Los Angeles, California: Cleopatra’s marathon Melanie reissue campaign continues apace with the earliest known professional recording of Melanie in concert.
Taped by her husband/producer Peter Schekeryk at the famed Troubadour in Los Angeles, Take Me Home - Live at the Troubadour 1969 features five songs recorded a full four months before Melanie’s epochal Woodstock appearance in August 1969, and captures the young chansonnier as she transfixed audience and watching media alike.
Reviewing the show, journalist Stephen MH Braitman wrote, “Her shining quality is a voice that literally weeps with huskiness. Melanie is an original, and what spouts from [her songs is a curiously compelling style….”
Elsewhere, Melody Maker called her as “a cross between Mother Courage and Judy Garland.”
Melanie, on the other hand, described herself as “A loose cannon.” In 2003, she reflected, “I don’t believe Woodstock changed me in the slightest, but it did alter my record label’s perception of me, and the media’s, and the public’s. And that bled into everything else - promotion, photo sessions, and I guess the songs I was writing, because as an artist you can’t help but write for your audience as much as you do for yourself.
“A lot of my earlier songs, my first two albums especially, I think got lost - there were certain songs I’d written, like ‘Beautiful People,’ that resonated with what the label wanted from me, but there were others, like ‘Deep Down Low’ and ‘Take Me Home With You’ [both included here] that were allowed to fall by the wayside.”
Here, they cannot help but demand attention.
Also included on the album is a rare recording of Melanie on tour in fall 1971, with her monster hit “Brand New Key” yet to commence its rise to #1. The response (or total lack thereof) to its appearance testifies to that.
Recorded at the California State College in California, Pennsylvania, it offers a fascinating glimpse of Melanie actually “on the road.” While other live recordings from this 1970-1971 period focus on the most prestigious venues in her itinerary, be they Carnegie Hall, the Montreux Festival or Glastonbury Fayre, here we hear her at what surely felt like just another venue in another town, as she wove her way around the country.
Yet her commitment to her performance is no less wholehearted than any of those better-known shows.
FIND IT HERE: https://orcd.co/melanie_takemehome
Track listing
1. Deep Down Low (excerpt)
2. I Really Loved Harold
3. Tuning My Guitar
4. Psychotherapy
5. Take Me Home With You
6. The Nickel Song
7. Alexander Beetle
8. Sign on the Window
9. Steppin’
10. Brand New Key
11. The Good Guys
12. Ruby Tuesday
