Maybe. Could have also been Korea. Mel Tillis wrote that in 1965. He says it was about World War II.
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Song you wondered how they they ever got played on Top 40 radio
- Thread starter secondchoice
- Start date
Maybe. Could have also been Korea. Mel Tillis wrote that in 1965. He says it was about World War II.
Quite correct on both counts.
Now, the word "Viet Kong" did make it on to a record that some top-40 radio stations played back in 1966 though I don't believe that Pat Boone's "Wish You Were Here, Buddy," ever reached the national top 40.
That wasn't a protest song, though. Boone was making fun of hippies or peaceniks or whatever they were being called then. WBZ Boston played it.
It's genuinely weird when "Lt. Calley" comes up on the American Top 40 rerun during our group chat.
Victor Lundberg? Heard it once or twice but years after the original release. "I have no son" is kinda rough.
There was an "answer" to "Eve of Destruction" called "Dawn of Correction".
The Barbarians’ “Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl”? Those long-haired punks (LOL)!
Unique band. They had a one-armed drummer.
I'm only speculating, but I think at least one of the reasons why so few records mentioned Vietnam by name was simple. If they did, it wouldn't be played on the radio.
It was a lot like the more modern wars in Iraq etc. I'm sure. There were many people who were against it, but that didn't mean there weren't at least as many people who supported the effort despite its unjust nature, and any records that directly criticized that effort by name were unlikely to be popular with them and thus unlikely to gain any traction in places where supporters were in the majority, but if they're written such that they could refer to any earlier war (or something altogether fictional), they probably wouldn't have minded so much.
The second part of the last verse of Peter, Paul & Mary's "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" (released in 1967) sums it up: "If I really say it, the radio won't play it, so I'll have to lay it between the lines." That's what a lot of the protest song writers of the time did, I'd imagine.
Of course, as the 70s wore on, radio became looser and more open (as the ongoing popularity of this thread can attest to).
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It was a lot like the more modern wars in Iraq etc. I'm sure. There were many people who were against it, but that didn't mean there weren't at least as many people who supported the effort despite its unjust nature, and any records that directly criticized that effort by name were unlikely to be popular with them and thus unlikely to gain any traction in places where supporters were in the majority, but if they're written such that they could refer to any earlier war (or something altogether fictional), they probably wouldn't have minded so much.
The second part of the last verse of Peter, Paul & Mary's "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" (released in 1967) sums it up: "If I really say it, the radio won't play it, so I'll have to lay it between the lines." That's what a lot of the protest song writers of the time did, I'd imagine.
Of course, as the 70s wore on, radio became looser and more open (as the ongoing popularity of this thread can attest to).
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That line was about sex, not Vietnam:
"I dig rock and roll music
I could really get it on in that scene
I think I could say somethin' if you know what I mean...."
Ah, I see. Same difference, though (it's stuff radio wouldn't play in '67, but it opened up to it considerably to it by, say, '77).
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Depends on the station, format, and market. Some are still pretty tight about some things. Some aren't.
What is even more intersting is that the group's second (and only other hot 100 hit--they never reached the national top 40) was inspired by that one-armed drummer.
Getting back to "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl,", I believe that was the first song where the gender of the person sung about comes into question. The Kinks would take the same idea into the top 40 for the first time with "Lola," in 1970.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
So did Def Leppard, who never had a song hit the chart which fit the original question.
D.O.A. by Bloodrock was released as a single. I don't have a clue how it did nationwide but being a band from Dallas, every top 40 played it wih some dayparting to after 5pm. It was marginal at best as far as popularity in Dallas. The guys in school thought the song was 'pretty cool'.
DOA is a play by play of an accident with sfx where the victims don't make it performed by what we then called a hard rock band (aka early metal)
DOA is a play by play of an accident with sfx where the victims don't make it performed by what we then called a hard rock band (aka early metal)
Some stations played it, some didn't. In Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, KHJ wouldn't touch the record but KRLA did (though, per the ARSA survey site, the song never reached KRLA's top 30 list.) Per the same source, KRIZ in Phoenix played the song (it went to #1 in February of 1971) but crosstown rival KRUX wouldn't touch it, either.
I have both the single and LP mixes of the song in my collection, and the album mix is definitely eerier than the shorter 45 mix. The 45 mix did, however, reach the top-40 in March of 1971, though I believe it only peaked at #38 or #37 on Billboard.
IIRC, I never heard the song on WRKO in Boston either, but I remember it being played on WVBF, the then-new Top 40 station in Framingham. Must have been a no-go for all the RKO stations.
Probably my (now) favorite sex song of all time, Carla Thomas' "B-A-B-Y,", falls into this category. When I first heard the song as a young child, I was embarrassed to hear it though I didn't know why. When we moved to Phoenix, I only occasionally heard the song on KOOL-FM and then only late at night. I later learned that the song had peaked nationally at #14 on the Billboard pop charts and #3 on the R&B charts in the fall of 1966. Using the ARSA surveys, I learned that there were several radio stations mostly in the Rocky Mountain West that wouldn't touch the song at all. Cities where "B-A-B-Y," wasn't played and didn't show up on any of the local top-40 stations' charts included Phoenix, AZ; Salt Lake City, UT; Tucson, AZ; Boise, ID; Fargo, ND; and Chicago, IL.
It wasn't banned in Boston, and frankly, having heard the song numerous times over the years, I'm puzzled that it would have been banned anywhere (except maybe SLC). I just looked up the lyrics and I see that the very unofficial websites seem to have latched onto ""Whenever the sun don't shine / You go out to light my hind" as a potentially offensive lyric, but when I posted that lyric to Google's AI, it told me that it was a mis-hearing, and that the actual final word is "mind." No documentation provided, so who knows what the truth is here?
This reminds me of the Spinners' "One of a Kind (Love Affair)," in which the lyric "Makes you want to love her / You just got to hug her, yeah" has been frequently misheard as "just got to f--- her." And indeed, there's an edit of that song in which that entire couplet is removed, but I've never been able to verify whether the excision was done merely to shorten the song or to remove an obscenity.
For me as a young child, since I didn't understand what the lyrics were about, it was Carla's vocal delivery of those lyrics that embarrassed me. That said, using the ARSA surveys, it looks like the places where that song wasn't played were cities and towns with (mostly) lily white populations.
I know this one by heart. The word is "hug". The song is 3:31. Some moronic PD somewhere had enough juice to say "I hear "f**k", not "hug" and get Atlantic to release a 3:20 edit.
The Spinners were trying to get their first hit records in two years when that album was released. To put "f**k" in it would have been the ultimate act of self-sabotage.