#18: Caribbean by Mitchell Torok
Peak Month: August 1959
Peak Position #1
14 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube.com: “Caribbean”
Lyrics: “Caribbean”
In 1929 Mitchell Torok was born in Houston, Texas. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. Torok learned the guitar at the end of elementary school. A natural athlete, Mitch went to university in Nacogdoches, Texas, on a football and baseball scholarship. While at university he was hired to write a song to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Cononco Oil Company. He also cut his first record in the late 40s while hosting a radio show in Lufkin, two hours northeast of Houston, and another radio show in the Houston suburb of Rosenberg.
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#19: Follow That Dream by Elvis Presley
Peak Month: May 1962
Peak Position #1
15 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ EP – did not chart
YouTube.com: “Follow That Dream”
Lyrics: “Follow That Dream”
Elvis Aaron Presley was born on in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935. His twin brother, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn. When he was eleven years old his parents bought him a guitar at the Tupelo Hardware Store. As a result Elvis grew up as an only child. He and his parents, Vernon and Gladys, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948. The young Presley graduated from high school in 1953. That year he stopped by the Memphis Recording Service to record two songs, including “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. Elvis’ musical influences were the pop and country music of the time, the gospel music he heard in church and at the all-night gospel sings he frequently attended, and the black R&B he absorbed on historic Beale Street as a Memphis teenager. In 1954, Elvis began his singing career recording “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” at Sun Records in Memphis.
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#19: Turn Me Loose by Loverboy
Peak Month: February-March 1981
Peak Position #1 ~ CFUN
21 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
2 weeks Playlist
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #35
YouTube.com: “Turn Me Loose”
Lyrics: “Turn Me Loose”
Loverboy is a band formed in 1979. It has been stated by Mike Reno that their name was chosen due to a dream by Paul Dean. He had come up with the name after spending the previous night with some of the bandmates, including Reno and their girlfriends, before going to the movies. The girlfriends were browsing through fashion magazines, where the guys in the band saw a Cover Girl advertisement. Cover Girl became Cover Boy, and then became Loverboy in Dean’s dream later that night. After being told by Dean about the dream the next morning, Reno agreed to try it out and it stuck. The group made its live debut opening for Kiss at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver on November 19, 1979.
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#21: Ballad Of A Teenage Queen by Johnny Cash
Peak Month: March 1958
11 weeks on CKWX’s Vancouver Chart
Peak Position ~ #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #14
Billboard Top 100 Singles 1958 Year End ~ #81
BONUS REVIEW
YouTube: “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen”
Lyrics: “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen”
John R. “Johnny” Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, in 1932. At the age of five he started working with his sharecropping parents and siblings in the cotton fields. During his childhood his family home was flooded twice. He began singing and playing guitar by the age of 12. He moved to Detroit in his late teens for work. He was drafted and served in the U.S. Air Force as a Morse Code Intercept Operator for Soviet Army transmissions at a base in Germany from 1950 to 1954. When he was discharged from the military he and his new wife, Liberto, moved to Memphis. Cash worked as an appliance salesman while trying to get a break in the music industry. Cash got to audition with Sun Records in 1954. He had his first charting single on the Billboard Country charts in 1955 titled “Cry! Cry! Cry!” Subsequently single releases, “So Doggone Lonesome” and “I Walk The Line” climbed to #4 and #1 on the Country charts. The latter hit also was his first debut on the Billboard pop charts where it made it to #17 in 1956.
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#20: Cuts Like A Knife by Bryan Adams
Peak Month: May and July 1983
Peak Position #2
22 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #15
YouTube.com: “Cuts Like A Knife”
Lyrics: “Cuts Like A Knife”
Born in Kingston, Ontario, in November 1959, Bryan Adams parents immigrated from the UK in the 1950s. His dad, Captain Conrad J. Adams, was a diplomat in the Canadian foreign service. While growing up his family was posted to Portugal, Austria and Israel. By the age of 15 Adams was playing with the band Sweeney Todd as a frontman. By the time he turned 17, Bryan Adams had landed work as a background vocalist for the CBC. His first salary came from working for Robbie King, a keyboard musician with Motown. During his senior years in high school he began playing music with his guitarist, Keith Scott.
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#22: Crying Over You by Platinum Blonde
Peak Month: September 1985
Peak Position #1
16 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Crying Over You”
Lyrics: “Crying Over You”
Mark Holmes was born in the UK and lived in Manchester until the family moved to Toronto. He met several other musicians and formed a punk band that played covers to The Police and other new wave bands. After a lineup change, Holmes was playing guitar and the lead vocalist, Chris Steffler was the drummer and Sergio Galli was a second guitarist. Steffler grew up in Wasaga Beach, Ontario, where his parents owned a 12-acre trailer park and campground called Jell-E-Bean Park. He started playing drums in 1972 and also became handy — learning everything from carpentry to plumbing — from his dad and uncle. At the same time he was playing drums in local bands, one being called Sledge. After high school, he worked at the shipyards in Collingwood and then in 1978 he moved to Toronto and started playing in bands. Sergio Galli had been in a band called Mace in 1979. The trio became Platinum Blonde. They got a record deal with CBS in 1983. Their debut album, Standing In The Dark, earned them two Video Of The Year nominations at the 1984 Juno Awards.
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#23: Justified And Ancient by KLF and Tammy Wynette
Peak Month: March 1992
Peak Position #1
17 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #11
YouTube.com: “Justified And Ancient”
Virginia Wynette Pugh was born in 1942 in the unincorporated Mississippi community of Bounds Crossroads. The farm in which she was born was on the Alabama state line. Her father died of a brain tumor when she was nine months old. Her mother moved to work in a defense plant in Memphis, Tennessee. Wynette, as she was called by her middle name, was raised by her grandparents and picked cotton on their Mississippi farm. She learned to play piano by ear. She got married at 17 to Euple Byrd, studied cosmetology and enrolled in a Beauty School in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1964, her uncle worked for the WBRC television station in Birmingham. He helped Wynette secure an audition for the Country Boy Eddie country music television show. The show’s headliner, Eddie Burns, was impressed and agreed to have her on the program. On her first show, she sang a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams”. In 1966 she got divorced and moved to Nashville.
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#24: Leah by Roy Orbison
Peak Month: October 1962
Peak Position #1
13 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #25
YouTube.com: “Leah”
Lyrics: “Leah”
Roy Kelton Orbison was born in Vernon, Texas in 1936. When he turned six his dad gave him a guitar. Both his dad, Orbie Lee, and uncle Charlie Orbison, taught him how to play. Though his family moved to Forth Worth for work at a munitions factory, Roy was sent to live with his grandmother due to a polio outbreak in 1944. That year he wrote his first song “A Vow of Love”. The next year he won a contest on Vernon radio station KVWC and was offered his own radio show on Saturdays. After the war his family reunited and moved to Wink, Texas, where Roy formed his first band, in 1949, called The Wink Westerners.
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#25: Oh Boy by the Crickets
Peak Month: December 1957
Peak Position #1 Red Robinson Teen Canteen chart
18 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #10
YouTube.com: “Oh Boy”
Lyrics: “Oh Boy”
The Crickets became a rock ‘n roll/rockabilly group in 1957. They are credited with influencing a whole range of recording artists including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. In fact, the Beatles got the idea for their name as a riff off of another insect, cricket, just going up one letter of the alphabet from C to B for Beatles. Paul McCartney once told the press, “If it wasn’t for the Crickets, there wouldn’t be any Beatles.” The Crickets were initially the backing band for Buddy Holly and among their hits are “That’ll Be The Day”, Peggy Sue”, “Oh Boy”, “Not Fade Away”, “Maybe Baby”, “It’s So Easy” and “Rave On”.
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#26: Let Your Backbone Slide by Maestro Fresh Wes
Peak Month: March 1990
Peak Position #1
16 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #14
YouTube.com: “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Lyrics: “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Wesley Williams was born in 1968 in Toronto. He grew up in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. His parents were Guyanese immigrants. From the moment he entered public school, young Wes Williams was very conscious of how exotic he was as the only black child in his classroom. This was, after all, the 1970s. At the age of six, a little girl who was a next door neighbor asked him, “Wes, when are you going to turn white?” Wes Williams was curious about the question. He noticed he was growing taller. So, considering his skin might change, he asked his dad the question. Williams remembers, “My dad just said, ‘I’m still waiting, boy!'” When he was twelve years old, young Wes Williams heard “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang in 1979. From that day forward Williams had a sense of purpose and vision for himself. Even though there was no such thing at that time as a black rapper in Canada.
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