College Collage Setlist – 9/9/07

A sequel of sorts to my crate THE GREATEST DECADE, this includes music from the 1970-1976 period (just before, during and just after my college years), from artists I loved (the Allmans, Van the Man) and some (Nick Drake) I only discovered later.

Current Bluebeat Ranking: 115th

Created: 19 months ago

Last Changed: 19 months ago

Running time of contents: approx. 204 hours

The music of College Collage is what one might have heard in a college dorm or fraternity during the early-to-mid 1970s when I was studying at the university. The 1960s had brought about a permanent transformation in the nature and even the function of popular music. In addition, at the beginning of the following decade, the tyranny of the pop single was finally losing its grip on the marketplace and the LP was in ascendance. The upshot was that songs in general began to get much longer and looser and funkier. You can find the contents of College Collage here.

I find it amazing how many of the artists listed below still have viable careers over thirty years later. I guess a lot of people, like me, are still fiercely loyal to the music of our youth.

Remember that, for the following "setlist," the computer is "selecting" the songs, not me. If you're a Bluebeat subscriber, you can listen to your own "setlist" from this radio station by clicking here.

• Hot Pants Finale – James Brown (Make It Funky: The Big Payback 1971-1975) – The Big Payback, indeed! The innovations that the late, great Godfather of Soul introduced into pop music in the ‘Sixties paid off handsomely in the early 1970s, when funk (which he’d helped invent) became a hugely profitable and influential genre. It’s still a great pleasure to listen to Brown and the other musicians egging each other on to more and more intense playing and singing. However, I could have lived without the M.C. on this track announcing “Let’s hear it for James Brown: Soul Brother Number One!” about fifteen times (literally).
• If It’s Magic – Stevie Wonder (Songs in the Key of Life) – Wonder’s dead-on mastery of the romantic ballad, particularly on this album, is truly magical. (He developed a taste for such material during his early days at Motown, under the tutelage of his mentor, Clarence Paul, who trained him to sing traditional pop styles.) Here, accompanied only by a single musician, Dorothy Ashby (on harp!), Wonder reveals his Achilles heel – his banal and often awkward lyrics – but the lovely melody and his beautiful phrasing truly evoke the wonder of life that the song seems to be about.
• Redwood Tree – Van Morrison (St. Dominic’s Preview) – More magic. The lyrics tell a tale so banal (about a boy, his father and their dog) that, if written as a short story, it wouldn’t have been accepted by the most humble boy’s magazine at the time. Yet, Van’s all-enveloping warmth (helped greatly by the wonderful horn and vocal arrangements) carries the day, and makes this brief, modest story song quite beautiful and moving. From one of the best albums of Van’s “classic” period, which can stand proudly alongside Astral Weeks and Moondance.
• Judy – Al Green (Let’s Stay Together) – Al Green. ‘Nuff said.
• Give Love on Christmas Day – The Jackson 5 (A Motown Christmas) – A fairly saccharine Christmas ballad. But the J5 give it their professional best, and Michael sings as if he means every single word. Sad to hear such innocence after all that’s happened to the adult Jackson.
• Friend of the Devil – The Grateful Dead (Dick’s Pick, Vol.8) – The Dead live at Harpur College, Binghamton, NY, May, 1970. It must have been great fun to perform these songs when they were brand new. In fact, The Dead had not even recorded the studio version of this tune (for their classic album American Beauty) when they took it on the road, and the ecstatic audience reception explains why they chose to put it on the album. The all-acoustic performance is brief, and after they’re done, the band can be heard deliberately teasing the audience, taking so long to tune up and launch into the next song that Jerry Garcia is moved to exclaim, “Everybody just relax, man, we have you all night long!” They then went on to play for three more hours.
• Was a Sunny Day – Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin’ Simon) – A typically sly and witty and rather risqué Caribbean-flavored song from Simon’s early solo period. “He was a Navy Man / Stationed in Newport News / She was a high school queen / With nothing really left to lose.”
  
• Whaling Stories - Procol Harum (Home… Plus) – With its “sea” theme sounding like an outtake from their previous album (and greatest masterpiece), A Salty Dog, this song is perhaps the most typical track ever produced by this great band. It starts out ominously (the tense calm before the storm), and then musical apocalypse breaks out (could this song really be about World War II?). The track ends with a miraculous evocation of peace and survival, echoing the “redemption” theme of so many of their earlier songs (Repent Walpurgis, A Salty Dog). The song is thus a kind of summing up of all their past styles and themes. “God’s alive / Inside a movie / Watch the silver screen.” It’s melodramatic, bombastic, way over the top, and I love it!
• Kitty’s Back – Bruce Springsteen (The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle) – I’m no longer the huge fan of the early Springsteen I used to be. However, this song, which sounds as jazzy as Bruce would ever get, is easy to take, lacking the bluster and self-pity that often mar Bruce’s work from this period.
• The Hitchhiker’s Song – Joan Baez (Blessed Are…) A strong song written by the lady herself. I’ve never heard the album that this track comes from. I’ll have to give it a listen sometime.
• Love the One You’re With – Aretha Franklin (Live at the Fillmore West) – The Queen loved to cover songs by white male rock stars (e.g., Bridge Over Troubled Water), either out of a desire to branch out into styles other than straightforward Soul, or as revenge on all those white artists who made millions ripping off Soul music (as well as every other black music style). Perhaps both motivations applied. In any case, this is a lively live recording of the Stephen Stills tune, though hardly a definitive cover.

• Shake Your Hips – The Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street) – We end with a highlight from The Stones greatest-ever album… but just about every track from that album is really a highlight. It’s a cover of a Slim Harpo tune that captures the mysterious, ominous, smoky-club-at-three-in-the-morning ambience that pervades the whole album and makes it unique in the band’s vast catalog. Very nice work by Jagger on harmonica. (Actually, I prefer to hear him play that instrument, on which he is at least as good as Brian Jones was, than listen to him sing). This track, appearing third in the album’s running order, after brilliant, hard rocking parodies of Chuck Berry (Rocks Off) and Little Richard (Rip This Joint), respectively, signaled that the boys had something a bit more serious and dangerous in mind this time than a rock-and-roll revival show.

Next time, my third station: Positively B-Side Myself. Stay tuned!