The Air That I Breathe

This song was a hit for the Hollies in 1974. What's your favorite song from that year?

Good Old Boys (US Release)

In this song off of his 1974 masterpiece Good Old Boys, Randy Newman steps into the role of a drunken man proclaiming his love for the song's namesake in a beautifully heartbreaking way . This is definitely one of my favorite love songs of all time. What's yours?

Another Feel Good Sunday Reggae Night at C&L! And tonight's song, "Take Me Home, Country Road," is dedicated to Jay Rockefeller. Written by John Denver, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, Denver had a smash hit with it in 1971 (#2 on the Billboard chart). Toots & the Maytals recorded their own version of it in 1974 for In The Dark. It was later released on a U.S.-only compilaton called Funky Kingston (1976) and took off big time. Toots & The Maytals actually have had more #1 smashes in Jamaica than even Bob Marley. (This song was a mega-hit in Asia and Japan, where it is popularly known as Country Load.)

John Cale has a secret-- or at least he did in 1963, regarding Eric Satie's Vexations. In 1963, when he was 21, not many people outside of his native Wales knew who he was. At the time, he was studying "serious music" and working on "experimental music," and hanging out with Aaron Copeland and John Cage. Two years later, in 1965, he and Lou Reed co-founded the Velvet Underground and changed pop culture. After that, lots and lots of people started knowing who he was. On this live version of "Ship Of Fools," (written for his 1974 solo release, Fear), Cale is joined by Chrissie Hynde and Nick Cave and I believe it was filmed for the Songwriter's Circle at the BBC Studios in London:

I think I may have booked the Blue Öyster Cult, as Soft White Underbelly, the first paying gig of their careers. One of my closest friends, Sandy Pearlman, was writing songs and managing them and they were almost the house band at my school after a while. Even back then, the late 60s, Sandy had a dream of creating a rock opera which finally was released in 1988-- butchered up by CBS Records-- as Imaginos. My favorite song on the album is an updated-- to put it mildly-- version of "Astronomy," which was orginally released in 1974 on Secret Treaties.