You could say that the Yardbirds had some pretty good lead guitarists. Eric Clapton joined the band in late 1963. Jeff Beck replaced him in May 1965. Beck’s good friend, Jimmy Page, joined the band in 1966 – initially he played bass – and remained when the band gave Beck the boot later that year. Rolling Stone ranked those guys as #2, #5, and #3 on their “100 Top Guitarists” list.
Jeff Beck
After he was fired by the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck formed the Jeff Beck Group. Rod Stewart was the group’s lead singer and Ronnie Wood (who later joined the Rolling Stones) its rhythm guitarist. "Morning Dew" is from the group's 1968 debut album, Truth.
The most interesting song on the album -- an instrumental titled "Beck's Bolero" -- had been recorded in the spring of 1966 by Beck, Keith Moon of the Who, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones (a busy session musician who shortly thereafter joined forces with Jimmy Page to form Led Zeppelin), and Nicky Hopkins (best known for his keyboard work on several classic Rolling Stones albums).
Beck had hoped to record an entire album with this group, but contractual difficulties presented what might have been the ultimate supergroup album from getting off the ground. (Damn lawyers!)
Here's "Beck's Bolero," which was composed by Jimmy Page:
The Beck-Stewart-Wood lineup recorded one more album before Beck broke up the band just before a scheduled appearance at a little outdoor music festival which has come to be known as “Woodstock.” Bad timing, n’est-ce pas?
The Jeff Beck Group
Beck's "Morning Dew" followed the Tim Rose template rather than the Bonnie Dobson-Fred Neil template. For example, the Dobson version said "I hear a young man moaning', Lord," while Fred Neil and Vince Martin sang "I heard a young man moanin', Lord." But there Rose-Beck versions go with the lines quoted above.
The Rose and Beck recordings have another verse that is almost exactly the same, except that it refers to a young girl instead of a young man, although Rose the "young girl" verse before the "young man" verse, while Rod Stewart sings those two verses in reverse order. (I don't read much into that -- it was probably just an accident.)
Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in 2009
Beck's version is also like Rose's when it comes to being more rock-and-roll than folk in style.
Here's Jeff Beck's version of "Morning Dew," featuring Rod Stewart on vocals:
You regular readers of 2 or 3 lines may be surprised to see me posting on a Thursday.
("Surprised?" I can hear you saying to yourselves. "Thrilled is more like it!")
I usually post three times a week -- Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. (Except for February, when I post each and every day, and twice on SuperBowl Sunday.) This week, you're getting a bonus fourth 2 or 3 lines at absolutely no extra charge -- you don't even have to pay additional shipping and handling!
Of course, the free bonus post is about a cover of the same song that was featured in the previous two posts. Back in the day, I might have written one big-ass post featuring not only the original version of "Morning Dew" but also all the significant cover versions.
Now that I'm an experienced blogger, I've learned to break those long posts into four or five small ones . . . make it look like the reader is getting more product when he or she is really getting less. (Hey, I'm a busy guy. I still have a lot of Christmas shopping to do.)
Why am I giving you this peek behind the curtain of my wildly successful blog? Because I'm honest with my readers -- I believe in full transparency. Also because I've pumped this post full of enough hot air that I only have to do a cursory research job on Tim Rose to end up with enough material.
Tim Rose grew up in the Washington, DC, area in the fifties, and graduated from Gonzaga College Prep School, a noted Jesuit all-boys high school near the U.S. Capitol.
After a brief stint with the Air Force, Rose joined forces with his boyhood friend, the late Scott McKenzie, who had a big hit in 1967 with "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," and John Phillips (of Mamas & Papas fame) to form a group. Later, Rose was in a folk trio called "The Big 3" with Cass Elliot before going solo.
In 1966, Rose's single of "Hey Joe" was getting a lot of airplay, especially in San Francisco. The song had been copyrighted in 1962 by singer Billy Roberts, but Rose claimed he had heard the song sung when he was child and credited himself as the author of the song on his single. Jimi Hendrix released his version of "Hey Joe" -- which was similar in style to Rose's -- later that year.
Rose's 1966 cover of "Morning Dew" was inspired by the Fred Neil-Vince Martin version. Rose claimed a co-writing credit for the song, which outraged the song's creator Bonnie Dobson.
"If anyone is going to be credited as co-writer or co-lyricist, it should have been Fred Neil because all Tim Rose did was take Freddy Neil's changes," Dobson said in a 1993 interview. "I've written songs with other people and never claimed them for my own. I just think it was a dreadfully dishonest thing to do."
The lines quoted at the beginning of this post are from Rose's cover of the song -- the Bonnie Dobson and Fred Neil-Vince Martin versions did not include those words. I thought that the "morning dew" referred to the radioactive fallout that was about to snuff out the lives of the people who had survived the fictional nuclear war in the movie On the Beach, which inspired Dobson to write this song. In Rose's version, "morning dew" seems to refer to . . . morning dew.
Rose's take on "Morning Dew" is much more rock-and-roll than Bonnie Dobson's or Fred Neil's. It influenced many of the bands who did subsequent covers of the song -- those covers use Rose's lyrics and feature a similar musical style.
Tim Rose in 2002
Rose released six albums between 1967 and 1976, but then his career stalled. He worked as a construction laborer, sang jingles and did voiceover work, graduated from Fordham University in 1984 (when he was 43), and worked for a time as a stockbroker.
With the help of Nick Cave, Rose moved to the UK and revived his career in the nineties. He released his final album in 2002, and died of a heart attack later that year.
Here's Tim Rose's version of "Morning Dew":
Here's a link you can use to buy a CD of Rose's 1969 album, Through Rose Colored Glasses (which includes "Morning Dew"), from Amazon:
The first cover version of "Morning Dew" was recorded by Fred Neil and Vince Martin and released on their legendary 1965 folk album, Tear Down the Walls.
Neil is best known for his song "Everybody's Talkin'," which he wrote and recorded in 1966. (The song was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson in 1969, and was featured on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated movie to ever win the "Best Picture" Oscar.)
I don't remember hearing any of Neil's music back in the sixties, but discovered it only after he died in 2001. He's a remarkable singer, and 2 or 3 lines will feature more of his music in the future.
Bonnie Dobson, who wrote "Morning Dew," remembers getting a call from Jac Holtzman, the founder and owner of Elektra Records, who told her that Neil wanted to record it.
Fred Neil
Neil revised the lyrics before he and Martin recorded it. For example, the first line of the song as Dobson sang it was "Take me for a walk in the morning dew," which Neil changed to "Walk me out in the morning dew." He changed Dobson's "You'll never hear your baby cry again" to "You didn't hear no baby cryin', mama."
Neil's changes were fairly subtle, but the effect was to take a song whose lyrics were a little stiff and literary-sounding and make them considerably more natural.
The Neil-Martin version of "Morning Dew" is very restrained but quite powerful. The two men have very different voices -- Neil sings in an unusually low register, and is the more distinctive singer -- but the combination is very pleasing.
The musical accompaniment is very simple -- an acoustic guitar and a guitarrón mexicano (literally, "Mexican large guitar" -- a six-string acoustic bass guitar commonly seen in mariachi bands), which was played here by Felix Pappalardi, a founding member of Mountain and the producer of several classic albums by Cream. (Lovin' Spoonful founder John Sebastian played harmonica on several Tear Down the Walls tracks, but not on "Morning Dew.")
A big-ass guitarrón mexicano
This is perhaps the best of the "Morning Dew" covers. The only thing I don't like about it is the guitar chord progression at the very end.
Here's "Morning Dew" by Fred Neil and Vince Martin:
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:
Bonnie Dobson was a folk singer/songwriter who was born in Toronto in 1940. In 1960, she left her university studies and came to the United States to perform at folk festivals and coffeehouses from California to New York.
Dobson was working in Los Angeles when she saw On the Beach, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Tony Perkins, that was set in Australia. The movie, which is based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Nevil Shute, is about the aftermath of a nuclear war that has wiped out the entire population of the northern hemisphere. As deadly radioactive fallout drifts inexorably towards Australia, most of the population opts to take suicide pills rather than waiting for the inevitable.
I remember On the Beach vividly -- especially the movie's score, which featured the traditional Australian song, "Waltzing Matilda." The movie scared the hell out of me, and it had a similar effect on Bonnie Dobson:
[I]t made a tremendous impression on me, that film. Particularly at that time because everybody was very worried about the bomb and whether we were going to get through the next ten years. . . . I remember I was singing in Los Angeles . . . and suddenly I just started writing this song. . . . I'd never written songs and this song just came out and really it was a kind of re-enactment of that film in a way where at the end there is nobody left and it was a conversation between these two people trying to explain what's happening. It was really [about] apocalypse . . . .
Dobson later told an interviewer that she thought she first performed "Morning Dew" at the Ash Grove, a famous folk music club in Los Angeles. (Doc Watson, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, and many other greats played at the Ash Grove.)
But the song first came to the attention of a larger audience at the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, in 1961. (That festival is still going strong after 50 years.)
This version of "Morning Dew" was recorded live at Gerdes Folk City, another legendary music venue in lower Manhattan, in 1962. (Folk City was where Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan debuted, and where Dylan met Joan Baez. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, Emmylou Harris, Phoebe Snow, Hüsker Dü, and Sonic Youth also performed at Folk City before it lost its lease and closed in 1987.)
Gerdes Folk City
A lot of people have covered "Morning Dew," and the next several 2 or 3 lines posts will feature the most significant of those cover versions.
Here's Bonnie Dobson's original recording of her song, "Morning Dew," which is sometimes called "(Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew":
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:
The Dutch Renaissance author and theologian, Erasmus, is credited with coining the saying, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." That seems to be the inspiration for the first line of this verse -- "One-eyed men aren't really reigning" -- but who the hell knows?
But first things first. When you listen to the this song, you're going to hear a weird little musical line that sounds like nothing you've never heard -- think wibble wibble wibble wibble.
You've probably seen old-timey bands that had a guy who played a gallon jug by blowing across the opening at the top of the neck, producing a bass note.
Tommy Hall, electric jug virtuoso
The sound on this record that I'm talking about is made by an electric jug. Honest to God, folks. Tommy Hall, who was one of the original members of the 13th Floor Elevators, played electric jug.
Hall was a world-class LSD user. He told the author of a book about the Elevators that he took LSD something like 317 times between 1966 and 1970. And he kept on taking it for decades.
Tommy Hall in 2009
I feel an artistic connection to Hall because I played bass jugs for a fife, jug, and bottle band in high school. We were strictly acoustic, however -- no electric jugs in our band. (No electric nothin', as a matter of fact.)
I could have used an electric jug. Maybe then I wouldn't have hyperventilated and almost fainted during every song we played. (More about that fife, jug, and bottle band later.)
Here's a video of the Elevators that shows Hall playing his electric jug. As far as I know, he is the only person in the history of the world who played an electric jug, as you can see from this old American Bandstand appearance by the band:
(The 13th Floor Elevators on American Bandstand? Maybe Dick Clark was on LSD, too.)
The next time you're in a tall building, check to see whether it has a 13th floor. Odds are that it doesn't.
Can you believe that it's the year 2012, and superstition still has sufficient sway over our hearts and minds that building managers skip from 12 to 14 when labeling the buttons on their elevators? Remarkable, isn't it?
Where's the button for the 13th floor?
Roky Erickson, the lead guitarist and lead singer for the 13th Floor Elevators, was brilliant. He was also mad as a hatter.
In 1968, when the band was performing at HemisFair -- which was sort of a mini-world's fair held in San Antonio that year -- Erickson began speaking gibberish. He was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic and was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (a/k/a/electroshock therapy or "shock treatment") at a psychiatric hospital in Houston.
The Elevators were major drug users and advocates of drug use, and the fuzz kept a close eye on them. In 1969, Erickson was arrested and found to be carrying a single joint. Facing a possible sentence of as much as ten years in prison, Erickson pled not guilty by reason of insanity and ended up at a state hospital for the criminally insane, where he had more electroshock and was dosed with the antipsychotic drug, Thorazine, until his release in 1972.
In 1974, Roky formed a new band named "Bleib alien," which combined an anagram and a pun and was supposed to mean "remain alone" but in German. He then released two aptly named albums (I Think of Demons and The Evil One) before announcing in 1982 that a Martian had invaded his body.
Roky Erickson in 1967
Here's how Wikipedia describes what happened next:
[Erickson] came to feel that, due to his being alien, human beings were attacking him psychically. A concerned friend enlisted a Notary Public to witness an official statement by Erickson that he was an alien; he hoped by declaring so publicly he would be in line with any "international laws" he might have been breaking. Erickson claimed the attacks then indeed stopped.
(It gets worse, boys and girls.)
Beginning in the 1980s, Erickson began a years-long obsession with the mail, often spending hours poring over random junk mail, writing to solicitors and celebrities (dead or living). He was arrested in 1989 on charges of mail theft. Erickson picked up mail from neighbors who had moved and taped it to the walls of his room. He insisted that he never opened any of the mail, and the charges were ultimately dropped.
Erickson has always been revered by fellow musicians -- especially Texas musicians. In 1990, Sire/Warner Brothers released a tribute album featuring covers of Roky's songs by R.E.M., ZZ Top, the Butthole Surfers, Doug Sahm, and others. In 1995, Henry Rollins published a collection of Erickson's song lyrics.
Here's how Rolling Stone described the 1995-vintage Erickson:
[A] man falling apart at the seams, his teeth rotted to stumps, his hair wild and matted, and his house blaring with multiple TVs, radios and police scanners, apparently a strategy to block out the voices in his head.
Rollins took care of Roky's dental problems, paying for him to get a full set of dentures. But the credit for most of Erickson's turnaround belongs to his kid brother, Sumner -- a former classical tubist for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Roky Erickson in 2012
In 2001, Sumner was granted legal custody over Roky, and helped him get his finances in shape. He also made sure he took his meds. Since then, things have been much better for Roky.
A documentary film about him was produced in 2005, and he appeared on stage (with ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons) for the first time in a long time that same year. In 2007, he played in New York City for the first time, and also travelled to the Coachella Festival, London, and Finland. In 2010, he released his first new album in 14 years. Earlier this year, he toured Australia and New Zealand.
"Slip Inside This House" is the first track from the Elevators' second album, Easter Everywhere. The song is over eight minutes long, and it is a true psychedelic masterpiece.
I had never heard the song until recently. I'm still prone to fits of slack-jawed drooling every time I listen to it. You'd best believe me when I say it is far-f*cking-out. Just look at the verse I quoted above, with its one-eyed men and two-eyed men and three-eyed men. (To quote Inspector Gadget, "Yowser!")
And that verse is only one of ten verses in this song, each of which is more bizarre and obscure than the last. Here's the first verse:
The only one who didn't give me any pain When I gave birth to him
And that's how I knew That he was a special child
These rather remarkable lines are spoken by rap superstar Jay-Z's mother, Gloria Carter, at the beginning of "December 4," the opening track on Jay-Z's The Black Album, which was released in 2003.
If you're one of the "Hip Hop 101" students who has read all the required readings and who pays attention in class instead of sitting in the back row and listening to rap on your iPod, you know that Jay-Z's real name is Shawn Carter.
Today -- December 4, 2012 -- is Jay-Z's 43rd birthday. So it was 43 years ago today that the second greatest miracle involving a child's birth in the history of the world took place: Shawn's mother, Gloria Carter, felt no pain while giving birth to him despite the fact that he weighed ten pounds, eight ounces.
Jay-Z with his mom, Gloria Carter
What do you mothers out there have to say about that? Maybe something like "When pigs fly!" Some of you moms might use saltier language to express the viewpoint that there is no flippin' way that any woman could give birth to a big lug like Jay-Z and not suffer excruciating pain, but this is a family blog.
By the way, people around the world have some very imaginative ways of expressing doubt that some unlikely event will ever take place. For example, Mexicans say "When the rooster lays an egg!" to make the point that something is impossible and will never happen. In China and India, they say "When the sun rises from the west!" And in the UK, the people say "Not in a month of Sundays!"
The Venezuelans supposedly say "When frogs dance the flamenco!" And the Turks supposedly say "When the fish climbs the poplar tree!" I have my doubts about those two, but maybe they're genuine.
My favorite is the saying attributed to Brazilians: "On St. Never's Day!"
Whether little Shawn Carter did or did not cause his mother any pain during childbirth, he certainly was a special child as far as his mother was concerned. And he grew up to be a very special man. If you don't think so, just ask Jay-Z -- he'll gladly point out that you are sadly mistaken.
It was said that The Black Album would be Jay-Z's final album -- that he was going to turn his attention to running Roc-A-Fella records and his other businesses. No one bought that, and they were right. Jay-Z released a solo album three years later, and followed that up with two more solo albums and Watch the Throne, a collaborative album with Kanye West.
The Black Album debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart, selling almost half a million copies the first week it was released. Most critics reviewed it very positively, and it was nominated for the Grammy award for best rap album.
The Black Album is breathtakingly narcissistic. Jay-Z has earned legendary status in the rap world, but he is a much bigger legend in his own mind than anywhere else.
In "December 4" we learn more about Jay-Z's childhood from both Jay-Z and his mother. For example, she tells us that young Shawn was a very shy child, was a big sports fan, and learned to ride a bike when he was four. He became obsessed with music at an early age, and used to practice his rhymes and tap out beats on the kitchen table until the wee hours. So his mother bought him a boom box to use to create songs.
A very young Jay-Z
Jay-Z points out some of the darker aspects of his childhood. He "was a kid torn apart once his pop disappeared" -- his father left his mother and their four children when Jay-Z was 12. "I went to school, got good grades, could behave when I wanted/But I had demons deep inside," Jay-Z admits.
Pretty soon he was dealing drugs on the street, and living large as a result:
I'm a hustler now
My gear is in, and I'm in the in crowd
And all the wavy light-skinned girls is lovin' me now
My self-esteem went through the roof, man
I got my swag
Selling drugs not only paid for Jay-Z's swag -- the clothes, the cars, the jewelry, the expensive food and drink -- but also gave him his swagger.
The once and future king of hip-hop
In 1996, Jay-Z said good-bye to "the game, all the spoils, the adrenaline rush" and decided "[t]o try this rap sh*t for a living." It worked out pretty well for our boy -- he's sold 50 million albums worldwide, is worth an estimated $500 million, and is married to Beyoncé Knowles.
But Jay-Z still schleps around a lot of guilt and angst:
I pray I'm forgiven
For every bad decision I made
Every sister I played
Cause I'm still paranoid to this day
And it's nobody fault I made the decisions I made
This is the life I chose, or rather the life that chose me
Whoa, whoa, whoa -- what does that last line mean? Is Jay-Z accepting responsibility for the mistakes he made when he was younger? Or is he blaming racism, poverty, and other social ills for his criminal behavior?
"December 4" then closes with a challenge -- which Jay-Z repeats four times:
If you can't respect that Your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black
"Fade to black" is a movie term, referring to a technique used to end a scene or a movie: the light that illuminates the screen is gradually reduced until the images fade away and the screen is dark.
Jay-Z and Mrs. Jay-Z (Beyoncé Knowles)
"Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black" has several possible meanings. "Maybe the public will appreciate The Black Album once they've heard it -- when the final track has faded out and the music is over" is one. "Maybe you'll appreciate my music after I stop making albums" is another. (Remember, The Black Album was supposed to be Jay-Z's last.)
Or maybe he is saying "Maybe you'll finally appreciate me after I'm dead" -- after his life has faded to black.
Here's "December 4":
Here's a link you can use to order "December 4" from Amazon:
Nelly (who was born Cornell Iral Haynes, Jr.) doesn't beat around the bush. Like Alice of Alice in Wonderland fame, Nelly says what he means and means what he says:
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least -- at least I mean what I say -- that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
The March Hare, Alice, and Mad Hatter at tea
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
(FYI, that's from chapter VII of Alice in Wonderland, which is titled "A Mad Tea-party.")
As you know from the last couple of "Hiphop 101" lectures, most of the prominent rappers who don't come from New York or California hail from the South-- OutKast, Ludacris, Gucci Mane, and T.I. are from Atlanta, Rick Ross and Pitbull are from Miami, Lil Wayne is from New Orleans, and so on. There are some prominent rappers from the Midwest, but not nearly as many as there are from the South.
Nelly on stage
Although he was born in Austin, Texas, Nelly grew up in St. Louis -- actually, he grew up in University City, an older, close-in St. Louis suburb.
John F. Kennedy once described Washington, DC, as a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency. The same description has been applied to St. Louis, which most people consider to be a midwestern city, but which has considerable southern DNA. After all, Missouri was a slave state, and St. Louis was located smack on the Mississippi River -- like Memphis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.
Nelly's first album was released in 2000. His follow-up album, Nellyville, was released in 2002 and debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart.
"Hot in Herre" (no, I don't know why Nelly threw in an extra "R") was a huge hit and won the Grammy for best male rap solo performance. The other nominees that year included Eminem, Jay-Z, and Ludacris, so Nelly beat out some very tough competition.
What you see is what you get with "Hot in Herre." There's nothing very complicated about it -- it tells the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of pulling out all the stops to get a woman's clothes off.
At one point, Nelly tries to get his girl nekkid by asking her to pretend that she is just dancing in the privacy of her own bedroom, checking her own body out in the mirror, perhaps comparing notes with her girlfriend:
So take it off like you're home alone
You know, dance in front your mirror while you're on the phone
Checking your reflection and telling your best friend
"Girl, I think my butt gettin' big!"
Nelly, you say that like it's a bad thing:
By the way, Kim, there's a new big-ass ass in town -- you'd better watch out:
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