A history of popular music, as told by 100 one-hit wonders (part 2)

Second in the series; the criteria for what makes a one-hit wonder is in the entry below. 

90: J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers –•– Last Kiss — (Peaked: November 7, 1964 at # 2)

For a time, teenage tragedy songs were the rage – grim storylines of star-crossed couples who vow eternal love just before one of them is killed, preferably (because it’s a lot closer to home if you’re a teenager who just got their driver’s license) in a vehicular accident. By 1964, the genre looked to have run its course when suddenly “Last Kiss” (and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las) pushed with clutching hands through graveyard dirt. J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers were touring the Midwest as "Last Kiss" rattled at the bottom of the charts. Early one morning in Ohio, a car in their caravan drifted into the oncoming lane and rammed head-on into a trailer truck. The driver of the car was killed, and Wilson broke his ankle. The tour continued, with Wilson hobbling onstage on a crutch, and “Last Kiss” began climbing up the charts.  

89. The Castaways –•– Liar, Liar — (Peaked: October 23, 1965 at # 12) 

88: The Elegants –•– Little Star — (Peaked: August 25, 1958 at # 1)

Based as they are on childhood rhymes, these songs offer instant familiarity. The Castaways were a Minneapolis band that mostly played Midwestern frat parties until they cut "Liar Liar" for a local record label. Built around the “liar, liar, pants are on fire” playground taunt, it was a national breakout. The Elegants were five Italian teenagers from Staten Island who reworked “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to create a doo-wop gem. 

87. Dean Friedman –•– Ariel — (Peaked: June 25, 1977 at # 26)

Dean Friedman of Paramus salutes his hometown’s most spectacular cultural contribution, the waterfall at Paramus Park, as well as Dairy Queen (he mentions getting onion rings, so it was probably the one on Route 4, where you could also get hot dogs and hamburgers from their “brazier”). 

86. Tom Tom Club –•– Genius of Love — (Peaked: April 24, 1982 at # 31)

The three members of the Talking Heads not named David Byrne pay tribute to black music, capturing a very specific time, not unlike Arthur Conley’s shout out of the soul superstars of 1966 in “Sweet Soul Music.” When someone gets around to making a documentary about inner-city culture of the early 80s, “Genius of Love” will play on the soundtrack as kids carry boom boxes the size of window air conditioners on their shoulder and graffiti-covered elevated trains roll by. 

85. Tiny Tim –•– Tip Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me — (Peaked: June 29, 1968 at # 17) 

84. The New Vaudeville Band –•– Winchester Cathedral — (Peaked: December 3, 1966 at # 1)

Mostly in the UK, music hall and vaudeville were a strange offshoot of psychedelia that not even the Beatles (or at least Paul) were immune to (“When I’m 64” and “Your Mother Should Know”). The New Vaudeville Band were following the trend, but Tiny Tim was the real deal, an eccentric human jukebox who seemingly knew the words and music to every song written since the turn of the century. 

83. The Undisputed Truth –•– Smiling Faces Sometimes — (Peaked: September 4, 1971 at # 3)

Serpentine slow-burner written by Motown’s Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, whose songwriting credits are pretty amazing, including Money, Just My Imagination, Psychedelic Shack, Cloud Nine, Runaway Child, I Wish It Would Rain, Too Many Fish in the Sea and I Heard It Through the Grapevine. 

82. Kai Winding –•– More — (Peaked: August 24, 1963 at # 8)  

Someone at Fairmount School, obviously with a negligent parent, saw Mondo Cane at the Fox Theater and it was the talk of the day. “You really see a guy get killed by a bull? Stabbed with its horns?” When, many years later, the film finally made its television debut on Channel 9 – which should tell you a lot about Mondo Cane – it turned out to be a dull anthology of dated “weird” scenes, like senior citizen bodybuilders. It had a nice theme song though, sort of a rewrite of Telstar (or maybe it was the other way around). 

81. Sheb Wooley –•– Purple People Eater — (Peaked: June 9, 1958 at # 1)

Woolworth's in Hackensack sold one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater toy figures. They scared me.

 

 

A history of popular music, as told by 100 one-hit wonders (part 1) 

The ground rules for defining a one-hit wonder: Each of these artists must have hit the Billboard Top 40 with only one song. Ever. That makes them a one-hit wonder. The Buffalo Springfield, regardless of their legacy, are a one-hit wonder by this definition. The Knack are not since their follow-up to “My Sharona” made the Top 40. This list only captures songs from 1955 to 1989, more or less paralleling my interest in this kind of minutiae and freeing me from having to comment on “Who Let the Dogs Out,” “The Macarena” or “Barbie Girl.” If this list covered the greatest one-hit wonders based on personal tastes, it would look much different. This is more about the one-hit wonders that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant – or at the very least offered something I could say about them. 

100: Hillside Singers –•– I’d Like to Teach the World — (Peaked: January 15, 1972 at #13)

99: T-Bones –•– No Matter What Shape — (Peaked: February 5, 1966 at # 3)     

As Middle America went about its business humming these commercial jingles, adapting them as standalone songs seemed almost too easy. The T-Bones were the LA studio musicians known as The Wrecking Crew, channeling the Ventures with their remake of the Alka-Seltzer jingle. The Hillside Singers were a studio creation that sounded too close to Up With People for comfort. Like an opened can of Coca-Cola that’s been allowed to sit, "I'd Like To Teach The World" had no fizz; it was just sweet and syrupy. 

98: Grateful Dead –•– Touch of Grey — (Peaked: September 26, 1987 at # 9)     

The 60s really ended at some point in the 80s with John Lennon and Marvin Gaye murdered, Keith Richards and David Crosby perpetually zonked; Brian Wilson unable to get out of bed; Bob Dylan with writer’s block; and Paul McCartney thinking it would be a good idea to write and record with Michael Jackson. But by the late 80s, with tie-dyed shirts back in fashion and the 20^th anniversary of the Summer of Love, that 60s incense was in the air again. The Grateful Dead, a 60s survivor not known for their self-preservation skills (or their ability to write a catchy tune), somehow tapped into all this and caught late-inning lightning with an ode to growing old gracefully – “old” in this case meant approaching 50.

97: The Jamies –•– Summertime, Summertime — (Peaked: September 22, 1958 at # 26) 

In a 1978 movie called Fingers, Harvey Keitel plays a gifted pianist with a knack for violently shaking down people who owe his gangster father money. Fidgety, impulsive -- in short a poster child for Asperger's -- when Keitel’s character isn't practicing dramatic piano concertos, he’s walking around Manhattan with a portable tape machine obsessively playing "Summertime, Summertime” over and over. Heard mostly on oldies radio, predictably when the seasons changed, the song was always pleasant enough, backed by with what sounds like a harpsichord. 

96: Edie Brickell & New Bohemians –•– What I Am — (Peaked: March 4, 1989 at # 7)    

Stoner anthem celebrating a complete lack of metaphysical awareness and depth on the part of the singer. 

95: Gary Numan –•– Cars — (Peaked: June 7, 1980 at # 9)

Maybe it was all the synthesizers, but something about New Wave music brought out the automaton in everybody. Gary Numan (new man – get it? Like an android!) offered non-emotional vocals and looked like a department store mannequin, but it was the very human drums and tambourine that kept this record moving until the end when the synthesizers threaten and then take over. 

94: Moms Mabley –•– Abraham, Martin and John — (Peaked: July 19, 1969 at # 35)      

93: Pigmeat Markham –•– Here Comes the Judge — (Peaked: July 27, 1968 at # 19)       

Possibly spurred by the late-career success of Redd Foxx, a handful of entertainers who spent most of their lives working the ‘chitlin’ circuit’ of nightclubs and theaters that catered to black audiences found themselves nearly in the mainstream of popular entertainment. Moms Mabley left her raunchy nightclub act to become a semi-regular on the Merv Griffin Show and at 75 was the oldest living person to make the Billboard Top 40, croaking a melancholy “Abraham, Martin and John.” When Sammy Davis Jr. (who began as a child tap dancer on the chitlin’ circuit) used the “Here Comes the Judge” line on Laugh-In, he was recalling an old Pigmeat Markham comedy routine and creating a new national catch-phrase overnight. Markham, 64, was rushed into the studio to capture the moment with some Jurassic Period rap. 

92: Victor Lundberg –•– An Open Letter to My Teenage Son — (Peaked: December 2, 1967 at # 10)     

Surely a hit on VFW hall jukeboxes, with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” swelling behind him, moonlighting newscaster Victor Lundberg in a “conversation” with his long-haired son starts out sympathetic, before veering right and ending with a promise that if the kid burns his draft card, "burn your birth certificate at the same time. From that moment on, I have no son." Like a troublesome stomach virus, this record thankfully moved through the charts quickly. Three weeks after its debut, it peaked at #10. The next week it slipped to #22 and then it was gone. As might have been any kid whose father, looking to send some sort of message, played this on the family stereo. OK pop, and if you’re looking for me to throw out the garbage tonight, I’ll probably be halfway to Toronto. 

91: Jim Backus and Friend –•– Delicious — (Peaked: July 21, 1958 at # 40)

Listen as Mr. Magoo sits in a dark cocktail lounge plying his date with champagne.

 

Two weeks of hell

If we survived these back-to-back Billboard charts from 43 years ago, quite possibly the worst, most annoying two weeks of popular music ever, there is hope for all of us. 

Here are the Billboard US Top 10 singles for the weeks ending July 23 and July 30, 1977. Ten years after the Summer of Love, this is your soundtrack to the Summer of the Son of Sam, playing across the nation as Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin were being pulled apart to keep from killing each other in the Yankee dugout.

1  LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT –•– Barry Manilow

2  I JUST WANT TO BE YOUR EVERYTHING –•– Andy Gibb

3  DA DOO RON RON –•– Shaun Cassidy

4  I’M IN YOU –•– Peter Frampton

5  MY HEART BELONGS TO ME –•– Barbra Streisand

6  ANGEL IN YOUR ARMS –•– Hot

7  UNDERCOVER ANGEL –•– Alan O’Day

8  MARGARITAVILLE –•– Jimmy Buffett

9  DO YOU WANNA MAKE LOVE –•– Peter McCann

10  BEST OF MY LOVE –•– The Emotions

1  I JUST WANT TO BE YOUR EVERYTHING  - Andy Gibb

2  I’M IN YOU - Peter Frampton

3  LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT - Barry Manilow

4  MY HEART BELONGS TO ME - Barbra Streisand

5  DA DOO RON RON  - Shaun Cassidy

6  BEST OF MY LOVE  - The Emotions

7  DO YOU WANNA MAKE LOVE  - Peter McCann

8  MARGARITAVILLE - Jimmy Buffett

9  (Your Love Has Lifted Me) HIGHER AND HIGHER  - Rita Coolidge

10  WHATCHA GONNA DO? - Pablo Cruise

These songs were ubiquitous that summer, like the heat and humidity. You heard them everywhere. In bars. Getting a hair cut. From a car driving by, a window open for someone to throw a half-eaten McDonald's hamburger out into the street. Maybe that's why as I first read these song titles, I wasn't so much reading them as I was silently singing them to myself. Two weeks of hell to haunt you forever. 

Burt and Ava visit Hackensack

The 1946 film The Killers is best known today as the movie that launched the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We can also definitively say it’s the only film noir set in New Jersey, mostly played out in the fictional town of Brentwood and the very real Hackensack. 

In the first ten minutes, Lancaster, as “the Swede,” gets gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (played by the underrated Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why (back in the days when crime movies often substituted insurance investigators for detectives – O’Brien’s character even packs a gun in a shoulder holster).

O’Brien works for “Atlantic Casualty” and when he calls in to the home office from a pay phone, he asks the operator for a number in Newark. He later references Prudential as a company that might want his services if his boss won’t let him pursue the Swede case and later orders an assistant to pass on information to a reporter from “the Ledger.”

People are after the Swede because they believe he has the $250,000 stolen years ago in a payroll robbery at the Prentiss Hat Company in Hackensack. In a flashback, we see Lancaster and three other gang members lined up at the factory gate wearing faked employee badges – and because it’s 1946, they fit right in with the other employees, all white and all male. 

Like most film noirs (films noir?), the plot gets a little twisty, but a telegram to O’Brien from “Hackensack Fire Department Chief Kenney” marks a turning point in solving the case. 

The Prentiss Hat Company of Hackensack was strictly made up, but it had a real-life parallel in S. Goldberg’s Slipper Factory, built in 1896, and located on River Street behind the county courthouse and jail, once employed more than 600 people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, all the loading dock doors were open, and you’d see (and hear) the machines punching out soles or stitching.

(And I know from bike rides past the plant and office supply deliveries I made in the seventies, that unlike the Prentiss Hat Company, Goldberg’s employees were mostly women and Hispanic).

An uncle liked to tell me that if I didn’t start concentrating on my grades, I’d be attending Goldberg’s Slipper College after high school. Big joke, although there were probably worse places I could have wound up. The factory was torn down in 2008, but today it’s known as SG Companies, a multi-national footwear and apparel corporation with factories and warehouses around the U.S. and Asia.

Here’s one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster plays a man with a fragile grasp on reality stranded in the suburbs. He 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.”

Getting MAD

When the playground bully in the Oval Office recently called Pete Buttigieg, “Alfred E. Neuman,” it sent Buttigieg scrambling to Google. “I’d never heard of him,” the 37-year old admitted. “It must be a generational thing.”

For even a dope like the president, whose reading was likely limited to Playboy and Penthouse (and then only for the pictures) to know who Alfred E. was, speaks to MAD’s pervasiveness in society over the decades.

Like reading The Catcher in the Rye or listening to punk rock, you had to be the right age to discover MAD. Written and drawn by the “usual gang of idiots” as they described themselves, the staff was made up of primarily New York, liberal-minded Jewish guys who helped generations question not only authority, but popular culture, politics, society and (especially) Madison Avenue.

MAD’s worldview was progressive and bipartisan. Corporations were mostly evil. Cigarette advertising was worse. Most TV shows were idiotic. Politicians were not to be trusted. Parents were loving, but often clueless. MAD never spoke down to its readers. While I had the impression that its staff, all children of the fifties (and forties), never got the Beatles, when it came time to parody them, Ringo was the obvious target in this gentle, gender-bending Breck girl ad:

From the days when MAD was still a comic book and not a magazine, it published one its sharpest satires, Mickey Rodent, which had Mickey, jealous that Darnold Duck was stealing the limelight, selling out his feathered pal to a zoo; all the characters questioning why they always wore gloves, and Pluto holding signs asking why, of all the animals in Dizzy Land, he was “chosen to remain mute.” Talk about questioning authority. And still funny.

New issues of MAD will disappear from newsstands before the end of the year. I pretty much stopped reading the magazine in the mid-Seventies when it was parodying TV shows I’d never seen and ads for products I wasn’t familiar with. It was time for younger kids to move up to MAD and for me to step away. National Lampoon was there to fill the void, followed by Saturday Night Live and, much later, Spy magazine and The Onion.

Twenty years ago, I tried to re-read Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t working for me like it did when I was 13. I put the book down and gave it to my son. We all move on, which is just another way of saying, What, me worry?

A step too far

When they came for Kate Smith, there was no one left to answer for her. 

Well, not exactly. There was a niece who said Aunt Kathryn didn’t have a prejudiced bone in her body. 

Based on an anonymous tip, the Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banned Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” after two songs she recorded in the Thirties that reference “darkies’ and “pickaninnies” were uncovered.

The Yankees, a team that dragged its feet when it came to integrating their roster (it didn’t happen until 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson) had taken to playing Smith’s recording during the seventh inning stretch as a jingoistic rejoinder to 9/11.

The Flyers’ connection went deeper. The team believed playing her recording before key games was good luck. When the Flyers made their Stanley Cup runs 40 years ago, they brought Smith to the Spectrum to sing it live. After many years of watching her star fade, it must have felt like personal redemption to put on a glittery gown, follow the red carpet out to mid-ice and belt out God Bless America. Relevant again. The Flyers erected a statue of Smith outside the arena to show their gratitude. When they banned the song, they took the statue down. 

It’s more sad than anything, a knee-jerk cynical reaction made by marketing executives who fear perception is reality and the possibility of losing a ticket sale or two (and I don’t think I’m exaggerating about how many people might stay away if the teams continued to play the recording). 

But what happens in 80 years when someone blows the dust off Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”? With no understanding of context or point-of-view, but only hearing the n-word dropped countless times, do they push the Motion Picture Academy to take away his Best Song Oscar?

Or Bing Crosby’s blackface number in Holiday Inn. Does his “White Christmas” start falling off  of holiday playlists?

A wild-eyed Ralph Kramden threatening to send Alice “to the moon”? Maybe one day gone forever to the same purgatory where Amos and Andy, Vaughan Meader and Foster Brooks’ “drunk guy” were recently joined by Kate Smith.  

White Heat

White Heat lives up to its reputation as possibly the best gangster movie Hollywood made. Aside from its “Made it Ma, top of the world!” fireball ending, there’s James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, an unhinged killer with Oedipal urges strong enough that his mother is a member of his gang (TCM showed the movie on Mother’s Day).  

Cody Jarrett makes people uncomfortable. His gang members, fellow inmates, girlfriend (everybody but Ma) are clearly on edge when Jarrett is around. He has a temper that flares up quickly and without warning. He kills without hesitation. Jarrett talks to his Ma after she’s dead (another gang member, sick of her domineering, shoots her in the back while Cody is jail). He doubts his own sanity as he dwells on his father, who died “in the nuthouse.”

By the time he reaches the end of the line, cackling while the flames from a burning chemical tank explode around him, Jarrett has pretty much lost it.

Cagney’s Jarret reminds me of Heath Ledger as the Joker. While the Joker is on a whole other plane of unreality, they are both unrepentant killers, unpredictable and just scary to be around. Cody, when he starts to get angry, shows a weird, lipless sneer reminiscent of the Joker’s own mutilated mouth.

One other thing that sets White Heat apart is its presentation of what may be a reasonably realistic portrayal of what it’s like to live outside the law. I’ve read a couple of novels in the Parker series by Richard Stark. Parker (he doesn’t seem to have a first name) supports his modest lifestyle by committing major heists. When his share of the take starts to dwindle past a certain point, he begins looking for his next payday.  

Just a few pages of the Parker books are about the actual crime. Mostly, they cover the planning and strategizing of the heist, and its aftermath, hiding out, sometimes for weeks, in shabby motels and abandoned houses.

White Heat similarly doesn’t romanticize outlaws. After Jarrett’s gang hijacks a “treasury train,” they hide out in a vacant house, wearing overcoats indoors (Cody won’t allow them to turn up the heat, lest the outside world notices smoke rising from the chimney), before moving on to cheap roadside bungalows. No penthouse apartments. No fur coats.

The other Parker touch in White Heat is the character called “The Trader,” a guy who stays mostly underground and serves as Cody’s financier/“business development” agent. The Trader meets Cody in yet another abandoned house (this time out in the country) to present him with the plans and financing to pull off a payroll robbery at a chemical plant. In the Parker books, there’s usually someone who recruits the gang, then lays out the money for guns, ammo and vehicles in return for a (usually major) cut of the take.

Hollywood gangster movies had pretty much run their course when White Heat came out in 1949. This late, last gasp left the genre on top of the world.