The Only Thing Missing…

. . . is “Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.” On this final day of August, here’s one last summer rerun. I guess it’s plausibly on-topic, and given the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it’s appropriate. It appeared at my first blog, the Daily Aneurysm, one week after Katrina made landfall, and almost a year before I got back into radio, on September 5, 2005:

For many years, when I was younger and could live on less money, I was a radio broadcaster. And when it came to working on the air, bad weather, be it tornadoes or blizzards, was my absolute favorite thing. Part of it was ego: Only when the weather is bad can your typical dumb-ass disc jockey be sure people are hanging on his every word. But part of it was a visceral understanding that providing information on weather events, information which can mean the difference between life and death, is the reason radio stations are licensed to begin with. So in my career, I read a lot of weather bulletins—even when the various corporate suits who ran the stations I worked at would have preferred I tell people turn over to the Weather Channel and play another Led Zeppelin tune.

The typical bulletin from the National Weather Service, although it can contain information about dramatic events, is usually fairly dispassionate in tone. In fact, these bulletins generally read like prepared scripts with blanks to be filled in. But the hurricane warning issued by the National Weather Service Sunday morning before Katrina struck, is anything but.

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…

HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.

AT LEAST HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED…ALL WINDOWS WILL BE BLOWN OUT.

THE VAST MAJORITY…OF TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

It’s been a week since Katrina made landfall, and I am over a thousand highway miles from New Orleans, but that bulletin scares the hell out of me—still.

And the [Bush] administration is still trying to claim they didn’t know how bad it would be?

Top 10 in Tucson

Ever since last year’s One Hit Wonder week in late September, we’ve been periodically dipping into the Billboard Hot 100 between 1955 and 1986 to find one-hit wonders at various chart positions near the bottom. A few weeks ago, I got it into my head that I’d quit with Number 90, and that I’d try to be done by this year’s One Hit Wonder week in late September, but I don’t think we’re gonna make it. There are at least 45 one-hit wonders who peaked at Number 91, which will take us a while to get through. This first installment has a Philadelphia flavor, and here we go:

“You’re So Nice to Be Near”/The Loreleis (11/12/55, one week on chart). The Loreleis were a doo-wop group and they recorded on the Dot label, but that’s all I can uncover about them. If you know more, help a brother out.

“Shirley”/The Schoolboys (2/23/57, two weeks). A group of five African-American boys from New York City, discovered by DJ Tommy “Dr. Jive” Smalls. The flip side of this single, “Please Say You Want Me,” outperformed “Shirley” on the R&B charts.

“Furry Murray”/Tradewinds (8/17/59, two weeks). A novelty song, recorded on RCA, produced by Hugo and Luigi: “Furry Murray got a Yul Brynner haircut/Now Murray ain’t furry no more.” Supposedly performed once on American Bandstand. This is why the grownups hated rock ‘n’ roll.

“I Cried”/Joe Damiano (9/7/59, three weeks). There’s more than one way to be part of a few dozen million-sellers: After he gave up trying to become a teen idol with “I Cried” and other releases, Joe Damiano (real name Joe DeAngelis) became a session musician in Philadelphia, and played French horn on many Gamble and Huff recordings.

“Old Shep”/Ralph DeMarco (11/16/59, two weeks). If you’ve never heard a version of “Old Shep,” the classic country weeper about a boy and his dog, prepare yourself for a mawkish good time. Red Foley wrote and recorded it; Elvis Presley just missed the Top 40 with it in 1956. The song had been covered by other country stars including Tennessee Ernie Ford and Hank Snow, but the version by DeMarco, who was just 15 years old, was intended for the pop market. Dick Clark featured it on both American Bandstand and his primetime show in the fall of 1959.

“Someone Loves You, Joe”/Singing Belles (4/25/60, three weeks). The Singing Belles were two sisters, Anne and Angela Barry, from Brooklyn, New York. “Someone Loves You, Joe,” borrows the tune of “Kumbaya” and uses an insistent martial drumbeat to make a record that sounds like it’s being sung to a soldier getting ready to go off and fight the Cold War.

“Come on Over”/Strollers (4/17/61, two weeks). There’s not much information about the Strollers or “Come on Over” available on the Internet, but if you’re looking for a stroller to put your kid in, there are plenty available.

“Joey Baby”/Anita & Th’ So-and-Sos (3/3/62, three weeks). This group is better known as the Anita Kerr Quartet, who provided backing vocals on dozens of countrypolitan hits in the 50s before Kerr founded the Anita Kerr Singers and moved into the pop field, where her group became equally ubiquitous as backing singers, and with their own recordings. “Joey Baby” has that vaguely hypnotic space-age pop sound so emblematic of the late 50s and early 1960s, and it’s the only single to chart on which Anita Kerr is a leader. There’s a lot more about her career here.

“Dancin’ the Strand”/Maureen Gray (6/16/62, three weeks). A big star in Philadelphia, Maureen Gray recorded a number of singles, but only “Dancin’ the Strand” made the national charts. (It was Top 10 in Tucson.) One source maintains that Gray was 13 when she recorded it, but I dunno.

In our next installment: Another titan of easy listening, a couple of Carrolls, and one of the greatest artist names of all time.

Top 5: My Summer With Marlo

After all these years of blogging, I never know precisely what will strike a chord. I didn’t expect last week’s Top 5 post about 1981 to be one of the most-commented in ages, but it was. Perhaps you people are more into the 80s than I imagined, so let’s grab this week’s Top 5 from 1980.

The last week of August 1980 was my last week of fulltime work as the night guy on WXXQ in Freeport, Illinois, before I went back to college. I did most of my shows that week live from the Winnebago County Fair. As I recall, they weren’t very much fun, because nobody seemed to know who I was or care very much about the station, so I ended my tenure wondering whether the work we had put in that summer had been worth the effort. In retrospect, I know that it was—if only because that summer now stands as one of my all-time favorites. Here are five albums that bring it back, based on the chart from CHUM-FM in Toronto dated August 30, 1980. (Last Monday, Echoes in the Wind looked at the Top 40 side of this week.)

1. Emotional Rescue/Rolling Stones. The jocks at WXXQ did not quite know what to make of the title song from this album, which seemed very un-Stones-like and was quite the momentum killer on the air besides. We’d moved on to “She’s So Cold” by the end of the summer, which was more satisfying to us. (I’ve linked to it before, but I really like this post from Kinky Paprika on the link between the title song  and The Great Gatsby.)

6. Empty Glass/Pete Townshend. We played “Rough Boys” every couple of hours all summer.

We avoided the big single from Empty Glass, “Let My Love Open the Door” until we absolutely had to play it. I remember a listener, a middle-school age girl, who used to call up and request it, although she called it “Let Marlo Open the Door.” Every radio station has regular callers—people who want to make song requests or just chat. I can’t remember too many from WXXQ, although the afternoon jock had one who was just a couple of clicks removed from being a stalker. If she missed him during the day (and even if she didn’t), she would call me just after I’d taken over at 6:00 and ask if Jeff was there. I would always say I didn’t know, even if he was standing next to me.

12. Just One Night/Eric Clapton. Once, live albums and best-of compilations from superstar acts were guaranteed smashes on the order of brand-new releases. Think of the way greatest-hits albums from Elton John, Chicago, America, and the Eagles became Number-One hits, or the way live albums such as this one (and One For the Road by the Kinks, also on this chart) got into heavy rotation at album stations. Just One Night did give us an excuse to play “Tulsa Time” and “Blues Power” over and over, which is not a bad thing.

15. The Blues Brothers/Soundtrack. We may have overplayed this album that summer, although I swear it wasn’t because the station’s music director (me) loved the movie so much—we weren’t alone. Album stations across the country were all over multiple cuts from it. All these years later, “Gimme Some Lovin’” still sounds pretty good to me. That big horn section gives it a punch the Spencer Davis original—which is plenty punchy its own damn self—doesn’t have.

19. Women and Children First/Van Halen. I had ended the school year back in the spring by destroying Van Halen in a campus newspaper column that generated tons of hate mail from pissed-off fans. I can’t say I had made peace with the band by the end of summer 1980, although 30 years later, I have—mostly by ceasing to care about them one way or the other. It’s not worth the effort anymore. I doubt that it ever was.

The last song I played on WXXQ at the end of my show that last Friday night was “How Does It Feel to Be Back” by Hall and Oates (which everybody forgets was the lead single from their career-making album Voices). I suppose I was ready to get back to school, but I also must have known I’d never have a summer like that again.

First Up, Second Helping

The name of Kenny Loggins does not exactly scream “rock and roll.” He’s spent the last 20 years as an adult-contemporary balladeer. The 1991 album Leap of Faith produced three big AC radio hits and was the epitome of tasteful; in 1994, the similarly tasteful Return to Pooh Corner went platinum. His last big radio hit was 1997′s “For the First Time,” which went to Number One on the adult-contemporary chart and was his last Hot 100 entry to date. He’s spent the last decade alternating soft-rock albums with children’s albums and Christmas discs.

In the middle of the 1980s, Loggins was one of the kings of the soundtrack single: Of his nine Hot 100 singles between 1984 and 1988, six were from movies, including the Number-One single “Footloose,” Number Two “Danger Zone” (from Top Gun), and Number Eight “Nobody’s Fool” (from Caddyshack II). His other singles from that period, such as “I’m Free,” “Forever,” and “Meet Me Halfway,” were power-ballad productions that have “mid-80s” written all over ‘em. Before the soundtrack years, Loggins’ biggest hits were the extremely fine “Whenever I Call You Friend” in 1978, and “I’m Alright” (a movie song itself, from Caddyshack) in 1980. Also recommended: the single “Easy Driver” from 1978, and I still dig “This Is It” from 1980.

Back in the 70s, before the world of pop duos was conquered by Hall and Oates, it was ruled by Loggins and Messina, who were rock ‘n’ roll credible. Their first album was conceived as a Loggins solo project with Jim Messina producing, but was eventually titled Kenny Loggins With Jim Messina Sittin’ In, and featured the original recording of “Danny’s Song.” Later in 1972, the album Loggins and Messina was propelled into the Top 20 by the hit singles “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and “Thinking of You”; their next three albums, Full Sail, On Stage, and Mother Lode, hit the Top 10. They stayed together through 1976, and if you don’t own anything else of theirs, I’ll bet their 1976 album The Best of Friends is on your shelf someplace.

Before joining with Messina, Loggins was a contract songwriter, penning several tunes recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, including “House at Pooh Corner,” which he would later record himself. He also worked as a musician, playing with a touring version of the Electric Prunes although not recording with them. And for a brief time in the late 1960s, he was part of a band called Second Helping. Not much is known about Second Helping; they were based in Pasadena, California, where Loggins was attending college. After winning a talent contest, they cut some sides for the Viva label. They’re garage-y, psychedelic, and vastly different from the stuff Loggins would do with Messina, let alone his solo balladry—but there he is, right in the middle of the clatter.

Technical-Type Note: If you are a user of Stumbleupon, Reddit, or Digg, you can now promote individual posts from this blog to those services. Find the links at the bottom of each individual post. (You won’t see them on the front-page feed.) If you use Twitter and you see something you’d like to share, you can also tweet individual posts. If you don’t care about any of this, go and download yourself some mp3s and have a nice day.

“Let Me In”/Second Helping
“Floating Downstream on an Inflatable Rubber Raft”/Second Helping
(buy ‘em here along with more obscure garage psychedelia from Los Angeles)

The Bombing of Sterling Hall

Here’s another summer rerun, which has little to do with our regular subject matter except for being about one of the seminal events in Madison history at the dawn of the 1970s. This post appeared at my first blog, the Daily Aneurysm, on August 24, 2005, and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written, although I’ve had to remove several now-dead links that appeared in the original version. I’ve edited it to reflect today’s anniversary.

Forty years ago today—3:42AM on Monday, August 24, 1970—the largest truck bomb ever detonated in the United States (until Oklahoma City) exploded outside Sterling Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin here in Madison. The target was the Army Math Research Center, housed in the building. A researcher working in the building, Robert Fassnacht, was killed in the blast, and 26 buildings were damaged. The blast was audible 30 miles away. Damage was eventually estimated at $1.5 million, which was real money back then.

The day of the bombing, Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles said he believed it was the work of a nationwide conspiracy of radicals who wanted to destroy American society. Well, not really, although there was a conspiracy. Four Madison men were eventually sought in connection with the bombing. Karl Armstrong, the leader of the group, was arrested in Canada in 1972, fought extradition, and eventually agreed to a plea deal that got him 23 years in prison. He was paroled in 1980. David Fine, who was only 17 at the time of the blast, was captured in 1976 and served three years. Armstrong’s brother, Dwight, remained on the run until 1977. After his arrest, he made a deal for a seven-year sentence and, like his brother, was paroled in 1980. The fourth conspirator, Leo Burt, has never been found.

What I remember most about the bombing (I was 10 that fall, growing up in a small town an hour from Madison) is the immediate and irrevocable characterization of Karl Armstrong in particular as the embodiment of evil. I’m sure I got this impression through news reports, and doubtless from whatever my parents said about the story. Surely that was the way many people viewed the conspirators in the days immediately following the bombing. In the intervening years, however, reactions to the bombing have become more ambiguous.

Stoned and Sugar-Buzzed

As August begins to dwindle and autumn approaches, here’s a content advisory for this blog. We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of that pivotal season when I first discovered the radio and the music on it—which means that things are probably going to be more moony and reflective than usual around here between now and Christmas, or thereabouts. Before we hit the anniversary itself, we ought to take care of some business that predates the fall of 1970.

Most of the songs on my Desert Island list are those I can remember as current hits on the radio, but not all. Nine of the songs on the list were popular before the fall of 1970. I found them in succeeding years, and by some alchemy they became favorites. I’ve already written about one of them: “The Weight” by the Band. The other eight follow here, with commentary Twitter-style:

“Crimson and Clover”/Tommy James and the Shondells. Like a marijuana brownie with lots and lots of frosting on it—you get stoned and sugar-buzzed at the same time.

“Hang ‘Em High”/Booker T. and the MGs. In which Booker T. at the organ is like a guy who’s good with a knife—when he gets you with his weapon of choice, you’re cut to shreds before you realize what’s happened.

“Only the Strong Survive”/Jerry Butler. A single drum kick, an angel chorus sings “I remember,” and the Iceman begins to preach the lesson for today. A Gamble and Huff production.

“Crystal Blue Persuasion”/Tommy James and the Shondells. Sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, weed, etc. Despite having come out in the summer of 1969, this is pure 1970s. (And I believe the version here is the mono 45.)

“I’m Gonna Make You Mine”/Lou Christie. One of the first pre-1970 records to make the Desert Island list, back when I was creating it as some point in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember why. What follows is the most bizarrely incongruous video I’ve ever seen. The process by which this was deemed a good idea, I can’t imagine.

“Love Goes Where My Rosemary Goes”/Edison Lighthouse. First heard this during the 1970 year-end countdown on WLS. Have maintained ever since that the louder you crank it, the better it sounds.

“Ride Captain Ride”/Blues Image. In which the hippie dream of sailing off someplace and building a brand new world still seems possible. (Click here for a clip of the band performing the song on the John Byner-hosted music series Something Else.)

“Into the Mystic”/Van Morrison. Relatively new to the Desert Island list. Sounds like it has existed forever. (Not linking to a version of this, since Van hates the Internet—he’s dumped his official YouTube channel and reduced his own website to a single page with no content. Aim the gun a little lower, sir . . . yeah, right at your foot. There you go.)

When I put the Desert Island list into chronological order, the next song on the list comes from October 1970, so you know what that means.

Recommended Reading: A review of the opening night of the Donald Fagen/Michael McDonald/Boz Scaggs “Dukes of September” tour. They’ll be in Milwaukee on September 15th, but we can’t go, and it’s killing me. The Mrs. will have to sedate me that day. Anybody who’s ever stared at a blank page for too long  will probably enjoy whiteray’s struggle for inspiration. At 30 Days Out, the recurring feature “Your Sister’s (Record) Rack” has been looking into her singles collection. (Part 1 here, part 2 here.) And for a while now, I have been digging the eclectic selection of tunes at Four Steps From the Blues. You should check it out, too.