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.