‘His Hope Was A Rope . . .’

 Sometimes, just to remind me of tunes I might have set aside in my memory, I look at a Billboard Top Ten from fifty or sixty years ago. Sometimes I split the difference and look at stuff from fifty-five years ago. The tunes from any one of those long-ago years are usually all familiar and likely spark memories. 

So, let’s see. If we go with fifty years ago, we get to October of 1972, when Top 40 was becoming less important to me than album rock, a process triggered by my hanging around the student radio station at St. Cloud State. The FM station had cast off its classical programming the previous spring in favor of the progressive format offered by numerous commercial stations around the country: album tracks – often played back-to-back – offered by disk jockeys who talked in conversational tones (as opposed to the rapid-fire Wolfman Jack-style patter heard on many Top 40 stations). 

So, instead of digging into the Billboard Hot 100, let’s instead take a look at the top of the album chart from fifty years ago this week: 

Superfly (soundtrack) by Curtis Mayfield
Carney by Leon Russell
Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues
Never A Dull Moment by Rod Stewart
Chicago V
All Directions by the Temptations
Rock of Ages by The Band
The London Chuck Berry Sessions
Honky Chateau by Elton John
Ben by Michael Jackson 

There’s some good stuff there, and some stuff that – both fifty years ago and today – get some side-eye (most notably the Chuck Berry album, from which came his biggest hit, the execrable “My Ding-A-Ling”). I didn’t own any of those at the time. I was a poor college student and I was still investing my money in catching up on tunes from earlier years, having come late to rock and pop. 

Five of those eventually ended up on my LP shelves. I somehow missed the albums by Chicago and Rod Stewart, and I was never interested in the albums by the Temptations, Berry and Jackson. Years later, when I was assembling an LP collection too large to listen to, I added a fair amount of music by Berry, Jackson, and the Temptations, but not those particular albums. 

So, the albums by Mayfield, Russell, the Moody Blues, The Band and Elton John mattered to me during the LP days, and four of those five – all except Leon Russell’s Carney – sit on the CD shelves. All five of them, along with the Rod Stewart and Chicago albums – are on the digital shelves. 

Are they great albums? Superfly is a soundtrack, one with two great singles – “Freddie’s Dead” and the title track. Days of Future Passed is where the Moody Blues – after some years of figuring things out – became the Moody Blues as we remember them: mystical and sometimes pretentious. Rock of Ages presents The Band live during their best years, but I tend to prefer their studio work. The albums by Russell, John, Chicago and Stewart are good but not the best work from any of them. 

But if we boil all that down to the best track from the ten albums we began with, well, we end up with “Freddie’s Dead” from Superfly:

– whiteray