(Above: Pepper-Uppers, unite.) If there's one thing we can count on in 2017, it's a lot of 50th anniversary retrospectives looking back at 1967. "Anniversary fatigue" is real, and while I don't want to do a lot of it this year, the problem is that some aspects of popular culture are just too damned good … Continue reading Pop charts: WERX, Grand Rapids, Michigan (January 12, 1967)
Grand Rapids
Glittering prizes and endless compromises: Rush, “The Spirit of Radio” (1981)
Sometimes a song has two distinct memories, and it's hard to decide which one is more powerful. Today is your lucky day, for you get both of them. In 1982 I was a freshman at Victor J. Andrew High School in Tinley Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. My formative years were spent between Tinley … Continue reading Glittering prizes and endless compromises: Rush, “The Spirit of Radio” (1981)
Lost local hits: Cornerstone, “Holly Go Softly” (1970)
Above: The Top 10 on WLAV/Grand Rapids, MI, 2/20/1970. You wouldn't likely predict that a song about a young man trading sex for money would have been a big hit in the conservative burg of Grand Rapids, Michigan in early 1970. But that's exactly what happened when "Holly Go Softly" by the band Cornerstone made … Continue reading Lost local hits: Cornerstone, “Holly Go Softly” (1970)
Lost local hits (Grand Rapids, MI): The Fredric, “The Girl I Love” (1968)
(Above: The Fredric, circa 1967). In an earlier post I wrote about the phenomenon of the local chart hit, a product of a bygone era when local radio programmers had sway in adding songs to the playlists of their radio stations. It was a phenomenon I investigated in writing my dissertation to see if the … Continue reading Lost local hits (Grand Rapids, MI): The Fredric, “The Girl I Love” (1968)
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