plorentz's Full Review: Anthology (1966-1975) by The Grass Roots
For me to review the music of the Grass Roots would be something like writing a review of one of my best friends. No, not even just a best friend, but someone who is almost like a parent, or at least a favorite uncle to me, for I've known the Grass Roots longer than I can remember. Before I learned the ABC's, I knew the choruses to songs like "Sooner or Later" and "Midnight Confessions" from my parents' records. For me to offer an opinion on them would be to think in critical terms about someone in whom I've entrusted many of my privatest moments, dancing and singing with wild teenager abandon in bedroom and basement, and just this morning, on my way to work, and later, on my way to a meeting, and again today, on my way home, pounding my steering wheel, moon roof open, on stage in my driver's seat, Live at Budokan for my fellow traffic-jammed travelers: Sooner or later, love is gonna getcha!
The music of the Grass Roots has been present at all the most important moments of my life. I have found encouragement there, perseverance, urgency, belonging, love, belief and heart-bursting joy. Coming back to the Grass Roots is always like coming home. They may never be considered the greatest band of their time (though they were surely one of the most successful), but they and their songs are as familiar to me, as integral to who I am as a person, as, say, the yellow house on the corner of 65th Street and 244th Avenue in Paddock Lake where I grew up, and where I heard many of these songs for the first time.
The artistic legitimacy of the band has always been disputed on the lamest, most cliched of points - that they didn't write their own songs, that they didn't play all the instruments on their own records, that they sang pop songs and were commercially successful - all the things we've been conditioned to dismiss.
It's true, the Grass Roots never recorded a "great" album. It's true, they generally steered clear of the cutting edge. They were, by their own admission, a singles band with a good formula. A well-oiled AM radio hit making machine. Like fellow travelers Three Dog Night, their music was a product that filled a demand. But, man, what a product. Like Ranch salad dressing or the Newlyweds Game, the Grass Roots' music immediately harkens back to the 70s, big sideburns and thick mustaches; but there's a timelessness in the way the pleasures of their songs have endured. Their well-over-a-dozen Top 40 hits are staples of oldies radio. You know their songs - "Where Were You When I Needed You", "Temptation Eyes" - they've been covered by the Bangles and the Blake Babies. They've appeared in movies and on TV shows. They're responsible for at least one generational touchstone - the spine-chilling and dramatic single "Let's Live for Today", which became an anthem for soldiers overseas during the Vietnam War. Insidiously, almost anonymously, the songs of the Grass Roots have crept their way into the fabric our popular culture. In that sense, they aren't just one of my favorite uncles, but probably one of yours too. You just may not know that yet.
In the late 70s, at the end of the band's slow, eventual dissolution, MCA Records (the ultimate owner of the band's recordings for the independent Dunhill label, later acquired by ABC-Paramount) memorialized the band with a classic greatest hits compilation. This is how I first heard the band. It was one of the first cassettes my parents ever bought, and the one they most frequently played.
By the time I moved away to college, I was starting to build my own personal music collection, and one of my earliest priorities was to find the Grass Roots on CD. It was right around this time, in 1991, that Rhino Records released a terrific double-CD retrospective of the group The Grass Roots Anthology 1965-1975. I snatched it up with Christmas money that year, and it's been one of my most prized possessions since, not just because of the music contained there, but also because of its increasing rarity. Due to licensing conflicts (Rhino's not the scrappy indie reissue label it used to be), the anthology is now out of print (as of this writing, it's selling for $60-70 on Amazon.com), but it's still the best-sounding (thanks again, Bill Inglot!), most thorough, most lovingly produced representation of the band ever released.
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The Grass Roots were formed around the songwriting and producing partnership of P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, two guys who'd spent much of the early 60s writing and recording oodles of by-the-numbers surf-n-sun singles under a veritable smorgasboard of aliases. But by 1965, they were maturing away from that sound and looking for a more steady vehicle by which to get their songs onto record and radio.
Gruff San Francisco folkie Barry McGuire had just had a big hit with Sloan's bitter protest song "Eve of Destruction"; and so Lou Adler, whose own Dunhill Records had released the single (and who would launch the career of The Mamas and the Papas, and later produce the The Rocky Horror Picture Show) approached Barri and Sloan about recording some demos and maybe forming a band (or at least a "brand"). When a demo version of "Where Were You When I Needed You?" became a local hit under the self-consciously folky name The Grassroots, Sloan and Barri - neither performers (though Sloan would make an ill-fated attempt to establish himself as a recording artist on his own) - were suddenly pressed to find a real band to back the song up, do the necessary concert and TV appearances to promote it.
After a brief revolving door period, and a hodgepodge self-titled debut album, the pair recruited singer-bassist Rob Grill, a Sloan sound-alike who also went a little easy on the eyes, and approached an unsigned trio called The Thirteenth Floor (not to be confused with Roky Erickson's contemporaneous, but very different Thirteenth Floor Elevators), consisting of drummer Rick Coonce, lead guitarist Creed Bratton, and guitarist-organist Warren Entner (later Faith No More's manager) to become the Grass Roots.
Though quite capable of both songwriting and performing on their own, the newly christened band would primarily record Sloan/Barri compositions; Sloan and Barri would direct their career and oversee their recording sessions, and in the studio, the band would be augmented by L.A. A-listers like Larry Knechtel, Hal Blaine, and Bones Howe (and deaser26's Dad!). On paper, the set-up may strike us as disturbingly boy-bandish; but on record, it's clear the band had an almost preternatural chemistry, not just with Sloan and Barri's material and production, but with each other as well.
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The Grass Roots Anthology 1965-1975 is an eloquent document of that chemistry and the way it evolved over the course of a very difficult, conflicted decade for pop music. Not only would the band start to fray at the edges by 1971, when Bratton and Coonce left the band; but Sloan and Barri themselves would drift apart as Sloan, who'd always favored a more progressive, personal style of writing and production withdrew from the industry while Barri embraced the successful commercial formula - all soulful horn charts and harmonies, and powerful singalong hooks - following it to its logical extreme.
Indeed, there's a continental divide between the two discs that make up this set. The first disc - made up almost entirely of Sloan/Barri compositions - finds the band doing a palatable, fast food version of the Byrds' folk-rock. There are urgent, twelve-string and harpsichord-laced, heart-on-sleeve love songs like "Is It Any Wonder?" and "This Is What I Was Made For", and rowdy, melodic garage-rockers like "Tip of My Tongue". At the time, Sloan was nursing a serious Bob Dylan jones, evident not only in the set's opening track, a Sloan-sung cover of Dylan's "The Ballad of the Thin Man", but also in his lyrics and the way he had obviously coached Rob Grill's phrasing and delivery. This is most notable on "Lollipop Train (You Never Had It So Good)," a song that nearly matches Dylan in dismissive bile and nearly plagiarizes some of his favorite imagery: Look at the Queen in her ragged gown!
The sole band-written number on the first disc is an excellent hard-edged rocker called "Feelings" which, like the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb", uses a marimba hook to build suspense and tension through the verses, before the band unleashes a furious and ultimately wordless chorus.
But the pinnacle of the band's early work was their 1967 hit "Let's Live For Today", a dark re-arrangement of an Italian bubblegum pop song, featuring a mournfully lyrical guitar lead played by Sloan, and a dramatic sung countdown to its anthemic chant of a chorus - sha-la la-la-la-la live for today (hey-hey-hey). Here, a hard bassline grinds like an armored tank through rough terrain; and after the second time through, the song breaks down to a quiet, long-distance prayer - I need to feel you deep inside me - the builds to an intense, emotional, tribal climax. It's a song whose obvious resonance with disconsolate soldiers in a strange land and their loved ones back home cannot be overstated - truly one of the great musical moments of the 60s.
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Still, after the success of "Let's Live for Today", the band found themselves in a commercial doldrums, Sloan was becoming more distant, and mumblings of a break-up were afoot. If the Stax-soul inspired 1968 hit "Midnight Confessions" (which appears here near the end of Disc One) - a drastic departure from their folk-rock sound - remedied the immediate situation and launched the band back into Billboard's Top 10, thereby setting the template they'd follow so loyally into the 70s; it also divided the band and Sloan & Barri along philosophical lines.
And if the second disc of the set, which covers this half of their career, and not coincidentally, contains a higher hit-to-miss ratio - songs like "Heaven Knows", "Temptation Eyes", "Come On and Say It", and "Sooner or Later" - seems less ambitious, more manufactured, full of redundancies; there's still not a single dud to be found, nothing that probably didn't sound, like, totally far-out and diggable on the radio. At this stage of the game, Sloan is virtually absent; with Barri producing the band in a sort of corporate partership with Rob Grill and Warren Entner.
Not only would the band's line-up change frequently, but they'd draw from a wider pool of songwriters - most frequently the team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter - all to produce that signature, urgent folk-n-soul sound. The approach might have seemed less idealistic, but it produced some absolutely wonderful 45s. Best among them is the almost terrifyingly urgent "I'd Wait A Million Years", a two-and-a-half minute explosion of desperation, marked by a Morse Code type synthesizer hook giving the song the nervy aura of a CBS News Special Report on the assassination of a world leader.
Eventually, the hits dried up, and Barri split too, but Grill carried on, eventually signing "a" band called the Grass Roots to Lambert and Potter's Haven label, releasing a second self-titled album almost exactly ten years after the first one got slapped together back when Sloan and Barri didn't even have a band. That album is represented here by "Mamacita", a quirkly, Latin-flavored Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil composition alternately praising and bemoaning a certain Latina's pre-marital chastity (and post-marital prolifery). The song was a minor hit, but ultimately served to punctuate the band's career, not with an exclamation point, but points of ellipsis.
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In the thirty years since the band faded away, their name has become less and less familiar even as their songs endure. And no better memorial to the band has ever been made than Rhino's Grass Roots Anthology 1965-1975. Aside from the beautifully re-mastered sound, which highlights particularly Barri's skill as a producer, the set includes thorough discographical notations and lots of band photos, and a great, historical essay of the band by Parke Puterbaugh based on interviews with Sloan, Barri, and Grill. This isn't an easy set to find, but, especially for fans of the California sound of the 60s and 70s, it is an essential compilation of the era's greatest pop singles group.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The Grass Roots Anthology 1965-1975" by the Grass Roots
Rhino Records
Released 1991
Recordings Produced by Lou Adler, Steve Barri, P.F. Sloan, Rob Grill, Warren Entner, Dennie Lambert, Brian Potter
Compilation Produced by Bill Inglot
SONGS: Mr. Jones (Ballad of the Thin Man) - You're a Lonely Girl - Where Were You When I Needed You - Only When You're Lonely - This Is What I Was Made For - Lollipop Train (You Never Had It So Good) - Tip of my Tongue - Let's Live for Today - Things I Should Have Said - Out of Touch - Is It Any Wonder? - Wake Up, Wake Up - Melody for You - Feelings - Here's Where You Belong - Midnight Confessions - Bella Linda - Lady Pleasure - Lovin' Things - The River is Wide - City Women - I Can't Help But Wonder Elisabeth - I'd Wait a Million Years - Heaven Knows - Out of This World - Walking Through the Country - Baby Hold On - Come On and Say It - Temptation Eyes - Sooner or Later - Two Divided By Love - Glory Bound - The Runway - Anyway the Wind Blows - Love Is What You Make It - Mamacita
This review was posted as part of the Best-ofs and Box Sets (aka The BOBS) write-off, hosted by plorentz (me). For information on how you can join this write-off and links to other entries, please click here.
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