Top 5: Cinnamon Cymbal

January 1969: Third-grade sports fans buzzed about the New York Jets’ upset win over Baltimore in the Super Bowl. Eight days later, TVs were rolled into the school library at noontime so we could watch the inauguration of the new president, Richard Nixon. As I watched the Obama inauguration last week, I couldn’t help remembering, because that’s what I do. I recall the TV set atop the towering audio-visual cart and the people crowded around it more than I recall the swearing-in itself, but that’s the way kid memory works.

I wasn’t a radio listener yet, not to my own station, anyhow. Radio to me was the hometown station Mom and Dad had on every morning as we got ready for school. We couldn’t get very many Milwaukee stations in my town anyhow, so I wouldn’t have known about WRIT—but here are five (well, six) songs from their survey dated January 27, 1969.

3. “Cinnamon”/Derek (holding at 3). “Cinnamon” was co-written and produced by Johnny Cymbal, a Scottish songwriter, producer, and singer who scored his first hit record, “Mr. Bass Man,” at age 17, and went on to a lengthy career in the music biz. By 1968, he had suffered through a string of flop singles, so he decided to release “Cinnamon” under his brother’s name, Derek, who was a member of his band. Derek Cymbal ended up going on the road when the record became a hit.

8. “Things I’d Like to Say”/New Colony Six (down from 4). The Six were from Chicago, and “Things I’d Like to Say” was their biggest hit, although “I Will Always Think About You” did nearly as well in 1968. This sort of light adult pop was everywhere at the end of the 60s, and it could be equally appealing to kids listening to Top 40 and to their parents.

15. “Worst That Could Happen”/Brooklyn Bridge (up from 19). Johnny Maestro had been a successful figure in doo-wop, most famously with the Crests on “Sixteen Candles.”  The Brooklyn Bridge was another entry in the Chicago/Blood Sweat and Tears horn-band sweepstakes, although they didn’t come close to the success of either band despite Maestro’s fine voice and dramatic style. Their next six singles would miss the Top 40. Here they are on The Ed Sullivan Show:

19. “Stand By Your Man”/Tammy Wynette (up from 23) and 31. “The Carroll County Accident”/Porter Wagoner (up from 33). Two indelible country performances. When CMT picked the 100 greatest songs in country music history back in 2003, “Stand By Your Man” was Number One, and why not? It’s got it all—first, there’s that little catch in Tammy’s voice, but then she rears back and belts out the refrain, which might be the killerest hook in all of country music. “The Carroll County Accident” didn’t make CMT’s list, but it’s an excellent example of country storytelling. Click it . . . and then try to click away before you hear the whole story. The Wagoner clip is from That Good Ole Nashville Music, a syndicated country show that ran from 1970 to 1985, often at 6:30 on Saturday nights. There was a whole string of syndicated country shows on TV from the 50s to the 80s; in fact, Wagoner had one of the most popular, which ran for 21 years. If you grew up in flyover country, you probably saw them; in urban areas, probably not.

40. “Can I Change My Mind”/Tyrone Davis (debut). Davis is one of at least five acts on WRIT from the greater Milwaukee area or Chicago, along with the New Colony Six, the Robbs, Thee Prophets, and Love Society (from Plymouth, Wisconsin, which is closer to Sheboygan than Milwaukee). “Can I Change My Mind” was the first of four Top-4o hits and a longer string of hits on the R&B chart for Davis, who’s probably best known for “Turn Back the Hands of Time” in 1970. That’s good, but this is better, seriously soulful, with a rhythm guitar that makes even the most dance-impaired person just wanna move somethin’.

Coming next week: The Number-One song on this chart, and the guy who made it.

“Can I Change My Mind”/Tyrone Davis (buy it here)

I Do the Rock

There are 282 songs in my library that have titles beginning with the word “I.” And that doesn’t count “I’d,” “I’ll,” “I’m,” and “I’ve.” And when I cued up the list and hit “shuffle” this afternoon, here’s what came out:

“I Never Think About You”/Huey Lewis and the News. This is a mid-tempo tune from the 2001 album Plan B that would likely have been a monster single had it come out during the band’s glory years. Plan B proves the band still had in 2001 what made them stars nearly 20 years before, even if the general run of listeners wasn’t getting it anymore.

“I Just Want to Make Love to You”/Foghat. Another classic song written by Willie Dixon, one that was a sizable hit for Muddy Waters in 1954. It’s been covered by dozens of artists, but Foghat’s is probably the best known version today. Although the live version made Number 33 in 1977, the studio version from Foghat’s 1972 debut album is more commonly heard on the radio.

“I Miss You”/Klymaxx. This record never fails to remind me of my days as a Top 40 morning-show host, and it ended up being one of the top songs from that whole year, 1986.

“I Just Wanna Stop”/Gino Vannelli. A fabulously romantic ballad that never fails to remind me of my first semester at college, which wasn’t all that great—except for some of the tunes.

“I Found Somebody”/Glenn Frey. The first single from Frey’s first solo album, No Fun Aloud. How was it that a guy who co-wrote and sang some of catchiest stuff in history made such bland music on his own? Perhaps Don Henley was a greater talent than we thought.

“I Enjoy Being a Boy (In Love With You)”/Banana Splits. I’m not sure what happened to it, but I used to have an EP of Banana Splits tunes that I got by sending in Kellogg’s box tops. Now that I’ve listened to the Splits again 40 years later, I find that some of it sounds pretty good, and some of it sounds pretty weird. Like “I Enjoy Being a Boy.”

“(I Know) I’m Losing You”/Rod Stewart and Faces. I’m not ready to add Rod’s version of “I’m Losing You” to the list of Motown Remakes That Stomp the Originals (I’m actually closer to adding Rare Earth’s version), but it’s pretty good, and it’s a worthwhile reminder that once, Rod could rock.

“I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me”/Rosanne Cash. A Grammy winner for Best Country Vocal in 1985, this song was inspired by an earlier loss at the Grammys, when Rosanne couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t won. Hear the story and see the video here.

“I Ain’t Got You”/Sugar Blue. You have probably heard this guy play harmonica and you didn’t know it. He guested with the Rolling Stones on Some Girls (and played on “Miss You”), Emotional Rescue, and Tattoo You.

“I Do the Rock”/Tim Curry. A deeply strange record, but one that’s hard not to love once you’ve heard it. Here’s Curry performing it live on TV sometime in the 80s, a little faster than the original, but you’ll get the idea:

My City Was Gone

Every once in a while, I duck into what used to be the main studio for 93.1 The Lake, the classic-rock station I worked for, the one that changed format last October. The hip-hop station that took over the signal broadcasts from another studio, so the Lake studio is vacant now. But the computer monitors, reference books, and CDs for use if the digital hard-drive went down are still there. The most recent jock schedule still hangs on the bulletin board. It’s like one of those post-apocalyptic movies, where the city still stands but all of the people are gone.

It’s too bad the station didn’t make it. It had a core of loyal fans, but not enough. It had lots of supporters within the company, but even that couldn’t spare it when the economy went to hell. Based on some conversations around the office, I have learned that the decision to pull the plug wasn’t taken lightly, and the job of telling the staff was personally difficult for the people who had to do it. Which is a good thing, actually. I once had a boss whose job with a big radio company had been hatchet man, the guy brought in from corporate to do the actual firings so the local suits didn’t have to face the staff, and the way he talked about it led me to believe he enjoyed it.

I’m glad the company thought enough of me to move me to one of its other stations, an adult-contemporary station with a bigger signal and higher ratings. And I have been enjoying one other side benefit: I’m hearing a lot less AC/DC and Van Halen now.

I have never been a fan of either band, and I’ve got clippings from 30 years to prove it. I wrote here several months ago that I have developed a grudging respect for the Bon Scott edition of AC/DC, although his replacement, Brian Johnson was (and remains) a hack. The gaudy sales numbers for their Black Ice album last year were yet another iteration of the adage about how nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. As for Van Halen, I respect Eddie Van Halen as one of the most innovative guitarists in rock history, but if David Lee Roth hadn’t had the good fortune to meet him, he’d be fronting a cover band tonight at some bowling alley in the L.A. suburbs, and spending his breaks trying to pick up dental hygenists. On The Lake, when the format was tweaked a year after I started there, we played both bands more than the Beatles. If there’s research to prove that’s a good idea, then all hail the research, but damn, what a world.

That’s all behind me now, though—I played the new Beyonce record yesterday, fer chrissakes. Some things in life you miss when they’re gone. (To a certain extent, those things are what this blog is all about.) I miss The Lake. I miss the camaraderie of the staff and the way it felt to be on the air there. But some things about it I don’t miss at all. If I’ve got to listen to AC/DC, I prefer it this way:

“Dirty Deeds”/Hayseed Dixie (a band that does classic-rock songs in bluegrass style, recorded live in Columbus, Ohio, in 2004; whole show here; buy Hayseed Dixie here)

From the Garages of Michigan

(Edited to add link below.)

As we have observed here previously, there used to be significant regional variations in record charts around the country. Bands and records of local interest would frequently outperform nationwide smashes, although they have now been lost in the onrushing years and the homogenization of radio playlists. But the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to this stuff, as it’s become possible for both obsessive collectors and chart geeks such as myself to hope that one day, we might be able to find some of it. More than two years ago, in one of my first posts exploring such records, I snagged a 1966 chart from Detroit’s legendary WKNR (“Keener 13″) with several records that either missed the Hot 100 entirely or just scraped in near the bottom. Nevertheless, all of these tunes were monsters in Detroit and elsewhere, a couple of the bands are still fondly remembered—and I’ve managed to get my hands on some of them.

For a record that reached only Number 99 in Billboard and Number 70 in Cash Box, “Open Up Your Door” by Richard and the Young Lions, a New Jersey band, was an enormous hit in lots of places. According to ARSA, it made the top five in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Tucson, Vancouver B.C., and Salinas, California, as well as Detroit, and it remains a psychedelic rock classic, albeit an obscure one. Not long ago, I heard from Bob Freedman, one of the founding members of the band, in a comment to the original post. He says the widely told story that the Young Lions nearly became the first white act signed to Motown isn’t true, and that “Open Up Your Door” was the victim of poor promotion. I e-mailed Bob and asked if he’d be willing to tell more about the Young Lions, but I never heard back. Until then, you can hear “Open Up Your Door” and other tunes at MySpace.

The Rationals, from Ann Arbor, were voted the most popular local band in Detroit by WKNR listeners at the end of 1966, and their cover of “Respect” charted before Aretha Franklin’s did. It’s vastly different from Aretha’s, however, with a great honkin’ garage harmonica. Despite a Hot 100 peak of only 92, it made the Top 10 in Detroit and Orlando, got a bit of airplay in New York, and also charted in Cleveland, Boston, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The Rationals, too, were apparently victims of bad management decisions, and were unable to build on the success of “Respect.”

Based on what I could find on the web at the time of the original post, the Capreez were either a garage band, a soul group, or a garage band trying their hand at soul. But “Rosanna,” which was on that Keener 13 chart, is more of a doo-wop throwback than either garage or soul, a little outdated for 1966, but mighty pretty, even though its producer was supposedly embarrassed by the piano part, which he considered out of tune. “Rosanna” bubbled under the Hot 100 without breaking in, but it was Top 10 in Detroit and Orlando, and it got some airplay in Toledo, Milwaukee, and Sacramento.

I mention all of this because the fine blog Fullundie has posted an out-of-print compilation called Michigan Memories that features Richard and the Young Lions, the Rationals, the Capreez, and many others. Especially notable: “A Change on the Way” by Terry Knight and the Pack—the more I hear by that band, the more I wonder how it is they didn’t become major stars; “Persecution Smith” by an extremely young and raw-sounding Bob Seger with the Last Heard: “(I Wanna) Testify” by the Parliaments, which is where George Clinton’s space travels with Parliament/Funkadelic began, although this record is firmly anchored in mid-60s soul; and “I’m So Glad” by the Scot Richard Case, a quintessentially garage-y version of the blues tune that Cream would record a few months later.

(Michigan music fans: Be sure to check the comment from Scott Westerman below, and go visit his Keener 13 site.)

Shout Out: Since I mentioned Orlando in this post, I also want to mention this: The first time I wrote about a mid-60s chart from WLOF in Orlando, I heard from Bill Vermillion, who was the music director there. But his website, which featured a goldmine of chart stuff, is now down, so I’m wondering—Bill, are you still out there somewhere?

Reminders: I’m on Facebook, so drop by. I’m also still posting at WNEW.com, on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Coming this week: the history of Super Bowl halftime shows and the death of Buddy Holly. And for those who care about such things, the political blog to which I occasionally contribute, Best of the Blogs, has reorganized itself. My posts can be found here. Let me know if you have trouble with the link.

“Rosanna”/The Capreez (out of print)
“Respect”/The Rationals (out of print)

Top 5: New Kid in Town

This week in 1977, Americans got a new president, and the country was optimistic about him. Jimmy Carter’s approval rating as he took office was something like 66 percent, the highest for an elected president since John F. Kennedy, and higher than any president who succeeded him until Barack Obama took office this week. Carter’s promises of an open administration and the perception that he was not the usual Washington politician gave people hope that he might be able to reverse the fortunes of a country that had been shaken by scandals and buffeted by economic hardship. And if you turned on the radio that week, you were treated to the 1970s in their full, glorious, goofy musical variety. No matter what you liked, you could probably hear it on your favorite Top 40 station—love songs, disco songs, rockers, novelties—so much variety, in fact, that it’ll take 10 examples to cover it, from the Cash Box chart dated January 22, 1977:

1. “Car Wash”/Rose Royce (second week at #1). Rose Royce was an LA funk band hired by Norman Whitfield to perform music he had written for the movie Car Wash, and as it turned out, the music was more popular than the film, which opened to lukewarm reviews and little audience response in October 1976. But for a time capsule of daily life in the urban 70s, you can’t do better. It features a load of actors whose faces you’d recognize if not their names, as well as appearances by George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and the Pointer Sisters. Here’s the trailer:

3. “You Don’t Have to Be a Star”/Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. (down from 2). McCoo and Davis were members of the Fifth Dimension, and based on this, one might have expected them to enjoy a lengthy run of success as a duo, but they didn’t. Fluffy, yeah, but it sounded great on the radio and still does on those few occasions when it gets played.

8. “Walk This Way”/Aerosmith (up from 10). It’s worth noting just how many records on this chart have become classic-rock staples: “Blinded by the Light,” “Somebody to Love,” “Night Moves,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Carry On Wayward Son,” “Free Bird” (albeit a live version here), “More Than a Feeling,” “Rockin’ Me,” and this, which is the best thing Aerosmith ever did—and surprisingly explicit for 1977, when radio stations were a lot more leery about language than they are today. Or was “down on a muffin” about breakfast?

10. “New Kid in Town”/Eagles (up from 13). The lead single from Hotel California, this was the most adult-contemporary thing the Eagles had done up to that point, a morsel of country-flavored rock that now seems rather slight up against the rest of the album. Nevertheless, it remains one of my two or three favorite Eagles records.

13. “I Like Dreamin’/Kenny Nolan (up from 16). Truly one of the most sugary love songs ever, and when we’re talking about the 70s, that’s really sayin’ something. The sap rises here.

14. “Jeans On”/David Dundas (holding at 14). Dundas was—and is—a British lord;  his father was the 3rd Marquess of Zetland. (His brother holds the title and sits in the House of Lords today.) The son’s career involved scoring films and television shows. He also wrote commercial jingles, which is where “Jeans On” came from. It was a sizeable hit in the UK, although not quite so big over here, where the commercial didn’t air. Here’s the ad:

22. “Year of the Cat”/Al Stewart (up from 33). And there I am in 1977, flying up the highway toward Madison with my girlfriend in her cherry-red ’66 Mustang, and we’re blasting WISM on the radio, and they’re playing “Year of the Cat.” You had to be there, and I’m glad I was. Here’s a fine live performance circa 1977 from The Old Grey Whistle Test:

23. “Whispering/Cherchez la Femme”/Dr. Buzzard’s Original “Savannah” Band (holding at 23). Despite sounding like something out of the 40s, “Cherchez la Femme” managed to sound contemporary at the same time. If all dance music had been this elegant and intelligent, people probably wouldn’t have hated disco quite so much, although according to Wikipedia, Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band frequently played live at Studio 54. Bandleader August Darnell went on to form Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

27. “Hard Luck Woman”/KISS (up from 35). Most teenagers at the time perceived KISS to be the baddest, hardest-rockin’ band of them all, so “Beth” had been controversial when it came out in the fall of 1976. The followup single, “Hard Luck Woman,” probably should have been controversial, too. It does not exactly kick ass either, and sounds most of all like a Rod Stewart outtake.

47. “In the Mood”/Henhouse Five Plus Too (up from 56). I actually have a copy of this somewhere, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort to digitize it, unless you beg. It’s a version of the big-band standard as done by chickens. (As we used to say back on the farm: I shit you not.) Novelty master Ray Stevens was behind it, and it was one of several novelties on the chart that week, along with Rod Hart’s “C.B. Savage,” Gabe Kaplan’s “Up Your Nose,” and “Dis-Gorilla” by Rick Dees—and you might also count “Flight 66″ (Walter Murphy’s disco version of “Flight of the Bumblebee”), “Disco Lucy,” and even “Muskrat Love.”

All in all, there are some pretty good 70s memories here. Or maybe it’s just me. As I warned you on the very first day, at this blog, sometimes I’m going to be the only one who gets it.

“Whispering/Cherchez la Femme”/Dr. Buzzard’s Original “Savannah” Band (buy it here)
“Hard Luck Woman”/KISS (buy it here)

Have Headphones, Must Travel

If you live in the States, odds are that a radio station within earshot has lost some people this week. Clear Channel, the country’s largest radio chain, laid off nine percent of its workforce on Tuesday. In cities from San Diego to Cleveland, Minneapolis to Charlotte, and other places big and small, Clear Channel fired jocks, producers, program directors and their assistants, and sales representatives in droves—nearly two thousand people in all, although something like 40 percent of the total is supposed to come from Clear Channel’s outdoor advertising business.

In Detroit and Los Angeles, Clear Channel largely wiped out the local staffs of its sports-talk stations, replacing them with Fox Sports Radio national syndication, after shuffling the decks at Fox Sports Radio itself, which it also owns. (How major-market stations with pro sports play-by-play contracts can be programmed like a one-man station in Muleshoe, Texas, I dunno, but that’s the road we’re on.) Here in Madison, eight employees were let go. Half of the cuts were in sales; no high-profile jocks were sacked. That wasn’t the case everywhere, though. At many stations, it was the most senior jocks—the ones with the biggest contracts—who were shown the door, people with 20 or 30 years’ service. For some, the severance packages were extremely generous, but getting fired is getting fired, and there’s never been a worse time to lose a radio job than right now.

It’s not only Clear Channel that’s suffering from the weak economy. Mid-West Family Broadcasting, the company that owns the station I work for, has made its own personnel cuts. MWFB cut three full-time jock salaries when The Lake changed format in October. A few weeks later, it fired the morning show on its talk station, moved the guy who had been doing middays back to mornings,  and replaced him with syndicated shows. In addition, the company shed several sales positions. We were told those were the only cuts planned, but we haven’t seen the bottom of the economy yet, either.

I’ve been worrying about the death of terrestrial radio for quite a while, and the current convulsive contraction of the biz doesn’t help. Radio won’t die entirely, of course—a few stations will continue to thrive, and will find it economically viable to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity,” that quaint old line from the Communications Act of 1934 which so neatly described station owners’ obligation to their communities, and which is no longer honored as much it used to be. But the trend toward turning local radio stations into remote-controlled jukeboxes, which began during the boom times of the 1990s, is only going to accelerate now that the economy’s gone to hell.

It would be nice to think that a remote-controlled jukebox can’t stay commercially viable after it’s kicked to the curb the one resource that’s hardest to replace—experienced air talent, who make a station unique and who are often deeply rooted in the communities their stations serve. It would be nice to think that replacing them with any old voice—or no voice at all—makes it just a little bit easier for a listener to give up on a station entirely. But research shows that it often doesn’t happen. More music and less talk is just fine with lots of people, otherwise why would the iPod be so popular? If terrestrial radio is dying, not all of the wounds are self-inflicted.

Sadly, many of my radio brethren who got invited to depart this week will find there’s not room for them in the industry anymore. They’ll face a tough decision—what do you do with the rest of your life when you can’t do what you were born to do? And to aspiring youngsters who have managed to get themselves bitten by the radio bug the way I did so many years ago, the sanest and most humane advice I can give is this: Get some calamine lotion for the itch. Choose another career.

“Who Stole My Radio”/Shemekia Copeland (buy it here)