Top 5: I Heard It in the Big Tent

The goal of radio programming anymore is not to win the war. Big, gaudy ratings in broad demographic categories are nice, but few are trying to get them. The goal for most is to win a very specific battle in the war, by carving out a precisely defined sliver of the audience. That can be just two percent of the audience, as long as it’s two percent on whom you can convince advertisers to spend big coin.

‘Twas not always thus. In days of yore—the days of mass-appeal music stations—programmers wanted to bring people into a big tent. So Top 40 stations played housewife music during the day and rocked harder at night, and/or mixed in country, R&B, and music by local artists, whatever they thought people wanted to hear. (The biggest stations did music research, yes, but not nearly to the degree that stations do it today.)

One of the things that made the big tent economically feasible was the relative lack of alternatives. Today, we can punch to dozens of other alternatives whenever we like. Back then, I’m convinced that people were more likely to sit through a record they didn’t like, because where else were they going to go? Even in the days of classic Top 40 dukeouts like WLS vs. WCFL in Chicago or WKNR vs. CKLW in Detroit, if people were sometimes moved to switch, they’d usually end up switching back.

The big tent has been out of fashion for quite a while now. (But me no buts about we-play-anything “Jack” formats. They’re as assiduously researched as any other format, and “anything” doesn’t mean “everything.”) Back in the day, however, it was completely normal, and here’s exhibit A: the WVOK Shower of Star at the Birmingham Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, scheduled for November 28, 1970. The headliner: the Carpenters. Also scheduled to appear: Michael Nesmith, the Grass Roots, and Iron Butterfly. Pillow-soft pop, proto-country rock, straight Top 40 pop, and organ-heavy stoner rock, all for $3 to $5 a ticket. It’s promoted on the WVOK Tough Twenty Survey for the week of October 10, 1970. (Could anything look less tough than the Carpenters do in that picture?) As evidence of the existence of the big tent you could scarcely do better.

Here are the top five:

1. “I’ll Be There”/Jackson Five. Possibly the most chaste love song in pop history, and a record that sounds more magical with every passing year.

2. “We’ve Only Just Begun”/Carpenters. Not nearly so chaste as it seems (“And when the evening comes/We smile”—because we know what we’re going to do when the lights go out), but it became the wedding standard of the 1970s nevertheless. Does anybody have it at their wedding anymore, though?

3. “Joanne”/Michael Nesmith and the First National Band. This greatly outperformed its national number (21) in lots of places other than Birmingham: San Francisco, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Diego, Peoria (where it was Number One), and in Manchester, New Hampshire. Nesmith was contributing to the invention of country rock here (dig that steel guitar and the hint of a yodel), and the enigmatic lyric only adds to its appeal.

4. “It’s Only Make Believe”/Glen Campbell. A cover of the song Conway Twitty took to Number One in 1958. I can remember hearing this on the radio in 1970, but I’m not sure I’ve heard it since.

5. “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”/Creedence Clearwater Revival. The WVOK survey includes the parenthetical note “album” after the title of this, meaning they were playing the song as an album cut, since it wasn’t out as a single. It’s at least possible that they were playing the album version, which clocks in at 11:07. (There’s a four-minute edit you used to hear on the radio a lot, but it wasn’t released until 1975.) However, it’s just as likely that they made their own shorter version.

I could write about nearly every other record on this chart (one I already have), and I’m tempted, if only to give myself an excuse to talk about Teegarden and Van Winkle’s “God, Love, and Rock and Roll,” which I bought on a 45. But that’ll have to wait for some other time. But one more thing about “Joanne”: Like the other records I’ve been featuring lately, it sounds like October to me, although it would sound more like it if I were hearing it on an AM radio, back in the days when radio was my favorite new toy.

“Joanne”/Michael Nesmith and the First National Band (buy it here)