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G is for “The Great One,” Jackie Gleason

Gleason’s first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the album longest in the Billboard Top Ten Charts

I recently noticed that actor/comedian Jackie Gleason would have turned 100 on February 26, 2016, and will have been dead 30 years come June 24, 2017.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I used to watch his Saturday night variety show on CBS fairly regularly. Gleason played a variety of characters, including the snobbish millionaire Reginald Van Gleason III, the put-upon character known as the Poor Soul, and Joe the Bartender, who always greeted the bug-eyed “Crazy” Guggenheim (Frank Fontaine) before the latter would break into mellifluous song.

The show featured Sammy Spear and his orchestra, and the June Taylor Dancers, who were often shown in aerial pattern kaleidoscope formations, probably my favorite part of the show.

Before that show aired, there was The Honeymooners. Gleason was Ralph Kramden, on a series also starring Audrey Meadows (pictured with Gleason) as his wife, and Art Carney and Joyce Randolph as the apartment building neighbors. It is a classic 1950s TV program, though I didn’t much like it when I saw it in reruns as a child. The bus driver really bugged me with his rants such as “to the moon, Alice,” as though he were going to punch out his spouse. The Honeymooners was reprised in the 1960s with Carney, but with different actresses.

My mother had several albums of music with Gleason’s name attached. He lent his imprimatur to “a series of best-selling ‘mood music’ albums with jazz overtones for Capitol Records… Gleason’s first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the album longest in the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first 10 albums sold over a million copies each.

“Gleason could not read or write music; he was said to have conceived melodies in his head and described them vocally to assistants who transcribed them into musical notes. These included the well-remembered themes of both The Jackie Gleason Show (‘Melancholy Serenade‘) and The Honeymooners (‘You’re My Greatest Love‘).”

Jackie Gleason had a decent movie career. I watched him, much after the fact, in The Hustler (1961) as pool shark Minnesota Fats. I saw him in the first two Smokey and the Bandit films, but not the third one. I recall enjoying his last film, Nothing in Common (1986), with an upcoming actor named Tom Hanks.

But perhaps the strangest thing in his career took place January 20, 1961: “‘You’re in the Picture‘ was a… replacement game show. Contestants would stick their heads through a cut-out board and guess what character they were. The first installment was so much of a failure that on the second week of the time slot Jackie Gleason came out, sat in a chair, and talked about how horrible the first show had been. He was hilarious.”

Music Throwback Saturday: Electric Avenue

Electric Avenue got to #2 in both the UK and US

Before I can write about the song Electric Avenue, a promise I’d made. Last year, I wrote: “Some time, I need to tell the story of when I saw Eddy Grant in concert.” Then I forgot.

Recently, I saw a photo of my old pal “Mary” on someone else’s Facebook page. Mary and I were casual friends, and we were going to see Eddy Grant performing at the University at Albany. I went to her house, and she and/or others were going to drive to the campus.

I came right from work, if I’m remembering correctly, and I was really hungry, and I ate a brownie she had out, and took another to go. We get to the locale, which didn’t have chairs, but had an open space for dancing. I ate the second brownie.

I’m grooving on the music, when suddenly, I’m in need of leaning against a wall. I am feeling unwell, maybe. Then even standing became too difficult, and my back slid down the wall, and I sat in a corner, I think, I don’t know.
And I really don’t remember much else, such as how I got home.

Sometime that week, I called Mary. She was SURE she had told me there was hashish in those brownies. Maybe there was a general announcement, but I never heard it.

Every time I hear that intro, I have, if not a flashback, an odd physical recollection. Electric Avenue got to #2 in both the UK and US, for five weeks in the States. It appears on the Killer on the Rampage album, and I heard that track on the radio. I have Electric Avenue on a reggae compilation album with Living on the Frontline.

Listen to:
Electric Avenue HERE or HERE
Killer on the Rampage HERE or HERE
Living on the Frontline HERE (short version) HERE (long version)

US: adopt rail transportation

Trains have inspired some of the finest music in the world.

The illustrious bard Jaquandor gripes:

What IS it with this country’s refusal to adopt rail as a serious method of transportation?

There’s a sign, less than two blocks from my house, that commemorates the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad that ran between Albany and Schenectady, one of the first in the nation. It’s clear that the transcontinental railroad created cohesion for the United States.

I’ve made it quite clear that I find passenger rail travel to be the only really civilized form of transportation. So why doesn’t the US embrace it more?

1) Freedom. The freedom of the open road, the myth sold by the car dealers decades ago, and now a part of the fabric of the self-definition of the country. EUROPEANS use trains and the metric system and socialized medicine, but that’s not what WE do. And it IS a big country.

2) Liberals. Most of the greatest concentration of potential train use, because of population patterns, is in the Northeast corridor from Boston to DC, and California. And do you know who lives there? LIBERALS, those arrogant prigs who fuss about energy conservation and don’t REALLY share American values. So screw ’em. We have the fix for the problems of some of the recent rail crashes, but we’re not going to spend money for THAT.

OK, that was exaggerated, but only slightly. There are also pockets of density in the eastern Midwest, and in parts of Texas suitable for rail transportation. Still, fixing the rails, usually shared by freight, and needing to defer to cargo, is considered “subsidizing” Amtrak. Fixing the roads is… oh, never mind, we don’t do that either.

And trains have inspired some of the finest music in the world. Here’s a list of 1000 songs. It’s MISSING at least two songs, both of which I own. One is Northern Bound Train by Pete Droge, which I’ve seen him perform. The other is Ridin’ the Rails by k.d. lang and Take 6, from the soundtrack to the movie Dick Tracy, a movie I’ve never seen.

Here are just a handful of my favorite train songs. Links to all.

500 Miles – Peter, Paul, and Mary
8:05 – Moby Grape
Big Train (from Memphis) – Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins

Casey Jones -Grateful Dead
Chattanooga Choo Choo – Glenn Miller
City of New Orleans – Steve Goodman

Engine Engine #9 – Roger Miller
Friendship Train – The Temptations
Hobo’s Lullabye – Emmylou Harris

Love Train -The O’Jays
Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight & The Pips
Northern Bound Train – Pete Droge

Ridin’ the Rails – k.d. lang and Take 6
Rock Island Line – Lead Belly

Book review: Never A Dull Moment

Jimmy Page explained, “The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away.”

I received the David Hepworth book Never a Dull Moment – 1971: The Year That Rock Exploded two days before Christmas. I finished the 286-page book before New Years Day.

The premise is that the pop period ended with the Beatles signing essentially their divorce papers from each other on 31 December 1970. Hepworth, who turned 21 in 1971, says that year saw “an unrepeatable surge of musical creativity, technological innovation, naked ambition, and outrageous good fortune that combined to produce music that still crackles today.” The era of rock was born.

Sometimes, he would make references to other cultural events of the time that seemed random, but eventually, it would somehow connect. Hepworth used a few Britishisms that I did not initially pick up on, but I figured out most of them in context.

The book is arranged by month. The albums referred to in that period might have been recorded then, or released then, or the artist was on tour. And not all would become internationally famous. In March, Led Zeppelin was doing tours in small clubs, because as Jimmy Page explained, “The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away.” Meanwhile, Nick Drake was well-regarded but lacked the stage charisma to become the success his talent might have suggested.

The May chapter details the Rolling Stones’ move to France. “Sex and drugs and rock n’ roll” were never more true. The year Mick Jagger got married did not seem to alter his omnivorous appetites. Meanwhile, Carly Simon was linked romantically to Cat Stevens and others. Later chapters touch on unlikely pairings, such as Leonard Cohen sleeping with Janis Joplin, though he later regretted writing a song about it.

Many things we now take for granted were born in this era. The benefit concert was born with George Harrison’s efforts on behalf of the people in Bangladesh. Since it had never been done before, certainly on that massive scale, mistakes were made, and George became a resource for those planning similar ventures.

Greatest hits albums became much more lucrative, from the Stones and the Who, for instance, presaging the unlikely resurgence of the Beach Boys’ catalog a couple of years later.

I’d write more, but I’ve decided instead to write about some of the albums of the period, and my reaction to them, once a month – I’m already behind!

If you enjoy the albums of the period, and it’s likely that you probably do, even if you were born years after ’71, you’ll enjoy Never A Dull Moment, which has been positively reviewed everywhere I checked, after reading it, of course. I lived through the period and I learned quite a bit.

Music Throwback Saturday: Lonely People

“It was the channel five sign-off, featuring NASA Apollo Eleven astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing about on the moon.”

While I was in Charlotte, NC in early 1977, I was unemployed. I worked at the parents’ flea market several hours a week, but nothing else.

Charlotte was a TERRIBLE city to get around then if you didn’t have a car. It was what my father called a “big old country town”, growing by leaps and bounds. North Carolina law allowed a core city to annex any adjacent unincorporated territory, as long as the city provided fire, police, and water service. So parts of the city proper were virtually rural.

The bus system, such as it was, sucked, to use a word my wife hates. Everything went through the main intersection of Trade and Tryon. It was like going from Paris, France to Brussels, Belgium via London, England.

I watched television, a lot. The TV miniseries Roots was on, and I watched it all except for a half-hour we missed getting home from the flea market.

Back in those days, TV stations actually signed off the air at midnight or one a.m. They usually played the national anthem, often and overplayed one in which tape sounded distorted.

But on the cable in Charlotte, I could pick up WTTG, Metro Media channel 5, out of Washington, DC. The outro was a music video produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and “made available in 1972 to any television station who wanted it.”

Someone on Reddit wrote: “As a boy growing up in Washington D.C. I would purposefully stay awake for the sign-off on which occurred at midnight every night. If I stayed up late I could escape hopelessness late at night by watching what was for me a lullaby of hope and peace possible.

“It was the channel five sign-off, featuring NASA Apollo Eleven astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing about on the moon. And the song Lonely People by the band America playing during the film clips. This showed me a reality on the other side of hopelessness and so reminded me there is hope for me, and perhaps for everyone.”

Actually, it made me a bit melancholy: I was one of the Lonely People, who thought that life had passed me by. But I enjoyed the alternative to the Star-Spangled Banner.

WATCH/LISTEN to Lonely People – America

But it’s actually the version with the voice-over tag (also on the Reddit version) that I recall.

Incidentally, the piano “solo” is played together by America’s Gerry Beckley and the song’s producer, the legendary, late George Martin.