May 4 – May The Fourth Be With You, Musically

Since this day has been pretty much designated as “Star Wars Day” (May the fourth be with you…that never gets old) why don’t we look a bit at the music of Hollywood’s favorite movie franchise, and in particular the first one.

Star Wars – back then that was its name, as a standalone it needed no “A new hope” tagged on – was of course a sensation when it opened in May, 1977. Movie viewers hadn’t seen special effects like that before, the droids R2D2 and C3PO charmed and there was the epic Good vs. Evil tension running all through it, all wrapped around a G-rated love triangle. No surprise it soon broke box office records and would be the biggest-grossing movie of all-time for the next four years or so, until the E.T. arrived on the scene and screen. Little surprise then that the movie was popular enough to launch two different versions of the theme onto the charts simultaneously!

An epic tale needed an epic, larger-than-life score and Star Wars delivered. Composer John Williams worked with the London Symphony Orchestra to deliver a bold, dramatic soundtrack that featured themes for the main characters and crescendos to build the tension. Movie-goers seemed to love the audio enhancement to the film. The film score was put out on the same day as the movie as a double-album, the different pieces having titles referring to their spot in the movie: “”Princess Leia’s Theme”, “Cantina Band” and so on. The album sold well enough to go platinum in the US. More surprising, the main title theme was released as a 7” single…and sold! The opening theme, technically Luke’s theme, is one of the most recognizable bits of movie sound ever and managed to hit #10 on Billboard‘s singles chart. It is if you think about, rather astounding that an instrumental work of classical music, played by an orchestra was played side by side with the likes of Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees and the Eagles on pop radio! Such was the appeal of Star Wars.

The soundtrack went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score, Grammys for that and Best Pop Instrumental and years later be named the Greatest American Movie Score by the American Film Institute. That organization also gave John Williams a Lifetime achievement Award in 2016 for his work making the movies so many love sound the way they do- besides Star Wars, he did the soundtracks of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, E.T., three Harry Potter movies and, well about half the box office smashes of the last 40 years.

Domenico Monando was a fan to be sure. The man who went by the nickname “Meco” saw the flick on its opening day, and by the end of the weekend had viewed it five times. He loved it, liked the music… but thought something was missing from it.

Meco had been a solid trombone player, playing in a band with Chuck Mangione in New York during the ’60s and adding horns to songs like Tommy James’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion”. By the mid-70s, he had become a fan of disco (“when disco was new, it was fresh and exciting because it was different,” he says, “but pretty soon it became too cookie-cutter”) and worked as part of a team which produced disco hits like Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye”.

Liking the sound, loving the music, Meco decided what it needed was a disco touch to make it palatable to the masses. He recorded a disco mix of the – well, a mishmash of the main points of the soundtrack, with R2D2 beeps and laser sounds dubbed in- and put it out, both as a single and part of a quickly-produced LP called Star Wars and other Intergalactic Funk. The Star Wars theme dragged out to 15 booty-shaking minutes on the album.

Meco was wrong about the orchestral version lacking commercial appeal, as we saw. But he was spot on when he thought a disco version would be the right sound for the times. His single was a #1 hit in the US and Canada and to date is the only instrumental single ever to get a platinum record in the States.

Williams went on to work on subsuquent parts of the Star Wars trilogy but none went on to garner large sales or iconic status. One has to be a bit surprised that Disney, which bought the rights to the whole empire in 2012, hasn’t done more to create a pop-sounding ear candy for the newer flims given the success they had with soundtracks like Frozen and The Lion King. But no matter what they do, one tends to think the diehards will consider only one piece of music as the sound that matters for the films – that opening theme from a long time ago!

March 24 – O’Jays Engineer The Steamin’ Seven

The O’Jays should circle this day in gold on their calendars, because it was on this day in 1973 they had their only #1 song in the U.S. – “Love Train”. It spent a week on top, interrupting Roberta Flack’s five-week run with “Killing Me Softly.” “Love Train” also has the distinction of being the first disco song to hit the top of the mainstream charts, something not everyone thanks them for perhaps but certainly set the stage for the second half of the decade.

The song urged people to “start a love train” and go around the world, urging love and understanding, in England and “tell all the folks in Russia and China too.” If the sound seemed to predict hits of a few years later and the message seemed to echo the “summer of love” vibes from a few years before, it still resonated with many … and you could dance to it. It’s a great “train” song, and turns out there are quite a few!

Power Pop Blog recently had a short list of great car songs, so why don’t we change the wheels from rubber to steel and present The Steamin’ Seven – great train songs.

If the O’Jays had a great one with “Love Train”, the idea was predated by Cat Stevens a couple of years earlier with his hit “Peace Train”, a top 10 in the U.S., UK, Canada and elsewhere. His message was often one of peace and hope, and he said he came up with the song idea while riding on a train, fittingly. He got to play it in 2006 at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony when a Bangladeshi banker and humanitarian won that award.

The early-’70s might have been the heyday for train songs. Besides those two, the Doobie Brothers told us about a “Long Train Runnin’” in ’73, and it became their first top 10 hit in the States and Britain. The song asked “without love, where would you be right now?” and somehow segued that idea into watching Illinois Central freight trains running, wheels going round and round. Maybe they meant love was a long string of events that keeps on going like a train is a long chain of cars that keeps rolling? We’re not sure, but it’s a good song anyway.

Speaking of the Illinois Central, another early-’70s gem – “The City of New Orleans”, Arlo Guthrie‘s biggest hit single. The song was written by Steve Goodman and was a fairly autobiographical account of people he ran into while riding on the actual City of New Orleans, an Illinois Central passenger train running south from Chicago.

Yet another great train song hit #1 in 1973, about seven months after the O’Jays one – “Midnight Train To Georgia.” It was Gladys Knight & the Pips signature tune, and tells of a disheartened young guy whose dreams of Hollywood stardom didn’t come true, hopping back on a train east to rediscover “the life he once knew.” Interestingly, it was written by Jim Weatherly as a gal hopping on a jet to go back to Texas, but Gladys correctly deduced a train just seemed more poignant and romantic.

Speaking of Georgia, let’s not forget that state’s Alt Rock heroes, R.E.M. who had a great train song with a great train video in 1985 with “Driver 8”. The song urges the engineer of “Locomotive 8” of the Southern Central line to take a break, but metaphorically urges people to keep on towards their goals and aspirations … “We can reach our destination, but it’s still a ways away”.

Not all of the great train songs are from the U.S. mind you. Al Stewart, a great story-teller, added one in 1995, with help from ex-Wings member Laurence Juber. Perhaps he noticed that Alfred Hitchcock used train settings in several of his great thriller films and he in turn wrote a whole little mystery thriller inside of about five minutes with “Night Train to Munich”. The song rolls along jauntily like an express train, with him urging the listener to find a conductor with a stain on his tunic in the restaurant car and obtain some mysterious papers from him but warns they’ll be being watched. If he was alive at the time, Hitchcock himself might have adapted that into another screenplay!

So there you have it The Steamin’ Seven, great train songs. Alas, that still didn’t allow space for goodies like the Stranglers’ “Ghost Train” let alone Gordon Lightfoot’s brilliant telling of the building of the railroad, the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” Or the Psychedelic Furs sexy ‘Into You Like A Train’, nor the Monkees ever-popular ‘Last Train to Clarksville.’ What do you think? Did other great train songs speed by my station while I wasn’t watching?

February 24 – Thomas Liked Old Movies. Record Execs Not So Much

Most in the U.S. probably already were thinking him an almost forgotten One Hit Wonder, but in his Canada, he was still a fairly big deal. And on this day in 1976, he put out one of his best and most popular albums, Calabash. We’re talking about Ian Thomas, the Hamilton-born singer/songwriter who’d come to fame across the continent, if not worldwide, with his debut single “Painted Ladies” three years earlier.

He’d had some minor success at home at the start of the decade in a folk band called Tranquility Base, but they split up and he went on to get some production skills with CBC Radio. In 1972 he started a solo career and, as noted, his first single was an American top 30 hit and a #4 one in Canada. After that he started a run of moderately popular, generally soft rock hits that, while not setting any records, kept him on the radio and generating decent sales for a decade or more. His voice was distinctive and to many sounded reminiscent of a slightly smoothed-out Neil Young.

Calabash was his fourth album, and even though he labeled this one as “Ian Thomas Band”, he wrote it all, produced it himself and played guitar, bass and keyboards making it pretty close to a true solo piece! Most of the ten songs were pretty standard, nice easy-going ballads he was known for but there was one uncharacteristically angry, straight-ahead rocker, “Liars”. It was the first single and his second top 30 hit domestically…and perhaps an odd choice of singles as it was unusually loud for Ian…and because it was a diatribe aimed at the record labels and execs he’d encountered.

More typical of Ian was another single off it, “Right Before Your Eyes”, a nice little love-on-a-bus song that hit the Canuck charts and would later be covered by America who took it to #45 in the U.S. in 1982. And there was the psuedo-title track, “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash” with some vintage movie clips overlaid , referencing the likes of Jimmy Durante, which wasn’t an actual single but did get reasonable airplay at home nonetheless.

The album only got to #62 in Canada, but did stick on the charts for 20 weeks and garnered decent reviews. Allmusic for instance, figured it had “enough strong material to make it his best album” thanks largely to “his ability to create a moving melody with an ear-catching chorus”. They singled out “”Goodnight Mrs. Calabash” , “a feel-good piece that represents Thomas’ fondness for the old movies and their stars”.

Ian has kept busy since, putting out several more albums on his own, making film scores for 22 movies, having three more top 40 hits – one of which was “Hold On” which was later recorded by Santana and became his biggest hit of the ’80s. In the ’90s he was a part of the band The Boomers, and according to his website, he’s playing a number of shows around Canada this spring for the “I’m Not Gone Yet!” tour. Oh, and he’s had some bit parts in movies and TV shows, which might not be as much a surprise if you realize his brother is Dave Thomas… of SCTV and Mackenzie Brothers fame. The two got together on the show once…

January 2 – Something Was A Bit Off About Angie, Baby

If the early-’60s were obsessed with songs about teens dying young, often in cars, the early-’70s obsession seemed to be songs about slightly off-kilter, creepy women. Among many such tunes, there was Cher’s “Dark Lady”, the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”, Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman”, Vickie Lawrence’s “Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”… and Helen Reddy‘s “Angie Baby” which rose to #1 on Billboard on to start off 1975, giving Australian Reddy her third American chart-topper in as many years. She’d previously been on top with “I Am Woman” and “Delta Dawn”.

Her parents were likely proud; both were actors and they instilled “you are going to be a star” into the little girl Helen. After winning an American Idol-like TV show Down Under in 1966, she moved to the U.S. and by 1968 had a record deal with Fontana Records. Her big break was when Canadian radio began playing the B-side to a 1971 single and made a hit out of “I Don’t Know How To Love Him“, garnering her attention world-wide and opening the door for her feminist anthem “I am Woman” the next year. Of that, she said she wanted a song about a strong, proud woman but “I realized that the song I was looking for didn’t exist. I was going to have to write it”.

“Angie Baby” seemed a less strong and admirable lass, but of the record, Reddy says it was “the one song I never had to push radio stations into playing.” The song about the mentally-disturbed young woman who lived in a dream world (and appeared to be responsible for the disappearance of a “neighbor boy” who dropped by to see her) was written by Alan O’Day. O’Day would have a major chart hit himself with a song about an unusual girl – “Undercover Angel.” He says “Angie Baby” was loosely inspired, lyrically, by the Beatles “Lady Madonna”, about a girl living in her own “reality” but he made her a bit creepy and “the intent was to show that the Angie character had more power than (the boy who disappeared) or the listeer expected.

The song, which hit the top 5 in both the UK and Canada as well, would be Helen’s last #1 hit, and fifth-straight #1 on Adult Contemporary charts. It helped push her Free & Easy album into the American top 10 – one of three for her – and gold-selling, her fourth. By the mid-’70s, Helen had put out six hit albums and even briefly had her own network variety show. Sadly she passed away of unknown causes in 2020.

October 3 – Undercover Alan More Than A One Hit Wonder

When you’re in a small “club” that includes Neil Diamond and Carole King, you’ve done pretty well. So then, we remember Alan O’Day today, on what would have been his 83^rd birthday. O’Day isn’t anywhere near as famous as those two, but he is among the few songwriters who’ve written #1 songs for other stars as well as themselves.

O’Day seemed set early on to live a life in music. He was playing a xylophone and making his own songs up by six, three or four years later he was playing ukulele to impress his friends at school. By high school, he was in two bands, one he started, The Shoves, influenced by his musical heroes back then – Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Little Richard. One of his bands made it onto a local TV talent show then, and Johnny Otis took notice. He recorded a song or two Alan had written, but they didn’t end up getting released. But it no doubt gave the lad confidence in his skills in music. After high school, he got work doing music editing for a small studio in his hometown of Hollywood. Around that time as well, his then-current band, The Archers, got to tour as the backing band for Dobie Gray.

As the ’60s wore on, he started to drift away (to borrow a term from Dobie) from performing and concentrate on writing songs, one or two of which Dobie had already done. By 1971 he was a staff writer at Warner Bros., and quickly penned his first hit song, “The Drum”, which was a top 30 hit for teen heartthrob Bobby Sherman. In the early-’70s he was very prolific, writing songs recorded by artists including Steppenwolf, David Clayton Thomas, Anne Murray, Dave Mason and many more. “Easy Evil” of his has been done by several dozen artists ranging from Tony Orlando to Dusty Springfield to Long John Baldry. But his first real big break was a song he wrote when inspired by the Beatles character “Lady Madonna” and partly by a girl he knew from his childhood neighborhood who was …socially awkward to say the very least. “Angie Baby” became a #1, gold-selling single for Helen Reddy.

He’d have one more big hit from one of his songs in that time period, “Rock & Roll Heaven” for the Righteous Brothers.

O’Day recorded a solo album in ’73, but it flopped, so he kept writing. However, in 1977, WB started a division called Pacific Records. Somehow he was the only artist they signed or put out! But their one artist did well for them. His song “Undercover Angel” was a #1 hit in both the U.S. and Canada and sold past two million copies. He pretty much disappeared from the radio after that, at least here, despite recording another album in 1979, which included his own version of “Angie Baby” and one more lesser hit in Australia, “Skinny Girls”. But in North America, he’s clearly marked as simply one of the big One Hit Wonders of the decade.

Although he didn’t create many more hit records after then, he kept busy. He did music for Jim Henson, writing 100 or so kids songs for the Muppet Babies TV show, and later, music for National Geographic shows as well. He’d also collaborate with a popular Japanese composer/producer, Tatsuro Yamashita, and together they wrote several Japanese hits like “Magic Ways.”

In the 21^st Century, he’d moved to Nashville and begun working as a producer and once again had a tune that was noticed – “Nascar Crazy”, a sort of theme for that car race circuit.

His career seemed to be finding a second wind in country but sadly before it really took off, he died of brain cancer at age 72, in 2013. A one hit wonder, perhaps, but a pretty good resume for that… and one that gets him mentioned with the likes of Carole King. Not too bad for someone who was so largely “undercover” .

August 4 – Gilbert Before He Met Clair?

If you’re feeling just too happy, this one might be for you! One of the massive hits of the ’70s, although not exactly a “feel good” kind of record had its moment in the sun this day in 1972. Irishman Gilbert O’Sullivan was sitting on top of the Billboard singles chart with his downbeat “Alone Again Naturally”.

The ode to suicidal thoughts and dying parents spent six weeks at #1 in the U.S., tying for tops that year, and went to #1 in Canada for three weeks, #2 in New Zealand and #3 in his homeland. Casey Kasem would later rank it as the fifth top single of the 1970s and Record Mirror in the UK named him the Singer of the Year for 1972. It was also perhaps the biggest hit ever on Britain’s MAM Records, a label co-founded by Tom Jones. The song has been used widely in movies and TV from The Virgin Suicides to Stuart Little 2 since and along with the more upbeat “Clair” later that year, helped make the then-23 year old a major star. The next year he won the Ivor Novello award for the Songwriter of the Year for the two hits.

He’s still recording but hasn’t had much of the golden success he had in the early-’70s. However, happily, despite some internet rumors, Gilbert seems to still be alive and well, living in the isle of Jersey. Although not prolific, he still performs and records from time to time, in 2018 putting out his 20^th studio album, Driven, last year.it the British top 20. At 77, he’s still performing with upcoming shows in Britain this summer and Japan in October.

March 1 – When The Eagles Began To Soar High

Perhaps no one would have been surprised back in 1975 when the Eagles finally hit #1 on U.S. charts for the first time. They had been one of the hottest new acts of the decade thus far and scored a number of radio hits like “Take It Easy” and “Witchy Woman.” However, few would have guessed the song that took them there on this day 48 years ago – “Best of My Love” seemed like a sure-fire hit, a nice, slightly achy love song with some fine steel guitar from Bernie Leadon. Yet it bucked the odds three different ways.

The song was from their third album, On the Border, which had done OK for them but hadn’t really grown their profile or stature with the singles “Already Gone” and “James Dean.” Even the fact that it was available in quadrophonic sound in its 8-track version didn’t spark a stampede to the sales counter. The label, Asylum Records, were all but ready to throw in the towel on it and get them working on a new record… until surprising things happened.

One DJ in Kalamazoo, Michigan liked the song and played it, despite it not being a single. His listeners loved it too and kept requesting it and soon it was on the one station’s hit chart. Asylum took notice and pressed 1000 copies of a 7” single of it and gave it to the station to distribute. So popular were they that Asylum decided to release it as a surprise third single from the record across the world. It soon picked up fans everywhere, including on the adult contemporary stations which hadn’t been big on the band until that point. It got to #1 in the States and Canada, their first in each country, and hit #14 in Australia, their first hit there. Soon it went gold in the U.S.

If that wasn’t unlikely enough, the songs origins made it more so. It was written by a trio of members, Glenn Frey, JD Souther and Don Henley. Souther says “Glenn found the tune…the three of us were writing it in a deadline to get it finished.” Frey remembers “I was playing acoustic guitar in Laurel Canyon and I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me…I got lost and ended up with what would later turn out to be ‘Best of My Love.’”

Henley wrote the lyrics, largely about a recent breakup with a girlfriend, sitting in an L.A. restaurant. They took the song with them to England, where they began recording the album with famous producer Glyn Johns. However, that didn’t go well as they didn’t gel well with Glyn. He wanted them to sound more country, they wanted to be a little more rock’n’roll. And he didn’t like them being high while working, and by then the Eagles (as with many California acts) consumed vast quantities of cocaine. They soon ditched the UK and Johns to finish recording close to home in L.A. with Bill Szymczyk, who ended up doing the final mixing of this song (and produced almost all the rest of the album.)

So everyone was ecstatic in the band’s camp when the song was a smash…right? Well, not quite. The record label lopped over a minute off the album version to make the single, without consulting with The Eagles. Henley in particular was furious, as was the manager, Irving Azoff. When it went gold, Azoff broke a piece off an actual gold record and sent it to the record company office, calling it the “Golden Hacksaw Award.” Guess the record executives didn’t always get the best of the Eagles love back then. Although after Hotel California went multi-platinum and the band’s Greatest Hits went on to sell something in the range of 40 million copies, we suspect all was forgiven!

February 28 – Music From The 4077 Was #1 To Brits

If you’re over, oh let’s say about 50, we can predict what you were doing this night 40 years ago. If you were in North America, we probably have at least a 50-50 chance of being right about it too, because that was when the final episode of MASH aired on TV.

The 1983 show was more than just a TV show running to its end, it was an event! The dramedy was wrapping up after 255 previous episodes and 11 seasons. It was of course based on a 1970 movie, and while about the Korean War, it brought home some of the realities of the horrors of war to Americans when they were fully involved in Vietnam. After a slow start initially in 1972, the show hit its stride and became a ratings hit by its second year, being in the top 10 ratings almost every year and averaging about 18 million viewers a week, a number many shows today would kill for. It made Alan Alda a household name and major star and won 14 Emmys. But the finale was an event unto its self. The two-and-a-half hour edition showing them finally getting to go home was the most watched TV show ever to that time. It was watched by 125 million people in the U.S. – over half the entire population then! – and was on 77% of all TVs that night, according to Nielsen, a record to this day. It’s said New York City hit its all-time record for water use at 11:03 that night – so many people had been waiting til the show’s end to run to the bathroom, and about three minutes later, one giant flush! All of which is interesting, but has little to do with music. But of course, there is music that is synonymous with the show.

The theme song has to be one of TV’s best, and best-known. The song is actually called “Suicide is Painless” and yes, it was a song with lyrics, though the TV show used an instrumental version. It first showed up in the movie. A character, the base’s dentist, said he was suicidal, so his colleagues there decided to throw him a going-away, “last supper” to mark the occasion, a scene of dark humor that ran through the film and the TV show. Director Robert Altman wanted a song that was about suicide and was “stupid” for another character to sing to the despondant dentist at the supper. He had Academy Award-winning composer Johnny Mandel come up with a piece of music, which was the theme we know. He tried to write lyrics himself, but found he was too mature to write something so juvenile. But he knew what to do.

“I’ve got a kid who’s a total idiot,” he told the staff, and gave the job to his teenaged son Mike. Mike was 14 or 15 at the time, depending upon which account you read. He penned lyrics with such insights as killing yourself brings about changes, in five minutes. He wanted a guitar in return. Luckily for him, his dad gave him a standard royalties contract instead. Twenty years later, Mike had made over a million dollars from it! Helping that along the way was the fact that it was released as a single by Columbia Records and hit #1 for a full four weeks in the UK, and also made #1 in Ireland. It seems remarkable, looking back, that the TV instrumental didn’t come out as a single in the ’70s when other themes like “The Rockford Files” were doing so well.

The single was put out under the name “The Mash”, who were more anonymous than some of those muddied faces in the Korean jungle the show dealt with. While the TV theme ran 90 seconds in the premiere then was cut to 45, sometimes 50, seconds after that, the single, with singing, came in just under three minutes.

What we do know about The Mash is that the singers were a quartet led by Ron Hicklin, who’d done backing vocals for the Laverne & Shirley theme, for the Partridge Family and various commercials. The actual musicians playing the tune are even harder to track down, but super-bassist Carol Kaye is reported to have played bass which would suggest the Wrecking Crew played it, likely with Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knetchel on keyboards among others.

As for Mike Altman – five minutes work, a million dollars.. Not so stupid after all!

February 27 – The First Of Gord’s Gold

If you could read the Billboard charts, you’d have seen that Canadian newcomer Gordon Lightfoot was doing pretty well 52 years ago today. His first American hit, “If You Could Read My Mind” had peaked at #5 this day in 1971. Earlier the song had hit the top of the charts in his homeland, where the folkster was already a bit of a big deal.

The song was from Gord’s fifth album, but first on the Reprise label who’d spared no expense in the recording of it in L.A. Kris Kristofferson, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and John Sebastian are among the other musicians who appear on the record, but for this song a more basic arrangement was used, with Gord on guitars – often 12-strings – and a number of violins arranged by Nick Decaro.

Simple in production and obvious in theme, the lyrics though showcased Lightfoot’s talents with words and crafting memorable melodies. The song was inspired by his own divorce and written “sitting in a vacant Toronto house.” One might surmise with lyrics like “I’d walk away like a movie star, who gets burned in a three-way script” that the first Mrs. L left him for another man. Probably her loss but the public’s gain.

The album it came from was initially titled Sit Down Young Stranger, but Reprise quickly renamed it If You Could Read My Mind when the single became a worldwide hit. He admitted in a documentary that he fought the label tooth and nail over the title change – but once it quickly tripled in sales he relented and learned not to second-guess them.  The album got to #12 in the U.S., where he was being compared to a northern Bob Dylan, and #20 in Australia. At home, it hit #8 during its run of nearly a year-and-a-half on the sales chart. The record also contained his go at “Me and Bobby McGee” which did well on country charts.

The Dylan comparison is all the more apt since Bob himself has commented that when he “first heard a Lightfoot song” he “wished it would last forever.” Since then he’s had some 15 top 40 hits (including “Sundown”, an American #1 song) and a double-platinum greatest hits album at home and been awarded the Governor General’s Award, the highest honor for Canadian entertainers, as well a similar accolade from Queen Elizabeth.

And if you find yourself thinking, “that song sounds vaguely familiar even though I haven’t heard Gord singing it for awhile”, you may be right. It’s been covered by artists including Liza Minelli, Glen Campbell and, most powerfully, Johnny Cash since. Then there’s Whitney.

In 1987, Gordon had sued Michael Masser, not exactly a household name, for plagiarism. Masser had composed the song “The Greatest Love of All”, a platinum selling single for Whitney Houston the year before. Lightfoot explained “it really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t want the present day generation to think that I stole my song from him.” Eventually he dropped the lawsuit as he thought it was doing more to harm Whitney than the actual writer; at that point Masser apologized publicly for the faux pas. Ironically, Duran Duran have said that the chorus of “Save a Prayer” was loosely based on the melody to “If You Could Read My Mind” as well, but didn’t get sued. Perhaps ‘fessing up is the best policy…because who knows if people could read your mind?

February 25 – Pointers Career Heated Up Thanks To The Boss

On this week in 1979, For the second time in two years, Bruce Springsteen saw one of his songs jump high into the Billboard top 10. And like the first time, it wasn’t recorded by him! Almost two years to the day since Manfred Mann hit the top with “Blinded by the Light”, the Pointer Sisters scored the biggest hit of their career to that point with their take on his song “Fire”. It hit #2 on this day 40 years ago.

Springsteen had written the song after seeing an Elvis concert and recorded it with Darkness on the Edge of Town. He liked it well enough but felt it didn’t fit into that album, so shelved it. Somehow producer Richard Perry (of Nilsson’s “Without You” fame) heard it and showed it to Oakland girl group the Pointer Sisters.

The Pointers had been around all decade long, starting as a duo of Bonnie and June, then known as Pointers a Pair, who’d sung backup for the likes of Boz Scaggs and Grace Slick. They added in two more sisters, Anita and Ruth, changed to their current moniker and got signed onto Atlantic Records. Although they had some decent success on R&B charts in the ’70s, they’d not done a whole lot on mainstream radio. They decided to change that with their late-’78 album Pure Energy. They brought in Perry to produce it, musicians including Randy Bachman, Waddy Wachtel, Toto’s David Paich (who plays keyboards on this single) and Jeff Porcaro, Elton John’s guitarist Davey Johnstone among others to work on it and covered songs like Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work”, Loggins & Messina’s “Angry Eyes”, Fleetwood Mac’s “Hypnotized”… and the Springsteen one.

It worked well. The album became their third to go gold at home, and broke through to the north in Canada, going platinum, but the real difference was this hit. The smoldering single that critic Christine Arnold notes “might well have been done by the Ronettes in the ’60s” got to #2 in the U.S., #3 in Canada (where they’d not been in the top 30 before) and topped New Zealand charts. As Anita says, it “became our first gold single…one song is played over and over all over the world. It really became a major hit for us and made a total difference in our careers.”

Indeed it did. they’d go on to notch six more top 10 singles in the ’80s with songs like “Slow Hand” and “I’m So Excited”, although that #1 rank remained elusive to them.

The Pointers continue on to this day, although with the death of Anita last New Year’s Eve, only Ruth remains of the original sisters. As for Springsteen, he’s done not too badly himself since then! And oh, the public finally did get to hear him do it himself – he released a live version of it as a single in 1987, although it only got to #46 on the charts.