” … The Supremes—all three members—all close together (on the album cover) and looking happy, instead of cheap artwork like on the last two LPs because Motown couldn’t bother to put the ladies together and waste Diana Ross’s time,” (Soulfinger). ” And not only did Mary Wilson, Cindy Birdsong, and new member Jean Terrell take a picture together, they also got to work together in the studio! No Supremes album since The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland (released three years earlier) had the Supremes singing every song on a Supremes album.
As for the music itself, this album is by no means groundbreaking. The ‘new’ (Diana-free) Supremes would never be trendsetters. This LP is an excellent case of how a group, songwriters, and producers can exist in a moment, assess the situation, and produce some high quality music that simultaneously evokes a particular point in time without being trapped by the gimmicks of that point in time.
Simply put, Right On is an album that clearly sounds like it was made in 1970 but is not trapped by being made in 1970. It was also a solid seller reaching #4 on the R&B album chart and #25 on the pop register.” One of the singles from the album, ‘Everybody’s Got the Right to Love,'” is “obviously playing off the various social movements of the late 1960s demanding greater freedom and rights for marginalized Americans … “
Built around an easy 12/8 groove, the tune is initially built in F major. A whole-step shift upward to G major hits suddenly at 1:30. The tune certainly didn’t match the group’s previous single, “Up the Ladder to the Roof,” but it reached #11 on the US R&B charts and #25 on the Pop chart. Written by Lou Stallman, the tune was released by Motown in 1970.
“Tanya Tucker is a living country music legend,” (AllMusic). “She first engraved her name in the genre’s history books in 1972 when, at 13, she hit with the Top Ten single ‘Delta Dawn.’ Across the following decade, Tucker transitioned into adulthood and maintained her fan base (no mean feat). Since then, she has notched a remarkable streak of hits including the chart-topping ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’ and ‘Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone).’ She’s placed many titles on the Top Country Albums charts, nine singles in the general Hot 100, and more than a dozen on the Top Country Songs list.
Between 1988 and 1997, she charted a comeback that netted three gold albums. In the 21st century, she started her own label and was inducted into the Texas Music Hall of Fame, while continuing to tour. After an extended break from recording, she released the full-length While I’m Livin’ in 2019, co-produced by Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings. They reunited with the artist to helm the sessions for 2023’s Sweet Western Sound.”
“I Don’t Believe My Heart Can Stand Another You” (1975), an absolutely textbook mid-tempo country tune, shifts up a half-step at 1:23 during a short interlude. Written by Billy Ray Reynolds, the track reached #4 and #1 on the US and Canadian Country charts, respectively. Many thanks to regular MotD contributor Rob P. for submitting this tune!
“If your childhood was anything like mine, you owned Marlo Thomas’ illustrated book Free to Be…You and Me and its companion CD, featuring recordings by Diana Ross, Shel Silverstein, Mel Brooks and The New Seekers. Released in 1972 in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Free to Be project—which later included an ABC television special—aimed to teach children about gender equality (Miscellany News) … The impact of Free to Be was tremendous. The book became a classic. The series won a Peabody Award. And in 2021, the album was inducted into The Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Former Supreme Court Justice and trailblazer for women’s rights Ruth Bader Ginsberg called the titular song the definition of feminism.
My mom and dad may have had very different parenting styles, but in raising three daughters, they agreed on one thing: My sisters and I would be empowered girls. We would know that we could do anything and be anything we wanted. They encouraged us to wear princess dresses and practice taekwondo; to paint jewelry boxes and look at bugs under microscopes; to speak up in class and speak up when we were angry … I cannot remember a time in my childhood that predates that sweet book. As I grew older, I grew out of ‘The land where the river runs free,’ as the opening poem imagines. It felt dated. Who did not believe that girls could be firemen and that boys could cry? … Free to Be had served its purpose in becoming a relic. My generation was proof that progress is real.”
The book and album were released in 1972; the TV special followed in 1974. The album’s title track is performed by the UK group The New Seekers (probably best known for their 1970 cover of Melanie’s “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma”). Featuring banjo, glockenspiel, a small chorus (which sounds like it might be adult singers impersonating a children’s choir), and an odd false ending at 2:40, the track shifts up a half step at 1:41.
“Todd Rundgren is, apparently by design, a bundle of contradictions,” (Trouser Press). “A facile composer of memorable hook-filled pop melodies, he has often chosen to make willfully difficult music. A one-man studio wiz proficient on any number of instruments … possessor of a highly original sound … (and) a tireless innovator at the boundaries of music technology, he has often performed with a lone acoustic guitar and piano. Rundgren’s gifts as a lyricist are impressive, yet he has also recorded a fair number of instrumentals. To some, he’s better known as a producer than an artist, although his commercial achievements in both realms are not inconsiderable. In short, the kid from Upper Darby, PA has fashioned a fascinating life out of following his muse wherever it goes.”
A few albums into his solo career and still in his 20s, Rundgren released Todd in 1974. The reviews were all over the map. “Todd sags under the weight of such indulgences as ‘In and Out the Chakras We Go (formerly ‘Shaft in Outer Space’),’ yet still contains ‘A Dream Goes on Forever,’ one of the most beautiful piano ballads ever recorded. ‘The Last Ride’ melds Todd’s pop sensibility with his Philly soul enthusiasm; ‘Izzat Love?’ could have been the album’s pop single, and the album ends with two triumphs. ‘Don’t You Ever Learn?’ runs over six minutes but wastes not a second with its washes of electric piano and strong melody, while the anthemic ‘Sons of 1984’ comes complete with backing vocals by concert-goers on two coasts. (Rundgren was one of the first rockers to truly understand and make creative use of the connections between artist and fans).”
The easy 6/8 groove of “The Last Ride” belies the tune’s rich harmonic textures and intense emotionality. Rundgren’s ballads frequently feature star-crossed relationships, lost horizons, and missed opportunities — and “The Last Ride” is no exception. I thought I knew just everything / I had it made and I could coast / But I turned away love when I needed it most. For this 2011 live version, the setting is Rundgren’s home in Hawaii, but the production credit (and the stellar band!) belong to fellow Philadelphia-area native Daryl Hall and his groundbreaking web series Live from Daryl’s House. Built primarily in G minor, the tune shifts to F minor at 2:36; the two keys alternate from there.
“New York R&B vocal group Ace Spectrum had a brief moment in the sun, but they remain favorites for their core fans more than four decades after they split,” (Soultracks). ” … the act began in the late 60s, releasing songs locally with some success. Ace Spectrum had a hit on both the pop and soul charts with the Ashford & Simpson-penned ‘Don’t Send Nobody Else,’ and also landed the dance hit ‘Live and Learn’ in 1976. They had more success on the album charts, hitting the top 40 with both Inner Spectrum and Low Rent Rendezvous.
The group achieved some unusual notoriety in 1975 for releasing a cover of ‘Third Rate Romance’ following its release by the similarly named Amazing Rhythm Aces, creating some confusion among music fans (though we actually liked Ace Spectrum’s cover better). By the end of the decade, Ace Spectrum members announced publicly that they were breaking up … “
Starting in a slightly uptuned intro in a mixed Eb major and minor, “Do You Remember Yesterday?” (1976) shifts into a verse in Eb major at 0:34. At 0:50, the pre-chorus returns to Eb minor, continuing through the chorus (1:06 – 1:38). At 1:39, the pattern continues, growing in intensity and complexity of arrangement (the string section is working hard!).
“Bowie’s cover of John Lennon’s ‘Across the Universe’ was a blatant, and successful, attempt to lure Lennon into the studio,” (Pushing Ahead of the Dame / BowieSongs). “Bowie and Lennon had first met in late 1974 at a small party in Bowie’s New York hotel suite. The two didn’t converse for hours until, cocaine and Cognac fueled, they began sketching caricatures of each other on notepads. Tony Visconti … recalled that the party ended with everyone in the room getting into ‘a dismally dark conversation about what does it all mean, it being life, which left us all staring dejectedly at the floor.’
About a week into New Year ’75, Bowie called up Lennon and said he was in Electric Lady Studios doing a cover of ‘Across the Universe’ (the whole thing seems like a set-up, as there was no need for another track on Young Americans; Visconti, oblivious to these developments, was in London doing string arrangements for a record he thought was completed). So Lennon went down, played acoustic guitar on ‘Universe,’ then stuck around to jam on another attempted take of ‘Foot Stompin” and wound up co-writing a #1 hit, ‘Fame.’ … It was likely a matter of Bowie being star-struck: how could he deny the temptation to include his very own Beatle collaboration? … Bowie’s interpretation seems to be a bungled attempt to mine the song’s thin vein of defiance. Calling the Beatles original ‘watery’ (no foul there), he decided instead to ‘hammer the hell out of it.‘” The reviewer doesn’t hold back: “Bowie finishes the track off with an extended tantrum … One of Bowie’s low points of the decade, just excruciatingly bad.”
After a start in D major, there’s a whole-step shift upward to E major at 1:58. Going beyond a garden-variety unprepared key change, this shift involves a metric hiccup via a stumble across a truncated measure as well.
“The Tymes began as the Latineers in 1956,” (Philadelphia Music Alliance). In 1963, they released their hit record “So Much In Love” … “the song hit number one on the Billboard charts. The classic was also the first record to replace the Beatles in the number one slot on the British charts. ‘So Much In Love’ is currently number 38 on Billboard’s all time record list. Their other most requested chart toppers include ‘Wonderful, Wonderful,’ ‘Somewhere’ and ‘You Little Trustmaker.’ … The Tymes, now known as The Original Tymes, were the 2005 inductees of The Vocal Group Hall Of Fame Foundation in Youngstown, Ohio. They were also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award and Retro Artist award in 2017 by The American Music Guild.” The group joined the Philly Music Walk of Fame in 2023.
RCA Records signed the group in late 1973. Soul Express: “Those days, RCA paid serious attention to developing their soul roster and they were awarded with some hits by the Hues Corporation (‘Rock the Boat’), Wilson Pickett (‘Mr. Magic Man’), the New Birth (‘I Can Understand It’), the Main Ingredient (‘Everybody Plays the Fool,’ ‘Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely’) and the Friends of Distinction (‘Grazing In the Grass,’ ‘Going In Circles,’ ‘Love Or Let Me Be Lonely’). In the summer of 1974, RCA released their first Tymes single … ‘You Little Trustmaker.’ Written by Christopher Mack Jackson, the single stayed on the Billboard charts for fourteen weeks and reached #12 (pop), #20 (soul) and #18 (UK pop).”
Starting with its intro featuring a distinctive wordless vocal, “You Little Trustmaker” is initially in F major. 1:53 shifts up to F# major, bringing an instrumental verse featuring a full compliment of strings and brass, augmented with another wordless moment. Stick around for the track’s genre-defying unresolved ending!
Melanie Safka was only 22 when she performed at Woodstock. Prior to that appearance, the largest audiences she had faced were the intimate crowds at Greenwich Village folk clubs such as Café Wha? and the Bitter End.
Her appearance at the festival was basically a fluke. The Woodstock organizers had an office in the same NYC building as Melanie’s manager, Peter Schekeryk (who would ultimately marry Melanie). Very early in the planning process, before the organizers had lined up some of the major acts who ultimately performed at Woodstock, Peter asked them whether Melanie could appear at the festival, and they essentially said “sure, whatever”. Given all the chaotic, last minute changes to the running order, it was not clear that Melanie would even get a shot at performing. But on the first night of the festival, the storm rolled in, and the Incredible String Band and several other artists refused to go on in the inclement weather. As a solo act with only an acoustic guitar, Melanie was an easy setup, so she was thrust onstage on very short warning. She didn’t even have a prepared set-list; instead, she apparently played every song she knew that night.
Melanie has described herself as so terrified that she basically had an out-of-body experience as she took the stage and confronted a half million people, arrayed on the hillside before her. But unbeknownst to her, the Hog Farm (the informal “Please Force” for the concert) had been passing out candles to the audience, in an attempt to keep spirits up during the rainstorm. The audience started lighting their candles as Melanie’s performance progressed, and something about that connection with the audience transported her an almost fugue-like state for the balance of her performance. Years later, when she saw some archival footage of her performance, Melanie was shocked by how long she had been onstage. Although Melanie wrote “Lay Down” soon after Woodstock, it wasn’t released until 1970.
Melanie’s Woodstock performance was the first widespread example of a concert audience lighting candles en masse, a tradition that has been passed down from Bic lighters to iPhones.
The first 1:48 of the recording is a spoken-word prologue, describing the Woodstock candles-in-the-rain experience. [On the single, the “Candles” portion was released as the B-side, which was an interesting A&R decision, if nothing else].
The song proper finally commences after two minutes, with a dramatic cold open by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, belting out the chorus. Melanie then sings the much quieter, folkier verse alone. This gospel/folk alternation continues for the rest of the song, with a dynamic range that prefigures the standard grunge template of two decades later. The song ends with an extended gospel outro, loosely organized around call/response and an improvised vocal vamp.
The outro [which was omitted from both the single and the LP, but is captured in the 9-minute master being discussed here] has its own fascinating back-story: Apparently, the entire vocal track was recorded in a single take! The choir had rehearsed a much shorter outro, but during their first take in the studio, the producer was so pleased with the vamp that the singers had settled into that he kept signalling for another go-round. A careful listener will hear several junctures [5:45, 6:05, 6:15, 6:46, 7:10, etc.] where Melanie and/or the choir subtly fumble the call/response handoff before recovering on the fly. Improvisation like this from a 40-voice SATB choir was possible only because the singers had spent countless hours in live worship settings following Edwin Hawkins (who played piano on the take) as he arranged on the fly.
The chorus (1:48) is in G major, with a strong mixolydian skew due to the bVII -> I backdoor cadence. The verse (2:12) is in E Aeolian, and the bridge (3:07) is in E Dorian.
For many more stories about this amazing recording – including how the 9-minute version saved a helicopter crew during the Vietnam War – check out Sam Tweedle’s detailed history.
“It’s humorous to see what experts in the music world thought was the location of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘My Little Town,’ the duo’s final Top 10 Columbia Records single,” (Viera Voice). “On October 18, 1975, Simon hosted the second broadcast of Saturday Night Live. In doing so, he brought on his former partner. They sang three songs together, including a new Simon composition called ‘My Little Town” … the fun began when people began to opine exactly where they thought that little town was.
In his book Paul Simon: A Life, writer Marc Eliot proclaims that ‘My Little Town’ is ‘clearly Queens, and all the references to schoolbooks, saluting the flag and so on appear to be symbols of nostalgia for the days of Tom and Jerry as much as for the years of Simon and Garfunkel.’ Not so, counters music critic Dave Marsh, the author of The Heart of Rock and Soul. ‘(It’s) a portrait of the middle-class Forest Hills, NY neighborhood where Simon and Garfunkel grew up.’
… In a (1980s) interview with Bill Flanagan for his book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Great Songwriters, Simon admitted, ‘I was picturing a town. I was thinking about Gloucester, Massachusetts. A friend of mine comes from Gloucester, and he used to talk about what it was like to grow up there … . That song was entirely an act of imagination. … There’s no element of me in there at all.'”
Starting in E major, the tune then briskly parades through many keys; at the 1:14 mark, D major is a resting point for awhile. After an interlude, the tonality shifts to B minor at 2:05 for the woeful mantra “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.” 2:23 brings another multi-key tour before B minor and the mantra return — this time accompanied by the intensity of a full horn section even as the tune fades.
Film and stage actor Tim Curry, a UK native, left us this week at age 80 after a long illness. After 1975’s classic film interpretation of the musical theatre classic Rocky Horror became a hit, “Tim Curry found himself in demand both on Broadway and in Hollywood,” (The Independent). “On the stage, he was nominated for a Tony Award three times over the course of 24 years, for roles as varied as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1981’s Amadeus, swashbuckling movie star Alan Swann in 1992’s My Favorite Year, and King Arthur in 2005’s Spamalot … His film and television roles were just as eclectic.” Curry’s co-star Rob Schneider remembered: “’I have never known another actor who could say more with a knowing grin or a raised eyebrow than the splendid Tim Curry. I was astonished as a young actor to witness Tim do a scene seven completely different ways and ALL OF THEM FANTASTIC!’ remembered Schneider.”
” … Rocky Horror became a cult classic hit and the center of its own devoted subculture,” (W Magazine). “Curry, suddenly famous, found himself inside a celebrity world he would later chronicle in his 2025 memoir Vagabond, with encounters with David Bowie and nights at Studio 54 alongside Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Carly Simon … By the end of his career, Curry had acting credits in roughly 126 movies and feature films, making him the sort of omnipresent figure that feels like part of the very fabric of pop culture … Of his penchant for playing villains, Curry told The Guardian in a 2025 interview, ‘I’ve always tried to make them amusing, which gives them a bit more edge. It’s like people being drawn to the scene of a car crash … ‘”
Curry is of course best known for his role in Rocky Horror, but we are featuring his performance as the con artist Rooster Hannigan in the 1982 movie version of Annie, alongside Bernadette Peters and Carol Burnett. With a score written by Charles Strouse, the film followed the 1977 Broadway hit. “Initially intended as a major production number, the final version (of ‘Easy Street’) is more contained, but still crackles with villainous chemistry,” (Golden Age Flicks). Starting in Bb major, the tune makes a bouncy shift to B major around the 1:25 mark. Several more dizzy jumps in tonality follow; meanwhile, the actors are completely absorbed in delivering relaxed-looking but exquisitely choreographed physical comedy.
