This song was replayed over and over again one summer on WABC!
Those were the days. It was 1973. We didn't have Ipods or Ipads or Iphones. We had kitchen phones with long cords and typewriters with ribbons that got all over your hands. That summer we went to Coney Island a lot. A bunch of us would go on the F Train. We didn't need much. A towel. Flip flops. Shorts. A Yankee t-shirt. Maybe a bottle of baby oil. I am very white so I burned like a motherfucker the first few times we went. But eventually I tanned for the summer even though I probably had sunstroke a couple of times.
Anyway the one thing we always brought was the battered white transistor radio. I used to have it with me when I went to bed and listened to the West Coast games with my shitty earpiece. I think that is where my love for listening to baseball on the radio comes from. Listening to Mel Allen and later Phil Rizzuto was the Golden Age for me.
We brought that radio and turned up to the highest volume and put it on WABC. We actually didn't need it because almost everyone was listening to Dan Ingram or Cousin Brucie. When you went from your towel to the water you passed twenty people listening to the same people. Three Dog Night. Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Maybe some Grand Funk. The Jackson Five. Sonny and Cher. The Rascals. The same seven songs played over and over and over again. It made you a community. Everybody knew those songs. Everybody knew the words to those songs.
All of that is gone now. The audience is splintered into a million pieces. We don't listen together. We listen past each other. It is part and parcel of the New America.
In my mind I am still on that beach. Sweating and getting sunburned. Waiting to go to Nathans for a hot dog. Maybe riding the Cyclone. Sneaking a beer at Sloppy Joes. Thinking about fucking Cher right through her sequined breechcloth the whore.
Do you think she might get cancelled today?
9 comments:
She almost did get canceled because she had some issues when he kid switched it up.
Now she's on Twatter all day screaming about Nazis
Opens with northwest indian imagery, she is wearing plains indian accoutrements (the traditional bikini adorned with rhinestones), she claims she is half Cherokee, an eastern tribe, the horse looks sedated, and she is actually Armenian. But so much for veracity and consistency in pop music, eh?
You know what, upon listening to this song again I find her contralto voice not displeasing. Too bad she is somewhere to the left of Stalin politically.
She's not "left." I bet she knows jackshit about progressive policy. Other than it's per se "good." Like most people, she's just unwilling/unable to think too deeply about controversial subjects (until they affect her personally) and has taken the easy way out hiding behind outrage and outsourced "caring."
Her voice is very listenable and she was also good onscreen. I enjoyed her mid-eighties movie ventures. She's reinvented herself several times and is a true American icon though the fame is unlikely to be durable over time hence the constant barrage of twatter nonsense to keep her name out there. Likely to be forgotten but was a fun diversion. I like her but wish she would refrain from politicking.
Truly, Sonny fucked her brains out.
I only wanted to stick it in her twatter.
You never heard Vin Scully and Happy Felton call the Bums, did you?
Those were the days.
WIBG in Philadelphia put the Gotham jocks to shame. My Aunt Claribel had a screened-in porch in her house in Ridgewood. I remember listening to the Bums on those hot summer nights, maybe the occasional Mel Allen.
The Good Old Days really were.
When I was growing up, there was one station that played pop music and the rest was country or Mexican or those public radio scolds (they're eternal) or classical. Religious stuff on Sundays or community activist shite that no one listened to but they were required to play once a week to keep their license.
Then we got a slightly more hip FM station that later got flipped to country when we finally got a rock station. Finally.
That was the entire scope of listening choices.
Even in the mid-late 70s/early 80s, the musical selection was pretty good and diverse so you weren't stuck with different flavors of the same thing all day. Also, by that time there was enough music available so that they didn't have to replay the same stuff all the time. When the second pop station got bought and switched to country they put "You Light Up My Life" on replay for the whole weekend to show disdain for the new owners. It was a very WKRP in Cinncinnati move.
After dark the car radio would be able to pick up WLS Chicago in East Tennessee back when they had a music format. Many a summer evening was spent seeking paradise by the dashboard lights.
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