Circa ’72: Rockets and Dreams
   

1   Toad Away,    Firesign Theatre   1:06
2   Garden Party,  Rick Nelson   3:37
3   Pure and Easy,    Pete Townshend            5:28  
4   If the Shoe Fits,  Leon Russell  2:13
5   A Child in These Hills,  Jackson Browne  3:52
7   Ventura Highway, America   3:01
8   Sheraton Gibson,  Pete Townshend  2:31
9   From the Beginning, Emerson, Lake & Palmer 3:39
10 Send In The Clowns, Glynis Johns  3:10
11 One Monkey Don’t
        Stop No Show Part 1,  Honey Cone  3:37
12 Same Situation,  Joni Mitchell  2:36
13 Learn How To Fall, Paul Simon  2:33
14 Sail Away,  Randy Newman  2:44
15 Hypnotized, Fleetwood Mac  4:41
16 Phil            Carl Reiner  1:01
17 Ancient Poetry      and   1:48
18 Fig Leaf     Mel Brooks  1:15
19 Right Place Wrong Time,   Doctor John  2:42
20 Superstition       Stevie   4:24
21 Big Brother     Wonder  3:27
22 Freddie’s Dead,  Curtis Mayfield   3:11
23 The Dirty Jobs         The   4:09
24 Helpless Dancer          Who   2:16
25 Beethoven piano sonata # 8, Op. 13 in C minor “Pathétique”       
Stephen Bishop (Kovacevich) 1972 2nd movement excerpt 1:10
26 Rock Me on the Water,  Jackson Browne  4:15
27 Magic Mirror,  Leon Russell  4:35
28 Hope for Mankind,   Carl and Mel  0:26

 

 

 

Circa '72 CD Notes  (albums are from ‘72 unless specifically mentioned as being from ’73)

Toad Away is the opening track on Firesign Theatre's  Dear Friends album.   Firesign Theatre, or some remnant of it, is still in business, having released an album called Bride of Firesign in 2002.   Garden Party is on Rick Nelson's album Garden Party.    I bought both these albums used at Half-Price Books in Austin.  History question:  What 1950s TV show was Ricky Nelson in?

Pure and Easy and Sheraton Gibson are on Pete Townshend's solo album Who Came First.  Steven and I bought a copy of the album when we lived at the Riverhouse in the summer of 1973, but that copy disappeared long ago.  I bought a used copy in 2002 at Jupiter Records, a local record store in Austin that has now also disappeared or else moved to Burnet Road.

The big hit on Leon Russell's '72 album Carney was Tightrope, with Masquerade being a close second, but only as recorded by other singers.  I'd planned to use (and tried to use) Tightrope on this CD, but the only songs that seemed to fit were If The Shoe Fits and Magic Mirror.  I bought a used copy of Carney in 2003 at Been Around Records in Little Rock, owned by my former Hendrix College classmate John Harris.

 

A Child in These Hills and Rock Me on the Water are from Jackson Browne’s album Saturate Before Using.

 

The fill-in selection, the missing number 6 above, is a brief excerpt from Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, recorded in 1991, as best I can tell.  The CD I recorded it from is a 1997 compilation called Elgar: The Ultimate Collection.  I used this selection to cover over my mistake of not reversing the turntable platter far enough when I cued up Ventura Highway, which made the first guitar note of that song off-key. 

 

Ventura Highway is the opening song on America’s second album, Homecoming.  Well, I’m pretty sure it’s their second album.  Not nearly as popular as their first album, which included the song everyone at first thought was being sung by Neil Young: A Horse With No Name.

 

From the Beginning was written by Greg Lake, and is on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s album Trilogy.  Lake is the vocalist and guitar player on this album and was formerly a vocalist, bassist and co-songwriter with King Crimson.  Keith Emerson plays keyboards and Carl Palmer is the percussionist.

 

Send in the Clowns was written by Stephen Sondheim for the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, based on the 1956 Ingmar Bergman movie Smiles of a Summer Night.  The music and lyrics are © 1973.  The song was later performed and recorded by numerous singers including Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.  Sondheim himself, in an interview related to a 2002 revival of the play, said the song’s lyrics have a somewhat manipulative quality.  This recording is from the original Broadway cast album, with Glynis Johns playing the female lead of Desirée.  From the album’s liner notes, written by William Evans:

 “Fredrik makes his way to Desirée’s  bedroom, where she reveals her true reason for inviting him—her hope that they might be able to revive their love permanently.  But Fredrik, unable to give up his child bride, walks out, leaving Desirée alone (SEND IN THE CLOWNS).

“Meanwhile, Anne and Fredrika scour the grounds for Hendrik.  Anne finds him as he is suicidally rigging up a noose.  Realizing it is Hendrik she loves, not ‘poor old Fredrik,’ Anne decides to run off with him.

“Petra, the maid, having made love with Madame Armfeldt’s butler, Frid (George Lee Andrews), expresses her sense of romance in terms of the practical and real (THE MILLER’S SON).

“Fredrik finds himself being consoled by Charlotte about the loss of his son and wife.  The Count spots Fredrik and Charlotte embracing.  He storms out of the house to challenge Fredrik to a game of Russian roulette.  They go off to the summer pavilion, a shot is heard, and the Count returns with Fredrik slung over his shoulder.  Fredrik has ‘merely grazed his ear.’  The Count orders Charlotte to pack their bags.  At last, Desirée and Fredrik realize that they are meant to be together (Reprise of SEND IN THE CLOWNS).

“The comedy ended, Madame Armfeldt tells her granddaughter that the night has already smiled twice, once for the young and once for the fools.  ‘The smile for the fools was particularly broad tonight.’  To the accompaniment of the NIGHT WALTZ, the lovers dance through the silver birches as the night smiles down for the third and final time (FINALE).”

 

I recorded One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part 1 and Freddie’s Dead from the CD Soul Train: 1972, which also has Michael Jackson singing Ben (a song about a rat, from the movie of the same name).  Everybody Plays the Fool, by The Main Ingredient, is on Soul Train: 1972, too.  I was certain I was going to use this song on my Circa ’72 CD, but it didn’t seem to fit after all.  Instead I used two other songs: One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show Part I is one of them; Same Situation, from Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album, is the other. The songs on Court and Spark are © 1973.

 

Learn How to Fall is one of the lesser known songs on Paul Simon’s 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.  Better-known songs from the album are Kodachrome, American Tune (I almost used it—the theme certainly runs throughout my CD) and Loves Me Like a Rock. 

 

Sail Away is from the album of the same name.  A couple of other fairly well known songs on this Randy Newman album are Political Science and You Can Leave Your Hat On.

 

Hypnotized is from Fleetwood Mac’s 1973 album Mystery to Me.  The members of the group at that time were (as listed inside the album cover) Mick Fleetwood, percussion; John McVie, bass; Bob Welch, guitars, vocals; Bob Weston, lead guitar, slide; Christine McVie, keyboards, vocals.  Like most of the songs on the album, Hypnotized was written by Bob Welch.  The album was “Produced by Martin Birch and Fleetwood Mac.  Recorded on the Rolling Stones Mobile Unit.  Mixed at Advison, London.”

 

Phil, Ancient Poetry, Fig Leaf and Hope for Mankind are from the album 2000 and Thirteen, an edited version of Mel Brooks’ and Carl Reiner’s conversational performance in front of a live audience of  “over 150 friends and associates” at The Burbank Studios in Los Angeles on August 25, 1973.  Brooks and Reiner introduced The 2000 Year Old Man to the world in about 1960 on their TV variety show.  (When Reiner refers to Brooks “living through two centuries” he means two millennia, but I didn’t even notice the mistake until I’d heard the conversation several times—until I was making the CD, actually.)  Including the track Hope for Mankind on my CD was something I hadn’t planned.  I used it simply because there was a little time still available on the CD.   I used the turntable on/off switch at the very end to stop the turntable rather than to start it as I’d done so many times during this project. 

 

Dr. John’s song Right Place Wrong Time is from the CD Soul Train: 1973.   Superstition and Big Brother are on Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book album.  The beginning of Big Brother is already mixed with the end of Superstition on the album, so this cool-sounding mix is not one I can claim for myself. 

 

Also ready-mixed are The Dirty Jobs and Helpless Dancer on The Who’s 1973 double album Quadrophenia.   Like Tommy, Quadrophenia is a rock opera.  Unlike the deaf, dumb and blind boy in Tommy, Jimmy in Quadrophenia is an all-too-typical-teenager struggling with allegiances:  parents vs. friends, home vs. escape, taking a demeaning job vs. fighting in the streets, love vs. hate in his relationship with the opposite sex; and throughout it all, of course, being supremely concerned with wearing the right clothes and having the right look.  Here’s the first paragraph of Jimmy’s long description of his messed-up life, included as part of the liner notes of the album, © 1973 by Pete Townshend:  “I had to go to this psychiatrist every week.  Every Monday.  He never really knew what was wrong with me.  He said I wasn’t mad or anything.  He said there’s no such thing as madness.  I told him he should try standing in a queue at Brentford football ground on a Saturday morning.  I thought it might change his mind.  My dad put it another way.  He said I changed like the weather.  One minute I’d be a tearaway, next minute all soppy and swoony over some bird.  Schizophrenia, he called it.  Nutty, my mum called it.”   At the end of this imaginative narrative, there is a disclaimer:  “No one in this story is meant to represent anyone either living or dead, particularly the Mum and Dad.  Our Mums and Dads are all very nice and live in bungalows which we bought for them in the Outer Hebrides.”

 

When I was buying a blank journal book at the Capitol Bookstore on Louisiana Street in downtown Little Rock in October 1982, the adagio movement from Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata began playing on the public radio station.  I didn’t know what it was at the time, but the girl behind the counter said, “Oh, I love this!”  After that I loved it too.  What we were hearing was the beginning of Adventures in Good Music, a radio program hosted by Karl Haas (still on the air) that opens and closes with the first minute or so of the Pathetique’s 2^nd movement.  I haven’t heard a version I like better than the one I put on the CD, and of course I needed one recorded in ’72 or ‘73.  See the pre-notes for a description of where I got the album.  The sound quality in the final version on the Circa ’72 CD is lacking, but I finally decided that’s the way it should be.

 

 

_____________________________

The main reason I made these tapes and CDs is that I enjoy the process of mixing the ending of one song with the beginning of another.  In the summer of 1984 I bought the mixer I still use (a small DJ mixer from Radio Shack) and made a cassette tape I called the Peace Links Planetarium Tape.  The idea was that people would simply listen to the songs and think about what was being said.  Listening too often takes a back seat to watching and looking, which are necessary for survival but can lead to a superficial viewpoint of complex issues.  The information from the eyes gets in the way of information from the ears.  Like the Peace Links tape, the tapes and CDs in the Circa 69-72 project are meant as anti-videos, to be listened to for whatever effect might be produced.  Unlike the Peace Links tape, which I envisioned being played for seated audiences at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s planetarium, the Circa 69-72 music is meant for dancing and healing, as well as thinking and feeling. 

When I recorded the first side of the Circa '69 tape, in September 1999, I had just moved to Columbia, South Carolina.  I was living in a dorm room without a roommate in the graduate student wing of a big dorm on the University campus. I was far away from friends and family, so the historical connection was important to me for that reason.  But I also had the feeling that history was about to recycle itself in a very undesirable way, particularly with regard to the war in Vietnam. 

 

I intended to make only the 1969 tape, but after making the second side of it in March of 2000, I realized there were a lot of relevant songs from 1970, 71 and 72.  So sometime in the year 2000 I decided to continue making and sending out recordings for each year through 1972.  The '69 tape has a few songs from a year or so earlier on it, and I found when I started trying to make the '72 CD that I wanted to include songs from '73 also.  Thus the need for the "circa" designation in those titles.

 

 I was in high school from the late summer of 1969 until May 1972, worked as a copy editor and reporter during the summer of 1972, and did my first stint at Hendrix College in the ’72-’73 school year.  I also started doing taping for TAPES in 1972—see Circa ’72 pre-notes.  The years 1969 through 1973 roughly correspond to the ill-fated reign of Richard Nixon as president (under threat of impeachment, he resigned in August 1974), the end of the reign of longtime FBI-chief/secret-drag-queen J. Edgar Hoover (he died in 1972), and the soul-searching that went on in America during the height of the Vietnam War and during the Watergate years.  And on the arts scene side of the human inequality:  Louis Armstrong died in 1971, Pablo Picasso died in 1973.

 

The years 1969 through 1972 are the only years people have visited the moon (so far as we know), and the moon is only the first step in the exploration of space by humans.  Unexpected developments in space flight propulsion are needed before space exploration becomes commonplace, but it now seems possible that private enterprise may send people to the moon in the not too distant future.

 

The biggest interest for me in making these recordings is the combined problems of war and love.  These are ever-present, worldwide issues, but they were at the top of the list of major themes in the United States during the late sixties and early seventies.  They were also major issues in my life back then.  For the U.S. and for me personally these are once again very problematic issues, mainly how to avoid or shorten wars and therefore avoid unnecessary killing and injustices, and how to put love into practice in everyday life.

Last updated July 17, 2005.

 

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