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(The Quotations - in the land of one-hit wonders)

I'm threatening to do an entire week of Doo-Wop next week. It's an almost extinct form of popular music that some people still swear by and maybe it's time to get those of you not familiar with it at least introduced. Like I always say, ignorance of your culture is considered uncool.

Rather than start at the beginning point (the early 1950's), I thought I would jump ahead and do something from the tail end of the Doo-Wop era, the 1960s. The Quotations were (as you can tell by the photo up there) from Brooklyn and were one of the only such signings to an almost exclusively Jazz label, Verve in 1961.

They delivered their one and only hit, Imagination, a standard written in the 1930s by the team of Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen. That was what a lot of Doo-Wop was about; taking standards and giving them a twist that, not only made publishers happy but exposed a whole new generation to some tried-and-true song material.

Some of it was pretty corny and some of it was absolutely great.

So with this track, you get to decide.

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(The Temptations - A definition of Soul in every move)

Motown this weekend. The Temptations were completely woven into the fabric of our culture in the 1960s. They defined the meaning of Soul. I don't think there is anyone who was around then who can't point to at least one Temptations song as being an integral part of their own personal soundtrack as so many films dealing with that decade have at least "My Girl" mixed in there somewhere. It's always good for a collective "ah-ha" from the audience.

Tonight it's The Temps from 1984. Still great, even though time is doing the thing it does so well. The pipes are heading towards rusty but the energy is still there in abundance. And the crowd at the venue in Santa Barbara that December night knew they were in for a memorable occasion.

And you get to join in too - even if it is from a distance.

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(Poster for a Tom Northcott gig in Vancouver, 1968)

Heading back into oldies territory tonight. Tom Northcott is better known in his native Canada than here in the States, even though he had a couple of hits on U.S. airwaves in the late 1960's. This track, the Harry Nillson song 1941 did rather well on the charts here. It's produced by Leon Russell (before his solo career and around the time he was tinkering with the concept group Asylum Choir with Marc Benno) and Northcott almost gets drowned out by the musical pyrotechnics, but it's still a well produced track.

Northcott won a Best New Artist Juno award in 1971, but never really became a household name down here. He later co-founded Mushroom Studios in Vancouver and put performing on ice for a while.

One of a long list of overlooked artists of the 1960s.

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(Phineas Newborn Jr. Bright promising future cut short)

When Phineas Newborn Jr. came on the scene in 1956 he was considered one of the great up-and-coming pianists in Jazz. His reputation rose very quickly in the late 1950's. But in the early 1960s things took an abrupt change and Newborn went through the rest of his life in and out of mental hospitals, battling a debilitating mental illness that eventually took his career.

But when he was at the crest of his wave, Newborn cut an album with a full orchestra led by the great British band leader Dennis Farnon for RCA. While My Lady Sleeps is the title cut off this same-titled album (Victor LPM-1474). There's something about recording a session with a full orchestra and strings that has always been so appealing to Jazz musicians - it's almost a sign of "having arrived" to having cut one. And Newborn was no different.

And so, from the session cut in New York on April 23rd and 24th 1957 . . .

The wonderfully talented Kate McGarrigle is dead. What I loved about The McGarrigles was that their songs were never easy - always about complex emotions, rendered in simple ways. Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like A Wheel" is like that, and we'll never forget the sound of Kate's voice singing, And it's only love that can wreck a human being and turn him inside out. Indeed.

CBC News is reporting that Canadian musician Kate McGarrigle has died at the age of 63. McGarrigle was best known as one half of the singing duo Kate And Anna McGarrigle, whose songwriting and performing career dated back to their time attending college in Montreal together in the 1960s. Linda Ronstadt gave their career a boost by recording the McGarrigle original "Heart Like A Wheel," and the attention led to their excellent 1975 debut album Kate And Anna McGarrigle. Nine more albums offering modern takes on traditional English and French folk music and suffused with the sisters' warm but difficult-to-pin-down personalities, their songs' mature sentiments thrown into sharp relief by the sisters' vulnerable, often girlish voices.

Kate married American singer Loudon Wainwright III in the 1970s, a union that produced another musical generation in the form of Rufus and Martha Wainwright before ending in divorce. 1998's The McGarrigle Hour finds Kate's children and both sisters performing alongside Loudon and guest stars like Emmylou Harris.

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(Quiz Show Scandals of 1959 - chipping away at our great National Naivety)

Coming to the end of the 1950s. 1959, just fifty years ago, the world was starting to come unglued. The eternal Cold War was slogging along with the extra added bonus of the Space Race being solidly in the Soviet Unions corner by the end of the decade. Berlin and U2 just around the corner. Scandals took a bite out of our collective innocence with rigged Quiz shows and teary-eyed confessions of wrong doing plastered across most newspaper headlines.

All in all, it was a year of transition - a preview of coming attractions for the 1960s. The decade when all social mores were kicked to the side and independence was rife throughout the world. But that was to come.

1959 was a curious look back with an apprehensive look ahead. This look back came from CBS News, narrated by Walter Cronkite.

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(A Christmas Sing With Bing - 1958. Guilty pleasure)

For those of you (and I guess there are a lot) who despise Christmas, this particular post ain't for you.

But since this is a blog dealing with aspects of our popular culture, present and past, you can't really let the season go without a nod to what was, for a very long time, an American Institution - Bing Crosby.

Every Christmas eve, like clockwork, CBS radio would blare out their annual "Christmas Sing With Bing" all throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, when TV took over with their Christmas extravaganzas and radio was promptly abandoned.

This Christmas Sing With Bing from 1958 was typical of the tradition with a heavy emphasis on the religious aspect of Christmas, not so much the consumer part. There is also a nod to the events of the past year, with a piece on the Nautilus and our newest state Alaska. The first "Sing With Bing" in 1955 was issued on lp by Decca (now Universal), and became a staple of their Christmas catalogue well into the CD era.

Crosby died in 1977 and with him went this tradition. He's pretty much relegated now to annual marathons of "White Christmas" and "Holiday Inn", but I thought you might enjoy a one hour dose of what the season used to be like fifty years ago. If you've never heard this before, I'd be curious to know your impressions. To you it may seem odd and quaint, a relic of a distant past. It was part of my culture of growing up and sometimes those impressions can be muddled. I took it for granted and never thought it would be any different.

We live in such interesting times. But nonetheless, it's Christmas Eve and we're almost at the close of another decade. And as with everything in life, it constantly changes and never remains the same.

Enjoy the holidays and thanks for all your support this first year of Newstalgia.

Oh yeah . . .and that too . .(click on the donate button if you can)

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(Brian Jenkins - in 1977 terrorism was an abstract concept to most Americans)

As part of its weekly program "Options", National Public Radio in 1977 ran a lecture given by terrorism expert Brian Jenkins of The Rand Corporation on the new dimension of power garnered by the terrorists of the world. How technology had made it possible in the recent decade to make bolder and more costly strikes possible, hinting at how America was no longer isolated from these attacks.

Of course, in 1977 it seemed an abstract concept. Terrorism was something that happened in Europe or the Middle East, or even Japan. But not the U.S. - no, we were too powerful and too isolated for that. That's what we thought. Naturally, we were wrong - we just didn't know how wrong at the time.

Brian Jenkins: “What really are the major sources of the terrorist power today? First, it is the value, the high value that society places on human life. Faced with the option, faced with any sort of an option, governments are extremely reluctant to allow hostages to be killed. Despite, in many cases, popular pressure that a line must be drawn, that the thing must stop here, governments are extremely reluctant to have people killed, to have the blood on their hands. So the tremendous value we place on human life, and certainly I would not argue for the contrary, is one of the vulnerabilities in our society, and a vulnerability that terrorists can exploit and one which gives them tremendous power. That terrorists recognize and exploit this can be seen in the frequency in which the terrorists use the tactic of seizing hostages. Indeed, approximately a third of all incidents of international terrorism involved taking hostages. By hijacking airliners, taking over embassies or kidnapping individuals. Terrorists seize hostages whether diplomats, corporate executives, tourists; sometimes just anybody handy, to deliberately heighten the drama of the episode by placing human life in the balance, and thereby increasing their own leverage. In return for the release of hostages, terrorists have received millions of dollars in cash. In one single episode in Argentina they received sixty million U.S. dollars. I want to point out that is the equivalent to one third of that country’s national defense budget.”

Something that happened somewhere else, under someone else's watch, with someone else's government. The irony is that, in less than two years, we would be in the same situation so many else had been for so long. And a little over twenty years later, we would suffer the shock and horror of 9/11.

But in 1977 it seemed too absurd to imagine. Even though there were warning signs back then.