Maria Muldaur's First Album

Oh the summer of 1973! I would be going to university that autumn. I had a summer job - ask your grandfather - and there was a crowd of us, made up mostly of boys from my old school and girls from my sister's school. We passed for legal drinking age, and met in one or other of handful of pubs in Twickenham and Richmond, usually on warm Friday evenings - and all the Friday evenings were warm then. We were all young and pretty and clever and south-west London middle-class, who lived with both parents in houses with gardens.

And we all knew the album and its hit single.

What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.



The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.

It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.

Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.

Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.

There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.

Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.