Saturday Single No. 272

It’s been a while since we played a game of Jump! here at Echoes In The Wind, taking a long-ago Billboard Top 40 and seeing which records moved the most since the previous week. For no particular reason, I’ve dug out the chart from the second week of January 1968, and it turns out to have a fair number of records with large leaps from the week before.

We’ll look at shifts of eight or more places. Two records met that bare minimum: “Who Will Answer,” an odd message record from Ed Ames, rose eight spots to No. 19, and the Rolling Stones’ “She’s A Rainbow” moved up eight places to No. 36.

There’s a bit of a logjam of records moving nine places: “Monterey” by Eric Burdon and the Animals rose to No. 15; the medley “Goin’ Out Of My Head/Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” climbed to No. 28; Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Am I That Easy To Forget” moved up to No. 30; and “Itchykoo Park” by the Small Faces jumped to No. 32.

One record shifted ten places: “Two Little Kids” by Peaches & Herb rose to No. 31.

Three records moved fourteen spots: “My Baby Must Be A Magician” by the Marvelettes moved up to No. 26; the Foundations’ “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” jumped to No. 38; and “Darlin’” by the Beach Boys rose to No. 39.

Moving up seventeen spots to No. 18 was “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz, while the Esquires’ “And Get Away” dropped eighteen places to No. 40. Two records moved more than twenty places: “Incense & Peppermints” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock dropped twenty-two spots to No. 37, and “Spooky” by the Classics IV jumped twenty-four places to No. 23.

Normally, I’d go with the Classics IV and “Spooky” for today’s selection, but I’ve always been ambivalent about the record, so I’m going to let it go by. Today’s runner-up, “Incense & Peppermints,” remains one of my all-time favorite singles, but I’ve shared it here at least twice, most recently in the 2010 Ultimate Jukebox.

So we move to “And Get Away” by the Esquires, an R&B quintet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When I first saw the record listed in the Billboard Top 40 under consideration, I knew nothing about the Esquires except that they’d had a hit during the summer of 1967 with “Get On Up” (No. 11 pop and No. 3 R&B). Then I listened to “And Get Away,” and this morning’s decision to skip the two aforementioned records got easier.

“And Get Away,” a witty and funky follow-up to “Get On Up,” had peaked at No. 22 during the first week of January 1968; it went to No. 9 on the R&B chart; and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

Tags: Esquires