Songs That Never Quite Made It from 1969

Though once, someone thought they would

This summer marks the 54th year since I dove head-first into pop music. My friend Robert, who also got me started watching TV’s Hee-Haw (don’t blame him; I loved it, especially the music), made me tune our car radio to WSGN-Am 610 on our summer drives with my mother to the grocery store or to K-Mart, and from there I learned to love the Top 30 (why not 40, who’ll ever know), and all the songs below, and even more.

That summer, songs like Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525,” Desmond Dekker’s “The Israelites,” the Stones’ “Honky-Tonk Women,” and The Rugby’s “You, I” were big hits. Later, Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” would change the course of my life, though I wouldn’t understand that particular lane until I got to grad school and figured out how earthy it and I really are.

Big hits came and went in that summer of 1969 and into the fall, and each Friday afternoon, Robert and I would listen to the new Top 30 countdown as songs like Bobby Sherman’s “Little Woman” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” began their climb up those charts. Sometimes even a 13-year old person understands when a hit will be a hit, but what I liked to do especially was see if the assorted disc jockeys at WSGN could also correctly predict what was coming, the weekly “Pick Hit” that either they honestly believed would make it, or were being encouraged in that belief by someone in a higher place.

As I remember those weeks, the first Pick Hit on my late May/early June entry into this world was Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band’s cover of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me”:

Last week I found a copy of Nelson’s Garden Party LP for $5, and so I suppose he was on my mind. This pick hit did pretty well, eventually making it into the station’s Top Ten, though it never hit #1.

From there, the DJ’s didn’t do so well, and so I wonder if anyone remembers this string of would-be hits that spun around a bit out of control, and then sputtered to the kind of halt you might think only happens in the old electric football games from this same period.

First, anyone up for “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am” by Bill Deal and the Rhondels?

It is an upbeat tune for sure, but for my teenaged tastes, after a listen or two, it quit even promising to pay dividends.

Something was in the Birmingham air, aside from the smog and other industrial waste wafting through us from US Steel, TCI, and any other big industry that didn’t give a damn about their bad reputations and emissions. Or maybe some lonely DJ wished this next song on someone lovely, listening out there in their midnight hour:

The Flaming Ember tried hard, and though this song maybe made it to #28, their next single, the title song from the album above, fared much better, though no one picked it.

I have two more for you, and this next one hurts, because truth be told, and all confessions on the table, my favorite 60’s band was truly Paul Revere and The Raiders. They had so many big hits like “Kicks,” “Hungry,” “Mr. Sun/Mr. Moon (gulp),” and “Indian Reservation.” But in ‘69, someone thought this one would succeed, maybe because it tried riding the train from a Youngbloods’ offering that journeyed through hope:

Man, I held out that hope for a few weeks and felt so close to whomever decided to pick this song. Sadly, no one much bought it, and after a few weeks at #30, it fell out of the sky, crashing somewhere on a train track no one could see or ever find again.

Maybe the most prescient pick hit of all came in the early fall of 1969. As one-hit wonders go, this band had a really great run wishing what I often do on fatty politicians who clog up our national arteries with their brand of racist/misogynist/grandiose delusions of their own natural selection (and if they were naturally selected by someone, then we should excise the word “natural” from our own Top 30 countdown).

It’s also a song we used to sing at various sporting events when someone had to leave a game after a battering or fifth foul:

Was it all worth it? That cover photo? Those sideburns? The mustaches that would soon adorn various porno stars in the anything goes 70’s?

Maybe so, as the song found its way to at least #2 in Birmingham.

I think WSGN ceased the Pick Hit feature by the end of that year. But I was hooked, and while I might not have been willing to say which songs would make it, I remember well so many of the ones that didn’t.

Don’t you?