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Rise Up

1/19/2017

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Spurz writes:
     I was playing the piano one day shortly after we’d moved to Sylvan Hills in southwest Atlanta. A knock at the screen door, and there stood the old neighbor from a couple houses down. Mr. Mayes. Braves cap on his big head, flannel shirt buttoned to the top and running down over his big belly. 
      “Hey,” I said.
      “I heard you playin’, and it sounds real good,” he said.
     “Thanks,” I said. “C’mon in.” He said to go on, and I played him a tune. “Just a Girl I Used to Know.” He nodded at the end, encouraging, and I ran through a couple of Hank Williams songs.
     
“Y’know,” he said, “I got an old mandolin down at the house. I haven’t played it for maybe twenty years. Y’mind if I go get it?”
     “No. Great,” I said. He came back with what he called a “tater bug,” a mandolin with a round back laminated in strips of different colored woods. Had it since the 1920s, he said. It had rusty strings, but he got it tuned.
      “Hee-hee,” he said. “Sounds OK. Let’s see. . . ,” and he sort of hitched his shoulder and started playing a song I’d never heard before. “My brothers and I used to play dances over on Campbellton Road for the soldiers at Fort Mac, and this old boy come in from over near Rottenwood Creek. And he had a guitar in a gunny sack, and he said now you boys get in tune, cuz we’re gonna play 'The Gideon.’ And this is it.” I switched to guitar and followed the tune with its funky timing. “Say, I can see you’re a valuable fella,” he said.
     After that we played together all the time. Melodies just came out from his fingers, and I’d add backup and lyrics, if there were any. A dozen years, a hundred songs from when he was a boy rambling the hills of Smyrna with his rabbit dogs and Nitro Special.
     The other thing we did together was watch the Braves, Falcons, and Georgia Tech. Mr. Mayes got mighty aggravated at all of the above at times. He died the year the Bravos went from worst to first, but he didn’t make it to the Series. The Falcons were mostly "DIS-gustin'" too. So the last couple days I got to thinking about how much he’d enjoy this year's edition, and I came up with this song, “Rise Up,” that lives somewhere between Ralph Stanley and Homer and Jethro.
    "Hee-hee," he'd say. "That's right Mr. Larry,  Them Falcons gonna 'Rise Up' all right.”
All music, lyrics, and other content Ⓒ 1976-2017 by Larry J. Schulz
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December 27th, 2016

12/27/2016

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Spurz writes:
     A band without a gig is just a bunch of players wishing they had someone to play for, and our regular first Friday at the Downwind Restaurant and Lounge has sustained the Band of Desperate Men for over ten years. The place is an attraction in its own right: its deck overlooking the Peachtree-Dekalb Airport runway gives a great view of private planes taxiing in and out and an atmosphere ripe with jet-A to accompany the best hamburger in Atlanta. Our audience has grown from people who came for those amenities and stuck around when they heard our tunes. We’ve seen a lot of folks come and go, got them dancing between the tables, and often heard their stories.
      A while back I got an e-mail from a Downwind friend  named Kara, a nurse, who I hadn’t seen for a while. Turned out she’d been having health issues, but she wanted me to know she was better and would come out to see us before long. She finished with, “Thank God for healing.” Just at that time, another pal—a doctor—had playfully suggested I should write a song for him. Our Doc Oster is a physician too. So I came up with “This I Know.” I said, “There can never be too much singing in the world. . . ; too much laughing in the world. . .; and there can never be too much healing in the world—This I know.”
     The guys know this tune as “For Michael,” and this is how it sounded when we recorded out live set up in Sautee, Georgia, a couple years ago.
All music, lyrics, and other content Ⓒ 1976-2016 by Larry J. Schulz
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Let Go of My Hand

12/9/2016

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Britt writes:
    Clay  Spurz and I did not become rich and/or famous. But, as luck would have it, we did get older. The two of us would sing from time to time in the interim years of careers and raising children. One day, we were recording some tracks in the large old-fashioned cedar closet in his attic, and, in a break, I started singing “Let Go of My Hand,” a tune I’d been tinkering with. It reminisces about my daughter, Amanda, and my son, DeSha, on the day she graduated from high school and and he from college. There’s a photo of baby DeSha balancing on my outstretched hand before he could even walk (babies can do that). “A photo can freeze what a hand cannot hold.” And there are lots of images in my mind of first solo bike rides, swims in the deep end, and those graduation days. “Let go of my hand, I’ll be right here. . . .”
     
Spurz turned on the machine, and I sang it as it came out in the track below, adding harmonies later. Spurz wept as I was singing. “And the next twenty times I listened,” he says. He put in some backup guitar, and we used it on our first CD. People started asking for it and closing their eyes as they listened. That’s sweet.
     Ironically, I wrote the tune not too long after the current band had played Eddie's Attic in Decatur, where we shared the stage with a duet that played an original song about their children. I said to Spurz, “If I ever write a song about my children, just shoot me.”
​     
So here's my song about my children. “A poppa so proud, he’s about to explode.”
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Studio One Session

11/27/2016

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    Britt Dean and Clay Spurz had gone to the same college in St. Pete--it was called Flordia Presbyterian College at the time. And on drives between Florida and Princeton in the early 1970s, Spurz had stopped in Atlanta for long night jams with the large group of FPC pals that had gravitated there. There’d be 20 or 30 people singing along to “This Could Be the Last Time,” “Tracks of My Tears,” “Long Black Veil”—a grand chorale of folk, pop, and R&B. Britt had “the prettiest voice I’ve ever heard,” says Spurz, and he improvised gorgeous harmonies. So Spurz for years had in his head a band with Buddy Miller  (see Nov. 19 post) playing guitar and singing lead; Britt singing ultra tenor, and himself writing and adding a third part.
    Britt’s brother, bassist T. Wesley Dean,
was doing studio work at Studio One in Doraville, Ga., for a producer named Steve Clark. Clark had been in charge of sales at VeeJay Records in Chicago, and he pitched the first U.S. Beatles singles when the company acquired the rights for the then unknown (in the U.S.) Fab Four in 1963. He then went to LA and was involved with The Association and other acts before ending up in Atlanta.   
    Through his brother, Britt got Spurz's song “What You Think You Gonna Find in Texas” a hearing from Steve Clark, who offered to produce a demo.  So in the summer of 1976 Spurz went to Atlanta, where Britt had recruited pianist John Healey, another FPC grad, and Mark Ford, guitarist, for the session.  Clark asked about other songs, and Spurz sang him “Need You So,” a duet built around Britt’s soaring range.  T. Wesley Dean played bass, and Charles Wolff--his partner in the rhythm section of Thermos Greenwood and the Colored People--played drums.   Hank Bruns added pedal steel and Clark asked Joe South’s sister, Barbara, to sing another layer of  high harmony.

    The result was these two demo tracks:
All music, lyrics, and other content Ⓒ 1976-2016 by Larry J. Schulz
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THE BAND OF DESPERATE MEN FROM THE FIRST

11/9/2016

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     In the early 1970s, Clay Spurz was living in Princeton, NJ, under an assumed name and doing research in I Ching studies. While there, he’d come under the spell of Buddy Miller, who played “high speed honk” in local bars with a 5 piece band called the Desperate Men and sometimes sat in with a bluegrass band called Strait Grain.
     Spurz sang lead on bluegrass standards for Strait Grain and adapted tunes like Sam Cooke’s “Good News” to their instrumentation along with Waylon Jennings and Beatles songs.  He loved Buddy’s harmonies and, of course, the guitar mastery for which later The American Music Association named  him “Instrumentalist of the Year” in 2007 and 2008.
     After a couple of years poring over rare editions of the I Ching in Taiwan, Spurz returned to Princeton and started writing C&W songs that he thought might be good enough for Buddy’s band.  Buddy had decided to try his luck in Austin.  Still, he said he’d bring his band to the wood framed attic above the Cabinet Shop in Princeton and back Spurz on a demo. So Spurz called his pal Britt Dean in Atlanta--he of the sweet, high harmony--to see if he’d come and sing on it. It was minimally miked and recorded by Ken Burger, who had what Buddy called "the best half-track machine around."  Here's "I'll Never Love Someone (the Way that You Love Me)," Spurz's first Desperate tune, from that session. 
And "Play Me One More Song " in high speed honk ":
All music, lyrics, and other content Ⓒ 1976-2016 by Larry J. Schulz
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    Britt Dean,
    ​Clay Spurz

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