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  • The Friday Morning Awesome: Kaleidoscope “Please” (1967)

    Most celebrated as the band that delivered the song “O Death” from the Stanley Brothers to Camper Van Beethoven, the L.A.-based quintet Kaleidoscope was formed in the mid-60s around singer-multi-instrumentalists David Lindley and Solomon Feldthouse, the former (who would go on to play in Jackson Browne’s band in the 70s) schooled in bluegrass, western swing and vaudeville, the latter in modal jazz, Middle Eastern and Balkan folk music. Over four years and four albums, Kaleidoscope dropped these two wide-ranging collections of influences into a vat of boiling South California acid folk with some often pretty fascinating results. But don’t let all that make you think the band made “difficult” music.

    Their debut single “Please” is an amiable, immediately ingratiating folk tune about a guy just learning to make his way in the world without undue (however well-meaning) outside interference. Feldthouse sings the verses with a talky matter-of-fact-ness. The lyrics are thoughtful and firm (“I know you mean to help… but don’t you realize you can’t live my life”), and the chorus is mostly just a single word – “Please” – which he holds solidly on a single note while harmonies shift and swirl all around him for nearly ten seconds. And finally, this simple request: Don’t say nothing at all. Just stand by me.

  • The Thursday Day Night Awesome: Jefferson Starship “Count On Me” (1978)

    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…”

  • 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.