Rant #2,521: Midnight Confessions

I have to day that I have kept busy during my time away from the workplace.

If it is not one thing, it is another.

I write this column, I look for jobs, I take my son to and from work, I do food shopping, I do my exercises, and I help my parents out in any way that I can.

In fact, yesterday, after doing my daily due diligence, I took my mother to her doctor, which happens to be near the Nassau/Queens border in Lake Success. It is a real hike, but she needed my help, and I was only too happy to provide it to her.

Notice I don't include answering the phone, because quite frankly nobody calls me, and certainly nobody calls me related to a possible job interview.

I do get those phone calls that we all get, related to disability, installing solar panels and stuff like that, even though my number is on the national no-call list.

So I have gotten into the habit at not answering the phone, unless the readout tells me that it is someone I know.

But during those down times that do come here and there--even yesterday, there was a slight window of opportunity--I digitize my records. I have spoken about this many times, but I continue to have scads of LPs and 45s that I haven't done this to yet, and their time has come. I find it very relaxing, and it allows me to listen to these vinyl records in my car on MP3 files.

You have to understand that not everything is available out there on CD or via streaming, so a lot of what I have digitized is only available via the original vinyl records. And I am doing it for myself, no one else, and it is fun getting into records I haven't heard in ages once again.

Right now, I am keying on the Grass Roots, one of the most fun bands to digitize in my entire collection. Yes, their hits--and they had quite a few from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s--are widely available, but not their LPs and certainly not the original single mixes of their 45s. In fact, if you look for them on iTunes, there is a scant amount of material from them, maybe a greatest hits and maybe an album or two.

But I am taking the original LPs and singles and digitizing them, so I am hearing the records the way that they were meant to be listened and played, not in any updated format.

This is what we were listening to all those years ago, and let me tell you, those records pop better than most records of that time, because they were originally produced to be radio-ready, meaning AM-radio-ready, with excellent production values and songs that draw you in from the first note to the last one.

Looking back, the Grass Roots--originally a studio concoction but later an actual band featuring Rob Grill on lead vocals and a variety of other players, including Creed Bratton, who went onto later fame as, well, "Creed Bratton" on the TV sitcom "The Office."

They posted 21 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1966 through 1975, and three more on the "Bubbling Under" chart, so they had a total of 24 singles on the chart during roughly a 10-year span. That made them one of the biggest hitmakers of their day.

Most of us probably know many of their hits, including "Midnight Confessions," "I'd Wait a Million Years," "Let's Live For Today," "Where Were You When I Needed You," and "Things I Should Have Said," but surprisingly, not only did they never have a No. 1 single, they only had one Top Five single, and that was "Midnight Confessions."

They put out more than 30 singles during their lifespan, and those songs were included on more than a dozen LPs. The band recorded into the 1980s, Rob Grill actually had a solo album that is sort of the "missing" Fleetwood Mac LP, as it includes participation by many members of that act, and basically, the Grass Roots passed over the pop mantra to labelmates Three Dog Night, who had their own succession of hits throughout the 1970s. You can hear so many similarities between the two bands, including the recording of some of the same songs, that the ABC-Dunhill label certainly cornered the pop rock market, with these two acts leading the charge, for more than a decade.

Anyway, I have so much from the Grass Roots--singles, albums--that I felt it was time to mine the complete hook-laden collection, so in between everything else, I have been doing that, and I am nearing the end of my quest, with only the Rob Grill solo album standing ahead of me.

Listening to the LPs now, they are basically storing records for their hits and album tracks. There is no "Sgt. Pepper" here, just collections of fine pop rock songs, one after the other, and they are highly listenable.

And like I said, they really, really pop--and better yet, most of music holds up, even decades after the fact.

Grill continued to keep the flame of the band going, and performed with them until virtually the very end of his life in 2011. He basically gave the band and its name and song list over to a new bunch of players in the early 2000s, and they continue on to this day, playing oldies shows around the country. No, there are none of the actual hit-making Grass Roots that are part of the current band, but they do an excellent job of carrying on the tradition of the band to audiences who want to hear all of those hits.

But the real essence of the Grass Roots is in the records, and I would greatly recommend that you look back on the band's catalog, even if you have to do it on YouTube.

The stuff is really that good.

Speak to you again on Monday. Have a great weekend.