Feeling a draft 

From my first days as a football and New York Giants fan, I realized the importance of the college draft. 

In 1971, I was home from school for some reason and desperate for an update on the NFL draft being conducted that day. Nothing on WINS, the news station, or WNEW, “home of the New York Giants” – only Knicks and Rangers scores from the night before. It wasn’t until the 5 p.m. news on WNEW that I learned that the Giants’ first round pick was, and this is as it was announced, Ralph “Rocky” Thompson of West Texas State. Wait, we took a guy named Ralph? West Texas State? 

Draft coverage in our local newspaper The Bergen Record was pathetic: a list of teams with names underneath. I needed to know who got picked, by which team and in what round. In order. I began buying The New York Times on the day following the draft, with its complete listing in order, cryptic shorthand explaining the lineage of each pick, traded from one team to another. At one point in the 80s, with the draft occurring while we were visiting Florida and with The Times nowhere in sight, I found that USA Today gave a similar recap. 

The Times draft posting was valuable enough that at one point, I went through back editions at our city library on an ancient microfilm viewer with dials you turned to advance each page and made copies of previous drafts. 

The NFL opened its doors to the proceedings to spectators at some point, and in 1975 I drove to midtown Manhattan, and with absolute faith in my ability to parallel park my Toyota Corona into the tightest spaces possible, found a spot on the street and attended the draft at the New York Hilton. Sitting in the ballroom balcony, I stayed for an hour or two; my recollection is hazy. I remember Pete Rozelle announcing a couple of first-round choices, and I took a sheet that the NFL passed out detailing the trades that had been made thus far that morning. One of those things I wish I’d held on to. 

Rozelle and fans at the 1975 draft

In 1980 ESPN began broadcasting the draft live. When I was reading meters, I could track the draft’s progress, house by house, sneaking a peak at televisions tuned to ESPN or in a quick conversation with a customer. Much later, on a business trip to Detroit, I put the draft on the hotel TV, fell asleep, then woke up in the middle of the night with the first round well over. 

I won’t fall asleep in front of the TV tonight, but once the Giants make their pick, I’ll head for bed. And the journey of how we get our news keeps changing. With the draft now broadcast on something like eight different channels and services, and online coverage eating up as many column inches and megabytes as a presidential election, there’ll be no need to buy tomorrow’s Times.

One of one hundred, 1964 

Songs that entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #100 are obviously at a huge disadvantage when it comes to getting airplay and selling records, but a few become unlikely success stories or just have an interesting narrative around them. Here are ten such records from 1964, listed by song title, artist and date it entered the Hot 100.  

The Son of Rebel Rouser-Duane Eddy (1/4/64), Mo Onions-Booker T & the MGs (2/22/64), Can’t Get Over (The Bossa Nova) – Eydie Gorme (8/29/64): If sequels can work in the movies, why not popular music? Because they don’t, unless it’s a follow-up to a monster dance record like The Twist (Chubby Checkers’ Let’s Twist Again in 1961 went to #8). The records by Duane Eddy and Booker T & the MGs kinda sound like Rebel Rouser and Green Onions while being just different enough. Can’t Get Over (The Bossa Nova) doesn’t sound at all like Blame It On The Bossa Nova, and it’s a pretty good record, written by Gorme and Steve Lawrence, but doomed to chart oblivion by the British Invasion. 

Charade – Andy Williams (1/18/64): A reminder that movie soundtracks used to feature an original song that performers like Williams would take hold of, singing them countless times on TV until they felt like songs that had somehow existed since the beginning of time. See also: Somewhere My Love (Dr. Zhivago), The Windmills of Your Mind (The Thomas Crown Affair), The Shadow of Your Smile (The Sandpiper), Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). 

People – Barbra Streisand (4/4/64): What’s fascinating about this record, aside from entering the chart at #100 and going all the way to #5, is the rumor that the song was originally intended for Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol 1962 cartoon special – all were written by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. Had People been included -- you can almost envision it as something the reformed Scrooge would sing on Christmas morning -- it might have lifted the cartoon into the holiday classic realm of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or Charlie Brown’s Christmas. Then again, if you’ve seen Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, maybe not. 

A World Without Love – Bobby Rydell (5/9/64): Paul McCartney wrote A World Without Love, decided it wasn’t good enough for the Beatles (maybe because the first line, “Please lock me away,” put John Lennon in hysterics), and gave it to his girlfriend’s brother Peter Asher, who along with Gordon Waller, took it to #1. Bobby Rydell’s cover was popular enough that in Rydell’s hometown Philadelphia, the local charts paired the two versions as they reached #1 together. Billboard’s competitor Cash Box also listed the two records in tandem for a while before Rydell’s version was dropped. On its own nationally, Rydell’s A World Without Love went to #80. 

No Particular Place To Go – Chuck Berry (5/23/64): Chuck Berry gets a case of what used to be known as “blue balls” when he drives his girlfriend drive out to the “Kokomo” to neck, but can’t unfasten her seatbelt, which sort of messes up his master plan. The Kokomo, wherever that is, was also where Sandy was last seen, “parked with lover boy.” Fun Fact: After Saab introduced seat belts as standard equipment in 1958, other automakers followed. 

It’s All Over Now – Rolling Stones (7/25/64): A record that makes the argument that Murray the K wasn’t the Fifth Beatle as he always proclaimed, but the Sixth Stone. He played the Valentino’s original of It’s All Over Now for the Stones and nine days later they recorded it themselves. It stayed on the charts for ten weeks, peaking at #26. 

You’re No Good – Swinging Blue Jeans (8/1/64): The best version of You’re No Good is the original by Dee Dee Warwick in 1961. Raw in a good way like many of those old R&B records, with the lead and background vocals overmodulated and a brief, fuzzy guitar break. Betty Everett’s 1963 cover is more Motownish, but she keeps the same voodoo drums from the original, similar to Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Linda Ronstadt took her version to #1, as her producer Peter Asher (him again) sanded off the roughness and lacquered on a 1970s production sheen from Andrew Gold’s impeccable guitar solo to the violins that slide the song into the fade. This cover by third-tier British Invaders the Swinging Blue Jeans isn't a match for any of them. 

It Ain’t Me Babe – Johnny Cash (10/31/64): I thought this may have been the first Bob Dylan song to hit the charts, but that was Peter, Paul & Mary’s cover of Blowin’ In the Wind (#2 in 1963). Cash and Dylan were mutual admirers of each other’s work; Dylan appeared on Cash’s TV show and Cash wrote the liner notes for Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. In 1965, The Turtles had a breakthrough hit single of the song, which reached #8.

 

Ross Hagen in Wonder Women

(This post is part of the 2^nd Annual Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon hosted by Films From Beyond The Time Barrier)

In the early days of cable, Wonder Women (1973) was a Saturday afternoon staple, an amazingly entertaining movie that crossed Dr. No with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Ross Hagen plays Mike Harber, ex-CIA and LAPD, hired to locate a missing jai-alai player kidnapped by resident evil genius Dr. Tsu (Nancy Kwan), who is harvesting athlete’s body parts as transplants for her aging, wealthy patients. Doing Tsu’s dirty work is a crew of leggy Amazons outfitted in the shortest nighties possible (imagine Bambi and Thumper from Diamonds Are Forever as members of The Pussycat Dolls).

Dr. Tsu sends her minions to stop Harber, including Linda (Maria de Aragon) whom he picks up in a bar with some lame come-on lines. She tries to kill him the next morning, leading to a furniture-smashing, door-splintering knockdown battle and the film’s centerpiece, a seven-minute chase on foot and jeepney through the streets of Manila. Words cannot do it justice (although it does contain scenes that might be upsetting to some viewers).

But there’s more: a raid on Dr. Tsu’s heavily guarded island lair, Harber and the doctor participating in clothed “brain sex” and a facedown with Tsu’s lurching, grunting failed experiments before she escapes and Harber rescues the kidnapped jai-alai player.

Your brain sex headband or mine?

Hagen’s performance at times is low-key enough that he comes off like a sleepwalking James Bond, but maybe he played it exactly right. An experienced actor whose career began in 1966 with minor roles in seemingly every western and adventures TV series of the era (including a regular stint on Daktari) would know to not hit the pedal too hard while navigating through a careening, over-the-top movie like this.  

Or maybe he was drowsy from the heat. Wonder Women was filmed in the Philippines, apparently during typhoon season, and some outdoor shots seem to just drip humidity. As the film’s producer, Hagen arranged for a local hotel ballroom to be converted to a soundstage for some interior shooting.

Hagen returned to the Philippines in 1975 to star, again with Nancy Kwan, in Supercock, which despite its title is a PG-rated romantic/adventure story about championship cockfighting, legal then and now in the Philippines. The title is just the start of an endless barrage of double-entendres; Kwan – surpassing the brain sex scene in Wonder Women as a possible low point of her career – says of Hagen’s character after meeting him and his world-class fighting rooster, “He has the biggest cock I’ve ever seen.”

With his aviator shades and safari-jacket wardrobe, Hagen is nearly cosplaying Lee Majors in Wonder Women, but he’s a solid presence throughout this silly, totally entertaining movie. In a nearly five-decade career, Hagen was a B Movie triple threat as actor, director (1979’s The Glove with John Saxon and Rosey Grier) and producer. To my mind, he’s a first-ballot B Movie Hall of Famer.

 

 

One of one hundred, 1969 

Songs that entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #100 are obviously at a huge disadvantage when it comes to getting airplay and selling records, but a few become unlikely success stories or just have an interesting narrative around them. Here are nine such records from 1969, listed by song title, artist and date it entered the Hot 100. 

Twenty-Five Miles – Edwin Starr (2/15/69). Journeyman Edwin Starr had a minor hit in 1965 with Agent Double O Soul but faced a long climb with Twenty-Five Miles. Eight weeks later the song rose to #6, making it the second-most successful single of the year to open on the charts at #100. 

Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show – Neil Diamond (2/22/69). After a nearly six-decade career that included some regrettable movie roles and duets with Barbra Streisand, it’s easy to forget that Neil Diamond was once “just” a singer/songwriter with a knack for writing great pop songs. This was his last record before breaking into the big time later in 1969 with Sweet Caroline. Diamond copped the title of his 1972 live album from Brother Love’s “hot August night” opening line. And speaking of regrettable, what’s up with the cover of that album? 

Hawaii Five-O – Ventures (3/8/69). Ironically, the Ventures’ best-selling record ever didn’t sound like the Ventures at all, twangy guitars buried under the weight of an orchestra. It hit #4 in June 1969 and without bothering to check, I’d venture (get it?) that it may be the most successful TV theme to chart. 

Idaho – Four Seasons (4/5/69). The Four Seasons changed their hairstyles and clothes, then recorded an unlikely trip into psychedelia and social commentary with the album The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, from which Idaho was taken. They were past their original expiration date at this point, but still years away from their 1975 disco comeback. 

Born To Be Wild – Wilson Pickett (5/10/69). Out of original material, Wilson Pickett took off on a second-wind career covering white rock artists like Steppenwolf, the Beatles (Hey Jude) and strangely, although he makes it his own, The Archies’ Sugar, Sugar. 

Tell All the People – Doors (6/14/69). As Jim Morrison’s behavior grew increasingly erratic and his interest in performing and songwriting diminished, The Soft Parade was the Doors’ lamest album. This was the lead cut from that record and just by virtue of debuting at #100 speaks to how far the band that recorded Light My Fire had fallen. 

Kool and the Gang – Kool and the Gang (9/13): Other songs with the performer’s name in the title: Bad Company, Black Sabbath, Bo Diddley, This is Radio Clash, Stray Cat Strut. 

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother – Hollies (12/20): Charting as high as #7 in 1970, the title was the slogan for Boys Town, supposedly said by one of the residents while carrying another boy with polio up a set of stairs. (Actually, the slogan is “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s my brother,” which I always hear in Leo Gorcey’s voice, “He ain’t heavy, faddah, he’s my bruddah.”) 

The Thrill Is Gone – B. B. King (12/27): B.B. King had three singles enter the charts at #100 in 1969; this is the one that stuck, going to #16 in early 1970, and earning him a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. King hit the #10 spot on Billboard in 1996, in a fashion, when his voice was sampled for the Primitive Radio Gods’ Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth, released just in time before phone booths disappeared off the face of the earth. 

 The Twilight Zone: Steel 

(This post is part of the 10^th Annual Favorite TV Show Episodes Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

In real life and otherwise, happy endings are rare in boxing. 

It’s 1974 and professional boxing between humans has been banned, with androids now taking their place in the ring. Steel (Lee Marvin) is an ex-prizefighter and manager of Battling Maxo, a robot boxer whose best days are behind it. Steel, his partner and Maxo have traveled by bus from Philadelphia to Kansas for a fight, lured by the promise of a $500 payday – money that be used for new parts and patches for Maxo. 

While running Maxo through its paces before the bout, an internal spring breaks, leaving the android useless. His back against the wall and desperately in need of the cash, Steel disguises himself as Maxo, darkening his hair and taking on the blank look and stiff posture of an automaton, to climb into the ring against a far superior boxing robot. 

Steel takes a pounding from his android opponent and since the fight barely lasts a round, the promoter will only fork over half the prize money. Afterwards, a battered and exhausted Steel begins to recalculate how to make it back to Philadelphia and repair Maxo with less money. 

Steel first aired in October 1963 amidst an air of unease about boxing. On a nationally televised fight in March 1962, Emile Griffith backed Bernie Paret into a corner and pounded him with 29 unanswered punches. Paret collapsed, fell into a coma and died ten days later from massive brain hemorrhaging. In a 1963 televised bout, Sugar Ramos staggered opponent Davey Moore, who fell into a rope, injuring his brain stem. Moore died 75 hours later. 

Moore’s death immediately became a cause célèbre. Editorials cried out for boxing to be outlawed. Pope John XXIII called the sport “barbaric” and “contrary to natural principles.” Bob Dylan wrote “Who Killed Davey Moore,” taking the voice of Ramos: “I hit him, I hit him, yes, it’s true/But that’s what I’m paid to do/Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say kill/It was destiny, it was God’s will.” 

It also led toy designers Marvin Glass and Associates to abandon development of a toy featuring two metal boxers facing off in a ring, their actions activated by control buttons. But when it was suggested using boxer robots that fall apart rather than human figures that fall over when hit, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots was born, hitting toy store shelves in 1964. We’ll likely never know if the airing of Steel somehow influenced it.

Steel is probably the best known of several Twilight Zone episodes that revolved around boxing. Rod Serling had a lifelong passion for the sport, as participant (17 Golden Gloves matches) and author (Requiem for a Heavyweight). 

While the episode’s underlying theme of man vs. machine resonates in these days of AI, Serling’s elegy at the end of Steel is a positive and hopeful statement about the human spirit that transcends boxing: “No matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any and all changes made by his society.” 

Given that, maybe Steel is a boxing story with a happy ending.

Crayons to perfume 

The World of Henry Orient was outdated the moment it premiered in March 1964. Not that the film doesn't have lasting merits. It does. Essentially, it’s an R-rated Disney movie about a couple of just-barely teenage girls who develop an obsessive crush on Henry Orient, a goofy avant-garde pianist. But the film also underscores the cultural reality back then that young girls had some slim pickings when looking for cute, non-threatening guys with which to channel their teenage infatuations. 

16 Magazine was the Dow Jones Index of teenage heartthrobs, and a quick review of its covers from late 1963 shows a true bear market. There was the bland (Paul Petersen of The Donna Reed Show) and the blander (Johnny Crawford from The Rifleman), and a group of actors whose ages might have made them old enough to parent a 16 Magazine reader: George Chakiris (31 and maybe a bit too swarthy), Russ Tamblyn and Richard Chamberlain (both 29). 

Pop stars? Bobby Vinton had a couple of huge chart hits with Blue Velvet and There I’ve Said It Again, but he wasn’t someone to fantasize over, a decade before he became the Polish Prince. Bobby Rydell was 21 and at the absolute end of his career as a pop star. The editors of 16, with a hint of desperation, began padding things out with features about nice-girl role models like Patty Duke, Shelley Fabares and Hayley Mills. 

The World of Henry Orient was filmed between July and October 1963, and the girls in the movie, played by Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, are filmed in slow-motion jumping, skipping and running around Central Park and Greenwich Village with a kind of soaring innocence and optimism that maybe the country – feeling good enough to describe itself as Camelot – was feeling up till then. 

By the time the movie opened on March 19, 1964, an “eternal flame” burned over John Kennedy’s gravesite in Arlington Cemetery and the Beatles, heretofore unknown, owned the first four spots on Billboard’s Hot 100. 16, meanwhile, kicked off its own golden age, beginning its breathless monthly coverage of the Beatles, then the Dave Clark 5, Peter & Gordon, the Monkees, Mark Lindsey, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy and finally the Osmonds. 

The World of Henry Orient, having spun off its axis, was gone forever.

Sophisticated Boom Boom 

Nearly forgotten in the sixty years since their first hit, the Shangri-Las hit the news this past weekend when Mary Weiss, their blonde lead singer, died at age 75. 

The Shangri-Las’ musical coming of age came just as Beatlemania was crashing the shores and the Brill Building girl group sound began to falter. Four teenagers from Queens, sisters Mary and Betty Weiss and twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, cut “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and it went to #5 in July, 1964. Even in a year with so many great records – “Dancing in the Street,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “She Loves You,” “Oh Pretty Woman” – “Remember,” with its doomsday piano chords, seagull sounds, finger snaps and Mary Weiss’ emotional vocal still holds up its end quite well. 

I was just a kid, so older girls were a mystery, but I’d watch the Shangri-Las lip-synching on Clay Cole’s dance show, and they seemed to have a worldliness about them, like the high school girls I’d see at the Woolworth’s downtown, shopping for make-up and wearing their boyfriend’s oversized blue and gold letter jackets. 

The Shangri-Las’ label wasted no time with a follow-up. “Remember” was still in the top five when “Leader of the Pack” was released that October. By the end of November it hit #1. 

This video tells you all you need to know about how seriously adults, especially variety show directors, took the record: 

The song starts as every parent’s bad dream – their daughter in love with a dropout from the “wrong side of town,” a J.D. who’s convinced her that he has a shy, vulnerable side (“They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad’). But it shifts gears and becomes the teenager’s nightmare when dad tells her to dump the loser; he pulls off recklessly onto the rain-slicked road and crashes his motorcycle. Jimmy’s dead! And it’s dad’s fault! 

Shangri-La records were equal parts innocence and toughness, moody teenage melodramas. And musically adventurous: sassy vocals in “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” Iron Butterfly psychedelic overtones of  “The Sweet Sounds of Summer” or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing underneath “Past, Present and Future,” they were all groundbreaking in their own way. 

Shadow Morton wrote "Remember" and co-wrote "Leader of the Pack." He produced the Shangri-Las and captured all that angsty teenage attitude before going on to produce the Vanilla Fudge, whose over-wrought vocals and arrangements squeezed every bit of drama possible from their Motown and Beatles covers, and Janis Ian. Think of  “Society’s Child” as essentially a Shangri-Las record with a wider worldview. 

Growing up, Bruce Springsteen surely internalized some of these sounds. His arrangements of “Jungleland” and “Backstreets” owed a lot to Morton. And when he sang, “I know your daddy don’t dig me, but he never did understand,” the Leader of the Pack couldn’t have said it any better.

A year of movies 

Last year, I watched 186 movies, mostly recorded off TCM, a few off lesser cable movie channels and one in an actual movie theatre. Here’s a couple of random thoughts. 

The Bowery Boys made 48 movies and I watched 21 of them last year, much more than any human should endure. If you’re looking for continuity within the Bowery Boys Cinematic Universe, forget it. What drove me crazy was the character of Gabe (Gabe Dell), whose personality and occupation changed from one movie to the next, anything to move the story along. He’s a private detective, or a washing machine salesman, a naval officer (with a French wife), muck-racking radio commentator, then he crosses over the tracks to play a hoodlum. And that’s just what comes to mind immediately. 

Bewildered

It also dawned on me that Huntz Hall plays his character Sach like the hophead Hall was in real life (he was arrested in 1948 for marijuana possession): the always-bewildered look, the stream of non-sequiturs and a fascination with the mundane. He was scoring more than just banana splits at Louie’s Sweet Shop. 

Here are the five unexpectedly best movies I saw last year: 

Stray Dog (1949) was directed by Akira Kurosawa and stars Toshiro Mifune as a detective whose service revolver is stolen and used to kill someone in a robbery. He and his partner track the killer in post-war Japan (which looks a mess, all rutted roads and shacks, people crippled with disillusionment), conducted during an oppressive heat wave that almost becomes another character. On a night when thunderstorms threaten, you know that the heat wave, and the case, are about to be cracked. 

Saw Godzilla (2023) in the theatre. You’d expect a sci-fi movie made in 2023 to have great special effects and this one doesn’t disappoint. What you wouldn’t expect is a compelling subplot about the redemption of a failed war hero, a kamikaze pilot who had second thoughts. 

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is a heist film nor full of betrayals and bad blood, with a all-star cast of character actors -- Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Marc Lawrence, John McIntyre, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern and Jean Hagen, not to mention Marilyn Monroe in an uncredited role as lawyer Calhern's kept woman. With a perfect dream-like ending that takes place hundreds of miles from any asphalt jungle. 

On the surface, the premise of Metropolitan (1990) doesn't sound all that promising: A group of privileged white kids participate in the gala debutante season. As unsympathetic and pretentious as they sometimes seem, between earnest discussions about Jane Austen and dancing in conga lines, several of them, played by amateur actors, do a lot of growing up in the movie as the film takes several poignant turns. 

A hitman is assigned to knock off an overly ambitious crime lord during the Christmas holidays. That's the plot of Blast of Silence (1961), filmed guerilla style without permits on the Staten Island Ferry, Queens, the Village, Harlem and Rockefeller Center. It offers glimpses of a long-gone New York City: a hotel with a sign welcoming “transients” and street views of bookstores, record stores and what used to be called stationery stores that sold newspapers, magazines, cigars and candy. A good punchy story too.

Are you a mouse or a monkey?

The news that the earliest version of Mickey Mouse (silent, and in black and white) was moving into the public domain effective today, coupled with the holiday season, resurfaced my lifelong obsession/fascination with the Mickey Mouse character in March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) going back many decades to when I first watched the movie one Thanksgiving morning on WPIX Channel 11.

For years I thought it was a puppet, before I realized, or was told, that Mickey is played by a monkey wearing what appears to be a suffocating rubber head over its own, which may account for some of its drunken stumbling:

There’s no listing for the mouse in the film’s credits, but March of the Wooden Soldiers was directed by Hal Roach, the film studio head responsible for The Little Rascals, and this scene from 1931 might reveal the monkey behind the mouse in an earlier role.

Internet research says that there was a Jocko, a Joe and a Josephine, all monkeys that appeared in dozens of film shorts and movies around this time. They may have also all worked under different stage names, trained by a former organ grinder named Tony Campanaro, who also trained The Little Rascals’ dog Petey.

Walt Disney was notoriously stingy about copyrights, but since he and Hal Roach were country club buddies, he granted Roach permission to not only use Mickey, but also snippets of music from Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon, released in 1933, in March of the Wooden Soldiers.

The scene where Mickey throws the brick at the cat isn’t quite copyright infringement, but “borrowed” from Krazy Kat and Ignatz the Mouse, a popular comic strip and cartoon at the time.

With the early version of Mickey Mouse now in the public domain, you can probably expect the character to appear in some horrible pornography (Minnie Mouse is joining Mickey for public use) or bloodthirsty video games; nothing as innocent as March of the Wooden Soldiers.