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FredLeonard
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Explains why CKLW went down the tubes after Canadian Content rules kicked in.
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The disgraceful Benny Goodman
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
Explains why CKLW went down the tubes after Canadian Content rules kicked in.
You are assuming that the "Mexican" (do you mean "Mexican heritage" or "born in Mexico"?) folks were partisans of CHR radio. Perhaps, if they were from any but the bigger cities of Mexico, they had no local Top 40 station back in the 60's and 70's when those songs were hits. Mexico City did not even have a Top 40 station until around 1961, and the rest of the nation had them even later... and only in the bigger cities.
As another poster stated, "Guantanamera" is a Cuban folk song "gussied up" in 1966 by the Herb Alpert crew to sell to Americans; in many Cuban versions it sings of a girl from Guantánamo who embodiees everything Cuban; it is considered a patriotic song. It was written in 1929 and would have little appeal in any of its earlier versions to anyone outside of Cuba. The Sasndpipers album also had covers of "Louie Louie" and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" on the same album... those are definitely not Latin songs.
"Eres Tu" is a 1973 pop song from 1973 from Spain that was a hit across the Western Hemisphere, including the US. But, probably due to language issues, was considered somewhat of a novelty and did not get much oldies station play later in the US. It's still played on adult hits and gold stations in Latin America and those Spanish langauge US stations that play oldies. But if a person was not into pop music in '73 they likely missed it.
But the real issue is that there are hundreds of thousands of song that I have not heard, some of which I might like. But the potential for playing unknown old "might like" songs on the radio is decidedly negative which is why nobody does it.
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FredLeonard
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The first US version of the song - and the definitive version - was by Pete Seeger, four years before Herb Alpert.
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Avid Listener
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I didn't say that I expected them to be familiar with those songs. I said that they (1) hadn't heard them before and (2) liked them when they heard them for the first time. I only mentioned that they hadn't heard them before to make the point that when someone hears a good song for the first time, they'll often like it. No more. No less.
No, I simply noted that they were hearing the songs for the first time. And, not that it matters one tiny bit, the family consisted of a Mexican born father, a gringo mother, and an American-born son.
Mr. Gleason, Mocedades are not Spanish, they are Basques. The Basques might live within the political borders of Spain, but ask any Basque and he'll set you straight. Basques are Basques, not Spaniards. The same goes for the Basques who live on the other side of the border in southwestern France.
As usual, your typical exaggeration. No one is suggesting playing hundreds of unknown songs. I'm only suggesting that slipping in a slightly less well known song from time-to-time, when its sound fits in well with the other songs surrounding it, isn't automatically going to disturb the readings of the chicken entrails. Of course, it does require being knowledgeable enough about music to recognize when the sound of a song is compatible with other songs.
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Not in the 21st century. They have computer programs that can automatically do that for you. That's the thinking behind YouTube, Pandora, and Spotify. The computer automatically comes up with similar songs. Similar in all of ways you can imagine: Similar melody, similar instrumentation, similar tempo, similar musical influences, similar chord progression, similar subject matter (actually a book was written on songs with similar subject matter in the early 1990s), and any other possible points of compatibility. Music knowledge not required.
I said that "Eres Tú" is a pop song from Spain. It was recorded in Madrid on Zafiro, a Madrid-based label (although a Euskera language version was later released on Novola, also a Madrid based label). Until Basques carry Euskal Herria passports, the ones south of the Pyrenees are Spaniards.
I know the Urangas personally, and have presented Mocedades and the "other" Uranga group, Sergio & Estíbaliz, in concert. I know they are from El País Vasco. But the song Eres Tu is a Spanish pop hit.
My point is that there are likely, among the hundreds of thousands of songs we have never heard, many that we might like. However, playing some on the chance that the audience might like them is dangerous based on the fact that unfamiliar songs are negatives. Even brand new songs that go on to be huge hits go through a period of negativity before the next stage of acceptance and the final stage of liking.
In a somewhat distant analogy, when I was programming Beautiful Music, I thought I could achieve better ratings by increasing variety by playing instrumentals of songs that had been hits in their original versions in other parts of the world. These were covers of huge hits, good songs, nice melodies, with nothing to set them apart from the covers of familiar songs we did play except their lack of familiarity. Ratings suffered. I pulled the unknown melodies and the ratings snapped back.
Point of clarification but a computer has to be programmed to be functional and that programming is done by humans. We do not, yet at least, have true artificial intelligence in computerland. Somebody, somewhere decided that a certain beat, with certain instruments, language and artist would define a specific song and that other songs meeting the same general criteria would be associated. So even though "the computer" selects the songs they were programmed by someone just like the old days.
As I said, there are computer PROGRAMS that do this. Read the 4th word in my second sentence. So yes, the PROGRAM was written by a human, then put onto disc, and sold to thousands of radio stations. The work is done for them. Just as back in the 90s, most rock stations owned a copy of The Green Book, which listed thousands of songs on similar subjects. Just look up the topic, and if you want to do an hour with songs about cars, the book tells you what to play.
The Pandora algorithm takes characteristics of a song that are identified by using a computer anallysis of songs that the same person also likes. The computer looks at the music elements, and things such as sound density, era, texture and so on.
A human programmed the algorithm as to how to look at the audio of a song to score it on a whole bunch of variables, but it is the computer that selects the songs themselves based on a seed list.
It's maybe worth noting that "Eres Tu" was released as a "bilingual" 45 rpm, with the Spanish version on one side and an English-language lyric, "Touch The Wind," on the other. "Touch The Wind" was the version the record company thought would be the hit, but the Spanish version got the air play even on English-speaking radio. (I believe both versions also appeared on the LP.)
For that matter, I heard Spanish versions of The Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" and Hot's "Angel In Your Arms" on English language radio back in the 70's; probably played for novelty value more than anything. (By the way, how'd we ever get here from Benny Goodman anyhow? Better ask Mr. Chicken Guts...)
Yes, the US release had the English "A" side. It was already a hit in Spain and Latin America when that came out. I got a gold "played it first" record from the label for being the first US station on the song... for play at KRUX in Phoenix.
A&M was the most proactive, but a number of labels did Spanish versions of their hit songs in the 70's. The practice did not last long, as most of the Spanish versions sounded like non-Spanish speakers trying to sing in a language they did not know. And few really got any airplay.
I think that that is Señor Tripas de Pollo now.
Even Linda Ronstadt, who has probably had more crossover success in Spanish than anyone I can think of, doesn't really speak the language fluently. I remember an interview she did years ago (Johnny Carson, I think) where she talked about trying to write lyrics in Spanish with a dictionary. She wanted to write the line, "You are the ruler of my heart," and ran the results past her Spanish-speaking dad (who was in the hardware biz) and he informed her that what she had actually written was "You are a yardstick in my heart!"
Nice work on "Eres Tu," by the way. (Since we're already so far off topic, I have a record of Andy Williams singing the "Theme From Love Story" in German you might really groove on...)
I recall reading years back that either Blue Swede ("Hooked on a Feeling," "Never My Love"), Los Bravos ("Black Is Black") or both could not speak English at all, and that their hit songs were sung phonetically, with the singer having no idea what the words meant. Do I recall correctly?
Eventually, this thread will return to Benny Goodman, though it's hard to see it coming soon.
Eventually, this thread will return to Benny Goodman, though it's hard to see it coming soon.
Ronstadt, like Jennifer López, learned Spanish as a necessity. Rondstadt's later recordings of ranchera music with a Mariachi was quite competently done.
Los Bravos, who I saw on stage in Spain "back then" did know "some English" but as we know, when a European tells you they speak "a little" of something, it means they are nearly bilingual or polyglot.
Better than that; I think they're terrific! (Also her album of Afro-Cuban-Latin songs, "Frenesi.") Radio folks up here are not exactly fluent; last summer I listened to a remote of a minor-league baseball game sponsored by Taco Bell, whose slogan was iLive Mas! and the sportscaster pronounced it "live mass" (i.e. a remote of a Catholic church service?) Oh, well...
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Avid Listener
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Interesting. I make one tiny little aside comment about neighbors of mine liking a good sounding song when they heard it for the first time, and Mr. Gleason and others have to turn the thread into a platform for their own personal prejudices. And then they blame me!
The click bait title of this thread mentions Benny Goodman, but the subject in the launch post is this:
It's not about Benny Goodman, it's about older generations not accepting the music of younger generations. And, what I posted was about how that rejection of the older generation's music was something that is no longer as prevalent today as it was in the past. Thanks to so many radio stations that play vintage music, in the 12st century, people are no longer as tied into the music of their high school days as was the case in ages past. As a culture, we're moving beyond that sort of closed-mind thinking. I was watching a video of a Foreigner concert from a few years back on Palladium, and my wife and I both noticed that at least half of the audience who was totally into the show, mouthing the lyrics of the songs, were people who hadn't been born when Foreigner's hits were new.
The click bait title of this thread mentions Benny Goodman, but the subject in the launch post is this:
It's not about Benny Goodman, it's about older generations not accepting the music of younger generations. And, what I posted was about how that rejection of the older generation's music was something that is no longer as prevalent today as it was in the past. Thanks to so many radio stations that play vintage music, in the 12st century, people are no longer as tied into the music of their high school days as was the case in ages past. As a culture, we're moving beyond that sort of closed-mind thinking. I was watching a video of a Foreigner concert from a few years back on Palladium, and my wife and I both noticed that at least half of the audience who was totally into the show, mouthing the lyrics of the songs, were people who hadn't been born when Foreigner's hits were new.
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