Origin stories

With mythologies so pervasive, every reader of a Superman or Batman comic book started at the same point of common knowledge, like beginning each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance. 

Everyone could recite Superman’s backstory: Krypton. Explosion. Rocketship. Ma and Pa Kent. Clark Kent. Metropolis. Daily Planet. Glasses. Lois and Jimmy. Lex Luthor. Same with Batman. Parents murdered. Rigorous training. Wayne Manor. Gotham City. Batmobile. Robin. Joker. 

It made for easy entry and helping matters more was that Superman and Batman, all DC Comics for that matter, were not serialized. Each issue was self-contained, every first page a new day for the characters. 

When I bought my first Marvel Comics off the newsstand in late 1964 (Avengers #10 and X-Men #8), the Marvel Age of Comics -- as proclaimed by Stan Lee -- was only in its third year, having started with Fantastic Four #1 in November, 1961. 

What made Marvel different, mostly, from the competition, but the key difference was that Marvel’s books were breathlessly plotted so that each issue built upon the preceding issue. There were connections between the characters and sometimes footnotes, annotating events that might have happened last month or two years ago. 

Unless you were in at the very beginning, you had to piece together the origins and histories of the characters. It was uncharted territory. As a new recruit, I needed a map, namely back issues. 

Once a comic book reached its month-long shelf life at Charlie Fein’s candy store, it mysteriously disappeared, seemingly gone forever. So I began following up on rumors of other kids in the neighborhood who supposedly had older Marvels that maybe I could trade other comics for, buy (as cheaply as possible) or borrow just to read. 

I kept a mental spreadsheet of who owned what. Jimmy, over on Willow Street, and Teddy on Pine Street had a few old Marvels. Pat on Spring Valley Avenue had issues of Spider-Man going back to #1 that he inherited from a cousin. Billy, a couple of houses up the street from me, owned Marvel Tales #1, which reprinted the origins of six Marvel heroes. I don’t think any of them cared as much as I did, but they wouldn’t budge. 

A new kid in my grade named Steve came over one day and brought some of his comic books. His parents were divorced and his mother, much younger and blonder than anyone else’s mom, dropped him off and met my father to assure her an adult would be present; he was apparently so overcome by Steve’s mom that as she drove away, he let out a wolf whistle that could be heard blocks away. Steve soon moved away. 

There was Richie on Elm Street and Billy on Fairmount Avenue, both a year older than me and owners of impressive comic collections. Billy had an older sister who was a Little Miss America finalist at Palisades Park. She pretty much ignored us. Richie talked back to his mother constantly. Acquaintances forged more out of necessity than anything, I didn’t care much for either of them. 

But I kept following leads. My father took me and my sister to Wehman Brothers, a storefront on Main Street that sold new and used books, old magazines and comic books. A combination hoarder’s paradise and firetrap, lorded over by a cigar-smoking old school book dealer, we waded through piles of well-worn comic books. Archie. Archie’s Pals ‘n Gals. Archie’s Joke Book. Archie and Me. Little Archie. Archie’s Mad House. Life with Archie. At least my sister was happy. 

Louie the Barber, who always had some beat-up old war comics along with the newspapers and Life magazines for his customers to read while waiting, let me go through his garage, a graveyard of stacked newspapers. It was a final, desperate effort. After an hour of digging around, all I had to show for it was newsprint-dirtied hands. And a couple of beat-up old war comics.

 

The revolution will be televised 

Fast-forwarding through a VHS tape from 1987, I came across an accidentally taped episode of the syndicated Top 40 show Solid Gold, featuring the soft-rock dream team of Amy Grant and Peter Cetera. Amy Grant was crossing over from Contemporary Christian music (as Billboard calls it) and Peter Cetera was staking a claim as a solo artist after fronting the rock band Chicago since the early 70s. We’re not talking Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell here. The song is a drippy ballad, Cetera’s hair blow-dried to tousled perfection as he looks into Grant’s eyes selling the lyrics. 

Among many, Cetera’s band Chicago was a sellout from the start. Underground bands weren’t supposed to hit the top 10 with the depressing regularity that Chicago did – it’s something that undid the Doors’ reputation for some – and it was particularly loathsome for Chicago after it included this note on its second album: “We dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. And the revolution in all of its forms." A paper revolutionary at best, it’s no surprise that Cetera wound up a preening pop star. Who knows where Jim Morrison might have landed if he’d lived, someone who once allowed himself to be profiled by 16 Magazine? 

Cetera and Grant’s performance on Solid Gold was followed by this commercial for Jordache Basics:

If you’re half-asleep on a Saturday afternoon with Solid Gold droning on in the background, you’re now awake, aware that scenes of rioting, with plumes of tear gas and a burning American flag have just flashed before you, framed between scenes of whiny adolescents. The girl wearing the t-shirt with the peace symbol only confuses things further as if to say, “Yes, we’ve just commoditized the past and trivialized the opposition to an immoral war and a military draft. But hey, that revolution thing was cool, right?” 

One other symbol of the counterculture that seems to have not so much lost its profile as misplaced it, is the raised fist. Used in leftist social movements for more than 150 years as an anti-fascist gesture, America took notice when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during their medal ceremony at the 1986 Olympics. 

Although for Smith and Carlos, the fists were a “human rights salute,” it got adopted by the Black Panthers as its logo, representing black power. Later, in blaxploitation movies, you’d see Bernie Casey walking through the ‘hood casually greeting other black men with a raised clenched fist. You saw it often following George Floyd’s murder. Unity, strength, resistance. 

Then, on Jan. 6 news cameras caught the despicable Josh Hawley awkwardly flashing a raised fist to the horde gathering in front of the Capitol, an image that he quickly turned into a fundraiser, putting it on coffee mugs that sold on his website. Someone on Hawley’s staff surely used the word “iconic” in selling him the idea. 

It commemorates when a politician with a $200 haircut urged on a bloodthirsty mob dressed for a tailgate party outside the Ninth Circle of Hell, the one Dante reserved for Treachery, to fight the power. Maybe he would have seemed more believable if he ditched the expensive suit and wore Jordache Basics.

September songs, part five

This entry covers the top ten songs of September 1968, based on a cumulative ranking of each song that hit the top ten that month (10 points for a #1 ranking, 9 points for #2, etc.). 

SEPTEMBER 1968

1. PEOPLE GOT TO BE FREE – Rascals
2. HARPER VALLEY PTA – Jeannie C. Riley
3. LIGHT MY FIRE – Jose Feliciano
4. 1, 2, 3 RED LIGHT – 1910 Fruitgum Company
5. BORN TO BE WILD – Steppenwolf
6. HEY JUDE – Beatles
7. HUSH – Deep Purple
8. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT – Aretha Franklin
9. FOOL ON THE HILL – Sergio Mendes and Brasil ‘66
10. HELLO I LOVE YOU – Doors 

There was something for everyone on the charts in 1968. Don’t care for the samba of Fool On the Hill when it came on the radio? Sit tight and chances are Deep Purple’s Hush would follow right after it. If you’re someone who needs to categorize into genres, the September top ten offers uplifting blue-eyed soul, a country story-song, flowing easy listening, horny pre-teen bubblegum and biker rock, and that’s just the first five songs. Not to mention three cover versions as well.

Hey Jude entered the charts on Sept. 14 at #10, then settled into the top spot for nine weeks – from the end of summer to Thanksgiving. This was a record with a buzz: the Beatles’ first release on their own label, Apple Records; more than seven minutes long (in the context of 1968, 15 seconds less than MacArthur Park); and word that during the long fadeout Paul utters either “bloody hell” or “fucking hell” when he hits a bum note on the piano. (With headphones, you can only make out “hell”). 

This was the first year that albums outsold singles, 192 million to 187 million, leaving record companies to release singles that did little on the charts since everybody bought the album. For this month, here’s what could be found on Billboard’s Hot 100: Deep Purple’s Hush, Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, the Who’s Magic Bus, Moody Blues’ Tuesday Afternoon, the Stones’ Street Fighting Man, Chamber Brothers’ Time Has Come Today, Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Big Brother’s Piece of My Heart, Vanilla Fudge’s You Keep Me Hangin’ On and Jimi Hendrix’ All Along the Watchtower. If you play the longer album versions of Iron Butterfly and the Chambers Brothers, that’s a solid two hours of programming on any classic rock station. 

Maybe the only time the producers of Mad Men slipped up with the soundtrack was in an episode that took place in 1968. Don Draper and few others from the agency visit a hip Hollywood party where Don gets zonked smoking hash and the music playing during the party is … Harper Valley PTA? Unless, of course, the idea was to draw a subtle parallel between the private lives of the employees of Cooper Sterling and the citizens of Harper Valley.

September songs, part four

This entry covers the top ten songs of September 1967, based on a cumulative ranking of each song that hit the top ten that month (10 points for a #1 ranking, 9 points for #2, etc.). 

SEPTEMBER 1967

1. ODE TO BILLIE JOE – Bobbi Gentry
2. REFLECTIONS – Supremes
3. COME BACK WHEN YOU GROW UP – Bobby Vee
4. THE LETTER – Box Tops
5. BABY I LOVE YOU – Aretha Franklin
6. APPLES, PEACHES, PUMPKIN PIE – Jay & the Techniques
7. ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE – Beatles
8. YOU’RE MY EVERYTHING – Temptations
9. NEVER MY LOVE – Association
10. LIGHT MY FIRE – Doors 

The soundtrack to the Summer of Love was relatively brief, starting with Sgt. Pepper in June, moving on to the singles chart with “San Francisco” and “White Rabbit” in July and ending with “All You Need Is Love” hitting the #1 spot in mid-August. While a number of groups spent the summer plotting their own Pepper statement, the records that filled the gap were mostly anything but journeys to the center of the mind. 

“Ode to Billie Joe” still feels unique, Americana before there was a name for it. Summer in Mississippi, nowhere to hide from the heat and humidity, and nowhere to hide secrets either. Its rise was impressive, entering the charts on August 5 at #71, jumping to #21 the following week, then #7 before taking the #1 spot for four weeks. 

Motown was in a slump this summer, with only Stevie Wonder’s raw (and very un-Motown like) “I Was Made to Love Her” hitting the top ten. “Reflections” helped redeem the quarter for Motown, after its producers tagged on that electronic whooping noise to accompany the high school sophomore metaphors (“Through the mirror of my mind” and “As I peer through the window of lost time”). “Reflections” rose up Billboard’s ranks in a rush, #61, #20, #8, then the #2 spot for three weeks behind “Billie Joe.” 

Trading horns for strings and Aretha for Diana, “Baby I Love You” was Southern soul, the antithesis of Motown. Recorded during the same session as “Chain of Fools,” the funky guitar on “Baby” may be the work of Joe South, who would have a couple of hits later with “Walk A Mile In My Shoes” and “Games People Play.” 

There wasn’t anything necessarily psychedelic about “Light My Fire,” save the circular keyboard riff and the extended instrumental break on the album, edited down to just a few notes for the single. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, the single still packs a punch, although its overall effect has been weakened from decades of overplay on rock radio and that the phrase “light my fire” has been reduced to tacky lounge lizard innuendo. 

 September songs, part three 

The look at the hits of September from 1964 to 1968 continues. 

SEPTEMBER 1966

1. YOU CAN’T HURRY LOVE – Supremes
2. SUNSHINE SUPERMAN – Donovan
3. YELLOW SUBMARINE – Beatles
4. SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER – Happenings
5. CHERISH – Association
6. SUMMER IN THE CITY – Lovin’ Spoonful
7. BUS STOP – Hollies
8. LAND OF A 1,000 DANCES – Wilson Pickett
9. SUNNY – Bobby Hebb
10. WORKIN’ IN A COAL MINE – Lee Dorsey 

Of the September songs from 1964 to 1968, this year feels like the weakest. The number one record, “You Can’t Hurry Love,” doesn’t seem all that special today, it’s best feature being its trademark Motown bass line. Otherwise, it’s not unlike the faceless and formulaic “I Hear A Symphony” and “My World Is Empty,” two other Supremes’ songs from around the same time. 

“Summer in the City” is the gem of this top ten, on its way down after sitting at #1 for three weeks in August. Wikipedia says it was released on July 4, 1966, but that seems doubtful. Fittingly, the summer of 1966 was brutal on the East Coast, as New York City recorded a mean daily temperature of 90.3 degrees for July, with a high of 101. The temperature hit 100 four times that summer, still the second-hottest on record. In those golden years before air conditioning became ubiquitous, 2,250 deaths were attributed to the heatwave. 

There’s much to like about “Summer in the City”: The crashing immediacy of John Sebastian’s voice coming out of the blocks as soon as the needle hits the groove. The key line “But at night it’s a different world.” The reference to the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” in the lyrics. The jazzy piano riff that forms the bridge and plays over the sound of car horns and jackhammers. The racket of guitars and drums – like a summer thunderstorm – before the fadeout. 

“Summer in the City” was the Spoonful’s only number one record, and pretty much their swan song. That May, two members of the band were arrested in California for marijuana possession. Faced with jail and, in the case of Canadian guitarist Zal Yanovsky, deportation, they were coerced into giving the police the name of their source, something nobody did back then. Underground newspapers vilified them, theatres wouldn’t book them and their career was essentially over. 

“Workin’ in a Coal Mine” was mostly a complaint about having to wake up early each morning., leaving the singer exhausted by the time the weekend rolled around. One year later, the Bee Gees would score a Top 20 hit with “New York Mining Disaster, 1941,” about the last moments of a group of miners after the mineshaft they’re working has fallen down around them. Getting up before 5 a.m. didn't seem so bad compared to that.

 

September songs, part two 

Moving forward with the Top 40 music of September 1964 through 1968: 

SEPTEMBER 1965

1.  HELP – Beatles
2.  LIKE A ROLLING STONE – Bob Dylan
3. EVE OF DESTRUCTION – Barry McGuire
4.  YOU WERE ON MY MIND – We Five
5.  CALIFORNIA GIRLS – Beach Boys
6.  HANG ON SLOOPY – McCoys
7.  CATCH US IF YOU CAN – Dave Clark Five
8.  UNCHAINED MELODY – Righteous Brothers
9.  THE IN CROWD – Ramsey Lewis Trio
10.  I GOT YOU BABE – Sonny & Cher 

This was a burst of unprecedented creativity. The evolution of lyrics and abstract concepts, compared to one year ago, is mind-boggling. 

In twelve months, we’ve moved from “I like bread and butter/I like toast and jam” to the line often trotted out to represent the Beatles’ growth as artists, “My independence seems to vanish in the haze.”

The words to “Hang On Sloopy” weren’t exactly Cole Porter, and there always has to be some silliness on the charts, but “Like A Rolling Stone” was, to an 11-year old listening to the radio, impenetrable, a rhyming alphabet soup that you couldn’t stick a spoon in. But it sure sounded cool. 

“Eve of Destruction” was too specific to 1965 to age well, but its lyrics beamed a light of global awareness to kids who weren’t exposed to the news much, save the hourly three-minute headline broadcasts on Top 40 radio. (And taking the song’s title literally, the Doomsday Clock read 11:48 in 1965. Today it’s at 11:58).

Taking in this sudden literary curriculum was like discovering the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man on the newsstands after reading Superman and Jimmy Olsen through much of your childhood. 

The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of the “The In Crowd” was the epitome of cool and the second popular jazz number to make the Billboard Top Ten, preceded the year before by “The Girl From Ipanema” at #5. Before that, Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” – two years before he scored A Charlie Brown Christmas – went to #22 in 1963, and “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck hit #25 in 1961. “The In Crowd” album won Lewis, who died earlier this month, the 1965 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance. 

Finally, there’s the troubled “California Girls,” the first 45 I ever bought. Brian Wilson wrote the music at his piano, coming down off his first acid trip and playing over-and-over the same four notes that would eventually form the foundation for “California Girls.” 

It is a record that has had to overcome 1) Mike Love’s ogling lyrics; 2) an embarrassing 1985 cover and accompanying video by the clownish David Lee Roth; and 3) deejays talking over the song’s unrelated-yet-connected 22-second instrumental introduction -- almost an overture -- that set the stage for Pet Sounds, which would come out the following year. 

The brief introduction was unlike anything heard before in a pop song and Wilson later said, “I'm still really proud of that. It has a classical feel.” It also served notice that things were changing and that many of the old rules about making records were quickly falling away.  

 

September songs, part one 

Maybe because it was viewed through the carefree lens of those lazy, hazy, crazy days of soda and pretzels and beer, I always had it in my head that the Top 40s of June, July and August, 1964 to 1968 – the five greatest years of pop music – were somehow better, more magical, than any other time of the year. (And I should add that while soda or pretzels were always welcome, I never touched a beer during those five years). 

There are plenty of fantastic summer songs during that time: “Light My Fire,” “I Get Around,” “Satisfaction,” “Respect.” But as summer began its inevitable creep toward autumn, there’s a lot to be said about the music that charted during September. Based on a cumulative ranking of each song that hit the top ten in September 1964 (10 points for a #1 ranking, 9 points for #2, etc.) is this list: 

1. HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN – Animals
2. WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO – Supremes
3. BREAD AND BUTTER – Newbeats
4. EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY – Dean Martin
5. LITTLE GTO – Ronnie and the Daytonas
6. OH PRETTY WOMAN – Roy Orbison
7. BECAUSE – Dave Clark Five
8. REMEMBER (Walkin’ in the Sand) – Shangri-Las
9. C’MON AND SWIM – Bobby Freeman
10. DO WAH DIDDY – Manfred Mann 

Any exercise like this unearths some bummers, but with one or two exceptions, overall this ain’t all that bad.

The Animals were #1 for three weeks that month, before giving way to Roy Orbison. A rearranged traditional folk song about a New Orleans brothel, “House of the Rising Sun” was recorded by Lead Belly, Bob Dylan and Andy Griffith (!), among many others, before the Animals. 

The Animals' version defied Top 40 conventions because it didn't have a chorus, only an extended organ break by keyboardist Alan Price. Keep that name in mind. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it takes the songwriting credit. In a Spinal Tap moment, the arranging credit went only to Price. There wasn’t enough room to list all five band members on the record label, and since Alan Price was first alphabetically – well yeah, if you’re one of the few who list alphabetically by first name – he received all the royalties. Needless to say, it was an oversight that caused a lot of tension within the band. 

Throughout the 60s, there were records whose rise to the top seemed completely propelled by adults buying 45s. Like “Strangers in the Night,” “Cab Driver” and “Everybody Loves Somebody,” which went to #1 for a week in early August, knocking “A Hard Day’s Night” off the throne. It was still in the top ten in September. Dino took this one literally to the grave: “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime” is inscribed on his burial vault. 

“Remember” was the first in a modest string of moody, psychodramas for the street-tough yet vulnerable Shangri-Las, four teenagers from Queens. A good part of their look and overall vibe was attitude, and the pre-teen me would watch them on Clay Cole and be reminded of the high school girls you’d see shopping for make-up at Woolworth’s on Saturday, chewing gum and wearing their boyfriend’s blue and gold letter jackets. 

September ’65 next.

 

The Perfect Day: August 28, 1964

It’s cool for August on Friday, August 28, 1964, with a high of 79 degrees, and in the low sixties overnight. Earlier in the week, Lyndon Johnson was named the Democrat’s nominee for the November election during the convention held in Atlantic City, as the long shadow of John Kennedy, murdered only ten months earlier, hangs over the week’s proceedings.

We’re living in what could best be called interim housing, a massive brick fortress of an apartment building while my parents saved enough to buy a house – which would happen it just another year’s time.

But right now, it’s time for 24 hours of television.

The morning is the usual mix of cartoons, game shows and Gale Storm and Topper reruns. We make time for Birthday House at 9 a.m. on NBC, hosted by Paul Tripp, a longtime children’s TV host (a job title nobody can claim anymore). One of his IMDB credits is for the movie, "The Christmas That Almost Wasn't," an abysmal affair that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 once featured. Birthday House was on five days a week for an hour, live, leaving its cast to scratch around for material, like time spent each show saying good morning to a caged parakeet and making a boom microphone (Mike) a character (greeted with the song, “Hi Mike, Hi Mike, I like to say, Hi Mike”).

More live TV at 12:30 with Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane. At 2:00, it’s Loretta Young, always worth watching for the show’s opening as Loretta sweeps into the room, a different gown everyday trailing her entrance.

At 4:00 p.m., it’s time for Hall of Fun on Channel 5. Uncle Fred Hall’s most memorable bit was having the viewers mail in drawings of five random lines, which Uncle Fred would turn into whatever the kid requested: a lion, a car, a lollipop. It was endlessly fascinating to watch and hear the squeak of Uncle Fred’s marker on the easel.

On Channel 11 at 6:30, we’re treated to two episodes of a 1953 serial, “Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders,” billed at the time as “Thrill a minute action in the frozen north.” The female lead was a mostly unknown actress named Susan Morrow, the older sister of Judith Exner, who claimed to be the mistress of both Mob boss Sam Giancana and John Kennedy.

We’re into prime time now. I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster is on Channel 7 at 7 p.m., with John Astin and Marty Ingels. At 7:30 on Channel 2, it’s time for The Great Adventure, an ambitious dramatic anthology series based on events in U.S. history. Tonight, Leif Erickson stars as President Grover Cleveland in an episode about his mysterious public disappearance for six days in 1893. (He had a malignant tumor on the roof of his month, which was removed in secrecy by a team of doctors aboard a yacht anchored off Manhattan). And we recall that Grover Cleveland was a character in Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and Indians,” played by Pat McCormick.

At 8:30, we go to Channel 7 and Burke’s Law, with the usual line-up of Hollywood guest stars whose fame was on the fade: Joan Blondell, Betty Hutton, Buster Keaton and Giselle McKenzie. The TV Guide tells us that the script is by Harlan Ellison, a writing machine and professional maverick who seemed to have written thousands of scripts, novellas, short stories and critical columns. (He wrote the only Star Trek episode that matters, “The City On the Edge of Forever,” as the future fate of the world hinges on Captain Kirk being held back to helplessly watch as Joan Collins is struck by a car and killed while crossing the street; Shatner’s restrained “Let’s get the hell out of here” was powerful and shocking for its use of a word that you just didn't hear on television back then).

At 10, there’s a boxing match between Willie Pastrano, 28, and Bobo Olson, 36, on Channel 7. The much younger Pastrano knocks out Bobo two minutes into the first round. How will ABC fill out the rest of the hour?

The rest of the night is mostly old movies (“Brain From Plant Arous” on Million Dollar Movie, starring Mr. Shirley Temple, John Agar) and Steve Allen’s syndicated variety show on Channel 11 with guests Jim Backus (and wife, Henny), Jayne Mansfield, Connie Stevens and Joe E. Lewis – no need for having a parakeet on camera to kill time. 

 

Marathon Man 

Working my way through a box of old VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s, many of them unlabeled, is a never-ending series of Christmas mornings opening wrapped gifts, each cassette holding another surprise. So far, they’ve mostly indicated what a sucker I was for those Boomer TV marathons the cable channels used to run. I’ve fast-forwarded my way already through hours and hours of The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, The Adventures of Superman, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the Three Stooges – all of which looks an awful lot like my current DVR viewing habits. 

But they’re also a reminder that there was time when cable seemed to care a lot more about programming than it does today with its endless recycling of ancient TV Westerns and half-day blocks of infomercials. TBS aired its Wild, Wild West and U.N.C.L.E. marathons with new commentary from Robert Conrad and Robert Vaughan. Even the not-so-super superstation WWOR had Jack Larsen host its Superman marathon. The Stooges episodes I taped more than 30 years ago off AMC are still shown on the channel, but often edited down to six minutes from their original twenty, plus more commercials to pad things out to a crisp 15 minutes. 

Because blank VHS tapes were somewhat costly, we did a lot of re-recording over programs we’d already watched. Something I’m hoping to uncover is what’s known in painting as pentimento – I had to look it up – the “presence or emergence of earlier images, forms or strokes that have been painted over.” Maybe a Superman episode will end abruptly and some exotic, rarely seen movie or a New York Giants football game will appear. So far, I’ve only uncovered a hidden last hour of the forgettable Schwarzenegger film “The Running Man” and a Scooby Doo cartoon. 

Recognizing the more ephemeral aspects of taped television, I find myself now fast-forwarding through the shows and watching the commercials. Hair Club for Men. Tote bags that come with a subscription to Time magazine. The Pathmark guy. All of which leads me to a videotape existential crisis. Am I the last person to have these fleeting moments of airtime in my possession and now have the responsibility for the preservation and stewardship of commercials for Carvel’s Fudgie the Whale and Slim Whitman’s “All My Best” album? I almost don’t want to check YouTube to see if they exist in perpetuity there. 

OK, I checked. They’re both on YouTube. I’m off the hook.

 

The Marie Kondo blues 

I began haunting newsstands when I was ten or eleven, spending my allowance on comic books, monster magazines or MAD before moving on in my teens to sports and music magazines, and National Lampoon. Oh, the fun of spending an afternoon or evening with a new mag. When I got comfortable with eBay, I began searching out more. My first dip into online bidding was a bundle of Hit Parader magazines from the 60s. It was easy and I was hooked; as my mania went unchecked, so did the clutter. 

Now, in anticipation of a downsizing that seems inevitable, I’ve gone on a Marie Kondo kick, looking to rid myself of the things that no longer bring joy – stuff in the attic that had become, literally and otherwise, a weight hanging over my head. 

For years I had a subscription to Goldmine, a thick biweekly publication for record collectors. What I thought were about twenty or so copies in the attic turned out to be closer to 75. I spent the better part of an afternoon going through them and discovered that what was entertaining and relevant 30 years ago today felt marginally interesting, but mostly obsolete and musty. 

Witness the countless letters to the editor revealing the paranoia and suspicion record collectors back then felt about those new-fangled CDs. Questions about their shelf-life (“Won’t the metal start to deteriorate with time?”) and production sources (“Why does my original Little Richard’s Greatest Hits album have noticeable differences when compared with the CD?”). These were questions that went on for years in Goldmine. That and a long running debate regarding the urban legend that if you drew a circle around the edge of a CD with a green marker it would sound better. 

Goldmines aside, another box in the attic held something like 50 issues of The Coffin Corner, a newsletter of original research dedicated to the history of pro football. Seemed like a good buy at the time, but too many of the articles were about subjects I could care less about (“The 1927 Pottstown Maroons: A Closer Look.”) Today you can find similar material – better written and researched – online. 

No doubt, The Coffin Corners would have been of some interest to somebody, but I was resigned to let them go. The entire load, Goldmines included, ended up in recycling. But as I dumped them into the bin, I kept hoping someone would walk over and offer to take all this stuff off my hands and put it in the trunk of his car. 

Next up: VHS tapes, and lots of ‘em.

 Radio roulette 

When I got my first transistor radio for my 13^th birthday (red with a silver grille), I discovered a game called radio roulette. I’d spin the tuning dial back and forth, from WMCA at 570 to WWRL at 1600, and wherever I stopped, I had to listen to that station for ten minutes, (although I may have given myself a pass if it was a Spanish-language station). 

Later, I’d wind up having random brushes with what could be called real-life radio roulette. 

WJRZ was a country music station (the term back then was “country and western”) with business offices on Main Street in Hackensack and a studio somewhere in the hinterlands of town near Route 4, a couple of sprawling cemeteries and a patch of wetlands that is likely long gone. In 1970, the station changed its call letters to WWDJ and its format to Top 40 – an uphill climb given the popularity and listening range of WABC in New York City. 

To promote the new format, a couple of deejays came to our high school for an assembly program. I can’t remember much detail, except that it got real embarrassing when they chose to play “Don’t Pull Your Love,” a slice of white bread performed by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds (comma placement is important here) at a deafening volume, while several black classmates laughed at the music and flashed mocking peace signs. White teen culture taking one on the chin. 

Pete Fornatale

By college I had a car with an FM radio, always tuned to WNEW-FM. My favorite deejay was Pete Fornatale, who had a likeable personality and delivery well-matched to his broadcast shift (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.), while championing uncool bands like the Beach Boys and Poco, and playing Buffalo Springfield well into the 70s. A true believer in the medium of radio, Fornatale put together what passed for a “multi-media” presentation back then (recordings from the radio matched up to a slide show) and took it around to college campuses. When he brought the show to my school, I made the time to be there. 

What I remember best from his presentation were his references to the power of a community of like-minded people tuned to the same radio station, his unmistakable voice not coming out of my car speakers, but from right there in the same room, and his opening line: “None of you look like what I pictured either.” 

I had a similar experience a few years later when I met Vin Scelsa, another WNEW deejay whose Sunday morning show was the definition of idiosyncratic and something I listened to every week. Speaking directly with someone whose voice you've heard for years through your stereo speakers can be a bit surreal. 

Then there were times when real-life radio roulette found me.  

When I was sports information director for Upsala College, our men’s basketball team went to the Division III Final Four, a big enough deal that some felt, understandably, that the game should be broadcast live over WFMU-FM, the former Upsala radio station whose studio was still on campus, although it was no longer officially affiliated with the school. The station agreed and several alumni traveled out to the game site in Grand Rapids, Michigan, lugging a heavy metal case holding the broadcasting equipment. 

The night of the game there were glitches – probably because the equipment looked like something Marconi would have experimented with in the 1890s – and a connection couldn’t be established. Unable to do a live broadcast, I became Plan B, calling into the station afterwards and being put live on the air to summarize the game. It worked out pretty well until some transcontinental telephone interference forced an end to the call.

One last spin of the dial occurred when I was working in corporate communications for the local electric utility and was on call after-hours when an outage blacked out Penn Station in Newark. At 5 a.m., WCBS-FM was looking for an update. So I wouldn’t wake anybody, I went down to the kid’s playroom and spoke with the reporter, then left early for work. During my drive in, the station played my soundbite during the news. I laughed, not just at hearing myself on the radio, but knowing that while some early morning listener might think this official spokesman was situated in some underground bunker, it was only me sitting on the floor in my underwear, surrounded by toys. 

 

May 1974: An ambulance can only go so fast 

There are few albums that engendered quite as much buyer’s remorse as Neil Young’s “Time Fades Away,” the 1973 follow-up to his fabulously successful “Harvest,” which included what is still his biggest (and only) hit record, “Heart of Gold” and set up the public perception of Young as the laidback singer/songwriter recording songs of yearning from the back of his barn. “Time Fades Away” was anything but. 

The genesis of “Time Fades Away” begins with Young and his band rehearsing for the tour in support of “Harvest.” As it became increasingly obvious that guitarist Danny Whitten was in no shape to go on a major arena tour, thanks to a heroin addiction, Young bought him a plane ticket and sent him home – where he promptly overdosed and died. 

"Any big event will inspire a song, and that indeed was a very large event,” Young said later. “I think that's the first major life-and-death event that really affected me in what I was trying to do. Like when one of your parents dies or a friend dies, you kinda reassess yourself as to what you're doing – because you realize life is so impermanent. So you wanna do the best you can while you're here." 

The tour, with Whitten’s death hanging over it, was by all accounts a miserable slog – 61 shows from January through April – but Young began using the concerts to introduce new songs he’d written on the road that felt more despairing than anything. The “Time Fades Away” album captured most of the new stuff, behind one of the ugliest album covers ever. 

Fast-forward to the wee hours of May 16, 1974, as Young plays an unannounced set at The Bottom Line in New York City following a Ry Cooder/Leon Redbone double bill. “I’m just passing through,” he tells the audience, as if he were an itinerant minstrel wandering the countryside. In truth, he’d just recorded an album scheduled for an August release titled “On the Beach,” and was eager to work out some of the new songs in front of an audience. 

The new stuff had the same gloomy feel as much of “Time Fades Away,” and while Young rarely wrote songs “ripped from the headlines” as they say, he previewed songs alluding to Watergate, the oil embargo, the Manson Family and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. During The Bottom Line show, he introduces a new song, the rambling “Ambulance Blues” – even the title is a bring down – with “Here’s another bummer,” before disarming the comment with a pause, then “It’s my trip, man.” 

Whether subconsciously or not, Young lifted the melody for “Ambulance Blues” from the British folk singer/guitarist Bert Jansch’s touching “Needle of Death,” a song whose title gives away everything, and which more or less fits with the unspoken theme of “On the Beach”  and a preoccupation with Young around this time. It’s not a record about drugs, but there’s always a feeling of desolation and doom waiting right on the horizon. That a song on the album is titled “See the Sky About to Rain,” is probably not coincidental. 

At times, “On the Beach” has all the lethargic energy of a junkie nodding out. On “Vampire Blues,” a song apparently about the oil embargo, there’s a guitar solo that barely gets going before it just starts to circle the drain and vanish. Heck, Young could barely come up with song titles for the album, preferring to just attach “blues” to several song names. 

As Young told The Bottom Line audience, he and his pals had lately been under the influence of cheap street weed cooked down in a frying pan, mixed with honey and eaten. “Worse than heroin,” someone in Young’s entourage later called it – “worse” in that there was an endless supply, it cut productivity to a trickle and all without any of those bothersome needles. 

Following “Time Fades Away” and “On the Beach,” Young completed his trilogy of doom in 1975 with the album “Tonight’s the Night,” a drunken wake for Danny Whitten and Young’s equipment tech Bruce Berry, another OD victim. Later that year he released the album “Zuma,” which wasn’t quite a walk along the beach either, but one could start to see cracks of sunlight through the clouds. 

Nothing gloomy or despairing about the top ten records for May 1974; the only sinister thing here is Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist. Rare for the times, there are three instrumentals this month: “Tubular Bells,” “TSOP” and “The Entertainer,” from another soundtrack (The Sting). Written in 1903 by Scott Joplin, it sparked a revival of Joplin’s piano rags; by September 1974, albums of Joplin’s music would occupy the #3, 4 and 5 spots on Billboard’s Best Selling Classical LPs list, staying on the charts for 64 weeks. Record World magazine called it the "classical phenomenon of the decade.” 

1 THE STREAK –•– Ray Stevens

2 DANCING MACHINE –•– The Jackson 5

3 THE LOCO-MOTION –•– Grand Funk

4 THE ENTERTAINER –•– Marvin Hamlisch

5 THE SHOW MUST GO ON –•– Three Dog Night

6 BENNIE AND THE JETS –•– Elton John

7 TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia) –•– MFSB Featuring the Three Degrees

8 BAND ON THE RUN –•– Paul McCartney and Wings

9 MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS –•– Maria Muldaur

10 TUBULAR BELLS –•– Mike Oldfield 

 

Into the Mystic 

Maybe one of the best, most thematically perfect, movie soundtracks is the one that accompanies a quasi-documentary from 1971, “Dusty and Sweets McGee,” which uses actors and allegedly real addicts to tell us all about the wonderful world of heroin. If Moby Dick is the place to go for everything you’d ever want to know about whaling, “Dusty and Sweets McGee” is the Moby Dick of heroin: vignettes that take us through the entire heroin supply chain: selling it, buying it, preparing it, injecting it, arguing over it, committing crimes to pay for it, and as one character puts it, “Spending a lot of time sitting slack jawed on park benches.” 

At the film’s center is City Life, played by an unrecognizable Billy Gray (Bud on Fathers Knows Best), selling heroin and needles from his high-performance Mustang. His epic shoulder-length mullet is a begrudging acknowledgement of changing fashion, but otherwise he’s wearing the time-honored uniform of 50s gearheads: white t-shirt with a rolled sleeve holding his cigarettes, comb at the ready in a back pocket while he mulls over adding a tape deck and mag wheels to his car. 

Billy Gray, a long ways from Father Knows Best

Much of the film’s music is playing over City Life’s car radio, tuned into “the Big K in L.A.” with all the deejay patter and jingles, as he downshifts to “Runaway,” “Duke of Earl,” “Book of Love” and “Hey Baby” and we watch the neon death march of old brands whiz by on the highway: Rexall, Pep Boys, Rayco. 

It's perfectly placed; incidental music you’d expect to hear riding shotgun with someone who looks like he’s dressed for a Sha Na Na audition. 

In a bedroom where a couple are shooting up, “Ride Captain Ride” comes on the radio – the deejay, talking over the song’s intro, says “we’re just two hours away from the start of another solid gold weekend” – giving his patter, along with the lyrics of that groovy AM hit from the summer of 1970, an ominous feeling, playing as it does over closeups of needles in forearms and what looks like blood coming up the syringe. Another couple, locked away in a cheap motel room, are getting ready to inject themselves as Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” plays on the radio. Sample lyrics: “Then magnificently we will float into the mystic” and “It’s too late to stop now.” 

Sometimes the marriage of music and movies works. Often, you’re left scratching your head. Why does the Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadows of Love” start playing in “The Fantastic Four” movie apropos of nothing? Why does the Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, include music by Roxy Music and Beyonce? Watching “Casino,” with its soundtrack of 60 songs sounded like some hip dude’s iPod was playing on a continuous shuffle in the next room. “Dusty and Sweets McGee” got it right.

 

 

Last stop: The Lost Oasis 

If it’s 1965 and you’re obsessed with comic books, monster movies and spy shows, and come across this paperback on a spinner rack at Newberry’s, what can you do?

You find 50 cents. 

Beginning in 1964, Bantam Books began reprinting the run of Doc Savage pulp novels from the 30s. When Bantam commissioned James Bama to paint the covers to the Savage books, it was a hot wire to the brain – the colors, the lighting, the sweaty heroic poses. Bama was an illustrator and painter whose work mostly focused on advertising and the covers of “men’s adventure” magazines like True and Dare. 

Here’s the cover to another of Bama’s Doc Savage paperbacks, The Man of Bronze, with its golden lighting against a black background and the obligatory torn shirt, Doc’s security blanket. 

Lured by the covers, I bought several books until the dated Depression-era language (cars were “sedans,” friends were “chums”) and “comedy” routines between members of Doc’s gang of scientific experts began to feel uncool and tiresome. Even then, when I came across the latest installment in the series at Brentano’s bookstore, I had to stop and admire the cover. James Bama painted more than 60 Doc Savage paperback covers and had the knack for making the imaginary seem real. 

I didn’t find out until the 90s that Bama’s creativity was behind another childhood folly. Concurrent with the Doc Savage covers, he was also responsible for the box art that graced the popular Aurora monster models series. When I came across rows of these images on the shelves at Modell’s department store, I burned with the temptation of the damned. How could I resist? 

Fast forward to the dawn of puberty, and I find this book in my sister’s room: 

It’s James Bama again, this time capturing something I couldn’t quite articulate. The image seared a hole in my head and left me dizzy with the possibilities of adulthood.  

In the late 60s, Bama walked away from commercial illustration – although calling him a commercial artist is as severe an understatement as you’ll find; he was a modern master of realism – and turned to painting Western scenes: Native Americans with dignity intact, craggy ranch hands and cowboys staring out from a snowstorm or saddling up a horse. All of it looking more like a photograph than a painting. 

Bama died in this past April, a few days short of his 96^th birthday. He had an enormous talent, influential to many other artists who followed him and to some pre-teen boys as well.

 

 

April 1974: They call him the Streak 

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night was nominated for four Oscars at the 1974 Academy Awards, winning the award for Best Foreign Film. It’s a movie about moviemaking, as its on-screen cast and crew work through a never-ending series of professional and personal challenges to complete a film whose plot sounds hardly worth the effort: French newlywed brings his British wife home to meet the parents. She falls in love with his father, whom the son confronts on a busy street and shoots. 

Nearly everything that can go wrong with making the movie does, but that doesn’t make Day for Night some sort of zany slapstick comedy. It’s about adapting. When an actor dies in a car accident, it necessitates a late-night rewrite of the script. To assist a boozy actress who keeps forgetting her lines, the crew hides cue cards with her lines around the set, unseen by the camera. 

Truffaut, who directed the movie and plays the on-screen director as well – very meta for 1974 – pulls the camera back even further to show, very matter-of-factly, how filmmakers go about creating an illusion of reality. A water pipe over a fake window to simulate rain. The scaffolding actors must climb to film a balcony scene. Monster hoses that spray “snow.” The back-up cat that comes out when a first cat won’t drink milk from a saucer on cue. 

A meta Francois Truffaut at left 

The title Day for Night comes from a process whereby sequences filmed outdoors in daylight are shot with a filter to appear as if they are taking place at night, which takes on another meaning here as the film sheds light and insight around filmmaking. 

Right around this time, a Beatles bootleg began showing up in discerning record stores titled Sweet Apple Trax. It offered, in mostly clear sound, outtakes pirated from the filming of Let It Be, much of which would not be officially released by the band until some fifty years later. 

With the universe’s most famous rock band working through sketches of songs, trying out and discarding guitar parts, singing half-written lyrics, mumbling when no lyrics exist or messing around with different tempos, at the time it was a revelation, a fly on the wall perspective that none of us had ever experienced.

That’s the value bootleggers have always brought, pulling back the camera, or in this case unlocking the studio door – a record about making records. Bringing day to night. 

The top ten records for April 1974 aren’t a very inspiring bunch: 

1 BENNIE AND THE JETS –•– Elton John

2 HOOKED ON A FEELING –•– Blue Swede

3 TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia) –•– MFSB

4 COME AND GET YOUR LOVE –•– Redbone

5 BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME –•– Gladys Knight and the Pips

6 SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS –•– John Denver

7 THE LORD’S PRAYER –•– Sister Janet Mead

8 OH MY MY –•– Ringo Starr

9 THE LOCO-MOTION –•– Grand Funk

10 SEASONS IN THE SUN –•– Terry Jacks 

Worth noting is this consecutive run of chart entries for the week ending April 13: 

82 — DAYBREAK –•– Nilsson

83 — SUNDOWN –•– Gordon Lightfoot

84 — THE STREAK –•– Ray Stevens 

Having “Sundown” follow “Daybreak” is kind of neat. “The Streak” was a novelty record with the great fortune of hitting the radio right as streaking hit its summit, the live broadcast of the 1974 Academy Awards. 

As the show was winding down to the big finale, Best Picture, David Niven is introducing Elizabeth Taylor just as the naked guy (Robert Opel, a photographer) runs onstage, setting up Niven’s famous retort, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen. But isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?" (Opel didn’t have much life left after that night. He was murdered in 1979 during an attempted robbery). 

There has always been thought that the entire thing was staged. Like Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, the camera was strategically placed so that we didn’t see anything below the streaker’s waist. Niven was a quick-witted type, but his ad lib appears too rehearsed and smooth. Watching him wait for the laughter to die down, he seems to be itching to pull the trigger on the punchline. 

Whether staged or not, Oscar night in 1974 was quite a slap in the face.

 

 

The Garden State Greats 

Saint Peters’ run in the NCAA Tournament revived all sorts of proclamations about New Jersey pride and Garden State grit. In response, here is a list of 21 songs that either bear some of that New Jersey attitude or at the very least have a strong Jersey connection. Missing in action: Whitney Houston, who could have been from Los Angeles or Miami for all the New Jersey she brought to her music, and Bon Jovi, because they’re Bon Jovi. 

Candy Girl – Four Seasons (1963)

The last holdouts of the urban doo-wop sound and briefly New Jersey’s answer to the Beatles. Three members were born and raised in the melting pot that was Newark and next-door Belleville. “Candy Girl” is a Frankie Valli vocal showcase.  

How Can I Be Sure – Young Rascals (1967)

Eddie Brigati of Garfield sings lead on this accordion-driven Paris on the Passaic ballad. 

My Boyfriend’s Back – Angels (1963)

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow – Shirelles (1960)

The Angels were from Belleville and Orange, the Shirelles from Passaic. “My Boyfriend’s Back” offers the immortal warning, “If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.” 

Hasbrook Heights – Dionne Warwick (1972)

Written by Burt Bacharach whom, the internet says, briefly lived in Hasbrouck Heights. While the lyrics are complimentary, he awkwardly changed the name of the town to protect the innocent. Sung, of course, by an East Orange native. 

Pleasant Valley Sunday – Monkees (1967)

Like Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Gerry Goffin were commuting into Manhattan from New Jersey while they worked at the Brill Building. The Goffins lived on Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange, among “rows of house that are all the same/And on one seems to care.” 

Brandy – Looking Glass (1972)

Ariel – Dean Friedman (1977)

Lies – Knickerbockers (1965)

One-hit wonders from, respectively, New Brunswick, Paramus and Bergenfield. 

At Long Last Love – Frank Sinatra (1957)

Cole Porter acknowledges that New Jersey isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden as he asks the musical question, “Is it for all time or simply a lark/Is it Granada I see or only Asbury Park?” Sung, of course, by a Hoboken native. 

You Can’t Catch Me – Chuck Berry (1956)

America – Simon & Garfunkel (1971)

Racing a car with “hideaway wings” late one night on the Turnpike and with a state trooper bearing down, Chuck’s car takes flight: “Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne.” The narrator in “America” stares out the window of a Greyhound Bus and counts the cars on the Turnpike. 

Jersey Girl – Tom Waits (1980)

Tweeter and the Monkey Man – Traveling Wilburies (1988)

The two best Bruce Springsteen songs not written by Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan’s “Tweeter” perpetuates the myth of New Jersey lawlessness: “In Jersey anything's legal as long as you don't get caught." 

4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen (1973)

Palisades Park – Freddy Cannon (1960)

The singer in “Sandy” has come to the realization that once you get to the boardwalk, there’s nowhere left except the ocean. “Palisades Park” was written by Chuck Barris; Springsteen used the song as the intro to concerts when he was touring the “Tunnel of Love” album. 

Slip Away – David Bowie (2002)

Somehow, Bowie successfully makes The Uncle Floyd Show a mournful metaphor for lost times. “Back in the late ’70s, everyone would rush home in the afternoon to catch the Uncle Floyd Show. He was on UHF Ch. 68 and the show looked like it was done out of his living room in New Jersey. I knew so many people of my age who just wouldn’t miss it. Two of the regulars on the show were Oogie and Bones Boy, ridiculous puppets made out of ping-pong balls or some such … I just loved that show." 

Song For My Father – Horace Silver (1964)

Rudy van Gelder converted a couple of rooms in his parent’s home in Hackensack into a recording studio before moving into a much grander space in Englewood Cliffs and oversaw the production of hundreds of jazz albums, including many by Miles, Monk and Coltrane, all those jazz dudes known today by one name. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker based “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” on the main riff of “Song For My Father.” 

The Nightfly – Donald Fagen (1982)

Fagen grew up in Kendall Park and found life in suburbia stifling enough that he escaped into a teenager bedroom fantasy as a tragic figure chain-smoking through the night while hosting a jazz and talk radio show. 

Day of the Locusts – Bob Dylan (1970)

When Princeton University gave Bob Dylan an honorary degree at an outdoors commencement ceremony, the seventeen-year cicadas were loud enough to drown out the speakers. He described the “locusts” – which sounds a lot more biblical than “cicadas” – as “singing for me.” 

White Castle Blues – Smithereens (1986)

Also included on the soundtrack of the New Jersey epic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. “I think I'll get some crisp onion rings/To compliment 10 of those little square things.”

 

March 1974: Can it be that it was all so simple then? 

The early 70s were transitional years. Time moved forward, but culturally everyone still seemed stuck in a gear clearly marked “60s.” 

The National Book Award winner for 1974 was Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (later adapted into the movie Who’ll Stop the Rain), a bleak travelogue about smuggling heroin that starts in Vietnam and ends with a firefight on a California mountaintop equipped with speakers and lights to accompany Ken Kesey-styled Acid Tests. 

In the 1974 film The Parallax View, a shadow-shrouded federal “commission” rules that a lone gunman was behind a Robert Kennedy-styled political assassination, leading reporter Warren Beatty to track down a connection between the shooting and the equally shadowy Parallax Corporation. (A strange movie, sort of The Manchurian Candidate meets Cannonball Run, merging serious themes with a “smash-everything-in-sight” barroom brawl and a police car chase that ends with a car crashing through the front window of a supermarket. All that’s missing is Jerry Reed). 

In real life, even with Vietnam more or less over, as well as the military draft, Richard Nixon’s re-election in 1972 was enough to get the revolutionary arm of the counterculture to declare itself alive and well, and begin blowing up banks and ROTC training buildings. 

Combine these 60s hangovers with the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate and the unresolvable resolution to Vietnam and amateur sociologists will tell you that America’s reaction was to “go back to simpler times” – AKA the 50s. 

And we got back with a vengeance. Grease opened on Broadway in 1972, American Graffiti in theatres in 1973 and Happy Days on television in January 1974. In July 1972, New York City’s WCBS-FM changed to an all-oldies format. John Lennon released an album of favorite 50s songs in early 1975, as did the Band. 

Re-entering the Billboard charts in March 1974 was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” 21 years after it was number one for eight weeks. Powered by its inclusion in the soundtrack to American Graffiti and as the first theme song to Happy Days, it reached #39 in May. 

Bill Haley & the Comets

The inherent irony in the rush for happier days was what got conveniently ignored, mainly the dark side of American society in the 50s: segregation, gay repression, cold war tensions and fear of The Bomb, the Red Scare. Joe McCarthy might have been the real face of the 50s, not the sassy drive-in carhop on roller skates who takes your order for a cheeseburger and a Coke. 

It took a long time to run its course, but the 50s fascination finally hit the wall in the early 80s; that Sha-Na-Na had its own variety show that lasted four seasons gives you an idea of how unescapable all this was. 

Here are Billboard’s top ten records for March 1974: 

SEASONS IN THE SUN –•– Terry Jacks

BOOGIE DOWN –•– Eddie Kendricks

DARK LADY –•– Cher

SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS –•– John Denver

THE WAY WE WERE –•– Barbra Streisand

MOCKINGBIRD –•– Carly Simon and James Taylor

JUNGLE BOOGIE –•– Kool and the Gang

SPIDERS & SNAKES –•– Jim Stafford

ROCK ON –•– David Essex

HOOKED ON A FEELING –•– Blue Swede 

“Seasons in the Sun” was a maudlin entry in the 70s genre of deathbed pop (“Yesterday When I Was Young,” “Reflections of My Life”). Terry Jacks was part of a strange run of studio vocalists who had multiple hits around this time, nearly all one-hit wonders and under different names. 

Jacks hit the top ten with “Seasons in the Sun” and in 1969 as part of the Poppy Family (Jacks and his wife) with “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” Ron Dante was recruited to sing lead on the Archies’ "Sugar, Sugar," Billboard’s #1 record for 1969. Later that year he recorded an album under the group name the Cuff Links and had a second top ten hit with “Tracy.” But nobody comes close to Britain’s Tony Burrows, who sang lead with five groups that didn’t exist outside of the recording studio, four of the five hitting the Billboard Top Ten: Edison Lighthouse's "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)"; White Plains' "My Baby Loves Lovin'"; the Pipkins' "Gimme Dat Ding"; Brotherhood of Man’s “United We Stand” (all from 1970) and First Class' "Beach Baby" (1974).