AM Gold 1971

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1994

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

Time-Life released this disc as Various - Superhits 1971 (SUD-10) in the Super Hits series in 1991. Tracks 6 and 11 on Superhits are "Sweet City Woman" and "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart".

Time-Life reissued this disc (in its original pressing) as Various - AM Gold 1971 (AM1-06) in the AM Gold series in 1994. Tracks 6 and 11 on the original pressing of AM Gold are "Sweet City Woman" and "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart".

Time-Life reissued this disc again (with RE-1 in the matrix number) as Various - AM Gold 1971. Tracks 6 and 11 on the RE-1 reissue of AM Gold are "Brand New Key" and "Mr. Bojangles".

℗ 1991 Warner Special Products.
© 1991 Time Life Inc.
© 1994 Time Life Inc.

Track durations obtained from software.

Publishing:
Track 1- Management Agency & Music Publishing, Inc. BMI.
Track 2- 212 Music Co./Forty West Music Corp. BMI.
Track 3- Longitude Music Co. BMI.
Track 4- Castle Hill Publishing Ltd. ASCAP.
Track 5- Kenneth Music/Quackenbush Music Ltd. ASCAP.
Track 6- PSO Limited/Southern Music Pub. Co. Inc. ASCAP.
Track 7- Acuff-Rose Music, Inc./Galeneye Music. BMI.
Track 8- ABC Dunhill Music, Inc. BMI.
Tracks 9, 21- Jobete Music Co., Inc. ASCAP.
Track 10- Stone Agate Music. BMI.
Track 11- Gibb Brothers Music. BMI.
Track 12- All Nations Music. ASCAP.
Track 13- Almo Music Corp. ASCAP.
Track 14- Talking Beaver Music. BMI.
Track 15- Canaan Music Inc. ASCAP.
Track 16- Beechwood Music Corp. BMI.
Track 17- Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. BMI.
Track 18- MCA Inc. ASCAP.
Track 19- Hill and Range Songs. BMI.
Track 20- Colgems-EMI Music, Inc. ASCAP.
Track 22- Unichappell Music Inc. BMI.

Made in U.S.A.
Printed in U.S.A.

Complete liner notes:

While the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s opened pop music up to women as never before, it didn't necessarily mean that women were now writing all their own songs. Some were able to break through doing just that, but many more continued to work as interpreters. Even among interpreters, though, there was now considerable diversity.

Joan Baez represented a new kind of female pop singer. The folkie madonna and queen of the student Left, Baez had been a national presence for more than a decade when she enjoyed her first million seller in 1971. Her whole career had been built around adaptations of traditional and folkish material, and her reading of Robbie Robertson's The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down continued that practice (even if Joan did misread key lyrics).

Robertson was the chief songwriter for the Band, four Canadians and an Arkansan who had first come together as the backup unit for rockabilly hedonist Ronnie Hawkins and later became Bob Dylan's touring band. They released their first album as the Band in 1969, and it offered anxious explorations of traditional American values that were very much at odds with the psychedelia dominating the era. For their second album, which bore even deeper into the American and especially the Southern-psyche, Robertson wrote this rebel soldier's cry of despair. He later explained that he wrote it to let drummer and lead singer Levon Helm (the group's Southerner) "get it all out of his system."

Brewer and Shipley, who were part of the singer-songwriter movement thanks to their acoustic music and chipper vocal harmonies, had trouble getting air play for One Toke over the Line because of the lyrics' drug slang. Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley were Midwesterners who met while working as songwriters in L.A. and soon began writing together. When a major label released an unauthorized album of their demos, the team was signed as a performing act. Written one night backstage, One Toke was the only one of Brewer and Shipley's three hits to do well on the charts. The duo insisted that it was a road song about excess in general rather than a specific reference to marijuana.

The recently passed Canadian Content Laws gave two north-of-the-border acts access to U.S. charts. Under these laws, Canadian radio stations, whose playlists were usually carbon copies of their American counterparts, were now required to devote a certain percentage of their programming to records made by Canadian artists or producers, or recorded in Canada. Once established as Canadian hits, such recordings had a better chance of reaching American ears, particularly around the border.

Ocean was a Canadian hippie band that tried and failed to write its own material before turning to Put Your Hand in the Hand. The song's writer, Canadian pop-talkie Gene Maclellan, had provided Anne Murray with the million-selling Snowbird in 1970. Ocean's Canada-to-America crossover success was duplicated by the group Stampeders, which had been launched in Calgary in 1963 as a sextet before paring down (in 1965) to the trio that later cut Sweet City Woman.

Jonathan Edwards, who hailed from Minnesota, was a disillusioned veteran of various folk and bluegrass groups when he went solo and came up with Sunshine. Joe Frank Carollo had done a brief stint with Paul Revere and the Raiders before forming the Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds trio, which immediately hit with Don't Pull Your Love.

The Raiders themselves were not doing badly. Though now basically a studio group (with original lead singer Mark Lindsay functioning instead as producer), they went to No. 1 for the first time ever with Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian). Written by Nashville's John D. Loudermilk, the tune had gone American top 20 for Englishman Don Fordon in 1968; in 1970, as the same version began climbing British charts, Lindsay decided to cover it using Freddy Weller on lead. Weller ran up a string of country hits later in the 1970s.

The Grass Roots started, at least, with an equally flexible line-up. The name was first used in 1966 when writers P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri used studio musicians as a band on their Where Were You When I Needed You. When that song hit the charts, Sloan and Barri recruited a local club band called the 13th Floor to tour as the Grass Roots, and this group recorded the subsequent group of songs that included hits like Temptation Eyes.

Bread rose out of the L.A. studio scene and was first known as Pleasure Faire. Nurtured largely by Leon Russell, leader David Gates's fellow Oklahoma transplant, Bread topped the charts on its first try, with 1970's Make It with You, but Baby I'm-a Want You proved the second biggest hit of the group's four-year run.

An East Coast studio was the birthplace of Dawn. Producers Hank Medress and Dave Appell coaxed their old friend Tony Orlando into singing lead over a demo they had received from a pair of backup singers. Orlando, who had cut a pair of Top 40 hits in 1961, was now working in publishing and had no taste for the performer's life. But he did overdub leads on Candida, and when that took off, he did the same for Knock Three Times. By now, all concerned parties were beginning to realize they had a good thing going, so Orlando was actually introduced to Telma Louise Hopkins and Joyce Elaine Vincent. The three went on the road together and quickly became one of the biggest soft-pop success stories ever.

Welshman Tom Jones sold a grittier, more overtly sexual brand of love song to roughly the same audience. Though he had just lost his network TV show when he cut She's a Lady, his career was still peaking, and the Paul Anka song gave him his best-selling hit yet. How Can You Mend a Broken Heart-originally written for, and rejected by, Andy Williams-resolved a career crisis for the Bee Gees. In 1969, the nonbrother members of the Australian harmony group had quit on Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, and after flailing directionless for a while, the Bee Gees broke up. Barry and Robin wrote this No. 1 hit as part of the reconciliation process. Three Dog Night's well-crafted harmonies took Paul Williams' An Old Fashioned Love Song nearly as high on the charts.

Aretha Franklin continued to show 'em why she was known as the Queen of Soul with a new take on Spanish Harlem, the Jerry Leiber-Phil Spector song that gave Ben E. King his first solo hit (in 1961) after he left the Drifters. The Chi-Lites, who had changed their name from Hi-Lites to pay homage to their hometown of Chicago, were still refining the new baroque soul sound with Have You Seen Her, written by lead singer Eugene Record and his Brunswick labelmate Barbara Acklin.

Not too far north of the Windy City, the Jackson 5 was continuing its fabulous streak for Motown with Never Can Say Goodbye. Gladys Knight and the Pips were giving birth to "middle-of-the-road soul" with smoldering ballads like If I Were Your Woman. And the Temptations were coming back stronger than ever. Since the group's recent socially aware material was showing less and less chart power, producer Norman Whitfield polished up Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me), which he had written with Barrett Strong a couple of years earlier. Whitfield put Eddie Kendricks back in the lead vocalist slot and recaptured the old sound flawlessly. As a result, for the first time in nearly two years the Temptations went all the way to No. 1.

-John Morthland

More Pictures