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Previously on The Formative Years…

I took some old records off Mom & Dad’s shelf
Talked ’bout ’70s disco, sci-fi and my nerdy little self
Superheroes, cartoons, and my older bro
Now let’s get into rock ‘n’ roll oldies radio*

In TFY Pt. II I spoke of how 1950s nostalgia influenced 1970s culture and how rising creatives at the time channelled romanticized memories of youth into their adult endeavors.  Today I set aside the broader social implications of the revival phenomenon in order to focus on my earliest experiences with ’50s and ’60s music and explore how rock oldies radio affected my musical sensibilities going forward.

*Sincerest apologies to Bob Seger (please don’t sue).

Time, RELATIVity, and ROCK OLDIES

I’d understand if anyone coming of age today mistakenly concluded that Bob Seger was being self-referential when he sang his ode to “Old Time Rock and Roll“; the song is almost 43 years old! Has it really been that long? The real kicker, however, is knowing that Seger’s classic anti-disco anthem was released a mere 24 years after the commonly recognized year-zero for rock and roll (1954). That’s hardly “old,” right? Too young to have witnessed rock’s birth, but old enough to remember the ’70s rock ‘n’ roll revival, I can’t deny that all these numbers are weighing on me…

In 2021, several of the albums responsible for exploding alternative rock into the pop mainstream (Nevermind, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Ten, Gish, Badmotorfinger, etc.) turned 30!! How is that possible? When those records came out I was 19, working two jobs, and fumbling through my first year of college. More surreal still, I’ve recently come to realize that my favorite “contemporary” artists, St. Vincent and The Shins, released their debut albums fifteen and twenty-one years ago, respectively!!! What…? Is that right?  Sure, I didn’t buy those cds when they were first released, but it still feels like they just came out. Does this mean that the song “New Slang” is…classic rock? Am I that old now??? Yes.  Yes I am (sigh).

As the decades pile up and lead us ever further away from rock’s beginnings, notions of what qualifies as “classics” and “oldies” becomes ever more relative.

Will You Remember Jerry Lee?

Do you “remember when rock was young?” Do you like to swallow bitter pills? Well! Try on this mad truth for size… The classic tunes that were initially leveraged to draw the “silent generation” and baby boomers to 1970s rock oldies radio are now in the range of 70 years old!

It’s crazy, I know, but that’s not all! In time, as those generations thinned and progressively shifted listening priorities from music to 24-hour “news,” slumping ratings forced programmers to find a new “mature” demographic to exploit: mine. Consequently, as oldies playlists lean ever more on ’70s and ’80s nostalgia to hook Gen-Xers, the true rock classics are getting squeezed out. ’60s acts still get some play, but songs that pre-date the British Invasion are rarely heard. At this rate, by the time Gen-Z ages up all early era artists not named Elvis, John, Paul, George and Ringo will have been phased out of public consciousness altogether.

Things change. It happens. But how can it be that “Detroit Rock City” has zero standard radio outlets reserved for rock’s foundational artists? Where are Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard? Why do we now have to rely on streaming services, YouTube, and (gasp!) the purchase of physical media in order to hear Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers?  It’s absolutely absurd!  It’s a travesty! This will not do! Curse the callously calculating winds of commerce! The kids need to know their musical heritage (whether they want to or not).

 “Will you remember Jerry Lee, John Lennon, T. Rex and OI Moulty?
It’s the end, the end of the 70’s. It’s the end, the end of the century”

Joey Ramone from THE RAMONES’ “DO YOU REMEMBER ROCK ‘N’ ROLL RADIO?”

Overpowered BY funk (and rockabilly and britpop and…)

Sooooo… Rock and roll and me.
Ugggghhhhh, where do I even start?
Outlining my indoctrination would be so much easier if I could posit rock as a single, distinct genre rather than a wild convergence of early 20th century (mostly) American music traditions. Here goes nothing.

In the beginning there was only total nothingness…
Then, in the late 1940s and ’50s,* pop, blues, jazz, boogie woogie, folk, country, black gospel, etc. all variously merged into one another and split again into the earliest rock forms – r&b, doo wop, rockabilly, girl groups, skiffle, etc., etc. In turn, as 1950s acts infiltrated the pop music landscape, mutually influenced one another, and evolved, rock’s next waves brought astounding flurries of development; enter ’60s soul, the British Invasion, surf, folk rock, funk, psychedelic, prog, etc., etc., etc., etc

Now, I don’t know if I was preternaturally possessed or came by my affinity for pop media due to constant reenforcement. A little of both would be my guess. Either way, because 1970s media was a melting pot of all twentieth century entertainment streams, I was exposed to all these myriad music forms as a young boy. With innocent ears both awed and overpowered, I sat passively in place and soaked it all in.

* Ok, so I skipped ahead a little…

Reconstructing ’70s ROck OLDIES Radio

Prior to the rise of album-oriented rock radio in the late-1960s stereo sound was something of a novelty. In fact, with the exception of classical works, most albums were only pressed for mono (single-speaker output). Many common consumer radios weren’t even equipped to receive an FM signal. Therefore, to folks born before 1960, the AM dial was the go-to place to hear the biggest mainstream hits of today and yesterday.

I was still in diapers when the rock oldies craze hit Detroit AM radio in 1974, so my memories are understandably sketchy. Between the orgiastic quantity of TV, records, and retro-friendly radio content I consumed as a kid and everything I’ve encountered since, it’s practically impossible to keep my facts straight. Many thanks are due to older family members, friends, and my favorite rabbit hole of information – the internet; my attempts to reconstruct these foggy memories of melodies heard long ago would have been impossible without them.

Honey (Radio) That’s What I Want

Established in 1974, “All Oldies” Honey Radio WHND AM 560 was simulcast on FM 94.7 until 1976.

Beyond these points, concrete info about the station and the exact scope of it’s programming is spotty; limited to a general consensus that playlists were principally gleaned from the early rock era, c.1955-’63. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1954*) is probably the earliest song my older brother and I remember hearing on Honey Radio, so the front part of that estimate is close enough. The back end, on the other hand, is another story…

Even if WHND didn’t originally play anything cut after ’63, song selections unquestionably pushed well into the 1960s by the time we started listening in the mid-late 1970s. “Turn Turn Turn” (’65), “Incense and Peppermints” (’67), “Mrs. Robinson” (’68), “Sugar Sugar” (’69), and “Tears of a Clown” (’70) are all tracks we clearly recall hearing on 560.  Further, I found two AM 560 caps on YouTube dated 1979 that corroborate our timeline and more; with one song – “All I Ever Need Is You” – hailing from ’71.

*One of innumerable tunes considered to be the first ‘true’ rock song.

Let’s make a rock oldies mixtape

My brother used to hang out in our room for hours on-end listening to Honey Radio. In those times of solitude, when he wasn’t meticulously piecing together plastic model kits, he was making mix tapes; capturing tunes from an AM-only, hand-held transistor radio to an old-school portable cassette recorder.* I was usually off elsewhere in the house wreaking havoc, but always kept an ear to the ground for favorite garage-flavored novelties (“Surfin’ Bird“; “Wild Thing“), bubblegum confections (“Sugar Shack“), early rockers (“I’m Walkin‘”; “Summertime Blues“), and anything that featured cool electric organ tones (“Runaway“; “House of the Rising Sun“; “Light My Fire“; “She’s Not There“).  Frequently featured ’60s pop-rock icons The Beatles, Beach Boys, and Monkees were huge favorites as well, but hold this thought; I’ll be delving more deeply into my love for all things 1960s rock in the next post.

* A hobby I also adopted as a teen with the acquisition of my first radio/tape deck. (Melodramatic tones) See brother…Youuu made me this wayyyyy (smile).

You Can’t Always Play what You Want

I can’t say if Honey Radio playlists were incomparably comprehensive, but they definitely covered a lot of bases. Hour by hour and day by day, loyal listeners were treated to the work of legends who bridged r&b, country, folk, and pop to rock (Elvis; Ray Charles; Johnny Cash; Bob Dylan; Beatles; Beach Boys; Rolling Stones); soul pioneers (Sam Cooke; Jackie Wilson; James Brown); British rock institutions (The Who; The Kinks), glamorous girl groups (The Supremes; Martha & The Vandellas), squeaky-clean teen idols (Frankie Avalon; Ricky Nelson), scruffy harbingers of the counter-culture (Jefferson Airplane); jangle pop progenitors (The Byrds; The Hollies), one-hit wonders (“Get a Job”; “Earth Angel”; “Tequila”; “Wipe Out”), and much, much more.

Of course, no matter how diverse WHND’s rock oldies selections were, they couldn’t play everything. To venture a guess, it makes sense that a line would have been drawn to exclude late ’60s tunes that were deemed too aggressively uncommercial for the normals; leaving artists that were either too “blacksounding” (James Brown), heavy (Led Zeppelin), arty (Velvet Underground), atonal (The Stooges) or weird (The Mothers of Invention) to the purview of early AOR FM radio and word-of-mouth. Was this true? All I can confirm is that I personally didn’t hear any of this stuff until late high school or later.

The Big 8

For decades, “The Big 8” CKLW AM 800 out of Windsor, Canada was one of the premier popular music stations in North America.

In the late ’60s, CKLW adapted a programming scheme akin to the hyper-commercial “Boss Radio” format out of L. A., California. In this configuration, an army of tastemaking DJs relentlessly plugged over top of song intros in order to squeeze a maximal number of heavily rotated records and lengthy commercial jingles into each hour of airtime. I have always found the guileless, endless prattling of disc jockeys to be a terrible distraction, but what do I know? The audience apparently loved it (shiver).

Anyway, AM 800 nicely compensated for the constant intrusions; making regular accommodation for regional favorites, showcasing a wide variety of artists, and playing hits from the not so distant past. With great consideration for the sizable African-American audience within their massive broadcast range,* additional effort was also made to feature popular r&b/soul/funk artists, past and present. A lot of Detroit stations played Motown, of course, but CKLW’s broad appeal made it a great candidate to have helped introduce me to “Little” Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, The Temptations, The Four Tops, and many, many more.

* Windsor is located directly across the Detroit river from Hitsville U.S.A.

Canadian Radio roll Teleology

In the early 1970’s, the Big 8 was reputedly impacted by new Canadian broadcast regulations that mandated as much as 30-50% representation of homegrown talent in the playlists of national outlets.

Theoretically, these regulatory actions should have meant serious exposure for important northern acts; providing a showcase for Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, The Band, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and The Guess Who. Empirically, however, if the lengthy audio caps I unearthed from YouTube are a fair representation of the station’s programming in the ’70s, I can’t validate the assumption. Volumes of contemporary fare and healthy doses of ’60s rock (“Nobody But Me“), r&b (“Cool Jerk; “Everyday People“), and pop (“Happy Together“) presented as advertised, but Canuck artists were few and far between. Sure, I could’ve picked Murray and Lightfoot* out of any lineup because they were successful crossover artists here in the U.S. However, I wouldn’t grow in familiarity with most of the others until my late teens and beyond.

* Sounds like a buddy comedy cop movie, eh?

the great voice of the Great Lakes

No conversation about how I came to love music – any music – can be complete without mentioning “The Great Voice of the Great Lakes” AM 760 WJR.

Recycling a childhood reminiscence shared previously in TFY Pt. I, mornings in my parent’s house were once “defined by the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen, industrial size boxes of Cheerios,” and the amiable, comforting tones of “The Voice of Detroit,” J.P. McCarthy on WJR.

Relating to the subject matter at hand, AM 760 wasn’t a music station per se… Rather, anchored by a deep stable of mild-mannered yet colorful on-air personalities,* WJR was a rich stew of news, weather, traffic, sports, public interest segments, regional commentary, conversational interviews with local and national public figures, reflection, listener call-ins, humor, and music.

In general, programming favored “mature” forms; shows like Patterns in Music, Afternoon Music Hall, McCarthy’s weekday morning show, and others offering classical numbers, big bands, and pop standards from the Great American Songbook (Eg. Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Lowe, Rogers, and Mancini; Armstrong, Sinatra, Cole, Fitzgerald, and Andrews). That fits. It wasn’t a youth-fixated contemporary pop format. …But WJR’s lengthy list of variety shows did, indeed, occasionally edge into ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s light rock and rock-adjacent MOR (middle of the road) territory.

* McCarthy, Jimmy Launce, Ted Strasser, Mike Wharf, Paul Harvey, Warren Pierce, Ernie Harwell, Paul Carey, et al.

Tell me MOR, Tell me MOR

WJR’s ventures into modern music tended toward the MOR–Brill Building–adult contemporary end of the pop-rock-soul spectrum. However ambivalent I might have been at the time regarding songs heard while bouncing around within earshot of the kitchen radio, warm, if fuzzy, impressions emerge while stripping back forty-plus years of repression…

Of the ’50s and ’60s material they would have featured, I recall early soft rock balladeers (Connie Francis; Paul Anka; Bobby Darrin), singer-songwriters (Neil Sedaka; Neil Diamond; Harry Nilsson; John Denver), trumpet player/brass band leader Herb Alpert, and pop folkies (Simon & Garfunkel; Judy Collins; The Stone Poneys). Tracks by Burt Bacharach/Hal David collaborators Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Jackie DeShannon, and B.J. Thomas turned up often; as did the booming voice of Tom Jones; the theatrical pop stylings of Petula Clark; and the soaring vocal harmonies of The Beach Boys, The Mamas and the Papas, The Seekers, and The 5th Dimension. Last, but not least, I remember that they played lighter-side Beatles tracks, most often in Muzak arrangements. 

Ok, yes… Maybe I’m being too casually all-inclusive with my definition of “rock oldies” here. Rock forms were so integral to the language of pop music during my childhood it’s all the same to me. Ultimately, the point is, however I fault on precise details, tons of ’50s and ’60s tunes reached my young, impressionable ears via AM radio in the 1970s.

Black and White

In retrospect, what I appreciate best about rock oldies radio in the ’70s is how well all the music fit together despite the radical evolution of rock forms between ’54-’70. Sure, because 1950s nostalgia primarily targeted white audiences (another guess), racial imbalance was inevitable. It was a far cry, however, from the cascade of pasty-complected hard (Boston; Journey; Styx) and soft (Fleetwood Mac; The Carpenters; Barry Manilow) corporate acts that dominated AOR and adult contemporary rock radio by the late ’70s.  Black acts were represented and their influence was impossible to miss.

Get Together

On oldies radio, rock and r&b royalty together reigned (“The King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley; “The Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin), harmonized (The Platters’ “The Great Pretender”; The Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby”), charmed (The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream”; The Supremes’ “Baby Love”), clowned (The Coasters’ “Charlie Brown”; Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash”), loved (The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby”; Buddy Holly’s “Everyday”), and lost (Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”).

Because of Honey Radio, I heard “The Architect” Little Richard play figurative piano duels with “The Killer” Jerry Lee Lewis; “The Father” Chuck Berry’s original versions of “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven” spin next to Beatles’ early British Invasion covers; and late ’50s girl group The Shirelles’ sing in parallel with ’60s blue-eyed soul follower Dusty Springfield.

Virtually all British Invasion bands reflected the ascendency of rock’s African-American founding fathers and mothers. Some acts (The Beatles; Herman’s Hermits; Dave Clark Five) interpreted r&b styles while exhibiting trace influences of native skiffle music and mainstream pop songwriting tradition; and others (The Yardbirds; The Who; The Rolling Stones) demonstrated an affinity for heavy blues via hard-hitting, deep grooving “maximum r&b.”

Integrating the oldies

The best example of how “white” and “black” musics intermingled in the ’50s and ’60s may be the preponderance of racially integrated acts that emerged during this period. Anyone not hiding under a rock for the last fifty years surely knows the The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Feel-good soul-meisters Sly and the Family Stone and The Foundations have been permanent residents on oldies radio for years. Blue-eyed soul group Three Dog Night had many hits in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But what about Stax’s grooving de-facto house band Booker T. & the MG’s and Pittsburgh doo wop ensemble The Del Vikings? Do you remember psychedelic garage-folk quintet Love and the innovative jazz-rock fusion group Blood, Sweat & Tears? …The Chambers Brothers? …Paul Butterfield Blues Band?

Still crazy integrated after all these years

Founded in the mid-’60s by namesake guitar virtuoso Carlos Santana, still-active San Francisco rock collective Santana (“Evil Ways”) embodied the integration concept as thoroughly as I imagine is possible; distinguished from all other acts by large, polyethnic lineups and their adventurous fusions of psychedelic rock, latin forms, blues, and freeform jazz. Predictably, because “pretentious” exhibitions of advanced music theory were viewed as heresy by the “purist” rock press at the time, the group drew harsh early reviews at inception. Regardless, Santana wowed during a high profile appearance at Woodstock that eclipsed all shades thrown by the paid cynics. Today, all these many years later, their 1969 self-titled debut is widely revered; standing as a lasting testament to the greatness that can be achieved when the boundaries that compartmentalize music and society are ignored.

Aaaaaaaand I’m back.  Picking up with more childhood reminiscences of media and life in the 1970s, today’s edition of The Formative Years concerns the so-called frivolous stuff that mattered most to me in my earliest years: toys, superheroes, and cartoons.

“THE DETAILS OF MY LIFE ARE QUITE INCONSEQUENTIAL…”

My early childhood was old-fashioned and sheltered even by 1970s standards. Born into the same vanilla-white porch community that fostered my father (a life-long resident) and mother (a teen transplant), I rarely met anyone whose overall complexion deviated much from my own. Large Sunday dinners with extended family were a regular occurrence. I didn’t attend any manner of pre-school, structured or otherwise. So, with all my older siblings in school by mid-’74, I luxuriated for three years as the only “need machine” at home during the day to be tended to.  The balance of those salad days were a mix of quality time with Mom – wearing out favored books (Green Eggs and Ham; A Fish Out of Water), errand walks downtown, berry picking (family dogs in tow), trips to the park, mid-day naps – and abundant, glorious “me” time.

In the cozy, semi-confined toy cubby at the top the basement steps I was a scientist: twiddling knobs on a massive control panel (letter blocks on a shelf); observing my progress on the monitor (Lite Brite); and inventing secret formulas (spent perfume sample flasks).  Profuse periods were allocated to activities that allowed for play and passive audio-visual data overload via TV. As a result, the worst of my damage was usually confined to the living room.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST SUPERHEROES

Of all the toys in the house arsenal, my favorites were the Mego “World’s Greatest Superheroes” I inherited (co-opted) from my older brother. 

Compared to the detailed, ‘roided out rendering of modern action figures, Megos were very basic, youngster-friendly representations. I didn’t care that Captain America and company didn’t look exactly like they did in comics or on TV… Fully posable, vibrantly colored, and clad in removable cloth costumes with vinyl/plastic accessories, they inspired epic adventure! I examined every detail of each figure down to the manufacturer stamp, swapped costumes, and fantasized about new additions while browsing through Christmas catalogs.  Always game to make me laugh, my brother vocalized punching sounds and simulated fights by violently shaking the dolls back and forth. …Not great for their elastic binding, but very entertaining.  Between the two of us, Mom became very adept at repair (wink).

A NEW HOPE

Fast forward 30 years to a chance discovery at a small local toy show… Toy shows usually yield very little in the way of genuine excitement, but not this time. Right away, I realized that the venue had played host to the comic shows my brother and I frequented in the mid-’80s. Very cool.

…And then I discovered Figures Toy Company‘s (mostly) faithful and affordable licensed repros of DC characters from the “World’s Greatest” line while trolling the shops with the family on “free comic book day.” Oh, my. They weren’t perfectly perfect replicas, but, man, were they close. For months, I perused the Figures website; pining and contemplating the wisdom (idiocy) of collecting action figures after age 40. Two Christmases ago, I finally caved and laid out for Batman, Robin, Shazam(!), and a long-coveted Superman! A replacement “Cap” would be nice as well, repro or vintage, but it’s just too much money. The whims of my nerdy inner man-child are mitigated by my native practicality (cheapness).

SEND IN THE CAPES

Beyond toys, my fondness for superheroes was buoyed by the fact that, even though 1970 marked the start of the “Bronze Age” of comics, the decade was a gilded age for colorfully clad adventurers on TV. Storming the airwaves in cartoons (Mighty Mouse; Underdog; Fantastic Four) and live-action programs (Adventures of Superman; Wonder Woman; Amazing Spider-Man), old and new. Super Grover and Spidey Super Stories featured on Sesame Street and Electric Company, respectively.  Superman: The Movie broke the genre onto the big screen in 1978.

WORLD’S GREATEST SUPERHERO CARTOONS

During the 1970s, superhero cartoons were a dime a dozen and I watched them all. Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends was a Saturday Morning institution, but didn’t make me a lifetime devotee to DC comics. No, apart from Batman (who I will discuss later), my loyalties have always lied with Stan Lee’s classic creations; the bias cemented by the Marvel Super Heroes and Spider-Man cartoons from the 1960s.

I don’t remember seeing them past age 5 or 6, but the rotating Heroes segments were a bulk indoctrination; showcasing a different Marvel luminary (Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Sub-Mariner) each day of the week. Infamously hampered by disjointed storytelling and astonishingly crude “animation,” these cartoons were a rock-bottom low even for the “limited” movement. …But what would such shortcomings matter to a young me? The vivid artwork – copped directly from pages illustrated by comic greats Jack “King” Kirby, Bill Everett, Gene Colon, etc. – was cool and exciting! The jaunty jingles for each hero were distinct and irresistible! It was literally impossible not to sing along.

Spider-Man was a more traditional, if still crudely drawn, cartoon that variably adhered to the spirit of the parent Lee-Ditko–Romita era books; mixing faithful impressions of key characters and arch-nemeses with baffling bastardizations of others. Between the spasticatchyjazzy music and shameless, repetitive recycling of action sequences, the show helped make Spidey an all-time favorite. Even now, the act of watching the MCU “wall crawler” sling from skyscraper to skyscraper as I’d seen the character do decades earlier provokes nostalgic (but manly) tears of joy and unconscious, sympathetic action movements (“thwip, thwip”).  Excelsior!

HULK SMASH PUNY PRIME TIME TV!!!

With only one TV in the house, opportunities to watch Marvel heroes when they hit prime-time in the late ‘70s were dependent upon 3 conditions: a lack of options elsewhere on the dial; Mom’s feelings toward the actors involved; and the probability of Dad – a vocal adversary of everything fantasy/fiction – falling asleep prior to show time.  Thanks, no doubt, to the presence of nice guy veteran actor Bill Bixby, only The Incredible Hulk slipped through with semi-regularity.

As is quite common when adapting literary works for screen, fiction or non, many retcons were enacted to bring Hulk to TV. Sometimes changes are made to compress a story that is too expansive to be told in the time available. Here, however, the retcons had more to do with reasonable budgetary constraints and pointless spite than anything else…

Exhibit A: Hulk’s mythic strength was downgraded to hoisting objects that star Lou Ferrigno could’ve believably managed without performance enhancing gamma radiation. FX are expensive, I get it. They had to tone down the most fantastical elements of the character. Besides, with the technology available at the time, they couldn’t have presented a comic-accurate version if they wanted to. Forgivable. Next…

Exhibit B: The origin story was changed to attribute Hulk’s transformations to a lab mishap in lieu of a bomb test. Last I checked, the cold war was still on in 1977, but ok. Simulated gamma explosions and staged desert military battles would have been extremely pricey as well. Forgivable. Next…

Exhibit C: More sci-fi tinged human drama than sensational superhero epic, the comic lore was eschewed in favor of stories that followed the Fugitive/Kung-Fu blueprint: David Banner, on the run from authorities, drifted from town to town and became embroiled in the personal lives of people suffering the whims of disposable villains.  …Obviously, the show went off formula a tad when the hero (cue Bixby’s glass-eyed “Oh face”) erupted through his shirt and shoes and transfigured into a paint slathered, shaggy wigged champion body builder; flexed, growled, and tossed some common goons around; flexed and growled some more then promptly ran away. Again, most comic stories had Hulk squaring off against similarly overpowered and impossible to depict villains. I give this a pass as well. Next…

Exhibit D: They changed the name of Hulk’s alter-ego from “Bruce” to “David.” What..? Why? Why? It’s such a petty detail in the grand scheme of things, so why should this bother me…? Because it’s so damned stupid. Did CBS execs think the name sounded too Australian for U.S. audiences?  Ugggh. FAIL! Whatever.

BAM! BAP! BOFF! KRUNCH! KAPOW!!!

Amazingly, as much as Marvel heroes captivated me, nothing matched the sheer mania stirred by the campy ’60s live-action Batman TV show.

Faithfully tuned-in every day at that “same bat time” to that “same bat channel,” I loudly vocalized the theme song while bouncing off walls, couches, and floors; dove into the hallway wardrobe, scouring for any items that could pass for Batman’s boots, cape, and cowl; and fought off imaginary hordes of villainous henchman (“POW!”). I loved the swirling horn motifs and swinging surf guitar riffs; cartoonish overacting and goofy dialogue (“You…filthy criminals”); the saturated colors and dramatic camera attitudes; silly plot conveniences; …Julie Newmar in a painted-on cat suit (yes, even then).  I was all in.

CARTOONS AND KID COPING STRATEGIES

Like any other kid, I loved cartoons and developed strategies for ensuring maximal viewing very early on.  As a toddler, for example, I pushed my crib away from the wall to my folks’ bed to climb down and get downstairs in time for for the start of Saturday morning cartoons.

“What’s the big deal…?,” you might ask.  “…Why not sleep-in and stream ‘whatever’ when you got up?”  It was the savage ‘70s. “On Demand” didn’t exist.  Before the VHS revolution of the early 1980s, everything had to be watched according to a set schedule or be missed.  If that wasn’t barbaric enough, because we had no remote, my siblings and I had to physically go to the large wooden floor console TV and manually turn chunky dials to change channels.  Between my rudimentary reading skills and seasonal shifts in programming schemes, tracking choice ‘toons was a challenge but I managed (“CLICK CLICK CLICK  CLICK CLICK CLICK”).

SATURDAY MORNING’S ALRIGHT FOR FIGHTING
(OVER THE TV)

Only about eight channels were functionally accessible back then, but I was nonetheless exposed to a near total history of popular animation; from repackaged and haphazardly edited golden age “shorts” to the haphazardly produced product of the day – which happened to rest squarely at the apex of animation’s “dark age.”

Why “dark age?”  Well, frankly, whatever nostalgic memories Gen-X has attached to the Saturday morning tradition’s heyday, the quality of the shows was almost uniformly dreadful.  After the old Hollywood System fell in the late 1940s-‘50s, the surviving studios slashed budgets and weakened – or outright dumped – their in-house animation divisions.  The animated theatrical short faded in balance with the rising demand for original Television content.  The innovation, whimsy, and excellence of the old reality obliterating (and yes, extremely violent) early creations was abandoned in favor of fast, cheap, and comparatively stale “limited animation.”  

Reconsidering shows from the 1950’s-’60s, it seems like some studios were at least trying to leaven the diminished animation standards with hip (Bullwinkle) and thoughtful (Charlie Brown specials) social commentary.  The Flintstones was an analogue for modern class warfare and technology. Scooby Doo was so loaded with veiled psychedelic tropes (3 “straight” kids meandering the country in a VW van with an unkempt, munchies obsessed hippie and a talking dog) that if TV’s were outfitted with “Smell-O-Vision,” parents everywhere would’ve had to open windows to vent the stank of cheap pot & patchouli whenever the van doors popped open. 

By the time I arrived on the scene, however, the medium had devolved into a guileless wasteland of homogeneous efforts.  I watched, of course – they were cartoons, after all.  The lens through which we evaluate our world changes a lot in the time between 4 and 49 (ideally).  Back then, using Fat Albert as an example, earworm theme songs, passingly colorful characters, and clunky catch phrases (“Hey Hey HEYYYYYYY”) were hook enough.  With Laugh-A-Lympics, Hanna-Barbera turned out their deep drawer of properties past (Snagglepuss) and present (Grape Ape) to lure kids in with an “all-star” lineup of catch phrases (“I’m smarter than the average bear!”).  Still, my tastes weren’t indiscriminate. When familiar characters from back in the day were resurrected (Tom & Jerry; Popeye), I saw the “ALL NEW” takes as pallid and unwatchable in comparison to the originals and steered away.

M.I.C.K.E.Y.M.O.U.S.E. M.I.A.

Strangely absent from Saturday mornings in the ’70s was the Walt Disney Company.

Struggling financially, like so many holdovers from the earlier era, the “House of Mouse” had turned almost exclusively to producing feature-length films (Escape to Witch Mountain; Rescuers; Pete’s Dragon).  Stray reruns of black & white era shows like Mickey Mouse Club aired from time to time, but it seems that Disney opted to lean on licensed merchandise (picture books, story records, etc.) and theatrical re-releases (Alice In Wonderland; Fantasia) as the principle means of maintaining legacy properties.  Their only regularly active TV presence – NBC Sunday night’s Wonderful World of Disney – focused on live-action event films (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), only rotating in animated classics like Snow White, Dumbo, or Pinocchio on odd occasions.  I seldom recall seeing their classic cartoon shorts and wonder how the industry could’ve changed for the better if Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy had figured prominently in the Saturday morning equation.

I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THAT LEFT TURN AT ALBEQUERQUE!

Yes, I watched numberless hours of unsatisfying filler, but, whatever ran against CBS’s Saturday Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner Show, the wascawy wabbit & fwends smoked them all.  Further, when given a choice between contemporary cartoons and the classics at any point in the week, I opted for the zany, frenetic, and wildly surreal iconic series from Hollywood’s golden age: Fleischer-Famous-Paramount’s Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost; Lantz-Universal’s Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy; MGM’s Tom & Jerry and Droopy; Disney; and, course, Schlesinger-WB’s Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes.  

What made golden age works so special?  For one, unlike modern cartoon makers, who saved money and aggravation by dumbing things down and pandering to overreaching parent groups, the old guard – Bob Clampett, Fred Quimby, Tex Avery, Robert McKimson, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, etc. – had relative free-reign to innovate and self-entertain.  As a result, they built raucous, rule-free universes; canonizing countless absurd sight gags (impossibly long limos; body shaped holes in walls; passing between points “a” and “c” without visibly going through “b”; etc.) in the process.  Of course, creators weren’t totally free from censorship – the Hays Code effectively neutered the Fleischer Brothers’ Betty Boop in the 1930s; but, so long as things didn’t get too sexy and the violence was bloodless, they were generally permitted to bully, bludgeon, bisect, blow up, blow apart, maul, mash, mutilate, squeeze, smash, and scare characters skinless to their heart’s content.

The classics were also deceptively sophisticated and respected the intelligence of their audience. Where artless, glacially paced “Dark age” products narrowly targeted simple minds with lame dialogue, labored narratives, and primitive images, golden age masterworks aimed higher in order to entertain a much broader base. The makers of the old theatrical shorts, keenly aware that animation is a visual medium, first and foremost, cleverly conveyed story through a combination of dynamic musical arrangements, beautifully rendered art, relatable characterizations, barrages of lightning quick sight gags, and winking, “meta” references (“Ok, break it up, son.  Joke’s over, hear?”).  Golden age cartoons didn’t talk down or waste precious time with needless exposition. They challenged patrons to use simple powers of observation to connect the dots for themselves.  

What’s more, golden age shorts were great because of their pure escapism. Sure, many shorts made during World War II, like most forms of popular media of the time, served to promote American propaganda (“Any Bonds Today?”); and Disney traded extensively in, well, “Disneyfied” morality tales (Snow White; Bambi; Peter Pan); but, generally speaking, their purpose was pure entertainment. The pretense of story only existed to set up endless gags. The scenarios were just vehicles for exploring the many inventive and delightfully brutal ways Bugs Bunny, Tweety, and Roadrunner could find to foil Elmer Fudd, Sylvester, and Wile E Coyote in the course of seven minutes; for demonstrating how much abuse Popeye could take before squeezing open a can of spinach; and providing Droopy with ample opportunities to break the “4th wall” with droll exclamations (“…I’m happy”).

YOU’LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT, KID!

Ok. Personal bias aside, I understand the argument that these cartoons may be too profoundly violent to not be desensitizing, particularly for young viewers. …It’s also probably for the best that all non-Anglo European stereotypes depicted in the old cartoons have been tucked away from newer generations who can’t likely reconcile the context of their creation.  On these points, I leave the following meditations on the importance of any level of nurturing guardianship or guidance…

Employing a style that resided somewhere in the vast middle-ground between the smothering, overbearing modern helicopter parent and the indiscipline of feral dogs, my Mom and Dad managed to impart to me a sense of right, wrong, and empathy. They knew what my siblings and I were watching and made certain we understood fundamental truths of life, such as “If you fall off a cliff you will die,” “if you shoot someone in the face they will die,” and “any person run over by a pavement roller will surely die…”  It was cathartic as hell to watch cartoon avatars for life’s jerks get the tables turned on them with hilariously extreme prejudice time and time again, but the line between real life and fiction never looked thin or blurred. Anyway… Something to think about…

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BUGS BUNNY

Even as a young child, variances in certain characterizations were hard to miss. Using Bugs Bunny as an example, I’d always assumed that his evolution was linear and easily traced, but it wasn’t. His appearance differed a lot from cartoon to cartoon early on, but he was also kind of schitzo: a mean-spirited bully in some shorts; an endearing trickster in others. It was hard to track because there was no consistency moving between black and white and color shorts. Well… Apparently, four different creative groups were churning out monochrome and Technicolor Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons at Warner Brothers at the same time! The groups operated independently with different budget mandates and under the distinct visions of their respective editors. That’s just insane! No wonder the characters were so changeable.

THE MAN OF A THOUSAND VOICES

To anyone born after 1990, a nickname like “Man of a Thousand Voices” may seem like hyperbole, but, take my word for it, Mel Blanc was inarguably the most important, prolific, and influential voice talent of all time.

Historically, Blanc is most fondly remembered for his work with Warner Brothers, where he provided the definitive voices for icons Bugs Bunny (“Ehh… What’s up doc?”), Daffy Duck (“Youuu’rrrre dithhpickable!”), Porky Pig , Sylvester, Tweety (“I taught I taw a putty tat!”), Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn (“Pay attention, son!”), and countless others for the near entirety of a six decade career.

A broader overview of his extensive output as a character/vocal effects man reveals a talent that bridged radio to television (The Jack Benny Program); rival production companies (WB; Lantz; MGM; Disney; Hanna Barbera); bawdy black and white 1940s instructional films for the U.S. military (Private Snafu) to vapid ‘70s Saturday morning kid schlock (Captain Caveman).  He was the original voice of Woody Woodpecker (“Guess who?”) and Barney Rubble (“Uhh huh huh huh”). He was in Duck Dodgers (“I claim this planet in the name of Mars! Isn’t that lovely?”) and Buck Rogers (“Biddy biddy biddy biddy”).  In 1944, after years of acrimony, his successful negotiations with Leon Schesinger changed the norms for how voice actors were treated in screen credits, improving the visibility of his peers and all who came after. 

ALL I KNOW OF HIGH CULTURE COMES FROM BUGS BUNNY CARTOONS

…And now a few closing words about WB’s MVC (most valuable composer), Carl Stalling.

In the early 1920s, young composer/orchestra leader Carl Stalling was recruited by a fledgeling Walt Disney to produce music for animated shorts he was developing.  Brief but fruitful, the partnership on the “Silly Symphonies” series heralded two revolutionary and natively complimentary advancements: “Mickey Mousing” and the “click track.” Where Stalling’s “Mickey Mousing” process served to align onscreen action with the music score, the metronomic “click track” (known then as a “tick system” or “tick track”) improved pacing, aiding musicians in the task of maintaining perfect tempo. In 1936, Stalling took his talent and innovations to rival Schlesinger-Warner Brothers, where he perfected his craft serving as musical director for a multitude of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes shorts forward into the late ‘50s. 

Echoing sentiments shared by film critic Leonard Maltin in a video I watched yesterday on YouTube (…and you folks thought I didn’t know how to properly document sources…), I’ve long viewed Carl Stalling’s scores as stealth mini-clinics in music theory; imprinting centuries of knowledge onto unknowing viewers via osmosis. So integral were his contributions, it’s sometimes hard to tell from the outside whether the stories informed the scores or vice versa. With the full might of a massive in-house orchestra at his command, Stalling deftly leveraged Warner Brothers’ expansive music catalog; seamlessly weaving passages from existing compositions into epic original scores. He was a master of meter, adept arranger, and savvy solderer who brilliantly bonded quotes from classical works, jazz, opera, show tunes, etc. to his own material. His approach set the standard for music in animated shorts for decades.

Tangentially, it’s not hard to see how Stalling’s facility for fusion might have influenced the ascent of later music forms, directly or otherwise. ’80s Pop producers repurposed (corrupted) the click track to keep “undisciplined” (feel) players robotically on the beat (kill their soul). Surely, Symphonic-Progressive Rock acts from the ’60s – ’70s (Yes; Moody Blues; King Crimson) would have been exposed to golden age Looney Tunes in their youth… Did Stalling and the composers at MGM somehow influence the early Industrial bands (Cabaret Voltaire; Ministry; Skinny Puppy) through their inventive use of “stinger” sound effects?” Mmmmmmmmmm…could be.

…Have different angles to consider or comparable stories to tell?  Please…  Start a conversation in the comments section!

The 1970s were a renaissance period of sorts for horror, fantasy, and sci-fi; elements of magic, the macabre, and a pervasive fear of the future and technology seeping out of virtually every pore of public consciousness.  I may not have fully understood the trippy, awe-inspiring sounds and images emanating from the television at the time, or that they were often designed as conveyances for more meaningful meditations on society, but their impact was indelible.

In the era before home video and cable TV became common conveniences and massive cineplexes erupted from the asphalt to stamp out local theaters in municipalities across the country, my consumption of media was largely confined to printed works found around the house and whatever programming our standard “rabbit ears” could draw into the family television set. Due to a scarcity of outlets and relative dearth of contemporary productions, I basically absorbed 50 years of Hollywood output simultaneously in my first eight years of life. Between that exposure and the fact that I’ve been around long enough now to twice observe revivals of the pop culture phenomena from my childhood, I understand the cyclical nature of influence.  Just as the post punk acts of the late ’70s (Talking Heads, Wire, Blondie, XTC, Elvis Costello) begat the ’90s-2000’s New Wave revivalists (No Doubt, Elastica, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, Killers) that today’s youngest music artists (Pale Waves, Starcrawler, The Regrettes) obviously heard as kids, it is clear that the “creatives” behind the horror/fantasy/sci-fi work of the ’70s were directly inspired by the media produced by the generations that preceded them. Items of influence may not sustain our interest in perpetuity, but they always leave a mark and they almost always come back around.

VAMPIRES & WEREWOLVES & BIG LIZARDS IN MY BACKYARD, OH MY!

Even now, I recall the influence Universal’s Classic black & white monster films (1925-1956) continued to exert on American culture in the 1970s. Universal’s legacy of definitive archetypes (Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, etc.) was evident in the music I was hearing (Bobby Picket’s “Monster Mash,” Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein“), on TV (reruns of The Munsters, Monster Squad, Hilarious House of Frightenstein), in film (Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein), Mego toys, sugary kids cereals, etc.  For crying out loud, Universal icon Boris Karloff (Frankenstein, The Mummy) even provided his instantly recognizable voice to the beloved 1966 cartoon adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  Locally, the movies aired regularly on Sir Graves Ghastly‘s Saturday afternoon “creature feature” on Channel 2.  In retrospect, each series began well, faithfully honoring the spirit of their source material and effectively making use of light and shadow to provoke scares from castle settings and charismatic leads, but faded to the point of self-parody after a succession of forced sequels. Really, though…who cares?  Plot?  What’s that?  I was a little boy. As far as I was concerned, the more monsters they could shoehorn into a single movie the better (House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein).  If they had dispensed altogether with the pretense of story and just presented 90 glorious, random, lightning-filled minutes of monsters cage fighting in a medieval abattoir-cum-laboratory, that’d been perfect. 

At some point late in the decade, unbeknownst to Mom (who would not have approved), I discovered Hammer‘s (’50s-’70s) comparatively gruesome, cleavage-filled color updates of Universal’s monster paradigms (Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein) that often starred Christopher Lee & Peter Cushing – known to other nerddoms, respectively, as Sarumon the White and Grand Mof Tarkin.  In parallel with the creative path of the Universal properties, each film series from “The Studio That Dripped Blood” started respectfully, often making use of classically trained actors and period-appropriate gothic settings, but sank quickly under the weight of overnumerous, ill-conceived, exploitative, low-budget sequels.

Peripherally, in the world of comic books, a relaxing of the Comics Code Authority – an arch-conservative concern that had been neutering content and imaginations since 1954 – spurred an explosion of horror comic books.  Completely obsessed with costumed heroes from the gold and silver ages, I was only vaguely aware of this development, but all the publishers went all-in, none perhaps more so than Marvel – who dropped their “superheroes from the crypt” (Morbius, Werewolf By Night, Dracula, Ghost Rider, Frankenstein’s Monster, etc.) directly into their established superhero continuity.  Predictably, when Marvel introduced Man-Thing (Savage Tales #1), DC answered with Swamp Thing (House of Secrets #92) a mere 2 months later (“WHAT?!!! They developed a SWAMP monster???  PREPOSTEROUS!  RIDICULOUS!  OUTRAGEOUS!  We MUST have one!!!”).

Giant monsters were also very much in-style.  In 1976, early ’30s holdover King Kong made a comeback in an (meh) update starring Jeff Bridges that traded the state-of-the-art stop-motion photography of the original for a green-screened dude in a laughably unconvincing gorilla costume.  Fun ’60s & ’70s Japanese import giant super-monster slugfests (Ultraman, Godzilla movies, Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot) aired on TV regularly.  For years, I couldn’t go near water without pretending to be the classic Marvel superhero Sub-Mariner (“IMPERIOUS REX!”) or imagining myself as Godzilla rising from the sea to smash buildings, stomp cars, and do mighty battle with other freaky, imaginary gigantors. Over the course of the decade, further updates of classic monster tropes continued to appear (Salem’s Lot, Frankenstein: A True Story, Blacula, Dracula), but appetites were changing; old models increasingly taking a back seat to disaster films (The Towering Inferno), gory demonic possessions (The Exorcist), damaged, telekinetic prom queens (Carrie), mutant-huge sharks (Jaws), slasher flicks (Halloween), zombies (Dawn of the Dead), and acid-bleeding bugs from outer space (Alien).

ROCK STARS ARE (NERDY) PEOPLE TOO

Although my personal exposure to swords, sorcery, and the occult was limited to the “fotonovel” for Ralph Bakshi‘s ’78 Lord of the Rings movie, my oldest sister’s (?) Brothers Hildebrandt book of paintings (collected mainly from Tolkien calendars issued ’76-’78), reruns of ’60s TV (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Addams Family, H.R. Pufnstuf) and Disney’s many kid-friendly fantasy films (Pete’s Dragon, Escape to Witch Mountain), interesting developments were afoot… 

In 1970, Marvel comics began a long run of Roy Thomas penned Conan books (Conan the Barbarian, Savage Tales, Savage Sword of Conan, etc.) and comic strips – most popularly drawn by Barry Windsor Smith and “Big” John Buscema – that, along with the work of Frank Frazetta & Boris Vallejo, established the visual language for old-world fantasy illustration, and the swords & sorcery genre as a whole, going forward (Schwarzenegger’s ’82 film, Conan the Barbarian).  The writings of J.R.R. Tolkien were finding wider audiences via mainstream animated adaptations of The Hobbit  (Rankin/Bass) and The Lord of the Rings; and, in hard rock music, via explicit lyrical references in songs by artists such as Led Zeppelin (“Ramble On,” “Misty Mountain Hop“) and Rush (“Rivendell,” “The Necromancer“).

On the whole, a number of known and emerging rock acts were demonstrating the influence of decidedly non-pop music themes. Artists were composing songs steeped in fantasy (Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” Black Sabbath’s “The Wizard,” Yes’ “The Gates of Delirium,” Queen’s “Ogre Battle“); horror (Misfits’ “Night of the Living Dead,” Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” The Cramps’ “Human Fly“), Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead“); and science fiction (Rush’s “2112,” ELP’s “Karn Evil 9,” David Bowie’s “Starman,” B-52’s “Planet Claire“).  Other acts, including Alice Cooper (“Dead Babies“), Talking Heads (“Psycho Killer“), XTC (“Into the Atom Age“), and Devo (“Mongoloid“), at times utilized the imagery provoked by these genres to disguise biting social commentary.  …And then there were the glam-funk-prankster heroes Parliament (“Dr. Funkenstein“) and the surrealist pre-fame incarnation of Oingo Boingo (the Richard Elfman led Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo), whose elaborate presentations bore more resemblance to gothic musical theater than rock and roll.  I don’t consciously recall anything of George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic collective from that time, but there is a chance I may have seen the Mystic Knights when they appeared (and won) on The Gong Show.

CONCEPTUAL (YOU’RE SO)*

Looking back on the bulk of science fiction work produced in the 20th century, it’s clear that all was not well with the world (good to see some things never change, eh?).  “Life imitates art” just as art imitates life. Even though most ’50 – ’70s science fiction films aberrated to varying degrees from their literary sources (Frankenstein, The Time Machine, Island of Doctor Moreau, I Am Legend, The Sentinel, etc.), the conflicted nature of humankind – it’s impressive, native adaptability verses a pervasive, self-destructive arrogance – remained central.  

Observing how differently the entertainment world generally treated sci-fi following the conceptually light, fun early space explorer-adventurer serials of the ’30s & ’40s (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon), it’s hard to miss the pattern of xenophobia that enveloped virtually all productions post World War II.  The atomic age had dawned.  Gone were virtually all signs of sanguine curiosity regarding science and what lay outside our little orb in space.  The ruination of Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare for all to see the potentially calamitous power of nuclear energy, but few had any practical understanding of the systems behind it all…including the “creatives.”  A benign example of this ignorance is the manner by which assorted forms of radiation (or “cosmic rays”) provided the foundation for Stan “The Man” Lee‘s Marvel Age of comics (est. 1962); used as a canned plot convenience to explain how numerous heroes gained their powers (Lee/Jack “King” Kirby’s Fantastic Four & Hulk; Lee /Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man, ).  In film, however, radiation and the “unknown” as a whole were almost universally panned as something to be feared, period.  By the ’50s, sci-fi had mostly degenerated into a joyless, funereal dirge of successive space-horror flicks (War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, The Thing, The Blob, This Island Earth), botched experiments (The Fly, Tarantula, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and irradiated giant monsters (Godzilla, Them!, Attack of the 50ft Woman). In 1968, the campy, exploitative, glorified B-grade space epic Barbarella arrived to at least restore an element of fun to the mix, but still, it was one of very few reprieves from an acetate wasteland of unpleasant futures that stretched into the late ’70s (THX1130, Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Westworld, Soylent Green, Zardoz) and beyond (Martian Chronicles, The Road Warrior, 1984, The Terminator).

Thanks to heavy rotation on the local weekday afternoon movie, the first example of this ’70s sci-fi phenomenon I engaged with may have been The Planet of the Apes.  Blending themes of disillusionment toward authority and institutions (The Longest Yard, Outlaw Josey Wales, Three Days of the Condor) with dystopian tales that were common at the time (The Omega Man, Mad Max), the franchise spawned from the 1968 Planet of the Apes film (based on the ’63 French novel, La Planète des singes) starring Moses from The Ten Commandments.  Four sequels followed in the early ’70s, chased by a TV show and Mego toy line in ’74 (and the Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon in ’75). Each entry, convoluted continuity issues aside, depicted a future where lower-primates have evolved to supplant humanity as the alpha inhabitants of Earth.  Mainly known to modern audiences through multiple cynical 21st century attempts by 20th Century Fox (since swallowed up by the Disney entertainment cabal) to again cash-in on once lucrative properties, the original Apes films were actually pretty effective parables in disguise. Science fiction was merely a vehicle to pose challenging questions about race, inequality, human rights, animal rights, fear, hubris, fascism, war, etc.  At age 5-6 or whatever, it’s hardly likely that I was grasping any deeper message here.  I’m pretty sure I just thought the space capsules and talking apes were pretty cool.  …You know, like the Bionic Bigfoot on Six Million Dollar Man.

* Sorry (I’m not sorry) for the obscure references, folks.  This is a play on the name of the Adam & The Ants song “Physical (You’re So).”  A few years later they released a track called “Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios.”  I couldn’t resist.

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!

To be fair, though, the state of sci-fi during that span of time wasn’t a complete bummer. Luckily, because of my young age, I was largely distracted from all that the doom and gloom by the allure of cool-looking ships, groovy spacesuits, robots, nasty beasties, mighty battle, high adventure, and thrill of the new.  There was still fun to be had… 

Over the their first 30 years or so of existence, the three TV networks that broadcast the bulk of first run programming periodically rolled the dice on playful fantasy programs (Mr. Ed, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, Mork & Mindy), adventure (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Wild Wild West, Six Million Dollar Man), and the supernatural (Dark Shadows, Night Gallery, Fantasy Island), as well as more conceptually ambitious “hard” science fiction (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The 1950s American small-screen revivals of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers appear to have stimulated a resurgence of the space explorer/adventurer category: in England, on the BBC, with Fireball XL5 (’62-63, filmed in “Supermarionation“), sci-fi institution Doctor Who (’63-’89), and Space 1999 (’75-’77); and in the U.S., with the ’65-’68 reinterpretation of The Swiss Family Robinson, Lost In Space (“Danger Will Robinson!“), and Gene Roddenberry‘s fantastically influential and enduring leap into the “final frontier,” Star Trek. 

Who knew when Star Trek was cancelled in 1969 after just three seasons that it would prosper in syndication during the ’70s and go on in the following decades to sire (to date) nine further television series, thirteen (!) feature films, and endless parodies.  Dad never liked it (“I have imagination…when it makes sense!), but the rest of us in the family faithfully tuned in virtually every Saturday and Sunday evening for two decades to watch the voyages of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise.  The show appealed to my imagination with a combination of rich, vibrant colors; distinctive ship designs; cool gadgets; beautiful matte paintings depicting “strange new worlds”; fun sound effects; compelling stories that often challenged viewers to grow beyond binary notions of right/wrong and good/evil; and the stagey (over)acting of William Shatner (“I’M CAPTAIN KIRK!!!“), Leonard Nimoy (“PAIN! …PAIN! …PAIN!“), DeForest Kelly (“KILLERS! ASSASSINS!“), and company.  Most of all, it taught me about the perks of being a space captain and the norms for responding to potential conflict in the context of male social identity (HA!). Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, inside the house or out, I usually found a way to be planted in front of the television set when it was on.  While outside playing in sufficiently rugged-looking terrain (literally, any setting), the iconic Trek battle music played in my head, telling me it was time to engage in mortal combat with a Gorn warrior (“…He has me…in his grasp! Time…to hit…the sides…of his head…with dual…CUPPED HANDS!”).  I coveted my brother’s AMT model kit Enterprise and younger cousin’s Mego Kirk and Spock dolls.  Along with Batman and Bugs Bunny cartoons, it was surely my favorite show.  And then…



FIRST STEP INTO A LARGER WORLD

It was a dark time for cinemagoers.  The evil leaders of corporate media – cynical, conservative, prejudiced, and obtuse – caged movie audiences in a relentless, dispiriting cycle of oppressive dystopian futures.  Fear had proven profitable.  “Why mess with a bad thing – just give them more of that” was the motto of every studio head.  …But all was not lost.  Raised in the “INDIE” wilds, young rebel director George Lucas, fresh from the surprise success of American Graffiti, emerged to blindside the American film industry with his world-changing, canny homage to the pure, escapist space adventurer serials of yesterday – Star Wars.  Not “Episode IV;” not “A New Hope.”  Just… Star Wars. 

On Wednesday, May 25, 1977, completely oblivious to the fact that they were sitting on, perhaps, the most influential pop culture phenomena of the late twentieth century and hoping to make some money back on their modest $10,000,000 investment before the official summer movie season began, a pessimistic 20th Century Fox opened Star Wars in limited release in a mere 32 theaters across the U.S.  The movie caught fire immediately and by August was screening in over a thousand theaters domestically.  With international release, by the end of ’78, global ticket sales exceeded an unprecedented $400 million (over 1.3 Billion in 2021 U.S. dollars).  Tangentially, Steven Spielberg’s warm, refreshingly non-fatalistic tale of first contact with alien species, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, arrived in late ’77 welcomed by rave reviews and keen public reception ($$$$$).  Looking back, did FOX and Lucas have sound reason for grossly miscalculating the connection Star Wars would make with audiences?  Having casually examined much of the data they would have had available to them at the time, I believe their myopic view was more attributable to a general industry-wide distaste for the genre than anything else.  Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) initially failed to make back it’s production costs for MGM, but proved extremely profitable in re-releases beginning in ’71. Paramount’s Star Trek was extremely popular in televised syndication throughout the ’70s.  FOX’s own Planet of the Apes property did well enough to justify continued exploitation well into the mid-’70s.  Obviously, they should have known that there was an audience out there for epic space stories.

Now…  Despite the profound influence Star Wars had on my kid brain, I turned 5 during the first few months of the original run and can’t recall the experience of seeing it in the theaters at that time. Did we see it as a family?  Which theater?  Nearly 45 years down the road, none of us can remember. It seems that there were some visuals and sounds that stuck: the striking flow of the 20th Century Fox fanfare into the main title music-title crawl-opening space battle; the Millennium Falcon immediately displaced the Enterprise as the coolest spacecraft ever to appear on any sized screen; memorable lines like “May the Force be with you,” “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” “Great kid. Don’t get cocky,” “I have a bad feeling about this,” and “R2-D2, where are you?”; Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber duel; the Cantina and trash compactor scenes; the innovative final space battle and the destruction of the Death Star…  Are these memories genuine or illusory – the result of constant reinforcement courtesy of the Lucasfilm marketing-merchandising machine and innumerable repeat viewings? All that matters is that I was very excited and moved by the experience, which, at best guess, occurred some time before the summer of ’78 – around the time Star Wars stuff began infiltrating the home.

My full surrender to the ways of the Force wasn’t immediate.  Superheroes had held a singular place in my young psyche practically since birth, so turning me was no small feat. It took unrelenting waves of media saturation, family/peer influence, and Star Wars product. Everyone involved in the production became overnight celebrities – Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, in particular.  Kids were talking about it in school and bringing items to class for “show & tell.” At home, I was reading the novelization (looking at pictures) while listening to the movie soundtrack (did they belong to my Mom or older…sister?). My brother, a promising illustrator/draftsman in his youth, produced many remarkably detailed pencil/pastel drawings of ships and selected scenes in addition to meticulously constructing model kits (Millennium Falcon, X-Wing, Darth Vader’s Tie-Fighter) that he amended by simulating scoring marks from laser blasts with graphite pencils. Stores were crammed with t-shirts, Topps trading cards, Marvel Comics, handheld electronic games…  Kenner’s continuously expanding toy line commandeered large expanses of shelf space in department stores and drew longing looks from young fans.  Disco adaptations of the theme music played on the radio.  On TV, in addition to frequent movie and toy promos, cast and crew were making the talk show rounds, networks aired variety show tributes, and CBS broadcast the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special – notable for featuring the first appearance of Boba Fett but abominable enough to be immediately disowned by all at Lucasfilm and repressed in collective memory until YouTube came along.  

Amazingly, Kenner lucked into the license to produce Star Wars toys.  Many companies passed on the opportunity, failing to recognize the commercial potential of the movie.  Initial rollout was rough, though. Due to the lateness of the agreement, failure to anticipate demand, and Lucas’ reluctance to offer reference images from the film ahead of release, no toys were available in time for Christmas ’77 (arriving in February ’78 – 9 months after the premier). Regardless, once products hit the market, sales soared – exceeding $100 million annually in ’78 and ’79.  Inarguably, the greatest innovation contributing to their success was the popularization of the 3.75″ action figure.  Prior to Star Wars, the only miniature figures I recall encountering accompanied Fisher Price (and Richard Scary) playsets and my brother’s Space: 1999 Eagle 1 Spaceship.  More portable and affordable than the traditional 8″ (Mego) and 12″ (G.I. Joe) standards, the smaller figures also accommodated sets and vehicles that better matched their relative scale, making them more optimal for active play and ease of storage. 

My personal interest in collecting Star Wars items started slowly but escalated precipitously as more items found their way into my possession.  The very first Star Wars action figure to come home may have been the large-size Darth Vader, followed by a few stray items (Star Wars Storybook; Escape From Death Star board game; Play-Doh action set)… My full allegiance was officially captured, however, in late ’78, when I awoke Christmas morning to find the Kenner Millennium Falcon – filled with all the principal characters (about 3/4 of all the figures available at that time) – and the large Obi-Wan Kenobi under the tree.  That was it.  I was hooked.  From that point forward, all I wanted for Christmas, birthdays, and everything in-between, was more Star Wars stuff. I was a card-carrying member of the official fan club and avid reader of the Bantha Tracks newsletter. Luke Skywalker supplanted Batman, Spider-Man and Captain Kirk as my favored live-action role-playing option. I practiced drawing by sketching freehand studies of the figures and trading cards. By the time Kenner phased out the original trilogy line in ’85, between toys, cards, patches, posters, books, and comics, I’d amassed an impressive collection. Sadly (hanging head), all these years later, only a few meager artifacts remain (many annoyed grunts). On the plus side, thanks to comic & toy shows (and the internet), I get to gaze longingly again – this time at the tragic remnants of many people’s broken Star Wars collections and Hasbro’s overpriced reproductions of Kenner’s classic line (that I can’t afford to buy and wouldn’t have space to display even if I could). Awesome.

Anyway… To say that Star Wars‘ cultural presence was constant leading into the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, is not an exaggeration.  Between a lengthy initial theatrical run, yearly re-releases, advertisements in newspapers and on TV, and the regular appearance of fresh “merch,” the property never had a chance to fade from public consciousness.  Even as other studios, desperate to capitalize on Star Wars’ success, squeezed out their own (mostly schlocky) sci-fi adventure projects, it never faltered.  Disney fell into The Black Hole; United Artists’ floated Moonraker (James Bond in space); B-movie impresario Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars ripped off The Magnificent Seven.  The TV pilots for Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were given theatrical release.  Originally planned as a TV revival, Paramount’s beautiful-looking Star Trek: The Motion Picture earned points for excellent production values and getting the gang back together, but failed to recapture the excitement of the original show; plodding along at sub-impulse with a recycled story that gave the actors little more to do than pose for reaction shots.  Mego toys, having passed on Star Wars when offered the license, bankrupted itself in a vain scramble to sell products based on most of these other properties.  I think the words you’re looking for are (pointing derisively) “Ha Ha!” Ok, that’s not very nice of me. It was a shame to see Mego fold due to a string of unbelievably bad business decisions at the top. A lot of workers lost their livelihood and a lot of kids lost out on the joys of discovering the World’s Greatest Superheroes figures. It makes me sad.

To be continued in…
THE FORMATIVE YEARS, PART IV:
…I PLAYED WITH CHILDISH THINGS

  

Once again, my compulsion to show off has taken me way off track and, as a result, I’m attempting to collate from an unmanageable mess.  As much as I want to share everything (I think) I know, I will forgo (for now) extensively extolling the virtues of early metal, prog, punk, and post-punk/new wave (none of which factored into my experience until much later) and stick to what I personally remember seeing and hearing during the ’70s…

Early on, the media I consumed encompassed a vast array of sound and images hailing from, roughly, a period spanning 1930-1980.  Dating back to Mom & Dad’s youth and early adulthood were “shorts” and “full lengths” from old-time comedy teams (Laurel & Hardy, Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello), Little Rascals, vintage Hollywood musicals (Shirley Temple, Big bands, Andrews Sisters, Astaire & Rogers, Garland & Rooney, Crosby & Hope), ’50s TV (Honeymooners, I Love Lucy), Universal’s Classic Monsters, Tarzan movies, & classic cartoons (Looney Tunes, Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, Walt Disney).  Selections from the ’60s-early ’70s included TV shows (Munsters, Twilight Zone, Addams Family, Lost In Space, Get Smart, Monkees, Star Trek, Brady Bunch), cartoons (Marvel Super Heroes, Spider-Man, Flintstones, Jetsons, Bullwinkle), Disney films (Doctor Doolittle, Mary Poppins, The Love Bug).  …And I was watching contemporary kids stuff (Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Sesame Street, Electric Company, Krofft Shows, Fat Albert, Hanna Barbara); National Geographic; game shows (Bowling for Dollars, Price is Right, Gong Show); Superheroes (Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Incredible Hulk); Planet of the Apes; Godzilla.  If I wasn’t actively watching Sanford & Son, Rockford Files, Rhoda, All In the Family, & Taxi, I was definitely within earshot when they were on. Monday Night Baseball/Football & Wide World of Sports were always getting in the way of watching the “good stuff.”  …And it seemed like every year ABC was airing the “World Television Premier” of yet another James Bond flick (but I was only allowed to watch the pre-credit scene before being toted off to bed).  Yeah (sigh), I watched a lot of TV.

AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY AND YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY!!!

The great American hangover that followed the civil rights movement & Vietnam War was often reflected in the media of the day; many films (All the President’s Men, Deer Hunter, Network) mirroring the American people’s growing disillusionment toward once blindly hallowed institutions and shows (White Shadow, Good Times, Maude, One Day At a Time, Diff’rent Strokes) considering changing attitudes toward “traditional” societal norms.  It’s not as if there was any shortage of propaganda…err, I mean, good, “clean” fun (reruns of Mister Ed, Leave It to Beaver, Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hogan’s Heroes), though.  Tones were clearly shifting toward “pure” escapism.  In an effort to restore our collective (false) sense of security, entertainment was looking backwards – toward more “innocent times” – evident in the music I was hearing: rock & roll “oldies” (Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Beatles, Beach Boys, The Byrds, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, The Who, Kinks, Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Four Tops); hits by contemporary artists like Harry Nilsson (“1941“), Elton John(“Crocodile Rock“), ELO (“Roll Over Beethoven“), Bette Midler (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy“), Bay City Rollers (“I Only Want to Be With You“); Stevie Wonder (“Sir Duke“), Billy Joel (“Only the Good Die Young“), & Queen (“Crazy Little Thing Called Love“); and at the movies (American Graffiti, Animal House).  Largely hidden from view, the subversive, naughty-campy cult glam musical Rocky Horror Picture Show pieced together many tropes of the decade (nostalgia for “innocent” America, old time rock n’ roll, ’30s-’50s horror/sci-fi).  With all the subtlety of a dragster, the ’50s doo wop flipping of “Taming of the Shrew,” Grease, continued John Travolta’s (Welcome Back, Kottar) winning streak & made country pop singer Olivia Newton-John a full-blown mainstream superstar. Closing out a decade full of nostalgic films was perhaps my favorite musical of all time – John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd’s comic ode to classic R&B, The Blues Brothers (“We’re on a mission from God”). Come to think of it, the ’70s closed the door on era of the movie musical, in general. Maybe the glut of weak disco vehicles c. ’79/’80 provided the final blow…? With few exceptions, the role of original music in 1980’s movies had been reduced to fodder for training montages and music videos.

On TV, Korean War-set dramedy M.A.S.H., starring Alan Alda, muted the darker, subversive traits of the hit film and become a beloved institution.  Happy Days, starring Opie from The Andy Griffith Show, was, by far, the most influential of all the nostalgic ’70s shows: creditable for spawning many memorable catchphrases (“Sit on it,” “I still got it,” “Ayyyyy,” & “Whoah“) and spin-offs (Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy).  For the first few years, at least, Happy Days attempted to present an authentic (if stylized) view of (white) suburban middle-America in the mid-late ’50s: vintage cars, “regular” men’s haircuts, poodle skirts, drive-in restaurant-soda fountains; music by Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Elvis, The Coasters, Everly Brothers, & Crew Cuts.  In the tradition of The Archie Show, many episodes included musical numbers performed by cast members & guests (Frankie Avalon, Suzi Quatro).  As the seasons piled up and Henry Winkler’s Fonzie (once a background character) became incredibly popular, the show “jumped the shark” due to obtrusive, gimmicky storytelling devices, the shedding of original cast members, and a lax sense of continuity (contemporary fashions, hairstyles, & social content).

Another example of the nostalgia in ’70s media was the ever presence of country-western music entertainers.  An integral part of the pop culture landscape long before the advent of rock n’ roll (itself starting out as an amalgam of country & blues), country’s biggest acts were mainstream stars as well: prominently featured on TV (Johnny Cash Show, Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour, Dolly, Hee Haw); film (Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born, Jerry Reed in Smokey & the Bandit); and the pop charts (Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me,” Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue“).  In rock music, ’60s, artists like The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Band, Credence Clearwater Revival, and Grateful Dead began more overtly exploring the “old timey” sounds that were always part of their heritage, in turn influencing big ’70s acts (Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eagles) who followed close behind.  Veteran folk acts from the ’60s like Gordon Lightfoot (“Sundown“) and John Denver (“Thank God I’m a Country Boy“) were now demonstrating pronounced country influences as well.  Back on television, the tradition of romanticizing the old west continued with the legacy western Gunsmoke, Waylon Jennings provided the “outlaw” theme for The Dukes of Hazzard, and Little House On the Prairie & The Waltons gave us “feels” for simpler, if harder, times.

Further evidence confirming the move toward pure entertainment is found in the preponderance of ’70s TV variety/sketch comedy shows (American Bandstand, Laugh In, Sonny & Cher, Soul Train, Tony Orlando & Dawn, Carol Burnett, Jacksons, , Donny & Marie, SNL, Sha Na Na), specials (Bob Hope, Diana Ross, Carpenters, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John), & talk shows (Tonight Show, Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett).  The overall quality of these programs was wildly inconsistent and, if you were experiencing your “15 minutes” at any point in that decade, odds were good that a network would offer you a time slot.  Always outstanding, however, was The Muppet Show.  I was real young and a bias for Jim Henson’s work on Sesame Street surely factors in my high esteem, but the show really was very funny and entertaining for people of all ages.  Unlike much “family” entertainment of today, Henson made the show fun for adults and children without being overly crass or intentionally speaking above or below his audience’s assumed intelligence levels.  The Muppet characters were all colorful, distinct, funny, and nuanced; repeated gags never felt rote, always finding new angles & fresh laughs (and groans); guest hosts hailed from diverse realms of acclaim (Rita Moreno, Ruth Buzzi, Paul Wiliams, John Denver, Peter Ustinov, Twiggy, Juliet Prowse, Bernadette Peters, Milton Berle, Debbie Harry, Lou Rawls, Steve Martin, Elton John, Gilda Radner, Raquel Welch, Alice Cooper, Helen Reddy, etc.). …And their house band had the snazziest name ever (Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem).

DISCO ‘FECTS

Set to become the most influential touchstone of 1970s culture, disco was already sewing itself into the fabric of the world by the time I was out of diapers.  Sure, other significant trends were happening, but almost everything in the mainstream had been seduced: architecture and décor; fashion; scores for TV (Kojak, Love Boat, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch) & film (Car Wash, Dirty Harry, Rocky, Xanadu); and popular music.  Too young, obviously, to have personally partaken of the disreputably decadent club scene, impressions from what I was seeing on TV (Dance Fever) are summed up thusly: mirror balls; blinking, Technicolor checkerboard dance floors; pretty, well groomed, bone-skinny women with long, flowing hair in blousy strapless dresses; smarmy looking hyper-macho “players” with helmet hair wearing wide-open, flared-collar shirts and leisure suits (man-perm, gold medallion, pinky ring, & porn mustache sold separately). My folks liked disco music and were very good dancers, but, with four kids to feed, a mortgage, car payments, etc., they were too busy “adulting” to worry about staying on the tip of what was “happening” and “cool.”  If anything, they actually appeared to be willfully devoted to remaining “uncool.”  That said, now firmly (if restlessly) ensconced in middle-age myself, I can look back and appreciate that: A) they were comfortable with who they were & knew what they liked; B) what they liked tended to be pretty good when viewed through the wide lens of history; and C) I too no longer give two (expletives) about being cool.  That ship has sailed.  

God knows I’m guilty of casting stones from time to time when seeing and/or hearing things my brain perceives as utter excrement, but I never understood the vitriol of the Demolition that marked the de facto nadir of disco in mid-’79.  In some ways I get it…  When thinking back to the embarrassingly tacky, sequin smothered superficiality of the clothes revered, legacy acts were wearing (Elvis, Neil Diamond).  But this was the world I was born into.  This was “normal” for the ’70s.  Anyway…  Simmering since around 1970, the disco craze caught fire in the U.S. c. ’75 through music that drew from a variety of forms: Latin beats and polyrhythms); funk & soul (Motown, The Meters, James Brown, Isaac Hayes); the lush symphonic rock of The Moody Blues & Electric Light Orchestra; Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound“; and the theatricality of Glam.  Once media moguls realized disco’s commercial potential, it was, of course, exploited (or weaponized) to the nth degree, at this point influencing R&B icons (Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” Diana Ross’ “Upside Down“), rock institutions (Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night“), art-rock (David Bowie’s “Golden Years“), Country (Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” C.W. McCall’s “Convoy,” Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia“), jazz (Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good“), Metal (Kiss’ “I Was Made For Lovin’ You“); pop (Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” Captain & Tenile’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom“), & punk (Blondie’s “Heart of Glass“).  ’70s icons that seemed to arrive fully-formed with Disco appeal included ABBA (“Dancing Queen“), Earth, Wind & Fire (“Shining Star“), KC & the Sunshine Band (“Get Down Tonight“), Chic (“Le Freak“), and Donna Summer (“Love to Love You“).  The airwaves were assaulted with a multitude of novelty acts (Village People, Bony M), 1-hit wonders (“The Hustle,” “Kung-Fu Fighting“), parodies (“Disco Duck“) & adaptations (MECO, “A Fifth of Beethoven“).  Amusingly, even though my Dad is a Sinatra-era crooner fan who often responds to the sight of flamboyant performers with intolerance punctuated with unflattering expletives, he sincerely has a soft spot for colorful showmen.  To this day, he still brightens up when talking about “that time we saw that crazy Scotsman…you know…awwwww what’s his name(?)… on TV…” (Rod Stewart, in full animal-print gloriousness, promoting his sellout disco single “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy“).  Good old Dad.

At home, I don’t know if we even had an FM radio yet and we definitely didn’t have many contemporary albums, but a few current tunes found their way onto the family hi-fi.  1977’s K-Tel Pure Gold collected hits from the previous year (Heart’s “Magic Man,” Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” Maxine Nightengale’s “Right Back Where We Started From,” ABBA’s “Fernando” KC’s & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man,” etc.).  John Williams‘ ’77 Star Wars Soundtrack was a particular influence, helping to fuel what would soon become the most enduing obsession of my childhood.  Although it wasn’t current, another orchestral album I was hearing regularly was the soundtrack to Disney’s Fantasia – noteworthy because, roughly the same time I was hearing Mussorgsky’s original “A Night on Bald Mountain,” David Shire’s adaptation, “Night On Disco Mountain” from the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack, was playing on Mom & Dad’s turntable as well.  Permanently etched in my brain from countless repetition, the Fever soundtrack was (is) a stellar distillation disco’s virtues (yes, I said “virtues”), featuring a multitude of R&B and pop artists (Kool & the Gang, The Trammps, Yvonne Elliman) who had gravitated to that style.  (In)arguably, the movie itself would have probably tanked like all the other disco-centric films had it not been for the stellar set of songs contributed by the Bee Gees in the wake of their recent new-slick-Gods-of-the-dance-floor” career reboot.

In retrospect, of all the acts unfairly stigmatized for lack of substance when the rock “purists” came for everyone’s disco records in ’79, I thought Sweedish pop perfectionists ABBA deserved a lot better.  Yes, they were an almost too perfect to be authentic embodiment of the disco aesthetic: big, driving beats; hooky, appealing melodies; honey-dipped productions; tonally rich, pitch-perfect lead & harmony vocals; detailed production & professional playing; a varnished, mannered stage presence more reminiscent of the Lawrence Welk singers than Janice Joplin…  But to be reflexively lumped in with 1-note wonders like Village People (just to be clear, I’m not saying that I hate Village People…just pointing out that every song they did was a disco-by-the-numbers reworking of the “YMCA” anthem) proves that people weren’t listening closely enough to develop an informed opinion much less voice one.  First of all, for anyone reading here who might be younger than 30, the craft they demonstrated was achieved without the benefit of Pro-Tools or auto-tune – meaning that A) Bjorn & Benny had to actually write the songs from scratch (no templates), B) vocalists, Agnetha & Anni-Frid, had to actually be that good to stay in key, C) while they definitely twiddled a lot of knobs in the studio in order to find the right mix, all the instrumental tracks had to be laid down by skilled musicians (no cheating, apart from using Moog synthesizers to replicate the sounds of organs, horns and strings).  Second, assessing the volume and quality of their output based on the two hits collections in my possession, the strength & musical range of the songs themselves was just fantastic. Yes, the groovy “Dancing Queen,” swinging “Take a Chance On Me,” & schmaltzy “Voulez-Vous” are definitive disco numbers, but what of the fetching, bubble-gum pop of “Honey Honey” (McCartney’s “Obli Di Obla Da” baseline); the kitschy charm & chime of ’50s inspired “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” (featuring a Fats Domino/”Blueberry Hill’” standard blues progression); the sophisticated & sonically modern new-wave synths of “Super Trooper; or “Chiquitita’s“ seamless synthesis of tender Spanish balladry & Bavarian Biergarten(?) folk songs. They never deviate from their signature sound, yet not a single melodic hook digs or lands the same way.  Influences come from far and wide.  Each tune is memorable and distinctive.  That, my friends, is something lesser songwriters/performers simply cannot do – certainly beyond the chops of the average, ho-hum, second rate, conveyor belt disco act. A person does not have to be a #1 superfan in order to find value and give credit where it is due.

LET THERE BE ROCK

Often, the heaviest hitters of the late ’70s (Led Zeppelin) were deemed uncommercial and unsuitable for mass consumption by our corporate media overlords (no different than today).  Slick, yet tuneful acts like Chicago, Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac are examples of AOR artists who had enough pop savvy to occasionally mingle on the AM dial with soft rock staples like Carly Simon & Carpenters, but it was a really rough road for most.  You can only imagine how wild it must have been to see a “dangerous” act like ostentatious heavy-glam-rockers Kiss ascend to the highest level of pop culture oversaturation.  They were everywhere – Network TV specials, movies, Halloween costumes, lunch boxes, comic books, pin ball machines, trading cards, toys – you name it.  Musically, Kiss were fundamentally a pretty straight-forward, not particularly accomplished hard rock band, but their image…  With faces caked in full black & white horror makeup and bodies draped in black & silver spandex (…or in Gene Simmons‘ case, faux blood-soaked spiked body armor with silver stilettoed demon-headed boots…), only Ziggy-era Bowie, Liberace, Parliament, and Gary Glitter could compete with the outrageousness of their stage personas and showmanship.

By c. ’79, my oldest sister and brother, now high schoolers, were developing tastes independently of parental influence.  Her choices leaned toward mellow, “unthreatening” (parent friendly) soft-rock styles (Barry Manilow, Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Air Supply) and the uptempo bubble-gum glam of Bay City Rollers.  In contrast, his tastes were becoming increasingly influenced by the way-too-loud-and-or-weird-for-the-parents hard rock/prog of Boston, The Who, Styx, Foreigner, ELP and Rush – acts featured on FM rock radio.  I shared a room with my brother, so naturally his listening habits had grown to be a greater influence on me.  When he brought home The Cars debut cassette, the worm turned for me as well.  Played on his trusty old Panasonic box cassette player-recorder, that album (joined quickly in rotation by The Cars‘ follow-up, Candy-O) played with near dogmatic reliability virtually every single night at bedtime for what feels must have been a solid year.  I was getting balled-out by table-mates in 2nd grade for incessant finger tapping because the song “Just What I Needed” continued to play on it’s own in my head long after the tape ended (hiss-delay… “click”).  Aligned by the music press with other New Wave bands (XTC, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, B-52’s, Devo, Split Enz), they are actually a difficult group to pigeonhole.  While Rik Ocasek’s strangely disaffected vocals & Greg Hawk’s synthesizers definitely bubbled and quirked like New Wave, the band’s heavy riffs, rhythms, deep melodic hooks, and clear affinity for old time rock & roll (Elliot Easton’s tuneful solos) were strongly in-line with the power pop of Cheap Trick.  We really didn’t think about it that deeply back then. We knew it sounded a little different, but (sorry for clumsily paraphrasing Mick Jagger) it was still “only rock and roll and we like(d) it!”

To be continued in…

THE FORMATIVE YEARS, PT III:
GOING WHERE NO (BOY) HAD GONE BEFORE A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY…

The 1970s were an interesting time to be a young kid.  I was only age 7 when the decade closed, so most of what pass for memories probably more realistically fall into the category of brief, vivid impressions, really…  Digging back through the minefield of repression, I remember the omnipresence of olive green-yellow-orange-brown earth tones. Everything seemed dirtier, somehow: sun-soaked in a haze of air pollution; perma-stained a grimy nicotine-maize.  The existential crises of the times played out in pop-culture as revisionist romanticism of an idyllic 1950s America (Happy Days; Grease; Sha Na Na) clashed with paranoid fears of technology and the future (Planet of the Apes; Westworld; Logan’s Run).  TV played like a dizzying, compressed full history of 20th century pop-culture.  Everyone’s hair was at least a little bit longer.  Fashions were appallingly tacky.  Dr. Seuss, Mego, Lite Brite, Wheaties, Krofft productions, M.A.S.H., Muppets, and Star Wars; John-Boy, The Brady Bunch, schmaltzy variety shows, “The agony of defeat”, Disco, Farrah hair, Kiss, and ABBA.

By the end of the decade, a multitude of ’70s popular culture touchstones would be increasingly (sometimes brutally) rejected as criminally shallow and uncool – but what did I know or care? A kaleidoscopic barrage of disparate sights and sounds were all being processed simultaneously with, as yet, unbiased eyes and ears.  I was still too overwhelmed by curiosity and the newness of everything to be much of a cynic about anything. 

As the “baby” of the family, my sheltered indoctrination into the world occurred in the pocket universe of my parent’s home, with influences that frequently hailed from the immediately preceding decades.  The morning experience was defined by the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen, industrial size boxes of Cheerios, and J.P. McCarthy on “The Great Voice of the Great Lakes, “AM 760 WJR – once a lightly conservative mix of news, commentary, and vanilla, awkwardly cropped music.  On the cusp of the cable/home video revolution, TV as a popular medium had only functionally existed for around 25 years, so the net effect of fewer outlets producing less original content over that span was that all viewers, for lack of choice, were exposed to the entire history of programming (and of film and music, by extension).  Daily viewing routines covered a lot of ground: Sesame Street; The Gong Show; cartoons (Bugs Bunny; Bullwinkle); ’60s reruns (The Munsters; Lost In Space; Leave It to Beaver); Bill Kennedy at the Movies (classics) with Mom; and maybe an hour of family fare like Little House On the Prairie.  Being a kid, I was always doing other things while the TV was on, of course…  Drawing superheroes (on any available surface), sneaking snacks (shhhhhhh!)… Bouncing up randomly to: pop open a can of spinach; throw on a cape to act out fight scenes (“KAPOW!”); fly (run) full speed through the house (“whooshing” sounds); climb the stairs like Spidey (“thwip”); jump REALLY long distances (“buh buh buh buh na na na na“), and beam down to strange new worlds (“I’m a KID, not BRAIN surgeon!”).  Looking back, the best part of threatening the structural integrity of the house with the power of serious play may have been aping the sound-effects and vocalizing the theme music.  “Proper” lessons, these were not, to be sure, but through all these shows I was exposed to a world of sound and intuitively learned a lot about tone and dynamics by attempting to mimic the what I heard, developing a decent vocal range and ear for music in the process. 

Around the house, I recall Mom singing Teresa Brewer and Doris Day songs while doing ALL the many things that busy house Mom’s do, Dad crooning assorted “big band” era tunes while cleaning up for bowling nights, and my older siblings spinning borrowed Beatles and Beach Boys 45’s on the family hi-fi. At one point, my eldest sister crafted a toy guitar for me from corrugated cardboard and yarn (strings) in the shape of The Monkees logo.  My older brother, who liked to tape songs off of the rock & roll “oldies” station (AM 560 “Honey Radio“) would play “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen on repeat just to see me fall down laughing.  The semi-weekly ritual of watching countless, mostly disposable, Saturday morning cartoons – almost all of which had theme songs that remain burned into the inner recesses my brain – with the youngest of my two sisters, huddled under an afghan over the living room register for precious heat.  Hours and days were spent lounging on the floor listening to Peter Pan brand 45 rpm kiddie story records and LP’s like Rocking Horse Players’ Peter and the Wolf, Lawrence Welk’s Baby Elephant Walk, Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, K-tel’s Pure Gold, and the Goldfinger, Saturday Night Fever, Fantasia and Star Wars movie soundtracks; examining every sleeve down to the last detail of each worn corner.  I can recall many occasions of being crashed out in the back seat of the blue family wagon (or was it the black Chevy?), meditatively listening as sweetly melodic songs like ELO’s “Evil Woman,” Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” Dionne Warwick’s Bacharach/David penned “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and “Saturday In the Park” by Chicago played on the stereo.  Good times.

Speaking again of the age before home video and “on demand,” holiday programming and movies were truly a treat – appearing only once a year (if at all).  If missed, that was it.  CBS ran Peanuts cartoons like clockwork three times a year.  Classic Disney films (Mary Poppins; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) were regularly shown on NBC.  Christmas time meant Rankin & Bass Claymation specials.  ABC fit in a Bond film at least once a month, usually.  Networks ran epic Biblical films (The Ten Commandments; The Greatest Story Ever Told) on Easter and Christmas, as they continue to do today.  Nearly revered on the level religious events (…to the child mind) were hallowed Hollywood musicals like The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.  Singin’ In the Rain, The Sound of Music and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers stand out in memory as well.  It didn’t matter what was going on… If it was at all possible to be present somewhere while these films were being aired, my folks typically made sure of it.  Additionally, if one discovered that a favored musical act was going to make an appearance, the instinct was to stop the world so as not to accidentally miss it. As I mentioned earlier, these were the “dark times” before YouTube… There were no second chances to see that sort of thing (usually). When Mom told me that Paul McCartney & Wings were going to be on the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon or Blondie was doing a spot on The Mike Douglas Show, I would keep a keen eye on the clock and make sure I watched the ENTIRE show so as to ensure no mistakes were made. Of course, unless it was Frank Sinatra or some other established heavyweight, musical guests were (are) always held back until the last segment, but the excitement was just too great to take any chances…

Yes, the setting was very conventional (square), but a varied enough array of impactful visual and aural information got through, stimulating my imagination and leaving me wanting more. The building blocks for the future WALL OF TUNES were being laid…

To be continued in…

THE FORMATIVE YEARS, PART II:
THE SWINGING SCINTILLATING DISCOLICIOUS SIGHTS & SOUNDS OF THE LATE ’70S (NOW WITH “FIST FIGHTING” ACTION!)

THE WALL OF TUNES, EPISODE II:
FACEBOOK VS. THE GROOVEWONDEROUS WALL OF TUNES

“It is a dark time for the rebellion…”  Err…I mean…for anyone who confidently believes for one minute that the content they share on social media inherently belongs to them…

The question of whether or not such an open platform as Facebook, for example, is an appropriate, healthy, protected means for expressing one’s most personal thoughts and innermost feelings is a legitimate one, deserving of exploration – which I plan to do to no small degree right now as it pertains to my decision to create THE WALL OF TUNES.

First of all, Mark Zuckerberg is a skeevy, serpentine, amoral sociopath and Facebook’s dubious, ambiguous public policies regarding “fair use” of the intellectual property of their users is troubling, at best.  Knowing that the average user is generally either pretty trusting or numbed by ambivalence – at any rate, lacking the time and will to sift through the ultra-fine print of the voluminous Facebook user agreement – let’s just assume that we all surrender ownership of everything we post the very second we press “accept.”  Our pictures, stories, comments and reactions – everything – ultimately belongs to them as blood payment for the “free” service they provide.  However the lawyers the money behind Facebook frame things, the ultimate truth is that this practice is a hustle; an exploitation.  They are like mobsters who, rather than using information as leverage to extort money or “favors” from their “marks,” have been publicly discovered to be guilty of selling it off outright to corporate data farms and God knows what else. …And then those entities, in turn, without our express permission, use that information for their own financial benefit…  And on and on and on it goes.  It’s not just Facebook that does this (remember those tracking “cookies” online shops insert in your browsers…?), but that doesn’t make the practice any less sucky.  As we all should know by now, terms such as “right” and “wrong” are complete abstracts where the law is concerned.  The money makes sure of that.  

If I’m pouring the essence of my singular mental-spiritual stew into anything, I want reasonable assurance that my intellectual property is legally my own and no one else’s – until I EXPRESSLY SAY otherwise; common, acceptable exceptions being contractual payment for commissioned works, proper employment agreements, donations for charity, etc.

Moving forward…

For years, like so many of us, I have used Facebook like a public journal through which my alternately passionate and passing intimate thoughts and opinions about subjects ranging from family to music to politics are cathartically shared with “friends,” far and wide.  Of late, for reasons discussed in the diatribe contained in the preceding paragraphs and beyond, I’ve questioned whether social media was a suitable vehicle for this kind of elaborate self-expression.  …A forum for sharing a few proud family moments, pet pics and brief quips, sure, but – as anyone who has really known me would appreciate and understand – I’m not really a chit-chat kind of guy.  If interested at all, I almost always want to dig deeper, regardless of the subject…to the point of distraction.  If a conversation isn’t evolving beyond a congenial, unoffending passing of time, wherein neither participant is likely to walk away any the wiser, I often don’t feel that I have a lot to contribute and grow quiet.  Of course, there is also the possibility that whoever I’m chatting with will pay a mighty price for making the mistake of humoring my tendency to blather on endlessly about…whatever (…as you, my audience are now discovering), but I digress…

Sensing my growing dissatisfaction with Facebook and it’s innate inadequacies, THE WALL OF TUNES was conceived to serve as a new primary online outlet (dumping ground) for speaking in-depth about the subjects I’m passionate about, principally life and music, music and life.  Uninterested in playing the part of yet another heavily biased hipster-cool influencer masquerading as an all-knowing beacon of objective authority and professionalism in hopes of capturing the attention of the all-powerful corporate media gods (conglomerates), I’m just here to be me.  I have strong opinions about what qualifies as “good,” “bad,” and so delightfully weird it ascends to the level of sheer genius, but I’m not irrationally immovable and respect the fact that other people like what they like too.

Agree with me.  Disagree with me.  It’s all good.
Write a comment and start a conversation. 

Thanks for coming.  I hope to see you again soon!

Once upon a time (a few days ago), while still firmly devoted to the idea of developing a blog that covered just music, I intended to find a title that related in a very specific, personal manner to this subject that occupies the largest, most favored territory in my pop-culture nerdom.

The Wall of Tunes was always going to be my first choice.

At home, The Wall of Tunes is the formal name given to the out-of-control music collection that occupies 3/4 of one “office” room wall, the main offender, stuffed almost beyond carrying capacity, being the four-foot wide, nearly floor-to-ceiling cd shelf.  The term was originally coined by The Kid many years ago when she was still a just a wee little person.  She made a sign and everything.  It was perfect.  The Mayor, ever the nurturer, graciously humored her man-child hubby’s desire to rescue our music from certain doom in a cold, damp Michigan dungeon and signed off on this reallocation of space to house the music collection.  To this day, I wonder if she fully understood what she was getting into…

Ready to get things started, I began to research the availability of my desired moniker and, sure enough, found that “Wall of Tunes” belonged to an obscure record label based in India. INDIA!!!  They have a Facebook page and everything (many LOUD NOISES)! Awesome. Now what? 

Soooo…

Now desperate for inspiration, further research was done, the court of public opinion was consulted and alternatives were considered; resources ranging from scholarly to completely random.  At one point the term “forte” – used in musical notation to indicate “loud or strong” – struck a chord (pardon the pun) because…well…I tend to like things loud….  However, harboring no illusions that mere ownership of a drum set that I play with all the skill and refinement of a coked-out baboon with ADD makes me a proper musician, this choice seems false.  Seriously, though… My playing isn’t THAT bad, but I’d have to be more knowledgeable about the writing and actual playing of the music to be entitled to the use of such an academic term.

No, something more befitting a devoted fanboy collector is in order.

Hmmmmmmmmm.  What about something completely random like “Ostrich Genitals” or “Underwater Necromancy?”

…Or I could cop my title from a favorite song title? The Flaming Lips always had some great songs like “Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles.” Meh. Kind of long.  Plus, the novelty would only qualify as “original” to folks who aren’t familiar with the song. 

What about something straightforward and literal such as “Vinyl, Plastics & Magnetic Tape?”  Sounds ok, but I can’t get past the redundancy (vinyl IS a plastic).

Names that featured plays on my name were floated, but this won’t do…  Surely, I can find a more imaginative way to brand than the man I refer to as “The Orange Cancer.”

 “Get Off My Lawn?”  I mean… Most of the stuff I’d be talking about would be considered “gramps” music at this point… No.

“Spleen?” Yeeessh! …Sounds like the name of a 90’s grunge clone band.  Negative.

Ahhh, well. SOMETHING else would have come, but my creative process is like that of Dr. House: A LOT of time and many tragic turns might occur before a satisfactory solution pops loose. No thank you.

(Blowing a raspberry). It’s settled then. My first choice it is.

I like “THE WALL OF TUNES.” It’s personal, it’s right and it’s MINE, precious.

Greetings and salutations! Welcome to THE WALL OF TUNES!

Stay tuned!