Jonathan Edwards - A & R Studios, New York City, 3-1-1972

A few days ago, I posted a 1974 concert by singer-songwriter Tom Rush, where he was backed by the band Orphan. I mentioned that I had another concert by singer-songwriter Jonathan Edwards from a couple of years earlier, where he also was backed by the band Orphan. Here is that concert. After listening to it again, I didn't find any actual mention of Orhan as a band, so I didn't include them in the song credits and such. However, they probably were backing him up around this time, just the same. I just did a little research, and found that in 1972, Edwards and the band Orphan were so close that they actually all lived in the same house in Boston.

Edwards released his debut album, the cleverly titled "Jonathan Edwards," in 1971. It contained a surprise hit, "Sunshine (Go Away Today)," which would be his only big hit. This concert took place around the time he was recording his second solo album, "Honky Tonk Stardust Cowboy." One song on that album, "Paper Doll," is the exact performance recorded at this concert. Everything else here is unreleased.

The sound quality is excellent, because this was recorded for FM radio broadcast. The radio station WPLJ broadcast a lot of great radio shows at A & R Studios in New York City, in the early 1970s, including this one. Some of them have been officially released as live albums, from the likes of Elton John and the Allman Brothers Band. Perhaps in the future I'll try to collect and post more of them, but my hands are pretty full with posting other things right now. The broadcasts were sponsored by the 7-Up soft drink. If you listen carefully at Edwards' banter between songs, he made some clever jokey digs about 7-Up.

I've already posted an Edwards concert from 1972. But that one is from the end of 1972 and this one is from the beginning, and their set lists are fairly different. I think both are very good. Edwards is really underrated, in my opinion. His first two solo albums (mentioned above) are excellent. But unfortunately he couldn't maintain that level of quality and his popularity declined as the 1970s went on.  

This album is an hour and three minutes long. 

01 Everybody Knows Her (Jonathan Edwards)
02 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
03 Dues Days Bar (Jonathan Edwards)
04 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
05 Sugar Babe (Jonathan Edwards)
06 Dreamer (Jonathan Edwards)
07 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
08 Morning Train (Jonathan Edwards)
09 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
10 Honky Tonk Stardust Cowboy (Jonathan Edwards)
11 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
12 Shanty (Jonathan Edwards)
13 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
14 Beautiful Day (Jonathan Edwards)
15 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
16 Don't Cry Blue (Jonathan Edwards)
17 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
18 Everything (Jonathan Edwards)
19 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
20 Sweet Upsy Daisy (Jonathan Edwards)
21 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
22 Sometimes (Jonathan Edwards)
23 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
24 Sunshine [Go Away Today] (Jonathan Edwards)
25 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
26 Train of Glory (Jonathan Edwards)
27 Paper Doll (Jonathan Edwards)
28 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
29 When the Road Has Called Up Yonder (Jonathan Edwards)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bEQPUCpd

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/8C4F0evtMQKkVQC/file

I had a very hard time finding any good photos of Edwards in concert from around this time. I found a YouTube video of him performing "Sunshine (Go Away Time) live on T.V. in 1973. So I took a screenshot of that performance. The video quality was pretty rough, but I improved the quality with the help of the Krea AI program. 

Mar Y Sol Pop Festival, Manati, Puerto Rico, 4-3-1972, Part 2: Jonathan Edwards, Long John Baldry & More

Here is the second part of the third (and last) day of the 1972 Mar Y Sol Pop Festival. This is the last album from this festival. Like the other album I put together from this third day, this is a grab-bag, consisting of relatively short sets of four music acts: Jonathan Edwards, Long John Baldry, Fran Ferrer & Puerto Rico 2010, and Osibisa.

Jonathan Edwards is a singer-songwriter who had a hit with the song "Sunshine." It went all the way to Number Four in the U.S. singles chart in 1971. That makes him a one-hit wonder. But he was (and still is) a lot more than that. I especially like his first few albums, and I've posted a concert from him. We have six songs from him here, but they only make up about 18 minutes of this album. "Sometimes in the Morning" and "Train of Glory" are from the official live album from the festival. His other songs are from the same audience bootleg as most of the other songs I've posted from this festival.

The next three songs are from British blues singer Long John Baldry. I've posted a BBC sessions album from him, as well as music from a band he was in, Steampacket. He had his biggest success in 1967, when he put out a single, "Let the Heartaches Begin," that went all the way to Number One in Britain (though it barely made the U.S. singles chart). His career was still going fairly well at the time of this concert. He had a minor hit in 1971 with the song "Don't Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll." Interesting fact: half of his 1971 album "It Ain't Easy" was produced by Elton John, and the other half was produced by Rod Stewart. "Bring My Baby Back" made it to the official live album from this festival, while the other song here is from the same audience boot mentioned elsewhere.

Fran Ferrer & Puerto Rico 2010 was a salsa band from Puerto Rico. Apparently, some of their lyrics were political, but the meaning was generally missed by the mostly English speaking audience. There were other lesser known bands like this one that performed at the festival, such as Banda del K-rajo, Bang, Elephant's Memory, Michael Overly, Rubber Band, Stonehenge, and Malo. But we don't happen to have any recordings from them, and we happen to have two songs from this band. Both are from the same audience boot mentioned above.

The last song was by the band Osibisa, who were the last musical act to perform at the festival. This song made it to the official live album. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about them: Osibisa is a Ghanaian-Caribbean Afro rock band founded in London in the late 1960s by four expatriate West African and three London-based Caribbean musicians. Osibisa was the most successful and longest lived of the African-heritage bands in London... and was largely responsible for the establishment of world music and Afro-rock as a marketable genre." They would have a couple of hits in Britain later in the 1970s.

Here's their Wikipedia entry:

Osibisa - Wikipedia 

So that's the last of the music I have from this festival. But before I finish my write-up of this last album, I want to explain a bit about some interesting events that happened as the festival finished. As I mentioned in a previous write-up, the main promoter of the festival was Alex Cooley, who had promoted some other major rock festivals. But he ran into a lot of trouble with this one, including the fact that he failed to get the proper permits. The festival only happened because it would have caused more trouble for the government to have tens of thousands of angry fans who had paid to fly to Puerto Rico just to attend the festival.

Cooley later explained how the festival ended for him: "[A] guy who was working in the festival, came over to me, the last night of the festival, and said [the government] issued a warrant in San Juan and they were coming to arrest me. So they smuggled me out of there with a Volkswagen bus. I got in the bus and they put things on top of me and they took me to the airport and there were people at the airport that were very sympathetic towards this and they let them.... Of course, you'd never be able to do this now - they let them drive the Volkswagen out on to the runway. So I got out of the Volkswagen and got directly on the plane. So that's how I got out of San Juan, out of Puerto Rico."

He left in all sorts of trouble, including owing at least $40,000 in taxes that apparently never got paid.

Cooley wasn't the only one who had trouble leaving the festival. Creem Magazine reported, "People had begun making the long trek back to San Juan and points beyond after the first day of the festival, but even this steady exodus didn't avert the Tuesday tie-up at the airport. Many of the people who had purchased the $149 festival package found that their return plane tickets were good only for stand-by, thus effectively leaving the stranded until auxiliary flights could be arranged."

Luckily, the government helped take care of the people stranded at the airport. Tents were set up near the main terminal. The Red Cross, the government, and even some airline companies provided food, water and medical attention. Some bands performed for the stranded passengers. Pan American Airlines provided the flights for about 3,000 people who attended the festival from outside Puerto Rico who otherwise couldn't leave. It took several days before everyone was able to leave the country. 

No wonder the government was mad at Cooley and the other festival organizers. It's also no wonder why Puerto Rico didn't have another rock festival like this until decades later.

This album is 55 minutes long. 

01 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
02 Athens County (Jonathan Edwards)
03 Dues Day Bar (Jonathan Edwards)
04 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
05 Give Us a Song (Jonathan Edwards)
06 Shanty (Jonathan Edwards)
07 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
08 Sometimes in the Morning (Jonathan Edwards)
09 Train of Glory (Jonathan Edwards)
10 It Ain't Easy (Long John Baldry)
11 talk (Long John Baldry)
12 Bring My Baby Back (Long John Baldry)
13 Hemos Dicho Basta [Incomplete] (Fran Ferrer & Puerto Rico 2010)
14 Ya Se Van (Fran Ferrer & Puerto Rico 2010)
15 Y Sharp [Instrumental] (Osibisa)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZSLiFptp

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/iaLTJsYB36ObzqH/file

The cover image of Jonathan Edwards is from this exact concert. 

Jonathan Edwards - WLIR Tuesday Night Ultrasonic Concert Series, Ultrasonic Recording Studios, Hempstead, NY, 12-12-1972

If you've been following this blog for a while, I hope you've gotten a sense of the type of music I post and you know I'm not going to post something unless I think it's good. I further hope you'll trust me enough to try out some artists you're not too familiar with. If you like early 1970s acoustic-based singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, and so on, I strongly urge you to give this a try.

Jonathan Edwards had a brief moment in the spotlight with the song "Sunshine." It was a number four hit in the US in 1971 and did about as well in Canada, though it seems to have been ignored in Britain. The album it came from, simply called "Jonathan Edwards," is kind of a sleeper classic, and I also strongly recommend you should get that one if you don't have it already.

Since then, Edwards has kept his music career going all the way until today, but at a much lower profile. He never had another song or album reach the top 100 in the charts, but he's kept plugging away anyway. When I went looking for a photo of him from the early 1970s to use for the album cover, I was shocked at how there were virtually no photos of him from that time, so I fear his music has largely been forgotten. And that's a shame, because he's a lot better than just one hit song or even one well regarded album.

This is an entire concert from him, slightly over one hour long. It's a bootleg recording, yes, but it sounds fantastic, better than a lot of official live albums from the time. It was recorded in a radio station record studio in front of a very small audience and played live on that radio station. So this is no ordinary concert recording. It's just Jonathan Edwards and his acoustic guitar and harmonica, plus one other musician who changes instruments from song to song, usually playing either bass or violin.

Basically, this is like having Edwards sitting on your porch playing his best songs and telling stories. I wish he would have released an album just like this back in the day; maybe he would have had more success. After his hit, he had trouble capturing how good his music was on his albums. (It hasn't helped that he changed record companies fairly often, so there never has been any best of compilation, or any other sort of archival releases.)

Here's an interesting little fact: most of the songs from this concert were written by Edwards, but about three or four were written by Joe Dolce, who would later have a huge number one hit, all over the world in 1980,"Shaddap Your Face." Dolce had a long career as a songwriter and poet before his novelty hit, and he and Edwards were in a band together in the late 1960s. A story Edwards tells during the concert about an unnamed band member who took acid in the countryside and got shocked by an electric fence is actually a reference to Dolce.

There was only one problem with this concert, and that's that it didn't have Edward's hit song "Sunshine" on it. The bootleg recording wasn't complete, because right as it gets cut off, one can hear Edwards counting in to starting another song. I'm sure he wanted to end the show with his hit. Luckily, I was able to find a live acoustic performance of him doing that song for a TV show, so I added that in at the end. It didn't have any crowd applause when the song finished, which sounded weird since all the other songs do. So I copied some applause from another song earlier in the concert to make that last song fit in with the others.

By the way, I cut out some of the dead air between songs, such as when the guitar is getting tuned. Also, one tradition in the WLIR Ultrasonic concert series was that halfway through the concert there would be an intermission in which the musician would be interviewed by the emcee / host. I cut that out, since it doesn't bear repeated listening. But you can hear the emcee talking between songs some, especially near the end when he has a request for the song "Athens County." He was miked up, so he sounds as loud and clear as Edwards whenever he speaks.

This album is an hour and two minutes long. 

UPDATE: On September 12, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same. But I changed the title and the cover art to be consistent with other albums from this same Ultrasonic radio show.

01 Travelin' Man (Jonathan Edwards)
02 King of Hearts (Jonathan Edwards)
03 Someone Better Listen (Jonathan Edwards)
04 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
05 The Ballad of Upsy Daisy (Jonathan Edwards)
06 My Home Ain't in the Hall of Fame (Jonathan Edwards)
07 Sometimes (Jonathan Edwards)
08 Morning Train (Jonathan Edwards)
09 Stop and Start It All Again (Jonathan Edwards)
10 Rolling Along (Jonathan Edwards)
11 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
12 Angelina (Jonathan Edwards)
13 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
14 Jump's Breakdown (Jonathan Edwards)
15 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
16 Jesse (Jonathan Edwards)
17 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
18 Shanty (Jonathan Edwards)
19 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
20 Train of Glory (Jonathan Edwards)
21 Everybody Knows Her (Jonathan Edwards)
22 talk (Jonathan Edwards)
23 Athens County (Jonathan Edwards)
24 You Are My Sunshine - Sunshine [Go Away Today] (Jonathan Edwards)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FTcr6MQC

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/hCBhnq5z8CPsIg2/file

As I mentioned above, I was amazed at how few good photos there are of Edwards from the 1970s. Luckily, I found one, from a concert in 1973. In February 2025, I improved it with the help of the Krea AI program.