Every RPM Canadian Content #1 single discussion thread 1964-2000

That's what I wonder. For example, did WABC play the song? Of the three hit songs on which Wolfman Jack appeared on the commercial 45 (besides the two by Canadian bands, the third was "Did You Boogie With Your Baby" by Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids, the only one that's actually pretty good), "Clap For The Wolfman" was the only one for which, to the best of my knowledge, radio stations were not serviced with promo 45s on which Wolfman Jack did not appear. (At least in the US; I don't know if these Wolfman-less promos were issued in Canada.)

 

A version by a Canadian broadcaster charted in Canada.

 

Coming up in a couple of weeks

 

This is completely non-scientific, but here are the number of results for "Wolfman Jack" by year on Newspapers.com
1965 (1), 1966 (3), 1967 (21), 1968 (58), 1969 (28), 1970 (17), 1971 (61), 1972 (241), 1973 (2,190), 1974 (2,224)

Wolfman Jack & The Wolf Pack (1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJFdvEJTBJM



Wolfman Jack (1972)



Through The Ages (1973)



Fun & Romance (1975)



Then there was a disk jockey that was an actual wolfman



#466: Clap for the Wolfman

(Billy Van reached #29 on the CHUM chart in 1961 with "I Miss You" with The Billy Van Four)
The Billy Van Four

 

"Clap For The Wolfman" turned up on WABC's September 17, 1974 survey. By then ex-WABC personality Cousin Brucie, now with WNBC, was succeeded in his old time slot at 77 at this point by former Philadelphia DJ (and later, Washington, DC sportscaster) George Michael. So by September, for one week at least if based on the survey, it was "safe" for WABC to play it. And PD Rick Sklar was very much belt-and-suspenders in terms of any perception of impropriety, especially having been around when the payola investigations hit the States.

 

You wanted the best, you got the best...

 

Why have I been looking forward to this?

I never minded this song that much, it's more boring than anything else. At least the band came upon the 50s influence honestly, having rolled it out on the Rockin' album a couple years back. 1974 really sucked for music, a lot of it anyway!

There's a bootleg of a radio broadcast of a St. Louis show. Burton promised the band would come back later to record a live album at the venue, which never materialized due to this version of the band breaking up. It's a good show, worth seeking out. Nice touch when the band does this song, complete with a live fadeout!

Mostly the albums that sold the worst are my favorites: Artificial Paradise, #10, and The Way They Were! Lots of filler on the Bachman albums, and Share The Land tries too hard. Not a fan of the Road Food album. So maybe I go along with McDougall and Wallace being good, and of course they were brought back for the 2000 tour.

 

​

Fairly amusing. I still like the line, "Baby you got the curves but I got the angles"!

 

I guess I consider Guess Who a singles band. And I enjoy every one of the Nimbus singles until near the end. As such the old Track Record still suits me fine although I compulsively place the stuff in proper order and add Shakin' All Over to lead off and my beloved Nashville Sneakers(I still can't believe that wasn't a single. I heard it on the radio so much).

 

At #29 the week of October 5, 1974, Fludd with "Brother And Me" b/w "Piece Of Alright" (#18 at Ottawa's CFGO, #24 at CHUM)





While "Cousin Mary" was riding high in the charts back in December of 1973, lead guitarist and co-songwriter Brian Pilling had to be hospitalized with health problems that would turn out to be leukemia. While he was out, Gord Waszek (Leigh Ashford) filled in for him and was kept on as a second guitarist when Pilling was able to return, also Doni Underhill would replace founding member Greg Godovitz on bass. "Brother And Me" was one of three songs the band recorded in 1974 for Daffodil, along with the flop single "I Held Out" and "Dance Gypsy Dance" (which we'll hear later). After that label dropped them, they took the two unreleased songs with them to the newly formed Attic Records, where "Brother And Me" would be the very first release. Attic had been created by Gordon Lightfoot's manager Alexander Mair.

 

At #87 the same week of October 5, "Love Is The Feelin'" by Black & Ward. It was produced on Yorkville by Bill Gilliland (aka Johnny T. Angel). No MAPL wheel because, Terry Black, of course.





Terry Black and Laurel Ward would move to RCA Victor for their next single, which would be their biggest hit as a duo.

 

Actually, looking at discogs, I can see no rhyme or reason to Yorkville's application of the MAPL logo at all. Plenty of singles that ought to qualify don't have it, but then some do, with no discernable logic that I can see.

 

Who applied? Management or the label?

 

The birth of a pretty significant label. I had lots of Attic releases as a kid in the 80s.

 

By 'application' I just mean 'usage': did they put the logo on the label or didn't they?

I don't know the answer to your question, though, and I've been wondering the same question for months now. Why is the usage of the logo so haphazard with the clearly Canadian Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young? Well, one thing those three have in common is Reprise Records. I get the sense that Reprise was intentionally resistant to using the MAPL logo, and I can't speculate as to why. Quality, interestingly, for all their cozy relationship with RPM and rah-rah-Canada-ism, frequently didn't use the logo either, just writing "MAPL" or "MAL" or whatever next to the song title.

I saw one title where the MAPL logo was on the radio promo but not on the commercial release. That makes perfect sense since ultimately it's a signifier to radio stations more than anything else. And discogs obviously misses a lot of radio promo releases. So maybe Reprise and Yorkville were putting the logo on radio promos but not commercial releases? Except... sometimes? Who knows.

 

156. EARACHE MY EYE
by CHEECH & CHONG featuring Alice Bowie
ODE ODE-66102-S
Highest ranking for 1 week: October 12 (4), 1974




​

A teenager's morning alarm goes off. He struggles to wake up before blasting a glam rock song on his hi-fi. After two and a half minutes of the song, the teenager's father bursts into his room, pulls the needle off the record, and gives the son an angry lecture that ends up with a spanking, Satisfied with his discipline, the father leaves, and the son responds by playing the song again.

The role of the father was played by Cheech Marin of Los Angeles (East L.A., to be more specific), and the role of the teenage son was played by Tommy Chong of Edmonton. Chong, it should be noted, was eight years older than Cheech, and was in fact 36 years old by this time.

The sketch was released as part of Cheech and Chong's fourth album, entitled Cheech & Chong's Wedding Album and featuring lavish cover art simulating a wedding album (all of Cheech and Chong's albums were well-packaged). I remember the cover art for those albums very well, as they sat unplayed in my father's record cabinet. When you have children, you stop playing Cheech and Chong. I remember being more intrigued by the packaging than I was by the contents, which by and large were a form of humour that just didn't particularly resonate with me. Decades later, listening to the 'skit' segment of "Earache My Eye", I confess that little has changed. I find it almost painfully unfunny.

That's no big deal, though. It wasn't the sounds of one grown man pretending to spank another grown man that drove this single up the charts, as radio very rarely played the entire five minutes and twenty seconds. The hook was, of course, the hook: the catchy guitar riff and horn section driving the rather excellent song that makes up about half of the a-side (and almost all of the non-album b-side, which continues the joke but is mostly a jam based on the a-side song). While the title "Earache My Eye" is taken from the skit and technically the composition itself is unnamed, the song is universally known by that name. The picture sleeve of the single credits the song to Alice Bowie, rather obviously a portmanteau of the names Alice Cooper and David Bowie, whose styles were being broadly imitated here. The picture sleeve shows Cheech Marin prancing on a stage with a guitar, dressed in a mockery of glam rock fashion. This is appropriate, as the "Alice Bowie" character is Cheech, who sings the song on the single. The lyrics are, in-universe, autobiographical, talking about how "glam" clothing has negatively affected his life but how he doesn't care because it makes a lot of money ($49,000, I seem to recall from a different song).

So if the song was sung by the American half of the duo, and if that same American half played the more prominent role in the skit, what makes me (and, of secondary importance, the CRTC) consider this song to be CanCon? It comes down to the songwriter credit: (Thomas Chong, Richard Marin, Gaye Delorme). Who was Gaye Delorme, the composer and guitarist on this piece? An amazingly versatile guitarist, who down the decades won praise for his ability to play in a large number of musical idioms, Delorme was a session guitarist in high demand both in Canada and in Los Angeles. Wikipedia's list of 'associated acts' reads as follows: Lenny Breau, Skylark, k.d. lang, Jann Arden, Powder Blues Band, Fosterchild, Cheech and Chong, David Foster, Airto Moreira, Billy Cobham, Stanley Clarke. Delorme hooked up with Cheech and Chong in L.A., where David Foster had brought him to play for Skylark. Never commercially successful as a frontman, Delorme's two best-known compositions are "Earache My Eye" and, well... "The Rodeo Song". You know "The Rodeo Song". Don't pretend you don't know "The Rodeo Song".

Delorme and Cheech and Chong had an association that lasted for years, culminating in his scoring Cheech and Chong's 1982 film Things are Tough All Over. (Never heard of it? Neither had I.) Something seems to have soured between Delorme and the duo, as the duo stopped making any reference to him or his valuable contributions and in fact stopped communicating with him at all.

An atypical chart hit to be sure, "Earache My Eye" followed an interesting parabola on the RPM 100, which is apparently mirrored quite closely on Billboard, where it peaked at number nine. Carrying the M, A and L segments on the MAPL symbol, the song broke into the top 20 on October 5, at 13. The next week, it was at number four, incongruously sitting next to Cat Stevens and Olivia Newton-John. From those lofty heights, it fell to number 8 on October 19 before the bottom fell out completely, falling to 35 the next week and 47 the week after that. Novelty songs famously lack staying power, but why did the song drop so rapidly from the charts? Apparently, both in the USA and in Canada, the shock of hearing the two infamous stoners on the radio - even if the recording had nothing to do with drugs - got many parents angry enough to register complaints with radio stations. Rather than risking controversy, a large number of radio stations apparently opted to just cut the song from the playlist, causing its steep tumble down the charts.

"Earache My Eye" (the song, not the skit) has been covered down the years by a variety of unexpected acts, including Korn, Soundgarden and 2 Live Crew.

Under the aegis of A&M, Ode Records put this largely spoken-word single out only in five English-speaking countries: Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Only the Americans got a picture sleeve.

USA:

 

"And I only Know three chords! Watch me BURN! You FOOLS! HA HAA HAAA"

I have quoted this record so many times the fathers rant is meme around our house. I was Junior in my day.

 

"Earache My Eye's" US label:

There was a "soundalike version" of this on one of T.E.J.'s album compilations of hits of the era. You have to hear it to believe it:

Unearthed In The Atomic Attic: Rock-On '74

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrmwm6gyl4bzn88/earache_my_eye.mp3?raw=1

And yes, the skit was, ahem, covered along with the song here.

 

Actually, I think they do the song itself not-half-bad. A for effort at least. As for the skit... well, if I didn't find it funny in its original form!

Speaking of covers of Earache My Eye:



I'll take the T.E.J. version.

 

#1 in Vancouver (CKLG), Chicago, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Columbus OH, Pawtucket. The link between Gaye Delorme and Cheech & Chong goes back to Vancouver:
https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2008/08/24/tommy-chongs-vancouver/

Cheech and Chong Fan News: Tommy Chong Remembers Gaye Delorme

Article on Django from the November 28, 1969 Edmonton Journal
Edmonton Journal - Google News Archive Search



My one and only interview with Canadian guitar great Gaye Delorme | earofnewt.com
Canadian Bands.com - Gaye Delorme

 

"Earache My Eye" might have been a novelty song but it satirized the glam rock movement perfectly and the main riff was an irresistible hook unto itself.

 

At #43 the week of October 12, "Wednesday with Roses Are Red" (#26 at Windsor's CKLW)



The B-side "Ride"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohk0PVJz_Wk



First "Last Kiss", then "Teen Angel", now this. It could have been worse, but Johnny T. Angel's release of "Tell Laura I Lover" probably prevented Wednesday from putting their version out as a single.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvMSJvdnAM

Their version of "Gloria" was more palatable. Their next hit would be written in the decade they were living in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v__OSarIN3c

 

At #65 the same week, "Letters" by Ron Nigrini, #10 for two weeks on RPM's Pop Music Playlist. This would be the second release on Attic Records (after "Brother And Me" by Fludd.



The B-side "Simply Flowers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXu0RSN-KlM




Push By Attic For Nigrini (RPM August 10, 1974)

His next single will chart along with his debut album

 

At #90 the same week of October 12, "Write Me A Letter" by The DeFranco Family Featuring Tony DeFranco. It was top twenty at Hamilton's CKOC, top ten in Salt Lake City, top twenty in Topeka and bubbled under at #104 in Billboard.



B-side "Baby Blue"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Jaj9zijQI




Scandinavian picture sleeve

 

Due to the poor showing, 20th Century Fox dumped producer Walt Meskell and put the group in the hands of Mike Curb. Curb would co-produce the next single with Michael Lloyd (West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band), "We Belong Together" (with no mention of Tony DeFranco on the label). This shameless piece of 1950s nostalgia would chart in a few scattered markets, Buffalo and Cleveland being the largest (#12/#16): Pine Bluff, Great Falls, Cedar Rapids, and Olympia



B-side "Time Enough For Love" (written by Lloyd)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F--QdOirZoQ





Japanese picture sleeve