Here's how quick emotion for the past can be
aroused. Last week had an all-Rod Taylor
day on TCM. I flipped past and there was The Time Machine, RT embarked upon
first trip forward. For fleeting moment came thrust back to my own first
awareness of The Time Machine, a 1961 day when my brother brought Dell's comic
adapt into the house, its cover featuring Rod Taylor in his magic transport,
plus escaping a Morlock. Tie-in mags thrilled me not for drawings inside, but
images on the front to draw eyes at the newsstand and entice a dime purchase. These
weren't tinted like lobby cards, but the McCoy as in photographic art,
full-color and not seen elsewhere. I salted that Dell and have it to this day.
Exposure to the movie wouldn't come until 1-9-65 and NBC primetime broadcast.
Such moments rush back when I encounter past films so meaningful. There are
hundreds to rouse emotion stilled since a last exposure. I didn't stay with The
Time Machine over a minute because there wasn't need to. Lingering would have
exposed cracks in fragile porcelain, a weak second half, future dwellers so
passive that I'd just as soon they be fed to Morlocks, and then lame
excuse for menace the Morlocks turned out to be (only The Giant Claw has them
beat for non-threatening threat).
The scene I stumbled on was ideal to wring
nostalgia's tear. The Victorian setting. Taylor
in smoking jacket and awed by his splendid creation. Rich color playing amidst
soft-lit interior. And ticking clocks always a most soothing aspect of The Time
Machine for me. I'd later knowa collector who had tick-tocks all through his
house. Like Rod Taylor's George, Mike had a basement too, only his was filled
with 16mm film rather than a time transport. I almost expected to find the
latter when we went downstairs, so much did the place remind me of The Time
Machine. Do stumbles-across a sentimental favorite work better where fleeting?
Clip programs have the right idea. Most people, certainly ones outside the
passion, will say they love a movie without any intention of watching it again.
To do so is investment of time after
all, ninety minutes to two or more hours, and it'll not be the same as
when first and deepest impression was made. Too many films curl up and die when we go
back to them. Especially where they arrived first to childhood or one's
romantic youth (Gosh, this doesn't seem as good as when I first saw it).
Music has eternal advantage over movies where return is had to age of wonder. A song transports, holds the trance two
and a half minutes, then gently deposits us back to reality, or a next
treasured oldie. Listeners zone out for duration of Love Train, or Steely Dan
singing Peg, basking in memory. These I mention because they seem a most often
played on Sirius channels. I can't drive to Winston and back without hearing
both at least once. Imagine toted-up exposure to 70's evergreens over a last
forty years. Then compare with number of visits to a beloved movie. I've seenThe Thingthirty times at least,The Maltese Falcon, The Mark Of Zorro, Out Of
The Past, many others, close to that. That's days ... weeks ... if you multiply
the hours, but what of thousands of listens to Barry White and Can't Get Enough
Of Your Love, or Gloria Gaynor bookending the Disco Era with Never Can Say
Goodbye and I Will Survive. Most times they're just noise in the car, but more
often I'm reminded of something nice about the era they represent, tunes taking
me there quicker than any movie could.
The oldie market, from what I'm told, is lightly
stocked. Most of past songs are gone, as in seldom if ever heard. Retro
stations, including Sirius, keep narrow playlists based on careful analysis and
focus group review. There are, it seems, a limited number of selections that
people are willing to hear again. Having been #1 is no guarantee of latter-day
currency. Hits once white hot can be toxic by modern measure --- We Are The
World, You Light Up My Life --- these plus oodles more translate to instant dial change, like with me whenever American Pie comes on. Whole decades get discarded
too. I mention 70's songs because that's as far back as most commercial stations
go anymore, earlier stuff left to private excavation or dedicated channels
Sirius keeps as sop to elder subscribers (though online there is wider choice
onSuper OldiesandTop-Shelf Oldies, among fan-manned others). Seems it is music
indeed that rules, with movies eternal runner-up for time-tripping. If I watch
whole of The Time Machine again, it'll not yield half what last week's glimpse
afforded, 103 minutes too long to hold the spell. I wonder frankly if I could
even finish the thing. Best then to have savored the moment and leave it lay,
time travel most satisfying when it's brief.
I didn't expect to see Sirius/XM come up as a topic here, but not surprised. I've noticed the same thing as you, a relatively short playlist for rock channels ensures that you can hear, say, Space Oddity on any road trip before too long, and listening to First Wave I've certainly heard far more Depeche Mode recently than I ever did in skinny tie days of my own.
That said, I've managed to find the corners of Sirius/XM where it's not so repetitive. For vintage rock, Little Steven's Underground Garage tends to play the grittier garage-rock obscure songs of the 50s through 70s. For classic rock, Classic Vinyl and especially Deep Tracks tend to dig deeper into more obscure bands and album cuts-- as I told a local DJ, those two seem to come from an alternate universe in which Stephen Stills is famous for having been in Manassas, not Crosby Stills & Nash.
On the weekends one of them-- I think 70s on 7-- plays old American Top 40 shows with Casey Kasem, giving you a real picture of what was popular in the 70s. I can usually go about 3 "hmm, interesting" cuts before the Carpenters or something I can't stand to hear again comes on. Likewise, I listen to 40s on 4, but sooner or later Vaughan Monroe or Dick Haymes comes on and I scurry away. Finding that sweet spot where more variety isn't obviously more of thankfully forgotten mediocrity isn't easy!
I like the Casey Kasem programs because they include music that was popular then, but forgotten since. Some of these are admittedly bad, but occasionally there will be one that I liked back in its day, but hadn't come across since.
Lovely post and I'll try not to take umbrage on behalf of so many of us social security aged monster kids when you lump the glow-y eyed morlocks together with the turkey bird marionette from THE GIANT CLAW. The differential between the original emotional impact of specific movies and their actual objective worth is something most of us pop culture freaks think about all the time.
George Pal is a great example of a film maker whose amazing talent was in triggering the viewer's imagination, not necessarily in fulfilling it. A great producer and, honestly, an only so-so director, Pal's staging could be a little wobbly when he helmed his own stuff (would THE TIME MACHINE or DR. LAO wear even better if he had handed them over to Byron Haskin?) Its not the effects that date TM for me so much as how we hang onto Yvette Mimieux doing absolutely nothing for precious minutes while Rod Taylor runs away, handles some sort of action stuff off-camera and then runs back into frame! But Pal invested all of his projects with a unique emotional punch that lingers long after first viewing (even, I'd argue, with junk like ATLANTIS THE LOST CONTINENT.) His playful but ultimately thoughtful approach to time travel is what impressed us way back then. Yeah, it's the terrific wrap-around structure of TIME MACHINE that made it especially memorable (nobody did that as well, although FIRST MEN IN THE MOON came close.)
True story. Just this month my not-particularly-sentimental sister-in-law pulled out the '61 TIME MACHINE for her 7-ish and 11-ish year old grand daughters. These are kids whose favorites are the DESPICABLE ME movies and FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM, so I wasn't expecting an exactly great reception. Had breakfast with them the following Sunday, and the oldie seemed to have gone down surprisingly well. They chatted about the time-lapse decaying morlock and pretty little Weena approvingly. But it was when I asked "Okay... what books would YOU have taken?" that they became really animated and engaged.
As to music, I root around iTunes for stuff like OLDIES ALTERNATIVE and various fifties, sixties and seventies outlets that specialize in the forgotten chart toppers, b-sides and covers. Not as interested in anything that would turn up in a Time Life box set.
Richard Kimble checks in with some music alternatives:
I no longer have Sirius but when I did I was a devoted listener to Little Steven's Underground Garage. My tastes -- in rock and roll anyway -- seem to match LS's almost precisely. I still listen to his weekly syndicated show on terrestrial radio.
There was also a great show on The Loft Channel called 'American Roots Radio' which played everything from bluegrass and country blues to rockabilly and alt.country. The weird thing is it was hosted by, of all people, Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin. I was never a huge Taupin fan and he deserves life in front of the firing squad for the stomach-turning "Candle In The Wind", but 'ARR' was an absolute treasure, the kind of thing you wish they'd teach in schools. Bob Dylan had a similar show, which was pretty good, but Taupin's was much better. Both ended after 100 episodes. I don't know if Sirius still plays them.
The Morlocks scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. And the decision to cast flabby performers in the parts was brilliant. And Weena .... (deep sigh).
As your production stills show, the young Rod Taylor was gorgeous! (Ah...Mongo STRAIGHT!) To see him in his last film is to shake your head sadly. Is there anything that shows the passage and ravages of time more than a long life lived in the movies? The wolf, man.
I don't know about the Taupin show but it's not hard to find the Dylan show, Theme Time Radio Hour, online. It's a fun mix of oldies and roots music and 50s-60s songs, each show on a slightly quizzical theme ranging from baseball to coffee to various states known for songs (eg Texas). I have them all for putting on the iPod for long trips. The show was scripted, but you can believe it comes pretty close to the kinds of things Dylan would dig out to play himself.
I never had a problem with THE TIME MACHINE John (nor THE SEVEN FACES OF DR LAO either some to think of it Dave), they were movies that delighted me back then and still do. George Pal may not have been the greatest director in the world, but he produced films of fantasy and flight that managed a little more moral heft and genuine feeling than his more exploitative contemporaries at the time, but stinted none on the entertainment value, and if the camera wanted to linger on Yvette Mimieux for extra seconds, I certainly had no problem with that.
All of Pal's films have unforgettable images and visuals that have stuck with me since childhood, like the wonderful flamboyant design of the time machine itself, or Ann Robinson meeting her first martian face to sort-of-face in WAR OF THE WORLDS, or the goldfish who turns into a sea serpent in LAO. And as I said, Pal was not afraid to inject some social commentary into the mix, something these too-immersed monster kids could use as these sort of films became more violent and mean as the years went on (Come to think of it, I see that morlock/sheep people relationship increasing quite a bit in todays society, certainly on the internet).
And some of the best moments in Pal's films are the little ones, the ending of THE TIME MACHINE has always been one of my most memorable moments from it, when Alan Young realizes that Rod Taylor's story is indeed true and he delivers one of the great punchlines to wrap up a movie. Wouldn't it be nice if we all had all the time in the world, and could travel it in ways other than watching a film, the one true window on our past.
Ah...The Time Machine does evoke memories for me, as my family had a discussion while driving back home about what three books we would have taken back to the future.
You are exactly right about oldies radio. The memories a song brings back are diluted after hearing them hundreds of times. (Do I really need to hear The Eagles "Hotel California" one more time?) Hard to believe, but Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life" was the best selling single of the 70's and stayed on the charts for many weeks, yet it is never heard on radio today. A radio programmer once told me that classic ballads were seldom added to oldies playlists. It's the seldom heard songs however that evoke memories for me.
This tango is from the days when my grandmother was a very young child (I also have now the original 1910 recording). It was rescued in 1941 and it have been played over and over, not to mention danced, up until now.
My first pro radio job was doing nights on the hometown AM station that ostensibly had an oldies format but ran the gambit from the 50s to the 80s. The time of day usually dictated just how much 50s-60s dominant the playlist would be. In the last few years, that station has definitely shifted into a heavier 70s-80s rotation with just enough 60s to keep it from qualifying as a Classic Hits station.
The cluster I work for now includes a 600-watt non-commercial station that, when the all-Christmas format in the background was threatening my sanity, I talked the owners into letting me flip to traditional oldies. I set the format as 1951 to 1974 with a few pop hits from 1975 to 1977 that compliment the main hits slipped in. Sadly, the station is down at the moment following a major lightning strike. If I can get the powers to be to sign off on streaming the station, I'll try and remember to share the link here. Nothing brightens the afternoon like a transition from Doris Day to some Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones.
All manner of Disney stuff, especially live action movies at their most formulaic, take me back. Soundtrack orchestrations all had a certain trumpet-driven perkiness that instantly identified a boomer-era film, TV show or ride.
Likewise certain musical items that were everywhere for a while, like Patty Duke singing "What's, What's, What's, What's On Your Mind", Herman's Hermits, Tiajuana Brass, "Camp Granada", Leroy Anderson orchestral albums, and the five-second pop soundbites in all those K-Tel commercials ("Western Union-nion-nion ..." Still haven't heard that song in its entirety).
The more sturdy a film or piece of music is, the less nostalgic even if -- or perhaps because -- I play it frequently. The associations are less compelling that the piece itself.
I still enjoy the Rathbone Sherlocks from time to time, and sometimes flash back to first encounters on local TV. But the one time a DVD really took my back was when I watched a little thing on the restoration. They showed a faded, fuzzy clip, and instantly I was squinting at an old B&W set really late on a summer night.
Yours sounds like a good station, Sean. I'm listening right now to "Super Oldies," and they are playing "Lullaby Of The Leaves" by the Ventures. Great stuff. Their selections really vary. Super Oldies is run by Shawn Nagy. It uses old commercials, jingles, and vintage station ID's in addition to the songs.
Donald, my favorite group during the mid-60's was The Tijuana Brass. I was glad to see all their albums finally come out on CD. It actually took kind of a long time for that to happen.
Most of these oldies stations I don't need anymore (and to be frank, nobody else does either)-I have YouTube for that. I'm trying to buy newer music these days, having already satiated my oldies needs as a child growing up in Toronto in the early '80's, and also having already acquired all of the Beatles's albums (the 2009 remasters, natch) on CD, plus a few other older albums, (Sly & The Family Stones Greatest Hits and Are You Experienced, as well as David Bowie's much maligned Let's Dance.)
Nothing gets me stirring than to see a starlet barefoot, and such is the case with Yvette Mimieux being held by Rod Taylor in that picture posted in this month's post-that's the kind of publicity shot missing these days, and I'm not ashamed to say it!
As for the movie? It's still a classic, especially with the scenes between Taylor and Young as he's about to go off to The Great War, and Taylor and Mimieux later on-nothing can deny this movie its rightful place in history.
Like Lionel, I've abandoned the stations for YouTube. They have interesting mixes and I was stunned once to hear a song which was hardly a hit (Eddie & Ernie, "Hiding In Shadows") and knowing exactly where and when I heard it. It's a strange and often pleasant feeling to be taken back to a time and place like that. Films rarely do that for me.
One of the more inexplicable things I do,especially to "youngsters", is being able to dip into a favourite film for a few minutes...ironically for a mass of generations with short attention spans when it comes to movie pacing, the thought of not watching the "whole" movie, that is five explosions,two murders and a sex scene in the first twenty minutes, just baffles them...the analogy with "time machine" pop music is so apt...
19 Comments:
I didn't expect to see Sirius/XM come up as a topic here, but not surprised. I've noticed the same thing as you, a relatively short playlist for rock channels ensures that you can hear, say, Space Oddity on any road trip before too long, and listening to First Wave I've certainly heard far more Depeche Mode recently than I ever did in skinny tie days of my own.
That said, I've managed to find the corners of Sirius/XM where it's not so repetitive. For vintage rock, Little Steven's Underground Garage tends to play the grittier garage-rock obscure songs of the 50s through 70s. For classic rock, Classic Vinyl and especially Deep Tracks tend to dig deeper into more obscure bands and album cuts-- as I told a local DJ, those two seem to come from an alternate universe in which Stephen Stills is famous for having been in Manassas, not Crosby Stills & Nash.
On the weekends one of them-- I think 70s on 7-- plays old American Top 40 shows with Casey Kasem, giving you a real picture of what was popular in the 70s. I can usually go about 3 "hmm, interesting" cuts before the Carpenters or something I can't stand to hear again comes on. Likewise, I listen to 40s on 4, but sooner or later Vaughan Monroe or Dick Haymes comes on and I scurry away. Finding that sweet spot where more variety isn't obviously more of thankfully forgotten mediocrity isn't easy!
I like the Casey Kasem programs because they include music that was popular then, but forgotten since. Some of these are admittedly bad, but occasionally there will be one that I liked back in its day, but hadn't come across since.
Lovely post and I'll try not to take umbrage on behalf of so many of us social security aged monster kids when you lump the glow-y eyed morlocks together with the turkey bird marionette from THE GIANT CLAW. The differential between the original emotional impact of specific movies and their actual objective worth is something most of us pop culture freaks think about all the time.
George Pal is a great example of a film maker whose amazing talent was in triggering the viewer's imagination, not necessarily in fulfilling it. A great producer and, honestly, an only so-so director, Pal's staging could be a little wobbly when he helmed his own stuff (would THE TIME MACHINE or DR. LAO wear even better if he had handed them over to Byron Haskin?) Its not the effects that date TM for me so much as how we hang onto Yvette Mimieux doing absolutely nothing for precious minutes while Rod Taylor runs away, handles some sort of action stuff off-camera and then runs back into frame! But Pal invested all of his projects with a unique emotional punch that lingers long after first viewing (even, I'd argue, with junk like ATLANTIS THE LOST CONTINENT.) His playful but ultimately thoughtful approach to time travel is what impressed us way back then. Yeah, it's the terrific wrap-around structure of TIME MACHINE that made it especially memorable (nobody did that as well, although FIRST MEN IN THE MOON came close.)
True story. Just this month my not-particularly-sentimental sister-in-law pulled out the '61 TIME MACHINE for her 7-ish and 11-ish year old grand daughters. These are kids whose favorites are the DESPICABLE ME movies and FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM, so I wasn't expecting an exactly great reception. Had breakfast with them the following Sunday, and the oldie seemed to have gone down surprisingly well. They chatted about the time-lapse decaying morlock and pretty little Weena approvingly. But it was when I asked "Okay... what books would YOU have taken?" that they became really animated and engaged.
As to music, I root around iTunes for stuff like OLDIES ALTERNATIVE and various fifties, sixties and seventies outlets that specialize in the forgotten chart toppers, b-sides and covers. Not as interested in anything that would turn up in a Time Life box set.
No No No!
The Time Machine is a great movie. Love every minute of it. I was ready to steal his time machine and go get Yvette Mimieux for myself.
"Destroy it, George. Destroy IT before it destroys YOU."
Richard Kimble checks in with some music alternatives:
I no longer have Sirius but when I did I was a devoted listener to Little Steven's Underground Garage. My tastes -- in rock and roll anyway -- seem to match LS's almost precisely. I still listen to his weekly syndicated show on terrestrial radio.
There was also a great show on The Loft Channel called 'American Roots Radio' which played everything from bluegrass and country blues to rockabilly and alt.country. The weird thing is it was hosted by, of all people, Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin. I was never a huge Taupin fan and he deserves life in front of the firing squad for the stomach-turning "Candle In The Wind", but 'ARR' was an absolute treasure, the kind of thing you wish they'd teach in schools. Bob Dylan had a similar show, which was pretty good, but Taupin's was much better. Both ended after 100 episodes. I don't know if Sirius still plays them.
The Morlocks scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. And the decision to cast flabby performers in the parts was brilliant. And Weena .... (deep sigh).
As your production stills show, the young Rod Taylor was gorgeous! (Ah...Mongo STRAIGHT!)
To see him in his last film is to shake your head sadly. Is there anything that shows the passage and ravages of time more than a long life lived in the movies? The wolf, man.
I don't know about the Taupin show but it's not hard to find the Dylan show, Theme Time Radio Hour, online. It's a fun mix of oldies and roots music and 50s-60s songs, each show on a slightly quizzical theme ranging from baseball to coffee to various states known for songs (eg Texas). I have them all for putting on the iPod for long trips. The show was scripted, but you can believe it comes pretty close to the kinds of things Dylan would dig out to play himself.
https://player.fm/series/theme-time-radio-hour-archive
I never had a problem with THE TIME MACHINE John (nor THE SEVEN FACES OF DR LAO either some to think of it Dave), they were movies that delighted me back then and still do. George Pal may not have been the greatest director in the world, but he produced films of fantasy and flight that managed a little more moral heft and genuine feeling than his more exploitative contemporaries at the time, but stinted none on the entertainment value, and if the camera wanted to linger on Yvette Mimieux for extra seconds, I certainly had no problem with that.
All of Pal's films have unforgettable images and visuals that have stuck with me since childhood, like the wonderful flamboyant design of the time machine itself, or Ann Robinson meeting her first martian face to sort-of-face in WAR OF THE WORLDS, or the goldfish who turns into a sea serpent in LAO. And as I said, Pal was not afraid to inject some social commentary into the mix, something these too-immersed monster kids could use as these sort of films became more violent and mean as the years went on (Come to think of it, I see that morlock/sheep people relationship increasing quite a bit in todays society, certainly on the internet).
And some of the best moments in Pal's films are the little ones, the ending of THE TIME MACHINE has always been one of my most memorable moments from it, when Alan Young realizes that Rod Taylor's story is indeed true and he delivers one of the great punchlines to wrap up a movie. Wouldn't it be nice if we all had all the time in the world, and could travel it in ways other than watching a film, the one true window on our past.
RICHARD M ROBERTS
I saw THE TIME MACHINE during its initial release, accompanied by my babysitter, a teenage girl who lived down the street. Her name was "Kay". I remember that she was wearing a ponytail, a pink "poodle" skirt, bobby socks and a pair of brown and white saddle shoes. Her fashion statement was de rigreur for young ladies in the mid-'50s, but was already a little passé by 1960, which was not an uncommon occurrence in a little southern town that ran about five years behind the rest of the world. Back then we were living in our own "time machine" of sorts, and how the theater managed to exhibit such a popular film in advance of its second-run I'll never now, though surely our sudden leap into the future would be shortlived. Anyway, this was fifty-seven years ago and I vividly remember Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux and the Scandinavic albinos that counted Yvette among their tribe, all of them running around, lost in some dystopic wilderness of caverns and primordial jungle, equipped with bubbling mini-volcanoes. But even at my early age, my brain having already become densensitized to monstrous images by the likes of William Castle and Roger Corman, I remained unimpressed by the buck-toothed Morlocks; they seemed slow and stupid, no more frightening than some of the characters I might see roaming the aisles of the movie theater on Saturday afternoons, when equally maloccluded hill folk poured down from the mountains to go to the "pitcher-show".
Kay had previously taken me to see THE SPACE CHILDREN, which bad been far less exciting.
Ah...The Time Machine does evoke memories for me, as my family had a discussion while driving back home about what three books we would have taken back to the future.
You are exactly right about oldies radio. The memories a song brings back are diluted after hearing them hundreds of times. (Do I really need to hear The Eagles "Hotel California" one more time?) Hard to believe, but Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life" was the best selling single of the 70's and stayed on the charts for many weeks, yet it is never heard on radio today. A radio programmer once told me that classic ballads were seldom added to oldies
playlists. It's the seldom heard songs however that evoke memories for me.
On radio and music...
This tango is from the days when my grandmother was a very young child (I also have now the original 1910 recording). It was rescued in 1941 and it have been played over and over, not to mention danced, up until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCpUS2nAVBk
My first pro radio job was doing nights on the hometown AM station that ostensibly had an oldies format but ran the gambit from the 50s to the 80s. The time of day usually dictated just how much 50s-60s dominant the playlist would be. In the last few years, that station has definitely shifted into a heavier 70s-80s rotation with just enough 60s to keep it from qualifying as a Classic Hits station.
The cluster I work for now includes a 600-watt non-commercial station that, when the all-Christmas format in the background was threatening my sanity, I talked the owners into letting me flip to traditional oldies. I set the format as 1951 to 1974 with a few pop hits from 1975 to 1977 that compliment the main hits slipped in. Sadly, the station is down at the moment following a major lightning strike. If I can get the powers to be to sign off on streaming the station, I'll try and remember to share the link here. Nothing brightens the afternoon like a transition from Doris Day to some Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones.
Born in '55.
All manner of Disney stuff, especially live action movies at their most formulaic, take me back. Soundtrack orchestrations all had a certain trumpet-driven perkiness that instantly identified a boomer-era film, TV show or ride.
Likewise certain musical items that were everywhere for a while, like Patty Duke singing "What's, What's, What's, What's On Your Mind", Herman's Hermits, Tiajuana Brass, "Camp Granada", Leroy Anderson orchestral albums, and the five-second pop soundbites in all those K-Tel commercials ("Western Union-nion-nion ..." Still haven't heard that song in its entirety).
The more sturdy a film or piece of music is, the less nostalgic even if -- or perhaps because -- I play it frequently. The associations are less compelling that the piece itself.
I still enjoy the Rathbone Sherlocks from time to time, and sometimes flash back to first encounters on local TV. But the one time a DVD really took my back was when I watched a little thing on the restoration. They showed a faded, fuzzy clip, and instantly I was squinting at an old B&W set really late on a summer night.
Yours sounds like a good station, Sean. I'm listening right now to "Super Oldies," and they are playing "Lullaby Of The Leaves" by the Ventures. Great stuff. Their selections really vary. Super Oldies is run by Shawn Nagy. It uses old commercials, jingles, and vintage station ID's in addition to the songs.
Donald, my favorite group during the mid-60's was The Tijuana Brass. I was glad to see all their albums finally come out on CD. It actually took kind of a long time for that to happen.
Most of these oldies stations I don't need anymore (and to be frank, nobody else does either)-I have YouTube for that. I'm trying to buy newer music these days, having already satiated my oldies needs as a child growing up in Toronto in the early '80's, and also having already acquired all of the Beatles's albums (the 2009 remasters, natch) on CD, plus a few other older albums, (Sly & The Family Stones Greatest Hits and Are You Experienced, as well as David Bowie's much maligned Let's Dance.)
Nothing gets me stirring than to see a starlet barefoot, and such is the case with Yvette Mimieux being held by Rod Taylor in that picture posted in this month's post-that's the kind of publicity shot missing these days, and I'm not ashamed to say it!
As for the movie? It's still a classic, especially with the scenes between Taylor and Young as he's about to go off to The Great War, and Taylor and Mimieux later on-nothing can deny this movie its rightful place in history.
Like Lionel, I've abandoned the stations for YouTube. They have interesting mixes and I was stunned once to hear a song which was hardly a hit (Eddie & Ernie, "Hiding In Shadows") and knowing exactly where and when I heard it. It's a strange and often pleasant feeling to be taken back to a time and place like that. Films rarely do that for me.
One of the more inexplicable things I do,especially to "youngsters", is being able to dip into a favourite film for a few minutes...ironically for a mass of generations with short attention spans when it comes to movie pacing, the thought of not watching the "whole" movie, that is five explosions,two murders and a sex scene in the first twenty minutes, just baffles them...the analogy with "time machine" pop music is so apt...
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