Carry Me Away for The Last Time
(Bradley Delp, 1951 - 2007)
I went to a small, strange high school. Take our "Choir" and "Band." "Choir" was called "Chorus" (to avoid the religious connotations of the former), and Band wasn't Marching. We played rock songs, most of them suggested by the students in the class. That's right, class: Chorus and Band weren't extra-curriculars but rather eighth-period classes for which you could get art or elective credit. Eighth period was a two-hour block that met Tuesdays and Thursdays from the end of lunch until the final bell -- although of course, we did not have a bell. In Band class, somewhere around 2:40 p.m., we'd amble through "Sweet Jane" one more time and then call it a day.
The only surprise about Band's eventual collaboration with Chorus was that it took so long to come about -- and the choice of song to perform for our classmates (whose cheering ranks were diminished by perhaps a quarter, because my high school had only about 100 students, and about twenty were in Chorus). The song was "Hitch A Ride," by the band Boston. "Hitch A Ride" had been proposed by one of the choristers, a girl named Sally who went by Sal-El and later became a drug-addict, then a sculptress in New York City, and eventually an art professor in North Dakota. (I told you it was a strange school.)
I played keyboards in Band. I could barely read music and wasn't much of a player, but I had a good ear for chord structure and relative pitch, along with a decent grasp of theory, so I was often the anchor of the band when our instructor wasn't there or didn't feel like meting out the necessary discipline and instruction. "It's A with an E in the bass," I'd say, or "that's actually an F-sharp diminished, not a D-seven. [small sigh, to mystified guitarist:] Just play a D-seven with an F-sharp root."
"Hitch A Ride" is an archetypal seventies power ballad: acoustic guitar joined by thundering electrics, lots of echoing drums, pretty harmonies, and gaudy solos. The song sounds simple but isn't at all. For one thing, it's in B-flat, a key horn players love but vexing to guitarists. Actually, the song only starts in B-flat. My memory recalls that it changes to E-flat for the chorus, has a solo in G major, and then moves transitionally through F major and B-flat before winding up in E-flat again, where the song stays for its final third, while the two guitarists collaborate on a complicated, pyrotechnical guitar duel. (It's hard to think of a key more infuriating to a rock guitarist than E flat; I'm wondering if the song was actually recorded a half-step lower, which would make its main tonics A and D majors, and then sped up in the studio to accommodate the singer's vocal range.) I didn't work out the complex chording, our instructor did, and we rehearsed "Hitch A Ride" for weeks. There is a showy organ solo in the middle of the song. The instructor -- an amiable, intelligent, but beleaguered (by us) man named Kris, himself a gifted keyboard player -- told me not to bother trying to mimic it. He said this with a mixture of warning and dismay. Just do the best you can, he said, not disrespectfully. It was f***in' Boston's fault, he implied, for making this stuff so hard.