Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Right on cue, just as Watergate was about to hit, America turned to its Beatles, and even put one of them at number one, but in the absence of the others – all relative, since both George and Ringo scored number ones that year – they instead turned to Elton John, requesting some sense. They got a tasteful, melodic calypso-lite ballad which, if it had never hit anywhere, would doubtless have resurfaced on some themed compilation on Ace Records decades later, but more importantly Elton – and Bernie – were saying things which (the audience felt) mattered, to people who were hurting, because of Vietnam. “Daniel” – which is also Stevie Wonder’s favourite Elton song – is about Vietnam, but not quite in the way that you’d expect. Daniel is the singer’s older brother and is flying off to Spain (because, frankly, it rhymed with “’plane”) to escape the attention that he got when he returned home from the war – Taupin says that he read a piece in Time magazine about veterans of the T...

They started out in 1962 as The Creators, and in 1968 changed their name to Nightshift when they became the backing band for Deacon Jones, the great Rams/Chargers/Redskins defensive end who fancied himself as a singer. About a year later they were recruited by old-school record producer Jerry Goldstein and ex-Animals singer Eric Burdon to form War. With Burdon up front they had a good deal of success (“Spill The Wine”); Jimi Hendrix’s last appearance on stage, the night before his death, was with the band at Ronnie Scott’s. Then Burdon left the band mid-tour due to ill-health and War proceeded on their own to become one of the smarter responders to the gauntlet that Sly Stone had laid down. The World Is A Ghetto was America’s biggest-selling album of 1973 – its demographic was largely black and Hispanic, and this was supremely refreshing in the middle of the white, middle-class, introspective world of Laurel Canyon; if anything, the multiracial, multicultural and socio-pol...

This cuts deeper than “Hurting Each Other” because its story of a loveless sham of a relationship bore a very palpable subtext. “Neither One Of Us” was Gladys and the Pips’ penultimate single, and last big hit, on Motown, and it is hard to listen to Knight’s woe without thinking about Berry Gordy. On the label – or at least its “Soul” subsidiary – for some six-and-a-half years, Knight was bored and angry at being a very distant second to Diana Ross in the female singer pecking order and of her group being tossed the leftovers that the Temptations or Jacksons didn’t or wouldn’t want. Knight invests the song – written by the Nashville-trained Jim Weatherly, with help from Michael Omartian and our old friend from the sixties, Artie Butler – with the right quantity of suppressed pain, concentrating all the hurt in her ululant punctuations, in combination with the increasingly raging despondency of her two “Every time I find the nerve”s and the prematurely exhausted frustration...

The CTI Records label was started by producer Creed Taylor in 1967, initially as a subsidiary of A&M before going independent in 1970. The underlying idea seems to have been to sell jazz to sceptics. After Bitches Brew , the way forward seemed particularly clear, and it was Taylor’s avowed aim that, although the music released on CTI should be commercial or at least approachable, the visions of the involved artists should remain intact and not tampered with. Another way to look at it would be as a lifeline for old-school Blue Note types unconvinced by avant-garde affairs, and at the time the label’s output was generally dismissed as superior muzak. Actually the range of artists involved was a lot broader than might initially be thought; everybody from Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, via Stanley Turrentine and Freddie Hubbard, to Bob James and Antonio Carlos Jobim turned up on the label at one time or another, and the music released was mostly much better and more inven...

If you want to try to understand why American society is in its current parlous state, you might want to go back and watch Deliverance , a film which came out just at the point where some Americans delivered Richard Nixon back into the White House for a second time. Admittedly you could go further and deeper by doing some detailed research into the causes and effects of the Civil War, not to mention the first encounters between natives and colonisers. It is fitting that Deliverance was directed by an Englishman, since its roots lie in a decidedly Western European paranoia and/or fear of “the Other.” If you so decide, then be warned that Deliverance is a rather merciless and pitiless film to watch. Horrible things happen in it. One of the four Atlanta city slickers dies. What happens to the Ned Beatty character is practically unwatchable. And yet, once the survivors are tactfully sent packing by the local sheriff – played by James Dickey, the author of the novel on which t...