Do That to Me One More Time
In the summer of 1975, I did not like the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” even as it did a month at #1, the first record to last that long at the top in over two years. I did not like “The Way I Want to Touch You” that fall, even as it insinuated itself into my head and now inspires strong flashbacks to the end of that year. (Which is omething I intend to write about next week.) The Captain and Tennille were woven into my favorite year, 1976, with three big hits. “Shop Around” didn’t bother me, but “Muskrat Love” and “Lonely Night (Angel Face)” did. (Click the link for Professor O’Kelly’s thoughts on the latter, and several C&T songs.) By 1977, however, they ceased to register much at all with me. By the end of 1980, they were gone from the charts, never to return, and I felt no void because of it.
As the years went by, I called them a cocktail-lounge act. I called Toni Tennille’s voice an in-your-face bleat, and I said that she reminded me of that mouthy cheerleader you hated in high school. I described the Captain’s style on keyboard as “blips and farts.” I even criticized them on a sociological basis. In their last two big hits, “You Never Done It Like That” and “Do That to Me One More Time” (which went to #1 in February 1980), I heard Toni criticizing the Captain’s prowess in the sack. “You Never Done It Like That” contains one of the most demeaning things a woman ever said to a man after he’s made love to her: “Hey little man, I want to shake your hand.” In “Do That to Me One More Time,” Toni seems mildly surprised to have gotten off.
Even in the early days of this blog, I was prone to snark. Back in 2005, I wrote:
September 20, 1976: The Captain and Tennille’s variety show premieres on ABC. It becomes one of the most enduring hits in the history of television, remaining on the air until 1994. Its staggering popularity results in seven consecutive number-one albums, 24 top-10 singles, and the 1997 induction of Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Wait, maybe not.
Now, all these years later, “Wait, maybe not” is right.
The variety-show crack gets at something truthful in a backward way: a network variety show did not often boost an act’s hitmaking profile. Sonny and Cher, Roy Clark and Buck Owens (with Hee Haw), Tony Orlando and Dawn, Donny and Marie, and the Captain and Tennille never scaled the charts after their TV shows like they had before. And if the Captain and Tennille’s show was cheesy, it wasn’t much more so than its contemporaries. As a time capsule of what TV celebrity looked like in 1976 and 1977, you can scarcely do better.
As for the rest of it—in-your-face bleat, mouthy cheerleader, and so on? Nah, that’s not fair, and I don’t believe it anymore.
Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon were hipper than people knew, as Ultimate Classic rock summarizes here, including the funny story about the Pink Floyd fan who discovered Toni is on The Wall, and the Captain’s history with the Beach Boys. In the middle of the 1970s, they cut some great songs: several by Neil Sedaka and one (“Shop Around”) by Smokey Robinson. They were backed on record by the LA superstars known as the Wrecking Crew. And they hit in an era that was perfectly perfectly primed for solidly built pop music, lightweight and catchy and fun.
(One of their records was more than just fun. “Shop Around” contains advice no young man ever needed. But by gender-flipping it, the Captain and Tennille told young women of the 70s that they could control their own lives and make their own choices—topical and significant advice amidst the changes of that decade. It’s my favorite record of theirs by a mile, but I like this one a lot, too, speaking of lightweight and catchy.)
No, the Captain and Tennille aren’t getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And no, I’m not going to buy their complete-works box set, should there ever be one. But it’s hard to imagine the 1970s without them, and that’s the biggest tribute I can pay anybody. Rest well, Captain, and thank you for the music.
Hi Always, Ray Sawyer
(Pictured: Ray Sawyer, in profile, and Dennis Locorriere of Dr. Hook.)
The thing I found most surprising about the death of Ray Sawyer, the guy who wore the eye-patch in Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, is not so much that he died, but that he was 81 years old. He was no baby-boomer; while “Cover of the Rolling Stone” was riding the charts in 1973, he turned 37 years old. Chronologically, he was more a member of my parents’ generation than of mine.
As it happens, I met Ray Sawyer once.
Dr. Hook formed in the late 60s and for several years specialized in amiable stoner rock. They performed some Shel Silverstein songs in the 1971 Dustin Hoffman movie Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me, and scored a Top-10 hit with Silverstein’s “Sylvia’s Mother” in 1972. The 1973 album Sloppy Seconds consisted entirely of Silverstein songs, not just “Cover of the Rolling Stone” but such PG-rated fare as “Freakin’ at the Freakers’ Ball,” “Get My Rocks Off,” and “Lookin’ for Pussy.” In 1975, however, they dropped the Medicine Show from their name. As Dr. Hook, they became a reliable pop act. Between 1976 and 1979, “Only Sixteen,” “Sharing the Night Together,” and “When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman” all hit the Top 10, and “A Little Bit More” reached #11. Released late in 1979, the album Sometimes You Win produced two more Top-10 hits, “Better Love Next Time” and “Sexy Eyes.”
(In terms of chart performance, “Sexy Eyes” ended up their biggest Hot 100 hit, equaling “Sylvia’s Mother” at #5 but charting for 21 weeks compared to 15 for “Sylvia.” Nevertheless, I bet you don’t remember it at all.)
And so it came to pass that in the summer of 1980, Dr. Hook’s itinerary bought them to the Stephenson County Fair in Freeport, Illinois, and I got to interview Sawyer and lead singer Dennis Locorriere.
I was the night jock at WXXQ in Freeport. One afternoon, I went with a guy from our AM sister station to a hotel room in Freeport (which may in fact have been a motel room in Freeport), and there they were: Sawyer with his eye-patch and cowboy hat, and Locorriere looking no different than other thirtyish dudes one might pass on the street. They were, as best I can remember, very gracious, greeting us with big smiles and handshakes, and quite gregarious.
At the age of 20, I hadn’t met anyone remotely famous. I didn’t want anybody to know that, of course, and furthermore, I wanted to come off as the hip rock jock I saw when I looked in the mirror. But these guys were real rock stars, and I was scared shitless.
I remember only two things about the interview. First was a line that Sawyer probably repeated in every interview: “I lost my eye in a car accident. I went back to look for it but I couldn’t find it.” The other thing is asking them how they would describe a typical Dr. Hook song. What they said, I don’t remember—but I do remember that in my flustered-ness, I asked the question twice.
I don’t remember how we used the interview. My station was an album-rocker, although we may have added “Cover of the Rolling Stone” for the duration, and we probably played at least some of the interview to help plug the concert. The AM station played soft rock, mostly, and the interview probably got more prominent play over there.
I didn’t go to the Dr. Hook show at the county fair, because I was on the air that night. But when I hear a Dr. Hook song today, I sometimes think of that interview. Were I to go digging through my boxes of tapes, I could probably find a copy of it—but I’d be afraid to listen to it.
Before we left that day, we asked Sawyer and Locorriere to autograph copies of Sometimes You Win for giveaways. We were embarrassed to have only ballpoint pens for them to sign with, which don’t write well on covers. One of the better-looking copies ended up in my collection; it’s pictured here. Although you can’t see it, Sawyer signed, in a nice throwback to his stoner-rock days, “Hi Always, Ray Sawyer.”
Coming tomorrow: another tribute post.
A Rose From Days Gone By
(Pictured: Helen Reddy at the Women’s March in Los Angeles on January 21, 2017, at which she performed “I Am Woman.”)
I know just enough about the concept of synchronicity to be stupid about it. The way I understand it, there are no coincidences. Everything is connected. Once you start noticing the way coincidences cluster, you’ll see clusters all the time.
For example: first thing yesterday morning I found myself looking at a post in the archives of this blog that mentioned Helen Reddy’s hit “I Am Woman.” A few minutes later, I came across this excellent piece from NPR on this history and impact of “I Am Woman,” which was climbing the charts 46 years ago this week. And a few minutes after that, from a totally different source, I learned that yesterday was Helen Reddy’s 77th birthday.
So I postponed what I was planning to put up today, and you’re gonna read about Helen Reddy instead.
Ask Me What I Am
I am a man of the 1970s. It’s where I grew up. It’s the country where I’m from. It’s where I learned to be me, in large part, and where I found much of what I still value most. It’s a place I understand, and one that understands me.
All I can see today, through the fog of the four decades through which I have traveled since, is the distant shore of that homeland. Certain beacons are still visible, reminders of what it was like back there. But those beacons grow ever dimmer, and sometimes they wink out, to be seen no more.
Burt Reynolds died yesterday at the age of 82.
Burt spent the 60s acting on TV, and he became America’s favorite box-office personality in the mid 70s. But he also had a modest recording career. In 1973, as his fame was beginning to build thanks to a breakout performance in Deliverance, he released Ask Me What I Am, produced by Bobby Goldsboro, a longtime friend and colleague, and Nashville record mogul Buddy Killen. It’s obscure enough not to have been reviewed at Allmusic.com, although the fine and bygone blog 30 Days Out reviewed it in 2008. Burt sings and sometimes talks his way through 11 songs as a down-home rural storyteller. It’s not very good beyond its curiosity value, but if you’re interested, you can listen to the whole album here.
In 1980, he recorded a single, “Let’s Do Something Cheap and Superficial,” for the movie Smokey and the Bandit 2, and it reached #88 on the Hot 100 in November. I was aware of it at the time, although I can’t say whether I actually played it on the radio. That it would get some traction was a foregone conclusion. By 1980, Burt Reynolds had become a national archetype. “Let’s Do Something Cheap and Superficial” was exactly the kind of self-mockery we would have expected from him then. The Burt of Ask Me What I Am, despite a successful career in TV up to that point, wasn’t a strongly defined personality yet, and the album works less well as a result. (Lack of a strongly defined personality is not the only problem the album has; song selection is another, as well as singing on-key.) If Burt had made a whole album in 1980, it would have been far different, and likely far more successful.
Although I am a man of the 70s, my title is in lowercase. Burt Reynolds was a Man of the 70s—if not The Man of the 70s. The milestones are many: his photo spread in Cosmo, a string of iconic movies spanning 1973 to 1983 (roughly from Deliverance through Stroker Ace), his romances with Sally Field and Dinah Shore and Loni Anderson. Over the last 25 years or so of his life, when his profession was not so much acting or directing as it was simply Being Burt Reynolds, he retained, for the most part, the persona he first projected during his glory days: handsome as hell, smooth with the ladies, tough and determined, unimpressed with authority figures, fearless and funny, able to laugh at himself above all. These were all things a lowercase man of the 70s wished he could be. Burt even managed a creative rebirth relatively late in life, with an Oscar nomination for playing Jack Horner in Boogie Nights (1997). A creative rebirth in his relative dotage is something a lowercase man of the 70s might also wish for.
Burt Reynolds is said to have said, “If you hold onto things long enough, they get back into style. Just like me.” That, too, is something a lowercase man of the 70s might wish for today. To be cool again, or to at least understand once again what cool is, if he was never actually cool himself. To escape being a relic. To wake up one morning back in his native country and recognize the place.
But that isn’t how our world works, and even the most wishful, wistful lowercase man of the 70s knows it. The best he—we–can do is to peer through the fog, looking back for those beacons that shine out to us from home, and never forgetting the ones that stand where we no longer can see them.
Rock Steady
(Update: Aretha passed this morning, August 16th.)
As I write this post [on August 15], Aretha Franklin is still with us, and maybe she’ll be with us for a while yet. The fact that she’s receiving hospice care, as was reported this week, doesn’t necessarily mean she’s going to die within days. I lost an uncle recently who had received hospice care for a couple of months.
When her time comes, other people are going to write about Aretha, and I look forward to those tributes. In this post, premature though it is, I’ll do what I can.
Although “Don’t Play That Song” peaked at #11 on the Hot 100 in the fabled fall of 1970, WLS didn’t chart it, so I didn’t hear it then. My introduction to Aretha came in the spring of 1971, when her glorious version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” went to #6 on the Hot 100 and #11 on WLS. My favorite Aretha record was a few months away. Forty-seven years ago this week, “Spanish Harlem” was blasting up the Hot 100, jumping from #29 to #19 in its third week on, although it was already #1 on soul station WWRL in New York City and at CKLW in Detroit. In September, it would peak at #2 on the Hot 100 where, in one of the great miscarriages of Top 40 justice, it got stuck behind Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl,” although it did reach #1 at WLS in Chicago and WABC in New York.
Aretha followed “Spanish Harlem” with “Rock Steady,” hot enough by itself, but positively smokin’ as processed for AM radio here, and in the spring of 1972, “Day Dreaming,” which is soul music as the pure, clear water of life—you could live on it for weeks if need be, with a shot of “Until You Come Back to Me” (1973) as a chaser. Although “I’m in Love” (1974), “Something He Can Feel” (1976), and “Jump to It” (1981) were significant hits, “Day Dreaming” would be Aretha’s last Top-10 single until “Freeway of Love” and “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” in 1985.
When I went to the record books, I was a bit surprised to find that Aretha hit #1 on the pop chart only twice, with “Respect” in 1967 and “I Knew You Were Waiting” with George Michael 20 years later. “Chain of Fools” and “Spanish Harlem” both made #2; “Until You Come Back to Me” and “Freeway of Love” each peaked at #3. In 1967, the album I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You, which started with the famously aborted recording session at Muscle Shoals, made #2. In 1968, Aretha: Lady Soul made #2 and Aretha Now made #3. Her scorecard: 17 Top-10 pop singles and six Top-10 albums.
(Links in the previous paragraph go to posts at The ’68 Comeback Special, a blog by Charles L. Hughes, author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. Go read them, and the book too.)
Aretha had two babies before she turned 15, troubled relationships with difficult men, financial problems, concert no-shows, and rivalries with family members and fellow performers. Her career cratered a couple of times, but she always managed to come back. The 2014 biography Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz is the definitive telling of her story, although Aretha called it “trashy,” and she accused Ritz, collaborator on her 1999 autobiography, of being “vindictive.” Ritz says that because certain subjects were off-limits in 1999, that book failed to tell Aretha’s story as it should have. Respect addressed those subjects, with the cooperation of three Franklin family members. It’s not flattering and it’s hard to read in spots, but it also gives Aretha her due as an artist. And at the end of an artist’s life, the art is the thing that matters, because the art is what will endure.
The greatest art has a natural quality that makes it seem as though it sprung forth, like a redwood tree or a glacier does, willed into being by something primal and more powerful than than the conscious choices and actions of fallible human beings. Humans like Aretha Franklin make art that proves humanity can achieve the highest heights to which we aspire. We aren’t here just to suck up natural resources and die wanting more. We can do better.
The Last Session
(Pictured: David Cassidy at his final concert performance on March 4, 2017.)
The Mrs. and I recently watched the A&E special David Cassidy: The Last Session, which was broadcast earlier this month. It’s partly a biography of Cassidy, but it also includes a great deal of footage recorded last summer while he was working on an album of standards intended as a tribute to his father, actor Jack Cassidy.
When the producers were shooting the sessions, they didn’t know what was going to happen, but two big things did: A) Cassidy was hospitalized, bringing an end to the sessions a couple of months before his death, and B) he admitted to the producers that his widely publicized diagnosis of dementia was false, and that he was actually suffering complications of alcoholism. Cassidy kept up the dementia facade nearly to the end; the special contains footage of him getting advice from a dementia specialist, and of Cassidy talking about the effects of the condition on him.
I have written before that David Cassidy was, to 11-year-old me, the boy I wanted to be—attractive, well-dressed, talented, and able to mesmerize girls. I eventually moved on from him (although I remain an unreconstructed Partridge Family fanboy), but I would occasionally wonder whatever became of him. And when I saw what he was up to—playing an undercover cop on TV, making new music, starring on Broadway, writing a book (now out of print and staggeringly expensive)—I thought about what it must have been like to be him, trying to grow beyond one’s teenage image into a normal, productive adulthood, and how hard it must have been.
So I was naturally disposed to be sympathetic toward David Cassidy, and as we watched The Last Session, I started thinking, “We shouldn’t be seeing this.” Perhaps it’s because we knew how the story was going to end, but the pathos of it was hard to watch. This man, who had already lost so much, was, at the last, losing his dignity on TV. Had he lived, the false dementia diagnosis would have given the special a significant news hook. But had he lived, A&E would not have attracted as many eyeballs for a biography centered around the making of an album very few people would buy. The way it turned out, it felt a little ghoulish.
Cassidy’s costar and friend, Danny Bonaduce, expressed a similar sentiment in a radio interview this week. It’s here. If you’re interested in watching David Cassidy: The Last Session, it’s here. You’ll have to sign in with your cable or satellite provider to see it.
Links and Notes: Since I haven’t hit the word count yet, there’s room to send you to good stuff I’ve read recently:
Writer, radio jock, beer geek, Badger fan. They don't think it be like it is, but it do. 
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