Organ Pavilion Rock Concert September 5 Was Good, but Could Have Used a Little Less Heart

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Monday, September 5 was the eleventh and last concert in the 2022 Spreckels Organ Soeiety’s Summer Organ Festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. It was billed as a tribute to “Women in Rock,” though their definition of “rock” was pretty elastic – it included a Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell duet, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, and two songs from Aretha Franklin, who was generally considered soul rather than rock (though Aretha’s talent was so protean it transcended genres and became what Duke Ellington called “beyond category”). The program consisted of 19 songs, all performed in one 90-minute set with no intermission (which surprised me a bit because I started to worry about the strain the band members, particularly lead singers Lauren Leigh Martin and Chloe Lou, were putting on their voices without a chance to rest them), and the opener wsas “Highway to Hell,” originally performed by the all-male heavy-metal band AC/DC. I suspect civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez just wanted a chance to play on the organ the famous opening power chords that originally were played on electric guitar. Either that or he relished the irony of playing a song like “Highway to Hell” on an instrument generally associated with churches and the aspiration to go to heaven, not hell – though Raúl does not strike me as someone with much of an appreciation for irony. (His idea of humor is to make sick, sexist jokes about Dietrich Buxtehude’s allegedly ugly daughter.)

The band was a surprisingly good one – the lead singers were ferocious and the musicians, including Ben Zinn on electric guitar, Harvey Magsino on bass guitar, Richard “T-Bone” Larson on drums and William Fleming on third vocal and trombone on their cover of Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” – and at one point early in the concert Fleming left the stage to propose to his girlfriend in the audience. When he came back, he turned to both his bandmates and the crowd and exclaimed, “She said yes!” Unfortunately, the song list was less compelling than the band’;s musicianship. The band performed 19 songs, of which one was by the all-male AC/DC, and one the classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a version that copied the original hit by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell rather the extensively reworked version later recorded by Diana Ross. Then came two songs by the late-1960’s Dutch band Shocking Blue, “Send Me a Postcard” and their biggest hit, “Venus.” After that came a group of three songs associated with Janis Joplin: “Move Over” (the only one of the three actually written as well as sung by Joplin), “Piece of My Heart” (written by white soul writers Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy and originally recorded by Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma in 1967 before Janis grabbed hold of it a year later) and “Me and Bobby McGee” (written by Kris Kristofferson; he and Janis had a brief affair and she offered to record it to help boost his career, but by the time her version was released she was already dead and Kristofferson’s career had been launched with Johnny Cash’s version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night”). Lauren Leigh Martin had just the right sort of voice to do Janis: big, loud, brassy and raspy, and though she didn’t get quite the power of pain that Janis did in the opening of “Piece of My Heart,” for the most part she was excellent.

The next song was Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” written by Stevie Nicks as she and Lindsay Buckingham (who had joined the band earlier and insisted on them taking his then-girlfriend Nicks as well) were breaking up. He had written “Go Your Own Way” as his side of the breakup and she wrote “Creams” in 10 minutes as her response – or at least that’s how the story goes. The irony is that both songs ended up on Fleetwood Mac’s mega-hit album Rumours, which is something like what would have happened if the Beatles hadn’t broken up and John’s and Paul’s songs savaging each other, Paul’s “Too Many People” and John’s “How Do You Sleep?,” had ended up on the same album. I hadn’t known the song was called “Dreams” but I certainly remembered it, particularly the line “Thunder only happens when it rains.” The next song was “Call Me,” a huge hit for Deborah Harry and her band Blondie in 1980, though the song was actually written by disco producer Giorgio Moroder (who, along with the late Pete Bellotte, masterminded Donna Summer’s early career and wrote most of her hits). According to last night’s concert commentary, “Call Me” was originally written for Stevie Nicks, who turned it down – a lucky thing, too, because the song needed the ferocious drive and energy Devorah Harry gave it and Nicks probably wouldn’t have. But as a Blondie tribute I’d rather have heard one of their own songs, like “Heart of Glass.”

After that, alas, the band chose to do no fewer than five songs by the band Heart – “Barracuda,” “Alone,” “Crazy on You,” “Magic Man” and “What About Love?” – and though, as with “Dreams,” I recognized the songs even though I didn’t always realize what they were called, they were O.K. but I thought five Heart songs were about three too many. If they hadn’t done so many songs by Heart, they’d have had room for some of the great women rockers they didn’t include at all, including Melanie (who got stuck with her hippie-dippy image even though she was one of the two greatest white women soul singers of the late 1960’s and unlike the other, Janis Joplin, she’s still alive), Suzi Quatro, Pat Benatar, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie. Maybe the emphasis on Heart came from the fact that they were a hard-rock band fronted by two women sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson (Ann was the lead singer and Nancy the lead guitarist and second vocalist), though ironically Lauren Leigh Martin and Chloe Lou outsang the Wilson sisters on their own songs! After that came two songs associated with Aretha Franklin, “Baby, I Love You” and “Respect,” on which William Fleming tried to duplicate the original horn riffs with a trombone.

Then came two songs that were hits for the Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” though they actually came to the Airplane with vocalist Grace Slick joined the band just before their sedona album, Surrealistic Pillow. Before she joined the Airplane Grace Slick and her then-brother-in-law Darby Slick had been in a band together called the Great Society, and when that band broke up and she joined the Airplane she brought those two songs with her: she had written “White Rabbit” herself and Darby had written “Somebody to Love.” They became the Jefferson Airplane’s greatest hits and put them on the map as nationwide sensations and not just another San Francisco-based band. (Recordings of the Great Society performing both songs exist, and “White Rabbit” is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWlI5uf5H-o; before I looked up that link I had assumed the long jazz solo that begins it was Darby Slick on soprano sax, but according to that post it’s actually Grace Slick on melodica. Two versions of the Great Society performing “Somebody to Love” exist: a studio recording actually released as a single on the tiny Northbeach Records label iun early 1966 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiSE0rOQn6c and a live version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsS9NJ36tnQ.)

The show ended with an odd choice: Cher’s mega-hit “If I Could Turn Back Time,” which according to the commentary from the stage was written by Diane Warren, a professional songwriter who actually was a major force in re-establishing that as a career path after the huge success of the Beatles had made it de rigueur for performing artists to write their own material to be taken seriously. The band member who introduced it told a strange story of Warren literally pleading with Cher to record it, even clinging to her leg and refusing to let go until she agreed to do a take. It was a weird piece of energy with which to end the concert, though at least it’s a great song and perfectly suited to Cher’s foghorn voice – she’s a great singer but she has almost no sense of phrasing, and she’s at her best in songs like this that can be sung as one straight-through moan and don’t suffer from a singer who can’t phrase. Eventually Cher apologized to Warren after “If I Could Turn Back Time” became one of her biggest hits!