“American City Suite” (Cashman & West)

Your forgotten overlong medley of short songs of the day is “American City Suite” by Cashman & West. The track was released in the fall of 1972 and got all the way to #27 on the Billboard Hot 100. In spite of that chart success, the song really didn’t get a lot of airplay, probably due to its 7+ minute length (even longer in the album version, here), and has become virtually forgotten over time. That’s a shame, because it’s a pretty good track.

“American City Suite” is about one particular American city, the one named New York City. In the early ’70s NYC was a deteriorating, crime-ridden, financially strapped mess, and that bothered songwriters and native New Yorkers Terry Cashman and Tommy West. As Terry recalled, in detail:

“…it was a very sad time for me. A lot of my friends were leaving the city and going off, getting married, and you know, things were changing. I was 30 years old, and New York where I had grown up all my life was really deteriorating. It was a very bad time financially, and it was a time of turmoil and of racial strife. It looked like the city was gonna collapse. This great place where I had grown up and enjoyed so many friendships and so many good times – the city that I love – was actually dying. I was going into our office the next day, and I said to Tommy, ‘I had this thought about New York in particular, but it’s really happening to all the Eastern cities. They’re decaying and white people are moving out of the cities and going to the suburbs. There are only very rich people and very poor people in the cities, and homelessness.’ We started talking about the whole phenomenon, and we came up with this idea to do a song about how it was, which was the first movement of the first song of the suite was called, ‘Sweet City Song,’ and it was very happy, it was about growing up in a city where everyone got along and it was fun to be there – rock and roll was in the air. And then tracing that through, going away to school and coming back and seeing that things had changed, and then the third movement is an up-tempo song about how things were at that particular time as opposed to ten years before. And then it goes into ‘A Friend Is Dying,’ which is the last movement of ‘American City Suite,’ which is about the city dying. And that’s the way it seemed to us at the time. That it was not only New York City, but all the Eastern industrial cities were having the same problems.”

The result was a unique and uniquely appealing four-song suite. The first movement, “Sweet City Song,” is a bright and hopeful shuffle reflecting on the city’s glorious days in the 1950s and early 1960s. The short, slower, second movement has the protagonist returning to the city after college and realizing that things have changed, and not for the better. The more aggressive third movement, “All Around the Town,” details everything going wrong with the city—the crime, pollution, traffic jams, junkies, and strikes. It all wraps up with the mournful final movement, “A Friend is Dying,” which reflects back on the glory days of the city’s past with little hope for the future of the dying city of the present. It really does tell the story of a decaying East Coast metropolis in the 1970s, which is what New York was at the time.

That last movement is especially moving. The chords are simple but effective, especially on the chorus. It’s just IV – ii – I, IV – V7 – I, IV – V – I, ii – V – I, but it works so well. It’s a heart-tugging chord progression with a similarly moving melody, and the accompanying lyrics express the writer’s sentiment precisely:

Now I’ve never felt so lonely
And so helpless
I’m wishing that I
Didn’t know the truth

They tell me
That a friend is dying
And there is nothing
In this world that I can do

This part could be about a long-lost friend passing away, but it’s about losing the city the writers loved. It’s terrific.

“American City Suite” was produced by Steve Barri who, along with P.F. Sloan, was the driving force behind the Grass Roots and lots of other pop acts of the 1960s and early 1970s; in addition to most of the Grass Roots catalog, they wrote and/or produced hits like “You Baby” for the Turtles, “A Must to Avoid” for Herman’s Hermits, “Secret Agent Man” for Johnny Rivers, “Undercover Angel” for Alan O’Day, and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got)” for the Four Tops. Jimmie Haskell, a behind-the-scenes legend in the business, did the orchestra arrangement on “American City Suite;” he also worked with Barri on the Grass Roots, did string and horn arrangements for Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied albums, and had a long career as a composer, arranger, and conductor for films and TV shows.

Terry Cashman got his start in the music business fronting a band called the Chevrons, apparently while he was simultaneously playing minor league baseball in the Detroit Tigers organization. The baseball thing didn’t work out but the music did, and in 1967 he teamed up with friends Gene Pistilli (a future Nashville country songwriter) and Tommy West for a group they imaginatively called Cashman, Pistilli and West. The band made a few records that didn’t go anywhere, but Cashman and Pistilli penned the song “Sunday Will Never Be the Same,” which was a top ten hit for Spanky and Our Gang in the summer of 1967. In 1969, the trio changed their name to the Buchanan Brothers, though none were named Buchanan and they weren’t brothers, and had a minor hit with the song “Medicine Man” (#29 on the Billboard Hot 100). The group released a number of albums with only moderate success then broke up when Mr. Pistilli left the fold. Terry and Tommy continued on, primarily as songwriters and producers; “American City Suite” was their only hit together as a performing act. They went on to produce all of Jim Croce’s big recordings (Jim was a friend of both the duo and Mr. Pistilli), as well as “Shannon” for Harry Gross and “Ariel” for Dean Friedman, a personal favorite of mine. Cashman also had a solo hit in 1981 called “Talkin’ Baseball,” which tied together his love of music and his love of the national pastime and ranked one slot lower (#28) on the Hot 100 than “American City Suite.”

Terry Cashman is still alive and kicking today, aged 81. Tommy West passed away in 2021, aged 78, of Parkinson’s disease. As for that city they wrote about in “American City Suite,” things got better; they cleaned things up, reduced the crime rate, and Disneyfied Times Square, so it’s now a fairly nice if somewhat expensive place to live. You should visit there sometime—it’s a sweet city again.