My introduction to Eddie Floyd

I was late to the party, as usual, when it came to Eddie Floyd, the great but often unheralded Stax soul singer.

Seven years ago, Mojo magazine included a compilation of Southern soul music with its May issue. On that CD was a song called “I’ll Take Her.” Its premise, simply put in its lyrics: If you don’t want her, I’ll take her.

That upbeat tune, with Floyd’s smooth voice lifted by some sweet horns and backup singers as it chugged along, hooked me. Truth be told, I don’t think I’d been aware of him before that.

“I’ll Take Her,” Eddie Floyd, from “I’ve Never Found A Girl,” 1969. The LP out of print as such, but it’s half of “Rare Stamps,” a two-fer CD with his second and third Stax LPs on it. I don’t have this LP. I’ve never seen it while record digging. This rip is from the Mojo comp.

Floyd wrote this cut with songwriter Joe Shamwell and the great Memphis guitarist Steve Cropper. He worked with both of them while a songwriter at Stax Records in the mid-’60s.

To hear more Eddie Floyd, head over to The Midnight Tracker.

There, at our lightly traveled companon blog, one side of his debut album from 1967 has materialized through the sweet blue haze of time.

Some records I used to have

One of our local concert venues announced the other day that Hot Tuna will be playing an acoustic show in February. Which got me to thinking about records I used to have. I used to have a couple of Hot Tuna records.

This one, their debut LP from 1970.

And this one, another live LP from 1971.

I remember nothing about either record, other than they were full of meandering folk-rock-blues tunes, which I apparently once fancied. My friend Scott suggested this: “Back then you were probably smokin’ the same stuff they were.”

That’s entirely possible. It seems the kind of music you’d put on and zone out.

While record digging in my friend Jim’s basement last weekend, another guy had this record on the top of his stack.

I used to have that one, too. That was a double live LP from 1976. I remember nothing about it, other than it also was full of meandering folk-rock-blues tunes.

There might be a couple hundred records I used to have. Lots of them went out in The Great Record Purge of 1989, when we took a bunch to our friends’ garage sale. It was mostly stuff I’d bought in my teens and 20s that I wasn’t listening to in my early 30s.

Any and all Ted Nugent records? Gone. Any Styx record released after 1974? Gone. Those Starcastle records? Gone. Even a Rolling Stones record considered to be one of their best? Gone.

This is another record I used to have. This one, I’d like to find again. When keyboard player Jon Lord died this summer, it reminded me of how often I’d listened to — and enjoyed — Deep Purple when I was in high school in the early ’70s. I still have three other Deep Purple LPs, but not this one from 1974.

I suspect I won’t dig the whole thing as much now as I did then, but hearing it again likely will summon a rush of memories. That’s something to look forward to. Until then, this cut — grabbed some years ago from a music blog that has since gone dark — will have to do.

“Sail Away,” Deep Purple, from “Burn,” 1974.

Please visit our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.

I approved this message, too

Heading out to lunch today, we saw a campaign sign stuck in the ground at the corner as we turned onto the highway. Heading home, we saw three more on the other side of the corner.

The only problem: You can’t plant campaign signs on the public portion of highway right-of-day in Wisconsin.

My friend Glick checked the law and sagely observed: “Fines: $10 to $100. The cynic in me thinks some will see this as chump change and a small cost of doing business.”

He could be right. Perhaps it’s all part of …

“The Plot,” Lalo Schifrin, from “Music from ‘Mission: Impossible’,” 1967. It’s out of print, even a 1996 CD reissue.

If you watched “Mission: Impossible” at all during the ’60s and ’70s, you probably heard bits of this as things got dicey. This is the full version, one you may not have heard, complete with groovy, mood-setting harpsichord.

This is just a little taste of what’s new at The Midnight Tracker, a lightly-traveled blog where we feature album sides brought back from the sweet blue haze of time. Your mission there, should you decide to accept it, is to enjoy our notion of a soundtrack for the political intrigue of the moment.