This 1969 single written by the unlikely team of Brian Wilson and father Murry (as “Reggie Dunbar”) perhaps should have been a higher charting follow up to “Do It Again” for the Beach Boys (although it did sit rather uncomfortably as part of the 1974 Endless Summer lineup). Why didn’t “Breakaway” do better than its numerologically eye-catching #69 peak position? My theory: the “Breakaway” catchphrase had already been getting tons of airplay with Steve Karmen’s jingle for the 1969 Pontiac.

Beach Boys – “Breakaway” (1969)

Beach Boys – “Celebrate the News” (1969): This was the broody B-side, a Dennis Wilson track that gives the single the yin yang tension familiar to many a Beach Boys observer.

And here’s this:

The Steve Karmen Big Band featuring Jimmy Radcliffe (1968) – “Breakaway Parts I and II”: Side A is Jimmy Radcliffe talking and singing over a troubled, minor key arrangement of Karmen’s theme, while Side B is the major-key instrumental version more familiar from TV and radio ads.

Two-sided UK guitar group perfection courtesy of “Shall We Dance” Bram Tchaikovsky’s former band The Motors, who also endorsed his dance-floor-as-nirvana notion. Side A clocks in at 3:13, but the album version, which is twice as long, is also a keeper, featuring an extended intro based on the yearning middle section.  Those lower register guitar octaves in the verses sound like vintage Cheap Trick, who would later cover this song badly. Side B (“Whiskey and Wine”) is another killer, featuring a zigzag hook that should have blared from late 70s car stereos on Saturday nights but never did.

The Motors – “Dancing the Night Away” (single version) (1977)

The Motors – “Whiskey and Wine” (1977)

The Motors – “Dancing the Night Away” (album version) (1977)

Celebrate Nick Drake’s eternal relationship with the Volkswagen brand with this collector’s model. Hold it up against the starry sky and admire its stark beauty.

Maybe you’ve been doing web searches for “going all the way to Casualfornia in my Volkswagen bus” the way I did off and on for many years, and now you’ve found yourself here. Maybe you, too, had an old VHS tape with fuzzy dubs from Night Flight or New Wave Theater circa 1982, including a clip from this mystery band featuring a front man in flippers, running shorts, a Mike Nesmith cap, and sunscreen on his lips and you had no clue who it was, and no sleuthing had seen you through. I finally had to follow a hunch and ordered this Sunken Treasures CD by the Marina Swingers, and lo, therein lay knowledge and peace.

Excerpts from the liner notes’ “cranky band history text” by keyboardist Esteban Elka:

“We weren’t sure if we wanted to be an artsy-intellectual new-wave act, a bloodthirsty dance-band, a multi-media comedy round-up, a surf/swing/big-band/punk ensemble or just an experiment in soul-splitting personality exploration (therapy that doesn’t work). So we did all of the above, often at the same time….

“We got to open for some zesty acts… Not one of them put in a good word for us with their management.

“…We don’t expect you to just listen to this CD. We think you’ll wish you had been there. We want you to be sorry that you weren’t. Where were you when we needed you?

“Come to think of it, where are we now?… One of us had a stroke, one of has leukemia, one of us had a brain tumor, two of us used drugs way too hard, one of us is wearing a crooked toupee, but two us are bald. One of us still gigs, most of us still record and we all walk, talk, pass wind and lie, except maybe the dead guy.

“Someday, you will be dead too.

“Special thanks to: A lot of you tried but it’s results that count. We didn’t make it, so the bulk of you shouldn’t expect a major pat on the fanny…”

For more information about the Marina Swingers, order Sunken Treasures on CD Baby, like I did.

The Marina Swingers – Casual (live at the Sweetwater in Redondo Beach, CA) (1982)

Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Andy Coakley, quoted in The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs (p. 21): “It was September 1 [1905], and that was Straw Hat Busting Day in the major leagues. The custom died with the retirement of Babe Ruth. Rube Waddell was going around destroying straw hats. I had a pretty expensive skimmer which was in fine condition, and Waddell was waiting for me. As he ran for my hat, I backed up the aisle. He lunged. I struck him with my bag. He slipped and landed on his shoulder.” This kept Waddell from pitching in the World Series where his A’s lost to the Giants.

What the station wagons of the fifties do to me is tap into my adult susceptibility to vintage advertising, prompting fantasies about putting on a Pendleton, lighting up a pipe, and driving my family through the Northwest evergreens. What the station wagons of the mid-seventies do to me is remind me of real life childhood vacations before seat belt laws, when you could freely roll out sleeping bags in the back, set up a smorgasbord or play croquet.

I bought this Kinsmart brand 1955 Chevy Nomad toy after spotting it by chance at a Walgreens in Albuquerque. I looked up the company and was disappointed that they didn’t also have a 1972 Ford Country Squire family wagon, white with wood panels and a red interior.  But this will do nicely.

This product didn’t exist, but a perceptive artist/promising marketer concocted designs for 12 different flavors and a special edition platinum box. You shouldn’t put it past the free-spending Casablanca label to have tried something like this, though. After all, they cheerfully green-lighted the unprecedented expenses for manufacturing the Kiss band members’ four simultaneous solo albums in 1978. And the tendency of both the label and the band to merchandise with no regard to age appropriateness was without parallel.

Non-Salt Lakers don’t understand why the “Jazz” monicker stuck when their basketball team moved in from New Orleans. If they ever listened to Hot Rod Hundley do play-by-play, though, they’d know that the team had to be called that as long as he was on board. He was the best ever. His verbal skills behind the microphone matched his physical skills as a ball player on the court: elastic, playful, and always entertaining. (He was the perfect voice to put the visual experience of kindred spirit “Pistol” Pete Maravich into words during the New Orleans years.) Every motion on the court crackled off Hot Rod’s tongue in real time with phrases like “yoyo back,” “hippity hop” and “belt high dribble” and when the Jazz won, they’d “put the game in the ol’ refrigerator.” Hot Rod Hundley was music, and if I had recordings of every game he called I would listen to all of them on road trips.

One of the less familiar Burt Bacharach/Hal David movie themes. Featuring harpsichord and sneaky chord changes, it appeared the year after What’s New Pussycat. It plays during a candy-colored animated intro and includes comical interjections by leading man Peter Sellers in between the Hollies’ lead vocals. More appreciated today than in 1966, the After the Fox movie serves as a cineaste’s field day with its numerous industry in-jokes.

The Hollies (with Peter Sellers) – “After the Fox” (1966)

A 1966-67 TV ad campaign for Benson & Hedges 100’s focused on the extra long cigarettes’ disadvantages, making for situational giggles. The commercial was popular enough for the alluring musical backdrop to get some airplay on its own. Written by Mitch Leigh, the same man who scored the Man of La Mancha musical, the genuine as-heard-on-television article made enough noise in Cleveland to chart locally and to get listed in a 2/11/67 issue of Billboard as a potential breakout hit. This record was credited to The Answer on the red Columbia label, and the arrangers are listed as “Music Makers,” aka Leigh’s own production house. (Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles erroneously cites Bill Dean and John Campbell as the songwriters.) Another arrangement of this song, by Phil Bodner’s studio assembly the Brass Ring, entered the charts a week earlier on the Dunhill label with the hyphenated title “The Dis-Advantages of You” (and an arrangement of the “Dating Game” theme on side B). Peaking at #36, it outpaced the original as a full-blown Top 40 hit.

The Answer – “The Disadvantages of You” (1967)
The Brass Ring – “The Dis-Advantages of You” (1967)