I was leaning toward the chill side of things this week as I assembled my most recent batch of “lost classics” of deep album tracks from records of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Regular readers know I’m a sucker for a pretty melody, tight harmony and gentle instrumental accompaniment, as practiced by many dozens of artists — famous or otherwise — during that period.

I hope you find something in the Spotify playlist you’ve never heard before among this group of songs. Nothing like a great old song that’s new to you!

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“Rio de Janeiro Blue,” Nicolette Larson, 1980

Larson was tapped first by Emmylou Harris to provide harmonies on her early albums, which led to an introduction to Linda Ronstadt, which led to meeting Neil Young in 1977. “When Neil came to Linda’s Malibu home and ran through some songs he had just written, Linda and I sang some harmonies,” Larson recalled. “Neil was jazzed about what he heard and asked me to sing on his ‘Comes a Time’ LP.” That album included “Lotta Love,” and Larson then covered the song herself on her 1979 debut “Nicolette” and it ended up a Top 10 single for her. The 1980 follow-up album, “In the Nick of Time,” didn’t fare as well, although her duet with Michael McDonald, “Let Me Go, Love,” reached #35. Check out another tune from that LP, “Rio de Janeiro Blue” — great vibe.

“Haven’t We Met,” Kenny Rankin, 1974/1991

“Above all, I’m a jazz singer who likes to mess with the melody,” Rankin said in 1997. “I sing the songs that touch me in the heart.” He was indeed a fine interpreter of songs by others like Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Leon Russell and Cole Porter, but he also wrote some fine stuff of his own that was recorded by Peggy Lee and Mel Tormé, and Helen Reddy, whose version of “Peaceful” reached the Top 20 in 1973. One of my favorite Rankin tunes is “Haven’t We Met,” a snappy number from his marvelous “Silver Morning” LP in 1974, which is sadly out of print, but he re-recorded it in 1991 for his “Because of You” album, which is the version you can hear here. Rankin was a big favorite of Johnny Carson, appearing on “The Tonight Show” 25 times in the ’70s.

“Magdalena,” Leo Sayer, 1976

Sayer got his start in 1973 writing songs with producer/manager David Courtney, including “Giving It All Away,” Roger Daltrey’s debut single that year. By 1976, Sayer emerged as a pop star in his own right, charting two #1 hits, neither of which I much liked — the disco smash “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” and the syrupy ballad “When I Need You.” But the LP they came from, “Endless Flight,” has a few deep tracks that perked up my ears, including a cover of The Supremes’ “Reflections” and the contagious “I Hear the Laughter.” Most noteworthy is “Magdalena,” a pretty tune by singer-songwriter Danny O’Keefe, best known for the #9 hit “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” from 1972.

“Outlaw Music,” Atlanta Rhythm Section, 1981

Formed in 1971, ARS struggled along for five or six albums, having some success regionally once lead singer Ronnie Hammond joined the fold. Producer Buddy Buie worked with guitarist J.R. Cobb and keyboardist Dean Daughtry to write six Top 30 singles in the 1977-1981 period, particularly “So Into You,” “Imaginary Lover,” “Champagne Jam” and “Not Gonna Let It Bother Me Tonight.” Their final chart appearance was “Alien” in 1981, culled from their tenth album, “Quinella,” but the song from that LP that stands out is “Outlaw Music,” on which Hammond’s vocals are particularly appealing.

“Ain’t the Sky Just Like a River,” Pierce-Arrow, 1977

A half-dozen top session musicians from New York and Los Angeles pooled their considerable talents to form Pierce Arrow, a pop/rock group that made two damn good albums in 1977-1978. Led by Robin Batteau on guitar, mandolin, violin and vocals, the band toured relentlessly behind The Eagles and similar artists but never seemed to catch on as anticipated. Their self-titled debut LP included the singles “Hot Summer Night” and “You Got to Believe,” but their best track, in my view, is Batteau’s “Ain’t the Sky Just Like a River,” augmented by Jeff Kent’s piano and harmony vocals.

“God Made an Angel,” Timbuk 3, 1991

Timbuk 3 was a Wisconsin-based group described as “a distinctly American band both in its spare, rootsy rock sound and its thematic obsession with the American dream gone awry.” Led by husband-wife team Pat and Barbara MacDonald, they cracked the Top 20 in 1986 with the quirky tune “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” Timbuk 3 made an appearance in the 1988 film “D.O.A.” as a house band in a club. Three years later, their LP “Big Shot in the Dark” made an impression on me, particularly the easygoing “God Made an Angel.”

“Acadian Driftwood,” The Band, 1975

Guitarist/songwriter Robbie Robertson was fond of using historical events as the basis for the songs he wrote, and “Acadian Driftwood,” the highlight of The Band’s 1975 LP “Northern Lights – Southern Cross” album, is a great example of that. Acadia was an area of Eastern Canada populated by a French ethnic group that were ultimately uprooted from their land by British forces in the 1700s in a war that presaged the Revolutionary War in the U.S. One critic described the track as “a slightly more complex and ambitious down-north analog to their Civil War ode, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.'” Drummer Levon Helm, typically The Band’s chief singer, sat on the sidelines as Rick Danko handled lead vocals on this track.

“Silver Thunderbird,” Marc Cohn, 1991

Cohn grew up in my neck of the woods in Cleveland’s suburbs, emerging in 1991 with an excellent debut LP (“Marc Cohn”) that spawned the marvelous single “Walking in Memphis,” which reached #13 on US pop charts (#3 in Canada). It earned him a Best New Artist Grammy in 1992. Many other engaging tracks can be found on this album — “Saving the Best For Last,” “Perfect Love,” “True Companion,” “Miles Away” — but I’m partial to “Silver Thunderbird,” partly because of its references to two Shaker Heights streets I used to drive down frequently: “Watched it coming up Winslow, down South Park Boulevard, /Yeah, it was looking good from tail to hood, great big fins and painted steel, /Man, it looked just like the Batmobile, with my old man behind the wheel…”

“Winterness,” Pousette-Dart Band, 1977

Conceived in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a string band in 1973, The Pousette-Dart Band evolved their sound into a quasi-soft rock vibe that turned heads throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s. Guitarist/singer Jon Pousette-Dart wrote some catchy, harmonious stuff that graced four albums during that period, most notably “Amnesia,” an album I played often, which featured fine songs like “County Line,” “May You Dance,” “Fall on Me” and the gentle ballad “Winterness.” I saw them perform a fine set once as the warm-up act for Rickie Lee Jones in 1982.

“Much More Than This,” Chris De Burgh, 1984

De Burgh was a well-traveled scholar who settled in England in his 20s and began his musical career in the mid-1970s writing and performing art rock reminiscent of early Genesis. By 1980, he chose a more commercial pop approach that brought him wider recognition, first in 1982 with the single “Don’t Pay the Ferryman” and leading up to the international #3 hit “The Lady in Red” in 1986. In between those two achievements, De Burgh released “Man on the Line,” his most consistent LP, which included the melodic “Much More Than This,” about a couple that contemplates whether their bond is firm enough to withstand trysts with other partners: “Can you still arouse the passions of another man? And if you carry it through, what would I do? /It would take much more than this to break a love so long in the making, /It would take much more than talk or dreams to shake so strong a foundation…”

“Love Over Gold,” Dire Straits, 1982

Mark Knopfler, the superb guitarist and chief songwriter of Dire Straits, made a big impression early on with “Sultans of Swing” from their 1978 debut, then reached stratospheric heights in 1985 with the “Brothers in Arms” LP and single “Money For Nothing.” In between those two milestones, the band released several less commercial albums, one of which was 1982’s extraordinary “Love Over Gold.” The 14-minute tour-de-force “Telegraph Road” is its clear highlight, but don’t overlook the stunning title song, which was reviewed as “a whispery ballad that plays the jazzy tingle of vibes against an almost classical piano air and the violinlike pluck of a synthesizer to heighten its images of a casual, even cavalier, sex life.”

“Sunlight,” The Youngbloods, 1969

Folk-singing guitarists Jesse Colin Young and Jerry Corbett met in Greenwich Village in 1965 and formed The Youngbloods, merging their folk roots with a jazz-rock sensibility. They released three LPs, the first of which included a Chet Powers tune called “Get Together” that became iconic in 1969 when used in public service ads and ended up a Top Five hit that summer. Their 1969 album, “Elephant Mountain,” includes two indelible songs — “Darkness, Darkness” and “Sunlight” — that Young would later re-record and feature prominently in concert during his solo career. I saw Young perform multiple times in the ’70s, and the mellow feeling evoked by “Sunlight” was always a highlight.

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When I started this blog in early 2015, one of my goals was to periodically shine a bright light on fantastic classic rock songs that are rarely, if ever, heard anymore. When I looked through my own vinyl and CD collections and at the greater rock music archives in general, it was almost overwhelming to realize the sheer volume of records that needed to be dusted off and glorified.

A dozen at a time in a few installments each year, I have shared nearly 450 “lost classics” in the hopes of reminding you, or enlightening you, how much great music was recorded and released in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Rock ‘n’ roll, country rock, folk rock, blues, soul, psychedelia, new wave, funk, garage rock, disco, bubblegum, progressive rock, heavy metal… Each of these genres has been represented here as I sift through many hundreds of albums and artists in search of the nuggets to be found and reinvigorated.

In this, the 38th group of lost classics here at Hack’s Back Pages, I return to the basic aggressive rock that was so prevalent in the late ’60s and early ’70s: relentless beat, crunchy guitar riffs, wailing vocals and plenty of swagger. Naturally, the tracks are compiled on a Spotify playlist at the bottom.

Crank it up, people!

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“Slip Kid,” The Who, 1975

Pete Townshend wrote several dozen songs in 1970-71 that were intended to be part of The Who’s aborted “Lifehouse” project. Nine of them became the tracks found on the magnificent “Who’s Next” LP that year, while others were shelved, showing up on later Who albums and compilations. One of the best ones is “Slip Kid,” a fiery rocker that surfaced in 1975 as the leadoff track on their “The Who By Numbers” LP, which, like “Who’s Next,” was immaculately produced by Glyn Johns. “Slip Kid” was released as a single but it inexplicably failed to chart. Said Townshend of the lyrics: “It’s a warning to young kids getting into music that it could hurt them. It was almost parental in its assumed wisdom.” Decades later, he added, “You could put it into the voice of some young Islamic student who decides to go fight in Syria and ends up in ISIS being forced to chop people’s heads off, and it would fit.”

“Respectable,” The Rolling Stones, 1978

While the massive #1 hit “Miss You” was a dance track, almost disco in form, many of the songs on their “Some Girls” album were, in Mick Jagger’s view, “somewhat influenced by the more aggressive punk thing that was going on.” Originally written by Jagger to be a slower song, “Respectable” turned into something else once Keith Richards saw the advantages of speeding up the tempo. “It became a ‘punk-meets-Chuck-Berry’ number,” he said, “and it was a gas to play in concert.” The biting lyrics, which talk of a woman rising into high society and the narrator’s attempts to remind her of her humble roots, were actually about the band’s evolving from brats to rock elders. “‘Respectable’ really started off as a song in my head about how respectable we as a band were supposed to have become,” Jagger noted with a grin, “but the record ended up sounding anything but respectable.”

“Bar-B-Q,” ZZ Top, 1972

Before they had their first minor hit “La Grange” in 1973 from their breakthrough “Tres Hombres” album, ZZ Top were still finding their way as songwriters. Guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons said of that period, “We started documenting events as they happened to us on the road. All of these elements went into the songwriting notebook. As we went along, we were keeping track of skeleton ideas as they popped up. The craft was certainly developing.” One of their great early Texas boogie songs, “Bar-B-Q,” is lyrically slight, vaguely equating barbecue food with sex (“Oh, now, baby, tell me why don’t you make me some of your fine famous Bar-B-Q?”), but the music chugs along relentlessly, giving a strong indication of what the band would be offering on their catalog in the coming years.

“Plynth (Water Down the Drain),” Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, 1969

Beck and his former Yardbirds mate Jimmy Page were both developing new groups in 1968, and Beck emerged first with a landmark solo LP, “Truth,” that featured future superstars Rod Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass and Nicky Hopkins on piano. While Page went off to form Led Zeppelin, Beck doubled down on what was now being called The Jeff Beck Group, releasing “Beck-Ola” (a wordplay on the Rock-Ola jukebox) in the summer of ’69, which included this busy rocker. The band toured the US and was slated to appear at Woodstock, but that plan fell through due to internal tensions, and Stewart and Wood splintered off to form Faces. Still, Beck’s distinctive guitar work, and the blues-based rock found on these first two albums (which both reached #15 on the US album chart) helped pioneer a genre that became hugely popular in the US over the coming decade and beyond.

“Mainline Florida,” Eric Clapton, 1974

George Terry, a respected session guitarist who also worked with Joe Cocker, Stephen Stills and The Bee Gees, joined forces with Clapton in 1974 as he was recording his comeback LP “461 Ocean Boulevard.” It was Terry who exposed Clapton to the music of Bob Marley, specifically “I Shot the Sheriff,” which became the LP’s huge hit for Clapton that year. Terry wrote the album’s closer, a churning rocker called “Mainline Florida,” which departs somewhat from the understated acoustic arrangements on most of the tracks. Clapton uses a talk box on the electric guitar solo (a relatively new device heard on hits by Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton around that time). Despite what you might think, “Mainline Florida” has nothing to do with drugs. Clapton had emerged from a three-year heroin addiction, and the song merely refers to “Hotel Row” in a community on the ocean just north of Miami.

“I’ve Had Enough,” Paul McCartney and Wings, 1978

McCartney’s erstwhile band Wings, after several consecutive successes in the studio and on tour, had splintered in late 1977 during sessions for the group’s “London Town” LP. A few basic musical tracks had been recorded in the Virgin Islands prior to the departure of guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English, which left just stalwart Denny Laine with Paul and wife Linda to carry on. One of those tracks was a raucous guitar-based rocker to which McCartney later added minimal lyrics, titling it “I’ve Had Enough,” sung in a snarling vocal that underscored the pent-up frustrations he was feeling at that point. As the follow-up single to Wings’ #1 hit “With a Little Luck,” the song reached #25 on the US pop charts and stood in stark contrast, sounding more like The Beatles’ cover of “Long Tally Sally.”

“Swing to the Right,” Todd Rundgren and Utopia, 1982

From 1974 through 1985, Rundgren maintained a blistering pace of new releases that included solo albums as well as separate projects with his progressive rock band Utopia. In 1980, Rundgren hit a creative peak with Utopia’s “Deface the Music,” which paid tribute to the many phases of music The Beatles recorded during their career. He followed that with “Swing to the Right,” Utopia’s hard-edged commentary on “corporate raiders, warmongers, political villains, and despicable music industry types,” as Rundgren put it. His record label didn’t care for the lyrical themes and were reluctant to release or promote the LP, resulting in it stalling at a disappointing #102 on US album charts. I’ve always liked the strident yet catchy title track that shows disdain for the country’s political “swing to the right” in 1981.

“Hang On to Yourself,” David Bowie, 1972

As a pioneer in the quickly-developing genre known as glam rock, Bowie had toyed with androgynous looks and multiple musical styles on his 1971 critical success “Hunky Dory.” As he and his band, christened The Spiders From Mars, began recording tracks for the next LP, a loose concept about a futuristic, decadent rock star called Ziggy Stardust took shape, and the resulting album stands today as one of the most influential rock albums of all time. “Suffragette City,” “Starman,” “Moonage Daydream” and the title track got most of the airplay, but the one that instantly grabbed me was the proto-punk rocker, “Hang On to Yourself,” which offers bold sexual images: “We can’t dance, we don’t talk much, we just ball and play, but then we move like tigers on Vaseline…”

“Keep Yourself Alive,” Queen, 1973

Originally conceived in 1971 as an acoustic guitar-based track when Queen was still playing London clubs without a record contract, “Keep Yourself Alive” was later retooled into an electric guitar workout that became the opening track on the band’s 1973 debut LP. When released as a single, it didn’t chart in the UK nor the US, but it became a regular part of their concert setlist throughout the 1970s. In 2008, Rolling Stone described the track as “guitarist Brian May’s statement of purpose: a phalanx of overdubbed guitars crying out in unison, with rhythm and texture from over-the-top effects…an entire album’s worth of riffs crammed into a single song.” Vocalist Freddie Mercury said it was one of his favorite songs to sing of Queen’s entire catalog.

“Straight Shootin’ Woman,” Steppenwolf, 1974

Between 1968 and 1970, this hard-driving psychedelic rock band with both Canadian and American roots released five Top 20 albums, scoring three iconic singles (“Born To Be Wild,” “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Rock Me”), carried by prominent organ and guitar riffs and John Kay’s forceful vocals.  Steppenwolf broke up in 1971 but reformed in 1974 for a moderately successful second phase, most notably 1974’s “Slow Flux” album and its hard-driving single “Straight Shootin’ Woman,” which peaked at #29 on US charts.  The song, written by drummer Jerry Edmonton, introduced a horn section to the band’s sound, which, unlike other horn-laden groups like Chicago, was more earthy and gritty than tightly commercial.  The lyrics endorse the idea of being — and finding — a loyal, faithful partner in life and love.

“Raise Your Hand,” Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, 1978/1986

As a student of R&B-infused Sixties rock, Springsteen made much of his early reputation performing blistering versions of famous and lesser-known songs of that era like Mitch Ryder’s “Devil With the Blue Dress” and Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three.”  Another one was “Raise Your Hand,” a modest 1967 R&B hit for Eddie Floyd of “Knock on Wood” fame, which Springsteen and his E Street Band turned into a sweaty barnburner during their 1978 “Darkness on the Edge of Town” tour.  He included a scorching 1978 performance from L.A.’s The Roxy on his mind-blowing, 40-track box set “Live/1975-85” that served to introduce the song to a new generation of rock and soul music fans upon that package’s release in 1986.   

“Room to Move,” John Mayall, 1969

Mayall, an influential harmonica player and a capable vocalist, has been known as The Godfather of British blues for his trailblazing music as bandleader of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in the 1960s. He is probably best known for attracting some of England’s finest blues guitarists (Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor in succession) to join his lineup for brief stints, but he also was a prolific blues songwriter as well. He notched five solo albums that reached the mid-40s on the US album charts between 1968 and 1971, perhaps none better than his scintillating live album, “The Turning Point,” in 1969. “Room to Move,” a mouth harp tour-de-force that got loads of FM radio airplay, is one of the great moments in blues records to come out of England.

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