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It was not a hit. As a matter of fact, the entire album was a stiff.

Donna Summer was part of David Geffen’s trifecta, launching his new, eponymous label with three superstars, Donna Summer, Elton John and John Lennon. And all three of their albums stiffed, although subsequent to his tragic and untimely assassination Lennon’s album was resuscitated, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was played incessantly, and one can argue quite strongly that “Double Fantasy” contains the most well-known Lennon solo cuts, the ones the audience knows best, other than “Imagine,” and the album is the one that has been embraced by the public.

But this is not about John Lennon.

Donna Summer was a superstar. Seen as a disco sideshow, the sound she helped pioneer became dominant and she was the scene’s queen. Still derided by many, but then came “Bad Girls,” suddenly it was clear Donna Summer could rock, that she was testing limits while the corporate rockers were repeating themselves.

That’s where I came along. Someone my boss represented was in the band. Actually, two people. And they came in one day with the double “Bad Girls” album and I dropped the needle and was stunned, it was good! “Hot Stuff” started with a driving beat, with more energy than you heard on the rock stations. “Bad Girls” had a breezy feel that epitomized the ethos of the late seventies, and then there were those extraneous, background sounds, the beep beeps, and then Summer started to toss off the lyrics, as if she ruled the world and didn’t care at the same time. And “Dim All the Lights,” had a swinging, swaying feeling like the last dance at your high school, it captured the zeitgeist better than the rock stuff. And the closer, “Sunset People,” which captured the feel of the Boulevard back when you had to be here to experience it.

So I bought the 1982 Geffen album “Donna Summer” the day it was released. The initial single, the opening cut, “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger),” had everything but the kitchen sink, but underneath the production was a substandard song. This was a new sound, nowhere near as good as the Giorgio Moroder sound. It was Michael Jacksonized Donna Summer.

Yes, they shared the same producer, Q, Quincy Jones, this was going to be a revelation, an apotheosis, Summer was going to be as big as the man with the one white glove, only she wasn’t. “Donna Summer” was a dud.

Now, in truth, decades later I cottoned to “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger),” especially the breakdown, what happens starting at 2:42 is magical, but what are the odds something can be a hit, can become legendary if it takes years to get it? Zero.

Track 2 was even worse, “Mystery of Love.” God, the whole album featured incredible production, incredible playing, incredible singing, just substandard material. The record existed in a nowheresville, this was not the Donna Summer of yore, it was too slick, too mainstream, it wasn’t hip.

But Donna Summer still owed one album to Mercury, from her old deal, which she had to deliver as part of her contract with Geffen. And funnily enough, just like with Linda Ronstadt and Asylum a decade before, the album sans Geffen was gigantic, the one that broke through. Donna Summer was singing “She Works Hard for the Money” in her waitress uniform on MTV. She was back. But then she disappeared again, she never had anything resembling a true hit thereafter. Well, that’s not completely true, Summer decamped to Atlantic, worked with Stock Aitken Waterman and produced “This Time I Know It’s for Real” in 1989, but despite the chart numbers listed on the song’s Wikipedia page, I don’t remember a video in constant rotation on MTV. And I don’t remember it being on the radio, it eluded me completely. Then again, I’d given up on Donna Summer at this point, there’d been too much disappointment.

But on that Geffen album “Donna Summer,” there were two tracks, and I continued to go back to them, again and again.

The first was “State of Independence,” a Jon and Vangelis composition whose recording had gotten radio airplay, that I knew, that was built on the magic of Jon Anderson’s voice before he went back to Yes for the monster “90215,” a sorely overlooked album today, sure “Owner of a Lonely Heart” is still heard occasionally, but go back and listen to “It Can Happen,” Hold On,” “Changes and “Leave It,” maybe the younger generations will discover the album in the future, it’s right there on streaming services, it’s unique, requires no prior listening or understanding, and it delivers.

But the best iteration of “State of Independence” does not, exist on streaming services that is. Whoa, wait a second, after decades, it’s finally appeared, an album I played incessantly back in the nineties, Moodswings’s “Moodfood”!

Talk about a magical album, one that almost no one knows…

The entry point is “Skinthieves,” with an astounding Jeff Beck guitar solo at the end. And then there’s “Rainsong”… I could pull up what I wrote about this ethereal, meaningful number back in the nineties, but I don’t want to bring up chiaroscuro memories. I’ll just leave you with these lyrics:

“I was thinking about our life together

Knowing it must be now or never

To get back to you

Now I’ve just got to get out of this rain”

The vocal is by Linda Muriel, someone neither you nor I know, but the delivery is from deep inside her soul.

But the piece-de-resistance on “Moodfood” is “Spiritual High (State of Independence), Pt. 2.” Actually, there are three parts to “Spiritual High,” they start the album, and you should listen to them all, but Pt. 2 has got a driving club beat and the vocal is by none other than Chrissie Hynde! Yes, with a voice somewhere between Jon Anderson and Donna Summer, and for some reason her thinner vocal adds even more meaning. But the version on “Donna Summer”…

Q throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, but this time the underlying song is worthy of the production. It features the essence of Toto, David Paich, Steve Porcaro and Steve Lukather, as well as backup vocals by Bill Champlin, Steve George, Richard Page and one Pamela Quinlan. Well, there’s also an all-star chorus featuring everybody from Michaels Jackson and McDonald and James Ingram, Stevie Wonder, Christopher Cross, Dionne Warwick, and even Dyan Cannon, and that’s not everybody! Yes, only Q does this, but here it works. But this nearly six minute version of “State of Independence” isn’t a single, not what they play on pop radio, although it did go to number one in the Netherlands, but in the U.S. they played this kind of stuff on FM rock stations, but this was not rock, but it was great.

But not as great as “The Woman in Me.”

“You know baby

I’m so happy to be here

With you tonight

And I just wanna let you know

That I’d follow you to the end of the world

Just to show you that I care

And I want you to know that

If you need me

I’ll always be there”

That’s all sotto voce, before the main vocal begins. It’s so intimate.

Unlike U2 at the Sphere. I was reading about that earlier today, that’s spectacle, U2 performing “Achtung Baby” and other hits, “The Woman in Me” was never a hit, and never will be. It was released as a single, but barely made a dent, it’s just an album track on an album that was a stiff, that is not going to have a renaissance, because it was a misfire, not that good, Donna didn’t need all that production, she was enough, but on this cut Q’s production techniques work.

“Dancing close

Feeling restless

It’s a slow sultry night”

Sultry is the word. For the entire song. It’s the aural equivalent of “Body Heat.” And it’s personal. You feel like you’re the only one listening, unless you’re living the life delineated in the song, with your honey, sharing a private moment.

Private. So much of today’s music is public. Meant to be shared with the assembled multitude, to party. And some of that stuff is great, but what really reaches me is the opposite, the stuff made for just me, alone in my bedroom, when my spirits are low, when I need the music to soothe me, to make me feel like there’s a reason to continue to live, just to hear this sound, to experience this bond with the sound.

So I dropped the needle on “Donna Summer” the day I bought it and was disappointed until I got to cut 3, “The Woman in Me.” It immediately registered. And I wasn’t listening to it on earbuds, it didn’t emanate from a small speaker in the dash of an automobile, rather it was coming out of the speakers of my state of the art stereo with enough power to wake up the neighbors (and, unfortunately, I once did this).

We need an entry point to an album. And back when records were shorter, with two sides, it was easier to do this. We’d play them through once, then concentrate on one side, then the other, waiting for a track to speak to us. And “The Woman in Me” spoke to me, immediately.

And for some reason, in a fog this morning, reading the newspaper, eating coffee skyr with walnuts and blueberries, “The Woman in Me” started playing in my head. I could have called out to Alexa to play it, but it was better in my mind, more personal.

It’s not like I was in a bad mood, but I can’t say I was in a good one. I had nothing on my day’s plate that was disturbing, then again, there was nothing exciting scheduled. And the news was fascinating, but it was at arm’s length, I was not in the paper, but “The Woman in Me” was in my head.

And I started to think… Of that old house, listening to “The Woman in Me.” About all my moods, all my feelings, back when. And how “The Woman in Me” is primary to me, but seemingly no one else. It was a commercial misfire. You’re not hearing it on the radio. All that effort went into its production, its recording, but it’s really only known to a select few, those who purchased the album and played it, and those who might have heard it on one of its occasional radio spins. But it’s a hit. To me. On my own personal parade. Donna Summer is alive when I hear “The Woman in Me,” and so am I. When I hear the right song in my head my life is complete, I can conquer all comers, I feel powerful. 

And today “The Woman in Me” is that song.

Drummer extraordinaire Keith Carlock has been Steely Dan’s man on the skins for decades. Hear the story of how he made it from Mississippi to the big time!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keith-carlock/id1316200737?i=1000631849077

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/475e0f43-391f-4260-a31d-66fd0a18488a/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-keith-carlock

“The Only Girl – My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone”: https://tinyurl.com/5xcn4xum

I’d never heard of this book, never mind its author, Robin Green.

Then again, I had. I saw her credit for years, as a writer and executive producer on “The Sopranos.” What? That’s quite a career!

Now this is not a self-published tome, it was put out by Little Brown. But it flew under my radar, and whether or not I read these rock books, I’m certainly aware of them. But in the brouhaha after Jann Wenner’s unfortunate remarks, an article I read went through the various books about “Rolling Stone” and said this was the best. Huh? I immediately reserved it at the library, I wasn’t going to buy it, what were the odds I’d even read it.

But I did. I finished it in less than 24 hours. Primarily because Robin Green delineates the era better than any book written by a person in music.

Yes, the sixties… They’re fading. But if you were alive and kicking, it was the opposite of today, it was an era of possibilities. And you certainly didn’t live your life by rote. Green graduated from Pembroke, which was to Brown as Radcliffe was to Harvard, and then…tried to fly straight in New York City, but on a whim moved to California with an old boyfriend.

Come on, do you know anybody who graduates from an Ivy and makes career decisions on a whim today? Hell, people have their careers planned out before they even take a class. And the goal is to make money. To set the world on fire. Personal fulfillment? That’s way down the list. But in the sixties and early seventies, that was everything.

And you could afford to meander. You could live on minimum wage. And not only did people do this, they were itinerant, as in moving from place to place. You didn’t fly across the country, you drove. You didn’t just see places on the internet, you went and experienced them up close and personal. And if a friend was going somewhere, even hundreds of miles away, you might decide to accompany them, and it might change your entire life.

So Robin is in Berkeley working a day job, and then she finds out she has a connection at “Rolling Stone,” so she borrows a car and drives over the bridge for a meeting with this bloke where she offers herself up as a secretary, a low level employee, she just wants to get in the building, to be close to the action.

But this guy doesn’t understand it. Why would she want such a lowly gig, didn’t she have more ambition, why didn’t she want to write for the magazine?

It had never occurred to her.

But she had a meeting with Jann, who found out she was an assistant to Stan Lee at Marvel during her brief tenure in New York, and he said if she wrote an article about Marvel and he liked it, he’d pay her five cents a word, if he didn’t, he’d kill it and pay her half. And seeing as how she was going to the east coast anyway, she took the gig.

And it became a cover story.

And from there…

I remember Robin’s story about Dennis Hopper and “The Last Movie,” it was in one of the early issues after my subscription to the magazine took hold. And its creation is retold in this book, and Hopper doesn’t look good. So many don’t look good, not even David Chase, Robin lays it down straight.

And you may not actually like Robin, but she was there, she lived it.

She had sex with many men. One night stands. She wouldn’t submit her story about the Kennedy children to “Rolling Stone” because…

But these were the days. Before AIDS. During women’s liberation. When women were demanding and living with the same power as men.

Green is far from subservient, she was one of the boys, but she maintained her female identity.

Green writes about the legendary “Rolling Stone” conference at Esalen. About Hunter Thompson. About the trials and tribulations of the “Rolling Stone” staff. It didn’t play out pleasantly for so many of them. But they were bedding each other, even if they were married to other people.

As for this focus on sex… You’ve got to know, at this point sex before marriage was seen as taboo, even divorce was. But the birth control pill came along and everything changed. There was freedom.

Green ultimately is demoted from the masthead of “Rolling Stone” after refusing to deliver that Kennedy piece and she went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then moved to Los Angeles and once again worked at a low level until she caught fire in TV. And this ultimately led to “The Sopranos,” and more.

This is not a typical tell-all. It’s more than the facts. And Green can certainly write. But it’s like it never came out, no one ever talked to me about “The Only Girl.” That’s what Robin was, again and again, the only girl amongst a group of men.

You’ll have a hard time putting “The Only Girl” down, especially if you lived through that era, the years have been bastardized and pooh-poohed, but if you read Green’s book, you’ll learn how it all really went down, from a perspective you don’t usually find. You’ve got men writing about the era, and you’ve got people who weren’t there writing about the era, but Robin Green was there, and she holds nothing back.

There’s just something about this book. It’s not like it’s hot or sexy, yet it’s far from dry. It’s kinda like a peek into Robin Green’s brain, her inner world. A perspective you don’t get too often, especially without judgment and a moral.

When looking for the Amazon link I saw that right now they’re selling the Kindle version for $3.99. That’s not much of a commitment. But if you do buy it, I know you’ll read it, I know you’ll finish it. Because you want this perspective. You want a book that is more than I did this and that, met this person and that. You’re thinking all the time, and so is Robin Green, but she laid her inner feelings down.

A big thumb’s up! 

P.S. This book is not only about “Rolling Stone,” actually the best parts are about her family and friends and growing up in Providence. And it does go into “The Sopranos” and…just wanted to let you know.