The Top Ten Hits Of The Week I Graduated High School

This Weekend the 40th reunion of my high school class will be held. I will not be attending. 40 years ago this week I graduated from high school and the top ten songs of that week were:

1. The Candy Man by Sammy Davis Jr.
2. Nice To Be With You by Gallery
3. Sylvia’s Mother by Dr. Hook And The Medicine Show
4. I’ll Take You There by The Staple Singers
5. Outa Space by Billy Preston
6. Song Sung Blue by Neil Diamond
7. Lean On Me by Bill Withers
8. Walkin’ In The Rain With The One I Love by Love Unlimited
9. Oh Girl by The Chi-Lites
10. (Last Night) I didn’t Get To Sleep At All by The 5th dimension
Perhaps if I heard them again I would recognize them all but I don’t remember Nice To Be With You, Outa Space,Walkin’ In The Rain With The One I Love, Oh Girl or (Last Night) I didn’t Get To Sleep At All.

The strange thing is that except for maybe Sylvia’s Mother by Dr. Hook there are no rock songs or rock bands on the list. This was 1972, was rock music already dead by then? It was twenty years past their heyday but the Rat Pack still made the charts with Sammy’s Candy Man but where are The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Neil Young, James Taylor or virtually any of the music that I was listening to? It’s no wonder that the early Seventies were a low point in Rock & Roll which wouldn’t rise again until Punk and New wave came around in ‘78 or ‘79.

 

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The Ultimate Facebook Band

There is a pop music phenomena in Japan called AKB48. It consists of more than 60 young girls that are divided into four teams. The public votes for which girls make it into the “band” and 1.4 million people vote annually.

Japan isn’t the only country to have these mass girl pop bands, South Korea also has a version. Although, South Korea also has dance teams organized in their prison system that do a mean interpretation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

Is this mass girl pop group thing a musical version of Social Networking? Would this concept work in America, would it work using males rather than females? Or is this just one more example of Japan’s obsession with teenage girls?

It is very strange to see our own pop culture synthesized through another country’s culture and fed back to us. Sometimes we can’t even recognize it as our own but if you really pay attention to Asian pop culture you should realize that it is not the natural evolution from ancient Asian culture but a version of Western pop culture. It’s like seeing somebody dressed as you going to a Halloween party. It could be flattering or insulting but it’s almost always rather creepy.

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The Drummers Of My Life

This weekend is going to be interesting and rather sad. The Tooners’ long time drummer, Pat Meehan, is moving to Idaho. This breaks up a band, at least temporarily, that has been together for thirty-two years and a friendship that dates back to 1964.

Pat Meehan and I were in fourth grade together in Mrs. Alkire’s class at Platt Ranch Elementary School in Woodland Hills, CA. In junior high school Pat replaced my band’s drummer, neighborhood friend and fellow former fourth grade classmate, Rick Morrison, when Rick’s family moved to Texas for two years. When Rick returned he replaced Pat as he was our original drummer and neighborhood friend, something for which I don’t think Pat has ever really forgiven me.

Pat and I reformed as a band in the late 1970s along with high school classmate David Nigel Lloyd and bassist John Bugby in a proto New Wave band called Wild Oscare. I left that band to form Womanizer and when our drummer quit to join a Heavy Metal band Pat joined. All the recordings we did as Womanizer and later as The Tooners features Pat on drums although a total of ten different musicians have been in those two bands.

Womanizer started as a six piece ensemble and ended up as The Tooners, a trio with bassist and vocalist Greg Piper. Not counting the years in junior high and high school Pat and I have been in bands together for thirty-four years. I am going to miss him terribly when he leaves for Idaho on Monday as this is not just the end of a friendship but the end of a band that’s been part of my life longer than almost any other relationship.

What ever happened to our drummer Rick Morrison? I say other drummer as the first drummer I played with in a band was Randy Runyon in sixth grade. Randy was the son of television kiddie show host Charles Runyon aka Chucko The Birthday Clown. Next weekend, the very next weekend after I’m getting together with Greg, guitarist and old friend Jerry Strull (Pat’s former Brother In law) and Pat for a little going away party, I’m going to meet Rick Morrison for drinks. He’s coming into town for our high school’s 40th reunion. Weird coincidence.

I bumped into Rick once in Westwood many years ago, he’s lived in Texas and Washington state, but before that Womanizer was playing a club gig and when he heard me introduce the band he jumped up on stage from the audience, excited to see me and Pat after many, many years. It seems he was at the club to hear his sister’s band play that night. It's a small world after all.

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For The Record, Indeed

In the June 12, 2012 edition of the Los Angeles Times in the For The Record column which seeks to correct typos and inaccurate information previously published was mentioned that in the obituary for Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch the Times had misspelled band mate Christine McVie’s name and the title of their biggest selling album, Rumours. In a separate article about Neil Young they misspelled former Buffalo Springfield band mate Richie Furay’s name.

The L.A. Times misspelling the names and titles of pop culture superstars and mega successful works of art shows a lack of respect for the “counterculture” of Rock & Roll that has been going on since its inception in the mid-1950s. I would have thought the Classic Rock era had proven itself enough by now to be shown at least a small amount of respect, at least by getting the names right in an obituary. All the editors at the Times had to do was Google the names and titles or ask their resident Pop critic. How hard would it have been to get the title right of one of the largest selling albums of the decade?

My mother always mispronounced the names of rock stars such as John Lennon whom she always called John Lemon. She claimed to confuse him with the actor Jack Lemon. The band Van Halen, for whom her son was employed, was always Van Alden, the street where her sister lived. The funny thing was once a rock star, even one I didn’t think she had ever heard of, died, she pronounced his name perfectly. You don’t have to show respect for those whose music you don’t like but you should show respect for the dead.

BTW. If I happened to have misspelled any names in this article remember it's for a BLOG not the L.A. Times.

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The Trifecta Of Musical Genre Flash In The Pans

Recently my brother -in -law attended the Van Halen shows at the Staples Center in L.A. He didn’t seem to enjoy it very much and said he was never a big fan like I was. Too bad he didn’t enjoy the show but I wasn't a big fan either. My brother worked for them, I got to see them several times in concert (for free) and as a guitar player I certainly appreciated the musicianship of the entire band but I was too old for the Sunset Strip Heavy Metal scene. 

Even though my band Womanizer was getting acceptance in that scene we thought of ourselves as a "skinny tie" New Wave band like the Knack or the Cars but the Troubadour had us as a house band on KWST nights which was for a San Gabriel Valley Heavy Metal station and Blam Magazine gave us a good review and described us as "entertaining, energized Pop Metal" which freaked me out.

I guess I bet on the wrong horse. Metal is still around today (like Punk and Rap, two other genres I never thought would last) and New Wave lasted all of about 18 months. Before starting my New Wave band in the late Seventies I was in a Psychedelic band in the late Sixties / early Seventies. Another flash in the pan genre. Even Disco bands can get gigs today. The other style I really like, although much too tough for me to play, was Prog Rock. I guess I don’t have the taste of the masses that’s needed to sustain a long term career in music.

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Ban The Bomb Not The Bong

In 1966 Bob Dylan recorded the song Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 for his Blonde on Blonde album. Its chorus includes the line “everybody must get stoned”. 1966 was not 1967 when using the word “high” in a song got that song banned from the radio but the banning of tunes because of drug references had already begun and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 did indeed get banned.

Dylan, being Dylan, probably recorded that tune specifically to make a point about censorship. He knew his fans were loyal enough to seek out his new single wherever it was getting played on the radio which means they would be tuning away from whichever stations refused to play it. It’s a deliberate attempt to “censor” the radio stations involved in censorship.

Although the word “stoned” predominately featured in each chorus and almost every line in the verses begins with “They stone ya when...” he didn’t use the term as part of the title. I don’t know exactly what the “#12 & 35 means but Rainy Day Women is probably a variation on the term “fair weather friends” which refers to people who show support only when it benefits them. That’s an apt description of the radio stations that touted Dylan as the new Messiah, only if he said what they liked. That wouldn’t sit well with a guy like Bob Dylan. After all, he did name his album after a lesbian sex act.

Of course he also could simply have been referring to being “stoned” in the biblical sense as in being persecuted by having rocks thrown at your head and getting your song banned because its lyrics are misconstrued is a good example of that persecution. But since people present at the recording studio during the recording of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 claim Dylan passed around joints and was himself, stoned, so it probably is a drug reference after all.

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Bill Murray, The Movie Guru

My son recently saw some kid wearing a Bill Murray T shirt and wondered why there seems to be Bill Murray cult forming.
    “Bill Murray is okay,” my son said, “but he’s not so great that people should be wearing him on their T shirts.”

True, that honor is usually reserved for rock stars or the dead but I think Bill Murray represents something deeper than just another bad boy, wise-ass comedian. This may be surprising, even somewhat shocking but I would venture to say that Bill Murray is one of, if not the most, spiritual of Hollywood stars, certainly of comedy stars.

Richard Gere may grovel at the feet of the Dalai Lama (if there’s a photographer around) but Bill’s spirituality comes out in his work. His first movie after attaining enough success to do any project he wanted was a remake of The Razor’s Edge, a story about a man’s quest for inner peace. Next came Ghostbusters which helped usher in the age of the New Age Sci Fi / Horror movie such as Poltergeist 2.

His take on A Christmas Carol, Scrooged (1988) is more a tale of Karma than it is a ghost story and what is probably the most spiritual, New Age and perhaps now even Quantum Physics of all motion pictures, Groundhog’s Day, must surely prove that there is more to Bill Murray than a lot of laughs.

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