ALBUM: Core of Rock, compilation, (Richie Havens, Tim Hardin, et. al. 1970)
MVC Rating: 3.5/$$$
An odd mix of popular and not so popular from the 1960s and 1970s.
I’m looking for some thread to tie them together, but is kind of a hodgepodge , that includes blues folk and a jamming drum and flute solo from Blues Project.
Janis Ian, the brainy teenager who wrote ‘At 17’, goes all Romeo and West Side story with ‘Society’s Child.’
Then there’s Cory Wells, formerly (or later) of hitmeisters Three Dog Night who should have stayed with the pack (or was this before he joined the pack). His two songs, with the band the Enemys, include a needless and poor version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Too Much Monkey Business.’
And then there’s Blues Project, hippie flute instrumentals– meh. And Van Dyke Parks is working his arrangement talents while humming Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Richie Havens’ take on ‘I Shall be Released’ is good. But my admiration here was focused on Tim Hardin, the fragile-voiced war vet who wrote and performed one of rock/folk’s most straightforward and best song ever in a career cut short by a fatal drug overdose: Reason to Believe.
if I listen long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true.
Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried
Still I’d look to find a reason to believe
I love Hardin’s voice. But Rod Stewart’s version is a forceful classic.
I realize this album was a bargain pickup so I, as I was wont to do, could glean two or three or four songs for a mixtape. I also used to discover new and good music on some of these hit-or-miss compilations. (Wait until i get you to one of my compilation purchases with a cool rave-up of a song that will make your ‘backbone slip.’ (That will be in the M’s), I think.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.