Curio Cabinet / Song Curio

He wasn’t just sly, he was downright wise. American musician and record producer Sly Stone passed away yesterday at age 82. As the frontman for the R&B and soul band Sly and the Family Stone, he helped shape Americans' perceptions of both genres in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Stone was a famously upbeat figure, and much of his music focused on equality and racial harmony during times when both often seemed to be in short supply. This is especially true of 1970’s Everybody Is A Star, which tells listeners, over the band’s signature slow, groovy instrumentals, that everybody deserves to be who they are and “shine”, regardless of their background or what the media told them they should be. The song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in February, 1970, and stayed there for two weeks. It’s no wonder that, at a time when music genres were often categorized as being “for” one racial group or another, Sly and the Family Stone managed to bring together some of the most diverse audiences of the day. Stone knew that music, like stars, should shine for everyone.

You don’t have to hit it big at home when the rest of the world appreciates you. American rocker Suzi Quatro never made it very high up the charts in her home country, but nations as far away as Japan and Australia loved her sound in the 70s. In fact, 1973’s Can The Can hit number one on the singles charts in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia. The song was heavy on all the elements that 70s rockers loved from aggressive, distorted vocals and a driving beat to heavy guitar reverb, so it makes sense that it gained a loyal audience. What makes less sense are the song’s lyrics. They reference a relationship between an eagle and a cat, with a chorus insisting that you should “try to can the can.” When asked what the lyrics meant, Quatro said that the phrase “can the can” refers to something impossible, like trying to fit two identically-sized cans inside each other. She acknowledged, though, that “The phrase sounded good and we didn't mind if the public didn't get the meaning of it.” Hey, if it works it works!

He might be a folk legend, but that doesn’t mean he can’t sing the blues. At a recent concert in Chula Vista, California, folk legend Bob Dylan busted out some unexpected tunes. First was a performance of Ricky Nelson’s 1972 hit Garden Party, then a rendition of 1963’s Share Your Love with Me by Bobbly Bland. The latter song rocketed to fame after it was covered by Kenny Rogers and, most famously, Aretha Franklin. But famed blues artist Bobby “Blue” Bland was its original singer, and it helped make him one of the first defining voices in soul and R&B. While the track is quite different from modern blues, with its easygoing sound, its lyrics are still about unrequited love and it features plenty of heavy strings—the classic instrumental signifier of heartbreak. Although Bland’s version of the song only reached 42 on the Billboard Hot 100, Aretha Franklin’s version reached number 13, and spent five weeks atop the Best Selling Soul Singles chart in 1969. It even won her a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance the following year. From Bobby to Aretha to Bob Dylan, this blues anthem just keeps reincarnating.

We’re tellin’ you from the start, this song’s a work of art! While The Temptations famously told us that they had the month of May with My Girl, the singer of My Guy was actually born in May. In fact, she was born on this day in 1943. Mary Wells has been called Motown’s first superstar and was a defining voice in the early days of soul music. Her best-remembered hit, 1964’s My Guy, was written by none other than Smokey Robinson, who also a co-wrote The Temptation’s My Girl. My Guy is a bouncy, uplifting tune about the narrator’s devotion to her boyfriend. The famous call-and-response vocals in the song’s chorus, echoing its title, make the ditty particularly prone to getting stuck in listeners’ heads. No wonder it’s been featured in numerous ad campaigns and even movies, most famously 1992’s Sister Act. The song first hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 just as Wells turned 21. How’s that for a milestone birthday present?

This week, as the weather continues to warm, we're looking back on some of our favorite springtime curios from years past.
 

It's still cold in some parts of the U.S., but in many places, spring is (finally) in full swing! This piece by new-age pianist George Winston will transport you to warmer weather, no matter where you live. Winston is best known for his improvisational and wandering piano albums on Windham Hill Records, which he helped debut in 1979. But he also plays stride piano, has a tribute album to The Doors, and is an accomplished solo harmonicist. Here he performs Rain, from his 1984 album entitled Winter Into Spring. Notice how Winston doesn't "drop the bass" until the 3:20 mark—but what impact when he does. We promise it will warm your spirit in a rainy-spring-day kinda way.  

[Image description: Raindrops falling on a wooden roof.] Credit & copyright: W.carter, Wikimedia Commons. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
 

You could always count on Lonnie to get his licks in. This month in 2016, the world said goodbye to American guitarist Lonnie Mack, who helped popularize the electric guitar with his impressive instrumentals. Specializing in rock, blues, and country music, Mack took a liking to electric guitars in the mid-1950s, before they were a popular mainstream instrument. He quickly endeared audiences to the guitars by using them to craft dynamic instrumental tracks, like 1963’s Wham!. The bouncy, danceable song wouldn't have been out of place at a sock hop, yet it featured significant reverb that gave it a rough-around-the-edges feel, courtesy of Mack’s electric guitar. The song reached number 24 on the Billboard pop charts, and piqued both public and industry interest in electric guitars. Today, of course, they're industry staples. No wonder many rock historians believe that Mack helped create our modern “rock guitar” sound. You could say he was instrumental in the process.

Talk about a renaissance woman. American singer-songwriter Laura Nyro was famous for her ability to perform and mix together all sorts of genres, including gospel, jazz, pop, and soul. Though she passed away on this day in 1997, she left behind an extremely unique body of work, starting with her 1967 studio album, More Than A New Discovery. One of the album’s standout songs, Stoney End, features country-esque lyrics about the daughter of a poor miner coping with life’s hardships. Nyro describes the path of these hardships as the “stoney end.” The song’s sound, however, is upbeat and poppy, with jaunty tambourines and gospel-like backing vocals. After the song helped cement Nyro as a beloved but unusual fusion artist, it went on to find a new life with Barbara Streisand in 1971. At the time, Streisand was questing to move away from recording mainly stage and movie tunes. She thought highly enough of the song to name her second pop-rock album after it. No one can say that the stoney end didn’t come with a few roses.

Sometimes hitmakers aren’t the ones to make a hit. As we remember British-American singer and record producer Scott Walker, who died this month in 2019, it’s worth thinking about how unlikely one of his biggest hits actually was. 1966’s The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore) was originally written for Frankie Valli of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons at the height of his popularity. It seemed destined that the song would be yet another hit for him; it was written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio who had penned plenty of Valli’s other chart-toppers. Yet, Valli’s 1965 recording performed meagerly. It wasn’t until Scott Walker’s The Walker Brothers took a crack at it that the song finally rocketed to number one on the UK Singles Chart and number 13 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. For their version, the band utilized the “wall of sound” recording technique created by Phil Spector earlier that decade. The layered instrumentation and vocals created a deep, somber sound perfect for such a sad song, while Scott’s heartfelt vocals and signature low voice really drove the heartbreak home. Sometimes you have to crank up the sadness to move up the charts.

Your produce may look fresh, but does it have a fresh sound? The Vegetable Orchestra is exactly what it sounds like: A musical group that plays vegetables as instruments. The idea started in 1998, when a group of friends in Vienna, Austria, were making vegetable soup together. They had signed up for an hour-long performance slot at an upcoming festival, but weren’t sure how to fill the time. Rather than do something traditional, the friends began joking about using vegetables to make music onstage. That’s exactly what they did, and they’ve been touring around the world ever since. Large, solid vegetables like potatoes and gourds are used for percussion, long veggies like carrots and cucumbers are sometimes hollowed out and used like flutes, while celery stalks are rubbed against each other to create squeaking sounds. The Vegetable Orchestra are big fans of variety, as they cover songs of many genres, from classical to electronic. They also perform plenty of original compositions. No matter what genres they happen to play during a given concert, every performance ends the same way: with the audience being served bowls of vegetable soup. Now that’s a dinner show.

[Image description: A spread of vegetables, including tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, green beans, and onions.] Credit & copyright: Engin Akyurt, Pexels
 

Today, we’re paying tribute to one of the greatest artists in the history of Soul music. Born on this day in 1944, Bobby Womack enjoyed a monumentally influential, six-decade-long career before passing away in 2014. His impassioned style helped define the emerging genres of soul and R&B in the 1960s, and made him one of their leading voices in the 1970s and 80s. One of the best examples of his technique is 1972’s Woman’s Gotta Have It. The song’s slow, sensual baseline is emphasized by Womack’s spoken-word introduction, in which he tells men that he has some advice for them. The song itself, in which Womack tenderly implores men to remember women' s emotional needs while that same groovy baseline plays, along with a soft drumbeat and funky guitars, serves as the promised advice. The song reached number one on the R&B chart, and quickly became a staple of the genre. It’s since been covered many times by artists like James Taylor and Wendy Mathews. After all, you can never have too much good advice.

Some songs are experiences in and of themselves, and sometimes they describe experiences you’d never want to have. While punk music is sometimes criticized for being too crass or violent, punk artists have always used the genre’s unique, anti-establishment ethos to tell stories that other genres shy away from. Case in point: Down In The Tube Station At Midnight by British punk/mod band The Jam, who signed with Polydor Records this month in 1977. The song tells the story of a man being attacked by skinheads in a London subway station—an all-too-common occurrence for non-white Londoners at the time. The attack is described in brutal detail, with the victim saying that the skinheads smell of “...pubs / And Wormwood Scrubs / And too many right wing meetings.” In the end, the victim dies on the subway platform, thinking about his wife. Upon its release, the song was banned by the BBC for "disturbing content”, but that didn’t stop it from reaching number 15 on the UK Singles Chart, nor did it stop The Jam from releasing 18 consecutive Top 40 UK singles. Some things might be hard to hear…but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be heard.

Rock on, Cupid! It’s the perfect time of year to revisit a retro rock n’ roll hit from 1959: Stupid Cupid, made famous by early American rocker Connie Francis. The song features teen-centric lyrics in which a schoolgirl chides Cupid for “picking on” her by making her fall in love. The song’s youthful, bouncy quality and swing-danceable beat make perfect sense considering that the song was written by Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka, the latter of whom was just 19 years old at the time. However, the duo originally intended to give Stupid Cupid to a girl group, The Shepherd Sisters, to match the song’s somewhat juvenile energy. Upon hearing the song, though, Francis was eager to sing it, since her only previous hit, Who’s Sorry Now?, was slow and sad, and she felt that something as upbeat as Stupid Cupid would show off her range. The song became her best-remembered hit, reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the UK Singles Chart. She might have been older than one of the people that wrote it, but Francis clearly knew best!

Some people have a talent for insults, but few can stretch them out to song-length. American musician and singer-songwriter Randy Sparks, who died on this day in 2024, was pretty unmatched in the jab department. Case in point: his early 1970s hit, Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio. Made famous by John Denver, the song is one long, detailed insult of the titular city. Sparks pokes fun at Toledo’s businesses (“They've got entertainment to dazzle your eyes / Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise!”), its lack of nightlife (“They roll back the sidewalk precisely at ten / And people who live there are not seen again!”), and even goes so far as to call Toledo women ugly (“And here's to the dogs of Toledo, Ohio / Ladies, we bid you goodbye!”). Why the animosity? One might think that Sparks had suffered some great misfortune in Toledo, but no. He simply spent a boring night there in the late 1960s, likely while he was still performing with his band, the New Christy Minstrels. At least Toledoans eventually got in on the gag. Today, the song is something of an unofficial city anthem. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, sing along!

He had a folksy name and wrote folksy tunes…but he also didn’t mess around. American singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie, best remembered for penning the legendary folk song This Land is Your Land, had no love for the worldwide tide of facism that he saw rising in the late 1930s and early 1940s. So, on an undisclosed date in the early 1940s, he wrote Tear the Fascists Down, a song explicitly about average Americans taking a stand against the Nazi regime in Germany. Sung in Guthrie’s signature, acoustic style, the song’s lyrics urge ordinary, American citizens to get behind the war effort with lines like: “There's London in ruins and Paris in chains/Good people, what are we waiting on?” Guthrie believed that music could make real change in the world, and sometimes referred to it as a weapon of the working class. He was even known for performing with a large sticker on his guitar that read, “This machine kills fascists.” He may have been a folk singer, but you could say that Guthrie had a punk rock spirit.

Sometimes you get a hit song and a film title in one fell swoop. On this day in 1978, the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever, a movie about New York’s disco scene, began a 24-week run at number one on the U.S. album chart. It remains the only disco album to ever win a Grammy for Album of the Year. But its name (and sound) would have been very different if the Bee Gees hadn’t been approached to work on the film. In 1977, the Bee Gees’ manager, Robert Stigwood, told them about a movie he was producing called Saturday Night and asked them to write a song with the same name for it. Instead, they gave Stigwood a song they had already written, called Night Fever, and persuaded him to change the movie’s title to Saturday Night Fever to fit it. The rest is disco history. Night Fever is one of the best-remembered disco songs of all time, featuring a danceable beat, the Bee Gees' signature harmonized falsetto, and lyrics about (what else?) dancing all night. The song helped make the movie and its soundtrack a resounding hit. The Bee Gees really knew how to work smarter, not harder!

He may be gone, but his legend drums on. On this day in 2020, the rock world lost one of its most iconic drummers: Neil Peart, of Canadian rock band Rush. Famed for his epic solos, which he often played on drum kits consisting of over 30 pieces, Peart was also a talented lyricist. In fact, he wrote one of Rush’s best-remembered songs: The Spirit of Radio. The song is a tribute to radio’s heyday, when music choice was left mostly in the hands of DJs, and tuning in could mean hearing a song you’d never heard before or revisiting an old favorite. Neil captured this excitement with his repeated lyrics, “Invisible airwaves crackle with life/Bright antennas bristle with the energy.” Though the song doesn’t feature one of Peart’s drum solos, its energetic guitar riffs and classic, hardline drums pay tribute to the era that the lyrics celebrate. In a 2004 interview with Billboard, Peart explained that the song was meant to be both a celebration of classic radio and a critique of the “formulaic, mercenary programming of most radio stations.” The song was a hit on the radio regardless, so Peart obviously struck the right balance.

This holiday season, you’ve almost certainly heard the carol of Good King Wenceslas...but you probably don’t know all the words, or who the main character really was. You could be forgiven for both, since many versions of the carol stop after the first verse, and the real Wenceslas, who was born around 907 CE., wasn’t actually a king. Rather, he was the Duke of Bohemia, a historical region that once existed in the Czech Republic. Wenceslas was renowned for his kindness to the poor. When he was assassinated by his own brother, people of the region were so aggrieved that they made him a saint and referred to him as a king. Almost 1,000 years later, English songwriter John Mason Neale took an existing folk tune and wrote the words to the carol atop it. The song tells of Wenceslas following a poor man through the snow, determined to give him food and drink. Most versions of the jaunty tune feature an acoustic sound, with stringed instruments and a flute. The song has three verses, though even in the full version we never find out whether Wenceslas reached the man he was seeking. Still, it’s quite a kingly carol.

These Carpenters sure knew how to craft a great song. On this day in 1982, Karen Carpenter, of the brother and sister duo the Carpenters, performed on stage for the last time. The show was a lowkey Christmas concert for students at the Buckley School in Los Angeles, and Karen Carpenter unfortunately passed away from congestive heart failure just weeks later. At the height of her career, Karen Carpenter’s unique, clear-as-a-bell voice made the Carpenters' unique brand of soft, melodious, folk-adjacent music stand out from the crowd. Most of their songs had a firmly optimistic flavor, especially their 1972 hit, Top of the World. The song’s lyrics describe a woman who’s so in love, she feels as if she’s sitting “on the top of the world lookin’ down on creation.” The track’s bouncy guitar, shimmering tambourine, and ethereal harmonies evoked the feeling of both folk and gospel music, despite it being considered a pop song in its time. Top of the World is one of the Carpenters best-remembered hits, and has popped up in everything from commercials to sitcoms. If you’re looking for some optimism in these uncertain times, this one might be worth a listen.