Chords for Dan McCafferty & Pete Agnew Remember Nazareth Recording Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight"

Dan McCafferty and Pete Agnew talk about Nazareth covering Joni Mitchell's This Flight Tonight,
their very different version.
I'm John Boden from Rock History Music. _ _
When Nazareth covered Love Hurts, they made a very different song out of it.
And of course, they always did that.
Whenever they'd record someone else's music, they would make it a Nazareth song, which
is what a good band should do.
This Flight Tonight, though, had a lot of people going, nah, they're not going to cover that.
Well, they covered it and they reinvented it.
We talked to Pete Agnew, who's still in Nazareth, and Dan McCafferty, their former lead singer,
who left a few years ago.
Whose idea was it to record This Flight Tonight?
Because when people talk about cover tunes, they always say, now there's a covered song
that doesn't sound like the original, that the band made it its own.
I know that sounds cliche, but it's true.
Whose idea was it?
That's the only way we would ever do one.
Every song that we ever covered, we've made it our own.
Because if you don't do that, then it's not, it's just a cover then.
It's just a cover.
I mean, even when we did Love Hearts, if you've ever listened to the Everly Brothers, or Emily
Harris and Graham Parsons, we don't sound like that.
Love Hearts was the first rock ballad, the first recognized rock ballad, you know, and
it sort of set the bar with that record.
This Flight Tonight, the other ones we did, My Hooked Bicycle, is nothing like the original.
You've got to take a song and change it, you know.
But I mean, with This Flight Tonight, obviously it was going to have to be changed when we
hear Joni's version.
We just liked Joni Mitchell in the entirety, and we loved _ all her albums.
But when we used to play that one in the van, when we were traveling around, it was one
of the things we played in the van.
And again, it was, we were in the studio, and it was with Roger Glover.
Roger was, he was producing, and we had done Raz Manaz.
We'd written all the songs for Raz Manaz, and that was released six months later, we
were in the studio doing Loud and Proud.
And Roger produced for Raz Manaz.
We'd come to do Loud and Proud, and we were a bit stuck for songs, you know.
And we were going, what are we going to do?
And we talked about this, this Flight Tonight, you know, and we loved the song.
We said, why don't we do something with that?
He said, yeah, maybe we could, you could do something with that.
And that's when we started playing it, like the kind of, do-do-do-do, Ghost Riders in
the Sky kind of thing, you know.
And we started to muck around with it in the studio, and we said, hey, this sounds really good.
So it became, we never went in intending to do that song on the album, it just kind of
developed while we were in there.
And again, I'm very, very happy that we did, because it was, that is probably the, I mean,
again, that was a massive hit.
And in Europe, for a long, long time, even now, a lot of people would say that that is
your biggest hit in Europe, you know, especially in Germany.
But in Germany especially, because it was very, very, today, they still talk about Nazareth Lovehurst.
They all talk about this flight tonight as being the rock song of Nazareth.
The album Blue kept coming up on everybody's, you know, favourite, we used to go home and
make favourite track tapes, eh?
And Blue kept coming up, so, you know, we'd sit in the vans, throw them away in, in, you
know, rooms and whatever.
And we started messing about with it, this flight tonight, and I said, well, that's great,
obviously, I wouldn't be trying to sing it like Joni, she's a girl, you know what I mean?
And then so we just, we decided Nazareth it and, and, and, well, steal it off her, really.
_ _ To take it away and pillage it.
And that's exactly what we did.
But I think we made a great job of it.
And we played it to her, but we're lucky enough to actually get to play it to her, when she
was recording Coden Spark in Los Angeles.
She went, oh, the rock band, that's so cute.
And she loved it.
And we were all just like, oh, that's it, that was good enough for us.
If she liked it, we were happy, we didn't care about anybody else, you know?
Oh, yeah.
And then a year later, she was, she was in London.
But I think we did a big hit with it in Europe and Canada and whatever, you know?
And so she actually announced it as a Nazareth song, which we gave her 20 points for class for that.
_ _ Rock My Baby, tell me about that song, one of my favourites.
_ My Baby, tell me about that rocker. _
I, well, it was, it was, it was Kyle Iverson and Colton one day in the studio.
And I said, look, we've now got something _ that's really like, what's that idea of listening
to rock and roll?
With people like Little Richard and Jelly Lewis and, you know, that sort of thing, you
know, that was the first rock and roll that I ever heard, in Britain, Scotland, anyway.
So I said, I want to do something like that.
So it was him and I and the guy from a check brand. _
We're all in the studio and we came up with My Baby.
And I said, I want it to be called My Baby, just like a real simple title, like, you know,
like a blue sled shoes or, you know, that kind of thing, you know?
So it was My Baby and that was it.
And we did the whole song in a couple of days.
And it worked out perfectly.
I mean, on the brass I didn't mention that, that's all Kyle, but the actual tune in the
words, not there, they're mine.
But it was a good collaboration between all the musicians in the place because everybody
knew exactly what I was talking about.
Like, we need to get one of those, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I agree with you.
When you have a very simple idea, stripped down, stripped down title, a very clear message,
you know?
I wouldn't try to fool anybody.
I'd be clever.
It was a case of this is what made everybody in this room want to be a musician.
Yeah.
This came to music.
People like Will Ressler singing, Bama lama, bama lee, bama lama, bama lee.
That's what turned me on.
We'll have more from Dan McCafferty coming up next week.
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I'm John Bowden from Rock History Music.
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