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.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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