Boneyard Media

Full page ad from the May 23, 1970 issue (p. 73) (click to enlarge).

The cassette version of Aja I used to listen to in my teens was totally different from the LP version. Still don’t know what the reasoning was behind that. I maintain that not only is the cassette sequencing for Pretzel Logic a thing of beauty that should become the standard version, but also that the cassette sequencing for both Aja and Can’t Buy a Thrill are much stronger and more sensible than the LPs.

All the Steely Dan albums through Gaucho, incidentally, had weird cassette vs. LP sequence discrepancies. Gaucho is actually the one Steely Dan album that I feel strongly about as having a better LP lineup. But again, why the difference in the first place?

Aja (LP):  Side 1 - Black Cow; Aja; Deacon Blues. Side 2 - Peg; Home at Last; I Got the News; Josie.

Aja (Cassette): Side 1 - Aja; Deacon Blues; Josie. Side 2 - Black Cow; I Got the News; Peg; Home at Last.

Gaucho (LP): Side 1 - Babylon Sisters; Hey Nineteen; Glamour Profession. Side 2 - Gaucho; Time Out of Mind; My Rival; Third World Man.

Gaucho (8-Track): 1 - Babylon Sisters; Time Out of Mind. 2 - Gaucho; My Rival. 3 - Hey Nineteen; Third World Man. 4 - Glamour Profession.

I’m sure it’s all water under the bridge, but I wonder how future country star Dan Seals, aka “England Dan” of duo England Dan and John Ford Coley, felt when his big brother Jim, of Seals and Crofts, stole the chord sequence and melody for the verses of Dan’s “New Jersey” (1971, #103) and used it for “Summer Breeze” (1972, #6).

England Dan and John Ford Coley - “New Jersey” (excerpt) (1971)
Seals and Crofts - “Summer Breeze” (excerpt) (1972)

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So I guess my assessment of Eurodisco as being one of the most glaring trends of last summer’s radio hits wasn’t entirely from left field. It did feel kinda lonely at the time, though.

Barry Walters, 2011: The Year of Europop

Since NPR started airing the current Wycliffe Gordon-penned theme for All Things Considered in 1995, I’d always imagined it as a smartened variation of the Smurfs theme. (South Park returned the favor in 1998 by lifting its cheesy poofs theme from NPR.) My friend Jim, though, has just sent me a terrific 1968 Christmas song by a Polish rock group called Skaldowie (aided by a girl group called Ali Babki), and if my ears don’t deceive me, the refrain near the end of the song, starting at 2:19, anticipates All Things Considered quite faithfully 27 years previous.

Skaldowie - Bedzie Koleda (There Will Be a Christmas Carol)

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December’s always a good time to check in with Hal Schneider, a.k.a. Hal Holiday, the man that brought us the deathless “Sleigh Bell Rock”/”Booze Party” single in 1960 and whom I declared, quite astutely, back in ‘07 to be “Utah’s King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Hal continues to perform live in the Ogden and Salt Lake areas and recently gathered up some local press when the makers of the Australian film Red Dog used “Booze Party” for a bar scene. A smashing development for someone who, as of four years ago, had yet to see a dime for his nearly half-decade-old songs.

The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” hit #1 over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1958.  I had a mini-Dooley fest on Folkways today, where I played the hit version, the Smothers Brothers version, Grayson and Whittier’s original 1929 version (Grayson was actually related to the Grayson in the song), and “Tom Dula” by the late Bill Morrissey with Greg Brown from 1993. I did not, however, play this 1974 Incredible Bongo Band version of the song, called “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, Your Tie’s Stuck in Your Zipper.”

Kendell Kardt has posted a disarming children’s story with a Thanksgiving theme on his blog. It’s called The Pearl, and let’s hope that by this time next year, some wise publisher or animator will have gotten to know William the Bell Buoy, Sally the Seagull and Freddy the Fish and given their story its due.

This is a mural done by William M. Tracy that once graced the entryway of the Terror Ride at Lagoon, which is an amusement park in Farmington, Utah.  See it in full splendor at Ichabod Sanz’s Flickr page.

When I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the current hits of the day were always playing at swimming pools, arcades, malls, grocery stores, and theme parks. You didn’t need your radio carefully tuned to the Top 40 station to hear contemporary hits. As an adult who now takes his own kids to these places, 85% of what I heard this summer were hits from the ‘80s.

If public background music targets adults so aggressively nowadays (at least in my neck of the woods), I wonder how kids are hearing current hits. Do they listen to Top 40 with more premeditated determination than my generation ever did? Are they sneakier about it? Are chart positions today swayed by an even smaller segment of the population than before? Are the dance clubs that cater to late teens and twenty-somethings now the primary venues for Top 40 exposure? Is it TV that’s introducing kids to these songs? Someone should get empirical about this and let me know how it turns out.

I can at least talk about some of the hits themselves. What follows is a quick skim through all 23 titles to have roosted in the Top Ten of Billboard’s Hot 100 between June 1 and August 31 of this year. I’m no mathematician, but I’ve listed them according to popularity in terms of chart positions and weeks in the Top Ten. I’ve gone out of my way this summer - which is what it requires for an adult - to take these songs in along with their accompanying videos. I’ve done this by keeping my ears glued to the local Top 40 station (avoiding mornings) and spending unrecommended amounts of time on Vevo.

Before getting started, allow me to touch upon six trends I’ve noticed in this year’s summertime hit parade:

1) Eurodisco: At first glance, the term might seem dated and out of context, but I can’t think of anything more accurate to describe the frenzied, Ibiza-friendly sounds that presently make “rock” and “R&B” seem like far more badly dated terms than “Eurodisco.”

2) Workhorse 4-bar chord sequences: Hit songwriters of today and the audiences who support them are very happy with refrains consisting of four repeating measures with four chords, each one assigned to an entire measure. The “With or Without You” (U2) template (”wowy” is what I call it) is among the most popular. The plodding persistence of this 4-chords per 4-measures in 4/4 time approach to songwriting (Adele’s “Someone Like You” is only the latest) is partly responsible for giving everyone over thirty the impression that their own teenage soundtracks were somehow innovative and/or Gershwin-esque.

3) Gap rap: As I put it once before, “gap rap” is a “longstanding musical feature unique to radio and music video in which ‘clean versions’ of (mainly) rap songs contain non-vocalized gaps in place of rude language. The effect is that of a rapper using a very cheap microphone cord.” An aura of defectiveness, in other words, accompanies all gap rap tracks.

4) The Katy Perry/Lady Gaga/Britney Spears corruptathon: The three biggest female singers of today are currently competing to see who can kill your preteen daughters’ childhoods the fastest. In their defense, they may be merely attempting to affirm that they are not, in fact, preteens themselves.

5) Whistling: The sound of whistling, either actual or synthesized, appeared in enough songs this summer to qualify as a full blown trend (so to speak). Who started this? What does it mean? Does it prophesy of the revenge of the “tweeter” after the long reign of the subwoofer?

5) Winks to the ’80s: Most of these songs contain a synth hook, melody, drum pattern, sample, or chord sequence that middle-agers will say sounds especially familiar. This is likely because contemporary hits are targeted to, and in many cases created by, kids who have subconsciously developed an ear for their parents’ ‘80s music, continually airing as it does in public spaces. (All of the short sound samples place the current hits alongside the ones they salute.)

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