Full-Time Child
This week’s reissue (a fancy way of saying “retread” or “rerun”) of an old post about medleys makes me think it might be worthwhile to repeat a few other posts this summer, some revised a bit and some as they were. This one appeared on June 6, 2008, but it’s appropriate for Memorial Day weekend.
During the years of full-time childhood, last days of school are as magical in their way as Christmas mornings. Both dangle delicious promises. The specifics vary depending on who we are, but in my world, anything could happen, during my annual visit to my grandparents for a week, or during our cousin’s visit to our farm, and when we’d return the visit to him. Our family would always go on an overnight trip; when we were very little, we weren’t told where we were going until we were on the way. We’d spend five days at the county fair. On more mundane mornings, my brother and I would take off for the back of beyond after breakfast with no rules other than “don’t get hurt” and “be back for lunch.” Every day seemed positively pregnant with possibilities.
But full-time childhood ends. The summer I turned 12, I was no longer permitted to laze around all day; I had to start doing farm work or other tasks around home to earn my allowance. The visits and the vacations went on; so did the adventures my brother and I shared. But the sense that somebody else had a claim on my time—even if it was just my parents—made summer feel different. The season still had plenty of room for possibility, but it never felt quite so rich again.
So come back with me now to the first week in June 1972 for the songs of the last days of school and the first days of summer. Many of them come echoing back to me from my seat on a tractor, driving some farm implement against my will. There was no radio on the tractor, but the songs played in my head anyhow, because that’s the way it was. (And still is.) . . .
“Oh Girl”/Chi-Lites. An incomparable soul record that doesn’t get nearly the praise it deserves as one of the most gorgeous emotional expressions in all of American popular culture. I mean it.
“Nice to Be With You”/Gallery. Another 70s essential and a perfect sound for summer days. I used to know a woman who said her mother was in Gallery, although I think it was after their hitmaking days were over.
“I Need You”/America. Although it’s loaded with cliches—”like a flower needs the rain” and “like a winter needs the spring”—”I Need You” also contains a marvelous description of what being in love is like: “And every day I’d laugh the hours away/Just knowing you were thinking of me.” I wouldn’t have known it in 1972, of course, but damn—that’s precisely it.
“Too Late to Turn Back Now”/Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. From the first second of one of the great intros of all time, this settles into a sweet summertime groove that’s still an absolute thrill every time I hear it. Although Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose was a trio on its first hit, “Treat Her Like a Lady,” on this record (new as school got out in ’72), they’re a quartet. A second sister, Billie Jo, joined the group but didn’t get billed.
“I Saw the Light”/Todd Rundgren. Good on Rundgren for his long and varied career, but to me, he’s never surpassed his first hit single under his own name. It’s June sky and the smell of new-mown hay and riding home from baseball practice wondering why I was such a bad player and driving that damned tractor and the way the fireflies flickered over the farm fields as night fell and the surprises that could happen to a kid in the summertime, distilled to two minutes and 59 seconds of AM radio glory.
It was 40 years ago, but there are times when it seems to have happened only a moment ago.
Hooked on Medleys (Part 2)
Here’s the second part of what was once a single epic-length post on the early 80s medley craze. Find part 1 here. The original megapost, which I have updated a bit in these two installments, appeared on June 27, 2007.
What follows, in the interest of keeping this post from running longer than the era it’s discussing, is a timeline of medleys to hit the Billboard Hot 100 between June 1981 and the end of 1982. It’s hard to believe some of this actually happened.
1981:
June: The first Stars on 45 medley (which was officially titled, at the insistence of music publishers, “Intro Venus/Sugar Sugar/No Reply/I’ll Be Back/Drive My Car/Do You Want to Know a Secret/We Can Work It Out/I Should Have Known Better/Nowhere Man/You’re Going to Lose That Girl/Stars on 45″) hits #1.
August: “Stars on 45 II,” featuring nine more Beatles songs, reaches #67.
October: “The Beach Boys Medley” hits #12. “More Stars on 45,” featuring a schizophrenic collection of 60s and 70 tunes, hits #55.
1982:
January: The second-most successful medley of all time in terms of chart performance, “Hooked on Classics,” reaches #10. It’s a collection of classical themes orchestrated by former Electric Light Orchestra member Louis Clark and performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. . . . Also: “Seasons of Gold,” a medley of Four Seasons tunes by Gidea Park featuring Adrian Baker, reaches #82. Oddly, Baker would become a member of the Four Seasons for a couple of years in the mid 90s.
March: “Memories of Days Gone By,” a medley of doo-wop songs rerecorded by Fred Parris and the Five Satins, reaches #71.
April: “Pop Goes the Movies” by Meco, featuring familiar themes from eight movies including Gone With the Wind, The Magnificent Seven, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, reaches #35. Meco was a natural for this kind of thing—he’d already released singles featuring various themes from Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Wizard of Oz, and The Empire Strikes Back.
May: On the Hot 100 for the week of May 15, “The Beatles Movie Medley” peaks at #12; “Stars on 45 III,” which was made up entirely of Stevie Wonder tunes and was actually the fourth Stars on 45 single, peaks at #28, and “Hooked on Big Bands” by the Frank Barber Orchestra, is at #90. Thus, this month would seem to represent the peak of the medley’s pop-cultural reach. (Barber’s record, made up of themes made famous by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, would eventually peak at #61 in June.)
July: “Hooked on Swing” by Larry Elgart and His Manhattan Swing Orchestra, which features several of the Miller tunes Frank Barber had done on his record along with other familiar swing themes, reaches #31.
December: “The Elvis Medley” reaches #71 on the pop charts and #31 on the country charts. (I was doing country radio during the medley craze, and if I’m recalling correctly, medleys didn’t really catch on there. We played “Just Hooked on Country” by Albert Coleman’s Atlanta Pops. It may have made the lower reaches of the country chart, but it didn’t place on the Hot 100.)
And so, the medley craze was pretty much over by the end of 1982. Stars on 45 kept releasing singles, featuring ABBA, the Rolling Stones, and the Carpenters, but none of them made the Hot 100. Producer Jaap Eggermont spun off the Star Sisters, whose Andrews Sisters medley, a massive hit in several countries, bubbled under in the summer of 1983. A group called Band of Gold was late to the party in December 1984 with a medley made up mostly of Stylistics songs entitled “Love Songs Are Back Again.” It got to #64, but didn’t reignite America’s passion for medleys.
Although the medley craze died down, it never died out. Channeling Stars on 45, Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers’ 1989 hit “Swing the Mood” became necessary wedding-reception fodder throughout the early 90s; the Grease Megamix recycled tunes from the movie soundtrack for the film’s 20th anniversary in 1998. Today, the medley spirit lives on. Do-it-yourself music mashups proliferate all over the Internet, and there’s a great debate raging among artists and intellectual property experts over the practice of reimagining existing works of art to make new ones, which is really just another form of medley-making.
(The radio show Crap from the Past from KFAI in Minneapolis often features these and other medleys. Their “Listing of all Godawful medleys” was extremely helpful in preparing this post.)
Hooked on Medleys (Part 1)
In the summer of 1981, one of the oddest fads of the rock era took flight when the Stars on 45 hit #1. Thirty years ago this month, the medley craze reached its peak when two entirely different medleys made it into the Top 40 at about the same time. That’s excuse enough to repeat one of the more highly trafficked posts in the history of this blog, which first appeared on June 27, 2007. Because the original post was so long, I’m splitting it into two parts and making some small edits. I am also adding some links that were not included when the post first ran.
The original Stars on 45 medley of “Venus,” “Sugar Sugar,” and a bunch of Beatles songs opened the floodgates for a medley craze that would produce some mighty odd records over the next year-and-a-half.
There had been hit medleys long before producer Jaap Eggermont had the idea that made him rich, however. In the summer of 1969, Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys hit with “Good Old Rock and Roll,” a medley of six early rock ‘n’ roll hits, and took it to #21. (Their producer: Jimi Hendrix.) The disco era produced “The Best Disco in Town,” an insanely catchy and well-sequenced medley of 1975 dance floor hits. It was released under the name of the Ritchie Family, a group of Philadelphia studio singers and musicians put together by Jacques Morali, and it squeaked into the Top 20 in November 1976. (Morali’s next studio creation: the Village People.) Shalamar’s “Uptown Festival,” a medley of Motown songs, made it to #25 in June 1977. But it took the Stars on 45 to kick the craze into overdrive.
The Stars on 45 medleys, which imitated the original recordings, were only the beginning. It wasn’t long before somebody figured out you could make a medley from actual snippets of original recordings stitched together Frankenstein-like. (Technically, that’s the way the Stars on 45 records were made; the performers did not sing the songs in medley form.) “The Beach Boys Medley” of “Good Vibrations,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “I Get Around,” “Shut Down,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Barbara Ann,” “Surfin’ USA,” and “Fun Fun Fun” was the first of these to hit, reaching #12 in October 1981. It was only the Beach Boys’ second trip back into the Top 20 since the 60s.
“The Beatles’ Movie Medley” was not far behind, promoting the Reel Music compilation but not appearing on it. It was a smash, reaching #12 in the States during May 1982, but it remains the only Beatles single never to be released in a CD configuration. In fact, Parlophone refused to release it in Britain at all in 1982, calling it “tacky.” Demand for the song as an import from the States eventually forced the label’s hand. Elvis Presley wasn’t left out, either—“The Elvis Medley,” similarly assembled from actual Elvis tunes, reached #71 in December 1982. It also got some play on country radio.
Coming in the next installment, a timeline featuring all the medleys that made the charts during 1981 and 1982.
Top 5: Novelty Streak
(This item was scheduled to appear last Friday, but I bumped it due to the death of Donna Summer. It almost got bumped again today due to the death of Robin Gibb—we would not have imagined in 1979 that rulers of the record charts would die within days of one another many years hence, because life doesn’t work that way. I was going to write about Gibb until I saw this piece from Rolling Stone, which sums up Robin’s contributions and legacy nicely. We now return to our regular programming, already in progress.)
Two weekends ago, the vintage American Top 40 countdown was one I remember listening to, up in my bedroom at home, pencil and paper at hand as Casey played the hits from the week of May 11, 1974. Thirty-eight years later, looking over the top songs of the week again, it occurs to me that the golden age of the novelty song had arrived. For the next couple of years, novelty songs—the kind of thing that would eventually be ghettoized on wacky morning shows before being exiled to YouTube—got airplay every couple of hours just like the other chart-topping hits of the day. The leading novelty of the moment was “The Streak” by Ray Stevens. Give Stevens credit for putting himself in the right place at the right time.
The craze began at the beginning of the year. A small item showed up in papers around the country late in January explaining that “streaking” had become a fad at Florida State University. UPI defined it as “a male running nude across campus.” Although there would eventually be female streakers, the fad was largely gendered—or at least the reportage was. Within a couple of weeks, more streakers were reported, from the University of Maryland, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Gonzaga University in Seattle, plus North Carolina, Maine, Auburn, and Alabama. At Western Carolina, 138 students held a mass streaking in mid-February and claimed to set a world record, although later in the spring, over 1200 showed up to streak at the University of Colorado. From the end of February and all through March, rare was the day when a newspaper somewhere didn’t report a streaker somewhere.
It wasn’t long before streakers were no longer confined only to college campuses, or even to the United States. Concerts by Yes and Gregg Allman were interrupted by streakers; Mike Love and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys streaked their own show once. On April 2, 1974, a streaker interrupted the Academy Awards, just as David Niven was about to award the Oscar for Best Picture. (There’s some suspicion that the Oscar streaking may have been staged; in the weeks to come, the guy responsible hired himself out to streak Hollywood parties.)
The very week of the Oscar streaking, Stevens released “The Streak,” which debuted on the Hot 100 during the week of April 13, and went from 84 to 54 to 19 to 6 to 2 for the week of May 11, and to #1 the week after that. After three weeks at #1, the record remained in the top 5 into July. By that time, newspapers were writing about how the streaking fad had passed.
(Here’s a scholarly article about the history and meaning of streaking: “‘It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas’: Streaking and Cultural Politics in the Post-Vietnam Era.” Damn, I love the Internet.)
On the flip, read some brief takes on other novelties from the Top 40 that same week.
Heaven Knows
It was somewhere around the first of the year in 1976 when we started hearing it on the radio, and it generally inspired two reactions among the 15-going-on-16 male crowd.
The first was, “What the hell is that?”
We had never heard anything like “Love to Love You Baby.”
The second reaction was: “That sucks.”
We didn’t like it.
Or did we? Strictly speaking, we liked the idea of a woman making those sounds. We liked even better the idea that we might be the one making her make those sounds. But we also knew that the likelihood of that was somewhere between slim and none. And being reminded of that unlikelihood every couple of hours, as we would have been in mid-February when “Love to Love You Baby” rose to #2 on the Hot 100, was not particularly pleasant, especially given how impossibly damn horny the 15-going-on-16 male crowd was (and is, and ever shall be, world without end, amen).
So we blamed the messenger. We greedily circulated the rumors about Donna Summer—that there was a version of the song that ran 17 minutes (which is true), and that Summer was actually having sex while it was recorded (she was not, although she was lying down, and the story goes, pretending to be Marilyn Monroe). And after “Love to Love You Baby” dropped off the radio, we didn’t think much about her at all.
She would be back, of course, but out of the gate, Summer was not the Queen of Disco. Her next four chart hits would fail to reach the Top 40. It was with “I Feel Love” that her dominance began. The record first charted in Billboard on August 6, 1977, and Summer songs would remain in the Hot 100 through the week of April 29, 1978. After a week off the chart, she would be back for the week of May 13, when “Last Dance” debuted; there would not be another Summer-less week on the Hot 100 for exactly two years, until the week of May 10, 1980, one week after “On the Radio” dropped off. That’s 142 out of 143 weeks. (Elton John once appeared in 171 out of 173 weeks; the Bee Gees had two streaks of more than 40 weeks between 1977 and 1979, but they were separated by a five-month gap in the last half of 1978.)
But “Last Dance,” coming at the moment when disco had invaded Holiday Inn lounges from coast to coast, launched the rocket. During those two red-hot years, she scored nine Top 5 singles, four of which were #1. It may surprise you, as it did me, to remember that “Last Dance” got only to #3; her first #1 was “MacArthur Park” in the fall of ’78. “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” and “No More Tears,” a much-hyped duet with Barbra Streisand, would follow it to the top. (For the week of June 30, 1979, “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls” would sit at #2 and #3 on the Hot 100. It was a feat of dominance matched in the 70s only by what the Bee Gees had managed in 1978.) Not only that: In the same two-year period, Summer released three straight double albums, each of which hit #1, an accomplishment unrivaled by anybody.
In 1980, Summer left Casablanca Records, for whom she had scored her biggest hits. On her first release for her new label, she moved away from her classic sound, adding a rock edge to The Wanderer. It didn’t change anything with the fans, at first—“The Wanderer” made #3 on sheer momentum. But tastes were changing in the early 80s, and she would get back to the Top 10 only three times after that: with “Love Is in Control” in 1982, “She Works Hard for the Money” a year later—a record that is as emblematic of its time as “Last Dance” and “Hot Stuff” are of theirs—and a final Top-10 hit, the Stock-Aitkin-Waterman production “This Time I Know It’s for Real,” in 1989.
Honesty compels me to report that I was no fan of Summer’s during her heyday. There was disco music I liked, and disco music I did not, and hers I did not. In the intervening years, however, I learned to like a great deal of it. The innovation of “I Feel Love” still amazes; the big thump of “Hot Stuff” was always more rock than disco; “Heaven Knows” and “Dim All the Lights” are great showcases for her voice and among the best songs she ever got to record. (“Bad Girls” is still awful, however.)
Please: tell your friends, relatives, and everyone you meet: Donna Summer is not the singer who recorded “I Will Survive,” which was trending on Twitter yesterday in conjunction with the news of her death. Perhaps she should have recorded it. Now she won’t.
(The Friday feature originally scheduled for today will appear Monday.)
Folk ‘n’ Roll Music
Among the CDs in my archives is an eight-disc Time/Life compilation called The Folk Years, released in 2002. (I picked it up at an estate sale a few years ago, where the company running the sale was letting CDs go for 50 cents apiece, meaning that I got The Folk Years, list price something like $79.95, for $2.00, which struck me as almost criminal.)
The Folk Years stretches the definition of the genre until it’s near to snapping. One does not generally think of Otis Redding, Van Morrison, Sonny and Cher, or Nilsson as folk acts, but there they are, and so are Glen Campbell, Chad and Jeremy, and Dion. All of them may have once walked down a street with an acoustic guitar on their backs, but they’re not folksingers the way Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, and Pete Seeger are. Some of this is because Time/Life repeatedly anthologizes whatever they can get the rights to, which explains why the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas are on every Time/Life set having anything to do with the 60s–-Classic Rock, AM Gold, The Folk Years, etc. Some of it is probably to make the set as commercially attractive as possible—Paxton, Tim Hardin, and the New Christy Minstrels won’t move late-night TV viewers to dial that 800 number as effectively as Peter Paul and Mary and the Spoonful might.
So The Folk Years is not anything like a comprehensive history of the genre in its heyday. But when you weed out the questionable inclusions, a couple of impressions remain about what’s left.
American popular music repeatedly assimilated African-American forms into the mainstream, from slave-era songs adapted by blackface minstrels in the late 19th century to the development of jazz in the early 20th to the hybridization of blues and country that gave birth first to R&B and later to rock ‘n’ roll in the mid 20th. It occurs to me that folk gives us a glimpse of what American pop might have sounded like without those influences. Baez and Paxton had beautiful voices and the acoustic guitars that accompanied them glittered like diamonds, but there’s no Elvis anywhere in those records. (Elvis was a white guy, but you know what I mean.) Even though folksingers often adopted and adapted Negro spirituals and traditional songs, they sometimes bleached the soul out of them entirely. Example from The Folk Years: “There’s a Meeting Here Tonight” by the Limeliters, which wants to be a spiritual, but ends up so stiff you start to fear the singers will break a hip.
Although folk prized its rural roots in addition to its ethnic ones, you do not imagine the artists on The Folk Years singing on front porches; instead, you picture them in ramshackle coffeehouses found on gritty urban streets. The popularity of folk on college campuses in the early 1960s confirms this image. The songs may have celebrated roamers and ramblers, but most fans were neither. I suspect that for some—fans and singers both—folk was fashion, representing how they wanted to be as distinct from who they actually were. In their defense, however, although that sort of thing happened with other genres and fans, and it still does. We’re all that way, at least a little.
Trying to be something you’re not might account for how painfully jive some of this stuff sounds. I’m thinking of the Limeliters again, trying to sound black and being unable to. One of the biggest hit singles of the folk boom, the New Christy Minstrels’ “Green Green,” is marred by Barry McGuire’s faux-gospel exhortations. Folk’s preoccupation with relevance can become wearying after a while (which is why the 1980s-vintage Saturday Night Live game show, “Make Joan Baez Smile” was so funny), but some attempts at levity were disastrous. The Serendipity Singers’ “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” and “Beans in My Ears” sound like nothing so much as clueless adults trying to do something the kids will like, and “The Marvelous Toy” by the Chad Mitchell Trio, which I will bet you find less charming now than you remember it.
All that said, however, folk musicians were capable of astoundingly beautiful music: “Today” by the New Christy Minstrels leaves me beautifully wrecked every time I hear it; “There But for Fortune” might be the greatest thing Joan Baez ever did; the version of “500 Miles” by the Journeymen, featuring future California folk-rock stars John Phillips and Scott McKenzie, just might be the definitive one.
As always, I crave your two cents’ worth, because this is just my opinion and I could be completely wrong.
Writer, radio jock,
On the Listener Line