Left of the Dial

"Left of the Dial" is a song by The Replacements off their album Tim. It's also hipster slang for where College Radio stations are found on your radio. You can stream just about any radio station you want nowadays, so it's an antiquated expression unless you still listen to terrestrial radio like I do. I'm fortunate that I live in a college town, Ithaca, NY, where both Cornell University and Ithaca College are located. Both academic institutions have radio stations, WVBR and WICB, and I have them pre-programmed on my favorites list in my car. I've stopped trying to keep up with modern music, but still enjoy some of the newer indie artists. What I've discovered on both of my local alternative college radio stations, is that it depends on the DJ as to what the playlists are, and how much I enjoy them. It's hit and miss.

I'm having a difficult time warming up to the popular recording artists of this era. I don't know if the music is inferior to decades past, or maybe it's me. I enjoyed music from as far back as the 1930s while I was growing up, and as I got older, I listened to bands much younger than my contemporaries. It was about 2010 that I noticed a big change where everybody started sounding the same. 

With female singers, it seems like there's a chanteuse of the month, one hit wonders that are like Madonna on steroids. I have no complaints with Madonna. If you haven't listened to her singles, you don't know what you're missing. She's a bona fide superstar and rightfully so. Just listen to "Borderline", or ,"Material Girl". Madge started it all. They don't call her "The Queen of Pop" for nothing. Yesterday I saw a photo of Dua Lipa in a sequined string bikini. I know she's won some Grammys, but I don't know if she's just hanging onto her career, or this is de rigueur for all the singers and starlets. She's great looking, but posing near naked in your twenties or thirties is no feat. Try doing it in your sixties. 

I've tried watching the Boy-Bands that top the charts and I just don't get it. It's like watching a futuristic version of The Osmond Brothers. Back in the day, when New Kids on the Block and N'SYNC debuted, I thought it was the end of Western Civilization. I was wrong. They've had staying power and catapulted some members to movie stardom, along with continuing to fill arenas. But I never enjoyed The Osmond Brothers. When they first hit the scene, I was listening to Led Zeppelin II, Who's Next, and Alice Cooper's Killer. "Sweet and Innocent" didn't quite cut it. They can sing and dance and fill the theaters in Las Vegas, but I'm staying on the sidelines. 

Some family bands from the 1960s were great. The Cowsills, The Jackson Five and The Beach Boys. The only song the Osmonds did that I liked was a cover of "Deep Purple" by Donnie and Marie. Originally performed in 1963 by Nino Tempo and April Stevens, Donnie and Marie had a rendition for their television show back in 1976. It hit #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. At the time, the only Deep Purple I was listening to was "Smoke on the Water". 

About fifteen years ago, my late father and I did a road trip to Ohio. We made a stop in Canton at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. When we were finished, we drove to Cleveland and toured the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. My father wasn't musically inclined because of a hearing impediment. Most of his musical tastes stemmed from his high school and college years: Johnny Mathis, Julie London, Frank Sinatra and The Platters. The only album he ever owned that I can remember was Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame wasn't his thing, but he knew my proclivity towards it. Another sacrifice he made for me.

When we got into the museum, there was one huge wall festooned with album covers of the 100 best Rock albums by their estimation. I've owned 85% of them at one time or another in various formats: 33 1/3 RPM Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassette, Compact Disc and MP3 files via iTunes. Many I've bought multiple times as each format became obsolete. I spent a small fortune on music industry offerings throughout the years. It was money well spent.

The Spirit of Radio

We're in the shutterbug era. It's not just Gen-Alpha, Gen-Z, Millennials, or Gen-X, it's Baby Boomers, too. Everyone has to document everything and share it with the world on social media posts. It's easy when you have an iPhone with you at all times. 4K Dolby Vision video recording, Action mode, and macro video. That's all in your pocket. On Steely Dan's second album Countdown to Ecstasy, there's a not so great song with a refrain of "Show biz kids are making movies of themselves and they don't give a fuck about anybody else". Prescient for the current environment.     

A big parody song in the sixties and seventies was "The Comet Song". It never made the airwaves, but was big on playgrounds. Although it sounds like something straight out of MAD Magazine, it's not. It originated organically from  kids on a Jungle Gym. The ditty goes something like this: "Comet - It makes your teeth turn green! Comet - It tastes like gasoline, Comet - It makes you vomit, So buy some Comet, and vomit, today!" It was sung to the melody of the "Colonel Bogey March" made famous in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. Kids today would take it verbatim and make a TikTok video of it. 

I went fifty years without a smartphone, but now that I have one, I don't know how I'd live without it. I wasn't an early adopter because I didn't know what to buy, the upstart iPhone, or, the more established  Blackberry. Plus, they were expensive. If you go back twenty years, Blackberry was the number one communication device, but Apple ate their lunch after launch. I'm glad I went with the iPhone. 

Apple sucks you into their ecosystem, but it's the best out there in my opinion. This is not a slight to Android, but most everyone I know has an Apple phone. I had a Palm Pilot Personal Digital Assistant in the late nineties and spent too much time playing DopeWars and Space Trader, but I was excited for what was coming in the future. We're a society of digital natives and digital immigrants. I'm definitely a digital immigrant. I had to learn everything from scratch beginning about 1990. I haven't had a landline in about ten years, but in my apartment, there's a wall-mounted rotary dial phone to remind me that things are in perpetual motion. 

Although I frequently check my email, financial accounts, text messages, stock watch lists, and social media feeds, I primarily use my iPhone as a jukebox. Give or take a few songs, I've got about 500 singles I've bought from the iTunes Store for almost twenty years in the palm of my hand. Dick Clark, who was once known as "America's oldest teenager", famously said "Popular music is the soundtrack of your life." I get flashbacks listening to some of the tunes ranging from the 1950s to now. Reminds me of good times and friends gone too soon. Clark hosted American Bandstand on Saturday mornings for decades, sandwiched in between cartoons and Soul Train. I watched all three. Don Cornelius was the emcee of Soul Train. The program's tagline was: "Sixty nonstop minutes across the tracks of your mind". It was a great way to grow up.

Kids these days stream cartoons 24/7 on The Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and The Disney Channel. If you prefer music, you can watch videos all day long on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music. Although more convenient and accessible, I liked it better in the old days when you did things together, with your friends or family, in a group. Soul Train and American Bandstand had significant ratings reductions when MTV was introduced and they both went off the air about the turn of the century. I should know. I was part of the problem. Video killed the radio star, but I haven't watched MTV in decades. I still listen to radio.  

You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie

Song parodist Allan Sherman cut his teeth on the Borscht Belt circuit in the summers of the 1950s. Although his day job was a television producer for the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman show I've Got a Secret, it was on the stage that he really shined. After years of developing his craft, he released the album My Son, The Folk Singer in 1962, which catapulted to gold. Over one million copies sold. Another album soon followed, My Son, The Celebrity. The parodies of public domain folk songs paid off in spades.

In 1963, Sherman released another LP, catering to a national audience, My Son, The Nut, which included the novelty hit "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah". "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" reached #2 on the charts for three weeks that summer.  Most Baby Boomers are familiar with the song about Camp Granada. Novelty songs were big in the 1960s."They're Coming to Take me Away, Ha-Haaa!", by Napoleon XIV comes to mind, or "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron", by The Royal Guardsman. "Lady Godiva" by Peter and Gordon was a big hit, too. 

This weekend I fired up YouTube on my Chromebook and played select songs from My Son, The Nut. Some are just audio clips and others are videos from performances on television shows. My favorite is "You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie". Unfortunately, there's no footage of Sherman performing the song, just a photo of the album cover and the audio. 

"You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie" runs a little over three minutes. The first minute of the recording sounds like a spoken word poem to give a little background - how Louie was the King of France in 1789 and whatnot. After the intro, the piano begins playing in a manner reminiscent of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn". The first three stanzas go like this: 

You went the wrong way, Old King Louie
You made the population cry
'Cause all you did was sit and pet
With Marie Antoinette
In your place at Versailles

And now the country's gone kablooie
So we are giving you the air
That oughta teach you not to
Spend all your time fooling 'round at the Folies Bergere

If you had been a nicer king,
We wouldn't do a thing,
But you were bad, you must admit
We're gonna take you and the Queen
Down to the guillotine,
And shorten you a little bit

European history buffs know Louis the XVI only made it to age 38. Allan Sherman didn't fare much better dying in 1973 at the age of 48. When listening to the song, it occurred to me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Hard Knox: The Life of an NFL Coach

Before the advent of ESPN, Sports-Talk Radio, podcasts, online sports betting, fantasy football, predictive markets and social media, there was NFL coaching icon Chuck Knox. Knox, nicknamed 'Ground Chuck' for his three yards and a cloud of dust style offense, had few peers in the 1970's, 1980's, and early 1990's on the gridiron. He was the Associated Press NFL coach of the year three times during his tenure as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, Buffalo Bills, and Seattle Seahawks. When he retired in 1995, he was tenth on the all-time wins list. Knox also had numerous playoff wins and competed in four conference championship games, but came up short all four times, which puts a damper on his induction into the NFL Hall of Fame. The powers that be want you to win the Lombardi Trophy to get a bust in Canton. Tom Coughlin and Mike Shanahan won the Superbowl twice and they're still not in. It's a longshot for Knox. To this day, he remains on the short list of potential NFL Hall of Fame candidates, but always a groomsman, never a groom.

Hard Knox: The Life of an NFL Coach by Chuck Knox and Bill Plaschke, covers Knox's life from his hardscrabble childhood until 1988, the year the book was published. You can infer from reading the introduction that Coach Knox dictated the narrative into a tape recorder and Plaschke was the scribe that organized and edited the manuscript. The book is peppered throughout with snippets of excerpts of interviews with friends, family, ex-players and former colleagues of the coach. I imagine Plaschke was responsible for this, too. You may be familiar with Plaschke with his work as a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, or nationally as a frequent panelist on ESPN's now defunct Around The Horn. He's an excellent writer. Published almost forty years ago, the book is an artifact of a bygone era, but gives us great insight into a man that should be given serious consideration for Canton. Not for his record, but what he did for African Americans in the NFL. 

Knox grew up dirt poor in the mill town of Sewickley in rural Pennsylvania near the Ohio border. A hotbed for football players. His parents emigrated from Europe through Ellis Island - his mother Scottish and his father Irish. His father would be considered abusive in today's world, or any world. Chuck took beatings and as a result, took refuge in the street to escape the wrath of his "old man". It was here that he developed a kinship with his Irish, Italian and African American neighbors, and became colorblind wherever race is concerned. Knox also began using "Knoxisms" at this time. An oratory style that he's famous for. Knoxisms are clichés such as, "Play the hand you're dealt", or, "Don't tell me how rough the water is, just bring the ship in". It's just the way he speaks and it works. It didn't detract from the narrative and is reminiscent of days of yore. 

The first third of Hard Knox documents the coach's upbringing in Sewickley, college ball at Juniata College, his time as a high school coach, and his tenure as an offensive line coach for both Wake Forest and Kentucky. The description of his Division I coaching and recruiting experience is a relic of the past well before the Transfer Portal and Name Image and Likeness contracts. Football fans will get a lot out of this even though the recruiting techniques are outdated. It's a slice of the Eisenhower Era in collegiate athletics. Although a player's coach, Knox put the fear of God in his teams and had a confrontational teaching style that is emblematic with old school coaches such as Bobby Knight of Indiana University basketball fame. It wouldn't fly in today's world, but was very common decades ago. I grew up with it. It doesn't bother me.

Knox gets his big break professionally in 1963 with the New York Jets of the American Football League. The old AFL was in a bidding war with the NFL before the leagues merged later in the decade. He made a lot of contributions to the Jets such as developing innovative blocking techniques, and was instrumental in stealing Joe Namath from the Saint Louis Cardinals of the more established NFL. It isn't until Knox moves to the Detroit Lions in 1967 that we get a glimpse of his contributions in race relations. Even though it wasn't publicized, the NFL still had a Jim Crow mentality in the late 60's. African American quarterbacks, middle linebackers and centers were almost unheard of because it was believed they were too dumb to play the positions. That didn't sit well with Knox. He believed that the best athlete should play. His first season in The Motor City, he took Bill Cottrell, an African American guard and moved him to center to anchor the line. That was the catalyst of turning a ragtag group of linemen into an elite corps of blockers. This is a familiar theme throughout Knox's coaching career.

Although Marlin Briscoe is recognized as the first starting African American quarterback in the AFL, it was James Harris in 1974 that shattered the glass ceiling in the NFL. This was under the leadership of Knox as the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams. Knox traded the All-Pro John Hadl to the Packers for five draft picks, one of the most one-sided trades in NFL history, and started Harris in his place. The Rams were a playoff calibre team and starting a Black quarterback was verboten until Knox came to town. Harris had a successful run with the Rams despite constantly receiving death threats and racist mail from Rams fans. This is in liberal Los Angeles. Harris was eventually benched for Pat Haden because of pressure from  Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom. Rosenbloom wanted things his way and the whole team knew it. As Knox put it, "Assistant coaches can smell the house burning before the match is ever struck". He saw the writing on the wall and resigned in 1977. 

Knox cemented his reputation as a master deal maker when he pulled off another blockbuster trade with the Forty-Niners soon after he joined the Buffalo Bills in 1978. He dealt O.J. Simpson for a boatload of draft picks. Simpson was on the decline, but by far the best running back in a running back league. It wasn't until years later when Dallas sent Herschel Walker to the Vikings that NFL fans witnessed a trade of this magnitude. Like with the Los Angeles Rams, Buffalo Bills and later with the Seattle Seahawks, Knox was considered the ultimate turnaround strategist in his era. Taking teams "from hopeless to hell-raisers" in only the way that Coach Knox could say it. Unfortunately, although he was the maestro of motivation, the expert at deal making, one of the most winning coaches of his generation and broke down the doors of racial inequality, he's primarily remembered for coming up short in the big games. This is a mistake.

First and foremost, Chuck Knox belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for eliminating roadblocks restricting African American players. I'm not suggesting he's as revolutionary as Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey who was instrumental in Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in the MLB. Nor is he as important as LBJ signing The Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, but his deeds are important to the NFL's African American population which consists of about 70% of the league. He was an influencer. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts influencers. For example, DJ Alan Freed is enshrined for amalgamating both Caucasian and African American artists over the same airwaves. Knox did essentially the same thing on the football field.

Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Dak Prescott, Caleb Williams to just name a few of the current African American quarterbacks owe a lot to Chuck Knox. In fact, the majority of the NFL owes a lot to him. Coach Knox died of complications of Dementia in 2018. Although he couldn't remember, let's not forget the contributions he made.