Grass Roots – "I'd Wait a Million Years" (1969)

I’d wait a million years 

Walk a million miles

Cry a million tears 

The singer of “I’d Wait a Million Years” wouldn’t really wait a million years, walk a million miles, or cry a million tears just to have you near him.  

Those lines are an example of what the ancient Greeks called hyperbole – defined as an exaggeration not meant to be taken literally.

People often use the word “million” hyperbolically.  But sometimes a million is just a million – and sometimes a cigar is just a smoke. 

As you can see from the photo below, my wildly popular little blog recently had its millionth visitor.  (I had hoped to get a photo of the counter as it rolled over from 999,999 to 1,000,000, but that was like trying to catch lightning in a bottle – I blinked and I missed it.) 

Who the millionth visitor was and where he or she is from, nobody knows.  (About half of our traffic comes from the good ol’ U.S. of A.  The countries that contribute the most visitors after the U.S. are Russia, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, Australia and Brazil, respectively.)

What we do know is that 2 or 3 lines continues to blow up after almost ten years in existence!

2 or 3 lines is purt near a stick of dynamite, boys and girls.  That’s as plain as the nose on your face – it don’t make me no never mind if you don’t agree. 

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“I’d Wait a Million Years” isn’t the first Grass Roots song to be featured on 2 or 3 lines, which is as it should be.

If you wanted to pick a quintessential 2 or 3 lines, you could do a lot worse than the Grass Roots.  

For one thing, they had their greatest success during what I like to call the golden decade of pop music – which consists of the years I was in junior high, high school and college.

Second, the Grass Roots’ hits were as eclectic as all get out, combining elements of folk rock, R&B/soul, and “British Invasion” music.  A lot of their singles featured brass instruments, something that was relatively rare at the time.  

Third, 2 or 3 lines has always had a soft spot for studio musicians in general and the Los Angeles-based “Wrecking Crew” conglomeration of studio musicians in particular.  The Grass Roots – who were the creation of P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri (who wrote “Eve of Destruction” for Barry McGuire, “You Baby” for the Turtles, and “Secret Agent Man” for Johnny Rivers) – originally relied on “Wrecking Crew” members like Larry Knechtel and Joe Osborn.

Eventually Sloan and Barri persuaded a Los Angeles band called The 13th Floor to become the Grass Roots.  While those musicians toured, Sloan and Barri continued to rely heavily on studio musicians for the group’s recordings.

Click here to listen to “I’d Wait a Million Years.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Grass Roots – "Midnight Confessions" (1968)

There's a little gold ring
You wear on your hand

Makes me understand

According to Wikipedia, this song “appears to be a musical dramatization of the midnight confession of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's love for Hester Prynne in the classic 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, The Scarlet Letter.”

The Reverend Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne

Butter my butt and call me a biscuit – I had no idea!

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I’m embarrassed to admit that until about an hour ago, I thought that the title of this song was “Midnight Confession,” singular – not “Midnight Confessions,” plural.

This song was released fifty years ago, and I’ve heard it hundreds (thousands?) of times.  Better late than never!

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“Midnight Confessions” was the last song I chose to include in the inaugural class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  But that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy of that honor than the other nine selections.

It’s true that the Grass Roots don’t have the cachet of the other artists whose singles were inducted in my hall of fame this year – artists like the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and Marvin Gaye.

That may be because some view the Grass Roots as an ersatz group somewhat akin to the Monkees.

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The Grass Roots were the brainchild of the songwriting and producing team of P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, who had recorded a demo of one of their songs they had written, “Where Were You When I Needed You,” with the help of a group of Los Angeles studio musicians.

P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri

Sloan and Barri’s demo was favorably received, so they went out to find a group willing to become the Grass Roots.  A San Francisco group called the Bedouins fit the bill.  They recorded a new version of “Where Were You When I Needed You,” and begin to perform using the Grass Roots moniker.

But the ex-Bedouins wanted to play more bluesy stuff, which got two thumbs down from Sloan and Barri.  So they recruited a Los Angeles band called The 13th Floor (not to be confused with the 13th Floor Elevators, the legendary Texas psychedelic group), who adopted the Grass Roots moniker and recorded the third version of “Where Were You When I Needed You” to be released under that name.

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The new incarnation of the Grass Roots cranked out over a dozen top-forty hits, the best of which are “I’d Wait a Million Years,” “Temptation Eyes,” and “Midnight Confessions.”  (My favorite Grass Roots song may be “Feelings,” but it failed to crack the Billboard “Hot 100,” so it is not eligible for the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME – unless I decide to change the rules, of course)

“Midnight Confessions” was the group’s biggest hit, peaking at #5 on the Billboard charts.  It is absolutely mind-boggling that a song this good didn’t reach #1, but it didn’t.

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“Midnight Confessions” was written by Lou Josie, a Clevelander who had written and recorded several rockabilly singles in the fifties.  

A very young Lou Josie

Josie moved to Los Angeles 1961.  After a couple of years, he gave up recording and concentrated on songwriting.  “Midnight Confessions” was by far his most successful composition, and sounds like nothing else he wrote.  

Josie first gave the song to the Ever-Green Blues, a Los Angeles band that he mentored.  Their recording of the song is very similar to the Grass Roots’ recording – it has the same distinctive bass intro and very similar backing horn parts.  The only real difference between the two versions are the lead vocals – Manny Esparza of the Ever-Green Blues really cuts loose, while Rob Grill of the Grass Roots plays it relatively straight.

Click here to listen to the Ever-Green Blues recording of “Midnight Confessions.”

("Confessions," not "Confession" – it's
as plain as the nose on your face!)

Click here to listen to the Grass Roots recording, which fully deserves to have been named to the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon.

Marmalade -- "Lovin' Things" (1968)

Our friends call us the perfect pair 

For the lovin' things, baby, that we share 

(As was noted in the previous 2 or 3 lines, I currently have three blissfully engaged children.  It seems like every song that my iPod serves up these days has some lines that reference this happy state of affairs.  To wit, see above.)

I was happy to get a compliment about a recent 2 or 3 lines from an old high school friend who went on to have a long career in journalism.  "Nice, nice column," she wrote.

The compliment was all the more meaningful because the friend was a year ahead of me in school.  When you're a junior in high school, the seniors are (to quote Genesis) "giants in the earth."  It was a red-letter day indeed when one of them deigned to notice a lowly junior.

I'd never thought of my three-times-a-week 2 or 3 lines posts as "columns" before.  But I really like the sound of "columns."  And being a "columnist" sounds so much better than being a mere "blogger." 

Of course, not everyone likes columnists.  Here's what the newspaper publisher played by Robert Duvall in the 1994 movie, The Paper, had to say about columnists:

I hate columnists! Why do I have all these columnists? . . . What every columnist at this paper needs to do is to shut the f*ck up!

(I can only imagine what this character would have had to say about bloggers.)

I thought about going to journalism school before deciding to become a lawyer.  (One of my daughters did get a master's in journalism.)  I greatly enjoyed working on my law school newspaper, and did quite a bit of freelance writing over the years before starting this blog in 2009.  Seeing my words in print -- not to mention my name -- is as satisfying a feeling as anything I know.

If you had to choose one word and one word only to describe me, "reader" would be a good choice.  I have deep admiration for good writers -- and I am absolutely awestruck by good writers who are also prolific writers. 

2 or 3 lines is the tiny grain of sand that I have contributed to the beach that is the internet, but I'm inordinately devoted to it.  (Some would say obsessed.)  It makes my day whenever someone says something positive about what I've written.

But even better than that, of course, is when someone clicks on my ads!

I was walking my dog the other day, listening to the latest batch of songs I had "liberated" from the Freegal music download service that is offered by the half-dozen or so public libraries I have accounts with.  (Power to the people -- right on!)  

Suddenly "Lovin' Things" -- a classic sixties three-minute pop song -- popped up on my iPod, and I sang along to it while my four-legged companion trotted alongside me, stopping to sniff every peed-upon mailbox along our route.

Something hit me a couple of hours later.  "Lovin' Things" had been recorded by the Grass Roots, one of the great singles groups of the late sixties and early seventies.  

But I was certain that I had searched the Freegal database for the Grass Roots and come up empty.  So where had my recording of "Lovin' Things" come from?

I hurried to my computer and found that the version of "Lovin' Things" on my iPod had been recorded the Glaswegian pop group, the Marmalade.

Marmalade

("Glaswegian" means someone who is from Glasgow, Scotland -- just like "Mancunian" means someone who is native to Manchester, England.  I don't know why the Brits think they're too good to use normal suffixes like "New Yorker" or "Washingtonian.")

The Marmalade are most famous in the U.S. for their 1969 hit, "Reflections of My Life."  

But in 1968, their recording of "Lovin' Things" was a #6 hit in the UK.  The next year, the Grass Roots released their version of the song -- the arrangements are very similar -- in the U.S.  

"Lovin' Things" has some almost comically over-the-top lyrics.  Here's one verse:

With your soft and sweet caress 

You brought me such tenderness 

To think I was once forsaken 

With your kiss I've been awakened

Here's another:

Then you walked into my life

Said how you'd soon end all my strife

With a smile from your young face, you 

Gave me back my inspiration 

The Marmalade released "Lovin' Things" just in time.  Their first few singles had gone nowhere, and their mean ol' record company was about to give them the old heave-ho.  The group had foolishly turned down the chance to record "Everlasting Love," which later was a #1 hit for Love Affair.  ("Everlasting Love" is a great record that 2 or 3 lines will have more to say about at a future date.)

Later that year, Marmalade reached the #1 spot in the UK with a cover of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," perhaps the worst song Lennon and McCartney ever wrote.  But the group made up for that crappy single with "Reflections of My Life," which is a FABULOUS song.  (We'll have more to say about it in the future as well.)  

Here's "Lovin' Things":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon:

Grass Roots -- "Feelings" (1968)

I have known you all my life

Girl, it seems to me

That you will always be

Very close to me -- close to me

Rob Grill, the lead singer of the Grass Roots, sustained a serious head injury last month when he fell after suffering a stroke.  He was in a coma for several weeks before he died earlier this week.  Grill was 67.

You don't hear much about the Grass Roots these days, but they were one of the most successful top 40 groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rob Grill

The Grass Roots set a record that is likely to never be broken.  There was a Grass Roots single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 307 consecutive weeks -- beginning with "Let's Live for Today" (which was released in 1967 and made it to #8) and ending in 1972.  (That statistic is from the Grass Roots' official website.  I can't quite make the math work, but it's not nice to nitpick rock 'n' roll legends.)  In between came great AM radio hits like "Midnight Confessions" and "The River Is Wide" and "I'd Wait A Million Years" and "Temptation Eyes."

The story of the Grass Roots begins in 1965, when P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri recorded a demo of their song "Where Were You When I Needed You?" as the Grass Roots.  (Sloan and Barri recorded some of their own songs, but are better remembered for the songs they wrote for other performers -- including "Eve of Destruction" and "Secret Agent Man.") 

The demo made a somewhat favorable impression so Sloan and Barri found a San Francisco band called the Bedouins and had them re-record the song under the Grass Roots moniker.  It reached #28 on the Billboard chart.  But the partnership between the Sloan/Barri duo and the Bedouins didn't last long -- they had "artistic differences."

Sloan and Barri recruited a Los Angeles band called the 13th Floor (not to be confused with the great Texas psychedelic band, the 13th Floor Elevators) to be the new Grass Roots.

One of the members of the 13th Floor was Creed Bratton, who is one of the regular cast members of the NBC television series, "The Office."



The 13th Floor's original lead singer got drafted, which is how Rob Grill (a graduate of Hollywood High whose back-in-the-day musician friends included Cory Wells of Three Dog Night and John Kay of Steppenwolf) became a member of the Grass Roots.  

Grill and the new Grass Roots hit it big right out of the starting gate with "Let's Live for Today," and the rest is history.  

The Grass Roots didn't get a lot of respect despite their popularity.  I suppose you could compare them to the Monkees -- they were a singles band (not an album band), and they didn't write their biggest hits themselves.  

But at the beginning, they were an honest-to-God San Francisco "Summer of Love" band.  Their first big hit, "Let's Live for Today," was very different from some of their later and more lightweight hits -- it's lyrics struck a chord with the Vietnam generation. 

The Grass Roots appeared at the "Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival" in Marin County, California, on June 11, 1967 -- at the height of the popularity of "Let's Live for Today."  That festival was arguably the first great outdoor rock festival.  It preceded the "Monterey International Pop Festival' by one week -- but no one made a movie about it.

Here's a partial list of the performers who also appeared at the Marin County festival:  the Doors, Canned Heat, Spanky and Our Gang, Every Mother's Son (don't sleep on "Come On Down To My Boat, Baby"!), Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Captain Beefheart, the Seeds, Tim Buckley, Steve Miller, Country Joe and the Fish, and the 5th Dimension.  That's a quality lineup, boys and girls.  

Part of the charm of 2 or 3 lines is its unpredictability.  So to pay tribute to Rob Grill, we are featuring a 1968 Grass Roots single that didn't break into the top 100 -- even though it is probably the best Grass Roots song of all time!  ("Midnight Confessions," a serious contender for that title, was the next Grass Roots single to be released, and made it all the way to #5 -- no Grass Roots song ever did better.)

I don't remember ever hearing "Feelings" until a couple of months ago, when I was listening to the music from the great "Mystic Eyes" radio show I had recorded in 1980.  (I recently found someone who transferred all that music from the ancient audiocassettes on which I recorded it to CDs.)  I had no idea it was a Grass Roots song until I googled the lyrics.  

"Feelings" features a marimba riff, and will likely remind you of "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones.  It is a pastiche of all sorts of rock/pop bits and pieces, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If you don't like it, you are banned from 2 or 3 lines FOR LIFE!

Here's "Feelings" -- featuring the late Rob Grill.




And here's a snippet of the band lip-synching the song in Doris Day's last movie, "With Six You Get Eggroll":