40 Year Itch : The Jazz Top 5

About to get down with your lady friend? You could put the needle on something from Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes or this new guy Barry White. But the safest bet is something from the Jazz charts. Here are the Top 5 selling jazz albums from June 3, 1973.


1. The Crusaders : The 2nd Crusade

With the help of ABC's "Wild World of Sports", which used a cut off the album for its sign off, The Crusaders took the top spot with the soulful and sometimes downright funky double album,  The 2nd Crusade.

2. Donald Byrd : Black Byrd

One of jazz's most successful cross over artists crossed all the way over into soul with his 1973 album.

3. Freddie Hubbard Sky Dive

Trumpet player Freddie Hubbard teams up with George Benson, Keith Jarrett and Hubert Laws on the smooth jazz album, which also featured a cover of The Godfather theme.

4. Deodato : Prelude Deodato

Best known for its hit "Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)", arranger/keybopardist Eumir Deodato's Prelude/Deodato featured ear pleasing elevator music that anticipated the disco beats to come.

5. Milt Jackson : Sunflower


Vibraphonist Milt Jackson hired Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard Ron Carter and Billy Cobham for this most traditional of the top 5 jazz albums. Their cover of  The Stylistics hit "People Make the World Go Round" launches into a funky groove about three minutes in. Check it out!

40 Year Itch : Right On, Right On, Summer Soul from '73

[Purchase]

Curtis Mayfield followed up his #1 Superfly soundtrack with more smoothly sung, politically conscious R and B. Back To The World, a Top 20 album, features the Superfly sound-a-like single "Future Shock" but the real treats are the title cut, about a disillusioned Vietnam vets return home to the US ( known as "the World" to vets) and the monster jam "Right On For the Darkness"--one of our very fave cuts from 1973.




To help promote the album, Curtis hosted The Midnight Special June 8, 1973.

[Purchase]

Velvet voiced Bobby Womack keeps it real on this follow-up to Understanding. Facts of Life, recorded in Muscle Shoals, may be Womack's best. The single, a cover of the standard "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out", came out a month earlier and peaked at #2 on the R and B charts.

[Purchase]

With the Brothers Johnson backing him up, Billy Preston continued his hit making roll with Music is My Life, featuring the future #1 hit "Will It Go 'Round in Circles". Most of the album is a mixture of feel good piano-based pop and songs celebrating God. The title cut sounds like an off the cuff autobiographical confession: "I may not be the best around/But I'm surely not the worst."

40 Year Itch : Whack for My Daddy-O

[Purchase]

On June 5, 1973  the Parisian TV show Point Chaud filmed Thin Lizzy lip syncing  "Whiskey in the Jar" at the Golf Drouot. By this point the band was tired of miming the song all over Europe. This rock and roll version of an Irish folk song had always been a bit of a fluke. The boys were joking around with it when their manager burst into the practice room and said they had to to record it. UK DJs were sent small bottles of whiskey with the single to soften them up. By early '73, as Thin Lizzy toured with Slade and an American singer named Suzi Quatro,  "Whiskey in the Jar" hit #6 in the UK and topped the Irish charts for several weeks.

But the band was running out of money. Having recorded two albums that failed to chart ( and a cover of Deep Purple tunes as "Funky Junction"), Thin Lizzy needed a hit album. After Vagabonds in the Western World , released in September, failed to chart guitarist Eric Bell made a New Year's gig his last with Thin Lizzy.





It was also the day Paul McCartney and Wings has both the #1 single on the Billboard Charts ( "My Love") and the #1 album ( Red Rose Speedway). That doesn't happen a lot. But Neil Young, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon and America also pulled off the feat in the early 70's.


HOT 100 SINGLES
1. Paul McCartney and Wings "My Love"
2. Edgar Winter Group "Frankenstein"
3. Sylvia "Pillow Talk"
4. Elton John "Daniel"
5. Clint Homes "Playground in My Mind"

TOP LP's
1. Paul McCartney and Wings Red Rose Speedway
2. The Beatles 1967-1970
3. Edgar Winter Group They Only Come Out At Night
4. Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy
5. The Beatles 1962-1966

40 Year Itch : Plonk's Last Gig

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Nobody thought he was serious at first because "I'm leaving the band" was a group catchphrase: the stock Faces response to any disappointment or setback. If you got slightly rained on between the hotel porch and the limo, you would automatically say, "I'm leaving the band".
      Rod Stewart in Rod: The Autobiography

On June 4, 1973 Ronnie Lane performed his last concert with The Faces at Edmonton Sundown in London. He was disillusioned by the band, which seemed to be spending too much time backing up Rod Stewart. On the final album, Ooh La La, Stewart barely showed up to the recording session and then bashed the album in the press.

In an interview Lane did with Dave McNarie in 1983 he blamed Rod Stewart for his departure:

There were things that Rod, if he’d been worth his salt, should have saved for Faces albums. But, it became obvious to me after a while that Rod was saving all his good ideas for his own albums, and very little for the Faces albums. I thought, "I’ve been through all this before. Steve Marriott left the boys right up the lurch, now Rod’s going to leave us up the lurch. So, the only thing to do is, I’ll leave first." Y’know? So that’s why I left the Faces!

By most accounts, Plonk's departure tore the heart out of the band. Ronnie Wood began making his case to join the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart was doing his superstar thing.

Lane formed Slim Chance in 1973 and toured Europe in a kind of gypsy circus, complete with fire eaters and jugglers.  Aside form a UK#11 hit in 1974 called "How Come", Lane saw more critical success than commercial success.1976's One for the Road is the must own album. While recording 1977's classic Rough Mix with Pete Townsend, Lane was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

''The odd spasm of double vision I didn't take very seriously at first,'' he said in 1987. ''I just put it down to that heavy Saturday night I just had. But it came on me very suddenly when I was trying to put the bass line on a song that I'd written. My fingers just would not work, and I thought, 'What the hell has happened to me?' From there it led to crippledom.''

He died twenty years later in Colorado at the age of 51.




1. Cindy Incidentally
2. Angel
3. True Blue
4. I'd Rather Go Blind
5. Jealous Guy
6. You Wear It Well
7. Maggie May
8. Borstal Boys
9. Twistin' The Night Away

 Rod Stewart - Vocals
 Ronnie Lane - Bass
Ron Wood - Guitar
 Ian McLagan - Keyboards
 Kenny Jones - Drums

40 Year Itch : Woman Power

[Purchase]

In the 1970's women began to desire more than a good husband,  a good family and a nice house. They made up more than half the population but, in far too many ways, felt like they were treated as second class citizens. It was time to upset the balance and one of the women leading the charge was Yoko Ono.

On June 3, 1973 Yoko participated in the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University where she made the following statement before singing "Coffin Car", a new song from the upcoming album Feeling the Space. (The album also featured a song called "Woman Power" with the lyrics: In the coming age of feminine society/ Well regain our human dignity/Well lay some truth and clarity /And bring back nature's beauty.)





What happened to me was that I was living as an artist and...as a woman  was considered the bitch in the society. Since I met John, I was upgraded into a witch and I was...and I think that that's very flattering. Anyway, what I learned from being with John is that the society solely treated me  as a woman who belonged to a man who is one of the most powerful people in our generation, and some of his closest friends told me that probably I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work and that way I'll be happy.  I was over thirty and it was too late for me to change.



 But still, still, this is one thing I want to say, sisters:You're not alone. Because the whole society started to attack me and the whole society wished me dead, I started accumulating a tremendous amount of guilt  and as a  result of that I started to stutter. And I consider myself a very eloquent woman and also an attractive woman and suddenly, because I was associated with John, I was considered an ugly woman, an ugly Jap, who took your monument or something away from you. And that's when I realized how hard it is for women. If I can start to stutter, being a strong woman and having lived thirty years by then, it is a very hard road.

40 Year Itch : Led Zeppelin Plays the City by the Bay

Checking in with the Led Zeppelin North American Tour as the band performs a two and a half hour set before 50,000 fans at Kezar Stadium. In the middle of "Dazed and Confused" Robert Plant sings Scott Mackenzie's famous 1867 hit "San Francisco ( Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"

In the audience at least one person held up a sign that read "IMPEACH NIXON".

Photos snatched from Brit Rock By the Bay. Blogspot

40 Year Itch : When One Window Opens...

[Purchase Rock Bottom]

One window opens another one closes. No I haven't got the expression right.
                                                                                -Robert Wyatt

On June 1st, 1973 Robert Wyatt, drunk on Southern Comfort, whiskey and tequila, fell out of a fourth story window during a party. He was paralysed from the waist down. As Wyatt recovered in the hospital, his friend and champion John Peel made an appeal to his listeners.





Wyatt learned of his situation from a busy doctor making the rounds:

The doctor comes around ...and he sits on the edge of the bed and he says "Now then, you probably don't know why you're here. You're here because you're a paraplegic.You're paralysed from the waist and you'll never walk again. It'll probably knock 10 years off the end of your life. 20 if you smoke" and he went on to the next bed.


Wyatt would be in the hospital for a year. Pink Floyd performed two benefit concerts to help Wyatt pay his medical bills. When Wyatt got out, he was surprised to learn he could still be a musician.

"I was just relieved that I could do something from a wheelchair. If anything, being a paraplegic helped me with the music because being in hospital left me free to dream, and to really think through the music."

Music that would appear on the 1974 cult classic album Rock Bottom and on his surprising hit single, a cover of "I'm A Believer" (UK#29), which he performed on Top of the Pops. Wyatt had a fruitful decade, performing with Henry Cow, Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno and Elvis Costello. He continues to be an influence to everyone with art rock pretensions to this day.