Six Hundred Words, Typed

I’m not a Luddite, but I don’t consider myself a gadget guy, either. I have a smart phone, but most of the time, it’s a glorified pocket watch. I don’t text, I am always forgetting that the thing has a camera on it, and even though it can play music, I don’t use it for that. (I am of the tribe that believes music needs to be in the air and that the perpetual wearing of earbuds is one of the more annoying affectations of the 21st century; besides, they’re uncomfortable.) My phone has a QWERTY keyboard because I was unfit for polite society when I tried to do e-mail and Facebook with the 10-key pad. But I barely do e-mail or Facebook on my phone often enough to justify what the capability costs every month. Nevertheless, just as I found myself intrigued by the iPhone, I am similarly intrigued by the iPad.

Amidst all the breathless commentary on what the thing can do, few people have bothered to notice what it can’t do—pick up radio stations. As recently as 15 or 20 years ago, if you’d designed the sort of all-everything device the iPad appears to be, it almost certainly would have included a tuner. Although you can get an iPhone app that allow you to listen to satellite radio, and Clear Channel has its own app that allows a user to stream its radio stations, top-down, we-program-and-you-listen radio is pretty much an afterthought in the new media world. Jerry Del Colliano has been preaching this for a long time, and he wrote about it again this week, before the iPad unveiling and after. Del Colliano maintains that radio has to reinvent itself for an on-demand world or risk going the way of high-button shoes and buggy whips. Key stat: Only about three percent of terrestrial radio listening is coming from Internet streams.

Since this is Friday and I’m used to putting up a Top Five here on Fridays, let’s call those Del Colliano links #1.

2. What’s most tragic about the consolidation-driven job losses in the radio biz is that they take out the kind of people the industry was built on and can’t do without. Like this one—who’s nobody famous, but didn’t have to be.

3. Not long after I discovered Tom Nawrocki’s terrific One Poor Correspondent, he decided to 86 it. But I’m glad to report that Tom’s back and blogging with a couple of cohorts at Debris Slide, so start reading it already.

4. I’ve had a long Internet relationship with Jeff at AM, Then FM, going back to an e-mailed Packers newsletter he published nearly 15 years ago. I’ve always dug his economical style. Sometimes, a few words is all it takes—as in his tribute to a friend and colleague who died suddenly this week at age 38. That’s writing. What I do here is just typing.

5. And because I don’t want to leave you without a record chart to conjure with over the weekend, check this one from WYSL in Buffalo dated January 26, 1976, particularly the album chart. There were giants in the earth in those days: the bazillion-selling greatest hits albums from America and Chicago, the Alive album from KISS, Still Crazy After All These Years, and Bob Dylan’s Desire atop the chart. It was on its way to Number One in Billboard, too, and would be the last Dylan album to reach Number One on the Billboard album chart until Modern Times in 2006. Although “Hurricane” was the bigger single, “Mozambique” would get to Number 54 on the Hot 100 later in the spring of 1976. According to the Wikipedia entry for the album, “Mozambique” came about when Dylan and collaborator Jacques Levy tried to see how many rhymes they could create for the syllable -ique.

The Easiest Road to Fame and Fortune

. . . is to have yourself a hit record and become a star. It helps, however, to have more than one, which few of the performers you’ll read about here were able to do. This is the second part of a series about the one-hit wonders whose lone claim to fame peaked at Number 96. (The first part is here.)

“Slipin’ and Slidin’”/Jim & Monica (1/25/64, two weeks on chart). It looks if the Jim in Jim and Monica is Jimmy Gilmer of the Fireballs, famed for “Sugar Shack,” which would still have been on the radio in January 1964 after a run at the top in late ’63. “Slipin’ and Slidin’,” a cover of the Little Richard song, was big in Chicago, charting high on several radio stations there, and its title is correctly misspelled here.

“Gator Tails and Monkey Ribs”/The Spats (9/26/64, one week on chart). Before hearing it, you might guess (as I did) that this is a blues number, but it’s actually standard-issue California teenage rock ‘n’ roll. The Spats gigged at Disneyland before cutting this extremely minor hit, which got them (and their dubious choreography) on American Bandstand, where Dick Clark ran into some trouble with the title. I can’t embed the video, but you can see it here. The Spats would later appear on the TV show My Mother the Car as themselves. Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

“Goldfinger”/Jack Laforge (3/20/65, five weeks on chart). LaForge was a pianist and record executive who ran his own label specializing in what Billboard called “‘class’ material, at a time when the easiest road to fame and fortune is usually via the hard-rock releases turned out with increasing intensity.” This was presumably a classy version of the James Bond movie theme, and almost certainly not very much like . . .

“Girl on the Billboard”/Del Reeves (6/26/65, one week on chart). Reeves scored eight Top 10 hits on the country chart between 1961 and 1971, but he was a 40-year star of the Grand Ole Opry. He also hosted a TV show for four years around the turn of the 1970s, The Del Reeves Country Carnival, which you may have seen if you lived in flyover country. He was a successful songwriter and later, a record executive at least partly responsible for discovering Billy Ray Cyrus. Many of his hits became trucker’s anthems, and none was more successful than “Girl on the Billboard,” which went to Number One on the country charts and crossed over to pop on its novelty value.

“Come Share the Good Times With Me”/Julie Monday (8/27/66, two weeks on chart). And I thought Wyatt (Earp) McPherson was obscure—we know his whole life story compared to what we know about Julie Monday, which is to say we know nothing. She had a catch in her voice like Melanie and jumped octaves like Joni Mitchell on “Come Share the Good Times With Me,” which did pretty well in Cleveland and Detroit, at least.

“Every Day and Every Night”/Trolls (10/22/66, one week on chart). A four-man garage band from Chicago, the Trolls recorded five singles between 1966 and 1968, starting with “Every Day and Every Night,” which rose to Number Two in Opelika, Alabama. One source I’ve found says that Ken Cortese, the booking agent killed in the plane crash that took Jim Croce in 1973, was a former member of the group. (These Trolls should not be confused with another group of Trolls, who were from Colorado and who are best known, I guess, for covering the Rolling Stones’”Stupid Girl.”)

“Hi Hi Hazel”/Gary & the Hornets (11/26/66, two weeks on chart). Three brothers from Ohio, aged 13, 11, and 6. Their greatest claim to fame may have been appearing on the TV music show Where the Action Is in late December 1966. (There’s a YouTube video of the group performing the song on TV, with an introduction by Tommy Roe. I don’t think it’s from Where the Action Is, but I dunno. The video doesn’t seem to play very well, but you can try it here.) It’s either that or having recorded “There’s a Kind of Hush” before Herman’s Hermits did.

In the next installment, some artists you actually have heard of, real and fictional.

Recommended Reading: Dick Orkin, creator of the radio shorts Chickenman and the Tooth Fairy and dozens of radio spots you’ve heard over the years, has asked the National Association of Broadcasters’ Hall of Fame to remove his plaque. Find out why here.

“Girl on the Billboard”/Del Reeves (buy it here, I think; many of the Del Reeves recordings in print are new versions and not the originals, but I believe the mp3 album found at this link contains original recordings)

Fried Onions and Deep-Voiced Cats

Last fall we started fooling around in the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 looking for songs that peaked at Number 100, then 99, 98, and 97. Billboard itself explored that region recently, although its post (the first in a series) picks the best song to peak at each number regardless of whether the performer has had one hit or dozens. We’re interested here in the one-hit wonders, the artists who crossed the line from obscurity into history just one time, and briefly. The list for Number 96 is mighty crowded: 30 one-hit wonders topped out there between 1958 and 1979, so it’s going to take us a while to get through them all.

“Fried Onions”/Lord Rockingham’s XI (10/6/58, one week on chart). Lord Rockingham’s XI was created to be the house band on Oh Boy!, Britain’s first TV show aimed at teenage pop fans, which first aired in 1958. (A handful of episodes were broadcast on American TV in the summer of 1959.) “Fried Onions” failed to chart in the UK, but another single, “Hoots Mon,” would do three weeks at the top of the UK charts at the end of 1958.

“Everyone Was There”/Bob Kayli (11/17/58, two weeks on chart). Bob Kayli was born Robert Gordy, and was the younger brother of Motown impresario Berry Gordy. According to an odd little entry at Allmusic.com, Kayli’s career screeched to a halt when he started making live appearances and people found out he was black. After “Everyone Was There,” he cut but one other side for Motown before taking a job behind the scenes at the label, eventually ending up as the head of Jobete Music, Motown’s publishing arm.

“The Search”/Dean Reed (3/2/59, one week on chart). Fifty years ago, Dean Reed was marketed as a teen idol, but it didn’t take. He moved to South America in the 1960s and became a star there. By the early 70s, he had become a Marxist and settled in East Germany, although he never renounced his American citizenship. In 1986, he gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which he defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and compared Ronald Reagan to Josef Stalin. Six weeks later, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances near East Berlin. Called by some the Red Elvis, Dean’s story is told in the book Comrade Rockstar by Reggie Nadelson.

“Don’t Forget I Love You”/Butanes (8/28/61, three weeks on chart). In the early 60s, there was a revival of interest in the doo-wop sound that had passed out of favor only four or five years before. In 1961, Billboard described “Don’t Forget I Love You” thusly: “A deep-voiced cat chants the rhythm figure ‘yip yip yip’ as the boys develop a sort of Coasters-type sound in the rhythm outing. Better material would be a help here.” Ooh, snap.

“The Little Drummer Boy”/Jack Halloran Singers (12/25/61, one week on chart). Halloran had a lengthy career in what Billboard and other trade publications liked to call “good music.’ He had sung on TV with a vocal quartet in the 1950s, he arranged Dean Martin’s recording of “Volare” and worked on Martin’s TV show, he directed the orchestra and chorus on several Bing Crosby albums, and he was even a member of the Ray Conniff Singers. Halloran had first crack at “The Little Drummer Boy” in 1957, but couldn’t get his recording out in time for Christmas; the next year, the Harry Simeone Chorale version became an eternal classic.

“Duchess of Earl”/Pearlettes (3/17/62, two weeks on chart). This is, of course, an answer song to Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl,” which was in the Top 10 of the Hot 100 during the Pearlettes’ two-week run near the bottom. Unlike some answer songs, which try to respond, cleverly or otherwise, to the original, “Duchess of Earl” is basically “Duke of Earl” with minor changes to the lyric.

“I Know, I Know”/”Pookie” Hudson (5/25/63, one week on chart). James “Pookie” Hudson had been lead singer of the Spaniels, who recorded the doo-wop classic “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” in 1954. “I Know, I Know” has some lovely production touches, including a rhythm figure that sounds like drops of falling water and one verse punctuated by chimes.

Coming next time, whenever that is: Dick Clark gets confused by a title, and a novelty song that topped the country charts squeezes onto our list.

If you’d like to read the other posts in this series, I have gone back and categorized them under “Down in the Bottom,” mostly because “Bottom Feeders” is already taken. In other blog news, whiteray is back on the case with another iteration of Echoes in the Wind, reposting his archives. And at WNEW.com, I present a further meditation on 8-track tapes.

Guarantees

Over the weekend the NFL Network repeated the television broadcast of Super Bowl III, when the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 16-7. It was the first win for the AFL in the Super Bowl, and it came after Joe Namath had guaranteed the Jets would win despite being three-touchdown underdogs. Some of the magnitude of the upset has been lost with the passage of time, so it’s worth remembering that the 1968 Colts were one of the most dominant teams in NFL history, and no way in hell should the Jets have won the game, even as good as they were. As the TV broadcast begins, even the NBC announcers, who had covered the AFL all year, seem certain that Namath had talked too much and a Colts win is inevitable. By early in the third quarter, when the Jets have lived up to Namath’s guarantee and put the game out of reach despite a score of only 13-0, they’re convinced that the Jets are for real—and so was everybody watching.

I was not yet nine years old on the day of Super Bowl III, and 1969 was going to be my first full year of sports fandom. I dimly understood the magnitude of the upset, although it was brought home to me more clearly the next morning when the guy on the local radio station, reading the game story, said “Every player in the National Football League is embarrassed this morning.” When I got to school, all of my friends were talking about the game. We were all Packer fans, so we knew a little about the Colts, but none of us knew much about the Jets at all. The very names of the players seemed exotic to us. The name that really captured our imaginations wasn’t Joe Namath, however—it was Jets fullback Emerson Boozer.

Two years later, the Colts finally won the Super Bowl, beating the Dallas Cowboys 16-13 on a last-second field goal. It was January 1971, midway through fifth grade. As I recall, we were doing a unit in reading class that required groups of us to put together radio news broadcasts and perform them in front of the class. My group did ours shortly after the Super Bowl—I remember it as being the day after the game, but I don’t know if that’s accurate—and I can see myself sitting at a table in front of the class reading sports stories, including one about the Colts’ Super Bowl victory. While my classmates stuck carefully to their scripts, I was throwing in ad libs, and it couldn’t have been long after that before I decided that I wanted to be on the radio for real. Perhaps that was guaranteed, too.

A Word About the Football Yesterday: Green Bay Packer fans who couldn’t define the word schadenfreude yesterday know what it is this morning. All season, we’ve waited for our former quarterback to throw one of those hideous, game-changing interceptions of his. That it cost one of our most hated rivals their most important game in 11 years makes it even schadenfreudier. And now, Minnesota Vikings fans get to experience Brett Favre’s offseason Hamlet act for themselves. Enjoy.

Other Stuff and Things: The Internet police shut down Echoes in the Wind again over the weekend, so whiteray is offline. (Not only that, but the man is a lifelong Viking fan, so no matter how crappy your weekend may have been, his was worse.) Whether he’s off temporarily or permanently is yet to be seen. Hoping to escape the depredations of the Internet police, Funky16Corners has a new home here. Over at SHH/Peaceful, Kinky Paprika listens to the American Top 40 countdown from this week in 1976. Later this week right here: A further examination of the one-hit wonders at the bottom of the Hot 100.

Top 5: So Hold My Hand Already

It’s worth remembering that the Billboard Hot 100, authoritative as it is, was usually a couple of weeks behind what was actually happening on the street back in the day. Exhibit A: the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which debuted on the Billboard chart dated January 18, 1964, at Number 45. By then, however, in cities across the country, Beatlemania had already left Billboard in the dust.

The earliest charts at ARSA showing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” are both from Buffalo, where WGR and WKBW charted it as a “pick hit” for the week of December 27, 1963. It shows up the next week in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Endicott, New York, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The first ARSA chart showing it at Number One is from KROY in Sacramento, dated January 11, 1964. The next week—46 years ago this week—it was already Number One in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Detroit, and Manchester, New Hampshire, when it debuted in Billboard.

So let’s see how the Beatles were faring against the rest of the competition on the record charts in some other cities that week. If nothing else, think of these charts as evidence for why the British Invasion had to happen.

WLS, Chicago:
1. “There! I’ve Said It Again”/Bobby Vinton
2. “Drag City”/Jan and Dean
3. “Surfin’ Bird”/Trashmen
4. “California Sun”/Rivieras
5. “You Don’t Own Me”/Lesley Gore
40. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (second week on)

Comment: “There! I’ve Said It Again” is the song knocked from the top of the Hot 100 by “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the chart dated February 1, 1964. It represents not just a changing of the guard but the dynamiting of an era, rock’s climactic assault and victory over the kind of adult pop music that had ruled American culture since the 1930s. Elvis started it; the Fab Four finished it.

WJJD, Chicago:
1. “Surfin’ Bird”/Trashmen
2. “There! I’ve Said It Again”/Bobby Vinton
3. “Hey Little Cobra”/Rip Cords
4. “You Don’t Own Me”/Lesley Gore
5. “California Sun”/Rivieras
27. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (first week on)
Up ‘n’ Coming: “She Loves You”

Comment: “She Loves You” shows up at ARSA before “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Station 2SM in Sydney, Australia, charted it in October 1963 as Beatlemania broke over the British Empire, and Toronto’s CHUM was on it in early December. “She Loves You” first appears on an American station’s chart at ARSA for the week of December 27 at WGR in Buffalo—the same week WGR showed “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a future hit—but that chart shows it in its second week on, which means that WGR was playing it during the week of December 20. But even it isn’t the first Beatles song found in the ARSA chart archives.

Moonlighting With Ted

In the mid 1970s, TV stardom often gave actors the chance to try their chops as singers. Some tried it straight as themselves, like John Travolta. Others had fun with it, like Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, who made a record called Laverne and Shirley Sing.  When somebody gave Ted Knight his chance, he played it as goofy as humanly possible.

Wait wait wait . . . Ted Knight made a record?

Yup. As The Mary Tyler Moore Show entered its sixth season on CBS in the fall of 1975, Knight was at the height of his fame, only a couple of years after threatening to quit the show altogether. (He was tired of playing anchorman Ted Baxter as a moronic cartoon, so the show’s producers humanized the character for the remainder of the show’s run.) Hi Guys was released that fall on the Ranwood label. It contains 13 songs “sung” by Knight as Baxter.

A couple of music blogs have written briefly about the album in recent months, including 30 Days Out and Popdose—briefly, because there’s not a great deal of information available about the album. We do know that it was originally billed to Ted Knight and the Poops. It features Knight talk-singing his way through versions of “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose,” “Who Put the Bomp,” “Mr. Custer,” “Chick-a-Boom,” “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” and “Blueberry Hill,” which Knight does as if he were impersonating James Cagney. He also tackles “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” which is simply indescribable. “I’m in Love With Barbara Walters” is about what you’d expect, and the title track is typical mid-70s gay-stereotype humor. “A Man I Used to Be” sounds like it’s being done straight, but it’s hard to tell. The album seems to have gotten as much attention from everybody involved as it deserved: the musical arrangements are cheap and cheesy, and Knight frequently spars with his backup singers, sprinkling the whole thing with leaden wisecracks. Veteran Los Angeles DJ Charlie Tuna provides liner notes.

I don’t remember hearing of this record in 1975, or seeing it in stores anywhere, and it’s likely I’d have noticed, since I was a fan of the Moore show. I must not have been watching American Bandstand on October 4, 1975, either—for on that day, Knight performed “I’m in Love With Barbara Walters” on the show.

In retrospect, it’s miraculous that the planet didn’t explode from the convergence of bad 70s pop culture on that October weekend. David Geddes’ “Run Joey Run” was at its chart peak just behind “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Feelings” was climbing the charts behind them, and Dickie Goodman’s “Mr. Jaws” was one of the hottest records in the country. Pet rocks were all the rage. Now it’s true that Saturday Night Live premiered the next weekend, and that “They Just Can’t Stop It” by the Spinners, “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles, and Born to Run were all on the radio that week too. But damn, with Ted Knight singing on American Bandstand, even those heavyweights must have been hard-pressed to keep the Earth on its axis.

“Hi guys” was Ted Baxter’s catchphrase on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it followed Ted Knight to the grave: His tombstone at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, includes the words “bye guy.”

Recommended Reading: Red Kelly attends Willie Mitchell’s funeral; at Popdose, there’s a new edition of One Day in Your Life.

“Cover of the Rolling Stone”/Ted Knight
“I’m in Love With Barbara Walters”/Ted Knight (out of print)