There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight

We continue here with our latest boffo series that explores the one-hit wonders whose lone chart hit peaked at #101 on the Hot 100. All data comes from Joel Whitburn’s fabulous Bubbling Under Singles and Albums; all mistakes I made without any help at all. (First installment here.)

“Need Your Love”/The Metallics (4/28/62, five weeks on chart). The Metallics were a doo-wop quartet from Los Angeles. Two of the members were brothers. “Need Your Love” was the first of four singles they made. Lead singer J. D. Wright has one of the most powerful falsettos you’ll ever hear.

“Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You”/Bernie Leighton (9/15/62, six weeks). Leighton was a pianist who recorded extensively with big bands before World War II and as a studio musician afterward. “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” had been a Number-One hit for Connie Francis earlier in 1962. Although I haven’t been able to find Leighton’s version anywhere, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be an improvement.

“The Bird”/The Dutones (3/23/63, seven weeks). A transparent (and derivative) attempt to start a dance craze, “The Bird” was an early production by future Brunswick Records impresario Carl Davis, sung by Richard Parker and Jerry Brown.  In 1988, it was heard in the John Waters movie Hairspray. Do not confuse these Dutones with the Five Du-Tones, famous for “Shake a Tail Feather”—a record that was also heard in Hairspray.

“Talk Back Trembling Lips”/Ernest Ashworth (10/12/63, six weeks). Ernest Ashworth was a reasonably successful hitmaker on the country charts, with seven top-10 hits between 1960 and 1964. “Talk Back Trembling Lips” was one of only nine singles to top the country chart in 1963, a very good year for country. Legendary songs hitting #1 that year included “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash and Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally.” While “Talk Back Trembling Lips” isn’t in that league, it’s a solid record.

“There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight”/Joe & Eddie (2/22/64, four weeks). Joe Gilbert and Eddie Brown were from Louisiana and Virginia respectively, but met while in high school in California. They were a popular act at the University of California in the Harry Belafonte mold. After being discovered by a record producer, they became stars on the folk scene, although their music tended more toward gospel. They were on a number of important TV shows in the early 60s,  including Hootenanny and Shindig! (where they performed “There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight.”) For a brief time in 1963, Gilbert was romantically involved with an aspiring singer named Joni Anderson, later to be known as Joni Mitchell. Joe and Eddie’s career was cut short in 1966 when Gilbert died in an automobile accident.

“Everyday”/The Rogues (1/23/65, four weeks). The Rogues were California bigshots Bruce Johnston and Terry Melcher, who did a great deal to popularize surf music in its heyday; “Everyday” is a surf-inspired update of the Buddy Holly original. They recorded as Bruce and Terry, and also cut “Hey Little Cobra,” but credited it to the Rip Chords, a group Melcher had a hand in forming, as a way of boosting that band’s profile. In 2003, Johnston told an interviewer that Columbia Records “hired us to be their rock ‘n’ roll department. We had girls drop by, we’d skateboard round the studios, the bosses were really freaked out—except that we’d get on the charts!”

In the next installment, we travel through the mid 1960s and meet a famous singer under another name, and discover an answer song to  multi-format smash that was one of the biggest hits of 1966.

Top 5: New Rock ’72

If you stepped into the Wayback Machine, traveled to the middle of the 1960s, and and scanned the FM band, you would hear a lot of stations simulcasting their AM sister station’s programming. But by late in the decade, the FCC required broadcasters to offer separate programming on FM. For some music stations, this meant taking advantage of FM stereo technology (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) to offer listeners an upgraded listening experience. And for many FM music stations, it also meant playing different music than AM stations did. The great progressive, free-form, album rock stations rose during this period, from KMPX in San Francisco to WNEW-FM in New York. It wasn’t long before most cities had their own “alternative” stations.

A few adventuresome FM programmers tried having it both ways—playing the AM radio hits and mixing in some flavor from elsewhere. That seems to be what was happening at WIXO in New Orleans during the week of October 27, 1972. The station positioned itself as “new rock, cooler than normal,” and alongside that season’s big hits by Lobo, the Spinners, Jim Croce, Albert Hammond, and even Gilbert O’ Sullivan, it went off the Top 40 map in interesting ways.

16. “Convention ’72″/The Delegates (up from 30) and 25. “Deteriorata”/National Lampoon (up from 32). The fall of ’72 was a season of parodies and novelties (which means we could count the song at #10, “Hot Butter” by Popcorn, also). “Convention ’72″ might be the most thoroughly forgotten top-10 hit of the 1970s. It’s a break-in record lampooning various political figures, and it rose to #8 in Billboard the week after Nixon was reelected. Most of the voices are provided by Pittsburgh DJ Bob DeCarlo. “Deteriorata” is a parody of “Desiderata,” the inspirational prose poem that had been a hit for Les Crane a year before. And on the subject of novelty:

22. “I Ain’t Never Seen a White Man”/Wolfman Jack (up from 25). The legendary DJ released two albums on the Wooden Nickel label in 1972 and 1973, in which he sings, talks, and generally hams up pop, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll songs along with a few originals. Most are pretty painful to listen to now. “I Ain’t Never Seen a White Man,” a plea for racial harmony, bubbled under the Hot 100, reaching #106 in a six-week run.

23. “Best Thing”/Styx (up from 26). Whoever worked New Orleans promotion for Wooden Nickel was earning his money in the fall of 1972. Like the Wolfman Jack record, the debut album by Styx was released on the Wooden Nickel label also, and “Best Thing” was the lead single. Here’s an ancient piece of video showing the band performing the song live in 1972 at what’s probably Summerfest in Milwaukee. Be sure to stick around for the last minute of the clip, which was apparently taken from a Chicago TV show.

26. “Poor Boy”/Casey Kelly (down from 22). Singer/songwriter from Louisiana who made a couple of country-rock albums in the early 70s and eventually settled in Nashville, where he still works as a songwriter and musician.

As album-oriented rock gained in popularity around the turn of the 1980s, programmers instituted a form of apartheid, banishing all black artists except for Jimi Hendrix, something that album stations would not have embraced a decade before. While WIXO is by no means an album station, its list of “new rock” extras includes R&B hits by the Detroit Emeralds, Al Green, Jerry Butler, Lamont Dozier, and Wilson Pickett, which is a small indication of how these artists were perceived at the time.

In New Orleans, “new rock,” running the gamut from Jethro Tull and Grand Funk to Curtis Mayfield and Johnny Rivers, meant “everything but the kitchen sink”—but I suspect it made for a mighty interesting station, too.

Boogie Nights

This post is half a rerun. OK, maybe three-quarters. In October 2006, I wrote about the first party DJ gig I ever had.

During the fall of 1977, when I was a senior in high school, I was approached by a group of cheerleaders (the only time such a thing ever happened, for damn sure) and asked if I’d DJ a postgame dance they were having. “I’d love to,” I said. Only afterward did I remember that I didn’t have a sound system that could do it. Fortunately, a few of my stereo-geek friends were eager to strut their stuff. One had a set of powerful JBL speakers; another had an amp with sufficient wattage to fill the cafeteria where the dance would be held. We scrounged a couple of turntables and rigged up a microphone after a series of trial-and-error experiments, and that was that. We did several dances throughout the school year. At one point, somebody even wired up some disco-style lights so we could add a bit of disco-style ambiance—although disco music was not especially popular, at least not in the fall. We had a rock-and-roll crowd—in fact, the single most popular record we played, the one guaranteed to clear the chairs and get everybody out on the floor, was “Peace of Mind” by Boston. It wouldn’t be until the spring dances that we started getting disco requests.

Being the high school’s ace DJ appealed to me. A lot. And there was a moment during one of the dances that the die was cast for my future. As we were setting up, I told my friends that I was going to play “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family at some point that night. They were aghast. I was adamant. About midway through the evening, I dropped the needle on it, and I will never forget the reaction. The first few notes of the introduction stopped every conversation in the room. A few people looked up at the balcony where we were set up. Then people started looking at each other. Nobody danced, but everybody sang. I learned at that moment the power of the perfect song at the perfect moment, as well as the power of old songs to transport people back in time. I’ve never forgotten the lessons.

That was my first party DJ gig, but it wouldn’t be the last. We did several more parties in the spring of 1978, and we were even invited back by members of my brother’s class to do one in the fall of 1979, after we’d all gone off to college. In 1978, I had a summer job spinning records at a roller rink in my hometown, which was far less glamorous than I imagined it would be. On the night I got fired in 1990, we went to a party at my wife’s company, where I got acquainted with the DJ, and he eventually hired The Mrs. and me to do weddings and other parties for him, which we did for two or three years. It was a pretty sweet deal—we didn’t have to do set-ups or tear-downs; we just spun the tunes.

These DJ gigs taught a lot about human nature. Clients and wedding guests could be terrifically gracious, inviting us to have dinner, a piece of wedding cake, or a drink at the open bar. But they could also be shockingly rude, peremptorily demanding this and that. And a couple of times, we felt physically threatened. One family had paid to rewire the reception hall after it was determined the electrical panel on the rickety stage in the middle of the room (in a decrepit hall, in a decaying town) couldn’t handle the smoke machine in addition to the DJ rig and the light rig. The smoke machine cost extra, and this family obviously wanted it badly, but on the night of the wedding, The Mrs. and I could not get the notoriously temperamental thing to function. So there we were, on a low stage surrounded by the entire cast of Deliverance, all violently pissed off that they weren’t getting the goddamn smoke they paid for, although the cigarette smoke in the room should have been more than enough.

The last time I took a turn behind a DJ rig was at a friend’s wedding in 1999. Like a lot of things I did when I was young, being a party DJ is something I’m glad I did, but it’s not something I want to do again.

Off-Topic Tuesday: Flagpoles and Booyah

A few weeks back during our season of reruns, I repeated a travel piece that first appeared at my original blog, the Daily Aneurysm. Since some amongst the readership enjoyed it, here’s another, covering a  journey from Madison to Wisconsin’s eastern shore.

The first interesting place you hit on [US] 151 [northeast of Madison] is Beaver Dam. Beaver Dam used to be the home of the Monarch Range Company. A Monarch range was the centerpiece of a lot of Wisconsin kitchens—including my grandmother’s—from the turn of the 20th century into the 1980s, until the company sold out and its successor went bankrupt.

The next stop along 151 is Waupun. In 1851, three years after Wisconsin became a state, Waupun was selected as the site of the state prison. Some of today’s prisoners reside in the first building erected, in 1854. Newly constructed prisons—and Wisconsin has its share, because, [as in] other states, prison construction was much of what passed for economic development here during the 1980s—look like industrial plants, apart from the razor wire. But old prisons, like Waupun, with those forbidding stone walls and towers, look like prisons. Waupun’s prison is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it’s safe to say you don’t want to visit there.

Vacation Days Are Over

A while back, we did an extensive series called Down in the Bottom, in which we examined the one-hit wonders whose lone chart hit peaked between #90 and #100 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart. But #100 isn’t necessarily the end of the line. From 1959 to mid-1985, and again from 1992 to the present, Billboard has published a Bubbling Under chart, showing the singles that have yet to make it onto the big chart. Over the years, the number of songs on the chart has varied in size, usually at least 10, but as many as 35 during the 1960s.

It occurred to me not long ago that there’s a rich vein of interesting music history/trivia in that chart, so let’s mine some of it: I count something like 60 records between 1959 and 1985 that were the artist’s lone pop chart hit and that peaked at #101, just shy of Hot 100 status. Here are the first six, in chronological order.

“Vacation Days Are Over”/Argyles (10/12/59 five weeks on chart). I am pretty sure this batch of Argyles is not related to the Hollywood Argyles of “Alley Oop” fame despite the fact that both were on the Brent label. “Vacation Days Are Over” is a pretty decent uptempo doo-wop record.

“Scandinavian Shuffle”/Swe-Danes (3/7/60, four weeks). The Swe-Danes were a Danish/Swedish trio. Alice Babs had become a nightclub singer while still a teenager and acted in a number of Swedish films. She was quite the rage with Swedish kids for a time, apparently, and later sang with Duke Ellington. Guitarist Ulrik Neumann was also known as an actor, and violinist Svend Asmussen was a big deal on the Swedish jazz scene. (All biographical details are from Wikipedia, so who the hell knows for sure.) Get a taste of “Scandinavian Shuffle” here, and should you speak Swedish, probably a lot more.

“Come Dance With Me”/Eddie Quinteros (4/18/60, five weeks). Brent Records was having a good year in 1960; Eddie Quinteros was in the label’s stable along with the Argyles, and this song was successful enough to get Quinteros onto American Bandstand in February. One of the musicians on the Richie Valens-esque “Come Dance With Me” is Roy Estrada, one of the founding members of Little Feat.

“Respectable” /The Chants (5/29/61, two weeks). Do not confuse these Chants with a Liverpool-born northern soul group with the same name. “Respectable” is an Isley Brothers tune, recorded on the small family-run label TRU-EKO and leased to MGM once it started getting airplay in New York City. Bill Jerome of TRU-EKO later produced hits by the Left Banke (“Walk Away Renee” and “Pretty Ballerina”) and the 1970s synthesizer novelty “Popcorn” by Hot Butter. Jerome remains an active promotion man to this day.

“Ev’rybody Pony”/Teddy & the Continentals (9/18/61, one week). Teddy and the Continentals were from Wilmington, Delaware, that came up the way so many other bands of the time did, via a local record label. They were a popular attraction around Wilmington for several years in the early 60s. “Ev’rybody Pony” is a competent bit of mid-tempo rock ‘n’ roll that was a top-10 hit in Pittsburgh. (You want trivia, you got it.)

“Trade Winds, Trade Winds”/Aki Aleong (11/20/61, four weeks). Ake Aleong began an acting career in the mid 50s and has made over 250 TV appearances and 40 movies, although for most of the 60s and 70s he was a musician, producer, and record executive. (His best-known production is probably “You Are My Starship,” the 1976 hit by Norman Connors.) “Trade Winds, Trade Winds” is the smoothly tasteful tale of a man on the run for a crime that turns out to be self-defense, and they all live happily ever after, except the dead guy.

Coming in the next installment: a jazz player’s cover of a Connie Francis tune, and a song that hit Number One on the country charts.

Note to Patrons: For the last couple of months, I’ve been repeating posts from the past while I have been off dealing with actual remunerative labor. The pace of said labor has slowed enough to permit me to spend more time with this blog, although the repeats I’ve got scheduled through the end of the month are still going to run. Here’s hoping I’ll someday be busy enough again someday to necessitate more reruns, because I gotta pay the cat’s vet bill somehow.

All Day Music

From a series about Octobers of the 1970s, here a bit that originally appeared on October 6, 2006.

I’m looking at a yellowed newspaper clipping of the team picture of the 1971 Northside Browns, undefeated champions of the Grade Football League’s sixth-grade division who, minutes before, finished thrashing the South Raiders 13-0 for the title. I’m in the back row, on the left, clashing ridiculously in a striped shirt and striped pants of entirely different patterns, hands on hips, doing my best to look like a grizzled gridiron warrior flush with victory. The moment the photo is taken marks the pinnacle of my sorry athletic career. I wasn’t much of a contributor to the championship. The city park and rec department made the schedule and provided officials, but the teams had no coaches, so we scrubs had to depend on the starters to take themselves out of the game to let us play, which they rarely did. But I was there, and I remember the feeling, on those golden September and October afternoons, as deliciously intense. The outcome of those touch-football games mattered to me in a way very few things have mattered since.

The year before, in the fifth-grade division, my team finished second. My elementary school was big enough to field two teams, and if I’m recalling correctly, we lost the championship game to our classmates. I don’t remember much about the game, but it had to be especially intense going up against the same people we played against at recess every day.

More about the photo and some extremely fine music on the flip.