Tag Archives: Music et al

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

July 1968

Eric Burdon

Eric Burdon with the Animals were part of the British Invasion in 1964. Their “House of the Rising Sun” stuck an earworm into  American teenagers’ heads that still resides there. What Boomer can hear those first few guitar notes without immediately recognizing the song? Perhaps it was one of the first licks you learned on guitar? (click and see!)

American blues dominated the Animals’ early albums, but like Bob Dylan’s job on Maggie’s farm and John Lennon’s Norwegian wood lover, Eric Burdon did not stay with the girl he brung to the dance.

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

Eric Burdon & the Animals

With his release of Winds of Change (the title echoing,  of course, Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin” as well as his line in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), Burdon allowed the times to change his content.

Such compositions as “The Black Plague” and “San Franciscan Nights” signaled those changes.

The Twain Shall Meet

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

1968. The Vietnam war raged and demonstrations regularly filled streets. Campuses seemed to have become places to sit in to protest, not to sit in a desk.

In May, MGM record released Eric Burdon and the Animals single, “Sky Pilot.” The following month, the song would be part of the “The Twain Shall Meet” album.

Even more than the popular “Monterey” on that album [Burdon’s reflections on the Monterey Pop Festival, an event he and the Animals performed at], “Sky Pilot” is the album’s strongest song.

Sky Pilot

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

He blesses the boys

As they stand in line

The smell of gun grease

And the bayonets they shine

He’s there to help them

All that he can

To make them feel wanted

He’s a good holy man

In some ways the song is as powerful as Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. Hendrix’s performance declared that those who were anti-Establishment were also entitled to our nation’s anthem.

Sky Pilot” (particularly with its inclusion the traditional bag piped “All the Bluebonnets Are Over the Border”) questions not only war, but whether God was on our side, or whether God’s self-appointed representative, the Sky Pilot, was even on God’s side.

Released as a two-sided single, many radio stations stated that its length too long and style not “pop” enough.  Be that as it may, the song remains among the elite of anti-war songs.

The whole band wrote the song: Eric Burdon, Vic Briggs, John Weider, Barry Jenkins, and Danny McCulloch

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

All the Blue Bonnets

It is interesting to listen to just the bag pipes song after listening to the Animal’s song with its inclusion.

Eric Burdon Animals Sky Pilot

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean Society
band Cartoon album cover
             “Wa Wa Wa” by King Oliver & His Orchestra.
Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Old story

The morning after Super Bowls, discussions about the halftime show are often more intense than than those about the game itself. Remember the outrage of some after Beyonce’s 2016 performance? Lady Gaga got off easy.  Some performers refuse invitations to show support for a cause.

It’s an old story: society debating what music is proper.

When radio stations discovered that listeners loved music, that debate included the airwaves.

WMCA-AM radio went on the air on February 6, 1925 and by December 1926, the station aired popular music continuously from 9 am to 5 pm – an unusually long broadcast period for that time. It soon became the first station in the NY metropolitan area to regularly program into the post-midnight hours.

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Clean Sunday Society

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean Society

On March 14, 1927,  John Henry Maynor, the secretary of the New York City Keep-the-Air-Clean-Sunday Society, sent a letter to WMCA objecting to the station playing of jazz music on Sunday nights, charging that it was “degrading” and “defaming.”  The show’s Milton M Roemer read the letter on the air.

New York Times article about the objection read: Whether jazz and other secular music should be allowed on the radio on Sunday or whether the air should be restricted to sacred music on that day was the question put up to the radio audience last night by Milton M. Roemer, director of a group which broadcasts an hour of music from 6 to 7 o’clock every Sunday evening from Station WMCA, Hotel McAlpin.

Roemer had asked his listeners to let him know whether they wanted to continue listening to his jazz selections (as well as the station’s other secular music on Sundays) or not. He left it up to them.

In response, listeners flooded the station with letters stating they had no objection to the one-hour program. Among those letters was one from a Colonel James E Dedman, the commanding officer of a local veterans hospital. He said that 400 disabled soldiers enjoyed the show and would miss it greatly if it were discontinued. [NYT article].

Arthur Batchelor, the Federal Radio Inspector for the New York District, explained that he had no power to censor the content of radio programs, but that he was referring the matter to the newly created Federal Radio Commission. In the 1920s and 1930s, many self-appointed guardians of public morals condemned this new music called “jazz.” The rhythms that moralists feared would lead people to immoral behavior prompted these attacks. And jazz was primarily performed by African-Americans.

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Federal Radio Commission

On March 20, 1927 the Federal Radio Commission called for a presentation of views on what could be done to regulate “chaos out of the ether.”

In reply to the criticism of WMCA’s Sunday music format, Donald Flamm, the president of the station, announced that “until popular opinion should dictate that he should do otherwise, he would continue the present policy of alternating light music and jazz with religious music on his Sabbath radio programs.” [NYT article]

Of course, in the 1950s and 1960s, the self-appointed guardians of public morals had the same objections to rock and roll just as those guardians have today with hip-hop and other “immoral” music.

Keep Sunday Airwaves Clean

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records
cover of Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon

I have already done piece on Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records.

In it, I briefly referred to the part the Nonesuch label played in relation to Holzman’s Elektra label.

In today’s post I will concentrate on Nonesuch Records.

Paquito D’Rivera recorded this piece with his group for the album Funk-Tango on 2006, featuring Fernando Otero on piano. The album won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Also David Harrington, from the Kronos Quartet , showed interest for this piece.Fernando wrote the String Quartet named *The Cherry Tree* for Kronos, which was premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 22nd, 2008.

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Paperback records

The quick history of Nonesuch is that Holzman founded the label n 1964  to produce “fine records at the same price as a trade paperback” (Holzman in Gavan Daws’s Follow the Music (1998).

At first the label concentrated on chamber and baroque music. In 1970, Holzman sold Elektra and Nonesuch to Kinney National Company, which became Warner Communications and later part of Time Warner’s Warner Music Group.

Teresa Sterne was the director of Nonesuch from 1965 – 1979 and expanded the labels musical horizons. According to a NYT article, “…she brought attention to areas of music neglected by the major labels, particularly contemporary music and American vernacular music. She championed American composers like George Crumb, Elliott Carter, Morton Subotnick, Charles Wuorinen and Donald Martino, not just recording their works but commissioning them, an unusual move for the leader of a record company. She also issued important recordings of lesser-known works by Schoenberg, Busoni, Stravinsky and other major figures. 

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Warner Bros actions

When Warner terminated Stern’s contract in 1979, twenty-two artists signed a letter sent to the New York Times expressing their sadness of her forced departure and also stated that they felt she had “had the courage and foresight to build a catelogue of unparalleled interest, importance and beauty.” 

Jac’s brother Keith Holzman operated the label from Los Angeles until 1984 when Bob Hurwitz became the Nonesuch President. In 2014, the Well-Tempered Ear blog interviewed Bob Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch Records. and David Bither, its senior Vice-President. 

Within the first two years under Hurwitz’s leadership, Nonesuch released albums by such “new music” pioneers as Steve Reich (The Desert Music, 1985), John Adams (Harmonielehre, 1986), Philip Glass (Mishima, 1985), John Zorn (The Big Gundown, 1985), and Kronos Quartet (Kronos Quartet, 1986).

For a great introduction to the broad range of Nonesuch music today, see their radio station at its site.

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records