Woke up this morning to the news that David Bowie has died at the age of 69. This coming just days after his birthday, the same day he released his latest album, Blackstar.
Bowie was a singer, musician, and actor, appearing in films and on Broadway.
The family released a statement:
“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”
Something happened on the day he died,
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside,
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried,
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)
~~~~~David Bowie, Blackstar, 2016
Bowie went through several ch-ch-changes during his 4 decade-plus career — from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke; from Glam to Disco to Electronica.
As Not Now Silly always says, It’s all about the music.
It was 80 years ago today that Billboard Magazine launched The Hit Parade, a countdown of the most popular recordings in the country based on sales and radio play. While the chart has changed over the years — and has been balkanized into just about every genre of music known — the main list is now known as The Hot 100.
According to a history written by his grandson, Roger S. Littleford, Jr., the founder of Billboard,
William H. “Bill” Donaldson, built the magazine to serve an entirely
different need. Donaldson worked for the family business, a Newport,
Kentucky-based lithography shop that churned out advertisements and
posters for the circuses, fairs, and other traveling shows that
criss-crossed the country. Donaldson realized that most of his
clients—the managers and owners who ordered the posters, and,
especially, the billstickers tasked with staying one step ahead of the
shows and pasting the posters to every available surface—lacked
permanent addresses, and thus were unable to communicate with each
other.
In 1894, Donaldson started to spend his nights and weekends putting together Billboard Advertising,
a trade publication dedicated to gathering all the news that might be
relevant to his more itinerant peers. The first issue, published that
November, had eight pages of relevant tidbits, laid out in columns like
“Bill Room Gossip” and “The Indefatigable And Tireless Industry of the
Bill Poster.” Now the “advertisers, poster printers, bill posters,
advertising agents, and secretaries of fairs,” as the issue categorized them, could pick up a magazine at a newsstand anywhere in the country and know what to expect on the opposite coast.
This is the first #1 tune on the first Billboard Hit Parade in 1936
Over the years as the entertainment industry expanded, so did Billboard’s coverage of it; from sheet music, to plays, to movies, to musicals, to radio, to recorded music, to downloads. It was all a natural progression to follow what was popular in ‘Merkin entertainment and technology. The WikiWackyWoo picks up the story:
On January 4, 1936, Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade.
The first Music Popularity Chart was calculated in July 1940. A variety
of song charts followed, which were eventually consolidated into the
Hot 100 by mid-1958. The Hot 100 currently combines single sales, radio airplay, digital downloads, and streaming activity (including data from YouTube and other video sites). All of the Billboard
charts use this basic formula. What separates the charts is which
stations and stores are used; each musical genre has a core audience or
retail group. Each genre’s department at Billboard is headed up by a chart manager, who makes these determinations.
For many years, a song had to be commercially available as a single to be considered for any of the Billboard charts. At the time, instead of using Nielsen SoundScan or Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems (BDS), Billboard obtained its data from manual reports filled out by radio stations and stores. According to the 50th Anniversary issue of Billboard,
prior to the official implementation of SoundScan tracking in November
1991, many radio stations and retail stores removed songs from their
manual reports after the associated record labels stopped promoting a
particular single. Thus songs fell quickly after peaking and had shorter
chart lives. In 1990, the country singles chart was the first chart to use SoundScan and BDS. They were followed by the Hot 100 and the R&B chart in 1991. Today, all of the Billboard charts use this technology.
IRONY ALERT: When I worked at Island Records Canada, I promoted this tune
There was a time in my life when I lived — literally — and died — figuratively — by the Billboard charts. When I worked for Island Records Canada as a Promotion Rep, I spent hours with each new issue of Billboard, trying to discern trends the same way astrologists look for signs in their charts.
Trying to get Bob Marley played on FM radio in Canada was a nearly impossible feat at the time. This was when Rastaman Vibration was just released. It was such an uphill struggle because few people even knew who Bob Marley was and Reggae still confused a lot of people. I told people it was just like Rock and Roll, except the beat didn’t go KUH-thunk, KUH-thunk. It went Thunk-kuh, Thunk-kuh.
We badgered one radio station in Canada after another to add Marley to their playlists, with almost no luck whatsoever. Only the odd campus radio station were sold on Marley’s power as an artist.
CHUM-FM was the station we worked on the hardest because it was the biggest station in the country. Consequently it was a leader among Canadian radio stations. CHUM’s music committee consisted of Benji Karsh and Brian Masters. They hated Marley. Week after week, we’d pitch them Bob Marley. Each week we’d send them photostatic copies of charts from around the world, showing which radio stations were smart enough to jump on the Bob Marley bandwagon. Every week they just laughed. Finally one week they said, “We won’t play this until it charts in Billboard.”
Guess what?
A few weeks later Rastaman Vibrations finally appeared on the Billboard chart. We were able to go back to CHUM-FM and make them eat those words. From that day on Bob Marley was heard on CHUM-FM. Later I was amused to hear them pretend to have discovered Bob Marley, even though they had to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way.
Two musical events occurred on this day in history — 8 years apart — that changed South Florida and music.
In 1960 the teen comedy Where the Boys Are was released to theaters around the country. SPOILER ALERT: It’s the madcap story of 4 college girls who take a road trip to Fort Lauderdale on Spring Break for some sand, surf and sex.
Where the Boys Are made Fort Lauderdale an official destination for every footloose college student. Starting with the very next break in 1961, college students poured into Fort Lah De Dah. The media publicized it, creating new converts for the next year.
At first no one minded so much because the kids brought money. However, every year there were more Spring Breakers than the previous until, as TIME magazine told its readers in A Brief History of Spring Break:
By the free-loving ’70s, Fort Lauderdale’s fun and sun had become
decidedly raunchier. With gratuitous PDA and “balcony-diving” —
negotiating one’s way from balcony to balcony to get to other floors or
rooms, a practice typically performed in a drunken stupor and thus madly
dangerous — the norm, many communities began questioning why the heck
they had invited such unruly houseguests in the first place. By 1985,
some 370,000 students were descending on Fort Lauderdale (or fondly,
“Fort Liquordale”) annually — prompting yet another exploitative film, Spring Break
starring Tom Cruise and Shelley Long. But by the end of the ’80s, the
town had enough: stricter laws against public drinking were enacted and
Mayor Robert Dressler went so far as to go on ABC’s Good Morning America to tell students they were no longer welcome. As a result, spring
breakers were pushed even farther south, and to destinations outside the
U.S. where the sun was hotter and drinking ages lower.
By the time I moved to the Fort Lauderdale area in 2015, Spring Break was just a shadow of its former Bacchanalian self.
Where the Boys Are is a pretty good movie and has held up over the years. It’s a wonderfully kitchy throwback to a simpler time, but still explores some serious social issues about teens and their sexuality. It also hosts a wealth of good acting, including Paula Prentiss in her first movie; Yvette Mimieux, playing an innocent who has a downfall; and George Hamilton, playing George Hamilton, the role he was made for.
However, avoid 1984’s Where the Boys Are. It’s so bad it’s not even good.
Eight years after Where the Boys Are came the Miami Pop Festival, a 3-day extravaganza featuring a who’s who of the music scene, including (alphabetical list stolen from the WikiWackyWoo): The Amboy Dukes, Chuck Berry, Blues Image, The Box Tops, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat, Wayne Cochran, Cosmic Drum, James Cotton Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, José Feliciano, Fish Ray, Flatt and Scruggs, Fleetwood Mac, Marvin Gaye, The Grass Roots, Grateful Dead, Richie Havens, Ian & Sylvia, Iron Butterfly, Junior Junkanoos, Jr. Walker & The Allstars, The Charles Lloyd Quartet, Hugh Masekela, Joni Mitchell, Pacific Gas & Electric, Procol Harum, Terry Reid, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Steppenwolf, The Sweet Inspirations, Sweetwater, Joe Tex, Three Dog Night, and The Turtles. All for $7.00 per day!!!
On this day in 1911 Lindley Armstrong Jones was born. He later got the nickname Spike because he was as thin as a railroad spike.
Spike Jones was, essentially, a drummer. He got his first drum kit at the age of 11 and never looked back. As a young man he played in various bands, orchestra pits and radio shows as he was coming up. As a drummer in the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, Jones can be heard playing on BingCrosby‘s biggest hit “White Christmas.”
Bored with playing the same music night after night, Spike found some musicians who were as warped as he was and they started playing parodies of the songs of the day for their own enjoyment. Then they started recording the songs to play for their wives.
One of those recordings found its way to RCA Records, where Spike Jones and His City Slickers recorded their first single, “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” The song, written by Oliver Wallace, was skedded for a 1943 Donald Duck cartoon called, originally, “Donald Duck in Nutzi Land,” and later “Der Fuhrer’s Face. It later won an Academy Award.
However, Spike Jones’ version was released first and became a huge hit.
Jones thought this would be a flash in the pan, but the ‘Merkin public surprised him. They demanded more from Spike Jones and His City Slickers and Jones was happy to accommodate them.
As the shows became more elaborate, Jones’ impeccable timing came to the fore, with guns, whistles, and pots and pans all taking the place of percussion in some songs. He called his concerts Musical Depreciation.
It wasn’t just the hit parade that Spike Jones and His City Slickers parodied. According to the WikiWackyWoo:
Among the series of recordings in the 1940s were humorous takes on the classics such as the adaptation of Liszt‘s Liebesträume, played at a breakneck pace on unusual instruments. Others followed: Rossini‘s William Tell Overture was rendered on kitchen implements using a horse race as a backdrop, with one of the “horses” in the “race” likely to have inspired the nickname of the lone chrome yellow-painted SNJ aircraft flown by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels
aerobatic team’s shows in the late 1940s, “Beetle Bomb”. In live shows
Spike would acknowledge the applause with complete solemnity, saying
“Thank you, music lovers.” An LP collection of twelve of these “homicides” was released by RCA (on its prestigious Red Seal label) in 1971 as Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics. They include such tours de force as Pal-Yat-Chee (Pagliacci), sung by the Hillbilly humorists Homer and Jethro, Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, Tchaikovsky’s None but the Lonely Heart, and Bizet’s Carmen.
The first time I ever heard a Spike Jones tune, it was on an 78 RPM platter of “My Old Flame”at Craig Portman’s house. It was one of his parents’ records. We played it dozens of times and laughred because we were just old enough to recognize the impersonation of Peter Lorre talk/singing the lyrics as the scenario became more and more macabre. [Later we used the stack of wax as Frisbees, long before the Frisbee was invented. While I’m not proud of that fact today, I’d still like to find Craig Portman, who moved to California when we were still teenagers. Google has been no help.]
Comedy music has a long and honourable history, as the Wiki also tells us:
Syndicated radio personality Dr. Demento regularly features Jones’ music on his program of comedy and novelty tracks. Jones is mentioned in The Band‘s song, “Up on Cripple Creek“. (The song’s protagonist’s paramour states of Jones: “I can’t take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk.”) Novelist Thomas Pynchon is an admirer and wrote the liner notes for a 1994 reissue, Spiked! (BMG Catalyst). A scene in the romantic comedy I.Q. shows a man demonstrating the sound of his new stereo to Meg Ryan‘s character by playing a record of Jones’ music.
As always, it’s about the music. Here’s a selection:
Youth culture was a phrase barely known when this movie was released and I was a mere 4 years old.
Top billed is Disk Jockey Alan Freed, who coined the term Rock and Roll and was an important link for teenagers until the Payola scandal brought him down in the early ’60s. Despite this disgrace, Freed was among the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The RnRHoF was placed in Cleveland to pay tribute to Freed and his Moondog Coronation Ball, considered the first major Rock and Roll concert.
Not only was the movie in Black and White, so were the performers. According to jgp3553@excite.com on the Internet Movie Data Base:
A young teenage girl desperately tries to earn enough money to buy a dress for a school rock and roll dance. This early rock and roll feature, the 3rd in a series of 5 staring Disc Jockey and Rock N Roll impresario Alan Freed, includes performances by artist Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Flamingos, The Moonglows and The Johnny Burnette Trio.
Because the movie entered the Public Domain, as the result of not getting the copyright renewed, it can be posted here without fear of a lawsuit. Enjoy:
On this day in 1977 (as The Music History Calendar tells us): Bing Crosby’s last Christmas special airs. The show was recorded in September, and Crosby died that October. The show is remembered for Crosby’s unusual duet with David Bowie, where they sang a modified version of “Little Drummer Boy,” with Bowie singing the new “Peace On Earth” lyrics composed by the show’s writers.
For many decades — and for millions of people around the world — Bing Crosbymeant Christmas. His rendition of Irving Berlin‘s White Christmas has been certified by Guinness World Records as the best selling single in history, with well over 150 million copies. According to the WikiWackyWoo:
The first public performance of the song was by Bing Crosby, on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941; a copy of the recording from the radio program is owned by the estate of Bing Crosby and was loaned to CBS News Sunday Morning for their December 25, 2011, program.[5] He subsequently recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers for Decca Records in just 18 minutes on May 29, 1942, and it was released on July 30 as part of an album of six 78-rpm discs from the film Holiday Inn.[5][8]
At first, Crosby did not see anything special about the song. He just
said “I don’t think we have any problems with that one, Irving.”[9]
Crosby reprised the tune in the 1954 movie White Christmas, which was virtually a remake of Holiday Inn.
One of my earliest posts here was called “Okay, I’ll Confess. I Love Bing Crosby!” It is a paean to one of my favourite vocalists, and one I used to make jokes about. However, as I explained, it took Louis Armstrong to make me appreciate Bing Crosby, who rocketed up to the top of my personal hit parade.
Here is the last time the country was able to celebrate Christmas with Bing Crosby.
He never said a word in the movies, but Harpo Marx never had a problem getting his point across. At a time when Talkies were all the rage, Harpo remained gloriously mute.
Adolph Marx — he later changed his name to Arthur — was born on this day in 1888, the 2nd oldest of the 5 Marx Brothers. With his older brother Chico (Leonard) and his younger brother Groucho (Julius), The Marx Brothers became one of the greatest comedy teams of all time. [Gummo never appeared with his brothers on film and Zeppo left after the first five.]
However, it’s not Harpo’s mime shtick or his intelligence Not Now Silly wants to commemorate today; it’s his harp playing, for which he got his nickname. According to the WikiWackyWoo:
Harpo gained his stage name during a card game at the Orpheum Theatre in Galesburg, Illinois. The dealer (Art Fisher) called him “Harpo” because he played the harp.[5][6] He learned how to hold it properly from a picture of an angel playing a harp that he saw in a five-and-dime.
No one in town knew how to play the harp, so Harpo tuned it as best he
could, starting with one basic note and tuning it from there. Three
years later he found out he had tuned it incorrectly, but he could not
have tuned it properly; if he had, the strings would have broken each
night. Harpo’s method placed much less tension on the strings.[citation needed]
Although he played this way for the rest of his life, he did try to
learn how to play correctly, and he spent considerable money hiring the
best teachers. They spent their time listening to him, fascinated by the
way he played.[6]
Here are some of Harpo’s greatest musical performances:
Celebrating a birthday today is Dan Penn, a name almost unknown, but the writer of some of the greatest Soul tunes ever recorded.
Born Wallace Daniel Pennington according to his official biography he was:
A native of Vernon, Alabama, Penn moved to the Florence/Muscle Shoals area while still a teenager and assumed the role of lead vocalist in a local group calling itself the Mark V Combo. When asked what kind of music they played, Penn replies, “R&B, man. There was no such thing as rock. That was somethin’ you picked up and throwed.” He laughs. “Or threw.” It was around this time that he penned his first chart record, Conway Twitty’s “Is a Bluebird Blue”. During the early ’60s, Penn began working with Rick Hall at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, first as a songwriter, and then as an artist under the names Lonnie Ray, Danny Lee, and finally Dan Penn.
In early 1966, Penn moved to Memphis, began writing for Press Publishing Company, and worked with Chips Moman at his American Studios.[5]
Their intense and short-lived partnership produced some of the best
known and most enduring songs of the genre. Their first collaboration,
the enduring classic “The Dark End of the Street”, was first a hit for James Carr and has since been recorded by many others. A few months later, during the legendary recording sessions that saw Jerry Wexler introduce Aretha Franklin
to FAME Studios and her first major success, the pair wrote “Do Right
Woman, Do Right Man” in the studio for her, which went to #37 in
Billboard in 1967. In early 1967 Penn produced “The Letter” for The Box
Tops. He and long-time friend and collaborator Spooner Oldham also wrote
a number of hits for the band, including “Cry Like a Baby”, another
song which has been covered many times.[6]
As always, it’s all about then music. Here are just some of the many hit tunes penned by Penn:
