Look Through Any Window

One of my favorite Hollies tunes, this song was even played at the Las Cruces Inn a few times, but unfortunately was never recorded. I often wonder what visitors to Las Cruces thought about the odd, obscure R&R songs the Calhoon Brothers would play at what was, let's face it, a cowboy bar. Then there was the year we had a strobe light . . .

LOOK THROUGH ANY WINDOW

July's Not the Hottest Month in Oz

It was back in 2012 that Knees joined a group of Canadians on Facebook and YouTube to make some music. It had been almost ten years since he thought about music very much. The group of about a dozen people was called the Cover Album Project Band. Each month they would do some recording project, usually covering all of the songs on a classic album like Revolver by the Beatles, Harvest by Neil Young or Joshua Tree by U2. But the project for February was a special one in which we were to write original songs about a month of the year (July was randomly selected for me) using the chord pattern: I  V  iv  V  or  D  A  Bm  G. 

I was leery of getting back into songwriting after 10 fallow years but I figured with the chords dictated I should be able to knock this off in about 15 minutes. As always I grabbed the first thing that fell out of my mind, in this case, a heat wave in Australia. Then I laid down simple tracks. Nothing to it. Like riding a bicycle.

JULY'S NOT THE HOTTEST MONTH IN OZ (MP3)

There's even a video!

JULY'S NOT THE HOTTEST MONTH IN OZ (Video)

When you find yourself in a sweat

Crank up the AC and take off your clothes

When it's too hot for even your pet

Remember it's summer and the world is a globe.

There's a place where toilets drain weird

Where the desert is north and the devil is south

And you won't feel like shaving off your beard

So cheer up my friend don't be down in the mouth

July's not the hottest month in Oz

In fact it's the month when the kangaroos roam

July's not the hottest month in Oz

So find you a wallaby and give it a home

July's not the hottest month in Oz

I can't wait to see those kangaroos roam

July's not the hottest month in Oz

I recommend a wallaby to spruce up your home.

July's not the hottest month in Oz

July's not the hottest month in Oz

July's not the hottest month in Oz

 BONUS COVER!

There are still 25 songs by Knees and/or his colluders left till the big day but I've decided for each of these last 25 nights I'll include one of Knees' better cover recordings down here at the bottom of the page. Why not? Some are actually pretty good.

CASEY JONES

Grateful Dead

One Tree Hill

This is a real departure for Knees. A song by U2! He considered it a "modern" song until he realized that it came out over 25 years ago. The instigation for the song was his joining a Facebook group that likes to do musical challenges every month, like covering all the songs on a classic album. For March the album was Joshua Tree by U2 and the song I picked was One Tree Hill. I had never heard it, or any of the songs on the album, before. It's easy to be musically ignorant when your only exposure to popular music is the time spent in Taco Bell waiting for volcano tacos.

ONE TREE HILL

My take on U2? Excellent singing by a guy with a voice to rival Don Henley's. They apparently know how to generate a truly hypnotic beat. I'm afraid the best I can do on modern songs like this is a Pat Boone version.

There's a video of me singing this song on Youtube and Facebook. Gawd help us all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs4a3v0UAg 

Bad Weather 2012

I had forgotten about recording this 1985 Knees Calhoon tune until I spotted the file. It must have been one of those late-night Ambien-induced sessions. It's probably the least subversive of all the Calhoon tunes and is kind of a travelogue of Knees' meanderings.

BAD WEATHER 2012

 

The End of the Innocence

I have a relatively cheap electronic piano that was out in a trailer in the back yard because there wasn't enough room in my office for it. But I moved some things around and now the piano, a Casio WK-200, is next to my recording stuff, ready to be used in songs. This is the first one that came to mind, mainly because the piano part is not too difficult. I haven't played the piano in over a year.

THE END OF THE INNOCENCE

When I first heard this Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby tune back in the late 80s I thought it was quite profound and catchy, especially the piano riff. When I figured it out I realized why. It's full of 2 chords.

2 chords, or mu chords according to Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, are what gave The Mothers and Steely Dan their sound. You play a 2 chord by simply adding a 2 note to the 1 - 3 - 5 of the major chord. You add D to a C major chord. When I played piano in a lounge back in 1982-83 I found that I rarely played a regular major chord. I always played a 2 chord.

A slow, odd phrasing of the Buckaroo lick appears in this song, except now it's on the piano, not the guitar. 

My Old Friend Fred 2013

This song has two distinct versions: the early one recorded in 1993 that's a C&W waltz and the R&R version in 4/4 time, done in 2013. I need to add another instrument to the R&R song but my minimalist guitar is so solid I can't think of what to add. If I went into a bar and heard this song, I would pay close attention. It's got a story, a lesson, a moral and it features a porn theater (remember them?)

MY OLD FRIEND FRED (R&R)

THE C&W version has a florid history and was played a lot at the Las Cruces Inn. Since it's a rather long song (it has to be to get in all of the plot) it's probably better as the much shorter R&R song.

MY OLD FRIEND FRED (C&W)

Written: Page AZ 1973

Knees wrote this song late one night in a motel in Page AZ in 1973 after ingesting what he was told was powdered THC. Whatever it was, it was incredible and he wrote the song in about an hour. The next day he went out on Lake Powell in a super speedboat (as a passenger, not the driver) and amazed himself by being able to remember all of the lyrics, probably because the song tells a story.

Well I know this is a bar an everbody’s drinkin

But an ol friend of mine just set me to thinkin

That mebbe we oughta try somethin else.

So if you just settle back an listen a spell

You’re liable to hear an educatin tale

About sex, booze and ourselves.

Well I was up in Denver bout two weeks ago

Wudn’t doin nothin thought I’d take in a show

So I parked my car an started walkin

The first show I came to was just my style

Triple X-rated called “Everthing’s Wild”

A whole buncha sex an not much talkin.

An on the poster I saw the name

Of a guy that I used to know

Ol Fred always said he was gonna make it big

An sure enuf he’s the star of the show.

So I paid my admission and went inside

Bought me some popcorn an a four dollar Sprite

Then I saw somethin that stopped me dead

Well remember I tole you a little while ago

About my ol friend who’s the star of the show

Well there, the projectionist was Fred.

We must have talked for an hour or two

Bout people and places like ol friends do

Relivin good an bad memories

An I wondered how Fred had sunk so far

When a few years ago he was a big porno star

So I axed him and here’s what he tole me.

Put the blame on the whiskey and wine;

They sucked the man outa me

I once had the world spread before my very eyes

But the bottle was all I could see.

So alla you people gathered in here

Guzzlin your whiskey, your wine an your beer

Remember bout my ol friend Fred

Well here was a man who had all he could handle

Till somethin took the wick right outa his candle

An that somethin, here’s what Fred said

Put the blame on the whiskey and wine

They sucked the man outa me

I once had the world spread before my very eyes

But the bottle was all I could see.

Well I know this is a bar an everbody’s drinkin

But an ol friend of mine just set me to thinkin

That mebbe we oughta try somethin else.

MY OLD FRIEND FRED (CALHOON BROS)

Why not? From April 21, 1977 at the Las Cruces Inn.

Saturday Night

I recently watched The History of the Eagles on the tube and my first thought was, "Boy am I glad I was in the Calhoon Brothers." There weren't as many groupies or as much cocaine in Las Cruces as there was in LA, but the food was much better and the hassles far less mean-spirited. Maybe it was the big bucks that made their lives so much harder than ours.

There haven't been very many albums better than Desperado and this is one of my favorite songs from it.

SATURDAY NIGHT

 

When You Dance

Out of the 50 presets I have on the Boss BR-600 digital recorder that supplies my guitar effects, I would guess that about 42 of them are fuzzy and distorted. I can still remember 1965, when the only distortion device was the Maestro Fuzz-tone, which arguably produced the ugliest sound you can get out of a guitar. Only "Satisfaction" made it sound good. Even Paul McCartney's ambitious stab at using it on the bass on "Think For Yourself" doesn't make it. Then the Big Muff Pi (and others) came along and before we knew it the clean guitar sound was strictly for C&W and bluegrass. In 1969 The Band once again made it respectable to play an undistorted guitar.

I haven't used one of the fuzzier effects in ages so I decided to tackle one of my favorite Neil Young tunes, using an effect Boss calls "American". It's a heavily compressed sound, which means I can hit the strings as hard or as soft as I want and yet the volume stays about the same. Handy for R&R.

WHEN YOU DANCE

This song has been with me for decades. Here's a recording of my wife, Joyce, and me singing the song in my mother's living room. Maybe 1971? Apparently I had recently discovered the reverb knob on the reel-to-reel recorder.

WHEN YOU DANCE 1971

Whispering Pines

I knew two songs that had the same title but were completely different. One was by Johnny Horton and the other was by The Band. But were they all that different? Could they be played in the same key and tempo and somehow glommed into one rather long song? Maybe.

WHISPERING PINES

Johnny Horton was one of my earliest influences mainly because his greatest hits album came out right when I was getting into music at 12 or so. We used to play a lot of Johnny Horton in the Calhoon Brothers.

If I had to pick any one singer I'd like to be able to sing like, it would be Richard Manuel of The Band. He sings this song in a falsetto that is the most mournful, poignant thing you've ever heard. I feel badly about my mid-range mouthing of the words but hey, it's the Knees Calhoon Midnight Ramble.  

The Doper's Dream

Tonight's song is the result of a challenge given me by Dugym Qycfyl. He wanted a song in which the guitar solos were made by scraping the pick along the strings. But before I added the guitar parts, I noticed that Band in a Box actually had "fret noise" as a MIDI-sound. So I picked a ragged waltz style and converted the piano parts into fret noise. Then I added to the chaos by scraping my pick along the strings as Dugym wanted.

The song is another one supplied by little Tommy Pynchon from his children's book, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. A while back I collaborated with him for TOMMY'S TRAINS, also from the book. If you want to read along with this song, the lyrics are on page 369 of the Viking edition, right about the middle of the book.

THE DOPER'S DREAM 

The song is essentially a list of popular drugs loosely knitted together in a dream sequence. In 1967 I was a private in the US Army at Fort Bliss in a Nike Hercules guidance system school. Every day we would be given a huge notebook labeled "SECRET" to keep track of our electronics work. At the end of the day they'd gather them all up and lock them away for the next day. In my book I wrote the lyrics of a song about all of the drugs I knew about that was very similar to this one. Incredibly clever wordplay, as I remember. Then one day in the summer of 1967 I, and three of my buddies, were snatched from class and accused of "drug usage", which essentially trashed our SECRET security clearances. The story is told in detail in THE COMPLEAT CALHOON.
 

I never saw the notebook again and the song is irretrievably lost (unless they invent memory drugs during my lifetime). But Tommy's dope dream lives on. If I remember correctly, it's not quite as good as the dope song the army might still have stored under a mountain in Colorado.

BONUS COVER!

One of my favorite old songs with a plot, here's a tune covered by a lot of people since it was written in 1959 by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkins. 

LONG BLACK VEIL

I Feel Fine

This is a mistake. I should have known better than to tackle a Beatle song that everybody knows, but it has the essential Buckaroo lick that has propelled the last three songs. At least the way I play it is similar to the other song licks. George actually plays a better, more difficult lick.

I couldn't find a drum pattern anything like what Ringo plays. What I picked was called "Johnny Cash Style" if you can believe that. Undoubtedly if I knew Band in a Box better I could have manufactured a pattern that mimicked Ringo's playing, but for now I only use the styles supplied on the CD.

I FEEL FINE

Enough excuses. I need to stick to obscure songs. We played this in The Disciples, a band from 1966 that lasted about a year. It had no chance -- everybody in it was waiting for their draft notice. I don't remember it being so hard to sing.

Younger Girl

Okay, so the Buckaroo lick only shows up a couple of times in this song. It's still a memorable tune, if only for the fact that after about 40 years I still remember it. I always considered my song, Hi Hello Mary, as the foremost paean to paedophilia in the Calhoon necrology, but maybe this one challenges it.

YOUNGER GIRL

 Now I have to go work on the Beatles song, one I haven't played since 1965.

I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better

I imagine you saw this one coming when I said I was going to be featuring songs that have the ubiquitous "Buckaroo" lick in them. Or should I say, the "Needles and Pins" lick.

This has always been one of my favorite Byrds songs, mainly because we could play it pretty well even back in the Torques days. Two jangling guitars, exuberant shouting for singing, crashing drums. It was right down the Torques' alley.

I'LL FEEL A WHOLE LOT BETTER

I thought Tom Petty showed a lot of class and respect for this song and the Byrds when he recorded it as-is when he covered it. They mimicked the Byrds perfectly.

The upcoming Spoonful and Beatles' versions of the lick may not be as obvious as this one so I expect you all to be waiting on pins and needles for the next two songs.

Needles and Pins

Unless I hit a snag I plan to devote the next four songs to what I call the "Buckaroo Lick". It's a simple guitar lick that to me personified the sound of the sixties. As I remember it, the first I ever heard it was on "Buckaroo", a catchy instrumental (1965) by Buck Owens' guitar picker Don Rich, but a visit to the all-knowing internet shows that this song by the Searchers (1964) may be the first time it was played. The other songs are by the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful and the Beatles and there are probably dozens more that use the lick.

NEEDLES AND PINS

Sadly, I never learned to play Buckaroo and a bunch of practice would be necessary before I would attempt it.

Couple More Years

I couldn't remember who sang this song or who wrote it so I finally snapped and googled it. Shel Silverstein! I should have known. Out of the top ten cleverest C&W songs ever written, he probably wrote at least seven. The melody is standard and the backing minimal (at least the way I do it) so it's got to be the words and the singing that make this into an almost perfect song.

COUPLE MORE YEARS 

Nope, it's not the singing.

Someday Soon

One of my favorite songs from the 60s was Ian Tyson's "Someday Soon", but since it was written for a woman to sing I never had much opportunity to sing it. But then I figured that if it's time for women to be engaging in combat, maybe it's time for this song to be re-gendered.

Hmmm. It doesn't really work. I changed all the gendered words but now it sounds like some mama's boy pining away for some bull-dozing staff sergeant named Melba. But I recorded it anyway.

SOMEDAY SOON

I went way overboard on the guitars, laying down several tracks and not being satisfied with any one of them. So I blanked out all the parts I didn't like and left in the ones I sorta did.

FLASH! Dugym Qycfyl just e-mailed me and said that my regendering of this song doesn't work because all I did was change the pronouns. He said the whole plot of the song needs to be adjusted so that it's about a guy who's having trouble because his girlfriend is too feminine. Just as the original song is about a girl's boyfriend being too masculine.

Luckily, Dugym supplied revised lyrics for me and here's the new, re-sexed version.

SOMEDAY SOON 2013 

If you ask me, this new version could become a hit for some studly C&W crooner.

BONUS COVER!

I realize that the song of the night was mostly cover but Knees made so many decent covers (all of excellent songs) I like adding them here. This is one that has a completely different beat from the original version by Buffalo Springfield. It was sort of an experiment and it turned out quite well, I think.

I AM A CHILD

This Wheel's on Fire

As usual, I am of two minds about the way these songs are done. Should I dash out a perhaps divinely-inspired song in an hour or two and call it done? Or should I let the song simmer a day or two on my recording griddle, in case I get another bolt from above about how the song should end?

Today I have one of the slapdash songs. It started last night when I realized I might be able to do justice to one of my favorite diminished chord-containing gems by The Band, This Wheel's on Fire. I had forgotten that Rick Danko's voice ranged far, far beyond mine and I couldn't croak it in the same key. But maybe if I sang an octave lower and let the harmonizer do the work . . .

THIS WHEEL'S ON FIRE

 It doesn't sound at all like The Band. But neither did the version that was used as the theme song for Absolutely Fabulous. It's a strange tune and it makes the most out of that diminished chord.

I Am a Child

A couple of things occurred to me as I was playing with this song, one of my favorite Neil Young tunes. One, I need to experiment more with changing some of the old tunes. And two, the harmonizer also works on guitars.

Band in a Box has a few hundred different song "styles" and finding the best one can be a chore. The style I decided on is definitely not the one used by Buffalo Springfield, but I really like the way that the melody fits over it.

I AM A CHILD

I had no idea what to play for the guitar solo so I just picked out the melody, miking my Fender G-DEC amp and running the signal through the harmonizer. You can bet that I will be using that effect on something swampy soon. I'm thinking the 2013 remake of Nocturnal Mission. 

Tonight the Bartender

The Calhoon Brothers enjoyed playing self-aware barroom songs and this one by Asleep at the Wheel is one of the best, although it seems to have been missed by the younger barroom crowd. I tried to check the lyrics I had for it online and couldn't find them. Apparently no one has uploaded the lyrics yet.

TONIGHT THE BARTENDER

Since this blog is a sort of archive as much as anything else, I should mention the instruments I use on the recordings. The acoustic guitar is a J.W. Gallagher and Son, G70 model, #376, The electric guitar is a 1966 Gibson ES-335 TDC, #360350. The harmonizer is a Digitech Vocalist Live 3. The effects come from a Boss BR-600 digital recorder. The microphone is a Shure SM-58, probably over 40 years old. I use a Boss volume pedal. The bass, drums and keyboards come from Band in a Box and the recordings are done with Audacity.

Here's how the Mighty Calhoon Brothers played the song back on April 21, 1977 at the Las Cruces Inn.

TONIGHT THE BARTENDER (Calhoons)

 

 

    

Operator

This is another one of those inevitable songs. It has perfect words and melody. And, in my opinion, as important as these in a song, plot.

OPERATOR

 The drums, bass and piano are played by a program I use call Band in a Box. It's the tool I wanted to program back in the 80s for the Commodore computer, which could play three notes at a time, making a chord. I wanted a machine that would play chords that I programmed into it. I'd play and sing along with the chords. Band in a Box is that concept beautifully realized for MIDI and the PC. I plug in the chords to a song and the computer plays it on as many as five instruments of my choosing. I try to choose only the drums, bass and piano. I figure I should be able to do the guitars myself.

Here's what this song looks like in Band in a Box.

  

No Reply

It's Beatle time again here at Knees Calhoon's Midnight Ramble and it's so much fun to go back to 1965 and play those chords that brought so much amazement to young Knees and Skip. We thrived on their songs, like Things We Said Today, that would have a relatively mellow verse or two before going into a rocking chorus, usually in another key.

NO REPLY

The Torques of 1965, as was their wont, would add another layer of excitement to the song by not only getting louder and more frantic during the chorus, but by speeding up like rabid greyhounds. Then, when it came time for the verse again, they would sheepishly slow down to a more normal pace as the dancing teenagers would glare at them with beer-fuddled eyes.

NO REPLY (Torques Version, Nov. 1965) 

With Skip Batchelor providing the vocals and guitar, Fender Tucker, the harmony and guitar, Dwight Babcock the soaring bass, and Bob Amerman the pounding drums, the Torques at the Boys Club probably looked a bit scruffier than in their amp picture.

  

We had bought the amps in Albuquerque a few months earlier. We had planned to get the traditional blond amps but the black ones were brand new from Fender and we couldn't resist. Years later the blond ones came back into vogue and we regretted it. The guitars in this picture would sell for $$$$ today. I traded the green Strat in for my Gibson Es-335 in 1966.

I was messing around with a labeller one day and stuck a label on Skip's Strat on the headpiece over the Fender decal. He was rather pissed when I pulled the label off and the Fender decal came off with it. It probably lowered the value of the guitar a few bucks in 1965 -- and a few hundred in 2013). Sorry about that, Skip!

Sanctuary 2013

Today I decided to see if I could do a better version of an old Knees Calhoon song in the hour I have slated for music. Well, it's better, but it's not much different from the version I recorded in the 90s and presented at the Midnight Ramble back in 2012. I guess I haven't had any major epiphanies since then (besides the harmonizer and the acoustic guitar).

SANCTUARY 2013

I got the idea for this song from my usual source of inspiration, my books. A tip for budding songwriters: if you need a good title for your song, just walk up and down the fiction aisles of a library. There are thousands of words and phrases that have been vetted by venal publishers and editors to be the most provocative, eye-catching titles possible, and they're all lined up on shelves facing you. Just tilt your head a bit to the right.

It might even help if you use the prose of the book, too. Perhaps this song would have been better if I had followed the plot of William Faulkner's book instead of using a situation I found myself in with a woman at the time. 

Papa Cried

How about another adorable pastiche from Legs Muldoon, aka Dugym Qycfyl, aka Jim Weiler? This time it's a country tune in the Merle Haggard vein and Knees naturally thought of "Mama Tried" when he conjured the music. Once again, he should have followed Dugym's directions better, but dramatic pauses for the drums are not easily programmed (at least by me).

PAPA CRIED

I would have sworn that Jim gave me the words to this song back in the 20th century but the lyric sheet says it all.

BONUS COVER!

It was 1960 and Knees was changing the marquee at the Allen Theater in Farmington NM when this movie came to town. He saw it five or six times that week. It had a great theme song which he had no trouble singing; he'd been singing it all his life.

NORTH TO ALASKA

The Way

I first heard this song when I was working at Softdisk in Shreveport LA back in the 90s. It was playing on somebody's radio at work and I remember asking around about that "old and gray" song. Nobody could remember the song or who sang it. Then one day I was at a pizza joint and it played on the TV on a cable channel and I finally found out that the name of the song was "The Way" and that it was by a band named Fastball. Of course I could have found out that on the Internet but my mind doesn't work that way now, much less in the 90s. I figured I had stumbled on a forgotten gem, because it was truly a catchy number with intriguing major/minor chord changes and an extremely rocking chorus.

THE WAY

It wasn't till I got on my current recording kick last year that I actually researched the song and learned it. I found out that the song was very popular in the 90s and may have actually been over-played. As if I would know.

Fastball turns out to be a three-piece band from Austin and if any of their other songs compare to "The Way" I need to listen more. There's even a Wikipedia entry about the song. Apparently, it's based on a true event, when an elderly couple were discovered dead in the desert, a distance away from their car, which had broken down. No one knew they were out.

Backslider's Wine

I recorded this a couple of months ago and have learned a few tricks since then but it's doubtful I will revisit this song, written by Michael Martin Murphy. There were too many football games today to allow me to spend much time at the Ramble. Sorry.

BACKSLIDER'S WINE 

Nothin' You Can Say

I'm getting ideas. About how my recent upsurge in energy and confidence, bolstered by my resurrection of the acoustic guitar and the purchase of a harmonizer, makes me think about re-recording all of those songs I wrote back in the 60s and 70s. I can do them so much cleaner than back then, with better vocals. And to start this new project off, I decided to redo NOTHIN' YOU CAN SAY, a song from 1966 written by my friend Albert "Mo" Moses. 

NOTHIN' YOU CAN SAY

It came out quite a bit different from the version recorded in 1993 and found in the Midnight Ramble for May 27, 2012. Is it better? I dunno. But from time to time I plan to redo some of the old songs. 

Mo wrote the words, chords and guitar lick for this song and had a slightly different melody when he sang it. I used the harmonizer and it seemed to force me to sing the rap-like chant I came up with. So I added on more guitars and more voices to give it that "wall of sound" that I used to dislike so much. 

After I've done a few more remakes, maybe I'll learn if it's a good thing to do. 

Sweet Baby James

It was inevitable that this song would appear in a blog like this. It's one of the world's best campfire singalong songs and I've sung it so often over the years that I didn't need to consult my songbook at all.

SWEET BABY JAMES

Sometimes words and music come together so brilliantly you just have to wonder if humanity is worthy of it.

NOTE: Ambien at work. When I added this song on January 18, 2013 I completely forgot that back on December 28, 2012 I had done the same song. To be fair, it is a different version, using an acoustic guitar and less Band in a Box. There are 2 inserted measures but I left the ending half-assed.

I wouldn't be surprised if I did this again. I'm prone to taking an Ambien at midnight and playing till three. 

For a Smile

We return to the arcane here at the countdown to with another song penned by my friend, Dugym Qycfyl, aka Legs Muldoon. When he found out I was on a recording kick back in the 90s he dropped a binder on my desk. It was filled with song lyrics he had come up with out of his twisted but Adderal-quality imagination. My job was to write the music and record the songs.

A while back we celebrated a couple of his songs, POME OF YOURSELF and THE PEDIPHAGE QUARTET, and if you survived those you'll probably enjoy

 FOR A SMILE

 I feel I must explain how the song came about. When I saw the words I sensed a rhythm (as all good lyrics should have) and immediately sang a simple melody over the first chords that occurred to my hands. This is my usual song-writing method. Think long? Think wrong. I recorded it and didn't really like it. Was it an upbeat song, or a wistful one? Then I looked more closely at the lyric sheet.

 

According to the official lyric sheet, it's both! My high school Latin skills tell me that "lagrimoso" has something to do with tears. "Allegro" means the opposite, I suppose. And lento and presto mean slow and fast. Boy do I not take directions well. 

So I made the song a bit more tearful, and more suited to the season of Lent. As your penance, here is the first version I did, a few months back. Both versions rely on Band in a Box for all the music.

FOR A SMILE (Early Version)

BONUS COVER!

Continuing with adding a cover song to the countdown, here is one of Knees' favorite Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby songs. He even learned the piano part for the recording.

THE END OF THE INNOCENCE

(c) Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby

Kind Woman

All right. It's time for one of my all-time favorite tunes and of course it's from Buffalo Springfield, the perpetrators of about 30% of my all-time favorites list. The first time I heard this song back in 1966 I knew that I wanted to be able to play the guitar like that. Unfortunately I was a tad naive and didn't recognize that it was a pedal steel guitar. Played by Jerry Garcia, no less.

KIND WOMAN

My nephew, Jocco Rushing, who can play circles around me on the guitar, was also blown away by the guitar and singing (by Richie Furay) in this song. I consider Buffalo Springfield's music timeless and I think young Jocco agrees. There is a 3-CD collection of all of Buffalo Springfield's music and I recommend it to anyone who likes classic 20th century music. At least check out Jerry Garcia's steel playing on this song. And this was 1966!