December 16 – Larson Got A Lotta Love From L.A. Scene

Yesterday we looked at one of Linda Ronstadt’s big albums from the ’70s. Today we remember fondly one of her friends. Nicolette Larson died on this day in 1997 at a young 45.

The Southern California music scene of the ’70s was, from all accounts…well, something! Call it incestuous, call it a creative cauldron, call it what you will, it seemed half the pop music world was there and all knew each other and probably lived within a few blocks of one another to boot. Larson’s road there was winding. She was born in Montana, went to the University of Missouri, moved out to northern California – San Francisco to be precise – and took a job at a record shop, volunteered at a bluegrass festival, which in turn led her to work singing professionally in Vancouver, Canada by the mid-’70s. She was somehow discovered by Commander Cody (“Hot Rod Lincoln”) and was before long doing backing vocals for any number of country musicians including Cody, Rodeny Crowell and Hoyt Axton. Her work with Emmylou Harris resulted in her meeting Linda Ronstadt. They became friends, and Linda invited Nicolette to her L.A. area house, where Neil Young was a next door neighbor. Why not?! Neil apparently more or less popped by one day to borrow a cup of sugar and see if Linda wanted to sing some backing vocals on his Comes A Time album in the works, and she suggested Nicolette. Larson did backing vocals on most of the tracks on that record – with the exception of, ironically, “Lotta Love.” She told Rolling Stone she found a cassette in Neil’s car, popped it in and heard that song, and loved it, told him “what a great song it was, and Neil said ‘you want it, it’s yours.’”

He helped her get signed to Warner Brothers and in 1978, she released her debut album, Nicolette. It was a solid pop debut, highlighted by the one song we remember her for, the upbeat take on Neil’s “Lotta Love” (which he recorded in a rather sombre, even depressing way).

Along the way she’d worked adding some vocals to the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute (starting to see what I mean about that SoCal music community?) so their producer Ted Templeman produced the record, and quite well. It won her Rolling Stone‘s choice as Female Vocalist of the Year and the public didn’t argue all that much. Her album hit #15 at home, going gold, and was a top 10 in Australia and actually made #1 in Canada. However, poor production and weak song selection prevented her second album from duplicating that success and she would have only one other top 40 song in the U.S. or Canada, albeit different ones. Canada liked “Rhumba Girl”, the States, “Let Me Go, Love.” In the mid-’80s she switched back to her country roots and put out a couple of Nashville records which did give her a 1986 top 10 country chart hit in “That’s How You Know When Love’s Right” And she kept working with other artists adding her sweet voice to the back of their records… Van Halen, Linda Ronstadt and again the Doobie Brothers were among those who utilized her vocal cords in the ’80s, and Neil Young again in 1992 on Harvest Moon.

While the attractive Larson had lots of suitors including Weird Al Yankovic and Andrew Gold (“Lonely Boy”) whom she was engaged to, she settled down with and married session drummer Russ Kunkel in 1990. They had a daughter together

Sadly, Larson died far too young from complications resulting from liver failure which was blamed on overuse of both Tylenol and Valium. Graham Nash summed up the California music community response when he said he was “truly devastated” to learn of her passing

September 19 – Record Set The Bar For Neil’s Gold Standard

The last one in to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was the first one out to really establish himself as a solid solo performer. That would be Neil Young, whose stature took a big jump this day in 1970 with the release of his third solo album, After the Gold Rush.

It came about six months after the landmark Deja Vu album for CSN&Y, a group Neil wouldn’t record new material with again until well into the 1980s. Neil built a small studio in his southern California basement and recorded most of the album there with a few musical friends around including guitarist Danny Whitten (for whom Young would soon right “The Needle and the Damage Done”, lamenting Whitten’s deteriorating condition due to heroin addiction) and 17 year-old Nils Lofgren (who’d later join Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) whom he put on piano… despite Lofgren never playing it seriously before!

The album had both a rather laid-back, slightly country-ish vice and a underlying theme of sadness, in some part no doubt due to his recent breakup with Joni Mitchell. In fact, the album’s hit single, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, was written for her apparently.

The one exception to the overall sound was the more electric and equally-famous “Southern Man”, a song largely responsible for Lynyrd Skynyrd writing “Sweet Home Alabama” as a rebuttal. In all the album included 11 songs, ten Neil originals plus a cover of Don Gibson’s country classic “Oh Lonesome Me” he’d released in advance. Interestingly, he also recorded the song “Wonderin’” for it, but discarded it until he re-did it for his 1983 album Everybody’s Rockin’. Some re-releases of After the Gold Rush did add in his original from those sessions however.

Although “When You Dance” was put out as a single to only modest notice or success, album cuts “Southern Man” and the title track became popular on FM radio and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” put him on the singles map for the first time without Crosby, Stills and Nash or Buffalo Springfield.

Critics were of mixed opinions at the time, but generally have retrospectively come to love the record. At the time, Rolling Stone would say “none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface”, though years later they’d rank it as the 71^st best album of all-time (just ahead of his follow-up Harvest, which also made it into their top 80) praising the “album of heart-breaking ballads.” However, even back in 1970, Robert Christgau declared Neil could “write poetic lyrics without falling flat on his metaphor” and calling it a “real rarity: pleasant and hard at the same time.” That opinion seemed to catch on later, with Britain’s Q magazine ranking it the 89^th greatest album of all-time, Time in 2006 putting it among the top 100 of all-time and Canada’s Chart considering it the fifth best Canadian record ever. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” was his first top 40 single in North America, making it to #16 in Canada and #33 in the U.S. The album hit the top 10 in Canada, the U.S. and UK and ended up double-platinum in the latter two. However, commercially at least, that was only a warmup for Harvest, which sold about twice as many copies and delivered him his only American #1 hit, “Heart of Gold.”

March 18 – Bad Back But Heart Of Gold

Having a bad back isn’t fun, but they say every cloud has a silver lining. For Neil Young, it turned out to be a “gold” lining, in more ways than one!

Neil hurt his back sometime early in 1971, and that made it difficult to stand up for long periods of time, and limited his ability to play his electric guitar. So he decided to sit down and take it easy, literally and musically. He began writing and playing some acoustic material on his old acoustic six-string. And that turned out to become Harvest, his fourth album. Which in turn was his only #1 album (in both Canada and the U.S) and at 4X platinum, with about six million or more copies sold, his biggest-seller. Although it contained the controversial song “Alabama”,( which piled upon “Southern Man” led Lynyrd Skynyrd to rebuff him with “Sweet Home Alabama”) and “The Needle and the Damage Done”, much of the album’s success was due to its first single. “Heart of Gold” hit #1 in the U.S. this day in 1972. As with the album, it remains his only chart-topping single in both countries. And it made the top 10 in Britain and New Zealand as well, even charting in Japan.

The weary, country-ish song was written for his then-love, actress Carrie Snodgress, with whom he had a five year relationship and a son. Neil had being playing a slightly different version of it, on piano, at some concerts before he recorded it in Nashville, but seems like the Tennessee session got it right. He played harmonica and acoustic guitar on it but added in some top-flight Nashville session players on it like Ben Keith on steel guitar and Kenny Buttery on drums. And, the cherry on the top, he happened to run into James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, who happened to be in town taping a Johnny Cash TV show, and they went back to Neil’s place and sang backing vocals.

The song was obviously right for the times, and has endured what’s more. CBC Radio in Canada ranked it as the third best Canadian song of all-time back in 2005 and Rolling Stone has consistently listed it among their 500 greatest songs of all-time, noting it “signaled the arrival of a new countrified prettiness that would come to define the laid-back Seventies.” But one person who wasn’t thrilled with it was Neil himself. He said “the song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.”

Another was Bob Dylan, who says in general he likes Neil and his music but he felt it was a rip-off of his style. He’s said “the only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona in about ’72 and the big song at the time was ‘Heart of Gold’…(I thought) s*** that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me!” That considered, it’s perhaps ironic that “Heart of Gold” was replaced at #1 by America’s “Horse With No Name”… a song many people complained was a total rip-off of Neil Young’s sound!

January 11 – Turntable Talk 10 : Those Prairie Winds

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! Thanks to all the regular readers and welcome to any new ones. Briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columns from other music fans and writers, sounding off on one particular topic. To kick it off in 2023, our topic is They’re a Poet Don’t You Know It... we look at a song that made a great impact on our contributors for its lyrics.

Today we have Randy from Mostly Music Covers. There he largely looks at songs so good they’ve been done time and time again. And he hails from Canada, a land which has produced its share of fine songwriters from Paul Anka to Neil Young to Joni Mitchell and many more. But his pick is…

“Four Strong Winds”

by Ian Tyson

This is my song pick for another assignment from Dave at A Sound Day, who suggested:

“pick one song that you think has fantastic lyrics, or one you like because of the lyrics, and say a bit about why you love it.”

This clip is from a reunion in 1986, 23 years after the song was first released and eleven years after the divorce of Ian and Sylvia who first recorded the song.

“Think I’ll go out to Alberta
Weather’s good there in the fall
I got some friends that I could go to working for
Still, I wish you’d change your mind
If I ask you one more time
But we’ve been through this a hundred times or more

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don’t change, come what may
If the good times are all gone
Then I’m bound for moving on
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way

If I get there before the snow flies
And if things are looking good
You could meet me if I send you down the fare
But by then it would be winter
Not too much for you to do
And those winds sure can blow cold way out there

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don’t change, come what may
The good times are all gone
So I’m bound for moving on
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way

Still, I wish you’d change your mind
If I ask you one more time
But we’ve been through that a hundred times or more

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don’t change, come what may
If the good times are all gone
Then I’m bound for moving on
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way

Apart from being a part of Canadiana, for me this evocative song is the first time I recall being able to relate to the lyrics. Originally sung by the author, Ian Tyson, and his partner, also soon to become his wife, Sylvia (Fricker) Tyson. Known as Ian and Sylvia they released it in July of 1963. It would appear on the 1964 album of the same name. I was only four when the song came out so I was a bit too young to be relating to anything beyond “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, but it was such an iconic song in Canada at least, that I would have heard it many times by many singers as I was growing up.

However, the first time I really listened, and now with a bit of life experience was when it was covered by Neil Young. That was in 1978, so I’m 19 years old with a few relationships behind me and I’m very much into music. Now I’m understanding or at least trying to get the message from song lyrics. While I came to appreciate the original just as much, at that age it was Neil that was talking to me.

If you read the lyrics, there is nothing very complicated about them, but then many of the greatest songs are thus due to their seeming simplicity. Ian Tyson was a real Cowboy, I mean the riding, roping, and rodeoing kind. After a serious foot injury, he decided to take up the guitar while he was laid up. Long story short he ended up via the Toronto music scene mingling in New York’s Greenwich Village. This is where he met a guy named Bob Dylan. After a particular encounter he thought if Dylan can write his own songs than maybe he should give it a try. At his manager’s New York apartment, he wrote this song in about 20 minutes.

As I understand the story the first verse tells me the protagonist is looking for a change of scenery and that even though it’s not going to happen, they want a loved one to join them. The second verse is such a brilliant metaphor with “Four strong winds that blow lonely”, I hear that as the winds themselves are traveling in aimless directions and that they come to you and go again just as soon. Sea’s “running high” suggests so many things to me personally. I think of my visits to my mothers native Newfoundland and watching the crashing waves and I also picture my father on a Navy Ship at sea during WWII.

The words to me are saying these things are implacable, and when love is lost, it is us that must realize it’s time to move on, the wind and the sea will not. Again, I am at an age at that time where I was struggling with these very same feelings. I had the impulse to leave, to be “bound for moving on”. As the story progresses there is still a hope, a thought that maybe they can meet again, but reality sets in as does loneliness and “winds sure can blow cold”. Yet the wish to somehow reconcile “I wish you’d change you’re mind” is tempered with “we’ve been through that a hundred times or more”.

To me this song is about relationships and difficult choices. Knowing that its time to move on but at the same time it won’t be easy. If only things were different. The last line “I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way” seems sincere but based on the reality of the separation and the leaving it seems unlikely this will happen. It is something I have found people say, perhaps to ease the pain.

Here is a video of the Neil Young version with lyrics.

This song has been covered about 100 times. Notable versions include Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare and Harry Belafonte all from 1964. There is Judy Collins (1971) and she did a duet with Glen Campbell on his TV show in 1970. Also covered by John Denver (1988) and Johnny Cash in 2006.

I started to write this on the evening of December 28 and just as I was putting in the finishing touches and starting to edit, I learned that Ian Tyson passed away today December 29, 2022, at the age of 89. Rest in Peace, Mr. Tyson and thank-you for the songs and the memories.

December 5 – Neil Showed ‘Who Needs C, S Or N?’

Neil Young‘s first American top 40 solo hit, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” peaked at #33 in the U.S. this day in 1971. In his native Canada, he’d scored a hit earlier in the year with “Cinnamon Girl” as well.

Young was already well-known to international audiences through his work with Buffalo Springfield (who had a Top 10 in 1967 with “For What It’s Worth”) and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Stills helped out Young on After the Gold Rush, the album which the single came from and that set the table for huge success with the 1972 album Harvest. Stills wasn’t getting along well with people at the time, so it was rumored the song might be about him, but later on Young confirmed it was actually about or for Graham Nash, after he’d broken up with another Canadian folkie, Joni Mitchell.

The song has become rather iconic. Artists who’ve covered it include Natalie Imbruglia, St. Etienne, Everlast and Nils Lofgren (now with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) , who appears on Young’s record. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played the song on their Live Aid reunion. Even scholars have weighed in. An Indiana University text mentions it and how it’s a “seemingly simple song which actually displays considerable attention to detail in deployment of instruments.” After the Gold Rush is also notable for the angry song “Southern Man” which references crosses burning and bullwhips cracking…and prompted a response from Lyrnyrd Skynyrd in the form of “Sweet Home Alabama”! While the album is great, it is largely acoustic (as were his subsequent hits in the following months, “Old Man” and “The Needle and The Damage Done”) and biographer Jimmy McDonogh has suggested that has perhaps harmed Neil’s career. Though Ol’ Neil has gone on to dabble in most every form of pop music known to man, from country to hard rock to electronica , many still typecast him as an angry folk singer with an acoustic guitar and miss a good deal of what he’s done. Not so the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame though; they’ve inducted him twice, as a member of Buffalo Springfield and for his solo work.

As much as for his folk songs, he might be known for his conscience and speaking out whenever he sees fit. His strong social conscience shows in projects he’s involved with like Farm Aid , which he started along with John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson, and the Bridge School Concerts (fund-raisers for a school for disabled youth.)

August 24 – Well, Jacksonville’s Not Too Far From Alabama

The unofficial anthem of Southern Rock, if not of the South in general, hit the top 40 this day in 1974. A band from Florida, recording in Georgia put Alabama on the musical map this day. Lynyrd Skynyrd‘s “Sweet Home Alabama” hit the top 40 and would go on to be their only top 10 hit and only gold single in the U.S.

Ironically, most of the band haled from northern Florida, although they did have members from Rhode Island (Leon Wilkeson), Texas (Billy Powell) and California (Ed King)…but no one from The Yellowhammer State. Likewise, they recorded much of the album out on the West Coast but this actual song at the Atlanta Rhythm Section’s Studio One. No matter what its origins, the single (which preceded their other arena rock classic, “Free Bird”) was from their Second Helping album, appropriately enough their second, which went double platinum at home.

The band’s origins stem from a pretty musical family, the Van Zants. At the time, Ronnie Van Zant was the lead singer – he, guitarist Steve Gaines and four others unfortunately died in a plane crash in ’77 and was then replaced by younger brother Johnny Van Zant. Meanwhile, another brother, Donnie, started the band 38 Special!

The song was inspired by some anger at Neil Young’s songs “Southern Man” and “Alabama” which portrayed the South as a racist, KKK-run backwoods – you hear them diss “Ol’ Neil” by name in the song. For all that, there’s no animosity between them, believe it or not. both say they’re fans of the other, have worn each other’s T-shirts on stage and played the same gigs. Young now says “I don’t like my words when I listen to them…I richly deserved the shot (they) gave me.”

Although the song only got to #8 on Billboard, it remains one of the most-played of the era on Classic Rock stations. Not to mention it loosely-inspired a Reese Witherspoon movie and has been used in advertising by the state itself. Wonder if Mississippi’s hoping Ol’ Neil will write something nasty about them?

March 25 – More Famous Than Secretariat

Even better than the real thing?

It’s not that unusual in pop for a song to come along that people think sounds like someone else – radio DJs had a hard time convincing people “Long Cool Woman” was the Hollies, not CCR when it came out for instance. What’s much more unusual though is for the sound-alike to knock the real one out of the top spot. But that’s what happened 50 years ago. That day in 1972 was when new band America hit #1 on the American singles charts with “A Horse With No Name,” a song many thought sounded like a spot-on imitation of Neil Young. Amazingly, it replaced Young’s “Heart of Gold” as the #1 song. To add insult to injury for ol’ Neil, America’s self-titled album did the same on the album chart, replacing his Harvest as the #1 album that week!

America were at the time actually a British trio, albeit one comprised of three young guys whose parents were all American but stationed in the UK on military duty. They were homesick for a land that wasn’t yet theirs and their name and sound echoed the other side of the Atlantic quite well. Take the hit for example. The band’s working title for it was “Desert Song” and it sure evoked more Arizona Sonora than rainy London, something they were going for. Although they at times have said that paintings they saw by Dali and Escher inspired them, writer Dewey Bunnell (who sang it as well) said it was mainly him writing memories of visiting the deserts of the American southwest when his dad was sent to air force bases there. The horse he says, contrary to the popular rumor that it was heroin, was a metaphor for a “vehicle to get away from life’s confusion into a quiet, peaceful place.” He won’t say why he wrote about setting the horse free after nine days. “Listener interpretations are far more colorful than any meaning” he had for it, he asserts. As for sounding like the Canadian rocker, he’s at various times said that he was indirectly inspired by Young creating the song and that he tried to use a different voice “so that I won’t be branded as a rip-off.”

Whether it was the trepidation over confusion about its meaning and the possibility of radio banning it (which did happen on a few stations) , or the worries of it being mistaken for a Neil Young song, their label, Warner Bros. didn’t really want it as the band’s first single. But neither did they think the other candidate for a decent radio hit on the album, “I Need You”, strike them as being the type of thing which would get America noticed right away, so they climbed upon the horse. A good thing, it turns out as it remains perhaps the band’s most-beloved song, both for their fans and themselves. Gerry Beckley, who played the acoustic guitar on this one, said recently it’s his favorite in their catalog because “it represents the start of the journey. It even says it in the song. But that’s what it’s (the band’s career) been – it’s been an unbelievable journey.”

“A Horse With No Name” would spend three weeks at #1 in the U.S., and also go to #1 in Canada, and Finland for good measure, and get them their first gold singles (in both the States and UK) and push the album to platinum status in North America. They’d go on to have one more American chart-topping single, “Sister Golden Hair” , that one sung by Beckley. Bunnell contributed largely to their success in the ’70s, writing and singing other hits of theirs like “Ventura Highway” and “Tin Man.”  However, they’d never again score a #1 album, even though their popularity endured into the ’80s and they remain as a well-loved touring act still.

March 7 – Burden Made The Look For The L.A. Sounds

Today we remember a man Neil Young calls a “friend for life” and “collaborator,” a Grammy Award winner whose name surely appeared in the rolodexes of California’s musical elite in the ’60’s and ’70s…but whose name is all but unknown to most fans. Designer Gary Burden passed away this day in 2018, at age 84.

“Album covers are an integral…often overlooked part of our musical listening experiences,” the CBC reminded us in a tribute to him. And Gary was among North America’s best at creating memorable ones. He was born in Cleveland to “a very conservative family and I didn’t fit in.” Curiously, his way of getting away from that was one of the most conservative-seeming routes… he joined the Marines! After leaving them, he spent a bit of time leading a “beatnik” lifestyle in California before settling down enough to go back to school. He studied design at the University of California, eventually graduating and working in architectural design. His lucky break though was having Cass Elliott hire him to remodel her house.

She liked what he did, and got along with him so she told him “you should design our new record cover – you know how to design things!”. And he did, designing the first Mamas and the Papas album cover…and getting to hang out with the group, and other Laurel Canyon musical friends of theirs all the while. “I blew off my three-piece suit and never looked back,” he says. “I was born – the real me.”

Soon he was the “go to” guy for the L.A. Music crowd when it came to making album covers. “How to visualize the music, that’s been my mission.” Conor Oberst, one of the last musicians he worked with says “Gary always wanted the album packaging to reflect the spirit of music (and thus) he was often at odds with the record labels when they sought to cut costs at the expense of what he and the artist had envisioned.” Happily he usually got his way!

After the Mamas and the Papas, he soon was doing covers like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut, the Doors Morrison Hotel (taken looking in to a real hotel named that, which Ray Manzarek had discovered driving around L.A.) and Crazy Horse’s self-titled one. That was a memorable one on two counts. One, because Burden typically envisioned and designed the cover, he more often than not got a photographer like his friend Henry Diltz to take the actual photo. “I was intimidated by the camera,” he said, but for this “I took that picture of the horse.” Which leads to the second reason it was memorable – “it was trying to bite me!”

He did Joni Mitchell’s famous Blue (“this was such an honor for me. That’s the only cover of hers that she didn’t make herself.”) , the Eagles Desperado and Jackson Browne’s The Pretender. But his most enduring artistic partner was Neil Young. Young liked Burden and his art, and told Rolling Stone they made at least 40 album covers together and “I still have covers for unreleased albums that he made for me” which he says will see the light of day eventually. It was with Young that Burden won a Grammy, for packaging of a Young box set in 2010. Burden picks Young’s On the Beach as his all-time favorite. The one with Young, facing away from the camera, staring at the sea in a bright yellow shirt beside a tacky yellow lawn dining set and with a fin from an old Cadillac sticking out of the sand “was about America in the ’70s where everything was cheaper than it looked.”

Burden was survived by his wife Jenice Heo, an artist herself. She worked with him on some covers and was for a time Art Director at Warner Brothers records. It’s hard not to think that his passing mirrors a passing of an era in music… because say what you will about Spotify or downloading mp3s, there is just no comparison to seeing a little 200X200 pixel picture on a phone screen to holding a 12” X 12” piece of art in your hands while listening.

December 14 – The Boss, Ol’ Neil Put Philly Back On Musical Map

This night in 1993 was quite a big one in Hollywood…and in turn, a day worth noting in music. The movie Philadelphia opened, just in time for Christmas… for those who wanted to limit their holiday cheer just a little. The movie about a lawyer with AIDS continued to elevate Tom Hanks status as perhaps the leading “everyday man” actor, getting him his first Academy Award for Best Actor (he’d follow up the next year with Forrest Gump) and was a box office smash, taking in over $200 million. As well, it achieved director Jonathan Demme’s objective of opening many people’s eyes to the tragedy of AIDS and its human toll at a time when it was still largely viewed as always fatal and its victims as contagious and frightening. A worthwhile movie, but why it’s mentioned here is that it also had a very worthwhile soundtrack, which Sony released days later.

Bob Clearmountain was brought in to mix and do final production on the soundtrack, but the idea was very much Demme’s. He wanted impactful songs by big-name artists not traditionally associated with the AIDS cause; no Queen songs for instance. One of the first names that came to mind was Bruce Springsteen.

Demme told The Boss about the movie idea and asked him to do the title track. Springsteen replied “I’m interested, if you give me some time I’ll see,” adding “I’m not very good at scores.” Turns out he was. He came up with “The Streets of Philadelphia,” a brooding ballad which would have seemed quite at home on The River or Darkness on the Edge of Town. He had a sax player called Ornette Coleman on the demo, but by the time it went to the album, it was all Bruce, playing all the instruments, with just a few backing vocals thrown in. Billboard called it “a powerful song with or without the image of the film to support it,” the L.A. Times seemed surprised to find he “can still write purposeful songs that connect on a deeply personal level.” The song was the lead single off the soundtrack, and connect it did. It was a #1 hit in Canada (his first one there), France and Germany and at home in the U.S., it got to #9 and earned him his first gold single since ones from Born in the U.S.A. nine years earlier. It also meant Bruce likely had to get a few new hardware shelves installed at home. It won him the Oscar for Best Original Song as well as four Grammys including Best Song.

Bookending The Boss was another song with the city in its name. In fact it was the name of the song from Neil Young, also hand-picked by the director. Demme originally wanted a song like it to open the film. “What we need is the most upto the minute guitar-dominated, American rock anthem about injustice to start the movie,” he said. “Who can do that? Neil Young can do that!” He showed Young a rough cut of the film with his “Southern Man” played to open it, to give the artist an idea of what the song should sound like. Young agreed and came up with “Philadelphia,” a song allmusic suggest is “arguably a better song” than Springsteen’s. Not quite the hard rock blast Demme had in midn perhaps, but still a song that he said made him cry the first time he heard it.  It got shifted to the ending of the movie but didn’t go unnoticed. It hit the British charts as a single and earned Neil an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, which as we noted Springsteen’s took. Young played it on piano at the Awards show.

A third noteworthy new song for it was Peter Gabriel’s “Lovetown”, one that sounded quite like songs of his previous album, Us. It was a top 20 in New Zealand.

Add in some cover songs from the likes of Sade and Spin Doctors (who took a run at CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” and you have one of the better soundtracks of the first-half of the ’90s. And like the movie, it was a hit, getting to #12 in the U.S. and going platinum. In Canada, it was triple-platinum. Just like Hanks next movie went on to eclipse the popularity of this one, so too did its soundtrack. Although it had no new hit songs on it, the Forrest Gump soundtrack which came out months later would go on to sell over 10 million copies.

December 5 – Back When Ol’ Neil Was Young Young

Neil Young‘s first American top 40 solo hit, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” peaked at #33 in the U.S. this day in 1971. In his native Canada, he’d scored a hit earlier in the year with “Cinnamon Girl” as well.

Young was already well-known to international audiences through his work with Buffalo Springfield (who had a Top 10 in 1967 with “For What It’s Worth”) and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Stills helped out Young on After the Gold Rush, the album which the single came from and that set the table for huge success with the 1972 album Harvest. Stills wasn’t getting along well with people at the time, so it was rumored the song might be about him, but later on Young confirmed it was actually about or for Graham Nash, after he’d broken up with another Canadian folkie, Joni Mitchell. The song has become rather iconic. Artists who’ve covered it include Natalie Imbruglia, St. Etienne, Everlast and Nils Lofgren (now with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) , who appears on Young’s record. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played the song on their Live Aid reunion. Even scholars have weighed in. An Indiana University text mentions it and how it’s a “seemingly simple song which actually displays considerable attention to detail in deployment of instruments.”

After the Gold Rush is also notable for the angry song “Southern Man” which references crosses burning and bullwhips cracking…and prompted a response from Lyrnyrd Skynyrd in the form of “Sweet Home Alabama”! While the album is great, it is largely acoustic (as were his subsequent hits in the following months, “Old Man” and “The Needle and The Damage Done”) and biographer Jimmy McDonogh has suggested that has perhaps harmed Neil’s career. Though Ol’ Neil has gone on to dabble in most every form of pop music known to man, from country to hard rock to electronica , many still typecast him as an angry folk singer with an acoustic guitar and miss a good deal of what he’s done. Not so the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame though; they’ve inducted him twice, as a member of Buffalo Springfield and for his solo work. As much as for his folk songs, he might be known for his conscience and speaking out whenever he sees fit. His strong social conscience shows in projects he’s involved with like Farm Aid , which he started along with John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson, and the Bridge School Concerts (fund-raisers for a school for disabled youth.)

A 50th Anniversary Edition of After the Gold Rush was released about one year back, although unlike some anniversary re-issues, this was a modest affair, adding only one new track (an alternate version of “Wonderin'”) but being remastered and offering a free digital download.