Top 5: Escape From the 70s

(I put this post in the can over Christmas, before Kinky Paprika took apart the American Top 40 show from the week of December 15, 1979 on Sunday. Compare, contrast, discuss.)

We like marking off cultural history into decades, but the boundaries almost never match the calendar. (What we consider “The Sixties” didn’t really start until 1964, for example.) So the last record chart of the 1970s, from KFXM in San Bernardino, California, dated December 24, 1979, is unlikely to show the end of anything. Mere months after it ruled the world, disco seems utterly dead, at least on this chart, with plenty of rock artists riding high: Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Jefferson Starship, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ELO, Foghat, Styx, Cheap Trick. But there’s plenty of 70s sap still rising, too.

1. “Escape”/Rupert Holmes (holding at 1). Rupert’s short string of hits in 1979 and 1980—this, and “Him,” and “Answering Machine,” seemed gimmicky and silly because they were. But Holmes has become quite the Renaissance man since then, writing a Broadway musical (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), other plays, and several novels. He also created the marvelous TV series Remember WENN, which was set in a radio station during the early 1940s. It ran on AMC from 1996 to 1998 before getting canceled by the channel’s new management, despite its being one of the more entertaining things on TV at the time. Here’s “Escape,” live on The Midnight Special, introduced by the Village People.

14. “Coward of the County”/Kenny Rogers (up from 16). The story of Tommy, who, to save his beloved Becky from being gang-raped by the Gatlin boys (seriously), breaks a promise he made to his dead father never to get into a fight. It’s every bit as dumb, sentimental, and predictable as you’d expect—and it blew out the telephones at radio stations for months. How big a pop star was Kenny Rogers at this particular moment? Big enough so that the top 40 station in San Bernardino would advertise his upcoming concert on the back of its survey. (This is not an official video, but it looks pretty good.)

18. “Wait for Me”/Hall and Oates (holding at 18). When looking over H&O’s career, people tend to skip right from “Rich Girl” in early 1977 to the stuff in the 80s. (Or maybe that’s just me.) But they hit the Hot 100 six other times between the summer of ‘77 and the breakthrough release of Voices in the summer of 1980. The hits include the marvelous “Back Together Again,” the passive-aggressive “It’s a Laugh,” and “Wait for Me,” which bridges the decades nicely.

24. “Savannah Nights”/Tom Johnston (holding at 24). By 1979, the Doobie Brothers had gone light-years beyond their biker-band sound of the early 70s. (It’s easy to imagine Michael McDonald singing something like “Wait for Me,” for example.) The contrast became even more striking when the band’s departed founding member Tom Johnston landed with Everything You’ve Heard Is True, a solo album that sounded a lot like the Doobies of old. But it was the new Doobies people wanted to hear—”Savannah Nights” barely squeaked into the Billboard Top 40. A video for the song was featured on MTV’s first day, however.

25. “Third Time Lucky”/Foghat (holding at 25). When this record landed at our college radio station, nobody knew what to make of it. It was perplexing to hear one of the more bad-ass boogie bands of the late 70s try a ballad. Consensus: It ain’t bad, but it ain’t really Foghat, either.

What’s most interesting about this chart is what’s not on it. True, Michael Jackson is (and Prince was charting in cities other than San Bernardino); Kool and the Gang would score hit after hit through the first half of the decade, Tom Petty’s star turn was just underway, and Kenny Loggins would chart a surprising number of singles in the coming years, but apart from them, the last chart of the 70s is still thoroughly 70s. At the tail-end of 1979, the cultural decade of the 80s was still a fair distance off.

Programming Note: I’m hopeful of getting one more post up before the New Year, but it’s looking shaky at the moment. (Curse this never-ending need to do actual remunerative labor!) Coming next, whenever “next” is: It’s the end of the 60s, and everything’s all over the place.

“Third Time Lucky”/Foghat (buy it here)

Top 5: The Way Out

In past years we’ve spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s fooling around with yearend radio countdowns. But since we’re wrapping up another decade this week, let’s switch it up and look at some end-of-the-decade weeks, starting at the end of 1989. In that week, I was nearing the end of a three-year run at the elevator-music station. The story’s too long to tell right now; I’ll say only that the station’s newly hired program director would turn out to be the single worst human being I ever met in radio. Six weeks later, the whole airstaff would be on the street.

I was getting almost all of my exposure to popular music in 1989 from VH1, which in those days had yet to become the astoundingly vapid reality channel it is today. It was still the adult-contemporary companion to MTV, and a lot of titles on the Cash Box chart dated December 23, 1989, remind me of videos, although I would eventually play many of them on the next radio station I worked for.

3. “We Didn’t Start the Fire”/Billy Joel (down from 2). This is a record that Billy Joel haters point to as Exhibit A for why Billy Joel sucks, although they never say why. Is it the randomness of the list of historical events? Is it the presumption that there’s some kind of Deeper Meaning to be drawn from the randomness of the list of historical events?  Is it the way that every high-school teacher covering the baby boom years uses it as a text? Is it the throwaway lines “JFK blown away/What else do I have to say?”

6. “Back to Life”/Soul II Soul (down from 3). Soul II Soul was all over VH1 in late 1989, and the channel declared them to be the first great act of the 1990s. Well, not so fast. “Back to Life” would be their lone Top-Ten single, and they would never make the American charts again after 1992.

20. “Rock and a Hard Place”/Rolling Stones (up from 23). Since 1981, a year when the Stones scored four consecutive hit singles from the Tattoo You album, the best chart year they’ve had to date was 1989. “Mixed Emotions” had been their final Top-Ten hit to date that spring; no single they’ve released in their sporadic existence of the last two decades has charted as high as “Rock and a Hard Place.”

84. “Me So Horny”/2 Live Crew (down from 72). I suspect that when the cultural history of America is written many years from now, a brief period of the late 1980s and early 90s will be of particular interest as the time when standards of what constituted acceptable media content took their biggest turn since movies got more “adult” in the 1960s. Although no mainstream hit has gone so far since, “Me So Horny” opened the door for sexually explicit, obscenity-laden rap music, although it was more important then (and now) as an obvious act of provocation that had the desired effect. It resulted in prosecutions for obscenity in a Florida court, as well as years of controversy over gangsta rap in particular and explicit lyrics in general.

95. “The Way to Your Heart”/Soulsister (down from 83). The Belgian duo Soulsister sounded like they could have been part of the early-70s Dutch invasion of the American charts (Shocking Blue, Tee Set, George Baker Selection, Mouth and MacNeal), but got here nearly 20 years late. “The Way to Your Heart” is one of the last great one-hit wonders from the era when I still cared about them.

Coming next: The last chart of the 1970s, which wasn’t really the end of very much at all.

“The Way to Your Heart”/Soulsister (buy it here)

Remember Christmas

There’s no time of the year when the shades of the past crowd around us like they do on Christmas. People we’ve loved and lost, memorable days spent with the people who still share our lives with us, moments we can’t forget—they’re all coming back in the next day or two, if they haven’t come back already.

I remember . . . when I learned the truth about Santa Claus. In our town, Santa met his public in a lovely double-wide donated by the local mobile home dealer and parked on the town square. One night my brother and me, maybe aged six and four at the time, shyly walked in with our parents. Santa took one look at us and then called us by name: “Well, it’s Jim and Dan Bartlett!” Since then, I have never doubted the jolly elf’s existence.

I remember . . . that first magical radio Christmas, the one that changed everything. I wouldn’t be on the radio today were it not for that Christmas Eve.

I remember . . . when I sent a half-dozen roses to a girl I was trying to lure away from another guy, making sure they’d arrive on Christmas Eve. It worked. Three years later she moved in with me just before Christmas, three months before our wedding, and we went to the local discount store to buy Christmas decorations for the apartment. We bought a “first Christmas together” ornament that still hangs on our Christmas tree today, 27 years later.

I remember . . . the year I picked up my brother and his girlfriend at the airport on Christmas Eve. When I arrived, there was a crisis. When the luggage came off the plane, one piece was missing: the carrier with her dog.

I remember . . . waking up with the flu one Christmas morning. That was the year my grandfather was in the hospital, and my grandmother was staying at our house. So in my misery on that day, I was ministered to not only by The Mrs., but also by my mother and my grandmother. If you have to get sick, that’s definitely the way to go.

That Christmas was the last one with my grandfather, who died the next summer. The rest of my grandparents have followed him now, the last one nearly 13 years ago. They were always such an important part of the holiday, Christmas Eve with my father’s parents and Christmas Day with my mother’s, that in certain ways the holidays have never felt right without them. But life requires us to adjust, and so we have. Now, Christmas Eve is best when The Mrs. and I spend it quietly, music on the box, fire in the fireplace, dinner together, drinks in hand, a cat or cats amongst the discarded gift wrap, phone call to some old friends, a low-key celebration. On Christmas Day (weather permitting this year), we’ll head down the road to the house I grew up in, where we’ll have dinner, open gifts, and make each other laugh.

Year by year, we’ve made new memories. They may not seem as vivid as the memories from earlier years, but give ‘em time.

I mentioned Nilsson’s “Remember (Christmas)” in Tuesday’s post, about Christmas records that barely nicked the Cash Box Top 40. The song charted in December 1972 and didn’t peak until late January ‘73, sticking around that long partly because the lyrics don’t mention the word “Christmas” or contain any sort of holiday imagery. But it’s a Christmas song nevertheless, because it’s all about calling up the shades that crowd around. The people we’ve loved and lost. Memorable days spent with the people who still share our lives with us. Moments we can’t forget. They’re all coming back in the next day or two.

Listen . . . they’re here now.

“Remember (Christmas)”/Nilsson (buy it here)

And Now, a Message From the Proprietor

I’m on the radio this afternoon and tomorrow, doing wall-to-wall Christmas music on Magic 98: 3 to 7 Wednesday,  3 to 6 Thursday, both US Central. (Listen live here.) Doing a radio show on Christmas Eve has always been something special to me, and I’m pleased to have the opportunity to do it this year.

I’ll have a new post tomorrow. Before I go today, here’s Darlene Love’s “All Alone on Christmas,” which was part of my crappy Christmas podcast earlier this week. Written by Miami Steve Van Zandt and featuring the E Street Band and the Miami Horns, the song was featured in the 1992 movie Home Alone II and again in 2001’s Love Actually. The E Street Band’s debt to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions, which goes back to Born to Run, is never more audible than it is here—the louder you crank it, the better it sounds. Why this record isn’t all over the radio every year on Christmas I cannot begin to fathom.

Shameless Self-Promotion Department: My ongoing series about rock and pop’s Christmas perennials concluded yesterday at WNEW.com with a look at the series A Very Special Christmas, which is up to seven volumes this year. At WNEW.com today: If it’s too loud, you’re too old.

“All Alone on Christmas”/Darlene Love (buy it here, on a compilation from Van Zandt’s radio show, Little Steven’s Underground Garage, along with some other mighty fine and rockin’ holiday tunes)

Christmas by the Numbers

It can be tough to get a handle on just how popular certain classic Christmas singles really were in their time, compared to all the other records on the radio in the same season. Billboard’s erratic policy of charting Christmas singles—sometimes on a separate chart and sometimes not—meant that certain perennials like “Happy Xmas (War Is Over), “Feliz Navidad,” and “Snoopy’s Christmas” never ran the big chart, even though they racked up sales and airplay numbers that certainly would have qualified them. Fortunately for geeks, Billboard’s competitor Cash Box maintained no such segregation. I explored the Cash Box charts for December and January from 1960 through 1986, and I could give you the whole laundry list of chart positions and dates, which would be interesting only to me (and maybe to our friend Yah Shure). Instead, here are the highlights.

What About Those Perennials? “Snoopy’s Christmas” by the Royal Guardsmen is, by the accounting of Cash Box, one of the top holiday singles of the rock era. It charted on December 9, 1967, and rose as high as Number 10 on the chart dated December 30, but plunged entirely out of the top 100 after that. Some others:

• In 1970, “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano charted for just one week (December 26, 1970).
• John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” hit the Cash Box chart the week of December 18, 1971, at Number 63, peaked at Number 36 during the week of January 1, 1972, then dropped off.
• Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas” lasted but two weeks on the chart, entering on December 22, 1973, and peaking at Number 56 the next week.
• “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake also spent two weeks on the Cash Box chart, peaking at Number 92 for the week of January 3, 1976.
• The Eagles’ “Please Come Home for Christmas” reached Number 29 for the week of January 13, 1979—a position lower than it achieved in Billboard, where it peaked at 18.
• Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” made Number 83 for the week of January 12, 1980.

What Songs Charted Highest? Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” reached Number 7 during the week of January 19, 1985. The next highest after “Snoopy’s Christmas” is Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper,” which peaked at Number 16 on the chart dated January 4, 1964.  A couple of holiday songs post-1963 just nicked the Cash Box Top 40: “Merry Christmas Darling” by the Carpenters (41, 12/21/70)  and “When a Child Is Born” by Michael Holm (39, 1/18/75). Nilsson’s “Remember (Christmas)” did too, hitting Number 40 on 1/27/73), although it’s not particularly Christmassy apart from the parenthetical title. (The early 60s are anomalous compared to the rest of the period I’m discussing, so we’ll leave the rest of the songs from that period for later on.)

The Things We Do for Rumaki

Consider the office Christmas party. Your employer, who grows prosperous from the sweat of your labors, forks out for dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant, and you can let your hair down for a while with your fellow wage slaves. Sounds like a good thing—so how come so many of them are so awful?

One year, the owner of the radio station I worked for scheduled our Christmas party for a mom-and-pop restaurant willing to trade the cost of the dinner for advertising. Imagine having the party at Denny’s, only with a limited menu, and you’re getting close to the vibe. The message to the staff was pretty clear—this is all you’re worth to me. And maybe it dawned on him that he’d skimped, because the next year, the party was scheduled for the most exclusive restaurant in the city. As the waitstaff brought the menus that night, the thought flashed from table to table instantaneously—let’s stick it to him. And so everyone ordered appetizers and bottles of wine, expensive entrees and desserts. The owner had a little facial tic, which grew more pronounced whenever he had to spend money, so that night he sat at the head table vibrating like a tuning fork. The Mrs. and I racked up $85 worth between the two of us. Two decades later, it’s still one of the most expensive dinners we’ve ever had.

Even though I loved many of the people I worked with, the company Christmas parties at my post-radio jobs were almost always dreadful. Dinner and drinks were fine. Even the little speech by the company president was OK. But when the party was planned by a committee, there always had to be an entertainment program of some kind—and I am convinced that there’s never in history been an office-party entertainment program that’s actually entertaining. Memo to party planners everywhere: Don’t waste money hiring a hypnotist or some damn thing—just reopen the bar and let everybody get back to drinking, because it’s drinking that provides the real entertainment at these things.

You can make the most fascinating sociological observations while watching people drink at office parties. Young people—those within, say, five years of college, who frequently spend Saturday nights out drinking—sometimes fail to see the difference between a typical night at Chasers and this distinctly work-related function, getting cheerily fucked up on appletinis and Miller Lite, depending on gender. Older people—couples in their 30s who are usually tied down with children but got a babysitter tonight—are a little more discreet, but only just, because they still think of themselves as college students who haven’t lost their ability to party. (And I can tell which couples have left the kids with Grandma for the night and booked a room in the hotel—usually by the look in the husband’s eye.) People 40s and up are harder to generalize about. My sympathies are always with the husbands of female employees, many of whom sit with a fixed smile on their faces, nursing a beer and pretending to watch with interest whatever’s going on around them. My sympathies are with these people because I was one of them—at least until The Mrs. excused me from having to attend any more of her office parties.

Since I got back into radio, I don’t go to the station’s parties, either. Nobody minds, because I usually volunteer to work that night so somebody else can go. But not all employers view party-skippers so benignly. At one company I worked for, the HR manager visited the cubicles of those who had declined the invitation to find out why. Sometimes I had a valid excuse, and sometimes I lied. One year I said I had tickets to a Badger game, which was true. She told me one of the vice-presidents had given up his tickets to the game, with the suggestion that if I were a good corporate citizen, I’d do the same. But I knew something she didn’t: I wasn’t a good corporate citizen.

There’s no natural musical angle to this post. (Sorry.) So this is as good a place as any to shift gears and unleash the 2009 Christmas podcast, recorded live in my living room and featuring the cat. I’m not happy with either the quality of my microphone or the quality of the production generally, but I hope you like it anyhow. It runs about 31 minutes and features a rarity by Darlene Love, plus Aimee Mann, Simon and Garfunkel, and a handful of songs I’ve written about this holiday season.

Christmas Podcast 2009