Thanks, unique.
Parents, you are responsible for previewing.
Maynard Ferguson ~ Funny Valentine
If you would like to be added/removed from the
Canteen Music Ping List, please
FReepmail Kathy In Alaska
Cue the Rockumentary theme!
This band was Motown’s Funk Brothers backed with pickup musicians from the Detroit Symphony.
Tandyn Almer (1942-2013) spent his life as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. In the mid-Sixties it looked like he might become the next Dylan, but it never happened.
He was born Tandyn Douglas Almer in 1942 in Minneapolis. At the age of 4, he was playing classical music by ear on the piano. When his parents divorced, he and his mother moved into a basement apartment with two pianos; he pushed them together and played both at the same time.
He had conservatory training but put it aside when he became fascinated with the jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He quit school and moved to Chicago to become a jazz pianist, but by the early Sixties, he’d moved to Los Angeles, where he shifted to rock. That’s when he heard Bob Dylan, and his musical world changed.
In those days you could walk into the music department at UCLA, plunk down some money and rent a practice room. Almer commuted across L.A. from UCLA, where he practiced, to Los Angeles City College, where he graduated in 1964. At nights he worked at the Troubador where he played bass for Linda Ronstadt and others who were coming up in the entertainment world.
Like so many others in that era, Almer took up marijuana and LSD. It was during this period that he invented the Slave Master, the world’s most efficient marijuana smoking device. Its users affectionately call it the “Bong Shelter”.
In 1965, he wrote “Along Comes Mary”, which of course is about Mary Jane, a.k.a. marijuana. Followers of Professor Publius know all about the major and minor modes in music. But there are other modes that are heard in jazz, liturgical music and ancient music. There is a mode called the Dorian mode, often used in jazz. “Along Comes Mary” is not written in A minor, but in A Dorian.
What caught the attention of producers and musicians was not so much the Dorian mode, but the lyrics. I reproduce them in full.
Every time I think that I'm the only one who's lonely, someone calls on me,
And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse and curse those faults in me,
And then along comes Mary,
And does she want to give me kicks, and be my steady chick and give me pick of memories,
Or maybe rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations no one ever sees?
When we met I was sure out to lunch.
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch.
When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play,
And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes as who is most to blame today,
And then along comes Mary,
And does she want to set them free, and let them see reality from where she got her name,
And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers will make them not the same?
When we met I was sure out to lunch.
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch.
And when the morning of the warning’s passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars.
The psychodramas and the traumas gone the songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars,
And then along comes Mary,
And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains she left the night before,
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them realize their urgent cry for sight no more?
When we met I was sure out to lunch.
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch.
It’s almost a sonnet. A long question is laid out, and it’s answered in the two-line chorus. It was sophisticated enough for Leonard Bernstein to interview Almer in his 1967 CBS special on rock, and even light Almer’s cigarette for him.
Almer recorded a demo of his songs where he did most of his own singing, but Linda Ronstadt also sang a few of his numbers as a favor. “Along Comes Mary” started life as a Dylan-like slow song like “Desolation Row”. Curt Boettcher, producer of the Association for Valiant Records, a small independent label, heard Almer’s demo. He helped Almer arrange it for the band – catch the flute solo at 1:41 – but the biggest thing Boettcher did was to speed it up.
The result was a huge hit, and Warner Brothers acquired Valiant for a large sum for the sole purpose of getting the Association under contract.