Brother Louie (1973)

Performer: The Stories                                          Writers: Errol Brown & Tony Wilson
Highest US Chart Position: #1                               Label: Kama Sutra Records
Musicians: Ian Lloyd, Steve Love, Kenny Aaronson, Ken Bichel and Bryan Madey

This is just one of the greatest songs ever recorded. “Brother Louie” was written by Errol Brown and Tony Wilson of the British band Hot Chocolate and released as a single in early 1973. The song went all the way to number seven in the U.K. charts, but failed to crack the Hot 100 in the States. The song was about an interracial relationship between a black girl and a white boy and the negative reaction of both of their parents. Though it was released several months prior, it shares a similar construction as Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” with a middle section that tells a story, in this case each of the couple’s parents weighing in with their racist views of the other. Ian Lloyd, the bassist and front man for the American group The Stories, heard the song and liked it. As the group was just finishing up recording their second album for Kama Sutra called About Us, they decided to revamp the song and record it as a single with the last song on the album, the ethereal “What Comes After,” on the B-side. But while their single of “Brother Louie” raced up the charts, sales of the album were lagging, so the company quickly grafted the new track onto subsequent pressings of the album and helped it to reach number 29 that August, at nearly the same time the single hit number one.

The song begins on the downbeat with Ken Bichel’s piano, then Bryan Madey’s hi-hat slipping in just after and coming down crisply on the snare on two. At the same time Steve Love’s distinctive guitar, part wah-wah and part tremolo, strums whole notes in the background before assuming the lead part going into the first verse. “She was black, as the night. Louie was whiter than white.” Madey lays on a heavy backbeat while Bichel provides some nice piano fills between Ian Lloyd’s raspy vocals. The lyrics are great in their attempt to diffuse a delicate situation by being the voice of reason, “Nothing bad, it was good.” But of course his family is not so accepting, and this takes the band into the first chorus. The distinctive chant of the title character’s name owes something to the Kingsmen’s hit single, “Louie, Louie,” from 1963. But the heavily soul-influenced chorus here is utterly different and yet familiar enough to catch the ear of the record-buying public. The other unique signature of the song is the solo sections that follow each chorus. The first is by Love, with Bichel’s organ in the background, and this is followed immediately by the string section playing the same solo part. After the second chorus, however, the guitar and strings trade off and finally play in unison heading into the final out chorus.

It’s a breathtaking number that hits on a number of levels. In a more innocent time, inter-racial couples were much more controversial. But the song also laid the groundwork for white bands with aspirations to play soul music, whether in imitation of black singers, like Wild Cherry, or just singing white like Average White Band. In the summer of 1973 my parents hired a babysitter to stay with me and my brother and sisters during the day. Unbeknownst to them, however, she would pile us all in her powder blue Plymouth Duster and drive us all over the county to visit friends, but especially to visit her boyfriend, a Mexican-American who lived on the south side of town. She used to say this was their song because her parents didn’t want her seeing him. But I spend a lot of time sitting in the car waiting for her with the windows down and the radio on, and as a result it was the first time I really became conscious of popular music. “Brother Louie” always gave me a frisson of the illicit whenever it came on and has since been one of my favorite songs of all time. The rest of the audience evidently felt the same way as it entered the charts on June 23rd and stayed on the charts the entire summer, peaking at number one on August 25th.

Hit Boots (1970)

Performer: Boots Randolph                                    Composers: Various
Album US Chart Position: #157                              Label: Monument Records
Producer: Fred Foster                                             Arranger/Conductor: Bill Walker

Though it might seem odd, this album is one of the most important musical experiences of my life. When I was in the fifth grade in 1972, band teachers from the high school came down to find out who wanted to play musical instruments and get them started. I can clearly remember thinking that being in band must be about the stupidest thing someone could ever do. I had absolutely no interest in playing music and other kids like me wound up singing with one of the grade school teachers while the band kids practiced. That summer--it must have been during the Fourth of July week--my family went up to the lake and the first day there I got a scorching burn on my shoulders from the water. The next day I had to stay in the trailer lying on my stomach after my mom put some kind of lotion on my back. That year she and my dad had purchased a cassette tape deck and mom joined the Columbia Record Club. After listening to them over and over that week, I can remember with crystal clarity every one of her six selections, one of which happened to be Hit Boots by Boots Randolph. I had obviously never heard of him, but in listening to this album I became mesmerized by the sound of his saxophone. The next year at school, when the band instructors came around again, I tried out for the sax and only the sax. If I couldn’t play that instrument I didn’t want to play at all. The rest, as they say, is history.

Though the album was released in 1970 the hits are those from the previous couple of years, some of which I was vaguely familiar with from television, and some I was not. Label owner Fred Foster is listed as producer, though it’s difficult to know how much work he did on the actual sound. Arranger and conductor Bill Walker was a European who had moved to Nashville in 1964. His arrangements do a nice job of emulating some of what made the songs hits, many with the kind of vocal chorus that owes a debt to Mitch Miller and was ubiquitous in country music for several decades. The album begins with the 1968 hit by Mary Hopkins, “Those Were the Days,” complete with strings and wordless vocals. Next up is the Credence Clearwater’s “Proud Mary,” which went to number two in 1969, and “Both Sides Now,” by Joni Mitchell from the same year. This is followed by a medley of “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” the signature song from the Broadway musical Hair, which my folks also owned the soundtrack album to. Two Burt Bacharach songs end the first side of the LP, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” written for Dionne Warwick in 1968 and “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” by B.J. Thomas from the soundtrack to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Simon and Garfunkel hit “Bridge over Trouble Water” opens side two, and the rest I didn’t really know at the time.

Monument Records was formed, appropriately enough, in Washington D.C. by Fred Foster in 1958. After some success in the Baltimore area, Foster moved the label to Nashville and recorded a wide variety of music, including country. Being from Kentucky, Boots Randolph naturally gravitated to Nashville after a long running engagement in Decatur, Illinois. Initially a session man, his first big success at Monument was in 1963 with “Yakety Sax,” a number he co-wrote with Spider Rich that was based on King Curtis’s saxophone solo in the Coaster’s 1958 song “Yakety Yak.” From then on Randolph supplemented his studio work by recording instrumental albums of hit songs or themes like religious or country music. I haven’t been able to find any information on the musicians who played on the album, as they were simply anonymous session musicians working in Nashville at the time. Randolph had a husky tenor sound, and in a couple of spots he showed that he had some decent jazz chops, but instead chose to work in the easy listening category. He had steady employment as a session musician, appearing on songs by Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Brenda Lee, and was a regular sideman for Chet Atkins. Hit Boots is not for everyone, reaching only 157 on the album charts in 1970, but it was so important to me as an inspiration for becoming a musician that it will always be one of my favorite albums of the seventies.

Livin’ Ain’t Livin’ (1976)

Performer: Firefall                                                  Writer: Rick Roberts
Highest US Chart Position: #42                             Label: Atlantic Records
Musicians: Rick Roberts, Larry Burnett, David Muse, Mark Andes and Michael Clark

Firefall was one of the great country-rock units of the seventies. Their breakout self-titled debut album from 1976, Firefall, was one of the defining musical moments of that year and spawned their biggest hit, the number nine “You Are the Woman” that fall. The thing that made the group unique among outfits plying the same trade was the presence of David Muse, who not only provided keyboard support but the distinctive saxophone and flute parts for the group. At this point in the group’s evolution, however, he wasn’t even a full member of the band, but all of that changed by the time the second album was released. The first single off of the album was “Livin’ Ain’t Livin’” which featured Muse on the tenor sax. The song was written by founding member Rick Roberts, who had previously been a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers and had released two solo albums in the early seventies that weren’t able to gain any traction on the airwaves. A series of accidents stemming from demo tapes produced by Chris Hillman, a former Burrito band mate of Roberts’, led to a recording contract with Atlantic and their first album, the quickest in the Atlantic catalogue to reach gold.

The song begins with deep, sliding notes on the guitar by Jock Bartley and a mournful wail on the saxophone by David Muse. This is accompanied by the acoustic guitars of Rick Roberts and Larry Burnett while drummer Michael Clark plays rapid-fire sixteenth notes on the closed hi-hat. The first verse begins immediately with Roberts singing and Mark Andes coming in on the bass. It’s an up-tempo number that deals with the regrets of the narrator about his poor treatment of women in the past. Now he has discovered, perhaps too late, that life isn’t so great being alone. What he wants is someone to share his life with and realizes that livin’ ain’t really livin’ when it’s alone. It’s a nice chorus that is thick with vocals and saxophone backing, and actually ends with the title words. From there Muse goes directly into a saxophone break before the second verse. The verses are punctuated with lead guitar fills by Bartley that seem to sustain and resonate throughout the chorus, but it is actually low-end synthesizer effects by Muse. After the second chorus Muse and Bartley trade off on a guitar and saxophone solo that builds to a break, with Roberts singing the first part of the third verse by himself and his acoustic guitar, backed only by Clark’s hi-hats and congas by percussionist Joe Lala. Muse and Bartley continue to trade off on the exit chorus with Roberts ad-libbing vocal fills, and the same ascending build-up after the solo concludes the song.

While it lacked the sales of their next single, the song was the perfect one to release first from the album as it really captured their sound more accurately than the follow up. One of the aspects of the group that may have been responsible for that unique sound was that they were based in Colorado rather than Southern California where the roots of country-rock were primarily formed. The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 5th at the number 83 spot and made its way up to number 42 by the middle of July before dropping off two weeks later. The B-side is “Love Isn’t All,” medium tempo ballad by the other writer in the group, Larry Burnett, the composer responsible for “Cinderella,” the final single released from the album early in 1977. While the A-side is one of Firefall’s memorable singles, it’s not one that I can specifically recall hearing at the time. That summer I went with my family to Hawaii and with the song not reaching the Top 40 it’s possible that it didn’t get enough of a rotation on radio stations to catch my attention. Nevertheless, “Livin’ Ain’t Livin’” is one of a number of tracks on their debut album that explains its rapid rise in the album charts and the continuing popularity of Firefall.