Top 5: Two Brothers

(With this post, we’re on hiatus. Back during the week of January 3. Go watch football.)

Sooner or later, many small-market radio stations get this brilliant idea: People in our town like lots of different kinds of music, so if we play it all, everybody will listen. Within limits, this isn’t a terrible idea—block programming could and did work just fine for lots of stations in lots of places. But without limits, or absent a degree of common sense, it can lead to some awful radio. In small-town Iowa, the other station in our town had the we’ll-attract-everybody philosophy. But—and here goes common sense straight out the window—they let each jock pick whatever he or she wanted. The morning guy played MOR, the afternoon jock played contemporary pop with a distinct R&B flavor, and the 17-year-olds they hired for nights played Motley Crue. (The station’s management maintained that all the kids in town listened to them after school, which may have been true in 1957, but this was the early 90s.)

A better plan was to categorize carefully and daypart intelligently. Thirty years ago at KDTH, pop-sounding country songs—Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt, etc.—got played all day. Straight pop—Barry Manilow, for example—was limited to daytime only. Hard country—Hank Williams Jr., say—was limited to nights. There were exceptions, and the all-day category eventually got pretty broad, but in general, it was the best possible way to appeal to a lot of people. I worked at another station that did this, although more ambitiously. They really did want to attract the kids at night, and as a result, the straight pop was replaced by country-flavored rock, such as “Jesus Is Just Alright” by the Doobie Brothers. (This particular record, and several others that mentioned Jesus, were labeled “never on Sunday,” which struck me odd. If not then, when?)

I mention all of this by way of introduction to this survey from KACI in The Dalles, Oregon, dated December 28, 1968. The station lists 40 “super hits,” 20 “album hits,” and 20 country songs. How they were playing them, I can’t say—whether they were sprinkled into the regular rotation or limited to a specific segment of the day, as many stations would have done back then. The top seven country hits were also on the pop chart at the time, which would have helped them fit in. Five tracks of interest, and a couple of mp3s, are on the flip.

American Top 39

I’m a big fan of Kinky Paprika’s American Top 40 breakdowns at Songs of the Cholera King. I go full geek on 70s music because I lived those years through the radio; as a younger man who didn’t, his perspective is more dispassionate. So I was especially interested in his recent post on the AT40 show from December 26, 1970, one of the more memorable weeks of my young life as a radio listener.

But it turns out that the show from that week is interesting for technical reasons and not so much the songs themselves. The week’s Number One song, “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, was listed as a double-A side by Billboard, and so Casey decided to play “Isn’t It a Pity” too, all seven minutes’ worth. To do this, however, he told the audience that he would be forced to omit a song from the countdown as a result. I’d love to know the thought process by which the AT40 staff decided to drop Number 30, “Share the Land” by the Guess Who. “Share the Land” was on its way down the chart, but Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” had taken a bigger fall to Number 38, and had been around the same number of weeks. Casey chose to play only one side of another double-A-sided record, “Patch It Up” by Elvis Presley (in lieu of the far superior “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which is listed on the show’s original cue sheet), and he could have made a similar decision with “My Sweet Lord.”

But it seems to me that the decision might have had just as much to do with Christmas as it did with Harrison’s landmark single. Casey chose to tell a Chrstmas story involving singer Jackie Wilson, and he played “Higher and Higher” to go along with it. Later in the show, he played Bing Crosby’s version of “Silent Night”—more Christmas flavor for the kiddies. He could have bagged either one to make “Share the Land” fit, so I wonder if Casey, in those early days of the show, wasn’t trying to placate program directors who didn’t want to go three hours during Christmas week without some mention of the season, or some seasonal music.

The Crosby “Silent Night” was edited out of the version of the show that aired around the country last weekend. Kinky noted that the version of the show that aired on Sirius/XM contained an odd glitch—it played Dawn’s “Knock Three Times,” the week’s Number 4 song, twice, and omitted Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown.” The version shipped to terrestrial radio stations had it right, though.

To make up for what Casey missed, here’s “Share the Land.” I linked to this live TV performance three weeks ago, so here’s a lip-synched performance of about the same vintage.

If you dig the classic AT40s, Magic 98 will be running an entire day of them on New Year’s Day, including the top 40 hits of 1974, starting at 6AM US Central. Click “listen live” here, where you can also listen to my Green County shitkicker routine today and tomorrow from 3 to 7 in the afternoon.

At this blog, I will have one last post on Thursday before 2010 trails off into history, but otherwise, we’re on hiatus until next week. May 2011 be a better year for you than 2010 was for me—because saints preserve us if it’s worse.

Ordinary Days

I enjoy reading old newspapers, not just to get a sense of history when it was news, but to experience the texture of the time in which that history was made. We learn as much from the feature stories and display ads as we do from the legendary headlines—and we learn as much from the papers published on ordinary days as we do from those published on historic dates. It’s all about the context. Context allows us to better project ourselves back into time, to better map our own journey from those days to this one.

On the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal dated December 24, 1994, one headline is “Student radio joins Internet; Carolina station goes global.” The student radio station at the University of North Carolina had become the first to offer its programming on “the World Wide Web, a part of the Internet that has become popular because of the development of sound, graphical and video features.” The story goes on to say: “The development marks a step toward the time when the physical limits of a radio signal become irrelevant to broadcasters. Many telecommunications experts believe radio stations will eventually rely on wires to reach most listeners, as TV stations do now with cable.” I would spend that Christmas Eve on the radio, having found out at the last minute and entirely by accident that I was scheduled to work 7-to-midnight on the 24th in addition to an early shift on Christmas Day. For this reason, Christmas 1994 will be the only one I do not celebrate with my family at some point around year’s end.

On the State Journal dated December 24, 1983, the main headline is “Cold Worst in 50 Years.” The high temperature in Madison the day before was 12 below, and the forecast for Christmas Eve was similarly bitter. There would be an NFL playoff game on this Christmas Eve: 9-and-7 Seattle would host 9-and-7 Denver in the AFC wild-card game. (Seattle would win easily, 31-7.) The Mrs. and I probably watched some of the game that afternoon, although it would have been small consolation for the trip home we couldn’t make because of the weather.

On the front page of the Madison Capital Times for December 24, 1976, there’s a story about House Select Committee on Assassinations, which learned of new evidence pointing to a conspiracy in the assassination of Martin Luther King. A feature tells of a Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, man who works as a mall Santa while hunting for a job in hopes of getting his family off welfare. Real-estate classifieds show that the best homes on Madison’s west side are topping out close to $70,000, but others around the city are selling in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. I spend the 24th and the morning and afternoon of the 25th with my family as usual, but will spend the evening of the 25th with my girlfriend, celebrating Christmas together.

More Christmas Eve newspapers are on the flip.

One Day in Your Life: December 23, 1970

December 23, 1970, is a Wednesday. The weather forecast for Madison, Wisconsin, includes a cold wave warning with a predicted low of 5 below for Thursday morning. The morning papers headline a government shakeup in Poland that replaced the country’s prime minister. Today, construction continues on the World Trade Center complex in New York City, with the topping-out ceremony for the north tower at a height of 1,368 feet. Black militant Angela Davis is arraigned on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder for a courthouse shooting earlier in the year. The Green Bay Packers must find a new coach and general manager to replace Phil Bengtson, who resigned yesterday. In college basketball, Iowa defeats Iowa State 87-68. Outside Nashville, Willie Nelson’s house burns down. The Associated Press reports on a Connecticut state police list of expired driver’s licenses that includes a man named Santa M. Claus.

Comic actor Charlie Ruggles, who appeared in 100 movies including Ruggles of Red Gap and Bringing Up Baby, and also provided the voice of Aesop on the “Aesop and Son” segments of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, dies at age 84. Robert Burck, who will grow up to be the Times Square street performer known as the Naked Cowboy, is born. Tonight’s TV listings include a Christmas episode of The Johnny Cash Show on ABC featuring the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, the Statler Brothers, and the Carter Family. NBC counter-programs with an episode of Kraft Music Hall titled “The Eve Before Christmas Eve,” hosted by country singer Eddy Arnold and starring Brenda Lee, Charley Pride, and the Klowns. CBS airs Medical Center and Hawaii Five-O.

The Grateful Dead plays Winterland in San Francisco. Laura Nyro opens a two-night stand at the Fillmore East in New York City, where her opening act is an unknown singer/songwriter named Jackson Browne. At KHJ in Los Angeles, the top three songs on the new Boss 30 survey are unchanged from the week before: George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” “One Less Bell to Answer” by the Fifth Dimension, and “Knock Three Times” by Dawn. Biggest movers on the chart are “Merry Christmas Darling” by the Carpenters, moving from 21 to 9, and “Stoney End” by Barbra Streisand, moving from 29 to 21. New songs on the survey this week include “Remember Me” by Diana Ross and “Let Your Love Go” by Bread.

Halfway across the country, a 10-year-old boy in Wisconsin and his two brothers, aged 8 and 4, are geeked up for Christmas. The 10-year-old is similarly geeked up by the radio. Tomorrow, he will hear something that will shape what his life will become, and make him what he will remain, for as long as life lasts.

Cosmic Christmas

Welcome to a pre-holiday edition of Short Attention Span Theater, in which I take several different items and attempt to string them together like popcorn on a Christmas tree.

Yesterday’s mention of fashion in the 1970s begs the additional note that some fashions of the 1960s haven’t endured well, either. Take the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, an elaborate album recorded over a period of several months in 1967 and released in December of that year. It’s usually considered the Stones’ attempt at Sgt. Pepper psychedelia, and an unsuccessful one, in the long view, failing to produce a major hit—”She’s a Rainbow” is probably the best-known song from the album. The Beatles put some oddments on Sgt. Pepper—a tone that only dogs can hear, and a repeating groove of gibberish. The Stones went one better, sort of, placing what might be the first hidden track in rock history at the end of side one, after “Sing We All Together.” And it happens to be a Christmas song, although it’s hard to recognize right off: “Cosmic Christmas” (a discarded title for the Satanic Majesties album) is a minor-key Mellotron-and-tympani version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” that runs about 30 seconds.

Some fashions of the 1960s haven’t become dated or unpopular, they’re just buried by the realities of modern times. In an era when absolutely everything comes out on DVD eventually, it’s mighty odd that the original Batman TV series from the 1960s remains among the missing. Several reasons are cited for the show’s absence from home video: a dispute between Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics and thus the Batman character, and 20th Century Fox, which owns the series; DC’s preference for its dark, contemporary Batman over the cartoonish 60s version; and, most intriguingly, the difficulty of clearing some of the guest appearances. The show was famous for celebrity cameos when Batman and Robin climbed the side of a building—stars including Dick Clark, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Edward G. Robinson appeared—but these are said to have been done as walk-ons, without contracts, which complicates the legal stuff required for DVD release.

In this clip, from the episode broadcast December 22, 1966, Batman and Robin run into Santa Claus, played by Andy Devine.

One thing that never goes out of style, however, is disc jockeys getting fired. It seems likely that the radio industry is about to see another round of mass executions, as the giant chains that are up to their receding hairlines in debt are required to refinance, and their bankers demand further austerity measures as their price for ponying up. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it happened today or tomorrow—just in time to ruin Christmas for hundreds of families across the country. Last weekend, Ken Levine told the story of “the last time I signed off my show with ‘see you tomorrow’ and was never heard from again.” Of particular interest to me is the comment from a reader quoting a radio friend who said “he was convinced the reason the talent’s chair was on wheels in the control room was that it made it easier to fire them by simply dragging them away from the board and rolling them straight into the elevator after or even during their show.”

That’s why I work my shows standing up. If you want me outta there, you gotta pick me up and carry me.

The Wish Book

When I was a kid, I can remember reading the Sears and J.C. Penney Christmas catalogs like some people read the newspaper—particularly the toy section. They didn’t call it a “wish book” for nothing. So I’ve been fascinated lately by a website called Plaid Stallions, whose tagline is “reliving the 70s a catalog page at a time.” These pages from the 1977 Western Auto toy catalog come from past my toy-wishing prime, although I recognize some things my 11-year-old brother would have wanted, like a Six Million Dollar Man action figure, or the SSP Smash-Up Derby car-crash game.

(There wasn’t much else you could do with SSP cars, except to crash them. They were powered by pulling a ripcord through a slot to set the car’s drive wheel spinning. Even a half-hearted pull of the cord provided enough torque to make the car travel at a high rate of speed, so unless you were playing with it on a basketball court or something, it was almost certainly going to slam into the wall of the family room or the basement long before it would stop on its own.)

The site also features ads for actual mind-boggling 70s fashions—like this, which gives a whole new meaning to the term “sweater puppies,” or these handsome his-and-hers shirts. (Honesty compels me to report that The Mrs. and I owned matching sweaters, which were given to us for Christmas a year or two before we were married. We wore them in public at least once.) And then there’s this indescribable pair of pants, which I would nevertheless buy if I could find a pair today.

It will take somebody smarter than me to figure it out, but I suspect that the oddity of 70s fashions involves more than our vantage point in time nearly 40 years later. Fashions of the 1950s don’t look half as dated and strange today. There was something seriously bent about our aesthetic sense at that time. We didn’t know it then, of course. Polyester leisure suit, Qiana shirt, enormous bell-bottoms, Earth shoes—all were normal fashion choices made by perfectly normal people. Maybe it was the result of the 1960s’ freewheeling ethos and rage for self-expression being extruded through the all-powerful force of the marketplace. Maybe it was sunspots. Beats the hell out of me.

In keeping with today’s theme—that today’s dated and strange was yesterday’s perfectly normal—I give you a disco version of “The Little Drummer Boy,” which sneaked onto the Billboard Hot 100 at Number 95, thus earning a spot in our Down in the Bottom series. When I mentioned it last spring, I said at the time, “Maybe I’ll post it someday, but it won’t be in March.” Well, today’s the day. It was released in 1975, a time before disco beats became mindless and repetitive. This version gives the old song a Philly-soul gloss, and it’s not awful.

“The Little Drummer Boy”/Moonlion (out of print)