August 4 Musicology

Six legendary artists. Six iconic songs. All of them connected to August 4 on the musical calendar, and each one of them comes with their own set of rock and roll “factoids”.
I hope you have some fun with this one.
I know I did. 🙂

On August 4, 1942 (78 years ago today!), the musical film Holiday Inn premiered at the New York Paramount Theatre. It was expected that Be Careful, It’s My Heart would be the big song. While it did very well, it was another song from the film that people would remember.
White Christmas changed Christmas music forever, both by revealing the huge potential market for Christmas songs, and by establishing the themes of home and nostalgia that would run through Christmas music from that point on.
It has often been noted that the mix of melancholy – “just like the ones I used to know” – with comforting images of home – “where the treetops glisten” – resonated strongly with listeners during World War II.
It topped the Your Hit Parade chart in October 1942 and stayed there for eleven weeks and is the biggest-selling single worldwide of all time.

On August 4, 1958 (62 years ago today!), Billboard combined its unwieldy system of sales, jukebox, and DJ charts to make one master chart: the Billboard Hot 100.
The first #1 was Ricky Nelson’s Poor Little Fool.
The song was written by Sharon Sheeley. At age 18, Sheeley was the youngest woman to write an American #1 hit, but her connection to music didn’t stop there.
She later had a relationship with singer Eddie Cochran which tragically ended when the singer was killed – and Sheeley seriously injured – in a 1960 car accident in London.
In 1961 she married Los Angeles disc jockey Jimmy O’Neill. They created the ABC-TV series Shindig! They later divorced and she moved away from the music scene.

On August 4, 1964 (56 years ago today!), the Kinks released You Really Got Me in England.
It was the group’s third British single (the first two had failed to chart) and reached #1 on the UK singles chart the next month. It established them as one of the top British Invasion acts in the United States, reaching #7 there later in the year.
Songwriter and lead singer Ray Davies initially planned for the song to be a “more laid-back number. I wanted it to be a jazz-type tune, because that’s what I liked at the time. It was written originally around a sax opening.”
However, upon hearing the track, younger brother Dave Davies (all of 17 at the time) decided that the riff would be much more powerful on a guitar. He achieved the distorted power chord sound by using a razor blade to slit the speaker cone on his Elpico AC55 amplifier (shown above), which he then ran through a larger Vox AC30 as a “pre-amp”.
That sound was one of the first mainstream appearances of distortion, which was to have a major influence on many later musicians, especially in heavy metal and punk rock.

On August 4, 1964 (56 years ago today!), the Animals released House of The Rising Sun in the U.S. It had been released two months earlier in England and reached #1 on both the UK Singles chart and the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was recorded in just one take on May 18, 1964. It started with a now-famous electric guitar A minor chord arpeggio by Hilton Valentine and Chas Chandler’s booming bass guitar. Alan Price’s pulsating keyboard (played on a Vox Continental) and John Steel’s understated drums completed the backing sound. Eric Burdon’s howling vocal did the rest.
As recorded – in just 15 minutes – the song lasted over four minutes, regarded as far too long for a pop single at the time.
In the United States, the original single was a 2:58 version. The edited version was included on the group’s 1964 U.S. debut album, while the full version was later included on their best-selling 1966 greatest hits album, The Best of The Animals.
Rock Factoid: The hulking Chas Chandler (6′-4″) later discovered a young guitarist playing in New York City, brought him to England and became his first manager and producer. The kid’s name was Jimi Hendrix.

On August 4, 1965 (55 years ago today!), Bob Dylan recorded this masterpiece at Columbia’s Studio A in New York City.
With a mesmerizing improvised lead acoustic guitar from Nashville musician Charlie McCoy, the song became one of Dylan’s most iconic offerings.
Released as the closing track of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album, the song featured characters from history, fiction, the Bible and Dylan’s own imagination in a series of vignettes that suggested urban chaos.
Clocking in at 11 and ½ minutes, the song opened with a report that “they’re selling postcards of the hanging”, and notes “the circus is in town”. It was, most historians agree, a direct reference to the lynching in June 1920 of three African-American circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota; Dylan’s birthplace.
The men were employed by a travelling circus and had been accused of raping a white woman. On the night of June 15, 1920, they were removed from custody and hanged on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. Photos of the lynching were sold as postcards.
In another verse, the passengers on the Titanic are “shouting ‘Which side are you on?,'” a slogan of left-wing politics.
For author Robert Shelton, one of the targets of this song therefore was “simple minded political commitment. What difference which side you’re on if you’re sailing on the Titanic?”
Will you play this whole video? Probably not.
Will you play even a small part of it? Probably not.
Will you be missing something significant in rock history if you skip it? Absolutely.

On August 4, 1967 (53 years ago today!), the Small Faces released Itchycoo Park.
It became the group’s fifth top-ten song in the UK Singles Chart, reaching #3, and became their sole top-forty hit in the United States, reaching #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1968.
The song’s name is derived from the nickname of Little Ilford Park, on Church Road in the London suburb of Manor Park. It was renowned for its stinging nettles (itchy) and courting couples (coo).
The “bridge of sighs” and the “dreaming spires” mentioned in the first verse were references to a brochure that song co-writer (and bassist) Ronnie Lane had seen about two sites in Oxford, England.
And of course there was the song’s adventurous production, to wit the swirling flange effect, echoing the trippy sentiment of the lyrics’ overt drug references (What will we do there? / We’ll get high / What will we touch there? / We’ll touch the sky).