One Hit No More, No. 86: Meri Wilson & Her Telephone Man

The Hit
The story of how Meri Wilson’s “Telephone Man” stumbled into daylight is without question the most interesting thing about it, so I’ll start there.

The tangled paths of her life (see below) led her to performing as the lead in a trio that played cabaret clubs Dallas, TX with names like Arthur’s Papillion, and (so good), Daddy’s Money. Somebody spotted her at one of them - Daddy’s Money, which, according to a site simply called Jon Kutner, was/is a Texas restaurant chain (indirectly confirmed), not a cabaret - and sources vary as to who saw her first: an obituary (mild spoiler) in Variety names producer Owen Castleman; Wikipedia goes with Jim Rutledge, the former front-man for a band called Bloodrock (a taste of them), who then introduced Wilson to Castleman; Jon Kutner provides the fullest story - and quotes Wilson directly (or claims to) - so I’m letting that be my truth on the question.

In Jon Kutner’s telling, the owner of the Daddy’s Money chain saw Wilson performing in Atlanta (Wikipediaagrees here, flagging “Underground Atlanta), liked what he heard, and told her to move to Texas to perform there. She’d been working some originals into her act and, with the encouragement of her backing band, she started playing a goofy (and true) little tune about an affair with an AT&T engineer. It got a decent reception from audiences, a completely different producer named Allen Reynolds among them, who recorded the first demo. That version was stripped down to acapella backed by finger-snaps, and it went nowhere. This circles back to the story noted above, only Jon Kutner agrees with Variety that Castleman saw her first, while calling Owen “Boomer” Castleman a musician, not a producer (and Wikipedia is the sole source for the nickname, “Boomer”).

That distinction between musician versus producer works better with the Jon Kutner narrative because, after getting “laughed out the door” by 17 different labels, Castleman decided to set up his own label, BNA, to market Wilson’s song. He hit up radio stations and record stores all over Texas, sometimes with Wilson tagging along. She recalled one occasion where they walked into a record store and heard “Telephone Man” playing over the speakers from a radio station, at which point they both called that station over and over pretending to be listeners begging to hear the song one more time. A little low-tech guerrilla marketing never hurt anyone’s career…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 24: The Cotton Club and The Duke

Hail, hail, the band's all here.

At some unknown date in 1923, but shortly after getting out of Sing Sing, a “prominent” bootlegger/gangster named Owney Madden bought a night club on the upper floor of a building on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and renamed it the Cotton Club. It wouldn’t hit its prime for a couple years, but the venue would become synonymous with the Jazz era, and the glamor that surrounded it. For all the careers it launched and sustained - beyond counting, honestly, including the artist/legend featured in this post - life on the talent side of the stage looked very different from what audiences saw.

First, it’s easy to forget that the Jazz era coincided with Prohibition - a function of how many people ignored it, I imagine. Wikipedia’s entry on the Cotton Club notes that the authorities shut it down for selling liquor in 1925, but that’s the only hint that the authorities cared what went on inside. Madden plied the club’s well-to-do clientele with “his #1 beer” and a schedule of the biggest entertainers of the 1920s. It even hosted "celebrity nights" to give audiences a shot at something fresh, which expanded the baseline who’s who list to include (lifted straight from Wikipedia): Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.

The regular programming at Cotton Club patrons were shows called “musical revues,” extended performances that featured singers, dancers, and comedians, all of it anchored with music by the house orchestra at the time. I imagine a space between vaudeville and the (early) modern variety shows aired on TV when I was a knee-high, only live and on stage. A guy named Andy Preer led the first orchestra, and for a while (1923-27), but the Internet recalls him only dimly. This was the musical revue's hey-day, when the hip and swell considered it a hot ticket, a detail that only makes the relationship between the entertainers and the entertained more coarse and distasteful. First, some framing:

“[The Cotton Club] reproduced the racist imagery of the era, often depicting black people as savages in exotic jungles or as ‘darkies’ in the plantation South. The menu depicts this imagery, with illustrations done by Julian Harrison, showing naked black men and women dancing around a drum in the jungle. Tribal mask illustrations make up the border of the menu.”

In keeping with that theme, the Cotton Club literally segregated the (largely? entirely?) black talent from its white clientele. The black singers, musicians and dancers - all of the latter cast to fit the “tall, tan and terrific” profile; “at least 5'6" tall, light-skinned, and under 21 years of age” - had to enter through a separate entrance and were barred from mingling with guests in the club itself. The superintendent’s basement at 646 Lenox was either offered or found as a place for the entertainers’ after-parties, “where they imbibed corn whiskey, peach brandy and marijuana.” Everything else reeked of spectacle and a cultural tourism bordering on outright exploitation. Wikipedia cobbled together a paraphrase of Langston Hughes’ contemporary notes:

One Hit No More, No. 85: Debby Boone Lights Up Everyone's Life

Snapshot from the origin story.

The Hit
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.

It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.

Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:

“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”

Now, from Boone's perspective:

One Hit No More, No. 84: Dean Friedman and His Date with "Ariel"

The Hit
My guess is that, if someone told you “Ariel” was a Billy Joel song, you’d ask why his voice sounds off. It actually came from a guy named Dean Friedman, who, near as I can tell existed in his own orbit, but that loping bass/piano on the bottom and the structure/phrasing of the lyrics does sound very much of the times (1977).

It’s a cute little vignette, “Ariel.” A tale of a lazy day set in suburbia where boy-meets-girl, they do some random stuff and wind up doing it, it has a day in the life feel. It has surprisingly open references of drug use - which stand out, because I haven’t heard many in this series - plus highly-local shout-outs to the “deep in the bosom of suburbia” where Friedman grew up, Paramus, New Jersey - e.g., the waterfall at Paramus Park, the young girl in the song is collecting money for an area radio station and, at the song’s climax, when the new couple makes love “to the sound of bombs bursting in air” as “channel 2” (WCBS-TV) signs off for the night. Can’t think of the last time I heard someone talk about a channel signing for the night…

Asked about the inspiration for the song in an interview with the UK-based Songwriting Magazine - e.g., was there a real “Ariel” in his past? - Friedman gave an answer that gives a fair impression of everything else I heard by him:

“Actually it was sort of a composite story of teenage crushes mashed together. I was self-conscious at first, having written it, because, in terms of the plot, nothing much happens – boy meets girl, they go on a date and end up making out in front of the television. That’s such a typical suburban scene, I was worried there wasn’t enough drama going on. That was until I played it to some teenage girls on the block, and they accused me of going through their diaries! So it occurred to me that, even though it was a simple story, it was infused with detail so it was recognisable to a lot of people. I think that’s what helped it become the hit that it was.”

And, for people interested in the mechanics of a song:

“[‘Ariel’] was something I was writing when I had my first access to a TEAC four-track tape deck, and I took advantage of that by doing a lot of multi-tracking and stacking up my vocals. So it was the technology that inspired me to develop what became the chorus, with all the layered harmonies.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”

One Hit No More, No. 83: Ram Jam & the Twice-Complicated Tale of Black Betty

The forgotten album, perfect framing.

The Hit
Because I saw it kicking around the internet a few years back, it feels fitting to start with the video for Ram Jam’s “Black Betty.” Most of the feedback I read trafficked in the “can you believe this shit?” vein - and the “star” of the video, Bill Bartlett, would very likely nod along to the commentary. As he noted in an absolutely delightful 2021 interview over the phone with a (striving) musician/(mostly) guy from Indiana named Ted Wray on a site called Steve Hoffman Music Forums, Bartlett was in New York working on Ram Jam’s debut album when he got a call directing him to show up at the studio in the morning, from whence they’d go to Hicksville, Long Island, NY, for a video shoot for “an English client.” Bartlett never saw so much as a play-back of the video until decades later, when the hygienists at a dentist’s office in Oxford, Ohio pulled it up and played it for him.

As Bartlett noted in the same video, the “Ram Jam” in the video wasn’t even the Ram Jam that played it - and I’ll get to that. First, more about the song.

I think most people know (or, like me, think they know) that Lead Belly recorded “Black Betty” back in 1939. According to research done by the interviewer for a 2017 audio interview on a site called RockTalkUSA with another Ram Jam member, Rick Santoro, the roots of the song dip back into the 18th century; it was a marching cadence back then and, fun twist, possibly about a flintlock rifle. Wikipedia’s entry on the song notes (the fairly obvious) that Lead Belly’s wasn’t even the first recorded blues version; musicologist/folklorist, Alan Lomax, first recorded a version by James “Iron Head” Baker at a Texas penitentiary in 1933: more to the point, both of those guys (think of the act they could have formed, but for prison) played a blues songs that knocked around for decades before the 1930s, with one player passing it on to another over all those years. Lead Belly (covered in a separate post/project) was just the first guy to copyright it. Back to the late 1970s…

Bartlett, who has a busy backstory all on his own, got hooked into a version of “Black Betty” played by the folk trio, Kerner, Ray and Glover (who covered Lead Belly's original 1:00 cut). Per a little history site hosted by Miami University called (per the url?) Project Oxford, he liked the song, but “thought there wasn’t enough to it.” So, he added some hand-claps larded it with guitar riffs, and, and generally worked it up with the members of his college-bar-band at the time, Starstruck (or Star Struck). The band released the song on their own label (TruckStar; clever) and started playing it at their shows. The reception reached a point where the crowd would call for “Black Betty” every time they played. Before long, it became a regional hit. Shortly thereafter, calls came in from industry people in New York…

Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.

One Hit No More, No. 82: "Hutch" Sings (Rather Nicely Too)

Knowing this happened? Totally worth it.

The Hit
“It wasn’t that good the first time, it just caught the imagination and everyone liked the car. I liked the car. Maybe the car could make a comeback but I don’t think Paul and I could run around like we used to.”
- David Soul, on Starsky & Hutch

That’s what David “Hutch” Soul had to say about the show that made his name to the Sunday Postsometime in 2019. He remains friends with his co-stars, Paul Michael “Starsky” Glaser and Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas - as demonstrated in this lightly dodgy 2017 interview on some British morning show - but his ambivalence about the series shines through every time he talks about how he can’t escape the character. Some conjugation of the word “haunt” comes up at least twice...

For all his complaints, Soul accepts that his day-job saved him (and Glaser, for that matter) from "taking part-time jobs as waiters" and bought him some time and comfort to get in the studio with Tony Macaulay where he reconnected with his first love, music. The pair used the song “Don’t Give Up on Us” (released in 1977), and it topped charts around the world - including reaching No. 1 on the U.S. charts (related, and fun stuff, we're in the music video era by this time; see the link). That sincere 'n' sappy tune comes from the singer-songwriter genre - which, as I now know, is just another name for easy-listening rock - but it does deliver a surprise with the pitch and quality of Soul’s vocals. That is not the key you expect from an undercover cop, or even a guy who just plays one on TV.

The rest of it is pretty standard 70s fare - e.g., strings and violins add a little dimension and sepia-toned production, warm tones, etc. David Soul’s career, on the other hand, throws a couple curves.

The Rest of the Story
David Richard Solberg (and how damn good is “Soul” for a stage-name?) was born to a teacher and a Lutheran minister in Chicago, Illinois in 1943. Due to his father’s involvement with Lutheran World Relief, Soul’s family moved around a lot - including seven years spent rebuilding post-Nazi Germany. As such, it’s hardly surprising that Soul wound up at someplace like Mexico City’s University of the Americas when the time came to strike out on his own. Wikipedia says he never earned a degree (see the sidebar), but, as it did for so many, college changed his life courtesy of to the fellow students who introduced him to the guitar.