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Motown Monday! A special THANK YOU to CKLW and Big 8 Radio’s own Charlie O’Brien for permitting Motor City Radio Flashbacks to display his fabulous lithograph (recently having discovered online) he penned of The Motown Records Museum, a.k.a. Berry Gordy’s house he personally had named — Hitsville U. S. A. Suitable for framing . . . that is one great sketch, Charlie!
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Debuted #62 week-ending January 16, 1965, “This Diamond Ring” peaks at #1 (2 weeks) on the Hot 100, week-ending, February 27, 1965. Having charted 12 weeks overall — on its final week on Billboard, the single drops out at #23 for the week-ending, April 3, 1965.
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Source: The Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles Charts [1965] Billboard Top Pop Singles
Audio digitally remastered by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
Gary Lewis a Star On First Disk
NEW YORK — It’s a lot easier for interviewers nowadays, with all these second generation show biz youngsters like Gary Lewis taking over. (Indeed, youngsters in general.) You have your stet questions—with a 19-year-old you can’t talk rack jobbing, you can’t rummage his past, you can’t ask him how he handles drunks in night clubs, etc.
You meet a Gary Lewis, son of comedian Jerry Lewis ( the biggest thing to hit Paramount Pictures since Cecil B. De-Mille and the bathtub scene), and a lad whose first record, “This Diamond Ring” (with his vocal-instrumental group, the Playboys), climbed to No.1 nationally, and it’s still early enough to ask:
Question: How did the record come about?
Answer: Snuff Garrett, my A&R man at Liberty Records, met Dad and hoped to sell him on a record idea he’d had for along time. But Dad’s film schedule was too heavy, so he suggested that our group might interest Snuff. My mother acted as our agent and financed the recording session for “This Diamond Ring”.
Question: How did your group get together?
Answer: I’d had a set of drums for about five years, but I didn’t started playing them in earnest until about a year ago. I was attending the Pasadena Playhouse at the time, and pretty soon I was joined by A1Ramsay, on bass guitar; John R. West, cordavox; Dave Walker and Dave Costell, guitarists.They were all from Pasadena. We played parties and then spent a good deal of last summer performing at Disneyland.
Question: Has it been easier to make the grade having a famous and influential father?
Answer: It’s been harder, I think. Maybe he could open a door for us but then we really had to show something. People would think, oh, he’s Jerry Lewis’ son—what does he think he can do? Then we were really on our own. (The answers sound as familiar as the questions after a while.)
Question: How does your father feel about your entering show business?
Answer: He approves. My Dad gives me advice and counsel more as a father than as a performer. This makes it rather easy because when he’s home he’s “Dad” and on the screen he’s Jerry Lewis the movie star.
Question: What next?
Answer: Well, we did a movie some time ago at Universal called “Swingin’ Summer” that is just coming out. And I’m going back to the Coast now to do a cameo role in Dad’s current film, “The Family Jewels.” We’ll do part of a musical number for this sight gag bit Dad has dreamed up for us. Incidentally, Dad plays seven different people in this picture, and they all get together in one scene! We’re also doing a Dick Clark road tour and more TV.
(Gary had just done the Ed Sullivan Show” and was wondering how all the teens who had been phoning and dropping by had found out where he was staying while visiting New York. Then he remembered he had signed an autograph for a teen-age female at the Sullivan theater on the only thing he had available: a matchbook from the Americana Hotel.)
Question: Have you done any other films?
Answer: Yes, several years ago I sang “The Land of La La La” in my father’s “Rock-A-Bye Baby.”
Question: Have you studied acting?
Answer: Yes, at the Pasadena Playhouse, where I did things like “Mourning Becomes Electra.” I think they’ve helped prepare me, too.
Question: Do you want to be a comedian?
Answer: I’d have to be awfully good, or have a completely different style from my father’s. I don’t know. Everyone says my seven-year-old brother, Chris, will be the next comedian in the family. (There are six Lewis children, all boys. Gary’s the oldest.)
Question: What are your latest records?
Answer: The album, “This Diamond Ring,” and the new single, “Count Me In.”
He’s a likeable individual, flexible of slender face and body, quick to smile with a natural propensity toward clowning, resembling Jerry a few pounds ago when he first came along in those “My Friend Irma” movies but with enough embryo Gary to speak well for his future. He moves a lot in his hotel suite, from couch to chair to phone table to wall, like a kind of an itch.
The same kind of itch, perhaps, that brought the five-year-old Jerry Lewis to a borscht belt stage singing “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” Hmmm. Son Gary’s first hit was “This Diamond Ring.” Yes, times have certainly grown easier for everyone, especially now that things are looking up for Gary Lewis. END
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Information, credit and news source: Record World, April 3, 1965
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After 8 years, 19 weeks, and 435 official WKNR surveys having been published since the November 7, 1963 premiere, this is, by all accounts, the last official music guide (03/20/1972) the legendary Detroit radio station published before WKNR changed it’s call letters and music format to WNIC in April of 1972.
A reliable music source and collector informed this site that the station, in essence, had publish one more chart, dated March 27, 1972 (which the collector is still in search of). Throughout the years having passed we’ve yet to see of such chart — anywhere — if such chart is known to exist, to this day.
One month after issuance of this chart, WKNR became the former. The station gave birth to a new Detroit radio sound on a Tuesday morning, April 25, 1972.
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The above WKNR chart was digitally restored by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
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A sincere thank you, Mrs. Patti Griggs. This featured presentation would have not been possible without your generosity, dedication, and your continuous support.
Above WKNR music chart courtesy of Mrs. Patti Griggs and the George L. Griggs estate.
Compiled by the Music Popularity Chart Dept. of Billboard, from national retail store and one-stop sales reports, and radio airplay reports.
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Source Credit: 1969 (March) WiKipedia
ON YOUR PC? To fully appreciate this Billboard Hot 100 (week-ending) March 22, 1969 chart feature click on image 2x and open to second window. Click image anytime to return to NORMAL image size.
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NEW! The featured CKLW audio aircheck is courtesy of Michael Lockhart, Ferndale, MI. Thank You! Michael recently donated this (60 year-old) CKLW audio memory for the site’s aircheck repository.
Audio recording was digitally enhanced by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
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According to renown Detroit radio historian David Carson (author of ‘Rockin’ Down The Dial’), Bud Davis began his only one-station career at CKLW in 1942, by first working in the mail room and adding duties as a transcription operator and as staff announcer. After serving in World War II in the Royal Canadian Navy, Davis returned to CKLW and began doing early “Platter and Chatter” shows and began to attract a much-younger listening radio audience.
Eventually, during the early-1950s, Davies ranked well in listener popularity with his two shows, “Good Neighbor Club” and “Your Boy Bud”, “when he played records and took the votes of fans in his ‘Battles of the Bands’ and ‘Singers'” at CKLW during the mid-day hours.
It was by the mid-1950s when Davies reputably drew a strong teen audience and was by then a huge teen favorite at CKLW. By 1956, he was doing daily on-air split-shifts. Two hours in the afternoon (1:30 – 3:30 p.m.) and one hour and a half hour in the evening (7:30 p.m. to 9). In between the two shifts, Bud also hosted ‘Top Ten Dance Party’ on CKLW-TV 9. Bud introduced Elvis Presley on stage at the Fox Theater, when he first appeared in Detroit in July of 1956.
Davis, by early-1961, was moved to the late afternoon hours at CKLW and began drawing a more mature, cross-over listening audience playing “the latest hits and engaging his listeners with his popular ‘Shafer Bread Quickie Quiz’ segments. At the time, CKLW went country in the evening hours, with a show called “Sounds Like Nashville.” By May of 1963, Bud Davis replaced Toby David as the new morning man (David going full-time at TV 9) at CKLW. Dave Shafer moved up in the afternoon slot held previous by Davies.
After 29 years at CKLW, for reasons never fully explained, Bud Davies was released from CKLW in August of 1966. Long retired from the radio business and living in Florida, Bud Davies passed away on October 20, 2006.
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Credit and source information: ‘Rockin’ Down The Dial’, by David Carson Momentum Books Ltd., Troy, MI. Copyright 2000
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Beyond Known for Pressing Hit Records, Motown Book Reflects of Its History, Cultural Relationship, and Racial Contributions to the Motor City
Music is an often heartfelt imitation of history. However, the discordant realities of history teach us that human beings usually strike the wisest notes only after all other options have been exhausted.
Consider the music and underlying truths of the legendary Motown Sound. There have been many book-length musical studies of Motown Records, its artists, recordings, and popular success, the best of them being author Nelson George’s “Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise And Fall Of The Motown Sound” (St. Martin’s Press, 1985). But there has never been an intimate, full-length history of Motown Records’ relationship with Detroit, whose African-American infrastructure of politicians, social activists, business owners, and industrial work force at the “Motor City” auto plants intermingled with the black music community and the corresponding strata of white Detroit to shape the cultural imperatives Motown expressed.
Now thanks to the publication of the fascinating “Dancing In The Street: Motown And The Cultural Politics Of Detroit” (Harvard University Press) by native-born author Suzanne E. Smith, music fans as well as lovers of social history can grasp for the fast time the unique nature of Detroit’s daily social scheme and its impact on the lives of those who embodied the Motown Sound during the parallel cresting of the civil rights movement.
While openly valuing the work of George and other chroniclers, Smith takes readers into the heretofore unexamined sphere of Detroit’s sidewalk-level social ferment from Motown’s founding in 1958 on through the city’s devastating riots in 1967 and the related early -’70s flight from its precincts of the two enterprises central to its modern identity. Those exiting businesses were, of course, the mammoth auto industry which relocated to the Michigan suburbs, and Motown, the most successful black business in America when it departed for Los Angeles in 1972, the year before Detroit elected Coleman Young its first black mayor.
“My fortune was the direct result of my city’s misfortune-of the same fear and loathing that had caused all my problems and Detroit’s problems in the first place,” reflected Young, as quoted by Smith in her skilled analysis of his ascendance. “I was taking over the administration of Detroit,” added Young, “because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore.”
Smith does a brilliant job of explaining the central role music plays in Detroit’s saga as far back as 1914, when Henry Ford’s announced daily plant wage of $5 moved bluesman Blind Blake to sing “Detroit Bound Blues” to help motivate Southern blacks to seek “a good job . . . in Mr Ford’s place.” Smith depicts the unique forces and individuals that gave rise to Motown in the years between the post -World War II rise of Detroit as “the Arsenal of Democracy, the industrial hero of the global conflict,” and the later economic and social setbacks Young tried to surmount as he struggled with racial polarization and the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. In a real sense, the mayor’s unofficial 1973 anthem was Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City.”
If you’ve never heard about the Concept East Theater; or of WCHB, the first radio station built, owned, and operated by African-Americans; or never knew about organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; or the Freedom Now Party (the first all-black political party in the nation), Smith’s text will explain their rich legacies. And if you thought Martha & the Vandellas’ 1964 smash “Dancing In The Street” (from which the Rolling Stones borrowed a central lyrical/melodic passage for “Street Fighting Man“) was just a party song, or assumed the Supremes’ 1967 hit “The Happening” was only frivolous soul /pop, this book will open your eyes and ears. In the past, many have likewise been too hasty or facile in taking either Motown or ambitious founder Berry Gordy Jr. to task for not rallying to the cause of civil rights at critical stages when it would have aided leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X following his break from the Detroit-bred Nation of Islam. To her great credit, Smith does exactly the opposite, marshaling an avid researcher’s dogged thoroughness and a social historian’s grasp of underlying factors to show such pronouncements to be untrue or grossly oversimplified.
Smith makes it plain that while Motown did not issue Malcolm X’s 1963 Detroit “Message To The Grass Roots” speech or sponsor the business panel at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Conference where Malcolm spoke, the company’s roots in supporting local black enterprise were deep and vigorous. “In fact,” she writes, “Motown’s prosperity as a black-owned business achieved many of the economic objectives of black nationalism espoused by leaders such as Malcolm X.” Moreover, Smith effectively refutes the longstanding assertion that Gordy shrewdly issued its first spoken -word recording, “The Great March To Freedom,” merely to capitalize on the national publicity surrounding the King -led March on Washington. Deliberately released on the same day (Aug. 28, 1963) as the March on Washington, the “Great March” album preserved an earlier version of King’s “I Have A Dream” speech as delivered at the historic (and arguably larger and more politically pivotal) June 1963 Detroit Great March. Even King initially claimed the album used its “I Have A Dream” subtitle only after Motown “saw the widespread public reception accorded said words when used in the text of my address to the March on Washington.”
But Smith documents that Motown subtitled all 11 tracks on the album to reflect portions of the speeches, that King used the dream metaphor in his talks and writings as far back as 1960, and that since “Motown completed the album in mid-August . . . it would have been impossible for Gordy to know ahead of time that the `’I Have A Dream’ speech would catch on.” Tension and confusion over such matters led to a temporary court injunction by King against Motown before King dropped it. Motown was subsequently allowed to press an LP documenting the entire Washington version of King’s address, and he won a 1970 Grammy forhis album on Motown’s Black Forum label, “Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam.”
Smith, who was born in Henry Ford Hospital on Aug. 19, 1964, the sole
daughter of three children by one-time Chevrolet Gear and Axle assembly-line worker Gerald Smith and the former Caralee Narden, told this columnist her goal in writing “Dancing In The Street” was “to show that Motown came from a very vibrant and complex community whose racial and cultural struggle are nearly forgotten and yet still need to be understood — because it produced something marvelous.”
On Feb. 23, the Music Division of the Library of Congress held a book party for “Dancing In The Street” to raise awareness for a Center for the Study of Rhythm and Blues Music that would help support more scholarship like Smith’s. Meanwhile, as Motown proved, corporations are integral to the health and well-being of communities. In an era when the stockholders and the bottom line seem to justify any sort of consolidation or relocation in search of increased profit-taking, the music industry must remember that people still come first If there is a final lesson that burns through the pages of “Dancing In The Street,” it’s that Motown’s original meaning and mission will always be linked inexorably to the people and history of Detroit. In fact, the Motown Record Co. should consider returning to the Motor City, proposed site of an expanded Motown Museum, and finish what it started in 1958. END
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Credit source information (as published): Billboard, March 18, 2000
‘Dancing In The Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit’, by Suzanne E. Smith, can be found available at Amazon Books and eBay.
Audio digitally restored by Motor City Radio Flashbacks
