Record Night Returns

Record Night returned with a vengeance last Friday at a new venue and with an addtional medium, as five of us met in Wauwatosa, where – in addition to music – a half an hour of Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion DVD made it into the mix, along with a turntable that jumped the groove if one stepped in the wrong location of hardwood flooring.   It was a minor hurdle to overcome in the name of Record Night.

The themes: Kevin’s was “Concerts I would have liked to have seen or that I would like to see again.”  Paul’s was “Stuff I’ve purchased in the past three or four months.”  JB, Pete and Frank had no theme and generally grabbed a selection from one of two boxes of LPs, though the miracle of wifi allowed us to tap into a few Youtube videos and mp3s.  In this sense, it was our first 21st Century Record Night.

And away we go… 

Paul       Hall and Oates, Bad Habits & Infections

Pete       Rickie Lee Jones, Weasel and the White Boys Cool

Kevin     Sly and the Family Stone, A Simple Song

Paul       The Shins, A Simple Song

Pete       Cheap Trick, Ooh La La La

(JB was busy getting the record player moved, a more technical task than one would think).

Kevin     Andy Gibb, Shadow Dancing

(Kevin’s first concert, 1978, Wisconsin State Fair)

Paul       Badfinger, Without You

Frank     Bad Company, Bad Company

(Interlude – white JB works on turntable, we watch Zeppelin’s DVD from their ’07 reunion concert.  Fantastic!  WAY better than I expected).

JB           Honeydrippers, Good Rockin’ At Midnight

Pete       Spinal Tap, Big Bottoms

Frank     The Firm, Satisfaction Guaranteed

Paul       XTC, Great Fire

Kevin     KC and the Sunshine Band, Who do you Love

(his second concert, 1979, Wisconsin State Fair)

(JB remarks, “I have no theme!”  It’s okay, man.)

JB           OMD, Forever Live and Die

Frank     The Kinks, Conservative

Pete       Joe Walsh, The Confessor/Rosewood Bitters

Paul       Big Country, Wonderland

JB          Paul Westerberg, Silver Naked Ladies

(Frank departed at this juncture.  Something about a job, kids, a life…blah, blah, blah).

Kevin     X Cleavers, 18 (Unprotected)

(a band from Milwaukee!

JB           Tin Lizzy, Romeo and the Lonely Girl

JB           Ian McLagan, Mystifies Me

(in honor of the maestro who recently passed away)

Paul       Harry Nilsson, One

Kevin     ELO, Sweet is the Night

Pete       Shooting Star, Last Chance

JB           Neil Young/Stills, Long May You Run

Paul       David Bowie, Diamond Dogs

Kevin     Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Paul       Beck, Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime

Pete       Macklemore, Thrift Shop Feat

JB           Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station/Estimated Prophet

(The Dead - a first for record night!  Kevin is still not sold on this band.  Nor am I)

Paul       Geddy Lee, My Favorite Headache

(Pete was forced to stay for one last song before exiting)

Kevin     The Kinks, I took my Baby Home/Stop Your Sobbin’

(I still don’t get this band.  Always sounds like an out-of-tune garage band to me).

 JB           Beck, Paper Tiger

Paul       The Call, Let the Day Begin

(Another dead guy!)

At this point things are getting ugly, as Paul attempts to discredit The Who due to their meager output.  Several beers have made their way into our systems, and it seems like it’s a race to the finish – i.e. sleep – at this point.

Kevin     James Gang, The Bomber/Bolero

JB          The Who, The Seeker

(JB attempts to discredit Paul's discrediting of The Who.  Fairly successfully too, I might add.)

Paul       REM, Gardening at Night/Finest Work Song

Kevin     Bee Gees, Ordinary Lives

JB          Faces, Cindy Incidentally

Paul       Elton John, Honky Tonk Woman

Kevin     Duran Duran, New Religion

JB           Eddie Vedder, Hard Sun

Paul       The Alarm, Deeside

Kevin     Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome

John       The Jayhawks, Straight Face Can’t Hide 

And there you have it.  It’s true, JB managed to finish the evening without having played a Replacements’ song, but only succeeded on a technicality, as Paul Westerberg made the list. 

Next up?  We shall see, but I’m leaning toward a secret theme that attendees have to guess throughout the evening.

Musical Memories: B.J. Thomas

At quiet times, typically during the cognitive equivalent of brackish water, when I lie half awake and half asleep, my subconscious sometimes plays a mental jukebox from my youth, delving into snippets of music whose latent melodies bubble to the surface of recognition some forty years later, producing memories of transistor radios crackling with pop songs on 920 AM, WOKY Milwaukee.

My recollection begins around 1973 with “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, Marvin Hamlisch’s version of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” from The Sting, Sweet’s “Little Willy” and – who could forget? – “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn.  How about “The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence (of The Carol Burnett Show fame), “Killing Me Softly with His Song” by Roberta Flack, or the early hits by Olivia Newton-John, The Carpenters, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Todd Rundgren and Harry Nilsson?

Oh yeah.  It’s all coming back to me now, Celine.

About a month ago, my memory set its needle on the groove of the following lyric: “Hey, won’t you play another somebody done somebody wrong song.”

Holy crap.  That’s some obscure shit.  I had no idea where it came from, but I needed to know who the heck sang it.  Lo and behold, it’s not a one-hit wonder at all, and while he may not be a household name to many these days, he’s still around and still singing: B.J. Thomas.

Remember him?  I didn’t.  For reasons unknown, his name doesn’t get tossed around as often as the aforementioned singers of the 70s, but you’ve undoubtedly heard him, most notably in the 1969 classic movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Towit:

Yeah, that’s the stuff.  It reached number one on the U.S., and it wasn’t Thomas’s first or last foray into the pop charts; he’d already scored a few hits with “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Hooked on a Feeling” (the original recording, not the 1974 cover by Blue Suede).  To date, he’s the recipient of eleven gold records, two platinum records and five Grammy Awards, and he’s sold more than 70 million albums.

Clearly, he’s a guy whose name should be known.  Forgive me, B.J.  I have officially righted a wrong.

But it’s Thomas’s 1975 number-one hit, “Hey, Won’t You Play, Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” that still echoes within my interior walls with recollections of rides in the Plymouth Gold Duster, my Mom taking me to Sentry where we’d exchange our 8-pack of empty Coke bottles for a new set, and upon our return home, she’d fix me a bowl of graham crackers in milk (yeah, that was my snack of choice, along with apple sauce and cottage cheese with a dash of cinnamon).  Later, I’d get out the sprinkler and place it on the uneven patio blocks – uneven because I would often pry them up to peer at the ant colonies underneath – and I’d run through the water while my sister hung upside down on the swingset.

And from inside the patio doors, the sounds of B.J. Thomas would crackle: "…and make me feel at home, while I miss my baby…while I miss my baby.”