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Wayne Kramer 2/2024


Wayne Kramer 2/2024 (75) was born Wayne Stanley Kambes in Detroit on April 30, 1948. He had a typically nomadic post-World War II upbringing. His parents divorced when he was young, and Kramer’s father, Stanley, effectively disappeared from his life. Raised by his mother and stepfather, the young Wayne sought solace in the seismic sounds of 50s rock’n’roll, apparently as a reaction to being abused by his stepfather and as a result turned to music as an outlet. 

In the music of the era there was one pioneering figure in particular shaping the course of his future.

“Quite simply, Chuck Berry was the reason I played guitar,” Karmer enthused in the sleevenotes for Rhino’s The Big Bang! The Best Of The MC5. “When I heard that sound when I was nine years old, that was it. That was the sound of liberation, the sound of release and of power. And I mean the electric guitar. The sound of the amplifier was a huge part of it for me. That visceral spirit formed me and got me into bands.”

While in his early teens, Wayne found a fellow disciple in childhood neighbour and friend Fred Smith. Obsessed with their instruments, the two young guitarists played with a variety of local acts and sought out the hardest and most dynamic rock’n’roll records they could find (they took their cues from The Rolling Stones as well as Chuck Berry) before forming their own band in Lincoln Park-Michigan, christened MC5. Short for “Motor City 5”, the name reflected urban Detroit’s primary industry – the manufacture of automobiles.

By 1965, MC5’s classic line-up had solidified, with Kramer and Smith joined by bassist Michael Davis, drummer Dennis Tomich and vocalist Bobby Derminer. The latter was responsible for doling out more fitting stage names to his bandmates. Having rechristened himself Rob Tyner (after John Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner), the afro-sporting singer invented Fred “Sonic” Smith for Smith, Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson for Tomich and suggested Wayne adopt the surname “Kramer” instead of Kambes. Wayne did so, legally changing his name in 1965.

During the early years, MC5 gigged constantly in and around the US Midwest. In the same way that punk later connected with the disenfranchised, the group established a solid fanbase among North America’s working-class communities.

“In Detroit, we ruled,” Kramer later asserted. “Our fans were the blue-collar shop rats and factory kids, and they connected with the energy and release in the MC5’s live shows. But our band was generally despised outside of the industrial Midwest power-base cities of Cleveland, Chicago and Cincinnati – and the hundreds of small towns across Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.”

Prior to signing with Elektra, MC5 released a couple of singles – the first a crunching cover of Them’s I Can Only Give You Everything, issued on AMG Records in 1967, with the follow-up pairing two self-penned songs, Borderline and Looking At You, for the small A-Squared imprint. However, while the records sold well locally, MC5’s attitude didn’t go down well with the era’s studio personnel – with Kramer in particular butting heads with the technicians attempting to tame the group’s sound for record.

In The Big Bang sleevenotes, Kramer wrote, “I’d start working on my guitar tone and the engineer would say, ‘Turn that down, it’s distorted!’ I said, ‘That’s what I want!’, that the Motown sound is not what I do. I wasn’t looking for a tight sound, I have my own ideas. So we had an adversarial relationship with the recording process from the beginning.”

In another future portent of punk music, MC5’s radical socio-political stance also concerned the powers that be. Until he was controversially jailed for the possession of a minimal amount of marijuana in 1969, poet, visionary free-thinker and activist John Sinclair, managed the band, whose collective world view was influenced by the Marxism of the Black Panther Party and Beat Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Black Panther founder Huey Newton inspired Sinclair, who died exactly two months after Wayne Kramer, to found the White Panther Party, whose ideas seemed radical to the era’s establishment, but now chime with modern-day beliefs surrounding ecology and human rights.

“The White Panther Party was an anti-racist, cultural revolutionary group,” Kramer wrote in his book The Hard Stuff. “It was a logical extension of our reefer-fuelled political ideas and it was done in the spirit of agitprop theatre. John [Sinclair] wrote up a ‘Ten-Point Programme’ to fight for a cleaner planet and for the freeing of all political prisoners.”

Fortunately, Elektra Records weren’t put off by MC5’s revolutionary spirit. After John Sinclair told the label’s director of publicity (and future Ramones co-manager) Danny Fields about the band on a US radio show, an intrigued Fields went to see MC5 play in Detroit and was impressed enough to sign the band to Elektra in the late summer of 1968. With thoughts turning to the group’s debut album, the two parties bucked industry trends by deciding that their first record, Kick Out The Jams, should be a recording of one of their concerts. “The live show was the central experience [of the MC5],” Kramer explained later. “That was who we were. We wanted to present that on record.”

Featuring several of the best MC5 songs, including Come Together, the Kramer-sung Ramblin’ Rose and the ferocious title track, the charged, raucous and aggressive Kick Out The Jams was taped at one of the band’s many rapturously received gigs at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, on 31 October 1968. Now widely regarded as a landmark proto-punk record, the album captured MC5’s garage-rock blitz in all its glory, and it even cracked the Top 30 of the US Billboard 200, staying on the chart for an impressive 23-week run. Rolling Stone Magazine considers the album one of the 500 albums that defined Rock and Roll.

However, because of the title song’s infamously controversial opening exclamation – “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” – influential Detroit chain store JL Hudson’s banned the record and went on to remove all Elektra product from its shelves. In a series of events that seemed to presage the scenario which unfolded when EMI sacked Sex Pistols following their notorious Bill Grundy incident just seven years later, Elektra then decided to drop the MC5 – only for the band to immediately find a new home with Atlantic Records.

Though still featuring songs with socio-political content such as The American Ruse and the anti-war Human Being Lawnmower, MC5’s Atlantic debut, 1970’s Back In The USA, largely dialled back the polemics and concentrated on sharp, smart garage-pop anthems such as Tonight, Teenage Lust and High School. Overseen by producer and future Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau, the record had the mainstream in its sights, yet it only hit the outer reaches of the Billboard 200.

“Kramer was one half of the explosive twin-guitar attack that drove the Detroit band’s incendiary live performances, helping to set the stage and template for punk rock. They were at the heart of the band’s sound and the centerpiece of its notoriously loud and frenetic live performances. Wayne Kramer and Fred (Sonic) Smith teamed to provide the twin-guitar attack 
In ranking Kramer and Smith, together and separately, were of world class among the 250 greatest guitarists of all time. Rolling Stone said the two “worked together like the pistons of a powerful engine” to “kick their band’s legendarily high-energy jams deep into space while simultaneously keeping one foot in the groove.”

MC5 self-produced their third and final studio album, 1971’s High Time, with help from engineer Geoffrey Haslam. At least in the creative sense, the band were still hitting new peaks, as Kramer asserted in The Hard Stuff.

“We had enough excellent new material, and good ideas for how to go about recording it,” he wrote. “We finally had enough experience to know how to be creative in the recording studio. We could now combine the raw energy of Kick Out The Jams with the studio chops of Back In The USA, and have it sound like the MC5 on record.”

High Time undoubtedly contained some of MC5’s most imperious music. Sister Anne, Over And Over and Kramer’s Miss X all rank among the band’s finest work, while the brilliant, brass-enhanced Skunk (Sonicly Speaking) adroitly married high-octane proto-punk with the free jazz music both Kramer and Fred Smith admired so much. “We loved Sun Ra and Archie Shepp,” Kramer noted in The Big Bang’s booklet. “We didn’t see any other rock bands trying to work them in. Skunk pointed to the future of what the MC5 would look like. The problem was the MC5 was a band that didn’t have a future.”

Despite High Time’s quality and a burgeoning European following which took the band across the Atlantic for half a dozen tours, MC5 were consumed by a combination of personal issues and drug-related problems. They split after an ignominious final performance at their old stomping ground, Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, at the end of 1972, but by then Kramer – who was now gripped by a sizeable heroin habit – had other priorities.

The next few years were the worst of the guitarist’s life. Though he somehow kept performing with different musicians on Detroit’s club circuit, most of Kramer’s energies went into feeding his habit, which he maintained through drug-dealing and petty larceny until – after one deal too many – he ended up in prison in Lexington, Kentucky, where he did a three-year stretch starting in 1975.

Upon his release from jail, Kramer moved to New York City and restarted his career, touring with post-punk pop act Was (Not Was) and playing on the group’s first two albums, and forming the ill-fated Gang War with fellow heroin user Johnny Thunders. Keen to quit drugs for good, Kramer temporarily eschewed music, working as a carpenter in Manhattan before moving to the Florida Keys in the late 80s, where he continued woodworking and also built custom homes.

During the guitarist’s wilderness years, however, MC5’s music was repeatedly cited as an influence by younger generations of musicians. The process had started with the UK punk firebrands (“In England, they really liked Back In The USA – you can hear what The Clash, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe got out of it,” Kramer noted in The Big Bang booklet) and it eventually led to Kramer’s stock rising in the US – so much so that Epitaph Records (home to Bad Religion, Rancid and The Offspring) offered him a solo deal. Relocating to Los Angeles, Kramer released three well-received albums for Epitaph, The Hard Stuff, Dangerous Madness and Citizen Wayne, and toured extensively during the mid-to-late 90s.

Succeeding in his quest to also quit alcohol in 1999, Kramer went on to enjoy distinctions in a variety of fields. He embarked upon a highly successful career scoring music for TV and film, with commissions ranging from HBO’s comedy series Eastbound & Down to Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby. For the ITVS/PBS documentary The Narcotics Farm, Kramer provided narration in addition to a separate soundtrack album, Lexington.

In 2009, after he returned to performing and recording as a solo artist, he established Jail Guitar Doors U.S.A., a nonprofit that donates musical instruments to inmates and offers songwriting workshops in prisons, in partnership with his wife, Margaret, and the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.
The name comes from “Jail Guitar Doors,” a song by the Clash that opens with a line about Wayne Kramer’s struggles with substance abuse and the law: “Let me tell you about Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”
“The guitar can be the key that unlocks the cell,” Kramer told High Times in 2015. “It can be the key that unlocks the prison gate, and it could be the key that unlocks the rest of your life to give you an alternative way to deal with things.”

Kramer had a fruitful solo career with several album releases and movie credits. In 2018, he released his memoir “The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities,” which won him a Michigan’s Notable Book Award.

Kramer and the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died in 1994, were both among Rolling Stone’s 2010 list of all-time top 100 guitarists. They “funneled Sun Ra’s sci-fi jazz through twin howitzers. Together they staked out a vision for hard rock that felt ecstatic, giddy, boundless,” the outlet’s David Fricke wrote.

Even though MC5 did not achieve great commercial success, their influence lives on through generations of musicians who were inspired by the group’s attitude and sound. Led Zeppelin, The Clash and Rage Against the Machine are among bands influenced by the MC5.

Wayne Kramer.

When MC5 guitarist and co-founder Wayne Kramer passed away from cancer, aged 75, on 2 February 2024, the rock world was quick to pay tribute to one of modern music’s genuine trailblazers. Iconic figures ranging from Alice Cooper through to Slash from Guns N’ Roses weighed in with well-chosen words, while in an especially heartfelt testimonial, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello even said that Kramer and MC5 “basically invented punk rock music.”

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Dickey Betts 4/2024

Dickey Betts 4/2024 (80) was born in West Palm Beach on December 12, 1943, and raised in Bradenton/Sarasota, Florida. He grew up in a musical family listening to traditional bluegrass, country music and Western swing. He started playing ukulele at the age of five and, as his hands got bigger, moved on to mandolin, banjo, and guitar.

At sixteen, feeling the need for something “a little faster”, he played in a series of rock bands on the Florida circuit, up the East Coast and into the Midwest, before forming Second Coming with Berry Oakley in 1967.

According to Rick Derringer, the “group called the Jokers” referenced in “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” was one of Betts’ early groups. In  February 1969, Betts and Oakley joined members of two other Sunshine State groups — guitarist Duane Allman and his keyboard-playing brother Gregg of the Hour Glass and drummer Butch Trucks – and Mississippi-born drummer Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson in a new unit that ultimately based itself in Macon, Ga.

Betts collaborated with Duane Allman, introducing melodic twin guitar harmony and counterpoint which “rewrote the rules for how two rock guitarists can work together, completely scrapping the traditional rhythm/lead roles to stand toe to toe”. Duane Allman, already a successful session player (Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin a.o.), gained a contract with Southern soul impresario Phil Walden, who planned to back a power trio featuring Allman. The ensuing Allman Brothers Band eventually grew to six members, including Duane’s brother Gregg, Betts, and Oakley. Duane, who had worked with Eric Clapton on Layla, once said, “I’m the famous guitar player, but Dickey is the good one.” 

After Duane Allman’s untimely death from a motorcycle crash in October 1971, Betts became the band’s sole guitarist and took on a greater singing and leadership role. In the course of one night’s traveling, he practiced slide guitar intensively in order to be able to cover the majority of Duane’s parts.

He wrote “Jessica” (inspired by his daughter of the same name and the Allmans’ biggest commercial hit, “Ramblin’ Man“.  He also gained renown for composing instrumentals, with one appearing on most of the group’s albums, including “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Jessica” (which was later used as the theme to Top Gear). 

The band went through a 3 year hiatus starting in 1976 (Gregg Allman’s marriage to Cher), during which time Betts, like many of the other band members, pursued a solo career and side projects under such names as Great Southern and The Dickey Betts Band. Betts’s first solo album, Highway Call, was released in 1974 and featured fiddle player Vassar Clements. Betts released  2 more albums, starting with Dickey Betts & Great Southern in 1977, which included the song “Bougainvillea”, co-written with future Hollywood star Don Johnson and in 1978 he released an album, Atlanta’s Burning Down.

The Allman Brothers reformed in 1979, with Dan Toler taking the second guitar role alongside Betts. But in 1982, they broke up a second time, during which time .

The Allman Brothers reformed in 1979 for the album Enlightened Rogues, with two members of Great Southern replacing Allman Brothers members who were unwilling to participate in the reunion: guitar player Dan Toler for pianist Chuck Leavell, and bassist David “Rook” Goldflies for bassist Lamar Williams. Several albums and personnel changes followed, until declining record and concert ticket sales and management problems led the group to disband again in 1982 when Betts formed his own band, Betts, Hall, Leavell and Trucks, where he was co-frontman along with former Wet Willie singer, saxophone, and harmonica player Jimmy Hall. Despite earning good notices, the group was unable to secure a recording contract and disbanded in 1984.

Betts returned to his solo career performing live at smaller venues, and released the album Pattern Disruptive in 1989. When a one-off reunion tour was proposed in support of the Allman Brothers’ 20th anniversay Dreams box set, a third reformation occurred with Warren Haynes now joining Betts on guitar.  Betts’s solo band again supplied the Allman Brothers’ other guitarist. The success of the one-off tour resulted in a permanent reunion, which absorbed Betts’s energies for the remainder of the 1990s. This band line-up release three studio albums between 1990 and 1994 and won the praise of the critics.

While remaining active as a touring band, the Allman Brothers did not release another album of studio material after 1994’s Where It All Begins for nine years, until Hittin’ the Note in 2003.

In 1994, Haynes and Allman’s bassist Allen Woody formed Gov’t Mule with former Dickey Betts Band drummer Matt Abts as a side project, and left the Allman Brothers for Gov’t Mule full-time in 1997. Betts was replaced on numerous Allman Brothers tour dates throughout the mid-to-late 1990s, for what were reported in the media as “personal reasons”.  A breaking point was reached in 2000 when the remaining original Allman Brothers members – Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks, and Jaimoe – suspended Betts (reportedly via fax) before the launch of the band’s Summer Campaign Tour. According to Betts, the band told him in the fax to “get clean” (presumably from alcohol and/or drugs). Betts was subsequently ordered out of the band after the dispute went to arbitration. Betts’ last show with the Allman Brothers was at the Music Midtown Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 7, 2000.

Betts was ousted from the band in 2000 over a conflict regarding his continued drug and alcohol use; he never played with them again, nor would he appear with other former band members for reunions or side projects.Haynes rejoined in the early 2000s with Derek Trucks and stayed with ABB until their final concert on October 28, 2014 at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.

He was first replaced for the 2000 tour by Jimmy Herring, formerly of the Aquarium Rescue Unit. who in turn was replaced by returning Warren Hays and Derek Trucks who had joined ABB a year earlier. When Betts filed suit against the other three original ABB’ers, the separation turned into a permanent divorce. Betts re-formed the Dickey Betts Band in 2000 and toured that summer. The band reassumed the name Dickey Betts & Great Southern and added Betts’ son Duane (named after Duane Allman) on lead guitar.  In 2005, Betts released the DVD Live from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Betts’ final album release was Dickey Betts & Great Southern Official Bootleg Vol. 1 (2021), a two-CD live album of performances from the 2000s. Although they were separated personally and as musical bandmates for over 15 years, Betts and Gregg Allman became reconciled before Allman’s death in 2017. 

In August 2018, Dickey Betts suffered a mild stroke and had to cancel tour dates with his Dickey Betts Band. He was taken to hospital and was in a critical but stable condition, following an accident at his home in Osprey, Florida. On September 20, 2018, he successfully underwent surgery to relieve swelling on his brain. Betts died from cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease at his home in Osprey, Florida, on April 18, 2024, at the age of 80. 

He was inducted with the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and also won a best rock performance Grammy Award with the band for “Jessica” in 1996. Betts was ranked No. 58 on Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list in 2003, and No. 61 on the list published in 2011.

After his death, drummer Jaimoe (Jai Johanny Johanson), became the last surviving original member of the Allman Brothers Band.

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Melanie Safka 1/2024

Melanie, hippie singer-songwriterMelanie Safka 1/2024 (76) professionally known as Melanie was born on Feb. 3, 1947 and raised in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Her father, Fred, was of Ukrainian ancestry and her mother, jazz singer Pauline “Polly” Altomare, was of Italian heritage. Melanie made her first public singing appearance at age four on the radio show Live Like A Millionaire, performing the song “Gimme a Little Kiss”. She moved with her family to Long Branch, New Jersey, and attended Long Branch High School, but disturbed that she was rejected by her schoolmates as a “beatnik”, she ran away to California. After her return to New Jersey, she transferred to Red Bank High School. She graduated in 1966, although she was prevented from attending her graduation ceremony because of an overdue library book. (different times!!!). Yet, she was inducted into the school’s hall of fame in 2014.

In the 1960s while still in high school, Melanie started performing at The Inkwell, a coffee house in the West End section of Long Branch. After high school, her parents insisted that she attend college, so she studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. At that time she began singing in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, such as The Bitter End, and soon after signed her first recording contract with Columbia Records. Melanie released two singles on the label in the U.S. She subsequently signed with Buddah Records and found her first chart success in Europe in 1969 with “Bobo’s Party”, which reached No. 1 in France. Her growing popularity in Europe resulted in performances on European television programs such as Beat-Club in West Germany. Her debut album received positive reviews from Billboard, which described her husky voice as “wise beyond her years” and said her “non-conformist approach to the selections on this LP make her a new talent to be reckoned with”.

Later in 1969, Melanie had a hit in the Netherlands with “Beautiful People” (which is how I got to know about her). She was one of only two solo female artists who performed at the Woodstock festival in 1969, and her first hit song, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”, was inspired by the Woodstock audience lighting candles during her set. The record became a hit in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States in 1970. The B-side of the single featured Melanie’s spoken-word track, “Candles in the Rain”. Her following hits included “Peace Will Come (According To Plan)” and a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday”.

In 1970, Melanie was the only artist to ignore a court injunction banning the Powder Ridge Rock Festival, which was scheduled to be held on July 31, August 1 and 2, 1970. She played for the crowd on a homemade stage powered by Mister Softee trucks. Not long after this performance, she played at the Strawberry Fields Festival held in August 1970, at Mosport Park in Ontario. She also performed at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970, at Afton Down. At the festival, she was introduced by Keith Moon, drummer of the Who and received four standing ovations. She appeared again at the Isle of Wight Festival in 2010. In June 1971, she was the artist who sang to herald in the summer solstice at Glastonbury Fayre (later the Glastonbury Festival) in England. She performed again at Glastonbury in 2011, the 40th anniversary of the original festival.

Melanie left Buddah Records when they insisted that she produce albums on demand. In 1971, she formed her own label, Neighborhood Records, with Peter Schekeryk, who was also her producer and husband. She had her biggest American hit on the Neighborhood label, the novelty-sounding 1972 No. 1 hit “Brand New Key” (often referred to as “The Roller Skate Song”). “Brand New Key” sold over three million copies worldwide and was featured in the 1997 movie Boogie Nights.

A vegetarian at the time, Melanie had just been through a cleansing fast in which she consumed nothing but distilled water for 27 days. She was so weakened by hunger that she was almost hallucinating, and a doctor recommended that she eat meat to build strength. One day, on a trip to a flea market with her husband, she found herself unable to resist the lure of the Golden Arches of a McDonalds.

“No sooner than had I finished the last bite of burger,” she told the newspaper, “I wrote ‘Brand New Key.’ It just came into my head. I had one of those little practice guitars in the van with me, and when my husband, who was a record producer, heard me singing, he said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, some silly song. I’m just playing around.’ He said, ‘No, no — do that part again!’ And I did, and he said, ‘Melanie, that’s a hit!’”

He was not wrong. With its sunny vocals and a percolating beat, “Brand New Key” set heads bobbing around the country. The song was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks starting on Christmas Day, 1971. Billboard later ranked the infectious ditty the No. 9 song of 1972. But not everything about the song was rainbow happy.

“Brand New Key,” seemingly written from the point of view of a girl hoping to win the favor of an elusive boy, includes the freighted line “I’m OK alone, but you’ve got something I need,” and then takes an apparent Freudian turn, with many listeners gleaning a sexual undertone in these lyrics:

Well, I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates
You’ve got a brand-new key
I think that we should get together
And try them on to see

In a time when the guardians of mainstream popular culture fought to keep radio and television output squeaky-clean, controversy soon followed. “I guess I can see why it was banned by some radio stations all across America,” she said in an interview with the website Where Music Meets the Soul.

The clamor recalled other “hidden meaning” kerfuffles, including speculation over the Beatles’ Technicolor odyssey “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which John Lennon always denied was a song about LSD.

“It was a time when people were reading things into lyrics,” Melanie said in the website interview. “Some said it was sexual innuendo or that it related to drugs, and ‘key’ a code for kilo.” But, she added, “I was just having a romp through my memory of learning how to ride my bike and roller skating,” along with the thrill of first love.

 I thought it was cute; a kind of old thirties tune. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it. They made up incredible stories as to what the lyrics said and what the song meant. In some places, it was even banned from the radio … My idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward … People will take it any way they want to take it.

In a 2013 interview with music journalist Ray Shasho, Melanie elaborated on the origin of “Brand New Key”.

 The aroma brought back memories of roller skating and learning to ride a bike and the vision of my dad holding the back fender of the tire. And me saying to my dad … “You’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, right?” Then I’d look back and he wasn’t holding and I’d fall. So that whole thing came back to me and came out in this song. So it was not a deliberate or intentional sexual innuendo.

The follow-up single to “Brand New Key” was “Ring the Living Bell”. To compete with this release, Melanie’s former record company released “The Nickel Song”, which she had recorded while still signed to Buddah Records. Both songs were simultaneous top 40 hits while “Brand New Key” was still on the charts, setting a record for the first female performer to have three top 40 hits at the same time.

Melanie won Billboard’s No. 1 Top Female Vocalist award for 1972 and was awarded two gold albums, and a gold single for “Brand New Key”. Three of her compositions were hits for the New Seekers. She is also known for her musical adaptations of children’s songs, including “Alexander Beetle” and “Christopher Robin”. When she became an official UNICEF ambassador in 1972, she agreed to forego a world tour in favor of raising money for the organization. She also took time to raise her daughter.

Melanie had another top 40 hit single in 1973 with “Bitter Bad”, a song that marked a slight departure from the hippie sentiments of her earlier hits, with lyrics such as “If you do me wrong I’ll put your first and last name in my rock n’ roll song”. Melanie’s other chart hits during this period were the self-penned “Together Alone” and a cover of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, which reached No 37 in the UK Singles Chart in March 1974.

In 1976, Melanie released an album on Atlantic Records, Photograph, which was produced by Ahmet Ertegun. The album was praised by The New York Times as one of the year’s best, although it was largely ignored by the public. It was re-issued on compact disc in 2005 with an additional disc of unreleased material.

Also in 1976, Melanie appeared at the tribute concert for Phil Ochs, who had committed suicide on April 9 that year. Held on May 28 at New York City’s Felt Forum, Melanie performed an emotional version of Ochs’s songs “Chords of Fame” and “Miranda”. She had appeared with Ochs on stage in 1974 at his “Evening with Salvador Allende” concert (also held at the Felt Forum), along with Dave Van Ronk, Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and others.

In 1983, Melanie wrote the music and lyrics for a theatrical musical, Ace of Diamonds, with a book by Ed Kelleher and Seymour Vall based on a series of letters written by Annie Oakley. Though never fully produced, several staged readings were performed at the Lincoln Center, with Melanie as the narrator and pop singer and actress Annie Golden as Oakley.

One of Melanie’s later albums, Paled By Dimmer Light (2004), was co-produced by Peter and Beau-Jarred Schekeryk and includes the songs “To Be The One”, “Extraordinary”, “Make It Work”, and “I Tried To Die Young”.

In 2007, Melanie Safka was invited by Jarvis Cocker to perform at the Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Her sold-out performance was critically acclaimed, with The Independent saying, “It was hard to disagree that Melanie has earned her place alongside Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Nico, and Marianne Faithfull in the pantheon of iconic female singers. Meltdown was all the better for her presence.” The concert was filmed for a DVD, Melanie: For One Night Only, which was released in October 2007. She recorded “Psychotherapy”, sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which parodied aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis. The song has been played on The Dr. Demento Show. Melanie won an Emmy Award for writing the lyrics to the theme song for the television series Beauty and the Beast. With one exception, her albums were produced by her husband, Peter Schekeryk, who died suddenly in 2010. Her three children — Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau-Jarred — are also musicians. Beau-Jarred is a guitarist and accompanied his mother on tour. In July 2012, Melanie headlined along with Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins at the 15th annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, which is held to celebrate Woody Guthrie’s life and music.

In October 2012, Melanie collaborated with John Haldoupis, artistic and managing director of Blackfriars Theatre in Rochester, New York, to create an original musical about her love story with her late husband. Melanie and the Record Man made its premiere on October 19, with performances scheduled until October 28. The musical, conceived and designed by Haldoupis, featured Melanie’s music and told the story of meeting Peter, falling in love, and working together to produce her music. Melanie performed during the musical and was also the narrator. In June 2014, she toured Australia for the first time since 1977.

In April 2015, Melanie Safka was inducted into Red Bank Regional’s “Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame”. She received the Sandy Hosey Lifetime Achievement Award at the Artists Music Guild’s 2015 AMG Heritage Awards on November 14, 2015, in Monroe, North Carolina. On New Year’s Eve 2019, she performed on the BBC’s Jools’ Annual Hootenanny. 

Melanie resided in the Nashville metropolitan area in later years, where she died unexpectedly from an undisclosed illness on January 23, 2024, at the age of 76. At the time of her death Melanie was working on a covers album titled Second Hand Smoke.

Despite her success during a period of singer-songwriter ascendence, Melanie was rarely mentioned in the same breath as Woodstock-era contemporaries like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. “It wasn’t the age of smiling women,” she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. “It had to be much more broody, and I was way too cherubic.”

She also seemed weary of her famous song celebrating steel-wheeled locomotion, and perhaps joys more libidinous; she had even expressed reservations about the success of the song when it was at its peak.

“I had already been battling this beatific image of, ‘Isn’t she ever so precious, every bit of Woodstock fluff person?’” Melanie told The Tennessean. “I wanted to be perceived as someone with some social commentary and relevance.”

She was even more pointed in her interview with Where Music Meets the Soul, saying, “It was the song that doomed me to be cute for the rest of my life.”

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Doug Ingle 5/2024

Doug Ingle 5/2024 (78), was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 9, 1945. His father Lloyd, a church organist and accountant, introduced him to music at an early age. The Ingles moved within three months of his birth to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and later, when he was 11,  the family moved to San Diego, CA.

With the timing right in the mid-sixties and California becoming the hotbed for love-ins and psychedelic rock, Ingle formed the original line up for Iron Butterfly with Ron Bushy on drums. As soon as Iron Butterfly formed, they moved to Hollywood Hills and started an excruciating practice and performing schedule.

Of the four musicians in the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida lineup, Ingle was the only one who was a founding member, having formed Iron Butterfly in San Diego in 1966. After a handful of lineup changes, a five-piece Iron Butterfly including Ingle and Bushy put out the band’s debut Heavy in 1968; soon after release, the other three members left and were replaced by Brann and Dornan, resulting in the lineup that would create the 17-minute psych-rock epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Released less than six months after Heavy and the lineup shuffle, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida would sell a reported 30 million copies worldwide, and a three-minute version of the title track — whose title was based on Bushy’s mishearing of “In the Garden of Eden” — became a Top 5 hit on the Hot 100 and a classic rock staple. Continue reading Doug Ingle 5/2024