Sunday, September 19, 2010

Carroll County

"Carroll County" was the band I played in in college. Country rock, three-and-four part parallel harmonies - still very sweet to me to hear that sound. But not when it's background. Only when it's quiet around and I can listen closely. The bands in the California Country Rock Family Tree comprise about a third of what we sang, and more than half of what we listened to. CSNY, Buffalo Springfield, Byrds, Eagles, and all their various ancestors and descendants. There's no one representative song of that genre, but you may like this.



If you want to hear Johnny Cash's cover of their Desperado, it's a whole different song when sung by that ravaged man. Lightened by June Carter Cash's more complicated harmony.

Richie Furay is now the pastor of a church in Colorado. Until YouTube became big, most of his congregation had no idea who he was.

Another third of our music was original, in much the same style. No videos of that, of course.

The last third was more eclectic, with true folk, do-wop, whatever we found hanging around. We liked heartbreakers. If you had just lost the girl (or guy), and were crying in your beer, we were the band to hear.

This was my big end-the-night number. Almost this good. Really.

1 comment:

Gringo said...

Some trivia follows. Linda Ronstadt is a first cousin once removed, a.k.a. first cousin first removed, of Roque Dalton. Roque Dalton was a Salvadorean poet and guerrilla leader who was killed in a power struggle in 1975.

The Wikipedia article on Roque Dalton is also a prime example of Wikipedia’s leftie bias. The article states that Dalton was accused of being a CIA agent before his fellow guerrillas killed him. Standard operating procedure. The article then goes on to state the following.

The reason was that many things he was privy to were subsequently known by the government, and by implication the CIA.

There is no citation for that statement. [no, a general link to the CIA doesn’t count as citation.]


Nor is there any citation for the following statement.

It is commonly suggested.[citation needed] that someone Roque knew, and confided in, was an "oreja" (ear, or CIA spy/informant) and this is how confidential information was being discovered. Both the FPL and ERP were founding organizations of a united guerrilla front known as FMLN.

Wikipedia has its uses, but for controversial issues it must be used with great skepticism. So what else is new?