Category: Music

Gary and Jerry

By 1965, Dean Martin’s career was still swinging, but Jerry Lewis was already done. Like Milton Berle, Lewis spent the rest of his life running on fumes from his past, but he had the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon every Labor Day to keep him in public view.

I don’t know if Jerry resented the success of his son Gary, whose career, let’s be honest, had been arranged by his dad. The thing is, like Dean Martin, Gary was what Jerry wasn’t — friendly, likeable and easy-going. Somewhere along the way, Jerry had become an attention-seeking jerk, in a world that was interested in watching him only in the way it couldn’t resist a car wreck on the highway.

The contrast between Lewis and Lewis was apparent from the start of Gary’s career, as seen in this remarkable video from 1965, with Jerry trying to find fans in his son’s audience. The show is an amazing artifact of a never-to-be-duplicated era. The entertainment is an uneasy balance of old school versus new. The fulfillment of what the Beatles had begun was a happening thing. It’s Hullabaloo, as seen in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood!

Buddy Battles the Suit

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog is no longer being updated, but thankfully its uniquely informative and entertaining content is still online. On this page is the story behind Buddy Holly doing an end run around Paul Cohen, the a-hole who ran Decca Records at the time.

Holly called Cohen with a request, and Buddy was told he’s screwed. Then Cohen immediately turned around and asked Buddy for his trust! Listen for yourself, as recorded by Buddy, and you can imagine what his thoughts were. Holly’s lack of respect for Cohen, by calling him Paul, is a good indicator.

Bridging the Generation Gap

1967! The year that my favorite musical genre — Psychedelia — came into its own. Youth culture was taking over! The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix joined the Beatles and the Stones on the Pop charts. But there was still plenty of music for adult contemporary audiences.

On ABC-TV that year was a remarkable special. The show was a tribute to the songs of Rodgers and Hart, when Hart had been dead for almost 25 years. It featured a one-of-a-kind lineup of performers:

  • Bobby Darin
  • Petula Clark
  • The Mamas and the Papas
  • The Supremes
  • Count Basie
  • The Doodletown Pipers

Petula, The Mamas and the Papas, and The Supremes had hits in ’67 that kids liked, but they were also acceptable to a middle-aged audience. The Doodletown Pipers were a group of TV singers in the 60’s.

Petula’s duets with Darin are very nice. Bobby was obviously very happy to be singing with Count Basie.

Note: Embedding isn’t allowed for the first video, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube. Don’t know why the same requirement wasn’t made for the second.

Part 1

Part 2

When Tower Lost Power

Another free music documentary on YouTube. I haven’t watched it yet, but the subject is good enough for me to recommend it.

Tower’s flagship store in Boston was at the Mass Ave. end of Newbury Street, the namesake of Newbury Comics, a longtime music retailer that’s still in business. The Tower Records store in Burlington, MA was a relatively convenient stop on the way home, where I used to live, but most of my purchases were made at Newbury Comics, at the other end of the same shopping center.

Before all of that, THE place to buy records in Boston was actually in Cambridge. The Harvard Coop, in Harvard Square, as in Harvard University. My first visit there was almost 50 years ago, spending some of the fifty bucks I earned one night, helping to close down the annual town fair.

…

I’ve watched the documentary, and definitely recommend it. The amazing thing about the rise of Tower Records is that most of the core team members were — let’s be honest — uneducated drunks, who were following the grand vision of a smart man who was as drunk and uneducated as they were. Their success is proof of the power in doing what you love for a living.

Tower’s over-expansion on borrowed money was technically what led to the chain’s bankruptcy. But even if they hadn’t taken on debt, that would only have softened the crash landing. Tower’s demise was inevitable, and the end was predicted not long after its beginning.

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form). — “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.