Saturday July 17, 2021 “Crazy” Patsy Cline/Aerosmith
Saved the best version of ‘same title different song week’ for our last entry. OK, that’s going to be my opinion and I must qualify that my opinion has recently been questioned on a number of tunes as to its musical validity.
For today's selection there couldn’t possibly be a broader chasm between style, content, music, lyrics, appearance and everything else, so let’s go.
Patsy Cline (Virginia Hensley) struggled for years to get established in the music business and finally had a successful hit with “I Fall to Pieces' ' shortly afterwards she was involved in a serious automobile accident which left her in the hospital and with a long recovery period. Following her recuperation her next song, today’s “Crazy” written by a young Willie Nelson, became a major crossover hit on both the country and pop charts.
Cline died at age 30 when the airplane she was traveling in crashed, but given her short career, she is still considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to successfully cross over into pop music.
And then there is Aerosmith whose lead singer Steven Tyler must wake up every morning and be thankful he is seeing another day given the abuses he has taken himself through over many years. Aerosmith was one of the most popular hard rock bands of the '70s, setting the style and sound of hard rock and heavy metal for more than two decades with their raunchy, bluesy swagger and then diving successfully into power ballads.
Many of their earlier singles contained lyrical content by Steven Tyler, a master of double entendre and maybe even single entendre if such a thing explaining the fact that there was no mystery in the lyrical direction as in this Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry song, “Crazy”.
And please don’t hesitate letting me know your thoughts on song of the day selections. I love to get the feedback and it doesn’t bother me to hear “this song is crap’, “I hate everything this group has ever done”, “I can’t f$ckin believe you did THAT song”, “Dylan sounds like Pavoratti compared to this guy”, “this song takes me back to high school and I hated high school”, “didn’t you do this song already?”, “this song was a hit?” or ‘I can't believe they wasted time and money to record this.” All mostly true, valued comments and please keep them coming.
Stay safe and well...and walk this way...and yes that is Steven Tyler's little girl Liv with Alicia Siverstone in the video.