#334: He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by Neil Diamond
Peak Month: December 1970
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKVN chart
Peak Position #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #20
YouTube: “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
Lyrics: “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
Neil Leslie Diamond was born in Brooklyn in 1941. His parents were Russian and Polish immigrants and both Jewish. His dad was a dry-goods merchant. When he was in high school he met Barbra Streisand in a Freshman Chorus and Choral Club. Years later they would become friends. When he was sixteen Diamond was sent to a Jewish summer camp called Surprise Lake Camp in upstate New York. While there he heard folk singer, Pete Seeger, perform in concert. That year Diamond got a guitar and, influenced by Pete Seeger, began to write poems and song lyrics. While he was in his Senior year in high school, Sunbeam Music Publishing gave Neil Diamond an initial four month contract composing songs for $50 a week (US $413 in 2017 dollars). and he dropped out of college to accept it.
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#335: Mendocino by Sir Douglas Quintet
Peak Month: February 1969
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube: “Mendocino”
Lyrics: “Mendocino”
Douglas Wayne Sahm was born in 1941 in San Antonio, Texas. Sahm began singing at age five and learned to play the steel guitar at age six. He was considered a child prodigy on the instrument. By the age of eight, he had appeared on the Louisiana Hayride. And on December 19, 1952, at the age of eleven, Doug Sahm appeared onstage in Austin, Texas, at what would be the final concert performance by Hank Williams at the Skyline Club. [Williams would die on January 1, 1953]. Doug Sahm also performed in the early 50s with country stars Faron Young, Webb Pierce and Hank Thompson. He won a children’s talent contest on KMAC in San Antonio, where he performed regularly for two years. At age thirteen, he was offered a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. However, his mother declined the offer, wanting Doug Sahm to finish school. Meanwhile, he grew proficient in accordion, guitar and piano. In 1955 he recorded at the age of 14 as Little Doug and the Bandits.
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#336: Little Bones by Tragically Hip
Peak Month: April 1991
12 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Little Bones”
Lyrics: “Little Bones”
In the early 1980’s bass player Gord Sinclair and guitar player Rob Baker were students at Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute in Kingston, Ontario. They had performed at the collegiate’s Variety Show in a band they called The Rodents. In 1984 Baker and Sinclair were in their early twenties. The Tragically Hip formed in 1984 in Kingston, Ontario when the duo added drummer Johnny Fay and lead singer Gordon Downie. Their name came from a skit in the movie Elephant Parts, directed by former Monkee’s guitarist Michael Nesmith. The Tragically Hip added Paul Langois, a guitar player, to their line-up in 1986. When they performed at the Horeshoe Tavern in Toronto in 1984, they were signed to a recording contract with MCA after the company president, Bruce Dickinson, saw the band at the tavern. A self-titled EP (Extended Play) was released in 1987 with a couple of singles that got some airplay. The group was launched.
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#1220: Giving Away A Miracle by Luba
Peak Month: December 1989
11 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG Chart
Peak Position ~ #19
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
Youtube: “Giving Away A Miracle”
Lyrics: “Giving Away A Miracle”
Lubomyra Kowalchyk was born in 1958 in Montreal, Quebec. During her teens she travelled across Canada performing traditional Ukrainian folk songs at weddings and festivals. Growing up she studied piano, guitar, flute and voice. She was a fine-arts student when she formed a band called Zorya in 1973, releasing an album. In 1977 she released her second album titled. Lubomyra. In 1978 she formed a band named Luba with herself as the lead vocalist. Then, when her father died in 1979, she wrote what would become her signature song, “Everytime I See Your Picture”, as a tribute to him. The first studio album for the band Luba, Chain Reaction, was released in 1980. A Luba (EP) was released in 1982 containing “Every time I See Your Picture”. The song climbed to #1 in Ottawa, #3 in Halifax, #6 in Montreal and #11 in Kitchener (ON). She performed in front of 12,000 rock fans at the Montreal Forum in January 1983. She was the opening act at that concert for the headliner Chris de Burgh.
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#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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#338: Invisible by Alison Moyet
Peak Month: April 1985
13 weeks on CFMI’s Vancouver Charts
Peak Position ~ #5
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #31
YouTube: “Invisible”
Lyrics: “Invisible”
Geneviève Alison Jane Moyet was born in 1961 in Billericay, Essex, England. After leaving school at 16, she worked as a shop assistant and trained as a piano tuner. She was involved in a number of punk rock, pub rock and blues bands in the South East Essex area during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the Vandals, the Screamin’ Ab Dabs, the Vicars and the Little Roosters. At the age of 21, Moyet’s mainstream pop career began in 1982 with the formation of the synth-pop duo Yazoo with former Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke.
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#339: And The Heavens Cried by Ronnie Savoy
Peak Month: November 1960
10 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #84
YouTube: “And The Heavens Cried”
Lyrics: “And The Heavens Cried”
Ronnie Savoy was born in Detroit in 1941 (or 1939), and his birth name was Eugene Ronald Hamilton. Savoy told website Soul Source in 2016: “Our parents came to Detroit in the 1920s to get away from the South. My mother came from quite a comfortable background but my father had it more difficult – he had hustled on the streets since an early age, after his mother died, when he was only thirteen. He played guitar and wrote songs – his dream was to make it as a songwriter and a singer. He would play his guitar to us coming up, usually the blues. My older brother Bobby started to pick up on the blues chords, ’cause, being the eldest, he was the first to get a guitar, but we found that music too miserable and sad.’ Although the seed was sown, no pressure was applied. ‘My parents didn’t push us into music, even though we all began to show promise at quite an early age. My father worked at Ford and advised us not to work in a factory. It was a very happy home environment. There were nine of us all together – three boys and six girls. Bobby was the spearhead. He encouraged and led us. He was the first to start writing his own songs and singing them and that inspired Kent and me. I guess the turning point for us was when we heard Billy Ward and the Dominoes. They were our greatest inspiration. Seeing them in concert in Detroit made me want to become an entertainer. I spoke to Marv Johnson years later about this and he confirmed that he’d had the same experience!”
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#1314: It Doesn’t Matter by Coleman Wilde
Peak Month: July 1989
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG Chart
Peak Position ~ #20
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
Youtube: “It Doesn’t Matter”
Lyrics: “It Doesn’t Matter”
Coleman Wilde was the name of a duo comprised of Ralph Cole guitarist formerly with Lighthouse, and composer Doug Wilde. Doug Wilde was born into a musical family and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. His father, Bob Wilde played jazz bass and piano, his brother Jim Wilde became a choir director/composer and multi instrumentalist. At Humber College he studied arranging with the legendary Ron Collier, and was awarded the Duke Ellington Memorial Scholarship. He later studied film scoring and advanced arranging with Rayburn Wright and Manny Albam at the Eastman School of Music, earned a master’s degree in composition from York University.
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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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#340: Green Green Grass Of Home by Tom Jones
Peak Month: January 1967
9 weeks on CKLG’s Vancouver Charts
Peak Position ~ #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #11
YouTube: “Green Green Grass Of Home”
Lyrics: “Green Green Grass Of Home”
Thomas John Woodward was born in Wales in 1940. His father was a coal miner. Young Tom began singing at an early age and was in a children’s choir. At age 12 he had tuberculosis. While convalescing he spent more time developing an interest in music and listening to records. In 1963 he was the lead singer for the Welsh band Tommy Scott and the Senators. They had a record made with Tornados producer Joe Meek. In 1964 Jones was heard by a manager in the music industry based in London. Jones was brought to London and renamed Tom Jones. This was a strategy to get his attention after the successful musical Tom Jones won four Academy Awards in 1963, including Best Director and Best Picture.
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