Classic Rock - Rock Renaissance III

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1990

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

Volume 26 of a 30 volume set.

Track duration obtained from software.

Issued with an 8 page booklet & no barcode
No mastering code or Specialty Records Corporation logo

Produced in cooperation with Warner Special Products

CD mastering by Trutone Records, Haworth, N.J.

Back cover inlay:
Manufactured for Time-Life Music by Warner Special Products, a Time Warner Company
℗ 1990 Warner Special Products

Booklet:
Time Life Music:
Time-Life Music wishes to thank William L. Schurk of the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, for providing valuable reference material.

Time-Life Music is a division of Time-Life Books Inc. © 1990 Time-Life Books Inc.
Printed in U.S.A. Time-Life is a trademark of Time Incorporated U.S.A.

Cover art by Jeff Wack © 1990 Time-Life Books Inc.

Manufactured for Time-Life Music by Warner Special Products,
a Time Warner Company
℗ 1990 Warner Special Products.

Disc:
Manufactured by Warner Special Products
℗ 1990 Warner Special Products
Made in U.S.A.

Complete liner notes:

Like a cultural Rand McNally, Chuck Berry put rock 'n' roll on the map, leaving no doubt in Sweet Little Sixteen that it flourished across America. Cats rockin' "deep in the heart of Texas" and "around the 'Frisco Bay" were all part of the picture. New bands sprouted faster than dandelions. By the early '60s, some regions had developed such important scenes that they were geographically linked to specific genres and sounds.

One burgeoning hotbed was the Pacific Northwest, where the big-beat instrumentals of the Ventures, the Wailers and the Kingsmen ruled. Paul Revere and the Raiders, formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1962, combined musical toughness and Marx Brothers stage antics, with the guitarists hopping onto their amps, singer Mark Lindsay writhing on the floor blowing sax and Revere routinely torching his $50 pianos. Revere and his band were CBS's first rock act, and the label's pop mentality initially stalled their progress (the Kingsmen won the Louie Louie battle, even though the Raiders' version came out earlier).

Revere and Lindsay discovered their American Revolution image at a costume shop, renting colonial uniforms as a joke for a Lake Oswego Armory gig. The bluecoats had landed. In 1965 Dick Clark signed them up for his Where the Action Is TV show, whereupon the Raiders became stars. Steppin' Out was recorded a week after Action aired. Producer Terry Melcher smoothed the rough edges for a sound Revere described as "somewhere between the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones."

Few bands anywhere in the U.S. could match the wild-eyed fury of the Tacoma, Washington, quintet the Sonics, named after the sonic booms caused by jets flying over nearby McChord Air Force Base. While they envied the Wailers' cool professionalism, the Sonics excelled at pummeling R & B standards and their own material into shape. "We were just a slam-it-out band," said bassist Andy Parypa. "I mean get down and crank it out. Slam them against the wall." Producer and ex-Wailer Buck Ormsby captured the primal garage-rock scream of lead singer Gerry Roslie's Psycho in just two takes.

California boasted purveyors of any rock style imaginable. San Jose's cult favorite, the Chocolate Watch Band, favored a psychedelic Stones approach to Let's Talk about Girls, originally cut by the Tongues of Truth. In Los Angeles, the Seeds (advocates of something called "flower-power") immortalized girls hung up on materialism in Can't Seem to Make You Mine, an L.A. hit in 1965 that broke nationally two years later. The Byrd's Roger McGuinn, steeped in John Coltrane jazz and Ravi Shankar ragas, gave folk-rock a parting shot in 1966 with 5-D. Steppenwolf's first album, recorded in four days for $9,000, included The Pusher by Hoyt Axton, who was part of the late '60s West Coast folk scene. Steppenwolf's front man, John Kay, caught Axton one night at the Troubadour and decided the song would work in a heavier context. The Pusher solidified Steppenwolf's biker image and gained new prominence later in the sound track to Easy Rider.

The Lone Star State added pages to rock history throughout the '60s, thanks in part to El Paso's Bobby Fuller Four, who kept the spirit of Buddy Holly alive with their cover of Love's Made a Fool of You. Fuller had relocated to Hollywood and seemed on the brink of stardom when he was found dead in his car, presumably fingered by the Mob because of an illicit love interest. He was only 22, and, like Holly, never reached his full potential. Over in Tyler, Texas, the Five Americans recorded I See the Light at a homemade studio under the supervision of Dale (Susie-Q) Hawkins. For extra punch, they double tracked the bass drum by whacking it with a mallet to match the original part.

On the East Coast, many of the metropolitan bands were as hip as garage bands in the other parts of the U.S. The Barbarians, veterans of Shindig and The T.A.M.I. Show, took a lowbrow Bostonian look at teenage androgyny in Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl. Nazz, "the first Philadelphia supergroup," according to leader Todd Rundgren, got their power-pop influences from the Who and their name from a Yardbirds B side, The Nazz Are Blue. Rundgren's 1969 ballad Hello It's Me was the B side to Open My Eyes; four years later his up-tempo remake reached No. 5.

The rock 'n' brass fusion concept occurred on the coasts, the brainstorm of guitarist Mike Bloomfield and keyboard ace Al Kooper. Both musicians had backed Dylan on his Highway 61 Revisited album and when he "plugged in" for the first time at Newport in 1965 - Bloomfield as a member of Paul Butterfields' Blues Band, Kooper on leave from the Blues Project. Bloomfield struck first in San Francisco with the Electric Flag, who debuted at the Monterey Pop Festival. Groovln' Is Easy displays the myriad sources the Flag tried to compress into a conventional song format. For the more disciplined Blood, Sweat and Tears, Kooper recruited horns from the top New York jazz and studio bands. He noted that his I Can't Quit Her was "the only song in the history of pop music that has the word 'proselytized' in it." Having written half the material on the group's impressive first album, Kooper left, handing the lead singer duties to David Clayton-Thomas.

In England, a wave of bands spilled out of the major cities as well as the provinces. With a certain arrogance in name and spirit, Cream defined the blues-rock power trio sound in London during the summer of 1966. Eric Clapton's heavy guitar licks, Jack Bruce's jazz bass lines and Ginger Baker's polyrhythmic drum excursions coalesced into a tight sound bespeaking a chemistry Baker called telepathic. I Feel Free represents Cream's bridled pop side - a far cry from the "just play" attitude of their live shows. Cream-Traffic-Family offshoot Blind Faith, conversely, never had time to jell. After one tour and album yielding Clapton's Presence of the Lord, they called it quits, soured by the supergroup hype.

The British merger of classical music with rock found worthy proponents in the Moody Blues and Procol Harum. In the wake of Cream, Sgt. Pepper and Hendrix, the Moodies' survival depended on updating their musty R & B image. Pianist Mike Pinder bought a mellotron that electronically simulated orchestral instruments via keyboard-activated tapes. The group's Days of Future Passed LP, which used both real and canned strings, placed them at the vanguard of progressive rock in 1968. Ride My See-Saw, with its soaring harmonies and mellotron, continued this trend and achieved greater popularity as an FM staple in the '70s. Procol Harum's more purist classical leanings favored only real strings, which grace A Salty Dog. The song didn't spring from some ancient mariner confrontation, but was inspired by a wood carving in a Cleveland bar that read "Great God, Skipper, we done run aground." Lyricist Keith Reid even pulls off the unthinkable - rhyming "moon" with "June."

For every sophisticated urbane British group, there were rustic English bands such as the Nashville Teens and the Troggs to keep rock honest and simple. The Teens began in 1962, backing Jerry Lee Lewis at the Star Club in Hamburg, and spent most of their seven-year career supporting U.S. artists touring England. Coincidentally, their one claim to fame, Tobacco Road, was penned by American songwriter John D. Loudermilk. The Troggs' With a Girl Like You outshone Wild Thing at home, soaring to No. 1. Once again they justified Graham Nash's assessment of the band: "They're so behind, they're in front."

Van Morrison proved that life imitates art in his own peripatetic existence by moving to sleepy Woodstock before recording Caravan, a celebration of gypsy wandering, for his Moondance album. His brooding persona and refusal to discuss his songs confounded critics. "He wails as the jazz musicians speak of wailing, as the gypsies, as the Gaels and the old folks in every culture speak of it," gushed music critic Ralph J. Gleason. Fellow Woodstock resident and kindred spirit Robbie Robertson of the Band best summed up this enigmatic Celtic soul brother in the song 4% Pantomime with the nickname "Belfast Cowboy."

- Charles McCardell

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