Top 5: On the Way

The windstorm that blasted through the Midwest this week is gone now. Yesterday, the first day after the storm, the sun struggled to stay out and the thermometer crept only into the 40s. This morning, the car windows needed quite a bit of scraping. There’s sunshine, but it’s no longer October light, for in its wake, that windstorm brought November.

For the next several days, autumn will linger, but in a couple of weeks, we’ll move to what New Englanders sometimes call the locking time, the gray space between autumn and winter. That season between seasons can last a few days, or a few weeks. It can even weather a snowstorm, if the snow melts in a day or two. But once the snow cover is here to stay . . . that’s winter. This seems like a good time to briefly discuss a few more of the songs on my Desert Island list, the musical essentials that remind me who I am and where I’ve been. A few of them have the sort of vibe that fits nicely with the graying world of November.

“Maxine”/Donald Fagen. From the 1982 album The Nightfly, which Fagen has acknowledged as a backward-looking album, “Maxine” is a wistful reflection on a time when possibility was unlimited, obstacles were surmounted lightly, and love was enough to live on. Which is an autumn thing to do.

“Steppin’ Out”/Joe Jackson. On the radio in the fall of 1982, which was the first autumn I was out of college and living on my own in the big city (well, Dubuque, but it was a big city to a farm boy from Clarno Township). Ever since, those big piano chords have reminded me of that life. Back then, “Steppin’ Out” was a song I couldn’t wait to hear, and then hear again, and it still is. I’ve listened to it twice now just writing this paragraph.

“I Believe in You”/Don Williams. I love me some Don Williams, who hit Number One 17 times on the country charts between 1974 and 1986. “I Believe in You” was his biggest hit, and also crossed over to the pop charts, making Number 24 during Christmas week in 1980. Despite that warm, grandfatherly delivery, it can be heard as bleak—trust nothing in this world except the love of the people you can look in the eye. But it can also be heard optimistically—that when everything else fails, you can trust the love of the people you can look in the eye.

“For Your Babies”/Simply Red. One of the more recent records to make the list, this one is from the superb 1991 album Stars. “For Your Babies” is one of Mick Hucknall’s best performances, in which he sings to a child and its mother in a way Don Williams could understand: “I don’t believe in many things, but in you, I do.” The rest of Simply Red never sounded better, either.

“Wasted on the Way”/Crosby Stills and Nash. One of the lessons we learn with age is how much we let slide when we’re young. We fail to take sufficient notice of things that happen, places we go, people we know. Even if we’re satisfied with the road we’ve taken and the place to which it’s brought us now, we never fully escape regret over some of what we left undone. But since we can’t go back in time and fix it, we’ve got to let it go.

So much water moving underneath the bridge
Let the water come and carry us away

I’m working on it. Because it’s an autumn thing to do.

One Day in Your Life: October 28, 1985

October 28, 1985, is a Monday. The headline on the nation’s sports pages today is the meltdown of the St. Louis Cardinals, who lost game 7 and the World Series to Kansas City last night 11-0. On Saturday night, the Cardinals had lost game 6 on an umpire’s call that TV replays clearly showed to be wrong. In tonight’s NFL game, the Los Angeles Raiders run their record to 6-and-2 with a 34-21 win over San Diego. Future NFL player Early Doucet is born, and former player Tommy Thompson dies. Chris Evert takes over the Number One ranking among female tennis players from Martina Navratilova, who had taken it from Evert two weeks only, and who will get it back a month from now. On the comics pages today, Garfield abuses Jon again. A series of stories in the current Time magazine dissects the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro earlier this month, and the joint American-Italian operation that intercepted a plane carrying the Palestinian hijackers. People magazine’s cover story is on the best and worst-dressed people of the year. Portions of Massachusetts are declared a federal disaster area after Hurricane Gloria struck the East Coast in late September. TV preacher Pat Robertson will claim the hurricane missed his headquarters in Virginia because of his prayers. A total eclipse of the moon is visible throughout all of Asia, but cannot be seen in North and South America.

Top movies at the box office this past weekend include Jagged Edge, Krush Groove, Commando, and Back to the Future. Among the soaps on daytime TV today: Ryan’s Hope. Tonight, PBS airs a documentary about the Statue of Liberty, directed by Ken Burns. On network TV, it’s the made-for-TV movie A Time to Live, starring Liza Minnelli in a role that will win her a Golden Globe award for Best Actress, and the retooled sitcom What’s Happening Now. Joan Rivers is guest host on The Tonight Show with John Larroquette and Howie Mandel. The Grateful Dead opens a two-night stand in Atlanta, Eric Clapton plays Milan, Italy, R.E.M. plays London, and Miles Davis plays Copenhagen, Denmark. The Bob Dylan box set Biograph and Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo are released. Barbra Streisand shoots a video for “Somewhere” at the Apollo Theater in New York. On the Cash Box magazine chart for the week, “Take on Me” by a-ha is in its second week at Number One; “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits holds at Number Two. “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears jumps into the Top 10 at Number 7, moving up from 12. Other strong upward movers: “We Built This City” by the Starship, Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City,” “Be Near Me” by ABC, and “Separate Lives” by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin. A Top-40 station in Illinois that is playing all of these songs plans to launch a live morning show next month. The host, who has never much liked to get up in the morning, will decide to set his alarm for 4:20AM, because 4:15 would be much too early.

Perspective From the Present: I don’t hate “We Built This City” as much as some people (such as Blender magazine, which put it atop its list of 50 worst songs ever), but that video really is sucktastic. It fails to use the images the song provides, most notably the radio reference in the middle, opting instead for shots of people staring. That’s a weird choice for a song supposed to be about the enduring power of rock.

Shreds of News and Afterthoughts

Odds and ends, seeds and stems, this is the best I can do today:

Bobbing for Apples: EMI is out with a vast reissue of music originally released on the Beatles’ Apple label. In addition to a one-disc best of featuring familiar hits like Badfinger’s “Day After Day,” “Carolina in My Mind” by James Taylor, and “Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin, a slew of full-length albums are also newly out, most with bonus tracks included. As Allmusic.com observes, Apple was the Fab Four’s playground—if an artist captured their interest or an idea crossed their mind, Apple gave them a place to put it. And so Paul McCartney indulged his dance-hall tendencies with Hopkin and Harrison worked closely with rocker Jackie Lomax. But Apple also released albums by Billy Preston, R&B singer Doris Troy, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, along with classical music and Indian music and scattered singles that defy easy classification. The attraction of much of it is the Beatle connection—their contributions as sidemen or songwriters—but some of it stands on its own pretty well. There’s an exhaustive description of what’s included in the reissue at Apple’s website.

Halloween Everywhere: Up until two decades ago, network TV schedules were not clogged with Halloween-themed episodes of regular series—we got It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and maybe Dracula or Frankenstein on the late movie, but not much beyond that. Some of the top-rated shows in television, including M*A*S*H in 1982 and The Cosby Show in 1985, did do Halloween-themed episodes, but without starting a trend. Then came 1989, when Roseanne, then the most-watched show on TV, did its first Halloween episode. After that, other sitcoms were quick to adopt the Halloween theme, including The Simpsons, which broadcast the first of its annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes in 1990. Home Improvement got on the Halloween bandwagon in 1992 and continued with annual Halloween episodes to the end of its run. Today, it’s a mighty poor sitcom that isn’t tempted to observe Halloween at least once, if not yearly. Correlation isn’t causation, but it sure looks like the general boom in popularity of Halloween in recent years occurred alongside the explosion of Halloween observance on top TV shows.

Trick and Treat: Over the weekend, 30 Days Out featured a great compilation of scary and/or Halloweenish music and TV themes, and briefly praised Twilight Zone, which has always been a favorite show of mine. I’ve been watching the fifth season on DVD this week, which features one of the strangest commentary tracks I’ve ever heard. In 1963, Mickey Rooney starred in a one-man episode, “Last Night of a Jockey.” His commentary track consists largely of him cantankerously disclaiming all memory of making the episode or meeting Rod Serling, and openly, angrily dismissing the very idea that anyone could be interested in anything he has to say about it. It has the grim fascination of a traffic accident, which is probably why the producers chose to include it. The commentary on a succeeding episode, “Living Doll,” more than compensates, however. It features the legendary June Foray, voice artist extraordinaire, who provided the voice of Talky Tina in the episode. (“My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.”) Over her long career, Foray also provided the voices for Rocky Squirrel and Natasha, Cindy Lou Who, Witch Hazel, and dozens of other cartoon characters you know—many of which she manages to work into her commentary.

If this post seems a little schizophrenic to you, remember . . . it’s almost Halloween, and it’s crazy out there.

Marlon Reynolds Is Bitter and Sad

Back when I was listening to American Top 40 regularly, I loved the chart trivia bits on the show—those letters from listeners asking who had the most Number-One singles in the rock era, and so forth. Before the Internet, and before Joel Whitburn’s tremendous chart books became widely available, Casey was often the best source for that kind of thing. But I would imagine he got thousands of letters, so the chance yours would be chosen for the show were comparable to your chance of getting hit by lightning.

On the show for the week of  October 23, 1976, Marlon Reynolds of New Orleans beat the odds with a pretty good question: Which artist has hit the charts under the most different names, whether as a solo artist or a group member? After Casey teased it, I tried to think of who it might be. Tony Burrows, maybe? He sang under four different group names on “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes,” “My Baby Loves Lovin’,” “Gimme Dat Ding,” and “United We Stand,” (which all charted at about the same time in the spring of 1970), as well as “Beach Baby” by First Class, and in the Flower Pot Men, the Kestrels, and the Ivy League. Or was it some session singer who also scored a solo hit or two?

But it wasn’t Burrows, and Casey explicitly disqualified session singers. The answer, according to Casey, was John Lennon, and then he listed eight different ways Lennon was credited on various charting records: John Lennon, John Ono Lennon, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Nuclear Band, etc. “And there you go, Marlon. Thanks for your letter; it was really interesting.”

The question was interesting. The answer was terrible—not just unsatisfying, but pointless. If I were Marlon, I’d have been pissed. It’s like winning the lottery and then finding out you’re getting paid in grocery coupons.

The other listener-submitted trivia question on the October 23, 1976, show, was also awkwardly handled. It asked which Motown hit had spent the longest stretch at Number One. A good-enough question to answer, sure, but in his answer, Casey insisted on interpolating that the song, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” also had the longest title of any Motown hit to reach the top. There’s a difference between trivia and minutiae, and that’s it.

The AT40 segment featuring Marlon’s question and answer is below. I’m posting it because the music (none of it by Lennon) is Top-40 glorious.

Close Encounters With the Famous: I was pleased to note that Dan O’Day stopped by and left a comment over the weekend. Dan is one of the best-known consultants in radio; years ago I had the chance to attend one of his jock seminars, and I’m still learning stuff from him today.

Recommended Reading: Nine years to the week after Apple introduced the iPod, Sony announced this week that it’s phasing out production of the Walkman, the portable cassette player that changed the way people listened to music following its introduction in 1979. I didn’t own a portable cassette player until relatively late in life—not until I had my own lawn to mow in the late 90s—and what I bought was a Walkman knockoff equipped with an AM/FM radio. It sucked—but not as hard as Casey’s trivia answer.

American Top 40, October 23, 1976 (excerpt) (I should mention here, because I never have before, that you don’t have to download anything I post here; you can go to the link and just listen.)

We Love the 90s

We continue here with our survey of the one-hit wonders to peak on the Billboard Hot 100 at Number 90, another part of the Down in the Bottom series, which has been going on for over a year now. If I’d persevered at any one of my various careers like I’ve persevered at this, I might have become a success at something.

“2001: A Space Odyssey”/Berlin Philharmonic (1/24/70, four weeks on chart). This version of the famous theme from the famous movie is apparently the version that appeared on the official soundtrack album. It is not, apparently, the version that appeared in the film itself. The version in the film was by the Vienna Philharmonic, and permission was given to include it provided that the orchestra not be credited. When a soundtrack album was released, a version by the Berlin Philharmonic was used. Recent reissues of the official movie soundtrack have restored the Vienna Philharmonic version. I think. Some of this stuff ain’t easy to track down.

“Mill Valley”/Miss Abrams and the Strawberry Point School 3rd Grade Class (8/15/70, three weeks). I blogged about this one last week because I had more to say about it than would fit here. Sue me, or better yet, go read the post.

“Questions”/Bang (5/27/72, six weeks). A trio from Philadelphia claiming inspiration from Black Sabbath and Grand Funk, then-unknown Bang crashed a show in Orlando on a dare, playing an audition for the promoter around noontime and finding themselves a the bill with Deep Purple and Faces the same night. They later made three albums for Capitol before splitting, although they have reunited in recent years. “Questions” made it to Number 4 on WAMS in Wilmington, Delaware, but if you didn’t hear it where you were, I’m not surprised.

“Summer Sun”/Jamestown Massacre (9/9/72, five weeks). This band was from suburban Chicago, and shared bills with the American Breed, New Colony Six, and Ides of March. In the mid 70s, after they changed their name to Mariah, Jim Peterik of the Ides of March wrote several songs for them; member Dave Bickler joined with Peterik in the original edition of Survivor. “Summer Sun” is a magnificent radio record—hard to imagine it missing in the same season with “Brandy,” “Black and White,” and “Saturday in the Park,” although it would be better with a stronger vocal.

“I Received a Letter”/Delbert & Glen (12/9/72, three weeks). Delbert is Delbert McClinton, who’s already appeared in this feature as a member of the Ron-Dels, back at Number 97. Glen is Glen Clark, with whom McClinton collaborated on two albums in the early 1970s. McClinton covered “I Received a Letter” on his 1979 album Keeper of the Flame.

“On and Off (Part 1)”/Anacostia (1/27/73, four weeks). An R&B trio from Washington, D.C., produced by Van McCoy, Anacostia was popular enough to appear on Soul Train in December 1972. “On and Off” was later covered by David Ruffin and by Peaches and Herb.

“He”/Today’s People (9/29/73, six weeks). In the early 70s, when it became clear that neither dope nor revolution was going to change the world, many kids turned to Jesus. The religious revival of the times reached down to small-town Wisconsin; my parents got into the whole charismatic Christianity bit for a while, and I can remember attending a youth revival or two. “He” is the sort of thing we might have learned to sing at one of ‘em, although we’d have taken it at a slower, Sunday-school tempo.

“You’re a Part of Me”/Susan Jacks (3/22/75, five weeks). It was only about a month ago that we discussed Susan Jacks and the Poppy Family; in that post I mentioned a single of hers called “All the Tea in China.” I’m not familiar with this one—but I do know the higher-charting 1978 version by Gene Cotton and Kim Carnes.

“Life and Death in G and A”/Love Child’s Afro Cuban Blues Band (7/26/75, three weeks). This group was a project of Michael Zager, who last appeared on this blog when we were discussing the group Ten Wheel Drive, which he formed with Aram Schiefrin in 1969. “Life and Death in G and A” was written by Sly Stone; Zager would later change the group’s unwieldy name to the Afro Cuban Band.

In our next and final installment of the Number 90s, you may find a couple of familiar names, provided you’re a certain kind of geek. Although I suppose that advisory actually applies to this entire blog.

Fallin’ Fallin’ Fallin’

When you are 16 and the two of you are on your first date since getting back together and the football game is over and the evening is getting late and you want to be alone, what can you do? A trip to the park seems like a good idea. There’s a secluded lot way in the back, just beyond the place where a little creek runs across the road. You pull the ’74 Hornet into a parking space. She slides across the bench seat (all hail the bench seat) and the two of you fall into each other’s arms.

There are only two songs from the fall of 1976 on my Desert Island list, although there should probably be more. But over many years and many iterations, I’ve never officially added anything beyond the first two that made it.

There’s “Say You Love Me” by Fleetwood Mac, as perfect a single as they ever made, although as the years go by, I prefer the album version, which lacks the big lead guitar line that’s jacked up on the 45. After the first couple of dozen times I heard that irresistible fade, “fallin’ fallin’ fallin’,” I had fallen for Christine McVie, and I still have a little thing for her to this day. The cool in that voice is among the sexiest damn things I’ve ever heard.

And there’s “Still the One” by Orleans. This is one of the greatest radio records of all time, and one of the best ever with which to start a radio show. The introduction is the sort of thing a jock can have a lot of fun with—four seconds to the bass and drums, seven to the electric piano, 14 to the vocal. Ex-jock and consultant Dan O’Day tweeted the other day that no listener has ever said that what he loves about a DJ is the way he can talk up a record. I know that’s true, but should you happen to hear me talking up “Still the One” on the air sometime, you should know that whatever I’m doing is mostly to entertain myself.

I can’t remember whether we were listening to the radio that night. Maybe, but I just don’t know for sure. For one of the rare occasions during my favorite year, I was much more interested in something else.

Programming Notes: This weekend’s vintage American Top 40 countdown to be broadcast around the country features the week of October 23, 1976. It’ll be on Magic 98 Saturday from 9 to midnight (US Central), right after my show. Also, commenter WestBerkeleyFlats tipped us to a story from the San Francisco Chronicle on the 40th anniversary of “Mill Valley,” which I can’t recommend highly enough. Click here. And I’m a couple of days late on this, but I also recommend the post at 30 Days Out featuring some classic-rock singles and B-sides from the 80s: rare tracks from Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, and John Mellencamp.