‘At Manager, No. 14 . . .’

Originally posted November 6, 2009

Despite my love of sports, I’ve never been an athlete. But thirty-nine years ago today, I wore a jersey as a member of a team for the only time in my life.

It was the last week of the football season at St. Cloud Tech. I was a manager, and I think we were all glad the season was coming to a close. It hadn’t been a good year: We were 2-6 heading into our final game. That was quite a come-down from 1969, when we were 6-3 and ended up ranked No. 9 in the state. (A three-loss team in the Top Ten? That was because we played a tough independent schedule, and our losses were to the top three teams in the state.)

There was a good reason that we’d not had a good season, though. That fall, St. Cloud had opened its second high school, Apollo High School, over on the north side. And when the kids from the north side went off to become the Eagles, about half of the underclassmen from the previous year’s team were among them. There was no way we were going to be as good as we had been or as good as we could have been, had we stayed one school. Things were no better across town at Apollo; the Eagles were 2-5 as the end of the season approached.

The Eagles’ difficulties, though, weren’t our concern. As the season had progressed, we’d kept up with our former teammates and their performances, and I assume that they kept an eye on how we were doing. We weren’t happy with their poor season, but we were pleased that they were doing no better than we were. And during that final week, we cared not one bit about their difficulties because our final game was against those same Eagles. It would be the first football game ever between St. Cloud’s two public high schools.

(One of the oddities of the split between the two high schools was where the boundary line between the two schools was drawn. On the East Side, the line was drawn at the north end of Kilian Boulevard, a block away from our house. It happened to fall right in the middle of the attendance area for Lincoln Elementary, and that meant that a number of kids I’d been in school with since first grade went to Apollo. Had the line been drawn only a little further south, I’d have gone to Apollo; I was relieved to stay at Tech.)

One of the long-standing traditions at Tech was that, on the day of a game or a meet, varsity athletes wore dress shirts, ties and sport coats to school. As a manager of the football team for two years and the wrestling team for three years, I did the same. But as our final week of practice came to a close and we gathered for a meeting Thursday afternoon, the captains had a question for the coaches: Since it’s our last game, and the first ever against Apollo, can we wear our jerseys during the school day on Friday instead of coats and ties?

The coaches looked at each other and thought for a second, then nodded. We left the meeting room, and as we headed for the locker room, I wondered how out of place I was going to look in school the next day. I didn’t have a jersey.

I pondered that as I went over our supplies in the training room, making sure everything was packed into the kits we’d haul to Clark Field, a block away, the next evening:  Bandages, various sprays, a couple of cleat cleaners and cleat wrenches, lots of tape and all the other things that we managers were responsible for. Well, I thought, as I packed the tape, I’ll just wear a coat and tie.

As I finished packing and was about to head out of the training room, certain that Dad was already waiting in the parking lot, one of the other seniors on the team, Scott, poked his head into the room. “So what are you gonna wear tomorrow?”

I shrugged. “A coat and tie, I guess.”

He shook his head. “C’mon,” he said, motioning with his hand as he walked through the locker room. I followed him to the equipment room, where Scott addressed the equipment manager, Mr. Kerr. “We need a jersey here,” Scott told him. “What can you do?”

Mr. Kerr pulled a jersey from the shelf and tossed it to me. Number 14. I pulled it on. I was of slight build, and the jersey was cut for shoulder pads, of course, so it hung on me like a large orange, black and white curtain. But it was, right then, my jersey. “There you go,” Scott said, as we walked back toward the training room.

I wore the jersey to school the next day, of course, and on the sidelines during the game that Friday evening. We beat Apollo fairly handily (a score of 26-14 pops into my memory, but I’m not certain) and crowded back into our locker room, happy to have ended the season with a victory. The next Monday, I handed the jersey to Mr. Kerr. I learned later that many of my fellow seniors had neglected to return their jerseys, eventually paying something like $25 for their “lost” jerseys. I wish I’d done the same.

A Six-Pack From Late Autumn 1970
“Let’s Work Together” by Canned Heat from Future Blues
“When You Get Right Down To It” by the Delfonics, Philly Groove 163
“Easy Rider (Let The Wind Pay The Way)” by Iron Butterfly from Metamorphosis
“Games” by Redeye from Redeye
“Too Many People” by Cold Blood from Sisyphus
“Who Needs Ya” by Steppenwolf from Seven

Bonus Track
“St. Cloud Tech School Song” by the Tech High School Band

During the week that we kicked off the Tech-Apollo football rivalry, six of the titles above were listed in the Billboard Hot 100. (See the note below regarding singles vs. album tracks.) There was one nice slice of Philly soul, one light rocker with some nice vocal harmony (Redeye’s “Games”) and four bits of fairly tough bluesy rock. I recall hearing “Let’s Work Together” once or twice and being intrigued, but I doubt that I heard the other five. Why not?

Well, only two of these six titles made it into the Top 40, which was guiding my listening: “Let’s Work Together” went to No. 26, and “Games” reached No. 27. During the week in question, the one that ended Saturday, November 7, 1970, these titles were strewn mostly in the lower levels of the Hot 100:

“Let’s Work Together” was already in the Top 40, sitting at No. 33. The Delfonics tune was at No. 56 after peaking at No. 53 two weeks earlier. Iron Butterfly’s “Easy Rider (Let The Wind Pay The Way)” would peak at No. 66 two weeks later. (I never paid much attention to Iron Butterfly after buying and quickly selling the group’s live album way back when, but I have to note that “Easy Rider” is a better and more interesting record than I expected it to be; it had been languishing, ignored, in my files with the rest of the Metamorphosis album for a while.) Redeye’s “Games,” on its way to its peak of No. 27, was in the Hot 100 for the first time and was sitting at No. 90.

Cold Blood’s “Too Many People” was in the “Bubbling Under the Top 100” section and had moved up one slot from No. 108 to No. 107. It would be gone when the next chart came out a week later. And Steppenwolf’s “Who Needs Ya” – a typical but fun Steppenwolf boogiefest – was in its first week in the “Bubbling Under” section, sitting at No. 119.  It would peak at No. 54 five weeks later.

As I was planning this post – I do plan sometimes – I called Gary Zwack, the current band director at St. Cloud Tech, and asked about a copy of the school song. He emailed it to me, and as I heard the song for the first time in what must be thirty-five years, I remembered all the words:

March straight on, Old Tech High
To fame and honor great.
The glory of our colors
We’ll never let abate.
We’re with you!
March straight on, Old Tech High!
Be loyal to her name.
Fight gallantly for dear old Tech
And all her worthy fame.

Gary added a note, telling me that the music for the song was written in 1931 by Erwin Hertz, who was Tech’s band director at the time. I wrote back, telling Gary that in 1964, I took my first lessons on cornet from Erwin Hertz, who was very close to retiring. Thanks for the help, Gary.

Note:
In five of the six cases, I’ve tagged the mp3s as coming from the various albums, as I’m uncertain whether the mp3 offered here is the single version. The only one I am sure of is the Delfonics’ tune.

I am nearly certain that the single that Cold Blood released was edited significantly, as the running times – 4:05 on the album version I have and 2:52 on photos I’ve seen of the single (San Francisco 62) – are so far apart. Redeye’s “Games” is not (as I erroneously reported originally) the same length on the single (Pentagram 204) as it is on the album, and Iron Butterfly’s 45 (Atco 6782) is timed at 3:05 while the mp3 runs 3:06, so I think those were the same, but I’m not sure.

As to the Steppenwolf and Canned Heat tracks: The running times I’ve seen on photos of those singles – Dunhill 4261 and Liberty 56151, respectively – are relatively close to those of these album tracks. That leaves me wondering if the singles and the album tracks were the same but the times were listed differently, as was often the case. But I don’t know.

Chart Digging: October 30, 1971

By the time the end of October rolled around in 1971, your narrator, in the midst of his first quarter of college, had realized a few things: First, he was likely going to fail chemistry and African history. Second, the young lady who sat next to him in sociology was kind of cute and was also a Minnesota Vikings fan. And third, he didn’t particularly like a lot of what he was hearing on the radio anymore.

As I’ve related before, I did fail the two courses, mostly because I didn’t know how to study; I’d never had to do so to get through high school. I did not fail sociology. I got a B, and by the end of the quarter, I was spending several evenings a week with the young lady who sat next to me. (That didn’t last, and it was my fault: I got nervous, never having had a girlfriend before, and I backed off abruptly when the quarter ended.)

As to the radio, I was getting tired of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” which by the end of October that year had been in the No. 1 spot (along with its flipside, “Reason To Believe’”) in the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks. The rest of the Top Ten was:

“Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” by Cher
“Yo-Yo” by the Osmonds
“Superstar/Bless The Beasts & Children” by the Carpenters
“Theme from ‘Shaft’” by Isaac Hayes
“Imagine” by John Lennon Plastic Ono Band
“Do You Know What I Mean” by Lee Michaels
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by Joan Baez
“Peace Train” by Cat Stevens
“I’ve Found Someone Of My Own” by the Free Movement

I liked – and still like – the Lennon and Hayes singles. Some of the rest looks better from the distance of more than forty years than it sounded to me back then. I still dislike the singles from the Osmonds and (viscerally) from Joan Baez. If I heard the Free Movement single, it was only if I went to sleep with the radio set to Chicago’s WLS (where the record went to No. 2), as it doesn’t show up on the KDWB surveys collected at Oldiesloon. (Either Google search failed me here or, more likely, I failed to use it carefully, as the Free Movement record did chart in the 30s for two weeks at KDWB, as noted below by our pal Yah Shure.)

Looking deeper into that end-of-October Hot 100, I find – as I usually do when scanning old charts – some singles that I’m generally unfamiliar with even today. Would I have liked them forty-two years ago? I don’t know. I remember a general dissatisfaction with Top 40 during that first quarter of college. Maybe there was something else going on specific to that quarter, as I do recall numerous Top 40 tunes from 1972 with affection. But however I would have felt back then, as I dig in the lower depths of that Hot 100 today, I find some nice things I’ve never heard before.

Sitting right at the bottom of the chart, at No. 100 and No. 99 respectively, we find some nice vocal soul/R&B: “Walk Right Up To The Sun” by the Delfonics and “I Bet He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” by the Intruders. The Delfonics’ single would peak at No. 81 and go to No. 13 on the R&B chart, while the Intruders’ record would peak at No. 92 and reach No. 20 on the R&B chart. Both groups obviously had better performing singles on both charts, and both probably had singles that were just better records, but to fresh ears forty-two years later, those are pretty good records.

The James Gang is a group that I gave little attention, and I’m not sure why. What I heard of the group in folks’ dorm rooms and at parties seemed too hard, too raucous, I think. Now, of course, it seems almost tame. The group’s “Midnight Man” was sitting at No. 94 at the end of October 1971, and it’s not at all what I would have expected from the James Gang; the eighteen-year-old whiteray would have found it much more accessible than he expected, had he heard it as it headed on its way to No. 80.

One of the constant presences in the budget bins at Woolworth’s and Musicland through the first half of the 1970s was the Beach Boys’ 1971 album, Surf’s Up. Its cover art puzzled me, with its depiction of the James Earle Fraser sculpture End Of The Trail as it might have been painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Every time I saw it, it baffled me, and it still does. The cognitive dissonance offered by the cover hid some music that perhaps I should have sampled; the single “Long Promised Road” is intriguing enough. It was sitting at No. 93 forty-two years ago, on its way to No. 89. (My bafflement and avoidance is not limited to Surf’s Up. Over the decades, that’s been my reaction to pretty much anything the group did after “Good Vibrations.” Maybe I need to go back and listen. On the other hand, I recall clearly my reaction of bemused indifference to Brian Wilson’s supposed epic Smile when it was released in 2004. I rarely sell CDs. I sold that one.)

Once the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had its hit single on the Liberty label – “Mr. Bojangles” went to No. 9 in early 1971 – the band moved to United Artists. And in the autumn of 1971, UA went into the group’s back catalog and released “Some Of Shelly’s Blues” as a single. Two years earlier (and before “Mr. Bojangles”), a Liberty single of the song – written by Mike Nesmith – had bubbled under at No. 106. The United Artists release did a little better but only a little, rising to No. 64. It likely deserved more attention.

I first encountered the Isley Brothers’ cover of “Spill The Wine” – the 1970 Eric Burdon & War hippie dream anthem – when I came across the Isleys’ 1971 album Givin’ It Back. I was skeptical. And, as I scanned the Hot 100 from the end of October 1971 and noticed the entry at No. 49, I recalled that skepticism. Yes, the Isleys at the time covered some iconic singles and made them their own – “Summer Breeze,” “Listen To The Music,” “Lay Lady Lay” and others – but “Spill The Wine”? I should have known better. The Isleys gave melody to the recited portion of the Burdon single and took it from there. The record went no higher, but on the R&B chart, it went to No. 14. (The video embedded below is from the album. Scans of the 45 label show a running time of 2:40.)

Spring ’68: School Bus Serenade

Originally posted May 6, 2009

On a cool, rainy day in the spring of 1968, the fifty or so students in the two ninth-grade biology classes from St. Cloud’s South Junior High scrambled onto a bus. Joined by a few teachers – I’ve never for one moment envied teachers who have to supervise field trips – we headed out of St. Cloud.

I’m no longer entirely clear on our destinations that day. I think we drove through the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, parts of which are about thirty miles from St. Cloud. I recall getting out of the bus every now and then to look at trees and underbrush and look for evidence of small animals. We had a picnic lunch, if my memory is right, served by class moms in the yard of a classmate’s farm home. And we visited a tree farm near the end of the day.

It was at the tree farm that someone took pictures of the group, which was large enough that it took three shots to get us all. The photographer overlapped the three shots, so if one wanted to, one could overlap the three prints and have a wide-screen image, as it were, showing all of us at once. (These days, that could be done with digital tools and only a little bit of effort. Forty-one years ago, it would have required a bit of darkroom legerdemain.) The best thing I remember about the picture, though, was that one of our teachers, Mr. Lemke, hoisted one of the girls, Patty, onto his shoulders for the picture. They stood at the back of the group on the left, and when the photographer had finished with that side of the group, Mr. Lemke walked behind the group and stood with Patty on his shoulders on the right side of the group. That bit of mischief allowed Mr. Lemke and Patty to seemingly be in two places at once.

On the way back to St. Cloud, one of our classmates astounded all of us by sliding his arm around the girl he’d evidently been dating for a while. Back then, at the ages of fourteen and fifteen, that was an amazingly bold public display of affection. The girls sitting around the couple spent the last five or so minutes of the ride back to school serenading the two of them and the rest of us with a lively version of “Somebody To Love,” the Jefferson Airplane hit from the year before.

The girls might have been singing just because there was no radio playing, but I don’t think so. Had there been a radio on the bus, though, here’s some of what we might have heard.

A Six-Pack From the Charts (Billboard Hot 100, May 4, 1968)
“Sweet Inspiration” by the Sweet Inspirations, Atlantic 2476 (No. 18)
“Soul Serenade” by Willie Mitchell, Hi 2140 (No. 30)
“I Will Always Think About You” by the New Colony Six, Mercury 72775 (No. 44)
“I’m Sorry” by the Delfonics, Philly Groove 151 (No. 77)
“I Love You” by People, Capitol 2708 (No. 85)
“Brooklyn Roads” by Neil Diamond, Uni 55065 (No. 124)

Even though they recorded a series of solid soul/R&B albums on their own – seven between 1967 and 1979 for the CCM, Atlantic, Stax and RSO labels – the Sweet Inspirations were likely better known as one of the top groups of background vocalists in the mid- to late 1960s. According to All-Music Guide: “The group evolved from the ’50s gospel group the Drinkard Singers. At various points soul singers Doris Troy, Judy Clay, Dionne Warwick, and sister Dee Dee Warwick were members. By the time they began to record on their own in 1967, their leader was Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney), and the women were renamed the Sweet Inspirations.” Singing along with Houston on “Sweet Inspiration” – taken from the group’s first album – are Estelle Brown, Sylvia Shemwell and Myrna Smith. This week marked the record’s peak position, No. 18, nine weeks after the record first entered the Hot 100. Over the next three weeks, the record would slide to No. 32 and then drop out of the Hot 100 entirely. “Sweet Inspiration” would be the group’s only Top 40 hit.

“Soul Serenade,” which peaked at No. 23 the week after this chart came out, was Willie Mitchell’s second Top 40 hit; “20-75” had gone to No. 31 in 1964. Mitchell’s finest time was still to come, as he spent the last years of the 1960s building a stable of performers, the greatest of whom was Al Green, and refining a sound as recognizable as any in pop music. That Hi Sound, behind O.V. Wright, Syl Johnson, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay and especially Al Green, became an inescapable part of the soundtrack of the Seventies.

The New Colony Six was a soft-rock sextet from Chicago that had two Top 40 hits in 1968 and 1969. “I Will Always Think About You” peaked at No. 22 in the first week of June 1968, and “Things I’d Like To Say” went to No. 16 not quite a year later. The group, as a couple of college friends always told me, was much more popular in its home territory: “I Will Always Think About You” was No. 1 at Chicago’s WLS for one week in March of 1968 and ranked No. 31 in the station’s ranking of the year’s top singles.

“I’m Sorry” was the immediate follow-up to the Delfonics’ “La-La- (Means I Love You),” which had gone to No. 4 and was ranked at No. 26 when “I’m Sorry” entered the Hot 100. It strikes me that issuing a follow-up single – even a single as good as “I’m Sorry” – while the group’s first single is still ranked that highly is being a little hasty. Maybe not; I’ve never been an A&R guy. At any rate, “I’m Sorry” didn’t have the impact “La-La” did: It got as high as No. 42, where it stayed for three weeks before tumbling out of the Hot 100. The Delfonics would reach the Top 40 three more times in 1968 and 1969 before getting back to the Top 10 in 1970 with the luminous “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).”

“I Love You” was the second Capitol single by People, a sextet from San Jose, California. According to the notes to the four-CD set Love Is The Song We Sing, after the group’s first single went nowhere, “the band took an obscure Zombies flipside and smothered it in Vanilla Fudge.” The single – one of my favorites from that era – went to No. 14 in June 1968 and was the group’s only Top 40 single.

Here’s what Neil Diamond says about “Brooklyn Roads” in the notes to his In My Lifetime box set: “I had just signed with MCA Records and wanted to stretch my creative wings. This is the most literal and personal story I had written up to that point. ‘Brooklyn Roads’ told of my youth and my aspirations. I loved the freedom of being able to write something without the charts in mind.” A week after “bubbling under” at No. 124, “Brooklyn Roads” slid into the Hot 100, eventually making it to No. 58.

A Memory From The Sledding Hill

Originally posted January 2, 2009

There are, as I’ve discussed before, many songs that take me back to a specific time and place, or remind me of a specific person, or both. That’s true, I’d guess, for anyone who loves music: some records trigger memories. Among such recordings for me are Pink Floyd’s “Us And Them,” which sets me down in the lounge of a youth hostel in Denmark; Orleans’ “Dance With Me,” which puts me in the 1975 version of Atwood Center at St. Cloud State; and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow,” which tugs me back to my duplex in Minot, North Dakota, on a winter’s night.

There are, I’m certain, hundreds of such songs, and every once in a while, one of them pops up on the radio, the stereo or the RealPlayer and triggers one of those long-ago association for a moment or two. Sometimes, those associations are a little puzzling, as was the case when I was driving to the grocery store the other day.

I was listening, once again, to Kool 108 in the Twin Cities. The station, as it does every year, had played holiday music from Thanksgiving through Christmas. Even if one loves holiday music – and as I’ve noted here, I generally don’t – that’s way too much of a good thing. So I was hungry for oldies on the car radio this week, hungry enough that I even listened to “Help Me, Rhonda” all the way through instead of pushing the button for another station. And I’m glad I hung in there with the Beach Boys, for the following song took me back:

It was early 1970, and Rick and I were at the sledding hill at Riverside Park, no more than a mile from our homes. We had a couple of new saucer sleds and were testing them out on the long hill, enjoying the times we wiped out as much as we enjoyed those times we made it upright to the bottom of the hill. It was a cloudy Sunday, and the light that penetrated the cloud cover was fading; evening was approaching as we hauled ourselves up the hill for the last time that day. And as we got to the top of the hill, from somewhere came the sound of a radio for just a few seconds: Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy.”

I’m not sure where the sound came from. In the parking lot at the top of the hill, a car with its radio on might have had a door open for just a moment, perhaps to admit tired sledders about to head home. That seems likely. But however it happened, we both heard the song as we went up the hill. “Good song,” I said. It was okay, said Rick, not one of his favorites.

And almost thirty-nine years later, as I drove to the store, the strains of “Holly Holy” put me back there again: On that long hill in Riverside Park, cheeks red, glasses splashed with snowflakes, feet cold inside my boots, taking the first steps on the way to home and hot chocolate.

A Six-Pack from January 1970
“Holly Holy” by Neil Diamond (Uni 55175, No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 of January 3, 1970)

“Evil Woman Don’t Play Your Games With Me” by Crow (Amaret 112, No. 22)

“Let’s Work Together” by Wilbert Harrison (Sue 11, No. 50)

“I’ll Hold Out My Hand” by the Clique (White Whale 333, No. 60)

“Jennifer Tomkins” (sic) by the Street People (Musicor 1365, No. 87)

“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by the Delfonics, (Philly Groove 161, No. 122)

A few notes:

“Holly Holy” had just peaked the week before at No. 6, Diamond’s fourth Top Ten hit. I think “Holly Holy” tends to get lost among Diamond’s other hits of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially falling into the shadow of “Sweet Caroline,” which had gone to No. 4 in the summer and autumn of 1969. But it’s one of my favorites; beyond the memories it spurs, it has a good melody and a great, haunting hook. And the slightly cryptic words sustain the haunted mood.

As I understand it, the Twin Cities group Crow was unhappy with its hit, which had peaked at No. 19. The group’s sound was much more straight-ahead guitar rock, not the horn-band sound one would assume from the single. Lore has it that the group was plenty annoyed with the folks at Amaret for adding the horns to the record. That may be, but I like the single.

Wilbert Harrison’s “Let’s Work Together” was an edit of a longer version that showed up on his 1969 album of the same name. For some reason, the Hot 100 didn’t identify the charting single as Part 1 (Part 2 was on the B-Side), but it’s listed that way in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. The single – the second Top 40 hit in Harrison’s career (“Kansas City” went to No. 1 in 1959) – went to No. 32. Canned Heat’s cover of “Let’s Work Together” went to No. 26 later in 1970.

“I’ll Hold Out My Hand” was one of the Clique’s follow-ups to “Sugar On Sunday,” which had reached No. 22 in 1969. “I’ll Hold Out My Hand” peaked at No. 45 in late December 1969 and then began to slide, leaving the Texas group a one-hit wonder. More interesting to me than either of those records was the group’s version of “Hallelujah,” the song that Sweathog beefed up and took into the charts in 1971. I’ll try to remember to post that sometime soon.

“Jennifer Tomkins” (the title was misspelled “Jennifer Tompkins” in the Hot 100, at least in the online copy I have) edged into the lower levels of the Top 40 in the last half of February 1970, peaking at No. 36. It was only hit for the Street People, which was a studio group that featured Rupert Holmes, who reached the Top 40 with three singles in 1979-80; the best known of those is likely “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” “Jennifer Tomkins” is a pretty slight record, but there’s something about the chorus – “I swear, just ain’t fair. Trouble, trouble everywhere. Oh, Lord, come on down. Got to spread some love around” – that I find sweetly appealing.

The Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” had a long climb ahead. From No. 122 (“Bubbling Under The Hot 100,” as it says), the record made its way to No. 10, the second Top Ten hit for the Philly trio. (“La – La – Means I Love You” had gone to No. 4 in 1968.) The record was one of the most luscious confections put together by Thom Bell – Stan Watson was his co-producer – in a long, long career.