December 10, 2017

Ray Stevens CabaRay Nashville...Don McLean

The second blog entry of the night focuses on the December 2nd episode of Ray Stevens CabaRay Nashville. This episode didn't air here locally last Saturday because of a PBS pledge drive but I just finished watching it on Ray's video streaming site. The episode guest starred Don McLean.

Ray opened the show singing "I've Got You Under My Skin". He made mention of it being on the CD titled Ray Stevens Sings Sinatra...Say What?!?. The way he said the album's name is exactly how I say it if I ever find myself making mention of it. He's performed other songs from that under-rated album on the television show (most recently, "Witchcraft") but this is the first time I'd ever heard him mention the album's name.

Don is introduced and he talks about his upbringing and how he was perhaps an oddity among his peers in that he loved listening to music that had been recorded prior to the invention of what was called rock and roll (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, etc.) but he also liked listening to a lot of music styles. He mentioned that he loved to sing songs that had a kind of old fashioned feeling (lyrically) but with a contemporary sound. He spoke of his earliest years in the recording business and how he once did some recording sessions in Berkeley, California. His songwriting success was brought up by Ray and this led to a mention of "And I Love You So", a huge hit that Don wrote in which dozens of artists recorded. The biggest hit belongs to Perry Como who took the song to the Top-40 on the pop chart in 1973 (decades after having burst onto the music scene in the early '40s!). Como hit number one with it on the Easy-Listening chart and in the United Kingdom the song hit the Top-10 and spent almost a full year on the charts (35 weeks!).

He spoke about being in California during the time of the riots and that eventually he moved to Nashville. He compared the sessions being done out West to those being done in Nashville and he applauded the professionalism and talent on Music Row and he particularly loved the efficiency of the process. He mentioned that the sessions he did out in California could be aggravating due to, as he put it, producers being fixated on having every single instrument sounding exactly perfect or fretting over something not sounding as expected. Don said that the sessions in Nashville were completely different and that it didn't take nearly an entire day to complete just one recording. Ray makes mention of the musicians accompanying Don...the piano player and the drummer. Particular emphasis was made on the drummer for it happened to be Jerry Kroon...and if you're a long time fan of Ray's and have looked over the album musician credits with any regularity then you'll recognize that name on dozens of Ray's albums. Ray states that Jerry Kroon used to be a member of the band (which draws applause from the current line-up in Ray's band). Don sings "Lucky Guy" and mentions it's from a new album, Botanical Gardens. The footage for this episode was recorded in the latter half of 2016.

After the performance Ray asks about "American Pie" and the history of the song. Don mentions it's a blend of all kinds of things and it isn't completely tied to just one thing. The phrase heard in the song, 'the day the music died', has long since been adopted as slang to describe the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper even though the song deals with pop-culture, in general, from one point in time to another. Ray remarked that he wrote and recorded a song that has one of the longest titles but said that "American Pie" probably holds a record for being the longest (as far as running time is concerned) number one pop hit in history. It spent four weeks at number one in 1972. The song is 8 minutes and 33 seconds and on the album it's in it's complete form. As a single, though, it was split in two parts and so you'd have "American Pie, Part One" on the A-Side and "American Pie, Part Two" picking up where part one ended on the B-Side. He performed it a bit slower in places but overall it was a great performance and given the sheer length of the song it took up a lot of airtime, too.



Ray closed the show performing "Pretty Woman"...a song that goes back to Roy Orbison...but Ray does it in a Bluegrass style. Ray debuted his version of the song several years ago during a guest appearance at the Grand Ole Opry but, to date, a recorded version has not become available. He performed it around the time his Bluegrass themed version of "Unchained Melody" hit YouTube. Those two songs, in particular, are suppose to be part of some larger project that's yet to be commercially released.

Don't forget that this is the episode that aired on December 2nd...the following episode, guest starring Felix Cavaliere, aired last night and I've already posted a recap of that episode. My next episode to provide a recap to is going to arrive next Saturday night.

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