We’re Not Gonna Take It

Reruns, foreseeable future, yada yada yada.

Why our tastes change and why they don’t is a subject that could get somebody a Ph.D, and it probably already has. I am still digging a lot of the geeky Top 40 records I bought when I was a kid, but the Emerson Lake and Palmer records I bought in high school (for example), not so much. Another album I adored for quite a while as a kid was the soundtrack to the film version of Tommy, which came out in 1975. I’ve mentioned it on the blog before—how I was excited to see the film from the moment I heard Elton John would be in it, playing the Pinball Wizard, but also how I was disappointed when I actually saw it. The story didn’t hang together all that well, but I dug the tunes, so I got the soundtrack, and I listened to it pretty regularly for the next several years. Then, like lots of things in life, it got left behind as I moved on.

So I hadn’t heard it start to finish in nearly 30 years, I’d wager, until I put it on a couple of weeks ago. I was prepared to have a different opinion of it after so much time, but I wasn’t prepared for how different that opinion would be.

It wasn’t just “hmm, I don’t feel the same way about this anymore.”

It wasn’t just dislike.

It was, for most of it, “turn this shit off right now” hate.

The movie starred Ann-Margret as Tommy’s mother, but what she is doing in this performance escapes me entirely. I’ve heard her sing in other roles and sound fine, but in this role, she either sings with a quaver in her voice like a tarted-up Katharine Hepburn, or she doesn’t sing so much as she screechily harangues. Her co-star, Oliver Reed, gives an equally godawful performance whenever he opens his mouth to sing. The producers rounded up Eric Clapton and Tina Turner for cameos in the film, but their performances are fairly rank—Turner’s performance of “Acid Queen” is, well, acidic; on Clapton’s “Eyesight to the Blind,” he sounds a wee bit stoned. And “Cousin Kevin,” in which Tommy is physically abused by Paul Nicholas, and “Fiddle About,” in which he is sexually abused by Keith Moon, are just unspeakable—the songs are vile and the performances are ghastly.

Roger Daltrey’s very good, though, and almost all of the worthwhile tracks on the album stick closest to the Who’s original vision and are performed by the Who, together or in various combinations: “Amazing Journey,” “I’m Free,” “Sally Simpson,” and the finale, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”/”See Me Feel Me.” The soundtrack’s most well-known performance, “Pinball Wizard,” is not done by the Who (although they’re seen playing it in the film); it gets the full mid-70s Elton John treatment, with the usual mid-70s Elton John result—a slick and substantial hit, although it was never officially released as a single in the States. There’s even a song featuring Jack Nicholson as a specialist called on to treat Tommy’s deafness. He’s no singer, but what’s oddest about “Go to the Mirror” is that it’s one of the few tracks on which Ann-Margret neither quavers nor screechily harangues.

Tommy has been showing up on Turner Classic Movies lately; I’ll catch it next time just to see if it looks any better than it sounds to me now. With a finger on the “mute” button, of course.

(Originally posted on October 2, 2007.)

Ten Thousand Years

Reruns, foreseeable future, yada yada yada. This post is a list of the top-ranking one hit wonders for each year from 1955 through 1986, with a couple of hyperlinks added.

1955: “Let Me Go Lover”/Joan Weber (four weeks at Number One)
1956: “Moonglow/Theme from Picnic“/Morris Stoloff (three weeks at Number One) To which William Holden and Kim Novak dance, in a scene that was pretty hot for 1956. The story is told that Holden was so nervous about the scene that he had to get drunk to complete it.

1957: “Rainbow”/Russ Hamilton (one week at Number 3) Hamilton was British—from Liverpool, actually; the flipside of this, “We Will Make Love,” was the hit in the UK. Hamilton’s Wikipedia entry says “it was due to the U.S. mistaking ‘Rainbow’ to be the A-side.” I’d bet on squeamishness over the A-side’s title.

1958: “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”/Laurie London (four weeks at Number One)
1959: “Sea of Love”/Phil Phillips (two weeks at Number Two)
1960: “Alley Oop”/Hollywood Argyles (one week at Number One) This was the first song played on WLS when they went to the rock format that would last for 29 years.

1961: “Mexico”/Bob Moore (one week at Number 7) I don’t believe I’ve ever heard this. Moore was a session player in Nashville; this was from an album of south-of-the-border-flavored tunes.

1962: “Party Lights”/Claudine Clark (one week at Number 5)
1963: “Dominique”/The Singing Nun (four weeks at Number One) Another reason why the British Invasion had to happen.

1964: “Popsicles and Icicles”/Murmaids (two weeks at Number 3)
1965: “The Jerk”/Larks (one week at Number 5)
1966: “Psychotic Reaction”/Count Five (two weeks at Number 5)
1967: “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”/Fifth Estate (one week at Number 11) Early evidence of the influence wielded on pop music by weed.

1968: “Fire”/Crazy World of Arthur Brown (one week at Number Two)
1969: “In the Year 2525″/Zager and Evans (six weeks at Number One)
1970: “In the Summertime”/Mungo Jerry (one week at Number 3)
1971: “Sweet Mary”/Wadsworth Mansion (one week at Number 7) One of my all-time favorite one-hit wonders.

1972: “Sunshine”/Jonathan Edwards (three weeks at Number 4)
1973: “Dueling Banjos”/Weissberg and Mandel (four weeks at Number Two) Just nosing out “Playground in My Mind” by Clint Holmes, which did a mere two weeks at Number Two. It was the 70s, and we couldn’t help ourselves.

1974: “The Entertainer”/Marvin Hamlisch (two weeks at Number 3)
1975: “Rockin’ Chair”/Gwen McCrae (one week at Number 9) Gwen was married to George McCrae, whose “Rock Your Baby” hit Number One in the summer of 1974. They’d be the answer to the greatest trivia question ever—name the only husband-and-wife one-hit wonders—were it not for George’s “I Get Lifted,” which spent a couple of weeks in the Top 40 in early ’75.

There’s more on the flip.

Distant Fire

While I am off dealing with work that pays me actual money, we are filling space here by repeating some posts from out of the past.

We were through, she and I. To admit it out loud, however, during those golden late summer days of 1977, would have been to set the idea loose in the world, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. By admitting it only to myself, I hoped to contain it, either until I was ready to set it loose, or until the knowledge went away.

The radio knew, of course. And it gave me advice.

So you’re having trouble with your romance
Well you better check it out before it goes
Cuz you might not be seeing things just the way you should
And you don’t recognize what everybody knows

It put words in my mouth—words I could sing in the car, but couldn’t say out loud when it counted.

If things are the same then explain why your kiss is so cold
And that mist in your eyes feels like rain on the fire in my soul

Sometimes it put words in her mouth. Or they sounded like they could be her words, and they made me feel like a heel for thinking what I could not say.

Once a story’s told
It can’t help but grow old
Roses do, lovers too
So cast your seasons to the wind
And hold me dear

It would remind me of what I was in the process of losing.

It’s late at night and we’re all alone
Just the music on the radio
No one’s coming, no one’s on the telephone
Just me and you with the lights down low

It would do these things to me randomly, several times a day, as summer turned to fall. What it resolutely refused to do, however, was give me answers—how to admit what needed admitting, how to say what needed saying, and how to live with the consequences. So I had to make my own way through, and I eventually did. But I should have known how it would turn out, after I got what I thought I wanted.

I look into the sky
The love you need ain’t gonna see you through
And I wonder why
The little things are finally coming true

The radio knew, of course. In those days, it knew everything.

(Originally posted on September 12, 2008.)

Radio Man

While I am off dealing with work that pays me actual money, we are filling space here by repeating some posts from out of the past.

I had the good fortune of being a little baby disc jockey at KDTH in Dubuque, Iowa. It was one of those beloved radio stations [that] mattered to its community in a way radio stations rarely do anymore. We frequently heard from listeners who claimed their radios had never tuned away in 40 years, and we believed them. And while I was there, the personality who mattered most was Gordie Kilgore, who anchored the noon news, hosted a twice-daily call-in show called Sound Off, and produced some public-affairs programs. Kilgore had one of those old-fashioned radio voices, with a distinctive inflection that can be impersonated to this day by everyone who worked with him—the sort of thing that’s bred out of today’s aspiring announcers from Day One. He’d been at KDTH 28 years by the time I arrived in 1979, and because I had heard him on KDTH’s FM sister, D93, while I was still in high school, I already knew who he was. And what he was, mostly, was intimidating. Not because of anything he said or did—although it was clear that he possessed a fairly substantial ego—but simply because of who he was, and the gravitas that came from his long experience.

Kilgore died yesterday [September 19, 2006] at age 81, and those of us who knew him, whether we knew him personally or only through the radio, can’t help remembering stories about him. Other people who knew him longer and better may have more colorful stories, but these are a couple of mine.

Kilgore was not an actual Dubuque native, although he was accepted as an honorary one, which was a big deal in pre-casino Dubuque. Back then, Dubuque was the biggest city in the country not located on an interstate highway, and its insularity was legendary. You could have lived in Dubuque 50 years and moved there when you were three, and some Dubuquers would still look down at you as an outsider. Kilgore cut through that. He loved the Mississippi River, and led each noon newscast with the river stages at various points in our listening area. He did this with such dedication that I once joked that the ultimate Kilgore lead would be, “Moscow in flames, Russian missiles headed toward New York, but first, these river stages. . . .”

One Friday before a long holiday weekend, Kilgore and the station’s program director got into a disagreement over something Gordie had done, or left undone. Harsh words were exchanged, and Kilgore stomped up to the station manager’s office and resigned. The next morning, the Des Moines Register reported that the longtime Dubuque broadcaster had quit, complete with a quote from Kilgore himself. (To this day, I wonder if Gordie tipped the newspaper.) That Saturday, I saw him quietly cleaning out his office, cardboard boxes full of plaques and memorabilia. On Tuesday, he showed up for work as if nothing had happened. It was the program director who ended up leaving not long afterward.

Like any lifelong radio man, Kilgore took severe weather seriously. One sunny Saturday afternoon, he stopped by while I was on the air. We had an alarm in the studio that blinked whenever the weather wire sent an urgent alert, and on that day, it had been blinking regularly, even though the weather out the window looked fine to me. Every time I checked it, there was nothing, so after a while, I stopped checking. He happened to be in the studio picking up a tape or something when the alarm blinked yet again. I saw him looking at it and I said, “Stupid thing’s been going off all day.” He looked at me for a second and then said, “Hmm . . . west side of Dubuque just blew away,” and walked out. His point was clear—as the guy on the air, it was my job to make sure the alarm wasn’t the real thing, and what if, that time, it was? I never forgot the lesson.

Although he retired several years back (during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1993, actually, which must have made his first day at home very hard on his wife), he continued to do a bit of on-air work at KDTH until just a few months before his death, because that is also what lifelong radio men do. They aren’t making broadcasters like him anymore. Beloved stations need beloved personalities, and in Dubuque, Gordie Kilgore was surely that.

(Originally posted on September 20, 2006.)

Top 5: As Blind as a Fool Can Be

(Hot damn, it’s a new post.)

It’s been nearly five months since I wrote anything about my Desert Island list here. And I guess it’s because I wonder whether it ‘s interesting to anyone but me. It’s not packed with forgotten gems that never made it on the radio, or unknown acts that never got their due. It’s not calculated to impress anybody with my quirky taste, unless you think that being a Top-40 nerd is quirky. I have been living with some of the songs for more than 40 years, from the AM radio in the bedroom I shared with my brother at home to the iPod on which I have loaded road music for use in my wife’s car, and I keep coming back to them when I could be listening to other stuff. Here are five (more than five, actually) from the Desert Island list that I haven’t written about yet, all of which were on the radio in Septembers gone by, and in no particular order.

“Who Do You Think You Are”/Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods (1974). The best of all descriptions of this song is in the liner notes of the Rhino Super Hits of the 70s volume that includes it: “the great lost Buckinghams record.” Just as they did with “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” in the summer of ’74, the Heywoods’ cover version outperformed a British original. “Who Do You Think You Are” was cut by both Jigsaw (of “Sky High” fame) and a band called Candlewick Green, whose version just missed the Top 20 in the UK. The Heywoods’ version has a drive the Candlewick Green version lacks, and it polishes the hooks until they sparkle like diamonds.

“Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”/Chicago (1973). There are actually three Chicago songs on my list, none of which I have written about: “Beginnings,” “Dialogue,” and this. “Beginnings” is ambitious and magisterial. Both “Dialogue” and “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” are records made great by building tension and then releasing it: “Dialogue” at the end of Part 1, when Peter Cetera sings, “I always thought that everything was fine” before a single electric guitar starts Part 2, and again at the end, when “we can make it happen” is stopped in mid-syllable, and “Feelin’ Stronger” after its stupendous bridge, about 2:30 in. In those ways and several others, both records prove that it’s the little things that matter. “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” is also one of the greatest top-of-the-hour songs in radio. (For what it’s worth, this sounds like a 45 version—more bass, more punch.)

“Beautiful Sunday”/Daniel Boone (1972). Another pleasure I have felt guilty about for years, although I’m trying to get over it. If you can’t figure out why a person might find some charm in this, maybe we shouldn’t be seeing each other anymore.

“Jimmy Loves Mary Anne”/Looking Glass (1973). No guilt here. This is a record we’ve praised repeatedly in the past, and for good reason: It’s cooler than all of us on the best day any of us ever had. Somebody’s blog—and I’m sorry to say I forget whose—tipped me to the fact that the guitar solo on the record gets its unique sound thanks to a Leslie amplifier, normally heard powering the Hammond B3 organ.

“Maggie May”/Rod Stewart (1971). There are two Rod Stewart songs on the list, both of which hit in the fall, “Maggie May” and “You Wear It Well,” a smartly observed lyric about the power of memory, which charted a year later. I have frequently pondered the arc of “Maggie May” in my life—when I bought the 45 at the age of 11, it was because I liked it on the radio. I really didn’t get the lyrics beyond the sound of them. It remained a favorite for the next 30-plus years, always welcome on my radio shows and on record or CD. When I began fooling around with the idea of music as memoir in the mid 1990s, I seized upon the line “It’s late September and I really should be back at school” as especially resonant, autumn being the season in which everything began. Today, a couple of weeks shy of 40 years since the song hit Number One, I realize that “Maggie May” performs, for those of us who love it, the function great art is supposed to perform: It tells us who we are. And who we’ve been. And now that we’re 40 years older, who we’re going to be.

Off-Topic Tuesday: Observations From the Road

This month—and for as long as necessary—we’re largely in repeat mode. This isn’t our first flirtation with reruns: in 2010 I repeated a few posts from my first blog, the Daily Aneurysm, under the rubric of “Off-Topic Tuesday.” Here’s a travel piece from there that doesn’t have anything to do with music. You can skip it if you want, although I think it’s one of the better things I’ve ever written.