Marathon Man 

Working my way through a box of old VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s, many of them unlabeled, is a never-ending series of Christmas mornings opening wrapped gifts, each cassette holding another surprise. So far, they’ve mostly indicated what a sucker I was for those Boomer TV marathons the cable channels used to run. I’ve fast-forwarded my way already through hours and hours of The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, The Adventures of Superman, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the Three Stooges – all of which looks an awful lot like my current DVR viewing habits. 

But they’re also a reminder that there was time when cable seemed to care a lot more about programming than it does today with its endless recycling of ancient TV Westerns and half-day blocks of infomercials. TBS aired its Wild, Wild West and U.N.C.L.E. marathons with new commentary from Robert Conrad and Robert Vaughan. Even the not-so-super superstation WWOR had Jack Larsen host its Superman marathon. The Stooges episodes I taped more than 30 years ago off AMC are still shown on the channel, but often edited down to six minutes from their original twenty, plus more commercials to pad things out to a crisp 15 minutes. 

Because blank VHS tapes were somewhat costly, we did a lot of re-recording over programs we’d already watched. Something I’m hoping to uncover is what’s known in painting as pentimento – I had to look it up – the “presence or emergence of earlier images, forms or strokes that have been painted over.” Maybe a Superman episode will end abruptly and some exotic, rarely seen movie or a New York Giants football game will appear. So far, I’ve only uncovered a hidden last hour of the forgettable Schwarzenegger film “The Running Man” and a Scooby Doo cartoon. 

Recognizing the more ephemeral aspects of taped television, I find myself now fast-forwarding through the shows and watching the commercials. Hair Club for Men. Tote bags that come with a subscription to Time magazine. The Pathmark guy. All of which leads me to a videotape existential crisis. Am I the last person to have these fleeting moments of airtime in my possession and now have the responsibility for the preservation and stewardship of commercials for Carvel’s Fudgie the Whale and Slim Whitman’s “All My Best” album? I almost don’t want to check YouTube to see if they exist in perpetuity there. 

OK, I checked. They’re both on YouTube. I’m off the hook.

 

The Marie Kondo blues 

I began haunting newsstands when I was ten or eleven, spending my allowance on comic books, monster magazines or MAD before moving on in my teens to sports and music magazines, and National Lampoon. Oh, the fun of spending an afternoon or evening with a new mag. When I got comfortable with eBay, I began searching out more. My first dip into online bidding was a bundle of Hit Parader magazines from the 60s. It was easy and I was hooked; as my mania went unchecked, so did the clutter. 

Now, in anticipation of a downsizing that seems inevitable, I’ve gone on a Marie Kondo kick, looking to rid myself of the things that no longer bring joy – stuff in the attic that had become, literally and otherwise, a weight hanging over my head. 

For years I had a subscription to Goldmine, a thick biweekly publication for record collectors. What I thought were about twenty or so copies in the attic turned out to be closer to 75. I spent the better part of an afternoon going through them and discovered that what was entertaining and relevant 30 years ago today felt marginally interesting, but mostly obsolete and musty. 

Witness the countless letters to the editor revealing the paranoia and suspicion record collectors back then felt about those new-fangled CDs. Questions about their shelf-life (“Won’t the metal start to deteriorate with time?”) and production sources (“Why does my original Little Richard’s Greatest Hits album have noticeable differences when compared with the CD?”). These were questions that went on for years in Goldmine. That and a long running debate regarding the urban legend that if you drew a circle around the edge of a CD with a green marker it would sound better. 

Goldmines aside, another box in the attic held something like 50 issues of The Coffin Corner, a newsletter of original research dedicated to the history of pro football. Seemed like a good buy at the time, but too many of the articles were about subjects I could care less about (“The 1927 Pottstown Maroons: A Closer Look.”) Today you can find similar material – better written and researched – online. 

No doubt, The Coffin Corners would have been of some interest to somebody, but I was resigned to let them go. The entire load, Goldmines included, ended up in recycling. But as I dumped them into the bin, I kept hoping someone would walk over and offer to take all this stuff off my hands and put it in the trunk of his car. 

Next up: VHS tapes, and lots of ‘em.

 Radio roulette 

When I got my first transistor radio for my 13^th birthday (red with a silver grille), I discovered a game called radio roulette. I’d spin the tuning dial back and forth, from WMCA at 570 to WWRL at 1600, and wherever I stopped, I had to listen to that station for ten minutes, (although I may have given myself a pass if it was a Spanish-language station). 

Later, I’d wind up having random brushes with what could be called real-life radio roulette. 

WJRZ was a country music station (the term back then was “country and western”) with business offices on Main Street in Hackensack and a studio somewhere in the hinterlands of town near Route 4, a couple of sprawling cemeteries and a patch of wetlands that is likely long gone. In 1970, the station changed its call letters to WWDJ and its format to Top 40 – an uphill climb given the popularity and listening range of WABC in New York City. 

To promote the new format, a couple of deejays came to our high school for an assembly program. I can’t remember much detail, except that it got real embarrassing when they chose to play “Don’t Pull Your Love,” a slice of white bread performed by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds (comma placement is important here) at a deafening volume, while several black classmates laughed at the music and flashed mocking peace signs. White teen culture taking one on the chin. 

Pete Fornatale

By college I had a car with an FM radio, always tuned to WNEW-FM. My favorite deejay was Pete Fornatale, who had a likeable personality and delivery well-matched to his broadcast shift (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.), while championing uncool bands like the Beach Boys and Poco, and playing Buffalo Springfield well into the 70s. A true believer in the medium of radio, Fornatale put together what passed for a “multi-media” presentation back then (recordings from the radio matched up to a slide show) and took it around to college campuses. When he brought the show to my school, I made the time to be there. 

What I remember best from his presentation were his references to the power of a community of like-minded people tuned to the same radio station, his unmistakable voice not coming out of my car speakers, but from right there in the same room, and his opening line: “None of you look like what I pictured either.” 

I had a similar experience a few years later when I met Vin Scelsa, another WNEW deejay whose Sunday morning show was the definition of idiosyncratic and something I listened to every week. Speaking directly with someone whose voice you've heard for years through your stereo speakers can be a bit surreal. 

Then there were times when real-life radio roulette found me.  

When I was sports information director for Upsala College, our men’s basketball team went to the Division III Final Four, a big enough deal that some felt, understandably, that the game should be broadcast live over WFMU-FM, the former Upsala radio station whose studio was still on campus, although it was no longer officially affiliated with the school. The station agreed and several alumni traveled out to the game site in Grand Rapids, Michigan, lugging a heavy metal case holding the broadcasting equipment. 

The night of the game there were glitches – probably because the equipment looked like something Marconi would have experimented with in the 1890s – and a connection couldn’t be established. Unable to do a live broadcast, I became Plan B, calling into the station afterwards and being put live on the air to summarize the game. It worked out pretty well until some transcontinental telephone interference forced an end to the call.

One last spin of the dial occurred when I was working in corporate communications for the local electric utility and was on call after-hours when an outage blacked out Penn Station in Newark. At 5 a.m., WCBS-FM was looking for an update. So I wouldn’t wake anybody, I went down to the kid’s playroom and spoke with the reporter, then left early for work. During my drive in, the station played my soundbite during the news. I laughed, not just at hearing myself on the radio, but knowing that while some early morning listener might think this official spokesman was situated in some underground bunker, it was only me sitting on the floor in my underwear, surrounded by toys. 

 

May 1974: An ambulance can only go so fast 

There are few albums that engendered quite as much buyer’s remorse as Neil Young’s “Time Fades Away,” the 1973 follow-up to his fabulously successful “Harvest,” which included what is still his biggest (and only) hit record, “Heart of Gold” and set up the public perception of Young as the laidback singer/songwriter recording songs of yearning from the back of his barn. “Time Fades Away” was anything but. 

The genesis of “Time Fades Away” begins with Young and his band rehearsing for the tour in support of “Harvest.” As it became increasingly obvious that guitarist Danny Whitten was in no shape to go on a major arena tour, thanks to a heroin addiction, Young bought him a plane ticket and sent him home – where he promptly overdosed and died. 

"Any big event will inspire a song, and that indeed was a very large event,” Young said later. “I think that's the first major life-and-death event that really affected me in what I was trying to do. Like when one of your parents dies or a friend dies, you kinda reassess yourself as to what you're doing – because you realize life is so impermanent. So you wanna do the best you can while you're here." 

The tour, with Whitten’s death hanging over it, was by all accounts a miserable slog – 61 shows from January through April – but Young began using the concerts to introduce new songs he’d written on the road that felt more despairing than anything. The “Time Fades Away” album captured most of the new stuff, behind one of the ugliest album covers ever. 

Fast-forward to the wee hours of May 16, 1974, as Young plays an unannounced set at The Bottom Line in New York City following a Ry Cooder/Leon Redbone double bill. “I’m just passing through,” he tells the audience, as if he were an itinerant minstrel wandering the countryside. In truth, he’d just recorded an album scheduled for an August release titled “On the Beach,” and was eager to work out some of the new songs in front of an audience. 

The new stuff had the same gloomy feel as much of “Time Fades Away,” and while Young rarely wrote songs “ripped from the headlines” as they say, he previewed songs alluding to Watergate, the oil embargo, the Manson Family and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. During The Bottom Line show, he introduces a new song, the rambling “Ambulance Blues” – even the title is a bring down – with “Here’s another bummer,” before disarming the comment with a pause, then “It’s my trip, man.” 

Whether subconsciously or not, Young lifted the melody for “Ambulance Blues” from the British folk singer/guitarist Bert Jansch’s touching “Needle of Death,” a song whose title gives away everything, and which more or less fits with the unspoken theme of “On the Beach”  and a preoccupation with Young around this time. It’s not a record about drugs, but there’s always a feeling of desolation and doom waiting right on the horizon. That a song on the album is titled “See the Sky About to Rain,” is probably not coincidental. 

At times, “On the Beach” has all the lethargic energy of a junkie nodding out. On “Vampire Blues,” a song apparently about the oil embargo, there’s a guitar solo that barely gets going before it just starts to circle the drain and vanish. Heck, Young could barely come up with song titles for the album, preferring to just attach “blues” to several song names. 

As Young told The Bottom Line audience, he and his pals had lately been under the influence of cheap street weed cooked down in a frying pan, mixed with honey and eaten. “Worse than heroin,” someone in Young’s entourage later called it – “worse” in that there was an endless supply, it cut productivity to a trickle and all without any of those bothersome needles. 

Following “Time Fades Away” and “On the Beach,” Young completed his trilogy of doom in 1975 with the album “Tonight’s the Night,” a drunken wake for Danny Whitten and Young’s equipment tech Bruce Berry, another OD victim. Later that year he released the album “Zuma,” which wasn’t quite a walk along the beach either, but one could start to see cracks of sunlight through the clouds. 

Nothing gloomy or despairing about the top ten records for May 1974; the only sinister thing here is Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist. Rare for the times, there are three instrumentals this month: “Tubular Bells,” “TSOP” and “The Entertainer,” from another soundtrack (The Sting). Written in 1903 by Scott Joplin, it sparked a revival of Joplin’s piano rags; by September 1974, albums of Joplin’s music would occupy the #3, 4 and 5 spots on Billboard’s Best Selling Classical LPs list, staying on the charts for 64 weeks. Record World magazine called it the "classical phenomenon of the decade.” 

1 THE STREAK –•– Ray Stevens

2 DANCING MACHINE –•– The Jackson 5

3 THE LOCO-MOTION –•– Grand Funk

4 THE ENTERTAINER –•– Marvin Hamlisch

5 THE SHOW MUST GO ON –•– Three Dog Night

6 BENNIE AND THE JETS –•– Elton John

7 TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia) –•– MFSB Featuring the Three Degrees

8 BAND ON THE RUN –•– Paul McCartney and Wings

9 MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS –•– Maria Muldaur

10 TUBULAR BELLS –•– Mike Oldfield 

 

Into the Mystic 

Maybe one of the best, most thematically perfect, movie soundtracks is the one that accompanies a quasi-documentary from 1971, “Dusty and Sweets McGee,” which uses actors and allegedly real addicts to tell us all about the wonderful world of heroin. If Moby Dick is the place to go for everything you’d ever want to know about whaling, “Dusty and Sweets McGee” is the Moby Dick of heroin: vignettes that take us through the entire heroin supply chain: selling it, buying it, preparing it, injecting it, arguing over it, committing crimes to pay for it, and as one character puts it, “Spending a lot of time sitting slack jawed on park benches.” 

At the film’s center is City Life, played by an unrecognizable Billy Gray (Bud on Fathers Knows Best), selling heroin and needles from his high-performance Mustang. His epic shoulder-length mullet is a begrudging acknowledgement of changing fashion, but otherwise he’s wearing the time-honored uniform of 50s gearheads: white t-shirt with a rolled sleeve holding his cigarettes, comb at the ready in a back pocket while he mulls over adding a tape deck and mag wheels to his car. 

Billy Gray, a long ways from Father Knows Best

Much of the film’s music is playing over City Life’s car radio, tuned into “the Big K in L.A.” with all the deejay patter and jingles, as he downshifts to “Runaway,” “Duke of Earl,” “Book of Love” and “Hey Baby” and we watch the neon death march of old brands whiz by on the highway: Rexall, Pep Boys, Rayco. 

It's perfectly placed; incidental music you’d expect to hear riding shotgun with someone who looks like he’s dressed for a Sha Na Na audition. 

In a bedroom where a couple are shooting up, “Ride Captain Ride” comes on the radio – the deejay, talking over the song’s intro, says “we’re just two hours away from the start of another solid gold weekend” – giving his patter, along with the lyrics of that groovy AM hit from the summer of 1970, an ominous feeling, playing as it does over closeups of needles in forearms and what looks like blood coming up the syringe. Another couple, locked away in a cheap motel room, are getting ready to inject themselves as Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” plays on the radio. Sample lyrics: “Then magnificently we will float into the mystic” and “It’s too late to stop now.” 

Sometimes the marriage of music and movies works. Often, you’re left scratching your head. Why does the Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadows of Love” start playing in “The Fantastic Four” movie apropos of nothing? Why does the Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, include music by Roxy Music and Beyonce? Watching “Casino,” with its soundtrack of 60 songs sounded like some hip dude’s iPod was playing on a continuous shuffle in the next room. “Dusty and Sweets McGee” got it right.

 

 

Last stop: The Lost Oasis 

If it’s 1965 and you’re obsessed with comic books, monster movies and spy shows, and come across this paperback on a spinner rack at Newberry’s, what can you do?

You find 50 cents. 

Beginning in 1964, Bantam Books began reprinting the run of Doc Savage pulp novels from the 30s. When Bantam commissioned James Bama to paint the covers to the Savage books, it was a hot wire to the brain – the colors, the lighting, the sweaty heroic poses. Bama was an illustrator and painter whose work mostly focused on advertising and the covers of “men’s adventure” magazines like True and Dare. 

Here’s the cover to another of Bama’s Doc Savage paperbacks, The Man of Bronze, with its golden lighting against a black background and the obligatory torn shirt, Doc’s security blanket. 

Lured by the covers, I bought several books until the dated Depression-era language (cars were “sedans,” friends were “chums”) and “comedy” routines between members of Doc’s gang of scientific experts began to feel uncool and tiresome. Even then, when I came across the latest installment in the series at Brentano’s bookstore, I had to stop and admire the cover. James Bama painted more than 60 Doc Savage paperback covers and had the knack for making the imaginary seem real. 

I didn’t find out until the 90s that Bama’s creativity was behind another childhood folly. Concurrent with the Doc Savage covers, he was also responsible for the box art that graced the popular Aurora monster models series. When I came across rows of these images on the shelves at Modell’s department store, I burned with the temptation of the damned. How could I resist? 

Fast forward to the dawn of puberty, and I find this book in my sister’s room: 

It’s James Bama again, this time capturing something I couldn’t quite articulate. The image seared a hole in my head and left me dizzy with the possibilities of adulthood.  

In the late 60s, Bama walked away from commercial illustration – although calling him a commercial artist is as severe an understatement as you’ll find; he was a modern master of realism – and turned to painting Western scenes: Native Americans with dignity intact, craggy ranch hands and cowboys staring out from a snowstorm or saddling up a horse. All of it looking more like a photograph than a painting. 

Bama died in this past April, a few days short of his 96^th birthday. He had an enormous talent, influential to many other artists who followed him and to some pre-teen boys as well.

 

 

April 1974: They call him the Streak 

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night was nominated for four Oscars at the 1974 Academy Awards, winning the award for Best Foreign Film. It’s a movie about moviemaking, as its on-screen cast and crew work through a never-ending series of professional and personal challenges to complete a film whose plot sounds hardly worth the effort: French newlywed brings his British wife home to meet the parents. She falls in love with his father, whom the son confronts on a busy street and shoots. 

Nearly everything that can go wrong with making the movie does, but that doesn’t make Day for Night some sort of zany slapstick comedy. It’s about adapting. When an actor dies in a car accident, it necessitates a late-night rewrite of the script. To assist a boozy actress who keeps forgetting her lines, the crew hides cue cards with her lines around the set, unseen by the camera. 

Truffaut, who directed the movie and plays the on-screen director as well – very meta for 1974 – pulls the camera back even further to show, very matter-of-factly, how filmmakers go about creating an illusion of reality. A water pipe over a fake window to simulate rain. The scaffolding actors must climb to film a balcony scene. Monster hoses that spray “snow.” The back-up cat that comes out when a first cat won’t drink milk from a saucer on cue. 

A meta Francois Truffaut at left 

The title Day for Night comes from a process whereby sequences filmed outdoors in daylight are shot with a filter to appear as if they are taking place at night, which takes on another meaning here as the film sheds light and insight around filmmaking. 

Right around this time, a Beatles bootleg began showing up in discerning record stores titled Sweet Apple Trax. It offered, in mostly clear sound, outtakes pirated from the filming of Let It Be, much of which would not be officially released by the band until some fifty years later. 

With the universe’s most famous rock band working through sketches of songs, trying out and discarding guitar parts, singing half-written lyrics, mumbling when no lyrics exist or messing around with different tempos, at the time it was a revelation, a fly on the wall perspective that none of us had ever experienced.

That’s the value bootleggers have always brought, pulling back the camera, or in this case unlocking the studio door – a record about making records. Bringing day to night. 

The top ten records for April 1974 aren’t a very inspiring bunch: 

1 BENNIE AND THE JETS –•– Elton John

2 HOOKED ON A FEELING –•– Blue Swede

3 TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia) –•– MFSB

4 COME AND GET YOUR LOVE –•– Redbone

5 BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME –•– Gladys Knight and the Pips

6 SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS –•– John Denver

7 THE LORD’S PRAYER –•– Sister Janet Mead

8 OH MY MY –•– Ringo Starr

9 THE LOCO-MOTION –•– Grand Funk

10 SEASONS IN THE SUN –•– Terry Jacks 

Worth noting is this consecutive run of chart entries for the week ending April 13: 

82 — DAYBREAK –•– Nilsson

83 — SUNDOWN –•– Gordon Lightfoot

84 — THE STREAK –•– Ray Stevens 

Having “Sundown” follow “Daybreak” is kind of neat. “The Streak” was a novelty record with the great fortune of hitting the radio right as streaking hit its summit, the live broadcast of the 1974 Academy Awards. 

As the show was winding down to the big finale, Best Picture, David Niven is introducing Elizabeth Taylor just as the naked guy (Robert Opel, a photographer) runs onstage, setting up Niven’s famous retort, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen. But isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?" (Opel didn’t have much life left after that night. He was murdered in 1979 during an attempted robbery). 

There has always been thought that the entire thing was staged. Like Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, the camera was strategically placed so that we didn’t see anything below the streaker’s waist. Niven was a quick-witted type, but his ad lib appears too rehearsed and smooth. Watching him wait for the laughter to die down, he seems to be itching to pull the trigger on the punchline. 

Whether staged or not, Oscar night in 1974 was quite a slap in the face.