traveling through time at 45 rpm (time travel records)

IT’S NO SECRET that most of us form strong emotional bonds with things during our teenage years. This includes attachments to humans (think your best friend), food (think pizza), even sports teams (think “Go, Phillies!”) This seems especially so about music: usually, whatever the hits on the radio were that we loved when we were 15-years-old, we are going to love—for better or worse—until we are 95-years-old!

Even if our tastes “progress” and we develop a passion for jazz or classical music, we usually keep our connections to those pop hits from our teen years. And here’s the best part—no matter when our teen years were, no matter how bad the hits were during those years, we think ourselves lucky to have been teens through those years and those hits!

Hell’s Belles, there are people who remember the ’80s with fondness! You may think, “How can that be?”

But it’s true! (It’s true! It’s true!)

There are magic records that transport me back in time to when I was 14-years-old and there was magic in the music.

There really are people who sigh when the synth sound of Flock of Seagulls, or the raspy voice of Bonnie Tyler, or the whatever-it-is-that-makes-him-so-annoying of Lionel Richie turns up on the radio or in a movie or even on the piped-in background music at their favorite shopping emporium.

I was lucky, as I grew up when the “oldies but goodies” concept and format was new and fresh and exciting. And it was everywhere, especially the northeastern part of the country.

Consequently, not only did I get the hear the Top 40 hits of the mid-1960s—hits so good that no one had to coin the term classic rock to sucker you into listening to them!—but interspersed among those hits were memorable blasts from the past—the past being the late ’50s.

To hear Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield alongside Brenda Lee and Connie Francis, and to hear the Miracles and the Temptations back-to-back with the Flamingos and the Platters was both a joy and an education. ¹

It turns out that Friends’s resident nerds, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) and Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), had a band back in the ’80s, where they attempted to look hip. Ross bears a resemblance to Lionel Richie while Chandler sported a hilarious Flock of Seagulls look. No wonder they had trouble getting layed. ²

Traveling through time at 45 rpm

I am not given to nostalgia, meaning I’m not inclined to a “wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” When I listen to music from the past, I remain firmly planted in the here and now. And that past includes Bach and Haydn and Ellington and Mingus as well as Chuck Berry and Elvis and the Miracles and the Shangri-La’s!

I could spend months blogging about the vast array of good music that found its way onto the national and local charts, whether pop or country or easy-listening or soul or rock & roll. Instead, I’m going to focus on a very special type of record that I call time travel records.

Most of us form strong emotional bonds during our teenage years to friends, food, sports teams, and especially music.

There are a handful of records that stop me in my be-here-now tracks and transport me back in time. When I hear them, a part of me finds myself not wistful or yearning for some bygone era where father knew best, but I find myself transported back to when I was 14-years-old and the magic was in the music and the music was in me.

If I was writing this in a story, this experience would not be listed under science fiction since there is no technological device or explanation as what makes this happen. It’s magic. Like Stephen King’s 11/22/63 novel, it would belong in the fantasy shelves in your local bookstore.

During the mid-1960s, Columbia pressed a number of promotional 45s on lovely translucent red vinyl and shipped them to radio stations. The idea, of course, was to attract attention to the records and get them played. Station managers often marked the side to be played by writing “plug side” or drawing an “X” on the label, such as on this copy of Columbia 4-43396.

Those magic moments

Aside from these experiences not being associated in any way with regular nostalgia, there are two things I want to stress about these magic moments with these records:

•  they are involuntary, and
•  I can’t make them happen with other records.

Regardless of their age, their proximity in time with these records, or how much I love them, the time traveling only occurs with a few records. Oddly, it’s not records by my very favorite artists (no Elvis or Dylan) or my faverave groups (no Beach Boys, Beatles, Byrds, Kinks, or Stones).

There are four records by artists, three of whom were among the stellar acts of their time. What they have in common is that they are groups (one being a duo) and they were released within months of each other in 1965.

Here are my Fab Four Time Machine Records, listed in order of their release date. Two were issued in September and two in November. I have included a nutshell look at the top of the charts at the time of their release:

On Cash Box, Bob Dylan had one #1 record, Like A Rolling Stone reached the top spot for one week in September 1965. On Billboard, Dylan has yet to score a #1 record. Unless he becomes a born-again hip-hopper, I don’t see that happening.

September 1965

During the first two weeks of September 1965, the #1 spot on the Cash Box Top 100 was held by the Beatles’ Help! Since my brother was a Beatles fan, I had to suppress my enjoyment of their music for several years, but who could help but love this record?

The Fab Four were followed by Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, which was stunning on first hearing: it stopped me in my tracks at Public Square Records and made me stop browsing and listen: I knew something was happening but I didn’t know what it was. Decades later and it remains stunning after thousands of hearings!

One week later and Barry McGuire’s Eve Of Destruction was the toppermost of the poppermost! Alas, the forebodings of this song are as worthy of contemplation now as they were then, except we’re a little closer to midnight on the doomsday clock.

On the Billboard Hot 100, Help! was #1 for three weeks followed by Eve Of Destruction. That is, Dylan was squeezed out of the top spot on the most folk’s top survey.

Simon & Garfunkel
Columbia 4-43396, The Sounds Of Silence

This side debuted on the Cash Box Top 100 on November 20, 1965. It spent fifteen weeks on the survey, reaching #1 for one week on January 29, 1966. It was a bigger hit on Billboard: it topped the chart on January 1, 1966, surrendered the top spot to the Beatles’ We Can Work It Out for two weeks, then returned to #1 on January 22.

The basic track for this record was an acoustic version that appeared on S&G’s first album, WEDNESDAY MORNING 3 A.M., which very few people had heard let alone purchased in 1965. Without the duo’s knowledge, producer Tom Wilson recorded an electric backing track and added it to the original version, turning the forgotten folkie recording into one of folk-rock’s greatest hits. ³

The Hollies
Imperial 66134, Look Through Any Window

This side debuted on Cash Box on November 27, 1965. It spent eleven weeks on that survey, reaching #34, although it reached #32 on Billboard, making it the group’s first Top 40 hit in the US. In the UK, it was their seventh Top 10 hit in twenty-four months.

Many readers don’t know that the Hollies were second only to the Beatles as hitmakers in England between 1963 and 1970. Here is the tally of their Top 20 hits along with those of a few other popular pop groups:

Beatles                        22
Hollies                         21
Herman’s Hermits    17
Rolling Stones           16
Kinks                           15
Animals                      11
Searchers                   10
Who                             10

Unfortunately, the Hollies were nowhere near as big in the US, where they scored only seven Top 20 hits. But they did do something here that they didn’t do at home: on September 16, 1972, Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress) reached #1 on the Cash Box Top 100, their only chart-topper in either of the world’s two biggest markets! ⁴

As lead singer for the Dovells, Barry’s distinctive raspy voice could be heard on five Top 40 hits in the early 1960s. Both Bristol Stomp and You Can’t Sit Down reached the Top 10 but spending ages at the top spot in hometown Philadelphia. As a solo artist, he placed three more sides in the Top 40, with 1-2-3 topping the Cash Box charts but stalling at #2 on Billboard.

November 1965

During the month of November 1965, the #1 spot on the Cash Box Top 100 was held by the Rolling Stones’ Get Off Of My Cloud for two weeks. I was a self-proclaimed Stones-hater at the time, but secretly liked the quirky sound of this record.

It was followed by the Supremes’ I Hear A Symphony—and everybody liked the Supremes and so did I—then Len Barry’s 1-2-3. I bought the Barry record then and still think it an under-appreciated gem now, but it’s probably doomed to be known only by those who were teenagers in the ’60s (or those doomed to grow up to be record collectors).

On Billboard, Get Off Of My Cloud and I Hear A Symphony split the four weeks between them, depriving Barry of the top spot.

The Mamas & The Papas
Dunhill D-4020, California Dreamin’

This side debuted on Cash Box on January 8, 1966. It peaked at #4 on March 12, 1966, where it stayed for three weeks, spending nineteen weeks on the survey. It also peaked at #4 on Billboard but, in what appears to have been a quirky decision by the BBC and British record buyers, it failed to even reach the Top 20 in the UK.

Although written by John and Michelle Phillips, the song was originally recorded by Barry McGuire for his THIS PRECIOUS TIME album. Dunhill’s main man Lou Adler knew two things:

1.  California Dreamin’ was going to be a hit record.
2.  The Mamas & The Papas were going to be a hit group.

So he took McGuire’s recording, removed the lead vocal, and had The Mamas & The Papas record new vocals. Adler proved himself correct and the rest is history.

The Vogues
Co & Ce B-232, Five O’Clock World

This side debuted on Cash Box on December 4, 1965. It peaked at #3 on January 29, 1966, reaching #4 on Billboard. While it topped Canada’s RPM survey, it received little attention in the rest of the world’s major pop market.

The Vogues broke into the national Top 40 with the great You’re The One, which was apparently given to them by one of the song’s co-writers, Petula Clark. The song sounds like it would have been a natural for the Turtles as a follow-up to their Top 10 success with It Ain’t Me Babe earlier in the year.

Like so many rock-based groups blessed/cursed with a lead singer with a heavenly voice (as the group’s Bill Burkette was), they gravitated towards easy-listening music, eventually sounding more like the Lettermen than the Turtles.

Like many movies of the time, Dell gave us a comic book adaptation. here a reader could travel with George (Rod Taylor) hundreds of thousands of years into the future to vanquish the flesh-eating Morlocks and fall in love with the toothsome Weena (Yvette Mimieux)—and all for only a dime!

Are you a fellow time traveler?

If you have a time travel record, please consider this an invitation to mention it in a comment below. And mention how old you were when the connection was made between you and the record.

You too can travel through time at 45 rpm—all you need is your own time travel record! Click To Tweet

FEATURED IMAGE: Rod Taylor as H.G. “George” Wells in of The Time Machine from 1960. There were very few science fiction movies good enough to justify a willing suspension of disbelief from fans of the genre in the 1960s. George Pal’s brilliant production of this Wells novel was a rare and wondrous exception—almost sixty years later and I can still recommend this movie to the discerning few among younger fans of the genre.

FOOTNOTES:

1   While Top 40 AM radio is long gone, there are faux “radio stations” that one can access online (Sirius XM is king but there are pretenders) that somewhat compensate for those days when we heard our favorite jocks assuring us that “The hits just keep coming!”

2   Both layed and laid are acceptable when describing having had sex. I prefer the former because it looks more, ahem, active.

3   Trying to find consistent and accurate accounts of Simon and Garfunkel’s reactions to hearing the “new” version of their record was fruitless. Both men had issues with technical aspects of Wilson’s overdubs: Art Garfunkel stated, “I would have made sure the drums and bass were in sync with the voices at the end of the fourth verse, but I was interested in having a hit record.”

     But whatever their issues, Simon and Garfunkel quickly embraced the new sound and recorded an entire album in a folk-rock vein to capitalize on the single’s success. The two became one of the most successful duos in recorded musical history.

4   On Billboard’s Hot 100, the Hollies’ rocker was #2 for two weeks, kept out of the top spot by Gilbert O’Sullivan’s insipid Alone Again (Naturally). Oddly, that record did not reach #1 on Cash Box, despite being played everywhere all the time for what seemed like forever in 1972.

And I would be remiss in my duties if I forgot to mention that way back then, we had the option of buying two comic book Time Machines: the movie version and the Classics Illustrated version, adapted from the book. This company charged 15¢ (even in 1956, when #133 The Time Machine was published) when other American comics were 10¢, implying a superiority to the other four-color publications.