Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

One of three new tracks recorded for inclusion in that year’s Aretha’s Greatest Hits album. The singer recasts the original red rose as “a rose in Black and Spanish Harlem,” sacrificing Ben E King/Leiber and Stoller’s baion sway for a foursquare no-nonsense funk(-esque) groove. She is working with quality musicians, including Chuck Rainey on bass, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie at the drums and special guest Dr John on keyboards, and her attempted recasting of the song as a black feminist anthem is salutary. But the record, as a record , is efficient rather than exciting. It sounds worthy rather than heartfelt, and the presence on its parent album of things like “Let It Be” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” suggests an artist unsure of where to go next – 1972’s gospel double Amazing Grace , amazing as it is, was a useful sidestep in this respect. However, her “Harlem” is certainly no match for her “Respect.” Date Record Made Number Two: 11 September 1971 Number Of Weeks At Num

In his absorbing history of recorded popular music in the USA, Love For Sale , David Hadju recalls interviewing three of the renegade country supergroup The Highwaymen in the early nineties. Kris Kristofferson was absent, but Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were all there. He asked the performers who their biggest early influence was, expecting pious responses like Jimmie Rodgers or The Carter Family. But all were of one accord – the performer who made them want to become country musicians was Gene Autry, whose movies they watched every Saturday morning at the cinema when they were kids. Jennings pointed out that fully half of any audience for a Gene Autry movie went out and bought a guitar the next day, or at any rate asked their parents to buy or lend them one. Hadju was slightly taken aback by this, but Jennings pointed out, rather forcibly, that, okay, Jimmie Rodgers may have been a genius but nobody knew or recognised that when he was alive – it was Autry w

A once again timely rejection of money as thing in itself – or him self – “Mr. Big Stuff”’s assured punch was recorded at Malaco Studios in Jackson, Mississippi, in early 1971 and no record label wanted to know about it; however, when King Floyd’s “Groove Me,” recorded at the same session by the same musicians, became a Pop top ten and R&B number one hit, a producer at Stax remembered what else had been recorded that afternoon and put Knight’s record out. Its characteristically elusive Southern rhythm matrix – drummer James Stroud is very careful not to beat on the beat, so to speak – was later widely sampled by artists including TLC (“Switch”) and The Beastie Boys (“Johnny Ryall”), and Knight’s New Orleans sassiness makes short shrift of the moneyed would-be love-grabber. Interestingly, the female hard rock band Precious Metal covered the song in 1990 and got a prominent businessman to appear in the video; however, when that businessman decided that he wanted $25,000 inst

Another Roger Nichols/Paul Williams song, sung by Karen in a tone of weary frustration which implies that rainy days and Mondays are the least of her worries. She sings the words “Nice to know somebody loves me” as though stifling a yawn, or perhaps a scream. “No need to talk it out,” she warns, “We know what it’s all about” – and it’s something starkly loveless. “Funny, but it seems I always end up here with you,” she remarks with a draining absence of enthusiasm, and the clock turns thirteen autumns to mid-eighties Merseyside . But time already appears to be running out. Date Record Made Number Two: 19 June 1971 Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2 Record At Number One: “It’s Too Late/I Feel The Earth Move” by Carole King UK Chart Position: 63 (1993 reissue)

Clifton Davis wrote the song with Jean Terrell’s Supremes in mind but Gordy reckoned this was one for the Jacksons. Faster than you remember, “Goodbye” canters along like a junior What’s Going On? (and possibly even an unwitting forebear of Barry White, if you recall Isaac Hayes' version) and was probably perceived as a way out of the cul-de-sac in which the group had lately found itself. Although I’m not sure Motown ever really found a way out for them – despite their proto-disco comeback in 1974, of which more later - Michael’s lead vocal remains remarkable, filling all available spaces in the music with its own intrinsic and desperate energy, and when he touches on the issues of “There’s that anguish, there’s that doubt” one has to remember that he was only twelve when he sang about them, and then shudder. Date Record Made Number Two: 8 May 1971 Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 3 Record At Number One: “Joy To The World” by Three Dog Night UK Chart Position: 33