Segment 125

I dare say that today’s batch of All Hand Mixed Vinyl features two artists who have never – in the entire history of radio – have never been played back to back. So if you want to know what it sounds like when the Earl Scruggs Review follows something off a Vanilla Fudge album, stay tuned because that’s later in the show. Now, about the Earl Scruggs Review, we’ve played something from this album before. The record is an all-star’s list of all stars, everybody from Leonard Cohen and Loggins and Messina to the Pointer Sisters and Johnny Cash. But the track we’ll be hearing was written and sung by Loudon Wainright III and it ends with something that reminded me of the beginning of “Highway 61 Revisted.” So that’s the road down which we’ll travel.

So right about now you may be asking yourself, what kind of set features Earl Scruggs and Vanilla Fudge? Well, admittedly, it’s not the sort of set we typically produce here in the Way Back Studios. What we have here is a big plate of leftovers. See, every now and then I’ll find two songs that mix nicely with other or make for a fun segue but then, I can’t find anything else to go with them. So I set those aside and move on to something else. But now I’ve got so many of them, I figured I’d just jam a few of them together and let her rip. Somewhere near the middle of the set we’ll turn the Cosmic Wheel and drop Donovan’s “The Music Makers” smack into the middle of Traffic’s “Rock & Roll Stew.” Before that, a couple of little gypsie-like ditties in the form of short instrumentals from Steve Forbert and Paul Simon.

Carole King will get the whole thing started because I needed some piano to lead into the Todd Rundgren that follows. And here I must confess that the transition from the first Todd track into the second one is a serious groaner. It’s like a really bad pun and if you’re not paying attention to the words, you’ll miss it, so I’ll leave that up to you. And with that introduction, here’s one from Tapestry.

Mr. Dylan asking and answering the age old question about where can you get rid of forty red, white, and blue shoe strings and a thousand telephones that don’t ring. It can be successfully done out on Highway 61. I believe that’s Bob himself blowing the police whistle on that one. Before that, Loudon Wainright III with a song he wrote called “The Swimming Song” which he recorded on his album Attempted Mustache but here we heard the verion he did with the Earl Scruggs Review. Now if you joined us at the top and you were waiting to hear the mix from Vanilla Fudge into Earl Scruggs that I mentioned, I may have overstated that a bit. See I needed something to act as a transitional element from the end of Traffic’s “Rock & Roll Stew” into the Earl Scruggs, so I played the opening eight seconds of the first Vanilla Fudge album which sounds like this. (INSERT).

Before that, for your listening enjoyment we stirred Donovan’s “The Music Makers” into the middle of “Rock & Roll Stew” from Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. We opened the set with Carole King’s “Home Again” and followed that with two from Todd. From Runt, “We Gotta Get You A Woman” and from Something Anything, Todd’s second version of “Hello, It’s Me.” I hope you caught the terrible pun that caused me to put those two next to each other. Following Todd, Paul Simon with Stephan Grappelli on violin doing “Hobo’s Blues” and Steve Forbert with an instrumental called “Lucky.” And that completes our set of orphaned segues and random song selection. I do hope you enjoyed it. If you’re looking for the set lists or the show commentaries, you can find them, along with the shocking interview and the embarrassing photographs, on the website, billfitzhugh.com. I’m Bill Fitzhugh. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back with another batch of All Hand Mixed Vinyl next time and I hope you’ll join us, right here in the Deep Tracks.