The Sunday Six

Welcome to another Sunday Six, my weekly recurring feature, in which I explore music from different genres over the past 60-70 years. As always, I do this in a time-travel fashion, six tunes at a time. Hope you’ll join me for the ride. Let’s go!

Lonnie Smith/Twenty-Five Miles

Our journey today starts in 1970 with some groovy jazz by Hammond B3 maestro Lonnie Smith. Given how much I dig the sound of this organ, perhaps it’s not a huge surprise I featured Smith before. He first came to prominence in the mid-’60s as a member of George Benson’s quartet. After recording two albums with the jazz guitarist, Smith launched a solo career in 1967 with his delicious debut album Finger Lickin’ Good Soul Organ. At some point during the ’70s, he decided to wear a traditional Sikh turban and become Dr. Lonnie Smith, though he neither converted to Sikhism nor obtained an academic doctor title. After a 50-year-plus recording career, Smith sadly passed away in September 2021 at the age of 79. Twenty-Five Miles, penned by him, appeared on his 1970 solo album Drives when he was still known as Lonnie Smith. He was backed by Dave Hubbard (tenor saxophone), Ronnie Cuber (baritone saxophone), Larry McGee (guitar) and Joe Dukes (drums). That track gets me in the mood for more music!

John Lennon/Nobody Told Me

Earlier this week (December 8) marked the sad 42nd anniversary of John Lennon’s senseless murder in New York City – really hard to believe it’s been 42 years! Rather than picking Imagine, the seasonal Happy Xmas (War Is Over) or another perhaps more obvious tune, I decided to go with Nobody Told Me, a track that appeared on the posthumous album Milk and Honey released in January 1984. Assembled by Yoko Ono and Geffen, it includes new music Lennon had recorded in the last months of his life during and following the Double Fantasy sessions. Originally, he had written Nobody Told Me for Ringo Starr to include on his 1981 album Come and Smell the Roses, but due to John’s death, Ringo decided against recording it. Nobody Told Me, a song I dug from the very first moment I heard it, also became the first single from Milk and Honey and a top 10 hit in various countries, including the U.S. (no. 5), Canada (no. 4), the UK and Australia (no. 6 in each), as well as Norway (no. 7). Here’s a cool video!

The Easybeats/Friday On My Mind

Our next stop is May 1967, which saw the release of Good Friday, the fourth studio album by The Easybeats and their first after the Australian band had relocated to London and had signed an international recording deal with United Artists Records. In North America, a slightly different version appeared in the same month under the title Friday On My Mind. The Easybeats had been founded in Sydney in late 1964 by Stevie Wright (lead vocals), Harry Vanda (lead guitar), George Young (rhythm guitar), Dick Diamonde (bass) and Gordon “Snowy” Fleet (drums). Notably, they each came from families that had emigrated from Europe to Australia: Wright and Fleet from England, Vanda and Diamonde from The Netherlands, and Young from Scotland. During their six-year run, The Easybeats scored 15 top 10 hits in Australia, including one of my all-time favorite ’60s tunes, Friday On My Mind. Co-written by Young and Vanda, their biggest hit topped the charts in Australia, reached no. 2 in New Zealand, and climbed to no. 6, no. 13 and no. 16 in the UK, Canada and the U.S., respectively. The band’s popularity waned thereafter, and they broke up in October 1969. Man, what a great tune!

Kenny Wayne Shepherd/Baby Got Gone

Let’s jump to the current century and some great blues rock by Kenny Wayne Shepherd. The Louisiana guitarist first entered my radar screen about five years ago. Shepherd who is completely self-taught started his recording career in 1995 at the age of 18. Since his debut album Ledbetter Heights, which came out in September that year, he has released nine additional studio albums and two live records, and established himself as an influential force in the contemporary blues realm. Baby Got Gone is from Shepherd’s August 2017 album Lay It Down. I haven’t listened to Shepherd in a while. This great tune makes me want to hear more!

Gene Vincent/Be-Bop-a-Lula

This next tune takes us back to 1956 and one of the pioneers of rockabilly and rock & roll: Gene Vincent. In June of that year, Vincent released his debut single Woman Love backed by what became his biggest U.S. hit: Be-Bop-a-Lula, credited to him and his manager Bill “Sheriff Tex” Davis. According to Vincent (born Vincent Eugene Craddock) and his label Capitol Records, he wrote the tune in 1955 while recuperating from a motorcycle accident at the US Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Va., inspired by the newspaper cartoon strip Little Lulu. That story was disputed by Dickie Harrell, the drummer in Vincent’s backing band The Blue Caps, who told Mojo in 2000 the tune had been penned by Donald Graves, and that Vincent and Davis subsequently purchased it from Graves for $25. Yet another version is that Vincent and Graves wrote it together. Whatever the truth is, there can be no doubt Be-Bop-a-Lula is a ’50s gem. The fact that it sounded very much like a Sun Records production probably wasn’t a coincidence. Capitol Records had eagerly sought an artist similar to Elvis Presley. Unlike Elvis, Vincent’s chart career in the U.S. only lasted until 1957. In the UK, he had a total of eight top 40 hits between 1956 and 1961. Vincent’s life was cut short in October 1971 when he passed away at the age of 36 from a combination of a ruptured ulcer, internal hemorrhage and heart failure – yikes!

The Wallflowers/Sugarfoot

Once again it’s time to wrap up another music journey. For this final pick, we jump to August 1992 and the eponymous debut album by The Wallflowers. Initially formed as The Apples in 1989 by Jakob Dylan and his childhood friend and guitarist Tobi Miller, the group changed their name to The Wallflowers in 1991. After six studio albums including the hugely successful sophomore release Bringing Down the Horse (May 1996), Dylan turned The Wallflowers into a project in 2013, relying on hired musicians for his recurring tours. The most recent Wallflowers album Exit Wounds from July 2021, the first in nine years, in many ways feels like it could have been the follow-on to Bringing Down the Horse. I reviewed it here at the time. Going back to the debut, the album missed the charts. In my view, it certainly wasn’t because it lacked decent music. Here’s Sugarfoot, which like all other tracks except for one was written by Dylan.

This post wouldn’t be complete without a Spotify playlist of the above tunes.

Sources: Wikipedia; YouTube; Spotify

Louisiana Guitarist Shows Blues Rock Is Alive

A few weeks ago, I read for the first time about Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s upcoming new studio album. It brought a big smile on my face. Ironically, this happened in the wake of a Washington Post story with the clever title Why My Guitar Gently Weeps with a cheerful subhead The slow, secret death of the six-string electric. And why you should care. Care I do. And there is perhaps nothing that gets me more excited than a bit of defiance!

Shepherd, a 40-year-old guitarist from Shreveport, La., is one of several young artists who are keeping blues rock alive. Three other musicians I can think of in this context are Texans Gary Clark Jr. (33), from Austin, and Casey James (35), from Fort Worth, as well as Joe Bonamassa, a 40-year-old hailing from New Hartford, N.Y. James just came out with his latest record Strip It Down, which I previously reviewed here.

Of course, I’m not suggesting all it takes to reverse declining electric guitar sales is a bunch of young blues rockers – BTW, “young artist” in my book means up to 40 years. But I hope, perhaps naively, the more cool guitar dudes are out there, the more young kids will realize there are cool things beyond video consoles and games. And, last time I checked, you can still impress a lady with playing the guitar – just saying! 🙂

Back to Shepherd who started teaching himself how to play the guitar at age seven after he had been blown away by seeing Stevie Ray Vaughan. In 1990, the then-13-year-old already recorded his fist demo tapes. His studio debut, Ledbetter Heights, followed in September 1995. Shepherd’s upcoming album, Lay It On Down, will be his eighth studio release. It’s scheduled to come out Friday, August 4.

Shepherd discussed his new album during a recent interview with Billboard. “I wanted to grab from several different genres,” he noted. According to the publication, the music ranges from hard rockers (Baby Got Gone), soul-flavored tunes (Diamonds & Gold), blues songs (Down For Love and The Ride Of Your Life) to country-influenced ballads (Hard Lesson Learned, Louisiana Rain and the title track).

“The goal was to make a contemporary sounding record,” Shepherd noted, “something that was new and fresh and obviously doesn’t sound like many of my other records. The last record I did (2014’s Goin’ Home) was traditional blues, so on this one I needed to do some different things, and I think we did.” From what I can tell at this time, he succeeded.

Four of the album’s 10 tracks are already available in iTunes/Apple Music and I imagine other platforms. The record vigorously opens with Baby Got Gone, a tune I instantly liked after listening to just the opening bars. Here’s a nice clip of the official video.

Next up: Diamonds & Gold. The track has a kick-ass horn section that gives it a nice soul groove. I’m also turned on by Shepherd’s use of the wah-wah pedal – yep, that antique electric guitar effect that became famous in the late 60s when Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and other guitarists widely embraced it. My kind of music!

Nothing But the Night takes things down by a tiny notch. The mid-tempo rocker has a good groove and a catchy chorus. Listen for yourself!

The final song I can call out is the title track, a beautiful mid-tempo ballad. It’s one of the above mentioned country-influenced and stripped back tunes. Shepherd co-wrote it with blues rock singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Mark Selby and Tia Sillers, a Nashville songwriter. Sillers is probably best known for co-writing I Hope You Dance, a no. 1 country hit for Lee Ann Womack in 2000 – one of the most beautiful inspirational tunes I know.

Commenting on the song during the above Billboard interview, Shepherd said, “This one is very complex…It’s got a very significant lyric to it. It’s personal. It’s about someone I know very well; It’s about a girl who has bought into the idea she’s not good enough, and that’s not the truth. Everyone else sees the beauty in her except her, so the guy in the song’s trying to say, ‘I wish you could see what I see.’ The message in the song is, like, ‘Believe in yourself. Don’t buy into the voices in your head that want to drag you down.’ I think that speaks to a lot of people in the world, too, not just who I’m singing the song about.”

Produced by Marshall Altman, Lay It On Down was recorded at Blade Studios in Shreveport. Altman also produced Shepherd’s previous studio album Goin’ Home, which appeared in May 2014. Despite what Shepherd called the experimentation, he believes folks who have come to like him because of his blues rock sound are going to embrace the new record. “That’s the foundation of what I do. You hear that in all my music, and in all of the tracks on the record,” he told Billboard. “Drawing from these different genres and various musical influences, it enables me to take that blues foundation and put it in different directions and try different things with it, step outside the box a little bit.”

Well said! I can’t wait until the entire album will become available.

Sources: Wikipedia, Washington Post, Billboard, YouTube