Wednesday Morning on Thursday Night

I have this plan: rather than try to post 217-word entries, every day, to this online journal, I think I’m going to do a weekly entry that encapsulates whatever’s been happening with me over the previous week. These entries are going to appear on Wednesday mornings because a) I originally appeared on a Wednesday morning, June 2, 1965 to be exact; and b) not enough cool things happen on Wednesday mornings.

I was going to do my first Wednesday morning post this week, but I have been visited by a nasty head cold that has left me mostly incapable of doing anything constructive since yesterday morning. But I thought I’d check in now on a few pertinent topics, before the nighttime Thera-Flu kicks in.

11-17-70

Since Elton John is about to play his final North American shows this weekend in Los Angeles, it is worth noting that 52 years ago tonight he played a live show to a tiny audience at the A&R Recording Studio in Manhattan. The show was broadcast over the radio and so widely bootlegged in subsequent months that it was released as a legitimate album on April 1, 1971.

For various reasons (the bootlegs, too much EJ product on the market, etc.), 11-17-70 wasn’t a huge hit at the time and has been critically derided over the years. I think it was listed in The Book of Rock Lists as one of the worst live albums of all time (and this at a time when I treated books of lists as sacred texts).

Despite all that, I think it is safe to say that 11-17-70 (or 17-11-70 in the UK, of course) has survived whatever commercial and critical indifference it may have received and remains an effective document of an artist who was on the verge of become a superstar, but wasn’t quite there yet. It is also a rare example of minimalist Elton: just EJ on vocal and piano, Nigel Olsson on drums, and the late Dee Murray on bass. Have no fear though, this trio kicks up a racket.

I first picked up a copy of 11-17-70 sometime in the later 1970’s. I was flipping through the bargain bin at the Sears at Granite Run Mall. What I actually found was a somewhat unofficial British edition of the album, retitled Elton John Live 11-17-70. But since I was a raving Elton John fan on a paperboy’s budget, a cheap Elton John album with a cheesy cover was fine with me.

I don’t have that copy of 11-17-70 anymore, but that is where I first heard EJ’s early stone-cold classic, “Take Me to the Pilot”. That was one of the songs I was fortunate enough to hear John perform live this summer at Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia. I’m happy to report that Elton at 75 sang and played “Take Me to the Pilot” with as much enthusiasm as he sang and played it when he was 23. And, at 57, I was as excited to hear it as I was listening to that cheesy copy of 11-17-70 when I was 12 years old.

I no longer have my cheesy 11-17-70, though on a night like this, I wish I did.

Returning Soon: Jingle Bell Jawns 

Earlier this week, before the head cold set in, I was all fired up to start a series of entries called Jingle Bell Jawns, each focused on a randomly chosen album from my Christmas music collection. I got so excited that I even posted the first two entries, on A Partridge Family Christmas Card and Nick Lowe’s Quality Street.

I am happy to have started out the series with those two fine albums and I plan to move forward and highlight a bunch more records, but I realized that I truly am one of those traditionalists who like their Christmas music after Thanksgiving. So expect Jingle Bell Jawns to come roaring back with entry #3 some on Frank Black Friday Night.

What’s Frank Black Friday, you may be asking? I’ll get into that next Wednesday morning.