One Hit No More, No. 93: Nick Lowe, One Hit, Many Legends

Because he thought he'd write his best at 60.

The Hit
I have to guess that most people of a certain age could mumble their way through Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to Be Kind” at their local karaoke joint. It’s a cute little bugger, lyrically, it opens with a nice strummed guitar and I’ve always liked the drumming - you don’t get a lot of one, one-two-three rolls in pop rock, or pub rock in this case - and it’s one of those great tunes that cuddles a tricky theme with a buoyant chorus. Anyone who remembers the video may share the same soft-spot I do for what they did in the video for the “Ooh-oooh-woo-oooh-wooo” that leads into the bridge…could be why it also struck me as a cute song.

No great stories attach to the writing of it, though it bears noting that Lowe first played it in his second band, Brinsley Schwarz. Oh, and they cut clips from Lowe’s 1979 wedding to Carlene Carter into the video…of the legendary Carter/Cash family. And I mean literally legendary. I tried to find Johnny Cash in the footage, but no luck so far.

Nick Lowe never wrote a ton of hits, but, holy shit, did the man live a life…

The Rest of the Story
…by which I mean his father was a RAF pilot (and eventually a wing commander), and one trusted enough to serve a stint in Jordan. Though born on Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 1949, Lowe spent enough of his childhood in Jordan to have memories of play-dates with the future King Hussein. Lowe passes on some of those memories in a whale of a 2018 Rolling Stone retrospective, including flying in the back of an old WWII era plane seated at the back with his mom and dad looking down at clear-blue skies while his dad let the auto-pilot do the driving.

Before all that, and the war, both of Lowe’s parents played and performed, his father as a pianist (nicknamed “the Dudenville” and wearing short trousers a la AC-DC’s Angus Young), his mother as a dancer. When he was old enough, his mother taught him some chords on a ukulele and gave him access to their record collection, from which he absorbed Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and, young Nick’s personal favorite, Tennessee Ernie Ford.

From there, the story fast-forwards to Lowe’s first band(s). He first joined an act called Kippington Lodge, a band started by a friend from his school days, Brinsley Schwarz. Lowe actually blew up that first band by insisting they fire all the session musicians and play themselves, but that pales against the disaster engineered by their management - the aptly-named Famepushers Ltd. - after they renamed themselves Brinsley Schwarz in 1969. With an eye to making a splash Famepushers booked the band at New York’s Filmore East, opening for Van Morrison and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and flew them and a bunch of music journalists in for the event…which flopped. They returned to the London pub-rock circuit and the grunt work of paying dues.

One Hit No More, No. 55: Coven, One Tin Soldier...and a Large Side of Satan

The Hit
I first heard “One Tin Soldier” on the 1987 Freedom Rock compilation…which, if I’m being honest introduced me a slew of acts from the late-60s/early-70s acts that didn’t stay in the headlines after the decade ended. Like any kid who found something that excited him, I played Freedom Rock into the goddamn ground (or parts of it; stretched that tape to the breaking point), but “One Tin Soldier” always came across as hokey, hippie-dippie, etc. - e.g., if you listen and hear what the greedy, murderous Valley People find under the stone, the naivete passes like a kidney stone. That carried into the music - the delicate flute it opens with, the soaring, uplifting horns - it sounded like folk after the marketing department got its hands on it. Researching this has only made this funnier…

At any rate, the original song came from the songwriting team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter (also responsible for Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds, “Don’t Pull Your Love,” the Four Tops, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got),” and the Grass Roots’ “Two Divided by Love”) as an anti-war ballad during the Vietnam War. The original was recorded in 1969 and performed by a Canadian act named Original Caste, with Dixie Lee Stone on vocals. The song played well in Canada an all right in the U.S. (#34). You don’t have to look hard to find Original Caste’s original, which…does not sound like the version I heard on Freedom Rock (above comes close, but I don't think it's entirely right). The tune is there, along with the strident critique of greed and organized religion (cousins!), but the production lacks the polish and richness of the other version.

The makers of a movie called The Legend of Billy Jackrevived the song for its soundtrack in 1971, only with the credit going to a band called Coven. That movie tells the story of a half-Native American Green Beret (presumably returned from Vietnam) who fought (semi-) reluctantly fought injustice in an Arizona town relying on martial arts. The rest of this post tells the story of Coven.

The Rest of the Story
“Also included inside the album was Coven's infamous Black Mass poster, showing members of the group displaying the sign of the horns as they prepared for a Satanic ritual over a nude Dawson lying on an altar.”