Guest Post: "Test Tracks #5", by John Marks

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(The story so far: Test Tracks #1 — Test Tracks #2 — Test Tracks #3 — Test Tracks #4)

Here are additional selections from the audio tracks I sometimes use for the subjective evaluation of drivers and loudspeakers. (I have been listening to some of these tracks for more than 40 years.) The theme of this list is Pleasures, Both Guilty and Innocent.

By which I mean, music that people who don’t know you well might be surprised to learn that you actually listen to. So, these might not be the first tracks I play when a new piece of audio equipment shows up. But, in the fullness of time, I might play them. Perhaps the Hidden Agenda of this playlist is that you can “Radio-Carbon Date” me by these tracks! (I am very proud of that pun.)

QOBUZ — TIDAL

Of course, for many of the albums these tracks come from, you can shop on eBay or on Discogs.com for the LPs or CDs.

Please note: To its credit, Qobuz does not “normalize” the volume level of its tracks; therefore, you might have to adjust the volume levels as you go. If you listen on Tidal, you might wish to check your Account’s Settings, and defeat “Loudness Normalization” if necessary.

1. The Raspberries, “Go All the Way” (Eric Carmen), from Raspberries (recorded 1972).

The hissing sound you hear is all the Helium escaping from the balloon that formerly had been my reputation as a musically-sophisticated person. The Raspberries? Are you joking? No I am not joking.

Back in the day, one of my friends commented that the opening guitar chords of “Go All the Way” (which were, at best, an homage to The Who, and at worst, rank copycatting) would lead you to expect greatness; however, once the band began singing, you got romantic mush.

I understood where he was coming from, but I thought that the songwriting was clever enough to sustain interest. Indeed, Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh suggested that the song could have been written by Paul McCartney.

However, seeing as Marsh was writing during Paul McCartney’s “Wings” period, that bar truly was not all that high. In any event, a comparison to Badfinger probably is closer to the mark.

“Go All the Way” is the song that a reconstituted Raspberries would play today as “A Medley of Our Greatest Hit.” (Singular.) “Go All the Way” reached position #5 on three different US charts, and it remains the Raspberries’ only Gold Record.

For me, apart from its smooth but punchy recording job (engineer Shelly Yakus was experimenting with a new dynamic-limiter box, and it shows), the Unique Selling Proposition of “Go All the Way” is that, although the band that is singing is all-male (all band members sang backup vocals, including the drummer), the lyrics quote the girlfriend. Therefore, it is the girlfriend who is politely requesting a sexual encounter, not the boyfriend.

I think that it is no accident that, when Eric Carmen and his mates are singing the words spoken by the girlfriend, they are singing at the tops of their vocal ranges, almost like choirboys trying to sing the soprano parts in an opera. Carmen did say that he structured the narrative of the song (my words not his) in order to avoid censorship: “I figured that made me seem a little more innocent.”

Love them, or hate the Raspberries, the opening chords of “Go All the Way” lit the fuse on a powder keg of Power Pop music.

(By the way, decades later, I had dinner with the Raspberries’ then-former Executive Producer Herb Belkin, who, after working for Capitol and other labels, took over running Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. Herb told me that the Raspberries “could have been as big as Grand Funk Railroad,” except for Eric Carmen’s manifest characterological failings. Well, Herb did not use exactly those words.)

2. Badfinger, “Baby Blue” (Pete Ham), from Straight Up (recorded 1971).

Speaking of Power Pop! The band Badfinger was founded, under a different name, in Wales in 1961. Badfinger had the mixed good and bad luck to be in the outer orbit of the musical phenomenon we call “The British Invasion.” As a result, they eventually were signed (as The Iveys) to the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd’s Apple Records label (in 1968).

Indeed, Badfinger was the first non-Beatles band or performer to be signed to Apple Records. Not long after, James Taylor became the first non-UK performer signed to Apple Records.

And yes, the cover photos for both the albums Raspberries and Straight Up feature four lads with waves upon mounds of Big Hair. Those were the days, my friends.

Back to Badfinger’s mixed luck. Paul McCartney allowed them to record the song “Come and Get It,” which he had written for the Ringo Starr “vehicle movie” The Magic Christian. (Other cast members included John Cleese and Graham Chapman—pre-Monty Python—and, Raquel Welch.)

That launched the newly-renamed band with a hit. However, in what would become a pattern, McCartney, as producer, dominated the recording sessions and prevented the band from using their own musical ideas.

Badfinger band members then helped George Harrison record the triple-LP album All Things Must Pass; some laid down tracks for John Lennon’s solo album Imagine (which apparently were not used); and they all performed live at The Concert for Bangladesh.

While those opportunities might have given them some street credibility among other musicians, it might have also been the case that that work only served to lock in the perception that the members of Badfinger were session musicians who needed to be told what to do.

When it came time to record Badfinger’s second album, Geoff Emerick (of Beatles fame) was chosen by Apple Records to produce, but his tracks were rejected. I find that decision capricious in the extreme, seeing as how Emerick had been awarded Engineering Grammys both for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.

(Of course I am aware that engineering and production are different functions; but I also think that it is obvious that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band successfully blurred that distinction.)

George Harrison then took over and recorded four tracks, but Harrison then shifted his focus to the Bangladesh record project. Todd Rundgren was hired to finish the album, but again, the band lacked not just creative control, but also any meaningful creative input.

Laws, sausages, and recording projects, my young friends. Laws and sausages and recording projects… If you like any of the above, perhaps it is better to be ignorant of the processes by which they are made.

Which is to say that, despite its apparently contentious origins, I think that “Baby Blue” is a perfect example of a successful Power Pop song. Ringing guitars at the start, massive drum hits, and yearning, earnest, high male vocal harmonies, bewailing the loss of love. What’s not to like?

Of course, a naysayer could say that Badfinger was just doing a nip here and a tuck there on a formula that had been jointly worked out during the 1960s by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Four Seasons. I recognize that, but I don’t care.

In the event, Badfinger suffered from felony-class mismanagement (and embezzlement); they were sucked into the vortex of the breakup of The Beatles (via Apple Corps); and their switch to Warner Brothers was too little, too late. Lead singer and writer Pete Ham took his own life, at age 27. His daughter was born one month after his death. Eternal Rest, Grant Him O Lord.

3. The Left Banke, “Walk Away Renée” (Mike Brown, Bob Calilli, and Tony Sansone), (single) (recorded 1966).

Speaking of high male voices bewailing the loss of love… . Mike Brown, a besotted teenager (whose father just happened to be a violinist and a session player with his own recording studio) poured out all his unrequited love for a band-mate’s girlfriend into one of the foundational tracks of the “Baroque Pop” style. In 1966, there was nothing else like it on the AM airwaves.

“Walk Away Renée” includes a harpsichord, an orchestral-strings section (which sounds like it is a string quartet), an alto-flute solo, and a descending bass line. Not operatic, really; but perhaps “Walk Away Renée” is an updated Madrigal. And, of course, there are high male voices singing about a love that never was. One of my favorite self-penned witticisms is:

If humans were like amoebas,

And multiplied by dividing,

We would never need

Sad songs about lost love.

Co-songwriter Mike Brown played the harpsichord and sang backup vocals—not bad for age 16! The lead vocal was by Steve Martin Caro.

4. Linda Ronstadt, “Long, Long Time” (Gary White), from Silk Purse (recorded 1970).

The things people have to do, to get or keep recording contracts. For the cover photo of her second solo LP (she had, before her solo career, been a member of the folk group Stone Poneys), Linda Ronstadt had to get friendly with some pigs. In a pigsty. Why?

To my recollection, Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time” was the second Baroque Pop single (the other one being “Walk Away Renée”) to get lots of airplay in the 1960s-1970s era. The album from which it came was a mixed bag of country covers and a couple of new songs. No surprise, it was recorded in Nashville. (I should mention that Carole King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” is the non-country outlier among the previously-recorded songs on Silk Purse.) Members of the country-music instrumental collaborative known as Area Code 615 were the session players.

To my ears, Ronstadt’s vocal on “Long, Long Time” is opera-flavored country. And again, harpsichord and strings are front-and-center in the instrumental accompaniment (and also, there is what sounds like a classical guitar). All in the service of another song about a love that never was.

I might be imagining things, but there is an F#-G#-A repeating pattern in the accompaniment that strikes me as somewhat characteristic of Spanish music. I hear the same kind of intervallic progression in Al Stewart’s song “Year of the Cat,” by the way. If there are any experts out there: Is that from the F-sharp Aeolian Mode?

And, on the subjects of laws and sausages and recording projects, Linda Ronstadt later claimed to hate her album Silk Purse, saying “I couldn't sing then, I didn't know what I was doing.” I beg to differ. To me, she sounds like she was making a serious play for Maria Callas’s job at the Metropolitan Opera.

5. Phil Ochs, “Pleasures of the Harbor” (Phil Ochs), from Pleasures of the Harbor (recorded 1967).

Pleasures of the Harbor was Phil Ochs’s fourth LP, and his first release on the major label A&M. BTW, I have been told that Ochs’s family name is pronounced “Oakes.”

Although the rather poetic and wistful title track certainly qualifies as Baroque Pop, it did not get major airplay. Hardly any airplay at all. The song tells the story of an encounter between a lonely sailor on shore leave… and a sex worker.

AM radio was not only uninterested; AM radio was unsmiling. By the way, the session musicians included Lincoln Mayorga, and reportedly, the young Warren Zevon, playing guitar on the title track.

Furthermore, the orchestration goes beyond Baroque Pop, all the way to “A Romantic Film Score that Erich Korngold Could Have Penned.” I loved it. But Phil Oakes reportedly later regretted its excesses. You decide.

6. Richard Harris, “MacArthur Park” (Jimmy Webb), from A Tramp Shining (recorded 1967).

Despite its second life as a Donna Summer disco hit, “MacArthur Park” remains a No-Go Zone for many music lovers. That’s too bad, I say.

Yes, “MacArthur Park”’s gargantuan scale (an orchestra of 35 musicians) makes the orchestration of “Pleasures of the Harbor” sound like a very subdued Baroque Trio Sonata. But “MacArthur Park” did reach No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, second only to Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love with You.” Which actually was the songwriting team of Bacharach and David’s first No. 1 single.

The Who’s famous “Rock Opera” Tommy was still two years in the future; but, in 1967, songwriter Jimmy Webb set out to write an album-length Rock Cantata. He apparently got it in good-enough shape to present it to the pop vocal group The Association, but they were not interested.

Webb later was asked to play background piano at a charity event that was attended by then-Broadway and film star (Camelot) Richard Harris, the Irish actor. Harris told Webb that he wanted to record an album, so he was looking for songs. Although Harris had sung several numbers in the Camelot film, Webb was skeptical.

Harris persisted, and so Webb later traveled to London and played for Harris (it is not clear whether he played the piano, or played tapes) various songs from his catalog; but Harris was not wowed by them.

However, the last song Webb played for Harris was the cantata excerpt “MacArthur Park.” The rest is history. By the way, as far as I know, Webb remains the only musician, composer, or arranger to win Grammys in all of the categories Song of the Year, Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), and Best Country Song.

Webb later said that, far from being an acid trip or some other kind of psychedelic experience, everything he described in the song was (my phrase not his) a present-sense impression from one time or another.

Webb had a girlfriend he used to meet for lunch in MacArthur Park. He was very sweet on her; but, she found someone else. She then invited Webb to her outdoor wedding. Which, of course, was held in MacArthur Park. Ouch.

That is the origin of Webb’s mental image of their love’s being pressed by a “hot fevered iron” like a “stripèd pair of pants”—the striped dove-gray pants that are part of the formal attire for a wedding that takes place during the day. And so on. On another occasion, Webb had witnessed a sudden rain squall that ended a large family’s outdoor birthday party—someone left the cake out in the rain.

Harris’s “MacArthur Park” starts with a jangly harpsichord that might be doubled by a piano, and then the orchestral woodwinds enter. Again, at the time, there was nothing like it on the AM airwaves.

As a youngster, I was fascinated by anything I could find out about record production. I was so impressed upon learning that when Webb had scored the French Horn to play an impossibly high note, the producer recorded that solo passage both at half musical tempo and one octave lower, and then dubbed the passage into the mix at double tape speed (and therefore, an octave higher).

Here's an amazing live version with slightly different orchestration—at the start it is piano and classical guitar, rather than harpsichord and perhaps piano. The strong brass section reportedly was from one of Her Majesty’s regimental bands.

7. Hubert Laws, “Pavane” (Gabriel Fauré), from The Rite of Spring (recorded 1971).

If listening to the Raspberries and to “MacArthur Park” weren’t bad enough, I will now come out of the closet as loving an LP from the Label that Real Jazz People Love to Hate, Creed Taylor’s CTI records.

Creed Taylor, buoyed by the success of his Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd project Jazz Samba (which launched the Bossa-Nova Craze-let in the US), left Verve to found Creed Taylor, Inc. As previously noted, Creed Taylor did pay Eumir Deodato to record a “jazz” version of “Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Well, it won a Grammy, did it not?

But, at least in my opinion, Creed Taylor also made a few albums of lasting artistic value, and this brief sojourn by flautist Hubert Laws is one of them. The album is famous for its title track, but you must hear Laws’s take on Fauré’s “Pavane,” with Gene Bertoncini’s classical guitar so wonderfully recorded. The Bach Brandenburg Concerto movements, with some of NYC’s finest session players, strike me as quite true to Bach’s intentions; merely, updated in execution.

The recording was engineered by Rudy van Gelder, with the result that a lot of the sound is Hard-Left and Hard-Right, and therefore there’s not much of an organic stereo soundstage. But I have been “listening past” those quirks for decades, and I never get tired of this album. Even if many people will conclude that my affection for it means that I don’t “know anything about jazz.”

8. Al Stewart, “Year of the Cat” (Al Stewart and Peter Wood), from Year of the Cat (recorded 1976).

Speaking of Radio-Carbon Dating myself! Al Stewart had been making records for ten years before he struck paydirt with his Alan Parsons-produced (recorded at Abbey Road Studios) seventh album Year of the Cat. I have often said that it can take as long as 13 years in the business, before you can become an Overnight Sensation.

Remember the folk-ish duo Seals & Crofts? In 1958, they were session musicians and backup singers touring in support of a novelty single called “Tequila,” by The Champs.

In 1972, “Summer Breeze,” the title track to their fourth album as the duo “Seals & Crofts,” made them Overnight Sensations, breaking into the Top 10 in the Pop, Adult Contemporary, and Album charts. So, Al Stewart might have been a bit ahead of the usual curve.

BTW, in some Asian cultures, instead of having a Year of the Rabbit, they have a Year of the Cat. I have no idea whether Al Stewart knew that. I am sure that the kitschy cat-themed cartoon album cover, with the Femme Fatale girl getting dressed for a costume party, sold lots of LPs.

And, speaking of tracks that have lots of Hard Left and Hard Right, the song “Year of the Cat” starts with a piano-and-bass intro that is locked in Solitary Confinement inside the Left loudspeaker. But, when the rest of the instruments enter, it is more of the usual Pop “mixdown” presentation. Crank it up!

Audiophiles with very long memories might recall that the album Year of the Cat was among the first ten LP releases on the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab label (MFSL 1-009). My surmise is that after Herb Belkin, who was then at ABC Records, had “primed MFSL’s pump” by licensing to MFSL titles such as Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, The Crusaders’ Chain Reaction, and John Klemmer’s Touch, MFSL had gained enough credibility to license hit albums from other major labels, such as RCA. There are several early MFSL Year of the Cat LPs on offer on Discogs.com; the asking prices are surprisingly reasonable.

9. “George Michael and ‘Wham!’,” “Careless Whisper” (George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley), from Make It Big (recorded 1983).

For the guitar solo in “Peg” (from Aja), Steely Dan’s Becker and Fagan legendarily auditioned and rejected seven session guitar players before settling upon Jay Graydon. However, before anyone hands Becker and Fagan an award, please know that George Michael went through eight saxophone players before settling upon Steve Gregory for the sax solo in “Careless Whisper.”

Listened to again, from a distance of 40 years, Make It Big makes plain its debt to Motown’s musical culture. The opening track, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” is rather obvious about its up-tempo Motown roots. But “Careless Whisper” could pass for a rare sad Motown ballad.

I think that George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were in the right place at the right time with the right record, a worldwide hit that seemingly came out of nowhere. A song with the hook line “Guilty feet have got no rhythm” could just as easily have sunk without a trace. But, in the event, it became one of those “once heard, never forgotten” hook lines.

Regrets, George Michael had a few. Especially about “Careless Whisper.”

In 1991 he was quoted as saying, “It disappoints me that you can write a lyric very flippantly—and not a particularly good lyric—and it can mean so much to so many people. That's disillusioning for a writer.”

10. Helen Folasade Adu, “Smooth Operator” (Sade Adu and Ray St. John), from Diamond Life (recorded 1983).

Talk about coming out of nowhere. Anglo-Nigerian Helen Folasade Adu studied fashion design, and then briefly worked as a model. She then began singing backup for the UK band Pride. She soon began doing solo sets featuring the song “Smooth Operator,” which she had co-written.

After briefly appearing as a solo act in New York, she signed as a solo artist with Epic records, while her bandmates signed on as contractors. Therefore, if you want to get picky, “Sade” (pronounced Shah-DAY) was the name of the band. As a band, Sade has been rather successful—all their albums reached the Top 10 in the US.

The album Diamond Life fell like a thunderclap upon 1980s musical culture, selling more than 10 million copies. Diamond Life became the best-selling début recording by a female UK singer, a distinction that endured for 24 years.

I think one of the subtle, nearly-subconscious things that makes “Smooth Operator” linger in peoples’ brains is that, as Sade Adu dispassionately and matter-of-factly sings about the coldhearted international con-man she is hooked up with, she betrays not a shred of moral revulsion.

The problem apparently isn’t that the guy is an international con-man, because Sade Adu memorably sings, “We move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy.” The problem is that his heart is cold—toward her. (He might be a part-time Gigolo, with other women on the side.) Doesn’t that make the narrator of the story in the song a bit of a “Smooth Operator” herself?

I also think that her line about their life together’s having “No place for beginners or sensitive hearts” is fully the equal to “Guilty feet have got no rhythm,” in terms of being the one inspired line that defines a great song.

Another thing that contributed to “Smooth Operator”’s remarkable commercial success is that it is one more hit pop single with a compelling saxophone solo—two, in fact; the intro and the bridge.

Whereas, the song “Year of the Cat” has only one sax solo. But it’s a solo that might make you think that Gato Barbieri was playing it. In truth, that solo was played by Phil Kenzie, whose credits include the Beatles and the Eagles, and many other bands that were not named after living creatures.

It goes without saying that the recorded sound of Diamond Life is of Demonstration Quality.

Alright! To paraphrase my mentor Boris Goldovsky (of the Metropolitan Opera): “That’s it, Kiddos!”

John Marks is a multidisciplinary generalist and a lifelong audio hobbyist. He was educated at Brown University and Vanderbilt Law School. He has worked as a music educator, recording engineer, classical-music record producer and label executive, and as a music and audio-equipment journalist. He was a columnist for The Absolute Sound, and also for Stereophile magazine. His consulting clients have included Steinway & Sons, the University of the South (Sewanee, TN), and Grace Design.