Fingerprints and B Sides

The great thing about 45RPM records was that you were getting two songs for the price of one – or at least that’s what it often felt like if you were inclined to flip the record over.

Being a redneck welfare kid for whom records were scarce, I made a habit very, very early on of flipping them over to see what had been thrown in for the price of admission – I didn’t get the chance to buy records often, but when I was old enough to keep a little money that I’d earned from working on my Pop’s farm, I’d prowl around and see what I could find…there was one record store in Savannah, and it didn’t last long, so it was whatever was available at the department store, when I was allowed to go. Otherwise, the occasional yard sale or maybe trading with friends who were sick of their copy of Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son” (still have it).

It was by flipping over my copy of Firefall’s “You Are The Woman” that I heard Larry Burnett’s “Sad Ol’ Love Song” and started figuring out the difference between their songwriting and storytelling styles. I had bought a copy of “Barracuda” by Heart in a yard sale batch and discovered “Cry To Me” on the flip side…I don’t remember where I got Nicolette Larson’s “Lotta Love”, but her cover of the Louvin Brothers’ “Angels Rejoiced” on the flip side remained my mother’s favorite song for years and years.

As I got older and found my way around, I started building up a little collection, and I might’ve been exceedingly lucky – I don’t know, because I don’t know many people as weird as I am when it came to this kind of thing – but I often found B-sides that were just as impactful, if not more so, than the flagship song on the record.

I remember over 15 years ago, doing a short tour in the northeast with Jim Photoglo and sheepishly admitting to him that when I bought “When Love Is Gone”, I ended up listening obsessively to “Faded Blue” from the B-side, to the extent of lifting the record changer arm and pulling it over and away from the center of the turntable so the song would repeat, over and over again…if it made him uncomfortable, he never said so – and we’re still friends, so I guess it wasn’t too terribly ill-received.

When I reached my mid to late teens, I started pushing my boundaries – I was never going to be content to work with my hands, and I knew it before anyone else did. I had a cousin who was a partner and on-air announcer at a radio station in town, and when they’d have some reason to go into town, they’d drop me off at the station for a visit – I’d sit, quiet as a mouse against the wall behind the turntables and watch him work, listen to him talk, learned the logs…the whole bit. Later, I finally got a weekend gig working for a competitor in town – the comically-named WORM-FM.

Yes, I’m serious. Here’s a stolen copy of a 10CC 45 with the station stamp on it:

The great thing about WORM (to me, at the time) was that it was a country station that had BEEN a Top 40 station, and there was a bounty of records in the attic that no one had bothered to lay claim to. Sure, all the Grand Funk Railroad stuff was long gone, but I found a ton of records up there that I still have to this day…my copy of the “Half Moon Silver” 45 by Hotel came from an attic raid at WORM, and that song has legitimately left a mark on my life. I found Florence Warner’s Epic records debut in a stack without a sleeve – it had covers of Kenny Loggins’ “Till The Ends Meet”, Todd Rundgrens’ “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference”, Dan Fogelberg’s “Song From Half Mountain” (I hadn’t even heard his version yet, that’s how long ago it was)…as well as an unreleased-to-this-day Fogelberg song called “The Lady Loves The River” and a piano interlude on side two that I’m convinced is his work.

I didn’t have the cover, only the vinyl itself – I used to fantasize about what she looked like…what kind of face that voice came from, and why I never heard anything else about her. TO THIS DAY, there’s almost no information about her anywhere on the internet, I’ve Googled the shit out of her as recently as a few years ago…I did finally find another copy of the album with a sleeve, but no liner notes.

The WORM Attic was a wealth of undiscovered gems, though…and as you might guess, a lot of B sides that I probably wouldn’t have been remotely curious about, were it not for the fact that I’d formed a habit of routinely flipping them over because I had so few records to listen to as a fledgling, obsessed music junkie.

I started to put a few things together – sometimes there were great songs on the flip side, and sometimes it turned out to be something of a contractual fulfillment. If there were two primary songwriters in the band, you could count on the flip side being written by someone other than the person who wrote the single. Sometimes they were filler – songs given to a singer who wasn’t the primary vocalist, instrumentals (“High Sierra” on the flip side of “Ghost Town” by Poco, “Tramontane” on the flip side of “Double Vision” by Foreigner)…but I listened anyway.

One of my favorite B-side bands was Little River Band. THEY DID NOT DICK AROUND WITH B SIDES.

You bought “Lonesome Loser”? Congratulations, you also got “Shut Down Turn Off”!

You bought “Cool Change”? Awesome, you also got to take home my second favorite LRB song of all time, “Middle Man”!

(My favorite song remains “Too Lonely Too Long”, which was never a single, but you can find it on the “Live in America” album…but I digress. Still, listen to this badassery right here…)

I remember being at a friends’ house who had a copy of “The One That You Love” by Air Supply and flipping it over and dropping the needle on a song called “I Want To Give It All” and falling in love with this four note descending arpeggiated guitar part that’s still one of my favorite songs.

The achingly beautiful “Hearts and Crafts” by Dan Fogelberg was a B-side to a single from his Greatest Hits album and didn’t resurface until his “Portrait” box set well over a decade later. Likewise with “Along the Road”, the flip side of “Longer” from the “Phoenix” album – never would have been a single, but was a gift to folks who bought that record.

It’s important to note, however, that for every gem you unearth from the rubble, there are some truly, truly TERRIBLE B-sides out there, as well. If there’s a worse song that “I’m A Marionette” (flip side of “Take a Chance on Me” by ABBA), I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it.

OK, that’s not true. There’s Nicki Minaj.

ANYway…

When I started working in radio, it was still – in my hometown, anyway – very much a vinyl-driven enterprise. The songs you heard on the radio were records, because that’s what we played. It was very much pre-digital, and even though we used cart machines for commercials, we didn’t use them for on-air music like many stations had begun to do by then. But I also found that the records that were sent to radio by major labels DIDN’T HAVE B SIDES! There’d be a mono version on one side and a stereo version on the other, and that was a disappointment, to say the least. I remember getting the white-label MCA copy of “Sea of Heartbreak” from Poco’s “Cowboys and Englishmen” and sure enough…mono and stereo. The only redemption was that not every label cared to service small-market radio stations in towns the size of Savannah, Tennessee, so we’d often have to go out and buy stuff that was charting in the major markets – because HEAVEN FORBID we not be playing what was charting in the towns we looked to in order to reinforce our inferiority complex…so now and then, a retail copy of something would come across the desk.

The last year I spent in town before leaving to join the Navy and never come back, I ended up back at WORM after having left there to work for WLIC in Adamsville and WKWX through the end of high school. My old boss, Tom Wood, had asked me to come work middays for him when he took over at WORM, and I jumped at it…I was out of school and in the DEP (Delayed Entry Program) but Tom welcomed me on anyway.

The cool thing about working for that station at that point in time was that while we were only serviced by a few of the majors, we’d get stuff from indie labels ALL THE TIME…and being a fledgling musician myself, I’d listen to everything that came in the door, and if I liked it, I played it. I played a song called “Music Machine” by a guy on Handshake Records named Mark Gordon Creamer until I started getting requests for it…I don’t know if it ever charted nationally or not, but there were a handful of folks in Savannah who seemed to like it. I’m sure there were other songs that I played that never turned up elsewhere, either – but I learned much later in life that Q-107 in Florence, Alabama did much the same thing…music recorded in Muscle Shoals got priority treatment and a lot of songs that I’d grown up thinking were national hits were a big question mark to people who’d grown up elsewhere. I was just playing songs that I liked…and that Mark Gordon Creamer record had an a cappella intro, and I love me an a cappella intro, so I played the shit out of it.

There was a weird metamorphosis going on, as WKWX was trying to edge into the country market without making a full-on format change, so WORM began creeping towards the middle as well, to the point where both stations were very nearly playing the same songs. You wouldn’t hear George Jones on K-93, but you wouldn’t hear Duran Duran on WORM, either…but there was a lot of shared territory.

As if to illustrate just how far they were willing to go in that direction, Tom comes in one day with a picture sleeve copy of “Physical” by Olivia Newton John.

I thought he was nuts.

He was dead serious, though…he put it in rotation.

I thought “Physical” was bullshit – I’m not gonna lie. Seemed like a gimmicky song recorded by someone who’d largely had their day, and was using a sexy video to rejuvenate her career…so I refrained from playing it.

But I flipped it over.

I’m willing to bet there are folks in Savannah to this day that never want to hear “The Promise (The Dolphin Song) again as long as they live…and to those fine folks, I apologize. Still, that was the song that I gravitated to from that record (that, and staring at the picture sleeve).

When I heard the news today that she’d finally lost her battle to cancer on the day after losing David Muse of Firefall to his own battle with the disease, that song was one of the first to come to mind (as well as “Suspended in Time” and “Whenever You’re Away From Me” from Xanadu – both contenders for B sides in and of themselves).

She’s not prone to repeating this particular sentiment, but I attribute it to her nonetheless when it crosses my mind – Wendy’s notion of “how lucky are we that we ended up here at the same time as this person, or this sports team, or this TV show” and how, at some point, all this will be lost to all but the most voracious historians…but we were here when it was all around us.

In a lot of ways, this post has nothing to do with Olivia Newton-John, but it’s also all about her…and what you might discover if sometimes you’re willing to dig even the slightest bit.

We’ve all lost a lot these past few years…and it seems like I’m saying goodbye to someone every time I sit down to leave a thought here. I guess that’s the cost of growing older, and I have no doubt that it’ll get worse before it gets better, but they’re worth remembering.

This is how I’ll choose to remember her…hopefully sharing a dance with Gene Kelly somewhere tonight.