SUGARLOAF, “GREEN-EYED LADY”
Welcome to The Minute of Spin, a bite-sized music segment in which we explore a single song that came to define an entire band. Unfortunately, I can't afford the rights to the songs we spotlight, so you won't actually hear the song. But you’re welcome to listen to it here.
Hailing from the unlikely music town of Denver, Colorado, singer and keyboardist Jerry Corbetta and guitarist Bob Webber initially called their group Chocolate Hair. But their label, Liberty Records, wasn’t too keen on it, fearing unwelcome racial overtones. So Liberty asked the band to change it. For inspiration, Corbetta and Webber turned to their natural surroundings, and a mountain outside Boulder called Sugarloaf.
The band’s self-titled debut album in 1970 yielded one massive hit, the six minute and forty nine second “Green-Eyed Lady,” a rambling art-rock behemoth that featured all five band members stretching out to full capacity. The lyrics are pretty basic: there’s a lady, her eyes are green, she has some relation to the sea. And though the song’s based on a scale exercise in a music practice book, its free-form-sounding organs and relentless bass line sound like they were recorded in a chamber, giving the song a spooky, menacing feel.
“Green-eyed lady / Passion’s lady / Dressed in love, she lives for life to be / Green eyed lady feels like I never see / Setting suns, and lonely lovers free.”
Free of... what, exactly? Does it matter? As happens so often with songs that verge on that musical netherworld called progressive rock, the lyrics are at the service of something, if not greater, then certainly larger. And indeed, “Green Eyed Lady” proves a expansive canvas. The song reached #3 on the Billboard charts in the fall of 1970.
Sugarloaf put out three more records, but never re-captured the magic of its first album, though it did find itself with another hit five years later, the pastiche “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You” which peaked at #9 on the Billboard charts. Corbetta went on to join the Four Seasons and form several other bands. He currently plays in a group called the Classic Rock All-Stars.