Top 5: Right Back Where We Started From

It couldn’t really have been the way I remember it. The year 1976 couldn’t have been the continuous parade of great memories I’d prefer to recall. And it wasn’t. Some of my friends let me down in ways that still sting all these years later. I had no interest in or aptitude for farming, but I was still expected to do chores and drive a tractor around home. (The job I wanted, at our local radio station, I couldn’t seem to get.) I tried to be an athlete, but I knew I couldn’t play. And despite being preternaturally glib everywhere else, I turned into a gibbering idiot when talking to the opposite sex.

And yet, there was also this: School was easy and I liked it; most people seemed to like me most of the time. I got my driver’s license and the freedom that came with it. At the end of the year, I fell in love, not for the first time, but for the first time, somebody loved me back. It wasn’t only that, though. I believe everybody gets one year in which they’d live forever if they had the chance. For all these reasons and others I can no longer remember, 1976 would be mine.

The week of my 16th birthday, the radio was pumping out loads of escapist pop, with only a handful of rock records and many more records you could classify as novelties. But I can’t really judge it dispassionately because in my head, the music of 1976 exists beyond a realm of rational discourse. The chart is from WFIL in Philadelphia, dated February 23, 1976.

1. “Theme from S.W.A.T“/Rhythm Heritage (holding at 1). Television infiltrated the record charts in 1976 to an unparalleled extent. A boatload of TV themes charted, and several TV actors scored hit songs that year. “Theme from S.W.A.T“ would probably have been a hit without the TV exposure, however. The show couldn’t have done the song much good—it ran only a short time, and it was never a particularly big hit to begin with.

8. “Evil Woman”/Electric Light Orchestra (holding at 8). A record that sounded insanely great on the radio and still does. Whether your station was playing the full version—the cold open with “you made a fool of me”—or the radio edit that starts with the piano, “Evil Woman” leapt out of the radio hot and stayed that way. (The 2006 CD reissue of Face the Music contains a stripped-down version with an extra verse. It also reveals some nice little musical touches that got swept away by the more bombastic production on the original. It remains insanely great.)

12. “We Can’t Hide It Anymore”/Larry Santos (up from 14). If I heard this on the radio at all back then, it wasn’t for very long. Santos would remain very familiar, however, as a singer on dozens of commercial jingles in the years to follow. YouTube DJ Music Mike has more here.

18. “The Game Is Over”/Brown Sugar (up from 22). This made it only to Number 79 nationwide, but was bigger in Philly because it was a local production featuring Clydie King,. You’ve heard her voice, and you won’t have to pull down very many albums from the shelf before you find her name. She sang on Exile on Main Street, albums by Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, and Elton John, and on “Sweet Home Alabama,” often with fellow singers Venetta Fields and Sherlie Matthews, as one of the busiest backup singers in the business.

21. “Right Back Where We Started From”/Maxine Nightingale (first week on). Another superb radio record, with an introduction blasting in at 100 percent that was made for DJs to talk over. (I’d have been doing that back then, even without a radio show.) Here’s Maxine doing it relatively recently as an enthusiastic crowd goes nuts:

Yep, it’s just like Maxine says: Sooner or later, this blog always comes back to 1976.

“Evil Woman” (stripped-down version)/ELO (buy it here)

Do Your Four and Out the Door

Last Friday I tossed off a remark about how, just as I was getting ready to leave radio behind, I was approached about doing afternoons at a station in the Quad Cities. In case you care, here’s the story.

From 1995 through 1997, while I was attending the University of Iowa, I worked part-time at Q106.5, the classic-rock station in Davenport. It was the perfect radio situation: a good boss, formatics that were fun to execute, and great tunes. And I was just a jock, without all the other stuff that would have gone along with a full-time gig. As we say in the biz, it was “do your four [hours] and out the door.” It paid next to nothing, but that didn’t matter—I’d have done it for free. I eventually started picking up the occasional shift on WLLR, the company’s country station, which was, if I’m recalling correctly, the market’s top-rated station at the time. Long about 1996, they had a full-time opening for the evening shift, which I pursued, but I lost out to a 19-year-old girl fresh out of some quickie broadcasting school. (I have always assumed this was because they knew she would accept $19,000 a year, and they knew I wouldn’t.) The next year, the longtime afternoon guy at WLLR decided to leave. I don’t recall all of the details anymore, but I remember a key conversation with the program director.

I had been trying to get Jim O’Hara to hire me for several years. In the late 80s, while I was still working for the elevator-music station, I interviewed for a gig at the oldies station in O’Hara’s group. He wasn’t specific about what shift he was hiring for, although it turned out to be overnights, and I didn’t get it. Jim softened the blow by telling me that didn’t think a guy with my experience would want to do overnights. At the time, I would have agreed with him. In retrospect, I should have bitten the bullet—the guy he hired ended up on afternoons within a few months.

So when O’Hara took over the programming of WLLR, I found myself back on his radar. He was always complimentary of my work, and when the afternoon guy announced he was leaving, Jim asked me if I was interested in the gig. But I was already working full-time in publishing, and we were getting ready to leave town, so I had to say no. “Too bad,” he told me. “You’d be my number-one candidate if you were interested.”

That night, recounting the conversation to The Mrs., I was disappointed. I loved my publishing gig and was looking forward to the move, but this was a potential rebirth in radio, the chance to work with a guy for whom I had the utmost respect, and at a top-rated station, too. “Where the hell were these people two years ago?” I asked her.

“Well, where were you two years ago?” she responded. “You’ve said yourself that you didn’t really get good on the radio until you got out of it full-time. And besides, you didn’t want a full-time radio job two years ago.” True enough. But the what-if still makes me wonder.

When we moved, I had to quit Q106, and it would be nearly nine years before I did a DJ show on the radio again.

Statistical Postscript: At some point over the next couple of days—perhaps even by the time you read this—we will pass 200,000 hits at this blog since January 2007. Thanks a lot, everybody.

The Further Dismantling of a Grammy Award

(Part II of a series. Part I is here.)

Like any Grammy Award category, Album of the Year contains its share of blunders—winners who haven’t endured, nominees who don’t belong, notable oversights, etc. You can’t necessarily blame the voters for this: They vote in the moment, while we have the benefit of history. But let’s not give away our opportunity to point and laugh.

We’ll ignore recent history for purposes of this post because recent history is too, well, recent to judge the long-term value of recent nominees and winners. But more than a decade is far enough back to giggle over the 1996 nomination of Michael Jackson’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future. It’s a greatest-hits compilation, a large share of which had already been honored by the Grammys. (Alanis Morrissette won that year for Jagged Little Pill.) In 1994, the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, featuring Whitney Houston’s godawful yodeling version of “I Will Always Love You” won out over Donald Fagen, Billy Joel, R.E.M., and Sting, which would never happen if the universe were benign and just. Nominees in 1991 included the debut album by Wilson Phillips, which looks pretty strange now because we have forgotten how big they were at the time, and how likely it seemed that they’d be around for a long time. It should have been easier at the time to spot as nonsense the nomination of Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em by MC Hammer. That Grammy ignored true pioneers of the rap genre like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys for several years, only to hand a nomination to Hammer, was farcical then and is even more so now. (The winner that year: Back on the Block by Quincy Jones—another lifetime achievement award, maybe.)

Another year in which the voters didn’t cover themselves in glory—although they lived up to their past tendencies—was 1985. The nominee class was one of the strongest in history: Purple Rain, Born in the USA, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, and Can’t Slow Down by Lionel Richie. The voters chose Richie. The 1983 award looks pretty strange all these years later, too: Toto IV, which beat Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain, American Fool by John Mellencamp, and Tug of War by Paul McCartney. And in 1981, Christopher Cross’ Grammy sweep extended to the album category, beating nominees who included Frank Sinatra, Pink Floyd (for The Wall), Billy Joel, and Barbra Streisand.

I’m a 70s guy, so the nominees that decade don’t look all that strange to me. Barry Manilow’s Even Now in 1979, maybe, or Behind Closed Doors by Charlie Rich in 1973, maybe, but in general, I’m OK with them. The strongest nominee class of all time, IMHO, was in 1976, when Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years beat out Janis Ian’s Between the Lines, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, and the Eagles’ One of These Nights. Reviewing the list, I found I’d forgotten a few surprising nominees: Boz Scaggs for Silk Degrees and Peter Frampton for Frampton Comes Alive! in 1977, Some Girls by the Stones in 1979, and Breakfast in America by Supertramp in 1980.

By the late 60s, the Grammys began to admit to the existence of rock, but didn’t seem to like it very much at first. The Beatles’ 1968 win for Sgt. Pepper seems like a slam dunk now, but at the time, any of the other nominees might have seemed like a more reasonable choice for tradition-bound Grammy voters: albums by Frank Sinatra, Bobbie Gentry, Vikki Carr, and Ed Ames. Sinatra had beaten the Beatles the previous two years, when they had been the first rock band ever to get an Album of the Year nomination. (You could count Simon and Garfunkel as the second, in 1969, wait for Crosby Stills and Nash in 1970, or if it’s a self-contained band you want, Chicago in 1971.) Before 1966, Album of the Year failed to acknowledge the kids’ music at all, but that’s understandable given that rock didn’t become an album form until the Beatles blazed the trail.

“Lido Shuffle” (live in 1976)/Boz Scaggs (original version on Silk Degrees; buy it here)

How to Dismantle a Grammy Award

Last week at WNEW.com, I wrote about the checkered history of the Best New Artist Grammy award. I also knocked off the following post about the Album of the Year award, intending to run it this week, but I decided not to. Rather than waste it, here’s an expanded version of it, with more to come later in the week.

Album of the Year can be one of the most frustrating Grammy categories to handicap, given the difficulty of judging the mix of styles frequently nominated. And during the decade of the ’00s, Album of the Year has honored nearly every major genre this side of death metal and opera. The bluegrass-inspired Allison Krauss/Robert Plant collaboration Raising Sand took this year’s award, although it wasn’t the first time in this decade that bluegrass took the prize: the soundtrack from the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? won the award in 2002. In 2007, country took the prize for the first time with the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way, and in 2006, U2 won for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. In 2004, rap won its first Album of the Year when OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won. Pop/jazz got its turn in 2003 with Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me, and straighter jazz last year with River: The Joni Letters by Herbie Hancock, a tribute to singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell (and one of the poorest-selling Album of the Year winners in history.)

The early years of this decade belonged to classic rock: Santana’s Supernatural won in 2002, Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature in 2001. Supernatural was the first big Grammy win for Carlos Santana, and had the feel of a lifetime achievement award, as if the Grammys were compensating for previously ignoring Santana’s work. It would have been neither the first time nor the last. It’s arguable that the Ray Charles album Genius Loves Company, which took the award in 2005, was given in tribute to the recently-deceased Brother Ray as much as it was for the album itself, full of superstar duets, few especially memorable.  In 1993, Eric Clapton’s first major Grammy win came for Unplugged, in the same year the godawful single “Tears in Heaven” won Record of the Year and Song of the Year—hardly work on par with his 1970s material, which had gone unnoticed by the Grammys. Other notable winners in the 90s: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind in 1998, and Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt in 1990

In the 80s, Album of the Year tended to honor mainstream rock and pop performers. There were no film soundtracks, no superstar compilations, and no tribute albums on the list. Notable winners: The Joshua Tree by U2 in 1988, an edgy choice by Grammy standards at the time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1984, and John Lennon’s Double Fantasy in 1982. (The latter could be considered a lifetime achievement award also, since it wasn’t nominated for the year it was released, but a year later, following Lennon’s death.) One of the stranger anomalies in Grammy history involved Paul Simon’s album Graceland, which took Album of the Year in 1987, and returned the next year when the title track won Record of the Year as a single.

During the 1970s, Stevie Wonder won Album of the Year three times in a four-year span (Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Songs in the Key of Life). Three wins is the record, shared by Wonder, Simon, and Frank Sinatra. During the ’60s, the Beatles won it once, for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first rock record to win, in 1968.(Help! had been nominated in 1966 and Revolver in 1967, but neither won, beaten both years by Frank Sinatra albums; Magical Mystery Tour would be nominated in 1969 and Abbey Road in 1970 without winning.) During the first five years of Grammy history, comedy albums took the prize twice: Bob Newhart’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart in 1961 and Vaughn Meader’s JFK parody The First Family in 1963. So while the winners in the ’00s comprise a widely varied—schizophrenic?—list, it’s got nothing on the 1960s.

For a complete list of Album of the Year nominees and winners, click here. Coming next: head-scratching nominations and winners.

“Jack of  Speed” (live in 2000)/Steely Dan (original version on Two Against Nature; buy it here)

Footstompin’ Music

One of the things I dig about the 70s is the ridiculous variety of music the typical Top 40 station would play, and few seasons of the year bring it home like the winter of 1972. Exhibit A: this fascinating chart dated February 18, 1972, from KSTT in Davenport, Iowa. Once, most cities of decent size had a station like KSTT, which loomed larger than life even though the jocks lived just around the corner from you. I lived in the Quad Cities area (Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois) from 1987 to 1997, by which time KSTT had become a rather lame sports-talk station, but memories of its glory days as the market’s Top 40 blowtorch still burned brightly there.

At 1170 on the AM dial, KSTT charted only the Top 11 on this particular week, but listed over 50 other records, including a few complete albums. There were country crossovers: “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” by Charley Pride (misstated as Charlie Rich on the retyped ARSA list, but correct on the original KSTT survey), “Are You Really Leaving Baby” by Pat Daisy, and the Jerry Lee Lewis cover of “Chantilly Lace,” which went Number One on the country charts nationwide. There was roots rock: J.J. Cale’s “Crazy Mama,” Delaney and Bonnie’s “Move ‘Em Out,” and “Sugaree” by Jerry Garcia. There was R&B of all sorts: Philly (“Betcha By Golly Wow”), Motown (“Floy Joy” by the Supremes), Memphis (“Let’s Stay Together”), and Northern soul (Donnie Elbert’s “I Can’t Help Myself”). There was bubblegum: David Cassidy’s “Could It Be Forever,” Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love,” and the Sugar Bears’ “You Are the One.” From flat-out rock and roll (“Footstompin’ Music” by Grand Funk Railroad and “Stay With Me” by Faces) to MOR (“Brian’s Song” by Michel Legrand) and from rock immortals (Paul Simon, Neil Young) to one-hit wonders (Climax, Potliquor), KSTT put the “mass” in “mass appeal.”

Several KSTT jocks became local legends. The most famous was Spike O’Dell, who started in radio at KSTT while he was still a security guard at a factory in Moline and recently retired after 21 years at WGN in Chicago. Jay Gregory held down afternoons throughout much of the 1970s. (Find an aircheck here.) Mike Kenneally, who later ended up in Chicago, was there in the late 70s. Jim O’Hara hit town about the same time, and he’s still there, serving as programming czar for Clear Channel’s Quad Cities group. I knew him a little bit—in 1997, just as I was leaving full-time radio behind, he wanted to hire me to do afternoons at one of the stations in the group—and although he was mostly a program director by then, on any day when he decided to get behind a microphone, he was the best jock in town.

“Cheer”/Potliquor (buy it here)
“Crazy Mama”/J.J. Cale (buy it here)

Hey Look, Shiny Shiny

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to Ryan Seacrest, but my Internet buddy Pat sent along a link to a recent blog post by Bill McMahon, a Seattle-based consultant, called “The Problem With Ryan Seacrest.” Seacrest, the American Idol host who also does a morning show in LA, has a syndicated show that’s heard in 140 markets.

McMahon isn’t blaming Seacrest for the death of localization in radio. Seacrest came along far too late in the game to be blamed for that. The trend toward using inexpensive syndicated programming to sop up airtime has been going on for a long time. Syndication at music stations first took hold in evenings and overnights a quarter-century ago, and migrated to mornings with the rise of Howard Stern and Bob and Tom around the turn of the 1990s. If Seacrest is an innovator at anything, it’s that many of the stations airing his show carry it in middays, which has been largely a syndication-free zone at music stations until now.

Instead, McMahon is critical of the Seacrest show for being a particularly vapid kind of radio, bereft of anything that speaks in a significant way to the listeners of his affiliate stations. That’s not necessarily a new development, either. Celebrity interviews and gossip have always been the lowest form of information. What’s different about our era is that the kind of thing that used to merit 15 seconds at the end of a longer newscast, what we used to call a “kicker story”—the octuplet mom, say, or Angelina Jolie’s latest pregnancy—now has entire 24/7 cable channels devoted to its proliferation, and even leads “serious” network news broadcasts sometimes. But you can’t blame Seacrest for that, either. He’s merely capitalizing on this level of interest since it exists.

McMahon observes that the ratings for Seacrest’s show aren’t impressive, and suggests that it exists mostly as a way for Clear Channel to fill time on the cheap. That sounds plausible enough to me, but the mere existence of a show like Seacrest’s, for whatever reason it exists, contains a rather damning indictment of the radio audience in general. Lots and lots of people like this shit. They seek it out, they follow its latest developments, and they develop passionate opinions about it, which they will discuss and defend with others who are equally engaged by it, while at the same time remaining indifferent to, or even actively trying to stay disengaged from, issues that can have actual, measurable impact on their lives. How many people can list Jennifer Aniston’s last three boyfriends but couldn’t name one aspect of the economic stimulus bill that President Obama signed yesterday? I’d wager that the number is in the millions. You distract a baby by waving something shiny in front of it; you distract an American by waving a transgressing cultural icon like Alex Rodriguez or Michael Phelps, or a missing white girl.

McMahon’s antidote is inventive new ideas that bubble up from creative individuals. But that creative force, as he observes, expresses itself mostly on the Internet today: YouTube, Facebook, and the various sensations and rages that are proliferated by them. Places where the creative force might express itself on the terrestrial radio dial have grown few. And even stations that remain dedicated to localism and relatability can get sucked into the celebrity maw, because it’s easy for an overworked jock to read about American Idol off some web page instead of talking about some local happening that may have required actual work to learn about.

I know, because I’ve done it myself, if not with Idol, than with other cultural phenomena of that ilk. But I promise to try not to do it again.