One of my favorite places to waste time on the ’Net is the Airheads Radio Survey Archive, a massive collection of the handouts from radio stations that listed their current top records. The surveys were usually handed out at record stores, as I recall. I remember seeing them during the early 1970s at the Musicland store in our local mall.
I don’t think I ever grabbed one, but lots of folks did, as the ARSA site has 157,449 of them as of this morning, covering a span of time from the late 1940s to the current decade. The holdings for St. Cloud, as an example, start with a handful of surveys from KFAM, which I believe was St. Cloud’s first radio station. The KFAM surveys come from the Forties and Fifties and list traditional pop with a slight country tinge now and then. During the mid-Seventies, KFAM became KCLD and went Top 40, and surveys from KCLD pick up at the website in 1980 and go into 1984.
Surveys from the Twin Cities’ KDWB – my Top 40 listening choice during my youth – begin in September 1959 and stretch on to a survey from April last year. That 2022 survey may be an anomaly, as the most recent KDWB survey before that is from April 1995. But the site has a pretty comprehensive collection of KDWB’s surveys. There are 1,485 surveys from KDWB listed, and some rough math tells me there were about 1,800 weeks between September 1959 and April 1995, which means that the ARSA site has the vast majority of KDWB’s surveys from between those two months.
I thought about digging into a KDWB survey this morning, but when I got to ARSA, I noticed a list of recent acquisitions released on June 19 over the years. One of those was a 1971 survey from WZMF in Milwaukee, which at the time was what was called a “progressive” station. In other words, WZMF generally avoided the hits and held to album tracks, even some that might be obscure. Here are the ten albums that WZMF listed on its survey on June 19, 1971, fifty-two years ago today:
Aretha Live at Fillmore West by Aretha Franklin
Every Picture Tells A Story by Rod Stewart
The Flying Burrito Bros.
Lovejoy by Albert King
Mudlark by Leo Kottke
Leon Russell & The Shelter People
Second Contribution by Shawn Phillips
Summer Side Of Life by Gordon Lightfoot
Sweathog
Winwood by Steve Winwood
That last entry baffles me, as I know of no self-titled album by Steve Winwood from 1971, nor does discogs.com have one listed. Winwood’s name – with his last name in all capital letters – is the first listed on Traffic’s 1971 release Welcome To The Canteen, so that might be the album in question.
As to the other nine, seven of them are here on the digital shelves. The only ones missing digitally are the Albert King and Flying Burrito Brothers albums. (I have some of the FBB album from an anthology, but not the entire album.) And of the seven that are here on the digital shelves, the Sweathog album is the only one I never had as an LP.
So that’s a list of very familiar music, although it would not necessarily been familiar at the time: I did not own any of those records for many years. Still, I would have heard a lot of them the next fall as I visited friends in the dorms at St. Cloud State. And the album title in that survey that attracts my attention the most is Second Contribution, released in 1971 by Shawn Phillips.
Phillips is a Texan who during the early Seventies was, for reasons I’ve never understood, a huge draw in Minnesota and the rest of the Upper Midwest. His music was . . . well, Bruce Eder of All Music writes:
Shawn Phillips is one of most fascinating and enigmatic musicians to come out of the early-’70s singer/songwriter boom. The mere fact that he is a virtuoso musician as much as a singer and songwriter allowed him to stand out and attract a dedicated following. His refusal to pigeonhole his music – which seamlessly melds folk, rock, jazz, funk, progressive, pop, electro, classical, and global folk traditions – to meet anyone else's expectations allowed him to retain his cult following without ever achieving the stardom that his talent seemed to merit. Though Phillips began recording for Columbia in the mid-’60s (and worked on Donovan’s records from the period), it was his virtually unclassifiable run of ten ’70s LPs for A&M – including Contribution, Second Contribution, Faces, Bright White, and Spaced – that established his reputation for boundless, nearly peerless creativity and virtuosity. Phillips was a musical shapeshifter. His work as a virtuoso 12-string guitarist combined with his four-octave vocal range fascinated and confounded some critics, but resonated with listeners.
I’ve enjoyed Phillips’ music since my pal Rick played Second Contribution for me one rainy day in 1971. And I saw Phillips in concert at St. Cloud State in early 1973. But as intrigued as I was, I didn’t try to track down his albums until the 1980s. (Too much other music to explore.) And I wound up with ten of his albums on the LP shelves. The most difficult to track down in good condition was Second Contribution because the first track starts with a quiet acapella section, and any used copy I ever got obscured that portion of the track with hiss. (That problem was solved in 2005 when I found the album on CD.)
That first track, colloquially known as “Woman,” actually has the unwieldy title of “She Was Waitin’ For Her Mother At The Station In Torino And You Know I Love You Baby But It’s Getting Too Heavy To Laugh,” and it’s the first portion of what turns out to be a four-song suite. The other three songs in the suite are “Keep On,” “Sleepwalker” and “Song for Mr. C.”
I could try to describe that suite, but I’ve never
had the right words for it, which is a disturbing failing for someone who made a
living finding the right words. The best I can say is that whenever that first
portion of Second Contribution pops up, either in iTunes or on
the RealPlayer, it’s the sound of the early Seventies:
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