I was listening to the radio not too long ago on a long drive from my hometown of Knoxville to Washington, DC. While there were plenty of great songs on the “Classic” radio stations along Interstate 81, the fare was pretty standard – the newer Oldies.
Eventually I lost interest and began thinking about the strange, diverse Top 40 stations of my cavalier youth. (I can hear the overly bright station ID jingles now in my memory.)
Could Frank Sinatra exist comfortably side-by-side with Beatles psychedelia today? Something Stupid jostling against I Am The Walrus? How about The Carpenters’ Close To You arm-in-arm on the airwaves with Whole Lotta Love? Who would listen to a station like that in today’s tribalized America?
There were those maudlin tragedy songs. Kids dying, drowning, bleeding on pavements, gasping at teen angels who were breathing their last with a degree of dignity, if not honor. Live fast, die young, have a song written about you.
This Chex-Mix of songs seems breathtakingly bizarre nowadays. From roughly 1955 through the very early 1970s, the melange was pro forma in broadcasting.
A Singing Nun; a Japanese language hit; a Sheik of the burning sands, and a song about a Sunday comics caveman all poked up like strange weeds in the midst of the mega-hit makers’ orderly fields – Beatles, Four Season, Byrds, Motown, old holdovers like Connie Francis, and instrumentals from Herb Alpert, among others.
Here’s some of my favorites, singles that today might find a niche audience but couldn’t make the Hot 100 if they had a battalion of PR flacks, legal payola and a whole lotta luck. (In no particular order.)
The Shangra-Las
Leader of The Pack and Remember (Walking In The Sand)
Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let’s ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy’s ring you’re wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where’d you meet him?
I met him at the candy store
He turned around and smiled at me
You get the picture? (yes, we see)
That’s when I fell for (the leader of the pack)
There’s a man in the funny papers we all know
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He lived ‘way back a long time ago
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He don’t eat nothin’ but a bear cat stew
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
Well, this cat’s name is-a Alley Oop
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
(Alley Oop) He’s the toughest man there is alive
(Alley Oop) Wearin’ clothes from a wildcat’s hide
(Alley Oop) He’s the king of the jungle jive
(Look at that cave man go!!) (SCREAM)
“And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining…”
Allan Sherman was a very funny guy who died much too young, at 49.
Set to Ponchiello’s The Dance Of The Hours, (also used for the hippo dance in Disney’s Fantasia), Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh is something well beyond a novelty song, having entered icon-hood decades ago. Perhaps because it’s so specific in time and place, ingratiating and grating at the same time.
The Ballad Of Davy Crockett hit the Top 10 three different times in 1955, recorded by three different artists: Fess Parker, pictured at left; Bill Hayes; and Tennessee Ernie Ford. What makes the song’s popularity so unusual – aside from the fact that another #1 hit that year was Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock – is that the move to the suburbs was in full swing.
Kids were longing for something other than white picket fences and two car garages. “Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”
The Bee Gees – Holiday
“Ooh you’re a holiday, ev’ry day, such a holiday
Now it’s my turn to say, and I say you’re a holiday…”
Creepy, eerie, a nihilistic, despairing love song that almost makes sense, although, in the spirit of the times, 1967, it really didn’t have to even try. Holiday hit #16 on the U.S. singles charts. It’s not every day the singer of a mainstream pop song asks to be murdered.
“Ooh it’s a funny game
Don’t believe that it’s all the same
Can’t think what I’ve just said
Put the soft pillow on my head.”
I have to admit that when it first was released in 1967 I didn’t know Pictures of Lily was about masturbation. Alright, a venerable teenage pastime. Nice ditty, great drums.
What launches the song to deepest bizarroworld, however, is that the kid’s FATHER suggests Lily’s pictures so sonny-boy can get his rocks off and go on to a good night’s sleep.
How far of a leap is it to Tommy’s pedophile Uncle Ernie?
And really, then, how much farther of a leap is it for Pete Townshend to be arrested for possession of kiddie porn?
Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful
Pictures of Lily helped me sleep at night
Pictures of Lily solved my childhood problems
Pictures of Lily helped me feel alright…”
Gene Chandler’s The Duke Of Earl has a sort of intellectually perverse appeal. WHO is the Duke of Earl? WHAT is the Duke of Earl? For some mystical Manhattan reason, the song is often played on Madison Square Garden’s organ after the opposing team scores a goal against the New York Rangers hockey club. Randy Newman’s song, Mikey’s, which closes the album Trouble In Paradise, ends with “Whatever happened to the old songs, Mikey?/ Like ‘The Duke of Earl’/ Mikey, whatever happened to the fucking Duke of Earl?”
Nothing happened to him. The Duke’s own words can attest to that: “Nothing can stop me now/Cause I’m the Duke of Earl… well yay yay yeah..”
Flat out, a song like Ahab the Arab (A-rab rhymes with Ahab) could not be made today. Its lyrics are so oddball, racist, ethnically charged and full of weirdness, it’s hard to imagine it could be issued even in Paleolithic 1962. These lyrics says it all:
“There she was friends lying there in all her radiant beauty. Eating on a raisin, grape, apricot, pomegranate,
bowl of chitterlings, two bananas, three Hershey bars,
sipping on a “R C” Co-Cola listening to her transistor,
watching the Grand Ole Opry on the tube reading the
Mad magazine while she sung,
‘Does your chewing gum lose it’s flavor?’ and Ahab
walked up to her and he said, (imitate Arabian speech)
which is Arabic for, “Let’s twist again like we did last summer, baby.”
Strangely enough, 1963 witnessed two #1 songs that were in foreign languages. Dominique (in French) and Sukiyaki (in Japanese).
Soeur Sourire was the Belgian “Singing Nun,” whose folk song was dedicated to St. Domenic, (Santo Domingo), founder of her order in the year 1215. Its perkiness, good folk strum rhythm and novel language propelled it to the top of the pops in the United States.
The song occupied the #1 slot until January of ’64 when it was supplanted by Bobby Vinton’s There, I’ve Said It Again, and then came the Beatles’ onslaught.
If Dominique is a mystery, the song that knocked Lesley Gore’s pain anthem, It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want To), off its perch on top seems even more incongruous. Sukiyaki is one of the top-selling singles of all time across the world. Was its success some sort of unconscious absolution of Japan’s actions in World War II? Its Japanese title, Ue o Muite Aruko, is loosely translated as I Shall Hold My Head Up High. Might be some sort of public confessional work, but I think it simply has a haunting, lovelorn melody and singer Kyu Sakamoto has a Japanese-inflected westernized voice. Ridiculously enough, “sukiyaki” means “hot pot in Japanese. It was chosen because it seemed familiar-sounding and was easy to pronounce. A Newsweek columnist observed that the re-titling was like issuing Moon River under the words “Beef Stew” in Japanese.
No need to discuss how Nancy Sinatra got her recording contract.
But These Boots Were Made For Walking is an early coming out of dominatrix culture into popular consciousness. Of course, since the mild-mannered days of the mid-1960s, the song has been covered and the naughty side teased out much more overtly than in Little Miss Sinatra’s version.
A couple of highlights of the song: a bit of meowing (Puss-In-Boots?) and the line to close it down and bring it home that is now recognized as high camp.
“Are you ready, boots? Start walkin’.”
1967 may well have been the high water mark of the contrast between the ridiculous, sublime and idiosyncratic. Although in all it was a very solid year for big hits (by everyone from The Monkees to The Turtles, The Doors to The Strawberry Alarm Clock), there was ample room for one of the most compelling songs of all time, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe.
Gothic in tone, southern Gothic, we are still left to wonder what on God’s green earth were the narrator and Billy Joe MacAllister throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge? Aborted baby? Compromising letters? Wedding ring? And what would make Billie Joe jump to his suicide? Was he to be arrested or hanged?
Most disturbing about the song is the dinnertime indifference – pass the black-eyed peas, have another piece of apple pie, the mundane recollections of a county fair. Possibly the worst part is the fragmenting of the family, almost as if a curse had been called down. Daddy dies, brother moves away. Mother and daughter are left with their sorrows and mysteries. An odd mess of greens for a number one smash hit.
You know it is funny, you grab someone’s iPod and listen to the songs they put together because they like them and it is pretty much like the radio station you describe, no computer generated lists of songs, no “songs that go together” they just go together because “these are my favorite songs”. I wonder if radio has learned this…..