for redemption, perhaps in the arms of a good woman? Just thank me in your Oscar speech, Tommy Boy... 

As a song, "The Driver" is better than "The Last Note Of Freedom" - it's more intense, personal and doesn't deal in clumsily glued together clichés, but it was simply the wrong song at the wrong place at the wrong time. So while I protest that Reid's song has somewhat fallen into oblivion, I can not fault the Days Of Thunder people to want to go with something else. At least they offered Terry Reid a consolation price: For an action scene involving drivers voluntarily bumping into each other, they used The Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'", but instead of also licensing it for the soundtrack, they asked Reid to record a cover version, again produced by Tervor Horn. And even if it was a consolation price, they worked hard to work up some royalties for Reid, issuing it as the b-side of both singles taken from the soundtrack. And it's a pretty fun version of the song, with Reid as usual singing the hell out of what's in front of him. But it isn't "The Driver".

If you have downloaded and listened to Reid's Digest - The Music Of Terry Reid, you will be familiar with my 'Pray For Headlights mix' of "The Driver". Normally my little reworkings don't necessarily need some annotation, but I feel I should say a word or three about it. The original plan was to avoid the akward Part 1 and Part 2 set up of the album, so I wanted to combine the two parts, but needed some sort of concept that makes sense. So I had the idea of a car crash towards the end of the full-fledged version leading into the short acoustic part as a sort of faint echo in the afterlife once the driver perished in that car crash. I don't know if anyone read that song's structure like that, but that was the thinking behind it.

Oh boy, this is getting long, so I wasn't lying when I said 'deep dive', but it's also plain to see why this stuff wasn't a good fit for thursday's piece. Now of course you know more then you ever wanted to know about either title song of Days Of Thunder. So, quickly off to today's download, because yes, there is one. The Crashing Thunder EP alternates Reid's and Zimmer's/Coverdale's contributions to Days Of Thunder, giving you the two parts of "The Driver", the original album version of "The Last Note Of Freedom" and its instrumental arrangement, as well as Reid's "Gimme Some Lovin'". And for the music lover who has everything, a short piece of Jeff Beck working out the guitar riff for "Note". And I end with the Pray For Headlights mix of "The Driver" which made sense to me, but which you can delete if you already have Reid's Digest and don't want double versions in your music collection. 

So, deep dive over, and for now we're done with Mr. Reid, and our regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly. In the meantime, rock and roll - especially the latter - with some driving music from 1990..."but the wheels just bearing down..."

Reid's Digest - Celebrating The Music Of Terry Reid

My way to Terry Reid wasn't as straightforward as some others, obviously because Terry's heyday - as much as he had one - was way before my time - both lifetime and music listening time. So the person to bring me to Terry Reid's music was...Rob Zombie! Yup, shlock rock grunter Zombie turned shlock shock horror film director Zombie. I absolutely hated House Of A 1.000 Corpses when it came out, and was more than dubious about its follow-up The Devil's Rejects. And while Zombie's grinning sadism isn't as entertaining or funny as he thinks ut is, at least Rejects was a hundred times better visually than the epilepsy-inducing Corpses. Zombie also got another thing right: the soundtrack, filling up his movie with classic rock from the 70s, the time frame of the movie. And while I could have gone without him styling his merry mass murdererd into martyrs tduring a long slow-motion shootout set to the entire full-length "Freebird", his other choices were better, especially the opening titles with its freeze frames being set to The Allman Brothers' immortal "Midnight Rider" and two tracks that sounded great, from an artiost unknown to me: That artist was of course Terry Reid, with a trio of tracks off Seed Of Memory, "Brave Awakening", "To Be Treated Rite" and the title track. For some reason, I didnt investigate further. 

The second run-in with Reid was a couple of years later, when River fell into my hands. I had heard of it as some kind of cult record, and the essay in the booklet does a great selling job of making it sound like an underappreciated classic - but yeah, I don't get it. For once, Allmusic is spot on: There is an amiable, relaxed vibe to the songs, but they sound unfinished, like a guy working out some tunes in the studio, then releasing these bits before they've developed into real songs. The essay actually touches on this, talking about "songs without lyrics, lyrics without songs", with Reid not being able to find words for some songs and sometimes not being able to sing over the existing backing tracks. Anyway, so River again temporarily quieted down my interest in Reid, until a couple of years ago I checked out his entire discography, with interesting results. 

Reid's music is interesting in that, like a river, it seems to go with the flow of whatever his mood was, and with which musical friends and partners he hung out. His first albums are still really heavy on blues-rock and loud guitars, as well as superboosting old standards with crunchy guitars. River was, well, jam- and improvisation-heavy. Seeds Of Memory three years later showed how he had made friends with some of the West Coast crew, notably Graham Nash, leaning into a more acoustic South Cali vibe. Rogue Waves three years later, maybe as a belated reaction to punk , new wave and and the beginning of post-punk, showing him as a guitar hero again, literally in the case of the front cover. And his comeback album, The Driver in 1991, was heavily influenced - for better or worse, arguably worse - by his burgeoning frinedship/partnership with Trevor Horn, which means lots of chunky keyboard and a real glossy mainstream sound, that Reid himself later derided as "unlistenable".

There is, however, also a less charitable way to look at Reid's dispersing or developing work. The fact that there are only six studio albums through a career spanning almost fifty years, and all of them appeard on a different record label shows that stability, long-term investment and support by record labels weren't on the menu, and finally the artist's own issues, creatively and otherwise, reared their head, that prevented Terry Reid from becoming a household name, despite being an idol to many in the music business. Every obit that is coming out these days is of course going to mention that Reid ws asked to front Led Zeppelin, but politely declined, and then suggested Robert Plant as lead singer. But Reid could never really pull it together, to stay with a label and develop his music. After his first two records, when he was still sold as somewhat of a teen idol, the next three records followed in intervals of three or more years of each other, an eternity in those days. So whatever momentum Reid got going with an at least artistically interesting or lauded record dissipated, together with label relations. 

Despite these changes in musical direction and musical homes, Reid could always be counted on to deliver some quality cuts, and Reid's Digest - The Music of Terry Reid is supposed to showcase that, while also giving folks a couple of song that they might not have already. When I heard of his death two days ago, I finally got myself to sit down and put together a Terry Reid compilation that I had been planning for a long time. At first I wanted to just reuse a comp I did for myself a couple of years ago, but finally - as these things tend to - the project got a lot more work-heavy, as I finally relistened to a ton of tracks and switched at least half of the line-up, did some editing and necessary volume equalizing, etc. yadda yadda yadda. Of course I had too many tracks to fit onto a CD-length comp (I know, I know, sue me...), so I had to drop a couple, rethink and replace again, and so forth.

But now I think I've landed on a compilation that represents pretty well all sides of Terry Reid. This isn't a greatest hit record of any type, even if he didn't really have any, but I didn't include his version of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)", for example, which is his early signature song. But like a lot of the heavier numbers from his first to records (Bang Bang You're Terry Reid and Terry Reid) his singing syle on these songs is a little too shouty for me, as if he had to show how gritty he was by accentuating a clipped, growling vocal style. So, from these albums I tended to take the more melodic, well-sung numbers, while still letting Reid cause a ruckus on tracks such as "Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace". 

River, as described above, is a bit of a particular case, as it's an important album in Reid's thin discography, but I'm not a fan, so while I included the title cut (in an alternate take), I otherwise used outtakes from the River sessions ("Anyway", "Let's Go Down") that I prefer to most of the songs that made the cut. As also said above, my first entranceway to Reid's music was Seed Of Memory - and more precisely that album's first side - which is presented here in its entirety. Rogue Waves was a more workmanlike effort at a time when he really could have used a hit, so I only kept his heartfekt version of "(All I Have To Do Is) Dream". And then of course Reid went radio silent for a decade, as the Eighties barely had any use for rock'n'roll heroes of the 70s, and no use for a niche figure like him. His fortunes changed when he hooked up with pop megaproducer Trevor Horn, from the ensuing album The Driver I kept the only acoustic tune, the lovely "Hand of Dimes", the admittedly slightly overproduced "The Whole Of The Moon" (which has great impassioned vocals by Reid, though) and the title track that I've edited into a very specific - and obviously eclusive to this comp - version. I'll have more things to say about "The Driver", but that would explode all reasonable word limits, so I'll keep that for another write-up, possibly coming quite soon. 

For now, I let you rummage through some of the best music that Terry Reid had to offer, even when audiences wasn't always willing and ready to lend their ears. A cult figure among cult figures, Terry Reid coul've been a contender, he could've been somebody...and he has the tunes to back this statement up. So enjoy Reid's Digest - The Music Of Terry Reid, and I might be back with more stuff to say about the man soon. Until then, let the bends and turns of the river of Reid's inspiration take you away...

R.I.P. Terrance James Reid, 1949 - 2025

(N)One Album Wonders: Inlaws, Outlaws And Terry Dolan

The music industry, man. Sometimes you just don't get it. No, strike that, most of the times you don't get it. And that's me talking about the old music business, not the streaming-based, 'millions of streams will buy me a box of Pringles, so I'll shell out these mega deluxe editions and special VIP concert tickets for a couple of hundred bucks' system of today. Whatever goes into calculations, into their prognostics, and margin calculations, and spreadsheets, about - as Bob Seger sang "what to leave in, what to leave out", but when the music gets left lying in the dirt, and it's great music, then all this calculatin' really don't end up. 

No one is entirely sure as to why exactly Terry Dolan's (presumably) self-titled album never got released in its day. Some think it's because in demand pianist and Rolling Stones sideman-cum-producer Nicky Hopkins abandoned the sessions halfway through, some because Warner Brothers were cleaning house...but no one knows for sure. The whole story gets told in details in the booklet included with our One Buck Record of the day, so I'll just say this: Whoever took that decision was a total idiot (cue GOB-voice: "I think I've made a huge mistake"). Sometimes records get buried, that aren't a huge loss. Some, as Terry Dolan's, were a huge loss. But what really gets me is that here Warner Brothers had a finished record, with a song that was almost certainly going to be a hit...and yet they let it all go away.

But let's rewind a little bit. And say a word or two about who the hell Terry Dolan is (the bootleg accompanying the album explains all of this in huge detail). If you are from the Bay area, you've probably heard of Terry Dolan, at least through his group Terry & The Pirates, the ultimate bar band. If you haven't, well, Dolan started as a folkie who, as he'd sing in his signature song "Inlaws And Outlaws" "came out from the East Coast", trading the Washington D.C. folk scene for that of San Francisco in 1965, then becoming known as a guy who played too hard and rock'n'roll for a folkie and too soft for a rock'n'roller. Hanging out with Greg Douglass, fuitar player for Country Weather, made him switch from acoustic to electric guitar. In 1970 he asked new Bay era resident Nicky Hopkins to produce a two-song demo tape, that included"Inlaws And Outlaws" and "Angie", a ballad written for his wife, both of which figure of course on the One Buck Record of the day. 

The story of "Inlaws And Outlaws" is as fascinating as it is frustrating: The hit that wasn't a record, and then never would be. DJs, first at San Fran's K-SAN and KMPX would play the demo tape version of the song, which became an airplay hit that even began to spread throughout the U.S., but callers enquiring about the song were disappointed, as there was no official single yet. An album with Warner Brothers was negotiated, with the understanding that Hopkins would again produce. In January 1972 Dolan, Hopkins and a hand-picked band of all-star Bay area pickers (including Douglass, Steve Miller Band-bass player Lonnie Turner, and of course John Cippolina, who had already contributed to the demo tape) Wally Heider's San Fran studios and started working on the album, recording what would become side one of Terry Dolan. 

These numbers live up to the 'folk rock'n'roller' reputation of Dolan, with crunchy guitars aplenty, and Hopkins especially piling on the multi tracks and flourishes in his part of the record. The Pointer Sisters, still months away from issuing their debut album, add lavish background vocals. Hopkins himself cheekily inserts a very Stones-ian melody about two and a half minutes into opening number "See What Your Love Can Do", a gospel-rave up. "Angie", the ode to his wife is followed by another guitar-based uptempo number, "Rainbow", before side a ends with what should have been Dolan's classic hit that we still hear on classic rock radio to this day. Quality work all around, and then disaster struck. With only these four finished tracks in the can, Hopkins was called up by The Rolling Stones to do overdubs on Exile On Main Street, then leave for a U.S. tour, then immediately go back to the studio to work on Goat's Head Soup. All of a sudden, Dolan's album was without a producer. 

After a break of almost six months, sessions restarted with Pete Sears as producer (and bass, piano, and keyboard player), who drafted in Neal Schon, right in between leeaving Santana and founding Journey, who shredded like crazy on "Purple An Blonde..?" and "Burgundy Blues", the two heaviest tracks on the Sears-produced second album side, while a cover of J.J. Cale's "Magnolia" and "To Be For You (a pure Sears/ Dolan collaboration) were more melodic. With the album finished, photos for the artwork were shot by Herb Greene, the record got a catalogue number, labels and test pressings. Warner Brothers created a bio for Dolan and a write-up, and then - cancelled the record, as well as summarily dropping Dolan from the label. What should have been - on the strength of "Inlaws And Outlaws" alone - if not a hit, then a more than decent debut by a major talent, turned into a great mess of frustration for Dolan and all the involved players and friends, musical and otherwise.  

Reasons for this suden and seemingy inexplicable cancellation abound, but answers aren't easy to come by. Just the sad fact remains, that a great record was shelved and then forgotten about for more than forty years, and by the time Terry Dolan's solo debut album finally came out in 2016, its author was dead, dying in 2012 of heart failure. He had seen the beginning of the campaign to finally get Terry Dolan issued, but wouldn't live to see it arrive in record stores. 

Why and how was he deprived of seeing the results of those sessions proudly as a finished record? And how many people were deprived of driving down the highway with a window rolled down, fist in the air and loudly proclaiming "Living! My Life! Free!"? Well, way too many. The sad story of how Warner Brothers fucked up, and would so again with Bob Carpenter shortly after, despite its reputation in the 70s as an 'artists first' label, reminds me of the mess they are right now, especially its movie division. You might have heard about a fella named David Zaslav who hates audiences and artists and movies and would rather turn an almost finished or finished film on which hundreds of people worked into a line in a spread sheet for a tax write-off. Big entertainment companies - music, film, TV, it doesn't matter - of course always cared about the dollar first and the artists second, but a company like Warner Brothers who always had a good reputation as being welcoming to artists, has now left that reputation in tatters. 

Oh well. Time doesn't heal all wounds, but this album sounded great in 1972 when it should have come out, and it sounds great now. A couple of weeks ago, over at Babs' place, she asked about what everyone's favorite unreleased music was. Well, this is mine. Just a top notch 70s album, halfway between folk and a rollicking Rolling Stones record. This album is a killer, and I'm happy, if a couple of you will discover it. 

Against The Current: The Lost Marillion Album, or Fish's Last Stand.

If the band had known how close to the truth the title of their 1987 album Clutching At Straws came, they might have wanted to reconsider. Then again, Fish's tales of the tortured rock star Torch was nakedly autobiographical, with its harrowing account of Fish's worsening alcoholism in "Just For The Record" ("Many's the time I've been thinking about changing my ways / But When ut gets right down to it it's the same drunk haze") and "Sugar Mice" ("So if you want my adress it's number one at the end of the bar"), disillusion with the life as a rock star ("We're terminal cases that keep talking medicine / pretending the end isn't quite near / we make futile gestures, act to the cameras / with our made up faces and PR smiles") and overall atmosphere of despair. Don't get me wrong, Clutching At Straws isn't nearly as miserable-sounding as these lines make it sound, in fact, rarely has extended misery sounded as enticing and seductive as on Clutching At Straws. But all was indeed not well for Fish, and for his band mates in Marillion.

The success of Misplaced Childhood and number one smash "Kayleigh" had put the band into an endless cycle of touring, doing promotion and finally recording a new record. The sessions for Clutching At Straws had already proven to be difficult, with the dreaded 'musical differences' causing more than a few arguments, often in different states of intoxication, between band members. Then it was on the road again, tiredlessly, only to get back together to plot a follow up record. The band members were all tired, and tired of each other, when they reconvened. Fish usually complained about the music the rest of the band was working on "being shite", and the band members returned the compliments concerning his lyrics. In between all this strife, the band somehow managed to go into a studio called Tone Deaf (a sign? an omen?) to cut demos of four songs, then holed up in an isolated castle - clearly the most sensible idea fdor five often drunk guys starting to hate each other - to write, and managed to other demos of songs, before Fish announced his resignation from the band, and Marillion, for all intents and purposes, broke up. 

"Ha, photobomb, guys, technically I'm already gone..."

Marillion was reborn in short order, of course, recruitiong Steve Hogarth as new lead singer, and using a ton of the musical ideas the band had worked on in early 1988 for use on 1989's Seasons End, while Fish took a bunch of his lyrics to use on his next three solo albums. A live album (The Thieving Magpie) closed out the Fish era in a rather underwhelming way. This is of course the moment, where the One Buck Guy's alternate history generator goes into overdrive: What if EMI had insisted on one last Fish-led studio album? What if Fish, after long and unpleasant negociations, agrees that the band can use the demos they cut in early 1988, but refuses to go back into the studio to record anything else and forbids the band to record anything else for that album without him? 

Faced with Fish's 'take it or leave it' proposition and a demo tape of six songs, some not even fnished, the guys at EMI face a problem: These songs do not an album make, as a matter of fact, they're barely more than half an album. Faced with this dilemma, they go back to the vaults, and decide to go right back to the beginning of the band, promoting Fish's last album as a 'now and then' proposition. They pick the band's early epic "Grendel" as a way to fill out the album, only slightly regretting having used the original b-side version on the stopgap compilation album B'Sides Themselves earlier in the year. A solution is found: An alternate version, cut at Fair Deal Studios, is a rarity the fans don't have and can thus fulfill its function as quality filler to go with the material recorded, which also includes "Beaujolais Day", an unused song from the Clutching At Straws sessions. Thus, Against The Current is born, with title and artwork being a wink at the situation the band and its estranged lead singer were in. 

[Alternate History Generator Off]

So, Against the Current. "Beaujolais Day" is a fine, energetic opener, giving way to "Tic-Tac-Toe", "Sunset Hill", "Exile on Princes Street" and "Story From A Thin Wall" as the atmospheric ending of Side A. Side B would then open with the short "Shadows On The Barley", give way to the Fair Deal version of "Grendel" and then close out with the short instrumental "Voiceless In The Crowd". In order to create Against The Current I had to work with the fact that "Tic-Tac-Toe" and "Shadows On The Barley" were incomplete and stopped abruptly, but other than a quick fade out at an appropriate moment there wasn't much else I could do. And "Voiceless In The Crowd" was originally an entire song called "Voice In The Crowd", but there was something off about the track. The drumming sounded weird, and the entire track had this weird Phil Collins vibe to it, as well as sounding pretty samey to some of the songs on side one. So I basically got rid of the song and only kept the parts I liked, which was the beautiful opening and the closing of the song with some beautiful guitar playing. And since there is no more voice, well, voiceless, geddit?! 

This isn't in any wy a 'great lost album', but an eminently listenable album full of fine moments that deserve better than to be soon forgotten bonus tracks, so that's exactly what Against The Current delivers. Sure, some of it isn't as polished as the group's studio creations - given that these were simple guiding demos, but as a goodbye to Fish and Mark I of the band, I don't think I'm clutching at straws when I say that Against The Current is a pretty decent send off. Listen, and see if you'll agree.  

If you are shaking a tree, but no one's there to see it, does it really move?

I never went to see Shaking Tree in concert. I never bought one of their three albums. And now I regret that I never did and never will. On one hand, Shaking Tree are, literally, like thousands of other bands: College rock from a band formed in college, get a loyal local following, bring out some records and grow their following, are on the edge of signing with a major label, and then - boom, nothing. Band is gone, their records are gone. I think about all these other bands who dreamed to go bigger than local, the elation they must have felt when that first album was out. And I'm thinking about all the music that is now lost, probably forever. Sure, some of these albums still exist, maybe in some cutout bins in whatever record stores still exist, but more likely in the garages or basements of people who liked the band back in the days and haven't thrown them in the trash, yet. But if you were a fan from when the band existed, so between 1995 and 2007, you are now middle-aged, have your I-Phone or Alexa play music and probably got rid of your CDs at least a decade ago. The title of this write-up is of course a riff on a very well known saying/philosophical riddle, but its aim is the same: What does it mean for Shaking Tree and its music if no one remembers them? 

To be fair, when I first heard of the band, I was still getting my feet under me, in a strange place, in a strange land. It was literally my first day of university classes, and the band - eager to grow their local fanbase among freshmen I imagine - had pinned a couple of maxi-CDs for promo purposes on the announcement boards in university building hallways, together with a reminder where they'd play that weekend. Not knowing any of the music clubs in town, nor having yet a reliable crew of friends to join me, I passed on that concert, though I did pocket the CD, played it once, thought 'hey, that's pretty neat' and then left things there. 

A couple of years ago, on a whim, going through my old Maxi CDs  I threw in that Shaking Tree promo disc and was blown away by how great "Memory Of Me" sounded. Shaking Tree's music with its reliance on mandolin and/or violin to fuel their songs is definitely different from the usual drums-bass-guitar four piece. Founder, lead singer and songwriter Dain Estes originally wanted the band to sound like Talking Heads circa Naked, with World Music beats and influences, but after cycling through dozens of band band members settled on a four piece with him on vocals, guitar and mandolin, plus a violin player, bassist and drummer. He found a reliable vioolonist in Dan Waddington, who stayed with Shaking Tree throughout most of its tewelve year run, whereas the staff turnover in the rhythm section was more frequent. 

Shaking Tree didn't and don't sound much like Talking Heads, but they do have a slight resemblance to the Dave Matthews Band who started to blow up at the time Shaking Tree were active. I never had much use for the Dave Matthews Band, finding most of their material bland and boring, and while the sound and feel throughout these ten Shaking Tree numbers and three Dain Estes solo tracks doesn't change much, it's more lively and memorable than its much better known counterpart, at least for my money. 

This is some fabulous music, and I'm happy I at least still have those thirteen tracks, even if that's all that remains, here, 4550 miles from where the band once roamed. And yet I have a drink and a thought for the thousands of bands whose music lies now on obsolete albums in an obsolete format in obsolete record collections. Or landfill. A drink to all those who made music when they were young, or younger, who continue to make music, for ten or ten thousands of people. Keep on making that music, and we'll keep on listening. And maybe we'll find local bands like Shaking Tree that left no footprint, but the ones in the fading memories and music collections of those that were there. Or almost there, like me. 

For those about to rock, in adulation or anonymity, we salute you.