Peter, Paul and Mary
They’re not in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
I got a hankering to hear “I Dig Rock And Roll Music.”
By 1967 Peter, Paul and Mary were an oldies act, with about as much of a chance of having a hit as Garth Brooks does today. They were the epitome of the folk boom, but now we were in the rock and roll era.
I used to have a Norelco portable cassette player. And if you bought enough adapters you could plug it into your stereo and tape songs off the radio. I know, I know, you could record records too, but that made no sense, you already owned them, you wanted that which you did not possess, like “I Dig Rock And Roll Music.”
The odds of me buying a Peter, Paul and Mary album were low, not because I wasn’t a fan of the trio, not because I did not own a bunch of their singles, but because there was so much else I needed to own! No one could afford everything they wanted to hear, which is why I found myself on the floor of my bedroom pushing that t-shaped button on the Norelco when WDRC-FM played “I Dig Rock And Roll Music.”
It was 1967 and FM radio was burgeoning, when I got my Columbia stereo I scoured the dial for what I could pull in, not only the New York stations like WOR and WNEW and WABC, but WDRC in Hartford. AM still ruled in New Haven, but in Connecticut’s capital…
And you get a hankering to hear these songs when you’re walking down the street, when you’re driving in your car, I can’t explain the science, I don’t think anybody can, but suddenly you can’t wait to hear something like “I Dig Rock And Roll Music” which I played so much after recording it with deejay patter way back when.
And through the magic of streaming services, these tracks are readily available.
I pulled “I Dig Rock And Roll Music” up on Spotify and I was stunned. The sound was so clean and so present. The track was mildly ersatz back in ’67, but today it’s MINDBLOWING!
So I decided to go deeper, what did I need to hear next?
The funny thing was I recognized all the titles. Even if I hadn’t heard the tracks in decades. Like the opener on “The Very Best of Peter, Paul and Mary,” “Early In The Morning.” Whew, this took me right back to the early sixties, when folk music ruled, when your voices, a guitar or two and handclap percussion was enough, when it was just about us, human beings. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate electronic sounds, but there’s a striking humanity in “Early In The Morning.”
So what to spin next?
“500 Miles” was a staple at summer camp, before the Beatles broke through.
And we had the single of “If I Had A Hammer.”
And we sang “Leaving On A Jet Plane” in youth group long before it was a hit single, it was part of “Album 1700” (named that because that was the Warner Brothers catalog number!) and “Blowin’ In The Wind” is where it all began for Bob Dylan, we knew the words and sang along before we had any idea of who the bard of Minnesota ever was.
And we wouldn’t have known of any of them if it weren’t for one Albert Grossman. He managed both acts, Peter, Paul and Mary and Dylan, and he put the former together! Funny how most managers are written out of history, but without them their charges never ever would have happened.
But scanning through the song list the cut that stuck out, that I needed to hear next was, TOO MUCH OF NOTHING!
Too much of nothing
Can make a man feel ill at ease
Funny how these songs suddenly make sense. You’ve been listening to them for years, know them by heart, but with age their truth is revealed. We think we need time off but then we get it and not only do we not accomplish what we’d planned, our heads go into places they should not go and…
There’s no way “Too Much Of Nothing” could be a hit today, but it’s a revelation, something that would turn the heads of millennials, never mind teenagers, because it’s so pure, honest and direct, it’s like it’s all done in one take and the changes are like the Matterhorn bobsleds at Disneyland, smooth, not jerky, but thrilling nonetheless.
And I’m lying on the floor in the dark and I see the history of music laid out in front of me, I can see why Bob Dylan won that Nobel prize, and then I remember…HE CUT IT ON THE BASEMENT TAPES!
Peter, Paul and Mary’s version was a hit in ’67, it was the only one we knew, back when you had no idea who wrote the songs on the radio, we were clueless as to its Zimmerman provenance. But then word started to leak out, what Dylan did up there in Woodstock, and then Robbie Robertson cleaned up the tapes and in 1975 there was a double album, which contained “Too Much Of Nothing.”
But that version was not the one I played first last night, rather it was the iteration from 2014’s “Basement Tapes” collection, and this one…was magical, not as magical as Peter, Paul and Mary’s, but better than the one from ’75, which I played next, and my memory proved to be true.
But now I needed to know more.
And that’s when I pulled up the Wikipedia page and found out Peter, Paul and Mary fell out with Dylan because the latter was pissed they’d changed a lyric.
Hmm… At this late date everybody lets everybody change everything, because they’re looking to get paid, why did Dylan get a bee in his bonnet?
It turns out he was angry Peter, Paul and Mary changed the name from “Vivienne” to “Marion.” And I always thought “Marion” worked so well in the hit single, I couldn’t fathom why Dylan was displeased.
Until I read that the “Vivienne” in the original song was the the first wife of poet T.S. Eliot. What?
I think I’m educated, but every day I find holes in my learning. And here’s this college dropout who knows more about literature than I do.
So then I Googled Eliot and saw those poems I read in Mrs. Hurley’s class in high school, and it turns out that Vivienne was the inspiration for “The Wasteland”…
And now I needed to see what she looked like.
No wonder Dylan didn’t want the name changed, the backstory is EVERYTHING!
And was Peter, Paul & Mary’s the only cover?
I checked out a live take by Fotheringay, which did not feature Sandy Denny, and then went down the rabbit hole with the woman who sang on “Battle Of Evermore” and learned how respected she was in the U.K.
As for Spooky Tooth’s recording… The less said the better. I love “Dream Weaver,” but Gary Wright was not fully-formed in his previous band, and if you weren’t around then you don’t need to hear it now.
So that brought me back to Peter, Paul and Mary’s version.
There’s that piano, that mouth harp and then that groove. Why is it as human beings we’re always hooked by the grooves?
And lines were jumping out and hooking me…
Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivienne
Give them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion
They were the two wives of T.S. Eliot. Valerie was thirty years his junior, she outlived him. Vivienne died in a mental hospital…
