10 SONGS: 2/18/2026

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 # 1324

MIKE BROWNING FEATURING ELENA ROGERS: Over And Under And All Around

THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO TEAM-UP! Like the first time Marvel Comics bowslinger Hawkeye joined forces with Marvel Comics bowslinger other Hawkeye, TIRnRR Fave Raves Mike Browning and Elena Rogers pool their mighty talents for the amazing, fantastic, and incredible new single "Over And Under And All Around." I can do this all day, and I can play this all day. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!

DAVID RUFFIN: I've Got A Need For You

From a previous 10 Songs: 

"I continue to be mystified about why Motown Records didn't release David Ruffin's proposed album David in the early '70s. It's such a fantastic record, and I wish we'd been able to experience it fifty years ago...

"...Sublime stuff. It borders on heresy, but I may even prefer the tracks on David to Ruffin's classic work with the Temptations."

From the originally-unreleased David, Ruffin's exquisite take on the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back" earned a chapter in my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), and we've programmed a number of the album's other tracks at various times here on TIRnRR. Stellar, stellar album. I can't fathom what Motown execs were thinking when they shelved it. 

MICHAEL SIMMONS: America

America feels like a dream to me now.

As duly ranted here, I'm in absolute thrall to Fun Where You Can Find It, the recent all-covers album by Michael Simmons. Among its garden of earthly sweets 'n' treats, my go-to selection has become Michael's lovely and moving version of Simon and Garfunkel's "America." Much of this interest is driven by the need for comfort in the midst of the country's spiraling miasma. The song provides some of that comfort, at least to the extent that a record can provide comfort. 

GLADYS KNIGHT AND THE PIPS: I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Most music-lovers likely consider Marvin Gaye's performance of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" definitive, and I would agree. If I understand the story right, Gaye recorded the song before Gladys Knight and the Pips did, but Gladys's "Grapevine" reached retail well before Marvin's, and it became a hit. Years ago, and for many years thereafter, I dismissed the Pips' take as too...show biz? Vegas, even? That was nonsense--nonsense!!--and I disavow my former POV as the hopelessly chuckleheaded take it was. Stupid young punk! 

WORMSTEW: Spinning

SUPERgroup! SoCal pop combo Wormstew has been around for ages honestly, originally as a solo DIY recording project for songwriter Mike Schnee. Now a trio, with the right honorable Mr. Schnee joining forces with longtime TIRnRR stalwarts Teresa Cowles and the above-mentioned Michael Simmons, Wormstew's new digital single "Spinning" heralds the release of their forthcoming album Last Days Of Loma. We're spinning! It's what good DJs do.

THE FLASHCUBES: Reminisce

The Greatest Record Ever Made!

THE HALF/CUBES: Whenever You're On My Mind

As we continue to bliss out with the pristine perfection of the Half/Cubes' current album Found Pearls, a long-player filled t'burstin' with nonpareil covers of underappreciated  pop pearls, my mind wanders to prolonged consideration of what other worthy source material our Half/Cubes could unearth for a hypothetical third album. It's...a long list, and I'm still adding to it as an idle exercise in delighted daydreaming. In the here and now, we're enthusiastically digging the latest single from Found Pearls, a go'geous cover of Marshall Crenshaw's "Whenever You're On My Mind," which the Half/Cubes accomplish with able assistance from Tom Teeley and Robert Crenshaw. Whenever pop music's on my mind, the Half/Cubes are THERE!

PARTHENON HUXLEY: Double Our Numbers

ALSO The Greatest Record Ever Made! We played Ballzy Tomorrow's ace cover of "Double Our Numbers" on last week's epic tribute to Parthenon Huxley. We program the original version this week. Once again: Godspeed, Parthenon.

TELEVISION: Elevation

Yet another hero passes, as This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio remembers Television bassist Fred Smith. Television's 1977 debut album Marquee Moon is rightly recognized as classic, and I've always been particularly drawn to its Side Two opener "Elevation." From its chapter in my GREM! book:

"Vertigo.

"For the disaffected and dissatisfied in 1977, no track expressed the feeling of rock music in dizzying free fall with greater menace and implied ennui as 'Elevation' by Television...

"...From Television's debut album Marquee Moon, the track 'Elevation' just fascinated me when I was 17. Fall of 1977, freshman in college, trying to finally hear all these punk or new wave or whaddayacallit bands I'd read so much about in the pages of Phonograph Record Magazine. I asked the campus radio station for help, and was rewarded with the sounds of the Ramones, Blondie, the Dictators, the Adverts, the Jam, Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, the Runaways, and oh yeah!, Television. I could never get enough of this jagged, loping, serpentine noise, so mesmerizing, so different, so gratifyingly dizzying in its willful application of elevation going to my head. And staying there. Marquee Moon was among my earliest LP purchases in this broad category of NEW MUSIC circa '77 and '78. It would not be the last...."

SLYBOOTS: If We Could Let Go

The only thing more powerful than hate is love. And yes, Slyboots' "If We Could Let Go" is indeed another sterling example of The Greatest Record Ever Made! My favorite individual track of 2024 and one of my favorite tracks of the decade, we'll hear this wonderous gem again on our next show. 

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider a visit to CC's Tip Jar. You can also become a Boppin' booster on my Patreon page.

I compiled a various-artists tribute album called Make Something Happen! A Tribute To The Flashcubes, and it's pretty damned good; you can read about it here and order it here. 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. You can read about our history here.

10 SONGS: 2/10/2023

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 # 1167. This show is available as a podcast.

TELEVISION: Marquee Moon

Much of this week's playlist was programmed in reaction to the death of Television's Tom Verlaine. When I was 17 in 1977, Television's debut album Marquee Moon was an integral part of my enthusiastic assimilation into punk and what would later be called new wave. That impact was immense, and it's still with me.

So both Dana and I wanted to play a few tracks from relevant acts of that era, culminating in a closing set of NYC artists. Over the course of the show, we figured we needed to play four songs by Television, and we supplemented those with a bunch of others we felt were also part of this general discussion of '70s punk and its periphery: Blondie, Gang of Four, the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, Tom Robinson Band, Talking Heads, Lou Reed, the Shirts, Public Image Ltd., Richard Hell and the VoidOids, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Flashcubes, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders (with the other Heartbreakers), the Dictators, and the late Robert Gordon with Tuff Darts. The acts are too varied to be lumped together within one genre. But trust me: at the time, each of them was part of our full-tilt embrace of NEW MUSIC! When I was a young punk, all of these acts were part of the punk conversation.

Our little mutant radio show is named after a spoken line in a Ramones song, and a show-specific edit of "Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?" serves as our usual opening theme. This week, Dana suggested replacing the regular theme song with the ten-minute title track from Television's Marquee Moon. I thought that was a superb idea, and we went with it.

I don't want to exaggerate how important Marquee Moon was to me...but I don't wish to understate it either. I bought my copy of Marquee Moon before I owned Ramones, probably before I got My Aim Is True, maybe before Blank Generation, definitely before Blondie or Go Girl Crazy or Talking Heads 77, maybe just before or just after my girlfriend gave me Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols. I played Marquee Moon in my dorm room, and I most especially played its track "Elevation" over and over and over. But I listened to all of its tracks, including the long one that gave the album its title:

I remember

How the darkness doubled

I recall

Lightning struck itself

I was listening

Listening to the rain

I was hearing

Hearing something else

At the age of 17, "something else" was what I needed to hear. I heard it in Television.

BLONDIE: Little Girl Lies

When I got to college in the fall of '77, one of my first and most pressing bits of business was getting the campus radio station at Brockport to play me some of the punk and associated records I'd read about in Phonograph Record Magazine. 

Blondie's "X-Offender" was near the top of my list of requests. The prurient 'n' pulchritudinous appeal of singer Debbie Harry was irresistible to this teen, and I was reeled in hook, line, and more hooks by PRM writer Mark Shipper's description of Blondie as looking like Marilyn Monroe backed by the Dave Clark Five. See, THAT'S playing directly into the CC demographic.

My first Blondie record purchase was the "Rip Her To Shreds" 12" single, acquired specifically as a budget approach to owning "X-Offender" without springing for the cost of the whole LP. Efficient! I did hear more of the eponymous debut album as well, either on the radio station or at the on-campus bar the Rat. That exposure included tracks "You Look Good In Blue" and "Little Girl Lies."

When I finally did buy a copy of Blondie's first album in the summer of '79, I was staying at my girlfriend's apartment and gave my newly-acquired record a spin on her turntable. One of the other girls living there heard "Little Girl Lies," and declared it the worst excuse for music she had ever experienced.

Heh. And you thought Blondie wasn't punk?

28 IF: Hold Tight

Our friend Ray Paul's group 28IF is prepping release of their new single, a cover of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich's fabulous "Hold Tight." We played it on the radio, because that's where ya play stuff. And if you'd like to hear 28IF perform the song live, proximity to Rochester, NY this weekend will give you a chance to realize that dream. 28IF are playing a show at Lovin' Cup in Rochester on Saturday February 11th, celebrating the 59th anniversary of the British Invasion. Their music is just, well, their music. We say thee FAB!

STYX: Kiss Your Ass Goodbye

THE WEEKLINGS: I've Just Seen A Face

We've been playing the Weeklings' ace new cover of the Beatles' "I've Just Seen A Face;" SPOILER ALERT: we're playing it again next week, at a deliberately climactic part of the program. Showmanship. We're all about the showmanship. 

Last week, we received a note from Weekling Glen Burtnik--I can never remember if Glen is the Shy One, the Smart One, the Cute One, or the Endowed-With-Powers-And-Abilities-Far-Beyond-Those-Of-Mortal-Men One--acknowledging the airplay on TIRnRR.

We were gonna play "I've Just Seen A Face" again this week anyway, but hearing from Glen also inspired us to dig out Styx's "Kiss Your Ass Goodbye," an incredible, incredible song Glen wrote a few years back. Glen was (briefly) a member of Styx at the time, and he also recorded the song as a solo track. But we knew it from Styx, and we were blown away by how an act that was, frankly, one of my designated bands to hate when I was a young punk and power popper, could be capable of such a flat-out great and explosive number.

Styx absolutely was not and should never be considered a power pop group. But if their version of "Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" isn't power pop, there ain't no such thing as power pop.

MAJOR LANCE: You Don't Want Me No More

Dana's been on a major Major Lance kick lately, and that interest is resulting in some terrific additions to the ol' TIRnRR playlists. I remember Lance's 1964 hit "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" from when I was a kid--someone in the family circle had the 45 on Okeh Records--and I eventually knew his previous hit "The Monkey Time," but never did any kind of deeper dive into the Major Lance songbook. Now, Dana's playing different Major Lance gems, and I'm lovin' each and every one of 'em. More, Dana! MORE!!

THE FLASHCUBES: You Really Got Me

The Flashcubes' unreleased live cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" comes from a show at the Jabberwocky in Syracuse in early March of 1978, a little more than a month after my first Flashcubes show. The Flashcubes' prowess as an exciting live rock 'n' roll group and their ability to craft killer original power pop tunes are a large reason why they became my all-time favorite act not named the Beatles or the Ramones. 

And when it comes to executing cover versions of essential ditties written and previously recorded by someone else, the Flashcubes' super powers are also nearly nonpareil. It's evident on this live Kinks cover, and it's equally evident in the superfine series of covers they've done recently as digital singles for the mighty Big Stir Records.  There's more to come in that category. I've heard them, and I do believe you're gonna love them.

TELEVISION: Elevation

The Greatest Record Ever Made!

THE RAMONES: Sheena Is A Punk Rocker

The record that changed my life. It's not an exaggeration. This radio show, my blog, the book I have coming out the spring--man, none of it happens for me if not for my first spin of "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" in late '77. Music matters. Musicians matter. A record can change your life. I'll testify to that under oath.

SYD STRAW: CBGB's

I regret that I never once set foot inside CBGB's. I think I walked by the club once, Spring '79, heading to or from a Flashcubes show at Gildersleeve's. That 'Cubes gig is the only NYC club show I ever saw; like Arty Lenin said in the Flashcubes' "Angry Young Man," I'm a million miles away from all the clubs I wanna play.

(Dana says that on his first visit to CBGB's, he was met at the door by a bum stumbling out, who then promptly puked on Dana's shoes. Ah, concert memories....)

Syd Straw made it to CBGB's. And there's a song about it on her 1996 album War And Peace, an album she did with members of the amazing Springfield, Missouri band the Skeletons. This week, we offer that song as a toast to a place I never knew first-hand, but which impacted me in ways beyond measure. In memory of Tom Verlain. In memory of Robert Gordon. In memory of the Ramones, and in recognition of sounds that still play in our heads, inspirations that live on eternally. 

At CBGB's. And everywhere else, too.

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider supporting this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon, or by visiting CC's Tip Jar. Additional products and projects are listed here.

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, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

POP-A-LOOZA: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! Television, "Elevation"

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is yet another page torn from the chronicles of The Greatest Record Ever Made!, celebrating the dizzying splendor of "Elevation" by Television.

I'm a little bummed that this chapter is no longer part of the blueprint for my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). But the book was simply too long; if I have any hope of placing the book with a publisher, I needed to make some cuts. And I have a different book due for publication in the spring of 2023. The GREM! Television chapter has now moved to the even-more-hypothetical The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 2). 

And it's in pretty good company for Volume 2. Other completed chapters moved from Volume 1 to Volume 2 discuss tracks by the Rubinoos, Sam Cooke, the Kinks, Grand Funk, Alice Cooper, Suzi Quatro, Joan Armatrading, Arthur Conley, the Searchers, Rufus, the Byrds, Elton John, Love, Nelson Riddle, the Jam, First Aid Kit, the Five Stairsteps, Wham!, Heart, the Runaways, Eddie Cochran, Rick James, the Romantics, the MC5, the Dixie Cups, T. Rex, America, the New York Dolls, and more. SEQUEL! Clearly, I need to sell Volume 1 and expedite Volume 2. An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. 

And today, that infinite turn belongs to a fantastic track that blew my freakin' mind when 17-year-old me first heard it in 1977. A Greatest Record Ever Made! spotlight on Television's "Elevation" is the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider supporting this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon, or by visiting CC's Tip Jar. Additional products and projects are listed here.

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, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl

THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE: Elevation

This chapter is in some potential drafts of my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), but is more likely to be pushed back to an even-more-theoretical This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 2.

An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!

TELEVISION: "Elevation"

Written by Tom Verlaine

Produced by Andy Johns and Tom Verlaine

From the album Marquee Moon, Elektra Records, 1977

It was not pushed back to Volume 2, so the original post has been unpublished for bookkeeping purposes. It can be seen as a chapter in my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1)

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider supporting this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon, or by visiting CC's Tip Jar. Additional products and projects are listed here.

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, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl

THE EVERLASTING FIRST: Quick Takes For T [music edition]

Continuing a look back at my first exposure to a number of rock 'n' roll acts and superheroes (or other denizens of print or periodical publication), some of which were passing fancies, and some of which I went on to kinda like. They say you never forget your first time; that may be true, but it's the subsequent visits--the second time, the fourth time, the twentieth time, the hundredth time--that define our relationships with the things we cherish. Ultimately, the first meeting is less important than what comes after that. But every story still needs to begin with that first kiss.

TELEVISION

So many of the stories of my immersion in pop music begin with things I read, particularly with things I read in rock 'n' roll magazines. The tabloid Phonograph Record Magazine had a seismic effect on me, introducing me to an interest in punk rock. This was the spring of 1977, my final semester as a high school student, and before I'd managed to actually hear (or have any interest in) this broad category of punk music. I read Patti Smith's Penthouse interview in 1976, and I saw a sensationalist news report about the Sex Pistols in late '76/early '77. But it was PRM that really impacted me.

A New York City band called Television was among the many acts I first encountered vicariously, in the pages of Phonograph Record Magazine. The list of artists introduced to me via PRM also includes the Ramones, Blondie, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Damned, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Chris Spedding and the Vibrators, the Dictators, Milk 'N' Cookies, and more. I don't even remember what the writers at PRM said about Television; I only know that I was desperate, desperate to hear them and all of these other groups. Patti Smith was initially a disappointment to me when I first heard/saw her on The Mike Douglas Show, whereas the Sex Pistols thrilled me when WOUR-FM played "God Save The Queen" in the summer of '77. I had to wait until the start of college at the end of that summer to hear some of the other acts that PRM recommended to me.

At school at the State University College at Brockport, I pestered jocks at campus station WBSU to play this stuff for me. Sometimes they refused, sometimes they complied. WBSU gave me my first listen of Television, with a spin (and several requested spins thereafter) of a track from Television's then-recent debut album, Marquee Moon. That track was called "Elevation."

Oh. My. GOD...!!

That was enough to get me to buy Marquee Moon at The Record Grove in Brockport. The rest of the album was also great, but I was well and truly mesmerized by "Elevation," then and now. Here's a bit of what I've written about the song for a tentative spot in my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1):

"Vertigo.

"For the disaffected and dissatisfied in 1977, no track expressed the feeling of rock music in dizzying free fall with greater menace and implied ennui as 'Elevation' by Television. 

"A large part of growing up manifests in staking one's own claim on fresh vistas. We don't necessarily crave a complete break from the past, from the frontiers settled by older siblings or preceding generations. But we want some real estate to call our own...

"...I could never get enough of this jagged, loping, serpentine noise, so mesmerizing, so different, so gratifyingly dizzying in its willful application of elevation going to my head. And staying there. Marquee Moon was among my earliest LP purchases in this broad category of NEW MUSIC circa '77 and '78. It would not be the last. 

"Oh, no. Not even close to the last."

THE TEMPTATIONS

Like the rock reads mentioned above, radio had an enormous influence on my development as a pop fan. Throughout most of the '70s, from roughly '70-'71 or so through leaving home for college in 1977, I listened to the radio nearly every night. Radio is such an ingrained component of everything I am that I can't possibly separate it. Radio gave me everything. Fine, TV gave me the Monkees, and flexi-discs in Trouser Press magazine gave me R.E.M. and Fools Face. I'm very grateful for that. But radio is where I first heard the Beatles, Badfinger, Gladys Knight and the Pips, KISS, Graham Parker, the Raspberries, Johnny Nash, Chuck Berry, the Isley Brothers, Alice Cooper, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Flamin' Groovies, the Hoodoo Gurus, Run-DMC, the Jackson Five, Dusty Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, the Spinners, the Four Tops, Sweet, and...and...

...you get the idea.

Radio also gave me the Temptations. I'm old enough to remember the Temps' legendary '60s sides, but I don't recall them contemporaneously; I came to them all well after the fact. It's especially weird that I don't remember their ubiquitous 1965 smash "My Girl," but the memory does what the memory does, even when it's a Motown memory.

I think I kinda sorta knew the Temptations prior to 1972, in the sense that I sorta kinda knew there was a soul group called the Temptations. I think. But in '72, "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" was the Temps' first hit record released within my prime AM radio era, when my ears were all but superglued to Syracuse's WOLF-AM and WNDR-AM. Maybe I heard the Temptations before "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone," but this was the first time I noticed them.

Once again, we turn to The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1):

"In 'Papa Was A Rollin' Stone,' Papa is every familiar stereotype of shiftless, shifty, amoral grifter made real, the roguish charm he presumably had in life dissipated in death, leaving the palpable pain in the voices of the Temptations as his resigned and unsympathetic eulogy. They mourn him nonetheless.

"On Syracuse's WOLF-AM, where I first heard this compelling diatribe in all its beaten and defiant glory, there was a Sunday night public affairs program called The Black Experience. I think it was a local program, though it may have been syndicated for all I knew. I usually switched the station over to rival WNDR on Sunday nights; I was a suburban white kid, and not remotely part of the show's target audience (and besides, if I was gonna listen to talk radio, I'd try to find a rebroadcast of a 1930s episode of The Shadow or The Green Hornet on public radio instead). What little I thought I might understand of the black experience was conveyed through pop culture, through my peripheral awareness of blaxploitation flicks like Shaft and  Superfly, perception through a fisheye lens. 

"In my sheltered environment, the Temptations' "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" felt genuine. Vocals by Dennis Edwards, Melvin Franklin, Richard Street, and Damon Harris convey dismay, disappointment, and reluctant acceptance in paradoxically equal measure. The controlled funk of the musical underpinning conjures emotional and economic desolation, possessed with a will to shrug it all off as if the artists are too cool to succumb to the big, bad world. I thought Damon Harris's falsetto lines were performed by a female singer, and I also thought that all Papa left his poor abandoned family was a loan, but even in my cluelessness I recognized the song's power, its disillusionment, its ache, its fury. Its sense of irreparable loss. The Temptations told a story. I listened. And I thought maybe--maybe--I understood. It was a sad story. I wished it could have a happy ending...."

TOMMY TUTONE

Jenny, I got your number/I'm gonna make you mine....

No, not that song. Before we all heard all about getting Jenny's number, my introduction to the music of Tommy Tutone was delivered by Breaking The Rules, a 1980 2-LP loss-leader sampler that included the band's song "Cheap Date." I confess I was more taken with Breaking The Rules tracks by Elvis Costello ("Tiny Steps"), Rachel Sweet ("I've Got A Reason" and her cover of the Velvet Underground's "New Age"), the Joe Perry Project ("Let The Music Do The Talking"), Rockpile ("Wrong Again [Let's Face It]"), and especially Quincy's "Critics' Choice" and "Turn The Other Way Around." There was also the Beat's "Don't Wait Up For Me," plus the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays," but I already owned those tracks prior to buying Breaking The Rules at Brockport's Main Street Records.

So my first exposure to Tommy Tutone didn't make much of an impression, nor did the track "Which Man Are You," which opened a 1981 loss-leader set called Exposed II: A Cheap Peek At Today's Provocative New Rock. Exposed II also repeated "Cheap Date" from Breaking The Rules, but I was too busy playing Holly and the Italians' "Tell That Girl To Shut Up" and the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty In Pink" over and over to care about the Tutone tracks.

But yeah, 1982's "867-5309/Jenny" blew me away. Just like it did everyone else. I bought the 45, the only stand-alone Tommy Tutone record I've ever owned. I recall hearing 1983's "Get Around Girl" a few times on the radio, but Tommy Tutone remain pretty much a one-hit wonder for me. A deeper dive into their catalog may be in order, just to see if any other numbers might also be worth getting.

THE TROGGS

Yes, that song. Wild thing, you make my heart sing. But the Troggs' 1966 smash recording of "Wild Thing" wasn't my introduction to the song, at least not my conscious introduction to it. I mean, I must have heard those Troggs warblin' on the radio about where the wild things are (and what the wild things do) at some point in the '60s, but I didn't really notice. I may have also heard "Love Is All Around," but it likewise would have been background music rather than something that made me feel it in my fingers and feel it in my toes.

So when an act called Fancy had an AM radio hit with their version of "Wild Thing" in 1974, it was a new song as far I was aware. I didn't remember the Troggs, and I'd certainly never heard the Wild Ones' forgotten original 1965 "Wild Thing." I didn't particularly like Fancy's hit, except that I picked up some hint of pouty sexiness in the chick vocals, which did intrigue my teen hormones even if I didn't care about the record. I would have been more intrigued if I'd known that breathy lead singer Helen Caunt had posed for Penthouse magazine. Wild thing, I think you move me.

When did I discover the Troggs themselves? Memory is imprecise, but I'm sure it was part of my overall embrace of '60s music--especially British Invasion--as a teen in the mid '70s. My first Troggs acquisition was "With A Girl Like You" on the 2-LP The History Of British Rock Vol. 2, received for Christmas in 1976. That collection looms largest in my legend for giving me my first Kinks record ("All Day And All Of The Night"), but it also led to more Troggs. I grabbed used 45s of "Wild Thing," "Love Is All Around," and the incredible "I Can't Control Myself." 

My first Troggs LP was a cutout-bin purchase of their 1975 album The Troggs, which didn't carry quite the same frenzy as their '60s work. I eventually secured the Troggs' double-album best-of set The Vintage Years, and much, much later the Archeology 2-CD set. Oh, and the 1992 Athens Andover album, which found the Troggs working with members of R.E.M. Love is all around. Wild thing, I can't control myself. 

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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, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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