One Hit No More, No. 74: An Ace With a Wild Card in the Blind

aka, Paul Carrack

The Hit
Ace’s “How Long” comes at an interesting time in the One Hit No More project. More than most of what came before it (see index in the top right corner), it flows into the larger stream of the 1970s mellow “rock” genre.

It starts with a lonely bass guitar, as I hear it, recalls the impatient tapping of a foot. It’s a good fit for a song that hints heavily at, if not future infidelity, then betrayal of some kind. Curiously, most parts of its tone and sound possess a kind of warmth - e.g., cozy trebles are all over the guitar, keys and vocals (more later) and the layered production creates a comforting ambience for a theme (again, betrayal) that seems like an odd choice. About that…

The man who wrote the song, Paul Carrack, didn’t write the song with that sound in mind. According to comments he shared with ClassicBands in 2017, Carrack envisioned something more strident and up-tempo, something closer to The Four Tops’ “Reach Out And I’ll Be There.” His explanation for the way the song wound up sounding like it did is worth sharing:

“But that wasn't how the band saw it or interpreted it, because we were basically stoned out old hippies. So, the version we came up with that evolved was the version, and I'm not knocking it 'cause it was bloody great, that wasn't how I envisioned it, that sort of laid back, smooth thing.”

It's worth reading that interview with Carrack, who comes off as humble and all-around unassuming, because it’s full of great recollections not just his own life, but growing up in the English Midlands (he’s a Sheffield lad, left fatherless too soon) as the wave that would become The British Invasion started to build. It also contains plenty of notes (too many?) on the writing and recording of “How Long” and what that meant to Ace as a band. With that, here’s one final note on the song: Carrack defends the fact it had just one verse on the grounds he wrote it on the back of a bus ticket on the way to a weekly visit to his then future mother-in-law’s for the “one square meal” he and his then-girlfriend would get each week.

The Rest of the Story
“Ace were a British rock band who enjoyed moderate success in the 1970s.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 16: Robert Johnson, the Devil's Own

Or so they say...

If you watch Netflix’s Robert Johnson: Devil at the Crossroads, you’ll get a taste of how much of the legendary blues artist’s reputation rests on a mix of rumor and projection. It’s worth the time, if for the interviews alone, but that documentary (part of their Remastered series?) also confirms most of what I read about Johnson around the web, but I’ll be damned if I can keep up with them for visuals…

The biggest surprise I found when researching Robert Johnson was how few recordings he left behind: Wikipedia puts the number at just 29 songs, if with 13 alternate takes over his entire career. That just builds the legend, of course, but the way people wax about both his voice and his playing points to something heard only by people with the right kind of ears. After a week plus with his catalog, I hear the singular voice, but I'm taking the rest on faith. (And Wikipedia has some good notes on his musicianship and the quality of his voice and his use of “microtonality” in the depths of its entry.) With that, time to introduce the man himself…

Robert Johnson was the 11th child in a family, most born out of wedlock, but he still had a good anchor in his life. Charles Dodds, the man who raised him, did pretty well for himself between managing land and making furniture - too well for prominent local whites in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. His success came at the right before one of those spikes of White resentment that, unfortunately, seem baked into the American DNA, so Dodds fled town on threat of lynching. He left behind his wife, Julia, who reconnected with Johnson’s biological father, Noah Johnson, but he stepped out of the picture again before long. Johnson eventually reconnected with Dodds wtih a move to Memphis, Tennessee. Having learned the terrible lesson of the times, Dodds had adopted a new identity as Charles Spencer. Johnson carried the Spencer name through his childhood.

Most sources agree Robert Johnson lived in Memphis for a while. Most also agree he had some decent state-provided education during that time, but only one source offers anything concrete that hints at his love for music: that’s Blackpast.org, who references people who remember him playing a diddley-bow, i.e., “…wire attached to nails sticking out of houses. A person could then hit the wire with a stick and use an empty bottle that slides along the wire to change the pitch.” The story picks up with Johnson following Son House and Blind Willie Johnson around the blues juke joint circuit asking for tips on how to play. Son House (covered earlier in this series) recalls that, while Johnson wasn’t too bad on the harmonica, he wasn’t so good on the guitar:

“such a racket you’d never heard!… ‘Get that guitar away from that boy,’ people would say, ‘he’s running people crazy with it.’”

One Hit No More, No. 73: Jigsaw, aka, Probably What Punk Rock Responded To

They inspired this guy. Who cares what I think?

Loathe as I am to essentially re-write a Wikipedia post, I simply couldn’t find a lot about this band. I also spent a week listening to music I did not care for and I can’t let that be for nothing. At least the song has a decent back-story.

The Hit
I have no memory of Jigsaw’s “Sky High.” I like the tense opening - e.g., pure 70s action movie gold with horns swelling above; sets a good mood - and then that clears to make way for the first verse. A bar or two passes before the song hits a 70s-pop trot for the rest of the first verse…and into the chorus. Apart from the semi-nude beginning, all of that repeats into a second verse/chorus. Without further investigation, all that counts as an odd choice for what amounts to a break-up song. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl “blows it all sky high” by telling boy a lie. Seems awful standard…and yet…

As it happens, Jigsaw wrote the song for a 1975 “martial-arts action movie” starring George Lazenby - this was after his one-film spin as Bond, James Bond - which makes more sense of the musical choices (e.g., maybe the woman was a femme fatale). I don’t know that movie either (and neither does Netflix, as it happens), which makes all this seem extremely “period” - as in, a pure, perhaps wild animal of the mid-1970s.

And yet the song hit a solid No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, outperforming the single in Jigsaw’s native UK - though not in Australia (maybe the attachment to Lazenby goosed it?). It did even better in Japan, achieving the odd and notable feat of being a hit in consecutive years…

…but the undeniably coolest thing about “Sky High” is the fact that a lucha libre legend named Mil Mascaras used it as his theme music. I’d kill for that claim to fame. As would you…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 15: Big Bill Broonzy's Achingly Slow Climb to Blues Royalty

Later days, I'm guessing.

“’He treated his life story as a set of fluid possibilities, as opposed to fixed events,’ Riesman says. ‘And his imaginative powers were formidable. As Studs Terkel said, “Bill is telling the truth — his truth.”’”
- National Public Radio retrospective, 2011

In other words, everything I’m about to tell you about Big Bill Broonzy could be a lie, but at least it’s a good one. There’s a main narrative, then a counter-narrative reconstructed by Broonzy’s biographer Bob Riesman, who most sources quote extensively. Also, most of them misspell Riesman’s name as "Reisman." The ground is thin, in other words, but let’s walk it anyway.

The man who became Big Bill Broonzy was born somewhere between 1893 and 1903. Some sources insert “Broonzy” as a final surname, some don’t, but they all agree on some variation on Lee Conley Bradley for a birth name, while also generally agreeing he did not have a twin sister (Laney, by name). Other stories from his early life - e.g., serving in World War I (of which, I’m still on maybe), and moving to the Mississippi Delta region during a flood, etc. - are generally read as thoughts he borrowed to serve as memories of his own; a site called broonzy.com pushes that line the hardest. One story supported by two sources claims he made a fiddle from a cigar box as a teenager and played picnics with a young guitarist named Louise Carter - segregated picnics, according to Wikipedia. In a fun twist, a couple sources say Broonzy learned to play his improvised fiddle from an uncle named Jerry Belcher, a man Riesman doesn’t think ever existed. Now, moving on to things that most sources agree on…

Big Bill Broonzy did start on the fiddle. There’s also general agreement that he left music behind, married, and worked as a sharecropper in the fields around Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story of how he got back into music starts 1) with something his wife, Gertrude, did and 2) makes most sense in the context of him serving in World War I. Sometime before the Great War, but also after or during a drought that devastated his farming plot, someone offered Broonzy $50, a new violin and $14 dollars in tips to perform at a three-day picnic(!?); the sources that mention the story agree that Gertrude spent the money before he got his advance, which forced him to play the picnic. A site called culturalequity.org fleshed out that story the best, while also noting a period of inactivity from (circa) 1918 to Broonzy moving to Chicago in 1920 - and without a wife. So, again, I’m inclined to accept that Broonzy might have served in Europe (also, culturalequity felt like the best source; read that in full for the most thorough history).

One Hit No More, No. 72: Billy Swan, a Man Who Could Help

What I'm calling his prime.

The Hit
Billy Swan wasn't a household name in his time, but his 1974 hit, “I Can Help,” reached somewhere north of 2 million households. The twangy sprint of a guitar riff that opens it gives way to an RMI organ - one Swan got from Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge as a wedding gift - laying glowing, sustained notes over a galloping rhythm straight out of the 50s. It’s very much a throwback number and, once you know Swan’s history, the reference makes sense. The single’s popularity makes just as much sense, dropping as it did at the front end of a long bout of 50s nostalgia that started with American Graffiti and continued with Happy Days, Grease, Sha Na Na, and so on.

I also came out of a particular cultural moment, as an entry in Stereogum’s No. 1’s series notes:

“’I Can Help’ first blew up on country radio, mostly because the country establishment of the ’70s had absorbed ’50s rockabilly sounds, the same way that the country establishment of today has absorbed ’70s and ’80s soft-rock sounds.”

Stereogum is less than gentle about the quality of Swan’s voice - “[his] voice is weedy and flat, and he sounds like he’s just keeping up with the song” - but they treat the song kindly and, in a repeating joke, bless it as “a good Samaritan seduction song.” For clarification’s sake, that means “[you’re] trying to convince this other person that they need you.”

The song’s moment was Swan’s moment as well. He recorded a lot more material and, given everything, had a decent career, but he never scored another big hit. Going the other way, Swan’s single had at least one very famous admirer and, if you buy an anecdote he dropped in an (undated) interview with Classic Bands, it enjoyed at least one epic moment:

“According to an interview I read with May Pang, John Lennon once served as a [DJ] at a party and played ‘I Can Help’ over and over again.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 14: The Blues, from the Delta (Son House) to Chicago (Tampa Red)

National resonator guitar.

I somehow got it in my head that both artists featured in this post plied their trade in Chicago. They did not, so I’ll cover the Chicago blues as a pivot to the second artist and continue on the Delta blues with…

Son House, Between God and the Blues
Edward James “Son” House, Jr. was born in 1902, on a plantation between Clarksdale and Lyon, Mississippi. His parents split when he was young, which, then as now, meant bouncing between households - the Clarksdale area with his father, Eddie House Sr., and various stops in Louisiana with his (for some reason, nameless) mother, including New Orleans. House’s father was a musician - a tuba player - who came in and out of the church as House grew up. When drinking drove at least one of those separations, Eddie Sr. tossed the bottle, straightened out, and became a deacon in the church. Both parents passed down their religiosity to Son House, and his faith weighed heavily and challenged him throughout his life - and it got hold early too; according to Wikipedia, he preached sermons on visits at his mother’s in Algiers, New Orleans, by age 15. To the extent music came into House’s life at all, he didn’t see it as a positive - and that tied to the culture and his upbringing. As a little bio on Musician Guide noted:

“Blues was so disreputable that even its staunchest devotees frequently found it prudent to disown it. If you asked a black preacher, schoolteacher, small landowner, or faithful churchgoer what kind of people played and listened to the blues, they would tell you, 'cornfield n*****s.'"

The heart of the Mississippi Delta didn’t provide many career options, so House, like most Black Americans grew up working on the old plantations, picking cotton, gathering tree moss(?), or whatever came his way. He married quite young, and against his parents’ wishes, to an older New Orleans woman named Carrie Martin. The moved to Centerville, Louisiana to help work her father’s farm, but House soured on both the marriage and farm-work after a couple years and ended both. Preaching became his next calling - he even found paid work for a time, but, like his father, he wrestled between drinking and bringing in the sheaths.

The challenge grew deeper when he got his first real, intoxicating sniff of the blues. It happened in 1927, though the specific accounts differ: the Musician Guide piece frames the moment as a chance encounter, while Wikipedia presents it as hanging out with “drinking companions.” Both sources agree on the two men in question - Willie Wilson and James McCoy - and the broad outlines: Son House saw one of them play bottleneck guitar and decided he’d found his calling. He’d gone from “Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was sin" to “Jesus, I like that! I believe I want to play one of them things” in an afternoon. He ran out and bought a $1.50 guitar, Wilson taught him how to tune with his ear and McCoy gave him a couple before they sent him on his way, and this is where his career starts. Sort of...

One Hit No More, No. 71: Pilot, "Magic" & an Alan Parsons Project

Not bad, also not dead-sexy.

The Hit
Whether you know it from commercials for ads for a medication that’ll either fix you, kill you, or bring on psychosis (Ozembic?) or oldies radio, you know Pilot’s 1974 hit, “Magic.” That said, if you learned it through the commercials, you might not recognize its surprisingly heavy opening, but it breaks into the familiar chorus about ten seconds in.

It’s a hard song to hate so long as the Ozempic(?) commercials haven’t made you sick to puking of it. Bright melody balanced by a surprising heft on the bottom end, cheery, tight vocals, the whole thing does exactly what it’s supposed to: feel fucking good. Pure uplift in just over three minutes.

There’s not much story about the song itself: the two key members of Pilot - David Paton and Billy Lyall - wrote and recorded a bunch of demos between 1972 and 1974 and “Magic” was the hit. They co-wrote most of Pilot’s material, but a 2012 interview with Paton for a Scottish radio station (Golden Brown, they call the show) suggests Paton took the lead. In it, he talks about talking ideas and melodies into a tape recorder he kept on top of his piano, and having the bones of the song lined up. He got further inspiration one early morning when his wife said something about “I’ve never been awake to see a day break,” a line you’ll hear immediately after the chorus.

The best story, though, followed from the friendly competition that Pilot’s label, EMI, set up between them and a couple label-mates signed at the same time - one called Steve Hearly & Cockney Rebel, the other a band called Queen. All the bands wanted to record the first No. 1 single, of course, and EMI’s suits leavened the competition with camaraderie by way of having the bands eat together and generally mingle. On one of those occasions - and this was after Pilot had landed its first No. 1 - Paton spotted Freddie Mercury and walked over for a chat. When he got there, Mercury’s first question was, why walk over to talk to me? Taken aback, Paton sputtered a polite response. Mercury came back with, “When I have a number one, I won’t talk to anyone.”

For the record, “Magic” wasn’t Pilot’s No. 1. It topped out at No. 11 on the UK charts; it did better in the States, hitting No. 5 on the Hot 100. Pilot’s scored their first No. 1 with a song called “January,” but that was only in the UK. That one stalled on the cool side of the Hot 100. And Queen, of course, became QVEEN! (As in, who doesn’t know them?) There were a couple reasons for that, as it happens.