The ABC's of 45's

Buried deep in my old stereo cabinet is a tattered red portfolio full of 45 rpm records. Each page is a sleeve that holds one record with a 3” hole to reveal a colorful label.

Thumbing through the book I can name almost every record without reading the labels because those labels are so familiar. The odds are good that orange and yellow swirls on a Capitol Record label means Beatles or Beach Boys. The solid red Columbia label belongs to my oldest record: The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The record is completely unplayable but I can’t let it go.

The light blue pattern signaled the Rolling Stones on London records and the solid blue label with the white whale was undeniably Happy Together by the Turtles.

Something I never realized about record labels was how often they changed in the early days of rock and roll. The most striking example was Elvis Presley who began his career on the colorful Sun label but hit his stride with the black label of RCA Victor Records. RCA was one of the five major labels in the 50’s along Decca, Columbia, Capitol and Mercury Records.

Beyond the big ones were hundreds of small labels owned by companies that came and went and merged throughout the early 1960’s. Anyone who owned a stack of 45’s will remember some of the more familiar ones like Bell (Box Tops, Delfonics), Roulette (Tommy James), Dot (Pat Boone), and Scepter (BJ Thomas).

Teenage record buyers weren’t all that concerned about who owned what but many new labels in the 1960’s were derived from bigger companies. Columbia Records owned Colpix (later Colgems) the familiar label for The Monkees. Atlantic or Atco owned Stax Records and Kama Sutra Records (Lovin Spoonful) merged with Buddah (Melanie).

The 1960’s ended with many of the same big companies dominating record sales although Motown, MCA and the Beatles’ Apple Records gave them all a run for the money.

I didn’t start this column intending to lecture on record label history. I wanted to say that thumbing through the 45’s was like visiting with some old friends. These guys were played over and over and over again on a cheap phonograph that quickly gave them a scratchy background noise.
I asked for the record “album” one Christmas so that I could haul my collection of singles around to friend’s houses. We would sit and play take turns playing the new ones or if mom allowed, we would stack them on the grownup’s phonograph.

While the 45’s were gradually phased out by lps in the 1970’s we continued to have listening sessions in basements and attics and later dorm rooms. I can tell you where I was when I first heard many of the classic rock albums that now fill my IPOD.

Simply listening to a new recording is something that has been lost with the advent of digital music and headphones. Listening to a new song is more of a personal experience in earphones or the car although accessibility to music has never been greater.

My meager 45 rpm collection included 24 records. Today my IPOD has over 10,000 songs inside of it, including files for every 45 in that old collection. I’d love it if I could have some friends over and we could play them all. They just don’t seem to have the time. I understand though. According to I-Tunes, my collection is 23.1 days long.

Tuning Into 77 WABC For The Top 100

Before IPOD playlists and MTV and classic rock, there was AM radio. For almost 20 years stations like KLIF in Dallas and WIBG in Philadelphia and WLS in Chicago dominated the listening habits of teenagers.

For millions of listeners in the greater New York City area, the two stations of choice for kids were WABC and WMCA. Like the scene from American Graffiti, radios in cars and on beaches might all be tuned to the same station as a single disc jockey like Wolfman Jack or Cousin Brucie rambled on.
I was right there with those millions of teenagers tuning every radio within reach to AM 77.

(Listen to WABC - 1967 Top 100)

My favorite day of the year for radio listening was December 26 because it signaled the end of non-stop Christmas music and the beginning of “the countdown.”

For a solid week, WABC would play the top radio hits of the year. The countdown would start at 100 and work its way down to number one and then start all over again. If you were a pop music fan, the countdown just sucked you in. If Incense and Peppermints is only the #18 super hit of the 1967, what could be better? There is no way that Judy in Disguise (With Glasses) came in at #17.
In the days before the Internet and instant information, there was no way to get the Top 100 list without first listening to hours of radio and the accompanying commercials. As a result, I found myself carrying a transistor radio and a crumpled piece of paper around the house. I numbered the page to 100 and scratched in the songs as they were announced.

The Top 100 was just an extension of the weekly Top 40 that was aired each Tuesday night. With the weekly excitement (at least in my house) of an American Idol final, the DJ would play songs from forty down to number one. It was big news in 1967 when Light My Fire jumped five places to push Windy out of first only to be bumped by Ode To Billy Joe two weeks later.

Top 40 radio was a format that began in 1954 at WTIX in New Orleans. The concept supposedly came from a radio station owner who kept hearing the same song played over and over on a jukebox. The owner trimmed the playlist of songs down to the ones determined most popular.
The bible for radio programmers was the Billboard Magazine Top 100 chart. The Billboard charts of pop songs started in 1955. Songs were rated based on actual sales nationwide and regional charts allowed regional bands to get more radio airplay.

Reaching #1 was every band’s dream but songs that stayed on the charts for an extended period were just as profitable. The Beatles, for example, had the most #1 hits (21) but Elvis Presley had the most charted records (107) compared to 48 for the Beatles. Interestingly, The Theme From a Summer Place by Percy Faith beat out the Beatles’ Hey Jude for the #1 song of the 60’s. The #1 charted song of 1970’s was surprisingly Debbie Boone’s You Light Up My Life.

If that last paragraph brought back fond memories instead of nightmares of an old statistics class, then look for a book called Top 40 Hits by Joel Whitburn.

There was a time when soul, rock and pop music all lived together on Am radio. How else could Sammy Davis Jr.’s The Candy Man, The Staple Singers’ I’ll Take You There and Neil Young’s Heart of Gold all hit #1 in 1972.

The rise of FM radio helped conquer and divide Top 40 AM radio in the 70’s but I still think back on those TOP 100 lists from the 60’s.

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