Paper Maché and Chicken Wire

Around the country, it’s apparently Homecoming Week. Friends of mine on Twitter and Facebook are writing about what their kids are doing, building floats, getting ready for the game or the dance, and so on. It’s got me flashing on some of the homecoming stuff I can still remember.

My freshman and sophomore years of high school, I was class president. That meant I had to be involved in parade float construction even though I had no discernible art or carpentry skills to offer. Freshman year it was easy—there were enough classmates with sufficient enthusiasm to plan and execute the job, so I didn’t have to do much, and what I did was fun. My biggest contribution was to recruit my father to pull the thing with one of his big farm tractors, which he was happy to do. I can remember riding with him, on the tractor’s fender, feeling like a parade float myself—and probably looking like one in the bright red polyester dress pants I wore on so many semi-formal occasions in the mid 1970s.

Sophomore year was different. If I’m recalling correctly, the class officers ended up doing most of the float work; a year older and therefore a bit jaded, fewer classmates showed up to do the hard and/or tedious work of paper-maché crafting and chicken-wire stuffing. I recall saying in later years that in the fall of my sophomore year I learned how to lie down and sleep anytime I had a spare 10 minutes, because there was a period of two weeks or so where I was spending nearly every waking non-school hour working on the goddamn float.

Junior year, I was no longer president of the class; I was vice-president our last two years. Our president both years was a pretty and popular girl who campaigned well but governed poorly, not suited at all for the handful of duties the class presidency entailed. One of those duties was being in charge of building of the float, a task I was happy not to have anymore—although I did make a suggestion. Our float, I said, should be a delegation of classmates and a keg, riding on a flat wagon decorated with a skirt reading “We don’t give a shit.”

Nobody else thought that was a good idea.

By senior year, I had divorced myself from the whole float-building problem and from homecoming entirely, or so I thought—until I found myself MC’ing the band’s halftime show, their biggest show of the year.

I had quit the band after my freshman year because I couldn’t get along with the director. During my senior year, I had to chauffeur my brother to school by 7AM for early rehearsal. I would then stake out a spot in the hallway near my locker, outside the band room, and kill the hour before classes began. Imagine my surprise one morning when the director came out and asked me to MC the show, which was based on Star Wars, then still rocking the theaters. I couldn’t imagine why he’d done it. I’m sure he disliked me as much as I disliked him, and while I’d acquired a reputation as a fearless public speaker, I wasn’t the only one he could have asked. But ask he did, and accept I did, and I remember standing there on the field in front of a packed house on homecoming night, microphone in hand, feeling as though performing that way was as natural as breathing.

Homecoming always seemed bigger in the abstract during the weeks leading up to it than in the reality on the night it happened. Of course, what I have learned since then is that many of the crises of high-school life are like that. Triumphs too.

There’s no musical angle to this post, except the usual one—that in the midst of all these experiences, the radio was always on. A favorite song from the early fall of freshman year is here; the extended version of a record both appropriate and inevitable, from the early fall of senior year, is here.

Glittering Prizes and Endless Compromises

The news yesterday that Bon Jovi is among the nominees for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year struck me as an outrage . . . at first.

Jon Bon Jovi is as close to a complete hack as has ever been brought up for the honor. For the first 20 years of his career, his band’s music sounded like the product of a focus group designed to sell records to fifteen-year-olds. His recent reinvention as a hot country artist, which began when he collaborated with Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland on “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” in 2006 and culminated with the release of an album on Mercury Nashville a year later, came conveniently at the moment he realized he couldn’t get airplay on rock radio anymore. A Hall of Fame induction would validate his brand of skillful careerism, and his ability to move product.

Not that it hasn’t happened before—and not that it isn’t what the Hall primarily exists to celebrate. The proviso that an artist is ineligible for induction until 25 years have passed since their first recordings ostensibly exists to allow a little historical distance, to place an artist’s work in the proper perspective. But when nearly everybody with a string of hit records gets nominated after 25 years, and eventually inducted, even if they did nothing innovative or influential—I have pounded lumps into ZZ Top and John Mellencamp for years on this score—the 25-year benchmark eventually becomes the only one that matters.

Which makes the Hall’s most conspicuous omissions especially maddening: the Doobie Brothers, Chicago, the Moody Blues, Heart, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes, Rush, Todd Rundgren, Ted Nugent, KISS, Hall and Oates, and my two personal hobby-horses, Three Dog Night and Tommy James. So it can’t be skillful careerism and the ability to move product that makes a Hall-of-Famer, either. What the hell is it, then? If the argument justifying certain omissions is that the Hall can’t honor everybody, the Hall ought to be able to explain why those who get in get in, and why those who don’t, don’t.

Defenders of the Baseball Hall of Fame, when pressed to explain why so-and-so is excluded, often say it’s not The Hall of Very Good. Except that frequently it is. (The likely first-ballot induction of Curt Schilling in 2013 will clinch this argument for all time.) The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame can continue to insist that its honorees represent the most significant artists in the music’s history, but it’s not especially rigorous about making sure that’s true. And as long as the 25-year benchmark is the main hurdle an artist has to clear, it’s actually going to be the Hall of Sold a Lot of Records.

Now Buy This: A totally ridiculous reissue of David Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station is out, featuring the original analog master of the album, two discs covering the oft-bootlegged March 1976 Nassau Coliseum show, a disc featuring the 1985 CD master (which supposedly sounds better than subsequent CD issues), a disc containing the single edits of tracks on the album, and a DVD-audio disc containing the original album, a 5.1 surround mix, and an entirely new stereo mix. So that’s six audio discs (with five different versions of the album)—plus three vinyl discs featuring the original album and the Nassau Coliseum show, and a whole bunch of memorabilia. (What, no 8-track?) List price: $165.98, on sale at Amazon for $132.95, it’s nature’s way of telling you that you’re a bit too obsessed with David Bowie.

Recommended Reading: Despite being snubbed by the Hall, the Doobie Brothers are back with their first new album in a decade, and against all odds, it’s apparently pretty good. Jeff Giles reviews it here. Jeff also scored the Quote of the Day yesterday on his Twitter feed, posting a link to the Bon Jovi/Hall of Fame story with the words, “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame revealed to be elaborate prank.”

Stars Out at Night

(Slightly edited.)

Back in the days when turntables needed to be fed and transmitters had to be tended, there was a class of radio people hard at work on the other side of the clock. Today, broadcast automation and self-tending transmitters make overnight jocks largely unnecessary. But before all that, overnights could be a proving ground, where a young talent showed that he or she was destined for better things, or a dumping ground, a place to file away somebody not good enough for the light of day but adequate enough to keep around.

For a handful of gifted personalities, overnights were where they belonged. I’ve written about a couple of Chicago’s legendary all-nighters, Eddie Schwartz and Franklyn MacCormack, and I’m remembering another today with word that Jay Andres, who did all-night shows in Chicago on WBBM and WGN for nearly 30 years, has died at age 86. (Andres’ passing comes just three days after the death of Ward Quaal, the man who built what the current management of WGN is dismantling.)

I remember hearing Andres on WGN, when his show was called Great Music From Chicago, featuring big-band jazz and/or classical music—and commercials for its sponsor, Talman Home Federal Savings and Loan, delivered in that utterly perfect late-night voice. Some overnight jocks would try self-consciously to be “mellow,” whatever the hell that means. But squarely within the context of the station, the music, and the hour of the night, Andres was simply himself.

It seemed to me, as a young listener, that there was romance in being on the radio late at night. You certainly feel it with Andres on the aircheck linked above. Picture him there in a darkened studio, cigarette smoke wreathing him (if he was a smoker, which I don’t know for certain), city lights through the window outside. The record ends, he keys the microphone, and speaks softly to his audience, one person in a car here, two people in a bedroom there, intimately, despite the fact that millions of people are within the sound of his voice (WGN is audible over much of eastern North America at night) and that thousands may be listening. Never mind that the studio phone probably rang constantly, that there was always an engineer through the glass, and that being on the air is a busy occupation—when the microphone was on, it was just you and him.

(That intimacy—that sense that it’s just you and the listener—is harder for a jock to achieve than you as a listener might think. We are bred to think of ourselves as “announcers,” like PA guys reading lineups at the ballgame, or “personalities,” which aren’t necessarily the same as real selves. Unlearning those tendencies can take a lifetime.)

I didn’t do an overnight until I was well into my 30s, after I’d left full-time radio and was working part-time. Doing it occasionally is harder than doing it regularly. If it’s a regular thing, you can adjust your biological clock to accommodate it—if you’re willing to commit to it as a lifestyle. I once knew an overnight guy who tried to live a normal daytime life on the weekends. When his body was just beginning to adjust to sleeping by day and working by night, he’d change the cycle again, with predictable results—he was always a little foggy. Sometimes, station bosses didn’t help overnight guys adjust, however. They were sometimes scheduled for a daytime shift on the weekends.

You will not hear much real life on the overnight radio dial anymore, should you surf it some night soon—lots of syndicated talk, voice-tracking, automation, program-length commercials, and other flotsam. What you will hear only rarely now is the voice of a real broadcaster living on the air, east of midnight.

Longshots

(My weekend post at Popdose on the 40th anniversary of the premiere of The Partridge Family is here, if you care.)

My laptop music stash is pushing 15,000 songs, which I usually listen to on shuffle, and that means that the odds of hearing any given song are relatively slim. But since I started using Media Jukebox earlier this year, I can adjust the shuffled list to group similar artists and genres or make more pleasing transitions. (Once a radio programmer, always a radio programmer.) Theoretically, therefore, some of the better stuff should be getting prioritized just a little bit. But the shuffle usually does fine on its own, coming up with an interesting selection of tunes first thing one recent morning. Here they are. Call it a Top 5 travelogue:

“Witchi Tai To”/Today’s Tomorrow. Based on a Native American peyote chant, “Witchi Tai To” became a modest hit in 1969 for Everything Is Everything, a group led by the song’s composer, Jim Pepper, and featuring future fusion hero Larry Coryell on guitar. Today’s Tomorrow was from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, although they were better known around that area as the Ladds; when their version of “Witchi Tai To” was released on the national label Bang, it was under the name Today’s Tomorrow. “Witchi Tai To” was huge in Milwaukee during the spring of 1970—one source says it topped WOKY’s chart for a month, but I can’t find charts to prove it. As one might expect a religious chant to be, there’s something hypnotic and alluring about “Witchi Tai To,” in whatever version you hear it.

(Cheeseheads amongst the readership might enjoy The Wisconsin Music Blog, a great source for Wisconsin bands, many beyond obscure. Nothing new has been posted there since July, however, so I’m a little concerned about its future.)

“Twenty Years Ago Today”/Gypsy. Continuing the Midwestern theme, this is a Minnesota group that recorded several well-regarded albums in the 70s before scoring a radio hit with “Cuz It’s You Girl” as the James Walsh Gypsy Band long about 1978. “Twenty Years Ago Today” is from the album In the Garden, released in 1971. How it missed becoming a hit single, I dunno. (Minnesotans amongst the readership tell me that this tune was actually cut in 1999 and added to a reissue of In the Garden. It’s still a good song, though.)

“The Dream Never Dies”/Cooper Brothers. Now let’s head for Canada. Richard and Brian Cooper formed their band in the early 70s but didn’t achieve success until they signed with the Capricorn label in the States. They won a slew of Canadian music awards beginning in 1978 and scored two country-flavored Hot 100 hits, including “The Dream Never Dies” in the fall of 1978. Obscure trivia connection: they were produced by Les Emmerson of the Five Man Electrical Band.

“See Forever Eyes”/Prism. From Ontario we head across Canada to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Prism was formed in 1976. They were the Canadian Styx, recording several albums of pop-rock loaded with big riffs, big synths, and punch-your-fist-in-the-air choruses, several written under the pseudonym Rodney Higgs by original member Jim Vallance, who would later write a bunch of hits with Bryan Adams. “See Forever Eyes,” which was not written by Higgs/Valance, was released as a single in 1978, but it doesn’t seem to have charted in the States. Their biggest Stateside hit was “Don’t Let Him Know” from 1982; their most fondly remembered song is probably the ridiculous and awesome “Armageddon” from 1979.

“Longshot”/Henry Paul Band. And down to the American South with Paul, who had been a member of the Outlaws until 1977. Since country rock was all the rage at our college radio station, his solo albums were a very big deal to us, particularly the 1980 album Feel the Heat. But country rock was starting to lose steam by 1980—the label often had more to do with where the records were filed in the store or the zip codes of the band members than the sound of the music itself. Regardless of what you call it, Feel the Heat isn’t very good (Allmusic.com destroys it here), although “Longshot” was a decent radio record.

I haven’t done this for a while, but you’ll find all five songs in the zip file below, at varying bit rates. The Prism (buy here) and Henry Paul (buy here) albums remain in print, but Today’s Tomorrow, Gypsy, and the Cooper Brothers are out of print. As is my practice when I put up a megapost like this, these tunes will be available for an extremely limited time—only until Wednesday noon—so snag ‘em now.

The Hits Just Keep on Comin’ Shuffle Megapost (30.6 mb)

You Kids Get Off My Lawn

There’s something that’s been bugging me for a while, and it’s time to deal with it.

I was looking through some listings for the Time-Life AM Gold series this morning, including one titled Teen Idols of the 70s. It features the usual suspects: the Partridge Family, the Bay City Rollers, the Osmonds, Bobby Sherman—and the Brady Kids doing “It’s a Sunshine Day.” The latter is frequently anthologized on collections of this sort, you get 9.6 million hits on it with a Google search, and I’d be willing to bet that if you asked random folks on the street who could place the record at all, they’d tell you that “It’s a Sunshine Day” was quite a big hit in its day. But it wasn’t. Of the 15,000 surveys online at ARSA, it doesn’t appear on a single one. It doesn’t appear in the Cash Box Archives and never made it into Billboard, either, not even on the Bubbling Under chart.

So how come this song is now considered one of the prime musical artifacts of the 1970s? Let’s see if we can figure it out.

The Brady kids recorded four albums between 1970 and 1973, but none of them charted. They recorded solo and in various combinations also. “It’s a Sunshine Day” appeared on the 1972 album The Kids From the Brady Bunch, and was seen on the show in a January 1973 episode. But even though I was mainlining the Top 40 in those days, I don’t remember hearing anything by them on the radio—or even knowing they’d recorded anything. This might be because I never cared much for the show, even though I was in the prime demographic for The Brady Bunch during its run from 1969 to 1974. (Far from seeming like my peers, the Brady kids seemed like vapid twits with whom I had nothing in common.)

Regardless of how I felt about it, The Brady Bunch was impossible to escape, running in syndication during those all-important after-school hours throughout the 70s and later getting extensive play on cable in the 80s. There was a TV reunion movie in 1981 and a reunion series, The Brady Brides, which ran for 10 episodes, but true Bradymania wouldn’t break out until the late 80s, with A Very Brady Christmas in 1988 and a brief dramatic (!) revival of the show in 1990. In 1993, various Brady recordings were cobbled together and released as It’s a Sunshine Day: The Best of the Brady Bunch; the big-screen Brady Bunch Movie followed in 1995.

So it’s only since the middle of the 1990s that “It’s a Sunshine Day” has been considered one of the classic pop hits of the 1970s. And that leads me to surmise that it’s the children of the 1980s and early 90s who worship “It’s a Sunshine Day,” and by extension, The Brady Bunch itself, much more than the children of the 1970s do.

I was a Partridge Family man myself. Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of that show’s premiere, and I’ll celebrate it with a Partridge Family megapost over at Popdose.

Coming Monday: the post I intended to put up here today.

We Been Researchin’ Songs

It’s One-Hit-Wonder Week, apparently, which means we’re approaching the first anniversary of the birth of this feature, which explores the one-hit wonders whose lone Hot 100 entry peaked near the very bottom of the chart. We’re working on the Number 91s, and what better way to honor the entire one-hit wonder concept than to remember some of the most egregious barf ever to creep onto the radio somewhere?

“Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me”/Lena Zavaroni (7/27/74, four weeks on chart). She had become a star in Britain after winning a TV talent show at age 9. She next caught the attention of American celebrities like Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, and Carol Burnett, and eventually performed at the White House, and on the Jerry Lewis telethon. Her American record deal was with Stax, signed as the label was flailing at everything and anything, and on the verge of extinction. “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me” charted before she turned 11. Zavaroni had a modest career on British TV, but battled anorexia all of her life, and died in 1999 at age 35.

“No Charge”/Shirley Caesar (6/14/75, five weeks). This is a soul/gospel version of the chart-topping country song Melba Montgomery squeaked into the Top 40 in the summer of 1974, a weeper about a boy who tries to give his mother a bill for all the things he’s done around the house, only to get one in return from Mom marked “paid in full.” In 1976, J. J. Barrie would take his own version of it to Number One in the UK. Shirley Caesar’s version, thanks to its soulful swing, is the least sappy of the three.

“When You’re Young and in Love”/Choice Four (9/13/75, four weeks). This song had been a minor hit for Ruby and the Romantics and the Marvelettes before two versions of it ran the charts almost simultaneously in 1975. The Choice Four’s version, which hits a nice little slow-jam groove, slightly outperformed that of Ralph Carter, which appeared in this feature back at Number 95. The Choice Four also cut “Walk Away From Love” before David Ruffin made a hit of it early in 1976.

“We Been Singin’ Songs”/Baron Stewart (10/11/75, six weeks). Another fabulously obscure artist of the sort this series seems to bring out. Stewart worked with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before Fleetwood Mac, and played with the much-hyped Bernie Leadon-Michael Georgiades Band and on Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue. He also recorded at least one album on his own. You can get a taste of “We Been Singin’ Songs,” and Stewart’s idiosyncratic style, at the 5:15 mark here.

Right about now you may be thinking, “Jim, you promised us egregious barf. Lena Zavaroni sucked, but the rest of the stuff was passable. Where’s the barf?” It’s on the flip.