Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 118

Record label: Elektra

Produced: Arthur Gorson

Recorded: Century Sound, New York and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles; autumn 1967

Released: March 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) 68 (US)

Personnel: Tom Rush (v, ag); Bruce Langhorne, Hugh McCracken, Don Thomas, Eric Gale (g); Jonathan Raskin (classcial guitar, b); Joe Mack, Bob Brushnell (b); Paul Harris (k, a); Herbie Lovelle, Bernard Purdie, Richie Ritz (d); Joe Grimm (s); Buddy Lucas (s); Brooks Arthur, Bruce Botnick (e)

Track listing: Tim Angel; Something In The Way She Moves; Urge For Going (S/US); Sunshine Sunshine; The Glory Of Love; Shadow Dream Song; The Circle Game; So Long; Rockport Sunday; No Regrets (S/UK)

Running time: 38.36

Current CD: WEA EA740182

Further listening: The Very Best Of Tom Rush: No Regrets 1962–1999 (1999)

Further reading: www.tomrush.com

Download: Not currently legally available

Exactly when folk singers became known as ‘singer-songwriters’ is hard to pinpoint, but this 1968 song cycle is certainly a milestone in that journey. The Circle Game was among folk rock’s first fully orchestrated albums, recorded at roughly the same time as Phil Ochs’s Pleasures Of The Harbor and Love’s Forever Changes (though both beat it to the street by a couple of months). As a true concept album, it bettered the framing devices of Sgt. Pepper and The Who Sell Out; it also just happened to introduce the world to the work of no less than three singer-songwriter icons: James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell.

The seed was planted when Cambridge folk star Rush met the unknown Mitchell in a Detroit coffee house, and she taught him her song Urge For Going. A tape of Rush’s moving six-minute demo of the song was played on Boston Top 40 powerhouse WBZ in the spring of 1967, where it became the radio station’s most requested song for the next six months. Urge For Going would obviously be a centrepiece of his next album, but Mitchell’s contribution didn’t end there. ‘I got a package in the mail from Joni,’ Rush recalls. ‘It was a tape she’d made in her apartment, wonderful songs like Tin Angel and Moon In The Mirror. At the end she did this little spoken disclaimer: “Gee, here’s a song I just finished. I’m not sure if it’s any good, but here it is.” That was The Circle Game.’

Rush had always been an open-minded folkie – his previous album had featured a side of Al Kooper electric arrangements – and he conceived this record as an orchestrated song cycle that would trace the arc of a relationship from hello to goodbye; side one would be the upside, side two the down. Mitchell’s tape had given him a title song (though The Circle Game was originally written for her old Toronto friend Neil Young) and a place to start in Tin Angel (‘In a Bleecker Street café/She found someone to love today’). The narrative was fleshed out with songs from unknowns Taylor (Something In The Way She Moves and Sunshine Sunshine) and Browne (Shadow Dream Song), both still in their teens. And though Tom Rush was known primarily as an interpreter, the two songs that cap The Circle Game were his own: the melancholy instrumental Rockport Sunday running into supreme break-up song No Regrets, which The Walker Brothers would spin into gold six years later.