Share memories of growing up with the great music of the 50s, 60s and 70s. My background includes radio and television personality as well as V.P. A&R for A&M Records, where I signed Bryan Adams. In 1997, I began Treasure Island Oldies, the Home of Lost Treasures. I play the biggies, but extensively feature hard to find rare oldies. Listen live Sundays 6 to 10 p.m. Pacific and also the show archives at www.TreasureIslandOldies.com
Let the memories flow!
What
a fun four hours we had together this week! The Chat Room was buzzing
with lots of friends and visitors. The Chat Room conversations make the
show go by so quickly; it feels more like an hour or so than 4! I invite
you to experience the Chat Room for yourself every Sunday during the
Live Show. Just click Chat on the menu at any page of the website and
follow the easy instructions. Remember to type your name or a nickname
so we'll be able to properly greet you and welcome you.
Be
sure to join me next Sunday, April 3rd for our next live show, the
Annual One Hit Wonders Special. You'll be amazed by just how many hits
have been achieved by artists who appeared on the Top 100 charts one
time only. Join me for the Live show or later in the week on the Archive
at the Listen page.
Happy
Birthday wishes go out to Frank Vandeven in Lillooet, British Columbia
and to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legendary disc jockey Red Robinson, in
Vancouver, British Columbia. All the best from me and everyone at
Treasure Island Oldies. If your birthday is coming up, please be sure to
let me know so that I can also celebrate your special day on the show.
Send the details to birthdays@treasureislandoldies.com. I’ll wish you Happy Birthday during the show and also play Birthday by The Beatles for you.
The
Treasure Island Oldies Blog is playing the Number One song on this
week's Top 5 Countdown from 1967. It's The Turtles with Happy Together
and it's our Song of the Week. Enjoy!
Connie Francis was born Concetta
Rosa Franconero on December 12, 1938 in Newark, New Jersey. Apart from
having a staggeringly successful recording career, she also appeared in
several motion pictures including Where The Boys Are, Follow The Boys, Looking For Love, and When The Boys Meet The Girls.
Between
1957 and 1969, she appeared a stunning 56 times on the Billboard
charts! Plus, she achieved 16 Top Ten hits, plus 8 Gold Records, quite a feat for
anyone! In fact, Connie is the #1 pop female singer from the late 1950s to
the mid-1960s.
The Turtles were featured in this week's Treasure Island Oldies Show Top 5 Countdown. As I've been doing these past several weeks is to play the Number one song from the Countdown.
Here then are The Turtles with the Number One song this week from 1967, Happy Together. It's our Song of the week.
Happy
Spring! And for our friends in New Zealand and Australia, Happy Fall!
Here on Canada's west coast, it sure is Spring with wonderful spring
flowers and blossom trees blooming all around Vancouver. It is such a
beautiful time of year, full of energy and renewal. And with the power
back after last week's outage, it was full steam ahead for this week's
show. Thanks for your requests and a big hello to first time caller and
listener, Linda in Alameda, California. She wanted to hear a real Lost
Treasure from David Gates. He had to have been so young, as the song she
requested, Jo-Baby, was from 1958. Great to have you listening, Linda.
If you would like to hear a song on the show, don't be shy. Either call
the Treasure Island Oldies Listener Line at 206-339-0709 and record your
message, or send an email request.
Please
make a note on your calendar for our next special. The One Hit Wonders
annual special returns, Live, Sunday, April 3rd, and later on the
Archive at the Listen page. It is quite surprising just how many big
hits there were but with only a one time appearance by the artist or
group on the charts.
Happy
Birthday wishes go out to Joel Drucker in Randolph, New Jersey, and to
my decades long friend, Tom Locke here in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Tom's feature the Moment In Time happens weekly on the show. All the
best from yours truly and everyone at Treasure Island Oldies. If your
birthday is coming up, please be sure to let me know so that I can also
celebrate your special day on the show. Send the details to birthdays@treasureislandoldies.com. I’ll wish you Happy Birthday during the show and also play Birthday by The Beatles for you.
The
Treasure Island Oldies Blog is playing the song that started off this
week's show. It's the Yardbirds with Heart Full Of Soul and it's our
Song of the Week. Enjoy!
The 5th Dimension scored many hits, initially on Johnny Rivers' record label, Soul City, then later on Bell/Arista Records.
The members were Marilyn McCoo, Billy Davis Jr., Florence LaRue, Lamont
McLemore, and Ron Townson. They originally recorded as the Versatiles
in 1966.
Their first single for Soul City Records, Go Where You Wanna Go,
made a sizable dent on the charts, peaking at number 16 in 1967. From
their first appearance on the Billboard to their last single in 1980,
they hit the charts a total of 30 times, including six Top Ten hits and
astounding five Platinum selling records as well.
I started this week's Treasure Island Oldies show with this great British rocker from The Yardbirds and I decided to play them here at the Treasure Island Oldies Blog.
Here are The Yardbirds witrh Heart Full Of Soul. It's our Song of the Week.
I
was 3 hours and thirty-eight minutes into this week's show, when during
the Rock and Roll Reunion...POOF! - a power failure! The West Coast has
been battered with heavy rain and wind storms on and off for the past
several days. Unfortunately, the power remained out for nearly 2 hours,
so the show was incomplete. As of this moment, I do not yet know if the
archive of the show can be salvaged. As soon as I get more information,
I'll provide an update for you.
I'd
like to thank you for your requests for the Name Game Special. I
received both emails and calls to the Treasure Island Oldies Listener
Line (206-339-0709). It's always great hearing from you and to play your
requests.
Happy
Birthday wishes go out to Rick Canode in Madison, Wisconsin. Rick is a
good friend, long time listener, and for many years, contributes a
weekly feature on the show, Rick's Rare Rock & Roll Relic. All the
best from yours truly and everyone at Treasure Island Oldies. If your
birthday is coming up, please be sure to let me know so that I can also
celebrate your special day on the show. Send the details to birthdays@treasureislandoldies.com. I’ll wish you Happy Birthday during the show and also play Birthday by The Beatles for you.
The
Treasure Island Oldies Blog is playing the Number One song from this
week's Top 5 Countdown from 1958. It's Tequila by The Champs and it's
our Song of the Week. Enjoy!
I must say that I don't know a lot about Ronnie Dove. I can tell you he was born September 7, 1935 in Herndon, Virginia and later raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
He first recorded on his own record label, Dove Records, in 1958 without any national success. However, it was when he signed with Diamond Records in 1964 that he began his string of successful records. Incidentally, nearly all of his records were produced by Phil Kahl who was Vice-President of Diamond Records.
Between 1964 and 1969, he appeared on the Hot 100 Billboard charts a total of twenty-one times, including 11 Top Twenty hits.
George Martin, whose production skills helped define the sound of British popular music, died March 8 2016 at age 90.
His
career spanned six decades; in that time he produced more than 700
records, wrote film scores and worked with music's greatest talents.
His
technical knowledge and love of experimentation saw him produce
incredible sounds from equipment that modern musicians would consider
primitive.
His greatest success came with the Beatles; from the
loveable mop-top recordings of the early 1960s to the acid-drenched
psychedelia of Sergeant Pepper.
George Henry Martin was born on 3
January 1926 into a working-class family in north London. His parents, a
carpenter and a cleaner, wanted "a safe civil servant's job" for their
son.
Four Liverpudlians
He
won a scholarship to St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill, but when war
broke out his parents moved out of London and he went to Bromley
Grammar School.
His passion for music really began when The London
Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Adrian Boult, arrived to play a concert
in the school hall.
"It was absolutely magical. Hearing such
glorious sounds, I found it difficult to connect them with 90 men and
women blowing into brass and wooden instruments or scraping away at
strings with horsehair bows. I could not believe my ears."
He
harboured secret ambitions to be a composer but, in the event, took a
job as a quantity surveyor before joining the Fleet Air Arm in 1943
where he qualified as a pilot.
By 1947 Martin was playing the oboe
professionally and had been accepted to study at the Guildhall School
of Music, despite being unable to read or write a note.
After graduation he spent a brief spell at the BBC's classical music
department before walking through the doors of EMI in Abbey Road as a
record producer. He took to the mixing desk like "a duck to water".
Five
years later, at the age of 29, as head of the Parlophone label, he
worked with artists such as Shirley Bassey, Matt Monro and the jazz
bands of Johnny Dankworth and Humphrey Lyttelton.
Martin also
produced catchy, comic numbers, and enjoyed such successes as Right Said
Fred with Bernard Cribbins and Goodness Gracious Me with Peter Sellers
and Sophia Loren. Image caption
He translated The Beatles' ideas
In 1962, Brian Epstein introduced him to four
Liverpudlians. They had been rejected by every major record label in the
country and Martin himself was more impressed by their strong
personalities and natural wit than by their music.
"They were raucous," he later remembered. "Not very in tune. They weren't very good."
Nevertheless,
he signed the Beatles and Love Me Do became their first hit later in
1962. Thus began the most successful recording studio partnership of all
time.
Learning curve
For
the next eight years, Martin guided the Fab Four from the frothy pop
sound of I Want To Hold Your Hand to the ambitious experimentation of
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.
It was a
steep learning curve for both producer and musicians. Martin had very
little experience of pop music and the band had no idea how a recording
studio worked.
Martin's main talent lay in his ability to
translate the adventurous ideas of Lennon and McCartney into practical
recording terms. While McCartney could express his requirements,
Lennon was often more vague. If he was searching for what he called "an
orange sound", it became Martin's task to find it.
But it all worked. In a 1975 interview with the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, John Lennon said that it was a true partnership.
"Some
people say George Martin did all of it, some say The Beatles did
everything. It was neither one. We did a lot of learning together."
Martin's
classical training became ever more valuable as the Beatles continued
to push the boundaries of their music. He wrote and conducted the
strings on Eleanor Rigby and the eclectic backing to I Am The Walrus.
All
this was being achieved on what would now be considered basic recording
equipment, which would be pushed to the limit for the recording of the
Sgt Pepper album.
At the time, EMI had only four-track tape
machines so Martin, and his engineers, devised a technique whereby a
number of tracks were recorded and then mixed down on to one single
track, giving the flexibility of a modern multi-tracked studio.
He
also made much use of recording different tracks at various tape speeds
to change the texture of the final sound, a technique used to good
effect on Lucy in the Sky.
The harmony between band and producer
suffered one of its rare hiccups when George Martin was temporarily
unavailable and McCartney brought in another producer to arrange the
strings on She's Leaving Home.
By the time The White Album came to
be recorded, Martin was working with a number of different artists and
The Beatles produced many of the tracks themselves.
Following the 1970 break-up of The Beatles, Martin
worked with artists such as Sting, Jose Carreras, Celine Dion and Stan
Getz, as well as Lennon and McCartney on their solo projects.
By
then he had set up his own company, AIR studios, which enabled him, for
the very first time, to be able to receive royalties for his work.
In
the late 1970s, Martin built a studio on the Caribbean island of
Montserrat, and artists including Dire Straits and The Rolling Stones
travelled there to record albums under Martin's respected guidance.
When
Hurricane Hugo devastated both island and studio in 1989, Martin
produced a benefit album to help raise funds for the victims.
Martin
received a knighthood in 1996, and a year later, Elton John asked him
to produce the reworking of his song Candle in the Wind for the funeral
of Diana, Princess of Wales.
He persuaded the singer just to sit
down in the studio and record it exactly as he had played it in
Westminster Abbey. The resulting single was Martin's 30th number one
record, the highest of any musical producer.
He retired two years later after producing what he
decreed would be his final album, In My Life, a collection of Beatles
songs, rearranged and recorded by a collection of singers, film actors
and musicians.
However, he was not able to completely relax. In
2002 he was part of the team which put together the Jubilee concert at
Buckingham Palace and in 2006 he supervised the remixing of 80 Beatles
tracks for use by Cirque de Soleil in a Las Vegas stage show called
Love.
In his career, George Martin worked with some of the
best-known names in popular music - ranging from Jeff Beck, through
Ultravox to the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
But his enduring legacy will
be his work with The Beatles whose timeless sounds, as acknowledged by
the band members themselves, owe much to his input as a musician,
arranger and producer.
It's
my great pleasure to welcome My Generation Posters & More to
Treasure Island Oldies! They are now a sponsor of both the show and
website as of this week. It's been a while in the making but it's now
official. Have a visit to their website at www.mygenerationshop.com and let them know you heard about them from Treasure Island Oldies. Cheers.
Be
sure to join me next week for our next special, The Name Game, Live
Sunday, March 13th. Every song I play during the show will have the name
of a person in the song title, like Sheila, Tommy, Bad Bad Leroy Brown,
Diana, and so many more. You'll be surprised with just how many songs
have the name of a girl or a guy in the title. Be sure to listen; it's
always a fun special.
Happy
Birthday wishes go out to Roy Geldart in Campbell River, British
Columbia (or as Roy calls it Campbell Crick LOL). If your birthday is
coming up, please be sure to let me know so that I can celebrate your
special day on the show. Send the details to birthdays@treasureislandoldies.com. I’ll wish you Happy Birthday during the show and also play Birthday by The Beatles for you.
The
Treasure Island Oldies Blog is playing the Number One song from this
week's Top 5 Countdown from 1962. Bruce Channel didn't have that many
hits, but this one has stood the test of time. The Number One song is
Hey! Baby and it's our Song of the Week. Enjoy!
Voice
Your Choice spotlights Clyde PcPhatter, the former lead singer of The
Drifters who continued to have great success as a solo artist. Cast your
vote at the Voice Your Choice page for either A Lover's Question or
Lover Please. I’ll play the winner on next week’s show.
The Drifters were an R&B group formed in 1953 as a showcase for singer Clyde McPhatter.
Prior to their first hit on the pop charts, they had eleven Top Ten
songs on the R&B charts. The original lineup consisted of Clyde McPhatter, Gerhart and Andrew Thrasher, and Bill Pinkney.
When Clyde McPhatter left for a solo career, manager George Treadwell disbanded the rest of the group, brought in The Five Crowns, and renamed them The Drifters (perhaps The New Drifters would have been more like it). This new lineup included Ben E. King, Doc Green, Charlie Thomas and Elsbeary Hobbs. The majority of their Top 100 chart hits were sung by three different lead singers: Ben E. King (1959-60), Rudy Lewis (1961-63), and Johnny Moore (1957, 1964-66).
Clyde was born Clyde Lensley McPhatter on November 15, 1932 in Durham,
North Carolina and sadly, he died of a heart attack at the young age of
39 on June 13, 1972. During his solo career, he charted 21 times, had 2
Top Ten hits and 1 Gold Record.
Bruce Channel has the Number One song on the Treasure Island Oldies Top Five Countdown this week and the Treasure Island Oldies Blog is playing a rare video clip in colour.
Here's Bruce Channel with Hey! Baby. It's our Song of the Week.
