Top 5: Bring Us a Dream

Low-rent amateur historians such as myself are frequently challenged by the fact that we know how stuff turned out, and that knowledge sometimes colors the way we look at events. Take the record charts from the spring of 1981. Looking at them now, we seem to see that pop music was ripe for the changes that MTV would bring within the next couple of years. But what did we think back then, living in that spring? Did it actually feel like the music we were hearing on the radio every day was flaccid and dull? Did we think to ourselves, “Damn, I wish something more interesting would come along?” Or were we just listening like we always had, because we always had?

Look at the Cash Box chart dated April 25, 1981. Within the Top 20, how much of it would you really like to hear right now? Do you even remember “Angel of the Morning,” “Somebody’s Knockin’,” “I Can’t Stand It,” or “Don’t Stop the Music”? I can’t decide if the amount of crossover country—at least a dozen of the top 100, depending on how you count them—is a commentary on the artistry of country music at the time, or an admission by record labels and pop programmers that pop was out of ideas.

All that said, I will now respond to the challenge of finding five records on this chart of sufficient interest to keep you reading for another 30 seconds or so.

26. “Sweetheart”/Franke & the Knockouts (up from 28). A fondly remembered record that still makes the phone ring at radio stations when it plays today. It’s been out of print for a while, but a new compilation of the band’s material is being released next month.

42. “Mister Sandman”/Emmylou Harris (down from 37). Harris had cut a version of the vocal-group classic “Mister Sandman” with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt in 1978 but couldn’t get it released, so she recut it, singing three-part harmony with herself. It works, although as evidence of the weirdness of the pop scene in 1981, you can scarcely do better.

61. “Hearts on Fire”/Randy Meisner (down from 50). Just the thing for people who were mourning the then-recent demise of the Eagles. Here’s a live performance from ABC-TV’s Fridays show, broadcast February 27, 1981:

78. “Time”/Alan Parsons Project (up from 87). Slow “Time” down by 25 percent, put a giant guitar solo in the middle of it, and it’s a Pink Floyd song. Which I guess was the knock on it back then.

86. “Seven Year Ache”/Rosanne Cash (up from 95). The eventual success of “Seven Year Ache,” which would hit the Top 20, has kept Rosanne singing it for 30 years, even though it wouldn’t rank among the best 50 songs she’s ever recorded.

The fact that I have picked two country crossover records and a country-rock song we played on KDTH, which was ostensibly a country station in 1981, should probably tell me something. If only I were smart enough to figure out what it is.

Recommended Reading: Bob Seger gives an odd interview to Rolling Stone, in which he complains about his age and his various physical ailments like somebody’s cranky old grandfather, and gives a completely unsatisfying answer regarding the reason why his early albums remain out of print. In other words: the next volume of Early Seger is going to be another disappointment.

“Sweetheart”/Franke & the Knockouts (order the new CD now; this song is coming down after the weekend)

Wide World

When I was a kid, Saturdays had a particular rhythm. There was no sleepy-headed dawdling up against the clock while getting ready for school. Often, my brother and I would be up by 6:00 and out for adventure—thereby infuriating my mother, specifically because we’d awakened her on a morning when she could sleep late, and generally because we couldn’t get up in such timely fashion on any other day. We’d come in for breakfast when Dad did, and after that, we’d spend the rest of the morning dining from the smorgasbord of Saturday morning cartoons on TV.

The afternoons were different, however. On long, dull weekdays in school, we’d long for an afternoon of freedom. But many Saturdays, when we finally got it, we found it to be a different shade of dull. My brother and I would grow tired of each other’s company. The TV, which had offered such glorious variety on Saturday morning, could be a disappointment if there wasn’t a game on, and sometimes when there was. But if we could stick it out until late on Saturday afternoons, we’d often find relief in the form of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

Wide World of Sports premiered 50 years ago this week. I remember its place in the rhythm of Saturday afternoons, and how it could seize our attention with something we’d never seen before. We were transfixed by the Acapulco cliff divers and the arm-wrestlers, and enchanted by figure-8 racing, in which cars competed on a figure-8 shaped track with precisely the entertaining consequences you would expect. We watched Howard Cosell spar with Muhammad Ali, in the days when the championship fights would be on closed-circuit TV in theaters one weekend but air on Wide World of Sports the next. We watched Evel Knievel cheat death, if not broken bones, time and again. The highest-rated episode in the program’s history was the October 25, 1975, show featuring a Knievel jump, which is as perfectly 70s a thing as there could be.

As we grew up and found more entertaining things to do with our Saturday afternoons, watching Wide World of Sports became less important—as did Wide World of Sports itself, in a television universe with more choices, including entire channels devoted 24/7 to what Wide World of Sports did for 90 minutes each week. But the show soldiered on until January 1998. ABC continued to use the title, if not the format, for Saturday afternoon sports programming until 2006.

Here’s a piece ESPN is running this week about the show’s anniversary.

Recommended Reading: At Retroland, the history of Cap’n Crunch cereal and its TV spots, which were created by the same team that created the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. And at Bloggerhythms, an appreciation of Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London”—a song you should know.

Hey, I got some music into this post after all.

Mundane Beauty

So I’m driving home from the radio station the other night listening to the vintage American Top 40 show when Casey plays “Old Fashioned Boy” by Stallion, and I am suddenly transported back to the spring of 1977, when the song spent a couple of weeks on the Top 40 and got a little bit of play on the stations I was listening to back then. It’s slick, hooky, AM-radio pop that, if it were a confection, would be cotton candy, because it melts away to nothing so fast and it leaves you wondering where it went. Here’s YouTube DJ Music Mike to play it for you.

As I listened to it for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, the verse, the refrain, the solo, the key change, and the refrain to the fade, I was struck by just how many records like it I dug back then. Lots of bands used that light, tasteful, adult guitar sound to greater advantage than Stallion did—Pablo Cruise and Player spring to mind, although their records were generally less busy than Stallion’s. Also unlike Stallion, each of those bands has a song on my Desert Island list.

Pablo Cruise had a bit of credibility as an album-oriented act thanks to their first two albums, their self-titled 1975 release and Lifeline in 1976. But they broke through as pop stars in 1977 with A Place in the Sun and the single “Whatcha Gonna Do,” which rose into the Top 10 late that summer. Here it is, from Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, featuring the most impressive collection of white-guy Afros you’ve seen in a long time. It rocks a bit harder live than it does on record.

Another band of similar musical weight came along just as “Whatcha Gonna Do” was moving into recurrents. Player hit #1 early in 1978 with “Baby Come Back,” a nice-enough radio record, but the one that I am taking along to the Desert Island came that summer: “This Time I’m in It for Love.”  It probably appealed to me more on the basis of the lyrics than the music—the incurable teenage romantic in me liked the idea of refusing to settle for anything less than the real thing. It, too, has that same light guitar sound, the opposite of what guitar gods like Clapton and Page were doing, something that sounds to me now like the distilled essence of the late 70s.

(Another Player song, “Prisoner of Your Love,” probably ought to be on the Desert Island list. Despite being an absolute hook-monster, it made it only as high as Number 27 in Billboard in the fall of 1978, when I adored it.)

Recommended Reading: It’s often noted that the transition to CDs and now to downloads has caused us to miss out on the distinctive pleasures of album art. But until yesterday, I don’t think anybody had noticed how we’ve also lost “the mundane beauty of blank cassette tape insert cards.” Tip of the baseball cap yet again to Dangerous Minds, which needs to be a regular stop on your Internet rounds. It’s one of the most consistently fascinating websites I know of. (If you’re on Twitter, follow Richard Metzger.)

Time to Get It Together

I have been postponing it for a while, but today I have to to take my medicine.

Back in March, I announced that in my newly acquired 1955-1999 edition of Joel Whitburn’s Pop Music Annual, I found a bunch of songs that I hadn’t included in my earlier Down in the Bottom series, which wrote about the one-hit wonders to peak between Numbers 90 and 100 on the Hot 100 between 1955 and 1986. I blamed Joel for omitting them from my old 1955-1986 edition and including them in the later one, because I was sure it wasn’t me who screwed up.

What a dumbass. I owe Joel an apology, for it was indeed I who missed them. Sixteen of ‘em, to be exact. All of them were there in my older edition of the book, but I missed them, including eight of them at Number 91 alone. Eight, for chrissakes. All I can think is that I was interrupted in my research one day and by the time I got back to it, I thought I was done with the 91s.

What a tool. You have no idea how much this pains me, really. But it does mean we get to dive anew into some obscure corners of music history, which will be fun, provided I see every goddamn thing I should. Let’s take four of them today and the rest in days to come.

“The Yen Yet Song”/Gary Cane and His Friends (peaked at #99, 6/6/60, one week on chart). I am pretty sure that having to listen to this is my punishment for screwing up. An ad in the May 9, 1960, edition of Billboard contains an ad that says, “Sixteen youngsters and a seventeen year oldster sing the new hit Yen Yet Song.” The ad also proclaims it “big novelty flash! smash!” It was co-written by Lou Stallman, whose songwriting credits include “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle” by Deniece Williams, Perry Como’s “Round and Round,” Clyde McPhatter’s “Treasure of Love,” and the maudlin and manipulative “Once You Understand” by Think.

“I Lied to My Heart”/The Enchanters (peaked at #96, 3/13/61, two weeks on chart). There are at least two different groups of Enchanters, and probably more. One of them backed Garnet Mimms and scored several hits under the name Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters. They also scored a single hit without Mimms in 1964 called “I Wanna Thank You,” which I didn’t include in my earlier series because they’d charted so many times with Mimms. This batch of Enchanters is apparently not the same one, although “I Lied to My Heart” appears in some online discographies credited to Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters. Which I suppose they could be. It’s not like I haven’t been wrong before.

“What Will I Tell My Heart”/Harptones (peaked at #96, 5/15/61, two weeks on chart). One of the most famous New York doo-wop acts, it’s hard to believe “What Will I Tell My Heart” was the only chart single they ever managed, because their sound is the Platonic ideal of doo-wop. They’re most famous for their 1953 version of “Sunday Kind of Love,” which won them a talent contest at the Apollo Theater, got them a record deal, and was their first single. They’re members of the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, and an edition of the group still exists today, fronted by original members Willie Winfield and Raoul Cita.

“Time to Get It Together”/Country Coalition (peaked at #96, 3/28/70, three weeks on chart). Here’s a gently rockin’, generic-soundin’ plea for some sort of connection, or communion, or something like that. But in true me-decade fashion, “Time to Get It Together” suggests that the key to humanity “getting it together” is for individuals to get together: “you and me, that’s all we need to be free.” (Leonard Nimoy recorded it, too.) Country Coalition briefly included bluegrass banjo legend Doug Dillard, but I’m not sure if he’s on this record or not.

In the next installment: Additions to Numbers 93, 94, and 95.

“The Yen Yet Song”/Gary Cane and His Friends (out of print; you can listen to it at the link, and you know you want to—it’s not necessary to download it)

One Day in Your Life: April 22, 1977

April 22, 1977, is a Friday. In the morning papers, it’s reported that Social Security recipients will get a 5.9 percent increase effective July 1. Members of Congress and leaders of the postal unions criticize a proposal to cut mail service from six days a week to five. This morning, President Jimmy Carter holds a press conference. He is asked mostly about energy policy, and he suggests that if Congress doesn’t adopt his energy plan, he could use his presidential powers to mandate gas rationing. Shimon Peres becomes acting prime minister of Israel after Yitzhak Rabin steps down. Late last night and early this morning, people in Dover, Massachusetts, claim to have seen an unidentified creature with glowing eyes that will be nicknamed the Dover Demon.

Cleveland TV station WJW-TV becomes WJKW. On TV today, Dinah Shore welcomes Pearl Bailey, Mel Tillis, and Mel Torme and their children to Dinah! Sonny and Cher announce that they will end the current reincarnation of their variety show at the end of the current TV season. David Frost and Richard Nixon tape their final interview to be broadcast this summer. Future FC Barcelona soccer player Mark Van Bommel is born, and former major league pitcher Rube Yarrison, who pitched in 21 games for the Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Dodgers over two seasons in the 1920s, dies. Movies in the theaters include Rocky, Airport 77, Slap Shot, Taxi Driver, and All the President’s Men.

The Grateful Dead plays Philadelphia, Boston plays Greensboro, North Carolina, Rush plays Binghamton, New York, Elvis Presley plays Detroit, AC/DC and Black Sabbath play Goteborg, Sweden, and Pink Floyd opens its “In the Flesh” tour with a show in Miami. At WLS in Chicago, “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates tops the new survey that will come out tomorrow. “Don’t Give Up on Us” by David Soul makes a strong move from Number 7 to Number Two; “Southern Nights” by Glen Campbell moves from Number 9 to Number Three. New in the Top 10 is “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer, moving to 8 from 11. The biggest movers are “I Wanna Get Next to You” by Rose Royce, up 11 spots, and “Lido Shuffle” by Boz Scaggs and “Can’t Stop Dancin’” by the Captain and Tennille, up nine. The top two albums are unchanged for the sixth straight week: the soundtrack from A Star Is Born is Number One (for the ninth week overall), Hotel California by the Eagles is Number Two.

In Wisconsin, a high-school junior and his girlfriend (who very much likes the Captain and Tennille, to her boyfriend’s great chagrin) celebrate her birthday. Years later, he won’t be able to remember what they did that night, but it’s enough to guess.

Nearly Died From Hospitality

Thirty-four years ago this week, as spring began to break for real over southern Wisconsin, one of the songs I couldn’t get out of my head was “Couldn’t Get it Right” by the Climax Blues Band. It broke into the Top 40 at the end of March and peaked at Number 3 on the Hot 100 toward the end of May. It seemed to be on the radio constantly, on whatever station I listened to, and why not? It’s a fine funky clatter that even the most vocally challenged fan could sing along with. I did, and I do. “Couldn’t Get it Right” is an artifact from a very happy season in my life, and it’s been on my Desert Island list as long as I’ve had one.

Like many British musicians who came up in the late 60s, the members of the Climax Blues Band were fans of American blues. They were originally known as the Climax Chicago Blues Band, although they dropped the “Chicago” in 1970, reportedly to avoid confusion with Chicago Transit Authority. They also became a more conventional rock band in the early 70s, scoring significant hit albums with FM Live in 1974, Stamp Album in 1975, and the 1976 release Gold Plated, which contains “Couldn’t Get it Right.” Their 1979 album Real to Reel contains the superb “Children of the Nighttime,” which deserved to be a smash but was not. They had one smash left in them, however: the 1980 album Flying the Flag contained “I Love You,” which was miles removed from both Chicago blues and “Couldn’t Get it Right.” Allmusic compares it to Badfinger or Paul McCartney, and neither is a bad comparison. “I Love You” is as powerfully and irresistably romantic a record as either of those artists ever made. It blew out the phones at radio stations back in the summer of 1981, and on those occasions when it plays now, people will still call wanting to know, “What was that song?” How it reached only Number 12 in Billboard I have no idea.

After “I Love You,” the Climax Blues Band got lost in shifting musical tastes, although they continued to record steadily through 1988. Since then, they’ve made only two albums, one in 1993 and one in 2004. An edition of the band still exists today. It contains none of the founding members, although lead vocalist Colin Cooper was part of the band until his death in 2008.

You’ve heard “Couldn’t Get it Right” and “I Love You” a million times. (A million and one if you clicked the links above.) So be sure to listen to “Mole on the Dole” from the 1973 album Rich Man, which features a most surprising instrument taking the solos. And dig “Children of the Nighttime,” below.

Recommended Reading: Sound engineer Roger Nichols, nicknamed “the Immortal” by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen for his work with Steely Dan, died earlier this month. Here’s his New York Times obituary. And also, the headquarters of Malaco Records, the Mississippi label that produced “Groove Me,” “Mr. Big Stuff,” and other, lesser-known landmarks of southern soul, was leveled by a tornado last weekend. The building that housed the label’s master tapes was among those destroyed. Find out more at Flea Market Funk. While you’re there, consider this provocative question: “Is Record Store Day a Bunch of Bullshit?”, and the response from the folks who organized the event.

“Children of the Nighttime”/Climax Blues Band (buy the compilation 25 Years 1968-1993 here)