Two-minute warning

Listening to a playlist of songs that last no more than 120 seconds was a terrain marked by rockabilly, surf instrumentals, British Invasion hits, the Elvises Presley and Costello, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ Stay, the shortest song (1:34!) to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the punk novelty of speeding up old songs (U.K. Subs’ 1:41 version of She’s Not There).

Not surprisingly, Lennon-McCartney and Brian Wilson are good at this type of minimalism (And Your Bird Can Sing, For No One, I’ll Cry Instead, Dance, Dance, Dance, most of the Wild Honey album). Buddy Holly too (Rave On, Not Fade Away).

There are short stories like the Coasters’ Love Potion Number Nine and Willie Nelson’s The Troublemaker. The Stones’ I Wanna Be Your Man (1:43), the Boxtops’ The Letter (1:58), the Clash’s Career Opportunities (1:53) and the Byrds’ Girl With No Name (1:56). Each over in a couple of hundred heartbeats.

Three other songs jumped out as well for their sudden timeliness.

The singer in Mushroom Cloud (1961, 1:57) isn’t losing sleep over school or because he’s bugged at his old man or that his girlfriend’s parents don’t approve. It’s the specter of nuclear annihilation and the powerlessness that comes with it: “We party, we laugh, and we pray again/And we play it cool and try not to think of the mess we're in.”

The lyrics, written by Boudleaux Bryant and sung by Sammy Salvo, fall opposite to the song’s poppy 50s standard format, complete with Ray Conniff-style backing vocals. Bryant, along with wife Felice, wrote Love Hurts and most of the Everly Brothers’ hits, including All I Have to Do Is Dream, Bird Dog, Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie. Salvo was a regionally well-known Alabama pop singer who later left show business to own a meat-supply business.

Held Up Without a Gun (1981, 1:21) by Bruce Springsteen and the B-side of Hungry Heart, was inspired by the 1979 oil crisis (or at least the first stanza is): “I was out driving, just taking it slow/Looked at my tank, it was reading low/Pulled in an Exxon station out on Highway One/Held up without a gun.”

Never minding the rest of the song (in this case the last 40 seconds), autobiographical lyrics about a “damn fool with a guitar” signing a bad management contract. Heard today it’s yet another reminder of the endless loop of economic realities we're trapped in. 

Shape of Things to Come (1968, 1:54) from the teen-exploitation flick Wild in the Streets always had an ominous feel, from the fascistic name of the fictious band (Max Frost and The Troopers) to its lyrics darkly promising the wrong kind of change ("There's a new sun/Risin' up angry in the sky").

The film’s plot is about a rewrite of the Constitution that lowers the age requirement for voting to 14, creating a youth bloc that gets Max Frost (Christopher Jones), a narcissistic rock star, elected president. Frost runs as a Republican.

It’s still a pretty cool song.

The Ballad of the Green Berets

Sixty years ago this month, the most popular record in America was The Ballad of the Green Berets, written and sung by Sgt. Barry Sadler. It was the #1 record on Billboard’s Hot 100 for an astounding five weeks, at a time when there was still a wave of patriotism over U.S. involvement in Vietnam – the idea that the war was an immoral quicksand pit sucking up American lives had yet to hit home.

Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was 67 percent in early ’66; it would drop steadily from there, as would the 48 percent of American college students in favor of the war.

Sadler was a Green Beret medic wounded in Vietnam, so there was a whiff of authenticity about The Ballad of the Green Berets, which he wrote during his convalescence. Performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show launch pad, the record took off, selling nine million copies and becoming the top-selling record of the year. Sadler also recorded what amounted to a concept album, Ballads of the Green Berets, that sold a million copies during the first five weeks of its release.

The record’s success was a reminder that while the Top 40 was mostly reflective of the musical tastes of teenagers, occasionally adults flexed their wallets and had some say. Some other examples: Everybody Loves Somebody and Hello Dolly in the middle of 1964’s Beatlemania, and later in 1966, Strangers in the Night. All #1 records.

Younger kids may have helped with The Ballad of the Green Berets as well, the eight- and nine-year olds pretending to be Vic Morrow and Rick Jason in their backyards playing with toy guns.

The irony of The Ballad of the Green Berets at the top of the charts is that it created a logjam of songs in the top ten that, at least in their titles and universal themes, spoke more powerfully about the emotional churn of soldiers trapped overseas and their families: California Dreamin’, My World Is Empty Without You, Homeward Bound, Nowhere Man, Daydream.

The song didn’t sit well with on the British pop charts. Mick Jagger called it “terribly sick,” and various Beatles offered up words like “crap” and “propaganda.” Paul Jones, of Manfred Mann, said, “The main point is that the American State Department is clearly annoyed because they cannot get people to volunteer to fight in Vietnam.”

Emotionally manipulative and jingoistic, The Ballad of the Green Berets, coupled with the moronic Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., whose run as one of the top three network shows pretty much ran parallel to the war and was filmed with the cooperation of the Marines, were a low-key recruitment effort that missed the mark badly.

After The Ballad of the Green Berets, Sadler did some television acting, wrote a series of men’s adventure paperbacks, then was found guilty of manslaughter when he shot an unarmed man in an argument over a woman. He met up with more violence after moving to Guatemala and was shot in the head while sitting in a cab. Left with brain damage and quadriplegic, he died in 1989.

On Spotify, The Ballad of the Green Berets has more than 9.7 million total plays and songs by Sadler are played more than 53,000 times a month.

Flipside (2023)

In the feature documentary Flipside (2023), filmmaker Chris Wilcha tries making sense of a spaghetti plate of unfinished film projects left hanging when he made the transition from documentary maker to television commercial director.

Flipside is Wilcha’s attempt at tying these loose ends together while seeking answers to bigger mid-life questions about the purpose of work and about letting go of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. Yeah, these are third-world problems and at times the narrative grows a little too self-absorbed, but Flipside’s main attraction is its documentary-within-a-documentary about the record store Wilcha worked in as a teenager, Flipside Records in Pompton Lakes, N.J.

Chris Wilcha outside Flipside Records

Shopping at Flipside, which I sometimes did way back when, took persistence as you worked your way through its overwhelming crush of inventory. Described in the film as a “hoarder’s runaway train,” if Flipside Records was a Brooklyn storefront instead of in suburban Pompton Lakes, vinyl freaks from throughout the tri-state area would be beating a path to its door.

The store, as Wilcha says, preserves a piece of the world that’s gone and it’s no surprise that Uncle Floyd Vivino, the New Jersey entertainer with one foot in the modern world and the other in a long-lost land of vaudeville and pre-war American pop, was a Flipside customer. He’s shown kibitzing around the store and, dramatically lit, improvising a Flipside Records theme song; a touching moment now that Floyd has left us.

Uncle Floyd improvises

(At one point Floyd comes across an ancient-looking Sesame Street busy box sitting among the records and wonders out loud when the toy was last cleaned. I took my three-year old son to Flipside once – he’s 35 now – and I swear the owner brought out the same toy for him to play with).

By movie’s end, Wilcha has found new homes for much of his childhood and teenage stuff and weaved together a satisfying ending to several of the parallel storylines and unfinished projects that have plagued him over the years. As we watch him close the closet door on his childhood bedroom, it’s a literal and figurative closet cleaning.

(Tellingly, when he sells off his record collection it’s not to Flipside, where he fears his records will be lost forever, but to a rival shop also located in Pompton Lakes).

I’ve been making steady progress on also reducing a lifetime of accumulations which, as he says, “can “transport you back but simultaneously make a suffocating mess that reminds you of how much time has passed,” says Wilcha.

I can totally agree. Recently I sold more than 300 LPs that I’d been hunting and gathering since middle school. It took more than a year to clear that mental runway, but when I was ready, I didn’t hesitate. Now to face down the four cartons of old sports magazines in the attic.

Cortez the Killer

Not counting greatest hits compilations, live records and archival projects, Neil Young has recorded 45 albums since 1968. Zuma – released 50 years ago this week – is still his best.

The songs on Zuma are essentially about a busted relationship (his marriage to Carrie Snodgress had ended) and unconsciously – because Young’s work often doesn’t seem premeditated – move from denial to anger to depression to acceptance.

The one song that doesn’t explicitly fit this cycle is Cortez the Killer. Young typically downplayed its lyrics when he told an audience in 1996, "One night I stayed up too late when I was goin' to high school. I ate like six hamburgers or something. I felt terrible, very bad... and in the morning I woke up and I'd written this song."

Okay, so the best thing you’ve ever written was the product of indigestion.

The song isn’t so much about Cortez and his geographic and spiritual conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire in the 16^th century as it is an idyllic vision of the Aztecs as a primitive society making love not war, laying around the beach chewing coca leaves and wearing colorful clothes, almost an idealized view of the hippie culture.  And with the coming of Cortez – Madison Avenue, Time magazine – it becomes an allegory about the death of sixties innocence.

Aztec washing day

(David Crosby’s Renaissance Fair, released by the Byrds in 1967, treads similar ground, using a medieval marketplace as a metaphor for hippiedom).

What lifts Cortez into the stratosphere are the final lyrics and the unexpected shift from the drone-eye view of the Aztec civilization to the first person, from tourist to participant: “And I know she's living there/And she loves me to this day/I still can't remember when/Or how I lost my way.”

Now it’s Young as flannel-shirted time traveler committing one of those conundrums of time-travel fiction, falling for someone of a past era and then before the butterfly effect takes hold, returning to his own era alone.

With the closing notes of the song, the time machine swoops away and splashes into a cosmic liquid light show.

Ironically, or maybe not, Cortez the Killer, and much of Zuma, was recorded in a studio near Zuma Beach, Malibu and Point Dume, the same location where the Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) – a film about time traveling astronauts displaced into the future – was shot.

Young’s guitar took on a new tone in Zuma, a sound that has since become his electric trademark, crackling at times with controlled feedback. The finished version of Cortez is a first take, a rehearsal jam with a dreamlike, psychedelic, at times ominous vibe, Young not letting on to Crazy Horse that the tape was rolling. It was a keeper, a rare example of first thought, best thought.

Wild and crazy, 1975

Last year, Young released another version of Zuma, called it Dume, replaced the last track on the original, Through My Sails (the acceptance song), added a few other songs that had nothing to do with the break-up theme, then rearranged the track order, placing Cortez first.

Of course, it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I’ll stick with the original. First version, best version.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Big Bopper and Dion’s “Winter Dance Party Tour” was a terrible idea – zigzagging across the upper Midwest in the dead of winter – made horribly worse by the plane crash in poor weather conditions that killed all three except Dion, who stayed on the tour bus. On January 31, 1959, four days before Holly’s death, 17-year-old Bob Dylan saw him perform at the Duluth Armory.

Here's a theory: As an impressionable kid, this might have been a haunting experience for Dylan and one wonders if the Rolling Thunder Revue was his belated response, an attempt to get it right this time.

In autumn 1975, Dylan rounded up Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg, put together a backing band and toured New England by bus and campers playing mostly theatres and college auditoriums. Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot joined for a few dates.

A film crew accompanied the tour, Dylan directing the musicians and some inner circle friends for an impromptu movie he envisioned. (At four hours, the mostly improvised Renaldo & Clara is for Dylan completists only).

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) rescued the best of that footage and includes interviews with Dylan, Baez and McGuinn, among others. When released, some criticized Scorsese’s use of several fictional talking heads (hence the title, A Bob Dylan Story), although none add much to the overall narrative.

Dylan seems energized playing to smaller rooms and performing new material from Blood on the Tracks and the upcoming Desire. Off-stage, he’s not the guy with the shades, amused by private jokes only he understands in Don’t Look Back (1967), the documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Here he’s more the avuncular dad on family vacation, even taking the wheel of an RV to drive to the next tour stop.

The band, made up of mostly spare parts, has a sound that sometimes verges on punk or metal, driven by the unlikely choice of Mick Ronson on lead guitar. Formerly with David Bowie, Ronson may have felt relieved to not have a lead singer simulate fellatio on his guitar during a solo.

Like other rockumentaries, the film looks to frame Rolling Thunder in a historical context, namely the upcoming bicentennial and the perceived country’s mood at the end of 1975 (“people lost their sense of conviction,” says Dylan). Scorsese shuffles several presidential clips, including one from Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech: “We have a country that in Bob Dylan’s words, is busy being born, not busy dying.”

It felt like an optimistic time, particularly for my generation, today’s detested Baby Boomers. Nixon rightfully left office, Vietnam and the military draft in the rearview mirror. We had our choice of FM rock stations, and something called Saturday Night Live debuted on NBC that October, a kind of Rolling Thunder Revue itself in presentation and values.

Rolling Thunder concerts ended with a cast rendition of This Land Is Your Land. Today, its lyrics seem more distant, and the sound of rolling thunder isn’t that of the wheels of a traveling caravan of musicians; it’s likely something a little more ominous.  

Rolling with it

Steve Winwood showed Mozartian skill playing the keyboards at age four, and by the time he was 14 was playing and singing in a professional band, the Spencer Davis Group.

The band's Gimme Some Lovin', which he wrote, played organ and sang lead on entered the Billboard chart at #100, hitting #7 for two weeks in early 1967. Seemingly recorded with no thought towards sound balance, its loud, sweaty party rush doesn't give the listener a chance to catch a breath. 

Cue the Summer of Love footage of dancing hippies as an artistically restless Winwood left Spencer Davis to form Traffic. The band spent several months woodshedding in a rural cottage without electricity; when they needed to plug in electric guitars they ran an extension cord to a neighbor's home. 

Traffic's 1967 album Mr. Fantasy is a whirlwind of flutes, sitars and psychedelic effects, a perfect soundtrack for the times. Winwood's voice kept things close to earth and the band remembered that extension cord for the guitar workout Dear Mr. Fantasy, a cut presaging the sound of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. 

Traffic's promotional video for Paper Sun, the single off Mr. Fantasy is a strange one, filmed at the British Museum of Natural History. 

Only year later Winwood was on the run again, joining Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker to form Blind Faith, whose debut was opening for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Following a brief tour of the U.S., they imploded. 

Winwood declined an offer to join Crosby, Stills and Nash – having survived the ego trips and drugs that sunk Blind Faith, he could be forgiven for not wanting to join another volatile environment. He did a memorable jam with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland’s Voodoo Chile and played keyboards on the B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in London session albums before reforming Traffic. 

Traffic 2.0 was a staple of FM radio; John Barleycorn Must Die (1970) and The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (1971) charting at #5 and #7 in the U.S. respectively. They were versatile enough to be heavy (Pearly Queen), jazzy (Low Spark, Glad) or rustic folky (John Barleycorn). Winwood broke up the band in 1974 and did keyboard session work with Lou Reed, Toots and the Maytals and George Harrison, including playing the synthesizer on Marianne Faithful’s Broken English single. 

Then, while many of his contemporaries stumbled about figuring how to update their sound, Winwood had a career renaissance. His album Arc of a Diver (1980), was a one-man production, performing all the singing and instrumentation, as well as engineering himself. The record included the single When You See a Chance (#7). 

Back in the High Life (1986) went triple platinum, with the single Higher Love reaching #1 and earning Winwood Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Roll with It (1988) and its title track (a rewrite of Junior Walker’s Shotgun; Holland, Dozier and Holland received writing credits) hit #1 on the album and singles charts. 

Smug rock fans felt Winwood's embrace of synth-pop was a sellout, a betrayal of artistic integrity. In truth, it's the sound of a virtuoso musician understanding and adapting, something he's done countless times during his career. 

Seeing Winwood today in concert is a thrill, having listened to his music for nearly 60 years. But Winwood, as with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, any artist with that kind of long-tailed legacy, is also holding up a mirror as we see ourselves in them, all of us trying to come to grips with our own mortality. Same as watching a Robert Redford film or a video of Mark Volman goofing around with the Turtles. Best to just roll with it. 

Surf's Up

I found the Beach Boys in 1964 when I Get Around hit the charts. It had an instant appeal and didn’t sound like anything else on the radio in that summer of the British Invasion; it wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d realize how complex I Get Around is, seemingly all chorus, no bridge, almost an endless circular loop. It was the first notice that Brian Wilson thought about music, and heard it in his head, differently than anyone else.

Three years later, already a candidate for canonization by having written and recorded God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Caroline No and Good Vibrations, Wilson sang the quietly elegiac Surf’s Up alone at the piano for Leonard Bernstein’s prime time rock music blessing “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” It was to be the centerpiece of Brian’s “teenage symphony to God,” Smile. He struggled to complete the album before his growing paranoia, drug issues and man-child excesses eventually sank it.

Brian in 1965

For decades Smile remained one of the great “what ifs” of popular culture. In his 1993 sci-fi novel Glimpses, Lewis Shiner’s central character time travels back to 1966 to encourage Wilson to finish the record. For those who read the book, it only added to Smile’s myth.

Brian’s trials over the next few decades are well-documented; in 1999 he publicly re-emerged and began touring again, backed now by younger, like-minded musicians. At the Beacon Theatre in New York City, he looked at times a bit startled, as if he’d just woken up to find himself on stage leading a band again. His stage movements were awkward. But the worshipful audience was behind him right from the start when we booed Mike Love’s talking head during a brief Beach Boys history video that kicked off the show.

During his summer 2000 tour performing the emotional powerhouse Pet Sounds, the audience knew every note – we cheered Brian’s brilliant production details, from the bicycle bell and horn in You Still Believe in Me to the bass harmonica solo in I Know There’s An Answer. The train whistle and barking dogs that end the album, sounds that always sent a chill on record, heard live and loud pinned me back on my seat. Wilson's stage moves were still non-existent, although he got out from behind his security blanket keyboard to play bass for a few numbers. I checked back at the setlist from that show. Thirty-four songs.

Encouraged by his band, in 2004 Brian finally completed and released Smile. I had mixed feelings about the record, a suite of interconnected pieces that were sometimes thrilling and at other times corny Americana. We’ll never know how the public would have reacted to the record had it been finished and released in 1967, whether it would have been seen as a masterpiece or interesting novelty. Hearing it in its entirety at Carnegie Hall gave a vibe outside of the usual concert experience, a spectacle that even attracted Lou Reed, who walked past me on the aisle.

What strikes me about those three concerts was the adoration that came off the audience.

Smile wasn’t Wilson’s only what if moment. If he’d been diagnosed early on and treated by real therapists instead of entrusting charlatans, had his supportive and talented younger brothers Carl and Dennis lived longer, his road may not have been so difficult. Even so, a Mount Rushmore of 1960s pop composers would offer up Wilson, along with Lennon and McCartney and Burt Bacharach. To label his music simply as being about “surfing” and “California,” does Brian a disservice. His brilliance was universal.

Do you remember rock and roll radio?

AM radio has been marginalized over the decades into a continuum of right-wing clowns and sports talk.

(Which is a reminder that in 2017, New Jersey’s conservative Republican governor, Chris Christie, reaching his term limit, was considering a second career on sports-talk WFAN, on paper a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination. He did a couple of fill-in stints, but it didn’t work out for the haughty and dismissive Christie. Arrogance worked for Mike Francesa, the afternoon host WFAN was looking to replace, but Francesa knew his shit. Christie wasn’t about to get his hands dirty digging into the minutia of the final seconds of a Knicks-Pistons game in the middle of January).

Tangents aside, there are occasional outliers on the AM dial that have resisted talk radio. WMTR, based in North Jersey, plays “classic oldies,” music for those of us who grew up between the Eisenhower and Carter administrations. Yeah, there are plenty of commercials and traffic and weather updates. Ski condition reports in the winter. And if you're listening while driving, you'll experience those waterfalls of static that occasionally wash over the broadcast. 

But the station owns a playlist that defies expectations. As part of a national chain of radio stations, there must be algorithms at work, but it seems programmed to purposely feel not like the spoon-fed comfort food one can expect on any of SiriusXM’s “oldie” channels.

Forgotten instrumentals? Here comes Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds Orchestral. Obscure doo-wop? Morse Code of Love by the Capris. Novelty tunes like The Purple People Eater. Pure schlock like Danke Schoen. You Keep Me Hangin' On by the Vanilla Fudge. Love Or Let Me Be Lonely by The Friends of Distinction. The Cookies’ Chains. Out of nowhere, Thunder Road. WMTR can almost – almost – feel like free-form radio at times.

A shuffle through such a wide playlist creates strange bedfellows. You can bear sitting through Helen Reddy’s divorced mom saga You and Me Against the World if it’s followed by Billy Preston’s Will It Go Round in Circles. It works the other way as well: Nobody wants to come off Eight Miles High into Who Put the Bomp. Another strange transition was Wonderful! Wonderful! by Johnny Mathis leading into Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music.

But reconsider the seemingly randomness of playing those two records back-to-back: Mathis, an African American sounding safely Caucasian with a record produced by Mitch Miller and featuring the Ray Conniff Singers, followed by an all-white funk band doing a Rick James imitation on a song that went to #1 on the Billboard R&B charts.

If it’s an algorithm, it has a sense of humor.