Election Crunch Time: THE VIDEO

The article below is now a video.

Music Video

One thing I have been doing is putting together some music videos. The first one is one that some of you "old-timers" may remember, a Jim Pepper composition entitled "Witchi Tai To", from Brewer and Shipley's 1969 album, "Weeds". I think it's a beautiful song, and I find it very uplifting and relaxing. I tried to capture that feeling with the images I selected to go with the song.


Here's a little background on the song:

Songwriter and saxophonist Jim Pepper adapted the song "Witchi Tai To" from from an old peyote chant that he learned from his Native American grandfather. Pepper's song was first recorded by his band Everything Is Everything, who to this day are credited with having the only hit to feature an authentic Native American chant in the history of the Billboard pop charts. The group's producers encouraged Pepper to express his Native American heritage in his music, so he brought one of his grandfather's peyote chants and they worked out the arrangement and English translation. "Witchi Tai To", became a cult favorite and leftfield hit, reaching #69 on the Billboard Charts in 1969.

Brewer and Shipley learned the lyrics to "Witchi Tai To" by listening to Everything Is Everything's recording on an FM station beaming out of Little Rock, Arkansas. It is ironic that they correctly interpreted the Native American lyrics but misinterpreted the adapted English lyrics.

Here are the two different versions of the lyrics. Funny thing is that I never noticed that Brewer and Shipley got it "wrong". When I listen to the song, I hear "Water spirit feelings", hence the water images in the video when those lyrics are sung:

Everything is Everything
Water spirit feelings
Springin' round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I'm not dead

Brewer & Shipley
What a spirit spring
Is bringing round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead

Indian chant
Witchi Tai Tai, kimarah
Whoa Ron-nee Ka
Whoa Ron-nee Ka
Hey-ney, hey-ney, no-wah

My Best Video To Date

Well, at least I think it is anyway. The song is meant to be a satire, but, of course, you, the listener can take it any way you want to; you have the final say. I put together images and video to go along with the song's lyrics as they are. This is Randy Newman's "Let's Drop the Big One Now." Personally, as I get older and more curmudgeonly, I tend to think, "What the fuck? Why not?" Just kidding...or am I?

The blast at the end is the Soviet bomb named "The Tsar". It's the largest tested bomb in history, coming in at over 50 megatons - roughly all the tonnage used in WWII - times 8.

Another Music Video

This song goes back to 1973, a sort of obscure offering by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, known then as Buckingham Nicks. The album of the same name was the result of a demo and received some airplay on FM stations at the time (I do remember hearing it on the radio as a kid). This was before they joined Fleetwood Mac who heard the duo when Stevie and Lindsey were in the same studio working on their second album (which never materialized) in 1975 following what was to be their final concert as Buckingham Nicks.

Buckingham and Nicks were recording material for their second album when Fleetwood Mac happened to be in the same studio. "They were just looking for a place to record, but after hearing our music they asked us to join and we just couldn't turn them down," explained Stevie.

The rest, as they say, is history.

A "popular" Buckingham Nicks song (among insiders and cultish followers), "Crying in the Night", is presented here as another of my slide-shows set to music. The two were romantically as well as musically involved, and perhaps this song was a bit biographical (as well as another song from the album, "Frozen Love") and a portent of their tumultuous break-up during the recording of their second album with Fleetwood Mac, the HUGELY successful "Rumours". I tried to tell that story with this video.



I have a particular fondness for this song because, once upon a time, I had the album and subsequently sold it (for which I am kicking myself now). I liked the song so much that, even after not hearing it for maybe 15 years, it was the first song that came to mind for me to download when I first got on the internet several years back. Stevie's voice had a real innocence and clarity back then, and it blended so well with Lindsey's, creating harmonies that had that magic quality. This song also captures what I call the "Southwest Sound" of the early and mid-70's - an easy-going, mellow-rock epitomized by bands like early Eagles, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, and others of that era. There's a nostalgic purity to that sound of when times were simpler, and nothing matches that today.

Visit the Buckingham Nicks fan site for some great photos and more background.

Brewer & Shipley: The Story Behind the Music - and My First Video Production!

A few weeks ago I presented (via Youtube) one of Brewer and Shipley's "cult clasic tunes", and the following song, "Don't Want to Die in Georgia," from the same album is another. It has a message and a story behind it, and the music has what I call a funky-folk feel. Below is a video slideshow I put together with the song as a backdrop. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome for Brewer and Shipley!

Story of Don't Want to Die in Georgia

1971 concert banter

Michael: “We'd like to do a song that sprang from our basic fear of the deep south. Actually our fears were unwarranted."

Tom: "Your fears were unwarranted. I still expect to be buried in a swamp down there."

Michael: (laughing) "No man. We met a lot of really nice people down there."

Tom: (in southern drawl) "Real nice!"

Michael: "We had to go to Atlanta one time, and Tom was really afraid."

Tom: "Horrified."

Michael: "We were flying in, he said ‘Ah man, I don’t want to die in Georgia’..... We wrote a song about it."

There are too many groups and individuals who have had great commercial success that I would not walk across the street to hear or see; rap, hip-hop, and other garbage that tries to pass as music these days are prime examples. We live in a "karaoke generation" where far too many people simply want fame and cash and actually fool themselves and their audiences into - not just thinking, but actually believing - that they have "talent." Talentless performers for a tasteless audience I call it. As the late Bill Hicks once quipped, "If you're in marketing or advertising - just kill yourselves now...You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage." That is the only reason 90% of what you hear on radio these days ever gets there in the first place.

Thanks to Radioio.com/70's Rock I have been having a great time rediscovering a lot of great old music and hearing some stuff I have never heard, either from bands with which I was unfamiliar or with songs I never heard from bands I have heard. One of these is Brewer and Shipley. Their songs were emblematic of the political and social unrest of the late 60's-early 70's. While I am certainly no liberal, I have great appreciation for many of the messages found in the music of that era. Brewer and Shipley were a folk-rock duo who sang about what they saw going on around them, and their voices blended together in such a way that it had a certain magic quality that has to be heard, a quality similar to that of Loggins and Messina and others, but unique unto themselves. You have probably heard their fairly big hit "One Toke Over the Line" and maybe thought they were just a "one hit wonder." That my be the case in terms of commercial success, but, as already stated above, commercial success means little to me and often has nothing to do with talent. Here's a little more of the story behind the music:

"Don't Want To Die In Georgia," from Brewer and Shipley's 'Tarkio' album, is another song about freedom and the restrictions placed upon it circa 1970. "Our music has always been somewhat autobiographical, reflecting our own experiences at the time," explains Brewer. "Our first three albums are like mini-time capsules in retrospect. Vietnam was still raging, and a lot of social unrest."

"Tom and I were traveling all over the heartland, and especially in the South, we pretty much were living Easy Rider. 'Cause here we were, a couple of guys wearing Nehru shirts, beads, and you didn't see a whole lot of that in those days. We really did have to pick and choose where we stopped to get something to eat or check into a motel or get gas." One such experience inspired "Don't Want to Die in Georgia": "One time we were doing something in Atlanta. John Lloyd, a black man who was a regional representative for Kama Sutra, was showing us around. There was so much tension, just because of the way we looked. And here we are with a black man too, and everybody knows how they were regarded, in those days especially. 'Don't Want to Die in Georgia' was sort of a metaphor for 'don't want to die anywhere,' really. It just happened to be Georgia.

"A lot of people would say a lot of that stuff was very political. But to us, it wasn't political at all. It was just social commentary, rather than political commentary. And even though we had social commentary, we also had spiritual commentary. That's probably why we're glad the message came across without slapping anybody in the face, or trying to cram anything down anybody's throat. We were just reflecting our own views. We've always pushed love as the only answer we know of that might fix things. I don't know how that's ever gonna happen, but that's what we think."