Download    On every Easter morning, the Archangel Gabriel picks up his trumpet to play a song in honor of this most glorious day. This morning he chose “I Believe”, and the sound of his horn reverberated through the heavens and on the face of the earth.  I’ve always loved this composition and play it whenever I get the chance because… well…I believe.

  Download Instrumental    There’s no happier music in the world than Reggae.  What?  You don’t like reggae?  Of course you do – you just don’t know it yet.  And if you’re a singer/performer, you should LOVE Reggae.  There’s no easier style to sing because you can’t screw it up.  If you forget a line… who would know?  You can invent your own words on the fly and the crowd will be amazed that you’re so brilliant.  That’s just how forgiving this genre of music is.  It’s fun and carefree and perfect for a beach bar gig – and that’s where we all want to play, isn’t it?

Actually, Reggae really isn’t all that much fun if you really listen to the lyrics.  Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political comment.  It makes me wonder if romance and love just aren’t a part of everyday life in Jamaica.  The music sounds inviting and lighthearted, but that’s usually not the case.  I’ve always thought Reggae was primarily a defense mechanism against the poor economy and drudgery of life in that country – but that’s just me.

But this song is uniquely different.  “Jammin” is Jamaican slang for coming together and celebrating.  Now that I can appreciate.  Bob Marley and the Wailers released it in 1977 and it’s been redone a million times since then and played in every beach bar I know.  This is a really good arrangement, I think – so download it from the Pop/Rock list and head for the nearest ocean.  And, singers…. don’t worry about getting the words just right.  Nobody cares!  They’re out there on the dance floor groovin’ to the happiest music in the world…. or so they think.

  Download Instrumental    My friend Charlene, a woman of dubious reputation, is the proud owner of an adorable stone owl which sits prominently on her fireplace mantel.  She’s elected to name him Al…”you know, from the song”.  It’s the perfect name for this critter and inspired me to pull that Paul Simon tune out of the storage bin.

“You Can Call Me Al” resides in my archives because we’ve never tried to perform it.  It’s simply too difficult, at least for me.  Oh sure, the song is fun and irreverent and has a great happy beat, but the lyrics… oh, man, the lyrics.  The words are so intricately woven into the music it’s almost impossible to figure out how to get ’em all in.  And they don’t make much sense, especially the third verse.  It’s vaguely about a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis who somehow ends up in a foreign country with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl in an alley somewhere.  I’m sure the meaning is clear as a bell to Paul Simon but he’s never bothered to explain them to us.  If I were you, I’d make up my own words.

I used a synthesized flute for the crazy melody line just so it would punch through.  There’s a penny whistle solo that I didn’t get quite right but it’ll work onstage if your audience is very forgiving.  The rest of the instrumentation was easy:  drums, bass, guitar and a little brass make up the whole arrangement.  It’s just those pesky lyrics that will give you a problem.  If you’ve got the vocal chops for this one, the sequence is on the Pop/Rock list.

Yes, Charlene, there is an “Al” – thanks for your reminder.  Oh, and take a look below at the hilarious video with Chevy Chase lip-syncing the lyrics.  Notice how many times Paul twiddles his thumbs.  It’s worth viewing one more time if you haven’t seen it in awhile.

  Download Here    The Copacabana nightclub in New York opened in 1940 with mob boss Frank Costello as part owner.  It had Brazilian decor and Latin orchestras – but served Chinese food.  Uh… okay.  The club was also known for it’s chorus line, “The Copacabana Girls”, who had pink hair, mink panties and bras, and fruited turbans (my kind of place!)   It was a club where celebrities came to play and performers began their career.  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Marvin Gaye, Sammy Davis, the Supremes,  Martha and the Vandellas, and Sam Cook were just a few of the artists that either debuted or frequently performed at this infamous night spot.

The place gained some unwanted notoriety on May 16th, 1957 from an incident involving the New York Yankees.  It seems Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra and Billy Martin arrived to celebrate Martin’s birthday.  Sammy Davis Jr. just happened to be the headliner that night and a group of drunken bowlers began hurling racial slurs at him and it was getting out of hand.  This behavior incensed the Yankees and the huge brawl made headlines the next day.  Martin was traded to the Kansas City Athletics as a result of the incident.  ‘Course, later, he came back as the greatest manager the Yankees ever had… but that’s another story.

I happened to visit this iconic club in 1976 after it had been turned into disco.  It was okay but I wasn’t terribly impressed.  Barry Manilow, however, thought it was cool enough to write and record this song dubbing the Copacabana as “the hottest spot north of Havana”.  He released it in ’78 and it became a huge disco hit even though that era was slowly coming to an end.  I’ve always enjoyed performing this song mostly because of the infectious, exciting Latin beat.  Download it off the Pop/Rock list and bring it to your stage.  Your crowd will dance and sing along if you do it right.

  Right-Click to Download    This request is from two guys in Decatur, Illinois who play banjo and guitar and work as a duo.  They needed backing tracks that only included guitar, bass, and drums – simple and uncluttered – I like that.  Of course, you can screw up that simplicity with too much banjo, boys – just sayin’.

They needed an Everly Brothers tune and “Bye, Bye Love” was the first one that came to mind.  ‘Course, I already had this one worked up so that made it easy for me – and these days I’m all about easy.  The song reached number one on the charts in the spring of 1957 and is ranked 210th on Rolling Stones Magazine’s The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time – so I guess that’s reason enough to put it on my list too.  Thanks for the heads-up, Decatur.

The original composition for this song didn’t include the guitar intro.  Don Everly insisted on tacking it on at the beginning to sort of make the song their own since they hadn’t written it.  The logic escapes me here because Chet Atkins played the lead through the whole song – not Don.  Oh, well…

I’m happy to see new entertainers interested in old songs – gives me hope for the future (unless Hillary gets elected -oops, I didn’t say that!)  And easy on the banjo there in Illinois…

  Download    Naming your band after insects or animals doesn’t really sound like a good idea, but sometimes it works out very well.  A few that come to mind are:  The Beatles, Adam and the Ants, White Snake, the Animals, the Eagles, Wasp,  the Bee Gees, Papa Roach, the Turtles,  and the group who recorded this song – Buddy Holly and the Crickets.  Why “crickets”?  Well, for some reason, Buddy wanted an insect-inspired name and he almost went with “The Beetles”.  In fact, some years later, John Lennon and Paul McCartney decided on “The Beatles” as an homage to Buddy Holly.

“It’s So Easy” was never a hit for Mr. Holly and his insect friends – didn’t even make the charts when they released it on Brunswick Records in 1958.  If it hadn’t been for Linda Ronstadt trotting it out in 1977, the song would have faded into obscurity.  It was the first cut off her hugely successful album Simple Dreams.  She also had a #1 hit the year before with a cover of another Buddy Holly tune “That’ll be the Day”.  That album also escorted Elvis off the number one country spot after ‘The King’ had held it for 15 consecutive weeks following his death in August.

We’ve always enjoyed doing this song – played it every night in the late 90s and never got tired of it.  The vocals were especially fun.  We use Ronstadt’s arrangement mostly because it has a little more “meat” to it than Holly’s.  My Yamaha keyboard has great distorted guitars, and I left the backup vocal track in (vocal oohs) so you “newbies” can see how they work against the lead line.  This one’s a blast from the past, but it’s worth an encore.

  Download with Lead    I hate this song… I really, really do.  The lyrics are repetitive and banal, the music simplistic, and Pharrell Williams is just too damn happy to be real (the abrupt ending doesn’t help either).  I know, the rest of the planet loves this little ditty, but too much of a good thing gets tedious after awhile.

Pharrell wrote, produced, and sang “Happy” for the soundtrack of the movie Despicable Me 2, which was fun and stupid all at the same time (which kinda explains this song).  The instrumentation is sparse by modern standards:  bass, programmed drums (not even a real drummer, Pharrell?),  and a keyboard.  The vast array of backup singers pretty much makes the bass and keyboard players immaterial.  Bingo!  That’s why I don’t like this song!  I knew I’d figure it out if I whined about it long enough.

Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, and this tune is one of them.  If you’re a singer without a band and using my backups, you’ll want to snatch this one off the Pop/Rock list.  You’ll get sick of it, but it’ll make your crowd…well, happy.

The video is sorta fun though:

   Download    Maurice White named his band Earth, Wind, and Fire because those were the elements in his astrological chart.  Do you know what your elements are?  Me neither.  Name notwithstanding, this band has put out some mighty fine music over the span of several generations.

Maurice formed his first “cookin’ little band” in a Memphis high school with his childhood friend Booker T. Jones, who later formed “Booker T. and the M.G.’s” (Green Onions).  Maurice went on to play drums for the Ramsey Lewis Trio in the late 60’s, performing on nine of their albums.  He left the trio in 1969 and began writing commercials with two friends in the Chicago area.  Why anyone would ever leave Ramsey Lewis is beyond me, but Maurice had bigger things in mind.

The song I’m featuring here and begging you to put in your stage act is “That’s the Way of the World”.  Earth, Wind, and Fire were commissioned to write the theme song for a movie of the same name about the darker side of the recording industry.  The movie was a bomb and the band knew it.  Maurice elected to release this song before the movie actually premiered and that proved to be a shrewd move.  It became their breakthrough hit and the rest, as they say, is history.

Maurice White died peacefully in his sleep last Thursday morning from the effects of Parkinson’s disease.  Another great one gone, folks.  I’m afraid this is going to be a very rough year.