for those who never gave up their turntables
I MOVED TO CALIFORNIA from Pennsylvania in June 1978. I naively believed I would find some semblance of “the sixties” hidden away in San Francisco. But in only a few years, most of it had been blotted out. There were still a lot of hand-painted Victorian houses and a few hip coffee shops and bookstores.
THIS IS THE FIFTH in a series of ten articles listing and addressing the #1 records of the year as they appeared on Cash Box magazine’s Top 100 chart from 1960 through 1969. It was originally published as “I Want To Hold Your Louie Louie” on my publication Tell It Like It Was on Medium on April 14, 2019. [Continue reading]
IN MAY 1978, a record by a group with a rather silly name was released in the San Francisco Bay Area. After making a splash in that market, radio stations around the country picked it up for their playlists. Had things been left to themselves, the record might have been a really big hit record. [Continue reading]
MISS PATSY CLINE may seem to be the focus of this article, but she’s not—at least, not primarily. Primarily it’s about hyperbole in describing the accomplishments of popular stars, even when the artist doesn’t need any embellishment to shine among the other stars. Fans of any field of artistic or athletic endeavor are given to excessive bragging about their faves, whether it’s rock bands or comic book artists or baseball players. [Continue reading]
FRANK DANIELS has been collecting records for a long time. Somewhere along the way, he started collecting all sorts of record-related data and information. For years now, he has been researching, compiling, assembling, and publishing several incredibly detailed and accurate Frank Daniels discographies (listings of records) and labelographies (breakdowns on the visual changes in the label designs of a given record company). [Continue reading]
WHAT EXACTLY IS A ROCK & ROLL ALBUM? To answer that question, we need to answer another: What is rock & roll music? After sixty years, we still don’t have a definition that everyone agrees with! Arguments about its definition and its origin in the early ’50s—no wait, was it the late ’40s?—have [Continue reading]
FAKE AUTOGRAPHS on rock & roll memorabilia being sold at charity fundraisers sounds like the act of a misanthrope or even a sociopath more. Cheating folk who are spending money knowing that it will go to help others is rather dastardly. And yet, huge sums of money are being spent on forgeries every day! [Continue reading]
PROCOL HARUM MADE A VIDEO of their worldwide hit A Whiter Shade Of Pale in 1967. It was shot in some spectacular ruins in Witley Court in Worcestershire, England, once one of the great houses of the Midlands, but by then a spectacular ruin devastated by fire thirty years earlier. [Continue reading]
IN 1970, local rock star and entrepreneur Joe Nardone opened a teenage dance hall on the Public Square of downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Formerly the Stardust Ballroom, it was a second floor affair where couples had practiced ballroom dancing. It was just above the old Paramount Theater, then a first-run venue for new movies. [Continue reading]