Stay Tuned By Stan Cornyn: Maria Muldaur’s Many Jugs
Every Tuesday and Thursday, former Warner Bros. Records executive and industry insider Stan Cornyn ruminates on the past, present, and future of the music business.
1973
Maria Muldaur has been a singer, out front of bands, for 50 years now, but her peak of fame came at Warner/Reprise in the 1970s, making records in her own name.
And in her own style: hot and sassy.
She’d started singing in junior high. “I had an all-Puerto Rican-girl rock and roll band called The Cashmeres. We wore tight white sweaters and tight black skirts and sang at all the dances.I had written like 18 rock and roll tunes, and we actually went around to the Brill Building, singing them in different offices. We were set to do some backup sessions for Jerry Butler’s group The Impressions, but my mother wouldn’t give me the permission. Therein ended my promising rock & roll career.”
Jug Bands
Maria had been banding around, starting out singing with “jug bands,” since 1964. She starting out with the EVEN DOZEN JUG BAND (recorded one loose and jolly album on Elektra), when she was known by her pre-marriage name: Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica d’Amato. Maria had been born in Greenwich Village. Her musical roots, despite that name, were greaser rock.
Ultimately, entering the band business, she shortened her name to Maria d’Amato.
The Even Dozen Jug Band had signed with Elektra Records (they wanted a jug band, and Vanguard already had Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band). Elektra thought jug band music was going to sweep the nation.
Maria recalled, “We made one record in two sessions. There were 13 people in the band. We each got $65, and we thought it was hot shit. One album, two concerts at Carnegie Hall, and that was it.”
Maria’s real start was with a band named for its founder: The JIM KWESKIN JUG BAND. Kweskin played guitar and comb. In his band were men who made post-war modern the sounds of 1930s rural American music. Ragtime, blues, and finger-picking on the strings. Plus this decade’s jazz and blues.
In the band was guitarist Geoff Muldaur. He sang like most did in the Jug Band. Geoff also played on mandolin, washboard, kazoo, and Maria.
Geoff and Maria went steady, and then guess what they did?
Mrs. Geoff Muldaur
1967: Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band was lured over from Vanguard Records to WBR. They made one album: Garden of Joy (tho his band and jugs showed up on a couple of others named America and Dr. Demento’s Delights.) “For six months we were the best band in the United States,” recalled bassist Fritz Richamond. “Then we broke up.”
The Muldaurs were signed, together, to make albums for Reprise. They were tired of singing “vo-dodeyo-do.”
After their first album, Pottery Pie, the Muldaurs moved to live in the newer center of folk rock in the late 1960s: to Woodstock, New York. Their marriage lasted through one daughter, and four years later an album called Sweet Potatoes, but at that point, the Muldaurs separated.
And Reprise separated from the Muldaurs.
Maria held on to her married name. She recalls the next step: “I ran into (Warner Records chairman) Mo Ostin at Brooks Brothers in New York, and he was delighted with the idea (of my signing solo with Warners). He immediately thought of Ry Cooder and Lenny Waronkers as people to work with.”
So Now: Maria on Her Own!
One year after Sweet Potatoes, Maria’s back in California, and back at Warners. No longer jug-gling, either. Five albums, all her own, mean the world to Maria. Here’s why:
The album’s amazing single, “Midnight at the Oasis,” peaked up at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100. Audiences felt the sweet passion of this song and its tale of a Arabian desert love affair. It got played and replayed and, according to one reviewer, “may have been responsible for the most pregnancies from a record during the mid-‘70s.” Probably so, with lines like “you won’t need no camel … when I take you for a ride.”
Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed
Shadows paintin' our faces
Traces of romance in our heads
Heaven's holdin' a half-moon
Shinin' just for us
Let's slip off to a sand dune, real soon
And kick up a little dust
Come on, Cactus is our friend
He'll point out the way
Come on, 'til the evenin' ends
'Til the evenin' ends
You don't have to answer
There's no need to speak
I'll be your belly dancer, prancer
And you can be my sheik
Hear Maria's Oasis:
Producers were Maria’s Warner colleague Joe Boyd, who’d done her albums since Pottery Pie, and Lenny Waronker.
Lenny Waronker worked deeply on producing the album. He recalled, “Basically she’d never worked in front of a band, but she has a good understanding of what she can do.
“We tried to come up with different kinds of colors and songs – the best songs – with lots of variety; It’s really a singer’s album.”
The choice of songs for her solo debut was notable. Funny: Dan Hicks’ “Walkin’ One and Only.” The country soul of Dolly Parton’s “My Tennessee Mountain Home.”
Another song choice made Maria Muldaur even more of a hottie: “Don’t You Feel My Leg.” It lured many into the album. Maria recalled, “It was kind of overtly … well, sexual, but not even that. It was a tease thing, but it gave people the opportunity to be turned on to a whole lot more sensitive, beautiful music on the rest of the record.”
Though concert crowds clamored for the song, Maria was reluctant to sing it, saying she had “sent the song to Miami on vacation.”
With the album clearing the way, Maria flew off to tour with Stephen Stills and got to sing in Carnegie Hall.
By now, recording for Warners became more of a “must” than a casual treat.
She’s a Woman
Maria’s next big one for Warner/Reprise opens with a Fats Waller standard, “Squeeze Me” and Maria Muldaur’s enthusiastic renditions of such earthy tunes rolled along. Biggest hit in the LP was her Earth Mother version of “I’m a Woman.”
I can wash out forty-four pairs of socks
And have them hangin' out on the line
I can starch and iron two dozen shirts
Before you can count from one to nine
I can scoop up a great big dipper
Full of lard from the drippin's can
Throw it in the skillet, go out and do my
Shopping and be back before it melts in the pan
'Cause I'm a woman
W-O-M-A-Nv I'll say it again…
Hear “I’m a Woman,”:
But more than that one single, the album felt like it came out of a very grown up woman. Songs like “Honey Babe Blues,” “If You Haven’t Any Hay,” and “It Ain’t the Meat (It’s the Motion That Makes Your Mama Want to Rock)” made date nights last til dawn for many two-somes across the English-singing world.
Her LPs were popularly regarded as sexy.
That sexuality question kept coming up. She began to question herself about it. Then, she said, “I decided I wasn’t doing anything wrong after seeing this Marilyn Monroe special on TV. It was beautiful. It showed some footage of her singing to acres and acres of horny guys stationed in Korea, and she just wiggled up onstage and sang: she exuded so much natural feminine energy without being lewd – though she certainly was suggestive – and it was enough to please them all to death.”
Her song choices? She answered, “People ask me, ‘Why do you do these sexist songs?’ That’s builshit. That’s a valid emotion that’s a part of us all.”
Next: Forty More Years of Maria
Still, Maria’s repertoire at WBR broadened and grew more deeply emotional. Her next album, Sweet Harmony, came up with no hit singles, but with major listenable-ness. Anchoring her is a rhythm duo of the four W’s: Willie Weeks on bass and Waddy Wachtel on guitars.
The album is more “contemporary,” and that made Maria feel more at home. She now avoided material that fits into that category called “This’ll be a cute song.”
There’s Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” (Hoagy came by the studio to sing harmony on this one). Backings by an orchestra arranged by alto sax star Benny Carter. Including his “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye.” And the album’s title song, “Sweet Harmony,” from Smokey Robinson’s pen.
Two more WBR albums will come along, tho neither of them matched the first three she solo’d for:
The mood by 1978 Warners was very little of jug. Maria Muldaur complied (or led the way) to a romantic album, even though the musicians were kin to the Jug Band days. Southern Winds got mellow.
The next year’s Open Your Eyes turned out to be the last album of Maria Muldaur’s youth-adventure at Warners. It is professional (Stevie Wonder on harmonica; Junior Walker on sax) but achieved no hits. Perhaps by 1979 that jug band era got celebrated not in bars but in Elks Clubs.
Time for Maria to move on.
Burbank had moved on, too. In 1978, Maria began working with Jerry Garcia, opening for some of The Grateful Dead’s shows.
Maria Muldaur continued to record, plentifully, although for littler labels.
So since those Warner Bros. albums in the 1970s, she’s been performing and recording, year after year. Twenty-five more albums.
In 2013, she even joined in for an on-stage reunion of the original Jim Kweskin Jug Band’s 50th anniversary. So did her ex, Geoff.
-- Stay Tuned