Fade Out

I am not much interested in movies anymore. I actually have trouble telling one from another—aren’t Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Kevin James doing three buddy/slob comedies a year with Jennifer Aniston now?—and all the one- and two-word titles don’t help.

So The Mrs. and I skipped the Oscars last night, yeah.

It wasn’t always like this. Our first date was a movie (And Justice for All, starring Al Pacino). When we were first married, we used to go to the movies almost every weekend. For a brief time in the late 80s, I worked an evening shift, and on Fridays, we’d hit the midnight show at the multiplex, not getting home until 2:30 or 3AM, the sort of thing you do when the movies matter to you (and when you’re in your 20s). And we watched the Oscars, even the shows that ran for four hours.

But at some point in the 1990s, when it started to seem like every movie was based either on a comic book or a video game, we decided that since Hollywood was leaving us anyway, we’d let it go. I can’t remember the last time we went to a movie theater, and I don’t miss it. I’d rather wait six months for Netflix than endure two hours in one of the airplane hangars that pass for theaters today, where the quality of the picture isn’t as good as I get on my TV, the seats aren’t as comfortable as my couch, and there’s no pause or rewind button.

Back when I cared more about the movies, however, Best Original Song was a category I always paid attention to. So here’s an off-the-cuff list of five great Original Song winners, with the year in which each was awarded. I’m not including anything after the mid 90s in this, because I can’t recall having heard any of the winners since then.

“I’m Easy” (1976). From Nashville, and on the radio in the summer of 1976, which explains a lot. Sung by Keith Carradine.

“The Way We Were” (1974). Big and splashy and Hollywoody, yeah, but when Barbra Streisand gets to “Can it be that it was all so simple then/Or has time rewritten every line,” you’re right there with her, remembering the way you were.

“The Shadow of Your Smile” (1966). Cool and romantic, and most famously recorded by Tony Bennett.

“Mona Lisa” (1951). From a movie everybody had forgotten by Oscar Night 1951, I am guessing (Captain Carey, USA), unforgettably sung by Nat King Cole.

“You’ll Never Know” (1944). Recorded by Dick Haymes and the young Frank Sinatra, simple and lovely without being clichéd.

And now, five stiffs.

“Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (1995). When I first heard Elton John sing this on the radio, I thought two things: “Christ, this is awful” and “This is going to win every award there is.”

“Beauty and the Beast” (1992)/”A Whole New World” (1993). This looks like it’s two songs, but it’s actually the same song with two different titles. It’s gotta be. Listen for yourself, here and here.

“You Light Up My Life” (1978). Come on, you were expecting this one, another artifact of Oscar’s mid-70s-to-mid-90s embrace of paint-by-numbers musical product.

“High Hopes” (1960). Only “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah,” the 1948 winner, has aged worse than this.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside” (1949). In which a guy slips his girl a roofie in hopes of committing date rape. Seriously. Listen to it.

Last night’s winner of Best Original Song was Randy Newman, whose “We Belong Together” appeared in Toy Story 3. Newman had been nominated 19 times before with only one win. There’s a good review of the nominees and the winner here. If you care.

Dad, We Need to Talk

Like most music obsessives, I have found some pretty odd stuff on my travels through cutout bins, used record shops, antique stores, garage sales, and websites written entirely in Serbo-Croatian or Portuguese except for the song titles. One of the stranger ones popped up on shuffle this morning.

I have frequently invoked the name of Jeff Barry ’round these parts—the bubblegum mastermind who wrote songs with Ellie Greenwich (“Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”, “Hanky Panky,” “Chapel of Love,” “River Deep Mountain High”), wrote or co-wrote most of the songs recorded by the Archies from “Sugar Sugar” on down,  and also “Montego Bay,” “I Honestly Love You,” and “Heavy Makes You Happy” by the Staple Singers. Barry’s other great collaborator besides Ellie Greenwich was Andy Kim, who collaborated on the Archies stuff and who cut several Barry songs himself, including “Baby I Love You” and “Be My Baby,” which rival the Wall of Sound originals, at least to my ears.

The songs Barry wrote with Greenwich were not in any way political, although they clearly emerge from a specific time and place—the lower middle-class urban world of the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of young people. (Much of the Brill Building’s output was written from the same point of view, because the writers were young, lower middle-class citizens of New York City in the early 60s.) Later in the 1960s, the Archies, existing only in the studio and in a cartoon, weren’t political at all and couldn’t be. But by the late 1960s, with the world in upheaval, especially the world of the young, it must have seemed like the right time for Barry and Kim to do, not a protest song exactly, but one that took a look at the world and proposed a solution to its troubles.

Andy Kim recorded “Tricia Tell Your Daddy” in 1969. It’s exactly what you think—a song addressed to First Daughter Tricia Nixon, asking her to talk to her father about, well, stuff:

Tell him he’s the man, Tricia
The world’s in his hands, Tricia
Tell him that you’re not his only child
He’s everybody’s daddy for a while

And also . . .

We’re glad we reached the moon
But didn’t it cost a lot
When some folks down here ain’t got enough to eat

It’s the gentlest “protest” song you’re ever going to hear, more folk song than bubblegum blast. But Tricia Nixon turned 23 years old at the time it was released, and was four months away from her highly publicized White House wedding to Edward Cox—and therefore, probably not tuned in to AM radio at the time. So it’s doubtful that she actually told her father anything “on a family Sunday morning/When he comes downstairs a-yawning.”

“Tricia Tell Your Daddy” bubbled under the Hot 100 for three weeks in the spring of 1969 (before the actual landing on the moon). A cover by Jay and the Americans, the last thing they released before going on an early-70s hiatus, gives the song more of a bubblegum sound, but it didn’t go anywhere at all.

Enjoy the weekend, everybody. Call your parents.

Do You Know What I Mean?

My Desert Island list has 12 singles from 1976 on it. To readers of this blog, that’s news approximately on par with the sunrise. Eleven are from 1971, which is not exactly news either. Forty years ago, it was a year of discovery—no, the year of discovery. Absolutely everything was new because I hadn’t been listening long enough to know the context of very much. But since we often love the stuff of youth more than the stuff that comes along later, some of what I discovered that year has never left me. I’ve written about a couple of them recently, and here are a few words about some more of them.

“Rings”/Cymarron. I know people still do it, but a barefoot beach wedding seems like a thoroughly 70s thing to do. “Rings” is a lovely frozen moment from the summer of 1971 that ran the charts right alongside “Here Comes that Rainy Day Feeling Again” by the Fortunes. The only thing wrong with the song is that it’s too short—a defect remedied here.

“Spanish Harlem”/Aretha Franklin. Ben E. King may have done it first, but Aretha owns it. By the time “Spanish Harlem” hit the radio late in the summer of ’71, I had already developed a hearty appreciation for soul music, despite also being devoted to Dawn and the Partridge Family. Me and Walt Whitman, we contained multitudes.

“Do You Know What I Mean”/Lee Michaels. Three minutes of glorious bashing that has never sounded right to me on anything other than AM radio, although this guy’s 45 gets close.

“I’ve Found Someone of My Own’/Free Movement. I would not have understood the emotional dynamic of this record in 1971, which is best described as “You can’t leave me because I’m already gone.” All I heard was how great it sounded on the radio.

“Have You Seen Her”/Chi-Lites. In which the line between the pain communicated by the lyric and pleasure generated by the vocal performance becomes too thin to perceive clearly, or even to matter.

“Respect Yourself”/Staple Singers. Good lessons for an 11-year-old boy, and for everybody else, wherever they are, down unto the present day. If you aren’t inclined to listen when your mama tries to school you about how to behave, you better not pull that shit with Mavis.

That’s not everything on the list from 1971, but it’s enough for today.

Recommended Reading: I think I’ve mentioned the Daily Mirror before—it’s an online feature of the Los Angeles Times that reprints old stories, columns, and photos from the paper’s archives. Yesterday it featured a fascinating column by music critic Robert Hilburn, written in the runup to the 1981 Grammy Awards. Grim as this year’s list of nominees seemed to me, 1981 may have been grimmer, dominated by Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Christopher Cross, the eventual big winner. (That year represented the nadir for Record of the Year nominees: “The Rose” by Bette Midler, “Lady” by Kenny Rogers, Sinatra’s “New York New York” and Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” and “Sailing” by Cross, the eventual winner—the dullest and most uninspired set Grammy ever yakked up.)

Our friend Jason Hare found a great artifact over at Buzzfeed—five-second snippets of every Billboard Number-One single from 1955 through 1992, edited into a two-part audio montage. The thing runs about 74 minutes, but once you start listening, it won’t seem nearly that long.

Eyeball to Cowbell

You have probably noticed that my town—Madison, Wisconsin—has been in the news a little bit lately. Back when I was a political blogger, I might have devoted quite a few posts to the ongoing battle between public employees and Republican Governor Scott Walker. As it is, I confined my commentary to Twitter because I know a few amongst the readership do not share my political opinions. I even deleted a few of my angrier tweets, especially over the past weekend, in deference to some of my friends and followers.

Politics aside, the spectacle on our Capitol Square has been extraordinary. These are the biggest protests in Madison since the Vietnam Era, and I’d have to dig into the archives to see if a protest ever drew 68,000, as one estimate of Saturday’s crowd had it. Right-wing blogs, talk-show hosts, and the Fox News Channel have tried to portray the protests as a gigantic orgy of hatred, or as a riot, but that’s projection—fact is, these protests have been almost impossibly peaceful. There were exactly zero arrests on Saturday. In a crowd of 68,000, you’d think somebody would have gotten busted for lighting up a smoke in the Capitol or something, but even that didn’t happen. A former Madisonian who blogs for one of the big liberal websites noted that Wisconsin is a place where even the angry mobs are polite, and nothing has happened so far that would make a reasonable observer think otherwise.

In case you missed it over the weekend, our friend Jeff of AM, Then FM, wrote about the week that was, and provided a fine selection of appropriate tunes. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters tweeted a plea over the weekend to Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and/or Eddie Vedder to get themselves to Madison to pitch in, but so far only Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine has been in town, last night.

When I got on Twitter a year ago, I was reluctant, and I was skeptical about its value, but I can say now that it’s become a necessary tool if you want to stay connected, and I can’t imagine online life without it. At his blog, veteran  journalist and marimba expert Tim Morrissey wrote about the value of Twitter and the performance of Madison reporters during protest week.

(A sign noted at the protests late last week said, “More cowbell, less Walker.” Coincidentally, 30 Days Out provided a selection of tunes with cowbell, and is absolutely right about the greatest cowbell song of all. Hint: It’s not “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”)

A more overtly political side of this post is on the flip, which you can skip if you want.

A Tender Rhapsody

In the classic era, Top 40 radio could be frenetic—crowded with jingles and commercials, and with high-energy jocks shouting over and around the hits. Every once in a while, however, a record would come along that demanded a pause in the chaos. Such records would often stop time entirely for as long as they took to play. One such record hit the Billboard charts 40 years ago this month.

It begins with a quiet, echo-kissed guitar figure, followed on by bass guitar and strings before the singers come in, wordless. A soft xylophone rises up out of the mix, as if to pull a curtain back for the lead singer, who does not seem to sing so much as to sigh: “Each day through my window I watch her as she passes by/I say to myself, ‘You’re such a lucky guy.’” “Just My Imagination (Runnin’ Away With Me)” was performed by the Temptations on The Ed Sullivan Show on January 31, 1971. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 dated February 6, and entered the Top 40 two weeks later. It was a departure for the group, who had been recording producer Norman Whitfield’s uptempo acid-soul with great success for a couple of years, but who wanted to return to the soft soul style they had pioneered from the days of “My Girl.” And in April, “Just My Imagination” would join “My Girl” and “I Can’t Get Next to You” at Number One in Billboard.

But after “Just My Imagination,” the Temptations would never truly be the Temptations again. There’s an argument that this had already happened in 1968, when the gifted-but-troubled David Ruffin was fired, but the group had achieved some of its greatest successes (“I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Ball of Confusion,” “Psychedelic Shack”) with Dennis Edwards in Ruffin’s old slot. By the end of 1970, a disgruntled Eddie Kendricks was on his way to a solo career, and “Just My Imagination” was recorded with the full knowledge that it would be his last hurrah with them. It also marked the end for original member Paul Williams, whose declining health was not helped by his dependence on alcohol. He was let go at the same time Kendricks left, but not before he sang the first line of that breathtaking bridge in the middle of “Just My Imagination”: “Every night on my knees I pray.” Richard Street had already been brought in to cover for Williams on stage, singing Paul’s parts from the wings while Paul stood behind a disconnected microphone, and he became an official member. Kendricks was replaced at first by a singer named Ricky Owens, who was fired after only two shows, and for good by Damon Harris. The Temptations would maintain a presence on Top 40 radio for two more years and bag another Number One single, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” but would fade after 1973 into a lengthy afterlife that continues today.

The story of “Just My Imagination” and the rest of the Temptations’ tempestuous career is told in Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, who has also written biographies of the Supremes and Stevie Wonder. Written with the assistance of surviving original member Otis Williams, but not an officially authorized biography, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg is a highly worthwhile read for Motown fans, shedding light on the strange workings of the label, and how the Temptations, an aggregation of pure soul singers, fit into Berry Gordy’s quest to erase the line between black and white pop. It also provides a look into the lives of the individual Temptations, whose stardom was often far less glamorous than we might imagine.

“Just My Imagination” is on my Desert Island list, and if I were to put that list in numerical order, there’s only a song or two that would rank as high. I heard it in that first spring of musical discovery just as I described it above—as an arresting oasis in the general rush of WLS. As the lament of a man in love with a woman who doesn’t even know he exists, it spoke to me throughout my adolescence. And today it remains a prime example of just how glorious the Temptations were, of the brilliance of Kendricks and Whitfield, and how a song can continue to shine in our lives for as long as our lives may last.

One Day in Your Life: February 18, 1979

February 18, 1979, is a Sunday. The top headline on the Sunday newspapers is China’s military invasion of Vietnam. Americans are concerned about rising gasoline prices, which have reached 70 cents a gallon in the Midwest. Also in the Midwest, a major snowstorm strikes, taking aim at the East Coast, where it will drop 18 inches of snow. Snow is also recorded in the Sahara Desert, in southern Algeria, for the first time in history. Over eight inches of rain falls in Greenville, South Carolina. The all-time low temperature record is tied in New York State, when a reading of 52 below is recorded at Old Forge in Herkimer County. President and Mrs. Carter spend the weekend at Camp David, although they zip back to Andrews Air Force Base at midday for a ceremony marking the return of the remains of Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs, who was killed in a firefight after being kidnapped last week. Following their return to Camp David in the afternoon, the Carters go cross-country skiing with family and friends. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper runs a feature story about the history of Coca Cola and illustrates it with a photo of the handwritten original recipe for Coke, thus revealing the drink’s secret formula, but nobody notices until 2011.

The Daytona 500 is broadcast live in its entirety for the first time. Richard Petty wins after a last-lap crash involving Cale Yarborough and  Donnie Allison, who are battling for the lead. Yarborough and Allison get into a fistfight on the track after the crash. Amy Alcott wins the LPGA Elizabeth Arden Golf Classic. On ABC, the first episode of Roots: The Next Generations airs. Other shows on TV tonight include Battlestar Galactica and All in the Family. On the radio, The Dr. Demento Show, heard around the country this weekend, features an interview with voiceover artist Mel Blanc; “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes, who also guest on the show, tops the weekly Funny Five countdown.

The Jacksons’ Destiny Tour plays Manchester, England, the Outlaws play New York City, New Riders of the Purple Sage play Rutgers University, Status Quo plays Zwolle in the Netherlands, Frank Zappa plays Hammersmith Odeon in London, and Frank Sinatra plays Chicago. Rod Stewart tops the Cash Box magazine singles chart for the third week with “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy.” (Stewart’s album Blondes Have More Fun holds at Number One on the Billboard 200 album chart.) Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” blasts from 16 to 5, a move matched within the Top 40 by the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy,” which leaps from 32 to 21 in only its second week in the Top 100. The highest debuting song within the Top 40 is “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits. Other hot new hits include “Big Shot” by Billy Joel, “Precious Love” by Bob Welch, Cher’s “Take Me Home,” and “I’ll Supply the Love” by Toto.

In Wisconsin, a college-radio DJ spends the weekend back home with the family. He’ll return to school that night, weather permitting, to a single room in the dorm, a luxury made possible when his roommate decided to quit school after one semester. He hates living in the dorm, but he loves radio, and that’s what he’s there for.