Summertime Is Here

We had us a pretty good week at this blog last week. It started when we heard via the comments from David Sandler of Northern Light after the post about their songs “Minnesota” and “Think Snow.” I have heard from several of my subjects over the years—Rod Novak of King Harvest, Denny Wall of the Bells, Kurt Maloo of Double, Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan, Bob Freedman of Richard and the Young Lions, former Milwaukee DJ King Zbornik, and maybe one or two I’m forgetting. Almost all of them were happy to be remembered, even if it’s in some dusty, lightly traveled little corner of the Internets.

After nearly six years of blogging here, I still guess wrong about certain posts. After I’d written “Driftwood,” which ran last Wednesday, I thought maybe it was one of those posts nobody would care about but me. (Even though I warned you that might be the case now and then, I do try to avoid it.) But then I decided what the hell, and I hit the “publish” button. I’m glad so many of you liked it.

And so here we are on Memorial Day weekend, the threshold of summer. A friend of mine likes to emphasize how short summer is by saying it’s only 12 weekends long, and when you think of it that way, how you choose to spend your weekends takes on a certain urgency. But it occurs to me that feeling urgency about the way you spend your free time is probably the wrong way to go about living. If there’s ever prime time to waste time, a summer weekend might be it. Here’s hoping you have a little time to waste between now and Tuesday.

tp://jabartlett.wordpress.com/2004/07/11/whats-going-on/

Top 5: Evolution

If you loved disco, you loved 1979. Long about April, depending on how you counted them, more than half of the Top 40 was made up of disco records. Many of the rest were bland, toothless pop ballads. Album-rock radio, on the other hand, was where the interesting stuff was playing. Several albums charting in the summer of 1979 would go on to become the backbone of we’d later start calling “classic rock.” WYSL in Buffalo was pumping out the disco like everybody else, but their chart dated May 26, 1979, features an album section showing several releases that were not merely hits, but would become the backbone of the classic-rock formats born in the 80s—Breakfast in America, Cheap Trick at Budokan, Van Halen II—and more were on the way. Here are five other albums from the chart, not quite so legendary but mighty interesting in their own way.

7. Evolution/Journey. Remembered by most as an 80s band, Journey actually made five albums in the 1970s—and Evolution is a pretty good one. “Just the Same Way” may be the best single Journey ever made, and “Too Late” is what “Open Arms” sounded like before the saltpeter kicked in. Everyone’s forgotten that album stations played the hit single “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” as a segue with its following track, “City of the Angels,” and to this day, I don’t think “LTS” sounds right without it.

11. Sheik Yerbouti/Frank Zappa. Only the 1974 album Apostrophe, which made the Top 10, charted higher than Sheik Yerbouti, a double-album set that got more attention than usual for its titles and lyrics: “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes,” “Bobby Brown (Goes Down),” the doo-wop styled “I Have Been in You,” and “Jewish Princess,” which some perceived as anti-Semitic. Back on October 21, 1978, Zappa performed “Dancin’ Fool” when he hosted Saturday Night Live. After clashing with writers, producers, and fellow performers all week, and then mugging to the cameras on the air (some of which you’ll see in the clip), Zappa was banned from future appearances.

14. Look Sharp!/Joe Jackson. Punk rock had been around for a while by the summer of ’79, but punkers didn’t hit the singles chart until they’d been repackaged as new-wave artists. (See Number 9, Parallel Lines by Blondie.) Joe Jackson had the skeevy look and the snotty attitude, although we’d learn as his career went on that he was actually a talented musician who’d likely have made it without the look or the attitude. One thing we knew that summer: We’d never heard anything quite like “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”

22. New England/New England. If you genetically engineered a band for the coming classic-rock formats, you’d build it exactly like New England—photogenic guys playing melodic songs the kids can sing along with, built on big riffs and big synths. One of those songs, “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya,” propelled New England’s debut album onto the charts, but nothing that came after could keep it there. (I blogged about New England here.) The band made a video for the song, which is not of great interest apart from its having being made during video music’s prehistoric period, but here you go.

27. Herman Brood and His Wild Romance/Herman Brood and His Wild Romance. Although this album had come out in the spring, our college radio station wouldn’t get on it until we’d come back in the fall. “Saturdaynight” quickly became a staff favorite. We didn’t know who Herman Brood was—a piano player who’d been on the Netherlands music scene since the 60s—all we cared about was that his record kicked ass. The video below mixes 70s footage with later film of Brood, who became an acclaimed painter. He was also a prolific drug user, and committed suicide in 2001 at age 54.

I would spend the coming summer of 1979 working radio, commuting to Dubuque on weekends for my gig at KDTH, learning a lot about broadcasting and life. I can’t seem to remember much else about the summer . . . except the music.

There might be a new post here over the holiday weekend, so check back if you can. Otherwise, have fun.

Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party

I was surprised to read yesterday that Art Linkletter has died—because I thought he’d been dead for years. He was just a few weeks shy of his 98th birthday. He shouldn’t be forgotten, however, because he’s a godfather of two familiar program formats that are everywhere on American television today, both of which began on radio.

First, there’s the general-interest daytime talk show. Art Linkletter’s House Party ran on radio from 1945 to 1967, and on TV from 1952 to 1970. House Party opened each day with a monologue, then featured everything from celebrity guests to game segments involving the studio audience to Linkletter’s famous interviews with children. (The latter resulted in a series of books called Kids Say the Darndest Things.) Linkletter can also be credited with one of the earliest competition/reality shows, People Are Funny, which ran on radio from 1942 to 1960 and on TV from 1954 to 1961. Contestants were given odd stunts to perform in public, such as giving money away to strangers on the street, while listeners and viewers eavesdropped on the action. Any show where people have to accomplish something under pressure while the cameras are rolling (and where viewers learn something about human nature along the way), from Fear Factor to The Celebrity Apprentice, owes a modest debt to People Are Funny.

Linkletter also had a brief recording career, which is the sort of thing that interests us around here. In 1969, he and his daughter Diane cut a spoken-word recording, “We Love You, Call Collect,” in which a father attempts to reach out to a runaway daughter while she tries to explain her reasons for leaving. Before the record was released, 20-year-old Diane committed suicide by jumping out of a sixth-floor window. The Linkletter family blamed LSD for her death, and there’s a widely told urban legend that Diane died because she was high on LSD and believed she could fly. (The toxicology reports didn’t back up the family’s contention that LSD was to blame for her death.) “We Love You, Call Collect” was released in November 1969, and climbed to Number 42 on the Hot 100 in a six-week chart run. A few months later, it won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording. You can hear it here, preceded by nearly a minute of silence you can cue past.

Since we have a TV category and we’re not afraid to use it, there’s more along that line after the jump.

Driftwood

It’s graduation week at my old school. My nephew graduates Sunday; if I’m recalling correctly, it will be 32 years to the day since I did. He’s our first nephew, and I can remember how, shortly after he was born, I calculated that he’d be in the class of 2010. It seemed unimaginably far away in 1992, and now it’s here.

The week I graduated from high school was not an especially happy one, as I’ve written before. (Out of all the writing I’ve done, the piece I miss the most is the journal I kept the last couple of weeks of the school year. At some point just after college, I tried converting it into a more lengthy memoir, but gave up and chucked the whole thing into the trash, including the original journal. I’ve mourned its loss ever since.) And so I wonder how the world looks to my nephew this week—if he’s looking backward at all, or if he’s focused on more immediate concerns. A little of both, I’ll bet, although the state track meet is undoubtedly getting most of his attention, and he’s not as self-dramatizing as his uncle was.

The Mrs. and I have no children of our own, so we watch our nephews and nieces grow, and we measure our lives by theirs. It’s not just living vicariously through their experiences. It’s re-living too.

Another of our nephews is ending his junior year. At the end of that year, I was in love, and I felt like I had life pretty much figured out. That was the summer I started off by working at the gas station and the grocery store, but early August I had quit one job and been fired from the other. Got your life figured out? Not so fast, kid.

Still another nephew is wrapping up eighth grade. Sometime that spring—and it might as well have been the last week of May—we had that fire in our house, the one that reshaped the whole summer.

A couple of our nephews just turned 10. Like they are, I would have been wrapping up fourth grade. One of them is deeply into sports, as I was. The other is a bright, earnest little guy who reminds me of myself, nurturing his pet obsessions and eager to be liked. Let’s hope for his sake he doesn’t go full geek over the next several years, as his uncle did.

I have one niece and one nephew who are turning eight this year; one is finishing second grade and the other first. In my life, those years were time without a calendar, as all time was before the fall of 1970. In first grade and half of second, I rode the bus to Lincoln School, and I can still walk the building and its playground in memory, though the building and the playground are both long gone. Midway through second grade, many of my friends and I transferred to newly built Northside School, which seemed like a great adventure then, but was also a lesson in the profound effects of change.

How many kids are left to count? A nephew who’s six, a niece who’s five, a nephew who’s four—representing years that are hazier still, first days of kindergarten and days before that, toys on the dining room floor, overnights at Grandma’s house, and back to the very beginning of everything.

Their most memorable days will come. Somewhere out there is a boy who will be my eight-year-old niece’s first love. The 10-year-olds are going to lose track of some of the closest friends they have right now; some will be found years in the future, but others will be gone forever. And the oldest, the graduate, will one day calculate the graduation year of an important newborn in his life, think it seems unimaginably far away, and then be surprised at how quickly it arrives.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when, just as I was putting the finishing touches on this post, the laptop music stash shuffled up the song below. For several weeks in the late fall of 1978, it was on the radio along with Justin Hayward’s “Forever Autumn”—and if there’s ever been a better pair of songs about time, memory, and loss to run the charts at the same time, I don’t know what it is.

“Time waits for no one at all/No not even you/You thought you’d seen it all/You thought you knew.”

Plug ‘Em In, Turn ‘Em Up

Here’s a bit of news you may have missed last week: Fritz Sennheiser, founder of Sennheiser Electronics, died at age 98. Radio geeks and audiophiles amongst the readership are nodding in recognition, with appreciation and a touch of awe mixed in, for Sennheiser headphones were recognized by many as the finest kind. Still are, actually—the company continues to manufacture headphones, earbuds, microphones and other audio products for consumer and professional use, and if you want to spend $1400 on headphones, they have a set for you.

Just as we would grow from 45s to LPs and from AM radio to FM in the fullness of time, there came a similar moment in our young lives when we were ready for headphones. This would normally have happened about the time we got our first stereo system with a headphone jack on the front—and if not then, at the time we discovered prog rock. I don’t remember anything about my first headphones, except that I would certainly have replaced them when I got to college.

Using your own headphones on the campus radio station, instead of the ones provided by the station, was a way of demonstrating that you were a serious radio guy and not just a dilettante. (Mine were Altec-Lansings, I think.) There was another reason, however—the ones provided by the radio station generally sucked. This is still true today. It’s not necessarily that they’re cheap to begin with (although they can be); headphones that get a lot of use inevitably fail, and once they fail, they frequently stay broken. Broadcast engineers don’t want to spend time fixing them because they’re just going to fail again, and quicker next time. So you use your own, because no jock wants to do a show with headphones that are dead in one ear or that cut out every time you breathe.

The fact that even the best headphones are mortal makes spending a bundle of money on them problematical. The ones I use on the radio cost me $30—not the cheapest ones in the store, but certainly not the most expensive, either. One of these weekends I’m going to drop them, or pull the plug out funny, or do something else that will turn ‘em into junk, and I’ll feel a lot better knowing I didn’t spend $200.

Part of what makes radio jocks talk like radio jocks involves hearing themselves through headphones while on the air. Many consultants, talent coaches, and program directors will tell you that you shouldn’t force your voice, and that you should sound very much the same on the air as you would in conversation with a listener. I get that, and I said it myself when I was coaching jocks. But every radio jock will tell you that something happens now and then when you’re wearing a good pair of headphones and you’ve got ‘em cranked, particularly if you’re talking over an uptempo record. It’s like the ghosts of all the great jocks you admire come rising up around you, and if you want to be worthy of that company, you’d better bring it and bring it hard.

And I am a headphone cranker. People watching me in the studio sometimes ask how I can stand ‘em so loud, but I don’t find them loud at all. A man’s gotta be able to hear what he’s doing. (Although maybe it’s hearing loss.)

The best set of headphones I ever used belonged to The Mrs. when we were in college—rich and ballsy on the low end, pure and clear on the high. I sounded like Orson Welles in those things. I know a few jocks who use earbuds on the air, but I’m not one of them. They can’t provide enough volume, enough resonance, enough presence for me. I’m prejudiced against earbuds in general, primarily for reasons of comfort—I just don’t like the way they feel in my ears, never mind their sound quality. But I can understand their usefulness with the iPod, where sound quality isn’t really an issue, and I guess I’m going to have to get me some. I finally put some music onto my fabulously over-capable cell phone, and I’d look mighty stupid walking down the street with a set of cans on my head. (I know that rappers and pro athletes do it, but that’s not sweetening the deal.)

So let’s raise a farewell toast to Fritz Sennheiser, and to the pleasure a really good set of headphones can bring—for as long as we remember to unplug them carefully.

We’re Happening, Man

Here’s another installment of our expedition to the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100, looking for one-hit wonders who just barely scraped in. I’m keeping on with this series because it’s fun to research, and because a handful amongst the readership seems to dig it. We’re up to (down to?) at those who peaked at Number 93,  and we’ve got surf music, organ jazz, and psychedelia gone wild.

“Butternut”/Jimmy Heap (3/10/56, one week on chart). Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters were an eight-man big band from Texas—two guitars, bass, drums, piano, fiddle, pedal steel, and saxophone, with vocals. One online discography describes “Butternut” as “a Texas honky-tonk version of Martin Denny (complete with bird noises!).” Heap’s single “Release Me” was a hit on the country charts.

“A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring”/Mike Preston (12/1/58, one week). This man has an interesting resume: Mike Preston started as a singer with a handful of hits in England in the late 50s. This single wasn’t one of them, although it was popular enough in the States to get him on the Dick Clark and Alan Freed TV shows. Preston emigrated to Australia and began an acting career, appearing for a season on the long-running Australian detective series Homicide in the early 70s, among other TV and movie roles. For a time in the 1990s, he was a member of the Flying Karamazov Brothers acrobatic troupe.

“Teenage Hayride”/Tender Slim (1/18/60, two weeks). An instrumental that became a Number-One hit in Buffalo despite its lesser performance on the national chart, “Teenage Hayride” is essentially a reworking of “Three Blind Mice.” You want trivia, you got it: The song ends with an emphatic “why not,” which might have been a tip of the hat to comic Dayton Allen, who used it as a catchphrase on radio and TV in the 40s and 50s.

“Summertime”/Chris Columbo Quintet (7/20/63, two weeks). Columbo was a jazz drummer who broke into showbiz with the Fletcher Henderson band in the 1920s and worked for more than 60 years, mostly in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His “Summertime” is a version of the Gershwin standard with Wild Bill Davis on organ, which you might dig if you are an organ freak like me.

There’s more organ music after the jump, plus a couple of mp3s.