In my wayward youth, before I accidentally found my true mission in life, I applied for a job at ASCAP – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The position was Deputy Under Assistant to the Radio Associate or some such ridiculous title. The work required successful applicants to tune across the AM/FM dials and identify the music they heard on some official sheet so ASCAP could charge royalties to the station on behalf of itself… and oh yeah, its songwriters. Back then ASCAP was located in a brand-spanking-new building near Lincoln Center and as I got off the elevator and entered their fancy offices, I thought I could hear the walls screaming, like Zero Mostel in The Producers: “I WANT THAT MONEY!”
To get the job you needed a perfect
score on a simple test: listen on headphones to a tape consisting of
15-second snippets of ten songs played consecutively, and correctly
identify each tune. “Piece of cake,” I thought, because I was obsessed
with pop music, in much the way some males get obsessed with baseball
stats. In fact I used to maintain a huge binder containing the weekly Billboard Hot 100 charts. This obsession came with a price though: Billboard
magazine was not cheap. Plus I had to take a subway to midtown to find a
newsstand that carried it. And all because of the late-great Gene
Pitney’s 1962 hit, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
First, let me explain that the man who shot Liberty Valence was not the same man who appeared in a Rolling Stone
magazine ad in 1968. That ad featured a grainy photo of proverbial
long-haired youths lounging in a prison cell listening on headphones to a
tape recorder. Underfoot were discarded signs reading “Grab Hold!” and
“Music Is Love!” I gotta confess to this day I have never seen any such
posters, but maybe they just never made it to Brooklyn. Below the photo
were thumbnails of Columbia Records LP jackets for synthesizer albums
nobody bought. The text alongside the photo of locked-up youth said
stuff like “The Establishment’s Against Adventure,” and “Nothing can
stop great sound makers like Stockhausen.” Above which, in heavy block
letters, appeared this tag: “But The Man can’t bust our music. “
Second, The Man did bust “Liberty Valance,” a song the aging director John Ford so disliked that he nixed its use for the closing credits. The drums were too prominent or something. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I sat through that flick at the ancient Brooklyn Paramount just to hear the song and… nothing!
During
that summer of Liberty Valence, as a pimply teen, I earned some money
house painting for The Man. And if you’ve ever painted or wall-papered
or done some other repetitive manual job, you know the radio is an
essential accessory. So, I fell in love with Liberty Valance. There was
no record player in my ramshackle home, but that hit inspired me to buy a
portable machine for $14.99 and lay down another 69 cents of my
painting money for the 45 RPM. Despite the fact that the record store
had it occupying one of their “Top 10” shelves, Liberty never appeared
on the NYC radio countdown shows – even though the DJs boasted they
based their lists on “local record store sales, NOT on national
trade magazine charts.” How could that be?!
When I learned what a “trade magazine” was, and then saw Liberty Valence sitting at #4 on the Hot 100 of the first Billboard I ever bought, I realized long before Rolling Stone that DJs were THE MAN. Also, THE MAN never mentioned the additional information provided in the Hot 100 lists, like who wrote each song. “Valance” was a Burt Bacharach tune according to Billboard and Bachrach was also listed as a composer for another song I liked on the chart, “Any Day Now,” by R&B legend Chuck Jackson. Wow! I was hooked!
So yeah, I was feeling kind of cocky
as that ASCAP gal explained those fancy headphones. I was particularly
strong on R&B, Country & Western and good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll. I
could also name practically every tune Sinatra had crooned for the past
decade. But Jazz was my weakest link. I knew Brubeck and Miles and some
Coltrane and Parker, but I couldn’t go deep on jazz at all. Jazz was not
Hot 100 stuff.
Well, I needn’t have worried. There was no jazz. But there were
instrumentals. In fact they were ALL sappy instrumentals played by easy
listening keyboard titans Ferrante & Teicher. After a while, the
snippets all started to sound exactly the same. Is that the “Theme from
the Apartment” or the “Love Theme” from Love Story?
The “Theme from Exodus” or the “Theme from Lawrence of Arabia”? The
“Love Theme” from the Jews in Exodus Dancing With the Arabs in Lawrence of Arabia?
The Theme from This, The Love Theme from That, The Theme from the
Theme, etc, etc, etc.
First, let me explain that the man who shot Liberty Valence was not the same man who appeared in a Rolling Stone
magazine ad in 1968. That ad featured a grainy photo of proverbial
long-haired youths lounging in a prison cell listening on headphones to a
tape recorder. Underfoot were discarded signs reading “Grab Hold!” and
“Music Is Love!” I gotta confess to this day I have never seen any such
posters, but maybe they just never made it to Brooklyn. Below the photo
were thumbnails of Columbia Records LP jackets for synthesizer albums
nobody bought. The text alongside the photo of locked-up youth said
stuff like “The Establishment’s Against Adventure,” and “Nothing can
stop great sound makers like Stockhausen.” Above which, in heavy block
letters, appeared this tag: “But The Man can’t bust our music. “Second, The Man did bust “Liberty Valance,” a song the aging director John Ford so disliked that he nixed its use for the closing credits. The drums were too prominent or something. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I sat through that flick at the ancient Brooklyn Paramount just to hear the song and… nothing!
When I learned what a “trade magazine” was, and then saw Liberty Valence sitting at #4 on the Hot 100 of the first Billboard I ever bought, I realized long before Rolling Stone that DJs were THE MAN. Also, THE MAN never mentioned the additional information provided in the Hot 100 lists, like who wrote each song. “Valance” was a Burt Bacharach tune according to Billboard and Bachrach was also listed as a composer for another song I liked on the chart, “Any Day Now,” by R&B legend Chuck Jackson. Wow! I was hooked!
Well, I needn’t have worried. There was no jazz. But there were
instrumentals. In fact they were ALL sappy instrumentals played by easy
listening keyboard titans Ferrante & Teicher. After a while, the
snippets all started to sound exactly the same. Is that the “Theme from
the Apartment” or the “Love Theme” from Love Story?
The “Theme from Exodus” or the “Theme from Lawrence of Arabia”? The
“Love Theme” from the Jews in Exodus Dancing With the Arabs in Lawrence of Arabia?
The Theme from This, The Love Theme from That, The Theme from the
Theme, etc, etc, etc. About five themes in, I knew I was toast.
The Book of Rock Lists
was obviously a seminal work of the 20th century but frankly it could
have been improved by using even more of my far-out lists. My favorite
was “Bizarre Last Records,” which I defined as recordings that were
released prior to an artist’s death but which gained eerie relevance
because of the title. For instance, on the day Hank Williams died, he
had a #1 Country & Western hit, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World
Alive.” And R&B artist Chuck Willis had a two-sided chart hit when
he died, “What Am I Living For?” backed with “I Don’t Want to Hang Up My
Rock & Roll Shoes.” I ranked the records, of course, because
countdowns still rock. Coming in at #1 was Sam Cooke’s masterpiece, “A
Change Is Gonna Come.”
On a whim, I just Googled “Bizarre Last Records” and found only one reference to it: Martha Hume singled it out in a New York Daily News review for her weekly music feature in October 1981. Martha was the late-great wife of Chet Flippo. Isn’t Life Strange? (Moody Blues, peaked at #29 on the Hot 100, June 1972.)
But nine years later my obsession
with pop music eventually found its full flowering when a dear friend,
Debbie Geller, who was taken from this earthly realm way too early,
asked to borrow the crazy pop music lists I had created over the years.
During some wonderful weekend afternoons in my Carroll Street garden
apartment, I laid out my binders and notebooks and we talked about rock
‘n’ roll, imbibing some excellent spirits and spinning many a 45. Debbie
was putting together a book for her boss Dave Marsh at Rolling Stone magazine. It was eventually published the next year as The Book of Rock Lists (updated in 1994 as The New Book of Rock Lists). Full Disclosure: I am mentioned in the acknowledgments before the late-great music journalist Chet Flippo only because the names were in alphabetic order.
The Book of Rock Lists
was obviously a seminal work of the 20th century but frankly it could
have been improved by using even more of my far-out lists. My favorite
was “Bizarre Last Records,” which I defined as recordings that were
released prior to an artist’s death but which gained eerie relevance
because of the title. For instance, on the day Hank Williams died, he
had a #1 Country & Western hit, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World
Alive.” And R&B artist Chuck Willis had a two-sided chart hit when
he died, “What Am I Living For?” backed with “I Don’t Want to Hang Up My
Rock & Roll Shoes.” I ranked the records, of course, because
countdowns still rock. Coming in at #1 was Sam Cooke’s masterpiece, “A
Change Is Gonna Come.” On a whim, I just Googled “Bizarre Last Records” and found only one reference to it: Martha Hume singled it out in a New York Daily News review for her weekly music feature in October 1981. Martha was the late-great wife of Chet Flippo. Isn’t Life Strange? (Moody Blues, peaked at #29 on the Hot 100, June 1972.)
