Five Man Electrical Band – "Signs" (1971)

The sign said

You got to have a membership card
To get inside (GRUNT!)

[NOTE: This resurrected 2 or 3 lines post – which originally appeared on July 23, 2010 – features a great song that I will always associate with the jukebox at Nina's Green Parrot, a Kansas bar where many of my high-school friends and I misspent our youth sucking down cheap 3.2% beer.  "Signs" is a one-hit wonder with not only a capital "O-H," but also with a capital "W."  That's why it's a member of this year's class of 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME inductees.] 

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Les Emmerson of the Five Man Electrical Band doesn't literally say or sing the word "Grunt!" in today's featured song – he just grunts.  And that grunt is the highlight of this song.  It's hard to explain why, but that grunt packs a tremendous emotional wallop.

We'll get back to this song a little later, but first let's set the stage – which means traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind – a journey into a wondrous land whose inhabitants float in a sea of cheap 3.2% beer.

Our destination: Nina's "Green Parrot" bar, in Galena, Kansas.  The time: a hot Friday evening in July 1971.

Galena (with sphalerite)

Galena – named after the most commercially important lead ore mineral, which was discovered in abundance in the area in 1877 – is and always has been (as far as I know from personal experience) a depressed and depressing old mining town.

Within a few months of the discovery of lead ore, Galena was home to 10,000 souls, and its population eventually peaked at 30,000.  The 2000 census reported that Galena had only 3287 residents, and I have to think that every single one of them would move away if they had their druthers.

Of course, I haven't been to Galena in years – I'm basing my opinions on what the town was like in the early 1970's.  Maybe things have changed for the better.  But maybe they haven't.

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I don't think I ever took today's featured song too seriously, but I'm guessing a lot of people did.  I sort of bought into all that counterculture stuff when I was in college, but I wasn't totally committed like a lot of people were in those days.

"Signs" hit #3 on the Billboard chart in 1971, and was very successfully covered by Tesla in 1990.  If you don't remember the gist of it, here's a very learned exegesis courtesy of Wikipedia:

The song was released during an era of social and political change, and its lyrics carry themes of tolerance and inclusion.

In the first verses of the song, the main protagonist (a hippie) expresses his frustration over a series of signs he encounters. One of the signs discourages "long-haired, freaky people" from applying for a job, while another expresses the "trespassers will be shot on sight" threat; yet another proclaims that membership cards are required to get into a club. 

While he is able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist in the first two instances — first, by tucking his hair up in a cap; the second, by telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior — the protagonist, since he isn't wearing a button-down shirt or tie, is turned away at the door by the club usher.

In the final verse, the hippie shares his experiences of going to a church, where he is finally accepted for who he is. After pointing out a sign reading "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray," he is asked to contribute to the offering; however, when he realizes he has no money, he takes out a slip of paper, writing on it "Thank you, Lord for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine." 

Did the author pull this from a paper he did for a college English class ("English 323: Popular Song Lyrics from the Psychedelic Era")?  I've never read such constipated prose.  "Able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist"?  "Telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior"?  You gotta be kidding me.

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I remember this song being on the jukebox at Nina's.  Nina's wasn't the only bar in Galena, but it was the one favored overwhelmingly by Joplin teenagers.  The summer of 1971 was the summer after my freshman year in college, when – and I am not exaggerating, as several other members of the Parkwood High School class of 1970 can testify – I spent six nights a week at Nina's.  (On the seventh day, Nina rested – and I dried out.)

I worked from 7 AM to 3:30 PM that summer unloading railroad cars at a grocery warehouse for four bucks an hour.

Did I ever tell you the story about having to unload an Clorox car that had been humped – that's a technical railroad term – a little too brusquely, which resulted in a few dozen cases of gallon jugs of bleach being crushed, leaving undiluted chlorine bleach an inch or two deep in the bottom of the car?  Where was OSHA when I needed them?  My lungs have never been the same.

A vintage Clorox ad

And what about the time the Ralston-Purina car got banged around somewhere on the Frisco railroad tracks between St. Louis and Joplin, and after unloading Quaker Oats and Cap'n Crunch and a bunch of other stuff, I came to a few damaged cases of dog and cat food that had been festering inside the cars for several days in the August sun, and were literally crawling with maggots?

When my shift at the warehouse was over, I came home and took a bath, gobbled down a home-cooked dinner (with nary a words of thanks), and headed out after a "conversation" with my mother.

This "conversation" generally went something like this:

Her:  "Where are you going?"

Me:  "Out."

Her:  "When will you be back?"

Me:  "Not too late."

Then it was off to Galena – via old Route 66, part of the nightly convoy of Missouri teenagers heading to Kansas for 3.2% beer, which could be legally purchased by 18-year-olds.

Going in the other direction was an equally heavy stream of Kansas 21-year-olds beating it to Missouri to visit our many classy cocktail lounges – liquor-by-the-drink (not to mention many other accoutrements of civilization) being illegal in Kansas.  

It's amazing there weren't more automobile-related deaths and dismemberments at the end of the evenings as both groups returned home (usually much the worse for wear) but it was only about a 10-mile trip, and I don't recall any serious accidents during those summers.  However, I do remember a few close calls passing buses and 18-wheelers on the two-lane highway.  But my 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme has a 350-cubic inch V8, so passing didn't take long when you really stomped on the gas.

(NOTICE:  Please drink responsibly.  Always have a designated driver.  Do as I say, not as I did.)

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We usually hit Nina's shortly after 7 PM and stayed until closing time, which was midnight.  Usually, I drank two quart bottles of beer each night – occasionally three.  (Sometimes, I would order a 24-ounce "tall boy" to go and down it on the drive home – a decision I would really regret when my mother rousted me out of bed at 6 AM the next morning to go to work.)

I could talk about Galena for hours.  I remember an amazing number of details, like the beer prices at Nina's.  My friends and I usually went for quarts of beer – not regular bottles.  (We were frugal types – children of children of the Great Depression.)  The premium brands – Budweiser, Schiltz, Coors -–were 35 cents a quart, while the bargain brands – Pabst, Hamm's, Stag, Busch – went for 25 cents, as I recall.

You could get the premium quarts for a quarter each at "Uncle" Buck's Recreation Parlor across the street, plus watch farmers in bib overalls play dominos and play pool on non-coin-operated pool tables, with the balls hand-racked by a gnarly little dude wearing a carpenter's apron full of change.  It was right out of a Dickens novel – if Dickens had written any novels about rednecks and beer-soaked teenagers, that is.

We spent so much time at Nina's that we ended up hanging out with the bartenders after hours – a couple of cousins named Ron and Marilyn, who gave us extra beer-company lights and window signs that Nina didn't need.

I fondly remember one very chic Hamm's lamp, which was by far the most notable piece of decor in my college apartment:

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What did we actually do for those five hours a night, six nights a week?  Drinking two quarts of beer didn't take all that much time, and Nina's didn't serve food.  (Well, they had chips and Beer Nuts and pickled hard-boiled eggs and SlimJims -- but not much else.)

We didn't dance to the jukebox – I don't think that was allowed.  (Nina, the mean, squinty, uncommunicative old woman who owned the joint, had a lot of rules, and you either followed them or got kicked out.)  There was a coin-operated pool table, but I rarely played it – I wasn't good enough, and it was always in use.  I don't think we played cards while we at Nina's – spades and hearts were obsessions of ours in those years – although we might have.  And there were no TVs to watch.

So I assume we mostly talked.  Talked with the girls who came to Nina's – or talked about the girls who came to Nina's (or the girls who didn't come to Nina's).

Sometimes one of the smart, quiet girls from your English class would show up and it would suddenly dawn on you that she was really quite attractive, and you wondered why you never asked her out back in high school because she was not only cute, but also nice and not stuck-up and no doubt would have made a much more satisfactory girlfriend than most of the girls you did pursue.

A Schlitz "tall boy" can

Some nights – especially Fridays and Saturdays – we ventured further west, to Baxter Springs or even to Pittsburg, a college town with more varied entertainment opportunities.  But most nights, it was Nina's.

I don't know Nina's last name.  But I can see her right now, almost 40 years later, wearing a white waitress's uniform, sitting behind a hostess podium just inside the front door, checking IDs under a small desk lamp with her beady little eyes.  (It did not matter one whit if you came to Nina's every Monday through Saturday for 3 months, as I did, because she would still look at you as if she had never seen you before and simply hold out her hand for your driver's license.)  I know she died years ago, and I heard they auctioned off the bar's furnishings.

Then someone took the place over and ran it another 25 years or so until 2006, when a mine-shaft collapse resulted in the 114-year-old building's being condemned and later razed.   Here's what the old gal looked like in her final days:

Click here to read more about Nina's.

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I had a hard time deciding which song from Nina's jukebox I should honor.  Some of the songs I remember vividly from Nina's were "Long Cool Woman In a Black Dress" (the Hollies sans Graham Nash), "Sweet Hitchhiker" (Creedence Clearwater Revival's last big hit before they broke up), "One Fine Morning" (Lighthouse, a Canadian band like the Five Man Electrical Band), and "Liar" (Three Dog Night's darkest single). 

The Five Man Electrical Band

Then there was "Brandy" (by Looking Glass), a favorite of a girl I hung out and drank with the following summer.  ("Dated" would not really be the correct term.)  

At night when the bars close down

Brandy walks through a silent town

And loves a man who's not around

She still can hear him say

She hears him say "Brandy, you're a fine girl –

What a good wife you would be.

But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"

That song seems to have been a major favorite among girls of that era, but it made no sense to me.  Why in the world would a girl like a song about a sailor who told the woman who loved him that the sea was more important to him than she was, and then sailed awayhor a couple of years.

Maybe those girls agreed with this line from Anne Taintor:  "She liked imaginary men best of all."

Here are some more good Anne Taintor lines:

  – "Had she punished him enough?  How could she be sure?"

  – "One just had to admire his deluded self-confidence!"

  – "Looking for trouble?  Look no further!"

And my all-time favorite:

  

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Hmmm . . . now where was I?  Oh, yes . . . now I remember.

Click here to listen to "Signs."  (If you're from Joplin, close your eyes and pretend you're hearing it on Nina's jukebox back in 1971.)

Click here to buy "Signs" from Amazon.

Sly and the Family Stone – "Stand!" (1969)

You’ve been sitting much too long

There’s a permanent crease

In your right and wrong

When Sly Stone called his record company representative in May 1974 to tell him that he was engaged to a young actress named Kathy Silva, the rep facetiously suggested that the couple get married before an upcoming Sly and the Family Stone concert at Madison Square Garden.  

Sly liked the idea and challenged the rep to make the wedding the biggest event of the year.  The record company did its best to hype the event, and those efforts no doubt contributed to the concert drawing 23,000 fans.  

Sly Stone busses Kathy Silva

The success of the event did little to revive Sly’s sagging career.  Sly and the Family Stone – which hadn’t had a top ten single since 1971 – broke up in January 1975.  

Sly Stone and Kathy Silva separated the next year.

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Cajun fiddler and singer Doug Kershaw – best known for “Louisiana Man” – got married in the Astrodome before a Houston Astros-Cincinnati Reds baseball game on a Saturday night about a year after Sly Stone’s Madison Square Garden wedding.  Kershaw and his band played a concert after the conclusion of the game, which went 14 innings.

Doug Kershaw

I wasn’t in attendance for Kershaw’s wedding, but I did go to the Astros-Reds game the next day.  I was in law school at the time, and was spending the summer interning at a large Houston law firm, which entertained its summer interns lavishly.  Surprisingly, the mediocre Astros prevailed over the Reds – who won an MLB-best 108 regular season games that year, and defeated the Red Sox in the World Series. 

That's pretty much all I’ve got for you today.

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“Stand!” wasn’t Sly and the Family Stone’s biggest hit – it peaked at #22 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart – but I think it’s their best song.  That’s why I chose to induct it into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Click here to listen to “Stand!”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon. 

Judy Collins – "Both Sides Now" (1968)

Tears and fears and feeling proud

To say “I love you” right out loud

Judy Collins was the first artist to release a recording of today's featured song, which was written by Joni Mitchell.  Mitchell was not a fan of the Collins cover, which peaked at #8 on the Billboard "Hot 100" when it was released as a single in 1968.

The Collins recording is titled “Both Sides Now.”  But when Mitchell recorded the song for her Clouds album, she titled it “Both Sides, Now.”

Mitchell re-recorded the song in 2000 and released it on her Both Sides Now album – sans comma.  That version is identified as "Both Sides Now" – also sans comma – on the track listing for that album. 

Miss Joni obviously has a low opinion of consistency – as did Oscar Wilde, who famously opined that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

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Mitchell has said that “Both Sides Now” was inspired by this passage in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel, Henderson the Rain King, which she happened to read while flying in an airplane:

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

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Mitchell was inspired to write “Both Sides Now” by a passage in a novel.  Stephen Stills was inspired to write what became Crosby Stills & Nash’s best-known song by Judy Collins’s bluer-than-blue eyes.

Stephen Stills wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about the time that it became clear that his romance with Collins was over.  

Stills and Collins in 2018

He sang the song for Collins shortly after writing it in 1969.  

“Oh, Stephen, it’s such a beautiful song,” she told him after hearing it.  “But it’s not winning me back.” 

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Did you know that both Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell both contracted polio when they were children?

From the Rotarian magazine:

In 1948, when singer-songwriter Judy Collins was nine years old, she and her family moved from Los Angeles to Denver. . . . Not long after, she developed pain in her legs.  A spinal tap revealed that she had polio. . . . “That was the year everybody got polio,” Collins says.

Doctors at the children’s hospital in Denver placed her in an isolation ward. “There was a baby in the room with me,” she says.  “He was there two days and died.  I didn’t have a roommate for another month.  They had to put my letters, flowers, and books through this big machine that sterilized everything. . . . There was a lot of pain.”

Judy Collins and her
bluer-than-blue eyes

From Insider.com:

“I had polio at the age of nine,” Mitchell told Star magazine. “My spine was twisted up like a train wreck.  I couldn’t walk. I was paralyzed.  Forty years later, it came back with a vengeance.”

Mitchell was 51 when she started feeling “mind-numbing fatigue” and muscle weakness set in for the second time.  Post-polio syndrome affects 25–40% of polio survivors decades after their initial illness, according to the CDC.

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The Collins cover of “Both Sides Now” gave me chills when I first heard it over 50 years ago, and it still does.  

I pretended not to like it when I was a teenager – my responding to it so strongly made me feel girly all over, and I didn’t want to admit that it had that effect on me.

There’s no point in pretending otherwise any more.  Mitchell wrote a great song, and Collins’s recording of it is amazing.  The record paralyzes me every time I hear it.

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Click hear to listen to the Judy Collins cover of “Both Sides Now,” the newest member of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Aretha Franklin – "Think" (1968)

I ain’t no doctor with degrees

But it don’t take too much high IQ

To see what you’re doing to me

Aretha Franklin re-recorded her 1968 hit, “Think,” for the 1980 movie, The Blues Brothers.

Click here to watch the scene from the movie that features Franklin lip-synching to her new version of “Think.”  

Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers

That scene is pretty bad.  But so is the whole movie, of course.  

I’d say about one per cent of The Blues Brothers is funny.  The rest of it is a waste of time.

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Aretha Franklin met Ted White in 1961, when she was 19 and he was 30.  The two were married by a justice of the peace a few weeks later.

White – a small-time wheeler-dealer who one Motown producer called as “a pimp” – was Franklin’s manager until the couple separated.  He is credited with co-writing several songs recorded by Aretha, including today’s featured song – which is now a member of the class of 2023 of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Aretha with hubby Ted White

Aretha’s sister Carolyn thought that Aretha wrote “Think” without any help from her then-husband.  She believed that the song’s lyrics were intended to send a message to Ted White.

If that’s the case, it apparently went in one of Ted’s ears and out the other one.  The couple were divorced the year after “Think” was released. 

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Click here to hear the original studio recording of “Think,” which made it all the way to #7 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1968.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Young Rascals – "How Can I Be Sure?" (1967)

How can I be sure

In a world that’s constantly changing?

That’s an easy question to answer: you can’t be sure of anything that really matters.

If you think I’m wrong, please identify even one significant aspect of your life that you can feel absolutely certain about.

Are you sure when it comes to your health?  Of course not.  You could drop dead tomorrow – or find yourself suddenly struck dumb, deaf, blind, or immobile.  (That’s true and you know it – but you refuse to acknowledge that truth, and so do I . . . probably because doing so would paralyze us.)

Are you sure when it comes to your relationship with your significant other?  HAH!  

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Here are the lines from “How Can I Be Sure?” that immediately follow the lines that are quoted at the beginning of this post:

How can I be sure

Where I stand with you? 

Can you truly be sure where you stand with anyone?  

I think you know where you stand with your dog.  And I think you know where you stand with your grandparents.

You may know where you stand with your parents most of the time.  But you always know where you stand with your grandparents.

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You probably know that the Young Rascals eventually changed their name to simply the Rascals.

But did you know that they called themselves the Rascals before they became the Young Rascals?

After the Rascals became the first white group to sign with Atlantic Records in 1965, their management decided to rename them the Young Rascals after receiving complaints from the Harmonica Rascals.

You may have never heard of the Harmonica Rascals, but they were a very big deal in the thirties and forties.  Click here to read more about the Harmonica Rascals.

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“How Can I Be Sure?” is a truly remarkable song.  

Felix Cavaliere (who co-wrote the song with fellow Rascal Eddie Brigati) said that the group felt comfortable doing a traditional pop-style song like “How Can I Be Sure?” only because the Beatles had done “Michelle” and “Yesterday.”

I think “Michelle” and “Yesterday” are two of the Beatles’ worst records – Paul McCartney wrote a lot of bad songs, and these two are high on that list.

“How Can I Be Sure?” is something completely different.  It has a slight resemblance to a Burt Bacharach song – if Burt Bacharach was French.

I feel a little girly admitting much I like “How Can I Be Sure?” but it’s time for me to come clean about that.  (Like the Gaspard Ulliel character in the famous Martin Scorsese-directed Chanel Bleu commercial, “I’m not going to be the person I’m expected to be any more.”)

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Click here to listen to “How Can I Be Sure?” – which is hereby proclaimed to be a member of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME. 

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Stevie Wonder – "I Was Made to Love Her" (1967)

You know my papa disapproved it

My mama boo-hooed it

Lula Mae Hardaway – who was born in Eufala, Alabama, in 1930 – didn't have an easy life.

Her unmarried teenaged mother gave her to a sharecropping uncle and aunt to raise.  When they died, she lived with various relatives before moving to Saginaw, Michigan.  There she married a much older man who physically abused her and forced her into prostitution for a time.

Lula Mae Hardaway with
her son, Stevie Wonder

Her third child – who she named Stevland – was born prematurely, and became blind when he was given too much oxygen while in an incubator.  His mother believed at first that his blindness was God's way of punishing her for her sins.

Stevland’s blindness didn’t prevent him from becoming a musical prodigy who was offered a recording contract by Motown Records when he was just 11 years old.   As "Little Stevie Wonder," he became the youngest recording artist to ever have a #1 hit single when "Fingertips" made it all the way to the top of the Billboard "Hot 100" when he was only 13.

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Lula Mae Hardaway co-wrote several of her son’s other hits – including "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" and "I Was Made to Love Her," which today becomes a member of the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Hardaway died in 2006 at age 76.  She was survived by five children and 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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Click here to listen to "I Was Made to Love Her," which peaked at #2 on the "Hot 100" in July 1967.  (The Doors' "Light My Fire" kept the record out of the top spot.)

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Music Machine – "Talk Talk" (1966)

My social life’s a dud

My name is really mud

I’m up to here in lies

I think that every class of new inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME should include a one-hit wonder or two.

My wildly popular little hall of fame already includes several fabulous one-hit wonders – like “Fire” (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown), “Spirit in the Sky” (Norman Greenbaum), and “96 Tears” (? And the Mysterians).

And I’m including two more one-hit wonders in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME’S class of 2023.  One of them is today’s featured record.  The other one will be revealed in good time.

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The best rock ’n’ roll records include a heapin’ helpin’ of either anger or angst.

“Talk Talk” is an excellent example of an angst-filled record.  We don’t know just what the singer did wrong, but it must have been something pretty bad because he now finds himself thoroughly ostracized by his peers.

He knows that “it serves me right” to have been shunned, and he accepts that he has to “hide my face or go to some other place” until “the talk subsides to gone.”

The singer is “out of circulation” for the time being.  His “social life’s a dud,” and his name “is really mud.”  

He’s a victim of “talk talk!”

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Sean Bonniwell formed a folk music trio called the Raggamuffins in 1965.  The next year, he recruited two other musicians to join the group, which was renamed the Music Machine.  

Sean Bonniwell

“Talk Talk” – the group’s one and only hit – features a very tight arrangement and precise instrumental work.  (Bonniwell was a fanatic when it came to rehearsing.).  It peaked at #15 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

One critic called it “the most radical single to be heard on Top 40 radio in late 1966,” describing the lyrics as a mixture of “sarcasm, rebellion, self-pity, and paranoia.”

Click here to watch the Music Machine performing “Talk Talk” on “Where the Action Is.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.