One Hit No More, No. 95: The Buggles, Seeing the Future in Novels

A visual of the production equipment.

The Hit
MTV didn’t have to think too hard about the first video it aired for its August 1, 1981, launch; the song they chose even handed them a gauntlet to throw down. Released over a year earlier (January 1980), The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” had already topped the charts in 16 countries, giving it title/tune recognition for plenty of people across the Western world. Perhaps even more fittingly, everything about it screamed, “FUTURE.”

With all the bells ‘n’ whistles in its production, Trevor Horn, one of the song’s three co-authors, once estimated that it would take 26 musicians to recreate live. You have to listen real close to hear that; I mostly get the piano, the (theme-appropriate) compression on the vocals, a couple layers of keys, plus the usual accoutrements of your modern (or even post-modern) rock band, aka, the rhythm section; call in a couple back-up singers, and you’d feel like you’ve got it…then again, it goes without saying that some kid with sufficient motivation could recreate the same song on a modern laptop with the right software (and maybe top-line audio equipment). That only increases the “wow-factor” of Horn, guitarist named Bruce Woolley and keyboardist Geoffrey Downes pulling all that together with pre-1980 technology - i.e., before the Commodore 64 was even a glimmer in the consumer computer market’s eye.

Hearing a song that future-drenched reference “tuning into” someone one 1952 a wireless goes a little way to helping place it in time; it feels like the further back you go, the futurists of the time seem to have bigger, brighter, even happier dreams. (while those of us living in the future they imagined know it ain’t all it’s cut out to be). The Buggles composed a nice, bouncy, trebly tune around all that, with a chorus you can sing along to for days, and it parks in your head like any good pop-tune should. That belies the lightly dystopian theme, of course, something inspired by something Horn and Woolley had been reading:

“It was a nod towards technology. Trevor and Bruce were the other two writers of the song, and came up with the initial ideas. They had been reading some very obscure science fiction novels, and then I came in and did all the orchestrations and the intro, the bridge section. Once we got it into that shape, we felt it had some potential, and that was it. It just came about like that.”

That’s Downes describing the song’s creative arc. And, based on what I’ve read, that’s a fair description of the timing. And now…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 35: The Rajah of Rhythm, The King of Swing, Benny Goodman

Know that I know what it took to make him smile....

Somewhere in the middle of 1935, shortly after a strike at Nabisco put NBC’s Let’s Dance on ice and gently flopping as a replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Grill, Benny Goodman reformed an orchestra and took it on a cross-country tour. Or something like that; Wikipedia’stimeline is fer shit.

The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.

After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:

“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”

Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:

“It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off.”

One Hit No More, No. 94: Get the (Arguably Over-Maligned) Knack

In all her glory. (I'm pretty sure.)

The Hit
“It seemed to us that there’s nothing more natural for a rock song than a teenage guy singing about trying to screw a teenage girl.”

And hold that thought. The Knack’s debut album, Get the Knack, went gold in just 13 days - a record at the time, and it’s too much damn work to figure whether that’s still a record - and it sold six million copies within seven weeks. Their label, Capitol Records, held the release of the album’s famous single for two weeks, but all the radio stations that received copies of Get the Knack picked out “My Sharona” almost immediately and without any prompting. Radio built it, in other words, and real damn fast.

For just about everyone except the young fans in Los Angeles who caught their shows at Whiskey and the Troubadour, The Knack’s monster hit came out of nowhere. It’s a funny song when you listen to it closely - even more so when you hear members of the band breakdown their parts in it, as drummer Bruce Gary does in a short video shot in 2004, and the rest of the members did across a three-part video titled, The Knack - About My Sharona (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). It started when backing guitarist/vocalist, Berton Averre, played the famous guitar riff out of the blue at a rehearsal; sooner or later, he slapped out the drum figure on his knees for The Knack’s front-man, Doug Fieger, one borrowed from Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go,” and they passed it off to Gary who made it heavier with some things he carried over from playing in surf-rock bands (e.g., the stutter on the floor and high tom beats). With Prescott Niles’ bass line following the drums in something close to lock-step (until the pre-chorus), all the instruments work to amplify the rhythm: it has melodic elements, of course, but “My Sharona” is a remarkably rhythm-driven song.

Among the young fans who noticed was a young woman named (yes) Sharona Alperin, then 17-years-old and part of an informal fan group that members of the band called The Knackettes. Fieger had a massive crush on her and acknowledges her as his muse for the single…so that’s a 27-year-old man singing about screwing a teenage girl, for those doing the math at home. As Alperin recounts in one part of the About My Sharona doc, the band played it for her one night. She doesn’t mention loving the attention or hating it; as much anything, she talks about it like something she had to take in.

Sharona Alperin was selling real estate when that mini-doc came out. And, according to Fieger’s interview with Classicbands, she was damn good at it. And she and Fieger did get together, but, in keeping with the song, it was more a rush of lust than forever (I kid, I kid. I don't know how long they lasted).

Crash Course Timeline, No. 34: Bing Crosby, American Colossus

His happy place, from what I gather.

“396 chart singles, including roughly 41 No. 1 hits. [Bing] Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of 'White Christmas' extended that streak to 1957."

“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”

“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)

That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”

Now, for how that happened.

He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)

Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.

One Hit No More, No. 93: Nick Lowe, One Hit, Many Legends

Because he thought he'd write his best at 60.

The Hit
I have to guess that most people of a certain age could mumble their way through Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to Be Kind” at their local karaoke joint. It’s a cute little bugger, lyrically, it opens with a nice strummed guitar and I’ve always liked the drumming - you don’t get a lot of one, one-two-three rolls in pop rock, or pub rock in this case - and it’s one of those great tunes that cuddles a tricky theme with a buoyant chorus. Anyone who remembers the video may share the same soft-spot I do for what they did in the video for the “Ooh-oooh-woo-oooh-wooo” that leads into the bridge…could be why it also struck me as a cute song.

No great stories attach to the writing of it, though it bears noting that Lowe first played it in his second band, Brinsley Schwarz. Oh, and they cut clips from Lowe’s 1979 wedding to Carlene Carter into the video…of the legendary Carter/Cash family. And I mean literally legendary. I tried to find Johnny Cash in the footage, but no luck so far.

Nick Lowe never wrote a ton of hits, but, holy shit, did the man live a life…

The Rest of the Story
…by which I mean his father was a RAF pilot (and eventually a wing commander), and one trusted enough to serve a stint in Jordan. Though born on Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 1949, Lowe spent enough of his childhood in Jordan to have memories of play-dates with the future King Hussein. Lowe passes on some of those memories in a whale of a 2018 Rolling Stone retrospective, including flying in the back of an old WWII era plane seated at the back with his mom and dad looking down at clear-blue skies while his dad let the auto-pilot do the driving.

Before all that, and the war, both of Lowe’s parents played and performed, his father as a pianist (nicknamed “the Dudenville” and wearing short trousers a la AC-DC’s Angus Young), his mother as a dancer. When he was old enough, his mother taught him some chords on a ukulele and gave him access to their record collection, from which he absorbed Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and, young Nick’s personal favorite, Tennessee Ernie Ford.

From there, the story fast-forwards to Lowe’s first band(s). He first joined an act called Kippington Lodge, a band started by a friend from his school days, Brinsley Schwarz. Lowe actually blew up that first band by insisting they fire all the session musicians and play themselves, but that pales against the disaster engineered by their management - the aptly-named Famepushers Ltd. - after they renamed themselves Brinsley Schwarz in 1969. With an eye to making a splash Famepushers booked the band at New York’s Filmore East, opening for Van Morrison and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and flew them and a bunch of music journalists in for the event…which flopped. They returned to the London pub-rock circuit and the grunt work of paying dues.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 33: Rudy Vallee, the OG Crooner

How his fans saw him, I figure.

People of earlier generations may know Rudy Vallee (there’s an accent aigu over the first “e,” for what it’s worth), born Hubert Prior Vallee, as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg in the old Adam West Batman series; even earlier generations may recall him from supporting roles in 1940s films like The Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours, The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, or even 1955’s Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, a sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both based on novels by Anita Loos.

But Vallee started elsewhere - and as something entirely bigger. From a very brief biography from the New England Historical Society:

“Women swooned when he would show his face in public and a crowd followed him everywhere. Watching his popularity, jokers said his effect on women made him a national menace.”

Most sources call Rudy Vallee one of America’s first crooners - if, inexplicably, without naming any other pretenders to that velvet crown. He was the phenomenon of Beatlemania before the Beatles, but he captured his audience through a national radio show rather than television. And yet Vallee relied on technology as much as anyone who came before him, if not more. Vallee need a microphone to reach the back of a large venue; even then, he often had to sing through a megaphone to make his “thin, wavering tenor voice” audible over the masses of flappers who screamed through his shows. (An old Betty Boop cartoon lampooned the megaphone.) On the other hand, that same gentle voice worked wonders on the radio, creating a personal, intimate rapport with his listeners, letting them get lost in the illusion that he was “coaxing, pleading and at the same time adoring the invisible one to whom his song is attuned.”

In a 1958 television interview with Mike Wallace (fascinating just for what it looks like), one that took place a couple decades after his peak radio fame, Vallee was oddly defensive about the female adulation, insisting that he saw plenty of men in his audiences. As much as he resisted, Vallee’s reluctance doesn’t make sense against the record. That New England Historical Society bio confirmed the same while hinting at some other theories, several of which Wallace brought up, all of which Vallee either denied or pushed back against: