A 3-CD Set Features Country Rock Pioneer Steve Young: Review
Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Steve Young, who died in 2016, had a long and notable but mostly under-the-radar career. He never had a pop hit and dented the country charts only once, with a 1976 album called Renegade Picker, which reached No. 48. He is remembered today, to the extent that he is remembered at all, for a beautiful ballad called “Seven Bridges Road,” which produced a hit for the Eagles in 1969 after they included it on a live album. The song has also been covered by a wide range of other artists, among them Joan Baez, Iain Matthews, and Dolly Parton.
There was much more to Young than that number, however. An early proponent of country rock and the outlaw country sound popularized by artists such as Waylon Jennings (who recorded Young’s “Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean”), he wrote and performed many fine songs in a career that embraced more than a dozen studio albums as well as live sets. One indication that his musical contemporaries held him in high regard is the list of guest artists on his 1969 debut LP, Rock Salt & Nails: they include the Byrds’ Gram Parsons and Gene Clark, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Chris Ethridge, and Eagles co-founder Bernie Leadon, not to mention renowned session musicians James Burton and Hal Blaine.
A new three-disc set called Stars in the Southern Sky, which boasts a playing time of nearly three hours, will perhaps belatedly bring Young’s music to a wider audience. Its first disc is a reissue of 1975’s Honky-Tonk Man, one of the artist’s best LPs, which sold only about 7,000 copies when first released and has been unavailable for years. Its 13 tracks (two recorded in concert) embrace five Young originals and eight covers that suggest the range of his talents and influences. Among the highlights are the Johnny Horton title cut, Robbie Robertson’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” Hank Williams’s “Ramblin’ Man,” and “Brain Cloud Blues,” from Western swing king Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys co-founder, Tommy Duncan.
Thirty-four previously unreleased live recordings, all from the period when Young issued Honky-Tonk Man, fill the remaining discs. His best-known self-penned numbers are here, including “Seven Bridges Road” and “Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean,” along with well-chosen covers that provide good showcases for his acoustic guitar work and distinctive baritone. Among the standouts are Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright),” Tom T. Hall’s “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died,” Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” and Mickey Newbury’s “San Francisco Mabel Joy,” which Young introduces as “my favorite song ever written.”
You’ll find more of the singer’s opinions and observations in the 40-page booklet that comes with this three-CD set. It includes extensive quotes from co-producer Ted Olson’s 1992 interview with Young as well as a lengthy appreciation by Olson.
A Remastered Edition of Cat Stevens’s Foreigner: Review
Before Cat Stevens converted to Islam, which resulted in a name change to Yusuf, he underwent several musical conversions. The first came at the dawn of the 1970s, when he stripped back his sound to focus on acoustic folk, resulting in several hugely successful and musically rewarding albums. The second came in 1973 when he walked away from folk on his seventh studio LP, the self-penned Foreigner, which was heavily influenced by R&B and soul and features keyboards, brass, and three female backup singers.
Several of Stevens’s albums – 1970’s Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman and 1972’s Teaser and the Firecat – have in recent years been reissued as lavish, 50th anniversary box sets, but a 2022 rerelease of 1972’s Catch Bull at Four contained no bonus material, just remastered audio of the original LP. That’s also what you’ll find on a new edition of Foreigner.
The album, Stevens’s first self-produced LP, reached No. 3 on the pop charts and yielded a minor hit single (“The Hurt”). It isn’t as musically successful as many of the singer’s earlier recordings, however. There are some fine moments in “Foreigner Suite,” which fills the whole first side of the original vinyl LP, but not nearly enough of them to justify the song’s 18-minute length; the album’s other four tracks aren’t bad, but none of them measure up to the best of Stevens’s earlier work. Serious fans will want to pick this up and savor its high points, but no one should expect anything as essential as, say, the material on Tea for the Tillerman.
A Live Set from Lightnin’ Hopkins, Who Influenced Jimi Hendrix: Review
If you’re not acquainted with the work of the great country and urban blues guitarist and singer Lightnin’ Hopkins, who died in 1982, you have a lot of catching up to do. You might want to start with The Complete Aladdin Recordings, which collects nearly four dozen of his key tracks from the 1940s, and the seven-disc Complete Prestige/Bluesville Recordings, which covers important work from the early 1960s. One of the many albums you should explore next, however, is Live from the Ash Grove…Plus!, which presents fine concert material from a bit later in the Texas native’s career. Like most of the other albums in his large catalog, it suggests why he had such an impact on rock guitarists, especially Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly owned a large collection of Hopkins’s LPs.
The first part of Live from the Ash Grove…Plus! delivers an eight-song, 24-minute acoustic set recorded at that Los Angeles club in November 1970. Accompanying himself on guitar and providing spoken introductions to most of the tracks, Hopkins serves up such originals as “Questionnaire Blues,” which concerns the military draft, and “Lightnin’s Boogie,” a showcase for his instrumental prowess. There are also a few covers, such as one of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.”
Bonus tracks include “Black Cadillac” and “Coffee House Blues,” both recorded at the Ash Grove in 1965, and four numbers from a 1971 club date in Palo Alto, California. This last batch finds Hopkins playing electric guitar and backed by an uncredited rhythm section on Robert Higgenbotham’s classic “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and three originals, among them one whose title should ring true for this seminal artist’s many fans: “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone.”
Jeff Burger’s website, byjeffburger.com, contains five decades’ worth of music reviews, interviews, and commentary. His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters.
