What a Ride

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from my Internet pal bean, who was listening to a vintage American Top 40 broadcast from 1978 that started with Rare Earth’s “Warm Ride,” written for them by the Bee Gees. He suggested that there might be a blog post in Barry Gibb songs written for other people, and mentioned Andy Gibb, Dionne Warwick, and Yvonne Elliman. Just off the top of my head I’d add Barbra Streisand, Olivia Newton-John, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton, but a quick spin through the listings at Allmusic.com shows a lot more.

Here’s just a fraction of the total: the Animals (“To Love Somebody,” which may be the most covered Gibb song of all, with versions ranging from Janis Joplin to Gary Puckett and the Union Gap to Gram Parsons to Joe Strummer to Hank Williams Jr.), Destiny’s Child (“Emotion”), Faith No More (“I Started a Joke”), Al Green (“How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”), Wayne Newton (“Run to Me”), Roy Orbison (“Words,” also done by many others, including Elvis Presley), Ozzy Osbourne (“Stayin’ Alive”), Diana Ross (several), Nina Simone (also several), Status Quo (“Spicks and Specks”), Swamp Dogg (“I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You”), the Temptations (“How Deep Is Your Love”), and Conway Twitty (“Rest Your Love on Me”). So when we’re listing the most prolific and successful songwriters of the 20th century, we’d better put Barry Gibb, by himself and in various combinations with his brothers, on that list.

As odd as it seems that rockin’ Rare Earth might have done a Bee Gees song, back in 1978 it wasn’t so strange, because the Bee Gees were it that spring. They wrote hit songs, produced ‘em, performed ‘em, and, one presumes, had their royalties delivered to ‘em in semi-trailers. Even at a distance of 32 years, the statistics are astounding to behold:

—During the 21 weeks between late December 1977 and mid-May 1978, the Bee Gees or their offshoots (Andy Gibb and Yvonne Elliman, who recorded their “If I Can’t Have You”) occupied the Number-One slot on the Hot 100 for 19 weeks. The only record to interrupt their run was Player’s “Baby Come Back,” which was on the Bee Gees’ record label, RSO.

—During the week of March 18, 1978, they held four of the top five positions (“Night Fever,” “Stayin’ Alive,” Andy Gibb’s “Love Is Thicker Than Water,” and “Emotion” by Samantha Sang). Only Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally” could stem the tide—and it, too was on RSO.

—The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack occupied the top slot on the album chart from the end of January through early July, while the film played on in theaters.

—During the June week when “Warm Ride” hit the Top 40, Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” hit Number One, and the new title song from Grease, also written by Barry Gibb, debuted in the Top 40. Those two singles would keep the Gibb flag flying through the late summer and fall before the release of the Bee Gees’ next single, “Too Much Heaven,” late in the year.

“Warm Ride,” which only got up to Number 39, isn’t much like Rare Earth of the early 70s, and if you can’t stop thinking about “I Just Want to Celebrate” or “Get Ready,” you’ll probably find it quite odd. (I wish I could find some information about how they came to record it.) Its two-week ride in the Top 40, during the weeks of June 17 and June 24, 1978, is an appropriate marker for the moment at which the Bee Gees achieved maximum cultural reach, when anything they touched was likely to turn to something approximating gold.

Coming Next Time: More vintage American Top 40.

It’s Cooler by the Lake

Milwaukee Summerfest is in the midst of its annual run on the city’s lakefront, now through July 4. Over the course of 11 days each summer, over 800 bands play on 11 different stages, and dozens of restaurants offer everything from hot dogs and pizza to baklava and sauerbraten. And because it’s Milwaukee, there are beer stands everywhere. They sell mostly macrobrew, but there’s just enough intriguing microbrew to keep a beer snob happy. Summerfest is also one of the great people-watching venues in all the world.

Organizers deliberately keep ticket prices relatively low—$15 a day this year, although major headliners playing the 23,000 seat Marcus Amphitheater require a more expensive ticket. Acts playing the Marcus this week include Eric Clapton and Roger Daltrey, Santana and Steve Winwood, Rush, and Carrie Underwood. But any Summerfest veteran will tell you that the real action is on the grounds stages. Music starts on each of them around noontime every day. In recent years, the national headliners play the last slot of the night, 9, 9:30, or even 10:00, although up to a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon for them to play in the early evening, or even the middle of the afternoon. Grounds stage headliners playing this week include Blue Oyster Cult, Cypress Hill, Weird Al Yankovic, Umphrey’s McGee, the Moody Blues, the B-52s, Joan Jett, Yes, Counting Crows, John Hiatt, Levon Helm, Devo, and the Average White Band.

Summerfest began in 1968 as a citywide summer festival with events including symphony concerts, the circus, comedy shows, a stock-car race, a polka festival, and other events held all over Milwaukee. The lakefront area, a former missile base one-fifth the size of the current Summerfest grounds, hosted “Youth Fest,” which brought in local favorites the Robbs for 17 shows in nine days, along with the New Colony Six, Ronnie Dove, Freddy Cannon, the Lemon Pipers, and others. The next year, Youth Fest was headlined by the Bob Seger System and a ton of bubblegum acts: Crazy Elephant, the Ohio Express, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, and Peppermint Rainbow, plus local/regional acts Soup, the Wrest, and Unchained Mynds.

By 1970, most of the other events under the Summerfest umbrella disappeared, and the festival centered on the lakefront and on musical acts. Headliners that year included Chicago, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Rotary Connection and Procol Harum on the same bill, and Bobby Sherman and Andy Kim on the same bill. Jazz acts would be a major presence at Summerfest for over two decades starting in 1970, when the lineup included Cannonball Adderley, Ramsey Lewis, Sarah Vaughan, and Doc Severinsen.

After the jump, Summerfest performers and fans get in trouble with the law, and the festival grows up.

Just Another Summer Saturday

One of the things I liked about the jobs I held in publishing was that there are no after-hours emergencies in publishing. Nobody ever calls at 5:45 on Sunday morning because a manuscript needs to be proofed. When you work at a desk from 8 to 5 every day, your time outside of 8-to-5 is almost entirely your own. Including holidays. In 1997, the Mrs. and I found ourselves working in offices that closed at noon on Christmas Eve. After having lunch together and running a couple of errands, we were home by 3:00. At that point, we looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” Unstructured time on Christmas Eve—or, more specifically, time not owed to a radio station or a retail store—was something neither of us had experienced in nearly 20 years.

But as nice as all of that is, it’s not normal, not really. I’m a radio man, and for me, real life means working on holidays. It means coping with after-hours emergencies. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I mention all this by way of introduction to my weekend. On Saturday, I worked a 10AM-3PM shift on Q106.3, the country station in our group. (During vacation season, I’ll be filling in for the people who are filling in.) On Saturday night, I worked my usual evening shift on Magic 98. Eight hours on the air in two shifts sounds like a lot, but it didn’t seem that way, because I had three hours off in the middle to recharge. (I can also use the money.) But then the weather went sideways late on Saturday night. I was on call for severe weather duty, so I had to go back in. I was at Magic from midnight until 3, watching the radar, scanning for bulletins, and doing updates on the air. In a 17-hour span, I was on the air someplace for 11 hours.

And I was happy as can be the whole damn time, which probably tells me something about my career in publishing, and everything not related to radio that I’ve tried to do these last several years.

I’ve got nothing else to add today, except that we’ve gone a while without posting any mp3s here, so here’s one that has nothing to do with the subject of this post so far. Mike Love is probably the least-loved member of the Beach Boys—by the other Beach Boys, to be sure, but also by the gang over at Popdose, the only site in the universe with this tag category. Love is the guy who hated Brian Wilson’s ornate experiments, described “Good Vibrations” as “avant-garde shit,” and filed several lawsuits against fellow members or their record labels, claiming retroactive songwriting credits or misuse of the Beach Boys name. (Plus he co-wrote “Kokomo,” which is sin enough for lots of people.) This week in 1978, his lone solo single to chart reached its peak on the Hot 100 at Number 28. Billed as “Celebration Featuring Mike Love,” “Almost Summer” was the title song from a movie, and was co-written by Brian Wilson and Al Jardine. If they’d known how much legal grief Love was going to cause them in succeeding years, they might not have bothered.

“Almost Summer”/Celebration Featuring Mike Love (out of print)

Top 5: Not So Rare

History in context is a whole lot more interesting—and messy—than history as told by the history books. History books will tell you that the rock era began around 1955, and that the kids’ music ruled the world from that time forward. But take a look at the chart from KXYZ in Houston dated June 24, 1957. Does it look like rock ‘n’ roll is in charge to you? It might have felt that way to listeners at the time: the Everly Brothers, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, and Pat Boone were part of the first wave of rock stars, and many adults would have found their music obnoxious, even though it seems pretty tame now. But in 1957, there were far fewer radio stations than there are now, and stations playing music frequently went for mass appeal. So in addition to playing the latest rock ‘n’ roll hits, KXYZ programmed a great deal of “adult” music—much of which was just as popular with the kids as rock ‘n’ roll. Some examples:

2. “So Rare”/Jimmy Dorsey. Jimmy and his brother Tommy led two of the most popular bands of the big-band era, with hits going back into the 1930s. Between 1954 and 1956, they hosted Stage Show, a variety series on CBS-TV remembered now for featuring Elvis’ first national TV appearances. “So Rare” features Dorsey himself honkin’ rock-style on alto sax. He died while the record was running the charts, only a couple of weeks before this chart was issued.

7. “Send for Me”/Nat King Cole. If Nat King Cole had been alive to witness his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, he’d have found it a dubious honor. Despite the success of “Send for Me,” he was not a fan of rock songs or rock singers. In 1960, he made his feelings clear in his nightclub act, with a song called “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock and Roll.” (I strongly recommend you click the latter link. It’s great.)

10. “Old Cape Cod”/Patti Page. Like Nat and others of their ilk, Patti Page’s chart success was diminished by rock’s rise. Her music lacks the timeless quality of Cole’s ballads, but some of the songs from her early-50s heyday remain shiveringly gorgeous, “Old Cape Cod” chief among them, but also the classic “Tennessee Waltz,” one of the top singles of all time. Also recommended: “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte,” from the  Bette Davis psycho-killer flick of the same name. The song was in the Billboard Top 10 this week in 1965—right between the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” and “Ticket to Ride.”

12. “Whispering Bells” and 19. “Come Go With Me”/Del-Vikings. A group of Air Force soldiers stationed in Pittsburgh became the first racially mixed group to score a rock ‘n’ roll hit. They weren’t racially mixed at their formation, however—only after they’d won a worldwide Air Force talent contest with “Come Go With Me” did they add a white member, and on “Whispering Bells,” they have two. The Del-Vikings were everywhere in 1957, with various labels releasing various versions of various songs by various lineups with various spellings, either “Del-Vikings” or “Dell-Vikings,” and often with pictures on the cover that did not reflect the actual lineup on the records within. Much more here.

31. “Talkin’ to the Blues”/Jim Lowe. Lowe had come to New York as an aspiring singer and songwriter, and had bagged a left-field Number One hit in 1956 with “The Green Door.” He eventually became a successful DJ, hosting segments of NBC’s Monitor and doing a couple of different stretches on New York’s WNEW-AM. serving as program director during the 1980s. All the while, he continued to pursue a career in music, and has done so since his retirement in 1992.

It’s worth remembering, because we so often don’t, that history is far from a settled thing. That doesn’t mean we can make up our own facts—only that we need to be careful about how we interpret the facts can we agree on. So while 1957 looks to some people like the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s just as appropriate to see it as a transitional era, in a world rock had yet to conquer.

The Battle of Iola

(Part 2; part 1 is here. Slightly corrected since first posted.)

The summer of 1970 was America’s rock festival summer. Little Woodstocks proliferated around the country, but where the kids saw them as opportunities to recapture the peace-and-love vibe of the original, local officials saw them as grave threats to public order. In the case of the People’s Fair held near Iola, Wisconsin that June, the cops probably had it right. The festival was haunted by heavy drug and alcohol use, as well as rumors of shakedowns, beatings, and rapes by bikers in attendance. With all that, what happened on Sunday may have been inevitable.

The 200-acre festival site was partly wooded, with a long, sloping field that created a natural amphitheater. The only building on the site was an old barn with a lily pond nearby, which had been taken over by the bikers for a campsite. It was the lowest point on the site, to the left of the stage area. Just before 7:00 Sunday morning, people up the the hill began throwing bottles at the bikers below. Amid the barrage, a few bikers mounted up and charged.

Despite the night of rumors, for many who were there, this was the first indication of real trouble. Scott Thomson, working for a company hired to provide stage security, remembers his boss sounding the alarm like Paul Revere: “The bikers are coming!” Paul and Bob Ericksen, who had traveled to the festival from Escanaba, Michigan, watched it all from their campsite. “Chicks were on the handlebars, shooting,” Bob remembers.

Three people were wounded, but it could have been worse—especially for the bikers. After the shooting stopped, angry attendees kept flinging bottles and rocks at them. Paul Ericksen says, “They were going to get their ass whipped.” The bikers fled, a few leaving their bikes behind, which were promptly set on fire by the crowd. A total of 23 bikers (17 men and six women) were arrested on the road outside. Portage County Sheriff Nick Check later claimed that the bikers had “thanked the pigs—that’s us—for saving their lives” from the beating they took.

After the jump: the rest of Sunday, the aftermath Monday, and what happened in the weeks beyond.

The People’s Fair

The Woodstock Nation gathered over an August weekend in 1969 for the single most famous rock festival ever held. In December 1969, a single-day festival at Altamont Speedway near Oakland, California, was a downer from the start—too many drugs, too little security, and too much of the Hell’s Angels, who murdered a fan within a few feet of the stage as the Rolling Stones played. But as the winter of 1970 melted into spring, the burnished glow of Woodstock outshone the fires of Altamont in the memories of young people. Millions craved a communal, outdoor experience of their own.

Wisconsin’s Woodstock was the Sound Storm Festival, held on the York farm near Poynette in Columbia County, north of Madison, in late April. Local law enforcement officials prepared for the worst—rioting, looting, clean-cut rural youth enticed to vice by hippie provocateurs—but at the same time they took a lenient view of drug use and public nudity. As a result, there were only a handful of arrests, and the festival proceeded peacefully. The success of Sound Storm meant that somebody would try to organize a second festival. Unfortunately, it ended up more Altamont than Woodstock.

Rumors of a festival to be held somewhere in central Wisconsin circulated for weeks before the official announcement on June 17, 1970. Earth Enterprises and Concert Promoters International purchased a plot of land that straddled the Portage/Waupaca County line near Iola, about 80 miles west of Green Bay and 140 miles north of Madison, and would hold a “People’s Fair” over the weekend of June 26–28. Although county officials briefly discussed whether the rock festival could be stopped, there was little they could do. Most of the festival activities would be held in Iola Township, which had no zoning laws that could be invoked.

By Monday, June 22, promoters had begun preparing the site, and underground newspapers were publicizing the show. The Friday bill was to be topped by Woodstock veterans Melanie and Paul Butterfield, Taj Mahal, and jazz drummer Buddy Rich. Saturday’s headliners were to include Spirit, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, Mason Proffit, Buffy Ste. Marie, Crow, and Brownsville Station. Chuck Berry and Ravi Shankar were set for Sunday. On all three days, local and regional bands would fill out the bill, including Siegal-Schwall, Soup, the Tayles, Short Stuff, Tongue, Oz, SRC, the Bowery Boys (which later became Clicker), and Fuse (which included two future members of Cheap Trick). Not all of the scheduled acts played—Spirit didn’t—and some late additions did. Iggy and the Stooges played one of the weekend’s most memorable sets just before sunrise on Sunday morning.

After the jump, the festival begins.