Top 5: I Wish I Was 18 Again

If you had asked me in January 1980, I would have told you that it was my world and everybody else was paying rent. I was not yet 20 years old, but I was program director of my college radio station. I had landed a part-time job at KDTH in Dubuque, in what we called “commercial radio” to distinguish it from what we were doing at school, and to distinguish ourselves as people who were good enough to get paid to be on the air. (Not paid much, however—the minimum wage, which practically all of us got, was $3.10 an hour.) I’d met a cute girl, I had a car and lots of good friends, and the drinking age was 18.

It was good to be the king.

As I look over the record chart from KKEZ in Fort Dodge, Iowa (“100,000 Watts of Power for the 80s”), dated January 19, 1980, some of the songs snap me back hard to that winter. I was still living in the dorms, which I hated, although I had a good roommate, a guy named Ron. We co-existed amicably, although we didn’t have much in common except our address—and after school got out in the spring, I don’t think I ever saw him again. I was taking a lot of broadcasting courses, plus an English course called Modern Grammars. I remember nothing about that one, which is not surprising, since I didn’t remember anything while I was taking it, and I got a D. I also took Medieval Europe, which I liked a lot better. (We joked that our professor lectured so well because she had lived through so much of the period. Her relatively advanced age seemed hilarious to us at the time. Now, not so much.)

A few favorite songs from that month, and a couple of oddballs, follow.

1. “Sara”/Fleetwood Mac (up from 2). What I like about “Sara” now is what I liked about it then—its hazy, hypnotic fall into a deep well of passion. “Undoing the laces”? Why yes, please do. 

10. “Lost Her in the Sun”/John Stewart (holding at 10). The third single from Bombs Away Dream Babies is the least well known, but the best by a mile.

14. “Looks Like Love Again”/Dann Rogers (down from 8). Dann Rogers was big in Iowa, apparently, because we played his song at KDTH for a long time. From its skillful deployment of love song cliches to the style of its production, “Looks Like Love Again” screams 1980. YouTube DJ Music Mike has it here.

21. “I Wish I Was 18 Again”/George Burns (up from 28). George Burns turned 84 in January 1980, and since he’d done everything else by then, it was apparently time for another hit record, 47 years after his first charted song. “I Wish I Was 18 Again,” which made #49 on the Hot 100 and #15 on the country chart, is sappy and sentimental, which should surprise exactly nobody. Neither should the fact that it blew out the phones at KDTH.

26. “Him”/Rupert Holmes (up from 30). The Mrs. hates “Him,” although maybe not as much as she hated it 31 years ago this winter, when it was all over the radio at a moment when she had to choose between the rugby player she was dating and this guy at the radio station. “What’s she gonna do about him?/She’s gonna have to do without him/Or do without me.” Seems like an easy choice now. Right, dear?

Right, dear?

Ken Burns and “Jazz”

Before the original release of the Ken Burns film Jazz 11 years ago this month, I knew very little about traditional mainstream jazz; afterward, I began listening to everything I could get my hands on. Now, I consider myself maybe halfway knowledgeable about the music and its history. I watched the film again recently, and found myself thinking about this:

—Louis Armstrong “invented modern time.” Time in terms of music, that is, and although I’d never thought about it before, it’s true. Pre-Armstrong jazz does not really swing, at least not as it does after Armstrong comes onto the scene in the early 1920s. And in popular music other than jazz, rhythms become less stiff and more supple after Armstrong appears.

—Gary Giddins knows him some jazz. (The longtime Village Voice critic is the one who makes the time observation.) Of the experts who speak on camera in the series, his comments are consistently the most insightful and interesting. Musicians who played with the giants of the past generally have fascinating insights too, and it’s great to hear from bandleader Artie Shaw, who was pushing 90 when the documentary was produced. Trumpeter (and program consultant) Wynton Marsalis, on the other hand, is a hideous gasbag. When he’s commenting on technical aspects of performances or artists, he’s fine. When he starts philosophizing that (to name but one example) Bix Beiderbecke and Ella Fitzgerald played jazz because they knew it signified the kind of nation America was going to become, I reach for a heavy object to throw.

—There is but one mention of Nat King Cole in the series, if I’m recalling correctly. Never mind the uniqueness of Cole’s piano style, light and playful, and how he pointed the way for a whole army of jazz vocalists who accompanied themselves on piano. And never mind that he stands alongside only Armstrong as a performer who was as influential a singer as he was an instrumentalist. It was Cole’s misfortune to reinvent himself as a pop singer at the start of the bebop era, which seems to erase his contribution to the history of jazz.

—According to Jazz, the sole effect of R&B’s rise in the 50s and 60s was to inspire Miles Davis to make Bitches Brew in 1969. But R&B had influenced the development of soul jazz a decade before. Soul jazz brought to prominence a whole generation of influential players: the crop of organists who made that instrument a new force, such as Jimmy Smith (a towering figure who gets mentioned once, I believe), Jimmy McGriff, Richard Groove Holmes, and Brother Jack McDuff, as well as sax man Lou Donaldson, pianist Horace Silver, and guitarist Kenny Burrell. But because Burns has chosen Armstrong, Davis, and Duke Ellington as his focus, the jazz history of the last third of the 20th century ends up being the tale of their decline from prominence, and that story is told at the expense of other possible stories. The effect is to make the last two installments of the series feel both hurried and padded; there’s a real sense that an entirely different (and more satisfying) documentary could have been made about the period from 1960 to 2000.

—Quibbles aside, Jazz is beautifully shot and overflowing with the greatest American music of the 20th century, and it benefits from the sterling narration of Keith David. It’s been said that the most beautiful sound in the English language is baseball broadcaster Vin Scully saying the name “Fernando Valenzuela”; I’d cast a vote for David saying “Coleman Hawkins.”

Because we love us some Jimmy Smith, here’s a clip of him in a 1964 movie called Get Yourself a College Girl, which starred Mary Ann Mobley, Chad Everett, and Nancy Sinatra. It featured a strange variety of musical acts apart from Smith, including the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, and the Standells, plus Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto doing “The Girl From Ipanema.” It’s not available on DVD, although it does show up on Turner Classic Movies now and then.

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And Also Bacon

Allow me to de-hiatus, drop some quick items, and then re-hiatus for a while longer yet.

Many thanks to whiteray (proprietor of Echoes in the Wind) and the Texas Gal for their hospitality in Minnesota this past weekend at Blog Summit and Beer Spree VI. Whiteray and I met online sometime around 2007 and decided to risk crossing over into the real world a couple of years ago. The Mrs. and I agree that if the two of them aren’t the nicest people in the world, they’re in the semi-finals. The weekend featured a too-short visit with Yah Shure, who has been making whiteray and me (and you) smarter for several years now, and also bacon. We can’t wait until next time.

The music blog world got a jolt with the demise of the filesharing site Megaupload last week, and the shuttering of Filesonic over the weekend. The blog Funk My Soul has a good rundown of precisely what the shutdowns mean for the file-sharing community. It was all accomplished without the controversial SOPA and PIPA legislation that got so much attention last week—which is not exactly a surprise. In the modern world, every piece of legislation has multiple purposes: the ones that are discussed publicly and the ones that are not, the benefits of the law that will be good for the legislation’s supporters without being discussed publicly and which could erode support for the legislation if they were. The shutdowns indicate that SOPA and PIPA aren’t really about the first part. (More about the shutdowns here.)

And finally: even though I was out of town and offline for a lot of the past weekend, some new posts of mine went up at WNEW.com, in case you care: a birthday tribute to Richie Havens, a post about an Elton John single in the 70s that missed the Hot 100 entirely, another one of the World’s Worst Songs, and a flashback to January 20, 1977. A new weekly series starts over there today, about each album to hit #1 on the Billboard 200 beginning in 1964 and continuing until the Mayan apocalypse, at least. (First installment: Meet the Beatles.) Later this week, I’ll start another new series, about famous songs, albums, and artists that never made it to #1. That’s in addition to my regular daily Rock Flashbacks and the weekend’s Bubbling Under and World’s Worst posts. (My author archive is here.)

Regular posting at this stand should resume later this week, but for now, if you missed buying those hits from January 1977, you can get some of ‘em here:

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Too Late the Hero

(After this post, we’re taking a hiatus. Posting will resume during the week of January 23.)

In addition to its weekly Hot 100, Billboard publishes a “Bubbling Under” chart. In this ongoing series, we’ve been checking into artists who never made the Hot 100, and whose only Bubbling Under single peaked at #101. We started with songs dating back to the 50s, and with this installment, we’ve reached the mid 80s, and the end of the series.

“It’s Over”/Teddy Baker (10/24/81, four weeks on chart). Teddy Baker is quite obscure, even by the standards of this series and our earlier one covering one-hit wonders who peaked between #90 and #100. He led a couple of popular bands around Atlanta in the late 70s, one of which was “borrowed” wholesale by Paul Davis for the album that became Cool Night. “It’s Over” (heard in a live version here) sounds like the sort of well-made radio pop song that sounded good on a music director’s turntable but never struck much of a chord with the audience.

“Too Late the Hero”/John Entwistle (11/14/81, three weeks). As drummer (ed: bassist, you dumb bastard) for the Who, Entwistle charted a lot, of course, but he also released five solo albums between 1971 and 1981. “Too Late the Hero” is the title song from the last one, made in the early video age and sounding like a generic power ballad of the time. It could be by anybody.

“Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”/Indeep (3/26/82, three weeks). It’s easy to understand why “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” was an enormous club hit. It finds the groove in the first nanosecond and rides it for four minutes. The DJ rap in the middle is a bit lame—in the video, the guy doesn’t come across as the superhero type—but it’s nice to see one of the brethren getting some credit.

“Just Another Saturday Night”/Alex Call (6/4/83, seven weeks). Alex Call was a member of Clover, a band best remembered for backing Elvis Costello on My Aim Is True and for some famous alumni, including Huey Lewis and Sean Hopper of Huey Lewis and the News and John McFee, who joined the Doobie Brothers. Call also wrote or co-wrote several Lewis hits, as well as Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny.” “Just Another Saturday Night” has the feel of a Lewis record with a little more guitar edge, and also a more serious lyric: “Just another high school killing on a Saturday night/Somebody got caught in someone’s sights.” Of all the records we’ve discussed in this series, this one might be the most perplexing failure—it should have been a monster.

“Young Hearts”/Commuter (8/25/84, one week). “Young Hearts” was the lone hit single from the movie The Karate Kid, and features some trendy electronics before the synthesized 80s percussion kicks in. It’s not bad, really; it’s exactly the kind of thing that would punctuate 30 seconds of a movie in the mid 80s and be forgotten as soon as the dialogue resumed. Inspirational lyric line: “Young hearts die young when they’re all alone and there’s no turning back now.”

“Rock You”/Helix (9/15/84, five weeks). By some scientific process, this Canadian metal band distilled the essence of what it means to be a 15-year-old boy and then transmogrified it, first to a song and then to a music video. “Rock You” has got everything—a primal beat, monster riffs, shouted vocals, cavemen, fire, and tits. (I will not title this post “Cavemen, Fire, and Tits,” but damn, I want to.)

“So Fine”/Marc Anthony Thompson (10/20/84, four weeks). Marc Anthony Thompson recorded two albums in the 80s, including the one containing “So Fine.” He later formed an avant-garde musical collective called Chocolate Genius, which at one time or another included John Medeski from Medeski, Martin and Wood, and Vernon Reid from Living Colour. Precisely what “So Fine” sounds like, we’re left to guess.

“I Want to Know What Love Is”/New Jersey Mass Choir (2/23/85, two weeks). The New Jersey Mass Choir backed Foreigner on “I Want to Know What Love Is,” and also put out their own version of it, which bubbled under while Foreigner’s original was still in the top 10. Lead vocals are shared by Donnie Harper and Sherry McGee; despite being gospel singers, they emote less than Lou Gramm does on the original, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

So here we are at the end of this particular line. Early football picks for the weekend are on the flip.

The Jigsaw of Joy

On the first Billboard chart of 1972, 40 years ago this month, there appeared an instrumental called “Joy” by the group Apollo 100. (Oh-so-trendy name, Apollo 100, with two more Apollo missions set to go to the moon in that year.) The pop-rock version of Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” zoomed up the chart, going from 100 to 90 to 49 to 35 to 15 by the week of January 29—and that’s about the time I first heard it, and bought the 45. It made the WLS Hit Parade dated January 31, 1972, where it rose to #4 at the end of February, outperforming its Billboard peak position of #6, reached the same week.

Apollo 100 featured arranger and instrumentalist Tom Parker, and it included four other musicians including Clem Cattini, whose claim to fame is having played drums on 45 British Number Ones including “Telstar” by the Tornadoes (a band of which he was officially a member), “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” by Edison Lighthouse, and “When Will I See You Again” by the Three Degrees. Both Apollo 100 albums, Joy and Master Pieces, feature classical adaptations and original compositions; Master Pieces features an eye-opening cover and contains some odd versions of songs by others, including “Telstar” and “Popcorn,” the synthesizer piece made famous by the studio group Hot Butter. But after those two albums, Apollo 100 was history, and what became of Tom Parker after that, the Internet is not forthcoming.

Although Apollo 100 was English, “Joy” was released in the States by the Mega label of Memphis, known mainly for country music, including Sammi Smith’s single “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and several of her albums, although the label’s discography features quite the smorgasbord. There was an album by country singer Mack Vickery called Live at the Alabama Women’s Prison, and, coincidentally, an album by Glen Sherley, the inmate at Folsom Prison in California who had written “Greystone Chapel,” performed by Johnny Cash during his famous 1968 concert there. Mega also released a series of jazz and R&B albums, including an early solo release by Larry Coryell, and several records by Bill Black’s Combo. But I digress.

Every early-1970s kid whose piano teacher handed him the sheet music for “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” wanted to play it at Apollo 100 speed, which is not what Bach intended. While we can blame Tom Parker for it, what with his record becoming a Top-10 hit and all, it was not his idea originally.

In late 1975, the group Jigsaw would become famous for the slick “Sky High.” Band members Clive Scott and Des Dyer had written “Who Do You Think You Are?,” which had been an American hit for Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods the year before. In their early years, however, they were not a pop band at all. They had spent part of 1970 as a show band backing soul singer Arthur Conley, spicing their act with explosions and fire-eating. By the end of 1970, however, they had released their first album, Letherslade Farm, a prog-rock album that is the diametric opposite of fiery R&B. Letherslade Farm features a handful of songs, but most of its running time is taken up with fake interviews and obtuse comedy bits, none of which have much value. One of the songs is a rock version of “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring”—and it turns out that Apollo 100′s version is pretty much a straight lift from what Jigsaw did. Parker shortened it, thereby improving it a lot—but the fact remains that rocking up that particular classical piece was Jigsaw’s idea first.

Bombs and Baby Fat

Return with us now to our pursuit of the one-hit wonders whose lone hit reached #101 on Billboard‘s Bubbling Under chart, a series we started a few months back and will continue for a few installments more.

“Long Stroke”/ADC Band (1/6/79, 11 weeks on chart). Two members of this band were children of Johnnie Mae Matthews, a Detroit singer who became a record mogul when she borrowed $85 from her husband to start the Northern Recording Company. Her own recordings in the early 60s featured a number of musicians who would become members of the Motown house band the Funk Brothers. Her label released a record by the Distants, who later morphed into the Temptations. Years later, the success of “Long Stroke” allowed Matthews to briefly restart Northern Recording Company. There’s much more about her career, rich with connections to everybody who was anybody at Motown, at Soulful Detroit.

“Disco to Go”/Brides of Funkenstein (1/13/79, 12 weeks). We could probably disqualify “Disco to Go,” because chart god Joel Whitburn does, sort of. In his Bubbling Under book, he lists it as the only hit for the Brides, but in his Top Pop Singles book, he aggregates it with the rest of George Clinton’s various projects, including Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, and others, in a single entry under Parliament. The Brides were Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry, who backed Sly and the Family Stone before joining Clinton’s collective in 1977.

“Baby Fat”/Robert Byrne (6/16/79, five weeks). Byrne started writing songs in the late 70s and wrote several that became hits for mid-level country artists (including Earl Thomas Conley, the Forester Sisters, and Shenandoah, a band he discovered). His own album, Blame It on the Night, was deleted by his record label almost immediately after its release. He’s a member of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, and he died in 2005. “Baby Fat” is about a girl who, when she dances, “sure shakes that baby fat,” which makes it a bit skeevy even as it rocks along pleasantly.

“Stay With Me Til Dawn”/Judie Tzuke (1/19/80, eight weeks). Tzuke (it’s Polish, and it rhymes with fluke, which is probably not the kindest word I could have chosen) grew up in showbiz—her father was an artist manager and her mother was an actress. In 1977, she was signed to Elton John’s Rocket label and became a success in the UK. “Stay With Me Til Dawn” was a big hit over there; here in the States, she got the most notice as an opening act for Elton, including a Central Park show in New York in front of 450,000 people. She continued to hit in the UK during the early 80s, and she still performs and records.

“The Rest of the Night”/Clif Newton (9/20/80, four weeks). “The Rest of the Night” sounds like a thousand other records that charted in 1980, which both explains why it got to #101, and does not. Newton is one of those obscure artists we find at the bottom of the charts, about whom we can uncover little. He sang on a record by Neil Sedaka’s daughter Dara, and he performed some songs heard in the 1981 movie Longshot, which starred Leif Garrett as a young man trying to win the world foosball championship. Which must be awesome.

“Bomb Iran”/Vince Vance & the Valiants (11/1/80, three weeks). Here’s a cultural artifact from a frustrated and unhappy time in America, as the Iran hostage crisis reached the one-year mark and the voters threw out Jimmy Carter in favor of Ronald Reagan. “Bomb Iran” is neither clever nor funny—and the fact that the band still plays it today borders on the obscene—but its modest popularity in the fall of 1980 is understandable.

“Magic Man”/Robert Winters & Fall (5/30/81, seven weeks). Winters was confined to a wheelchair after getting polio at age 5. “Magic Man” is a romantic slow jam, perfect for Quiet Storm radio formats. It is not the same song as Heart’s “Magic Man,” although this magic man also claims to have magic hands.

On the flip, an mp3 and the weekend’s football.