Time Machine co-ordinates VICXXVI60611020

Today was January 10th, 1976 (not 1975, as the dreaded beginning of the year temporal claudication shifts us 2 years from the last post), and the National Association of Fire Marshalls would like to let you know why it's significant- and why building managers shouldn't spend three hours mucking around...

On January 10, 1976, a natural gas leak caused a massive explosion in the basement of the Pathfinder Hotel in Fremont, Nebraska. Chunks of sidewalk the size of compact cars were hurled into the air. The bottom two floors of the hotel collapsed into the basement. Windows were broken on buildings blocks away. Twenty died; 40 were injured. Eight buildings were destroyed.

Extremely cold weather played into the tragedy. Workers had retrofitted 4-inch gas mains in the area by inserting 2-inch plastic pipes within them. Low temperatures, which fell to 25 below zero that winter, caused a new fitting to contract. It began leaking gas beneath the hotel. People started smelling gas about 6 a.m. on the day of the explosion. Around 9 a.m. the hotel maintenance man located three service men from the gas company who immediately determined that there was an explosive concentration of flammable gas in the basement and requested the hotel be evacuated. Only the kitchen had been evacuated before the explosion occurred at 9:33 a.m. and the building erupted in flames.

"...the maintenance man LOCATED three service men from the gas company..."?  And why did he have to locate them?  Why did not management call for the gas company to investigate at 6 AM when the calls started coming in?  Not ours to muse on here, though, because for the first time in a while, we have a regular, honest to goodness Time Machine post!  And this lead in is gonna be brief, because I have no idea where were going, or how I got there!


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And of course the week I debut NO new songs in the M10 is the week I have NO idea what to do for the 6D!  Reason being, last year we hit this stage at the beginning of February, and guess what?  The song that got the 6D nod (highest on Cashbox's chart without a Panel vote) that week, is the one that got it THIS week- John Denver and Olivia Newton-John with Fly Away, # 7 on the way up this week.  And I strained and stretched THAT time to come up with something- and this week, after spending an hour drilling a dry well, I said to myself, "This all seems eerily familiar."  But I have come up with a topic for discussion, and we will have that discussion with our guest this week, Mr Carl Douglas!

'Ello, glad to be here!

Glad to have you, but I wouldn't want to take you out of the Tardis into the world outside right now, because it has gotten absurd beyond belief.  Why, just a while back, a gentleman got arrested for singing your Kung Fu Fighting...

What?  You mean recording without license or some such?

No, nowadays, we have a thing called Karaoke, where they put the words of a song on a screen and play the music without vocals so that pub patrons can take a hand at singing it.

And that's bad?

No, that's good, but this guy sang Kung Fu Fighting, and a Chinese guy got all bent, claimed it was racist and the guy did it just to humiliate him, and had him arrested...

WHAT??? The arrest is a little unbelievable because there’s no racism in the song.  It’s very strange indeed.  I’m very proud of the song. Everyone told me that a fusion of the west and east couldn’t work and I said “no, it can”. I have cousins that are Chinese in Jamaica, so I knew it could work.  Why would I sing a song that could be interpreted as racist?*

(* NOTE:  Actual quote after the event, from the Mirror, dated April 2011)


Well, that's the world of idiots I've found out there.  In fact, here in a little bit, I'm going to put up a few of the songs that you almost can't sing anymore, because someone's bound to have a coronary over them now.

Let me ask you this:  Am I still alive in this world?  

Yes you are.

And I no longer sing the song?

From what I understand, you had requests for it in CHINA during a recent Olympic games...

But a Chinese man in England thought it was racist...

Yep.

I think I'd like to go home and find a way to not get any older...

Elvis:  Hey, man, you could stay here with me...

Hey, bud, before I forget, Happy Birthday, a couple of days late!  In the main timeline, you woulda been 85...

E:  EIGHTY-FIVE???  I'd be headlining at the Old Folks Home!

Or you could do like Keith Richards and just keep getting transfusions of much younger blood..

E:  Nah, man, I've seen what he looks like now...

Anyhow, this week we had just 13 contestants from 44 stations, including an Australian hit which I'll bring up a little later, and a South African vote for Joe Dolan- an Irishman who had tons of hits throughout the British Isles, but neither the UK nor Ireland charted this one, called Lady In Blue.   Also, 6 of the Cashbox top 10 made the list- as did Gary Wright's Dream Weaver, despite having just charted for its first week at number 123!  The race itself was a bit of a blowout, and thus you get just three choices for the final vote!  Carl?

Thank you, man!  Your choices are:

The Ohio Player and Love Rollercoaster at #5...

CW McCall and Convoy at #3...

and the #1 this week, Barry Manilow with I Write The Songs!

Thanks, Carl!  Last time we were this way, Barry won for a second straight week.  Can he do it again?  Stay tuned....

E:  'TUNED'... betcha think yer clever, dontcha?


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The Australian vote I held out on was the Ted Mulry Gang with Jump In My Car, a fun tune that would have been unacceptable today.  It was about this guy trying to talk this girl he finds walking along the road to accept a ride from him, going on about how nice he is, how pretty she is, and it's far too long a walk.  Then she tells him that it's 84 miles to where she's going, and he kicks her out!  And I bring this up because the plight of the karaoke singer made me think of some of the other songs that might well be unacceptable now.  Not the ones that are unacceptable in ANY era (like Lou Reed's Take A Walk On The Wild Side), or ones that play at unacceptable (say, for instance, the Kinks' Lola), but ones that were just normal, mostly acceptable songs at the time.

I looked at a couple of articles to get some ideas (and sorry, Carl, but your song was on ALL of them), and I noted a few that were not big surprises- and I also noted that one that I think should be HUGELY unacceptable NEVER gets mentioned.  Anyway, why not start out the list with YOU, Elvis?

Me?  I never did anything that was unacceptable- 'ceptin to that old prude Sullivan..

Well, one site stretched the incest angle to knock you for Kissin' Cousins...

But they were DISTANT cousins, man!  This is bogus!

I agree, but nonetheless it got you on one list.  Others ranged from racial questioning (like Elton John's Island Girl- far be it from a gay white man to sing about a straight black prostitute, I guess- and the Stones with Brown Sugar...)

I see no point in objecting to... ah, wait.  Forget I said anything...

... to ethnically questionable (Like Kung Fu Fighting and the Vapors' Turning Japanese, which combined to offend Japanese people and those given to masturbation), or sexual preference (OMG, how can you listen to Dire Straits' Money For Nothing, you brute?). 

But the one I have never figured out why NO ONE bitches about is that popular ballad in tribute to segregation, and those who fought the National Guard to defend it, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama.  I have stood next to a black dude singing this song at a club and wondered, do you even get what this is about?  But I'm not gonna throw stones, because for me, I don't always understand or even hear the lyrics, and I consider the vocals to be just another instrument.  Thus I never had any problem singing along to Marlene Gold crooning to Betty on the Pom Poms song I had at #1.  Or questioning just why Victoria Legrand thought wide eyed girls "got it right" on Beach House's Space Song.

I think, though, next time KC drags me to karaoke, I might just sing Kung Fu Fighting...WAH HAH!

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It's time again for Crazy Covers, where we pick out the more unusual covers on this week's Cashbox hot 100 and Laurie and I do the Siskel and Ebert thing on them!  First up, a dude name Gino Cunico was doing a version of the currently climbing Bee Gees hit Fanny Be Tender, which was at #91.

Laurie: Not as good as the original, but good!  Up.
Chris:  Awesome!  Almost liked it better than the original! Up.

Second, our apparently obligatory Tavares cover of the week.  This time they had Edgar Winter's Free Ride at #58.

Laurie: They did nothing different.  Would have been better without the vocals. Down.
Chris:  This is like one of those Ronco remakes where they're too cheap to get the original act and cover it with some studio outfit.  Down.

Third, we have Jim Capaldi covering Roy Orbison's (and later Nazareth's) Love Hurts, at #96.

Laurie: NO.  Down.
Chris:  If Nazareth never did it, he might get away with this poppy arrangement... but, no.  Down.

Fourth, we have a story we featured a long time back on a years-gone TM.  The song is Somewhere In The Night, and it was brought to the chart simultaneously by Helen Reddy and a duo called Batdorf and Rodney.  The legend says that Reddy's hubby/manager threatened radio stations not to play B&R or else they'd never get another Reddy hit.  B&R would go on to form the band Silver, who hit with Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang- a song I always loved, but THEY hated.  Anyway, we judged the B&R version, at #75:

Laurie:  Like Barry Manilow's version the best.  Sideways.
Chris: Like Barry Manilow's version the best.  Up.

Finally, we have Al Martino with a cover of Volare that starts out like one of the earlier ballad versions- then abruptly becomes hard disco.  At #69:

Laurie:  "I saw that face you made when it changed tempo..." Down.
Chris:  I was with him till it went disco.  Down.


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Our stat pack this week:

Hot debuts this week included:  Larry Groce's Junk Food Junkie at #88, Dr Hook's Only 16, one of my all-timers, at #89, and the second coming of Dream On by Aerosmith (it had charted earlier and spent 11 weeks going nowhere) at #86.

Barry White got the big mover with Let The Music Play, 16 spots from 70 to 54.

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was at the top of the UK charts- here, it was in its second week on the CB charts at #76.

And the song I woulda had at the top?  No question, I Write The Songs.


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The debutless M10:

Our two 8-week former number ones take the bottom two slots- the Derevs and It's The Love falling 5 to #10, and Criminal Hygiene's Incompletely 3 to #9.

The next three all parade up two spots- Pure Bathing Culture's Black Starling to #8, Temples' Shelter Song to #7, and Jeff Lynne's ELO to #6 with Goin' Out On Me.

Khurangbin and Leon Bridges slip to #5, down 3 with Texas Sun, while Saint Asonia holds at 4 with This August Day.

Huey Lewis and the News rocket up 4 spots to #3 with While We're Young.

Tennis makes it up one more spot to #2 with Runner.

And holding at the top...

....MGMT and In The Afternoon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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And that Panel blowout?

Well, a vote for the Ohio Players got you 6.8%...
One for Barry Manilow got you 11.36%...

But yer winnah, with a whopping 54.5%....

...CW McCall and Convoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Catch ya on the flip-flop, good buddies, next week with 1977!