My 70's Page, Music in Review
"Get Ready"
Rare Earth
Rare Earth 5012
heir sound was a combination of hard rock and
funky blues, and for that reason, millions assumed that the five men in the band were
black. They weren't. In reality, Rare Earth was a blue-eyed soul group the first white
act to cut hits under the Motown banner.
John Persh, Gil Bridges and Pete Riveria grew up in Detroit on a steady diet of rhythm and blues. The three attended elementary and high school together and started rehearsing as a trio in their mid-teens. In 1961, as the Sunliners, they began playing parties, dances, and "whatever paid" around the Motor City area. They continued to build a local following all through the sixties, and in 1969 decided to reorganize. They added guitarist Rob Richards and keyboard player Kenny James and renamed themselves Rare Earth.
The quintet then ran into Dennis Coffey, an arranger and session man who helped the group produce a medley of old Motown hits. The recording was released on Verve Records and impressed the people at Motown. It paved the way to a Motown contract with one unusual wrinkle. For the first time in history, Motown was setting up a subsidiary label to be named after its leading act. In that way, Rare Earth Records was formed.
Their first album release was, as before, built around Motown gold. The band decided to reinterpret "Get Ready," which had been a Top 30 hit for the Temptations in 1966. On July 4 at 1 a.m., Rare Earth began recording, and when they were through, they had stretched the song to twenty-one and a half minutes. It took up the entire second side of that first album, issued in the fall of 1969.
The album was given heavy Motown promotion and broke nationally early in December. By far, the most popular cut for air play was the long version of "Get Ready." Reversing the usual procedure, the hit album spawned a hit 45 a cut-down version of the song which took off in mid-March. By June, it was one of the best-selling pop singles in the country, and was getting R&B play as well. "At first," said Gil, "everybody on the soul stations thought we were black. When they found out we weren't, we were knocked off by some deejays. They would be playing the song one week, and then gone!" The record wound up, though, in the R&B Top 20.
Rare Earth followed this success with another remake of a Temptations song, "(I Know) I'm Losing You." In 1971, they had three more hits: "Born to Wander," "I Just Want to Celebrate," and "Hey Big Brother." After that, though, dissension, dropouts and lawsuits decimated the band. Some former members ended up doing session work for Motown.
In its prime, Rare Earth was one of the most popular live groups of the early seventies. It was, in fact, the top-selling white act to blacks until displaced in 1975 by Average White Band.
"How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"
The Bee Gees
Atco 6824
t was the success and flash of Elvis Presley that
inspired the Gibb brothers to make their first public appearance as contestants in a
hometown talent show. At that time June 1956 their leader and main writer, Barry,
was nine years old; his twin brothers, Robin and Maurice (pronounced "Morris")
were seven.
Coached by their father, Hugh, a bandleader, the boys began singing at speedway stadiums around Brisbane, Australia. Race driver Bill Good, impressed by their vocal harmony, introduced them to local deejay Bill Gates. Gates, in turn, started playing tapes of the group on his "Midday Platter Chatter" radio show, which helped build a local following. "Because of our names, we became known by the three initials B.G.'s," said Maurice. "Later we changed that to 'Bee Gees,' after the words 'Brothers Gibb.'"
By 1960, the boys had their own regional TV show, and in 1962, they signed with the Festival label. Four years and a dozen singles later, the Gibb family departed for England. Their last festival recording, "Spicks and Specks," became a number one hit Down Under after they arrived in England.
Before leaving Australia, the Bee Gees had sent audition tapes to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, at NEMS Enterprises. They were heard by managing director Robert Stigwood, who was impressed. He put the brothers under contract, along with two backup musicians, guitarist Vince Melouney and drummer Colin Petersen.
On Valentine's Day, 1967, this quintet recorded a stark, Gothic ballad entitled "New York Mining Disaster 1941." Released amid a massive publicity campaign, the record was a million-selling sensation. It sounded so much like the Beatles that many were convinced that "Bee Gees" was simply a pseudonym for "Beatles Group." When critics attacked the Gibbs as Beatles imitators, the brothers lashed back that the Beatles' sound was actually a ripped-off Bee Gees sound! This bizarre controversy came to an ironic end in 1978, when the Bee Gees starred in a film of Beatles music Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The Bee Gees had three other hits in 1967: "To Love Somebody" (which they wrote for Otis Redding), "Holiday," and "(The Lights Went Out in) Massachusetts." In 1968, they entered the American Top 10 for the first time with "I've Gotta Get a Message to You" and "I Started a Joke."
The sixties were crazy days, and the Bee Gees, caught up in the lunacy of their own rise to stardom, broke up in early 1969. Robin left, upset over "musical direction." Colin was fired and tried to sue, claiming the others could not go on as "the Bee Gees" without him (he lost). Then Vince quit, formed his own group, and promptly sank from sight. Barry and Maurice tried to forge on as a two-man Bee Gees, but with little success. Finally, in November 1970, the three agreed to reunite.
The second phase of their career was the ballad period (1970-75). It began with "Lonely Days," a comeback record noted for its jagged rhythm. Released late in 1970, it bounced up the chart to number three, becoming the boys' biggest pop single. They were ecstatic, and wondered if they could top it.
They did in the summer of 1971. "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" was an anguished, yet soothing ballad, composed expressly for Andy Williams. When Williams turned it down, the Bee Gees decided to record it themselves. "The writing of it was neither a struggle nor a hardship," said Robin. "The whole thing took about an hour to complete. The song reached the number one spot, to our great satisfaction."
"How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" took off in late June, and spent four weeks at the top of the charts, cresting in August. It solidified the return of the Bee Gees. In 1972, there were two more lush ballad hits: "My World," and "Run to Me." The best was yet to come.
"Without You"
Nilsson
RCA 0604
arry Edward Nilsson was born in Bushwick, a tough
neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. In the early fifties, his family moved to California,
where Harry began to get into rock music. After high school, he started work as a computer
supervisor at the First National Bank of Van Nuys. In his free time, he wrote songs, came
up with commercial jingles, and sang demos for music publishers. Once his voice was heard,
off camera, singing on an episode of the sixties television series "I Spy."
He got his first real break from producer Phil Spector, who had the Ronettes record two Nilsson songs. After that, other artists began to use his material, including the Turtles, the Yardbirds, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Rick Nelson, Lulu, Herb Alpert, Glen Campbell, the New Christy Minstrels, Jack Jones, and Harry Belafonte. One day, after hearing the Monkees sing his "Cuddly Toy" on the radio, Nilsson decided to make music his full-time occupation.
In 1967, he signed with RCA and put out the album Pandemonium Shadow Show. It used twenty voices, all his, and featured "You Can't Do That," an eleven-song montage of Beatles tunes. John Lennon heard it and immediately called Nilsson his "favorite American singer."
His second album was Aerial Ballet, titled after his grandparents' turn-of-the-century circus act. On it was "Everybody's Talkin'," which became his first hit in the fall of 1969. The song, written by Fred Neil, was used on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. Nilsson had also written a tune for the movie, but it was rejected by the film's producers. Instead, Nilsson released it as a follow-up single, and "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City" became his second hit.
In 1971, Nilsson wrote the story and songs for an animated TV special, "The Point." It was the story of Oblio, a little boy banished to the Pointless Forest because his round head made him different. From that soundtrack came Nilsson's third hit, "Me and My Arrow," which was later rewritten into a TV commercial for Plymouth Arrow automobiles.
And then came the big time Nilsson's first number-one record. He ventured to England for a whole new tone and feel to his music, and met up with producer Richard Perry. The two began to map out an album, which came to be known as Nilsson Schmilsson. Almost immediately, Richard came up with the first song a tune he'd found on the first Badfinger album. Group members Pete Ham and Tom Evans had written "Without You," and Richard was certain it would be an excellent tune for Nilsson to record. Harry wasn't quite so sure, and it wasn't until the middle of their sessions that he agreed to give it a try.
"It was a different record for its time," Richard recalled. "It was a big ballad with a heavy backbeat, and although many artists have cut songs like it since, no one was doing it then. It has a very romantic feel, and you know who was playing piano on that? It was Gary Wright, and that was years before he hit it big with 'Dream Weaver.'"
"Without You" was released as a single in December 1971 and spent four weeks at the top of the charts that February. In March, Nilsson received an RIAA Gold Disc Award, for sales surpassing one million copies. Soon after that, he also picked up a Grammy, for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. "Without You" itself was nominated for Record of the Year and Nilsson Schmilsson for Album of the Year.
That album also produced Nilsson's next couple of hits, "Jump into the Fire," and "Coconut," both in 1972. Later in the year, Nilsson had another hit, "Spaceman," on which he was joined for the first time by Ringo Starr. In 1974, Ringo and Nilsson made a movie together, Son Of Dracula, which featured "Without You," "Jump into the Fire," and a new hit single, "Daybreak," and then Nilsson became John Lennon's companion during the ex-Beatle's separation from his wife, Yoko Ono. During this time the two recorded Pussy Cats, an album of old rock & roll songs. Nilsson faded from the recording scene during the eighties, straightened out, started a family, and pursued business interests, which included a Hollywood-based film distribution company. After Lennon's murder, Nilsson became a gun-control advocate, and made a low-key return to recording with 1988's A Touch More Schmilsson in the Night, on which he sang such pop standards as "Over the Rainbow" and "It's Only a Paper Moon."
In 1993, Nilsson suffered a heart attack, which inspired him to begin writing and recording again in earnest, even though he had no contract. Just a few days after finishing a new album, he died of heart disease at age 52, leaving behind a wife and seven children. The 1995 tribute album For the Love of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson featured Randy Newman, Brian Wilson, Adrian Belew, Joe Ely, and others.
With his three-octave vocal range, the late Harry Nilsson displayed an amazing studio wizardry and sang nearly all the parts on his records. The final effect would have been almost impossible to duplicate live, so Nilsson never tried. When asked when he would give a concert performance, Nilsson would just shrug and say, "I don't know."
"Crocodile Rock"
Elton John
MCA 4000
eginald Kenneth Dwight began teaching himself to
play the piano at the age of four. He got good grades at London's Royal Academy of Music,
but wasn't entirely satisfied with the sound of the "classic masters." Then one
day, his mom bought him copies of "Heartbreak Hotel" and Bill Haley's "ABC
Boogie." "I couldn't believe how great they were," he grinned. "And
from then on, rock'n'roll took over." He soon left the academy, much preferring to
stay home imitating Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis.
At thirteen, he put together his first band, the Corvettes, and two years later, helped form a backup band, Bluesology. It was then that he decided to change his name, because Reg Dwight "sounded too much like a laboratory assistant, or cement mixer, or something." He lifted "Elton" from Elton Dean, the sax man in Bluesology, and "John" from R&B singer Long John Baldry.
In 1967, Elton John answered an ad placed by Liberty Records. He was given an audition, but failed, due to "weak words in my songs." Liberty suggested that he get in touch with a lyricist, and teamed him with Bernie Taupin. For six months, the two collaborated entirely by mail Elton writing music to fit Bernie's poetry. To supplement his income, Elton took a number of odd jobs: playing piano for the Hollies (on "He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother") and singing backup for Tom Jones (on "Delilah" and "Daughter of Darkness").
Eventually, Elton and Bernie met face-to-face, and got a job together as staff songwriters for Dick James Music. Finally, one of the staff salesmen had the guts to tell them their work really stunk, and the only way they'd ever get anywhere was to write in their own natural style. The boys wholeheartedly agreed, and from then on, it was uphill.
In America, Elton's career was ignited on August 25, 1970, the night of a remarkable showcase performance at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Many members of the pop press were there, and they quickly spread the word about "England's brilliant new superstar" (Bernie elected to remain in the background). That first U.S. album, Elton John, featured the hit "Your Song," which went Top 10 in January 1971.
The floodgates were open, and five more albums were rapidly released: Tumbleweed Connection, 11-17-70 (a radio soundtrack), Friends (a movie soundtrack), Madman Across the Water, and Honky Chateau. As his popularity snowballed, Elton took a few weeks out to record another album Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano Player. He cut it in Paris at the "Honky Chateau" his name for the Chateau d'Herouville.
In the fall of 1972, EJ embarked on his most elaborate American tour. On it, he introduced a tune that some referred to as "the British answer to 'American Pie.'" It was Elton's distillation of his record collecting interest, and clearly, the mot potent cut on his brand-new album.
"Crocodile Rock" was a celebration, of sorts, of rock's earlier days, and in many respects echoed the sounds and styles of Elton's lifelong idols. From a construction standpoint, it was akin to early sixties records, such as those of Neil Sedaka. Elton gave it a carnival feel by playing the farfisa organ, strongly reminiscent of Del Shannon's "Runaway."
The story line concerns happy, carefree teenage years, as fictitious (at least in Elton's case) as the dance the song "recalls." "I had such a miserable time as a child and a teenager," said Elton, who spent much of his youth as a fat, lonely kid. "That's why I'm making up for it now. I regard myself as a teenager today, even though I'm in my mid-twenties," he said at the time.
"Crocodile Rock" was issued about two months ahead of the album it came off, and broke in the U.S. in early December 1972. By March of '73, it was a million-seller, and the number-one single in America. Elton's record company had an extra reason to celebrate, as it was also their first release under a new name MCA Records. With one swoop, both the label and the song were established in the marketplace.
"Seasons In The Sun"
Terry Jacks
Bell 45432
anadian-born Terry Jacks grew up admiring American
rock'n'roll, especially the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. "Buddy
was the greatest," Terry recalled. "I used to have a job delivering papers in
the morning, and all the money I earned was spent buying Buddy Holly 45s."
Terry began his own career as rhythm guitarist and lead singer for a Vancouver group, the Chessmen. They recorded extensively in Nashville and Los Angeles, but never managed to have a hit. "It was frustrating," said Terry, "and I had to find out why. So whenever I could, I'd hitchhike down to L.A. and study the record trade."
One night, while playing with the Chessmen on Canadian TV's "Music Hop," Terry met a young singer named Susan Pesklevits, who was then making her national debut. The two decided to team up, personally and professionally, as a husband-and-wife duo: the Poppy Family. Susan was lead vocalist, while Terry composed, arranged, and produced all their material. One tune, written quickly to fill up a B side, became a huge Canadian hit early in 1970. American listeners whose radios picked up the song from over the Canadian border demanded its U.S. release. The London label obliged, and before long, "Which Way You Goin' Billy?" reached number two in the States. In Canada, the tune was voted "Song of the Year" by RPM, the Canadian music industry trade paper.
The Poppy Family had one other Top 30 single, "That's Where I Went Wrong," issued later in 1970. After that, everything seemed to go wrong. "We stayed together as long as possible," Terry explained, "but it got to be too much for us. I liked making records, and sometimes singing live, but hated to go on the road. Susan enjoyed traveling." By mid-1973, both their marriage and their act had broken up.
Terry continued to write and produce for Susan, but was then open to outside projects. The Beach Boys called and asked him to supervise one of their sessions. In the studio, he had them cut one of his favorite tunes, "Seasons in the Sun." When the group refused to released the finished track, Terry began to consider singing the song himself.
"Seasons in the Sun" had been written in French in 1961 under the title of "Le Moribond" (The Dying Man), by Belgian poet-composer Jacques Brel. In 1964, it was translated into English by Rod McKuen and recorded by Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio. Although that version didn't sell well, Terry heard it, and the tune remained in the back of his mind. The Beach Boys' rejection coupled with the death of a close personal friend of Terry's, which made the song's theme more meaningful to him finally sent Terry back into the studio, accompanied by guitarist Link Wray.
Terry received permission, but not credit, for changing part of "Seasons in the Sun." He rewrote the last verse and rearranged the words and chords in the chorus in order to "lighten up" the song. He released it on his own label, Goldfish Records, and was amazed when it became the largest-selling single in Canadian history more than 285,000 copies sold in a matter of weeks. Bell's A&R vice president, Dave Carrico, heard the record, flew to Vancouver, and snapped up American rights. On February 14, 1974, it earned its first RIAA Gold Award, for sales of over a million copies. Eventually, it sold more than three million copies in the United States alone. Worldwide, the figure is over six million.
"Seasons in the Sun" is the story of a dying man, bidding farewell to loved ones who have shared his life. Shortly before Terry's recording came out, Jacques Brel retired, at the peak of his popularity. Fans around the world were stunned, but the composer would give no reason. Finally, the truth was revealed. After a quiet, six-year battle against cancer, Brel succumbed to the disease and died, on October 9, 1978.
"Fame"
David Bowie
RCA 10320
avid Bowie (born David Robert Haywood-Jones) began
his odd musical odyssey in the early sixties. He worked with a mime troupe, and through
them developed an interest in theatrics and abstract characterizations. He also formed and
played in several rock bands, and wondered if somehow he might be able to link the two.
In 1966, he changed his last name from Jones to Bowie to avoid confusion with the Monkees' Davy Jones. He also began recording but didn't get anywhere until 1969, the year man landed on the moon. That event inspired "Space Oddity," his first major U.K. hit. Almost immediately, David staged his first in a career of publicity stunts his "retirement" to an arts lab in Beckingham.
In 1970, he returned in a new guise a transvestite posing for photos in ankle-length skirts. This gimmick caught the attention of RCA Records. They signed Bowie to a lucrative, long-term contract. Their hope was to turn flash into figures: through heavy promotion, make David Bowie out to be "the Elvis of the seventies."
On January 22, 1972, the campaign took off with a "shocking announcement" David's famous admission to the press that he was gay. Taking a cue from A Clockwork Orange, he cropped his hair, dyed it orange, and started appearing in modified space suits. This visual image tied in with the new album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Amid a huge publicity push, it became a successful album, and David Bowie was on the way.
Within a few months, David was the best-selling recording act in England. Then, on July 3, 1973, he announced his second "retirement" this time, he assured fans, he meant business. Bowie kept his word, and vanished entirely from the music industry for a few weeks.
In 1974, David made a "comeback" tour of America, cutting a live album in the process. RCA released new figures, trumpeting cumulative Bowie sales, by then, of "one million albums, and one million singles." The BBC chimed in with numbers of their own: in a survey of favorite record stars in Britain, Bowie had finished third in the Best Male category, and first in Best Female. He had become the "King of Glitter Rock" and perhaps the "Queen" as well.
In 1975, Bowie turned his back on all that, and entered an R&B bag. "He'd been working to put together a soulful sound for years," said co-producer Tony Visconti. "Every British musician has a hidden desire to be black." David entered the Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, and, backed by the city's top session men, recorded the album Young Americans.
"It wasn't a statement album," said Bowie. "It was a Polaroid album. I took a snapshot of music in America as I saw it at the time. I don't play Young Americans much. I think it's one of the most unlistenable albums I ever made."
The title track made the U.S. Top 30 the first time a Bowie song had done that since "Space Oddity." Then, in late June, a second tune was pulled off the album "Fame."
"Now that's a happy song," David continued. "Everything about it, the melodic feel, is happy. The whole disco thing, I think I anticipated the whole plastic soul thing with that LP."
Bowie wrote "Fame" in the studio, along with his guitarist, Carlos Alomar, and a new-found friend, John Lennon. John, whom David called "the last great original," can be heard joining in with Bowie toward the end of the song.
"Fame" reached number one on September 1975, and was certified as a million-seller on October 17. Six months later, "Golden Years," from another album of "plastic soul" and his highest charting album, Station To Station, reached the Top 10 in the U.S. After the paranoic Scary Monsters album in 1980, Bowie turned his attention to acting, starring in a series of pictures that were neither critical nor commercial successes. Let's Dance returned him to the top of the charts in 1983 with three Top 20 singles "Let's Dance" (#1), "China Girl" (#10), and "Modern Love" (#14).
Reflecting on his career as a musical chameleon, Bowie once said: "I'm a corporation of characters. Naturally, ahead of my time. I'm not part of rock'n'roll, I used rock'n'roll. I've rocked my roll and it's finished."
"Play That Funky Music"
Wild Cherry
Epic 50225
hat I wanted to do was cross R&B and pop
music," said Rob Parissi, lead singer of Wild Cherry. "That's why I put a band
together in 1970. Shortly after that, I wound up in the hospital for a few days, and the
other guys came to see me. They brought me a bunch of stuff they were clowning around
and one of those things was a box of cough drops. As they were getting ready to leave,
one said, 'Hey, we don't have a name for our band.' So I held up the box of cough drops,
as a joke, and said, 'You can call it this,' and pointed to the words 'Wild Cherry.' They
liked it, and I hated it. I said, 'Are you serious?' It took me a long time to get used to
that name.
"Anyway, we signed with Brown Bag Records Terry Knight's label but nothing really came of it. We went through some changes and broke up in 1975. I sold all my equipment and went to manage some Bonanza steakhouses. I listened to radio as we closed up each night and heard things like 'Fame' by David Bowie and 'You're No Good' by Linda Ronstadt. I started saying that the trend was changing that we were getting back to the roots of rock'n'roll.
"So I got out of the steakhouses, got another bunch of fellows together, and formed a second attempt at Wild Cherry. We started playing all the rock clubs, but then they started to disappear, and we wound up having to work in discos, including a place in Pittsburgh called the 2001. We played too much rock, I guess, because people came up to us and said, 'Play that funky music.'
"In the dressing room, I told the guys that we had to find a rock'n'roll way to play this disco stuff. Our drummer said, 'Well, I guess it's like they say "You gotta play that funky music, white boy."' I said, 'That's a great idea.' I grabbed a bar pad, the kind used to take down drink orders, and began to write.
"A couple of months later, the Commodores came out with a song called 'I Feel Sanctified,' which I thought would be a good A side for us. So we went into the studio and cut that, along with 'Funky Music' as a B side. While I was laying down my vocal part on 'Funky Music,' our engineer called up some friends across town and said, 'I think you ought to come in here I think we've got a hit.' So this guy came over and listened to it, and said, 'Yeah, when you get through with that, let me have it.'
"Well, I didn't take his opinion alone, so I took the song to New York and played it for a few labels, but nobody was really that much into dealing for it. I was pretty disgusted, and after a few weeks, I was ready to throw the thing away. Then that first guy called me back and said he'd played it for Epic Records.
"I knew enough about the record business to know that we had to capture the biggest cities. But to me, to get a breakout in Pittsburgh, our hometown, was something that we needed badly. When I first heard the song on the air in Pittsburgh, it was a real exciting thing. It just became everything I'd hoped it would be. And all the things that followed! Billboard called us the Best Pop Group of the Year; we got the American Music Award for the Top R&B Single of the Year; and there were two Grammy nominations, for Best New Vocal Group and Best R&B Performance by a Group or Duo. We got gold records from Canada and a lot of other foreign countries.
"After that, we started to overproduce our records, and that's probably why we never had another major hit. A lot of that was my fault, striving to sound different. We cut our last album in February 1979 and then just kind of fell apart.
"I grew up on Bo Diddley, Duane Eddy, the Animals, the Easybeats, the Yardbirds, the Ventures, Sly and the Family Stone all pure forms of rock music of their own kind. I'm a firm believer in cutting things in their purest form, with each guy playing something interesting, and complementary to the song. That's what happened with 'Play That Funky Music.' Every guy had a designated part, and it all came together, and sounded good."
"A Star Is Born (Evergreen)"
Barbra Streisand
Columbia 10450
Star Is Born started out in 1937 as an
early Technicolor feature film. It told the story of two stars whose marriage goes on the
rocks because one is on the way up and the other is on the way down. Frederic March played
the loser, an aging, self-destructive type; Janet Gaynor was his wife, a young movie
hopeful. The picture itself won an Oscar for Best Original Story, which was something of a
lark; its premise, in fact, had been lifted from What Price Hollywood?, a
feature made in 1932 by George Cukor.
Ironically, it was Cukor who directed A Star Is Born when it was remade in 1954, with James Mason. The plot was rewritten a little bit to allow musical numbers by Mason's co-star, Judy Garland. A high point was Judy's classic rendition of "The Man Who Got Away"; her "love theme" from A Star Is Born.
The next twenty years were peaceful on the retread front; everyone assumed that A Star Is Born was "dated" property, and two versions were more than enough. But then, somebody got the bright idea of changing the setting adapting the old concept to the world of rock music. In 1974, rumors began: Streisand was up for the female lead in Rainbow Bridge, a third remake of A Star Is Born. Cher and others had been in the running; Kris Kristofferson was pretty much set for the male lead. Then, in April 1975, a source close to Elvis Presley said that he would "definitely co-star in the movie, newly titled Rainbow Road." That bit of inspired casting never came off, of course, and is one of the great rock'n'roll "ifs." We can only speculate as to the kind of sparks Streisand and Presley might have struck if they'd been able to work together onscreen.
Kris Kristofferson wound up with the part, and, quite credibly, made it very much his own. A gifted singer-songwriter, he'd gained great fame in the early seventies with such tunes as "Why Me" and "Loving Her Was Easier" (he'd also written "Help Me Make It Through the Night"). Thanks to his popularity (and Barbra's), the film found a huge fan market even though critics, by and large, were less than impressed.
Their main gripe was with the movie music, which they said was middle of the road, passed off as rock'n'roll. Indeed, most of the score was by soft pop composers: Kenny Loggins, Paul Williams, and the team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Kris himself was not really a rock singer, and neither was Barbra, who took screen credit for the picture's "musical concept."
"In many respects, this is a filmed Streisand concert," wrote one reviewer. "It's simply set against a soggy soap opera. As in Funny Girl and The Way We Were, there's a brassy woman, intent on a guy less strong than she is. She can't control her ambitions, and in the end, her main squeeze is lost. How many times is Barbra going to play the same role?"
Streisand served as the picture's executive producer; her boyfriend, Jon Peters, was producer. The two edited their film at home, allowing no one to see it before the world premiere. It was finally released on December 18, 1976. Within eighteen months, it had earned back a spectacular profit more than $65 million.
Barbra also came up with the title theme, which she wrote with Paul Williams. Despite its greeting card sentimentality, it became enormously popular, and is still a standard song chosen by many couples to be sung at weddings. Streisand's version broke in mid-December 1976, and reached number one in March 1977. In all, it spent nearly six months on the charts. Later, it earned three Grammy Awards: Best Female Vocal Performance, Best Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist, and Song of the Year. The soundtrack album was a pretty big hit too, despite carrying the highest list price of any pop album to that time $8.98. After seven months in the Top 20, it had sold over three and a half million copies.
"Stayin' Alive"
The Bee Gees
RSO 885
he Bee Gees' saga can be neatly divided into four
parts: their Days of Development (1956-66), the Ethereal Era (1967-69), the Ballad Boom
(1970-74), and the Disco Deluge (1975-79). The latter period, of course, was when they hit
their peak creatively, and commercially.
Their immense popularity, though, was a distant dream in 1974. The group had been making two million a year in the late sixties, but then, after a string of hits, they fell apart. A comeback in the early seventies yielded such million-sellers as "Lonely Days" and "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," but that success was short-lived.
Then, in 1975, the rhythm of their car tires on a Florida bridge inspired "Jive Talkin'," their first number-one hit in four years. They thought of it as just an R&B tune, but when the record took off in dance halls, the Bee Gees were suddenly cast as "disco kings." Barry, Robin, and Maurice were not entirely sure as to what that meant, but were determined to find out. By the end of the decade, they had not only mastered the music, but defined, shaped, and epitomized its potential.
Each hit after "Jive Talkin'" seemed more impressive than the last, as the brothers explored and shattered the limits of disco. In 1975, there were "Nights on Broadway" and "Fanny (Be Tender with My Love)"; in 1976, "You Should Be Dancing" and "Love So Right." They started 1977 with their sixth major dance record, "Boogie Child."
And then they got a phone call.
It seems that their manager, Robert Stigwood, had been talking to an English writer, Nik Cohen, who was based in New York. Nik told Robert that he'd send him some ideas for movies. Stigwood saw Cohen's New York magazine cover story about discomania, and rang him up.
"Who needs ideas?" said Stigwood. "Let's do your magazine piece."
"He rang us up," said Robin, "and said, 'Would you like to do the soundtrack for a film? We said, 'What film?' He said, 'A film I'm making. I haven't even got a title for it yet. Maybe you could think of that, too.' 'How many songs?' 'Oh, about six or seven.' I said, 'Well, that's about one a day. When will you send us a script?' He said, 'Well, I don't have a script. You'll just have to get on with the soundtrack.' 'Well, I said, 'You haven't got a script, and we haven't got any songs, so we're equal, we're even.' I put down the phone, and we went to work."
The brothers actually wrote "Stayin' Alive" on a staircase at the chateau.
"Years ago, there were many porno films made here," said Robin. "The staircase where we wrote 'Stayin' Alive,' 'How Deep Is Your Love,' and all of those songs was the same staircase used in about six classic porno movies."
Barry recalled other details of "Stayin' Alive," which he called "a desperate plea for help."
"Robert wanted a scene that was eight minutes long, where Travolta was dancing with this girl," he said. "It would have a nice dance tempo, then a romantic interlude, and all hell breaking loose at the end. I said, 'Robert, that's crazy. We want to put this song out as a single, and we don't think the rhythm should break. It should go from beginning to end with the same rhythm, and get stronger all the way. To go into a lilting ballad just doesn't make sense.' The film got changed."
"Stayin' Alive" wound up opening Saturday Night Fever, as John Travolta struts along a city sidewalk. A teasing thirty seconds of that scene was shown in fifteen hundred theaters a week before the movie actually opened. A record was not yet available, but people began calling RSO anyway, asking for "Stayin' Alive."
The single broke in mid-December 1977, spending four weeks at number one in February 1978. It was on the charts for more than six months, and won a Grammy for Best Arrangement for Voices.
"Stayin' Alive" is about survival in the big city any big city but basically New York," said Robin. "When we saw the film we were surprised that it fit so well. It just amazed us, since we'd never even seen the script."
"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
Rod Stewart
Warner 8724
ll through the seventies, Rod Stewart stuck to a
simple philosophy: Give the people exactly what they want. And what they wanted from him
was spectacle, showmanship, and his own brand of sensuality.
Rod developed into one of the most moving singers of the decade. His voice was little more than a hoarse rasp, yet was capable of both hard rock and deep emotion. He was streetwise tough with a soft heart and millions thought he was very sexy indeed.
In 1976, his "Tonight's the Night" became the largest-selling single in Warner Brothers history. It came from the album A Night On The Town, the first album released on his own label, Riva (distributed by Warner Brothers). Off that same album came two other Top 30 hits in 1977, "The First Cut Is the Deepest" and "The Killing of Georgie." With a new backup band, Stewart then cut Footloose and Fancy Free. It featured "You're in My Heart" "a very confused song," according to Rod, "about women, Scotland, and two soccer teams." Also on that album was another pair of Top 30 hits, released as singles in 1978: "Hot Legs" and "I Was Only Joking." The latter tune was written to explain his unfaithful lifestyle to Britt Ekland, his former girlfriend.
In 1978, Rod bolstered the band by adding Nicky Hopkins on piano and Carmine Appice on drums. Together, they recorded his most spirited album of the seventies Blondes Have More Fun. "It's Stewart in a playful mood," wrote one critic. "The music is rowdy and irreverent." Another called it "smutty self-indulgence." Regardless, it sold nearly four million copies in six months. Additionally, the album was released in a limited edition of 100,000 picture discs, featuring disc imprints of front- and back-cover album graphics, as well as a cardboard pull-out of Stewart's face, also taken from album artwork.
The standout track, of course, was "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" "I wrote the verse, chords and the melody for the bridge," recalled Carmine Appice. "Rod wrote the bridge. It's the kind of stuff he likes sort of singalong music. And when we did the song live, the audience reaction, worldwide, was amazing. Whenever we started playing it, they started singing it. And when you get fifteen or twenty thousand people going 'Do ya think I'm sexy, da-da-dada-da-da,' it's incredible. Even in Japan, where they don't even speak English, they were singing along anyway."
In concert, Rod's rendition of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" was met by a tidal wave of screaming fans mostly female shouting, "YES!" It underlined his image as "rock's premier playboy of the seventies."
"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" was selling 250,000 copies a week in February 1979, the month it made number one. It was the fastest-selling single in Warner history and their first platinum single of the year. A special twelve-inch version was said to be the first 48-track disco mix ever made (only 300,000 copies were pressed as collector's items). The song topped charts in eleven countries, including France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Belgium, England, Australia, and Canada. In Brazil, singer Jorge Ben cried "ripoff," claiming the tune was too similar to his work, "Taj Mahal" (he later withdrew the complaint).
The record also sparked a parody, "Do You Think I'm Disco?," recorded by Chicago deejay Steve Dahl. An antidisco anthem, it sold over 300,000 copies for Ovation Records, without breaking into the national Top 40.
Rod didn't make much off "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" since he donated all his publishing royalties to UNICEF. But he did get an answer to his question on April 6, 1979, when former model Alena Collins Hamilton, became his bride.
- Gary Theroux, The Top Ten, Fireside, 1982.
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