January 19, 1981: Celebration

On By jbIn One Day in Your Life1 Comment
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(Pictured: the released hostages meet the press on January 27, 1981.)

January 19, 1981, is a Monday. Today, the United States and Iran agree on terms for release of 52 Americans held hostage in Iran since November of 1979. The agreement brokered by Algerian intermediaries will unfreeze $8 billion in Iranian assets in exchange for the hostages’ release. President Jimmy Carter spends his final day in office working out the details. He also issues a pardon to singer Peter Yarrow. Yarrow served three months in 1970 for indecent liberties with a 14-year-old girl who had knocked on his hotel-room door and asked for an autograph.

Carter has hoped that the hostage release would happen on his watch, before Ronald Reagan is sworn in as the 40th president tomorrow. Today, the Senate confirms eight more of Reagan’s cabinet nominees. After a day of meetings at Blair House in Washington, the president-elect and Mrs. Reagan attend a pre-inaugural gala with stars including Frank Sinatra (the show’s producer), Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Carson, Charlton Heston, Debby Boone, Ben Vereen, Donny and Marie Osmond, and Charley Pride. ABC will air highlights of the inaugural gala in prime time tonight.

Today in Los Angeles, a suicidal Vietnam veteran threatens to jump from a ninth-floor fire escape. He is eventually talked down by a man who lives nearby: Muhammad Ali. Yesterday was the first Sunday without NFL football since Labor Day weekend. The league was idle in advance of Super Bowl XV this coming Sunday in New Orleans, where the Philadelphia Eagles will meet the Oakland Raiders. The new Associated Press men’s college basketball poll released today has Oregon State at #1 for a second straight week. Virginia is #2, DePaul and Wake Forest tied for #3, and Louisiana State sits at #5. In the NBA, it’s a quiet night with one game on the schedule. In Hartford, Connecticut, the Boston Celtics hold off the last-place Detroit Pistons 92-90. The Celtics trail the Philadelphia 76ers by one-and-a-half games in the Atlantic Division. Other divisional leaders are the Milwaukee Bucks, San Antonio Spurs, and Phoenix Suns.

Before tonight’s inaugural gala show, ABC airs episodes of That’s Incredible and Dynasty. CBS presents Flo, the sitcom Ladies Man (with Lawrence Pressman as the only male staff member at a magazine for women), M*A*S*H, House Calls, and Lou Grant. NBC airs Little House on the Prairie and the TV movie When Hell Was in Session, the story of Vietnam POW Jeremiah Denton, starring Hal Holbrook. Earlier this month, Denton was sworn in as United States Senator from Alabama, his home state.

The Beach Boys play at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, as part of the inaugural celebration. Black Sabbath plays Hammersmith Odeon in London. Steppenwolf plays Houston and AC/DC plays in France. John Lennon’s “Starting Over” is at #1 on the Hot 100 and in Cash Box for a fourth week. It’s also #1 in many cities around the country, but not all. At WZUU in Milwaukee, the #1 song is “Love on the Rocks” by Neil Diamond. Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen” is #1 at KTKT in Tucson. At CKLW in Detroit, Kool and the Gang tops the chart with “Celebration.” “Celebration” is also #1 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. The #1 country song in Billboard is “I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbitt; it’s also #1 on pop station KIMN in Denver this week. John and Yoko’s album Double Fantasy is #1 on the Billboard 200.

Perspective From the Present: Just before the fall semester of 1980 began, I considered quitting college and keeping my summer radio job. As the spring semester of 1981 began, I reconsidered it, but eventually decided to stay, and I was back in my college apartment on Inauguration Day. That semester I took Introduction to Astronomy, Business Law, Introduction to Educational Media (in which I would get a D since I almost never showed up), and a one-credit class on the cable TV industry, about which I remember absolutely nothing.

My girlfriend and I had split up in December, speaking of things about which I remember absolutely nothing. At some point around this time, we got back together, and we remain together today. At least I think we do. She has the day off today and I haven’t talked to her yet.

This post is once again by reader request. If there’s a date you’d like me to write up, let me know. 

Still Going Bananas

On By jbIn Uncategorized6 Comments

ImageIt took a while for rock ‘n’ roll to become a routine part of television. Think of any black-and-white series from the early 60s that might have featured a loud jukebox. Said jukebox is never blaring rock ‘n’ roll; it’s always blaring a noisy bebop tune, when in reality, the music that would have annoyed restaurant and bar patrons far more in those days was almost certainly rock ‘n’ roll. It was the mid-to-late 60s before contemporary pop and rock started cropping up as part of the furniture (as distinct from segments of variety shows), and the first place it appeared regularly was in kids’ shows. And not just musically oriented live-action shows such as The Monkees, or animated series featuring the Archies and the Beatles. By the late 60s, nearly every kids’ show seemed to feature pop tunes. (Even Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp produced a modest hit in “Sha-La Love You,” which is better than a song by a talking chimp has any right to be.)

One of the more well-remembered kids’ shows of the late 60s was The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, which debuted in the fall of 1968. It ran for two seasons on NBC, and for years afterward it was paired in syndication with other Hanna-Barbera cartoons as The Banana Splits and Friends Show. Inspired by Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and sponsored by Kellogg’s, it featured live-action segments with four costumed actors playing the Splits. At least two of the actors were sons of veteran Kellogg’s jingle writer N. B. Winkless, billed under assumed names to avoid accusations of nepotism, but their voices were provided by veteran voice-over artists Paul Winchell and Daws Butler, and actor Allan Melvin. The costumes were designed by Sid and Marty Krofft, who would get their own show, H. R. Pufnstuf, in 1969.

The show was massively promoted at the time, especially on Kellogg’s cereal boxes. I don’t remember if you could cut Banana Splits records off the back of the boxes like you could with the Jackson Five, the Archies, and others, but I know you could send away for them, because I did. There were two four-song EPs, both released in 1969, and I think I had both.

The first EP to be issued contained the Splits’ theme, “The Tra-La-La Song,” “That’s the Pretty Part of You,” “The Beautiful Calliopa,” and “Let Me Remember You Smiling.” The second one, pictured above, features “Doin’ the Banana Split,” “I Enjoy Being a Boy,” “It’s a Good Day for a Parade,” and “The Very First Kid on My Block.”

Despite its vaguely gay title, “I Enjoy Being a Boy” is actually a garage-rock tune that seems to have been inspired by “I Am the Walrus.” The YouTuber who posted this version says the lead singer is bubblegum hero Joey Levine, and I don’t disagree. “Doin’ the Banana Split” was written by Barry White, and Wikipedia says he sings it, but I do disagree with that, unless it was cut before Barry hit puberty. Whoever sings it sounds like a cross between Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. “That’s the Pretty Part of You” is the love child of Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds and the Classics IV. “The Beautiful Calliopa,” written by Winkless and Hoyt Curtin, is a virulent earworm. How the Beatlesque “Very First Kid on My Block” and “Let Me Remember You Smiling” missed becoming radio hits, I can’t imagine. (The latter gives songwriting credits to Al Kooper, Bob Brass, and Irwin Levine, the latter a co-writer of some of Dawn’s biggest hits.) As it was, the Splits’ only national chart entry was “The Tra-La-La Song,” which did a single week at #96 on the Hot 100 in February 1969. It made only #133 on the Cash Box Looking Ahead chart, although it was a Top 10 hit in Greenville, South Carolina. A couple of other Splits songs made brief local chart appearances.

We’ve seen it (and heard it) time and time again: the best bubblegum outlived its era because of the time and care lavished on it. The Banana Splits Adventure Hour was just a Saturday morning kids’ show. The songs didn’t have to be as good as they were.

If you would like to know more about the Banana Splits (and who doesn’t), I refer you to this entry at the Hanna-Barbera Wiki and this post at the UK site A Quarter Of. This post is rebooted from one that appeared here in 2008 (!). The reboot was inspired by the Bluesky feed Dr. Pop Culture USA, where I recently snagged the EP cover pic at the top of this post. 

Together Everywhere

On By jbIn Fifty Years On, Record Charts4 Comments
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(Pictured: Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon, with bulldogs Broderick and Elizabeth. The Captain passed away during this week in 2019; Toni is still with us at age 85.)

Fifty years ago tonight, the nation’s radio stations counted down their top hits of 1975. “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain and Tennille was the year’s top song in both Billboard and Cash Box and at 52 of the 67 Top 40 stations with year-end listings for 1975 at ARSA. On the flip are the stations that went a different way.

Continue reading “Together Everywhere” →

Christmas Shuffle #28

On By jbIn Christmas, Random Universe3 Comments
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I promised you another shuffle before Christmas came this year, and I’m sliding in just under the wire.

“Little Drummer Boy”/Ottmar Liebert. Back when I was programming Christmas music on the radio, I think my station’s library had more versions of “The Little Drummer Boy” than any other Christmas song. Liebert’s guitar version is fine, although this blog is on record as saying there are only three truly good versions: the 1958 original by the Harry Simeone Chorale, the one by Kenny Burrell on his 1966 album Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas, and Daryl Stuermer’s version on the first GRP Christmas Collection, released in 1988.

“Socks”/J. D. McPherson. When my first nephew was little, my wife and I used to tell him that if he didn’t give us a Christmas list, he was going to get socks and underwear—and we followed through on the threat at least once. He was probably 12 or 13 the year he gave me socks and underwear, and he was very pleased with himself. Joke’s on you, kid. I was happy to get them then, and I’d be happy to get them any year. I linked to the entire Socks album in last week’s shuffle post.

“Arbolito de Navidad”/Los Lobos
“Feliz Navidad”/Los Lonely Boys
In the process of recording their 2019 album Llegó Navidad, Los Lobos assembled dozens of Latin Christmas songs spanning many cultures and whittled the list down to 12. I expect that most will be new to you, although the band covers “Dónde Está Santa Claus” and the Christmas warhorse “Feliz Navidad.” Los Lonely Boys, three Texas brothers, do a rockin’ good version of the latter on their album Christmas Spirit from 2008.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”/Joe Sample. From the 2003 compilation Christmas for Lovers, which is exactly it says on the label: an album of mellow, romantic jazz interpretations of Christmas songs both familiar and not. Sample’s track is a solo piano improvisation that renders the song almost unrecognizable. Which, in the case of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” is not a bad thing.

“O Holy Night”/Supremes
“O Holy Night”/Perry Como
The Supremes album Merry Christmas is 60 years old in 2025. “O Holy Night” wasn’t on it, however, until the 2015 digital reissue. Florence Ballard takes a rare lead vocal and is magnificent. Neither Ballard nor Como sing the lesser-known third verse, however, which some so-called Christians might want to cancel for  wokeness:

Truly he taught us to love one another
His law is love and his gospel is peace
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother
And in his name all oppression shall cease

“Go Tell It on the Mountain”/Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. A Season for Miracles, released in 1970, might be the best of all the Motown Christmas albums, and it’s one of the biggest sellers. Motown’s Christmas music tended toward the very traditional or the very schlocky. But the Miracles’ soulful-yet-reverent “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is right up there with the Jackson Five’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and Stevie Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me” as the most joyous of all Motown Christmas songs.

“My Boyfriend’s Coming Home for Christmas”/Toni Wine. This song about a soldier coming home on leave was a modest seasonal hit in 1963, when Wine was just 16 years old. Apart from several important songwriting credits, Toni Wine was also one of the voices of the Archies. She’s the one who sang “I’m gonna make your life so sweet,” and she should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her performance of that line alone.

“Jingle Bells”/Willie Nelson. Willie’s 1979 collaboration with Booker T. Jones, Pretty Paper, is in the hot rotation at our house every Christmas. Veteran music critic Nate Chinen recently wrote a good appreciation of the album. (Also, the New Yorker‘s new profile of Willie is fantastic.) “Jingle Bells” itself is so familiar that it seems like it must always have existed, but it was written by John L. Pierpont in 1857 for a blackface minstrel show. According to journalist Khalil Greene, it’s racist as hell, although the racist references in the lyric were long ago lost to history.

WordPress tells me that what you are reading is the 3,000th published post in the history of this website, a milestone that has been a long time coming considering the long silences here in 2025. I feel like I’m getting some of my writer’s mojo back as the year ends, however, and if you have stayed with me, I am grateful. Also, I wish you and yours a happy holiday. 

Christmas Shuffle #27

On By jbIn Christmas, Random Universe3 Comments
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The Christmas shuffle tradition, with 10 tracks from my laptop music stash yakked up at random, started here in 2007, and I feel a yearly obligation to keep it up, so here’s one for 2025. This is the 27th in the series; you can find others here. My plan at the moment is to try and get one more of these up before the day arrives, so stay tuned and see if that actually happens.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside”/Robert Palmer and Carnie Wilson. No matter who’s singing it, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” usually runs on two tracks—the woman wants to go home, the man wants her to stay with him, and each one tries to persuade the other while they talk past each other. Here, Carnie sings fetchingly while Robert is only slightly less subtle than Pepe Le Pew. Their singing styles are so different that you don’t for a moment believe they’ve ever met, let alone spent an evening together.

“Merry Christmas Darling”/Vanessa Williams
“Merry Christmas Darling”/Deana Carter
Vanessa has released two Christmas albums; her version of the Carpenters standard was on Silver and Gold in 2004, and it’s really good. Deana Carter is a country singer best known for her breakthrough album Did I Shave My Legs for This? and the #1 single “Strawberry Wine.” Her 2006 Christmas collection was produced by her father, Nashville session veteran Fred Carter, so it’s naturally called Father Christmas. It’s miles better than the cookie-cutter Christmas product every country singer is required to extrude at one time or another.

“Lonely Christmas”/Sonny Til and the Orioles. In 1962, Til and the Orioles recut the 1948 Orioles original for an album released on the Charlie Parker label. Yup, that Charlie Parker. The label was co-founded by his widow in 1961 to control the release of bootleg albums that had proliferated since Parker’s death. “Lonely Christmas” came to me years ago on Any Major R&B Christmas, which our longtime friend Gunther has reupped at Any Major Dude With Half a Heart, along with his entire collection of Christmas mixes, including a new one for 2025. His site is a fabulous gift to all of us, and I hope you will join me in raising a Christmas toast in his direction.

“Santa’s Got a Mean Machine”/J. D. McPherson. Few albums in my collection are more purely enjoyable than Socks, McPherson’s 2018 album of holiday originals inspired by early rock and rockabilly.

“Blue Christmas”/Richard Hawley
“Blue Christmas”/Bright Eyes
I have accumulated several Richard Hawley tracks from various sources over the years and I don’t know what to think of them. His version of “Blue Christmas” has a throwback feel without imitating the Elvis version. The Bright Eyes version is OK.

“White Christmas”/George Conedy
“White Christmas”/Booker T and the MGs
Conedy and his soul-jazz organ album Merry Soul Christmas represent one of my favorite musical mysteries. I’ve gone as far as e-mailing the address of what might have been a family member I found on a geneaology site trying to learn anything about the guy, but have found nothing, and there’s precious little hard info about his album out there either. I guess there are some things we’re not meant to know, and that’s OK.

Also: I didn’t try to write anything here memorializing Steve Cropper, although I probably should have. I didn’t see nearly as many stories as I expected after his recent death. But considering that Rolling Stone ranked him as the #2 guitarist of all time after Jimi Hendrix, maybe nothing more needs to be said. He doesn’t have much to do on “White Christmas” other than a bit of rhythm, but as many other MGs performances show, Cropper’s genius was like that of Miles Davis—in the notes he didn’t play.

“Sleigh Ride”/Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors. In which Mojo can only remember a few lines of the song, so he makes up the rest. I played this for my wife and she was a bit mystified by it, but in her defense, Mojo tends to confuse the uninitiated.

Recommended: If you have yet to watch the PBS American Masters documentary about Dick Van Dyke, produced for his 100th birthday, go and do immediately. (It’s also on the PBS app if you swing that way.) It’s so good that my wife and I were sorry to see it end.

The Elephant in the Room

On By jbIn Record Charts2 Comments
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In the wake of my involuntary retirement from radio, I have started working as a substitute teacher. And because of the way my thought process works, I find myself recalling the most famous substitute teacher of them all.

Cheech and Chong’s album Big Bambu became a sensation when I was in middle school—junior high, as we called it in my town then. Kids who had heard it thanks to older siblings would play it for their peers, who then wanted to borrow it, and who eventually went out and got copies of their own. It’s hard to fathom that we listened to titles such as “Let’s Make a Dope Deal” and “Ashley Roachclip” on an album packaged to look like a box of rolling papers (which actually came with giant rolling papers inside) without any sort of freakout from school officials or parents.

A year-and-a-half after its release, Big Bambu was boosted by an actual hit single: “Sister Mary Elephant,” in which a substitute teacher deals with a difficult class in her own unique way (“shudd-up!”) “Sister Mary Elephant” hit the radio in the fall of 1973, first at KHJ in Los Angeles, although stations in New Orleans, Louisville, Vancouver, and Buffalo were early adopters as well. In Louisville, she was in the Top 10 by Thanksgiving. In mid-December she hit #1 in Milwaukee, at both WOKY (for three weeks, through the holidays and into the new year) and WZUU. In January, she would get as high [snortlaugh] as #2 at WCFL and #3 at WLS, both in Chicago. “Elephant” was more popular in Chicago than anywhere else in the country, and given the popularity of WLS among teenagers in my Wisconsin hometown, that may have juiced Big Bambu‘s popularity a bit. “Sister Mary Elephant” reached #24 on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 19, 1974, and she peaked at #36 in Cash Box one week later. But before the winter snow had melted, she was gone from the charts, and from the radio. WLS ranked her at #54 for all of 1974. WKTU in Pittsburgh ranked her at #11 for all of 1973.

(“Sister Mary Elephant” nearly overlapped another Cheech and Chong single, “Basketball Jones,” which reached peak popularity around the country in October and November 1973. Chicago had been ground zero for “Basketball Jones” too; it hit #1 on WBBM-FM and #2 at WLS. In Cash Box, it peaked at #13 and in Billboard, #15. Its success likely spurred the record label to issue “Elephant” as a followup.)

I bought the “Elephant” single before I got my own copy of Big Bambu (which I still have, rolling papers included). The flip side of the single was a track from Cheech and Chong’s 1971 debut album titled “Wink Dinkerson,” in which a naïve Top 40 DJ introduces an act at a rock concert. I liked that almost as much as the A-side, considering that by then I wanted to be a Top 40 DJ myself.

Big Bambu had gone to #2 on the Billboard 200 album chart; so did Los Cochinos, which contained “Basketball Jones.” A year later, Cheech and Chong’s Wedding Album would make #5, propelled by the national Top-10 single “Earache My Eye.” But that’s a post for another time.

Recommended Reading: In December 1975, Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue played a benefit at Madison Square Garden to raise funds for the legal defense of boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, convicted of murder in New Jersey. The night before, Dylan and the entire company, which included Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Alan Ginsberg, and others, performed for Carter and other inmates at a prison in Clinton, New Jersey. Here’s the story.

Also: I have linked to this before but it’s worth another look: the promos, intro, and commercials from the original broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, on Sunday, December 6, 1964. The show aired as an episode of the General Electric Fantasy Hour at 5:30 in the afternoon Eastern time, in an era when late Sunday afternoon was valuable network real estate. GE had paid a half-million dollars to the show’s producers, Rankin/Bass, a deal that permitted two broadcasts, and which presumably helped to pay for commercials in the show that featured Rudolph characters plugging the newest modern wonders Mom would want for Christmas that year. They’re a charming look back into a bygone world.

Also Also: I was pleased to be cited as a “radio historian” in this interesting piece about Marcia Strassman, who was a “flower-power pop singer” before becoming one of the great TV babes of the 1970s. This is a quiet corner of the Internet, but every now and then someone happens by.