The New 40

Some of you know that my birthday is February 29. I get no birth date this weekend, but time and arithmetic don’t care. We can call it 12-and-a-half in leap years all we want, but at some point this weekend, I’ll have to call it 50.

(As I type those words, the laptop music stash shuffles up “Calcutta” by Lawrence Welk. I shit you not.)

I am trying to approach this birthday with equanimity, to exhibit the rough grace of baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, whose own age was a mystery even to him. He supposedly said, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” Age is, for most people on most days, an arbitrary number. Some days we’re 20, young and vital and stupid; other days, we’re 77 and failing, let down by mind and body and spirit. Some days, we’re 49-turning-50. And on those days, since 50 is the new 40 (isn’t it?), it’s all good.

I’ve got no other great philosophical observations to make on this milestone, except to say that I’m grateful time has given me a bit of wisdom and the ability to see myself more clearly. Which might be the same thing.

This blog is going on hiatus for a while. The Mrs. and I are taking off to visit the family, plus I’ll need a little time to fill out the goddamn AARP membership form that came in the mail the other day. (Whoops . . . brief loss of equanimity there.) I’ll have a new post at WNEW.com on Saturday, but that’s it—nothing new will appear here until Tuesday March 2 at the earliest. In the meantime, go out and buy yourself some music.

And something to play it on.

How Chick and Chuck Saw the Beatles

In the winter and spring of 1964, a ticket to see the Beatles in concert was a precious totem. Just because you wanted one didn’t mean you could get one. National General Corporation, one of the country’s largest theater chains, which had branched out into movie distribution and closed-circuit TV, realized it could help meet the demand for the Beatles, and clean up in the process. The Beatles’ first live show in America, in Washington, D.C., two nights after their famous first appearance on The Ed Sullivan show, had been filmed by CBS. National General packaged the film with concert footage of the Beach Boys and Lesley Gore shot elsewhere, and planned to show the whole thing closed-circuit in theaters on the weekend of March 14 and 15, 1964.

National General produced an ad for the film that was to be shown in participating theaters—an ad largely eliding the fact that the ticket kids would be buying was to a movie and not an in-person show, although it eventually comes clean. It also tells viewers, “don’t confuse this with home TV.”

According to an article at the Pop History Dig, the film played in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Washington, as well as El Monte, California, Portland, Oregon, Norfolk, Virginia, Oak Park, Illinois, San Jose, California, and most likely several other cities where National General owned theaters. A contemporary report said that National General made $4 million—equivalent to a lot more than that today.

Excerpts from the film were featured in The Beatles Anthology, but the whole thing as seen on that March weekend 46 years ago is most likely lost. Excerpts from the Washington show have been released on DVD, but reviews I can find for the releases (the five-disc 2008 set Turn Left at Greenland and a 2003 release by Passport Video) are negative, criticizing the sound and video quality. A higher-quality film apparently appeared on the Internet sometime last year.

For more extremely fascinating stuff on the early days of Beatlemania in America at the Pop History Dig, click here. Word of warning: Once you start clicking links at the Pop History Dig, you’re going to be at it all day.

(While fooling around with the clip above at YouTube, I found another one in which John and George do an endorsement for Marlboro cigarettes. There’s precious little on the web to indicate whether it was an actual commercial, paid for and put on the air by Marlboro to sell cigarettes, or a clip from somewhere else that’s been labeled as a Marlboro commercial after the fact. If you know, you’ll have to tell me.)

News News: Huey Lewis and the News is a band we like a lot around here, so we’re glad to hear they’re releasing a new record later this year. It’ll be their first since 2001, is made up of Stax covers, and was cut at Ardent Studios in Memphis, where a number of Stax releases were made. The band’s earlier album of cover songs, Four Chords and Several Years Ago, was great, so this new record clearly has a chance to be pretty good, too. There’s no word on when it will be released, but we do know that the band is going on tour later this spring. More here.

At WNEW.com: I hear Rumours.

Electricity So Fine

In a post last week (on which I am still inviting your comments), I described what goes on inside our heads each day as “a roiling stew of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, and felt, an endless fugue of audio and video playing every waking hour.” But maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s just bloggers. Sometimes, however, patterns emerge from the noise, like so:

My mental list of potential topics has included for quite a while the sound of the electric piano. I was reminded of this a week or so ago when Larry at Funky16Corners put up a post called “The Piano Electrified,” which featured his own impressions of the sound and some great examples of it. I was reminded of it again later in the week when I came across the 1976 self-titled album by a keyboard player named Tom Ranier. All I knew about Ranier was one song, “Goin’ Home,” which I heard years ago on one of those Warner Brothers Loss Leaders compilations, so I was pleased to find the eponymous album it came from, which is full of the same warm electric piano sounds as “Goin’ Home.”

“Warm” is the adjective I keep coming back to when trying to describe the way the electric piano sounds to me. (I used it not long ago describing the way it sounds on Peter Wolf’s “Five o’Clock Angel.”) But if I allow myself to freely associate for a moment, it occurs to me that the sound can be very cool, too—summoning up a jazz club late at night as the band downshifts into a mellow groove, last call draws nigh, and couples start thinking about heading for the door. Example off the top of my head: Victor Feldman’s solo on Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” (at the 2:45 mark here). The electric piano can also be funky as hell, when played with the key-pumping abandon of a Brian Auger, on a track such as “Happiness Is Just Around the Bend.” (And is there a cooler band name than Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express?) A lighter but equally funky touch produces the sound Deodato got when soloing on “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Watch now as the blogger’s brain shifts topics like a driver’s ed student shifts a manual transmission.

“Also Sprach Zarathustra” came up in an e-mail I got the other day from a longtime reader, who had just listened to an American Top 40 countdown from February 1973 and noted the number of records on it that have pretty much vanished from memory, or at least from regular rotation on oldies stations. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is surely one of those—although the fact that it became a Number Two hit in the first place remains one of stranger moments of the 1970s.

So let us give up some love for the electric piano in all its incarnations—and oddly out-of-place hit records, cool band names, and the spazzy mental processes that manage to tie them together.

“Goin’ Home”/Tom Ranier (out of print)
“Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)” (single version)/Deodato (buy full-length version here)

Top 5: Gotcha Fever

(I’m still hoping to whip up a little reader participation based on Thursday’s post about songs and other bits of cultural flotsam that you found scary or disturbing when you were a kid. Click here, but come back.)

It hasn’t been that long since I chose a record chart from 1972 for this Friday feature,  but I’m grabbing another one today because it’s mighty interesting: from XPRS in San Diego, dated February 19, 1972. The station’s main chart featured the top 30 soul hits, with 10 top pop hits in a separate section of the chart.  Here are five from the soul section:

1. “I Gotcha”/Joe Tex. Some serious soul shouting here, so real that it’s hard to imagine that it might become a significant pop hit, although in the winter of 1972, it hadn’t yet. It would be later in the spring before “I Gotcha” crossed over to pop, during a golden season for soul. When it reached Number 2 pop in May (behind Roberta Flack’s “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), it shared the Top Ten with the Chi-Lites’ “Oh Girl,” “I’ll Take You There” by the Staple Singers, “Betcha By Golly Wow” by the Stylistics, and Aretha Franklin’s “Day Dreaming.”

3. “Jungle Fever”/Chakachas. Here’s one of the weirder damn things you’re likely to hear, by a group of Latin musicians who assembled in Belgium in the late 50s. “Jungle Fever” is a sizzling R&B groove (oft sampled in later years), its only lyric a series of orgasmic moans—which eventually got it banned from airplay on the BBC. That this made the pop Top 10 in the spring of 1972 is another of the things about the 1970s that makes me very, very happy.

11. “I Can’t Help Myself”/Donnie Elbert. Elbert was famous for maybe four months between late 1971 and early 1972 thanks to a pair of indelible Motown covers, “Where Did Our Love Go” and “I Can’t Help Myself,” both of which are all kinds of awesome. YouTube DJ Music Mike has more:

16. “The Day I Found Myself”/Honey Cone. In 1971, Honey Cone came out of the Invictus/Hot Wax hit factory with three magnificent singles, “Want Ads,” “Stick Up,” and “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show.” “The Day I Found Myself” is a mid-tempo ballad that might have been better placed as their third single, but even in the fourth spot, I can’t figure out why it missed being a bigger pop hit.

21. “Taurus”/Dennis Coffey. After “Scorpio” hit the Top 10 in early January, another Zodiac-themed record from Coffey was almost inevitable. This thing is hotter than hell, with searing guitars and a fierce groove, and it ought to be a lot better known than it is. I’ve posted it before, but I’m doing it again because you really ought to hear it.

A brief online history of XPRS says that by 1974, the station operated out of Los Angeles and was playing country. The call letters are still on the air today on the same frequency, as an all-sports station. Too bad: XPRS is a great set of call letters for a music station.

Get Those Beer Taps Ready: This weekend, The Mrs. and I are pleased to host whiteray, of Echoes in the Wind, and the Texas Gal here in Madison for Blog Summit and Beer Spree III: Cool Subtitle I Thought of Last Night While Falling Asleep But Can’t Remember This Morning. It’s our pleasure to return the hospitality they’ve shown us on two previous trips to their homebase in Minnesota. If you’re looking for any of us this weekend, we’ll be in the bar.

“Taurus”/Dennis Coffey (buy it here)

It’s Comin’ to Gitcha

The stuff you can learn on the Internet never ceases to amaze. There is, for example, an entire Internet subculture of people who were—and are—freaked out by the short musical logo used by Screen Gems studios to identify its TV productions from the mid 60s to the mid 1970s. It appeared at the end of shows such as The Flintstones, Bewitched, The Monkees, and The Partridge Family, just after the closing credits. You know the one I mean:

Fear of the Screen Gems logo and theme has apparently been satirized by The Simpsons and Family Guy (unless those YouTube clips I found are homemade parodies), and now somebody’s actually made a short film about the fear called The S From Hell, which was shown at Sundance last month. I can’t tell if it’s intended to be a parody or a true documentary of an actual phenomenon, but that may be a distinction without a difference in this case.

I vividly remember the Screen Gems logo from my own childhood, although I found it more cool than scary. (Perhaps that’s how teenage synthesizer geeks are made.) But I know well how we can seize on little things when we’re kids, and how they stay with us for years thereafter. I’ve written before about the episode of the 1998-2000 TV series Sports Night in which a character perceives Three Dog Night’s “Eli’s Coming” as the harbinger of bad news. In high school, I knew a kid who abhorred the Emerson Lake and Palmer song “Tank” because of the nightmares it caused, thanks to an older sibling who played it all the time. (Listening to it again for the first time in a while, I’m not surprised that kid found it scary. I’m a little bit disturbed by the last couple of minutes myself, and I’m almost 50.)

How do we function every day, anyhow, what with our heads a roiling stew of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, and felt, an endless fugue of audio and video playing every waking hour? It’s no wonder some psychologists believe that consciousness, contrary to being a mechanism that opens the world to us, is actually a filter that shuts a lot of the world out. If we could perceive everything there is to perceive—the sound of every insect, the sight of every detail in the carpet—we’d be so overloaded that everyday life would be unbearable. It’s tough enough living with our memories.

Audience participation time: What are the little things that scared you—and maybe still disturb you now? Places, songs, bits of cultural ephemera or other oddments of life that your head has collected? Show ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, in the comments.

(Tip of the baseball cap to Matt at Scrubbles.net, who mentioned The S From Hell earlier this week.)

Hit Somebody

I play my music stash on “shuffle” most of the time, although I often use shuffle to choose albums for me—a track comes up on shuffle and I cue up the whole album it comes from. I rarely shuffle from the whole 13,440 songs on it (at the moment), except when I need ideas for a blog post.

So I hit “shuffle” the other night and the first thing that came up was “Waldo P. Emerson Jones”  by the Archies, another Jeff Barry/Andy Kim confection found on the band’s greatest hits album, about the sort of guy thinks he’s too cool to hang out with the Archies—”he rode his chopper up to Woodstock and he wormed his way backstage.” Searching for information about the song, I discovered that a band I read about just the other day at WNEW.com with the remarkably stupid name Everybody Was in the French Resistance . . . Now has recorded a song called “(I’m So) Waldo P. Emerson Jones.” It is apparently some sort of half-assed update of the Archies original, because it would be too much of a coincidence if it wasn’t.

Here’s the next nine songs that came up on on shuffle:

“Two for One”/Grant Green. Another fine groove by the jazz guitarist who is frequently heard with the greatest organ players in jazz, from Jack McDuff to Big John Patton. (No organ on this track, though.) Green claimed that his greatest inspirations were horn players like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and not other guitarists, which is why it’s so easy to imagine his solo lines being played by horns.

“2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten”/Lucinda Williams. An extraordinary tune from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, with a lyric full of strange and striking images.  If you’re unfamiliar with Lucinda, this is the album, and maybe the song, to start with. This particular version was recorded for a radio broadcast on WXPN in Philadelphia.

“Show Me the Way to Go Home”/Emerson Lake & Palmer. This is the song I used to play at the end of record dances I DJed in high school. It’s thematically appropriate, and it had the added bonus of chasing people out the door, since not everybody was quite as crazed by ELP in those days as my friends and me.

“Time Waits for No One”/Ambrosia. Despite a handful of great singles and another handful of worthwhile album cuts, the most interesting thing about Ambrosia might be that they share a songwriting credit with novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on the song “Nice Nice Very Nice,” which is taken mostly from Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.

“Lonely at the Top”/Van Morrison. Morrison tends to improvise songs on the fly, in the studio, with the band in place and a tape machine running, which may be why he seems to revisit a lot of the same themes in the same terms. Here’s a pleasant-enough song about wanting to be left alone, which is one of Van’s main preoccupations—and this was recorded in 1986, on the album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.

After the jump, one of the most astonishing jukebox finds I ever found, and three more songs.