By Martin H. Rots

We looked for this tune for a long time.  By that I mean five, maybe ten years.  The trouble was, we didn't know the name of the tune or the artist.  The lyrics didn't give a hint.  It wasn't like Help! or Hey Jude where it was hard to miss.  If the title was in the lyrics, it was subtle and Candy couldn't remember it or hum the tune. 

This made it tough, even for an old music freak like myself.

For a while, she thought it might be Shawn Phillips and we started buying and listening to his music.  It wasn't easy to find, especially before the internet.  Shawn's own music isn't well known, but if you listen to it long enough, it starts to sound familiar.  It sounds very similar to some of Donovan's best work, which he played on in the late sixties.

After several years of searching for Shawn Phillips' music, she still hadn't found the track she was looking for.  Frustrated, we began to look elsewhere for the elusive mystery track.  She thought she heard it on a  Sunday morning show, but the deejay never told us the name of the song.

The search went on.

A few years back, Candy thought it might be by a band called Chase.  The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but they weren't a household name from the sixties.   She couldn't find their music anywhere, but somehow, Candy made contact with their former manager.  He graciously sent her both Chase albums on CD.  One, he burned himself.  She listened to the albums for several days and enjoyed them both, but neither of them featured the song she was seeking.

Sometimes, finding and obtaining obscure music can be difficult.  It can be even more difficult if you have nothing to go on but a distant  memory.  She tried singing the tune to me but that brought us no closer to a solution.  Time passed and we didn't actively pursue it any longer.

She was checking out the iTunes store one day and buying a few tracks when she stumbled on it.  She listened to the twenty-second snatch of the tune they offered up and realized, here at last, was the elusive, long sought after, mystery tune.  She immediately bought it and ran excitedly to tell me that the long quest was over.

It was Jesse Colin Young and the song was called Ridgetop.  It had been years since I'd heard it.  You can't dance to it so they don't play it on the radio anymore.  If it were some inane piece of feces with a drum track, I'm sure it would be hard to escape, but it isn't given the consideration it deserves.  It's a little different for Mr. Young.  Before Ridgetop, I was only familiar with the Youngbloods' two most well known tracks, Get Together and Darkness, Darkness.  As an easterner, I had always thought of Jesse Colin Young in the same vein as the Dead, the sublime jazzy feel of Ridgetop changed all that.  Living on a wooded ridgetop in northern California for the last three years, a veritable "squirrel sanctuary" as Young would term it, I can easily relate to his lyrics even though they were written decades ago.  Ironically, the mountain paradise Young refers to in the song burned to the ground in a 1995 forest fire, leaving the singer and his family homeless.

In the end Sparky was happy and so was I.  She loves to dance around the house to it.  Ridgetop is a wonderful track and we both play it often.  More delightful music to enrich our lives and free our spirits.  Go online and buy it today!  Invest a dollar.  You won't be sorry.

To learn more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Colin_Young