Music on Only A Game 10/17/09

Each week Only A Game's senior producer Gary Waleik selects the music for the show.  Here's why you heard what you heard:

Bad, Bad Weather (Till You Come Home) by The Spinners (from 2^nd Time Around, Polydor, 1970)

Gary’s Take: Maybe we should have gone with some Philly Soul instead; The O’Jays or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, for example. Still, The Spinners, who launched in Detroit, must know about bad weather.

 Deer Hunter’s Polka by Brown Trout and the Lunkers (from Songs for the Deer Hunter, Lunker Records, 1993)

Gary’s Take: I thought deer hunters usually did the reel.

Jungle Girl by Betty Page (from Music for Gracious Living, Vol. 1, Q.D.K. Media, 1998)

Gary’s Take: I bet you didn’t know that pinup queen Betty Page also had a recording career. I think what that really meant was that some sharp record exec would hire an obscure lounge act to record a bunch of sultry/kitschy instrumentals, purchase the rights to a new Page photo and come up with a catchy title for the cover that resonated with repressed music listeners of the 1950’s. Presto…instant recording career.

I’m Alright by Kenny Loggins (from Caddyshack Soundtrack, Columbia Records, 1980)

Gary’s Take: This was a tough choice for me. From 1971 through 1979, I had to take a bus to school. In these acoustically-live metal tubes on wheels were radios…really cheesy, bad sounding radios. Some received only AM signals. My fellow bus mates (and that’s a far too nice way to describe most of them) just had to have their Top 40, so I had to endure the worst music of the ‘70’s every weekday morning and afternoon. If you don’t rememeber or have simply suppressed the memory, ‘70’s Top 40 was a nightmarish mélange of many genres. To me the dead worst was soft rock, with artists like Seals and Crofts, Bread, America and, yes, Loggins and Messina. (Is it any wonder that the youth of the Western World was fascinated, at least for a time, by punk rock?)

Anyway, good on Kenny Loggins for his amazingly lucrative movie soundtrack career. Maybe he can use some of his money to establish a network of counselors for those of us who’d like to once and for all expunge the horrible memories of “Baby I’m-a Want You” and “Whenever I Call You Friend”.