Tag: John Denver

Mom-and-Pop Music

Flip through the chapters of my life and you’ll find a bookmark at 1975. It was the year I became a teenager. It was the year I started middle school. But most importantly, 1975 was my first foray into Top 40 music. In those days, punk, funk, disco, and metal were just getting started; all too progressive for a kid taking his first dip into the pool of radio rock. Instead, my preference was to chew on something a little sweeter. Like bubble gum.

In the 1970s, I was way too young to witness the birth of rock and roll.  I also missed the advent of pop music.  But I was right on time for a musical genre known as bubblegum.  Bubblegum siphoned off pop music’s more catchy, upbeat tunes and marketed them to children and adolescents.  And what better way to market theses songs than kid TV?  Anyone who ever watched The Partridge Family, The Monkees, or the cartoon rock of The Archies on Saturday mornings enjoyed bubblegum music.

As for 1970s Top 40, it’s easy to look back on those weekly lists and find bubblegum.  “Love Will Keep Us Together” (Captain & Tennille), “Laughter In The Rain” (Neil Sedaka), and “He Don’t Love You, Like I Love You” (Tony Orlando and Dawn) are just a few examples from fifty years ago.  Like most things back then, music was more innocent.

Having said that, bubblegum wasn’t even specific enough to define my own tastes.  The industry standard Billboard Magazine generates a Hot 100 list at the end of every year based on sales and radio plays.  It’s fun to go through the 1975 list and recognize just about every song.  But I was looking for three names in particular and – no surprise – all of them made the list with multiple entries.  Hello again, John, Olivia, and Barry.

John Denver was only 53 when he was tragically killed piloting a single-engine plane above California’s Monterey Bay, yet he managed to create over twenty-five years of gentle hits before that.  When I first heard his voice he’d already landed top-ten’s like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (from the movie Armageddon for you younger readers), “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, and “Rocky Mountain High”.  One of Denver’s biggest hits, “Annie’s Song”, was a love song to his first wife.  Another, “Calypso”, paid tribute to the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.  I purchased most of Denver’s albums (cassette tapes!) with a good chunk of my meager teenage savings.

I was an Olivia Newton-John fan well before 1978’s Grease became a Hollywood phenomenon.  Newton-John and her sweet Australian accent were an instant teenage crush, with songs like “If You Love Me, Let Me Know”, “Have You Never Been Mellow”, and “I Honestly Love You”.  Then Grease came along and good-girl-turned-bad Olivia turned my teenage heat up several notches.  A testament to Newton-John’s popularity came in the form of 100 million records sold, fifteen top-ten singles, and four Grammy awards.  To this day, the soundtrack to Grease remains one of the world’s best-selling albums.

Barry Manilow and his music are more of a confession than the two we’ve already visited with.  It wasn’t at all cool to admit to liking Manilow’s “adult contemporary” music back then.  His hits were better suited for your parents, like “Mandy”, “This One’s For You”, and “Even Now”.  “Copacabana” was a dance number you couldn’t get out of your head.  “I Write the Songs” spoke to my inner-musician wannabe.  Manilow’s talents on the keyboard certainly captured my attention as I pursued the piano myself.  Unlike Denver and Newton-John, I purchased every Barry Manilow album as soon as it hit the shelves.  Somewhere in my attic I still have a boxed CD collection of his best work.

Like him or not, what is remarkable about Manilow is his enduring popularity.  He has been ensconced in Las Vegas for years now.  He just completed his 600th performance at Westgate’s Resort & Casino (an achievement which prompted this post), breaking a record held by Elvis Presley.  The one time I saw him in concert – at an outdoor venue in the Bay Area – I knew every song he performed.  Sure, almost all of his audience members are now graying at the temples, and his popular music is from five decades ago (!) but you still have to give him props.  The man has staying power.

Do I still listen to John, Olivia, or Barry?  No, but I can sing entire songs from memory.  There’s nothing like the music of those three to take me back to my teenage years.  Call it adult contemporary if you want, but this guy will always think of it as “Pop” music.

Some content sourced from The Atlantic article, “It’s Okay to Like Barry Manilow”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

American Tune-Up

Each of the fifty United States is represented by more than just a flag. America’s state symbols include animals, birds, trees, flowers, and songs. As a kid growing up in California I memorized these items, and years later I’ve still got them.  The “Golden State” has the Grizzly Bear, the Valley Quail, the Redwood, the Poppy, and “I Love You, California”.  Imagine my interest then, when Brooklyn Magazine took an updated stab at the state songs, publishing “The Musical Map of the United States”.

Image courtesy of Brooklyn Magazine, October 2016

Brooklyn Mag’s map is more than meets the eye (see here).  It’s not a collection of easy ditties you and I might come up with: Beach Boys for CA, John Denver for CO, Frank Sinatra for NY.  Instead, it’s a broad spectrum of lesser-known tunes, attached to the states by writers who chose them.  Read their stories and listen to their song choices.  It’s like 50+ blogs in one, plus a playlist if you want to shift the whole shebang to your smartphone.

Here’s a sampling of the Map’s creativity.  The writers chose Kenny Knight’s “America” for Colorado, a “dusty, country rock gem” with lyrics befitting its patriotic title (even if the song itself twangs along modestly).  For California, the writers needed two songs – Joni Mitchell’s “California”, and Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode”.  The former artist is Canadian; the latter raised in the gangland streets of Compton near Los Angeles.  You’ll find Mitchell’s folk music as appropriate as Dre’s rap for such a diverse state.

As I studied the Map, I realized each of us possesses our own musical geography, accumulating map dots as we move through life.  My own map began on the 8-track player of my father’s Cadillac in the 1960’s, crooning along with Perry Como as he claimed, “the bluest skies you’ve ever seen (are) in Seattle”.  By the 1970’s, I’d moved on to a hard-earned collection of 45-rpm records (“singles”), focusing on Top 40 bubble-gum one-hit wonders like Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” and Terry Jack’s “Seasons in the Sun”.  Also in the 70’s – courtesy of my brother’s extensive LP collection (and a stereo capable of a sonic boom) – I mapped to all kinds of rock, including Emerson Lake, & Palmer, The Eagles, Elton John, and Linda Ronstadt.

By the 1980’s, I’d graduated to cassette tapes and the easy-listening music of John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, and Barry Manilow (to which some would say, two steps forward three steps back).  Later in the ’80’s, I embraced compact discs with a budding affection for country music (Alabama), continuing to this day (Thomas Rhett).

Throw in a handful of downloads from my kids (Katy Perry, Meghan Trainor), sprinkle the whole mess with classical symphonies and concertos – a carryover from childhood piano lessons – and you have my musical map.  I’ll bet yours is wildly different.

Even the world of sports has a musical map, as Steve Rushin wrote in an excellent piece in this week’s Sports Illustrated (“Cheer and Trebling”).  You can’t hear the whistling of “Sweet Georgia Brown” without thinking Harlem Globetrotters, just as you can’t make it through baseball’s seventh inning without singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.  You won’t leave Yankee Stadium without Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, just as you won’t hear John Williams’ spectacular “Fanfare” without thinking Olympic Games.  Moments of silence at sporting events are literally reserved for the dearly departed.  Otherwise it’s all marching bands, pipe organs, and loudspeaker instrumentals.

My now-home state Colorado has a set of symbols like California.  The “Centennial State” has the Bighorn Sheep, the Lark Bunting, the Blue Spruce, the Columbine, and John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High”.  But the song could just as easily be Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful”, inspired by the Rocky Mountain peak I can see as I type.  The song could also be Kenny Knight’s “America”.

You listen.  You choose.  There are no right or wrong answers here.  Remember, even Google Maps gives you several options as you navigate your way.