Christmas Number One 

The British have this peculiar tradition of coronating whatever song is at the top of the charts on Christmas as that year’s “Christmas Number One.” People used to flock to the record shops to buy it (now done online) and the anticipation was enough that bookmakers began taking bets on which song would make the top of charts Christmas day.         

Nobody would ever describe any glam band, all of whom worked very hard at looking and sounding over-the-top, as shy and unassuming, so it's no surprise that in 1973 Slade and Wizzard deliberately released holiday songs in an effort to reach the top of the charts at Christmas. Slade won. 

Wikipedia says that more recently, the Christmas Number One has been mostly holiday novelties or songs recorded by reality TV personalities in a bid to stretch their minute of fame into two. Even without hearing any of this, it just seems like the dregs of the eggnog. 

Of course, here in the U.S. we’re much too sophisticated to give any time to anything so cheap and exploitive but just for the heck of it, here are the number one singles on the U.S. Billboard charts each Christmas morning for ten years starting in 1964: 

1964: I Feel Fine – Beatles

1965: Over and Over – Dave Clark Five

1966: I’m a Believer – Monkees

1967: Hello, Goodbye – Beatles

1968: I Heard It Through the Grapevine – Marvin Gaye

1969: Someday We’ll Be Together – Supremes

1970: Tears of A Clown – Smokey Robinson & Miracles

1971: Brand New Key – Melanie

1972: Me and Mrs. Jones – Billy Paul

1973: Time In A Bottle – Jim Croce 

Not a bad group of songs overall, although it takes a downturn, predictably, after 1970. “Over and Over” had perfect timing, hitting the number one spot for just this week in 1965 by bumping the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to #2. The following week, “The Sounds of Silence” would be on top. 

With a week to go until Christmas 2023, Billboard lists Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” recorded 65 years ago, as #1 on its U.S. Hot 100 and streaming charts. Thanks to streaming, social media or getting licensed for television, older songs get a major bump in the charts nowadays (see “Running Up That Hill” earlier this year). Brenda Lee made a video of the song with a couple of popular country singers, then took it to TikTok, where it picked up 15 million views. 

It’s how to make a number one single in the new old-fashioned way.

Act Naturally

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce may not be the first entertainment/pro football power couple, but they’re certainly the most boring.

In 1963, Detroit Lions defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane married jazz singer Dinah Washington, his second marriage, her sixth. Less than six months later, Lane discovered Washington dead at their home from an apparent overdose of prescription pills.

Dallas Cowboys receiver Lance Rentzel married Joey Heatherton, a storybook wedding we were told, in 1969. Two years later he was charged with indecent exposure in the presence of an underage girl and Heatherton filed for divorce.

Atlanta Falcons receiver Andre Rison had a rocky relationship with R&B singer Lisa Lopes, complete with several domestic violence allegations. In 1994, she angrily lit a pair of his shoes on fire, and in the process burned down his house.

And what about Oakland Raider defensive lineman John Matuszak and Debra Winger?

No, that never actually happened and I’m guessing that they never even met, but Matuszak was sure enthusiastic about her.

I interviewed Matuszak in 1981 when he was promoting Caveman, a film in which he co-starred with Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach. Not only was he the largest person I’ve ever met at 6’8”, 285 – when he answered the door of his hotel suite in New York City, he just filled the entire doorway – but also someone with a single degree of separation from a Beatle.

The interview went well, even if some of his answers were canned, like quoting the lyrics to the Beatles’ Act Naturally (a Ringo-sung Buck Owens cover), about being the biggest fool that ever hit the big time and all he had to do was act naturally.

He did, however, seem genuinely pleased when I brought up this pivotal scene from his first movie, the cartoonish football film North Dallas Forty (1979) and he was more than willing to talk about its inspiration (directing his anger at a former coach of his, Hall of Famer Sid Gillman).

I really don’t remember how it came up, but it was his turn to ask a question: Had I seen Urban Cowboy yet? He saw it the night before and apparently his head was still swimming with visions of Debra Winger in this scene:

Possibly overstepping my role as interviewer, I suggested that since they were both in the movie business, he might meet her someday. He grunted something that seemed to say, yeah, I don’t think our paths are ever gonna cross, and I knew the interview was over.

Different paths? Matuszak’s next films were The Ice Pirates and The Goonies. Winger went on to be nominated three times for the Best Actress Academy Award.

Matuszak’s path also included an ex-wife trying to run him over with her car, and an accidental overdose after mixing multiple beers with Valium during which his heart stopped. He died in Hollywood in 1989 at age 38 from what was later ruled as a heart attack brought on by drugs and alcohol.

Oh spit! 

I never had a particular interest in the manly art of spitting. 

In my twenties I had friends, guys who worked in warehouses or spent their time staring at car engines, who could – seemingly out of nowhere – summon up a “loogy” and spit it out, a silvery comet of sputum that traveled for yards. My father, a fireman, was a champion spitter. An otherworldly snort from somewhere deep in his head while driving, then rolling down the car window to let her fly. Our next-door neighbor left for work every morning at 6 a.m. – my bedroom window overlooked his driveway – and like the rooster’s crow, I greeted each sunrise with the sound of him clearing out his nasal cavities. 

I mention everyone’s profession purposely, since a headful of phlegm and catarrh seemed consistent with guys whose schooling stopped at high school. Not drawing any conclusions, just an observation. 

By the way, if you’re a British rock singer, it’s a plus. Listen to the “soulful grit” of Rod Stewart, the Stories’ Brother Louie or John Lennon singing Twist and Shout. And let’s not get into the whole punk thing of spitting at performers to show appreciation. 

I’m coming down off a head cold and at least a couple of times a day I raise up a loogy that needs to be quickly addressed. Obviously, I’m not good at this, retching when the thing lands in my mouth, then running to the nearest bathroom to spit it into the toilet. It’s not pretty and sounds even worse. If I’d paid attention to this sort of thing when I was younger, it might not be such a grisly chore. 

The other day in my car, a crackling cough brought forward a loogy and for some insane reason, my immediate reaction was to spit it out the window. But wait. I could picture the thing never making the window, dripping instead down the inside of the car door. Or having it fly back into the car. Instead, I did the sensible thing, waiting until I got a red light, then opening my door and spitting. It didn’t even make it to the street, hitting the inside chassis of the car. 

What’s the rule about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve a mastery of complex skills? In this case, I’m way behind and I’d like to keep it that way.

The song remains the same

I grew up one town over from Teterboro, N.J., which was essentially then and probably now a couple of residential homes and a private airport, the second busiest in the state behind Newark Airport. 

When our Cub Scout pack got a tour of the airport, it included a ride in a plane that taxied down the runway and a look at Arthur Godfrey’s private plane. That was a bigger deal to some of the adults than us kids; he was of another generation, and one of those celebrities, like Art Linkletter or Danny Thomas, that you couldn’t quite put your finger on just why they were famous. 

Turns out one thing Godfrey was well-known for was Teterboro Airport. A longtime amateur pilot, in January 1954 he buzzed the Teterboro control tower, which got him a suspended pilot’s license for six months. According to Wikipedia, while he claimed that windy conditions forced him to turn back immediately after takeoff, in truth he was angry that the tower had not given him clearance on the runway he requested. 

Obviously used to having things go his way, he was still peeved seven years later when he recorded Teterboro Tower, a novelty song about the incident that portrayed the Teterboro flight controllers as a bunch of rubes placing our blameless hero in jeopardy. Apparently, that kind of bitterness was a Godfrey trademark. He was a true prick, someone who fired more than twenty cast and crew members of his national radio show during a two-year reign of terror, including singer Julius La Rosa right on the air. 

Godfrey was also a public champion of vasectomies as a way to control overpopulation, and he creeped me out as a teenager with a TV Guide quote about his sex life following his own vasectomy. “It’s never been better,” he cooed, or something to that effect. Jesus. I still shudder thinking about it. 

Given its proximity to downtown Manhattan (you could be on 33^rd Street by Madison Square Garden in 15 minutes if there’s no traffic), Teterboro was a popular arrival and departure site for rock bands. If none of my fellow Cub Scouts were moved by the sight of Arthur Godfrey’s parked plane, how might we have felt nine years later if we’d witnessed this July 24, 1973 photo of Led Zeppelin outside their private Boeing 720 at Teterboro Airport? 

Thank God Arthur Godfrey never posed in front of his plane looking like this:

Moving outside television’s friendly confines 

Watching Woody Allen’s Bananas recently reminded me of how the theatre audience reacted in 1971 when Howard Cosell came onscreen. Laughter and applause, even before he said a single word. 

Back when there were only seven channels, television – not unlike radio – was a place you could visit everyday where you built a connection with the news anchors, sports and weather reporters, sometimes actors and actresses. They were familiar faces, sometimes friendly, sometimes annoying, and when they occasionally earned a paycheck by appearing in a movie, seeing them on a big screen was akin to finding coworkers that you only knew from your job waiting for you inside your house. Or that time you came across one of your teachers in the supermarket. 

Bananas is the king of unexpected TV cameos. Whether because they were cheaper to hire or just available since much of the movie was filmed in New York, along with Cosell you’ll find Don Dunphy, who covered boxing matches on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; New York City news anchor Roger Grimsby; and Ricardo Montalban’s brother Carlos, El Exigente, the coffee fascist from the Savarin commercials. 

He's playing himself, but Cosell is terrific here; very Cosellian:

James Karen was an accomplished character actor with more than 200 credits. But for 28 years he was the spokesman for Pathmark Supermarkets, whose commercials were ubiquitous on New York City TV. In All The President’s Men, Karen plays a lawyer in a brief scene ushering his client out of a courthouse. Nobody applauded when Nixon gets taken down at the end of the film. James Karen got the cheers when he came onscreen. 

They had no lines, and their appearance is only for a few seconds, but when the Three Stooges popped onscreen as firemen in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, there was a burst of laughter from us kids in the audience. We knew them almost entirely from television (although I did see The Three Stooges Meet Hercules in the movies, with the real Stooges live on stage doing some schtick and introducing the film. Yes, I saw the Stooges -- albeit with Curly Joe -- in person), and they were certainly much more recognizable to us than say Sid Caesar. 

Bill Cardille, a wrestling announcer back in the pre-cable days when televised wrestling was relegated to late Saturday night, played a news reporter in Night of the Living Dead. Watching the film in a near-empty theatre on a snowy weeknight, we yelled out his name when he came onscreen. It’s Cardille who interviews the local sheriff in the film: “Are they slow moving, chief?” “Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.” 

Another familiar face from television was George Reeves. Even with all the drama of From Here to Eternity, the biggest reaction from our high school English class watching the movie was when Reeves, in a minor role, came onscreen. We all knew him, even without the cape.

Something in the night 

You can call me a lapsed Bruce Springsteen fan. Just as a lapsed Catholic still identifies as Catholic but has stopped practicing, I kept my interest (which ebbed and flowed over the years) in Bruce’s newest records and tours but hadn’t seen him perform since the three times we caught him in 18 months between 1977 and 1978. 

Suddenly this summer, something inside told me it was time to go back.

Life felt like it was closing in a little too much. There were some family issues, work-related worries and, on the other end of the spectrum, a nest of hardy yellowjackets that kept making uninvited drop-ins inside our house. I can't intellectualize why, it was more of a feeling that attending a Springsteen show would be an uplifting, maybe inspirational, way to break the cycle. And the irony wasn't lost that Bruce's concerts at MetLife Stadium were during Labor Day weekend, providing an upbeat, hopeful finale for a summer that didn't deserve it.  

Throwing away all our previous apprehensions about attending concerts at a football stadium, we bought tickets and started planning with all the precision of a military campaign – a dry run to the stadium two weeks before to scout out exits and parking; a careful study of the available food vendors; and me, not being used to their seemingly ephemeral nature, ensuring every single day leading up to the show that our mobile tickets were safe on my phone. 

If we could, we’d have built a miniature layout of the highways and the stadium, moving a model of my car around the map with a long stick like when World War II movies show military commanders tracking troop efforts back in headquarters. 

We gave ourselves four hours to get to the stadium, go through the mobile ticket check-in – I was positive that I’d be the person who couldn’t find their tickets on the phone and got pulled off to the side for special treatment – and find our seats. 

We made it with hours to spare. 

Most of those issues mentioned earlier seem to be working themselves out, and the yellowjackets are finally finished. 

The show? Awesome. I feel much better now.

 

My all-time greatest albums, part five 

If you asked me to list the best guitar players when I was 12 or 13, the only names I knew were George Harrison, the Ventures and Wes Montgomery. 

My first exposure to Montgomery was probably on December 12, 1967, when Herb Alpert hosted The Hollywood Palace with a lineup of acts taken mainly from the roster of his A&M label: Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, the Baja Marimba Band, Boyce & Hart and Montgomery. 

A&M’s signature style back then was a cool, jazzy easy listening vibe, and signing with the label was surely intended to introduce Montgomery to a wider audience beyond the jazz-head subscribers to Downbeat magazine who annually voted him the best jazz guitarist on earth. 

Looking to hit with the pop market, Montgomery began covering safe pop music that adults could dig, like California Dreamin’ and Goin’ Out of My Head. On Hollywood Palace, he played Windy from his new album, A Day In The Life. 

Which cued my interest. You mean this older black guy in the tuxedo (he was 44 at the time) had recorded his own version of what was at the time the coolest, most progressive song on the planet, A Day In The Life? 

The album was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, on June 6 and 26, 1967. The liner notes say Montgomery hadn’t heard the Beatles song before recording it, which I guess is possible given that Sgt. Pepper was released on June 1. Certainly Herbie Hancock, who plays piano on the cut, was familiar with it. Hancock was 27 at the time, 17 years Montgomery’s junior. 

A Day In The Life opens with Hancock’s prowling cocktail lounge piano and while it swapped the overpowering orchestral sound of the original for strings that push the song into Mantovani territory, overall it worked. Call it psychedelia for suburbanites. 

The album also included Montgomery’s takes on When A Man Loves A Woman, Eleanor Rigby and one weird choice, Leslie Gore’s California Nights. And I admit to being familiar with Watch What Happens and Anthony Newley’s The Joker, some adult gravitas that I knew from our kitchen radio and from watching God knows how many television variety shows. 

One year after recording A Day In The Life, Montgomery was dead of heart failure. A heavy smoker, you’ll note the irony of the album cover, a collection of cigarette butts in an ashtray. Surely, and unfortunately, representative of a day in Montgomery’s life. 

Gone With The Wind

The irony of TCM showing a documentary last week called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession wasn’t lost on anybody paying attention. During a week in which five TCM executives were fired and staffing cut, jeopardizing the channel’s existence, showing a documentary about a cable channel devoted to airing, without commercials, an eclectic mix of overlooked and under-appreciated movies, foreign films, six-hour director’s cuts – essentially films that weren’t being shown anywhere else, felt like a cautionary tale about history repeating itself.

With nearly 100,000 subscribers in Southern California at its height in the mid-1980s, Z Channel became embroiled in lawsuits, then sold to Cablevision and NBC in March, 1989. Three months later, it was off the air.

TCM is still here and on the surface seems to be running the same as ever. For now, we have the assurances of several TCM hosts on social media that things aren’t changing. Spielberg and Scorsese, among others, have both spoken out loudly about the need to keep TCM alive, including personal calls to the guy ultimately calling the shots here, the same Warner Bros. Discovery CEO who rebranded HBO to Max and hired the exec – since fired – who attempted to make CNN more appealing to conservatives. That Trump town hall went really well, didn’t it?

The Z Channel documentary was originally made in 2004 for the Independent Film Channel. Originally a commercial-free service devoted to airing independent films, today it’s known as IFC where you can catch repeated airings of Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3 through most of the day, followed by six-hour blocks of Everybody Loves Raymond and Three’s Company.

My all-time greatest albums, Part 4 

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part four of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list.  

When Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was released in 1971, I was in my early teens and beginning to question the eternal wisdom of parents and teachers, and especially, institutional beliefs. 

Ian Anderson always claimed that Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, and he’s right. While one side is a travelogue through some of the more threadbare neighborhoods of London, side two is a diatribe against organized religion. And while everybody dug side one, and Martin Barre’s awesome guitar on the title song (the opening riff and the fantastic solo), it was on the flip side, which Anderson conveniently titled on the record label, My God, that he got down to some heavy-duty axe grinding. 

Essentially, his thesis that organized religion is a crock comes down to two lyrics: “He is the God of nothing/if that’s all that you can see/You are the God of everything/He’s inside you and me,” and “He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.” Heavy stuff when you’re a high school sophomore. 

Some random thoughts about Aqualung: 

When Aqualung was recorded, Ian Anderson had only been playing the flute for three years. 

Once rock and pop began to diversify and add new instrumental colors, flute solos were all over the charts, gracing You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, California Dreamin’, There Is A Mountain and Spill The Wine, among others.  

The artwork on Aqualung are watercolors done by an American artist named Burton Silverman. The original paintings were stolen decades ago. 

The early 1970s were a golden age of album cover constructions: Déjà Vu, with its “leather” photo album look; Sing It Again, Rod (shaped like a shot glass); L.A. Woman (die-cut center); and Through A Glass Darkly (octagon shaped). The cover of Aqualung was manufactured with the texture of an artist’s canvas to show off Silverman’s paintings. 

There was a kid in my high school who took the portrait of Aqualung on the album cover to heart, with long hair, scraggly beard and wearing an old overcoat that I’d bet once belonged to his grandfather. 

Ian Anderson had a distinctive style when playing the flute, sometimes noisily taking in air – which added another “voice” to his music – and (something I learned from a flutist message board) rolling his tongue the way the Spanish do when pronouncing their “Rs.” 

Rock and pop songs that charted on Billboard during the late winter and spring of 1971 when Aqualung was released: George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord; Judy Collins’ version of Amazing Grace; two songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the title and I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which can go either way, secular or religious; that trilogy of happy-hippie soft-headedness, One Toke Over the Line, Put Your Hand in the Hand and Signs; and Aretha’s gospel version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Somehow, TIME magazine missed running a cover story on this “trend.” I’m sure it would have been positioned as “disillusioned with drugs and meditation, today’s youth find new kicks from the Old Testament.” 

Decades before – heck, lifetimes before – critics were praising Nirvana and the Pixies for their “soft/loud/soft” aesthetic of playing a quiet passage, then blasting (with great dramatic effect) huge electric guitars, it was the central sound of much of Aqualung, with several songs building from quiet to loud and back again. The electric guitar that erupts in the quietly acoustic second verse of My God is like the thunder accompanying the delivery of the Ten Commandments.

Ian Anderson also drops in a reference to a “plastic crucifix,” and when you’re questioning the sincerity – and the brains – of those who embrace Christianity, dime store crap like a dashboard Jesus or lenticular portraits of Jesus, seemed an apt symbol. 

George Carlin on The Tonight Show in 1974: “If God is like us … big trouble, man.”

Kick-ass stoicism 

What was Jim Brown thinking when he quit football for acting at the end of the 1965 season? 

He was never going to compete for the black leading man roles that went to Sidney Poitier. Nor was he going to sit still for the types of roles that characterized the career of another former pro football player, Woody Strode, playing African warriors or Pompey the handyman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And Brown wasn’t about to work at honing his craft doing summer stock performances of The Glass Menagerie on Cape Cod. 

Riding the tailwinds of The Civil Rights Act, he barreled into Hollywood as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967) where he only needed to keep his head down while scenery-chewers like John Cassavetes and Telly Savalas did their thing. In Empire of the Sun (1968), he played a mercenary soldier, mostly Tonto to Rod Taylor’s Lone Ranger. Brown’s first leading role was in The Split (1968), a disappointing mess that failed even with a cast that included Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, Julie Harris and Diahann Carroll. 

It wasn’t until Hollywood got the idea of casting Brown with attractive white actresses, and in doing so tapping into white America’s fears of interracial sex and miscegenation, that Brown’s career really took off. 

There’s a strong undercurrent of sex in The Grasshopper (1970) with Jacqueline Bisset and El Condor (1970) with Marianna Hill. 100 Rifles (1969) received a major publicity push, including lots of hot stills of Brown and Raquel Welch, but the film didn’t stand up to the hype: it’s mostly average. Brown’s twelfth film, Slaughter (1972), a terrific tale of vengeance, fired up the taboo meters and delivered the goods thanks to his on-screen (and reportedly in real life) groping with Stella Stevens. 

As cynical and dark as this trend seems, it reached its inevitably violent peak in Fingers (1978) with Brown playing a scary pimp (whose name is Dreams; it might as well have been Super Spade) who brings a “romantic interlude” with two white women to a brutal end when they refuse to kiss each other. 

Brown’s acting was often described as “wooden,” although he became noticeably better with time. But what he was best at was displaying the same kick-ass stoicism he brandished as the greatest football player of his era: inflicting as much punishment as he received before walking back slowly to the huddle with unemotional indifference.

My All-Time Greatest Albums, Part 3

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part three of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Frank Sinatra’s Love Is A Kick (1958) is a compilation of previously released tracks from 1944 to 1952, recorded when he was still with Columbia Records.

The songs cover the young Sinatra’s usual Hoboken waterfront of “she’s here and I’m giddy in love or she’s gone and I’m no longer giddy in love,” but the songs on the album, even those about lost love, are upbeat. Saturday night may be “the loneliest night of the week,” since his girl left him, but there’s hope: “Until I hear you at the door/Until you're in my arms once more.”

Sinatra’s voice is youthful, and he sings with power and feeling. And the big-band arrangements swing. The track Bim Bam Baby – the title alone tells you everything you need to know – flat out rocks, maybe the closest Sinatra ever got to recording something that felt like it belonged with the early R&B band sounds of Louis Jordan or Johnny Otis. Elvis Presley should have covered it.

Love Is A Kick was the only Sinatra record we had around the house for years, so it got played a lot, or at least until we bought our first rock & roll album, the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night (1964). But for a kid like me, whose favorite song up to that point was Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans, Love Is A Kick prepared me for the Beatles by introducing what could be called the language of popular music. Universal belief in, and acknowledgement, of certain feelings. The emotional tone. The beat.

And the use of personal pronouns to make the music more impactful and build connections with the listener. Love Is A Kick included You Do Something To Me, My Blue Heaven, When You’re Smiling and Should I. A Hard Day’s Night is the 101 class on the subject: I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, And I Love Her, Tell Me Why, Can’t Buy Me Love and I’ll Cry Instead.

It all felt like a single river flowing into the same sea. If I could envision Elvis singing Bim Bam Baby, certainly Sinatra could take a swing at I’m Happy Just To Dance With You or And I Love Her. A Hard Day’s Night was the soundtrack to the film, so it included instrumental versions of several Lennon-McCartney songs that were used as background music in the movie. Again, one river, and we never skipped those tracks when we played the album.

To use up all my water metaphors, it wasn’t until rock began to fragment and take on some gravitas, that popular music felt more like a network of tributaries, each bound for different regions.

Love Is A Kick is a forgotten album. Released only in mono, it never made the leap to CD. The soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, on United Artists, was discontinued decades ago in favor of the British version, which didn’t include the instrumentals. To this day, if it isn’t the best pop album ever made, it’s certainly in the running. 

 

Seen on the Screen blogathon: The Killers in Hackensack, N.J. 

The Killers (1946) is a well-respected movie that earned three Oscar nominations, introduced Burt Lancaster and served as Ava Gardner’s career breakout. It may also be the only film noir set mostly in New Jersey, with its pivotal plot point a daring daytime robbery in Hackensack. 

Yup, Hackensack, New Jersey, located some 12 miles west of midtown Manhattan and my old hometown. Mostly residential and with a thriving retail scene when I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, the name Hackensack has a rhyme and rhythm to it, and as such, has lent itself to the lyrics of popular songs for decades, written by the likes of Cole Porter, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Billy Joel. 

But this is about The Killers. Its one-sentence TV Guide synopsis might read, “a former boxer gets involved with a gangster’s moll.” There’s much more to it than that. Within the first ten minutes, Lancaster as “the Swede,” is gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why. 

What he discovers is that people were lining up to kill the Swede because they believed he had a $250,000 payroll stolen years before from the Prentiss Hat Company, located in Hackensack. 

The film is mostly told through flashbacks as we see the Swede and three others walk through a factory gate wearing faked employee badges before they storm the payroll office and make off with the cash. 

While plenty of pre-war architecture still existed in Hackensack when I lived there, it’s safe to say there was nothing resembling the Prentiss Hat Company. With its arched gated entryway and central road running through the site, if anything it resembles the familiar look of the entrance to a movie studio lot – which it probably was. 

In real life, the only factory in Hackensack that came close to what’s depicted in The Killers was a sprawling throwback, built in 1896, that at its peak employed a few hundred people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, with all the loading dock doors open, we’d ride our bikes past the site and hear the machines punching out soles or stitching. 

After making off with the payroll, the gang meets later at a farmhouse eleven miles away to divide up the loot. There’s some discussion about the “hick roads” they’ll take to get to the place, leading one to think this is a totally rural area. 

Downtown Hackensack, circa 1960s

In 1940, the countryside outside Hackensack was fairly rural; there were scattered farms with apple orchards and small-scale cornfields, but nothing like the desolate farmhouse with its dirt roads pictured in The Killers. Even in the 1940s, the residential boom was beginning to eat up the available farmland. 

In the two brief scenes that take place in Hackensack, handy and somewhat generic buildings stand in for the real thing. Which is fine. Anthony Veiller’s Oscar-nominated screenplay at least treats Hackensack like something other than an old vaudeville joke. (Unlike Superman: The Movie (1978), where Hackensack was ground zero for a nuclear missile launched by Lex Luthor – more of a punchline than a destination). 

It’s probably worth mentioning one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster looks up at the blue summer sky and marvels, “It’s beautiful, as if we’re on the bow of a ship – Lisbon, Naples, Istanbul,” to which a neighbor flatly adds, “Hackensack.”

 

Someday We’ll Be Together

Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Someday We’ll Be Together sent me back to Diana Ross & the Supremes’ original, a song that I misread when it came on the radio at the tail end of 1969.

Up to that point, it was difficult to think of the Supremes as “soulful.” Their records were hooky little sugar cookies, but Ross’ vocals often seemed a little too cool, emotionally detached. What grabbed me about Someday We’ll Be Together was that male voice in the background, distant enough that he sounds like he’s standing in a hallway outside the studio, and like something out of a black church sermon with his echoing “say it” and “sing it.”

My misconception was that I always thought it was one of the Temptations; after all, hadn’t the two groups cut an album together with the unwieldy title, Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations?

Turns out the “preacher” is Johnny Bristol, one of the song’s three co-authors. His idea was to sing with Ross to push her a bit and get her into the right mood. When an engineer accidentally recorded Bristol’s words of encouragement, the Motown brass thought it added something and kept it in. Bristol’s coaching seems to have worked as Ross' vocals gets a little more heated as the song goes on.

The record was originally intended to be her first solo single, so neither Mary Wilson or Cindy Birdsong are on it (which might also help account for the song's different feel from what they’d recorded before). One of the background singers is Merry Clayton, a first-call singer when white rockers were looking for a little touch of gospel (see Neil Young’s The Old Laughing Lady, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama and especially the Stones’ Gimme Shelter). And just to stretch these connections even further, Clayton was married to jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, who played the smoking solo on the fadeout of the Door’s Touch Me.

Ross’ first solo single instead, released in early 1970, was Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), a song choice more in line with the Las Vegas/Copacabana aspirations Berry Gordy had for her.

Someday We’ll Be Together remains one of the songs from the time period that wasn’t specifically about Vietnam, but could certainly be interpreted that way, along with I Say A Little Prayer, Last Train to Clarksville and Leaving On A Jet Plane. It was also the last number one hit of the 1960s, hitting the top spot on the Billboard chart dated December 27, 1969. For those keeping score, the first #1 single of the decade was Marty Robbins’ El Paso.

 

Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon: 

I Spy: Home to Judgement 

The Story 

Government agents Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott are on the run. They’ve botched an assignment, been captured – likely tortured – and escaped. Now they scramble through cornfields and countryside as silent, faceless enemy agents track them. Kelly wears a shackle around one ankle. He’s wounded and feverish. 

They stumble across a farmhouse that Kelly realizes belongs to his Uncle Harry (Will Geer) and Aunt Alta (Una Merkel), whom he hasn’t seen for 27 years. He and Scott hide out in a hayloft. 

Kelly is in bad shape, and as he recites the names of the comic strips he read during his teenage summers on the farm, Scott comes out of hiding and offers to help Uncle Harry with his chores in return for food, which he sneaks back to Kelly. Their trackers, meantime, are closing in. 

Will Geer and Robert Culp

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta realize something is amiss and Kelly is discovered. Uncle Harry, suspicious of these two strangers, tries calling the sheriff, but the telephone is dead. He asks his wife to bring the car around; he’ll drive them to the sheriff himself. Kelly stops his aunt, and a search confirms that the stalkers have wired dynamite to the car’s starter. 

AUNT ALTA: Who are you? What’s your name? 

KELLY: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t possibly know me. If you remember me at all it would be as a child – who doesn’t exist anymore. (Holding up the dynamite sticks). This is what I am now. And this is what I brought you. 

With the farmhouse now completely cut off, the truth is that the enemies coming after Kelly and Scott will wait until dark, then storm the house and kill everyone. 

Taking inventory of his uncle’s firearms, Kelly asks about a .22 that once belonged to him, and in doing so, reveals himself. 

KELLY: It was mine. But I couldn’t take it back to the city with me and boarding school, so at the end of summer, I left it here, with you. 

UNCLE HARRY: Kelly? Why, it’s Kelly. 

KELLY: You put two nails on the wall in the kitchen. And your 30-30 (Winchester) was on it, for me to take down, when I was tall enough to reach it. The next summer. I would have made it too, because I was tall and skinny the next summer, but that winter my mom died. Next summer never came. And now I’ve come and wished I hadn’t. 

Aunt Alta tears up and Kelly chokes back a sob. His training won’t allow for emotional breakdowns, but what’s implied is that the price for “swingin’ on the Riviera one day,” as Johnny Rivers sang on Secret Agent Man, is emotionally immense. “We’re poison,” Kelly says. “Everything we touch gets contaminated.” 

But it’s getting dark, and this isn’t a time for self-reflection. Working with what’s on hand – two hunting rifles, some barbed wire, homemade explosives in plastic bags, hurricane lamps, fuses for blasting tree stumps and the dynamite sticks taken from the car, Kelly, Scott, Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta prepare to defend themselves. And wait. 

It’s night and the sound of the cicadas give way to footsteps on the roof and in the storm cellar. 

As the intruders try to break into the darkened house, the climax of Home to Judgement is a crescendo of violence and intensity – as much as the networks might allow back then. Electrified barb wire. Explosions. Gunshots. Lit by car headlights or flares. Even the family Dalmatian gets into the action going up against a snarling hound used to hunt down Kelly and Scott.  

Since this is network television, you can guess the outcome. In the final scene, Kelly and Scott walk back to the highway, Kelly holding the rifle his uncle promised him as a teen. He’s smiling for the first time. You can go home again. 

The Script

Robert Culp’s script for Home to Judgement was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in a Drama.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta are based on Culp’s own grandparents, whose farm was in Idaho. “The story Kelly tells about the two rifles is true,” Culp said. “My children and grandchildren will always have this little magic carpet to take them back to a better time, the way I remember it.”

Synchronicity

Home to Judgement was broadcast as the networks’ fascination with secret agents was running on fumes. One week after it aired on Jan. 8, 1968, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. broadcast its final episode. I Spy survived until April 1968. 

One of the comic strips Kelly remembers in the hayloft is Terry and the Pirates. At the time of his death in 2010, Culp was working on a film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates that he was to direct. It was his favorite boyhood comic strip. 

Straw Dogs

Culp originally wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct Home to Judgement. They had a long relationship working on television projects together. 

One could guess that Peckinpah saw Home to Judgement and may have had it in the back of his mind when he directed Straw Dogs (1971). Both share a common reference point of a violent finale of homemade traps in a darkened house and a hero redeemed. 

You can also draw a straight line from Home to Judgement, through Straw Dogs, to Home Alone (1990). While they take different routes to get there, they share similar final acts, even if the violence in Home Alone is more along the lines of a living Warner Brothers cartoon. A crew member on Home Alone said, “I kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”

Only The Strong Survive

Albums of all cover versions can fall into a couple of different areas. Some are contractual obligations. An artist owes the record company an album and what’s easier than recording a bunch of songs you don’t have to labor over writing.

Sometimes they’re pay-it-back tributes to music that influenced an artist, like David Bowie’s Pin-Ups. Or indulgent crate-digging through an artist’s record collection (see Elvis Costello’s Kojak Variety).

Bruce Springsteen’s Only The Strong Survive falls into the former, a heartfelt revisiting of soul and R&B standards and half-remembered songs that once clipped the lower regions of the Top 40. It’s Springsteen’s passion and commitment – his strong and expressive voice – that puts this record over. That and the arrangements, all of which fall close to the originals and feature an army of backup singers, Motown strings, Stax horns.

The song titles give away the ground he’s covering here: When She Was My Girl (Four Tops), I Wish It Would Rain (Temptations), Don’t Play That Song (Aretha), Turn Back the Hands of Time (Tyrone Davis) – heartache and regret were no strangers to soul music. There’s an unexpected cover of the Commodore’s 1985 tribute to the recently departed Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, Nightshift, a song that deals with another kind of loss and a subject that Springsteen seems preoccupied with lately.

Jerry Butler’s 1968 hit Hey Western Union Man is a reminder that once upon a time, songs that referenced telegrams and made use of that dot-dash cadence were big hits, like Western Union by the Five Americans.

Whether purposefully or not (and I tend to think that as with most Springsteen projects, a lot of thought went into the song selection), a few songs fit right into the artist’s persona. The Motown oldie from 1966, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted (Jimmy Ruffin), opens with a line that sure sounds like something Springsteen would have written on one of his better days: “As I walk this land of broken dreams/I have visions of many things/But happiness is just an illusion/Filled with sadness and confusion.”

Someday We’ll Be Together is not just a cover of the underrated Supremes hit from late 1969, but a title he used for a song intended for Darkness on the Edge of Town that didn’t make the final cut.

The Four Tops’ version of 7 Rooms of Gloom always felt chaotic and unpleasant. You can make out the lyrics in Springsteen’s version better and it takes on the life of the midnight ranting of a man whose wife has left him. He can’t sleep and as he roams his house in the dark, bumping into the furniture, it recalls Springsteen’s own line from Adam Raised A Cain about walking “these empty rooms looking for something to blame.”

If I have a single complaint, it’s the album cover. Hey Bruce, it’s okay to smile occasionally. And stop posing in front of cars. Brian Wilson hasn’t been photographed with a surfboard since the Kennedy administration.

Bruce has taken many paths over the course of his long career. Sometimes, there are detours that leave me cold, but this album is not one of them.

 

My All-Time Greatest Albums, part two

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

In the days before albums became Artistic Statements, the Ventures were knocking out one record after another, all of which could be filed under the heading “teenage dance party music.” Between 1962 and 1967, they released 22 albums of instrumental rock, 13 of which reached the top 40. Their most successful single during this time, Walk Don’t Run ’64, went to #8. 

The kids in my neighborhood lined up to buy the latest Ventures’ release and for decades, thumbing through someone’s record collection or a box of albums in a garage sale or a flea market, you were always bound to come across, usually looking worse for the wear, at least one Ventures album. 

My initiation was Christmas 1965 when I found Ventures A Go-Go under the tree. Ventures’ albums were as predictable as mail delivery, and Ventures A Go-Go met the same criteria as all other Ventures albums. A quick listen? Both sides of the record, taken together, clocked in at under 30 minutes. Recent Top 40 covers? Satisfaction; Louie, Louie; The In Crowd; Wooly Bully; I Like It Like That. A bunch of original songs cooked up by the band in the studio, with interrelated titles? They’re listed right there on the back of the record: Go-Go Slow, A Go-Go Guitar, A Go-Go Dancer. Special guitar effects? Some fuzz tone here and there, certainly on Satisfaction. A pretty girl on the album cover? She’s in blurry motion, but it still counts. 

I was only ten-years old, but I figured I had the soundtrack for my first teenage dance party. All I needed was a few more years and have, like Sam Cooke sang in Having A Party, “Cokes are in the icebox/Popcorn's on the table.” Instead, my parents held what used to be referred to as an “open house” that New Year’s Day, with other couples and family. I played Ventures A Go-Go on their stereo as background party music. Nobody got up to dance. 

I really scratched my Ventures itch in the 80s and 90s, picking up a bunch of their records at several of the aforementioned flea markets. Their Christmas album, which came out two months after Ventures A Go-Go, still gets played every holiday season. The first one was still the best.

 

My All-Time Greatest Albums, part one 

When music publications tossed out their All-Time Greatest Albums lists, it was a fun read and a good timewaster, the top of the list heavily weighted with the usual suspects of classic rock legend and radio playlists: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, along with the obligatory, sometimes begrudging nods to black music (Marvin Gaye, Sly), punk (Clash, Sex Pistols) and grunge (Nirvana). 

Often, before drifting off at night, I’ll draw up my own list of greatest albums and it’s utter predictability is boring enough to put me right to sleep: “Okay, tonight #1 goes to Pet Sounds and we’ll drop Revolver to #2, something from Neil Young should be at #3 … and … and … zzzzzz.” 

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Remember How Great, Volume 1 and 2

These were my mother’s records, issued in 1961 and 1962. If you’re familiar with the Now That’s What I Call Music series (the McDonald’s hamburgers of music with billions sold), its roots, and that of all compilation albums, start here. 

Available at the time for $1, plus 10 Lucky Strike cigarette packs (not to mention countless trips to the doctor, the hospital and finally hospice), this commercial for the records clocks in at 1:26, practically the equivalent of a half-hour long infomercial by 1961 standards. 

What worked best for the albums was the range of music, from vanilla pop standards to soundtracks for a drive through Harlem. Nearly everything on the two volumes is from the 1940s and 50s, although this version of St. Louis Blues by Louis Armstrong on Volume 2 was recorded in 1929. It has an intensity that totally changed my mindset of Armstrong as that harmless guy with the trumpet and the handkerchief on Ed Sullivan. In my late teens I played this over and over. 

What else was on Remember How Great? Tequila by the Champs, Jumpin’ Jive by Cab Calloway, The Tennessee Waltz by Patti Page, a slice of Wonder Bread that I inexplicably liked -- and that I later realized was the inspiration behind Neil Young's underrated The Old Country Waltz.

When my mother moved, the records disappeared before I could make off with them, but they’re all over eBay, leading me to think that this series was a fairly big seller. I’m also sure that if everybody owned a stereo like the one belonging to my parents, with its needle resembling a roofing nail, they all survive with plenty of pops and crackles.

More to come.

The Perfect Day: February 1, 1964 

In this exercise, we go back in time, and using an old issue of TV Guide as our map, navigate our way through 24 hours of New York City television. 

Clowny and Claude

February 1, 1964 is a Saturday, so the morning is taken up by cartoons, ancient reruns and that perennial 7:00 a.m. favorite, Modern Farmer. At 9:00 we find an hour of cartoons on WOR Channel 9 hosted by Claude Kirchner. I don’t recall if this was a daytime version of Kirchner’s early evening show Terrytoon Circus, which used to open with his puppet sidekick Clowny bursting through a paper-covered hoop and ended with Clowny telling us kids that it was time for bed – at 7:30? Even as a child I scoffed at Clowny’s brazenness! 

At 1:00, it’s American Bandstand under whose listing TV Guide tells us, “Next week Bandstand moves to the West Coast,” casually downplaying another crack in an ongoing seismic shift, the ending of the East Coast’s television dominance. American Bandstand had been based in Philadelphia since 1956, where it aired live each weekday and established itself as television’s #1 teen hangout, many of its regular high school-age dancers popular enough with viewers to receive more than 500 fan letters a week. In 1963, the show cut back to Saturday afternoon and Dick Clark, with an eye toward revving up his own career, then took the show to Los Angeles where it ran until 1989 as Clark tried his luck acting before building his empire of game shows, specials and “rockin’” New Year’s Eve broadcasts. 

But maybe Clark outsmarted everyone but himself. Consider this. The Beatles landed in America that Friday, Feb. 7 to play the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday. Two days later they traveled by train to Washington, D.C. and gave a concert at the Washington Coliseum. Imagine if Bandstand was still in Philadelphia and Clark convinced Brian Epstein to stop in Philadelphia for a taped interview and maybe a song or two. Epstein would have understood that Bandstand was a perfect venue and that Clark would be much more simpatico with the band than the New York press, who seemed more concerned with questions about their hair. It could have been a landmark moment in Beatlemania and rewarded Clark with a much hipper legacy. 

At 2:00 we switch over to college basketball on NBC Channel 4, Princeton vs. Penn, to watch Bill Bradley, a superhuman sophomore averaging 30 points a game for Princeton. Remarkably, this is the only college basketball game broadcast on this day. Today, on an average Saturday there can be up to twenty college games available to view from noon to midnight even if you only have basic cable. 

After the game we have our choice of a special, New Jersey School Budget, or the last 30 minutes of a roller derby match between the San Francisco Bay Bombers and the New York Chiefs on Channel 11. Guess what we’ll choose? 

Late afternoon brings with it Jungle Jim on WNEW Channel 5, followed by Sandy Becker. At 6:30 it’s Clay Cole’s teen party on WPIX Channel 11, where the guests are the unlikely Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows – unlikely given Steverino’s long-standing condescension toward teenage pop music. 

Our choice at 7:30 is between the Jackie Gleason Show and Hootenanny. Not unlike Dick Clark, Gleason is also seeking greener pastures – or in his case greener putting greens – and will move his show from New York to Miami, where it will start airing in September. Hootenanny was a variety show cashing in on a campus folk music craze fueled by acts like Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio. Unbeknownst to Hootenanny’s producers, it – and traditional folk music’s popularity among the young – has about one week left before Paul McCartney kicks off All My Loving on national TV the following weekend. Hootenanny gets cancelled in June, replaced by Shindig. We’re choosing Gleason here, if only to see Frank Fontaine’s “is he supposed to be drunk or just really slow” Crazy Guggenheim routine. 

Between 8:30 to 9:30 we drop in on a couple of movies already in progress, Son of Sampson on Channel 9 and The Monster From the Ocean Floor on Channel 11. At 9:30 we switch over to Hollywood Palace on Channel 7, with its uninspiring lineup of host Donald O’Connor, Buddy Greco and Buddy Hackett “doing his Chinese waiter monolog” according to TV Guide. You know, when he wraps a rubber band around his head to make his eyes look “Asian” and transposes his “R’s” and “L’s” as in “flied lice.” It manages to be both offensive and unfunny. 

Hollywood Palace never had the panache, the feeling of Broadway sophistication or the caliber of guests that Ed Sullivan pulled. Too often it featured performers whose best days were behind them, out-of-work actors and animal acts. After Sullivan introduced the Beatles, then had them back three times this month, Hollywood Palace staggered about with guests like Van Johnson, Betty Hutton and Gloria Swanson. It took until late April for the Palace to book its first British Invasion act, second-stringers Chad & Jeremy, and finally got up to speed that summer by having the Rolling Stones on, only to have them mocked on-camera by host Dean Martin, who was clearly in an “I’m a bigger star than these creeps’ll ever be and I don’t give a shit what I say about them” mood. 

At 10:30 we watch a rerun of Car 54, Where Are You, before moving on to the news. Les Crane comes on at 1:15 a.m., interviewing New York Congressman John Lindsey, who is on his way to running for mayor of New York City and, with his youthfully handsome looks, possibly filling some spot in the public’s heart and mind left vacant only three months earlier by JFK’s death. 

The old guard is clearly beginning to fade and give way to the new -- Lindsey, Lennon and McCartney, Los Angeles. But at this point we’re just content to stare at the screen while the Late Movie, followed by the Late Late Movie, flicker by.

David Crosby meets the Avengers

David Crosby reads or pretends to read Avengers #22, which hit the newsstands in September 1965. Best guess is that this a publicity shot of some sort, with the comic book used as a prop and taken right around the time that Mr. Tambourine Man was a hit. A somewhat similiar image of fellow Byrd Roger McGuinn reading Superman #181, which came out the same month, also exists although it's been tough to track down.  

A freak flag flies at half-mast

David Crosby, it seemed, spent the last decade on some sort of national apology tour, expressing his endless regrets for how his hardcore drug habits sabotaged CSN, along with several personal relationships, for being a smug douchebag when he was with the Byrds, for saying things about Neil Young’s then-girlfriend Darryl Hannah. It’s a long list.

It’s tough to make excuses for who you are and while Crosby could be an egotistical, unrepentant hedonist with no filter, he was one of the great singer-songwriters of the era and somewhat of an icon. Possessing a voice that blended well with others, but could soar on its own, his singing was effortless, in the same vein as a Willie Nelson. Remarkably, all those years of abuse had no ill effect on his voice. We saw him perform at a solo show in 2015, and his 73-year-old voice had held up incredibly well.

Also on stage that night were his uncensored opinions, as he trashed Kanye West, “He can’t write, sing or play” and Trump, “an intelligence-free zone.”

Like his personal life, Crosby’s songs had a freeform feel. Everybody’s Been Burned and Eight Miles High, for which he’s listed as a co-writer, were Byrds songs that didn’t follow any rock songwriting conventions. Same with Déjà Vu and much of the current stuff he’s cut over the past couple of decades. Miles Davis thought enough of Guinnevere to cover it.

As for his status as an icon, Dennis Hopper claimed to base his character in Easy Rider on Crosby. In the anthemic Almost Cut My Hair, Crosby offered up these two deathless lines: “I feel like letting my freak flag fly” and “It increases my paranoia/Like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car” – who hasn’t had that feeling driving down the highway, stoned or not? Smart-ass 1980s punk rockers The Dead Milkmen made Crosby the punchline of The Thing That Only Ate Hippies – it eats Stills and Nash but spits out Crosby. Millennials, the type who tend to revere jam bands, saw him as a benevolent but toasted Grandpa Walton. The Croz.

Two other thoughts.

Crosby’s father Floyd was a Hollywood cinematographer and while he worked on High Noon and won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1931, by the mid-1960s he was working mostly B-movies, including nearly all the Annette and Frankie “beach” flicks.

How much of Jim Morrison’s animus was fueled by his father, a career Navy officer and in command at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, an incident which lit the fuse for the Vietnam War? How similarly strange for Crosby – although admittedly not on the same level – to be working in an L.A. recording studio on Eight Miles High while his father was a few miles away figuring the best way to light How to Stuff A Wild Bikini?

Secondly, after he was released from a Texas prison in 1986 on narcotics and weapons charges, and kicked the hard stuff, Crosby went on a creative tear, a second wind that had him performing with bands of much younger musicians, releasing four albums of mostly new material, collaborating with such unlikely bedfellows as David Gilmour and Donald Fagan, touring several times with Stephen, Graham and Neil – at least before the latter two stopped speaking with him – and being fairly active, and filter-free, on Twitter. 

He may have been in a rush, living on somewhat borrowed time with a transplanted liver and other health problems, to redeem himself for his past sins and to recapture a talent that appeared to be all but lost. His may be one of the great comeback stories ever. 

Davids Gilmour, Bowie and Crosby

 

Rascalmania 

It wouldn’t have been too far a stretch, around 1967 and 1968, to call the Rascals the American Beatles. They had a knack for writing R&B songs with rock arrangements, scored nine Top 20 singles including two all-universe hits in Groovin’ and People Got To Be Free, then pushed themselves stylistically with Once Upon A Dream, an eclectic album that tried hard, but only proved that the American Beatles couldn’t assemble an American Sgt. Pepper, before band politics busted everything apart. By the early 1970s, the Rascals were done. 

During the final months of last year, I had Rascals on the brain after reading Felix Cavaliere’s autobiography Memoir of a Rascal, noting that Felix and Rascals guitarist Gene Cornish were playing in nearby Morristown, N.J. during a brief East Coast tour and with the death of the band’s drummer Dino Danelli on December 15. 

In Memoir of a Rascal, Felix comes off as a great guy in need of an editor. It’s a book that carries with it all the downsides that accompany self-published efforts: lousy photographic reproduction, some tortured sentence structures and numerous typos, reading more like a verbatim transcription of someone speaking into a tape recorder. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any interesting stories. Felix was studying medicine at Syracuse University when he made a deal with his father to take a shot at being a professional musician for one year with the promise that if didn’t work out, he would return to school. He quickly got a gig playing keyboards for Joey Dee and the Starlighters, toured Europe and had a new career. Soupy Sales came up with the band’s name (originally the Young Rascals to avoid any confusion – and possible legal action – with an outfit popular in the 1930s and 40s known as the Harmonica Rascals). One can also assume from the book that a primary reason why the band broke was Eddie Brigati, who shared lead vocals and songwriting credits with Felix and who comes off as sometimes confused, ornery and obstinate. 

I passed on Felix and Gene’s tour not because of COVID concerns – certainly we could just wear masks in the theatre – but because I just felt it could never match up to all the good vibes I felt after seeing all four Rascals during their multi-media reunion in 2014. (Something only I’m interested in, but this wasn’t the first time some form of the Rascals played just a few miles from my home. In 1966, the band played concerts at the Fox Theatre and at the Bergen County Technical High School, both in Hackensack, the latter hosted by Zacherle who apparently spent some of his downtime that day fittingly walking around the cemetery across the street). 

Dino’s death wasn’t unexpected – Gene revealed in an interview promoting the Morristown show that he was in hospice. A flamboyant and powerful drummer, not unlike Keith Moon of the Who (whom, according to Cavaliere, learned how to twirl his drumsticks mid-beat from Dino), for Groovin’ he stepped away from his drumkit to steer the song’s Latin rhythm on the congas. He was a vastly underrated drummer and a talented artist. He built this collage out of found objects and dime store junk for the cover of Once Upon A Dream. It remains one of the coolest album covers ever: 

Some 40 years now since the Rascals broke up, it’s probably safe to say that we’ll never get any of the “product” that other artists that have been around as long, or less, keep bombarding the market with: the inevitable reunion album, archival live concerts (did anyone tape the Rascals performing at the Fillmore West or with a symphony orchestra at the old New Jersey Performing Arts Center?), expanded versions of albums marking their anniversaries, the five-CD box set with outtakes and alternative versions. 

Just in case someone opens the vault – if there is a vault – I’ve got some cash saved up in an envelope hidden in my sock drawer. But I’m not holding my breath.