10 Songs is a weekly list of ten songs that happen to be on my mind at the moment. The lists are usually dominated by songs played on the previous Sunday night's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. The idea was inspired by Don Valentine of the essential blog I Don't Hear A Single.
This week's edition of 10 Songs draws exclusively from the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 1260.
THE COWSILLS: Shine
For years now, I've been proudly declaring that the Cowsills' under-heard and underrated 1998 work Global is my favorite album of the '90s. Its track "She Said To Me" is a TIRnRR standard; the Cowsills themselves allowed us its use on our compilation This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 2, and the song has its own chapter in my current book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). The rest of Global is just as good.
The original album has been out of print for decades, limiting chances for its discovery by potential new fans. During the course of interviews I've done on behalf of my GREM! book, radio host Jim Monaghan expressed his delight that I cast a spotlight on a track from Global, whereas journalist Jeff Tamarkin (who knows more about music than I'll ever know) wasn't familiar with it at all. My favorite album of the '90s, but for most music lovers the album may as well have never existed in the first place.
Omnivore Records' new deluxe reissue of Global remedies that. You can read Jeff Tamarkin's discussion with Bob Cowsill about Global and its reissue here, and you can get with it awready and buy your own copy of Global here.
The updated Global includes three previously-unreleased tracks from the same era. Each of the three deserves to be part of the Global experience, and we're pleased to open this week's radio extravaganza with one of them. We'll hear another one on Sunday night. Global is as Global does.
DONNA SUMMER: She Works Hard For The Money
When Donna Summer's "She Works Hard For The Money" hit big in the '80s, I wanted to hear how it would sound in the hands of a rock band, emphasizing the song's Kinks-like riff. I also wanted to hear a hard rock version of Summer's disco smash "I Feel Love." I don't think I was looking for capital-R ROCK! validation of the songs--I liked both songs just fine as they were--but I was, I dunno, imagining how they could cross over into a different market.
Even if those versions had happened, though, I'm confident Donna Summer's originals would have remained definitive.
We play Donna Summer on TIRnRR, perhaps not a lot, but enough that listeners aren't surprised when a "Hot Stuff" or an "I Feel Love" finds its way to our sovereign airwaves. I love both of those records, and frankly I'm surprised we've never gotten around to playing "She Works Hard For The Money" before this week. It's come close on a few previous occasions, and it was specifically in our initial programming blueprints each of the two previous weeks. Yes, it worked hard for the airplay.
And it deserves it.
SLYBOOTS: If We Could Let Go
NYC combo Slyboots made their TIRnRR debut on May 19th of this year with a cover of Meat Puppets' "Oh, Me." In June, we started playing their original tune "Blindsided," and that track's now a likely lock for the year-end countdown show of our most-played tracks in 2024.
As superb as "Blindsided" is, the new Slyboots single "If We Could Let Go" is somehow even better, and easily one of my favorite tracks of this year. The title offers a path forward in troubled times, even if it's a path I'm not sure I'm ready to take. Yet. But we'll play the song, again and again. Another great record from a great group.
THE ARMOIRES: Ridley & Me After The Apocalypse
I don't think we've quite reached the "after the apocalypse" stage. We might not even be into the thick of its spiraling malaise. We're approaching the onramp. The onramp to Armageddon. Road trip! We'll face the apocalypse with rings on our fingers, bells on our toes, chips on our shoulders, and a song by the Armoires in our hearts.
CARLA OLSON AND TALL POPPY SYNDROME: Is It True
With this turn on the ol' virtual turntable, Carla Olson and Tall Poppy Syndrome's cover of Brenda Lee's "Is It True" makes its seventh consecutive weekly appearance on the TIRnRR playlist. We'll go for eight in a row on Sunday.
THE PALEY BROTHERS: Come Out And Play
Earlier this month, we received news that the great Andy Paley was nearing the end of his life. The information was not meant to made public at the time, so we paid unspoken tribute with another spin of "Come Out And Play," the 1978 pure pop gem from the Paley Brothers, Andy and Jonathan Paley. We circled back later in the playlist for "Come On Let's Go," the Paley Brothers' collaboration with the Ramones to render the definitive cover of that Ritchie Valens classic. We toasted amongst ourselves in appreciation of the life and gift of one of pop music's good guys.
Andy Paley passed this week. We mourn along with those who knew him better, including some mutual friends who are experiencing a personal loss far beyond what we feel as fans. Others are better suited to eulogize him, and to celebrate the pervasive breadth and depth of his legacy, a wide-ranging c.v. of heart and substance, inspiration and accomplishment, craft and artistry.
Our suns only shine upon us for the briefest of times. While we are here, we are together. Come out and play.
LESLEY GORE: You Don't Own Me
The Greatest Record Ever Made!
THE BOBBY FULLER FOUR: I Fought The Law
Realizing that this week's show was TIRnRR # 1260, it felt important to celebrate the importance of that number in my life:
1260 WNDR!!
1260 WNDR was (along with The Big 15 WOLF) one of the two Syracuse Top 40 AM radio stations that shaped so much of my development as a pop music fan in the '60s and '70s. We devoted the entirety of this week's closing set to songs Dana and/or I used to hear on WNDR and/or WOLF.
And the set began with a song I remember hearing on the radio when I was six years old. From my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1):
"In 1966, my brother Art had a red Alfa Romeo. I'm told it was a shitty car, and I remember its ignominious final days in his possession: A scarlet husk parked, prone, lying in state beyond the shed at the end of our back yard. Collecting dust, collecting rust. A tow truck came to whisk this luckless red shell to its final reward.
"But my prevailing memory of this doomed vehicle is a happy one. The memory involves the consumption of Royal Crown Cola, or possibly a root beer and Teen Burger at the nearby A & W Drive-In. The memory absolutely involves the car's one true immortal virtue:
"Its radio.
"That radio? When I was six years old, I thought that radio was magic.
"I mean, it must have been magic. There were songs I heard on that car's radio that I never heard anywhere else. But it was a different magic than I imagined; it was Syracuse's 1260 WNDR-AM. Set to 1260, the Alfa Romeo played 'I Like It Like That' by the Dave Clark Five, a record that--to me--only existed in Art’s star-crossed Alfa Romeo. Even better, it played--often!--another irresistible exclusive: 'I Fought the Law' by the Bobby Fuller Four.
"My visceral memory of that terrific song remains inextricably linked to those moments in my brother's Alfa Romeo, of drums, guitars, and a singer bemoaning his fate of breakin' rocks in the hot sun, all pouring forth from the little car's speakers as my big brother cruised suburban streets with his pesky kid brother on board. It's indelible, and I embrace and cherish its vivid image...."
FREDA PAYNE: Band Of Gold
While my ears were stapled to WOLF and WNDR in Syracuse, my future wife Brenda was a little girl listening to WABC in New York. Also from The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1):
"Brenda also grew up listening to the radio. Jesus, didn't everyone our age do that? As a little girl originally from Brooklyn, living from school-age to young adulthood on Staten Island in a government housing project--an environment dramatically more racially- and culturally-diverse than my vanilla childhood surroundings--she was immersed in a lot more black music than this suburban kid was exposed to during the same time frame.
"But Top 40 radio was an equal-opportunity rush. I heard Motown, just like she did. I heard the Honey Cone, Isaac Hayes, the Spinners, the Stylistics, the O'Jays, Rufus, Curtis Mayfield, and more, all pop music, offered for interracial, interfaith radio worship along with the Partridge Family, Three Dog Night, the Carpenters, Alice Cooper, and John Denver. It was the soundtrack of the seventies, in the city and the suburbs alike. Brenda heard more of it, and she heard it more often; but the soulful sounds certainly reached my ears sometimes, too.
"At the end of 1970, when Brenda was eleven years old, she listened to the year-end countdown on New York's WABC, the home of iconic NYC DJ Cousin Brucie.
"Cousin Brooooooooooocieeee!
"Ahem. As she listened to the radio's proclamations that New Year's Eve, as '70 became '71, Brenda knew exactly which great record would be anointed # 1 for the Year Of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred And Seventy. And she was right. Number ONE! ONE! ONE! ONE! ONE! Freda Payne, 'Band of Gold.' Brenda's belief was validated. And the hits just kept on coming...."
THE BEATLES: I Want To Hold Your Hand
Pop mania's Ground Zero. In Syracuse, we heard it on WNDR. Tweeeelve-sixty, double-you-enn-dee-ARRRRRRRE!
I think you understand.
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My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available, and you can order an autographed copy here. You can still get my previous book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones from publisher Rare Bird Books, OR an autographed copy here. If you like the books, please consider leaving a rating and/or review at the usual online resources.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. Recent shows are archived at Westcott Radio. You can read about our history here.
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