Bye Bye Baby

Let us pick up again with our Down in the Bottom series. I missed a few records on our first pass through the last 10 positions on the Hot 100, including eight of them to peak at Number 91, because this is not a very good blog, really. Here are those eight.

“Russian Bandstand”/Spencer & Spencer (5/18/59, two weeks on chart). I am not sure this one belongs on the list. Spencer and Spencer were actually Dickie Goodman, king of the break-in record, and Mickey Shorr, a Detroit DJ, with whom Goodman collaborated after his earliest records with Bill Buchanan. “Russian Bandstand” has a couple of break-ins featuring Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” played backwards, although there’s supposedly another version that substitutes Russian folk songs. More here.

“Pick Me Up on Your Way Down”/Pat Zill (5/22/61, one week). Another Ohio guy (from Youngstown), Pat Zill was known as “the singing bartender” when he was discovered. Despite Zill’s protests that he wasn’t a country singer, superstar producer Owen Bradley turned him into one. “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” is a quintessential example of the pop-oriented “countrypolitan” sound that dominated Nashville in the 60s.

“Wishin’ on a Rainbow”/Phill Wilson (7/17/61, two weeks). This was the first release on the Huron label of Dayton, Ohio, founded by a local DJ, a tool and die manufacturer with a load of money to invest, and Phill Wilson’s father. “Wishin’ on a Rainbow” was cut in Nashville, and the label spared no expense on session players, hiring Floyd Cramer, Bob Moore, Hank Garland, and other top cats including the Anita Kerr Singers. They got what they paid for—an extremely well-made record that probably deserved better than Number 91.

“So Far Away”/Hank Jacobs (2/1/64, three weeks). Jacobs became a session keyboard player while he was still a teenager, and also worked with a partner, Kent Harris, trying to score hits. I would describe the organ-driven “So Far Away” as more rhythmic than it is funky, but I suspect it sounded pretty good blasting out of a jukebox.

“Baby Is There Something on Your Mind”/McKinley Travis (7/25/70, two weeks). McKinley Travis was from California, and he cut several singles on labels in Los Angeles. “Baby Is There Something on Your Mind” is another terrific soul record nobody knows about. Its failure to rise above Number 91 must be partly because its old-school soul sound was becoming dated by the summer of 1970.

“Astral Man”/Nektar (6/7/75, five weeks). Here’s a band familiar to those who prowled the cutout bins in the 1970s, for it seemed as though there were always Nektar albums to be had cheap. The 1973 album Remember the Future was the only one that got much traction in the States. At their first American show in 1974, the combined wattage of their sound system and elaborate light show blew the power in the hall. “Astral Man” came from their followup album, Down to Earth. The band intended it as a reinvention of their early 70s sound, and it was—so much so that longtime fans hated it. Hear “Astral Man” and “That’s Life” from Down to Earth here.

“For Your Love”/Christopher Paul & Shawn (8/3/75, five weeks). This is a version of the song first recorded by Ed Townsend in the 50s and later revived by Peaches and Herb in the 60s. Christopher and Shawn Engemann were a brother and sister whose father was a VP at Capitol Records, and whose uncle was one of the Lettermen. Shawn grew up to be a TV personality and is currently married to talk-show host Larry King. At least I think they’re still married. King’s been married eight times, and I haven’t checked the news today.

“Bye Bye Baby”/US 1 (12/6/75, two weeks). This one might not belong on the list either. US1 was another project of Joey Levine, heard on many fine Kasenetz-Katz bubblegum productions in the 60s and on “Life is a Rock” by Reunion in 1974. And “Bye Bye Baby” is pretty much what you’d expect it to be.

Here endeth our Down in the Bottom series, for reals this time. Because if I find I’ve missed any more of them, I’ll be too embarrassed to admit it.

“Bye Bye Baby”/US1 (out of print)

Stay Tuned for the Spectacle

The Indianapolis 500 celebrates its 100th anniversary today. It’s not the 100th race (thanks to the world wars), but the first race was run in 1911. There are two other another anniversaries associated with the race this year—it’s the 40th anniversary of the first time the race was broadcast on TV in its entirety on the same day it was run, and the 25th anniversary of the first live TV broadcast. From 1965 through 1970, ABC aired taped, edited highlights of the race as part of Wide World of Sports. From 1971 through 1985, the race was delayed into prime time. Not until 1986 could you see it as it happened.

Before 1986, if you wanted to follow the race live, you had to listen to it on the radio. When I was a little baby disc jockey, KDTH carried broadcasts from the time trials on the weekends leading up to the race, and the race itself on Memorial Day weekend. I’d never heard auto racing on the radio, but I was impressed from the start at the way the broadcasters made the race come alive. And by 1979, my first year engineering KDTH’s broadcast, they should have had it figured out—the first network broadcast of the race had been in 1952.

The radio network was owned and operated by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway itself, and it had some quirks that made it unique. The format was very rigid—they tended to break for commercials by time and not necessarily when race action dictated. And it didn’t take long as a listener to realize that there was a strict hierarchy among the announcers. When one left the crew, everybody else moved up one spot around the track, closer to the finish line. One year they made a big deal about how new announcers used specially labeled microphones to set them apart from the veterans. When the first female announcer joined the crew, none of the others could mention her without saying that she was the first woman ever to work the Indianapolis 500. The radio announcers also seemed to venerate the race, almost as if it were a religious observance. Not for nothing was the top color commentator on the race also the official historian of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The local stations’ cue for commercial breaks was, “Stay tuned for the greatest spectacle in racing.”

Quirks aside, when the race was in progress, the broadcast ran like a Swiss watch, and it could represent the best that sportscasting can be. Get a taste on the flip.

One Day in Your Life: May 27, 1976

May 27, 1976, is a Thursday. Scandal continues to envelop Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays, who is accused of keeping Elizabeth Ray on his government payroll solely to provide sexual favors. Today, in a speech on the House floor, a fellow Democrat, Romano Mazzoli of New York, calls for Hays to resign. In September, he will. Controversy also swirls regarding a remark made yesterday by President Gerald Ford, who seems to have said that the Supreme Court should reconsider the Brown v. Board of Education decision as the administration battles against school busing. Later in the week, Ford’s spokesman will issue a correction. Today, Ford spends time working on his reelection campaign but also holds meetings on the Clean Air Act, the food stamp program, and motor carrier reform.

Ads appear around the country for the Zayre Concept 10 calculator, which adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides for just six dollars. Actress Ruth McDevitt, frequently seen on television in the 50s and 60s, dies at age 80. Future porn star Anita Blonde and future musician R. J. Krohn, who will be known professionally as RJD2, are born. In 2007, RJD2′s song “A Beautiful Mine” will be adopted as the theme song of the TV series Mad Men. New York Times movie critic Vincent Canby destroys the new movie Mother, Jugs, and Speed, which stars Bill Cosby and Raquel Welch.

The three TV networks combine to air 12 game shows and 14 soap operas during the day. In prime time, ABC’s shows include Barney Miller and Streets of San Francisco; NBC Friday Night at the Movies presents the thriller Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, starring Fred MacMurray and Donna Mills. CBS devotes its evening to game 2 of the NBA Finals, where Boston defeats Phoenix 105-90 to take a 2-0 lead in the series. The major leagues’ leading hitter, Ron LeFlore of the Detroit Tigers, extends his hitting streak to 30 games, but the Tigers lose to Baltimore, 4-3.  

Harry Chapin plays Grand Rapids, Michigan. In London, the Pretty Things play the Marquee Club, where John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin joins them for their encore. Elsewhere in London, AC/DC plays a club called the Nashville, and the Rolling Stones play at Earl’s Court. Elvis Presley plays Bloomington, Indiana. Paul McCartney brings the Wings Over America tour to Cincinnati, Bob Marley plays Santa Monica, California, and Weather Report plays Seattle. Tom Waits appears on a radio show in the Netherlands. At WLS in Chicago, “Welcome Back” by John Sebastian spends a third week at Number One; it has topped the national Cash Box chart for two weeks. “Silly Love Songs” by Wings, which tops the Billboard Hot 100, is at Number Two on WLS and in Cash Box. Strong movers on the chart include “Happy Days” by Pratt & McClain, moving from 15 to 7; “Misty Blue” by Dorothy Moore, climbing from 22 to 15; “Get Up and Boogie” by Silver Convention, going from 24 to 17; and “Shop Around” by the Captain and Tennille, leaping from 29 to 20. The Number-One album at WLS is Presence by Led Zeppelin.

It is graduation day at many high schools, including Monroe High School in Wisconsin. A high-school sophomore may attend the ceremony, or he may not—in years to come, he will be unable to remember. During the coming Memorial Day weekend, he will get his first car, a 1974 AMC Hornet in robin’s-egg blue. It will be the first milestone of the summer—a summer that will echo down through the years in ways he cannot begin to imagine.

Programming Note: We don’t usually post around here on Sunday, but we will this weekend, so stop back.

Every, Every Minute

In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily, who died young, is given the chance to relive any single day of her life. “Pick an ordinary day,” she is warned. But she doesn’t; she picks her 12th birthday. And she finds that it’s just too painful to watch herself and her loved ones, not so much because it’s her birthday, but because her family fails to notice everything around them—everything that seems so much more precious to Emily now that it’s irrevocably lost to her. She asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

“No,” the Stage Manager tells her. “The saints and poets maybe . . . maybe some.”

From Grover’s Corners to wherever we are, people remember the days on which the big stuff happened: when we graduated from high school, when a loved one died, when we got married or when our kids were born, when we got fired, when the Challenger exploded or when the World Trade Center fell. But even for those days, we forget many of the minute details, the texture of the canvas on which the day’s big events are projected. And on days when nothing big happens, we eventually forget everything.

My favorite thing to write at this blog is One Day in Your Life. It’s where the little things—songs on the radio, shows on TV, news items that merited a single mention by Walter Cronkite or an inch or two on page 3—collide with big events we are more likely to remember, creating a simulation of the day that’s the best we can do with the tools at hand. We may never find the secret to time travel, but perhaps the meticulous recreation of ordinary days can generate something like virtual reality.

If you read this blog regularly, you probably can guess where this is going.

I am neither saint nor poet, just a guy with a blog, but I’m going to try something anyhow, now that Memorial Day is upon us: recreating the summer of 1976 with One Day in Your Life posts—one a week at the start and we’ll see how it goes, see whether we can paint each week of the summer in sufficiently interesting detail. Because I’d like to believe that done right, such a project might hit the magical combination of keystrokes and toonage that opens up the wormhole. First one tomorrow.

Ring Your Bell

Look at the list of Number-One singles from 1966. There were giants in the earth in those days; with very few exceptions, the songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 that year remained the backbone of radio playlists for years to come, and the vast crop of oldies stations that sprouted in the 1980s built their libraries on them.

But while those songs were playing out in real time, I was hearing practically none of them. I turned six in 1966, a chubby-cheeked little kid who had yet to discover music, or sports, or any of the other interests that would define the rest of his life. (My main interest that year was the TV show Batman, which debuted in January.) So the hits of 1966 made little impression on me at the time.

Little impression, but not zero impression. As I’ve noted before, my parents were heavy radio listeners, mostly to WEKZ, our hometown radio station, or WGN from Chicago. So it ‘s understandable that a few WEKZ-appropriate hits of that year managed to seep into my consciousness. Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” which was Number One the week I turned six, was one of them. Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” which did a week at the top in July, has a clear association with summer, and fooling around in the little inflatable swimming pool with my brother. But the one that made the biggest impression at our house—not just on me but on Mom and Dad, too—was “Winchester Cathedral” by the New Vaudeville Band.

“Winchester Cathedral” was inspired by the English music-hall style, so it would have been old-timey and nostalgic to British listeners. There’s no true American equivalent to music-hall style, although some American listeners would have been reminded of Rudy Vallee’s 1920s and 30s crooning, and older ones might have recollected vaudeville itself. It wasn’t necessary for “Winchester Cathedral” to remind anybody of anything, however: all things English were still hot ‘n’ trendy in 1966, and “Winchester Cathedral” is amazingly hooky from intro to coda. The song did four weeks at the top of the easy-listening chart and three weeks in two different runs at the top of the Hot 100 in December 1966.

The New Vaudeville Band was a studio group put together by songwriter Geoff Stephens, but when “Winchester Cathedral” became a hit, a band had to be assembled for TV appearances and concerts. One musician who appeared on the record made the cut. Stephens reportedly approached the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (whose members included future Monty Python collaborator Neil Innes) about assuming the name and going on the road, but ended up with only a single Bonzo.

“Winchester Cathedral” had enough momentum to produce two more American hits for the New Vaudeville Band, “Peek-a-Boo” and “Finchley Central.” But the band’s output was so resolutely English that its American appeal was limited. And by the summer of 1967, their 15 minutes were up.

Mom and Dad went out and bought “Winchester Cathedral”—not the 45, but the Lawrence Welk album of the same name, so that version was heard a lot around our house. I remember being a bit perplexed by it, though. I knew what a cathedral was, but I couldn’t figure out how precisely it was supposed to have kept the singer’s girl from leaving him. I knew nothing about girls at the time, but I suspected that simply ringing the bell wouldn’t have done it.

Dispatches From the Cloud

Futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests that someday, people will be able to upload their consciousness to the Internet and live forever in the cloud, free from the restrictions of a physical body. But some of us are spending so much time connected to the Internet already, for work and for diversion, that uploading our consciousness is almost a distinction without a difference. And when you’re out here a lot, stuff happens. You see things fascinating, enlightening, disturbing, mind-boggling—and you run into people who are the same.

Last week at WNEW.com, I wrote a post about “Ebony and Ivory,” the Paul McCartney/Stevie Wonder hit from 1982. It received the following comment, which I am reposting verbatim.

do you have the power to contact mr. sir paul mccartney for me.
message the us. copyright office told me over the phone that they have me in the copyright office computer as the song lyrics owner of the song lyrics of the ebony and ivory song i need to work out a deal with you paul buy my movie copyrights and pay me some of my royaltys from my song lyrics of the ebony and ivory song. i,m asking for $35.million dollars.i have the power to take away your pass port for good think about it.

Shorter message to Paul: Shit’s about to get real.

Here’s more Internet serendipity: One of the great names of Chicago soul is impresario Carl Davis, famed for discovering Gene Chandler, and producing the Chi-Lites, Tyrone Davis, and Jackie Wilson’s legendary single “Higher and Higher.” In 1980, he collected contemporary work by some of his artists on an album called Chi Sound: Soul From the Windy City, which features Chandler and the then-current editions of the Impressions and the Chi-Lites, among others. Many of us have been hosed over the years by purchasing an oldies compilation that turns out to be made up of “new stereo versions recorded by one or more of the original artists.” So I wouldn’t expect to like a new version of the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her,” particularly because the 1971 original is one of my all-time favorites. But the lead singer of the Chi-Lites during their glory days, Eugene Record, had rejoined the group by 1980, so the sound is right. And the decision that Carl Davis made to update the song for 1980 was a brilliant one.

(Tip of the baseball cap for the Chi-Lites update to my Internet pal bean, who is no weirder than he should be. Certainly no more or less than anybody else who reads this blog, which is maybe not such a compliment after all.)