When I was a little kid, I had a rocking horse on springs and I loved it. My earliest memories of listening to music were sitting on the rocking horse, happily squeaking along with the music, though I doubt I was a stickler for keeping to the rhythm.
My older brother says I loved Tubby the Tuba. I remember we had the record because the name rings a bell and I remember the album cover. I went to YouTube to listen to several versions, and I can report the songs and the story are not in my memory. I suspect this is because I stopped listening at a certain age and never went back to it.
I definitely remember a condensed soundtrack album of The Wizard of Oz with all the songs and enough extra dialog to make the plot clear. Like most Americans my age, I have no idea how many times I saw The Wizard of Oz, but it was always a treat to watch after we got a color TV. I also remember loving Artur Rubenstein's recording of the Chopin waltzes, which was the start of a lifelong love of Chopin's music. The springs on the rocker made a racket even when they were oiled, but in my imagination of it, I assume my mom found the noise comforting, since she knew if I was in the rocker, I wasn't running around the house getting into trouble.
What I remember about the radio in the early 1960s are just a few stations. My mom and dad listened to classical and the two stations were KKHI and KDFC. I listened to the rock stations because my older brother and sister listened and I definitely got into it myself. When I started listening, the rock stations were KYA, KFRC and KEWB.
I was also a Giants fan, so I tuned into KSFO for the games and sometimes hung around to listen to their easy listening format after the games were over. The big star DJ in the area was Don Sherwood, but I started listening after he left the station. The names I remember from listening to were Jim Lange and Dan Sorkin, respectively the early morning and mid-morning DJs and a weekend announcer named Scott Beach. The station had a rarely used minute and a half long station identification jingle by the Johnny Mann singers that I always loved to hear.
But most of my memories were of the top 30 stations. While they heavily relied on whatever songs were hits at the moment, DJs would also throw in a few songs from a few years back, so I heard Buddy Holly's music years after he was dead. Other 1950s favorites for me were Chuck Berry and Little Richard. On the other hand, Elvis Presley left me cold.
Top 30 radio was weird. Yes, of course we heard the Beatles and the Beach Boys and a lot of Motown acts, but I distinctly remember when a streak of Beatles' songs at number one for months was broken by Puff the Magic Dragon. Other songs that made it into the number one spot on the rock stations included Louis Armstrong singing Hello, Dolly - a much bigger hit at the time than What a Wonderful World ever was - and Barbra Streisand's People. I also remember hearing Allan Sherman's Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah played on the rock stations.
I confess that I didn't listen much to KDIA, the local soul station, so while I heard a lot of black artists, there were also many I wouldn't discover until well after the fact. I remember the first time Etta James was on a jukebox in San Francisco in the late 1980s that had a few of her singles from the early 1960s. Because she was a survivor, her older tunes started to be a big part of media, with At Last used on several commercials, and her 1995 tribute to Billie Holiday entitled Mystery Lady won a Grammy. But I can testify she was not a crossover star on the rock stations in the Bay Area back in the day.
Some music gets more play in retrospect than it did at the time, some gets less. Ray Charles recorded Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962 and it was absolutely huge. The song I Can't Stop Loving You made it to number 1 on the charts for R&B, rock and easy listening. While ironically it didn't do as well on the country charts, many artists like Willie Nelson and Buck Owens acknowledge that the record did wonders for the sales of country artists, opening people's ears and their hearts to how good the best of country music was.
If I could be an "influencer" in today's culture - a highly unlikely event - I think the first name I would like to bring out of the past for more respect is Sam Cooke. He had a lot of crossover hits, but my most vivid memory is listening to the radio report that he had been killed. At the time he died, the song Shake was climbing the charts, but right after the news, some DJ put on the B-side, A Change Is Gonna Come. I had never heard it before and I began to weep uncontrollably. The song can still make me cry.
I will write more about 1960s radio in the months ahead, but I wanted to get these few ideas down first.
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