Shot in the Dark

As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam, it never takes this blog very long to get back to 1976. This week, however, we’ve all gone back. The burgeoning swine flu outbreak has inspired memories of the previous swine flu threat, which was one of the top news stories of 1976. There’s a pretty good summary of the story right here and a timeline of newspaper headlines from the period here, which reminded me of a lot I had forgotten.

The scare started in February, peaked in March and April, and spiked again in early August after the Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak in Philadelphia (which had nothing to do with the swine flu). As summer turned to fall, preparations to vaccinate all 220 million Americans for swine flu were underway. The government rolled out a couple of public-service announcements to encourage people to participate. (These have been turning up all over the Internet in the last few days, but I’m going to put ‘em up anyhow.)

Poor Dotty. She looks so happy, but she’s so very dead.

It’s impossible to gauge whether the PSAs helped, or how much. In the weeks before the vaccination program began, polls showed only about half of Americans were planning to get the shot. Vaccinations began in October, and reports of adverse reactions to the vaccine began almost immediately. Weeks of intense controversy followed. By the time the vaccination program was suspended in December, after the vaccine was linked to the paralyzing neuromuscular disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome, between a quarter and a third of Americans had been vaccinated. The rest of us decided we’d rather take our chances with the flu. As I recall, there was no panic at my house. I did not live through my favorite year in the shadow of impending doom, because it wouldn’t have been my favorite year if I had. We must have discussed whether to get vaccinated, but I don’t think any of us did. As it turned out, the flu itself killed exactly one person—a soldier at Fort Dix who died in February, and whose death started the whole scare. Swine-flu vaccine killed 25 others and sickened about 500. By late 1978, the government faced over $2 billion in claims from people who said they’d had vaccine reactions.

Many government officials suggested in succeeding years that the Ford Administration had little choice but to do what it did, although it’s worth noting that the director of the Centers for Disease Control got fired over the debacle in early 1977, so even back then, there was a perception that the whole thing was goofy. In the end, the swine-flu fiasco had a lot in common with many other things we did during the 1970s: It seemed like a good idea at the time even though it looks pretty silly now.

“Sick City”/Elton John (bonus track from Caribou reissue; buy it here)
“Shot in the Dark”/Utopia (original album out of print; downloadable version here)

Jump Back Jake and the Sound of Memphis

(Before we begin: I am all over WNEW.com this week. In addition to my regular features—a post yesterday on the Beach Boys’ Smile album, today’s Rock History thing, and another Rock Flashback feature this coming weekend—they’re running my interview with Mister Zero of the Kings as well. So check ‘em out already. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.)

I get invited to review new music all the time. It’s not that I’m particularly special—bands and record labels will blast dozens or hundreds of blogs with e-mail solicitations, hoping to get publicity, which is fine. That’s how promotion gets done nowadays. But I rarely respond because 99 percent of the time, I can tell from the description that neither I nor you will be remotely interested in 99 percent of them. We don’t devote a lot of space to hip-hop, techno, or metal around here, but those three genres comprise most of the solicitations I get.

A couple of weeks ago, however, it was a different story when I heard from a guy at Ardent Music in Memphis. The label is based at Ardent Studios, which opened in 1966 and recorded some famous Stax hits including “Soul Man,” the Isaac Hayes album Hot Buttered Soul, and Booker T. and the MGs’ magnificent Abbey Road tribute McLemore Avenue. Ardent’s most famous client, however, was Led Zeppelin—the band mixed Led Zeppelin III there in 1970. ZZ Top, James Taylor, Cheap Trick, and lots of others recorded there as well, so the place has got a significant pedigree. The e-mail invited me to check out Jump Back Jake, describing the band like this: “Jump Back Jake plays raw soul-flavored rock and roll with dance grooves and horn lines that tout a modern writing approach.” Hot damn, I thought. That I’ll listen to.

Jump Back Jake’s debut album is called Brooklyn Hustle/Memphis Muscle, and hot damn, indeed—it’s exactly as advertised. The record is inspired by classic soul and blues, full of good horny horns, a mighty Hammond B3, and guitar work both sweet and stinging, but it’s not the work of a nostalgia act, either. According to a Memphis newspaper profile, leader Jake Rabinbach is the sum of his influences, growing up on Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and diggin’ other white soulsters like Tony Joe White and the Sir Douglas Quintet, as well as author Peter Guralnick’s classic Sweet Soul Music, which describes the sort of communal music-making Rabinbach wanted to engage in. He realized fairly early on that while most bands borrow from the past, precious few were borrowing from the Memphis soul of the 1960s. He moved from Brooklyn to Memphis in 2006 and formed Jump Back Jake shortly thereafter with guitarist Jake Vest, drummer Greg Faison, bassist Brandon Robertson, and horn players Nahshon Benford and Paul Morelli. The band’s mission is to take that classic Stax sound and make it relevant right now.

Mission accomplished. Brooklyn Hustle/Memphis Muscle is a party record in spots and a smoky late-night groover in others. Picking a favorite track is a tough assignment: I especially dug “Samson,” “Won’t Leave the House,” and “X-Mas Time,” although “The Flood,” “Terrible Mistakes,” and “Too Cool for Love” are strong tracks as well. But you don’t have to take anybody else’s word about Brooklyn Hustle/Memphis Muscle—stream the whole thing right here and decide for yourself.

“The Flood”/Jump Back Jake (buy it here)

No Shirt, No Clue

The fall of 1977 was one of those seasons when the radio was talking to me constantly. When the chatter got too much, I’d put an album on the record player, and in that season, it was usually Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Works Volume 1.

Works Volume 1 was the first new studio recording from ELP since Brain Salad Surgery nearly four years before. It was also was the band’s White Album, a double-disc set that gave one side to each member and brought them together on the fourth side. Keith Emerson’s side featured a straight classical piano concerto that I may have listened to twice. Carl Palmer’s side didn’t excite me much, either, although it sounded more like the ELP of old than the rest of the album. The group side, featuring a lengthy adaptation of “Fanfare for the Common Man” and a 14-minute epic called “Pirates,” was the sort of thing I wanted to hear from ELP, and I dug it.

But it was side two, Greg Lake’s side, that I listened to the most, and four songs in particular: “Lend Your Love to Me Tonight,” “C’est la Vie,” “Nobody Loves You Like I Do,” and “Closer to Believing.” None of them sound much like ELP apart from containing Lake’s voice; they’re all backed by an orchestra. But I liked them then because they contained lots of lyrics that a love-struck teenage rock fan of literary bent would find profound. From “Lend Your Love to Me Tonight”:

Just lend your love to me once more
Don’t ask me what I came back for
Just watch the moonlight cross the floor
And as your blood begins to roar
You’ll feel your senses spin and soar
You will become my meteor
Divine and universal whore
Complete me

“Divine and universal whore?”

If there had been a video for the song, it would have featured Lake standing on a high cliff somewhere, shot all in blue with swirling mist, declaiming into the wind as a storm approached. If Lake was going for Big Drama, he got it.

From “Nobody Loves You Like I Do”:

You can rent your blues and photograph your soul
You can even dig some diamonds out of rock and roll.
You can change the world
But if you lose your control
They will take away your T-shirt

Those first two lines sound great, even if they don’t mean anything. But “they will take away your T-shirt”? Given that the line doesn’t have to rhyme with anything, that’s lameness of Fogelbergian dimensions.

From “Closer to Believing”:

But of course you know I love you
Or what else am I here for
Only you not face to face
But side by side forevermore
And I need to be here with you
For without you what am I
Just another fool out searching
For some heaven in the sky

Given that my love life was shot through with hideous confusion at that particular moment, “Closer to Believing” found its way onto my turntable a lot. I wanted to believe that things were going to work out, even though I was at the mercy of the gods because I sure as hell didn’t know what to do.

So be closer to believing
Though your world is torn apart
For a moment changes all things
And to end is but to start
And if your journey’s unrewarded
May your God lift up your heart
You are windblown
But you are mine

Anything But Tranquilizin’

For the purpose of making this post fit the general subject matter of this blog, let me state first that Bea Arthur, who died over the weekend at age 86, once made a record. Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends was recorded in December 2001 at her one-woman Broadway show. Arthur was an old Broadway hand, having appeared in the original productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Mame, and her album features songs and stories from across her lengthy career. But it’s a mere footnote to her years as a television actress, on The Golden Girls (1985-1992) and Maude (1972-1978).

Maude aired for a short time on TV Land in the 90s, but it had vanished into the vaults before the first season came out on DVD last year. I recently rewatched the whole thing, and it occurs to me that historians who attempt to discuss the cultural history of the 1970s without mentioning it are missing an important touchstone. For the last 20 or 25 years, conservative cultural critics have been on guard, looking to expose the liberalism inherent in Hollywood productions and sometimes finding it where nobody else seems to notice it. Maude would have blasted them off of their couches and into orbit.

Maude Findlay’s liberalism was writ large and on display in every episode, and it dated back to the character’s December 1971 appearances on All in the Family, when she sparred with Archie Bunker over Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maude‘s characters discussed political, racial, gender, and sexual issues with an openness that’s simply not permissible today. Yet the program didn’t present Maude as an unabashed heroine; occasionally, she came off as what we’d have called a “limousine liberal” back then—somebody who talks the talk without walking the walk.

The single episode of Maude most remembered today is one in which the political melded with the personal. Maude, on her fourth marriage and 47 years old, gets pregnant, and decides to have an abortion. The episode aired in November 1972, two months before the Roe v. Wade decision, but after abortion had been legalized in New York State, where the show was set. The subject is handled euphemistically—the word “abortion” is mentioned but once:

The episode didn’t become profoundly controversial until it was rerun in August 1973, when a couple dozen CBS affiliates refused to carry it. “Maude’s Dilemma” would not be the only time Maude courted controversy, or dealt with subjects that were no laughing matter. Throughout its run, Maude frequently visited the dark side, with stories about domestic violence, marital infidelity, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and suicide.

The program’s topicality isn’t the only reason it disappeared from syndication, however. The show is brightly, almost harshly, lit. The costumes and set design, while typical of upper-middle-class life in the 1970s, often feature colors not found in nature, and they look badly dated today. Neither Maude nor her husband Walter (played by Bill Macy) is particularly attractive, although the show doesn’t use that as an excuse to ignore their sexual relationship—which is another way in which Maude is marked as a unique document of its moment in history. On TV today, unattractive people don’t get to have sex, and if they do, it’s seen as perverse, or an excuse for humor. (Of course, the show also featured Adrienne Barbeau as Maude’s daughter Carol, and Barbeau became one of the 1970s most famous pinup girls.)

Sony apparently has no plans to release Season 2 on DVD as yet, although Season 1 remains in print. Few artifacts of our favorite decade will take you back to the social and political maelstrom of the Nixon era better than Maude. Plus, it had one of the funkiest theme songs in TV history, sung by Donny Hathaway. It doesn’t appear as though he ever officially released a version of it, but you can hear it here.

Top 5: More Hall-of-Famers

Whatever happened to all the famous DJs?  The best-known jock in America right now is probably Ryan Seacrest, although he’s less famous for being on the radio than for hosting American Idol. It used to be Howard Stern, but he’s been a talk show host for years, and he’s disappeared into the anonymity of satellite radio—a good move financially and for his freedom of speech, but not one that’s likely to build his fan base. True, there are lots of people doing solid work in cities across the country, and some of them end up with national gigs, but national gigs ain’t what they used be, given the number of stations, both terrestrial and Internet-based.

Take a look at this survey from WABC in New York dated April 20, 1963, and specifically at the jock lineup. Several of these guys became national radio celebrities, and three would be first-ballot choices in anybody’s Hall of Fame. A couple others would deserve consideration, too:

Dan Ingram would stay at WABC until 1982 (when it abandoned music for talk) and then work at WCBS-FM from 1991 to 2003. I’ve quoted a line of Ingram’s for years, one that I heard when he was on a panel at a radio convention attended, that the key to becoming a great DJ was to be able to go to the bathroom in three minutes or less, the length of a typical record. (Ingram’s version was a bit more scatological, however.)

Scott Muni followed Ingram every night, and would leave radio briefly in the mid-60s before returning as one of the pioneers of free-form “progressive” radio, spending three decades on afternoons at WNEW-FM. He hosted several nationally syndicated series and specials throughout his career.

Bruce Morrow, the legendary “Cousin Brucie,” would be on the air in New York daily until 1977 before hosting oldies shows locally in New York and in national syndication, most famously Cruisin’ America. He’s been on the Sirius/XM ’60s channel since 2005.

Herb Oscar Anderson was present at the creation of Top 40, working for Storz Broadcasting’s WDGY in Minneapolis. He joined WABC when it went Top 40 in 1960. “The Morning Mayor of New York” left WABC in 1968, claiming that he didn’t like the newer music he was being asked to play. (Anderson’s son is actor John James, a 1980s heartthrob on Dynasty.)

Sam Holman was the program director who put WABC’s Top 40 format on the air; he later did the same at WLS in Chicago, and worked on-air there as well. He eventually became the head of programming for all of ABC’s Top 40 stations during the 1960s, and is one of the genre’s forgotten pioneers.

As for the music on WABC this week in 1963, it was girl groups aplenty: the Chiffons, the Cookies, the Shirelles, and the Orlons (actually three girls and a guy), plus Little Peggy March and Ruby and the Romantics, were all in the Top 10. There was a liberal sprinkling of MOR singers: Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Jack Jones, Eydie Gorme, but also some rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, including the Beach Boys and Roy Orbison. And some classic hits, too: “Surfin’ USA,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “On Broadway,” “Da Doo Ron Ron.” It’s easy to say—and I’ve done it myself—that by 1963, the British Invasion had to happen, to shake American pop music out of its post-Elvis funk, but there’s plenty on this chart that’s still worth listening to 46 years later.

On and On and On and On

In my e-mail interview with John Picard, better known as Mister Zero of the Kings, we covered a lot of topics. (Scroll down  to see ‘em.) Like any writer would, I tried to cut the material down to the best stuff. And like most writers will at one time or another, I looked at the pile of cuts and decided they were too good to throw away. What follows are some random answers to random questions.

jb: One of the hookiest things about “The Beat Goes On” is the lyric, and phrases like “Hey Judy, get Trudy” and “Me and Zero request you in the Mercedes.” Did either you or [bassist and co-writer] Dave [Diamond] really have a Mercedes?

Zero: I had two old Benzes, a ’65 220 and a ’64 220S. Both were that old kind you see in movies shot in Europe, the big boxy cars with the small fins on the back. When the ’65 gave out, I wasn’t really looking for another, but saw the ’64 in a garage lot on the way to a gig. It looked pretty good, and I think it was $800, so I bought it. That was the one the song [mentions], we had a lot of fun in it, it really did have a smooth ride. I do remember it had a four-speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column, and it would always fall out of first gear if you didn’t hold it there. And the speedometer was this crazy sort of barbershop pole thing that I loved.

jb: Did it help you get girls . . . or is a hit record better for that?

Zero: Playing in the band helped more than the car. Having a hit just made it easier further from home!

jb: “Switchin’ to glide” is another cool phrase. How did that come about?

Zero: “Switchin’ to glide” was a line I came up with when I was thinking about how my dad used to coast down hills sometimes when we were on family vacations. I think we were in Allegany State Park, and there are long hills there, and we kids thought it was cool that he would put the car in neutral and coast for what seemed like miles. I was probably in the Benz driving around and kinda spacing out on that, and thought about doing that in the sky in an airplane, and the phrase “switchin’ to glide” just came to me. I didn’t know it would make it into a song. I told Dave about the idea and it just happened to fit with something he was working on. Of course trying to glide in a powered airplane is not a good idea there, kids!

jb: The radio biz has changed a lot since the early 80s, and not always (or usually) for the better. Talk a little about radio and the role it played in your career.

Zero: Yes, I think radio has changed. It is much more of a business now, run by corporate bean-counters and consultants. It has always been dominated by major label acts, which is fine, but the labels seem to be followers of fashion instead of champions of creativity. I remember the days when you would hear cool new songs on the radio and they would have an arc of life on the playlist. I suppose this is still true, but the quality of the music has diminished to my ears. Very “same-y.” And everything is in a box now—this demographic of people has to like this, and those people will like that. And a whole generation of people now refuses to pay for music, so the whole business is suffering. We consider ourselves very lucky to have had a real hit on the radio, but the great thing about those days was the fact that the audience, the listener, had a big part in it. Those ringing phones were the barometer of success—they couldn’t be ignored because this was no test market, or focus group, this was reality, and people were saying, “We listen to your station because you play this great music.” And then wonderful things could happen, based solely on the quality of the music and the audience reaction to it. I fear that organic interaction is a thing of the past. Not to mention the fact that a lot of current stuff sucks!

. . . There is a huge AM station in Toronto called CFRB 1010. . . . I remember they had a DJ named Wally Crowter, an older gent who had been there forever and was beloved by his audience. One day he played [our song] “If We Don’t Belong Together” and said something like, “Now that is a good song!” My old buddy Mike’s mother was a loyal listener to Wally’s show and I will tell you now that Mike’s mom never looked at me the same way again. I wasn’t just some wannabe kid in a band—the Kings were the real thing because Wally said so. And again, that was the power of radio, and I fear that is in the past.

More on American Bandstand: I would have to say that our appearance on American Bandstand was due to our U.S. manager, Randy Phillips, and his hard work. He came to Canada on his own dime and found us and said, “Do you guys have any idea of what is happening for you in the U.S. right now? Your songs are climbing the charts. I can help you make money.” As I said before, we were so green, and, well, Canadian, that we didn’t have a clue about the opportunity right in front of us. Randy’s connections and not-taking-no-for-an-answer ethic were key in keeping the flame on at the [record] label, and also in getting us gigs like Bandstand.