May 17 – Turntable Talk 26 : The Single That Was More Like A Home Run

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 26^th round. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! I hope you find it interesting and check back from time to time here – new posts go up daily and we run the ‘Turntable Talk’ feature usually once a month. And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. We have an index of past topics, with the final one of each in the link, others could be found going back day by day from each of those.

This month, our topic is Music Music. We asked our contibutors to write about a song that is about music – either about music itself, or the art of making it or the lifestyle of a musician. I’m intrigued to see what people come up with. Today we have Max from Power Pop blog. He’s played in bands himself, so he should come up with an interesting pick for a song about music…

Thank you Dave for posting this on your site. Below is the request that we wrote about.

There are many great songs about music, so let’s highlight them. Pick a song you like either about music itself (eg, ‘I love Music’ and so on)  or about the life of a musician making music . Or anything else you can think of about music… about music! 

I sometimes go for the B-sides or ones that aren’t heard as much. Not this time! This 1971 song remains a classic. It was the first single I bought that you had to flip over to listen to the other side. The song was 8:42 long.

I remember when I was 5-6 years old and listening to this song. The verses I ignored at the time and enjoyed the chorus immensely going around singing it and being told to shut up already by my sister. I guess a six-year-old singing Bye, bye ‘Miss American Pie, Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye, Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die, This’ll be the day that I die…” Would get old but hey…I had good taste anyway (better than my sister).

It’s a song that I don’t get tired of…ever. When I think of it I think of my childhood and also a big dose of pop culture. We all know that the day the music died was pointing to the Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper plane crash. The rest builds up and between the lines, he sings about a lot of events and artists. 

Where do I begin with this one? The song has so many references that it acts as a pop culture index by itself. I have read about college classes just on this song. It has been inspected and dissected since its release. Long after Don McLean leaves this earth…the song will be inspected and dissected again and again.

We do know the song was inspired by Buddy Holly… What does it all mean? While being interviewed in 1991, McLean was asked for probably the 1000th time “What does the song ‘American Pie’ mean to you?,” to which he answered, “It means never having to work again for the rest of my life.” Now that is a great and honest answer by McLean.

In 2015 he opened up about the song and sold the original lyrics for $1.2 million . This time he answered the question seriously.“It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.” He also said that “American Pie” was Buddy Holly’s airplane that crashed…it was a made-up name by McLean because the company that owned the plane didn’t name any of them. “People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity, of course, I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”

In later years I would buy the single and try to figure out who he was talking about. Some of the lyrics include references to Karl Marx (or Groucho Marx), Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (or John Lennon), the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, The Byrds, James Dean, Charles Manson, the Rolling Stones, the “widowed bride,” Jackie Kennedy (or María Elena Holly), Jimi Hendrix, the Vietnam War, The Fillmore East, and more.

This song peaked at #1 in the Billboard 100, #1 in Canada, #1 in New Zealand, and #2 in the UK in 1972. If you want more… here is a website PDF that breaks down the song line by line of their interpretation.

I’ll let Don McLean talk about the song: “For some reason, I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way. As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), ‘Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.’

I thought, Whoa, what’s that? And then the day the music died, it just came out. And I said, Oh, that is such a great idea. And so that’s all I had. And then I thought, I can’t have another slow song on this record. I’ve got to speed this up. I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal. Buddy Holly’s death to me was a personal tragedy. As a child, a 15-year-old, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. I mean, I went to school and mentioned it and they said, ‘So what?’ So I carried this yearning and longing, if you will, this weird sadness that would overtake me when I would look at this album, The Buddy Holly Story because that was my last Buddy record before he passed away.”

 

May 16 – Turntable Talk 26 : A Salute To ’60s Rock

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Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 26^th round. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! I hope you find it interesting and check back from time to time here – new posts go up daily and we run the ‘Turntable Talk’ feature usually once a month. And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. We have an index of past topics, with the final one of each in the link, others could be found going back day by day from each of those.

This month, our topic is Music Music. We asked our contibutors to write about a song that is about music – either about music itself, or the art of making it or the lifestyle of a musician. I’m intrigued to see what people come up with. Today we have Christian from Christian’s Music Musings, a site where he keeps us upto date on new releases every week and looks back at some great oldies.

Once again, it’s Turntable Talk time. Now in its 26^th round, fellow blogger Dave’s monthly series continues to go strong. This time, the topic was great songs about music, whether they express sentiments about music or focus on the life of a specific musician.

While there are many examples that fit the above definition, the first song that randomly came to my mind was “Sweet Soul Music”, a classic first released by Arthur Conley in 1967. The second one I thought of was my pick, “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” by John Mellencamp, one of my longtime favorite artists.

Written by Mellencamp, who at the time was still known as John Cougar Mellencamp, “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” first appeared on his eighth studio album Scarecrow, released in July 1985. This album also happens to mark the start of my Mellencamp musical journey, which I felt was another good reason to pick the song.

“R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A,” subtitled “A Salute to ‘60s Rock,” also became the album’s third single and its biggest hit. In the U.S., it peaked at no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Canadian audiences evidently liked it as well, propelling the song to no. 7 on RPM’s singles chart. Elsewhere, it reached no. 17 in New Zealand and no. 67 in the UK – not bad for a song with a ‘60s retro sound during a time the charts were dominated by new wave and hair metal.

Songfacts explains “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” tells the story of how rock and roll emerged in America, and how those (now infamous) musicians that were not afraid to take personal risks for the sake of their music became a strong influence on the next generation. It mentions numerous artists and bands, including Frankie Lymon, Bobby Fuller, Mitch Ryder, Jackie Wilson, Shangra La’s, Young Rascals, Martha Reeves and James Brown, who became influences for Mellencamp. Growing up, he listened to their music on AM radio.

Initially, Mellencamp hesitated to include the song on the Scarecrow album, feeling it was too light-hearted compared to other tracks about more serious topics, such as “Rain on the Scarecrow” about the financial struggles of midwest farmers and “Face of the Nation”, which addresses the decline of the so-called American Dream and corporate greed. “It was one of those absolute last-split-second decisions,” Mellencamp said in 1986. “I was only including it on the cassette and CD copies of Scarecrow as a bonus party track, but my manager loved the energy of it and I thought, ‘Yeah! What the hell!'”

Contrary to Mellencamp’s first manager Tony DeFries, who insisted the last name Mellencamp wasn’t marketable and came up with Johnny Cougar, a name Mellencamp hated, in the case of “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A”., the manager got it right. While I know by that time Mellencamp had long parted ways with DeFries and next worked with Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff, I’m not sure Gaff was still in the picture at the time of the Scarecrow album.

“R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” was recorded at Belmont Mall in Belmont, Ind. Mellencamp produced the song under the alias “Little Bastard” together with Don Gehman. Other musicians on the recording included Mike Wanchic (guitars, backing vocals), Larry Crane (guitars, flutophone), John Cascella (keyboards), Sarah Flint (backing vocals), Toby Myers (bass) and Kenny Aronoff (drums).

Here’s a fun live version captured in 1985 at Farm Aid, an annual benefit concert to support American farmers, founded in 1985 by Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Neil Young.

Following are some additional tidbits from Songfacts:

With “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A”…Mellencamp was paying homage, but he was also paying his dues. For example, the late Bobby Fuller’s mention on a Top 10 song, and a platinum album, was enough to revive flagging interest in the artist (as well as get Mellencamp a credit on a Bobby Fuller Four Best-Of album). Said Mellencamp: “When I played in Albuquerque, I think it was, his [Fuller’s] mom and some of his family came down to see me play. They acted like I gave them 60 million dollars just for mentioning his name. They gave me his belt that he died in.”

The instrumental break in this song is very clever. Mellencamp says the riff was lifted from Neil Diamond’s first hit, “Cherry, Cherry.” When we first hear it, it’s played on an ocarina, which is a small wind instrument of ancient Eastern origins, thought to be 12,000 years old, and often made in the shape of a bird and used to imitate its fluting song. This is a nod to the song “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, which featured an ocarina solo. In Mellencamp’s song, the riff is then played on guitar and later on keyboards, going through various musical forms popular in ’60s rock. In concert, Mellencamp would often bring a fan onstage to dance with him during this section.

In the months prior to recording Scarecrow, Mellencamp’s band worked their way through nearly a hundred cover songs. Mellencamp hoped that through these covers, they would absorb the stylistic essence of the era through osmosis. Mellencamp’s bassist Toby Myers admitted that, “I thought he was giving us busywork, but he wanted us to understand what made those songs tick so we could put some of that grit into his songs.” The band was surprised by the sheer quantity of different styles that characterized the era. “Take an old Rascals song for example,” Mellencamp said. “There’s everything from marching band beats to soul music to country sounds in one song.”

In keeping with ’60s hit single tradition, Mellencamp kept this song under three minutes long – it clocks in at 2:54.

Last but not least, here are the song’s lyrics:

They come from the cities

And they come from the smaller towns

Beat up cars with guitars and drummers

Goin crack boom bam

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A., Yeah, Yeah!

Rockin’ in the U.S.A.

Said goodbye to their families

Said goodbye to their friends

With pipe dreams in their heads

And very little money in their hands

Some are black and some are white

Ain’t to proud to sleep on the floor tonight

With the blind faith of Jesus you know that they just might, be

Rockin’ in the U.S.A.

Hey!

Voices from nowhere

And voices from the larger towns

Filled our head full of dreams

Turned the world upside down

There was Frankie Lyman-Bobby Fuller-Mitch Ryder

(They were Rockin’)

Jackie Wilson-Shangra-las-Young Rascals

(They were Rockin’)

Spotlight on Martha Reeves

Let’s don’t forget James Brown

Rockin’ in the U.S.A.

Rockin’ in the U.S.A.

Hey!

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A., Yeah, Yeah!

Rockin’ in the U.S.A.

Sources: Wikipedia; Songfacts; YouTube

May 15 – Turntable Talk 26 : Rock Has A Head For Rock

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Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 26^th round. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! I hope you find it interesting and check back from time to time here – new posts go up daily and we run the ‘Turntable Talk’ feature usually once a month. And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. We have an index of past topics, with the final one of each in the link, others could be found going back day by day from each of those.

This month, our topic is Music Music. We asked our contibutors to write about a song that is about music – either about music itself, or the art of making it or the lifestyle of a musician. I’m intrigued to see what people come up with. And today we have our second Canadian contributor in a row – Deke from Ontario. We know from his Deke’s Vinyl Reviews and More site he loves music… especially the rockin’ variety!

Thanks again to Dave for letting me spout off about some good old hard rock. So this month we picked “Music Music “about great songs. I could have picked a million hard rock tunes but for me it’s fun at times to pick not an obvious choice. My pick is by the band Rockhead, and a tune called “Bed of Roses”.

Who are Rockhead you ask? I’m sure many of you Ruch’N’Rollers who read Dave’s blog may have heard the name Bob Rock mentioned previously. In case you don’t remember, Bob Rock has produced Metallica, Bon Jovi, Micheal Buble,Motley Crue, The Offspring, The Cult… I could keep going on. What many don’t know is that Bob, back in 1990 put together a rock act named – you guessed it – Rockhead!

By late 1992 the self-titled CD appeared and disappeared quickly. Probably as the style had more to do with ’70s Rock than 90’s Grunge. It’s little notice was a shame as Bob put together a kick ass band featuring vocalist Steve Jack, bassist Jamey Kosh and drummer Chris Taylor.

Thirteen tracks make up the debut and Bob brought in some heavy hitters on guitar like Richie Sambora and Billy Duffy to add some muscle on a few tracks. Bob is no slouch on the six string himself, as you hear on my pick , the opening track and lead-off single : “Bed of Roses” . It has a real throwback sound even with the amped up honky tonk piano along for the ride as well. Great verses,choruses along with Jack’s lead vocal and the musical muscle behind the singing proves that it’s all about timing in the music biz.

This album didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell back in ’92 yet Bob’s relationship with Bon Jovi got them the opening gig of Jovi’s European tour even with the album stalling sales-wise Rock went back to his day job producing. Perhaps Bob had to scratch that rock itch one more time as he was also the guitarist in The Payolas back in the early to mid-’80s. The Payolas had the big hit “Eyes of A Stranger” back in the early ’80s.

One final thing I will add about this album is that the first four tracks (“Bed of Roses”, “Chelsea Rose”, “Heartland”, “Lovehunter”) would stand toe to toe with any band of this genre (hard rock) at the back end of the ’80s. It’s all about timing in the music biz and Bob Rock and the boys were too late to the party.

It’s a great album yet for some funny reason it’s not on streams (Apple for sure) but the whole album is up on YouTube.

Thanks Dave, and thanks to you for reading!

May 14 – Turntable Talk 26 : Edmunds Loves Music

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Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 26^th round. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! I hope you find it interesting and check back from time to time here – new posts go up daily and we run the ‘Turntable Talk’ feature usually once a month. And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. We have an index of past topics, with the final one of each in the link, others could be found going back day by day from each of those.

This month, our topic is Music Music. We asked our contributors to write about a song that is about music – either about music itself, or the art of making it or the lifestyle of a musician. I’m intrigued to see what people come up with. And we’re starting with Randy, from Mostly Music Covers in Ontario, Canada. He’s the expert on cover songs, and lately has shown himself to be a pretty knowledgeable figure on the early influences of rock…

When Dave asked us to pick a song about music, I immediately knew which one I would write about. Then, of course, I thought this was a good theme! More songs came to me. Alas, he asked for one song but as we contributors often do, I will cheat and sneak in a related tune.

My choice is “I Love Music” written and recorded by Dave Edmunds and it appeared on his 1994 album Plugged In.

While I could not find the lyrics and if the title wasn’t enough to convince you, I did pick up a few words from the song. Edmunds starts by introducing the song “In the Key of G”, he mentions things like flats and sharps, MTV, Fred Astaire, and music making “the world a better place”. Near the end, he says “Rocking and Rolling Universe that’s my philosophy”. One could do worse these days.

Depending on the day you ask my favorite musician is either Dave Edmunds or Nick Lowe and I have talked plenty about them both. Just in case you don’t know who he is, here is a brief bio.

Dave Edmunds was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1944. At age ten he was playing in a band with his older brother and by the mid-1960s he was playing in several bands and recording. You likely know his best charting song, “I Hear You Knocking”, a cover of a Smiley Lewis song that reached #1 in the UK in 1970 and #4 in the US. And while he was never able to reproduce that success, he went on to release 14 studio albums and he played in the critically acclaimed band Rockpile (with Nick Lowe). As a producer, he has worked with Shakin’ Stevens, The Stray Cats, Dion, Paul McCartney, Status Quo, and The Everly Brothers’ comeback album among others. He is known for his production precision and his incredible guitar work.

If Dave will indulge me, (ed. Note – Dave will) is Dave Edmunds has another great ‘Music’ song. “A.1. On the Jukebox” from his 1978 album Tracks on Wax 4. Written by Edmunds with Will Birch who would later write the book Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe.

“A1 on the Jukebox and nowhere on the charts”

April 19 – A Sensible Novelty Song? Wot?

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we finish up with one more pick, from yours truly.

First, I want to thank our seven contributors this time around who again came through in a big way with some fun and often obscure novelty songs that really spanned quite a range of the musical spectrum.

Several people looked at just what a “novelty” song was anyway. I guess the best answer to that is there’s no definition… but you know it when you hear one! The closest thing I could come to suggesting a definition would be a song that was deliberately humorous , and as a consequence often become a bit stale or cloying before long. I had a number of ones which came to mind for possibilities. Of course the ’60s had a lot of hit novelty songs, ones about purple people-eaters and polka dotted bikinis, and I vaguely aware of them but they were a bit before my time. The ’70s seemed a golden age of the genre, with a number of hits being played into the ground by radio . Being a youngster at the time, I liked a lot of them – “The Streak”, “Spiders & Snakes” (by Jim Stafford who had several novelty hits, as Max reminded us), “Disco Duck” – which even at the time made me cringe – but few really still entertain me or make me want to pop them into the playlist. Just try listening to Jimmy Castor’s “Troglodyte” (a #1 hit in Canada in ’72) from start to finish. We dare ya!

The 1980s though seemed to also have their share of big novelty hits, and a few of them still hold up to this day to me. “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo was and still is a favorite of mine, as are some of its singer, Stan Ridgway’s solo songs . “Camouflage” for example, is a great tune and has its humorous moments but relies on a quirky, Sixth Sense-type story twist instead of guffahs to make its lyrics truly memorable. But the one I decided to feature is just flat out goofy, and being from the ’80s, it has a suitably goofy video to go with it.

Captain Sensible or Ray Burns as his birth certificate listed him, was one of the founding members of one of the premier bands of London’s ’70s punk movement, The Damned. He played bass, and at times guitar. However by the early-’80s, he’d gone solo and like several other “punk” stars (think John Lydon, The Stranglers by and large) one gets the impression he might not have been all that invested in the real “punk” lifestyle and walloping sound. I mean, he wore a trademark red beret and dark John Lennon glasses and his first solo hit was a tongue-in-cheek take on an old Rodgers & Hammerstein musical number, “Happy Talk.” Sensible was always good for quotes mind you, like on politics : “it’s quite easy to write lyrics when politicians are so corrupt. I had to start my own political party I was so angry. I called it the Blah Party.”

Anyway, one time while in a nameless city in the U.S. on tour, he was trying to get some sleep in his hotel room when someone started doing roadwork with a jackhammer. He complained to the front desk and suggested it was “a ploy to upset British bands” but the staff told him to just “have a nice day.” The musician taped some of the street racket… and used that actual tape to build a hit song on. Innovative, wot?

“Wot” was his second single off his debut album, Women and Captains First. I just “added some rubbish on top of the (hammer) track” he explains. He manages to make a three minute dancey, stream of consciousness diatribe where he complains about the noise, Adam Ant and informs us of his taste in females in the memorable line “I’ve been to the East, I’ve been to the West, where the girls I like most are the ones undressed!”. Go west,lads, go west! To top it off he got British girl group Dolly Mixture (of whom his girlfriend was a member) to sing over-the-top backing vocals echoing his sentiments. The song was repetitive, dumb… but just made me laugh! Even more so when watching the video that follows the story with Queen Elizabeth and Adam Ant imposters. And if you think the whole thing had a slightly Monty Python-esque quality about it, well pay attention to the video. You never know who might silly walk on into it.

“Wot” made it to #26 in Britain, #30 in Australia and #6 in fun-loving New Zealand. It did even better in continental Europe, reaching the top 5 in France, Germany, Switzerland and several other countries. Over here, it reached #24 on Billboard dance charts and was a college radio hit but missed mainstream commercial radio attention. Which might be part of the reason why I like it so much – unlike say, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, I didn’t hear it hundreds of times over and over, day after day.

A couple more interesting tidbits on the Captain – he’s a vegetarian and a couple of years after “Wot” he followed up with “Wot, no meat?”. And he’s a big fan of the Crystal Palace football club in Britain. That should endear him to at least a few folks!

I hope this series brought a smile or two to your face. We can all use a bit more of that these days, I think!

April 18 – Turntable Talk 25 : John Says This Is Only A Test

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we have John, from The Sound Of One Hand Typing where he demonstrates his good sense of humor daily as well as periodically his interest in radio from around the world, so we’re curious to see what he will pick!

I had wanted to write about Allan Sherman this time around, because for my money he does the best parody songs. I got about halfway through it, and I was getting a severe case of deja vu, the feeling that I had already been down this path before. I went back through the Turntable Talk, and lo and behold, I found one of my first Turntable Talks (https://soundday.wordpress.com/2023/05/17/may-17-turntable–talk-14-the–original–parodying–al/).

So, I had to find something new to write about. And came up with this:

This isn’t a song so much as a jingle. Well, three jingles, really. They had to do with the old Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), the system “developed to keep you informed in the event of an emergency.” Naturally, the big thing was a nuclear attack launched at the USA by one of its many enemies, particularly the USSR.

The truth was, neither the USA nor the USSR had any desire to start a nuclear war. Those get ugly. But we needed to prepare for that eventuality. The original system, CONELRAD, was to be used only in the event of a nuclear attack, and many forward-thinking broadcasters thought “Hey! We need something like that for local things, like tornadoes and toxic chemical spills and stuff.” So they scrapped CONELRAD and came up with something a little less intimidating, the aforementioned EBS. Its primary purpose was still to alert people that there was a nuclear attack coming, but it could also be used for tornadoes and such.

That was the idea, anyway. The FCC rolled out the EBS and gave radio and TV stations a little job: once a week, on random days and times (between 8:00 AM and local sunset), they were to run a test of the EBS. They gave the stations a test script that they were to say during the test, in the middle of which they were to broadcast an Attention Signal just to make sure they could. It looked and sounded something like this.

After a few years of going with this script, someone said “hey! They told us to use the script, but they didn’t say how…” Soon, stations had the likes of Howard Cosell, Pee Wee Herman, and Rodney Dangerfield (all voice actors, I’m certain) reading the script. Even better, some broadcasters set the script to music.

The first is a generic reading of the script by a vocal group. The second was a setting ordered by WHEN-AM in Syracuse, NY. The third was done by a group called The Conception Corporation.

WDAI-FM in Chicago used the third variation until the FCC told them that it was inapproprate to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as the attention signal. Eventually, the FCC said that stations were not to treat the test script as a joke, or they would fine the rear ends off station managers who allowed their staff to continue using them.So, as funny and entertaining as it was to use a whimsical jingle for this rather ominous-sounding script, stations abandoned this approach and did the thing straight.

The FCC is no fun…

April 17 – Turntable Talk 25 : Jim Lit Up A Hit

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we have Max, from Power Pop blog where he showcases music ranging from old school blues to ’90s rock to British Invasion greats. Which should give him a lot of ground to choose from!

“Wildwood Weed” made me laugh as a kid and still does. It’s about as country and corny as you can get but fun all the same. Jim Stafford had mostly novelty hits. His prime was 1973-1974. I had in my possession (from my sister) three of his hits. “The Wildwood Weed”, “Swamp Witch”, and his biggest hit “Spiders and Snakes.” I was going to cover “Swamp Witch” today by Stafford but I couldn’t resist this one. As corny as this is…it contains one of my favorite lines of all time. More about that later.

Jim Stafford has a sense of humor. Most of his songs were silly songs like “I Got Stoned and I Missed It”, “My Girl Bill”, “Turn Loose Of My Leg”, and his big hit “Spiders and Snakes”. It didn’t take a genius to know what “Wildwood Weed” was about. Of course, I wasn’t and am not a genius now… the first time I heard it as an eight-year-old, an older neighbor had to tell me about it.

It peaked at #7 on the Billboard 100, #3 in Canada, and #57 in the Billboard Country Charts in 1974. I can’t believe it made it that high on the country charts considering how conservative country radio was at that time. Don Bowman wrote this song in 1964… I never knew until I wrote this. It’s a little different but I don’t like it as much as Stafford’s version. Bowman got inspiration from the Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower”.

The song contains one of my favorite lines of all time. It’s not exactly “Meet the new boss same as the old boss” But… “Take a trip never leave the farm.” is pure gold and yes, I’ve used that line in real life. It’s about two country brothers living on a farm and discovering pot growing wild. Some federal agent soon discovered the huge garden of weed that was grown by the narrator and his brother Bill. The agent dug and he burned and he burned and he dug and killed all of their cute little weeds…but not before our two heroes waved goodbye… sitting on a sack of seeds.

Even though it peaked at #7 on the pop charts… some AM radio stations banned the song because of its reference to marijuana. Dang kill joys…just like the federal agent. Y’all Come Back Now Ya Hear!

April 16 – Turntable Talk 25 : An ‘Unbelievable’ Pick?

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we’re going to our resident hard rock fan and expert, Deke, from central Canada and his Deke’s Vinyl Reviews and More site.

Thanks to Dave for letting me be a part of this month’s topic which is “A Novel Idea For A Song”.

My pick goes way back to 1991 and for me this would fall under the category of one hit wonder. The band is E.M.F , which stands for Epson Mad Funkers. I first saw E.M.F on MuchMusic and the thing is I always dug was the cool keyboard line and a great guitar solo both of which my pick of a song “Unbelievable” has.

I never bought the album by these guys which was titled Schubert Dip but I bought the cassette single, so I guess that counts right?

“Unbelievable” fuses almost a hip hop/rock beat driving piano line and a great guitar solo by Ian Dench who, sounds likehe knows a thing or two about the wah pedal. The album at the time went Gold so it did quite well. It would take a lot for me to come out of my “Metal Sandbox” so to speak but some songs would do that. This for me isone that did. It’s not a cringe tune but a good track even 34 years later.

April 15 – Turntable Talk 25 : Benny Got Hill Of Laughs With Ernie

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we’re across the ocean to the UK to check in with Paul, from Once Upon A Time In The ’70s. Hmm, a website about the 1970s and a ton of hit novelty songs in the 1970s… let’s see where that leads!

Thanks to Dave for coming up with another great topic for this month’s Turntable Talk. 

Listening as I did to a lot of 70s radio, Novelty Records were very much part of the landscape in that decade.

To be honest, I was never a big fan of the genre and found 99% of novelty songs to be as annoying as hell as it seemed to me that they just sucked up valuable airtime.

I mean who wanted to listen to Rick Dee’s ‘Disco Duck’ when you could listen to the Real Thing? However, every now and then a decent novelty tune would come along that held your attention and merited its share of airtime. To be fair though, they were few and far between and apart from Bobby Pickett’s ‘Monster Mash’ and my own choice… ‘Ernie (the fastest milkman in the west)’ by Benny Hill, I’m struggling to think of too many others.

To muddy the waters further, what even constitutes a novelty song?

Some people (including Google) think that Randy Newman’s satirical masterpiece ‘Short People’ is a novelty record, so where do you draw the line… aligning ‘Short People’, a song that’s blatantly about prejudice, with The Pipkins ‘Gimme Dat Ding’, a song about, god knows what, seems ludicrous to me, but who am I to argue with Google? I also think there’s a distinction between comedy songs i.e. Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and comedic novelty songs i.e. “The Streak” by Ray Stevens.

It comes as no surprise that the bulk of novelty songs are one hit wonders, artists presented with the opportunity to grab their 15 minutes of fame and never to be seen again (Ray Stevens being a notable exception).

Another gripe I have is that in lots of cases these dodgy discs prevented genuinely great pop songs from reaching their allotted slots. In the UK, Lieutenant Pigeon’s hideous ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ blocked the paths of both Python Lee Jackson’s ‘In a Broken Dream’ and 10cc’s ‘Donna’ from attaining the number one spot in 1972, whilst Ray Stevens ‘The Streak’ kept the Sparks classic ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’ at bay in 74.

Even my own pick, ‘Ernie’ by Benny Hill, blockaded T-Rex’s glam-rock anthem, ‘Jeepster’, and Isaac Hayes’ iconic ‘Theme from Shaft’ from topping the charts in ’71… “you’re damn right”!

Given his popularity home and abroad, Benny Hill probably needs no introduction on either side of the Atlantic, albeit his comedy schtick hasn’t travelled that well into the 21st century.

Any Gen Z kids out there watching classic Benny Hill clips on YouTube will probably be saying “wait a minute, you’re saying this guy is funny!?”.

Fascinatingly for everyone on this side of the pond, Hill was a big noise in America with celebrity fans including Johnny Carson (who tried and failed repeatedly to get him on his talk show), Burt Reynolds, and most bizarrely Michael Jackson all hailing his comic genius. Inspired by his own experiences as a milkman, the story of Ernie was initially written by Hill as part of a proposed screenplay.

Fifteen years later the screenplay remained unfilmed but the character and an accompanying song were resurrected for a sketch on Benny’s TV Show, and the song was released as a single the following year.

‘Ernie’ would go on to spend 17 weeks (about 4 months) in the UK charts and was number one for four of them, attaining the coveted Christmas number one spot in December 1971.

Fifty-two years on and after a zillion hearings, my inner 12-year-old takes over any time I hear it and I can’t help but chuckle when I hear the lyrics….

Now Ernie loved a widow, a lady known as Sue,
She lived all alone in Liddley Lane at number 22.
They said she was too good for him, she was haughty, proud and chic,
But Ernie got his cocoa there three times every week

Bearing in mind the song came out in 1971, the same year as – Carole King’s, Tapestry, Lennon’s Imagine and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, ‘Ernie’ wasn’t going to win any Grammy’s, (although it did win a coveted Ivor Novello Award alongside George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”) but with all respect, Lennon hadn’t written lyrics as earthy and as descriptive as these since ‘A Day in the Life’!

Now Ernie had a rival, an evil-looking man,
Called Two-Ton Ted from Teddington and he drove the baker’s van.
He tempted her with his treacle tarts and his tasty wholemeal bread,
And when she seen the size of his hot meat pies it very near turned her head.

Not many people have a number one single in the UK and Australia, win a coveted Ivor Novello award and then (musically) call it a day, but Hill resisted the temptation to jump on the gravy train or in this case the milk float, and ‘Ernie’ was to be his last foray into the music business.

Yep, even good old Benny Hill knew there was a limit to the public’s appetite for novelty songs!

April 14 – Turntable Talk 25 : What Was That Name?

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

To keep the fun going, today we have Christian, from Christian’s Music Musings. Growing up in Europe as he did, let’s see what caught his sense of whimsy:

Turntable Talk 25 it is, and the series is still going as strong as ever. This time, Dave’s proposition was to write about a novelty record we like. As usual, he was kind enough to give us some flexibility.

While I had heard the name “novelty song” before, I couldn’t come up with a great definition. Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept: A novelty song is a type of song built upon some form of novel concept, such as a gimmick, a piece of humor, or a sample of popular culture. Novelty songs partially overlap with comedy songs, which are more explicitly based on humor, and with musical parody, especially when the novel gimmick is another popular song.

Based on the above, the first artist who came to mind is “Weird Al” Yankovic, but I figured he would be too obvious a choice or somebody might pick him. Then I strangely remembered a song titled “Gimme Dat Ding”, which my six-year-older sister had on vinyl. When looking it up in Wikipedia, I found it appeared in 1970 and was by The Pipkins, a British novelty duo.

Since it’s kind of an annoying song, I didn’t want this to be my pick, so I ended up doing some research. I was really surprised to see how many novelty songs there are, though the boundaries between novelty, comedy and parody songs are fluid. Finally, I decided to pick a song, which if I recall it correctly was the first I heard by Johnny Cash: 

“A Boy Named Sue.”

For some reason, I liked that song right away, even though I didn’t really get what it was about, since I didn’t understand English at the time. “A Boy Named Sue” was penned by American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician and playwright Shel Silverstein. “The Man in Black” first recorded the song during his February 24, 1969 gig at California’s San Quentin State Prison for his At San Quentin live album released in June of the same year.

Curiously, that live version of the song became Cash’s biggest hit on the U.S. pop chart the Billboard Hot 100 where it peaked at no. 2, marking his only top 10 single there. It also topped the country charts in the U.S. and Canada and climbed to no. 4 in the UK – his best showing there in a tie with his 1971 single “A Thing Called Love”.

According to SecondHandSongs, there are more than 60 versions of “A Boy Named Sue”. Here’s the original by Shel Silverstein. Not bad, but it’s hard to beat Cash’s coolness factor!

Here’s another live version by The Highwaymen, a country supergroup featuring Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson – quite a quartet! Their live rendition was included on an album titled Live: American Outlaws, which came out in May 2016.

Following are some additional insights from Songfacts:

This is about a boy who grows up angry at his father not only for leaving his family, but for naming him Sue. When the boy grows up, he sees his father in a bar and gets in a fight with him. After his father explains that he named him Sue to make sure he was tough, the son understands.

Shel Silverstein’s nephew Mitch Myers told us [meaning Songfacts ] the story: “In those days in Nashville, and for all the people that would visit, the most fun that anyone really could have would be to go over to someone’s house and play music. And they would do what one would call a ‘Guitar Pull,’ where you grabbed a guitar and you played one of your new songs, then someone else next to you would grab it and do the same, and there were people like Johnny Cash or Joni Mitchell, people of that caliber in the room.”

“Shel sang his song ‘Boy Named Sue,’ and Johnny’s wife June Carter thought it was a great song for Johnny Cash to perform. And not too long after that they were headed off to San Quentin to record a record – Live At San Quentin – and June said, ‘Why don’t you bring that Shel song with you.’ And so they brought the lyrics. And when he was on stage he performed that song for the first time ever, he performed it live in front of that captive audience, in every sense of the word.”

“He had to read the lyrics off of the sheet of paper that was at the foot of the stage, and it was a hit. And it wasn’t touched up, it wasn’t produced or simulated. They just did it, and it stuck. And it rang. I would say that it would qualify in the realm of novelty, a novelty song. Shel had a knack for the humorous and the kind of subversive lyrics. But they also were so catchy that people could not resist them.”

Shel Silverstein went on to write another song titled “The Father of the Boy Named Sue.” It’s the same story, but from the father’s point of view.

Johnny Cash performed this song in the East Room of the White House on April 17, 1970 when he and his wife were invited by President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s staff had requested the song along with Okie From Muskogee and a song by Guy Drake called “Welfare Cadillac,” but Cash refused to perform those songs, saying he didn’t have arrangements ready.

The Goo Goo Dolls named their 1995 breakthrough album A Boy Named Goo in a play on this song’s title.

In the 2019 animated film Missing Link, the main character, a male Sasquatch voiced by Zach Galifianakis, is named Susan.