In Early 1970

Originally posted January 15, 2010

After running some errands this morning and despite having a more full agenda than most days this afternoon, I wanted to stop by and at least offer something here today.

This year, 2010, turns out to be the fortieth anniversary of one of the more important years in my musical life. For all of 1970, I listened intently to Top 40 radio, and that’s the only year about which I can say that. My Top 40 habit came upon me, as I’ve written here before, during the summer of 1969 (and as I write that, my internal jukebox starts playing Bryan Adams), and by the latter months of 1971, I was listening more and more to the album rock played at night on KVSC-FM, St. Cloud State’s student station.

But for all of 1970, I tuned my radio to either KDWB in the Twin Cities or – in the evenings – to WJON just across the railroad tracks from Kilian Boulvard and, later in the evenings, to WLS in Chicago. And by the time that year began, with four months of listening tucked away, I knew when a record was new to the playlist. I was no longer – for the most part – trying to sort out what was current and what had been current six months or a year or eighteen months earlier. That meant I had a cogent answer available if the locker room jabber turned to music and one of the guys asked me, “Whaddaya think of the new Temptations single?”

Being able to know, in that case, that he was referring to “Psychedelic Shack” instead of “I Can’t Get Next To You” meant there was one more way for me to seem like I belonged in high school society. Or, alternatively, it meant that there was one less way for me to seem like a dork.

Anyway, I look these days at various radio stations’ playlists and surveys from forty years ago, and I see, for the most part, old friends. Even if I were alone more than I might have wanted – a condition not uncommon for those who are sixteen, I think – I had the radio. I won’t say that I recognize all the titles I see on every survey; but I recognize the vast majority of them, and I think that if I were to hear the records, I’d recall most of those whose titles are not familiar.

All of that serves as an introduction to the first of what I hope will be regular looks throughout this year at radio surveys from 1970. We’ll start with the “$ilver Dollar $urvey” for the week of January 16, 1970 from KCBQ in San Diego, California. Why KCBQ? Because I was unable to find surveys for this week from either KDWB or WDGY, the Twin Cities Top 40 stations of the day. (The KDWB surveys used to be available at The Oldies Loon, but no longer; the only WDGY survey available there from January 1970 is from a week earlier.) Given that, San Diego seemed like a fine place to start.

Here’s the top fifteen in that $ilver Dollar $urvey:

“Venus” by the Shocking Blue
“Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin
“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” by B.J. Thomas
“I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5
“Take A Letter Maria” by R.B. Greaves
“Cold Turkey” by the Plastic Ono Band
“Baby I’m For Real” by the Originals
“Someday We’ll Be Together” by the Supremes
“Don’t Cry Daddy” by Elvis Presley
“Brand New Me” by Dusty Springfield
“Leavin’ On A Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul & Mary
“Down On The Corner/Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Ma Belle Amie” by the Tee Set
“Walkin’ In The Rain” by Jay & The Americans
“Up On Cripple Creek” by The Band

That’s a pretty good – and very familiar – hour of listening. A couple of those records – the Elvis title in particular, as well as the Jay & The Americans tune – didn’t really speak to me, and years after having last heard it regularly, I’m still tired of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.” But several of those fifteen – the joyously excessive “Whole Lotta Love,” the R.B. Greaves tune and “Up On Cripple Creek” – remain among my favorites.

I should also note I have some affection for “Ma Belle Amie,” which gave listeners a useful French phrase for saying goodbye. (A young lady headed to a different high school for senior year actually wrote that French sentence, word for word, in my annual in May 1970. The next time I saw her was twenty years later in the role of Trudy Chelgren, one of the waitresses in the iconic coffee shop in Twin Peaks.)

The only record among KCBQ’s top fifteen from forty years ago that I didn’t immediately recall was the Originals’ “Baby I’m For Real.” Whether it got much airplay in the Twin Cities, I don’t know. All I can say is that I found the WDGY survey for the previous week, and “Baby I’m For Real” is not listed.

The Originals were part of the Motown organization, according to All-Music Guide, and after some records that didn’t hit all that well, reached the top of the R&B chart in 1970 with “Baby I’m For Real.” The record, produced by Marvin Gaye and co-written by Gaye and his then-wife, Anna, was the first of two Top 40 hits for the group, peaking at No. 14. (“The Bells” went to No. 12 in the early spring of 1970.)

Even though I didn’t recognize the title, it turned out I had the record on vinyl on a Time/Life anthology, and I did indeed dimly recall it. To my ear, it sounds more like something that would’ve come out of Philadelphia than Detroit, but it’s a sweet piece of modernized doo-wop.

“Baby I’m For Real” by the Originals, Soul 35066 [1969]

Note: I’ve corrected some title errors in the KCBQ survey. “Whole Lotta Love,” for instance, was offered as “Whole Lotta Lovin’.”

In Early ’72

Originally posted January 8, 2010

When I think of the first weeks of 1972, no huge or poignant memory comes to mind. I was beginning my second quarter of college; the most important thing I’d learned during my first quarter was that I was going to have to study if I wanted to improve on my 1.67 GPA. This wasn’t high school and I was going to have to work at it

I’ve always been grateful that my parents were both educators and understood the value of letting me find my own way through the thickets of college. After that disastrous first quarter, I began to learn how to study, and my GPA rose rapidly over the next three years. Had I come from a smaller town and/or from a family not so certain about the value of education, that wasted first quarter could easily have resulted in my heading back to Long Prairie or a similar small town and a job at the local gas station or grocery store.

But I, as the saying goes, began to apply myself as 1972 began. I paid attention in class and took better notes, and I made sure I read what I was assigned to read. When classes were done for the day, I swept the stairs and classroom floors in the Business Building for two hours. And I spent more time hanging around the campus radio station.

I’d gotten an AM-FM radio for Christmas, and my attachment to Top 40 and to AM radio began to fade. I began to dig into the albums I heard at the campus radio station and that I heard from other FM stations as I explored that side of the radio universe. I still listened to Top 40 on occasion, but not nearly as often as I had during previous years. Still, the music was all around, and almost everything in the top ten in the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 8, 1972, is familiar, if not exactly loved:

“Brand New Key” by Melanie
“American Pie” by Don McLean
“Family Affair” by Sly & The Family Stone
“Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green
“Got To Be There” by Michael Jackson
“Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band
“Sunshine” by Jonathan Edwards
“I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” by the New Seekers
“Cherish” by David Cassidy
“Hey Girl/I Knew You When” by Donny Osmond

And there was some interesting stuff a little further down the chart, too:

A Six-Pack From The Charts (Billboard Hot 100, January 8, 1972)
“Hey Big Brother” by Rare Earth [No. 22]
“Superstar (Remember How You Got Where You Are)” by the Temptations [No. 39]
“Without You” by Nilsson [No. 54]
“Pretty As You Feel” by Jefferson Airplane [No. 60]
“After All This Time” by Merry Clayton [No. 71]
“Get Up and Get Down” by the Dramatics [No. 78]

I really only recall two of these, which I think is more an indication of my slide toward album rock during the 1971-72 college year than it is a comment on the tunes. On the other hand, the two that I do recall are two of the three that found their ways into the Top 40: The Rare Earth and Nilsson singles. I’m sure I heard the Temptations’ record, but it doesn’t seem to have penetrated. I might have heard the Merry Clayton recording as an album track at the college radio station, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear the Jefferson Airplane or Dramatics singles until years later.

“Hey Big Brother” still sounds to me a little bit clunky, as did all of Rare Earth’s singles. That’s not bad, but the records aren’t as smooth as you’d expect from a band that came through the Motown door. (The group had its own Rare Earth label but had been one of the first white acts signed to the Motown label.) But that clunkiness does lend the group’s records an identity. “Hey Big Brother” eventually climbed another three spots to No. 19. There is a labeling anomaly with the record: All the commercial 45 labels I can find online list the time as 2:59, while a label I saw for a DJ promo stereo/mono 45 listed the correct time of 4:45, at least on the stereo side.

A few weeks ago, I tried to rip my vinyl copy of the Temptations’ single, but I thought there might be a skip. I think it was just a funky bit of rhythm, having listened to this copy that I got from another source, a rip of the 1972 album Solid Rock. The record – supposedly a comment from writers Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield on Motown singer David Ruffin, who had left the Temptations a few years earlier – peaked at No. 18.

The late Harry Nilsson was capable of pulling off irony with a straight face, so it’s possible, I suppose, that “Without You” was actually a joke, a commentary on songs of lost love. I’ve never read anywhere that he had any such intentions, but it’s something – given the rest of his career – that I’ve occasionally wondered about. But I don’t think that’s the case. The record – which spent four weeks at No. 1 in February and March of 1972 – is just too damned sad. At least until Nilsson opens up the pipes in the end and blows you away.

All-Music Guide has this to say about Jefferson Airplane’s “Pretty As You Feel,” which was sitting at its peak position of No. 60 as January 8, 1972 came along: “Constructed from a live, in-the-studio jam that features Carlos Santana, ‘Pretty As You Feel’ was then picked up by new Airplane member Joey Covington, who wrote the lyrics. Musically, it’s a soulful exercise in a jazz-inflected strut, with a strong but mellow blues feeling. The lyrics are a take on the stupidity of changing one’s appearance for appearance’s sake – to be, that is, au naturel.” Three weeks later, the record had fallen out of the Hot 100. The jacket of the Bark album and the 45 labels I’ve seen have the record running 4:29, but oddly enough, on the Airplane anthology Flight Log, there is an edit of the song that runs 3:07. I haven’t listened to that piece of vinyl for years; I’ll have to do so soon.

I’ve liked Merry Clayton’s version of Carole King’s “After All This Time” ever since I heard the Merry Clayton album many years ago, wherever that was. But until last evening, when I was digging through the Billboard listings for early 1972, I’d had no idea that it was ever released as a single. It didn’t do well: by January 8, the record had been in the Hot 100 for five weeks and, as it turned out, had reached its peak at No. 71. It tumbled out of the chart during the next three weeks. Listening to it this morning, I still think it’s better than a lot of stuff that prospered on the charts that winter.

I don’t have a lot to say about the Dramatics’ “Get Up and Get Down,” except that it’s got a great groove. Unless you’re in traction or something like that, your head should be bobbing by the time the horns start calling at about the nine-second mark. The record didn’t do well: Its No. 78 ranking in the January 8 Hot 100 was its peak.

(My best guesses – based on comparing running times with those listed on 45 labels I found online – is that these are the recordings that were released as singles. Those I’m most sure of are the ones I’ve tagged with single catalog numbers [in two cases, along with the album from which they were pulled as singles]. The two I’ve tagged with just the album titles, I’m just not certain about.)

Willie Mitchell, RIP
Having mentioned Al Green in the top ten list above, I should note the passing this week of Willie Mitchell, who crafted the Hi Records sound that backed Green and a great number of others on hits and other recordings. While I love the Hi Records sound and acknowledge Mitchell’s huge influence, I’ll let others more qualified than I handle the tributes, starting with Larry at Funky 16 Corners.

That First Top 40 Season

Originally reported September 23, 2009

Often, when I immerse myself in my reference books or lists, I ponder two categories of Top 40 music: Records that I don’t recall ever hearing at all and records that don’t show up these days on oldies radio.

Regular readers know the tale: I was, at best, a passive listener to Top 40 for years. If I were around Rick, I heard what he heard. If my sister had friends over, I heard – from another room – what they heard. During my junior high years, I heard the records played at dances and in the gym during the second half of lunch hours. It was during the fall of 1969 that I became an active listener to Top 40, hoping to join in on locker room gab about music and not seem utterly clueless.

So it was about this time forty years ago that I re-tuned my radio, moving the little red line over to the left, to 630, the frequency of KDWB in the Twin Cities, one of two Top 40 stations available to St. Cloud listeners in the daytime. (Evening brought Top 40 to WJON, just down the street and across the tracks from our house, and I was a regular evening listener for years.)

So what was it I heard during those first days? The Billboard Top Ten from forty years ago this week looked like this:

“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies
“Green River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones
“Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman
“I Can’t Get Next To You” by the Temptations
“Jean” by Oliver
“I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” by Tom Jones
“Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly & the Family Stone
“Oh, What A Night” by the Dells

Some of that is pretty good, some of it a little gooey, but overall, pretty good. To be honest, a couple of those are records I don’t think I ever heard back then. If I heard them, it didn’t happen frequently enough for them to make an impression. I know the Dells’ single, but that’s from digging into pop and rock history over the last twenty years, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Tom Jones’ version of “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again.”

The Billboard chart is a national chart, however, and what we were listening to in Minnesota might have been a fair amount different (as was frequently the case across the country; local playlists often differed a fair amount). I wasn’t able to find a KDWB chart from this week forty years ago, but the Airheads Radio Survey Archive offered one from WDGY, the other Top 40 station in the Twin Cities. I didn’t listen to WDGY, memory tells me, because its signal was not as strong and it didn’t come in well in St. Cloud. I imagine there are a few differences here from what KDWB was playing, but I don’t think they’d be major. (Someone can correct me if I’m wrong.) Here’s WDGY’s Top Ten for September 26, 1969:

“Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman
“Easy to Be Hard” by Three Dog Night
“Jean” by Oliver
“Everybody’s Talkin’” by Nilsson
“Hurt So Bad” by the Lettermen
“Lay Lady Lay’ by Bob Dylan
“Green River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“This Girl Is A Woman Now” by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
“Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly & the Family Stone

Every one of those comes out of the speakers of my memory. But as I look further down the WDGY chart, which goes to No. 30, there are five records I do not recall hearing. The Tom Jones tune is joined by four others: “When I Die” by Motherlode, “And That Reminds Me” by the Four Seasons, “No One For Me To Turn To” by Spiral Starecase and “You, I” by the Rugbys.

In the Top 30 of the Billboard list, I find five unheard records as well: The Dells’ record and the Tom Jones single along with “What’s The Use of Breaking Up” by Jerry Butler, “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am” by Bill Deal & the Rhondells and the Rugbys single.

Some of those – most notably the singles by Spiral Starecase and the Rugbys – remain mysteries today. But one can’t hear everything. And that brings me to my second list: Songs that one doesn’t seem to hear even on oldies radio these days. (And when I talk about radio, I’m talking about earthbound stuff, not satellite and so on. I get the sense from what I’ve read and from folks who listen to satellite radio that playlists are immensely deeper and specialized.)

I have to admit I don’t listen to radio much these days. My radio time is usually in the car when I’m out running errands, although I occasionally have it on when I’m puttering in the kitchen. And when the radio is on, I imagine that about two-thirds the time, it’s tuned to KQQL-FM, an oldies station in the Twin Cities. In any case, as I looked at the Billboard chart from forty years ago this week, I saw many titles that I don’t recall hearing on the radio for a long, long time, if ever. Here are six of them.

A Six-Pack of Radio Rarities (Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending September 27, 1969)
“Little Woman” by Bobby Sherman, Metromedia 121 (No. 5)
“A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash, Columbia 44944 (No. 11)
“Your Good Thing (Is About To End)” by Lou Rawls, Capitol 2550 (No. 18)
“When I Die” by Motherlode, Buddah 131 (No. 21)
“Move Over” by Steppenwolf, Dunhill 4205 (No. 31)
“Did You See Her Eyes” by the Illusion, Steed 718 (No. 36)

Including a record here isn’t necessarily a recommendation. The best example of that is the Bobby Sherman record. It’s pretty limp pop, but it did get all the way to No. 3, according to the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. That was the best that Bobby Sherman ever did on the chart, although he had six more Top 40 singles through May of 1971. I guess if I were to choose a Bobby Sherman hit for a deep spot on a radio playlist, I’d be tempted to go with “Julie, Do Ya Love Me,” which actually isn’t all that great a record either. In the context of an oldie station, though, neither one would sound awful coming out of the speakers every once in a while.

“A Boy Named Sue” was pulled from the live 1969 album Johnny Cash recorded at San Quentin prison in California. It’s humorous, and you can hear Cash almost laughing as he sings Shel Silverstein’s work. There might have been versions out at the time that didn’t bleep out the epithet – which I think was “son-of-a-bitch” – at the song’s climax, but I’m not sure. Sometime very soon, I’m going to get the expanded CD release, which contains the entire concert Cash and his band put on for the inmates of San Quentin, and I expect the bleep will be gone. The single was Cash’s twelfth Top 40 hit and spent three weeks at No. 2, being blocked from the top spot by the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

It seems like there’s a rule for many artists – those who had relatively few Top 40 hits – that one record stands in for all. When you hear Lou Rawls on the oldies stations today, the record is almost sure to be “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,” which went to No. 2 in 1976. There’s no doubt that’s a great record (and Rawls’ biggest hit), but why not stretch a little? Play “Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing” (No. 13, 1966) or the one I offer here, “Your Good Thing (Is About To End),” which peaked at No. 18 forty years ago this week.

I’m not sure what the formal definition is for identifying a One-Hit Wonder. Actually, I’m not sure there is a formal definition. Mine is: one Top 40 hit. Lots of groups that are called One-Hit Wonders very often aren’t, as they have one memorable record and something else that edged its way to No. 37 or some similar spot. One example of that is Lighthouse, which had the superb hit “One Fine Morning” go to No. 24 in 1971 but also reached the Top 40 with “Sunny Days,” which peaked at No. 34 in 1972. Motherlode, on the other hand, is a pure One-Hit Wonder. The Canadian quartet had one hit and one hit only: “When I Die,” which is pretty good, peaked at No. 18.

Steppenwolf seems to fall into the Lou Rawls Rule: The group had seven Top 40 hits between 1968 and 1974, but only two of them – “Born To Be Wild” and “Magic Carpet Ride” – ever seem to show up on the radio. And that’s too bad. “Rock Me” and “Hey Lawdy Mama” would liven up the day considerably if they ever came out of the speakers. As would “Move Over,” which was the fourth of the group’s seven hits. It peaked at No. 31.

The Illusion is another pure One-Hit Wonder, as “Did You See Her Eyes” was the group’s only trip into the Top 40. Released on Jeff Barry’s Steed label, the record is a good piece of pop-rock – tougher than most – and would be a nice change of pace on radio. The record peaked at No. 32. (My thanks to the Acid Test DJs for the clean rip.)

Idle Hands & A Green Mini-bat

Originally posted August 28, 2009

As I’ve noted before, we have numerous oak trees on our lot. Which means, come this time of the summer, we have acorns. Lots of acorns. Almost every time the Texas Gal and I are outside for more than a moment – tending the garden, lugging in groceries or even sitting in the lawn chairs – we’re likely these days to be clonked on the head by a falling acorn. The lawn is covered with the nuts. If we’d intended to raise acorns, we’d have a bumper crop.

We had four oak trees in the backyard at Kilian Boulevard when I was a kid, and acorns were frequently thick on the lawn there. They’d start falling in mid-August, and we’d wait until late September before we spent a Saturday raking and bagging them. So they were thick on the ground during one August that I recall.

Sometime earlier that month – I think it was 1970, when I was sixteen – Dad had seen a green stick at the base of the driveway one evening. After parking, he investigated and found one of those foot-long baseball bats given away as souvenirs: A miniature Louisville Slugger. For some reason, it was green.

He figured a kid lost it somehow, perhaps having it fall out of a bicycle basket.  But which kid? No way to know. So he dropped it on the small table in our back porch and thought no more of it.

During one of the next few early evenings, I found myself with an empty hour or two. I sat on the lawn near one of the oaks, watching whatever traffic there was on Eighth Street or Kilian. Bored, I picked up a stick that had fallen from one of the oaks and swung it like a bat. Then I picked up an acorn, tossed it into the air and flailed at it with the stick. The acorn flew into the street. I thought for a moment, then went inside and grabbed the green Louisville Slugger. Back at my place on the lawn, I began flipping acorns in the air and whacking them with the bat.

As with anything, practice improved my performance: I fouled off a few, hit some grounders and easy pop-ups, and then began reaching the street regularly. Then, using an uppercut, I began to launch acorns across the street and into the yard of August and Rose, an older couple. (It was Rose who had started me collecting coins a few years earlier.) I sat there for an hour or so, happily whacking acorns, and did the same during a couple of other slow evenings during the rest of that summer. It filled some time, and it also got some acorns off the lawn, meaning there would be – by a small degree, to be sure – fewer acorns to rake when the time for that chore arrived.

September came, and school started. We spent a couple of Saturdays raking and bagging acorns and leaves. Sometime during that winter, the green minibat was tossed into a box in the closet and forgotten.

One afternoon during the following spring, August was out watering his garden when Dad drove up and parked. Dad walked across the street and spent a few minutes chatting with August, as neighbors do. Sometime during dinner, Dad mentioned August and his garden and lawn. It was all good, Dad said, “but he said, ‘You know, I don’t have any oak trees in my yard, and I can’t figure out how come I have so many oak seedlings over by the street.’” Looking at me, my dad added, “I just told him that seeds can travel in a lot of different ways.”

A Six-Pack From the Charts (Billboard Hot 100, Aug. 29, 1970)
“Hand Me Down World” by the Guess Who, RCA Victor 0367 [No. 19]
“Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)” by the Temptations, Gordy 7099 [No. 30]
“The Sly, Slick, and the Wicked” by the Lost Generation, Brunswick 55436 [No. 37]
“Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt, Capitol 4826 (The mp3 is from the CD rerelease of Silk Purse.) [No. 61]
“Funk #49” by the James Gang, ABC11272 [No. 79]
“As the Years Go By” by Mashmakan, Epic10634 [No. 97]

“Hand Me Down World” was the Guess Who’s first chart hit after Randy Bachman left the group, according to the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, and to my ears, Bachman’s departure marked the end of the classic Guess Who era. From April of 1969 through April 1970, the group had five records in the Top 40, with four of those reaching the Top Ten and one spending three weeks at No. 1. Those five were “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” “Undun,” “No Time” and “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight.” (“American Woman” is listed as having reached No. 1, while “No Sugar Tonight” is not given an individual rank. It is, however, listed as having been in the Top 40 for thirteen weeks. Confusing.) Then Bachman left and – although the band had seven more Top 40 hits, with “Share the Land” and “Clap for the Wolfman” reaching the Top Ten – the stew just wasn’t as tasty. Still, “Hand Me Down World” is a pretty good single if not up to the quality of the string that came during that one year. It peaked at No. 17, but given the richness of the band’s catalog, it seems to be a bit forgotten by the programmers of the oldies stations.

About “Ball of Confusion,” All-Music Guide says: “Another excellent track in a brilliant run of Norman Whitfield-produced and -written, Sly Stone-inspired Temptations records from the late ’60s/early ’70s, ‘Ball of Confusion’ was one of the only Motown ‘protest’ records. The beguiling lyrics illustrate a tense America at the dawn of the 1970s, and include attacks on the Vietnam War, a corrupt government, drug addiction, and spirituality. It hit the nail on the head, much like P.F. Sloan’s excellent ‘Eve of Destruction’ in 1965. Musically, it’s an excellent funk record of the period, with some fabulous bass playing and a blaring horn arrangement. Of course, the Temptations’ gospel-inspired vocal trade-offs make the overall record even more powerful, and it has dated extremely well.” The record spent thirteen weeks in the Top 40, peaking at No. 3.

I don’t recall hearing the Lost Generation’s “The Sly, Slick And The Wicked” during the summer of 1970, but it might have been one of those records that did very well in other places – I would guess that Chicago, the Lost Generation’s hometown, would have been one of those – and not so well in the Minnesota market. Or maybe I just missed it. The record sounds very much like the Chi-Lites (with the exception of a few production tricks, like the echo), and that’s not at all surprising, considering that both groups recorded for Brunswick. “The Sly, Slick And The Wicked” was the Lost Generation’s only appearance in the Top 40. The record peaked at No. 30.

The first three chords of “Long Long Time” still, after thirty-nine years, make me draw a sharp breath of hurt. They always have, since long before I knew the sad tale told by the song’s words. Once I knew the words, I suppose I might have assigned their meaning to a young woman of my acquaintance. Whoever she was, she’s long gone from my life, but the emotional wallop of the song – especially those first three chords – has stayed with me. Meaning that Ronstadt’s performance of Gary White’s song is about as good as it gets. The record spent seven weeks in the Top 40 and peaked at No. 25.

I have a suspicion that the James Gang’s “Funk #49” found airplay in 1970 based on some other chart than the Hot 100, because it remains one of the most identifiable tunes of that time with some unforgettable riffs. The single spent ten weeks in the Hot 100, peaking at No. 59.

I know very little about Mashmakan, a group from Quebec, Canada, except for this record. Even that knowledge is lately found: When I saw the group’s name in a Hot 100 chart a while back, I noted my lack of knowledge about the record and the group, and one of my blogging friends sent me the mp3. It’s an odd, clunky record with an over-earnest lyric, and I am pretty sure I never heard it back when it was on the charts. It was in the Top 40 for four weeks and peaked at No. 31.

Afternote:
Despite my efforts, these may not be the versions of these records that went out on 45s. Take “Long Long Time” as an example. I don’t have the 45, but I’ve seen a fuzzy picture of the label and know that the record lasted just less than three minutes. The version on the album Silk Purse, as listed at AMG, runs 4:18. The version on the Silk Purse portion of the two-CD set The Best of Linda Ronstadt: The Capitol Years, runs 4:22, and my only vinyl version, from Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits [1976], runs 4:21. That’s also the length – 4:21 – of the track as included on Different Drum, a 1974 anthology of previously released work. I know that the version of “Long Long Time” here is from the Capitol Years CD, and not knowing what else to do, I’ve tagged it as coming from Silk Purse, as it’s included in the version of Silk Purse in that two-CD package.

At The Ballpark Long Ago

Originally posted August 3, 2009

I went to a baseball game forty years ago today. How do I know?

Because I saw something that day at Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium that’s been etched in my memory ever since.

It was a Sunday, and I went to the ball game through a trip sponsored by St. Cloud State. I was fifteen, and my folks – Dad, of course, taught at the college – paid my way and sent me off on the bus to the Cities. It wasn’t the first Minnesota Twins game I’d gone to, but I hadn’t been to many of them. And I’d never gone to one essentially unsupervised. Yeah, there were adults on the bus, but none of them were going to keep track of me. I was basically on my own, and that made me feel pretty good.

And the game promised to be something special, as well. The Twins were playing the Baltimore Orioles, and both teams were in first place as the last two months of the season got underway. That season, 1969, was the first year that the two major leagues were split into divisions, with the division winners set to face each other in playoffs after the regular season. So the series between the Twins and the Orioles was a preview of a likely post-season series.

There was an added attraction: The Orioles’ starting pitcher that Sunday, Dave McNally, had won fifteen games without a loss that season. If he won that Sunday’s game, he’d set a new American League record for consecutive victories at the start of a season. (He was tied at 15-0 with Johnny Allen, who’d pitched for Cleveland in 1937.)

In addition, by winning his sixteenth game in a row, McNally would tie an American League record, set by Walter Johnson in 1912 and tied by Smokey Joe Wood later that same season, as well as by Lefty Grove in 1931 and by Schoolboy Rowe in 1934. (The streaks by Johnson, Wood, Grove and Rowe had come after they’d lost games in those seasons.)

So McNally was trying to become the first American League pitcher to ever have a record of 16-0. (He’d then set his sights on Rube Marquard of the National League Giants, who in 1912 won his first nineteen decisions.)

I wasn’t yet an avid baseball fan, but I was learning. I knew as we drove from St. Cloud that morning about McNally and his chance for history. I also knew that the Twins and the Orioles were two very good baseball teams. A look at the box score from that day’s game reveals the name of four members of the Baseball Hall of Fame: Rod Carew and Harmon Killebrew of the Twins and Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson of the Orioles. (There are also some names in the box score of at least two Twins who also deserve to be in the Hall: Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat. Other Orioles? Probably not.)

[Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022. Note added May 13, 2022.]

I had a good seat, about fifteen rows above the third-base dugout, the Orioles’ dugout. And it was a tight game, as might have been expected. As the Twins came to bat in the bottom of the seventh inning, they trailed 1-0, and McNally had given up just four hits. But in that bottom of the seventh inning, the Twins managed two hits, and then a walk loaded the bases. Rich Reese came to the plate, pinch-hitting for Twins pitcher Kaat. I don’t remember how many pitches McNally threw to Reese, but the last one was decisive: Reese launched the ball over the right-field fence for a grand-slam home run. The Twins had a 4-1 lead, and McNally’s first loss was in sight.

McNally stayed in the game, which I find odd, both in memory and in baseball strategy. (I’m referring as I write this to a box score available at Baseball-Reference.com, an invaluable site, and I find that some details of the game have become fuzzy for me. But my main point, which I’ll actually address in a bit, remains clear.) In the top of the eighth inning, the Orioles closed the gap to 4-2, and McNally went back to the mound to pitch to the Twins in the bottom of the eighth inning. The Twins scored another run, and that was when Orioles manager Earl Weaver came on the field to take McNally out of the game.

The stadium was noisy as the Twins took that 5-2 lead and as Weaver came out of the third-base dugout, right in front of me. The noise lessened a bit as Weaver walked to the mound and took the baseball from McNally. And as McNally headed toward the dugout, his head down and his perfect season gone, two remarkable things happened:

First, the Minnesota fans – more than forty thousand were there that Sunday – stood and applauded. I’ve since learned, of course, that most sports fans in most cities acknowledge historic performances by opposing players, but this was the first time I’d seen that happen, and it made an impression on me. But that was only the first remarkable thing.

McNally crossed the third-base line as the crowd applauded him. He raised his head, and – in a gesture that’s remained vivid in my memory for forty years – took off his cap and tipped it to the fans in the stadium. If there were ever an object lesson in sportsmanship and grace, it came in that moment from Dave McNally.

A Six-Pack From The Charts (Billboard Hot 100, August 9, 1969)
“My Pledge of Love” by the Joe Jeffrey Group, Wand 11200 [No. 16]
“Choice of Colors” by the Impressions, Curtom 1943 [No. 24]
“Hurt So Bad” by the Lettermen, Capitol 2482 [No. 44]
“Muddy River” by Johnny Rivers, Imperial 6638 [No. 45]
“Hey Joe” by Wilson Pickett, Atlantic 2648 [No. 59]
“While You’re Out Looking For Sugar” the Honey Cone, Hot Wax 6901 [No. 62]

Joe Jeffrey, according to the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, was from Buffalo, New York. There’s a bit more information at All-Music Guide, which notes that the singer, who was born Joe Stafford but changed his name (evidently to avoid confusion with Jo Stafford, even though Jo Stafford sang pop and was female) was a regular in clubs in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. “My Pledge of Love” was the only one of Jeffrey’s four singles on Wand to reach the Top 40, peaking at No. 14.

As the late 1960s rolled on, Curtis Mayfield of the Impressions was becoming more and more explicit in his songwriting about the racial divide in the United States. “Choice of Colors” may have been the furthest extension of that progression. Listening to it today, I find it remarkable that the song did as well as it did, peaking at No. 21 on the pop chart and reaching No. 1 on the R&B chart. The record is a remarkably frank piece of work.

“Hurt So Bad” was the Lettermen’s remake of the 1965 hit by Little Anthony & the Imperials, which went to No. 10. The Lettermen’s version was more lightweight than Little Anthony’s; it peaked at No. 12 as it floated from radio speakers during the late summer and early autumn of 1969, speaking directly to the life and heart of at least one young listener in the Midwest. It was the Lettermen’s final Top 40 hit.

Johnny Rivers’ “Muddy River” was pulled from his remarkable album Slim Slo Slider, and it’s surprising to me that it didn’t do better than it did. Rivers’ “Summer Rain,” a single that’s high on my all-time list, had gone to No. 14 as 1967 turned into 1968, and “Muddy River,” while not quite of that quality, was a good single. But “Muddy River” sat at No. 45 for one more week and then jumped to No. 41 for a week before falling back down the chart. Rivers wouldn’t hit the Top 40 again until 1972 with “Rockin’ Pneumonia – Boogie Woogie Flu,” which went to No. 6.

Wilson Pickett’s version of “Hey Joe” didn’t reach the Top 40, but it did prove once again that Pickett could to justice to pretty much any song. The record peaked at No. 59 on the pop chart, and went to No. 29 on the R&B chart. It’s also notable for the presence of Duane Allman on guitar. (If you listened to the mp3 before reading this, it’s likely you knew – or at least suspected – that already.)

“While You’re Out Looking For Sugar” is one of the delightful confections with a groove that Honey Cone and the other members of the Invictus stable turned out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Formed by the one-time Motown team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, Invictus and Hot Wax were also home to Freda Payne, Laura Lee, the Chairmen of the Board and others. “While You’re Out Looking For Sugar” was, says Wikipedia, Honey Cone’s first single. It peaked at No. 62 on the pop chart and made it to No. 26 on the R&B chart. The group eventually had four Top 40 hits, including “Want Ads,” which went to No. 1 in 1971.

Smoking With Jumbo

Originally posted July 22, 2009

I went to summer camp three times during my childhood and youth. I spent one week each of the summers of 1965 and 1970 at a Boy Scout camp a little more than an hour north of St. Cloud. The second time I was there, the camp was formally called Parker Scout Reservation, but, informally, everyone still called it Camp Clyde in honor – as I understood it – of the stuffed moose head called Clyde that presided from the wall of the mess hall.

My other camping summer was in 1968, when I spent something like twelve days at Bible camp, swimming, boating, crafting and more at a camp called the Shores of St. Andrew near the town of New London about forty-five miles southwest of St. Cloud.  St. Andrew wasn’t near as rustic an experience as Camp Clyde had been: We slept on bunk beds in a cabin instead of in canvas tents, and everything was located within, oh, a hundred yards of the lakeshore instead of being sprinkled throughout the piney woods as it was for the Boy Scouts.

A few things stick out from my time at the Shores of St. Andrew:

First, it was during those twelve days that my voice changed. When Mom and Dad dropped me off on a Sunday afternoon, I was still singing something close to soprano when we all gathered for sing-alongs in the evenings. Within a few days, that started to change. I felt constantly as if I needed to clear my throat. It never helped. Another few days went by, and I was a tenor. My range diminished slightly as my voice deepened, and as I struggled with the new sound of me, my fellow campers joshed me gently. When I greeted Mom when she arrived to take me home after those twelve days, the first thing she said was “What happened to your voice?”

One of the girls in the little crowd that had gathered at the departure point giggled. “It changed,” she said simply. Mom looked at me, looked at Jill – and the fact that I recall my fellow camper’s name after forty-one years is a little surprising – and then back at me. She nodded, and then we put my stuff in the car, and I left my remaining camper friends behind.

Jill’s presence – and the presence of the other girls – is another thing that makes that time at camp memorable. Oh, there was no romance between us, although a few other couples among the older campers – the ages of campers ranged from about twelve to sixteen – paired up tentatively during our time there. But there were cross-gender friendships, which was kind of a new concept for a lot of us, I think, girls as well as boys. Those friendships were aided by a decrease in the number of campers after one week. Most of the kids who arrived the same Sunday I did had signed up for just one week; about a third of us – maybe twenty – had signed up for the twelve-day session. A few of the kids from the nearby city of Willmar who’d signed up for the single week extended their stays because we were all having so much fun, but the second portion of my time at camp still had a much smaller population, and I think that helped encourage the development of a wider range of friendships, including those that crossed the gender line.

But friendly or not, we were still boys and they were still girls. And one night after midnight, we boys decided to go visit the girls’ cabin. We didn’t go in, of course. We ran around the outside of the cabin and then banged on the windows, yelping and hollering. I was gratified to hear the sounds of laughter on the other side of the window where I stood, shouting what in effect were nonsense words. After about five minutes, we ran back to our cabin, where our counselors – who had not attempted to dissuade us from our plans – were waiting. Both Louie and Paul – More names! Amazing! – shrugged as we tumbled in, laughing. One of them said, “I hope it was fun, guys. You’ll pay for it tomorrow.”

And we did. After lunch, while the girls got to go outside and go swimming or do whatever they wished, we boys were issued buckets and scrub brushes and spent the afternoon cleaning the floor of the mess hall. That wasn’t all that bad; as we scrubbed, we talked and laughed.

I also recall the last night at camp. We had a dance in the craft room, which was on the upper floor of one of the buildings. The tables were folded and moved to the side, some basic decorations were installed and one of the counselors provided a radio. I might have danced once; I think I had a dance with Jill. But I spent a good chunk of the evening with a few other guys standing near the wall, watching the others dance. After a while, I slid along the wall to the door. Once outside, I made my way down the stairs.

I wasn’t the only one who’d gone outside. A guy whose real name I never knew – he was chunky and called himself “Jumbo” – was sitting atop one of the picnic tables smoking a cigarette. (Another thing I never knew was whether Jumbo truly chose that nickname for himself or accepted it with as much grace as he could when it was given to him.) “Dull dance,” I said as I approached and sat on the table top.

He shrugged and nodded. “But we can at least hear the music here,” he said, and we could. The front windows of the craft room were open, and the sound of the radio was clear.

Jumbo offered me a cigarette, my first. I took it and smoked it inexpertly, somehow not managing to inhale. (That, and the habit, would come to me during college.) And perched on top of a picnic table, we listened to the music and sat out the dance. As we did, I would guess we heard at least one of these records.

A Six-Pack from the charts (Billboard Hot 100 the week of July 27, 1968)
“The Look Of Love” by Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, A&M 924 [No. 16]
“MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, Dunhill 4134 [No. 23]
“People Got To Be Free” by the Rascals, Atlantic 2537 [No. 32]
“The Eyes Of A New York Woman” by B.J. Thomas, Scepter 12230 [46]
“The Snake” by Al Wilson, Soul City 767 [No. 110]
“This Wheel’s On Fire” by Julie Driscoll/Brian Auger and the Trinity, Atco 6593 [122]

“The Look Of Love,” the first hit for Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, was part of the soundtrack for the James Bond film Casino Royale. The title was the only one of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels to which producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli didn’t hold rights. Faced with the prospect of mounting a spy film without Sean Connery – secure in the role of the British spy in the Saltzman-Broccoli films – the producers of Casino Royale turned Fleming’s taut tale into a spoof and a shambles. According to the Internet Movie Database, the producers were Jerry Bresler and Charles K. Feldman; six people were listed as having directed portions of the film, and ten individuals were involved in the writing (six were officially credited, not including Fleming, who got the credit: “suggested by the novel Casino Royale”). The movie was a mess in which – according to my memory – actors David Niven and Peter Sellers were allowed to run amok. But it did have some good music, including “The Look Of Love.” The song went as high on the charts as No. 4 during an eleven-week run, and the group had two more Top 40 hits in 1968, both also done in a light and friendly Latin style.

I said the other day that “In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)” is one of those records that one either loves like a first-born child or hates like mold. I imagine the same is true of “MacArthur Park,” the rambling and symphonic love song whose most famous line is “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” I happen to think that the combination of Jimmy Webb’s admittedly over-the-top songwriting with the astounding vocal range of Richard Harris makes “MacArthur Park” a great record. Top 50 of all time? Maybe, maybe not. But – using a measuring stick I used here at least once before – if I were selecting a hundred records for a classic rock and pop jukebox, I think “MacArthur Park” would be in it. The record – Harris’ only Top 40 hit – spent ten weeks in the Top 40, peaking at No. 2.

Here’s what Dave Marsh had to say about “People Got To Be Free” in his 1989 classic, The Heart of Rock & Soul: “Sung like a funky Italian boys choir, arranged like a cross between Dyke and the Blazers and the Buckinghams, written in the fullest immersion in the glorious naivete of the times. Does hearing Felix [Cavaliere] try to preach about ‘the train to freedom’ render ‘People Got To Be Free’ dated? Of course. But what a glorious date, and what a way of celebrating the part of it that’s eternal: ‘I can’t understand, it’s so simple to me / People everywhere just got to be free.’ Ask my opinion, my opinion will be: Dated but never out of date.”

The Rascals’ record was in the Top 40 for thirteen weeks and spent an astounding five weeks at No. 1.

For more than ten years, from 1966 into 1977, B.J. Thomas recorded reliably good singles, but all too often, when talk and thought turns to listing the great Top 40 performers, his name seems to get lost. I’m not sure why that’s so. The man had fourteen Top 40 hits, with two of them reaching No. 1: “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” in 1969 and “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” in 1975. Three others – 1964’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 1968’s “Hooked on a Feeling” and 1970’s “I Just Can’t Help Believing” – all reached the Top Ten. And I’d be amazed if at least one of those five songs doesn’t start running through your head as you read that list. (And no, Blue Swede’s version of “Hooked on a Feeling” does not count!) “The Eyes Of A New York Woman” didn’t quite reach the heights those five records did, peaking at No. 28, but it’s probably my favorite B.J. Thomas song. Why? I dunno. Some things just are.

Al Wilson’s “The Snake” was pulled from his Searching For The Dolphins album, which was released on Johnny Rivers’ Soul City label. Through the end of the summer and into the autumn of 1968, the sly and funny slice of R&B moved slowly up the chart, peaking at No. 27, where it sat for the first two weeks of October. It was Wilson’s first Top 40 hit; he’d reach the top spot five years later with “Show and Tell,” which spent a week at No. 1 during the autumn of 1973. Being a sucker for drums, I love the four-second riff that starts about six seconds into the song. Drummers on the album were Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon.

Julie Driscoll never had a Top 40 hit in the U.S., but her version of “This Wheel’s On Fire” (written by Bob Dylan and Rick Danko of The Band), which she recorded with Brian Auger and the Trinity, went to No. 5 in her native Great Britain.  Shortly after that, Driscoll moved her career toward vocal improvisation and jazz, recording under her own name into the mid-1970s and in a variety of ensembles since then. In 1992, according to All-Music Guide, Driscoll re-recorded “This Wheel’s on Fire” as the theme to the smash BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous.  

Saturday Single No. 775

The upper portion of the Billboard Hot 100 released exactly fifty years ago today wasn’t particularly surprising. Here’s the top five:

“Without You” by Nilsson
“Hurting Each Other” by the Carpenters
“Precious and Few” by Climax
“Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green
“Down By The Lazy River” by the Osmonds

There are a few nice memories there: Two of the folks I hung around with at the time – this was midway through my freshman year at St. Cloud State – had paired off, and the Climax single was their song. Those of us who hadn’t yet paired off might have thrown off an eye-roll or two at times, but we were generally happy for them.

And the memory of the Al Green record reminds me of a brief pairing of my own. “Let’s Stay Together” provided part of the background music for a Sunday afternoon interlude in a twelfth-floor dorm lounge fifty years ago this month. That relationship lasted only into April, but in retrospect, that was okay; I was learning. (At the time, of course, the ending of that pairing hurt.)

As to the others records in that top five, I was very taken by the Nilsson single, but nothing attaches to it until about five years later, when a woman named Laura and I would serenade the other nine or so women who shared a house with her – along with whatever company might be present – with the song, she on vocals and me on piano.

The singles by the Carpenters and the Osmonds were good radio listening, but neither of them were any more than that. And here, of course, is where I check to see how many of those five records has a place in my iPod, and – unsurprisingly – four of them do. The only one missing is the Carpenters record, and that oversight will be corrected today.

But poking in the lower regions of that fifty-year old chart, I came across something I’d not been at all aware of. First of all, take a listen to a McDonald’s commercial from 1972:

We’ll come back to that, I promise.

But first, think back to mid-January of 1972, when a vocal group called the Hillside Singers had a No. 13 hit with “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony).” The tune originated in a British commercial, and with new words, crossed the Atlantic to become a jingle selling Coca-Cola, with vocals by the Hillside Singers, who were assembled specifically for the commercial. (The commercial, one of the most popular of the time – and perhaps all time – ended up years later as a linchpin in the final episode of the television show Mad Men.)

The jingle in the commercial was recast as a longer song, with references to Coca-Cola removed, and the Hillside Singers recorded it. It hit the Hot 100 in November 1971 and went – as I noted – to No. 13. At about the same time, the New Seekers also recorded the song that came out of the jingle and had a slightly bigger hit, with their version reaching No. 7.

And that brings up a mystery: According to the website Second Hand Songs, the New Seekers had also recorded the Coke jingle in early 1971 with copies of the recording (available at YouTube) being sent to radio stations (which seems odd). But according to Wikipedia, the New Seekers had been the first choice of the Coke folks but had not been available to record the jingle, which is why the advertising team brought in (or created) the Hillside Singers. Which is true? I dunno.

Anyway, the Coke jingle turned into a hit, and in early 1972, someone – either the Hillside Singers or someone connected to them in the advertising world – heard the McDonald’s jingle embedded above (I said we’d get back to it) and thought that with a different tempo and some new lyrics, it might become a hit. So, the Hillside Singers recorded the new song, “We’re Together,” and it went out as a single (as well as becoming a track on the Hillside Singers’ first album, which went to No. 71 on the Billboard 200).

“We’re Together” didn’t work nearly as well as “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing.” Fifty years ago this week, “We’re Together” sat at No. 100 in its only week in the Hot 100. And it’s today’s Saturday Single.

The Least Of The Best: 1975

Here’s the end of the line for our game, The Least Of The Best, as we hit 1975, the last year in what I call my sweet spot. It was the last year during which I liked most of what I heard on AM radio and on jukeboxes in bars, restaurants and down in the snack bar at St. Cloud State’s Atwood Center.

It was also the year when I started taking college seriously, when I realized that the classes I was taking in Mass Communication were actually intended to give me skills I would need when I got my degree and had to go out into the real world and make a living. Along the way, I learned that I liked to write and was pretty good at it.

Add some good friends, a fun part-time job, and 1975 was year during which most things went well. Even forty-seven years later, 1975 is still among the best three or four years of my life.

So, what was at the top of the Billboard year-end chart, as offered by Joel Whitburn in his book, A Century Of Pop Music? Take a look:

“Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain & Tennille
“Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention
“Island Girl” by Elton John
“He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” by Tony Orlando & Dawn
“Bad Blood” by Neil Sedaka

Three of those – the records by Silver Convention, Elton John and Neil Sedaka – peaked in the autumn, which was one of the ten or so best seasons of my life, so they’re hard to assess. “Fly, Robin, Fly” is probably the least of those three with its throbbing bass, keening strings and the nearly chanted vocals. I may be wrong here, but it’s not quite disco; call it proto-disco, and I’m not sure what leads me to that conclusion.

Nor do I think that “Island Girl” and “Bad Blood” are great records. At least, I’m not sure that they are. (And I’m not sure the first could be released today.) But they’re parked right in one of the sweetest spots of my sweet spot, and I can’t sort out quality from memory; all I can say – and this holds true for “Fly, Robin, Fly” as well – is that every time I’m at leisure and hear any of those three, I’m lost in them and their time for at least a few seconds.

As to No. 1 from that distant year, I got tired of it at the time. It sat at No. 1 for four weeks during the early part of the summer, and I thought I’d be glad to never hear it again. Then, maybe about eight to ten years ago, “Love Will Keep Us Together” popped up on a random game here, forcing me to reassess it. And I decided that it’s a marvelous piece of popcraft.

That leaves Tony Orlando & Dawn. The record peaked in early May, spending three weeks atop the Hot 100 (as did the records by Sedaka, John and Silver Convention). But I don’t recall hearing it nearly as often as I did the other four. Maybe “He Don’t Love You . . .” wasn’t in the Atwood Center jukebox. It could be as simple as that. But it doesn’t move me one way or the other.

So, how about now? Do any of those five matter now (as measured by their presence in my day-to-day listening in my iPod)? Well, Silver Convention is there (as is a cover of “Fly, Robin, Fly” by the string quartet Bond). “Island Girl” is there, and so is “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The other two singles aren’t likely to be added.

What record, then, sits at the bottom of 1975’s Top 40? Well, it’s a record that I know I heard a lot and liked okay, but if you’d asked me a couple of hours ago what year it came out, I’d have had to stop and think a bit. “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles peaked at No. 2 in early November of 1975, but it’s not instantly connected to that season. And it’s not one of the nine Eagles’ singles in the iPod. I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t matter much to me, either.

The Moody Blues: The Nineties

I recall, back in 1992 or 1993, when I got the Moody Blues’ 1991 album, Keys Of The Kingdom, that it sounded slight. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to invest in listening to it; I was working as a reporter again after some years of teaching, and that took time away from listening.

When I was teaching, I could play music in the background in the evenings as I graded papers and planned lessons. As a reporter, at least three – sometimes four – evenings a week were spent at athletic events or else interviewing coaches and other folks on the phone. My listening time decreased a great deal, and Keys Of The Kingdom didn’t spend a lot of time in the cassette deck of my stereo, so I did not know it well.

I know it better now. Not as well as I do the Moody Blues albums of the years 1970-72, when I seemingly had all the time in the world to listen to music. But I know it better.

The other week, I noted that the Moody’s 1988 album, Sur la mer, was, except for one track, “the sad sound of a band running out of ideas.” Well, Keys Of The Kingdom – and the group’s next album, 1999’s Strange Times – were a little better but mostly more of the same: The sweeping, sometimes majestic sound of the band was there on occasion, but it didn’t always work with the topic of the songs.

On Kingdom, the guitar opening of “Just Ask Me Once” puts me in mind of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Up Around The Bend,” but the track – written by Justin Hayward and John Lodge – devolves with an odd transition into a shuffle. The shift is so jarring that the first verse – a not bad bit that sets up the song – is easily missed. And then there’s “Bless The Wings (That Bring You Back).” Now, I’m a romantic, but I groaned just at the title. And then came the opening lines:

Like the rose that blooms in the wintertime
As it reaches up through the snow . . .

Then there’s the closer, and all you need to know is the title: “Don’t Blame The Rainbows For The Rain.”

Keys Of The Kingdom is a better album than I thought it was on first listening, but it’s not nearly as good as I hoped when I first put in the cassette deck in the 1990s, nor as good as I was hoping a few months ago when I began listening to it for the first time in thirty years.

With the group taking advantage of the increased time available on a CD as opposed to an LP, the album runs fifty-three minutes, and it feels too long by about ten minutes. As far as the charts go, it muddled around and peaked at No. 94 on the Billboard 200. It’s not quite as good as the 1986’s The Other Side Of Life, so it’s a solid C.

Here’s the best track on the album, “Say What You Mean (Parts I & II).”

Then there’s Strange Times, which came out in 1999. I’d done one of those “Ten CD’s for a dollar each” deals, and the CDs showed up after I’d become ill and had left the workforce. I had all the time I wanted to listen to music, but after I put Strange Times in the player once, I never played it again until maybe two years ago.

From some listenings over the past couple of years, it’s actually not that bad, which is not a great endorsement. As with Kingdom, the sound of the group is mostly there. But the ideas and the lyrics generally fall short or else bring up the thought – as came through my mind when listening to “Forever Now” – “Yeah, John Lodge, you’ve been singing the same kind of shit since 1968. It sounds pretty and all that, but have you learned anything over those years?”

Strange Times did not do well in the charts, either, peaking at No. 93 in the Billboard 200. As I noted a while back about Octave, the group’s 198 album, Strange Times (and Keys Of The Kingdom, too, for that matter) would be fine background music both in 1999 and today, playing quietly as those of us who grew up and grew old with the group talk about current concerns, most of them related to our health, I’d guess. Strange Times, which also seems over-long at fifty-seven minutes, is a little better than Keys, so I’ll give it a C+ even though that feels too generous.

Here’s “Haunted,” one of the better tracks on Strange Times.

The Moodies would release one more studio album, 2003’s holiday release, December. I’ve heard it and it’s decent. But I won’t dig into it here, as Christmas albums are not my deal.

Having wandered through almost all of the Moody Blues’ catalog in the past few years, I’m facing a question. As I think about the albums I like best, they’re the ones I listened to when I was young and seemed to have all the time in the world: A Question Of Balance from 1970, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour from 1971, and Seventh Sojourn from 1972.

So, the question is: Are those my favorites because I could immerse myself in them at a time when I was figuring myself out, or are they my favorites because they’re really so much better than the stuff that came before and after? Probably the former, but that’s okay.

The Least Of The Best: 1974

We’re back with the next-to-last game of The Least Of The Best, playing this time in 1974. We’ll look at the top five records of the year – as offered by Joel Whitburn in his book A Century Of Pop Music – and then check out the record that finished No. 40 for the year.,

And 1974 is one of those years that might bring me a surprise, as I was out of the country and not very clued into Top 40 for the first five-plus months of the year. I heard bits and pieces of what was popular in the States as I visited Danish friends and then backpacked around Western Europe, but even now, almost fifty years later, records from that time sometimes surprise me.

We’ll start with the year’s top five records:

“The Way We Were” by Barbra Streisand
“Seasons In The Sun” by Terry Jacks
“The Streak” by Ray Stevens
“(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka with Odia Coates
“Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas

Oh, my. When “Kung Fu Fighting” is the second-best of a bunch of records . . .

I was out of the country when the Streisand and Jacks records peaked, but I’d somehow managed to hear “Seasons In The Sun” on – I think – a British radio station in January 1974. I was appalled the first time I heard it, as I have been ever since.

I missed the Streisand single – and the movie it came from – and by the time I got back to the States, it wasn’t getting airplay. I had to catch up with it later. It’s a fine record, by far the best of the five in that list.

And I missed, mostly, “The Streak.” It peaked a few days before I returned to Minnesota. As I’ve noted here over the years, very few novelty records rank very highly with me.

As to the singles by Anka/Coates and Douglas: I’ve always thought that “(You’re) Having My Baby” was clumsy social pandering, and I’m not sure which annoyed me more, the pandering or the clumsiness, and “Kung Fu Fighting” was just silly (though I wonder now, in a different age, how its use of ethnic stereotypes and its cultural appropriations might be viewed).

I’m certain that the only one of those five records that might be in the iPod and thus part of my day-to-day listening is the Streisand. And it’s not even there (though I’ll likely add it today). The only one of the other four that’s even in the 84,000 tracks in the RealPlayer is “Kung Fu Fighting.” Even in a wide-ranging archive, the singles by Anka/Coates, Stevens, and especially Jacks are not welcome.

And now we head to the bottom of 1974’s Top 40, where we find Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” a record that’s – in my mind, anyway – a middling sort in John’s catalog but vastly superior to anything we found in the top five of the year. It peaked at No. 2 in July of 1974.