BLUE JEAN BABY
by Marshall Bowden

Blue jean music. It's a term that describes the early-to-mid-seventies style that is piano based, usually by female singer/songwriters (not always, though), and represents some of the inner searching that followed the outward, protest-based expressions of the 1960s. Some call this the "singer-songwriter era", and there is no question that was a predominant piece of the pop music pie, but the recordings I'm speaking of evoke the time in which they were recorded, a time that, in my mind, was simpler in many ways. Of course, it was not a simple or even a positive period in many ways, but it's become clear to me that a lot of folks who were only hitting their teenage years in the 1970s responded to this music in much the same way. Witness the resurrection of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" after its appearance on the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. The song's use in the film further demonstrates the connection that these songs made between listeners, a connection that I think still exists today. These songs remind me of a couple of cute girls I went to junior high with. They remind me of the way my father would speak in hush tones about his concern that the Vietnam War might not end before I reached draft age. They also remind me of macrame, of endless days and nights of the Watergate hearings on TV, of Friday night meals out with the family.

Carole King's Tapestry is the mother of all blue jeans music. King had labored long and hard in the salt mine of the Brill Building, writing hit after hit for various vocal groups with her partner Gerry Goffin. At some point Carole decided she wanted to write a different kind of song, or at least hear them performed differently, a way that only she could perform them. Tapestry is a perfect album, with every song a jewel, from the opening romp of "I Feel the Earth Move" to the concluding "You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman)". "So Far Away" and "You've Got a Friend" are perfect examples of blue jeans music. They are somewhat sad, melancholy, but not tragic because there is a sense of belonging that they communicate that is an essential quality of blue jeans music. It is the same sense of belonging that cause the band and groupies to break into "Tiny Dancer" in Crowe's film. The same sense of belonging that has inspired 22 million people to purchase the album in its original vinyl format, or as a CD or a remastered resissue CD. I doubt if you can find a female who was at least 15 years old at the time Tapestry was released who didn't own a copy or who doesn't presently own a copy. King became fairly obscure pretty quickly after Tapestry even though subsequent albums such as Music, Rhymes and Reasons, and Wrap Around Joy were almost as good. Part of the reason is that the singer-songwriter thing fell into disfavor. King also represents the visual definition of this time and place on Tapestry's cover, on which she wears (you guessed it) a pair of well worn blue jeans. Perched on a window seat, she is barefoot with her cat in the foreground. Just looking at that album cover will take you back to whatever your reality was at the time you first heard it, guaranteed.

Another blue jean songwriter is Laura Nyro, although a lot of her music falls outside the genre as well. Nyro was, like King, a writer of hit songs for others, but she had few hits herself, partly because she refused to make commercial concessions in her arrangements and challenging vocal style. Ultimately this makes her own performances of her songs stand up much better than the many covers performed by the likes of the Fifth Dimension or Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Nyro's masterpiece is Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (released in 1968, it predates Tapestry but didn't make the mark the latter album did), and it is also a pretty blue jean-drenched album. Not only do classic tunes like "Stoned Sould Picnic" and "Eli's Comin'" bring you back to the time when they were recorded, but so do eccentric and interesting songs like "Timer". It's hard to tell just what the song is about, but there's no mistaking the piano chords, the angelic female voice, and the celebratory-yet-melancholy feeling of the tune--completely blue jeans. There's Brill Building pop in her work, but there's also the influence of poetry, jazz, the city of New York, soul, R&B, and Laura's own personal mythology. "Timer knows the lady's gonna love again/Timer says the lady rambles nevermore/And if you love me too/I'll spend my life with you". It is music that makes you feel--and that is part of the allure of music of this time and place, with it's heart on its sleeve. You feel something, it is not disposable. There is not much of that type of music around today. The album's final track "The Confession" blows away every other songwriter, male or female, of the time with its combination of intimate psychological detail, day-to-day observation, sexual frankness, sense of history, and melodic beauty. No one--not Joni Mitchell, Carole King, or anyone else--could have written this song. "Love my love thing/Love is surely gospel" she sings into the grand ending. Thankfully, Sony has seen fit to remaster this along with two other classic Nyro albums, because the sound has been their only drawback since they were transferred to CD. If you don't have this one in your collection, now is the time.

Nyro produced more wonderful albums, some venturing on blue jean music, some not. New York Tendaberry, the followup to Thirteenth Confession,is a personal ode to New York City, and a pretty good demonstration of blue jeans music. Many feel it is her masterpiece, and her ultimate personal statement as well. Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, released in 1970, completes Nyro's blue jeans trilogy. By the mid-seventies she was, like most of the rest of the country, in a slightly different place, as the album Smile demonstrates. Nyro quit the music business and sat it out until 1984 when she released her first "mature" album, Mother's Spiritual. She recorded only sporadically through the '80s and '90s, and passed away in 1997.

Until recently many forgot that Elton John first arrived in America as a singer-songwriter in the best blue jeans music tradition. Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, and Honky Chateau are easily his best albums, because the songs were good, and Elton presented them simply and with straightforward dignity;he had not yet become the rock music buffoon that he would portray for most of the later '70s and well into the 1980s. For my money, Madman Across the Water is the best blue jean album of his, with its denim-looking cover and its inspired string of songs--"Tiny Dancer", "Levon", "Madman Across the Water". The piano work is similar in many ways to that of Carole King, and the lyrics by Bernie Taupin tapped into the feelings that everyone had without defining them too clearly. The result is both uplifting and sometimes sad--"Hold me closer tiny dancer /count the headlights on the highway /lay me down in sheets of linen." Nor can one forget Honky Chateau's "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters", my personal favorite Elton John song.

Still, the King of blue jean music (as opposed to the Queen) has to be James Taylor, whose Sweet Baby James, released the year before Tapestry was also widely purchased by every female across the country. Taylor combined folk, soul, and rock (the heady blue jean music trinity) to create songs that were mellow but lyrically melancholy. It could be argued that this is indeed the first real blue jean album, but I hold out for Nyro's Thirteenth Confession even though it isn't quite as squarely within the genre as Taylor or King. Interestingly, Carole King played piano on some tracks, and it could well be that she saw the potential of what Taylor was doing and decided to do it herself, leveraging a female perspective. Songs like "Country Road", "Fire and Rain" and the title track take you places you may not even remember being--I still get choked up when I hear "Fire and Rain" while eating in a fast food restaurant. Then there's Taylor's future wife, Carly Simon. Her first album, Carly Simon was released in 1971, and is completely unremarkable except for the single "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". She followed it up with a string of albums--Anticipation, No Secrets and Hotcakes that explored a sexier, darker side of the blue jean genre. Not to mention the succession of ever-sexier album covers that reached a pinnacle with 1975's Playing Possum. I guess Carly is a minor player in the blue jean music annals, but she still belongs in there and has plenty of fans.

Then there's Jackson Browne, whose popularity has always eluded me, but then, as I've pointed out, blue jean music is all about what makes you feel a certain way, and Browne definitely does it for some folks. Beginning with his debut Jackson Browne and continuing through the remarkable albums For Everyman, Late for the Sky and The Pretender, Browne defined the California singer-songwriter as well as contributing some fine songs to the annals of blue jean music. Try listening to "Take It Easy", "Late for the Sky", "For A Dancer", or "The Pretender" and avoid slipping into a reverie of self-reflection that mirrors what all of America was doing in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Come to think of it, maybe the time is right for the return of blue jean music.

It's interesting that Joni Mitchell, one of the best and longest lasting of the singer-songwriters, really didn't create blue jean music at all--with one notable exception, which is her 1971 release Blue, an album that still exudes a special magic even after all the fantastic albums Mitchell has since released. The album features musicians who played on Jackson Browne and James Taylor's albums (Taylor himself plays acoustic guitar on several songs). Blue has turned out to have as much staying power as Tapestry, and is more confessional while still remaining universal.

Of course, this isn't all the blue jean music that exists, but it gives you a sense of what I'm talking about and why these songs and albums seem to occupy a special place in the history of American pop/rock music. I could have written about each one in much greater detail (and probably will someday). There were lots of imitators and plenty of individual songs that captured this particular era as well as the above-mentioned, and there have been blue jeans songs that have been written years, even decades later (the Dixie Chicks' "Wide Open Spaces" or Sheryl Crow's "Strong Enough") than these. More recent songs don't, of course, take you back to the time that the early '70s tracks do, but I bet in the future we'll find that another generation has their own version of blue jeans music that they'll always look back fondly on no matter what the current fads or critics say.