{"id":35745,"date":"2013-04-26T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-26T17:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35745"},"modified":"2013-04-26T07:22:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T12:22:00","slug":"take-a-break-adele","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35745","title":{"rendered":"Take A Break, Adele"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Put those Amy Winehouse records away.<\/p>\n<p>Wherever you are, Duffy, take five.<\/p>\n<p>Kelly Clarkson? \u00a0I love you, hon, but take a knee and listen up.<\/p>\n<p>Nicky Minaj? \u00a0Lady Gaga? \u00a0Taylor Swift? \u00a0Take a seat.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I was was watching Steve Van Zandt&#8217;s hilarious\u00a0<em>Lilyhammer<\/em> &#8211; a Norwegian TV\/Netflix collaboration about a mobster (what else?) that goes into witness protection in northern Norway &#8211; the other night. \u00a0In addition to starring and being the executive producer, he&#8217;s one of the music directors for the show &#8211; and say what you will about Van Zandt, but his taste in other peoples&#8217; music is impeccable.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; over the closing credits of episode 2 of the first season rolled a song that even I, with my encyclopedic knowledge of music trivia, barely remembered; Evie Sands&#8217; 1970 cover of the Troggs (and The Liverpool Five&#8217;s) 1966 hit &#8220;Anyway That You Want Me&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Only much, much better; in place of the Troggs&#8217; awkward tone-deaf garage punk, shimmering white soul:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bFW0wO3fAFw\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And I remember making a mental note when I heard the odd Evie Sands song back when I <em>did<\/em> work in Oldies radio; &#8220;Check more of this out&#8221;. And finally with the aid of Youtube, I did.<\/p>\n<p>Evie Sands was a nice girl from Brooklyn with a couple of musician parents and a dusky, Dusty Springfield-y voice who caught a little jolt of success &#8211; but not nearly enough &#8211; during the girl-group boom in the early sixties.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HzleOI8W4yQ\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"338\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>She bent the sound of the Brit Invasion and the girl groups into a bluesy melange &#8211; as in this, among many collaborations with songwriter Chip Taylor&#8230;:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XRFPcPpLipM\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;of whom more later. &#8220;I Can&#8217;t Let Go&#8221; was a hit for the Hollies among a few others back in the day &#8211; not the last time Sands would do the original version of a song that&#8217;d be paydirt for someone else.<\/p>\n<p>Soul? Sands made Diana Ross sound like the karaoke singer she always was:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/czTul8VsAxg\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"450\" height=\"253\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As the decade wore on, Sands &#8211; a peripatetic dabbler all over the music dial &#8211; evolved all over the place (as in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ajZ-IeY9mnA\">this vid from the old Johnny Cash variety show<\/a>; they owners disabled embedding, the bastards)<\/p>\n<p>She came to the brink of near-fame when she recorded a new single by Chip Taylor (who is, by the way, the younger brother of John Voight, and the uncle of Angelina Jolie), &#8220;Angel of the Morning&#8221;; it was the first of dozens of covers of this pop standard, and maybe the best:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Nq6kh_37bvs\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>But financial trouble at her label prevented the record from getting distributed; while they were ironing that out, Merrilee Rush released a version that sold a jillion copies; the song&#8217;s become associated with Rush (and Juice Newton) over the years, but only via commercial misfortune, like so much in the history of pop music.<\/p>\n<p>Sands &#8211; like most pop artists of the day &#8211; would do a cover or two, as in this vastly better version of a song that Kenny Rogers and the First Edition had a hit with in the sixties (and that Dolly Parton would cover in the late seventies):<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LmkDQ08_9J0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>She recorded into the seventies&#8230;:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kgBYWp-xlNw\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and has found a burst of retro popularity among Brit white-soul fans over the past few years. Sands is 67, still sings and plays guitar and rocks the joint.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yeah, Taylor Swift &#8211; <em>this<\/em> is a breakup song:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8RRx5WD8JAM\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>OK. As you were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Put those Amy Winehouse records away. Wherever you are, Duffy, take five. Kelly Clarkson? \u00a0I love you, hon, but take a knee and listen up. Nicky Minaj? \u00a0Lady Gaga? \u00a0Taylor Swift? \u00a0Take a seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35745"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35993,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35745\/revisions\/35993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}