Here’s another group that I loved before I even knew who they were. By the time I was in junior high, the group had morphed into Starship and taken over Top 40 radio with songs like the much-maligned (I love it) “We Built This City”, “Sara”, and, oh yeah, the theme song to Mannequin starring one Kim Cattrall. (Give her a break. She was young and she needed the money.) But I’d been hearing songs from this band on the radio for as long as I can remember. To this day, the three notes that punctuate the chorus of their song “With Your Love” induce a pang of strangely non-specific longing in me. And yet, I don’t think I was ever conscious that the song was called “With Your Love” and that it was a Jefferson Starship song until quite recently when I heard it on a road trip while listening to the 70s channel on Sirius. I get a similar sensation with a number of Jefferson Starship songs – “Miracles”, “Find Your Way Back”, “Jane”… and this one. I love this song so, so much. I don’t know that this band, which Suzanne Somers described in her intro to this video as the world’s longest running soap opera, ever sounded so much in love with each other and how they sounded together as a band as they do on the song’s recording, which appeared on their 1978 album Earth. Sure, lead singer Marty Balin wasn’t long for the group, and given the decade-plus of intra-band bed-hopping that preceded this particular performance, there were almost certainly a few seething resentments present in this particular livingroom. But, for three minutes at least, you get six old friends, veterans of a counterculture struggling with its imminent extinction, sitting around, strumming guitars and laying out lazily lovely harmonies while Marty Balin pours his heart out: “Precious love, I give to you…”
Category: Videos
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The Thursday Morning Awesome: Little River Band “Lady” (1979)
And here’s the guy John Farnham replaced – Glenn Shorrock – leading the Little River Band in their great 1979 hit “Lady” from their breakthrough Sleeper Catcher album. Little River Band was sort of Australia’s version of the Eagles. They were one of the first bands I ever loved – and I loved their music before I even knew who they were. Songs like “Lady”, “Reminiscing”, and “Lonesome Loser” (with its fantastic harmony-rich chorus) – their first string of really big hits – always remind me of a time when I was 6 or 7 years old, riding in the car out to Kenosha to pick up my dad from work. I had no idea who was singing the songs – I just loved when they came on the radio. I still love when they come on the radio. This song’s piano-and-bass introduction alone is enough to induce a nostalgic swoon with me, but Shorrock’s handsome, understated vocal is what really hits my sweet spot.
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First Look: Phil Collins “Heat Wave”
Phil Collins has posted a video for his take on the 1963 Martha and the Vandellas classic “Heat Wave”. It’s from Going Back, his forthcoming collection of Motown and other 60s pop and soul covers which finds him backed by a very large band which includes former members of Motown’s iconic house band the Funk Brothers, a couple of longtime Genesis associates, and a herd of back-up singers, who all appear to be having a blast. Collins’s love for Motown is no secret. Collins was still considered mainly an album rock guy best known for his work with Genesis (who hadn’t gone completely pop yet) and for the moody atmospherics of “In the Air Tonight” when his 1982 cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” gave him his first solo top 10 hit. That song played a pivotal role in establishing Collins as the pop superstar he would become by mid-decade with his No Jacket Required album and he’d later return to the Motown sound with his original song “Two Hearts” from the movie Buster, which ending up topping the charts in early 1989.
Phil Collins “Heat Wave” (2010)
Phil Collins “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1982)
Phil Collins “Two Hearts” (1988)