Issue #224 - “Hot Fun In The Summertime” by Sly & the Family Stone is the second of their four consecutive titles to hit No. 1 on the KHJ chart. No other artist accomplished this feat. The Bee Gees would have had four consecutive No. 1’s had KHJ not charted the LP-only “More Than A Woman.”
4 comments:
"Fortunate Son" follows the same pattern as "Something." It gets the initial attention, then is joined by its flip side, "Down on the Corner," and eventually the flip will be the bigger hit.
"Is That All There Is?" Boy, I did NOT "get" this song when I was 11, but of course, now that I'm 50, I get it all too well. Talk about a song you can't appreciate until you've experienced several decades of life.
I also scratched my head when I first heard "Is That All There Is." Break out the booze and have a ball? It sounded like a record that was delivered to KHJ by mistake and something that my parents would've listened to on KMPC. My brother and I made fun of it by saying "is that all there is" to practically any subject. I learned to appreciate the song many years later.
I would call it the most unlikely song written by the team of Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller, who wrote and/produced so much early r & b/rock & roll ("Hound Dog", "Kansas City", most of the Coasters' output).
I just found out more on "Is That All There Is". Over at the Reelradio site (spiritually as well as physically linked to this one), they have an aircheck featuring the ORIGINAL version of the song, performed by New York disc jockey Dan Daniel, recorded about a year and a half before Peggy Lee did. When it began to be played on Daniel's home station, WMCA, they received a cease and desist order from a record label...because they wanted to save the tune to be recorded by Dionne Warwick, for the soundtrack of a (never produced) film called THE SLAVE.
Post a Comment