Our Top 40 Past . . . in the Present
Writer, radio jock, football fan, and beer snob.
In my head, it's still 1976.
Studio Monitor
Since I’ve got nothing worthwhile to say today, go read this tremendous interview with Gary Owens, conducted by Kliph Nesteroff of Classic Television Showbiz and WFMU. Owens’ career involved far more than his gig as the goofy booth announcer on Laugh-In and his years on radio in Los Angeles, and I’m sure you’ll be as surprised as I was to learn how much more.
I’ll be back later in the week with something or other.
This week in 1971, “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics moved into the Billboard Top 40. WLS had just started playing it, and it wouldn’t be long before I went to S&O TV, handed over my 95 cents, and took the single home. I would be a Stylistics fan forever after. “You Are Everything” has, well, everything—vintage 70s guitar noises, dreamy, ethereal production by the great Thom Bell, and a breathtaking performance by Russell Thompkins Jr., master of the falsetto.
For the next two-plus years, Bell, songwriting partner Linda Creed, and the Stylistics would deal out hit after hit, every one of them unique: the nursery-rhyme flavored “Betcha By Golly Wow” would have sounded stupid coming out of any mouth but Thompkins’, but one year later, “Break Up to Make Up” was the exact opposite—Thompkins convincingly conveys the frustration of a misfiring love affair. The 1974 hit “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” which featured a rare lead vocal by Airrion Love in addition to Thompkins, is one of the most powerful songs of devotion and gratitude you’re ever going to hear.
But none of them are on my Desert Island list. Two others are.
At the end of 1972, Bell and Creed dumped some extra sugar into their successful Stylistics recipe and produced their most powerful earworm to date, “I’m Stone in Love With You.” I was 12 years old at the time, in the seventh grade and in love with various unattainable girls, and I fantasized about them just like Thompkins did. But even before Thompkins started to sing, I’d already been seduced by Bell’s pretty music. The first nine seconds of “I’m Stone in Love With You” are pure AM-radio perfection, as is the last half-minute or so.
You might say that all I do is dream my life away
I guess it’s true, cuz I’m stone in love with you
At the end of 1973, after that string of love songs, the Stylistics tried something different—an uptempo number about life on the road, the kind of thing rock bands had been singing for years. Filtered through the Bell/Creed aesthetic, however, it came out exactly the way you’d expect it to.
So it’s “Black Friday” today. The phrase, as I understand it, is a bit of retailing/advertising industry slang that has crept into general usage only within the last decade at the most—it’s easier to say “Black Friday sale” than “After-Thanksgiving sale,” which is what advertisers used to say. “Black” supposedly refers to the time of year at which retailers get into the black for the year, although I’d be curious to know what percentage of Black Friday shoppers know that.
I hear “Black Friday” and I associate it with something bad, like the stock market crash that signaled the start of the Great Depression, on a day that was called Black Thursday. And there’s that Steely Dan song too, the 1975 single from Katy Lied:
When Black Friday comes
I’ll stand down by the door
And catch the gray men
As they dive from the 14th floor
Sounds serious.
Black Friday is the day when many radio stations start adding Christmas music to the rotation. To spark the holiday mood, some stations go solid Christmas music for today only—Magic 98 does, and I’ll be on the air this afternoon from 3 to 7 U.S. Central. In 1984, shortly after I had taken over as program director at WKAI, the general manager, a kindly man who’d been at the station for years, had not hired me, and did not quite know how to take me, asked during Thanksgiving week if we would be playing Christmas music all day on Friday, which the station had done in its earlier, pre-me incarnation. I looked at him like he had two heads and dismissed the idea. It made no sense to me.
In his radio programming newsletter this week, consultant Dan O’Day suggested that stations put their brand at risk by relying too heavily on Christmas music. I dimly understood this in 1984, a time when there was much less format-appropriate Christmas music available than there is now. I would have couched the argument like this: We’re a Top 40 station programmed to kids, so suddenly switching to Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby for a day would make no sense. There would be a time for Nat and Bing on my air, but a month before Christmas was not that time. (Magic 98 today is another story. Today’s Christmas-a-thon is a strong component of the station’s brand.)
Years ago, it was rare for the stations I knew to play continuous Christmas music much before Christmas Eve. Instead, holiday songs would be worked in gradually, a few at a time, and more as Christmas got closer. Thirty years ago at KDTH, an old-school full-service AM station, we’d do every other song even on the morning of the 24th, only plunging completely into the pool later in the day.
Here at this blog, we will stick to the traditions we know, and mix in the Christmas music alongside our regular crap, but we’ll bow to current practice and start today instead of waiting a week, as I would have done at WKAI. And we’ll begin as we usually do. During the jump-blues craze of the 1990s, few bands did it better than Chicago’s Mighty Blue Kings. Ten years ago, they released a Christmas album that almost never gets out of the player at our house each holiday season. For the last several years, they’ve done special Christmas shows in Chicago, but this year, they’re doing one at Shank Hall in Milwaukee on December 18. Do The Mrs. and I have our tickets yet? Hell and yes.
“Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday”/Mighty Blue Kings (buy it here)
November 24, 1971, is a Wednesday. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Headlines on the morning’s newspapers include passage of a major defense bill by the United States Senate and the ongoing tensions in south Asia, where India and Pakistan are on the brink of war. On an inside page of the Wisconsin State Journal, hungry pre-Thanksgiving shoppers learn that they can get a spaghetti dinner with salad, roll, and beverage for 95 cents at their local Rennebohm’s lunch counter. Future actress Lola Glaudini, who will appear on NYPD Blue, The Sopranos, and Criminal Minds, is born, and so is future professional hockey player Keith Primeau. Radio relay operator Rick Holt of Dundalk, Maryland, with less than 30 days remaining on his hitch in Vietnam, writes two letters home. Tonight, a Northwest Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle will be hijacked by a man who claims to have a bomb in his briefcase. He demands $200,000 and two parachutes. The plane lands to release the other passengers and get the hijacker his money, then takes off again. Somewhere over Washington state, the man jumps out of the plane, and he is never seen again. Although he’s on the passenger list as Dan Cooper, his name will be reported by the media, and he will be remembered forever after, as D. B. Cooper. In today’s Doonesbury strip, documentarian Mark intrudes on B. D.’s football huddle.
The CBS-TV lineup tonight features The Carol Burnett Show, Medical Center, and Mannix; on NBC, it’s Adam-12, McCloud, and Night Gallery. In the UK, George Harrison is a guest on The David Frost Show. Led Zeppelin plays Manchester, England. The Kinks album Muswell Hillbillies is released. The Doors, minus the late Jim Morrison, play at the University of Pennsylvania, while King Crimson and Yes play the Academy of Music in New York City. At WWDJ in Hackensack, New Jersey, there’s lots of movement at the top of this week’s chart: “Family Affair” by Sly and the Family Stone leaps from 9 to 1, and “Got to Be There” by Michael Jackson jumps from 17 to 2. Last week’s Number-One, “Gypsys Tramps and Thieves” by Cher falls to Number Three. Also moving up: “Superstar” by the Temptations, from 16 to 11, and “I Know I’m Losing You” by Rod Stewart from 21 to 14. New on the chart this week are David Cassidy’s “Cherish,” “Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey, and “Hallelujah” by Sweathog.
A sixth-grader in Wisconsin (who will shortly buy “Scorpio” on a 45) looks forward to Thanksgiving Day, to be spent with his mother’s side of the family. He’ll play with his cousins and watch football with the men of the family. The day will end too early, as such days always do.
Just as tomorrow will do. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all, and thanks for your continued support of this Internet feature.
Every once in a while, I dig through old files here at the blog looking for semi-worthwhile odds and ends that were, for some reason, never published, then I patch them together to make a post. Today is the kind of day on which it happens.
About clients who want to record their own radio ads:
Wherever I was in charge of commercial production, I encouraged clients voicing their own ads to use their names in their ads. For example: “Hi, this is Ted from Ted’s House of Stuff.” This had a dual purpose: it massaged the client’s ego by making them even more the star of their ad, and it took the curse off of an obviously non-professional delivery.
And I used to make the clients work, too—if they fluffed a line or gave me a poor read, I’d make ‘em do it again, always kindly and in the spirit of “let’s make this sound good for your money,” but never giving them a choice in the matter. Not every client took this well, but most did—and why everybody producing radio spots doesn’t do it, I don’t know. One local business up here has been running a nearly indecipherable ad for months (not on my stations) with a girl slurring words in an accent that’s one part suburban teenager and one part lifelong Wisconsinite. If it’s the first take, my question is “why?” If it’s the best of multiple takes, my question is still “why”?
About a strange, early moment in the history of the Electric Light Orchestra:
Their 1971 debut album, No Answer, got its American title when a record-label executive was unable to reach the band by telephone to find out what they wanted to call it. His note about the call—”no answer”—was somehow misconstrued as the title the band wanted. The album was released in the UK as The Electric Light Orchestra, and although it’s listed at Amazon.com as No Answer, I don’t believe you’ll find the words “no answer” on it anywhere.
About Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right”:
It’s the one record to play if you want to know what the summer of 1976 sounded like. It’s hazy sunshine and humid nighttime, it’s down the road with the windows open on the hunt for adventure, it’s the promise of romance for a couple of hours, or a lifetime. (The girl with the “class of seven-four gold ring” would be in her 50s now, and I’ll bet she’s still hot.) And it’s got a xylophone marimba solo.
A forgotten 45 from the spring of 1970:
As for “Viva Tirado,” it’s a cool Latin groove that barely scraped into the Billboard Top 40 despite going to the top in LA and scoring big in San Francisco and Detroit. Here’s a TV performance, with vintage headache-inducing TV effects:
There’s a thin line between eclectic and random . . . and now you know what it is.
‘”The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 . . . It came to seem that Kennedy’s murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.” –Lance Morrow, Time, 1983
It’s too much to say President Kennedy’s murder 47 years ago today changed everything, because in the modern world, no event short of collision with a rogue asteroid will truly “change everything.” (Remember how 9/11 was supposed to have done it?) But as Lance Morrow observed, the assassination signaled vast, hard, strange changes to come. From that day, the world seemed to accelerate, accelerate and fly apart at the same time, smashing long-cherished values, reopening long-settled questions, exposing to view like never before the random universe of fortune and tragedy in which we live. And the acceleration has never stopped.
But we’re about music here when we’re not about other things, and I spent some time last week looking at the Cash Box chart from November 23, 1963. One month earlier, Beatlemania had broken out in Britain; within six weeks, the storm would start to rise here in the States. And as the Cash Box chart makes clear, America was ready for a break in its musical history. The jolt we would receive from the British Invasion in the spring of ’64 would be just as transformative as the break in our cultural and political history that were forced upon us in November of ’63.
Take a look at the top 10: “I’m Leaving It All Up to You” is a tired retread of 50s pop; “Deep Purple” seems to exist in a historical moment of its own, looking neither backward nor forward. Even if you take the folk boom into account, “Dominique” is sui generis, and if it had come along even six months later, it’s doubtful whether anyone would have heard it. The Impressions maintain a sterling reputation largely among serious fans of historical bent; they never really made it into the good-times-great-oldies radio pantheon. (Only “Sugar Shack” managed that feat.) “Washington Square” and “Maria Elena” are instrumentals that might have hit at any point in the preceding decade. The Lesley Gore and Tommy Roe records were forgotten as soon as they dropped out of current rotation, and “Bossa Nova Baby” by Elvis is movie trivia.
Can we find five records out of 100 on this chart worth listening to again 47 years later? Find out on the flip.
