K-Tel

First off: Yes, if you have a mixtape I gave you, please, email the tracklist or post it in the comments; I'm sure some of them will be embarrassing (I think there's an OMD song on one of the tapes I made for Cara) but isn't that the whole point of this? Cringing?

Second: The only 70-second long song I have is by Howe Gelb, and I suspect it's more likely to make you feel like having a little lie down than any sort of invincibility. Better places to look: Napalm Death, Converge, or Agoraphobic Nosebleed (although for them, 70 seconds would be an epic - even 17 seconds is a little on the long side).

We were out shopping today, for curtain material (didn't get any), records at the fabulous new record store, Sounds Unlikely (5 Arlington St. - spent over $150 without really trying) and clothes at the Village des Valeur in Gatineau (a $20 3-piece suit for me, a $4 cashmere sweater for Jess). There was also a brief foray into the record section, where I found a K-Tel compilation from 1983 (Hit Express or something like that), but I didn't get it.

Here's the thing: K-Tel Records' compilations slavishly followed the top 40 of the day, and so when, in the late 70's and early 80's commercial radio became rigidly formatted, the top 40 became utterly bland. Here's a simple comparison, between the first sides of 1972's 22 Explosive Hits, 1977's Right On and 1982's Radio Active (all three of which we own.)

22 Explosive Hits
The Candy Man – Sammy Davis, Jr.
Nice To Be With You – Gallery
A Simple Man – Lobo
Don’t Pull Your Love – Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
Layla – Derek & The Dominoes
Guilty – Al Green
Vaya Con Dios – Dawn
If Not For You – Olivia Newton-John
Wild Eyes – Stampeders
Day By Day – Godspell
Popcorn – Hot Butter

So, there's at least one really great song here (I meant the Al Green, by the way), and some schlock (Sammy Davis Jr), a weird novelty hit ("Popcorn") and pre-Grease Olivia Newton-John covering Bob fucking Dylan. (If you haven't heard Olivia's early work, particularly "I Honestly Love You", consider yourself lucky. Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch" is only marginally more treacly.) But the sounds are all over the map: hard rockin' shit sits next to soul and wuss-pop, capped off with quasi-experimental electronica (well, in much the same way that Underworld were "experimental"). It's pretty amazing at how bright and sunny this music is - I mean, all of it. One wonders what depressed teenagers listened to in 1972 (I mean, if they hadn't discovered the Velvet Underground or the Stooges. Rod McKuen?)

Right On
Shake Your Booty – K. C. & The Sunshine Band
I’d Really Love To See You Tonight – England Dan & John Ford Coley
You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine – Lou Rawls
Strange Magic – Electric Light Orchestra
Getaway – Earth, Wind & Fire
The Cisco Kid – War
I Got To Know – Starbuck
Take It Or Leave It – Moxy
Magic Man – Heart
The Best Disco In Town – Ritchie Family

Again, a little bit of everything (although no novelty hits this time - side two does include the theme song from "The Young & the Restless", which apparently charted*). Two flat-out disco songs, two wussy pop-rock numbers, two hard rock songs and slow, groovy one suitable for stoners or people who drive enormous cars very slowly (uh, that's the one by War. They also did "Low Rider".) There's also Lou Rawls, filling in for Barry White as the make-out song singer, and Earth, Wind & Fire's overly slick funk (side two features the Ohio Players, who are much better). The mood is a little less pollyana-ish (nobody's talking about any fucking Candy Man) but it's still largely fun. I don't suppose I need to point out that there's not a hint on this record of the existence of punk rock.

*mind you, so did a prog-rock version of "The Lord's Prayer", so you see how fucked-up the seventies must have been.

Radio Active
Who's Crying Now - Journey
Take it on the Run - REO Speedwagon
Morning Train (Nine to Five) - Sheena Easton
Don't Want to Wait Anymore - Tubes
Falling in Love Again - Michael Stanley Band
Feels So Right - Alabama
I've Done Everything for You - Rick Springfield
Private Eyes - Hall & Oates

Everyone who thinks 80's nights are fun: you suck. The first two songs here are enough to indict the entire fucking decade; it's hard to imagine music less enjoyable. Sheena Easton's saccarine pop, sort of a low-rent Sandy Denny/Petula Clark thing, seems weirdly appropriate for an age whose best songs all seemed to be about bored office workers. Well, except that it's cynically free of angst or depth. Nevermind. Tubes sound just like Foreigner or Journey or Toto, and the Michael Stanley Band somehow manage to have less personality than that. So far, we've heard 5 songs and exactly one production style. There's the odd hint in Alabama's gluey ballad that they used to be a country band, but it's not like it makes the song any more distintive. I'm slightly amazed that the closest thing to an acknowledgement of New Wave comes from Rick Springfield - considering, for one thing, that he'd been on the charts for 10 years at this point (his "Speak to the Sky" appears on 1972's Believe in Music, another K-Tel comp we've got). Which makes his teen idol status in the early 80's more than a little creepy. But lo and behold, he's got the best, most distinctive and only listenable song on the whole side. And Hall & Oates wrap things up with their mindless, Gary-Numan-esque ode to stalking.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this collection as a whole: for one thing, it's remarkably uniform. Not just stylistically - most of the songs do fall into that same non-genre, the not-rocking rock song - but also sonically. The drums all sound basically the same, the vocals are mixed at the same spot, there's compression up the fucking wazoo. But also, it's very very white. Every 70's collection had as much funk and soul as rock; the closest Radio Active gets is Blondie's "Rapture" (there is a song by the Police on side 2 as well, but it's not one of the ones that's reggae-ish.)

Somewhere at the end of the 70's, there clearly was a major cultural shift, and it's tough for someone like me (born in '70) to figure out from here where it started. I'd love to pin it on the election of Ronald Reagan, or maybe the release of The Big Chill - but it just seems that somewhere between 1978 and 1981 North America got collectively freaked out by disco and decided that it was time to start being more uptight about everything. I suppose that this must also have been a time when radio program directors started clamping down on their dj's - the Andy Travis effect, perhaps - and ensured that nothing weird or off-style made it on air.

Come to think of it, the economy's lack of growth for several years probably caught up with a lot more people as the decade went on, and when times are tight, people don't feel so liberal about, say, music, or dress, or behaviour (there was serious talk of marijuana decriminalization on both sides of the border in the late 70's, but that turned into "just say no" and the War on Drugs soon enough...)

Next week: who sucks more, The Eagles or Billy Joel?