Young Love

SONG Young Love

WRITTEN BY Ric Cartey & Carole Joyner

PERFORMED BY Tab Hunter, Sonny James, Chaim Tannenbaum, others

APPEARS ON Young Love: The Best of Tab Hunter (1995); Sonny James: 20 All-Time Greatest Hits (2002); The McGarrigle Hour (1998); many, many, many others

Ric Cartey wrote "Young Love" as vehicle for his band The Jiva-Tones. Released in November 1956, it failed to chart and might have headed to obscurity had not teen idol Tab Hunter and Sonny "The Country Gentleman" James both released cover versions in January 1957. Hunter's version reached #1 on multiple charts, while James hit #1 on the Billboard country chart for nine weeks running. With its operatic chorus and dreamier tempo, it's James' rendition and not Hunter's cooler version that has been sung in showers for over fifty years.

Certainly, "Young Love" is easy to parody and poke fun at: It's hopelessly overblown and melodramatic. And yet the song successfully captures the earnestness, histrionics, and charming naivete of teenage love, which has given it staying power. Anyone listening from the vantage point of middle age knows that there's not "just one love in this whole world." There may be one, there may be more than one, there may be none. This knowledge may not be part of "Young Love," but it's an important part of many listeners' connection to the song, eliciting senses of nostalgia or loss or regret.

There's nothing cerebral about young love, although it is divine ("The heavenly touch of your embrace"). But how much of this is real and how much is fantasy? The third verse ("Just one kiss from your sweet lips") implies that he hasn't yet received a kiss, that the love may be one-sided. Is he actually waiting for her to notice him and respond? Note the future tense of the next verse ("We will vow"), which seems to imply that nothing has happened yet. Is the singer staring longingly at the girl in the next desk, afraid to ask her out or admit his feelings? In this sense, "Young Love" conveys not only the intensity of teen love, with its "true emotion" and "deep devotion," but its uncertainties and insecurities as well. Perhaps the song resonates today because it gets at the truth of unrequited teen love as opposed to the idealized version it appears to celebrate on the surface.

Or perhaps it's both. Two certainties of adolescence are its incredible ups and downs and the intensity with which they are experienced. To the middle-aged listener, "Young Love" is a safe way of revisiting those days without having actually relive them. And to the teenager? Most of today's kids would no doubt scoff at the song. But once it was truth. Or should I say Truth.

LYRICS
They say for every boy and girl
There's just one love in this whole world
And I know that I found mine

The heavenly touch of your embrace
Tells me no one could take your place
Ever in my heart

Young love, first love
Filled with true devotion
Young love, our love
We share with deep emotion

Just one kiss from your sweet lips
Will tell me that your love is real
And I can feel that it's true

We will vow to one another
There will never be another
Love for you or for me

Young love, first love
Filled with true devotion
Young love, our love
We share with deep emotion

The heavenly touch of your embrace
Tells me no one could take your place
Ever in my heart

We will vow to one another
There will never be another
Love for you or for me

Young love, first love
Filled with true devotion
Young love, our love
We share with deep emotion

Sonny James, the Country Gentleman, performing "Young Love" in 1958:




Tab Hunter's 1957 hit single:




Click here and scroll down to hear Chaim Tannenbaum's lovely rendition from 1998's The McGarrigle Hour. That's Kate and Anna McGarrigle on backing vocals. Tannenbaum is a producer and musician who has played with the McGarrigles and Loudon Wainwright III.

T-Bone Burnett: Shut It Tight

SONG Shut It Tight

WRITTEN BY T-Bone Burnett

PERFORMED BY T-Bone Burnett

APPEARS ON Proof Through the Night (1983, vinyl only), Twenty Twenty: The Essential T-Bone Burnett (2006)

Born in Missouri and raised in Fort Worth, T-Bone Burnett is best known today as a music producer and for his work with such film soundtracks as O Brother Where Art Thou? and Crazy Heart. But the protean 10-time Grammy winner is also a gifted songwriter and, in the Eighties, a prolific recording artist. His lyrics typically explore the challenges that modern life and technology impose on imperfect humans increasingly ill-equipped to deal with them. Burnett often turns to the redemptive themes of love and faith, although his writing has become increasingly pessimistic. Even so, Burnett holds on to the possibility of inherently broken people finding a measure of fulfillment by the simple act of turning to each other.

Burnett first came to my attention back in the mid-Seventies as rhythm guitarist for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. The unusual name stuck with me; when rummaging through the Austin Public Library's record collection a few years later, I came across his Truth Decay album and checked it out. The album immediately resonated with me, especially the lovely, hopeful ballad "Power of Love." He followed Truth Decay with the highly regarded EP Trap Door, then, in 1983, the full-length Proof Through the Night.

Proof garnered excellent reviews, but Burnett didn't like the production foisted on him by Warner Bros, which probably explains why it has never been released on CD. He reproduced the six songs from it that appear on the excellent Twenty Twenty retrospective, among them "Shut It Tight," the album's best song. "Shut It Tight" covers familiar Burnett territory with a deftness that blends a hard edge with sympathy and defiance. The juxtaposition of opposites ("I do the very things I hate to do") reveals a confused, sometimes inept man who "stumble[s] like a drunk along this crazy path I walk." In the end, no matter how imperfect he may be and no matter how bewildered by life, he's going to hold on because it's what he's given and perhaps because there's a certain dignity and satisfaction attained by fighting until and even after there's not a breath left to draw.

With "Shut It Tight," Burnett creates an everyman out of his own self-doubt and struggles, a figure with whom anyone who admits to his or her own humanity can identify. There's not a songwriter out there who hasn't attempted this at one time or another. That T-Bone Burnett succeeded demonstrates why he remains one of the best.

LYRICS
I find it hard sometimes to say the way that I feel
I do the very things I hate to do
I act like a child and I'm afraid of what is real
And so I try to cover up the truth

I stumble like a drunk along this crazy path I walk
I have a hundred thousand questions too
I'll go to any length to prove that nothing is my fault
Then later on I will deny the proof

I don't like to win but then again I hate to lose
And in between is something I can't stand
I don't care what you think and I hope that you approve
I am just an ordinary man

Sometimes I want to stop and crawl back into the womb
And sometimes I cannot tell wrong from right
But I ain't gonna quit until I'm laid in my tomb
And even then they better shut it tight

Witchi Tai To - Jim Pepper

SONG Witchi Tai To

WRITTEN BY Jim Pepper

PERFORMED BY Jim Pepper

APPEARS ON Pepper's Pow Wow (1971)

This song literally changed my world; when I first heard it back in the early '70s it stopped me in my tracks. I had never heard Native American singing before that, and my knowledge of jazz was pretty much limited to big band and high profile types like Louis Armstrong; I hadn't yet discovered the world of fusion jazz from the likes of Miles and Coltrane and Don Cherry. This song introduced me to all of that, and my musical world hasn't been the same since.

Jim Pepper (1941 - 1992) was of Native American descent, from the Plains tribes of the Kaw and the Cree. He came from a family of "road men", the peyote priests of the Native American Church. He was also a jazz saxophonist, playing primarily tenor sax (but also soprano sax and flute), and as such he was one of the pioneers of fusion jazz, mixing rock, r&b, and jazz into a whole new sound. He played with the likes of Larry Coryell, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. His playing was soulful, very much influenced by r&b, and his tone was incisive and penetrating. His style influenced later saxophonists like Jan Garbarek and David Sanborn. He died in 1992 of lymphoma.

In the mid '60s, encouraged by Coleman and Cherry, Pepper began experimenting with mixing Native American music and jazz, with interesting results. "Witchi Tai To" is a prime example of that blending, taking a peyote song he'd learned from his grandfather and putting it in a jazz setting. The song first turned up in 1969 on an album by the band he was playing with at the time, Everything Is Everything. But it's the 1971 version from his own solo album Pepper's Pow Wow that's the definitive version, starting with the peyote chant plain and unadorned, and slowly segueing into Pepper's beautiful, flowing sax line that sets the tone for the rest of the tune. In a way the song is anthemic, especially the parts based on that sax melody; you can imagine stadiums full of people singing that line with great power. Yet the song remains very simple in all it's elements. It's that simplicity and the spiritual intent behind the words, and the spiritual intent that fuels Pepper's performance, that gives the song it's power. The Kaw words are untranslatable now - Pepper said his grandfather never did tell him what they meant in English - but he sings them anyway, and adds English lyrics which emphasize the roots in the peyote ritual, especially speaking of the Water Spirit, who carries the visions brought by the peyote.

Lyrics

Witchi tai to, gimee rah

Hoe rah neeko, hoe rah neeko

Hey ney, hey ney, no way



Witchi tai to, gimee rah

Hoe rah neeko, hoe rah neeko

Hey ney, hey ney, no way



Water Spirit feelin' springin' round my head

Makes me feel glad that I'm not dead



Witchi tai to, gimee rah

Hoe rah neeko, hoe rah neeko

Hey ney, hey ney, no way



Witchi tai to, gimee rah

Hoe rah neeko, hoe rah neeko

Hey ney, hey ney, no way

This song changed my world because it introduced me to a new way of hearing music. It introduced a new style of jazz I'd never known before, and it introduced me to music outside the Western tradition. I listen to a lot of Native American musicians these days - Primeaux and Mike, Ulale, R. Carlos Nakai, Douglas Spotted Eagle (I just did a Sight & Sound post on my own blog which includes a piece by Doug that incorporates elements of the Diné [Navajo] Beauty Way ceremony), and others - as well as music from other parts of the world, both indigenous artists like Yousou N'Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Western "world fusion" types like Peter Gabriel. All because one day in 1971 or '72 somebody dropped a dime in the jukebox and played "Witchi Tai To" and stopped me dead in my tracks.

This video isn't much visually, just the album cover from Comin' and Goin' (a later compilation album), but the music is that definitive version from the 1971 album. The song has been played by others - Brewer and Shipley, Ralph Towner (both with and without Oregon), Jan Garbarek - but never with the power and spirit of Jim Pepper. Enjoy!

Truck Driving Man

SONG Truck Driving Man

WRITTEN BY Terry Fell

PERFORMED BY Terry Fell (1954), George Hamilton IV (1965), Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen (1972), Red Steagall (1976), many others

APPEARS ON B-side to "Don't Drop It" (Fell); Fort Worth, Dallas or Houston (Hamilton); Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Trucker's Favorites (Cody); Lone Star Beer and Bob Wills Music (Steagall)

When one-hit wonder Terry Fell exulted in the 1954 success of "Don't Drop It," he couldn't know that its B-side would go on to become one of the most-performed songs in country music history, a staple of bar bands from Maine to California. Indeed, the first time I heard "Truck Driving Man," it was by that greatest of bar bands, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. While their version was a far cry from Fell's straight ahead rockabilly original, the Commander and the boys delivered it with their signature coupling of ironic vocals and crack musicianship. George Hamilton IV and Red Steagall charted with the song, both delivering polished country arrangements. Buck Owens, like Fell and Merle Haggard a product of Southern California's post-war country music scene, performed the song featuring his inimitable vocals and rousing instrumental breaks.

It's easy to understand why "Truck Driving Man" became a staple. It's a light-hearted romp about the romance of the road that tells its story through such icons as a road house, a cup of coffee, an anonymous waitress, a juke box, and, of course, a semi-truck. It invokes Texas, that most iconic of states, and San Antonio, Texas' most iconic city. Anyone can listen to this song and imagine themselves at Hamburger Dan's, hastily downing fast food and coffee, pausing to listen to a self-referential song on the juke, and boasting to the waitress, all before climbing back aboard a semi and heading down the road. The only mystery about "Truck Driving Man" is why Terry Fell thought it should be a B-side.

There are many great truck driving songs; "I'm Coming Home," "Looking at the World Through a Windshield," and "Semi Truck" all come to mind. The Marshall Tucker band took the genre beyond country and rockabilly with their southern rock classic "24 Hours at a Time." Performers such as Red Simpson and former Airman Bill Kirchen have literally made their livings writing and playing truck songs. There's even a web site called Virtual Truck Route dedicated to trucker music, movies, radio, and television. All of this could well have happened without "Truck Driving Man." But it's nice to know that such a great song is at the head of it all.

LYRICS
I stopped at a road house in Texas
A little place called Hamburger Dan's
I heard that old jukebox a-playin'
A song 'bout a truck driving man

Pour me another cup of coffee
For it is the best in the land
I'll put a nickel in the jukebox
And play The Truck Driving Man

The waitress then brought me some coffee
I thanked her and called he back again
I said "That old song sure does fit me
'Cause I am a truck driving man"

Pour me another cup of coffee
For it is the best in the land
I'll put a nickel in the jukebox
And play The Truck Driving Man

I stepped back on board my old semi
And then like a flash I was gone
I got them old truck wheels a-rolling
I'm on my way to San Antone

Here are versions of "Truck Driving Man" beginning with Terry Fell's original and proceeding through George Hamilton IV, Buck Owens, Commander Cody, and Red Steagall.







Here's a pointer to the audio by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Scroll down and select the song.

200 More Miles

SONG: 200 More Miles

BY: Michael Timmins

PERFORMED BY: Cowboy Junkies

APPEARS ON: The Trinity Session (RCA)

I don’t remember all the details of how I came to learn about & for a time, become obsessed with, the music of the Cowboy Junkies. It was well over 20 years ago now, & a very eventful time in my life—a time I’ve yet to really resolve, a time that focused many of the creative tensions I still work from & at times resist.

This is all to say that things I knew in that time, & that defined it for me, continue to resonate when I encounter them. This is true, for instance, of Big Star’s music, which I wrote about earlier on Just a Song; Big Star, & especially Big Star’s 3rd, was a major portion of my life’s soundtrack at that time. The Cowboy Junkies were another significant strain.

For those of you who don’t know, the Cowboy Junkies hail from Toronto, & like another Canadian group, the Band, they’ve always impressed me with their ability to both inhabit & re-shape a U.S. Americana sound; when they perform songs by Patsy Cline or Hank Williams—or Lou Reed for that matter—the music becomes at once familiar & also rich & strange.

The core of the Cowboy Junkies is the Timmins family—brothers Michael (guitar), Peter (drums), & Margo (vocals). Their sound can only be described as haunting—particularly Margo Timmins’ singing, which only can be described as a contradiction in terms: a sort of laid-back intensity. On their second album, The Trinity Session, the sound is enhanced by some beautiful pedal steel courtesy of Kim Deschamps & some fine harmonica work by Steve Shearer. The album was recorded in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity using a single mic!

Michael Timmins’s song “200 More Miles,” as interpreted by Margo, is a night-sea journey by car across a quintessential American landscape. The melody & harmonies & lyrics all conjure up a road trip that is ultimately transformative—& what larger 20th century American myth is there? The poetry of Timmins’ lyrics stands by itself—the truth of the road, which fades into the distance & also appears, distant & strange on the forward horizon, the promise—as yet (or ever?) unattained of reaching the point that will transmute everything & redeem the past….

There are a couple of obscure references in the verse about Nashville: the “lighter in a case for all to see” & “in the corner stands a guitar/& lonesome words scrawled in a drunken hand.” This refers to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where Patsy Cline’s cigarette lighter is on display, as well as Hank Williams’ guitar & some of this handwritten songs.

I remember a trip of my own in 1988 from Charlottesville, VA to Davis, CA (almost, but not quite, with a detour to Los Angeles), setting out in the late afternoon & driving past Knoxville in the night, this song in my head & on the tape player, the words echoing with my thoughts. When I hear them now, I hear those same echoes…. hope you enjoy this beautiful & evocative piece of music.


200 More Miles

Atlanta's a distant memory
Montgomery a recent blur
And Tulsa burns on the desert floor
Like a signal fire
I got Willie on the radio
A dozen things on my mind
And number one is fleshing out
These dreams of mine

I've got 200 more miles of rain asphalt and light
Before I sleep
But there'll be no warm sheets or welcoming arms
To fall into tonight

In Nashville there is a lighter in a case for all to see
It speaks of dreams and heartaches left unsung
And in the corner stands a guitar
And lonesome words scrawled in a drunken hand
I'm travelling paths travelled hard before
And I'm beginning to understand

I've got 200 more miles of rain asphalt and light
Before I sleep
But there'll be no warm sheets or welcoming arms
To fall into tonight

They say that I am crazy
My life wasting on this road
That time will find my dreams
Scattered dead and cold
But I heard there is a light
Drawing me to reach an end
And when I reach there, I'll turn back
And you and I can begin again

I've got 200 more miles of rain asphalt and light
Before I sleep
But there'll be no warm sheets or welcoming arms
To fall into tonight

I've got 200 more miles of rain asphalt and light
Before I sleep
But there'll be no warm sheets or welcoming arms
To fall into tonight

Atlanta's a distant memory
Montgomery a recent blur
Tulsa burns on the desert floor
like a signal fire.

Dark Hollow

SONG Dark Hollow

WRITTEN BY Bill Browning

PERFORMED BY Bill Browning, The Grateful Dead

APPEARS ON B-side to "Borned With the Blues" (1958);
Bear's Choice (History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1) (1973), Three from the Vault (2007), others

I couldn't find out much about the history of this song. I first heard it on the Grateful Dead's Bear's Choice, an album critically derided on its release in 1973, although it did offer their first release of "Dark Hollow." I assumed for years that it was either a traditional number or borrowed from someone like Lefty Frizell.

But, according to the Grateful Dead Lyric & Song Finder, "Dark Hollow" was actually the B-side of a single recorded in 1958 by one Bill Browning. Other than that he was from Wayne County, West Virginia, fronted a rockabilly band called the Echo Valley Boys, and passed away in 1978 at the ripe young age of 57, not much is known about Browning. How an unknown late-50's B-side came to the attention of the Dead's Bob Weir is equally a mystery, although Bobby has a gift for discovering and elevating obscurities: After he learned "Me & My Uncle" from John Phillips, it became the most performed song in the Dead's catalog even though Phillips himself never recorded it.

However Weir came across "Dark Hollow," he knew a winner when he heard one. It's a song about madness and the fever of unrequited love, and how the former -- signified by the dark hollow -- is preferable to the latter. Punctuated by a train whistle, that great country symbol of loneliness, the lyrics of the song are simple yet eloquent: It's not better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. In fact, it's better to go mad ("...knowing that you're gone/Would cause me to lose my mind...") than to even contemplate the thought of your loved one in the arms of another. Contrary to what Pete Townshend and The Who might think, love is for keeping because the alternative when it's gone is darkness, loneliness, and riding the rails with the misfits, outcasts, and lunatics.

The Dead perform "Dark Hollow" with as a folk-bluegrass standard, assisted greatly by Jerry Garcia's keening harmony behind Weir's rock-style vocals. The Browning version is pure melodrama, replete with train whistles. Browning recorded from 1957-1960 and left a small discography. He likely didn't write another song close to the league of "Dark Hollow," but he at least achieved greatness once. That's more than most can say.

LYRICS
I'd rather be in some dark hollow
Where the sun don't ever shine
Than to be in some big city
In a small room with a girl on my mind

So blow your whistle freight train
Take me far on down the track
I'm going away, I'm leaving today
I'm going but I ain't coming back

I'd rather be in some dark hollow
Where the sun don't ever shine
Than to see you another man's darling
And know that you'll never be mine

So blow your whistle freight train
Take me far on down the track
I'm going away, I'm leaving today
I'm going but I ain't coming back

I'd rather be in some dark hollow
Where the sun don't ever shine
Than to be home alone, knowing that you're gone
Would cause me to lose my mind

So blow your whistle freight train
Take me far on down the track
I'm going away, I'm leaving today
I'm going but I ain't coming back

I'm going away, I'm leaving today
I'm going but I ain't coming back

Here's Bill Browning's rendition. Dig the train whistle!



The Grateful Dead sing "Dark Hollow" in 1971:

Falling Slowly - Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová

SONG Falling Slowly

WRITTEN BY Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová

PERFORMED BY Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová

APPEARS ON Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová, soundtrack to the movie Once

I'd actually been planning to do a post on Richard and Linda Thompson's "Dimming of the Day", but I ran across the DVD of the movie Once this week and fell absolutely in love with the movie and the soundtrack, especially the featured song, "Falling Slowly". The movie is about two struggling musicians who meet and create something special in the world between them. I've done a review of the movie here. On Just A Song I want to talk specifically about "Falling Slowly.

Co-written by Glen Hansard (guitar & vocals) and Markéta Irglová (piano & vocals), the song is the essence of the movie. It's so wistfully sad that it's hard not to be in tears by the end, and at the same time it's powerful and dramatic. It deals with the "what could be" but admits that life will go on if it doesn't. Ostensibly written by the "Guy" character in the movie, it's based on his estrangement from his girlfriend who now lives in London, and his wish to rekindle the spark. At the same time it comes to represent what happens between Guy and Girl in the movie - the close friendship that develops and has the potential to go even closer, but in the end they realize that they have even stronger feelings elsewhere and so move on.

The poetry in the lyrics is especially moving. The desperate hopefulness of "Take this sinking boat and point it home..." and the despair of "Moods that take me and erase me..." send a chill through me every time I hear them. This is a powerfully moving song, exquisitely composed and performed by these two sensitive souls.

Lyrics

I don't know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can't react
And games that never amount
To more than they're meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You've made it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can't go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I'm painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I'll sing along

The video of the song I've chosen is from the tour Glen and Markéta did after the movie in 2007 as The Swell Season. This is from an appearance on Disney's Artist's Den show, recorded in the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Seattle. Enjoy!

Todd Thibaud: Give Back My Heart

SONG Give Back My Heart

WRITTEN BY Todd Thibaud

PERFORMED BY Todd Thibaud

APPEARS ON Favorite Waste of Time (1998)

While it's easy to dismiss the appeal of the Boston music scene as similar to the Tulsa skyline or British cuisine, that would overlook the genuinely talented singer-songwriters who came out of the Hub. I'm thinking of artists like Antje Duvekot, Patty Griffin, Melvern Taylor, and Todd Thibaud. Each of these singer-songwriters has a distinct artistic voice that resists easy classification. Duvekot and Griffin are mightily talented singers as well as songwriters, Taylor supports his idiosyncratic outlook with creative, ukulele-based arrangements, and Thibaud brings a booming baritone and aggressive rock instincts to a genre otherwise nearly bereft of both.

Thibaud, a native Vermonter, moved to Boston in 1987 to pursue his dream of making it in music. He fronted The Courage Brothers for a few years until that band dissolved under the pressures of artistic differences. His career bent under a further setback when his record label dropped all rock acts. But, Thibaud persevered and eventually released Favorite Waste of Time on an indie label in 1997. Remixed and rereleased to national distribution, it received good reviews, one of which I read.

I picked up Favorite Waste of Time on the basis of a brief write-up in Rock & Rap Confidential (now sporadically available by email). I quickly gravitated to "Give Back My Heart," the album's anthemic breakup song. Rather than sing from a perspective of bitterness or pain, Thibaud forthrightly recognizes that the relationship is over. With bravado he demands that his ex return his soul even as he recognizes that "it's in your hands." It's as if he's saying that "My heart may be broken, but I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of me not moving on. So, give back my heart."

Thibaud conveys a feeling of solidarity with anyone (which means everyone) who has experienced a broken heart. It's hard, he says, but it doesn't necessarily mean unending misery. It's an opportunity to find strength: By taking back your heart and soul, you take back your life. That may not be much different from what Dear Abby has said for generations, but it's actually unusual in popular music. So, Thibaud treads new ground of a sort, and he does it inspiringly.

LYRICS

Give back my heart, you've had your turn

It's time for me to move along and this I've learned

That sometimes love is more a curse

You give your heart and soul but then it just gets worse

Don't expect me to linger here

When I've got my life to start

And all the plans that bound us once have been torn apart

Give back my heart

Give back my soul, it's in your hands

And all that I can do is hope you'll understand

That sometimes love is meant to be

Well that's just not the way it went for you and me

Don't expect me to linger here

When I've got my life to start

And all the plans that bound us once have been torn apart

Give back my heart

Here, Thibaud, fronting The Courage Brothers, performs a somewhat subdued version of "Give Back My Heart." It's fine, but not as grand or inspiring as the studio rendition on Favorite Waste of Time. Unfortunately, I could not find this anywhere on the internet.

The Who: Blue Red and Grey

SONG Blue Red and Grey

WRITTEN BY Pete Townshend

PERFORMED BY The Who

APPEARS ON The Who By Numbers (1975), Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (1994)

Fueled by Pete Townshend's high octane power chords and ambitious operatic album structures, The Who by 1975 were the most important and most artistically successful extant rock band. The Beatles had broken up five years earlier. The Stones were lost in a creative wilderness. Southern rock, led by the Allman Brothers, had introduced a new element of virtuosity to rock, but it never tackled grand themes with the force of The Who. So, it came as somewhat of a surprise when Townshend retrenched and delivered The Who By Numbers, a brief set of personal, nearly confessional songs that left critics scratching their heads.

Today, By Numbers stands as respected part of The Who's canon. It by no means reaches the heights of Who's Next and most of its predecessors, but it's also superior to anything that came after. One of its most enduring songs is "Blue Red and Grey," a simple, life-affirming number sung by Townshend and supported by an unlikely (for The Who) ukulele and haunting, muted trumpet. The rest of the band -- and, indeed, Townsend's electric guitar -- sits out while Pete sings this simple paean to love and how it can infuse every second of life with delight. There's no other Who song quite like "Blue Red and Grey," and I suppose that it's arguably a Pete Townsend solo tune inserted into a Who album.

And yet. Pete had already embarked on his solo career. Who Came First was three years old, and the brilliant Rough Mix was two-years imminent. There were other outlets for the song, so I prefer to think that he wanted it on a Who album for a reason. Maybe he wanted his listeners to look past the usual Townshend themes of angst, anger, and the fraught relationship between star and audience. Maybe he wanted to remind us of the simpler joys of living in a context that guaranteed a larger listenership than a solo album. Or maybe "Blue Red and Grey" is a simple leavening of the confessional tone that dominates so much of By Numbers. No matter, it's a terrific and sensitive song, an anomaly in The Who catalogue, perhaps, but also perhaps all the more likable for that.

LYRICS

Some people seem so obsessed with the morning

Get up early just to watch the sun rise

Some people like it more when there's fire in the sky

Worship the sun when it's high

Some people go for those sultry evenings

Sipping cocktails in the blue, red and grey

But I like every minute of the day

I like every second, so long as you are on my mind

Every moment has its special charm

It's all right when you're around, rain or shine

I know a crowd who only live after midnight

Their faces always seem so pale

And then there's friends of mine who must have sunlight

They say a suntan never fails

I know a man who works the night shift

He's lucky to get a job and some pay

And I like every minute of the day

I dig every second

I can laugh in the snow and rain

I get a buzz from being cold and wet

The pleasure seems to balance out the pain

And so you see that I'm completely crazy

I even shun the south of France

The people on the hill, they say I'm lazy

But when they sing, I sleep and dance

Some people have to have the sultry evenings

Cocktails in the blue, red and grey

But I like every minute of the day

I like every minute of the day

Here are four renditions of "Blue Red and Grey," beginning with the original album version and followed by solo performances from Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, then closed out by Eddie Vedder's cover. Note that all three live performers use a ukulele. I guess when you strike a perfect note, people are reluctant to change it.