Top 5: Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me?

I haven’t got a good opening paragraph for this post, so let’s just go with some Top Fives, from 16, 24, 32, 40, and 48 years ago this week.

Cash Box, week of October 30, 1993:
1. “Just Kickin’ It”/XScape
2. “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”/Meat Loaf
3. “Dreamlover”/Mariah Carey
4. “All That She Wants”/Ace of Base
5. “The River of Dreams”/Billy Joel

Comment: It shocks me to realize that the only one of these songs I wouldn’t mind hearing again is the one by Ace of Base, although I remember digging “The River of Dreams” at the time. Now, however, feh.

Cash Box, week of October 26, 1985:
1. “Take on Me”/a-ha
2. “Money for Nothing”/Dire Straits
3. “Part-Time Lover”/Stevie Wonder
4. “Miami Vice Theme”/Jan Hammer
5. “Saving All My Love for You”/Whitney Houston

Comment: These, too, were part of the soundtrack on that memorable Halloween night of ’85. If you wanted to pick a single musical week that typified the 1980s, you could do worse than this one.

WLS, Chicago, week of October 29, 1977:
1. “You Light Up My Life”/Debby Boone
2. “Star Wars-Cantina Band”/Meco
3. “Nobody Does it Better”/Carly Simon
4. “Do Ya Wanna Get Funky With Me”/Peter Brown
5. “Keep It Comin’ Love”/KC & the Sunshine Band

Comment: The theme song from the most enduring movie of the 1970s becomes an enormous hit, but in a disco version. That fact tells you pretty much all you need to know about the 1970s.

WHBQ/Memphis, week of October 25, 1969:
1. “Something”-”Come Together”/Beatles
2. “Baby It’s You”/Smith
3. “Lady Jane”/Plastic Cow
4. “Take a Letter Maria”/R. B. Greaves
5. “Smile a Little Smile for Me”/Flying Machine

Comment: “Plastic Cow” is actually derived from the title of the album The Plastic Cow Goes Moooog, a synthesizer record by Mike Melvoin, the veteran composer, producer, arranger, and musician. “Lady Jane” is the Rolling Stones tune. Also included on the album: covers of “Spinning Wheel,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” “One,” and the least bad-ass versions of “Born to Be Wild” and “Sunshine of Your Love” in the history of the world. Neither the original “Born to Be Wild” nor the original “Sunshine of Your Love” strike me quite as bad-ass, however, as “Baby It’s You”:

Cash Box, week of October 28, 1961:
1. “Runaround Sue”/Dion
2. “Big Bad John”/Jimmy Dean
3. “Hit the Road Jack”/Ray Charles
4. “Bristol Stomp”/Dovells
5. “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)”/Sue Thompson

Comment: Three iconic hits at the top, plus the Dovells, a Philadelphia group that counted one Len Borisoff among its members; he later changed his name to Len Barry and recorded his own iconic hit, “1-2-3.” Sue Thompson was a combination breathy/twangy singer who scored a couple of pop hits, “Sad Movies” and the painful “Norman,” before settling into a country career.

Recommended Reading: As we watch October turn to November this weekend, check whiteray’s terrific essay on autumn: “I think the season may be both gift and obligation at the same time. If autumn does have a price, though, it’s not just winter’s winds. I think that price is closely related to the weight of autumns gone by.” I wish I’d written that. The post includes several evocative tunes from the autumn of 1975 as well, and there’s not a plastic cow among ‘em.

“Sunshine of Your Love”/Mike Melvoin (out of print)

Three Minutes

The standard length of a pop song has long been considered three minutes, even though pop songs haven’t consistently been three minutes long for a generation or more. The creep began in the 70s—American Top 40 went from a three-hour show to a four-hour show in October 1978 because the records were getting so long—and it’s continued to this day. But if brevity is the soul of wit, it must also be the soul of music. Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic singles, for instance, practically none longer than 2:50 and some as short as 2:05. So anyway: Here’s a random selection of songs from my music stash that run between 2:59 and 3:01. Your mileage may vary—the length of an mp3 does not necessarily correspond to the official timing on a record—but this is what I’ve got.

“My Baby Loves Lovin’”/White Plains. One of the mighty quartet of Tony Burrows records that ran the charts early in 1970. Hear it here, then check the version Elton John recorded for an album of soundalike hits released scant weeks before he became a star.

“Celebrate”/Three Dog Night. Written by Gary Bonner and Allan Gordon, who also wrote “Happy Together” and “She’d Rather Be With Me,” and featuring all three of the group’s singers, Danny Hutton, Cory Wells, and Chuck Negron. Live performance from Soundstage here.

“I’m Only Sleeping”/Beatles. Features backward guitar lines played by George, and differences between the mono and stereo versions, if Wikipedia can be believed.

“God, Love and Rock and Roll”/Teegarden and Van Winkle. One of my favorite one-hit wonders, and one we’ve discussed here before. Listen here, where it’s preceded by a classic CKLW shotgun jingle

“People Get Ready”/Kenny Rankin. The Impressions song, from Silver Morning, by the singer/songwriter who died earlier this year.

“Sad Day”/Rolling Stones. The B-side of “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and a pretty good song.

“Invisible Man”/Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators. You’d swear this group is from the days of the three-minute pop song, but their album Keep Reachin’ Up was actually recorded in 2005.

“Warm Love”/Otis Clay. From a 2003 Van Morrison tribute album featuring various R&B stars, including Little Milton, Bettye Lavette, Eddie Floyd, Ellis Hooks, and others. The original is from Hard Nose the Highway, and is very fine indeed.

“Don’t Ask Me Why”/Billy Joel. I was never quite sure what this Latin-flavored earworm was doing on what was supposed to be Billy Joel’s hard-rock album, Glass Houses, but it’s harmless.

“They Don’t Know”/Tracey Ullman. Now THIS is a three-minute pop song. Although the video cuts off a few seconds early, it goes on long enough for a special guest to appear.

Pressure Night

When the sales rep first handed the radio station’s rate card to the client, he burst out laughing. The rep sat there mortified, and her mortification got even worse when the client called to his partner in the outer office, “Come on in here! You’ve got to see this!” She thought they were laughing because the cost of the spots was too high. In fact, they were laughing because they’d come to town from Dallas, and they couldn’t believe how cheap it was to get on the radio in Macomb, Illinois.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Some relationships between radio stations and clients are just business. With this particular client, the bar in one of the local hotels, it was synergy. We were the lone Top-40 station in a college town, so they benefited from being on our air all the time; when they became the hottest party place in town as a result, we benefited from our association with them. They’d run a hefty schedule every week plugging whatever they were doing on the weekend. One of their most unusual promotions was called Pressure Night. Starting at 9:00, tap beer would be 25 cents, and the taps would continue to be 25 cents . . . until somebody used the restroom, then it was back to full price. (It would usually last about 20 minutes, and the person who broke the seal would usually be somebody who was clueless about the whole thing.)

Often, what the bar was doing on the weekend involved us. We’d frequently do a live broadcast from the place on Friday or Saturday nights, and the remote breaks always sounded great because it was clear on the air that the place was packed. Among those having the most fun: the radio crew. The bartenders were under orders to take good care of us, and during a postgame party one football Saturday, I realized around the midpoint of the broadcast that I’d had far too much to drink for somebody who had to be on the radio. On future remotes, I resolved to stick to diet soda until I was completely off the air.

On Halloween Night 1985, the weather was miserable. It had been raining all day, the wind was whistling, and the temperature was in the mid 40s. We weren’t expecting very many people to venture out on such an awful night, particularly in costume, yet venture they did. By 10:00, the bar was full and the party was raging. Even I was in costume that night, sort of. I’d bet a friend that the Chicago Cubs would finish ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1985; the loser of the bet had to be photographed in public wearing a T-shirt of the winner’s team. The Cardinals lost the World Series that season; the Cubs, after their miracle 1984, finished fourth. So there I was, in a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt and a mask of Bob Uecker, the former Cardinal-turned-broadcaster.

Somewhere in my archives I have a tape of the remote we did that night, and it sounds like the greatest blowout in the history of mankind. (This may have been before the institution of my no-drinking-on-remote rule.) At some point during the night, we learned that the other bars in town, some of which had promoted their Halloween events on our air, were dead. We had the only real party in town.

In 1985, radio was what I lived to do. The fact that I made practically no money doing it couldn’t have mattered less. When I was in a crowd with a mike and a set of headphones, where everybody knew who I was, it felt like the only thing in the world worth doing. It wouldn’t long before I’d begin to imagine that there were other things in the world worth doing, too. But on that rainy night, the radio station’s success felt like a personal triumph, and it was as intoxicating as anything the bartenders could have served me.

Here’s a song we probably played on the radio that night. If the DJ had played it in the bar, we’d have had ourselves a singalong.

Erratum: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is on ABC tonight. Yesterday’s post said it was on last night, because this is not a very good blog, really. But you ought to have the show on DVD anyhow.

Recommended Reading: Today at WNEW.com in Rock 101, just where the hell did “Monster Mash” come from, anyhow?

Never Jump Into a Pile of Leaves With a Wet Sucker

It’s 50 years this week since Charles Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin in his Peanuts comic strip, and it’s 43 years tonight since It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was first broadcast on CBS. Every time I watch the show, I wonder how much of it goes sailing over the heads not merely of today’s kids, but of their parents’, too.

“I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.” Never mind the vocabulary itself; today, placing such high stakes on sincerity versus hypocrisy seems about as quaint as worrying about the commercialization of Christmas, which is the point around which A Charlie Brown Christmas revolves.

There’s a lot to love about The Great Pumpkin—the early scenes featuring golden fall leaves are gorgeous, and all throughout the show the backgrounds are rich with shades of gray and purple. And of course, there’s the music. Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, the soundtrack features of Vince Guaraldi’s cool, contemporary jazz. The choice to score the Christmas special with jazz hadn’t pleased CBS when that special was first delivered, but its success ensured that all future specials would feature the same sort of thing.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the third animated Peanuts special, following A Charlie Brown Christmas and the little-seen Charlie Brown’s All Stars, and like its two predecessors, it was among the highest-rated programs on television the week it aired—nearly 50 percent of the viewing audience watched the show that night. It won’t draw that kind of numbers when it’s rebroadcast on ABC tonightWednesday night, although it does well enough. If you plan to watch tonight, keep in mind that when the show was originally produced in 1966, it ran 25 minutes. The standard for commercial TV today is 21 or 22, and sometimes less in “children’s” programming, so you won’t be seeing the whole thing. According to Wikipedia, ABC once cut out the scene in which Lucy tries to get Charlie Brown to kick the football, one of the classic bits in the history of the Peanuts strip. That’s like trying to shorten “Stairway to Heaven” by taking out the guitar solo.

Recommended Reading: Speaking of holiday perennials, on Halloween night 1968, WKBW Radio in Buffalo broadcast a version of The War of the Worlds updated for the Top-4o era. They thought nobody would panic—but they were wrong. Also, at WNEW.com: This Week in Rock History.

“The Great Pumpkin Waltz”/Vince Guaraldi (buy it here; buy It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown here)

Late Games

I’ve often said of my father than he’s a fan of the Green Bay Packers the same way he’s a Methodist—not flashy, not demonstrative, but in the pew every Sunday. And when I was a kid, sports fandom was acquired in the same way religious affiliation was acquired—it was a family thing. And so we’d hustle home from the Methodist church on autumn Sundays at noon to attend services of a different sort, from Lambeau Field or Soldier Field (or Wrigley Field) or wherever they might be taking place.

My first season of full-scale Packer fandom was 1969, the first second year of the post-Lombardi era, when the team retained a few names from the glory years of the 1960s, but the results weren’t the same. Throughout the 1970s, the teams were generally mediocre, but there was never a question of abandoning them to root for another. And I’m guessing that most other fans of mediocre teams in those years felt the same way. Today, the ubiquity of televised games make it possible for anyone anywhere to root for a winner (which explains the proliferation of Yankees, Red Sox, and Duke basketball fans across the country). Not so back then. We had our teams, and we watched them, even on their bad days, even when bad days were many.

At 3:00, the second game of the day kicked off. Then as now, the late game usually involved two of the better teams in the league. In the 1970s, that was generally the Dallas Cowboys, Pittsburgh Steelers, or Oakland Raiders. Thinking back on those games, the image that returns is of late autumn, when it starts getting dark just after 4:00 in Wisconsin, the darkness falling over the house I grew up in, the TV glowing with sunlight from a game in Oakland or Denver or San Diego. I have written before of the way I remember that house as an oasis of light in the darkness, and this memory is another example.

We grow up, we move away from home, we live in new places, we acquire new rituals. The Sunday doubleheader game isn’t what it used to be. (For one thing, it’s no longer the last game of the day since the dubious innovation of the nationally televised Sunday night game, and for another it sometimes features the Packers, as it will this coming Sunday, as it rarely did back then.) But an autumn Sunday rarely passes that I don’t think about how I used to watch the games.

Recommended, If You Dare: At Kliph Nesteroff’s Classic Television Showbiz, check out The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, broadcast October 29, 1976. It stars Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz), Betty White, Florence Henderson, Tim Conway, Donny and Marie Osmond, and KISS. In the fourth segment of the show, they lip-synch their then-current hit, “Beth” and “King of the Nighttime World,” which is appropriately bad-ass, complete with Gene spitting fire. KISS also performed “Detroit Rock City,” but it’s been edited from the YouTube version—KISS enters at the end of segment three, but that’s all we see. (A separate video of the performance exists at YouTube, but the audio has been removed.) The excruciating finale, featuring Lynde’s vocal on “Disco Lady,” is indescribable 70s kitsch. That’s actually an apt description of the whole show, which is available on DVD nevertheless. How did KISS ever remain cool after this? (Much more about the show and the DVD is here.)

Top 5: It Only Takes a Minute

I’ve been a DJ for most of my life, whether it was the imaginary radio station in my bedroom when I was 11, college radio, the years I spent getting a full-time paycheck, or the more recent years I’ve done my four and hit the door. Even during the nine years I was out of radio entirely from the mid 90s to the mid 00s, I couldn’t help talking over records in the car like my Top-40 heroes of old. So why did it take me until yesterday, after five-plus years at this blog, to shut up and play the hits?

This first one is one of the best autumn songs I know. On this live version (the song was originally on the radio this week in 1974), some famous folks show up at the end to provide backing vocals and rock some 70s fashions.

Billy Preston’s original “Nothing From Nothing” is one of the most economical records in pop history, streaking out of the gate and taking less than 2:30 to get to the fade, and I’ve always wished it went on longer. On this live performance from the 1980s, it does—about 6 1/2 minutes altogether, as Billy introduces his band.

The fall of 1975 may have marked the peak of Top 40 misogyny—on the chart at the same time you had Elton John’s “Island Girl,” a song about a prostitute that tries to take an admiring tone but misses (and is racist to boot), and Elton’s collaboration with Neil Sedaka on “Bad Blood,” in which Neil sings that “woman was born to lie” and “the bitch is in the smile.” And that fills this video with all sorts of contradictions. His backup singers both appear positively thrilled to be part of this smackdown of their gender, and Sedaka comes off as such a dweeb that it’s clear either one of them could kick his ass.

An alternate viewpoint—quite nearly an answer song—was on the radio at precisely the same time. It’s here. Meanwhile, back here on the show, the Brothers Johnson get on down in a video that seems to have been partly shot through a lens smeared with chocolate pudding.

Veteran TV director Louis J. Horvitz would have gotten away with it if the clip below didn’t include a credit roll from its original source, an episode of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert broadcast in October 1975. But now we know he’s responsible for giving us as many shots of the Tavares brothers from the back as from the front, and we know how much he loves the circular wipe. LOUIE FOR CHRISSAKES STAY ON A SINGLE SHOT FOR MORE THAN FIVE SECONDS DAMMIT

Mighty good song, though.