| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Joe Z
Windchimer
USA
1738 Posts |
 Posted - 04/11/2012 : 15:50:11
|
SETTING THE STAGE
The curtain rang down on the last Ryman Opry show on March 15. 1974. The closing song, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, featured Hank Snow and Johnny Cash, but the entire Opry cast raised their voices in tribute to The Mother Church of Country Music. The Opry would move from Captain Ryman’s Auditorium to the modern, safe confines of the Opryland complex, just up the Cumberland River on the outskirts of Nashville. Lower Broadway would soon become a bizarre parade of bums, drunks, hookers and tourists, prowling up and down the filthy sidewalks, visiting the go-go-joints, massage parlors, blue movie houses and porno shops.
The man in the grey flannel suit dares not walk on this street
Does anyone know what became of the old Opry?
THE NIGHT YOU WROTE THAT SONG
Scores of Secret Service agents were in town on the Opry’s opening evening at its new location. At the urging of Republican Roy Acuff, President Richard Nixon unfurled a yo-yo onstage before sitting down to play the piano. In the VIP audience, reported Country Music, were “country music moguls, local business people and other bigwigs, Opry sponsors, journalists and politicians (four Governors, two Senators, and 13 Congressmen); not quite your average Opry crowd.” Nixon’s performance - the first Presidential Opry - failed to muster sufficient support. A few months later he would resign the Presidency due to the Watergate scandal. Adding insult to injury, it is doubtful the Opry paid him.
The Newburys moved about the same time as the Opry. They relocated from Vida just up the McKenzie River on Leashore Drive in the town of Springfield, a peaceful Oregon community with 30,000 residents. Mick’s new home was situated one mile from Eugene, the state’s second largest city. He could still hear the whistle blow, as Amtrak, Southern Pacific and Burlington Northern all maintained Springfield schedules.
Forty-eight inches of rain fell annually... mostly it seemed when Mick was in town. (For good reason, the University of Oregon’s sports teams are referred to as “Ducks.”) “Eugene,” Mick explained during a concert, “is a lot like San Francisco was... except that it rains all the time. And I really don’t like the rain. It follows me wherever I go... It’s really the strangest thing. I can be gone for weeks and it’ll be sunshiney... And the plane lands and it starts rainin’.”
It will drive you insane
To search the sky in vain
For a sunny day
THAT’S THE WAY IT GOES
The next few months would put Mickey to the test. After all these years, he and his dad Milton had come to terms. Though Mickey experienced his share of hell during his younger years, he had grown up and grown strong, maturing beyond most bad memories. Milton was proud of his successful boy, and the good son reciprocated by helping his folks. He and Susan presented them with the most precious gift, a beautiful grandson, nine months old by this time. Mickey helped his parents financially too, surprising them with a new boat, for example. Then out of the blue, Mamie called with shocking news, “Your Daddy has had a stroke.”
“I still remember,” she explained, “how devastated I was and how hopeless Milton seemed... It is so hard to see someone you love slowly go away from you, even though they are still breathing. They are there, and yet, they are not there.”
He worked and sweated all the years to finally find it out
He was once a man but twice a child
APPLES DIPPED IN CANDY
Mickey was having a hard time physically, too. Since the ‘63 jump-from-train spinal injury, he had suffered excruciating back pain, which he faced with under and over-the-counter medication. Lately the pain had intensified, so in November of ’74, he went to Nashville for back surgery and to work on the next album, “Lovers.” Following a successful surgery, Mick curbed his dependence on drugs.
Early ’75 found Mick in the hospital with pneumonia, from being out late at night with friend and producer Chip Young, running around in a thunderstorm, trying to record rain sounds for his next album, “Lovers.” Susan Newbury explained, “They were almost struck by lightning which would have assured their place in musical history... People love a sad story.” Then, while recording “Lovers” in a dark studio, Chip stepped on and ruined Mick’s favorite guitar, which Mick had used for the “Montezuma” concert. It was the expensive Ramirez guitar, a model used by Segovia. Chip knew how Mick felt; a few years earlier, Elvis had accidentally destroyed Chip’s guitar during a karate exhibition in the studio.
Mickey loved guitars and said, “Every guitar has its own voice. Some are so beautiful they could bring a smile to a dead man’s eye... and yet... when they open their mouth to speak... others... look like they have been used to cut Johnson grass for years but sound... oh they cannot be replaced. The first guitar I fell in love with was a small Martin. It was broken by a good friend of mine in a drunken rage... as was my heart. I found another one years later and it was stepped on in a studio in Nashville. I swore I would never fall in love with another guitar. But... I did.”
ALBUM # 8
Lovers (Elektra 7E-1030) contains the following songs:
(Side 1)
Apples Dipped In Candy
Lovers
Sail Away
When Do We Stop Starting Over
Lead On
(Side 2)
How’s The Weather
If You Ever Get To Houston
You’ve Always Got The Blues
Let Me Sleep
Good Night.
“Lovers,” produced by Chip Young and released in February of 1975, was the last of Mickey’s Elektra recordings. They again used Youngun Studio and most of the musicians from the preceding LP, “I Came To Hear The Music.” Mick explained that as he was drinking excessively, his “voice was off.” On top of the booze, he had been hospitalized with pneumonia, had endured painful back surgery and his father had suffered a serious stroke. It is no revelation the album contains his weakest singing. A glance at the front and back album cover presents the mood. The man was facing the music.
Hand me another I’ll swallow that mother
Soon I’ll be higher than the sun ever rose
We’ve had a showdown and I’m feeling mighty lowdown
HAND ME ANOTHER OF THOSE
Night and day is all the same
Pourin’ whisky on the flame
Burn another memory from my mind
Through the years she moved uptown
While I came a long way down
MAKES ME WONDER IF I EVER SAID GOODBYE
Being a Newbury product, however, the album reaches several high points. Apples Dipped In Candy became his third trilogy. Its center selection would be right at home on the “King Creole” soundtrack; it’s easy to imagine a gyrating Elvis growling the riverboat chorus: “Apples dipped in candy, sweet potato wine / One is for your belly (baby!), the other’s for your mind.” And the jazzy interlude is played sensationally by Mister Guitar, the one and only Chet Atkins.
Lead On is delivered as an old time gospel hymn with traditional passages (“Jesus do you still know me / Here I stand ragged and worn”), and flavored with Newbury seasoning (”Like an orphan left to wander / Like a sailor lost in a storm”). Let Me Sleep contains a one-of-a-kind rarity for Newbury... a drum solo. (Most Newbury songs are so laid back, they have no need for a drummer.) Against Newbury’s swirling tenor, drums pound out a hypnotic rhythm that could be titled, “Drums of Insanity.”
The album’s title song, Lovers, is a pretty ballad with lyrics immediately recognizable as Newbury’s: “To think they once tore down a wall for a door / But now they don’t speak anymore.” The verse was inspired through actions taken by Mickey’s pal, songwriter Hank Cochran. According to the story, Hank and pretty singer Jeannie Seely - the first lady to wear a miniskirt on the Opry - lived in adjoining apartments in Nashville’s Executive House Apartments. Hank eventually grew tired of having to go out into the hall and knock on her door... So one day he borrowed a chain saw and cut a hole in the wall between the two rooms. Though Hank’s amorous actions were impressive, the story required a bit of a rewrite. “To think he once chain sawed a wall for a door” does not have the same sweet ring.
After Hank solved his problem and Mick romanticized the line, the song would spawn covers by Charlie Rich, The Kingston Trio, Cliff Richard and Olivia Newton-John. Mickey had met Olivia - “a sweet and lovely teenager” - at the World Song Contest in Tokyo, and she included Lovers on her 1975 album, “Clearly Love,” which went gold and to the number 12 spot in the United States. Other songs from the LP would be picked up by Charlie Pride, Don Gibson, Bobbie “Blue” Bland, B B King and Kate Ceberano / Wendy Matthews. The last two recorded You’ve Always Got The Blues as the soundtrack for the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s eight-part TV series, “Stringer.”
The album concluded an era, as it marked Mick’s final release on Elektra. It had been a good run during a pivotal period in American music. Newbury’s five Elektra albums influenced scores of country artists to reach beyond honky-tonk twang, while hundreds of artists in other spheres would interpret his country material. As stated by Mark Brend in Record Corner, “Newbury produced some of the most intriguing country music ever made. Or at least, it was described as country music as a matter of convenience. In fact, Newbury's great run of albums on the Elektra label in the mid seventies trampled all over the defining boundaries of that particular musical idiom... with plaintively soulful vocals, vast orchestral arrangements, sound-effects and instrumental passages linking songs...” Peter Blackstock efficiently summed up in “Farther Along”: the period 1970-1975 “was a fertile time for budding songwriters, and Newbury was the best.”
Country music was the indisputable benefactor of Mickey's Elektra creations. Its audience increased exponentially, while the music industry as a whole benefited enormously.
Drawn from "C&S" (updated) and "Mickey Newbury Songs Covered" |
|
|
San Diego
Rocker
397 Posts |
Posted - 04/12/2012 : 17:55:33
|
| Keep spreading the word, Joe. Love you. |
 |
|
|
Bill Smith
Windchimer
2361 Posts |
Posted - 04/12/2012 : 23:40:28
|
| Thanks, Joe! |
|
|
|
larry larry
Firefly
USA
3818 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2012 : 06:45:14
|
I remember Suzette and I visiting Milton and Mamie , some time, after Milton's stroke. When we got into the car to go home, Suzette jumped my butt for trying to finish sentences that Milton would start and get hung up on. Crap, I didn't know. Suzette was the Speech Pathology major, not me. Think I saw Milton one time after that, just him and me with a great afternoon with him telling me about the story behind Micks song, Frisco Mable Joy and The Georgia Farm Boy part that involved him.
The man could hold you spell bound with his story telling. Well, maybe except the story about the legless frogs. Gross!
LL |
|
|
|
Karen Runk
Firefly
USA
4904 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2012 : 08:13:07
|
When the book first came out....I lived and breathed it. Now...I must read it again. Good stuff.
Karen Runk |
|
|
|
Bob C
Swinger
USA
1147 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2012 : 19:07:28
|
A great read Joe.. Thanks..!! |
|
|
|
aussiedave
Rocker
Australia
472 Posts |
Posted - 04/17/2012 : 03:45:33
|
Thankyou Joe,
Loved reading every word.
AD |
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
Album # 8: Lovers