Déjà vu

The first Baby Boomer nostalgia boom occurred in the Eighties when, if you had cable, you could find The Addams Family, The Munsters, Donna Reed and My Three Sons, among many others, during primetime – not at hours when only shut-ins and truancy cases might be watching. I ran our VCR ragged taping The Outer Limits and weird shit like Camp Runamuck and Lancelot Link.

The second boom is happening now. We have several new channels dedicated to old shows, a virtual senior center airing mostly programs I don’t care about: hours and hours of black and white Westerns, and seemingly every dopey fantasy sitcom from the sixties. But if you watch the schedules closely, the occasional gem – more weird shit – surfaces.

Like Mack and Myer For Hire, a bargain-basement Abbott and Costello. Pistols and Petticoats, a cross between The Munsters, F Troop, The Wild Bunch and an NRA promotional film. The Lucy Show, where the only male the man-hungry widows Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance ever seem to encounter is the fussy Gale Gordon.

Also on view are shows dating to the Paleolithic Age of television that offer subtexts I didn’t get when I was a kid. Like My Little Margie, with daughter Margie left to protect her 49-year old widowed father from preying women. “After all, he still looks good in his tennis shorts,” muses Margie, as the show takes a weird turn. Or Topper, where the ghostly couple George and Marion Kirby are not only dead and childless, but dedicated lushes.

GET-TV has been running old variety shows, those singing, dancing and comedy shows that hit the wall hard at some point in the seventies and never got up. Reruns of the Judy Garland Show are a reminder that at one time an army of energetic young men made a living leaping about in these shows, mimicking (and mincing) to song lyrics and always smiling. The heyday of male variety show dancers is long gone.

I’m also reminded of how the older Judy Garland scared me. Big head, spindly body, like Dorothy Gale in a funhouse mirror. Her shaky singing, like she was going to burst into tears at any minute. Plus, I knew, because I read The Daily News and WNEW-AM was always on in the kitchen, that she kept overdosing or trying to cut her wrists. Scary adult stuff.

Then there was a rerun of The Merv Griffin Show, with Xavier Cugat and Charo. The unctuous Griffin leans in close to Cugat (whom he calls “Coogie”), who explains there’s nothing wrong with a 66-year old (like Coogie) marrying a 21-year old (like Charo). This was another weird adult thing. I was 12, had some idea about sex and couldn’t get my head around the idea of Coogie and Charo in bed. Same with Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and Hayley Mills and that old British fart she married. My parents were born 12 years apart and I could accept that, but the rest confused me to no end.

Thank God Arthur Treacher, the ancient, chain-smoking Sphinx sitting at the end of Merv’s couch, didn’t marry some 20 year old.

Plugged in: 1968

In 1968 I had a transistor radio to listen to when delivering papers or shooting baskets, and one of my parents’ discarded kitchen radios in my bachelor pad bedroom for kicking back with the ladies (whom I lured upstairs with promises of showing off my collection of Doc Savage paperbacks).

On Tuesday afternoon, Dan Ingram would reveal the week’s new standings before Cousin Brucie would do a more formal countdown Tuesday evening. Yes, I used “Cousin Brucie” and “formal” in the same sentence. On Wednesday I turned to WMCA for its weekly survey, always a broader playlist than ABC. Each Thursday, I’d take a sheet of notebook paper and labor over my own personal Top 20.

I was totally plugged in as radio got radically eclectic in 1968; here are some of the reasons why:

Words

The Beatlemania tsunami that swept the charts in early ’64 sunk two musical styles. One was surf, the other instrumentals. Eight instrumentals made the Billboard Top 100 for the year 1963. Then, between 1964 and 1967, only seven instrumentals charted among the total of 400 top songs for those collective four years. But 1968 marked a comeback, with five in the year’s Top 100 – heck, five in the top 30 – Love Is Blue (#1 for five weeks!); Grazing in the Grass; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I overlook the grunting chorus and count it as an instrumental); The Horse; and Classical Gas. It sparked a brief trend: in 1969, five instrumentals charted in the Top 100 for the year; the following year, the number dropped to one.

Born To Be Mild

Easy listening songs always lurked on the outskirts of the Top 40. Sinatra always had a presence as Strangers In The Night went to #1 in ‘66, and Summer Wind and It Was A Very Good Year made the Top 40. The Beatles’ early spell on the charts was broken when Louis Armstrong’s Hello Dolly, and later Dean Martin’s Everybody Loves Somebody, both inexplicably went to number one. In 1968, however, Love Is Blue, Honey and This Guy’s in Love With You all finished in the Top 10 for the year and collectively spent 13 weeks at number one. The Mills Brothers, missing in action since the Eisenhower administration, returned to the Top 20 with Cab Driver. For the year, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 had two records in the Top 100, while Little Green Apples, Valley of the Dolls and Those Were the Days finished in the Top 20. As an easy listening instrumental, Love Is Blue, with its harpsichord and oboe, had to be the most unlikely hit record of the decade.

Both Sides Now

This was the year of the Great FM Crossover. White Room coming on the radio right after Chewy, Chewy? It happened that November when they were both in the Top 10. Hello I Love You, Fire, Born To Be Wild, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Magic Carpet Ride, Sunshine of Your Love, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Hush and You Keep Me Hangin’ On were all “heavy rockers” that made it to the Top 100 for the year. Others that didn’t finish in the Top 100, but did all right anyway included All Along the Watchtower (which charted as high as #20), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (#30), Time Has Come Today (#11), Suzie Q (#11), Piece of My Heart (#13) and Summertime Blues (#14). Even the faux psychedelia of Just Dropped In went to #5.

There Was A Time

Hey Jude (#1 for nearly the entire autumn of ‘68) and MacArthur Park (which hit #2 that summer) both clocked in at more than seven minutes. You have to go back to 1965, with Like A Rolling Stone and You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, to find two records that ran over four minutes that did as well. How did AM stations, where every second was tightly orchestrated – song, jingle, DJ banter, jingle, ad, ad, ad, DJ banter, song – cope with the possible loss of revenue that came with playing music that sucked up time usually reserved for three or four commercials? WABC shaved precious seconds off both songs by slightly speeding them up – standard practice for them – and by fading them out early. On the flip side were the records which had to be cut from their long album versions to make them radio ready: Time Has Come Today, Suzie Q and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (from nearly 20 minutes to three).

The End of Our Road

Not an example of the eclecticism of ’68, but an observation. I’m always amazed at how quickly some bands lose their touch, when they turn the handle and suddenly there’s only a trickle where it once gushed. There were three prime examples in 1968. The Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and Stones combined in 1967. They hit #3 with Valleri in the spring of ’68 and were done. The Association couldn’t come up with a follow-up hit to Never My Love and hit the wall. Like the Monkees, their reliance on outside songwriters wasn’t sustainable to any long-term success. (BTW, they turned down MacArthur Park). The beloved Rascals, who only a year ago were being compared with the Beatles (at least by me), had a 1968 #1 hit with People Got To Be Free (for five weeks), while A Beautiful Morning went to #3. Bickering, leading to Eddie and Gene leaving the band, left them stranded, and they never returned to the Top 20.

The Vanishing Point on the Edge of Town

Somewhere along the line, Bruce Springsteen must have seen Vanishing Point, the 1971 movie about a guy drifting through life’s disappointments who finds consolation – maybe even discovers his life’s work – driving a supercharged Dodge Challenger through the mountains and deserts from Denver to San Francisco.

(I’d like to think Bruce caught the flick at that long-gone drive-in by the Driscoll Bridge where the screen faced the Garden State Parkway. Catching a few seconds of some film from a speeding car was always a highlight of the drive home from the Shore).

After the cinematic, operatic, Wagnerian – pick one or all three – Born To Run landed him on the covers of Newsweek and Time, Springsteen spent more than two years waiting out a lawsuit forbidding him from entering a recording studio, a forced retirement that left him to write the Darkness on the Edge of Town album; hits for other artists – Because the Night, Fever and Fire; and several dozen other songs that he and the E Street Band later recorded, then discarded. All in all, a remarkable output.

It’s the Darkness song at the end of Side 1 that brings Vanishing Point to mind. The film and the song, Racing In the Street, are concerned with finish lines, literal and existential, and the connection only came to me when TCM showed Vanishing Point around the same time I was listening to the Darkness on the Edge of Town CD collection.

The narrator of Racing in the Street finds some spending cash, local notoriety and a girl racing like-minded motorheads on summer nights. By the song’s end, he’s three years older, but no wiser, still running cars while his girl sits at home alone wondering just how and when her life slipped by. All to the accompaniment of autumnal, elegiac keyboards that make the characters’ inability to fulfill the promises of youth feel like a longing that never goes away.

The driver in Vanishing Point, Kowalski, a Vietnam vet, has lost his job on the police force and his girl. Juiced on amphetamines, he ignores speed limits and the highway patrol’s attempts to pull him over. Leaving Denver in the early hours, his focus is only on getting the car to San Francisco by 3 p.m. to win a bet. Even a “naked girl on a motorcycle,” as she’s listed in the credits, can’t move him.

A vanishing point is the spot where the outside lines of the highway seemingly converge at the horizon. An illusion, to be sure, and no matter how hard you push or how fast you go, the vanishing point is always out of reach. Kowalski meets his personal vanishing point when the police set up a wall of bulldozers on the highway, and rather than stopping, he hits the accelerator, crashes into the barricade and goes up in a ball of flame. In Racing in the Street, the narrator keeps fumbling his way to a finish line he’ll never reach. His girl, on the other hand, vanishes a little more each day.

In my last post, I listed Racing in the Street as the best song of 1978. Its maturity is amazing to this day, and I’m not even getting into how its lyrics celebrate summer and acknowledge Motown’s Dancing in the Streets.

Early on, Springsteen got saddled with the “New Dylan” label, but while Dylan wrote often-inscrutable lyrics about personal relationships. Bruce was writing short stories about people trying to reconcile their past with the future. A few weeks after Darkness came out, Dylan’s album Street Legal hit the stores. The title refers to a car that is roadworthy – most cars used for racing are just street-legal enough to get from a garage to where the next race is. Maybe it was a comment on Dylan’s durability versus that of the new kid. Maybe not. But in this case, the student took the teacher to school.

It’s a generational thing, the radio

The audience for pop music and, by connection – at least at one time – AM radio, seems to run in cycles that last maybe five years or so. My time, when pop meant the most to me and my radio, ran from 1964 to 1969, bursting out of the gate with I Want to Hold Your Hand, ending with the embarrassing Sugar Sugar.

By 1978, pop had moved on to a generation still in grade school while I was graduating college. It made for a rough ride if you were trapped in a car with only an AM radio, or hanging in a bar with a hit-bound jukebox as a soundtrack. It was an endless loop of Blue Bayou and white people neutering  Motown – anybody up for Rita Coolidge’s The Way You Do The Things You Do? I didn’t think so. You Light Up My Life. Andy Gibb. Chuck Mangione. Eric Clapton, light years from Cream, with the dreary Wonderful Tonight. Copacabana. The Stars War Theme. The Wiz. Grease. Saturday Night Fever.

Thankfully, as you get older your horizons widen, as do your options. Albums and FM radio become the coin of the realm. And while regular radio was no place to seek refuge, if you looked hard enough, or were interested enough, 1978 was a pretty decent year. Looking back with 40 years of hindsight, this was a hip Hackensackian’s top 40 for 1978.

1.     Racing in the Streets (Bruce Springsteen)

2.     Shot By Both Sides (Magazine)

3.     Because the Night (Patti Smith)

4.     Miss You (Rolling Stones)

5.     Number One (Rutles)

6.     Public Image (Public Image Ltd)

7.     Ca Plane Pour Moi (Plastic Bertrand)

8.     I Need to Know (Tom Petty)

9.     Pump It Up (Elvis Costello)

10.  Jocko Homo (Devo)

11.  Senor (Bob Dylan)

12.  Take Me To The River (Talking Heads)

13.  Disco Inferno (Trammps)

14.  Lawyers Guns and Money (Warren Zevon)

15.  On the Air (Peter Gabriel)

16.  Badlands (Bruce Springsteen)

17.  Roxanne (Police)

18.  Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (Santa Esmeralda)

19.  Stay/The Load Out (Jackson Browne)

20.  Every 1s A Winner (Hot Chocolate)

21.  I Wanna Be Sedated (Ramones)

22.  And So It Goes (Nick Lowe)

23.  The Big Country (Talking Heads)

24.  Navvy (Pere Ubu)

25.  David Watts (Jam)

26.  Good Times Roll (Cars)

27.  Look Out For My Love (Neil Young)

28.  Breakdown (Tom Petty)

29.  Hanging on the Telephone (Blondie)

30.  Punky Reggae Party (Bob Marley)

31.  Running On Empty (Jackson Browne)

32.  Prove It All Night (Bruce Springsteen)

33.  One Nation Under A Groove (Funkadelic)

34.  Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)

35.  Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty)

36.  Love Is Like Oxygen (Sweet)

37.  Take Me I’m Yours (Squeeze)

38.  Wavelength (Van Morrison)

39.  FM (Steely Dan)

40.  Walk And Don’t Look Back (Peter Tosh)