February 12, 2017

Ray Stevens: Such a Night at 35...

Earlier today via social media Ray Stevens made mention that on this date in 1980 "Shriner's Convention" debuted on the charts. The story of Coy, Bubba, Charlene, and a Harley motorcycle first graced the grooves of vinyl that year and it became a Top-10 hit. The album, Shriner's Convention, also hit the Top-10 of the Country Albums chart...the festive mood of a fictional Shrine convention described in song by Ray and the humorous happenings taking place at a fictional motel in Hahira, Georgia certainly captured the imagination of plenty of people. The song features a one-sided phone conversation between a couple of Shriner's. The Illustrious Potentate calls up Noble Lumpkin to ask about a series of incidents being reported in, each involving Lumpkin, that are giving the Shriner's a bad reputation. During the first conversation an irritated Potentate drops the formalities and reveals his name as Bubba and reveals Lumpkin's name as Coy. There are three one sided conversations in addition to Ray performing the song's verses and chorus. The song itself is more than 5 minutes in length...the actual length is 5 minutes, 33 seconds. The performance played on radio is an edited copy since the song had to be cut significantly for airplay. It was cut to 4 minutes, 10 seconds and even that length of time is a bit lengthy for a typical country music recording. I've posted vinyl images in the past of the full version and radio edit before.

Ray didn't produce a music video for the song until 15 years later. It debuted on a home video movie starring Ray titled Get Serious! in 1995. The movie became available on DVD for the first time a couple of years ago.

35 years ago Ray Stevens issued one of his greatest albums...an under-rated and under-appreciated project titled Don't Laugh Now. The song's are balanced in that there's a mixture of uptempo sing-a-longs and ballads. The album's opening track, "Such a Night", wasn't released as a commercial single but I'm guessing that it was a favorite of Ray's given his music background and love of classic rhythm and blues. The song even appears on the front of the album in the upper left hand side as if it's one of the songs that'll become a single release at some point; of the three songs highlighted in the upper left hand side of the album cover only one actually ended up being a single...the ballad "Written Down in My Heart".

The album's title is decked out in neon lettering and his performance and arrangement of "Such a Night" fits into that retro, classic rock sound as does another rocker song on here, "Take That Girl Away".

A couple of days ago somebody on YouTube uploaded a couple of vintage performances of Ray Stevens from 1982...and both songs come from Don't Laugh Now. I had seen one of those performances many years ago on The Nashville Network but I had never seen the second performance until a couple of days ago. In both instances the performances come from the long running syndicated series, That Nashville Music (1970-1985), as you'll see once you view the YouTube clips. Up first is his rousing performance of "Such a Night"...have your volume up...



The other performance is one of the single releases from the 1982 album. "Where the Sun Don't Shine" is a sing-a-long, hand clapping performance in the vein of southern gospel music but in reality it's a break-up song as Ray sings about everything he's going to voluntarily give to the ex-lover...and for good measure he tells her where she can put everything he's giving her. It should have been a much bigger hit...it stalled in the lower half of the Country Top 100 (this is back hen the country singles chart had 100 positions just like the Hot 100 pop chart). The upload has several glitches and it abruptly comes to an end...if you're familiar with the audio recording of the song you'll understand what I'm referring to. Nevertheless it's vintage early 1980's Ray Stevens...and I know you're all gonna love it as much as I do...


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