Bartender from Another Planet and the
One Hit Wonders by Alan Catlin

You know how, when you are shopping in a grocery store, or a department store (remember those?), or a discount warehouse, and a loop tape is playing and you hear songs from the 60’s, the 70’s 80’s or the 90’s you thought you had banished from your brain forever and you are, involuntarily, instantly, transported back to that time? Don’t you hate that? Don’t you feel as if you are trapped in a  time warp you never wanted to be in the first place? Don’t you feel imposed upon? I know I do.

I mean being transported can be a wonderful thing if the song was The Mamas and the Poppas California Dreaming.  That one has rich associations for me of senior year in high school, my first real love, and riding around in the back seat of Hank Nathanson’s VW bug drinking a Tall Boy of whatever he was able to buy on sale at the deli. (he was 18 and I wasn’t)  Those were good memories, on the whole, though Hank is long gone, high school sucked, in every way imaginable except for that senior year and the girlfriend. In 1966, looming just beyond that back seat, was college, or getting drafted, or any number unforeseen, absolutely incredibly bad stuff. 

Try to cling to the good stuff. If you can. Then the next song on the loop plays and it’s something like Love Shack.  Talk about bad stuff! Try to stop yourself from not anticipating, knowing by heart, the lyrics of this absolutely terrible song. California Dreaming lyrics are one thing but Love Shack…And then, well you know how it goes? Now you are being held captive by inanity and while you want to scream, “Turn that shit off! Or, at least, turn it down….” But you can’t. People will stare. Rather than shopping, you are listening, and it is entirely possible, you forget why you are in the store in the first place.

I always thought the background music was supposed to be relaxing, to put you in a pliable, good mood suitable for shopping and making bad, impulse purchases(subliminally seducing you. I’m not sure where Love Shack fits on the subliminalseduction scale and, frankly, I don’t want to find out) Then the next song starts, You Could Be Dancing . Am I supposed to be dancing down the aisles of Price Chopper? Of Job Lots.? No dude, I’m supposed to be shopping. The folks in loop tape land didn’t get the original memo about why we make these damn intrusive tapes in the first place.

As I was assembling poems for my trilogy of books about working night in the bar business, Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, I remembered vividly why I never listen to A.M. radio.  I want to forget all those songs I was involuntarily exposed to. There are certain recording artists best hits that make me physically cringe when I hear them i.e. anything by Van Morrison (sorry Tony G.), anything by the Steve Miller band, Guns ‘n Roses….I guess, I mean, if I want to hear songs from that era, I have them on cd’s and I can listen to them at my leisure.  True, I don’t have Billy Idol at home ,but White Wedding Day and Rebel Yell, are pretty catchy tunes especially if you don’t pay close attention to the lyrics.  Heart has their moments, Strawberries too but I never would actually buy their music except during Friday Happy Hours when I am trying to control the narrative. I found it was possible to pretty much monopolize the whole three hours  with long playing songs of my own choosing for three bucks. Thank God for The Doors.  It was only when one of my co-workers blew my cover, revealing I was the maniac playing the same songs every week at the same time, which meant she couldn’t get hear her Abba songs. When life gives you choices sometimes it’s as simple as Abba and Jim Morrison. Which one would you choose?  The answer reveals a lot about an individual’s personality. (Note: In a Gadda Da Vida is the ultimate long-playing favorite along with The End and Like a Rolling Stone.

My shunning of popular music forms goes way back to working in lounges in the 70’s and 80’s.  After daily exposure to wannabee entertainers, (they are playing Albany so, by definition, they are second tier. At best), singing the same sets for weeks on end. Multiply that by five years and certain songs  could make you skin crawl.  You’ll Never Find, for instance, no disrespect to the original artist, Lou Rawls, is intended believe me. I like Lou Rawls, which makes the pain of hearing the song mutilated worse. Hearing that sung by bad, not just second rate, but truly bad singers, forty-two times in a week is grounds for murder. 

And every wannabe female artist has to have her favorite Barbra Streisand song she thinks she can sing. The reason Barbra is who she is ,and you are who you are, playing a lounge in Albany, is she can hit the high notes and carry a tune, and you can’t. Please don’t try.  And the Tom Jones imitators ... Don’t get me started on them. I swear there was one guy who paid middle-aged women to throw underwear on the stage every Saturday night.  And offstage he is such a near-sighted, zero personality, cheap copy of the original, an outright, dude. Somehow you just know that paying an underwear tosser is the only way he is ever going to get worshipped by a woman. Any woman.  (Oddly he did have one groupie who showed up at all his shows in various venues around town over the years and presumably was his road girlfriend until he made rude and disrespectful remarks about her that I overheard. I knew her slightly. She told him, also so I could hear, to go back to his gerbil cage.  I’m not sure what That meant but I totally get her disgust.)  I do know he had a wife back home in Canada he called from our office trailer/dressing room after his last show. I was locking up the night’s take in the safe and invariably, when Richard went into the trailer, the extension telephone light would come on and stay on for long periods of time. When the accountant was bitching about unauthorized long distance phone charges the next day, I suggested he check Richard’s home phone number in Canada against the phone charges and guess what? They matched. He never played our lounge again.

In my sequence A Different Planet for Bartenders I demonstrated my overall attitude  towards popular culture, as well as some other pedestrian stuff (my attitude was often described as, “In need of serious adjustment”).  A young guy, obviously in the trade, probably a fellow bartender, plays a couple of songs on the Infernal Machine ( my nickname for the jukebox) turns to me and says, “Who was the artist? What was the label? And how many minutes was it.? Now there was a time I probably could have answered that question, if the single was from the 60s. But now, (now being late 90’s) not so much.

If the music is innocuous enough as that was, I can concentrate on holding a conversation with the young lady he was with, a literate young person, also in the trade, and block out the “musical” distraction. It’s a necessary skill that needs to be developed when working service bars in a lounge while Tom Jones’s evil twin is singing.  I considered lying, always my first impulse with obnoxious wise guys, who make broad assumptions about me, like him, but in this case, I opt for the truth. He probably knew the right answer or he wouldn’t have asked the question in the first place. I turned to the guy and said, “I have no idea, I wasn’t listening. My musical tastes generally run more along the line of Mozart though I am learning to appreciate Bach more now that I’m older.” His lady friend laughed: a huge plus for me, a huge negative for him, which is usually reflected in the tip. In this case it wouldn’t be as he didn’t want to be seen as a stiff, yet another demeaning moment for him, and we both knew it. His immediate reaction was disbelief. He looked at me as if I was that legendary, mythical bartender from another planet (not to be confused with Brother from Another Planet, a black man in local film maker John Sayles’ movie who healed jukeboxes. I was the diametrical opposite of a healer of those dreaded machines) He wouldn’t be the first guy to think I was from another planet nor would he be the last. 

And then Still the Same, has its turn on the loop tape.

I often wonder who designed these things and what kind of drugs they were doing when these tapes were assembled.( Outside of holiday music. All Christmas tapes should be burned, in my opinion. I’d go full Fahrenheit 451 on every single one given the opportunity. I mean that monotonal I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas one more time, which sounds like someone one step from the medicine chest for the sleeping pills, the whole bottle, brings me down like nothing else can. We’re supposed to be Happy folks, not suicidal. It’s the whole point of Subliminal Seduction. Read a couple of books on the subject., Believe me, it’s fascinating and horrifying stuff And it gives new meaning to the phrase black ops.)

Still the Same evokes a memory of my last night on the job at the night club/supper club. I left a brief, effective immediately, resignation note on the manager’s desk along with my keys to the place. I locked up the day’s proceeds, after setting up a Hitchcock movie scene back at the bar which would develop, in stages, the next night, during the course of a busy Saturday. First the soda machine would stop working. A well-placed kick to the  generator would dislodge the system and make it inoperable. It’s easy to fix, if you know how, but no one but my driver and I did, and neither one of us would be back to do it. I cranked up the jukebox to maximum volume for Still the Same and September Song (Willie Nelson version) knowing the jukebox would cycle to On about 8 or so, and shatter what was left of the manager’s bad nerves. As I was doing three people’s jobs by the time I quit, including solo bartending and night manager, she would have no one to replace at any of these positions. It was going to be a tough night for whoever got the bar with no set ups at the bar, non-functioning machines, and then the coup de grace, a randomly selected song at Mach 10. (I felt bad about her nerves, I liked the manager, it wasn’t her fault the owner was a dick, but the only way to get to him was through her.) 

I bid my adieu to the night clean up man, who was probably the happiest man on earth to see the back of me. I did him one last good turn before I left, trying to make up for all the time I disturbed his sleep asking him to come to work early, “Stanley, “ I said,” the place is going down the tubes. It will close in a month so if I were you, I’d be looking for a new job.”  I left feeling I had done a good night’s work. The restaurant ceased operation four weeks later. I’m not sure what happened to Stanley though I did read his obit a few years later.  I hope he got another job first.

It's not my imagination but most of the Golden Oldies One Hit Wonders are nonsense songs.  I think you can make a case for the revised facts of life statement that should now read: Death, Taxes and The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Instead, of course, of Death, Taxes and Keith. Keith was the daily day shift regular who clocked in just after I did and left just before I did when his wife used to pick him up to take him to jail, for his weekends in the cooler, after his last DUI. He was often joined on the job drinking by the equally as ubiquitous OB usually just known as The Liar. He usually clocked in later than Keith,  and left earlier, claiming to be working at  some pretend at home job no one believed he had for a minute. I don’t know what happened to him ( or he was robbing for money, probably his mom) and, frankly, I don’t care.  But if you listen to the radio long enough, you fully well understand that The Lion Sleeps Tonight like Moby Dick, is ubiquitous.

Specialty, novelty nonsense songs can have a shelf-life way beyond anyone could have expected in their wildest dreams as Bobby “Boris” Prickett can attest. Who among us has not hard this song? Who among us cannot recite, from memory , at least one verse?

(Wa-ooh) Out from his coffin, Drac's voice did ring
(Wa-ooh) Seems he was troubled by just one thing
(Wah-wa-ooh) He opened the lid and shook his fist, and said
(Wa-ooh) Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?

Okay, I cheated and copied the lines just to make sure I had the right words in the right order.  I do not want to be known as the man who misquoted The Monster Mash.  Whatever else you can say about this song, and there is probably quite a bit, all of it ridiculous on some lever, Bobby “Boris”” Pickett achieved a kind of immortality few of us will equal; his obit was in the New York Times.

Who can forget their first? Way back when, the first song of this kind I fell in love with was Alley Oop. I had to have it. We didn’t have a record player that could actually play 45 rpm records but who cared?  Records cost about 39 cents in those days, so you could buy the record and hang on to it, imagine playing it, and eventually you would have a record player that would meet your needs. Then you learned about the little plastic inserts you could stick in the large round 45 r.p.m. holes in the center of the record and it would play on your machine meant for 33 r.p.m. records only. We had one of those, everyone did. (And bliss of blisses, the large plastic adapter that fit over the machine’s spindle so you wouldn’t need a drawer full of those little plastic things. And joy of joys, you could groove now to Alley Oop

[Intro]
(Oop-oop, oop, oop-oop)
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)

[Verse 1]
There's a man in the funny papers we all know
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He lives 'way back a long time ago
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He don't eat nothin' but a bear cat stew
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
Well, this cat's name is-a Alley-Oop
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)

There’s more but you get the picture. We weren’t sophisticated in those days. How else you explain Bubble Gum Music, Car crash songs (as disc jockey Big Dan Ingram used to say, The Gory Story of Laurie songs), dance crazes, Dick Clark standards of excellence and the ubiquitous nonsense songs. I mean such standards as  Rock ‘n Robin, Yogi (not related to the late great philosopher and baseball player Lawerence Peter Berra), Peanut Butter, Rama Lama Ding Dong, Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp), Witchdoctor, The Purple People Eater (another early purchase), Sh-boom and on and on. Sometimes I wish there were time machines so I could go back in time to prevent certain things from happening. Not, like a Stephen King hero, prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy (though that would be a good thing) but to prevent the recording of certain pernicious earworms.  Short Shorts, (my girl) Lollipop, Summertime, Summertime (the all-time worst), Teen Angel (see Gory Story of Laurie), Denise (Oh, Denise scooby doo….stop me before I go on) McArthur Park (would someone please explain to me what this song is on about. Cake melting in the rain and all that stuff is not a metaphor for lost love in the context of that so-called song), Mother-in-law and so on.

Certain one hit wonders from that era actually rock. I am thinking of the Swinging Medallions, Double Shot (of my baby’s love), Liar, Liar (a song with unintended political overtones in the current age), The Swinging Blue Jeans, Hippy Hippy Shake, Los Bravos, Black is Black,  and Wooly Bully, among many others.  Occasional songs transcended  even the nonsense genre (no not Alvin and the Chipmunks) but The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s, Fire! Once you have seen him perform that, everything else seems, well, pedestrian.  If there is such a thing as Dada rock n roll, Arthur Brown achieved it. Of course, you could only see it in black and white on Ed Sullivan but it’s something to behold even now on You Tube. 

I can say, with a high level of confidence, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the Martian Hop.  Anyone with the slightest appreciation of camp, Kitsch or whatever it is you want to call low art at its apex, is embodied in this song.  It must be on You-Tube somewhere. I am not lending my 45 to anyone. It’s just too valuable and I keep it locked up in a burn proof safe. 

Which brings me to the Apocalypse Now era, I mean the late  60’s

The Eastern world, it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin'
But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
How you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

If you would have asked me back in the middle 60’s, what song you are hearing on the radio now, that would be just as relevant, or even more so, in the year 2025, Eve of Destruction wouldn’t have been it. ( Sounds of Silence anyone?) But here we are, and those are the lyrics and well, what more needs to be said?

I think we still have a Barry McQuire long playing album. The Eve of Destruction album would not be the only one hit wonder I own. I still have the original Trashman collection on vinyl (I have the Electric Prunes too but not on vinyl. I have the CD. I mean, who hasn’t had too much to
dream recently? I’ll bet you didn’t know The Electric Prunes wrote and recorded  a Mass in F Minor?  I might have that lying around somewhere too. Or dreamt of a Pretty Ballerina? I actually saw the Left Banke in person in Walton NY) Who are the Trashmen you might ask?  Well, if you put The Ventures, (you know the Ventures from the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. They do a seriously kicking Malaguena on one of their album) the ghost of Bobby “Boris Pickett” and The Beach Boys together you get something like Surfin’ Bird.  That is if they were sitting on a beach in Malibu, smoking high grade Moroccan hash from a hookah, and noodling about with guitars and stuff.  There are no words to describe Surfin’ Bird, you just have to hear it. Even quoting the lyrics is futile. Still “everybody’s heard about the bird with a refrain, poppa oom mau mau, cobbed from  a song of that title by The Rivingtons (does anyone actually remember the song they cobbed it from.? It’s seriously cheesy but classic. In its way).   Surfin Bird is a song in a league by itself and when it comes to cognitive dissonance, none realized its potential better than director Stanley Kubrick, who inserted into Full Metal Jacket, as a medical evac helicopter lands and Vietnam war casualties are loaded on board.

An original  inductee into the One Hit Wonders Hall of Fame has to be In a Gadda Da Vida.  Essentially a long drum solo with an electric keyboard accompaniment this song is well, classic. In a good way. It has all the high notes, it gets you where you live, it’s a virtuoso performance and musically, pretty basic. But hey, it works and once you’ve heard it, it stays with you and you want to keep hearing it. All hail the Iron Butterfly (Yes, I have the record but it skips)

This is the point in the essay where I was going to branch off from One Hit Wonders in the rock n roll era to literary one hit wonders. What these two genres share is, careers cut short. The Big Bopper was known for his one Big Hit, a Mega-Hot too, Chantilly Lace, but he was on that The Day the Music Died plane along with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and Patsy Cline.  Buddy and Richie were establishing highly successful careers though their output was small, it was memorable. Patsy was already and CxW legend in the prime of her career.  The list of the dead in plane crashes is long from Selena to Stevie Ray Vaughn with stars like Ricky Nelson and Otis Redding among others. Others like Sam Cooke were killed in ways that have never been satisfactorily explained.  Rap artists really don’t count, unless you have one in a Dead Pool. Odds are if you’re in one, and you have a rap artist under the age of 30, you are going to score points as the mortality rate for those folks is astronomical

Ah, the literary one hits. As I started to tote up the scores of One Hit Wonders, the list began to read like a report from a day at work with the grim reaper.  We have John O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, Richard Farina, Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Me, Breece D’ J Pancake, Stories, Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, Nathaniel West, Four Short Novellas, Jean DominqueBarby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano…..I count at least three suicides, three killed in motoring accident, two in cars and one on a motorcycle, one hounded into silence by the state, one disfigured and incapacitated by a wasting disease and only one who, basically, quit while she was ahead. (How can you top a classic like Mockingbird? I haven’t read Watchman and probably never will.) Lowry, drank himself to death. He wrote other stuff and published finished novels and  novellas, stories, and poems but none are even in the same planet as Volcano making his other work seem almost trivial (even though much of it isn’t) There is only one Volcano and the only book that exists on the same plane as it does, is Ulysses which Lowry clearly is imitating, shifting focus from Dublin to Mexico. And then he drank so much he could no longer write while Joyce went on to write Finnegans Wake thus cementing himself in the hearts of literary scholars forever.

The radio jocks say, We keep the hits coming.” The literary agents say, where the hit makers go to die.  Let’s stick with the tunes like I’ll Never Find Another You,

There's a new world somewhere
They call the Promised Land
And I'll be there someday
If you will hold my hand
I still need you there beside me
No matter what I do
For I know I'll never find another you

Young love, the 60’s, before it all went to hell, The Seekers…. Maybe not a one hit wonder, but it still gets me where I live whenever I hear it one of those loop tapes and it makes me feel like dancing.