"Billboard Top 5 songs from 1965 | Gen Z Music Producer Reaction" -- the title says it all. But I give Isaac Brown credit for being intelligent, articulate, and not at all snotty as some others of his generation would be. He's respectful, not sarcastic; a nice guy. You can see as he listens to each song, and occasionally comments, that he approches them across the gulf of sixty summers with a very analytical mind, like an archaeologist.
But wait to watch his head explode when he gets to "Wooly Bully"!
1965 was a very good year for pop music - this is my kind of music, from that sweet slice of time after Meet the Beatles but before Sgt. Pepper. No, I wasn't part of the counter-culture. Too square; still am.
For more fun with Isaac, go watch him listen to Rumours for the very first time! (How the hell do you get to be a music producer without ever having heard Fleetwood Mac? Sheesh! Kids these days . . . )
The Beach Boys' 1969 hit brings back memories of someone I can't quite recall. Was it a girl I was dating in high school? That didn't work out, but I thought I was in love, and I do recall the warm, cozy feeling of this song. Or was it later on, and I re-listened to this song, thinking of a boy I thought I loved? Funny, I usually do remember personal things like that. I guess the mind is aging like the body. Oh well, it's still a good summer song, so enjoy.
Who wouldn't like to take a trip back to 1960? That's the year the Andy Griffith Show premiered, beginning an eight-year visitation in the small town of Mayberry that still delights many hearts. Located in a far corner of the state of make-believe, Mayberry was an old-fashioned place even then, home to many quaint, amusing characters. It was small-town America with the sad and ugly parts left out; a place where good humor, homely virtues, and common decency still ruled. How very far away it seems today.
Your Head Trucker swore off broadcast television thirty years ago, so I never saw this reunion special with Andy and company that was made in 2003. But I'm enjoying it now - maybe you will, too.
The Mayberry Special departs at 7 o'clock on Track 1. I've got my Pullman ticket in hand. Who else wants to go?
Bonus:Marina Coates from Mockingbird Lane Design has done a brilliant job of portraying the Taylor home in 3-D. Check it out:
Lovely Lesley Gore, who resembles a favorite cousin of mine, sings her first hit song on the Ed Sullivan Show, October 13, 1963 -- sixty-one years ago today.
Ralph and Kevin from Cavalcade of Food visit the Rambler Ranch House in Colorado, full of groovy 1960s decor, furniture, and appliances. Ralph also bakes a Mexican Wedding Cake in a 1964 Frigidare Flair oven just like the one in Samantha's kitchen on Bewitched - remember? The recipe is in the video description.
Your Head Trucker remembers that 1960s stuff very well, although it's not my favorite period, aesthetically or otherwise. And I don't know about other parts of the country, but shag carpeting was not a thing in the Deep South until the 1970s. But it's a fun fantasy for the owner and his visitors, and maybe for you, too, if you don't mind some shaky camera work. Enjoy.
P.S. - Your Head Trucker used to have a recipe for that cake. It was delicious, and a big hit at get-togethers. I'll have to dig through my old cookbooks and see if I can find it again.
Ah, the sounds of summer - 60 years ago (!) and still just as fine as ever. The Beach Boys performed this hit on the Ed Sullivan Show on September 27, 1964:
The crazed modern world has nothing to compare to this.
From 1969 . . . 55 years ago . . . end of school . . . childhood's end . . . no longer a boy . . . not quite a man . . . Where would I go? What would I do? Who would I be? No answers then . . . only the sound of happiness . . . a long road ahead . . . hopeward bound.
It might be old news to the rest of the world, but we just discovered this 2008 documentary about the Los Angeles studio musicians who created the sounds we all loved in the 1960s. As Dick Clark says in here, "They played for so many people in so many styles. . . . They had the magic touch." Though rarely credited for their work back then, this show honors their contributions to the "West Coast Sound" that was heard 'round the world on radio, records, TV themes, and movie soundtracks. Fascinating.
An extra interview with delightful Carol Kaye, the only woman in the group, and a fabulous bassist:
Your Head Trucker couldn't get enough of this bouncy tune when it came out in the fall of 1969. I got the 45 as soon as I could, and played it over and over and over again, dancing around the house.
My dancing days are long past, but the song still makes me smile. And I'm loving this brilliant little collage with classic dancers from the golden age of the movies. Enjoy.
Lately it's been hard to get my mind and body in gear. Perhaps it's just hibernation time. There's nothing wrong beyond the usual creaks and rumbles of old age. Guess I'm just in a blah mood.
The state of the world being what it is, I've tried today to think of something I could blog that might give me a lift - maybe it will help somebody else, too. So here goes.
I'm sure many of my truckbuddies remember the Watusi song and the dance of the same name - or do you? Alas, by the time I started going to high-school dances, say about 1968 or so, all the cutely named dances popular in the early sixties had degenerated into miscellaneous twitches, jerks, and shuffles. There were no steps to learn - you just stood there and wiggled as you pleased, more or less in time with the music. A couple of years later, the Cool Kids in their puritan zeal declared that dancing was "not relevant" - and so there were no more dances, in high school or college. They didn't return until the rise of disco, about 1976.
But I digress. Just what was the Watusi? I've tried to look this up before, and apparently nobody really knows. I've seen comments from dance teachers on YouTube who say they can't find any actual steps to that dance. Well, here are some historical videos that might give a clue. See what you think - and I think you will smile.
3. The KCTU Dancers from Wichita, Kansas, in 2014, having big fun with something that may or may not be historically correct:
4. Luci Johnson and Steve McQueen certainly ought to have known what they were doing in Beverly Hills in the summer of '64, so perhaps this is the definitive performance:
5. On the other hand, how can you get more authentic than these chaps? From the 1959 film Watusi, I think:
Vote for your favorite version in the comments section.
P. S. -- Actually, there is documentation for how to dance the Watusi. See it and try it after the jump. And let me know how that works out for you.
While making my coffee this morning, I looked out the window at the cars zooming by on the busy boulevard - from a distance, they are not so much different from those of fifty years ago. Traffic lights still wink red and yellow and green, just as they did then. Little birds flit among the trees, and nimble squirrels jog along the fence top just as their long-ago ancestors were wont to do. The sun shines just as brightly now as in the past, the sky is just as blue, and puffy white clouds still float along in their insouciant way. The grass and the trees are just as green, the cheerful zinnias and flaming crepe myrtles still as delightful to the eye as ever they were.
Inside our humble bungalow, long since remodeled countless times by who knows how many previous tenants, the potted plants in the windows, the plastered walls, the simple furniture, the striped blue-green-gold tablecloth and old-fashioned china, the kitchen shelves full of pots and pans and dishes and canned goods, are none of them very different from what might have been here fifty years ago. It doesn't look at all like the Jetsons' home. A time traveler suddenly popping in from a half-century ago would no doubt be quite unimpressed - apart from the microwave, the computers, and the big flat-screen TV, he would surely think there was really nothing to write home about. How disappointing!
And yet despite the seeming similitude, all is changed, and changed utterly.
The other day, M. P. told me at breakfast that he had just seen an online ad by Michael's, the nationwide arts-and-crafts chain, announcing their Pride Month sales. And we were both struck for a moment with awe and wonder at how very much things have changed for gay people just in our lifetimes. Now, at least with some retailers, gayness has joined the pantheon of other commercialized holidays, in the good old American tradition, along with Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. What a breathtaking development.
I understand that certain weenie-whiny children of the snowflake generation decry the evils of "corporate sponsorship," but it cannot be doubted that when Wal-Mart decks its shelves with all sorts of rainbow merchandise, gayness has arrived, it is part of the mainstream of American life, along with apple pie, baseball, Budweiser, and Twitter, like it or not. (And some don't like it a bit, but I'll get to that presently.)
The petulant Eloi of the modern world, college age and younger, have no memory of the 20th century - they have no real idea of what it was like to live before Stonewall, before gay bars, before AIDS, before gay books and newspapers and magazines and soccer clubs and churches and websites (and free porn 24/7), and all the social media hookups anyone could want, and even marriage - all those out-and-proud things that were simply unimaginable fifty years ago. Unimaginable, do you hear me, children? Pure fantasy - things that if we thought of them, we would immediately also think, "Oh, that will never happen."
But it did, every bit of it. And it's still happening, as each successive generation takes things a bit further. Now there is even - will wonders never cease? - a gay presidential candidate who is taken quite seriously, at least by the Democratic Party. Utterly unimaginable in 1969 - and for quite a long time afterwards, too.
Because, of course, it usually takes time for big changes to seep from the culture-churns of the Blue Coasts down into all the hills and valleys, nooks and crannies of the Big Red Middle. In some ways, I think it is still as true today as it was fifty years ago that people in New York and Los Angeles are living in a future that will not arrive in the far provinces until five or ten years from now - though the ubiquity of television, internet, and smart phones certainly hastens the process, especially among the young hipsters in every part of the country.
But then, impatient youth in every era, in every century, has always yearned for the limpid, dreamy future to arrive as quickly as possible, while age, weary and wizened, yearns for the comforts and certainties of a vanished past. It's human nature. We want what we don't have. And all too often, we don't miss what we do have until we lose it.
This fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots brings up a number of reflections I will share with my truckbuddies over the next few days. Having been under the weather with one little ailment or another the last couple of months, I just don't have the oomph to type it all out in one sitting. And of course I would enjoy hearing your comments on this momentous anniversary, too.
Just to jog your memory of prehistoric times, you can watch The Boys in the Band, written just before Stonewall - when "gay rights" were as yet completely unthought-of by most people. When I saw it again a year or so ago, I was startled to realize which character I most identified with, from the fuller perspective of maturity. What about you?
Cheat sheet - the cast and characters
Kenneth Nelson as Michael (the host)
Frederick Combs as Donald (Michael's best friend)
Leonard Frey as Harold (the guest of honor)
Cliff Gorman as Emory (Oh Mary, don't ask!)
Laurence Luckinbill as Hank (divorced guy)
Keith Prentice as Larry (Hank's lover)
Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy Tex
Reuben Greene as Bernard (black guy)
Peter White as Alan McCarthy (straight guy - ?)
Labor Day weekend has arrived to mark the end of the summer season in the US of A, and so we come to the end of our beach party here at the Blue Truck. I hope you all have enjoyed listening to my faves from the mid-sixties; there are of course many more great songs from that period that I haven't posted, but I've tried for the most part to feature those that have a good beat that you can dance to, as a good DJ should.
It took a bit of work, but it was a real treat for me to track down all these videos - live performances whenever I could find them in good, or at least bearable, quality. And truth to tell, in many cases it's the first time your Head Trucker has ever seen these singers and bands perform - or even just seen what they looked like. Today's children would be shocked and amazed, no doubt, to learn that once upon a time, still within living memory, one might go for years on end enjoying certain songs, but having no idea what the singers looked like. And somehow it just wasn't all that important to see the singers - the music, the sound, was the important thing, and that was enough.
I miss transistor radios. Hell, I miss radio - simple and free, radiating from out the aether to everyone, everywhere, endlessly emanating delightful sounds - a constant comfort and joy.
But I digress. We begin our final Beach Mix by dimming the lights for the sweetheart dance - which goes out to my truckbuddy Frank, because he is one (and that's all you need to know, ragazzi).
And this perfect updating of the Cole Porter classic is an oldie but such an elegant goodie - like my dear old chum Tim, living the beach life year-round on the Costa del Sol, the lucky blighter.
To end the summer with a bonus: Your choice of any stud in the Blue Truck catalog - free! - goes to the reader who can name all the TV shows featured in this brilliantly edited little video. Have fun, y'all.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
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