Top 5: You Get What You Need

I have written here previously of my amazement that the whole country didn’t end up diabetic in the summer of 1973, given the sugary goop that was proliferating on the radio: Donny Osmond’s “The Twelfth of Never,” “Sing” by the Carpenters,” “My Love” by Paul McCartney and Wings, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” by Dawn, “Playground in My Mind” by Clint Holmes. But holy smokes, look at the top of the chart from WCFL in Chicago dated May 26, 1973: How many other charts of the 1970s were topped by two instrumentals, and by two hard-rockin’ instrumentals at that? “Hocus Pocus” by Focus and “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter hold down the top two spots, with Steely Dan’s guitar-driven “Reelin’ in the Years” at Number Three. Plus Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, the Stones, and Pink Floyd are on the chart to counterbalance the cotton candy.

This is why I love me some 70s Top 40.

Elsewhere on the chart, these tunes were happenin’:

8. “Cherry Cherry”/Neil Diamond (holding at 8). This is the version of “Cherry Cherry” from Hot August Night, a live album recorded as Diamond’s transition from rock ‘n’ roll kid to tasteful adult balladeer was in progress. In later years, Diamond would sound uncomfortable singing these rockin’ old numbers—or maybe he just had trouble summoning up the passion to do them one more damn time.

18. “Let’s Pretend”/Raspberries (up from 21). After you’ve made one of the greatest AM radio rockers of all time in “Go All the Way,” what do you do for an encore? The same thing, again. “I Wanna Be With You” was “Go All the Way” with extra caffeine, while “Let’s Pretend” is the prequel, before the protagonist of “Go All the Way” got quite so horned up. Its failure to become a national hit on the scale of the earlier two singles is a crime against art. Here it is, in a TV performance from approximately 1973:

21. “Back When My Hair Was Short”/Gunhill Road (up from 24). One of the profoundly great one-shot singles of the 1970s, “Back When My Hair Was Short” narrates a young man’s experiences growing up in the 1960s. He’s a sock-hop refugee from the 1950s making his way in a decade of change; the song is goofy/nostalgic, and damn catchy. But that is not the story the song originally set out to tell. The version that appeared on Gunhill Road’s eponymous album was vastly different, and in no way fit for AM radio circa 1973. A representative verse follows:

Back when my hair was short
Before I’d been to court
For selling dope to some kids
Only a couple of lids
They stood around and made bids

The Gunhill Road album and both versions of “Back When My Hair Was Short” were produced by a fella named Kenny Rogers. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

22. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”/Rolling Stones (down from 19). This song had been on the flipside of “Honky Tonk Women” in 1969, but was released on its own in 1973 in hopes of spurring sales of the Hot Rocks 1964-1971 and More Hot Rocks compilation albums, which had both been released the previous year.

25. “Wild About My Lovin’”/Adrian Smith (up from 28). I have been able to learn practically nothing about Adrian Smith, except that she’s not the guitarist with Iron Maiden. The phrase “tiny lady, big voice” pops up in a significant number of web citations about her self-titled album, but that’s it. “Wild About My Lovin’” rode the charts at WCFL for at least 12 weeks in the summer of 1973, and it got some play on other Chicago stations as well. If you know anything more, help a brother out.

“Back When My Hair Was Short” (original album version)/Gunhill Road (the Gunhill Road album and various compilations that once contained the 45 version of “Back When My Hair Was Short” are all out of print; as is often the case with officially out-of-print material, used and after-market copies remain available; see comment below)

You’ve Said . . . Some of It

One of the most famous advertising jingles in history is the one for Budweiser beer that ends with “When you say Budweiser, you’ve said it all.” It was first broadcast around 1970, and it wasn’t long before it was adopted by college marching bands. Georgia Tech claims to be first—they played the song in tribute to then-football coach Bud Carson. Here in Madison, the University of Wisconsin marching band has played it since 1972. People polka to it with such gusto that the band isn’t permitted to play it during football games because it causes the upper deck of Camp Randall Stadium to move. (They play it after the games, however, during the famous Fifth Quarter celebration.) At the end, every Badger fan within earshot shouts, “When you say Wis-con-sin, you’ve said it all.”

What you may not know about the jingle is that it became a hit song in a couple of different incarnations. In the late spring of 1972, Bob Luman took a rewritten version of it to Number 6 on the country charts under the title “When You Say Love.” (Luman is best remembered, probably, for his 1960 pop and country hit “Let’s Think About Living,” an answer to all the teenage tragedy songs of the late 50s.) A few months later, Sonny and Cher cut a version of it. Their “When You Say Love” was released only as a single and charted in July. It peaked at Number 32 on the Hot 100 in August (and went Top 10 in Des Moines, for whatever that’s worth).

The original jingle was written by Steve Karmen, whose other credits include “Weekends were made for Michelob,” “Carry the big fresh flavor of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum,” “Sooner or later you’ll own Generals” (for General Tire), and “Nationwide [Insurance] is on your side.” The country songwriting team of Jerry Foster and Bill Rice turned the jingle into a full song, which isn’t slavishly true to the jingle. And in fact, if you didn’t know it was based directly on the Bud song, you might chalk it up to coincidence.

By the time “When You Say Love” was off the radio in the fall, the third season of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour had premiered, and it was one of the top-rated shows on TV. Despite their TV success, Sonny and Cher would never return to the Top 40, although one other single, “Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All Her Songs,” creased the Hot 100 the next spring. Time and again in the 1970s, previously successful recording acts saw their hitmaking days fade when their TV shows became successful. It happened to Tony Orlando and Dawn, the Captain and Tennille, and even to Buck Owens and Roy Clark after Hee Haw.

Recommended Reading: Steely Dan is getting ready to hit the road for the fourth straight summer, with a twist this year. On some dates, they’ll be playing all of Gaucho, Aja, or The Royal Scam, while at a handful of others, fans will be able to vote for the songs they’d like to hear at the show. Details and dates here. The Dan has always been one of the most literate bands in rock, which is one of the things I dig about them. Over at My Hmphs, you can explore the anti-Dans: 20 songs with really bad grammar and what might be the single most illiterate song in the history of music.

“When You Say Love”/Sonny and Cher (buy it here)

Over and Over

I did something on the radio yesterday I haven’t done in donkey’s years—I played the same song twice on the same radio show.

Although I’ve been on Magic 98 for a year now, I’m on mostly during weekend specialty shows devoted to the 70s and 80s, where nothing repeats. And when I work during the week, the station doesn’t repeat songs between 9AM and 5PM, and the list of current hits is pretty small anyhow. Before that, my last two jobs were on classic-rock formats, which tend to beat the hell out of songs one day at a time, but not to repeat them within the confines of a single five- or six-hour shift. At my last full-time gig, in the early 90s, we didn’t repeat songs very often either. We ran a satellite-delivered format most of the time; its list of current hits was very short. (It stayed on them forever, too. If I’m recalling correctly, “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette was in current rotation for nearly a year.) I might have heard one or two songs twice in the course of a normal workday, but since my airshift was only three hours long, I’d never play a song twice. (Except for that day I played “Starting All Over Again” by Hall and Oates twice back to back because I liked it so much.)

But when I was a little baby disc jockey in Dubuque—a job I got 30 years ago this spring—we repeated stuff a lot. For a stretch in those years, I was on the air weekend nights from six to midnight, and over the course of those shifts, we’d play the 10 hottest songs on the playlist three times each. Much of the rest of the top 30 would get on twice per night. But even a two-hour rotation for the hottest hits isn’t the tightest one I know of. In the 70s, some top 40 stations (WLS was one) would play a few of their top hits on a  75-minute rotation, and a few others every 90 minutes. But at least these frequent repeats were balanced by a selection of oldies and recurrents. When the Hot Hits format was launched in the early 80s, some of those stations played only two dozen songs in all, and kept playing them over and over. You’ll have to tell me what’s standard in the Top 40 biz today, if you know.

If I’m recalling a hallway conversation correctly, the hip-hop station in our group was playing only two dozen songs in all shortly after its launch a couple of years ago. (It may be playing more now, but I dunno.) Some new stations have chosen the strategy of playing a tight rotation of extremely strong songs as a way of establishing their identity. Years ago, WXXQ in Freeport relaunched itself as an album-rock station as I started my summer job there, and did so by playing “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird,” and other classic-rock staples like they were current hits, repeating them every five or six hours. (It drove the jocks nuts.)

I am not saying repetition is a bad thing. On the contrary, if you’re a station whose identity involves playing the hits, then you ought to play the hits. And there’s this: I’m convinced that the record charts wouldn’t have become the calendar of my life if the songs hadn’t been hammered into my head over and over every day for weeks or months at a time. And without that, who would I be?

At WNEW.com: a brief history of some famous band names.

“Again and Again and Again”/Paul McCartney and Wings (lo-fi mp3; buy the mp3 album here)
“Over and Over”/Delaney and Bonnie and Friends (buy it here)

Dawn to Dusk

At the turn of the 1970s, few record labels were hotter than Bell. Founded in 1952, Bell had become a power player in pop music when it was acquired by Columbia Pictures in 1969. It became the home of the Partridge Family, the Fifth Dimension, Tony Orlando and Dawn, the Stampeders, Terry Jacks, Vicki Lawrence, Davy Jones, and Barry Manilow (whose first big hits appeared on Bell shortly before its assets were folded into a new label, Arista). It was also the American label on which British sensations Gary Glitter and the Sweet first appeared.

Bell’s peak year was probably 1971, when you couldn’t listen to AM radio for 10 minutes without hearing the Partridges, Dawn, or the Fifth Dimension. And even in 1971, when music marketing was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today, marketers knew about synergy. Since one of Bell’s biggest acts was called Dawn, it followed that the label should create and market another act called Dusk.

Like Dawn had been initially, Dusk was a studio creation. Most of the same people involved with Dawn also worked on Dusk’s records, including producers Hank Medress and Dave Appell, and songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown. Dusk never came anywhere close to Dawn’s success, although the group made the Hot 100 twice in 1971. “Angel Baby,” with its marimba line, motorcycle sound effects, and girl-group feel, would have sounded a bit dated in early ’71, even as it recycled “Knock Three Times.” It made Number 57 nationally, but was Number One in Canton, Ohio, and Top 10 in New Orleans. “I Hear Those Church Bells Ringing” is another throwback, derived from the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love.” It made Number 53 in Billboard, but got far more exposure than “Angel Baby,” if ARSA is any indication. It made Number One at WYNE in Kimberly, Wisconsin, in August, and it got significant airplay in Honolulu and Chicago as well—despite having an extremely high cheese factor. Dusk released one other single, “Treat Me Like a Good Piece of Candy,” which charted in Cash Box but not on the Hot 100. After that, they disbanded.

There’s a very good reason why Dusk sounded so much like an early-60s girl group. Like Dawn, Dusk featured a veteran of the music biz out front on lead vocals: Peggy Santiglia, who had sung lead on “My Boyfriend’s Back,” the 1963 hit by the Angels. She had been singing on sessions in New York City for years, and was a friend of original Dawn singer Toni Wine and Hank Medress. Her involvement in Bell’s attempt to whip up a female counterpart to Dawn was a natural.

At least one website claims that after “Knock Three Times” became a smash and Bell needed to make Dawn a real group for touring purposes, Santiglia and former Angel Barbara Allbut were offered the chance to be Tony Orlando’s backup singers. The story goes that since they were planning to reform the Angels, they turned down the offer. Santiglia herself doesn’t say that in a couple of online interviews, so I don’t think I buy it. The gig went to Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson instead. The precise timeline of their involvement with Dawn is an interesting story on its own, but it’s a story for another time.

“Angel Baby”/Dusk
“I Hear Those Church Bells Ringing”/Dusk (both out of print)

Rockin’ All Over the World

Almost everybody knows that the Beatles cut German-language versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.” “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand” and “Sie Liebt Dich” were recorded on the same day in January 1964, while the band was in Paris. At the time, record labels believed that German listeners would resist English-language recordings, so EMI hired a producer from Radio Luxembourg to translate the songs to German, and the Beatles learned them phonetically.

In my music stash, I have an album that is tagged Motown in a Foreign Language, although there’s no official Motown release by that name. A CD called Motown Around the World was released in 1987, collecting versions of various Motown hits in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. My guess is that Berry Gordy believed, like the suits at EMI, that listeners in Europe would be more likely to buy Motown product if it were in their native languages. Like the Beatles, the Motown artists cut translated lyrics over the original instrumental tracks, which didn’t always result in a perfect match. And for what it’s worth, Stevie Wonder’s Italian is apparently perfect, but the average Italian would have trouble understanding Diana Ross. (The mighty power of Levi Stubbs is obvious in any language.) Motown was recording foreign-language versions of hits as late as 1981, when Smokey Robinson cut a Spanish version of “Being With You.”

Also recording in foreign languages were Petula Clark, who cut “Downtown” in French, Italian, and German, and Little Peggy March, who recorded “I Will Follow Him” in French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, and Japanese, although both “Downtown” and “I Will Follow Him” retain their English titles. One of the unlikeliest instances came in 1971 when Chicago cut versions of “Questions 67 and 68″ and “Lowdown” in Japanese. They were released as singles over there, and the band performed them on tours of Japan in 1972, 1995, and 2008.

If you know any other foreign-language versions of hit songs by their original performers, tell the whole class in the comments.

Linkage: We dig one-hit wonders around here, and so does One Poor Correspondent. Davewillieradio has news that Larry Lujack is returning to radio—maybe even to a station near you. Addicted to Vinyl remembers the early days of music video on TV. And at Popdose, Jason attacks the chart from this week in 1978. Also please notice that I have moved the blogroll, which used to appear on the right-hand side of this page, to its own separate page, also called “Linkage.” Find the tab for it at the top of this page.

“Questions 67 and 68″ (Japanese version)/Chicago (out of print)
“Gira Gira (Reach Out I’ll Be There)”/Four Tops (out of print)

Top 5: Hamsters in the Smoke

I have had 1974 on the brain lately. That was the spring I put blacklight bulbs in the overhead fixture in my room, and the spring I tried getting into Emerson, Lake and Palmer because a girl I liked was into Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and it was easier than actually talking to her. It was also the spring we came home from church one Sunday to find our house full of smoke. We didn’t see any fire, but we couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from, either. As it turned out, the culprit was the radio in my brother’s bedroom— the green Westinghouse tube-type, my first radio, the one I listened to on Christmas Eve 1970—which had shorted out and burned. It’s hard to imagine that it could have produced the volume of smoke we saw, but it did, and the smoke and soot damage, particularly to the upstairs, was significant.

The afternoon of the fire, my brother was inconsolable, sure that his hamsters, which lived in his room, were dead. At mid-afternoon my father finally went up to retrieve the cage. The little creatures were covered with black soot—but they were still alive. It fell to my grandmother, for reasons I can’t recall, to clean them up. I can see her even now, standing at the kitchen sink, washcloth in one hand and hamster in the other, with a look on her face that said, “You know, at my house we set traps for things like this.”

Around nightfall, I innocently asked my mother, “So, do you think things are getting back to normal around here?” She went off. “Normal?! It’s going to be months before things are back to normal around here!” She was right. We would be weeks washing clothes and drapes and walls and having furniture and carpets replaced. We had to discard lots of stuff that was too smoke-damaged to save—including my entire collection of original WLS music surveys from late 1970 through early ’74, a loss I have mourned ever since. It was indeed months before my brother and I could move back into our rooms upstairs. I would spend the summer of 1974 hanging out in the basement of our house.

That was also the spring I began listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 with pencil and paper in hand. Casey used the Billboard chart, but here are five tunes from Cash Box, dated May 18, 1974:

6. “Midnight at the Oasis”/Maria Muldaur (up from 9). I am pretty sure I took this at face value—a desert narrative, like an old movie that might come on after the 10:00 news—thereby missing the sexual subtext, which is the only thing I can hear now. (Live performance from Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert here.)

17. “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)”/MFSB (down from 7). Soul Train was must-see TV for me, mainly for the theme song, although I had a healthy appreciation for R&B by that time. And when the theme turned up on the radio, I couldn’t get to the record store fast enough.

21. “My Girl Bill”/Jim Stafford (up from 25). In which we learn that punctuation matters. (Live performance and interview clip with David Letterman here.)

36. “Save the Last Dance for Me”/De Franco Family (up from 47). In the early 70s, you had your Osmonds, your Jackson Five, your Partridge Family, and a vast array of teen magazines to promote them. Surely there was enough teenage-girl interest to sustain the career of another family singing group. In the case of the DeFranco Family, there was three singles’ worth. “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” would be better if Tony DeFranco were a better singer, but “Abra-ca-Dabra” is a glorious gob of bubblegum that overcomes his limitations. Their respectful and respectable cover of “Save the Last Dance for Me” marked the end of the line.

37. “Star Baby”/Guess Who (up from 38). In which the Guess Who channels the spirit of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Crank it up, open the windows, step on the gas . . . and enjoy the holiday weekend. I’ll be on the radio a lot, so tune over. And because I didn’t post much this week, watch for an extra post or two here as well.

“Save the Last Dance for Me”/DeFranco Family (96 kbps, but you’ll get the idea; out of print)
“Star Baby”/Guess Who (buy it here)