‘With You By My Side . . .’

 by whiteray

Just as readers getting to know one another check out each other’s bookshelves, so, too, do music lovers cast inquiring eyes on the record and CD collections of folks new to their lives. And I was rifling through the LPs owned by my new lady in June 1987 when I came across an album by a group I’d never heard about: The Pozo-Seco Singers. 

The album was I Can Make It With You. 

“Oh, that’s one of my favorites,” my ladyfriend said. And when I heard the album later that day or maybe that week, her love of the record made sense. The folk rock of the Pozo-Seco Singers’ second album, a 1966 release, fit right in with the folk and the folk-rock that made up most of her collection: Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, Gordon Lightfoot, Simon & Garfunkel, the We Five and more. 

And I Can Make It With You became one of the albums we played on occasion when we whiled away time at her place that late spring and summer. After that, I doubt that I heard it again until sometime about ten years ago, when a digital copy of the album came my way. And when the title track popped up on the computer not long after that, I got to thinking about the Pozo-Seco Singers and I did some digging. 

The group – in a couple of incarnations – released a total of four albums. In 1966, Time went to No. 127 on the Billboard 200, and the following February, I Can Make It With You went to No 81. With some personnel changes, the group renamed itself Pozo Seco, and its last two releases, 1967’s Shades Of Time and 1970’s Spend Some Time With Me, did not chart. 

Perhaps better remembered these days for the presence of eventual country star Don Williams, the group had eight singles in or near the Billboard Hot 100, starting with “Time,” which went to No. 47 in early 1966 and ending with “Strawberry Fields/Something” (credited to simply Pozo Seco), which bubbled under the chart at No. 115 in late 1970. Of their eight charting or near-charting singles, the best performing was “I Can Make It With You,” which peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard chart on October 1966. 

I don’t recall the record from its time on the chart, but I wasn’t really listening in the autumn of 1966, and from what I see at a couple of references online, “I Can Make It With You” never charted at the Twin Cities’ KDWB anyway. A few years later, I might have heard it late at night on WLS, but as it happened, I likely never heard the record until I heard it on my lady’s stereo some evening late in the spring of 1987. 

And I learned, as I dug around a few years back, that the Pozo-Seco Singers weren’t the only ones who released “I Can Make It With You” as a single. Jackie DeShannon actually recorded the Chip Taylor song first, and her version reached the Hot 100 the same week that the Pozo-Seco Singers’ version did, on September 10, 1966. But DeShannon’s version – a slower ballad-like take backed with a near Wall of Sound – peaked at No. 68 in early October and was gone from the chart by the time the Pozo-Seco Singers’ version was at its peak. 

If I were forced to do so, it would be hard to choose one of the two. I love almost everything I’ve ever heard from DeShannon’s catalog, and her take on “I Can Make It With You” is no exception. But the visceral tug of memory is hard to resist, so I’d probably go with the Pozo-Seco Singers on a warm, late spring evening: 

When the world was on my shoulders
And all hope for tomorrow was gone
You touched my hand, and baby
You made me see: There’s a future for me

I can make it with you, baby
I can make it with you, girl
I can make it with you, baby
With you by my side

And when life has lost its meaning
And my dreams had been shattered by time
You touched my hand, and baby,
You made me see there’s a future for me

I can make it with you, baby
I can make it with you, girl
I can make it with you, baby
With you by my side
With you by my side

I remember when I was down
I was lost but I’ve been found
I can make it with you, baby
I can make it with you, girl
I can make it with you, baby