Sidebar: Was there more to Life than the Radio?

     I’m going to switch the beat for a minute here. The radio and my extensive K-tel record collections weren’t the only sources of music in my life. There was also television. (I wasn't quite old enough for the concert scene.) In the early 1970’s ABC had The Partridge Family, which I remember watching every Friday night. I have this bizarre memory of driving down Garfield Ave in Cramer Hill, sitting in the back of my Dad’s Lincoln Town Car singing I Think I Love You out the car window at the top of my lungs. I guess I got caught up in the Tiger-Beat hysteria!

     In 1975 The Monkees make it in to local syndication. The show had originally aired from 1966 to 1968, but local syndication rights were available in 1975. While everything about the show just screamed ‘60s, I really liked this show. It was on just about every afternoon and the songs were great. I had a Monkee's Greatest Hits album that had a few songs on it that I don’t remember ever seeing in the series like Peter Tork’s Shades of Gray. My daughters are big fans of Nickelodeon’s Big Time Rush. I’ve seen a few episodes and it really does remind me of the Monkees. They even drive around in a big GTO convertiable that is rather reminiscent of the Monkee Mobile.

     On Saturdays, we still had American Bandstand, with Dick Clark. A lot has already been written about Bandstand’s place in the pantheon of Rock and Roll, but even in the 1970’s it was still relevant, at least for the pre-teen set. I never cared about who was dancing but I always wanted to see the performers, and the Rate-a Record section. Of course on a show that featured dancing, Bandstand was an unwitting accomplice in the take-over of Disco. KC and the Sunshine band were regulars, but I also remember a young Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats doing the eerily out-of-place I Don’t Like Mondays a few years later. If I was feeling funky I could follow that up with Soul Train, but that wasn’t really my thing. In the summer I think ABC had the Steel Pier Show. I’m sure I could fill another entire memoir with my memories of Saturday morning cartoons and those totally psychedelic Sid and Marty Kroft trip-fests. I still have flashbacks from Lidsville, the Bug-a-Loos and HR Puff-n-Stuff and I never even took LSD!

Often over-looked when recalling those sugar overloaded Saturday mornings are the various variety Shows that populated the line-ups. The main one I recall was The Hudson Brothers’ Razzle Dazzle Show. The Hudson Brothers were a middling group with a few hits that I never heard anywhere else but on their show. I would watch the show religiously, though. Mostly I think it was for the guy with the emu puppet. I’m pretty sure that at one point, the Bay City Rollers even had their own TV show. Saturday Night hit big in 1976 and it was probably one of the last of the golden AM radio classics. Somewhere in this whole mess, was of course, The Banana Splits. The show had the best theme song of them all. I can’t place when it was on in the Philly market, but it was most likely earlier in the 1970s. Asking folks for the names of the Splits is one of favorite trivia questions.

     There were also quite a few prime-time variety shows that I remember watching. Of course, earlier in the ‘70s there was Sonny and Cher. Cher charted a few hits in the 1970’s like Gypsies Tramps and Thieves and Half Breed and they had channeled their earlier success as a duo into a prime-time hit series that actually had a few iterations. First there was the married Sonny and Cher show, and then the solo Sonny show, then the divorced, yet reconciled Sonny and Cher Show. Well, c’est al vie!

     I don't think there is anyone in the 40 something age group that doesn’t remember the Donny and Marie Show. Whether you were a little bit Country or a little bit Rock and Roll, you probably tuned in for the antics of Donny’s “Captain Elprup” and his purple power socks or maybe to see brother Jimmy (try to) steal the show. The show ran from 1976-1979 and my sister had a Donny Osmond album – The one with Puppy Love and The Twelfth of Never on it, and she played it a lot. Puppy Love would later be parodied to great effect in the cult classic Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Just don’t get me started on Shaun Cassidy, although I’ll admit to being a big fan of the Hardy Boys on ABC.



     The Brady Bunch and even the Captain and Tenille had a go at the prime time variety show as well. Every one of these shows featured the music of the show hosts, of course, but also guests and covers of popular tunes of the day.


     I was a little too young for Saturday Night Live, The Midnight Special or Don Kirschner's Rock Concert, at least until high school, but there a number of years I remember staying up for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Of course a show that featured KC and the Sunshine Band as a guest loses the right to refer to itself as “rockin”. I can still remember the conversation between Dick Clark and the band when Clark asked them who came up with the “Uh-huhs” in That’s the Way (uh huh uh huh) I Like it. I think it was KC who said, “Well someone asked if I wanted some coffee and I said ‘uh huh uh huh’” To which his bandmates responded “What? Why would you say it twice? You only wanted ONE cup of coffee?” Well I guess it was funnier in 1977.


     Back in the Day, every show had a theme song. Some of them became radio hits in their own right, like John Sebastian’s Welcome Back or the theme from the Rockford Files and of course, the theme from Happy Days. There was catchy pop music to be found everywhere. All of that added up to a world where it seemed like I was surrounded by music.

Next: Disco Sucks!