Feather – "Friends" (1970)

When we are friends

Digging each other

I have what most people would consider to be an unhealthy personal attachment to all the vinyl LPs I collected between the early 1960s (when my parents purchased a Magnavox console stereo) and 1990 (when I bought my first CD player).

A lot of those records are full of great music, but I could get most (if not all) of those songs in digital form suitable for listening to on my computer on iPod.

I haven’t kept those records for 30 years, 40 years, even 50-plus years to listen to them.  (I do still have a stereo system complete with turntable, amplifier, and speakers, but I haven’t played an album on it in years.)

I kept them because of the memories that are triggered when I look at the covers of those albums – memories of where I was and who I was with and who I was when I played them.

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Like most people my age, I’ve accumulated a lot of flotsam and jetsam over the years.

My plan was to dive into cleaning out all that crap once I left my job, but I didn’t make much decluttering headway in my first year of retirement.  So one of my 2019 resolutions is to devote at least one hour a day to sorting through everything and either selling, giving away, or throwing away everything I don’t truly need.  

The Swedish call that “death cleaning” because the point is to spare your children or other family members or friends the unpleasant task of doing that after you’re dead.

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I did a mini-death cleaning a couple of years ago when my former law firm moved to a new building.

I’m guessing I threw away at least 75% of what was in my old office.  As a result, my new office was tidy and uncluttered.  What little I brought with me was stored away in drawers or shelved.  

The only things on my desk were a spiral-bound calendar/organizer, a cup of pencils and pens, and a stapler.

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Cleaning out my old office wasn’t at all difficult because I didn’t care much about all the paper I had accumulated.  “When in doubt, throw it out” was my mantra.

My home is a whole different animal.  I have thousands of family photos and videotapes, boxes full of baseball cards, old stamps and coins I collected when I was a kid, hundreds of books, and hundreds of record albums.

After pawing through everything, I decided to start the decluttering process by getting rid of my LPs.  I knew it would be hard for me to get rid of some of those albums despite the fact that I will probably never listen to them again.  But I have no sentimental attachment to the majority of my records.

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So I created a spreadsheet and started entering the names of all my record albums.  The plan is to e-mail that list to a few used record dealers and see what kind of bids I receive.

So far, my list has over 300 albums on it.  Most of them are classic rock albums I bought when I was in high school or college.  I’m talking household names like the Rolling Stones, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, but also less well-known favorites like Blue Öyster Cult.

I also have a fair number of rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s – including releases by Roxy Music, the Tubes, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, the Ramones, and X.

I’ve got a few country-western albums as well, some Motown greatest-hits collections, and some miscellaneous compilation albums.

I have no idea how much money all these are worth, but I’ll find out pretty soon and let you know.

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I was pretty picky when it came to buying full-priced albums.  

But my standards were a lot lower when it came to the records in the cut-out bins.  I would often buy a low-priced cut-out that only had one good song on it.  (For you younger folks out there, a “cut-out” is a heavily discounted LP – usually one that didn’t sell well.  The name comes from the fact that the record companies punched a hole in the corner of the album cover to distinguish cut-outs from regular-price records.)

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, regular albums might retail for $4.99 or $5.99.  Cut-outs went for half as much or even less – I still have some decent cut-out albums that cost me only 33 cents at a bargain store in my hometown.

(All the albums whose covers are featured in this post are from my collection of obscure cut-outs.)

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One of my deeply discounted albums is Friends, by the group Feather.  I bought it for the first track on side one – “Friends” – which was a minor radio hit in 1970.  (I don’t think I ever listened to the entire album, and I’m guessing it’s been more than 40 years ago that I heard “Friends.”  If I hadn’t found the album in a box in my basement while preparing to do my death cleaning, I may have forgotten it altogether.)

There’s not much about the record or the group on the internet.  But it seems that “Friends” made its first appearance on the Billboard “Hot 100” on May 30, 1970 – which just happened to be my 18th birthday.  It peaked at #79 a few weeks later, and then disappeared.

I can’t imagine I heard it on the radio more than a few times, but it had enough significance for me that I bought the album when I stumbled across it in a cut-out bin.  

I have a feeling that a girl had something to do with my feelings about the song – maybe I was sitting in the local Dairy Queen parking lot with her one early-summer evening when the song came on the radio and we had a moment.  (A very short moment, and a moment that didn’t really go anywhere . . . but a moment nonetheless.)

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“Friends” is a very good song.

Some reviewers thought it sounded like a Crosby Stills & Nash track.  It does feature close, upper-register CS&N-like harmonies, but it’s much tighter and energetic than most of that group’s recordings.

There were a lot of smartly-arranged, well-produced pop records in the 1960s and 1970s, and “Friends” was one of them.  It was produced by J. R. Shanklin, whose real name was Wayne Shanklin.  (More about him in the next 2 or 3 lines.)

It’s less than three minutes long, and every second counts.  I don’t know how to break down the song into its component parts – I’m not sure what’s the verse and what’s the chorus and what’s the bridge.  

Drummer Dan Greer’s performance is especially noteworthy – he knows all the tricks, and keeps the song moving forward.  I had never previously noticed that there are four measures in 3/4 time at about 0:33 and 1:15 of the song, and it’s Greer’s drumming that makes the transition from 4/4 to 3/4 and back to 4/4 so seamless.

Click here to listen to “Friends.”