Back to Work

Between radio gigs and freelance writing assignments, I am busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest right now, and I expect to find myself with much, much less time to noodle around with this blog over the next few weeks. So until the siege of actual remunerative labor eases, a lot of what you read here will be repeats of earlier posts. Because even old-time readers don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of all 1350-some posts that have appeared in this blog’s history, and new readers are coming along all the time, this seems like an OK idea. I’ll write new stuff when I can, but I don’t know how much or how often.

I was never sorry to see school start in the fall. I recall asking my mother one time if she thought that was weird. She said, “No, it’s your job, and everybody needs to get back to work.” (I remember this, but it doesn’t mean it really happened. But it’s the kind of thing I would have asked and she would have said, so it’s true either way.) Looking back over the record charts from various back-to-school weeks, the most vivid comes from 1972. The radio was always on in the summertime, but that August, I must have lived with it even more intensely than usual, because the chart fairly drips with humidity, and the light comes brightly back even at a distance of 35 years. Several of these records put me back into the waning days of summer, or aboard the school bus on some rural road, or in some classroom noticing some girl I’d never noticed before.

1. “Brandy”/Looking Glass. (up from 2) I didn’t buy this on a 45, although my brother did, and I played his copy a lot. This is AM radio glory that you couldn’t improve upon.

4. “Hold Your Head Up”/Argent. (up from 6) Pretty heavy stuff for the Top 40, even in its edited form (to less than three minutes from over six), but that was the great thing about the Top 40, right?

6. “I Don’t Want to Be Right”/Luther Ingram. (down from 5) I would not have been able to talk knowledgeably about the glories of Southern soul at that point; all I knew was that there was something different about this kind of music, and I liked it.

7. “Goodbye to Love”/Carpenters. (up from 9) Karen Carpenter doesn’t often get the recognition she’s due for possessing a beautiful and unique voice. (Try singing along with her sometime. Even if you’re a guy, can you get that low?) As for “Goodbye to Love,” it’s a vastly underrated record in the Top 40 pantheon, containing as many killer hooks as any Carps record ever did.

10. “Guitar Man”/Bread. (up from 14) Although they’re synonymous today with mellow makeout music, in ’72 Bread had rocked within recent memory on records like “Let Your Love Go” and “Mother Freedom,” so the slide and wah-wah they deploy on “Guitar Man” wasn’t as great a departure then as it seems now.

11. “Back Stabbers”/O’Jays. (up from 18) This was the year I would become a confirmed Philly soul freak. I’d bought my first Stylistics record earlier (“You Are Everything”), and before the year was out I’d be introduced to the Spinners, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Paul—and the O’Jays.

13. “Rock and Roll Part 2″/Gary Glitter. (up from 25) I bought this on a 45, too, and if there were ever a record made for 45s and AM radio—and public-address systems in arenas and stadiums—this is it. Play it on FM or CD and it loses almost everything that made it such a smash back in the day.

15. “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”/Donna Fargo. (down from 11) Fargo’s crossover success from country, with this and its even-bigger followup, “Funny Face,” is a bit hard to figure. That this could play on the same station in the same quarter hour with Gary Glitter or Argent makes me woozy.

17. “Black and White”/Three Dog Night. (debut) More cowbell from a band with an all-access pass to the Fountain of Hooks.

2o. “Beautiful Sunday”/Daniel Boone. (up from 21) As a genre, bubblegum’s day was largely past by 1972, but its influence never went away. It’s heard on this relentlessly happy record, which describes the kind of Sunday that seemed pretty appealing to my 12-year-old self. And to my 47-year-old self, too.

(Originally posted August 31, 2007.)

Fragments

Back in May, I started a summer-long project involving One Day in Your Life posts, revisiting 1976 day by day. “We may never find the secret to time travel, but perhaps the meticulous recreation of ordinary days can generate something like virtual reality,” I wrote. “[W]e’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.”

I didn’t really expect to be physically sucked back through the vortex of time, transformed again into the long-haired, chubby-cheeked, vaguely ridiculous figure I was. I hoped I might be able to recapture how it felt to live in those days via the things we did, the news we read, the songs we heard, and by recounting the incidents and accidents that touched our lives on otherwise mundane and forgettable days.

I knew I would be grasping at shadows, and wisps of smoke, and gossamer milkweed seeds of memory blown on the wind. And I probably should have known what I realize now: that’s not enough to build on. Shadows, smoke, and gossamer don’t add up to a narrative, a novel we can turn back in to refresh our recollection of the story. At best, they might yield a fragment of flickering film, something that’s there and gone before we’ve fully recognized what it is.

TV producer David Milch has said that all storytelling involves the weight of the past on the present. But the weight is all we have. We cannot be there again, on the softball field or on the tractor, or in whatever other memory we might choose, cherished or otherwise. We can only glimpse ourselves there through the haze of years, with the eyes we have now. How it felt to us then, what it was really, really like in the moment—we can guess, but we can’t know.

Two years ago, I wrote about my 1976 daybook, and I found that it didn’t reveal the reason for the weight the summer of 1976 impresses on me at such great distance. Neither did this summer’s project. Back there, in never-ending 1976, the days unspool, mundane events come and go, the radio plays, but what’s really going on—what makes that summer into That Summer—happens somewhere else, beyond the sunsets and the softball scores and the family vacations, in a place unrecorded in the 16-year-old heart, and inaccessible to a much older one.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

“The saints and poets maybe . . . maybe some.”

But not me.

One Day in Your Life: August 25, 1976

August 25, 1976, is a Wednesday. In Monroe, Wisconsin, it’s the first day of school. In France, premier Jacques Chirac resigns in a dispute over political strategy with president Valery Giscard d’Estaing and is replaced by foreign minister Raymond Barre. President Ford is on vacation in Colorado. Among his activities today: attending a picnic hosted by prominent Vail restauranteur/hotelier Pepi Gramshammer. The Russian space mission Soyuz 21 returns to Earth early; a crew member has begun displaying psychotic behavior possibly linked to toxic gases in the ship’s cabin. The Lincoln Park Carousel, which has stood in an East Los Angeles park since 1914, is burned by vandals. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, Earl F. Hunsicker Bicentennial Park opens. Future actor Alexander Skarsgard, NBA journeyman Damon Jones, and New York Yankees pitcher Pedro Feliciano are born. The Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins 5-4 in a 19-inning game that takes five hours, 26 minutes to play. Yankee Dick Tidrow enters the game in the 7th inning and pitches through the 17th.

On daytime TV, Dinah Shore welcomes Chuck Berry and M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell. Merv Griffin’s guests on his daytime show include singers Mel Torme and Cyndi Grecco and the group Silver. In primetime, a pair of half-hour, four-week summer variety shows premiere back-to-back on CBS: Easy Does It, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, and The Late Summer Early Fall Bert Convy Show, which stars the erstwhile game show host. Also in the cast is comedian Lenny Schultz, who performs as Lenny the Bionic Chicken.

Jethro Tull’s Too Old to Rock and Roll tour continues in Calgary, Canada, while Lynryd Skynyrd’s tour moves on to Lewiston, Maine. Frank Sinatra plays Holmdel, New Jersey, Tom Waits plays Cleveland, and the Band plays Los Angeles. The Electric Light Orchestra plays St. Louis, with opening acts Mahogany Rush and Pure Prairie League. The self-titled debut album by a new group, Boston, is released. At WLS in Chicago, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee is at the top for a second week. New in the Top Ten are “Let ‘Em In” by Paul McCartney and Wings, “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” by England Dan and John Ford Coley, and “Say You Love Me” by Fleetwood Mac. The biggest movers on the chart are “Baby I Love Your Way” by Peter Frampton (up 10 to #27) and “With Your Love” by Jefferson Starship (up 14 to #29). The Beatles compilation Rock and Roll Music spends its fifth and final week at the top of the album chart. Next week, it will be knocked out by Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, currently at #2.

Back in Wisconsin, a newly minted high-school junior knows he is ready to return to school, because anything is better than driving a tractor in the heat. But the things he does not know are legion: He doesn’t know that he’s just passed the summer he will cherish the most as the years go by. Neither does he know that the coming fall will be a season he will never leave behind. He also doesn’t know that 35 years in the future, his 51-year-old self, on something called a blog in a place called the Internet, will try to recreate the summer of 1976 —and fail.

More about that in tomorrow’s post.

Numbers Game

I don’t know if the tale I am about to relate actually happened the way I tell it, but the circumstantial evidence is convincing and this ain’t a court of law, so here we go.

Len Barry was lead singer of the Dovells, a group of high-school pals from Philadelphia who were big for a couple of years in the early 60s. He began his solo career in 1965 with “Lip Sync (to the Tongue Twisters),” which went to #84 during a brief chart run in the summer of ’65 (and is pretty much what you would expect it to be). Barry’s next release was one for the ages, however: “1-2-3,” which went all the way to #2 in the fall of 1965, is one of those 60s pop records everybody used to know. (Vintage TV performance here.) Barry’s next two releases, the “1-2-3″ soundalike “Like a Baby” and “Somewhere,” the song from West Side Story, also hit the Top 40, but two more barely scraped into the Hot 100. Another single bubbled under in early 1967.

Flash forward to the summer of 1968. Len Barry, three years removed from his biggest hit, is on a new label, and the new label is looking for a score. The thought process is easy to follow: Len Barry is best known for “1-2-3.” Ergo, if we want to get radio stations to notice his new release, shouldn’t it be called “4-5-6″?

Not an unprecedented thought in the entertainment biz then or now—if people like something once, make it a second time and they’ll probably like it again. But there was a flaw in the plan: Somebody would have to write a song called “4-5-6.” What in the hell would a song called “4-5-6″ be about? A house number? An area code? A batting average?

It was at this moment some anonymous record executive was seized with a stroke of brilliance worthy of an era 40 years in the future, when no promotional gimmick is too shameless and people will fall for anything. Barry had recorded a song called “Now I’m Alone,” a weeper about a man who has lost his wife and family. In June 1968, that song was released under the title “4-5-6 (Now I’m Alone).”

Never mind that the numerals 4, 5, and 6 do not appear anywhere in it—a radio programmer who remembered “1-2-3″ might be persuaded to give it a listen when it crossed his desk, just because of the title on the label. Perhaps some did, but not enough to make it a hit. “4-5-6 (Now I’m Alone)” did not make the Hot 100, although it showed up on some surveys from WRIT in Milwaukee in the summer of 1968.

Note to Patrons: Posting will continue lighter than normal for the foreseeable. Next one is scheduled for Thursday. In the interim, as always, go play outside.

“4-5-6 (Now I’m Alone)”/Len Barry (out of print; the audio quality of this is sketchy but acceptable)

Top 5: Wry and Sly

(Correction below.)

I have been threatening for a couple of years to write a post about singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall, and today’s the day. Let’s begin with Hall the songwriter, whose “Harper Valley PTA” we mentioned last week. It’s the most famous of his songs recorded by someone else. Among his widely covered songs that might be familiar to some amongst the readership: “Hello Vietnam,” “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” “I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew,” and “Louisiana Saturday Night.” But Hall was, as most songwriters tend to be, the best interpreter of his own material. The wry outlook of his lyrics benefited from his sly delivery. Here are five Tom T. Hall hits worth hearing in the man’s own voice:

“The Ballad of Forty Dollars” (#4 country, 1968). Hall’s first Top-10 country hit, and a great example of the observational, storytelling style that makes Hall’s music so compelling. Why the song is called “The Ballad of Forty Dollars” doesn’t become clear until the very last line.

“Salute to a Switchblade” (#8 country, 1970). My favorite Tom T. Hall record. Hall served in the military in Germany during the late 50s, and “Salute to a Switchblade” describes the adventure of a young American in a beer hall who tries to pick up a fraulein without knowing she has jealous—and well-armed—husband. Hall’s parenthetical observations at the end of each verse are hilarious.

“The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” (#1 country, #42 pop, 1971). When Hall was seven years old, the man who taught him how to play guitar died. Clayton Delaney was not the man’s real name; neither was he the kindly old man you envision when listening to Hall’s tribute—”Clayton” was only 19 or 20 years old when he died. Hall talks about the song and performs it here.

“Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” (#1 country, 1972). This might be the loveliest melody Hall ever wrote, and it’s a beautiful arrangement too, with those shimmering countrypolitan string flourishes so common in Nashville productions of the 60s and 70s. It’s a lovely lyric, too: “That night I dreamed in peaceful sleep of shady summertime/And old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”

“I Love” (#1 country, #12 pop, 1973). “I Love” was Hall’s biggest pop hit, deceptively simple and moving, and it even manages to be funny, when Hall gives up the opportunity to make an obvious rhyme with the word “vine” and goes for something else altogether. The fact that the record runs a little more than two minutes made it popular with DJs who had to back-time to hit the network news.

Bonus track: Hall wrote Bobby Bare’s 1968 hit “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn.” It’s a song that takes me deep into memory, with vivid associations I can’t sort out or explain, but that’s a subject for another time. The sound is pure late 60s countrypolitan, but the lyric is a powerful lesson for writers everywhere: storytelling is not only about what you put in, but what you leave out.

Besides “I Love” and “Clayton Delaney,” Hall hit the pop charts four other times, with “Me and Jesus,” “That Song Is Driving Me Crazy,” and “Sneaky Snake.” A nice bit of journalism about the 1972 Democratic presidential campaign and the Watergate affair, “Watergate Blues,” bubbled under the Hot 100 in 1973 at the very moment Congressional hearings into the scandal were on TV every day.

Hall hasn’t scored a hit since the middle of the 1980s, but he’s still a relatively young man, having celebrating his 75th birthday last May. His most recent album was released in 2007 and was his first in a decade. Hall wasn’t inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2008—and that was a wait too long.

Dining Room

Most Saturday nights, I buy myself a sandwich on the way to the radio station and eat it in the studio while I’m on the air. And I wonder precisely how many meals I have eaten in radio studios over the years.

Back in 1979, I was disappointed to find myself scheduled to work Christmas Day from noon to 6. It was the first major break in the family Christmas routine in my lifetime. To minimize the disruption, I planned to drive the hour from home to the station and back again the same day. Before I left, my mother packed leftovers from our Christmas Eve turkey dinner, and as I began my Christmas broadcast day, I enjoyed what is still the most elegant studio meal of my career.

After that, it was fast-food burgers (back when I still ate those), but in recent years it’s been a lot of sub sandwiches. Many were fetched to me by The Mrs., even before she was The Mrs. I recall having Chinese a couple of times, although a meal like that poses a couple of problems. First, anything requiring utensils raises the degree of difficulty because you need to bring utensils. And second, anything hot tends to get cold, because it’s the nature of the studio meal to be eaten a bite here and a bite there over a lengthy period of time. There is no radio station on Earth that has never had pizza delivered to it, but pizza is problematical for studio dining—greasy fingers and studio equipment don’t mix.

Neither do beverages and studio equipment. Coffee was once ubiquitous in radio studios—no jock would hit the air without a cup in one hand and headphones in the other—so it was never unusual to find coffee rings or stray brown drops on the printed program log used in the studio every day. This also meant a risk of beverages being dumped into sensitive equipment. I have never done this myself, despite the fact that a large insulated mug of Diet Pepsi powers every radio show I do, although every jock has heard stories of such accidents, and may have witnessed them.

A beverage accident prompted one company I worked at to ban all beverages from the studios. Memos were sent, signs were hung, and small tables were placed outside each studio door with signage to make abundantly clear what they were for. I complied, begrudgingly, for one long, miserable night shift—only to discover that the station’s highly paid morning team was exempt from the rule. I decided I wasn’t going to be treated any differently than they were, so I ignored the rule from that point on. So did everybody else, and pretty soon the tables disappeared.

(My beverage mug is a source of great amusement for a couple of people at the company I work for now. It’s a 52-ouncer, which used to be what I required to get through the six-hour night shifts I did back in days of yore. Now I use it primarily because it’s a cheap refill at the local convenience store, and because the next-biggest size, a one-gallon gasoline can, is just too big.)

When I was a little baby disc jockey in the late 70s, smoking was permitted in station buildings, and even in the studios. Cigarettes were as ubiquitous as coffee, and the spongy windscreen over the microphone would permanently hold the aroma. At one place I worked, the back hallway between the studios and the newsroom was designated as a smoking area. I always wondered how our chain-smoking news director failed to set the building on fire, given the way she’d flick butts into wastepaper baskets full of discarded wire copy.

A radio studio is a place with many faces: it’s a stage for performers, a salt mine for the underpaid, a refuge for the maladjusted, a garden of delight for those who love what they do. And sometimes, it’s a dining room.

Note to Patrons: Posts are liable to be light here for the remainder of this week. I suggest you use the time to read some other like-minded blogs, which you can find by clicking “Favorite Waste of Time” at the top of this page. Most of them are better anyhow. Or go play outside. Summer’s nearly over.