Luckiest Music Generation: Stone Poneys - Different Drum

[Genki Hikari]

I go an earworm with this song the other day. So now maybe you get to have it, too:

I don't know why I like this song. I just do.

Maybe it's the "earworm-ness" of it.

[highplainsdem]

1. Good song! Written by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, who'd wanted his band to

record it, but the show's producers turned it down. So it became Linda Ronstadt's first hit instead.


Nesmith recorded the song himself in 1972. Here's a live performance in Oregon in 1992:

[Genki Hikari]

2. I remember reading about that once

But it had slipped my mind until you mentioned it.

The song is very much something that Nesmith was dabbling in at the time with all of those flower power pop elements, like the orchestral touches and that Neo-Baroque bridge. Whoever arranged it made that sound almost like a harpsichord playing the opening chords (and in the background as the bridge continues).

If the production were better, and I wasn't listening on my cruddy computer speakers, I'd know if it really were a harpsichord. Speakers might not help, though. Some 60s productions had a metallic, hollow sound to them that no speakers really help. IIR, this may have been one of them.

[highplainsdem]

3. That is a harpsichord you hear:

https://popculturereferences.com/five-songs-inspired-to-use-harpsichord-by-a-song-that-didnt-use-harpsichord/

[highplainsdem]

4. Article on the song with much more detail than the one I posted above:

https://thesongbook.org/about/news-blog/the-songbook-blog-items/todays-song-different-drum/

Linda Ronstadt had been singing only harmonies. In late 1966 she was looking for a song where she could sing lead. Linda heard the Greenbriar Boys record and thought it would be a fit for her Stone Poneys trio, which was playing mainly acoustic folk music. Their agent and recording producer Nick Venet wanted a more upbeat folk/rock sound featuring two guitars, bass, and drums, with a baroque-style harpsichord bridge. (The harpsichord solo, longer on the album version, was played by Don Randi who had been playing keyboards with L.A.’s Wrecking Crew studio band with the Beach Boys and Phil Spector.) It worked out that Linda Ronstadt was the only member of Stone Poneys to appear on “Different Drum,” although the record label credited the song to “Stone Poneys.”