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.