74) Bobby Vinton – “Roses Are Red (My Love)”

When I first started this blog, I had planned on posting about once a day.  And for a while there, I did – I was between semesters and taken with the idea of my shiny new blog.  I was already 50 years and nearly 1000 number ones behind when I wrote my first review back in December, and I knew I needed to get cracking if I ever hoped to make progress.  But, naturally, posting daily gets difficult after a while.  School and work came back in session, and I got busy.  The quality of my posts wasn’t quite up to snuff.  I needed more time to think about each song, to develop an opinion, to get a handle on just what exactly I wanted to say about the track.  So I gave myself a little more time between each post.

Eventually, though, this little extra time has turned into posting only about once a week or so.  And while I’m still busy (albeit with looking for a job, rather than with actually working and studying), and while I still need extra time to think, I’ve also hit a bit of a rut.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m still excited about this project as a whole, and I think some of the most recent posts are among the best I’ve written.  But, frankly, this era in the pop charts is often maligned for a reason.  In the past, I was worried I was handing out too many high scores.  Now, I’m just trying to burn through some of these mediocre-to-poor tracks in search of a record I can actually get excited about.

Symptomatic of this chart fatigue is “Roses Are Red (My Love),” a song Bobby Vinton rescued from the demo reject pile. It would have been better off left to rest in peace.   The production, instrumentation, melody and vocals are virtually interchangeable with any other contemporaneous ballad crooned by a young male singer.  The main difference is the lyrics, which are somehow even worse.   The chorus is lifted wholesale from the old “Roses are red, violets are blue” chestnut, without even the benefit of a semi-clever twist (unless you count throwing in the occasional “my love”).  The verses, which describe the blossoming of a high school romance, are just as clichéd.  (That I just used the word “blossoming” proves that the pervasive hokeyness has started to infect my brain.)  The whole affair just seems really lazy – no surprise, given that the songwriter claims it was written in three minutes (running time of the record: 2:39).  In fact, the record’s so bland that I just spent two of the three paragraphs in this entry writing about something else.  If you want more of my thoughts on “Roses Are Red,” I refer you to any other entry I’ve written on teen idols.  3

Hit #1 on July 14, 1962; total of 4 weeks at #1
74 of 972 #1′s reviewed; 7.61% through the Hot 100

73) David Rose – “The Stripper”

The David Rose LP featuring “The Stripper” is subtitled “And Other Fun Songs For The Family.”  Really.   Which is actually quite appropriate, as the instrumental has surely been used as shorthand for “sexy” in children’s cartoons at least as often as it has soundtracked actual stripteases.  Probably more so, as there’s very little erotic about the cheesy trombone wails; it’s the musical equivalent of Elmer Fudd swooning over Bugs Bunny in drag.  In fact, the pop cultural baggage associated with “The Stripper” is probably the heaviest of any of the records we have discussed as of yet.  It’s bizarre to think that this instrumental was only composed in the second half on the 20^th Century – it just seems like one of those pieces of music that has always been there, lurking in the collective unconscious.  Indeed, it was an “accidental” hit, starting life as filler for a 1958 single and only achieving fame after being featured in the film version of Gypsy. Yet it was this throwaway, and not one of Rose’s more typically reserved compositions, that reached #1. Clearly, the success of “The Stripper” was due to the record’s perceived naughtiness, albeit a naughtiness as inoffensive and family-friendly as you’d expect from a 1962 number one.  (Not that current Top 40 singles are necessarily any sexier, despite being more explicit.)  The record’s one saving grace is the air of good humor that pervades throughout. So while “The Stripper” may not actually be very risqué, and the instrumentation may be overblown by half, the LP cover’s assertion that it’s a “fun song” seems, eh, fair enough. 4

Hit #1 on July 7, 1962; total of 1 week at #1
73 of 972 #1′s reviewed; 7.51% through the Hot 100

72) Ray Charles – “I Can’t Stop Loving You”

In American culture, blues and country are viewed as operating on opposite ends of the race spectrum.  Charley Pride aside, country is still the whitest genre in pop; and before the Brits co-opted the blues in the 1960s, it was almost exclusively an African-American art form.  Musically, though, the line between the two genres is a blurry one. In the early 20^th Century, black and white musicians essentially played the same songs, and primitive country and blues versions sit together comfortably on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Early country legend Jimmie Rodgers, who shot to fame with his series of (appropriately named) “Blue Yodels,” was cited by Howlin’ Wolf as a formative influence.  Likewise, Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” and “Rock Island Line” have been covered at least as many times by country singers as blues musicians.

Yet by 1962, when Ray Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, country and blues had become firmly entrenched in the popular consciousness as “different,” both from each other and from the mainstream.  Part of this divide was due to marketing (“race records” versus “hillbilly music”); part was due to decades of natural musical evolution, especially once name stars became established and emphasis shifted to recording original compositions over old folk tunes.  So when Ray Charles decided to record an album of country covers, the general reaction was surprise, to say the least.  And when the album became successful, it was hailed as groundbreaking.  Charles’s record was perceived as a powerful statement during the Civil Rights era, uniting black and white audiences and illuminating the shared roots of blues and country in American folk music.  It also, rather unexpectedly, was the record that proved country music had a place in mainstream pop.

“I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the biggest hit from Modern Sounds, illustrates the record’s template.  There’re no steel guitars or exaggerated accents here, just Charles crooning the ballad in his usual Southern drawl and playing his jazz/gospel piano.  The result is that it sounds like a Ray Charles song, not a gimmicky cover.  Current listeners unaware of the record’s history may not even realize that it had ever been a country song.  And if the record had been merely Charles, his band and his backing singers, The Raelettes, it would have been a knockout.  Later live versions (such as this one) demonstrate how great the song could have sounded if recorded with Charles’s usual set-up.  Instead, in a bid to make the single even more appealing to white pop audiences, it’s slathered in strings and a backing chorus that sounds too formal and restrained for either R&B or country.  “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is still an impressive record, but one that sounds a bit too dated and straitlaced.  And when viewed as part of Charles’s legacy as a whole, it also marks the point where he became less concerned with being an R&B innovator, and more concerned with appealing to the mainstream. 6

Hit #1 on June 2, 1962; total of 5 weeks at #1
72 of 972 #1′s reviewed; 7.41% through the Hot 100

71) Mr. Acker Bilk – “Stranger on the Shore”

“Stranger on the Shore” might be otherwise forgotten, at least on this side of the Atlantic, were it not for a minor bit of trivia: the record was the first by a British artist to top the Hot 100.  But if the honorific in Mr. Acker Bilk’s name didn’t tip you off, this record doesn’t quite signify the launch of the British Invasion.  A clarinet-led instrumental recorded for a BBC television serial is about as far from rock and roll as one can get, at least on this side of Lawrence Welk.  It is, however, in keeping with the Hot 100’s anything-goes crapshoot of the early ‘60s, before the chart became dominated almost exclusively by whichever records teenagers were buying at the time.  (It wasn’t just 16-year-olds who gave Percy Faith nine weeks at number one.)  The raw, vibrant first wave of rock and roll that had emerged in the ‘50s was losing its footing, and it was far from a given that rock would rule the pop charts for the next several decades.  Just a few months earlier, Decca Records had rejected The Beatles, notoriously stating that “guitar groups are on the way out.” In retrospect, it’s easy to mock the label’s short-sightedness.  But given the state of the British and American charts, the decision was an informed one.   And after all, a successful invasion requires an element of surprise.

What separates “Stranger on the Shore” from most of the other easy listening fodder we’ve explored so far is that it works as a personal statement.  Regardless of whether or not you like “Theme from A Summer Place,” its bombast and glossy sheen mark it as a piece of film score for a major Hollywood motion picture.  “Stranger on the Shore,” on the other hand, started life as a melody composed independently by Bilk.  Originally named “Jenny” for his daughter, it only later ended up as the theme for the namesake TV program.  And unlike the previous instrumental chart-toppers, recorded by orchestras numbering in the dozens of instruments, “Stranger on the Shore” is essentially a solo showcase for Bilk’s expressive clarinet.  There are also some light strings serving as counterpoint, but they are far more restrained than what you’d hear on comparable recordings of the era.  This limited palette of instruments allows the composition to breathe, and lends the record a convincing air of loneliness.  A more complex arrangement would have undermined the emotional truth of being the title stranger, uncertain of one’s place in the new land and wistful for home.

The relative simplicity of “Stranger on the Shore” also makes it sound more modern than the other orchestral instrumentals that have turned up so far at number one, which in turn makes it easier for me to relate to it as a music listener definitely not of that era.  While it’s not a revolutionary record (unlike 1962’s other chart-topping British instrumental – more on that later), it’s one of the few easy listening singles we’ve covered that I actually find easy to listen to. 6

Hit #1 on May 26, 1962; total of 1 week at #1
71 of 971 #1′s reviewed; 7.31% through the Hot 100