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.