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And The Stiffs Just Keep On Comin'

eriedj said:
Here's a song that came up in discussion today on a collector's forum. "Wavelength" from Van Morrison. Peaked at #42 in 1978 and doubtful there was much airplay back then. S T I F F.
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"Wavelength" was the title track of the 1978 album that played well for a while on Album Rock Radio. The song also referenced his seemingly indestructible song, "Brown Eyed Girl" which was originally penned as "Brown Skinned Girl," according to a few discographies and an interview years ago on WNEW-FM New York, which at the time was one of the heritage Album Rock radios stations in America.

But yeah, as a single, stiffarello.
 
Element9 said:
"Brown Eyed Girl" which was originally penned as "Brown Skinned Girl," according to a few discographies and an interview years ago on WNEW-FM New York, which at the time was one of the heritage Album Rock radios stations in America.
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A little trivia on BEG - when it first came out on CD circa 1986 (on a Van Morrison compilation) he insisted the line "making love in the green grass" be removed (guess he got religion or something like that) so it was (poorly) replaced with the line "laughing and running, hey hey". That terrible edit has since been removed, thankfully.
 
DN14224 said:
A little trivia on BEG - when it first came out on CD circa 1986 (on a Van Morrison compilation) he insisted the line "making love in the green grass" be removed (guess he got religion or something like that) so it was (poorly) replaced with the line "laughing and running, hey hey". That terrible edit has since been removed, thankfully.
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I thought the sanitized version of that song went back a lot farther than than 1986. WBZ Boston, I'm pretty sure, was playing it in the '70s, along with the similarly neutered "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon, with the "crap I learned" in the first verse replaced with "girls I knew" from the second verse.

Morrison's parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. As far as I know, he's never "got religion" over the years. If anything, he's distanced himself from the JWs and any other organized form of religion.
 
CTListener said:
I thought the sanitized version of that song went back a lot farther than than 1986. WBZ Boston, I'm pretty sure, was playing it in the '70s, along with the similarly neutered "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon, with the "crap I learned" in the first verse replaced with "girls I knew" from the second verse.

Morrison's parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. As far as I know, he's never "got religion" over the years. If anything, he's distanced himself from the JWs and any other organized form of religion.
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Morrison did thank L. Ron Hubbard (The Scientology Guy) on one of his albums- "Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart".

Morrison follows his "Muse" more than any one faith. I don't know that it's ever been confirmed that the edited version of "Brown Eyed Girl" was his idea. Morrison is notorious for being vague and cranky during interviews.

"Call Me Up In Dreamland" got to #95, so that's another minor hit. Morrison is an "Album" artist anyway. Even his early work with Them was high quality. He makes records, not "singles"...
 
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CTListener said:
I thought the sanitized version of that song went back a lot farther than than 1986. WBZ Boston, I'm pretty sure, was playing it in the '70s, along with the similarly neutered "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon, with the "crap I learned" in the first verse replaced with "girls I knew" from the second verse.

Morrison's parents were Jehovah's Witnesses. As far as I know, he's never "got religion" over the years. If anything, he's distanced himself from the JWs and any other organized form of religion.
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The edited "Kodachrome" must have been custom station edits as it was never released on promo or commercial 45s that way.
 
Shannon went to #6. Henry was a founding member of Sha Na Na. The song was written about Beach Boy Carl Wilson's dog.
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"You come out of those uptempo records with a story about a dog dyin'..."
 
eriedj said:
The edited "Kodachrome" must have been custom station edits as it was never released on promo or commercial 45s that way.
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WBZ was very much a "chicken rock" station by the time the mid-'70s rolled around. The edit was actually pretty smooth, although why someone would be left unable to think after looking back on girls he knew in high school remains a mystery. I wonder if the edit made its way to WOWO Fort Wayne or any other Westinghouse stations that were still playing music then. "Crap" is pretty mild, but there were stations then that were still queasy about "damn" going out over the airwaves, so could other stations/station groups done similar things to "Kodachrome"?
 
Summer of 2015, driving I-81 listening to a station near Syracuse (could have been Ithaca) I heard the jock intro Be Real by 'Kidding.' I thought "Who the hell is 'Kidding?'" I found out days later there was no 'Kidding,' it was Kid Ink. Even Kid Rock these days wishes he didn't use the "Kid" name. Be Real topped the Billboard Hot 100 around 43, so it qualifies probably qualifies for this thread. No kidding.
 
CTListener said:
WBZ was very much a "chicken rock" station by the time the mid-'70s rolled around. The edit was actually pretty smooth, although why someone would be left unable to think after looking back on girls he knew in high school remains a mystery. I wonder if the edit made its way to WOWO Fort Wayne or any other Westinghouse stations that were still playing music then. "Crap" is pretty mild, but there were stations then that were still queasy about "damn" going out over the airwaves, so could other stations/station groups done similar things to "Kodachrome"?
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Considering a year later Elton John released "The Bitch Is Back" with no edited versions created. In 1977, a then local A/C aired an edit of "Rich Girl" they received from WWWE in Cleveland that replaced it's a bitch part with you're a rich girl from another part of the song.
 
eriedj said:
Considering a year later Elton John released "The Bitch Is Back" with no edited versions created. In 1977, a then local A/C aired an edit of "Rich Girl" they received from WWWE in Cleveland that replaced it's a bitch part with you're a rich girl from another part of the song.
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I'd imagine that stations whose management was uncomfortable with "The Bitch Is Back" just refused to add the song to their playlists rather than do or demand an edit that would eliminate a word repeated so often in the lyrics. There may have been a few, seeing as how "The Bitch Is Back" peaked at No. 4 nationally, the only single of Elton's not to hit No. 1 or No. 2 in a six-hit string that ran from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" through "Philadelphia Freedom." Or maybe it was just too hard for some chicken rockers like WBZ that had passed on his last hard-rocking single, "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting," which reached only No. 12 as the follow-up to the No. 2 "Daniel" two years earlier.
 
CTListener said:
I'd imagine that stations whose management was uncomfortable with "The Bitch Is Back" just refused to add the song to their playlists rather than do or demand an edit that would eliminate a word repeated so often in the lyrics.
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That's exactly what happened. There's a quote from the PD of WPIX in NYC saying they wouldn't play the song on page 19 of the attached article:

https://books.google.com/books?id=x...snippet&q="the bitch is back" (banned&f=false

The song peaked at #5, at a time when Elton was the biggest star in the world, so obviously the ban had an effect on the chart.
 
Searched the thread until My Eyes Glazed Over but didn't see mention of "Love Is Like A Rock" by Donnie Iris from 1981. More than a few stations in Buffalo gave this song a spin, mostly on Album Rock, but it only reached #37 on Billboard's Hot 100. That would qualify it for this thread.
 
Rusty Bridges said:
Searched the thread until My Eyes Glazed Over but didn't see mention of "Love Is Like A Rock" by Donnie Iris from 1981. More than a few stations in Buffalo gave this song a spin, mostly on Album Rock, but it only reached #37 on Billboard's Hot 100. That would qualify it for this thread.
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97 Rock did a parody version when the Bearman and Snortin' Norton were the AM show - it was called "Bearsie Likes To Rock".

While we're at the Donnie Iris section - there was "My Girl" which did a little better so it sorta qualifies...
 
Otis Redding was a powerhouse who recorded hit after hit for Stax (distributed by Atco) working in the Memphis studio. He was also a songwriter with "a hundred ideas" floating around in his mind. One was a song he started writing while relaxing on a houseboat in Sausalito for weeks after his killer performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. He and Steve Cropper later took the song fragments he had jotted down then and during a following tour and put the song together during his next studio session. Otis wanted to do something "different", and considered the song unfinished. After his death in a plane crash, Steve Cropper took the tracks and put the recording together based on what they'd talked about. He added the seagulls and wave sounds, moved a whistling intro to the end, and crafted what he had into the final production - "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay".

Honchos at both Stax and Atco were unimpressed. Otis was gone, and it was not his usual style. If they were going to release it there had to be a strong song more in his usual style on the other side. That song was "Sweet Lorene."

"Dock of the Bay" went to #1, and not just on the R&B charts. "Sweet Lorene" became just another album cut. But, if you like Otis, you'll like this:

 


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