The Deadly Nightshade (1975)

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[BPL1-0955] The Deadly Nightshade

On our first album, The Deadly Nightshade, released in 1975, the producer was Felix Cavaliere, who had been the keyboard player and creative leader of The Rascals. They’d been one of our favorite groups from the days of their energetic, passionate first album (before the mellow later hits), when they were still called The Young Rascals, and Felix’s trademark was dramatic slides up and down his Hammond B3 organ, with his elbow. 

We were thrilled at the prospect of having Felix’s elbow on our album. And we also felt that as a producer, he’d understand our own live energy, and be able to translate that into an exciting recording.

Felix did play on the album. But he was past his elbow days and Hammond B3 melodrama, into more tasteful Fender Rhodes jazzy/Latinesque stylings. (Think “Groovin’” rather than “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore”.)

The Deadly Nightshade had not, very deliberately, progressed beyond melodrama. Still, we felt that Felix could capture our kamikaze live sound and spirit in the studio. Unfortunately, however, between Phantom/RCA and us-- pulling in opposite directions and with very different concepts of what The Deadly Nightshade’s recordings should be-- he was in an impossible position.

We did try to compromise on the issues. It was clearly a given, for instance, that there would be many studio musicians playing on our album, and some—drums replacing my tap boots stomping on the backbeat or downbeat; real horns supplementing or replacing our kazoos; keyboards added in places—seemed reasonable ideas. But since a big part of what The Deadly Nightshade was about was inspiring other women to play in bands, and proving women could cut it, we wanted as many of the studio musicians as possible, preferably all of them, to be female.

It was a simple concept that no one got, and it caused constant conflict. With the hottest studio guys in town eager to work with Felix, and RCA happy to pay for them, it seemed incomprehensible to them that we wanted to hire lesser known women.

Since the players we found were both excellent and appropriate for our musical style, we found it equally incomprehensible that they persisted in acting like we were prioritizing gender over musicianship.

As it worked out, we used everybody on some song or other. But the grrrls were generally relegated to the songs that the powers that be considered lightweight. The boyz seemed mainly interested in impressing each other. Nobody was happy.

The most astonishing war story came out of a weekend when we went up to Massachusetts to do a couple of gigs. In the cats’ absence, the mice came out to play. On one country song we’d recorded earlier, the jazz drummer Susan Evans had played. We loved the tracks. Susan had gotten a hard-hitting, rowdy bar band feel that few jazz drummers can manage. But our production team decided that one of the album’s engineers, a guy who had drummed for the Blues Magoos six or seven years before (but hadn’t played since), could do better. So he played over Susan’s tracks, erasing them.

His drumming was out of sync in roughly a zillion places, naturally; laying rhythm tracks after the fact is difficult even for players who aren’t rusty. So imagine our delight when we got back from our road trip. We ended up using the single scratch track onto which the guys had mixed all of Susan’s tracks. Actually, even with the customary individual EQing of each drum rendered impossible, she sounds damned good.

All in all The Deadly Nightshade finished up the album feeling like The Dead Nightshade. The songs are our originals/our choices. The vocals are all ours. And we are playing on all the cuts, buried under there somewhere.  [PRB]

High Flying Woman   In 1975, after our first album was released, “High Flying Woman” was the first single. That’s why it’s the first song on the actual record, though the album jacket incorrectly lists it as second, after “Keep on the Sunnyside”. The song order got re-shuffled to feature “High Flying Woman”, but the jackets were already printed—and since they were the hideously expensive fold-out kind, there was no way RCA was going to pay for a re-print. Anyway, American Airlines used the song on their in-flight entertainment program. We somehow suspected it was the title, rather than the feminist message, that grabbed them.   [PRB]

We did High Flying Woman at many women’s marches and rallies. And after the record was done we did it on national TV, on an NBC Special inspired by second-wave feminism, called "Of Women and Men".  It was a very exciting show for us at the time, three of our 15 minutes. (I guess that means we still have twelve minutes left).   [HH]

Nose Job A hauntingly beautiful song about a woman who gets her nose fixed for her boyfriend. The hardest thing about playing this song at live gigs was doing it with a straight face, especially since, in keeping with the spirit of the sucky-uppy lyrics, we did girl group choreography on this number. Since for our entire so-called “adult” lives, we always played the music rather than dance to it, the choreography was… less than flawlessly elegant. Think the Supremes BEFORE Motown Charm School. Waaaaaaay before.   [PRB]

Something Blue This anti-wedding song comes from days decades before gay marriage became an issue, and has absolutely nothing to do with that. What we were dissing here is the pre-feminist assumption that all women, to be truly fulfilled, must be married… to men, of course. The lyrics were written from the point of view of a not-quite-awakened woman who’s automatically opting for this conventional marriage trap, with all the conventional wedding trappings. But there was at least as much of a purely musical motivation for the song: Audiences always responded powerfully to the way Anne’s voice sounded singing covers of Patsy Cline’s and Kitty Wells’ country shuffles, so we wanted to write an original two-step tearjerker for her. As usual, however, we could not resist camping it up a bit. I believe I speak for all three of us in saying that our favorite part of the song is the talking section, where Anne is backed up by singing teardrops. The gay genes made us do it.   [PRB] 

In the spirit of playing as many gigs as possible, we played the wedding of one of our best fans to his long-time woman partner.  Our dressing room at the wedding (which was at her childhood home) was her bedroom, frozen into a frilly pink time-warp of her high school self.

The entire setting spoke more to me of a kind of confusion of expectations, and reminded me of the old saying of what you needed at a wedding:  something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.  In my mind there was no doubt that the something blue would be the bride, caught in the conflict between her old life (as that bedroom symbolized it) and her new one (deep in the counterculture).

So that was as much of a song as I could come up with, but fortunately Pamela and Helen had some swell ideas for finishing it.  [AB]

Losin’ at Love A more-or-less true story from my own personal life, this song relates the story of a woman who must choose, as women classically had to in the days before second-wave feminism, between deliberately losing a poker game or losing her guy. In real life, the sport was actually bowling, with my seventh grade boyfriend. Poker just sounded cooler.

The three of us Deadlies wrote songs in all sorts of ways, but this one was definitely more free-form than most. I had lyrics, and we decided we’d all just try playing something that sounded like a fast Chuck Berry-type song, while I’d try singing some melody that went along. In the ensuing bedlam, the line “looks like my lucky night” came out “looks like my nucky light”, which is how we got the name of our publishing company, Nucky Light.

Btw: The “Ms. Leslie West” credited on the jacket for playing one of the guitar leads (blowing two speakers in the process) was actually the quite male guitar hero from the power trio Mountain. We told him he could only play if we made him an honorary woman for the session. He agreed enthusiastically, though he did ruin the illusion a bit with his customary daily greeting at the studio: “Hi, ladies! Suck my dick!” (It was refreshing, actually. Most guys in the business end of the mainstream recording industry felt the same about female artists. They were just less honest about it.)   [PRB]

Dance, Mr. Big, Dance Definitely a period piece, this one’s classic 1970s role-reversal from the days when bosses were almost always men, secretaries were almost always women, and sexist stereotypes ruled: An unemployed shithead ex-boss comes to his former secretary, now a boss, for a job, and she makes him dance to the same old tune working women always had to deal with back then.
While some misinterpret this song as anti-male, it’s actually anti-sexist. Also anti-shithead.

And frankly, the original motivation behind the song was more practical than political… kind of a New England “waste not, want not” thing. The band was all living on a farm in a rural area (Ashfield, MA) and for Christmas, a friend had given Anne an Appalachian dancing doll. This is a little wooden guy on a stick; the player makes him tap dance on a paddle, thereby serving as a percussion instrument. Anne’s doll, however, had an abnormally large head that unbalanced him. He kept falling off the stick. So the whole idea was: What song theme could we come up with that climaxes with a dancing doll solo that lasts until the little guy falls on his face?   [PRB]

Part of the ephemera from this band is Mr. Big himself.  There were several of them over the years, including a special Easter Bunny version.  There are Mr. Bigs now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute, the Sophia Smith Collection, and the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame.  But I kept one of the original ones, and he’s the one performing again today.  [AB]

This tune was incredibly fun to record.  Nedra Johnson’s dad, Howard Johnson, the renowned tuba player, recruited several of his best buddies, including David Sanborn and the Brecker Brothers, for a Dixieland horn section background. The music as we composed it was already vaudevillian, and Howard took it home and came up with a horn section arrangement that, when played by these top studio players, was amazing. You could just see Mr. Big “pulling up his pants,” just like an old strip-tease number…. [HH]

Keep On the Sunnyside This traditional Carter family song has always been our favorite first song for live gigs. We just play it a whole lot louder and faster than Mother Maybelle did. We like to hit the stage at 110% energy, and escalate from there.

Important correction: The album jacket credits “A.P. Cauter” as the song’s writer. That, of course, is A.P. Carter. It wasn’t our fault, honest.    [PRB]

I was fortunate enough to see Maybelle Carter and Sister June Carter perform in Cambridge at Club 47, which would later become Passim.  It was a transformational moment for me.  I am sitting in a smoky dingy folk club in a basement.  Two women in high heels, cocktail dresses, and beehive hairdos come out of the dressing room and take the stage.  And when they started to sing and play, very hard and very loud, sweating and stamping those high heels, it completely blew me away. 

I never played less than full-blast or sang less than full-voice ever again.  [AB] 

It’s so upbeat, so energetic, so essentially us.  [HH]

Sweet, Sweet Music Music does bring very different people together—this song’s message, inspired by many, many Deadly Nightshade gigs in joints where audiences ranging from big ol’ bikers to Radical Faeries miraculously partied together in peace… for a few hours, anyway.

Still, I do have to admit, as the lyric writer, that this song’s words are kinda wimpy and twinkle-toed. In retrospect, 30 years later, this number reminds me of a commercial for fabric softener.

I think our web designer, Holly Hendricks (who came often to rock out with us in the 1970s, even though she was a hardcore folkie) has a more accurate analysis of why our band’s gigs temporarily transformed fighters into friends. She says that when we played at feminist events, we were so damned loud that even hardcore politicos who’d been squabbling all weekend couldn’t continue yelling at each other above our cranked amps. So they just gave up and danced. I.e.: Sweet, sweet music my ass.   [PRB]

Shuffle Anne’s a former jug band veteran, who plays a mean washboard; we wanted a song where she could show off; we wrote one.

The lyrics were inspired by a woman we knew in the Pioneer Valley, Kate (the song's "Katie"), a fledgling feminist who had just gone through a divorce from a guy who wanted her to be an old-fashioned wife. About the only thing she had in common with her ex, Michael, is that she also wanted a wife.

Anyway, Kate had once been into tap dancing, and originally we thought it would boost her confidence if she sat in with us and tap-danced “Shuffle”’s second lead. But it turned out to be way too fast for her feet. Not for Anne’s fingers, though.

We eventually learned “Shine On Harvest Moon” for Kate. She did a soft shoe solo.   [PRB]

My favorite part of this song is the 3-part kazoo introduction.  It caused quite a stir in the studio.  Also, if you listen very carefully, in the ending kazoo section, I am playing a pretty mean jug.  [AB]

I Sent My Soul to the Laundromat   Anne came up with the idea for this religious-themed song. But after writing the lyrics to the first verse and the chorus, she had to go wash her hair or something. So Helen wrote the lyrics to the second verse, but then also ran out of steam, and I wrote the last verse. Spiritual experiences sure are exhausting.   [PRB]

Bop-shoo-wah! [HH]

Someone Down In Nashville   In Ariel, the weird-ass rock band all three of us were in before The Deadly Nightshade, Helen and I were the songwriters/creative leaders—and we didn’t get country music at ALL. Anne, who grew up in Texas, knew a lot of C&W. But Helen and I ran Ariel like teenaged psychedelic Nazis, and we were far too busy re-arranging Jefferson Airplane’s most obscure songs (so that they were even more incomprehensible) to have time for Patsy Cline.

From the start, The Deadly Nightshade was more relaxed; one of our few rules was that everyone got to play her favorite cover songs. So we learned some country music… And we got it. So did audiences. Even when we opened for totally non-country bands—Billy Joel, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Peter Frampton, War—their fans responded, because it’s a kind of music that expresses what people feel on a gut level but often can’t express for themselves. And that’s what we’re saying in this song.

Also, we just wanted to write a song in a certain tempo that was a good showcase for Helen’s slide guitar playing.   [PRB]

But my slide playing cannot hold a candle to the amazing licks of Eric Weissberg, who played pedal steel on this cut.  Good thing we had him as he lent a very Nashvillian flavor to the song. [HH]

Blue Mountain Hornpipe Our arrangement of a little-known traditional Acadian fiddle tune from Prince Edward Island. Admittedly, it’s obscure, but it’s accessible.   [PRB]

Fiddle tunes are such a wealth of melodic and harmonic inspiration…This one’s very cheerful.  [HH]

Onions This is an electrically blazing bluegrass song. But since Bill Monroe, the “father of bluegrass”, didn’t approve of electric instruments, he doubtless wouldn’t have considered this song to be in the genre. So maybe it’s more like blue-streakgrass; it’s loud, fast, and ultra-high energy. In fact, the famed “Theme from Deliverance” banjo player Eric Weissberg, who’s playing Jew’s harp throughout this cut, actually fell off his chair at the end of the take, with his lips bleeding.
The most interesting musical thing about this cut, however, comes halfway through the first verse. The lyrics relate another more-or-less true story about how I was immediately zapped out of a deep depression-- one that had resisted all other compulsive eating remedies-- by a single accidental bite of a really evil little raw onion. And the lyrics include the sentence, “I still felt like a piece of shit.” But RCA, which was responsible for financing and marketing our albums, refused to let us sing “shit”, because they said then the album would have to be stickered as possibly offensive. Then the big chain stores wouldn’t stock it.

Therefore, we substituted a toilet flush for the word “shit”. Being true artistes, though, we were concerned about the musicality. So we dragged a microphone (with a VERY long cord; this was in the days before cordless mics) into every rest room on every floor of the building housing the snazzy New York studio where we were recording, to find the toilet with the best tone.

We’re sure that RCA agreed that the well-rounded, beautifully balanced, rich yet tight “whoosh” of the eighth-floor commode we settled on, after hours of testing, was well worth the extra $2000-3000 of studio time.   [PRB]

This is truly one of my faves of ours.  Pam’s true life epiphany with the raw onion takes vegetarianism from the sublime to the religious.  [HH]