One Hit No More, No. 63: Dancing in the Moonlight, Darkness and Light

Closer to this. Please.

The Hit
You know “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Everybody knows “Dancing in the Moonlight.” Then again, I always thought another band made it, even if I could never say who exactly. (I keep flashing to Lovin’ Spoonful, but I’ve listened to enough of them to know better.)

From those first fat, sparkling treble keys, it’s a happy little song. The keyboards keep pulsing warmth throughout the track, the bass seems like it’s only there to keep time and add a bubbly counter-melody; per the song, the vocals “keep things loose” and have the happy easy-going mood of someone inviting you to a party. And that party definitely takes place at the height of summer - or some place that’s always warm - where you’ll never get caught out by a sudden drop in temperature. The guy who wrote it, Sherman Kelly, calls the song exactly what it sounds like: a celebration.

Kelly wrote that song on his own and passed through a couple of bands - e.g., Boffalongo and, more obscure, High Broom - but it ultimately landed with a band made up of American ex-patriates studying, playing and slumming in Paris, France in the early 1970s. Kelly’s brother, Wells Kelly, was the guy who brought it to a couple members of King Harvest. Well, sort of…

Per a 2020 remembrance in Vinyl Dialogues, both of the Kelly brothers briefly played in Boffalongo with two other guys, one named Dave “Doc” Robinson and another named Larry Hoppen (who later formed Orleans with Wells Kelly). Boffalongo actually recorded “Dancing in the Moonlight” first, and with Sherman Kelly on vocals - who, incidentally, tells a funny story about someone feeding him one snort of cocaine after another to get him through the vocals, only that didn’t help, but rather did the opposite (“And the producers would give me more cocaine to keep me doing takes until my voice was so distorted and so weird”; Sherman Kelly had the guts to quote a clever something a critic once said about his voice: “As a singer, Sherman Kelly is not too bad of a songwriter.”) The Vinyl Dialogues piece gets to that, but only after re-telling the horror story that inspired the song.

Back in the late-60s, Sherman Kelly, his girlfriend and a bunch of friends had settled in the U.S. Virgin Islands, running a bar or some such. One day, they decided to sail to St. Croix, only Kelly and his girlfriend (Adrienne, I believe) got horribly seasick at the crossing. They decided against spending another night on the boat and tried to check into a hotel…only Kelly forgot his wallet on the boat. They begged the hotelier to let them stay and settle up in the morning, but he asked a vile price - i.e., he’d do it if Adrienne would have sex with him - so they decided to sleep on the beach. Where things went so horribly fucking worse.

One Hit No More, No. 62: Regular Guys in the Looking Glass

Guys! I have an idea...

The Hit
If you didn’t know “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” before you saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, you knew it before the final credits rolled, if only because you heard it twice by then. The guy who wrote the song, Elliot Lurie, liked how the song fit both times and, while I thought I read somewhere that Kurt Russell (who starred in the movie as Ego) called it the best song ever, it was his character (again, Ego) who made that call. Still, that’s high praise from a god. Or a planet. Or whatever.

That said, Lurie mentioned one particular thing he appreciated to the Hollywood Reporter:

“It was a story song, and the band I was with, Looking Glass, we were hoping and praying for a hit record that people would play in their convertibles with the tops down.”

The way James Gunn (right?) used the song doesn’t stray so far from the original story/intent of it. Lurie borrowed the name of a high school sweetheart named Randye when he started writing it, but he thought the name too gender-neutral for a lyric. Once the inspiration hit to make it a song about a barmaid who poured drinks for and captured the hearts of lonely sailors, “Brandy” struck him as a natural fit. And, just like in the movie, it’s a tale of heartbreak:

“’Brandy,’ as Lurie noted, was basically the tale of a barmaid in a busy seaport town. As in so many songs before and since, she longs for her true love, but for him, nothing could match the lure of the wide-open sea."

A couple of tales attach to “Brandy,” one true - the timing of its release forced Barry Manilow to change the name of a famous hit to “Mandy” - the other, the one about a “spinster” named Mary Ellis, not true. A New Jersey legend claims that, at the end of “a very hot romance,” a sailor promised Mary Ellis that he’d come back to marry her. Her never returned, of course, and poor Mary left nothing behind but the tombstone with her name on it. Lurie knew nothing about that legend when he wrote the song at the age of 20 and, as he explained to The Tennessean in 2016, he had a pretty simple songwriting process of playing some chords and free associating from there.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 8: Ethel Waters' Succession of Hard Times

Barely north of her prime...

“Life isn’t the easiest thing, but if we can learn to do more laughing about it, it won’t weigh so heavily on us.”

Ethel Waters should have never had a chance in the world, but she reigned as one of the leading performers of the 1920s and opened doors for black Americans across the emerging media of the decades that followed. She caught hell for opening a few of them - from black Americans, specifically - but her career embodied the progress and stumbles of an evolving American culture, both pop and otherwise.

Because so much of Waters’ story takes place after the 20s, placing her in that decade feels a little like cheating - i.e., since so many of her achievements came after 1930, why include her while pushing a legend like Duke Ellington to the 1930s? I don’t have a good answer for that beyond, well, I made a choice.

Ethel Waters came into the world in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, but not into a stable family. Her birth resulted from the rape of her mother, Louise Anderson, by a family acquaintance, John Waters, who happened to be a pianist. Her mother passed her to her grandmother, a housemaid who provided her less a home than a rapid succession of places where she happened to live. Waters married, and poorly, at the disturbing age of 13, but had the sense and confidence to leave her abusive husband before too long. As the rest of her life proved, she knew how to survive. Still, and not surprisingly, she described growing up in bitter terms:

“I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.”

Her career started while she lived in Philadelphia, supporting herself as a maid at a hotel. One night, Waters attended a costume party at a nightclub and somehow got an opportunity to sing. She nailed her unplanned debut and parlayed that to performing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theater earning $10/week, twice as much as she did as a maid (Wikipedia’s entry notes that her managers stole her tips, so who knows what she might have earned). That stumble into show business started a long, fraught career that continued somewhere between A-List and B-List until the 1950s.

One Hit No More, No. 61: Clint Holmes and the Playground Is in the Damn Lounge

Yep, real damn place.

The Hit
I recognized intro to “The Playground in My Mind” the second I heard it. Had someone asked me cold where it came from, I’d say something like…shit, I don’t know, Sesame Street? Some weird damn kids’ program I’d forgotten from the 70s? Happily, the real story makes far less sense.

A guy named Clint Holmes recorded that saccharine and literally escapist trifle. It has its good parts - e.g., I like the piano - but, generally, it’s a vicious little earworm that chokes on kid vocals. And, for the record, Holmes had nothing to do with its creation. A New Yorker named Paul Vance caught him performing at the Paradise Island Hotel while vacationing in Nassau and, adding together a lounge-singer and that song, somehow came up with “four” (i.e., he thought it added up). Holmes recalled his skepticism in an interview with Classic Bands (best source for all this, btw):

“He had a couple of songs. I didn't particularly like the ‘My Name Is Michael’ song. I thought it was cutesy. The other song he had was a song called ‘There's No Fortune In My Future Without You,’ which was a little closer to where I really thought I ought to be recording.”

Hold that last thought. Vance got one thing right: he had written a hit, one that soared as high as No. 2 on the 1972 Billboard chart.

For good or ill - mostly the former, happily - it stranded Holmes professionally. He didn’t have anyone he really worked with, for one, but it also didn’t sound like anything else he did day-to-day. While he performed it on American Bandstand and variety vehicles like Merv Griffin and the Mike Douglas Show, Holmes never toured. As it happens, he was more of a residency kind of performer…

The Rest of the Story
Clint Holmes was born in Bournemouth, England in 1946, but his family later relocated to the United States - a tiny town called Farnham, New York, specifically. His parents had roots in the arts - his mother was an English opera singer, his father a Black jazz musician - but other interviews (e.g., a 2017 interview with Las Vegas’ KNPR) answered the question of where a jazz musician and an opera singer would perform in a town of 500: they didn’t. While it’s unclear what his mother did for a living, Holmes’ father, Edward Louis Holmes, commuted to nearby Buffalo, New York, where he worked a variety of jobs - working in steel, driving garbage trucks, working as a janitor. His father found something else in Buffalo, too: jazz clubs.

One Hit No More, No. 60: Arlo Guthrie, Alice, Steve & Pete

These shows sounded like a blast...

The Hit
I’d heard “The City of New Orleans” before last week - but, of course, everyone has - only I never knew it was Arlo Guthrie singing it. As it happens, he did and he didn’t (then again, so did Bob Denver (hold that thought), The Highwaymen, Judy Collins, and Willie Nelson solo).

A young folk singer Guthrie knew named Steve Goodman actually wrote it. Goodman was a friend of Guthrie’s - and, as he noted in Part 2 of an interview* with American Songwriter, one he esteemed highly - a good guitar player and “an awesome picker” to boot. (* here are links to Part 1 and Part 3 of that interview; again, you’ll learn more about Arlo Guthrie by reading those three than you will be reading this, different missions, etc.). By 1972 and given his birth-right, Guthrie had name recognition while Goodman did not, so Guthrie decided to put that to work to boost Goodman. After gushing a little more about Goodman’s character and personality, Guthrie recalls:

“That’s what made me take his demo, and put it on my piano with a lead sheet, and work through it, and it was because I loved Goodman himself.”

The happy, wistful ode to rail travel (highly recommended, btw) in which professional/family histories of rail-workers mingle with the strange, sudden friendliness that just sort of happens when you take the same, ponderous ride with a bunch of people. The time ticks away at a clip that matches coming into and leaving a rail station, steady, patient, and feeling like it’ll never stop, while warm and cozy vocals and instruments beam over it; I caught the trebles in the chorus only later in the week and they’re just gorgeous.

It wasn’t a massive hit for Guthrie - No. 4 on Billboard’s Easy Listening charts, No. 18 on the big Billboard - but it was the only one he ever recorded. And Wikipedia’s history of the song tells a colder version of how it came to Guthrie:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 7: Al Jolson & His Various Demons

A final tribute to a massive ego.

Al Jolson was a massive presence of the 1920s, which makes it hard to know where to begin with him. One could mention him starring in the first “talkie” - 1927’s The Jazz Singer, of course, a role that, though not written for him, seemed tailor-made to his real-life story. There’s also his years-long use of blackface, the odious 19th century artistic relic that he carried to new heights in the 20th century. As an essay posted to Ferris University’s website put it:

“If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson. Many other 20th-century performers from Shirley Temple to Bing Crosby donned the makeup for various roles, but Jolson adopted it as a core part of his public persona.”

After a little reading and a lot of thought, calling him America’s first rock star best translates Al Jolson for a modern audience: several times larger than life, consumed by ego, and burning bridges all the way. They made a movie called The Jolson Story in 1947, but his personal history would have posed one hell of a challenge to making Jolson sympathetic.

Jolson was born Asa Yoelson circa 1886 in Seredzius, Kovno Governate, Russian Empire, aka, what is now Lithuania. Because Russia wasn’t the gentlest place for Jews (pogroms, etc.), his father Moses Yoelson, a rabbi and a cantor, made arrangements to relocate to the U.S., first on his own to get settled then to send for his family. (The best source for this period was a site called Musicals 101; just to note it, you’ll learn more from their four-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) than you will reading this.) His wife Naomi brought over Asa and his three siblings - two sisters, Rose and Etta (both bit players in his story) and his older brother Hirsch (highly relevant) - and the family planted roots in Washington D.C…for as long as Naomi kept them planted. Jolson’s mother died when he was 10, an event that, by every account I read, shattered Jolson; as Musical 101 puts it, “Jolson, for all his tough, earthy exterior, would remain an emotional child for the rest of his life.”

Despite Moses Yoelson’s dreams that both boys would follow him into the family business, they were busking on DC street corners as early as 1897; they even Americanized their names to Harry and Al. When Harry moved to New York to get into show business, Al ran away to join him (they both ran away a lot, as it happened); the ragtime bug had bit them both. Wikipedia’s history of Jolson mentions some time spent in the circus, but the Jolson brothers eventually teamed up to form a vaudeville act with a wheelchair-bound comic named Joe Palmer. While accounts vary on the details - particularly, on what made the act fall apart - they all agree that Al left the other two. It’s what happened next that changed Al Jolson’s life.

One Hit No More, No. 59: Timmy Thomas, One-Man Global Ambassador

Carrying on a proud tradition.

The Hit
Another chapter, another journey into the unknown; not even my oldies-radio-lovin’ wife had heard Timmy Thomas’ 1972 hit, “We Cant’ We Live Together.” That said, millions of young people have heard the tune without realizing it. (Quality foreshadowing…)

It opens with a percussive tapping. Pulses on an electric organ come in just over ten seconds in and proceeds to soar over it (or surf on it?) that sound. The longer the intro runs (it is not short), the more it feels thoughtful, even meditative, like an idea turning over in someone’s mind. The song continues - short, tense bursts from the electric organ here, some mellow grounding tones there - and then the vocals come in to pose the plaintive, troubled question: “Why Can’t We Live Together.” Call it a plea playing over a groove.

I’ll let Timmy Thomas tell the origin story. This comes from a 2015 interview with Spin Magazine on another big moment in his career:

“And then after that, put it on this little tape, and went to WEBF, which was a local radio station. And they played local artists then… they played it, and the phones lit up. They said ‘Man, who is that?’ And I did it as a one-man band! That was my foot playing bass, that was my left-hand playing guitar… Could never believe that as a one-man band, something like that would’ve been played that much. But I do believe that the world was ready to start changing a little bit. And that song made the change.”

One man alone in a room doing it all. Timmy Thomas was ahead of his time in a couple ways.

The Rest of the Story
Timothy E. Thomas came into this world in 1944, born in Indiana. He started in music with a band called Phillip & the Faithfuls, who released a string of singles in the mid-1960s (represented on the sampler by “Love Me” and “Rhythm Marie”) After that project dried up, he became a session musician in Memphis (and, from another source, a school administrator) while releasing more material on the side - e.g., “Have Some Boogaloo” and “It’s My Life” (snappy little cover) - on a local label called Goldwax Records. Thomas never stopped plugging away at his side gig; in fact, he went in even harder after another position in education moved him to Miami, Florida, opening a nightclub on the corner of 46th & Collins. Which is where things took off for him.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 6: Jimmie Rodgers, Tuberculosis & YOLO

Died at 36. Nuts.

By the time he turned 13, Jimmie Rodgers had twice tried to organize musical road shows, only to get retrieved by his father both times; he even got stranded with at least one of those. It’s not surprising, in other words, that Rodgers eventually worked as an entertainer. The real shock is how long he lasted working as a railroad brakeman.

Born in 1897, in either Meridian, Mississippi or Geiger, Alabama, Rodgers grew up in a large family that alternately fractured and diminished after his mother died when he was between six and seven years old. After some shuffling around, Rodgers moved back to Meridian to live with that same father, Aaron Rodgers (different Aaron Rodgers), who finished raising him and set him up with work on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. The younger Rodgers started as a water boy, but later rose to the occupation of brakeman. Hence, his nom du career: The Singing Brakeman.

His Wikipedia entry talks about how Rodgers continued his musical education with help from railworkers and “hobos.” It also speculates that he picked up “work chants” by listening to the black employees of the rail-lines who maintained the railroads before machines took over - and he was certainly open-minded enough to do that. For a man with stars in his eyes, Rodgers stuck with his career on the railroad for a surprisingly long time. Famous people, even the eventually famous, get that final “nudge” from all kinds of places: in Jimmie Rodgers’ case, that nudge came with a tuberculosis diagnosis at age 27 (in 1924).

It wasn’t a clean break. He attempted another traveling show, only to see his tent destroyed by a cyclone; Rodgers returned to the railroad after that, relocating as far West as Arizona (on the theory that drier climes would help with the TB; he really did try) - but, by 1927, he returned once more to Meridian and finally and fully committed to a career in music.

It started with a free radio show with Charlotte, North Carolina’s WWNC. He recruited a band from Tennessee called the Tenneva Ramblers and, by the second half of 1927, he/they performed a weekly slot on the station - an unpaid gig, according to his Country Music Hall of Fame biography notes. The band performed as the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers (hold that thought) and, per the bio posted on the Jimmie Rodgers Foundation, they didn’t sound like anything else on the local radio. It buzzed loudly enough for one area columnist to write: “Whoever that fellow is, he either is a winner or he is going to be.” Because the radio show didn’t pay, Rodgers and the Tenneva Ramblers played resorts to make some scratch.