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The First Slow Dance

Friday, February 19th, 2016

Last Sunday, after I sang “Come To Me” at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, I wandered over to one of the activity tables. At the other tables, kids and adults were doing word puzzles, making posters and making balloon figures, all centered on Valentine’s Day.

The table where I sat had started with folks drawing random topics related to the day and telling tales from their lives. By the time I got there, the kids had moved to other tables, and the activity had evolved to the three or four adults sharing a tale on the same topic.

As I got settled, one of the women looked at me and said, “Okay, your turn. First crush?”

I thought for a few seconds. Evidently thinking I was struggling to remember, one of the women said something like “Men don’t remember that stuff.” And I told my tale.

She showed up on the first day of third grade, Marilyn did. Her folks had bought a restaurant in town and they’d set up housekeeping near the far end of Kilian Boulevard from us. I liked her, but no more than that for a couple of years.

Somehow, by the time fifth grade was ending, two years and nine months later, I really liked her, and I didn’t mind her knowing. I was pretty unclear on what might happen after that, but I wanted her to like me back. She did, kind of. At least, that’s what I perceived from quick glances and heard through whispers. But she didn’t like me as much as I liked her.

Well, it wouldn’t be the last time my ardor outpaced that of my chosen one.

That’s how it stayed through sixth grade. When we moved from Lincoln Elementary on to South Junior High in September 1965, I thought I’d try again (though I was still unclear on how to nurture a relationship and would remain so for some years).

She still kind of liked me, and I still liked her a lot.

Then came the seventh grade dance. I think it was our first of the year; it could have been the second one. That I don’t recall. For a while, many of us danced in groups, seemingly not wanting to pair off with anyone specific. I wanted to dance with Marilyn, of course, but seeking her out would be a very public declaration of what just my friends and hers knew about my feelings. Scary stuff. So I stayed with one group or another. Sometimes, I just watched from the boys’ side of the room.

Then the teacher running the record player announced a “girls ask boys” dance. I had little hope that Marilyn would invite me to dance, so I thought I’d sit that one out. Then Carrie came over to me. I didn’t really know her, though I’d likely seen her in the hallways. She smiled nicely at me as she invited me to dance, so we took the few steps out onto the dance floor. I don’t remember the record, but it was a fast dance. And when it was over, we each retreated to our side of the room.

After a couple more records, I decided that I was going to ask Marilyn to dance. In the short gap between records, I – shorter than most of my classmates – raised myself on tiptoes and scanned the room for her. As I did, my eyes caught those of Carrie’s friend Candace, who helpfully pointed out where Carrie was standing.

Not being a cad, I put on a smile, walked over to Carrie and asked her to dance. We got onto the floor just as a slow record started. I nervously put my hands on Carrie’s waist, she put hers on my shoulders, and I had the first slow dance of my life.

I remember thinking she had nice eyes. I remember liking her hair, which was in a sort of pixie cut. I remember her burgundy dress. I remember being thrilled and terrified at the same time. And I remember nothing else after those moments about that seventh-grade dance.

I should have, of course, tried to connect with her somehow in the days after the dance, maybe – as those things were done during seventh grade – through her friend Candace. I didn’t, and I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

And Marilyn? I never did dance with her. My crush on her faded, and I turned my gaze in other directions.

I’m not entirely certain when that dance took place. It was likely early in the school year, as I remember clearly that Carrie’s burgundy dress was sleeveless. (It could have been springtime, but I don’t think so; by that time, I was getting over Marilyn.)

And I don’t recall at all what record was playing as I danced with Carrie. Given what I find on various WDGY surveys from the late summer and early autumn of 1965 at Oldiesloon, it could have been the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It might have been the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” Maybe it was “Baby, I’m Yours” by Barbara Lewis.

Whatever the record was, it should have been “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” by the Silkie. The British group’s cover of the Beatles’ tune was first mentioned in a WDGY survey at the beginning of October that year and peaked there at No. 17 late that month. And it would have been perfect for my first slow dance with Carrie:

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‘They Won’t Tell Your Secrets . . .’

Friday, January 15th, 2016

Things start with a familiarly slinky piano riff joined by a girl group singing softly in the background. Then, enter Mitch Ryder.

“Sally,” he says, “you know I’m your best friend, right? And four years ago, I told you not to go downtown, ’cause you’re gonna get hurt. Didn’t I tell you you were gonna cry? Mm-hmm. So you kept hangin’ around with him.”

Then, sounding utterly fed up, Ryder hollers, “Here it is, almost 1968, and you still ain’t straight!”

And Ryder rolls into his own version of “Sally, Go ’Round The Roses,” one that works in the chorus to “Mustang Sally” along the way:

Ryder’s cover of the Jaynetts’ 1963 hit is on his 1967 album What Now My Love, and it’s just one of numerous covers of “Sally” in the more than fifty years since the Jaynetts’ hit went to No. 2 in the Billboard Hot 100. Twenty-seven of those covers – including two in French – are listed at Second Hand Songs. There are certainly more covers of the song out there, but as usual, that’s a good starting place.

That list of twenty-five covers in English range in time from a 1965 version by Ike Turner’s Ikettes that doesn’t roam very far from the Jaynetts’ original to a 2012 version from the album Moving In Blue by Danny Kalb & Friends – Kalb was a member of Blues Project in the 1960s – that’s instrumentally exotic but vocally drab.

There have been plenty of others along the way. One that I’ve heard touted as worth hearing is a live performance from 1966 by the San Francisco group Great Society with Grace Slick. I found it uninteresting, as I did a 1974 version by the all-woman group Fanny (on the album Rock & Roll Survivors). Yvonne Elliman traded in the Jaynetts’ slinky piano for some weird late Seventies electronica when she covered the song on her 1978 album Night Flight, and that didn’t grab me too hard, either. More interesting was the funky 1971 version by Donna Gaines (later Donna Summer) released on a British single.

At a rough estimate, covers of “Sally” by female performers outnumber those by male singers by about a three-to-one ratio. Joining Ryder with one of the relatively few male covers of the tune was Tim Buckley, whose 1973 cover from his Sefronia album has an interesting folk vibe (though he wanders away from the lyrics and the melody for an odd bit in the middle).

Another folkish version of the tune comes from the British band Pentangle, who included the song on its 1969 album Basket of Light. The group’s version is one of my favorite covers, as is the version by the far more obscure group Queen Anne’s Lace, which put a cover of “Sally” on the group’s only album, a self-titled 1969 release.

But the honors for strangest version of “Sally, Go ’Round The Roses” that I came across go to singer Alannah Myles, who found an utterly weird – but compelling – Scottish vibe for the song on her 1995 album, A-Lan-Nah.

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Posted in 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1995, 2012, Covers, Video | No Comments »

Of Pate & Rye

Wednesday, March 25th, 2015

Once more, we visit the ghosts of East St. Germain, the main drag here on the East Side of St. Cloud. It’s 1965, and we go once more into the dining room of the Ace Bar & Cafe, where the young whiteray, his parents and his sister are celebrating one occasion or another.

After we order, as we sit with our beverages – probably a Mountain Dew for me, a Coke for my sister, a Hamm’s Beer for Dad and an old-fashioned for Mom – our waitress brings us the relish tray: Carrots, celery, radishes, pickles, liver pate, probably some pickled herring, and an assortment of crackers in cellophane packages.

Restaurants don’t do relish trays anymore. They’re too labor intensive and too wasteful, I imagine. But fifty years ago, every “go out for a nice dinner” restaurant in the St. Cloud area offered them: The Ace, the Persian Club, the 400 Club, the Hub, the Log Lodge, and maybe more I can’t think of right now. The trays’ offerings changed a bit from place to place but a relish tray was a constant of a nice dinner out in those days.

My favorite portion of the relish tray, as I’ve noted here once before, was the liver pate. (I love pickled herring almost as much, but it wasn’t a rare treat, as we routinely had a jar of it in the fridge at home.) Almost as soon as our waitress placed the tray on our table, I’d have my eye on the pate, and I’d rummage through the selection of crackers until I found a packet of Ry-Krisp. The flat rye crackers seemed made for liver pate, and just thinking about that long-ago treat makes my mouth water as I write.

The pate and of the pickled herring on the tray were no doubt a reflection of the Northern European origins of many of the East Side’s residents back then. Most families on the East Side had been in the U.S. for a couple of generations – there were a few immigrants and first-generation Americans – but even second- and third-generation folks fifty years ago tended to hold onto the ethnic tastes and traditions of their ancestors.

There were still vivid connections to those immigrant ancestors: My mom spent a lot of time as a child with her maternal grandfather, who emigrated from Prussia as a child (and in fact, William Raveling lived long enough that I sat on his lap as an infant). My dad’s family had come to the U.S. from Sweden a little earlier but still held onto many of its Scandinavian traditions, lutefisk, pickled herring and flatbread among them.* The families of most of the kids I knew on the East Side were like that. Not all of them descended from Northern Europeans; the names I recall of some of my schoolmates reflect origins in England, Scotland, and the Slavic nations of Eastern Europe. But we all cared about our ancestors’ origins, and the folkways and tastes of those ancestors were important as well.

So why this today? Because last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Ry-Krisp has come to an end. After nearly a century, the company is closing. As Kevyn Burger wrote:

For as long as there have been modern grocery stores, there have been boxes of Ry-Krisp on their shelves. Every one of the commercially produced crackers inside was mixed, baked and packed at the world’s one and only Ry-Krisp plant in southeast Minneapolis.

But the Minnesota-born brand is no more. Production at the boxy white factory wound down in March. Soon the final packages of Ry-Krisp will disappear forever from the cracker aisles, and with them, a bit of local history will crumble.

In one short century, Ry-Krisp rose from humble origins to become a product distributed around the globe. The crunchy rye-flavored snack became an emblem for overlapping culinary trends, shifting from peasant fare to health food to diet aid until changing tastes led to the cracker’s quiet demise . . .

Reading that piece brought me back – as so many things seem to do – to the Ace Bar & Cafe. And it brought me back to the occasional stock of Ry-Krisp I used to keep on my shelves at home. I’d buy it as a snack – a platform for cheese – now and then, and about fifteen years ago, after my doctor advised me to adopt a whole grain diet and further encouraged me to avoid yeast and fermented products for a year, Ry-Krisp was one of my bread substitutes. I recall sitting at my kitchen table in my small apartment on Minneapolis’ Bossen Terrace, eating kippered snacks on Ry-Krisp for a quick lunch.

Once the prohibition on yeast and fermented products was lifted, I found myself a brand of whole wheat bread. At about the same time, whole grain Triscuits and Wheat Thins became my snack crackers of choice, and Ry-Krisp left my shopping list. Until this week, that is. Once I read the piece in the Star-Tribune, I knew I had to buy one last box of Ry-Krisp. And here it is.

My Last Box of Ry-Krisp

I wasn’t the only one with the idea, though: By the time the Texas Gal and I got to our neighborhood Ca$h Wi$e on Sunday afternoon, all of the regular Ry-Krisp was gone from the shelves, as was all of the seasoned Ry-Krisp. I was left with the consolation prize of a box of light rye crackers. (The company also made multi-grain and sesame versions of the cracker, but there was no shelf space for those new-fangled varieties at the local store.) It may be light, but it’s Ry-Krisp, and the ingredients are the same as they always were: Whole rye and salt. (The idea of a multi-grain Ry-Krisp, a version I don’t ever recall seeing in stores, bothers me, if only vaguely; Ry-Krisp was supposed to be rye, and when you start throwing other grains into the mix, you’ve got something else.)

So I’ve got my last box of Ry-Krisp, and I think I’ll head out sometime in the next few days to the Byerly’s grocery across town – it’s a little more high rent than Ca$h Wi$e – and see if there’s any liver pate from Scandinavia or even Germany on the shelves. (If I have to settle for French, I will.) Then I’ll have myself one more snack of pate on Ry-Krisp, and for a fleeting moment, it will be 1965 in the Ace Cafe once more. I think I’ll skip the Mountain Dew this time.

And here’s a record that we might easily have heard in the background at the Ace on a Saturday evening in 1965: “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” by Sounds Orchestral was No. 1 for three weeks on the Billboard Easy Listening chart and went to No. 10 on the magazine’s Hot 100.

*That attachment to tradition was likely enhanced by the homogeneity of the area around Dad’s hometown of Cambridge – most folks there in the early 20th century could trace their roots to Sweden – and by multi-generational living: Among the members of Dad’s household during his childhood was his Great-Uncle Charlie, whose parents or grandparents came from Sweden. (Great-Uncle Charlie’s rocking chair, refinished and reupholstered a few years back, sits in my dining room.)

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‘Eine Schwarzwaldfahrt’

Tuesday, March 24th, 2015

As it sometimes is, easy listening music is on my mind, and today, it’s specifically easy listening music from 1965, the kind of stuff we would have heard coming faintly from the overhead speakers in nice restaurants.

There’s a reason for those thoughts, but the tale of the end of a Minnesota institution that sparked them will have to wait until tomorrow. Even so, I didn’t want to leave this little corner of the ’Net blank today. So, here is a 1965 piece by Horst Jankowski that was No. 1 for two weeks on the Billboard Easy Listening chart: “A Walk In The Black Forest” or as it’s called in Jankowski’s hometown of Berlin, “Eine Schwarzwaldfahrt.”

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Black & Blue

Friday, March 13th, 2015

Every once in a while, the various ailments that escort me through life combine to make life, well, difficult. One of the least-liked phenomena around here is the body aches. I’ll be having a perfectly fine morning – like I was Wednesday, when I wrote about tape recorders and the Beatles – and my muscles will start to tighten, especially in my back.

Walking becomes difficult. Sitting becomes difficult, though a little less so than walking. And a mind-numbing fatigue sets in. So I begin to cancel plans. On Wednesday, that meant dropping an errand for my mom and a meeting for church. Yesterday that mean altering significantly an errand for my mom; I attended a church meeting in the evening, though I likely should not have. I had no plans for today, and that’s just fine.

This will pass, as it always does. But I may be scarce in these precincts for a while. Or at least terse.

Here’s Judy Roderick’s “Black & Blue” from her 1965 album Woman Blue.

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What’s At No. 27?

Friday, February 27th, 2015

So, with today being February 27 and Odd, Pop and I being short of ideas this morning, we’re going to look at a few Billboard charts released on this date over the years and check out what’s hiding at No. 27. Along the way, we’ll check out the No. 1 records of the times, too. There are four such charts during the span of years that tends to interest us here. We’ll start in 1957.

One of the odd things about the earlier charts in the files I have is that records are often tied for a spot. In the Top 100 for February 27, 1957, two records are tied at No. 26, which means there really was no record at No. 27. So we’ll look at both records at No. 26. The first listed is “Lucky Lips” by Ruth Brown. The record, which went no further on the Top 100 but went to No. 25 on two of the other main charts Billboard issued at the time, is the first listed under Brown’s name in Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles, where the listings start in 1955. Brown was a force long before that, of course; her listings on the magazine’s R&B chart start in 1949. “Lucky Lips” went to No. 6 on that chart.

The other record at No. 26 on this date in 1957 was a pairing of artist and song that seems incongruous from a distance of nearly sixty years: “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody” by Jerry Lewis, whose image in my mind starts at goofy comedian and ends at smarmy telethon host and doesn’t come close to hit singer at all. (The combination evidently seemed so bizarre to the anonymous person who transcribed my collection of Billboard charts that he or she credited the record to Jerry Lee Lewis, which caused me a bit of confusion.) Lewis offers the song over a Vegas-style big band arrangement that serves it well although the whole thing sounds odd to me. Listeners liked it, though; the record peaked at No. 10 on the store sales list. Lewis had one other hit: “It All Depends On You” went to No. 68 on the Top 100 later in 1957.

Sitting at No. 1 on this date in 1957 was “Young Love” by Tab Hunter, by far the most successful single the actor ever had to his credit. (I recall Hunter’s smiling visage on the front of a comic book that told the tale of one of Hunter’s movies. I forget which movie, and a look at Hunter’s credits this morning doesn’t help.)

The next time Billboard released a pop chart on February 27, it was 1961, and the chart was called – as it would be past the turn of the century – the Hot 100. Parked at No. 27 was “What A Price” by Fats Domino. The slow, sad record, which was the forty-fourth of an eventual seventy-seven Domino placed in or near the Hot 100, was on its way down the chart after peaking at No. 22 (No. 7, R&B). Should it have done better? Well, yes, because Fats Domino should always be in the Top Ten.

The No. 1 record as February approached its end in 1961 was Chubby Checker’s “Pony Time.”

It took only another four years before a Billboard Hot 100 touched down on a February 27, and the No. 27 record on this date in 1965 was the first track on one of the first pop LPs I ever owned. My sister gave me Herman’s Hermits On Tour (which was made up of studio recordings, not the live recordings that the album’s title might have implied), and “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” led off the album. As a single, “Heartbeat” went to No. 2, the first of nine straight Top Ten hits for Peter Noone and his group. (The Billboard Book of No. 2 Singles tells me that the Hermits’ single was blocked from the top spot by the Supremes’ “Stop! In The Name Of Love.”)

The No. 1 record fifty years ago today was “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & The Playboys.

And the last of the February 27 Billboard charts that we’re concerned with today came out in 1971. (There were charts on February 27 in 1982, 1988 and beyond, but that gets us into years we are not all that enthusiastic about.) The No. 27 record at the end of the last February of my high school days was “Help Me Make It Through The Night” by Sammi Smith, written by Kris Kristofferson. Smith’s plaintive performance was on its way to No. 8; it would go to No. 1 on the country chart and to No. 3 on the easy listening chart. I’m not sure I had much regard for “Help Me Make It Through The Night” when I was a high school senior, but now I think it’s pretty great stuff.

And to finish this off, the No. 1 single during on this date in 1971 was the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple.”

Here’s Smith’s single:

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Saturday Single No. 426

Saturday, January 3rd, 2015

We’re going to play some games with numbers and dig into some fifty-year old surveys this morning in search of a Saturday tune. The Airheads Radio Survey Archive offers seven surveys released on January 3, 1965, so we’re going to take a look at four of them. We’ll take today’s date – 1/3/15 – and turn that into No. 13 and No. 15, and see what we find.

We’ll also, as we customarily do, check out the No. 1 record on each survey simply for context.

We’ll start in the Midwest with the “Silver Dollar Music Survey” from Milwaukee’s WRIT. Sitting at No. 13 fifty years ago today was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers, an epic record that would top the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks a month later. And parked at No. 15 in Milwaukee was “Let’s Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)” by Jay & The Americans, a single that, as far as I know, I’ve not heard until this morning. It did go to No. 11 in Billboard, but that only goes to show that making the Top 20 is no guarantee of oldies radio immortality.

The No. 1 record at WRIT fifty years ago was the Beatles’ two-sided “I Feel Fine/She’s A Woman.”

From Wisconsin, we’ll head east and make a stop in Columbus, Ohio, where we’ll check out the hot tunes on WCOL’s “Hit Line Survey” from the first week in January 1965. The No. 13 record there was “Give Him A Great Big Kiss” by the Shangri-Las, a lively bit of girl group joy with a bit of teenage theater between verses. It went to No. 18 nationally, which was kind of a bring-down after “Leader Of The Pack” went to No. 1 in late 1964. Sitting at No. 15 in Columbus was Gerry & The Pacemakers’ “I’ll Be There,” another record that I’ve never heard before this morning. A sweet pledge of loyalty to a departing lover, the record went to No. 14 in Billboard.

Sitting atop the “Hit Line Survey” at WCOL fifty years ago today was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

From Ohio we head to Newport News, Virginia, where WGH releases its “Original Official Top Thirty,” which includes at No. 13 Del Shannon’s “Keep Searchin’ (We’ll Follow The Sun).” Blessed with a great organ break and Shannon’s unearthly wails at the end, the record would go to No. 9 in the Hot 100. Sitting at No. 15 in Newport News that week fifty years ago was the Animals’ “Boom Boom,” in which Eric Burdon and his pals take on John Lee Hooker and, almost inevitably, come up wanting. The record stalled at No. 43 in Billboard.

Perched at No. 1 in WGH’s “Original Official Top Thirty” fifty years ago was “Mr. Lonely” by Bobby Vinton.

From the East Coast we jump to the West Coast and the “Top Sixty Tune-Dex” offered by Los Angeles’ KRLA. At No. 13, we find “Willow Weep For Me” by Chad & Jeremy, a soft rock duo from England. Squishy by even Chad & Jeremy standards, “Willow” would peak at No. 15 in Billboard. And at No. 15, we find British MOR singers Matt Monro with “Walk Away,” a song telling a lover to move on for her own good. It went to No. 23 in Billboard.

The No. 1 record on the “Top Sixty Tune-Dex” fifty years ago today was, as it was in Columbus, the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Well, with the No. 13s and the No. 15s, we have a wide range of records to consider for our Saturday morning listening. Most of them are relatively unfamiliar to me, which only serves to show that there is a limit to how much back-filling can take place. As 1965 began, I was eleven, and I was still four to five years away from digging deeply into the Top 40 and a good twenty years away from beginning any serious effort to know and understand what came before 1969.

In any case, we have some intriguing choices for our Saturday morning listening, and I think we’ll go with a cool organ break followed by unearthly wails and make Del Shannon’s “Keep Searchin’ (We’ll Follow The Sun)” today’s Saturday Single.

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From The Castaways To . . .

Thursday, November 13th, 2014

So I glanced at the Billboard Hot 100 from November 13, 1965, a date that slid past while I was busy seventh-grading, perhaps even as I was making a mouse out of paper mache while my pal Brad made a kangaroo that he named Aloysius. (The mouse never got a name, turning out more as an abstract idea of a mouse than anything like a real mouse. Neither did the mouse get put on display for parents night while Aloysius did. Such were the stakes in the seventh-grade Paper Mache League.)

But as we papered and mached in November of 1965, Minnesota’s Castaways were trying to follow up their No. 12 hit of late summer, “Liar, Liar.” The Minnesota label Soma released “Goodbye Babe,” and forty-nine years ago today, “Goodbye Babe” showed up in Billboard for the first time and was bubbling under at No. 125.

The record bubbled under for another five weeks and got as high as No. 101, and that was the last the Billboard charts saw of the Castaways. But the group’s drummer, Dennis Craswell, started calling himself Denny and wound up behind the kit for the Twin Cities band Crow, which had a No. 19 hit with “Evil Woman Don’t Play Your Games With Me” in early 1970. “Evil Woman” was one of the highlights of my 1970 radio listening although I’ve read many times that the members of Crow were mighty pissed after the folks at Amaret buried Crow’s sound under a lot of added horns.

“Evil Woman” sat at No. 19 for two weeks in January 1970, and the upper portions of the Hot 100 for both of those weeks look like lists I could have made if I had been keeping track of the sounds that came out of the old RCA radio on my nightstand. By that time, Aloysius and the mouse no longer mattered; junior year of high school found me with other concerns, at least one of them quite lovely as she played her violin. Many of the records I heard during the first months of 1970 spoke to that specific concern. Other records, romantic though they might have been, left me with no specific object in mind. Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl” was one of those, and it was No. 20 during the second of the two weeks “Evil Woman” sat at No. 19.

I heard Holman’s record often as it climbed to No. 2, having no idea that it was a cover of Ruby & The Romantics’ version from 1963, which went to No. 27. I also had no idea that during the same weeks when I heard Holman’s plaintive single, there was a girl in Texas a little more than three years younger than I who heard the same record and wondered who would offer to ease her loneliness, and when. She found out, eventually.

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My Russian Fascination

Wednesday, August 6th, 2014

At the top of my reading pile these days is The Zhivago Affair, the tale of how Russian author Boris Pasternak came to write the novel Dr. Zhivago, how he came to have the novel first published in 1957 in Italy (to the absolute dismay and anger of Soviet authorities who wanted it not to be published at all), and how the United States’ CIA used the novel as an anti-Soviet tool.

I’m about halfway through the book, written by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, and I find it fascinating, as I do many books, movies and pieces of music that have any connection with Russia. That fascination has endured for many years, built on a number of things, including (but likely not limited to) watching and reading the news of the Cold War centered on Moscow and Washington during my childhood; playing the many pieces of Russian and Eastern European music that my orchestra director at St. Cloud Tech High School selected for our repertoire; seeing the 1965 film version of Dr. Zhivago not long after it came out; spending six days in 1973 in Moscow and the city that was then called Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg, as it was at its founding in 1703); and learning (and watching as an adult) the arc of Russian history from ambitious empire to Soviet linchpin to chaotic democracy to today’s authoritarian state.

When that fascination was developing, in the late 1960s, I tried to read Pasternak’s novel and found it confusing and not a little boring. For years, as an adult, I had a leather-bound copy of the novel on my shelf and never read it. That copy is gone now; I evidently sold it during the lean years of the late 1990s. And as I read The Zhivago Affair, I’m tempted to try Dr. Zhivago once again. I’ll also likely take another look at the David Lean film. I ordered it several years ago from Netflix but for some reason never finished watching it; what I did see confirmed my long-standing impression of it as sprawling but likely easier to digest than the novel itself.

With the movie, of course, comes the music: Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack, for which he won a deserved Academy Award. During recent late evenings, I’ve been using the expanded version of the soundtrack as background music for The Zhivago Affair just as I once used Tchaikovsky’s music – including, of course, the “1812 Overture” – for a long-abandoned reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (Another book I need to try again, I guess.) Jarre’s themes and motifs echo Russian music; the real thing also comes out of the speakers here frequently, from Tchaikovsky to Borodin to Glinka to a scavenged collection of maybe 300 Russian folk songs and the two-CD set The Best of the Red Army Choir.

The listening is easy. Reading, of course, takes more time (and sometimes much more effort). There are Russian books beyond Tolstoy’s masterpiece that I need to read, including a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment that was signed and dated by my dad in 1948. And I need to accelerate my reading of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, at which I’ve been poking for years. (Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Soviet forced labor camps – and of the various government agencies that sent millions to those camps – is more anecdotal than narrative, so reading bits and pieces at a time is an approach that seems to work.)

So is this fascination of mine with things Russian – especially with the period from, oh, 1900 through 1950 – just a historical interest? I don’t think so. It feels deeper than that, like the grip that Stonehenge has had on me over the years. I think that the soul I carry through this life – or that carries me, more fittingly – knows Russia well. That’s all I can say. Would I like to be able to say more? Well, yes, but the best I can do is guess at this point. And beyond indulging in a little bit of supposition over a beer with friends, I’m better off finishing The Zhivago Affair and then turning my attention to other works that might enlighten me, helping me to know (once again, I think) the history and culture of a place that seems so alien and yet so familiar.

Here’s Maurice Jarre’s “Main Title” from the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago.

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Sitting Near The Bottom

Thursday, July 31st, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, Odd, Pop and I spent some time looking at records that over the years on July 8 had perched at No. 100 in the Billboard Hot 100 and at the bottom of the magazine’s Bubbling Under section. The exercise brought our attention back to the music of B.W. Stevenson, which provided two CDs’ worth of new listening and fodder for a few posts in this space.

I don’t expect anything quite as cool as that to come out of a similar exploration for three charts released on July 31 in the 1960s and 1970s, but we’ll see what we find.

We’ll start in 1961, when the No. 100 record was a lugubrious bit of wedding bell doo-wop by a New York-based R&B group called the Van Dykes. “The Bells Are Ringing” had been released in 1958 on the King label and went nowhere; this release, on the Deluxe label, would climb one more spot, to No. 99, before disappearing. (Earlier in 1961, “Gift Of Love,” a re-release on the Guardian Angel label of a recording that had been released on the Spring label in 1960, had done a little better, climbing to No. 91.)

Parked at No. 120, the bottom of the Bubbling Under section on July 31, 1961, was “Johnny Willow” by Fred Darian, the ludicrous tale of a World War II infantryman who, if I hear the record correctly, helped hold off the enemy while holding a letter to his girl in his left hand and his rifle in his right hand. The record, which accelerates alarmingly to an almost tongue-twisting speed, eventually spent one week in the Hot 100, making it to No. 96. It was Darian’s second low-charting record based on things military; the Detroit native saw his spoken word “Battle of Gettysburg” spend one week at No. 100 in February 1961. (Darian was also a co-writer of “Mr. Custer,” Larry Verne’s No. 1 hit from 1960.)

And we’re off to 1965, when the No. 100 record on July 31 was a single recorded live that in ten weeks would peak at No. 5 (No. 2 R&B): “The ‘In’ Crowd” by the Ramsey Lewis Trio. It was the sole Top Ten hit for the jazz pianist, but he’d put three more records into the Top 40 in the next year: “Hang On Sloopy” went to No. 11, a cover of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” went to No. 29, and “Wade In The Water” went to No. 19. Lewis’ 20th and last record in or near the Hot 100 was “What’s The Name Of This Funk (Spiderman),” which went to No. 69 in 1976.

The Bubbling Under section that July 31 was thirty-five records deep, and sitting at the very bottom of that section was a record by young English singer who in a little bit more than a year would become a television and recording star. “What Are We Going To Do” by David Jones is a lightweight record that to my ears owes a lot to Herman’s Hermits. In a couple of weeks it would move into the Hot 100 and peak at No. 93. Starting in September 1966, Jones would be better known as Davy, and with the other three members of the Monkees, would star in the hit television show and record and release numerous hit records, including three that went to No. 1.

In her first hit record, “Harper Valley P.T.A.” (No. 1 pop and country, 1968), Jeannie C. Riley took on small-town hypocrisy. In 1971, in the last record she had in or near the Hot 100, Riley took on cohabitation, telling her beau in “Good Enough To Be Your Wife” that shacking up wasn’t gonna happen. The record was at No. 100 as July 1971 ended, and it would only move up three more notches before disappearing. On the country chart, however, “Good Enough To Be Your Wife” went to No. 7, the sixth and final record Riley put into the country Top Ten.

The horn band Ides of March had a No. 2 hit in early 1970 with “Vehicle” and kept throwing singles at the wall for the next eighteen months or so, hoping something would stick. Nothing really did, with “Superman,” the immediate follow-up to “Vehicle” doing the best, getting to No. 64. In the last days of July 1971, the band’s “Tie-Dye Princess” was parked at No. 124, smack on the bottom of the Bubbling Under section. It would get up to No. 113, and it was the last time the Ides of March would be in or near the Hot 100. (The single version of “Tie-Dye Princess doesn’t seem to be available at YouTube; you can find the eleven-minute album track here.)

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