TV Rock

The trend of pop stars hosting TV variety shows didn’t really start with Sonny and Cher, but theirs was the first to become a Top-10 Nielsen hit. The duo’s 1971 summer replacement series, which took over the time slot of The Ed Sullivan Show after it left the air, was so successful that it led to a regular series beginning in December. It lasted until Sonny and Cher’s marriage broke up in 1974, although each of them had their own solo variety show afterward, and they reunited briefly, on TV at least, a couple of years later.

The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour had been a summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968 on CBS and gained a regular slot in January 1969. This Is Tom Jones was imported from the UK and began running on ABC, also in 1969. But it took Sonny and Cher to clear the way for several other best-selling pop artists to host TV shows in the mid 1970s. Here are a few of the other pop-star variety shows (list lifted mostly from the book TV Rock by Mark Bego). Most were limited-run series intended to fill a time slot normally occupied by something else that was off the air for the summer.

The Jerry Reed When You’re Hot You’re Hot Hour (CBS, June-July 1972). One regular cast member was, according to The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Shows, “John Twomey, a Chicago attorney who made music with his bare hands.” I don’t know either.

The Helen Reddy Show (NBC, June-August 1973). Summer replacement for The Flip Wilson Show, co-produced by Wilson. Featured the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, and ended each week with Reddy answering audience questions like Carol Burnett did.

The Mac Davis Show (NBC, three different periods, 1974-1976). If at first you don’t succeed, fail to succeed two more times.

Tony Orlando and Dawn (CBS, July 1974, December 1974-December 1976). Took over The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour time slot in the summer before becoming a regular series and a hit, at least for a while. George Carlin was a regular.

The Hudson Brothers Show (CBS, August 1974). Produced by Chris Bearde and Allan Blye, who produced Sonny and Cher’s show. Eventually morphed into a Saturday-morning kids show.

The Gladys Knight and the Pips Show (NBC, July 1975). Music, sketches, yada yada yada.

The Manhattan Transfer (CBS, August 1975). Featured production numbers spotlighting different musical eras, and managed to land Bob Marley and the Wailers for its final episode. Laraine Newman was a regular, only months before joining the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

Donny and Marie (ABC, January 1976-January 1979). The biggest TV variety hit this side of Sonny and Cher.

The Jacksons (CBS, June-July 1976, January-May 1977). After leaving Motown, the Jacksons signed with Epic, a label owned by CBS, so the TV crossover was inevitable. It featured five of the six Jackson brothers (Jermaine, who was married to Berry Gordy’s daughter, stayed with Motown) and three of the sisters, including Janet and LaToya. Michael Jackson is said to have hated the whole idea.

The Captain and Tennille (ABC, September 1976-March 1977). Executive-produced by Dick Clark, this show premiered at the Captain and Tennille’s peak moment of fame. Its belly-flop down the ratings ladder mirrored the duo’s fall from the record charts. Featured one of the most awesomely bad television moments of all time, previously showcased here.

The Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. Show (CBS, June-July 1977). That unwieldy name didn’t help this show succeed, although it featured Jay Leno and Tim Reid (later of WKRP in Cincinnati) in its cast. There’s almost certainly a joke to be made based on the title of the duo’s most famous song, “You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show),” but I can’t get the bat off my shoulder.

The Starland Vocal Band Show (CBS, July-September 1977). One of the oddest summer variety series of all time, featuring a musical group with no recognizable stars but a high-powered lineup of comedy regulars, including the ex-Firesign Theater team of Proctor and Bergman, a young David Letterman, and political satirist Mark Russell. The show featured a great deal of political humor, and according to Bego, was aimed at a college-aged audience. According to the website TV Party, it was the last summer replacement variety show to air until the Smothers Brothers’ brief return in the summer of 1988.

Pink Lady and Jeff (NBC, March-April 1980). One of the more notorious failures in TV history, featuring a Japanese duo who had scored a minor disco hit called “Kiss in the Dark.” Comedian Jeff Altman, who had been a cast member on The Starland Vocal Band Show, was on board to provide, well, English.

The last pop star to attempt a network variety show was Dolly Parton, whose splashy variety hour started out a smash in 1987 but pancaked within a few weeks of its premiere. The fragmenting of the audience, thanks to a wide universe of choices, made variety shows and their all-things-to-all-people ethos a tough sell. Every now and then, somebody tries one again. Usually, they bomb.

Top 5: Rock Me Tonite

September 1984 was quite a month. It was the height of my baseball geekery, and the Chicago Cubs were on their way to an unlikely division championship. Also that month—on the 1st—the radio station I was working for changed format, from soft AC to top 40. Unlike other format changes I’ve been involved in, which either got me fired or drastically changed my working life, this was one of the greatest thrills of my radio career. I was going to be the program director of a real rock ‘n’ roll station, and get paid for it. (Pay in the technical sense, if not in the having-money sense.) I blogged about the change several years ago, and I haven’t thought of anything else to add, except five of the songs that we started slammin’ on that weekend a quarter-century ago, and their positions on the Cash Box chart dated August 25, 1984:

5. “State of Shock”/Jacksons (down from 4). Despite being billed to the Jacksons, “State of Shock” is a duet between Michael and Mick Jagger, and a fairly pedestrian duet at that. But in the fall of 1984, there was never a chance it wasn’t going to be an enormous hit. (There’s a remarkable number of really lame videos for “State of Shock” at YouTube, and nothing that looks like an official video, so I picked this one.)

9. “Sunglasses at Night”/Corey Hart (up from 12). It seems to me that this song is joining Mr. Mister as a shorthand term for bad 80s rock. Like Mr. Mister, it doesn’t deserve it. If you are able to listen to “Sunglasses at Night” the way we heard it 25 years ago, you may be able to remember how well it fit in with the rest of the stuff on the radio at the time—and how it reflected the cultural moment when wearing shades after dark was not an uncommon way of making a fashion statement.

14. “Rock Me Tonite”/Billy Squier (up from 16). Although some people think the completely ridiculous video for “Rock Me Tonite” sunk Squier’s career, you don’t have to watch it—just listen. The refrain (“take me in your arms/roll me through the night”) and the monster riff that accompanies it were about as balls-to-the-wall as 80s radio rock ever got.

22. “Lights Out”/Peter Wolf (up from 24). The Lights Out album was an up-to-the-second 80s production, different from the down-n-dirty blues grooves Wolf and the J. Geils Band made famous, and the title track is another of the underrated radio records of the age. I’m convinced that Wolf is one of the most underrated figures in rock—his deep understanding of R&B and the blues informs nearly everything he’s ever recorded. (His 2002 album Sleepless is one of the best albums I’ve ever heard by anybody.) Not bad for an ex-radio DJ.

75. “The More You Live, the More You Love”/A Flock of Seagulls (up from 86). Of the four singles by AFOS to chart in Billboard between 1982 and 1984, this was the last and the least successful, failing to make the Top 40 at all, but it’s the one I’ve never been able to get out of my head. The lead guitar has a haunting urgency that’s clearly conveying something we’d better pay attention to. Also: the further we get from the ’80s, the dumber a lot of videos look (cf. “Rock Me Tonite”), so the fact that this one still holds up is becoming a greater achievement every day.

For more ’80s goodness, check this week’s Chart Attack! at Popdose.

We Get It Almost Every Night

From time to time, we give ourselves over to the shuffle gods and see which of the nearly 12,000 tracks in my laptop music stash will come up first. Despite the fact that the stash contains everything from Monty Python to John Coltrane to the Starland Vocal Band, there’s not a single train wreck on this list. Not to my ears, anyhow.

“Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)”/John Mellencamp. I have never found comparisons between Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen to be all that persuasive, and “Key West Intermezzo” doesn’t sound much like Springsteen, either. It does contain some lyric lines from Springsteen’s discard pile, though. For instance, “In the bone-colored dawn me and Gypsy Scotty are singing/The radio is playin’, she left her shoes out in the back.”

“Sugar Sugar”/Archies. Bubblegum music’s “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s no wonder that Archie would propose to Veronica—if somebody whispered “I’m gonna make your life so sweet” to you the way it’s whispered it here, you’d marry her too. Now I suppose it’s possible that it could be Betty singing that line . . .  but why am I so sure it’s Veronica? The video provides no evidence either way.

“Harlem Shuffle”/Booker T and the MGs. Originally recorded by Bob and Earl, whose recording just missed the Top 40 early in 1964, “Harlem Shuffle” was also famously covered by the Rolling Stones, plus the Righteous Brothers and by Edgar and Johnny Winter on a 1976 live album. The Booker T version was recorded sometime in the 60s at Stax, but not released until 1995.

“Is That News?”/Gypsy. A Minnesota band of the 1970s much beloved by people who remember them. Like whiteray at Echoes in the Wind.

“Engine Number 9″/Wilson Pickett. In which Pickett’s soul shouting meets some seriously burnin’ guitar under the direction of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. That something so hot was on Top 40 stations at the same time as “I Think I Love You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” leaves me woozy with delight.

“Joey”/Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. “A song about a restraining order,” as Grace puts it, and my favorite song on Nothing But the Water, the Nocturnals’ 2005 breakthrough album. The version that popped up today was recorded for Free at Noon, a live radio concert series produced by WXPN in Philadelphia; another version recorded in Birmingham, Alabama, is here.

“Coca-Cola Commercial”/Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. From a whole series of Coke spots I’ve collected, this jingle is sung about as well as anything else Marvin and Tammi did together.

“Barb’ Wire”/Jimmy McGriff. What the purpose of the apostrophe following “Barb” might be, I have no idea, but this is a pretty decent blues featuring Jimmy Ponder on guitar. Ponder played for several years with Hammond B3 player Charles Earland in addition to working with McGriff, and even on his own recordings as a bandleader, he frequently features the B3.

“I Got a Woman”/Johnny “Hammond” Smith. Another B3 player, less well-known than McGriff but still mighty mighty, doing the Ray Charles tune that mixed the secular with the sacred so successfully that some fans found it blasphemous. It closes Smith’s 1967 album Soul Flowers.

“Dancing in the Moonlight”/Boffalongo. For a long time, I knew this band only because they are name-checked during the fade on Reunion’s “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me).” As it turns out, they were the first band of Larry Hoppen, later of Orleans. One of his bandmates was Wells Kelly, also later of Orleans. Kelly’s brother, Sherman, joined Boffalongo in 1970, and brought a song along: “Dancing in the Moonlight.” It appeared on Boffalongo’s second album, Beyond Your Head, although it wasn’t added until a second pressing of the record, and Sherman Kelly doesn’t appear on any of the album’s other tracks.

Man, I love trivia like that.

“Engine Number 9″/Wilson Pickett (buy it here)

Days to Remember

It is a late-August morning in 1965. I am standing at the screen door, clutching the only item I am required to take to kindergarten on the first day: a red-and-blue plastic mat to lie on during “resting time.” The door has one of those aluminum grates in it, a letter “B” in the middle, and I am peering outside between the bars. As I wait for the unfamiliar school bus to intrude on the familiar view through the window, the world seems a lot bigger than it ever had before.

I would attend kindergarten, first grade, and half of second grade in a classic early-20th century public school building, brick on the outside, wood and granite tile inside, huge windows, bulbous yellow suspended light fixtures. I know now that it was a normal, human-sized building, but in my memory, perspective is distorted—ceilings are a mile high, hallways are yards wide, and I’m a tiny creature looking up from very close to the floor. Which, in fact, I was. At semester break in second grade—January 1968—I moved to a brand-new building, one with all the features of enlightened 1960s design: carpet on the floors, soft lighting, and bubblers in every room (which was the thing that impressed my friends and me the most). I would spend the next four-plus years there.

A memorable day in that building came on the first day of fourth grade, 40 years ago this month (this week? Today?). My new teacher, Mrs. Goodmiller, told us about a student in our class, David, who was new in our school. She said he had just recovered from open-heart surgery. (I am guessing that he had transferred to our school because it didn’t have any stairs to climb.) On that day, I decided that I would make friends with David. We would go through a lot together—and put each other through a lot—in the coming years. We fought, rebuilt our friendship, fought again, rebuilt again. He would be my college roommate for a while, and a groomsman in my wedding. His heart trouble finally killed him at age 23, and I’ve never had another friend so close.

First day of junior high, first day of high school, first day of classes in college (both times)—not so vivid. A lot has disappeared down the memory hole, and I sometimes mourn the loss of it. When I see kids lined up at the bus stop, there’s something inside me that wants to say to them, “Make sure you remember everything.” But it’s an impulse not worth acting upon. First of all, you can’t remember everything. And second, when you’re five or nine (or 12, or 14, or 18), only one thing would seem more absurd to you than the idea that your days are worth remembering: the amount of time you’ll someday spend remembering those days that once seemed so forgettable.

I tried to find a song from 1965, 1968, or 1969 to complement this post, or something about remembering, or even school buses, but nothing really fit. So here’s one I’ve put up before. It always makes me think of Dave, and since a reader in California shared his memory of it via e-mail just last week, it’ll work.

“Dancin’ Man”/Q (buy digital version here along with other 70s and 80s dance tracks, some in extended versions)

More Radio Relics

Last December I blogged about a series called Psychedelic Promos and Radio Spots. It’s a vast collection of radio ephemera from the mid-to-late 1960s—commercials, station promos, jock bits, and even a few newscast excerpts.  The collection opens a unique window into 60s pop culture, giving us a chance to hear what went on between the hits that are still so familiar 40 years later. Here’s another taste of it:

We’re Only in It for the Money: In 1963, before they were famous, the Rolling Stones recorded a jingle for Rice Krispies cereal that was used on a European TV ad. In late 1968, after a string of hit records, Neil Diamond cut a spot for Buick. Later, he did another for Coca-Cola, at a time when Coke was signing up everybody from Ray Charles to the Who to sing variations on “Things go better with Coke.”

We’re in It to Serve the Public: Around 1967, the Who also did a recruitment PSA for the United States Air Force, which seems deeply strange, given that they’re English. Sometime around 1968, Bob Seger recorded one too. Also from the public service file: the audio from a January 1968 episode of Dragnet turned into a campy anti-LSD PSA.

We’re Not Sure Why We Did It: The Four Seasons did a spot on behalf of Brunswick, the bowling equipment manufacturer, encouraging you to take up bowling. “Take your baby out tonight and you’ll be scoring high,” they sing, but I’ll bet the kids didn’t hear it the way Brunswick meant it.

We’re Saving Us All Some Time: For a time, WCFL in Chicago produced “capsule countdowns,” in which they ran through the top 10 songs on the weekly survey in 90 seconds. The collection includes one from the week of February 2, 1967.

We Are Not Impressed: There’s an audio clip of what was presumably the lead story on NBC-TV’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report from what must be Sunday, August 17, 1969, talking about Woodstock. The clip illustrates the media’s preferred narrative over that weekend—that the festival was clearly a disaster for the poor town of Bethel, but the silly, long-haired, drug-addled kids kept coming “for reasons that baffle most of their elders, if not betters.” Oooh, snap.

I’ve posted the Woodstock report as a separate file here, but the rest of the spots mentioned in this post are in the zip file below. Enjoy.

NBC News Woodstock report, 1969
Miscellaneous promos and radio spots zip file (about 9.35 MB)

Top 5: Cats Lost and Found

When your cat goes out but doesn’t come back in, or a stray dog comes begging at your back door, do you call your local radio station and ask them to announce it? Almost certainly not. But there was a time when people commonly did so, and radio stations were happy to read lost-pet announcements—and not just in small towns, either. Take a look at the survey from KFRC in San Francisco dated August 21, 1972. Stations frequently sold advertising on the back page of the weekly music survey, but without an ad, a station promo would do. And on this particular week, KFRC promoted this:

KFRC Petline
982-1552
Call day or night
If you have lost your pet or found someone else’s animal friend, we will try to help.

You’d get a call—sometimes from a child—reporting that their dog was lost. It could be heartbreaking to take the description and the dog’s name, and promise to read the announcement, all the while knowing that the odds of someone hearing the announcement and finding the animal as a result were slim. We also took pet-found announcements. The likelihood of reuniting pet with owner probably wasn’t any higher than with lost-pet announcements, but they were easier to take.

This sort of public service announcement was once just the tip of the iceberg. Thirty years ago (!), when I was at KDTH in Dubuque, we kept a Rolodex full of other announcements for the jocks to read whenever there was time (like when you needed to fill a little time before the network news). Chicken barbecues, church bazaars, boy-scout fundraisers, craft shows—if you sent us the details, we’d put the announcement into the rotation.

I don’t know why the community-calendar/lost-animal PSA fell by the wayside, but by the mid-80s, it had. I don’t remember reading many of them after Dubuque, but I also don’t remember why we stopped. Maybe the demand for announcements started to exceed the supply of time, or the value of the time became just too great to give away. Maybe it’s that many of the events were of limited interest and promoting them made us sound cheesy and small-time. But it occurs to me now that for making a station sound plugged-in to its community, you could scarcely do better. Any individual announcement didn’t get on much, but in the aggregate, it sounded like the station knew everything that was happening everywhere. And when members of the sponsoring organization—or the owner of the missing cat—heard their announcement, even if they heard it only once, they felt as though the station really cared about them, and by extension, the community.

Here are five songs you would have heard between the lost-pet bulletins on KFRC in late August of 1972:

7. “You’re Still a Young Man”/Tower of Power (down from 5). “You’re Still a Young Man” was the first hit single for the Bay Area’s kick-ass horn band. In an era when Chicago was still big and BS&T not long gone, the failure of Tower of Power to make a greater national impact is hard to figure.

8. “My Ding-a-Ling”/Chuck Berry (debut). The biggest hit of Berry’s career, and exactly the same shame it would be if the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” were better remembered than “Yesterday.”

12. “Baby Let Me Take You”/Detroit Emeralds (up from 18). On the radio, the little guitar figure that starts this record sounded great out of a jingle. I blogged about the Detroit Emeralds here a couple of years ago; you can hear “Baby Let Me Take You” here.

23. “Motorcycle Mama”/Sailcat (up from 25). One of those hippies-on-the-road songs that once were everywhere, like hippies on the road themselves. Here they are performing it on American Bandstand and talking with Dick Clark. The video quality is awful, but you’ll get the idea.

NEW. “Dinah Flo”/Boz Scaggs. Another Bay-Area musician gets on Bay-Area radio. Boz has been around longer than most people think. He was on his fourth album in 1972, and was still four years removed from Silk Degrees—although “Dinah Flo” would have fit nicely on that album.