#337: I Could Be So Good To You by Don and the Goodtimes
Peak Month: May 1967
11 weeks on CFUN’s Vancouver Charts
Peak Position ~ #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #56
YouTube: “I Could Be So Good To You”
Lyrics: “I Could Be So Good To You”
Ron “Buzz” Overman was born in 1946 and was in a rock band from Walla Walla titled the Gems starting in 1960. In 1964 he joined a garage band in Walla Walla named Hawk and the Randelas. His Don And The Goodtimes bandmates knew Overman as a huge fan of Star Trek, as well as corn on the cob and watermelon. Joey Newman was born in 1947 in Seattle, and became a guitarist with Don And The Goodtimes. His guitar playing was credited on their 1967 studio album, So Good, with contributing to a “get-up-and-go quality” to the bands’ music. Before he was with the band he was known as a good pool player and winner of numbers of go-cart racing trophies. L’il Don Gallucci was born in 1947 in Portland, Oregon, and was a child prodigy. He was a member of the Kingsmen and was playing organ and keyboards on their 1963 hit “Louie Louie”. While he was with the Don And The Goodtimes, Gallucci was the bands’ musical arranger, known to lift weights “to keep muscles on his slender frame,” and in 1967 was expected to “set an Olympic Record for dating.”
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#340: One Minute To One by Ricky Nelson
Peak Month: October 1959
9 weeks on CFUN’s Vancouver Charts
Peak Position ~ #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “One Minute To One”
Lyrics: “One Minute To One”
In 1940 Eric Hilliard Nelson was born. On February 20, 1949, while still eight years old, he took the stage name of Ricky Nelson when appearing on the radio program, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. A child actor, Ricky was also a musician and singer-songwriter. who starred alongside his family in the long-running television series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66), as well as co-starring alongside John Wayne and Dean Martin in the western Rio Bravo (1959). He placed 53 songs on the Billboard singles charts between 1957 and 1973.
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#341: Sometimes A Fantasy by Billy Joel
Peak Month: December 1980
Peak Position: #3
12 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100: #36
YouTube: “Sometimes A Fantasy”
Lyrics: “Sometimes A Fantasy”
William Martin Joel was born in 1949 in The Bronx. His father, Helmut “Howard” Joel, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and sold his textile business at a fraction of its value to be able to move to Switzerland. From there his father traveled to Cuba and was able to enter the United States from the Caribbean. Billy Joel’s mother, Rosalind Nyman, was born in Brooklyn, also to Jewish parents. Young William was coerced by his mother to take piano lessons at the age of four. He kept taking piano lessons until he was sixteen. His parents divorced when he was eight, and in his later years in high school Billy Joel played at a piano bar to make some extra income to support his single mother, his sister and himself. Though his parents were Jewish, Billy Joel did not identify as Jewish and began to attend a Roman Catholic parish at age eleven.
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#1378: Good Times With Bad Boys by Boy Krazy
Peak Month: July 1993
6 weeks on CKLG’s Vancouver Chart
Peak Position ~ #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #59
YouTube: “Good Times With Bad Boys”
Lyrics: “Good Times With Bad Boys”
Johnna Lee Cummings was born in November 1971 in Philadelphia. She moved to New York City in 1989 at the age of 17. She became a dancer and a singer in the music scene in Manhattan from 1989 onward. Cummings became the lead singer of a girl group called Boy Krazy after she successfully auditioned in 1991. Boy Krazy was put together through auditions of hundreds of young women by a management company in New York. In addition to Cummings, Boy Krazy featured female singers Kimberly Blake, Josselyne Jones, Renée Veneziale, and Ruth Ann Roberts (born Ruthann DeBona in Glen Rock, NJ, in 1976). Roberts was a former Miss Junior America and was 15 when she successfully auditioned for the band. She had already been doing a lot of auditioning for commercials on TV.
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#343: Make Believe by Wind
Peak Month: October 1969
9 weeks on CKLG’s Vancouver Charts
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position ~ #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #28
YouTube: “Make Believe”
Lyrics: “Make Believe”
Michael Anthony “Tony” Orlando Cassavitis was born in 1944 in New York City. In 1959 Orlando formed a doo-wop group called The Five Gents when he was 15-years-old. The Five Gents recorded some demo tapes. In the following months music publisher and producer Don Kirshner hired Orlando to write songs in an office across from New York’s Brill Building. In 1959 Tony Orlando recorded a doo-wop single titled “Ding Dong” on the Milo label. In 1961 he recorded “Halfway To Paradise” which climbed to #13 in Vancouver (BC) and #39 on the Billboard Hot 100. His next single, “Bless You”, peaked at #11 in Vancouver in September ’61, and #15 on the Billboard Hot 100. He had a minor hit titled “Talkin’ About You” which made the Top 50 in Vancouver in January 1962, and cracked the Top 30 with “Chills” in the summer of ’62, and “Shirley” in early 1963.
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#344: I Live For The Sun by the Sunrays
Peak Month: September 1965
11 weeks on CFUN’s Vancouver Charts
Peak Position ~ #4
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #51
YouTube: “I Live For The Sun”
Lyrics: “I Live For The Sun”
Eddy Medora was born in Los Angeles in 1945. He writes about the backstory to the Sunrays. “We were called the Renegades. We were a garage band rehearsing in my parents home in Pacific Palisades. We were in 7th and 8th grade. I saw a band perform called the Riptides – they had a local hit called Machine Gun….After I saw the response from the crowd, I knew I wanted to start a band. We played all over West L.A. There were five of us – Marty, Darrol, Mike, Ricky, and myself. We were doing pretty well when Mike moved away. Darrol also left. In the first year of high school, I met Steve and Vince. These guys did not have a band. They were both good musicians. They asked if they could join our band. We auditioned them. After we heard them play, I knew they had all of our votes.”
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#1184: Sunny by Neil Sedaka
Peak Month: August 1964
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #12
CFUN Twin Pick Hit of the Week ~ June 20, 1964
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #86
YouTube: “Sunny”
Lyrics: “Sunny”
In 1939 Neil Sedaka was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brighton Beach beside Coney Island. His paternal grandparents immigrated to America from Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, in 1910. His fathers side of the family there were Sephardi Jews and his mother’s side Ashkenazi Jews from Russian and Polish background. Sedaka is a cousin of the late singer Eydie Gorme. When Neil was eight years old he listened to a show on the radio called The Make-Believe Ballroom that opened his world to appreciation for music. Within a year Neil had began learning classical piano at the age of nine at the Julliard School of Music. His progress was impressive and Arthur Rubinstein voted Neil as one of the best New York High School pianists after he turned 16 years old.
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#351: Bigelow 6-200 by Brenda Lee
Peak Month: November 1956
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CJOR chart/Red Robinson’s Teen Canteen Survey
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Bigelow 6-200”
Lyrics: “Bigelow 6-200”
Brenda Mae Tarpley was born in 1944 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents were poor. During her childhood, young Brenda shared a sagging iron bed with her brother and sister in a series of three-room houses. They had no running water. Here parents went from job to job. After the stock market crash in 1929, Brenda’s mother would recall “you could hardly buy a job.” The region was devastated by an infestation of the boll weevil. Brenda started singing solos each Sunday at the Baptist church where her family attended. In her 2002 autobiography, she wrote “I grew up so poor, and it saddens me to see the poverty that is still there. A lot of my family have never done any better. Some of them are just exactly where they were when I was a kid. And in a way, there is still something inside of me that is a part of that, the part that doesn’t expect much. Little things make them happy, and that’s the same with me.”
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#355: Blues Theme by the Arrows
Peak Month: March 1967
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #37
YouTube: “Blues Theme”
Davie Allan is a guitarist best known for his work on soundtracks to various teen and biker movies in the 1960s. Allan’s backing band is almost always the Arrows (i.e., Davie Allan & the Arrows), although the Arrows have never been a stable lineup. In the late sixties, Davie Allan & The Arrows carved their niche in the musical history books with an array of classic instrumentals and two dozen motion picture soundtracks. The most notable of the movies was Roger Corman’s cult classic The Wild Angels featuring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. The Arrows also were featured in Devil’s Angels, The Glory Stompers (Dennis Hopper) and Born Losers (the film that introduced the character Billy Jack). Some of the other 60’s “B” films were Riot On Sunset Strip, Thunder Alley, The Angry Breed, Mary Jane, Teenage Rebellion, Hellcats, Mondo Hollywood, The Wild Racers, Wild in The Streets, The Golden Breed, Skaterdater and The Hard Ride. The LA Reader described the bands’ sound as “perhaps the closest thing you’ll ever hear to a combination of Link Wray, Dick Dale and Henry Mancini…”
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#356: Rock Your Little Baby To Sleep by Buddy Knox
Peak Month: June 1957
5 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #17
YouTube: “Rock Your Little Baby To Sleep”
Lyrics: “Rock Your Little Baby To Sleep”
Buddy Wayne Knox was born in 1933, in Happy, Texas, a small farm town in the Texas Panhandle a half hour south of Amarillo. During his youth he learned to play the guitar. He was the first artist of the rock era to write and perform his own number one hit song, “Party Doll“. The song earned Knox a gold record in 1957 and was certified a million seller. Knox was one of the innovators of the southwestern style of rockabilly that became known as “Tex-Mex” music.
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