Yeah! That's the one I was looking for but somehow missed on the Ytube. I know Casey Kasem talked about this back in the day and may have even played a snippet of it on his show. You and W.B. are absolutely correct. Much mahalos for finding this as I thought maybe I was imagining things.
I was all set to hate this one, too since I loved it in it's original version by writer Kenny Rankin but lo and behold, she did a nice job; jazzed it up a little. Kenny Rankin - Peaceful 1972
Something in the back of my mind told me it wasn't what I was looking for as I had a memory of the original sounding quite different from the hit. I even input I Don't Know How To Love Him LP version but got nada. Since the one I posted was the only "different" sounding one I could find, I went with it. I can always count on a forum member to come up with the correct answer. As an aside, I also found this reworking of the tune in a smooth jazz style from 1991:
When Reddy arrived in the USA she was a 'Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home/Caravan with a drum solo lounge/cabaret singer (her family is 'old showbiz' in Australia). She started hanging out with Lillian Roxon (author of Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia) who suggested she add a few Van Morrison and John Lennon songs to her act. Roxon then wrote about her being the first post modern lounge singer. That and Jeff Wald being a 'whatever it takes' kind of guy helped her get where she got.
Also, the Capitol Records that scored this #1 was a different label, in terms of some roster, than that where "Hello Goodbye" topped the charts nearly five years before. Gone were the likes of Lou Rawls and label mainstays Peggy Lee and Jackie Gleason; while the likes of Glen Campbell, Al Martino and Bobbie Gentry were still on the label, there were also "newies" (relatively speaking) including the Raspberries, plus such acts as Grand Funk (Railroad) and Steve Miller (plus, on its Harvest subsidiary, a certain British rock group called Pink Floyd). Definitely corporate-wise, it was a different setup. Alan Livingston was gone from Capitol by 1968. Stanley Gortikov (later to run the RIAA for some years) and then Sal Iannucci (formerly involved in business affairs for CBS) took turns running the label before, in 1971, Bhaskar Menon was put in charge. (That same year, label co-founder Glenn Wallichs died.) Capitol had a loss of around $8-million in 1971, which, after pruning a good deal of its artist roster and several staff producers (many of whose names are very familiar with some Forumites), climbed into a rather small profit.
I'd heard "I Am Woman" maybe twice in my life before today's fresh listen. (I love this thread.) I was eight years old when it was a hit, so it never registered for me back then, and it was conspicuously absent from the radio when I started diving into pop music. I was aware of the song, but the only times I ever actually heard it were during special radio features (one time the local oldies station ran all the #1 hits of the seventies, and even then it skipped a few, though "I Am Woman" did make the cut that time). Anyway, I can see why this was an important record for the women's movement, and at that level I'm glad it was successful, but I find that it kind of meanders musically, and would probably not have been as big a hit if the lyrics were more prosaic. But it's a lyrically well-written, provocative song, and that's never unwelcome to me on the radio. I'm going to listen again. Maybe it will grow on me some; I do enjoy many of Helen Reddy's other hits, which I'm more familiar with.
Helen's first single from 1968. Just missed the top 40 in Melbourne. Fat Boy Slim sampled the intro ( showing he's got a better record collection than I have)
Did the song have this impact because of "I Am Woman" and "I Am A Woman" would not have had this impact? I have the song "I'm A Woman" from Leiber/Stoller with Peggy Lee in my collection which also had a statement. At least I think so.
The Band was/were still on Capitol too. Their Rock Of Ages LP is the only one I have with Captiol's 1971-1972 red target LP label. Linda Ronstadt was also still there. Another "gone" group was The Beach Boys.
Riiiiiight! But as you mentioned that word, wasn't it around this time Ferlin Husky was also "gone" from the label? By 1973 he was on ABC . . .
You learn something new every day. I had never heard of Ferlin Husky until your post, but upon looking him up and reading about him, you are correct. Your post (and the resulting research) made me think of Sonny James, and it appears he too was off the label around this time.
I had to rack my brain a bit, but I came up with a single on Capitol that I picked up around this time (around September 1972). "Small Beginnings" by Flash (I also had it on the target label, as shown by this uploader). I really like the target label, but it was on its way out.
The "target label," in its overall color scheme, looks like it was also the inspiration for Columbia's red/orange "ring around" label that debuted in June 1970 and was used all the way to about 1990-91. The orange color may well have been the same, too - PMS 136.
He was. Definitely. Moved to Columbia. Traded one label with a design including orange (and red) for another. From this: to this:
Yeah, I read on Wiki that from toddler days she was singing on the Australian vaudeville circuit. (Tivoli, as it was called). Makes sense she'd gravitate to cabaret. I wanna hear Caravan with a drum solo!
Oh man, that original version is totally dated. If the ultimate single was cabaret-tinged, this thing was full out cabaret and kinda Mama Cass-esque. In fact, this is just the kind of song that could have been the commercial hit for Cass her solo career sadly lacked.
Not for lack of trying either. She had some fine pop tunes on her own - Make Your Own Kind Of Music, Move In A Little Closer Baby and New World Coming to name a few - but it seems the world had moved on and she was yesterday's news. Maybe she would have had a second career down the road if not for her untimely passing but that point is moot.
I think she was the first Aussie act to top the chart, full stop. The closest I can recall from before this was "Georgy Girl" in 1967 (four weeks at #2). ETA: Unless you count the Bee Gees, but they were originally from England.
I like "I'm a Woman" (how could anyone not love a line like "I can make a dress out of a feedbag/and I can make a man out of you"?!), but I don't consider it feminist in any real way. It's more along the lines of celebrating the kind of unfair Superwoman stereotype that second-wave feminism was trying to overcome. After all, no one - male or female - could really do all the things that song says, could they? And expecting women to do so was really kind of damaging. Speaking of Peggy Lee, an earlier post mentioned she was no longer on Capitol at this point. That's just barely true: her last Capitol album came out just a few months before this (and it's a fantastic album, too).
I did count the Brothers Gibb, so Helen gets the title when you add a native-born qualifier. In any event, it's a good trivia stumper because 99 out of 100 people will probably say Olivia Newton-John.
