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What Was At No. 41?

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

In the absence of anything else within my expertise to write about today, and in the interest of getting to chores less interesting but more vital than this blog, I thought I’d take today’s date – 4/19 – and use that to find a few records to write about. We’ll change that date to No. 41 and go find out what tunes lay just outside the Billboard Top 40 on a few years in and around our sweet spot. We’ll start with 1962.

In the third week of April 1962, Etta James and her cheeky “Something’s Got A Hold On Me” held down the No. 41 spot on the pop chart. With its pop-styled arrangement, its gospel chorus background and James’ bluesy vocals, the record is a little bit of a mish-mash. But James is in fine voice, making it worth a listener’s time. The record peaked at No. 37 on the pop chart and No. 4 on the R&B chart.

Three years later, a sweet slice of Chess R&B was in spot No. 41, as Billy Stewart’s “I Do Love You” was heading up the chart to No. 26 on the pop chart and No. 6 on the R&B chart. Stewart, who passed on early at the age of thirty-two, had only one other record go higher in the pop chart: “Sitting In The Park” went to No. 24 (No. 4 R&B) later in 1965. In 1969, Chess released “I Do Love You” in 1969, but it went only to No. 94 the second time around. (Somehow, as Yah Shure points out below, I managed as I looked over Billy Stewart’s entry in Top Pop Singles to read right past his biggest hit of all, the No. 10 “Summertime” from 1966. Thanks for the catch, Yah Shure!)

Memphis R&B was sitting in spot No. 41 three years later, as Sam & Dave’s classic “Thank You” was just under the Top 40 during the third week in April 1968. The record had peaked earlier at No. 9, giving the duo of Sam Moore and Dave Prater their second Top Ten hit; “Soul Man” had gone to No. 2 during the autumn of 1967. On the R&B chart, “Thank You” went to No. 4 and was the last of seven Top Ten hits for Sam & Dave on the R&B chart.

Okay. I’m going to let Wikipedia describe the No. 41 record as of April 19, 1971: “‘The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley’ is a 1971 spoken word recording with vocals by Terry Nelson and music by pick-up group C-Company . . .  The song is set to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ It offers a heroic description of Lieutenant William Calley, who in March 1971 was convicted of murdering Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968.” The record, which turns my stomach in its approval of Calley and his actions, went to No. 37 on the pop charts and, says Wikipedia, No. 49 on the country chart. (The story of the My Lai Massacre is here.)

When we get to 1974, it’s time for some Philadelphia-style soul with the Spinners, whose “Mighty Love, Pt. 1” was holding down the No. 41 spot as the calendar moved toward the final third of April. The record had earlier peaked at No. 20, the seventh of an eventual seventeen Top 40 hits for the Spinners. (They had thirty-five records in or near the Hot 100.) “Mighty Love, Pt. 1” spent two weeks on top of the R&B chart; the Spinners wound up with thirty-four records in the R&B Top 40, with six of those going to No. 1.

And then, we find the Starz rocking it with “Cherry Baby” at No. 41 during April 1977. The band, formed in New York, had eight singles in or near the Hot 100 between 1975 – when the band was called the Fallen Angels – and 1979, but the very catchy “Cherry Baby” was the only record by the band to ever climb into the Top 40, where it peaked at No. 33.

A Legend Gone
I should note today the passing of Dick Clark, the man who for years brought rock ’n’ roll into our living rooms. Other bloggers will no doubt pay tribute to the man better than I can: I rarely watched American Bandstand or any of the other shows with which he was connected, so I have no memories to tap. I have only respect, so I will let others tell the tales and simply provide a closing video as a farewell to the man. It’s a clip from Bandstand with Link Wray performing “Rawhide,” likely from early 1959, when “Rawhide” was in the charts.

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Posted in 1959, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1971, 1974, 1977, Farewells, Games With Numbers, Video | 3 Comments »

Some More Buster Brown

Friday, February 10th, 2012

Well, the best-laid plans and all that . . .

Sometime this morning, the cable guy will stop by to replace our modem, which has been acting up often enough to be a problem. As I need to be ready for that (and not be in the middle of something when he comes), the tale I’d planned to tell this morning will have to wait until Monday, and at that time, I’ll dig into the Billboard Hot 100 for the second week in February 1971.

In the meantime, here’s another 1962 track by Buster Brown, whose “Sugar Babe” I posted here Tuesday. “I’m Goin’, But I’ll Be Back” was the flip side of “Sugar Babe” on Fire 507.

It’s a fun bit of R&B:

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The Dovells, The Megatons & Buster Brown

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

As I was digging around last week in the Billboard charts for February 1962, I found a few things that should get your head bobbing today.

Sitting at No. 74 fifty years ago this week was “(Do The New) Continental” by the Dovells. The Philadelphia group – which included future solo star Len Barry (“1-2-3,” 1965) – had reached No. 2 in late 1961 with “Bristol Stomp” and would reach No. 3 in the spring of 1963 with “You Can’t Sit Down.” (“Bristol Stomp” went to No. 7 on the R&B chart, and “You Can’t Sit Down’ went to No. 10.) “Continental” didn’t do nearly that well, peaking at No. 37, but to my ears it’s a better record than either of the Dovells’ bigger hits:

The Megatons were a rock and roll quintet from Memphis that featured Billy Lee Riley (“Flying Saucers Rock ’N’ Roll,” 1957) on guitar and harmonica. The group’s only charting hit was “Shimmy, Shimmy Walk, Part 1,” which was sitting at No. 95 this week in 1962. The record would peak at No. 88.

I’d certainly heard Buster Brown before; the R&B singer and harmonica player’s “Fannie Mae”: had gone to No. 38 on the pop chart and to No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1960. But the relatively gentle sway of “Fannie Mae” hadn’t prepared me for Brown’s “Sugar Babe.” The tumbling, rumbling single was at its peak position of No. 99 fifty years ago this week. It went to No. 19 on the R&B chart.

Tomorrow, I hope to take a look at a few covers of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”

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From Stanyan Street To The Twist

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

It was either in late 1969 or early 1970 – I’m not at all certain – when I checked out of the St. Cloud Tech library two volumes of Rod McKuen’s poetry: Listen to the Warm and Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows.

Why? A couple of things contributed, I imagine. I’d been listening frequently to the Glenn Yarbrough album The Lonely Things, a 1966 LP of McKuen’s songs that my sister had received from a boyfriend before he headed off to Vietnam. And there was my embryonic interest in writing my own verse and lyrics. Those two bits of my life united, I think, into the realization that even if matters of the heart did not unwind as I might wish they would (and they did not, though at sixteen, how could they have done so?), something worthy might be salvaged from the sorrow.

So I read the two volumes, recognizing a few of the pieces from the Yarbrough album and dipping into those that were not familiar. I found some of them affecting, I remember, and I found some of them not to my taste. Assessing them from a distance of more than forty years – and not having read many of them for that long – I now see much of McKuen’s work as manipulative, pushing his loved (and lost) one’s buttons, as it were, instead of truly grieving. And his poems and lyrics – even those on the Yarbrough album, which I still love – all too often tap sentiment instead of true emotion.

Hmmm. Until I wrote those words, I didn’t know I felt that way about McKuen’s work. As I used to tell my reporting and writing students: If you want to know how you really feel about something, start writing about it and follow the words. But anyway, back to work . . .

I looked at a few more of his books and listened to a few of McKuen’s own records, but none of them grabbed me. And I don’t know that I spent much more time thinking specifically about McKuen. I knew he’d written “Jean,” which was a No. 2 hit for Oliver in the late summer and autumn of 1969 – just before I began to dig into McKuen’s books – and I liked the record well enough. Hearing the record these days, it’s pleasant as a slice of old times, but taking the time to really think about it this morning, I find it cloying and clichéd in both music and lyrics. Well, that could be said about a lot of the hit records and songs from any generation, and “Jean” hardly ever pops up, anyway.

(But if I’d known back in 1974 that McKuen was responsible for the English lyrics to “Seasons in the Sun,” well, that would have explained a lot.)

I still, however, like The Lonely Things, the Yarbrough album that first introduced me to McKuen. And I like – with reservations about its being over-produced – McKuen’s own 1965 version of his “So Long San Francisco,” one of the tunes that I first heard on the Yarbrough album:

But none of that prepared me for what I found this morning. I was digging into the Billboard Hot 100 for February 3, 1962, and I noticed, of course, that the No. 1 record was “The Peppermint Twist” by Joey Dee & The Starlighters. “The Twist” by Chubby Checker was No. 3. So I began to look for records with “twist” in their titles:

“Dear Lady Twist” by Gary U.S. Bonds at No. 11.
“Twist-Her” by Bill Black’s Combo at No. 26.
“Rock-A-Hula Baby (‘Twist’ Special)” by Elvis Presley at No. 49
“Percolator (Twist)” by Billy Joe & The Checkmates at No. 53.
“Let’s Twist Again” by Chubby Checker at No. 54.
“Twistin’ the Night Away” by Sam Cooke at No. 70.
“Twistin’ Postman” by the Marvelettes at No. 73.
“Twistin’ All Night Long” by Danny & the Juniors with Freddy Cannon at No. 83.
“Oliver Twist” by Rod McKuen at No. 85.
“Tequila Twist” by the Champs at No. 99.
“Do You Know How To Twist?” by Hank Ballard at No. 111.

So what was that at No. 85?

Pulled from an album of twist tunes titled Mr. Oliver Twist, the single peaked at No. 76. The album is out on CD, says All-Music Guide, and “it’s a delightfully goofy and varied collection of novelties full of jokey references to literary figures, actors, and musicians (and constant self-references).”

Well, it might be a better purchase than digging up a copy of Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, but I’m not sure I’m in the market for either one.

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A Rambling Post Seeking A Destination

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Like the real universe all around us, the musical universe continues to expand. I scan each new edition of Rolling Stone and the weekly music news in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and online, and more often than not I see unfamiliar titles released by groups and performers I do not know, many of those in genres I could not define if my beer supply depended on it.

And I explore some of those unfamiliar groups and performers, sometimes through music borrowed from friends or the library, sometimes through the many blogs I visit each week and sometimes through just taking the famed flying leap and buying a CD by a group or performer entirely new to me. The RealPlayer shows me this morning a tally of something more than 350 tracks released last year, about half of those by relatively new groups and performers. Compared to the total number of mp3s residing in the RealPlayer – something around 58,400 – that might seem a paltry amount, but it nevertheless indicates to me that I continue to explore new music.

In addition, as my recent post about the historical anthologies new to my collection indicates, I also explore music in the other direction, looking back through the clouds of the universe to see what things sounded like fifty years ago or more.

But I realized this week that I’ve set myself one more task in regards to music and listening and collecting: I’m trying to replicate my own early universe, duplicating on CD the record collection that I had sometime around 1970. That’s perhaps not surprising, as 1970 has a grip on me stronger than most years. But sometimes I’m slow in figuring out my own motivations. In December, as I was finishing off one of my occasional sprees at Amazon, finally purchasing a number of CDs that had been languishing for a while in my holding bin there, I found myself ordering John Barry’s soundtracks for the third and fourth James Bond movies, Goldfinger and Thunderball, released in 1964 and 1965, respectively.

I vaguely wondered why as I clicked the buttons. I have the original soundtracks on well-preserved vinyl. But, I thought, the CD versions are expanded, with additional tracks from the movies presented for the first time. Well, I argued with myself, hadn’t I already heard those expanded tracks via blogs? Yes, but . . .

And the argument in my head foundered there and stopped, and I clicked my way through the purchases and a few days later found the two CDs in the mail. As has always been the case, I enjoy Goldfinger more than I do Thunderball, but at odd moments in the past weeks, I will find myself humming a portion of either soundtrack. And I realized that many of my CD purchases in recent years are of music that resided on LPs kept in a cardboard box in the basement rec room on Kilian Boulevard when I was seventeen.

And that’s fine. Given the moderate epiphany of realizing my motivation, I’ll likely continue to replicate my early collection. But the arrival of the two Barry soundtracks pushed me further back, to an album I’d not owned before. Last week, I found myself picking through the Amazon website again and ordering the soundtrack to the Bond movie that came out in 1963: From Russia With Love, Barry’s first full Bond soundtrack.

And in reading the notes as the music played, I discovered the answer to a question that I’d wondered about a fair amount during my mid-1960s James Bond immersion: Why, given the iconic success of the “James Bond Theme” – which was introduced in the first Bond film, 1962’s Dr. No – did Barry write another iconic and heroic identifying theme, “007”? That second theme was introduced in From Russia With Love and, like the “James Bond Theme,” bits and pieces from it popped up on occasion in Barry’s soundtracks for the following Bond films. It’s a good piece, but why did Barry think it was needed?

And the answer was, perhaps understandably, pride. Barry had arranged the “James Bond Theme” for Dr. No, but it was written by Monty Norman. And, say the notes for the CD release of From Russia With Love (written by the fortuitously named Jeff Bond), “Barry was keen to put his own musical stamp on the series, and the result was ‘007,’ a pulsing syncopated action ostinato which included a bold, heroic trumpet theme.”

And that’s as good a reason as any, I guess. But as stirring as “007” is, it’s never entered the public consciousness the way Norman’s “James Bond Theme” has, right along with martinis shaken not stirred and the laconic words from Sean Connery: “Bond. James Bond.” I was reminded of that – and spurred to write this rambling piece – this morning. I was wandering through the Billboard Hot 100 for this week in 1982, trying to find a topic, any topic, and I came across a listing for “Spies In The Night,” a record by Manhattan Transfer that was sitting at No. 105 thirty years ago this week. It’s a record that owes a lot to Monty Norman.

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Posted in 1962, 1963, 1982, Chart Digging, Soundtracks, Video | 1 Comment »

Chart Digging: What’s At No. 106?

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

In the midst of busyness, nothing has been planned for this space. So it’s time for Games With Numbers again. It’s October 6 – a date that all J.R.R. Tolkien obsessives will recognize as the day that Frodo was attacked under Weathertop, as I noted in a post three years ago – so I thought I would convert that to one number – No. 106 – and see what records were in that position in the Bubbling Under portion of the Billboard Hot 100 on October 6 through the years.

As we all know, just as odd, wonderful and rare creatures inhabit the deepest portions of the oceans, so do similar records sometimes swim in the Bubbling Under portions of the charts. It may be difficult to find some of the records so listed. Or we may find familiar tunes. Let’s dive and find out. I think we’ll hang around in the 1960s for this one.

Jimmy Jones was an Alabama-born R&B singer, according to Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, who had two songs get close to the top of the chart in 1960: “Handy Man,” which went to No. 2, and “Good Timin’,” which went to No. 3. (The records reached No. 3 and No. 8, respectively, on the R&B chart.) But that was about the extent of Jones’ success. Four other singles listed by Whitburn either stalled in the lower levels of the Hot 100 or Bubbled Under. One of those was a rock ’n’ roll version of “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.” Another was the single that was sitting at No. 106 – its peak – during the first week of October 1960: “Itchin’” would be gone from the chart the next week, and after “I Told You So” went to No. 85 in early 1961, so would Jimmy Jones.

There’s an interesting bit of information on the Top Pop Singles entry on the Wanderers, an early 1960s R&B group. The Wanderers had two singles released on the Cub label in 1961, with “For Your Love” reaching No. 93 and “I’ll Never Smile Again” bubbling under at No. 107. In 1962, “There Is No Greater Love” was released on Cub and failed to reach even the lowest portion of the charts, but then, for some reason, the same track was released on MGM and it pushed a little further in the chart than had the two previous singles. A ballad with an odd introduction and an interesting arrangement, “There Is No Greater Love” was at No. 106 this week in 1962; it peaked at No. 88 and was the last chart appearance by the Wanderers.

It’s always fun to find a nifty track I’ve never heard before, and that was the case with the record that was at No. 106 during the first week of October 1964. Earlier in the year, Roger Miller had a No. 6 pop hit with “Dang Me,” a record that spent six weeks atop the country chart. In September of that year came an answer record, “Dern Ya” by Ruby Wright, who happened to be the daughter of country performers Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright. “Dern Ya” peaked at No. 103.*

The name of P.F. Sloan pops up often enough in tales and discographies from the 1960s that I should know a lot more about the man than I do. I’ve mentioned him four times over the more than four years I’ve been writing this blog: three times in connection with the Grass Roots, which he and Steve Barri created, and once as the writer of Barry McGuire’s 1965 hit, “Eve of Destruction.” Along with everything else, Sloan did have two mid-1960s singles that touched the charts. “The Sins Of A Family” was the first, a preachy attempt at raising social consciousness that was sitting at No. 106 in the Billboard chart for the week of October 9, 1965; the record would peak at No. 87. Sloan’s other chart appearance came in 1966, when “From A Distance” bubbled under for one week at No. 109.

Up to this point, our explorations of records at No. 106 have found performers without a great deal of chart success. That changes when we move ahead to 1966: Sitting at No. 106 during the week of October 6 that year was a funky instrumental called “My Sweet Potato” by Booker T & the MG’s. After the No. 3 success of “Green Onions” in 1962 (No. 1 on the R&B chart), the group – essentially the house band from Stax Records – released a series of singles that didn’t come close to reaching the same heights. “My Sweet Potato” was no different, as it peaked at No. 85 (No. 18 on the R&B chart). Eventually, between 1967 and 1969, the group got five more singles into the Top 40, two of them – “Hang ’Em High” and “Time Is Tight” – into the Top Ten. The final total for Booker T & the MG’s? Eighteen singles on the pop chart and twelves in the R&B Top 40.

I do love me some saxophone, so I was very pleased to see the title that was listed at No. 106 during the first week of October in 1968: “Harper Valley PTA” by King Curtis and the Kingpins. I’ve written about Curtis Ousley a few times and mentioned him many times here, so I don’t need to say much more except that, just as it’s fun to discover new-to-me records by new-to-me performers, it’s more fun to discover a new-to-me King Curtis track. “Harper Valley PTA” didn’t do very well in the charts, going to No. 93, but it’s a great slice of soul for a Thursday morning.

*Soon after I posted this, I learned at Any Major Dude With Half A Heart that Wright crossed over on September 27 at the age of ninety-seven. He and Wells were married October 30, 1937, and spent nearly seventy-four years together.

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Posted in 1960, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, Chart Digging, Games With Numbers, Video | No Comments »

The Creation Of An Anthem

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

We’re not usually open for business on Wednesdays here at Echoes In The Wind, but as I waited for the Texas Gal to head out for the day, I got to messing around with the Billboard Hot 100 from September 28, 1964, looking for fodder for a future post.

And I saw a title I’d not heard of before – not an infrequent occurrence – and did a little bit of looking. It’s a jazz piece, which explains a little of my ignorance; as many gaps as there are in my knowledge of pop, rock and soul, there are far more gaps in my knowledge of jazz. I did know the name of the main performer on the record: pianist Oscar Peterson, recording with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen as the Oscar Peterson Trio. The track is called “Hymn to Freedom.”

As the tune played at YouTube, I did some digging, and I found at Peterson’s website a brief memoir about the 1962 session that resulted in “Hymn to Freedom” and the trio’s album Night Train. The webpage was posted in 2002, about five-and-a-half years before Peterson passed on at the age of eighty-two, and it is interesting reading.

As I said above, I came across the listing of “Hymn to Freedom” in the Billboard Hot 100 from September 28, 1964, forty-seven years ago today. The record was bubbling under at No. 109. It stayed there one more week and then fell out of the chart. It probably deserved better.

(As indicated in the note at Peterson’s website, “Hymn to Freedom” had words added by Harriette Hamilton and became an anthem of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and later a piece frequently performed by youth choirs. Here’s a link to a performance of the song – with lyrics – by a children’s choir.)

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A Field Of 43s (And One 44)

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

Heading home the other day, I drove along the frontage road that parallels U.S. Highway 10 not far from our house. There’s a stretch there that bears watching for a driver, with lots of vehicles turning onto and off of the frontage road from various businesses: You’ll pass a bank, a tire place/tune-up garage, the main entrance to a mobile home park, a used car dealer, a Dairy Queen, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet and finally, a porn shop.

Being the height of the warm season – and with Highway 10 being one of the main routes from the Twin Cities to the northern part of the state, where many folks have vacation homes – the frontage road is appreciably busier at this time of year than others, especially where the two fast food joints sit side-by-side. Vehicles entering and exiting the two parking lots – with drivers distracted by appetites and possibly small children – make for a mini-jam.

And as I sat in the mini-jam the other day, I noticed the license plate on the car in front of me. It was an Idaho plate. About three years ago, I wrote about my one-time hobby of keeping track each year of the out-of-state license plates I saw, and I noted that the two rarest plates to see in Minnesota were those from Hawaii and Idaho. As I looked at the plate with its “Famous Potatoes” legend, I was tempted for an instant to resume that hobby from my teen years.

But no, I won’t do that. I’ve got my adult manias to feed now. Like noticing that Idaho was the forty-third state admitted to the Union and wondering what tunes were No. 43 on this date, ending with one of those years when I was looking for a license plate from Idaho.

We’ll start with 1956: The brief biography of Don Robertson in Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles is pretty impressive. Robertson was born in Peking (now Beijing), China, in 1922 and was raised in Chicago. A pianist/composer, he was one-half of the pop duo The Echoes and wrote their best-known single “Born To Be With You,” which topped out at No. 101 in 1960. (The Chordettes took the song to No. 5 in 1956, and it’s been recorded by many artists and groups since.) Robertson also wrote, Whitburn notes, several of Elvis Presley’s hits and – with Hal Blair – Lorne Green’s No. 1 hit from 1964, “Ringo.” He’s also credited by Whitburn with creating the Nashville piano style. And fifty-five years ago this week, his “Happy Whistler” was the No. 44 song in the U.S. (Wait, I can hear you say. We were looking for songs that were No. 43. Yes, we were, but the Billboard Hot 100 for August 1, 1956, lists two songs tied at No. 42. Instead of trying to break the tie, I took the next song down the list.) Robertson has one other single listed in Whitburn’s book: His version of the “Tennessee Waltz” bubbled under at No. 117 in the summer of 1961.

Getting back to our original intent, the No. 43 tune during this week in 1959 was a sprightly ditty titled “Keep It Up” from Dee Clark, who is likely best known for “Raindrops,” his 1961 hit that went to No. 2. Clark, who hailed from Blytheville, Arkansas, racked up ten Hot 100 hits between 1958 and 1963. “Keep It Up” was his second-most successful single, getting to No. 18. Whitburn notes that before becoming a solo performer in 1957, Clark sang in groups known as the Hambone Kids, the Goldentones, the Kool Gents and the Delegates. Clark last showed up near the chart in 1965, when his “T.C.B.” went to No. 132.

In the autumn of 1961, Jimmy Dean had a No. 1 hit with “Big Bad John,” his tale of tragedy and heroism in a coal mine. The next spring, Dean’s “P.T. 109,” an account of the heroic actions of then-President John F. Kennedy during a World War II naval engagement, went to No. 8. In the summer of 1962, Dean’s “Steel Men” combined working class tragedy and real life events, relating the tale of the collapse of a bridge under construction in British Columbia, Canada. The collapse, which took nineteen lives, according to Wikipedia, resulted in the completed bridge being named the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing. Dean’s record about the event, which was at No. 43 forty-nine years ago this week, didn’t fare as well as his previous efforts, reaching only No. 41. Dean would have four more hits in the Hot 100, with “Little Black Book” from the autumn of 1962 doing the best by reaching No. 29.

Between 1956 and 1980 (with some admittedly long gaps), Roy Orbison notched thirty-eight records in or near the Billboard Hot 100. During the last week of July 1965, the record at No. 43 was Orbison’s “(Say) You’re My Girl,” which is kind of a herky-jerky tune, one that I’d call idiosyncratic. The record went only to No. 39, and for the rest of his long career, the lower reaches of the Top 40 was about the best that Orbison did, until “You Got It” went to No. 9 in early 1989, shortly after Orbison’s death in late 1988.

Billy Vera’s name is most familiar to music fans, I’d guess, from “At This Moment,” his 1987 No. 1 record with his R&B backing group, The Beaters. But he’s had some success as a songwriter and in early 1968, he and Judy Clay hit the Top 40 with their duet “Country Girl – City Man,” which went to No. 36. That summer, Vera released his version of the divorce-themed “With Pen In Hand” and saw it get as high as No. 43, which is where it sat during the last days of July. The more successful version of the tune was by Vicki Carr, whose single went to No. 35. (I was surprised for an instant – and then, after some thought, not so surprised – to see that the song was written by Bobby Goldsboro.)

In an era when numerous hit records touched on or clearly promoted the Christian faith – the best example, offhand, might have been Ocean’s “Put Your Hand In The Hand,” which went to No. 2 in May of 1971 – perhaps the most moving of those records was “Mighty Clouds of Joy” by  B.J. Thomas. I’d not heard it for years until this morning, and the faith expressed is one I don’t share, but I still found it musically thrilling, as I did forty years ago when I occasionally heard it coming out of the radio speakers. As July ended in 1971, the record was sitting at No. 43 on its way to No. 34, one of twenty-five records Thomas placed in the Hot 100. His best performing records were two that reached No. 1: “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” was No. 1 for four weeks in early 1970, and “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” topped the chart for a week in 1975.

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One Chart Dig: June 2, 1962

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

As the school year ended and the green promise of summer lay ahead for your eight-year-old narrator in 1962, one thing that he wasn’t thinking about was an iconic American television series that had just reached of the half-way point of its four-year run.

I don’t know that the eight-year-old whiteray had any broad dreams heading into that summer. He would have been thinking about the soon-to-begin summer enrichment courses he would take – this might have been the summer when he and his classmates studied Alaska – and he was thinking about swimming lessons on cold mornings.

He was without doubt thinking about his pal Rick and the yard games and bicycle rides and other pastimes they’d find in the next three months. He might also have had in mind the prospect of one or more trips during the summer to Municipal Stadium on the west end of town, where the players of the local baseball team – the St. Cloud Rox of the Northern League – followed their own summer dreams.

But, unless I’m very wrong, he was spending no time at all thinking about Route 66. The CBS television show completed the second of its four seasons on the evening of June 1, 1962, with, says Wikipedia, Tod Stiles – played by Martin Milner – heading off in search of a runaway henpecked husband. (George Maharis’ character, Buz Murdock, was absent, as Maharis was hospitalized with hepatitis as the time, Wikipedia notes.)

I was, I guess, aware of Route 66, the highway. Before the Interstate highway system was built, Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles and was celebrated in literature, folklore and song. Bobby Troup’s famed song, “Route 66,” was first recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio in 1946 as “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” and went to No. 3 on the R&B chart. Since then, the tune has been covered by a long line of performers, including – as noted again by Wikipedia – Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Manhattan Transfer and Depeche Mode. Others listed at All-Music Guide as having covered the tune include Asleep at the Wheel, Buckwheat Zydeco, the Four Freshmen, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Mel Tormé, Perry Como, Harry James, Van Morrison’s Them, and the list goes on and on.

Here’s a black and white video of Troup performing his composition on a Julie London television show in 1964. (The original poster at YouTube says the show was from Japan, and the poster also notes that Troup was married to London.)

The iconic television show, surprisingly, did not fare particularly well in the ratings, finishing out of the Top 30 shows in the Neilsen ratings during two of its four seasons. It had finished in 30th place during its first season in 1960-61, and then was in 27th place in the ratings during the 1962-63 season. But its story lines – the wandering pair crossing America in their very cool Corvette, their lives intersecting dramatically with those of the people they meet – added to the historically charged locales of one of America’s great highways to create a television series that’s seemingly remembered long after others of its time have been forgotten.

And then there was the music. No, not Troup’s “Route 66,” although the song’s popularity may have helped the television series gain viewers. The music for the show was original. For a theme, the show’s producers turned to Nelson Riddle, who’d created a signature sound for Capitol Records and its stars – Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and more – in the 1950s.

Riddle provided the show with a signature theme. And in the Billboard Hot 100 released forty-nine years ago today, “Route 66 Theme” was at No. 93, heading to an eventual peak position of No. 30. It would be Riddle’s fourth and final Top 40 hit. (“Lisbon Antigua” spent four weeks at No. 1 in 1956; “Port Au Prince” went to No. 20 and “Theme From ‘The Proud Ones’” went to No. 39 later that year.) Riddle would go on to write and produce through the 1960s and then find his career reinvigorated in the 1980s by his work with Linda Ronstadt on her series of three albums of standards.

But I don’t know that he ever again did anything quite as cool as “Route 66 Theme.”

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Posted in 1962, 1964, Chart Digging, Television | 4 Comments »

There’s Still So Much Left To Learn

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

One of the questions about music from the late 1950s and the early 1960s that I consider from time to time is: What do I actually remember?

I’ll look at a list of songs from a particular year – usually the records that got to No. 1 in Billboard (or occasionally Cashbox) – and see how many of them I actually remember. Not how many of them I know now – that’s usually all of them – but how many I remember hearing as I lived through that time. Given that I was six when the 1950s turned into the 1960s, the numbers of records I remember actually hearing from some of those early years can be quite small.

As an example, I give you 1959, the year I turned six: Of the fifteen songs that made it to No. 1 in Billboard that year, I recall hearing only one: Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.” Where I heard it, I don’t know, but I remember singing along: “We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’ . . .”

The numbers of songs I remember increases year-by-year, of course. Some of that is a function of memory, I’m sure. Some of it can likely be ascribed to the increased popularity of the music itself. And a large part of it is my own increased interest in the music, to the point where from 1966 on into the mid-1980s, I remember hearing during its run in the chart nearly every record that got to No. 1. (I use the word “nearly” there because of the 1973-74 academic year I spent in Denmark; I had to catch up later with about half of the records that went to No. 1 during those months.)

So what’s the point, exactly? I’m not sure there is one, really. But this morning, I was looking through songs that were in the chart during this week in 1962, and I realized – not for the first time – that one of my favorite records from 1962 is one that I don’t recall from the time and that I almost certainly didn’t hear back then: Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl” was No. 1 on the pop chart for three weeks and No. 1 on the R&B chart for five weeks.

I don’t remember it. I recall “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and I heard “The Peppermint Twist” by Joey Dee & The Starliters. I know I heard “Stranger on the Shore” by Mr. Acker Bilk and I heard David Rose’s “The Stripper.” Now, those four make sense: The twist – the dance and the accompanying records – was a pop culture phenomenon. And the other two tunes were mainstays of the middle of the road radio stations we listened to at home: “Stranger on the Shore” went to No. 7 on what is now called the Adult Contemporary chart, and “The Stripper” went to No. 2 on the same chart. But most of the records on that 1962 list were strangers to me during the year I turned nine, and that holds true for all the ages I was from the mid-1960s back.

Accordingly, one of the first things I realized when I began to dig into the history of pop music as a serious hobby sometime in the late 1980s was that I had a lot of things to learn. And that was fine, as learning about stuff as fascinating as music was fun, and I eventually got to a point where very little in the lists of No. 1 hits – or even Top Ten hits – could surprise me. Then, twenty or so years after that self-education project began, I started a blog and in the process of finding new things to write about, I began to dig into the Hot 100 charts from over the years. And I’m reminded every time I do that how little I actually know.

Not surprisingly, that lack of knowledge is greater, once again, in those early years. So as I dig into those years – now extended back to the mid-1950s because I have the charts and my copy of Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles – I am once again challenged and pleased. Whether I’m looking into those sources for one of the Chart Digging posts that have become a mainstay of this blog or simply to pass the time, I’m finding two or five or twelve (or more) things I didn’t know before.

Among today’s harvest, as I looked through the Billboard Hot 100 from May 12, 1962, was Gene Chandler’s follow-up to “Duke of Earl.” Actually credited to the Duke of Earl, the single “Walk On With The Duke” was bubbling under at No. 112 forty-nine years ago today. The record topped out at No. 91 and did not make the R&B Top 40. But it’s fun to know about it.

Recommended reading: At The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, jb takes a pensive look at life via a record that never strays far from me. His thoughts on Seals & Crofts’ “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” are worth your time.

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Posted in 1962, Chart Digging, Video | 3 Comments »

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