Rant #2,684: You Go Your Way

We often profile people who have passed that had a major impact on our lives, and we also look at people who may have had their 15 minutes of fame and then faded into the framework of society.
 
In today’s Rant, I am going to talk about someone in the latter category, someone who had some level of brief fame and then simply became one of “us.”
 
Tina Mason died last week. I believe she was 76 and succumbed to a long-running illness.
 
Who is Tina Mason, you are probably asking?
 
Well, she was one of the girl singers on Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is” TV show, which ran on ABC afternoons in the mid-1960s.
 
Along with “Dark Shadows,” the show—which profiled some of the hottest rock and pop acts of the 1965 to 1967 era—helped ABC, then the third network behind CBS and NBC, to create a block of programming geared toward pre-teens and younger teens.
 
The show also catapulted its original house band—Paul Revere and the Raiders—to incredible heights, making them pop/rock superstars into the early 1970s.
 
And WTAI was certainly one of the templates used for “The Monkees” TV show and pop/rock group, and thus, it is also one of the forefathers of rock videos and MTV.
 
But all of that does not explain who Tina Mason was.

 
Mason was one of the most popular of the girl singers who appeared on the program, with the looks and the talent to make an indelible mark on viewers, both male and female.
 
Mason was a singer who had a few singles out as the leader of Tina and the Mustangs, and had also done some acting … with one uncredited role as one of the background players on “Dark Shadows” as a patron of “The Blue Whale,” the Collinsport hangout where much of the action of early shows of the series revolved around.
 
Anyway, when a girl singer was needed on the show, she was one of the finalists to land a role on WTAI, and she won the competition pretty handily.
 
And it was that show where she met Phil “Fang” Volk of the Raiders, and began a romance that culminated in marriage, a union that lasted for decades.

 
Once Mason was firmly ensconced as a cast member of the show, she put our a few singles and one LP as a solo, and while they didn’t set the world on fire, listening to them today puts Mason right in with the popular female singers of the day, like Petula Clark, Lesley Gore and Lulu, and her music is really is a lost relic of the time.
 
When WTAI ended, Mason and Volk started a family, and while Volk continued as a musician apart from the Raiders in numerous bands from then until now, Mason took a backseat with her career, although she was part of some of the acts that her husband was part of.

 
As the moderator of the Facebook site “Where the Action is: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” I was saddened to hear of her passing, although I had heard through the grapevine that she had been in ill health for some time.
 
She made an indelible mark on my childhood during the WTAI years, and evidently, most of our 2,000-plus members feel the same way, with accolades coming from all sides.
 
True, some of our members had never heard of her, because by the time she came on board, the daily show had been completely taken over by the Raiders, and honestly, when you think of that show, they are part of your over-riding thoughts.
 
But she was a cast member of the show—more of a supporting player—and she often performed with the Raiders on the show trying to make her presence known amidst their funny bits.
 
If you are interested in finding out more on the show, please visit the Facebook site at https://www.facebook.com/groups/598790963991601/?modal=false&should_open_composer=false&hoisted_section_header_type=notifications&show_migration_preparation_dialog=false&show_migration_onboarding_dialog=false.
 
There are also a few videos from the show that feature her on YouTube, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gJ7xDd131w
 
And her music is also all over YouTube, so you can hear her full LP on that site.
 
Now for some more news …
 
As for the rest of the week, I might be in and out of here.
 
I have several major doctor's appointments early in the day, and I don’t know yet what days I will be writing this column and which days I will have to take the day off, so please, just check back here and there to see if I have a new post for that particular day.
 
Speak to you soon … ?

Rant #2,683: It Don't Come Easy

Happy Friday!
 
I won’t say “Thank God It’s Friday,” because Friday to me is just the last day of the work week, so until Friday is over, it is still the work week to me.
 
Looking ahead to the weekend, I hope to finally get into the pool with my wife and maybe even my son, although he has to work on Sunday, which we have been told is going to be the better of the two-day weekend weather-wise.
 
We shall see, but the pool is there and it is ready to go!
 
And when I am in the pool, we have the radio on to further relax us, and somehow, we are able to pick up pretty clearly an oldies station from southern New Jersey, and that is what we listen to.
 
It plays a really good mix of oldies from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, which I think are the best years to listen to the music of my life.
 
So included in that music are tunes from the year 1971, and music that was popular in June of that year, or exactly 50 years ago.
 
What will be the songs that we will hear on that station—I have no idea what the call letters are or the frequency, as I always have to search for it—and specifically, from June 1971?
 
Here is a rundown of the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 from the week of June 26, 1971, and I bet we will hear some of these songs when we are waddling in the pool this weekend.
 
At number 10 is one of Donny Osmond’s top solo outings away from his brothers, “Sweet and Innocent.” He was hot as a pistol then, and just about anything he put out with or without his brothers was a hit, and this one was no exception.
 
And talking about being hot, Jerry Reed’s “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” was the ninth most popular song in the U.S. this week. Reed, the actor/writer/singer and musician, placed a number of songs on the Hot 100 during this period, and his association with Burt Reynolds certainly helped him become one of America’s most popular stars during this period of time.
 
Hamilton, Joe, Frank and Reynolds placed “Don’t Pull Your Love” at the number 8 spot on the chart. Althoiugh this song was on the Dunhill label, they eventually became the fledgling Playboy record label’s biggest-selling act a few years later.
 
Ringo Starr proved to the world that he could become a top-selling solo artist apart from the Beatles with a number of songs that made the Top 10, one of them being “It Don’t Come Easy,” which was in seventh place this week. The title of the song was kind of a rebuff to the critics, who thought he would fall flat on his face away from John, Paul and George.
 
The Rolling Stones came in at number six with “Brown Sugar,” the former number one smash that was now moving down the chart, but it remains to this day one of the Stones’ most beloved songs of their entire career.
 
“Treat Her Like a Lady” by the family act the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose came in at number five this week. It would get as high as number three on the chart in the coming weeks.
 
At number four was an out of left field hit by the Raiders, the oft-recorded “Indian Reservation.” This soon-to-be number one tune was “cleaned up” by the former teen idols, led by Mark Lindsay and, of course, Paul Revere, and it was the band’s only tune to top the chart out of the bushel-full of hits that they had during the period.
 
Honey Cone, a three-girl act that kind of resembled the Supremes, had a massive hit with “Want Ads,” which came in at number three on this week’s chart. This former number one song was one of several large hits for the group during this era.
 
One of the top acts of the 1970s placed one of their most endearing hits at the number two spot this week. The Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays” occupied the runners-up spot on the chart, and it was kept from the top spot by a tune from one of the musical juggernauts of this time period.
 
The number one song of the week was actually a two-sided hit, and topping the chart this week was—
 
Carole King and her songs “It’s Too Late” and the B side of “I Feel the Earth Move.”
 
Both coming off the “Tapestry” album, this long-time songwriter—who had recorded as a solo years earlier with some success—re-burst onto the music scene with this album, one of the largest selling LPs of all time and a record that spun off many hits for King, and pretty much signaled the beginning of the singer/songwriter period in pop music at the time.
 
The highest debuting single on the chart was “Moon Shadow” by Cat Stevens, which came in at number 70. The song would eventually reach number 30.
 
The biggest mover on this week’s chart—the song that moved up the most places from last week to this week—was “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, which moved up a whopping 38 places from number 85 last week to number 47 this week. The song would eventually rise to number 28 on the Hot 100 a few weeks later.
 
So there you have it, the Top 10 of this week 50 years ago, plus two other beloved songs from that period.
 
I am willing to bet that I hear most of those songs played on the radio this weekend while I am in the pool, and let me tell you, it will be good to hear all of them again, since the songs were so strong on the chart this week.
 
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday. 

Rant #2,682: TV OD

Television is my life.
 
No, I don’t work in television, but since I was born in 1957, I have always loved to watch television.
 
I do believe that along with the telephone and the car, it is probably the greatest of all the inventions of the past 150 years or so.
 
As a little kid, I watched the first piece of furniture my parents ever purchased together as a married couple—a large Dumont TV with sliding doors—and it was on that TV that I really learned about life, whether it was from “Ding Dong School” or later, when I saw the JFK assassination saga unfold, seeing Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald right before my six year old eyes.
 
Even later on that TV, I watched the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and I watched the first moon landing with Neil Armstrong setting foot on the orb in the sky with Jackie Gleason’s face on it.

 
When that TV finally went in the early 1970s--it sits in our basement now--I moved on from one TV to another, and they all served their purpose—from analog to HDTV—and each one we had lasted a number of years.
 
One TV I had—a black and white Zenith portable that my grandmother bought me for my room—not only was able to get out of town channels for whatever reason, allowing me to watch the Knicks’ first championship the day prior to my bar mitzvah, when I was sick as a dog—but it also exploded in my hands when a lightning bolt directly hit our antenna during my teen years.
 
Anyway, what this is all leading up to is that yesterday, for the first time in several years, we had to buy a new TV, and my, how the world of TV has changed now that we are in the HDTV age!
 
You can’t just buy a TV anymore, plug it in where you want to, and start enjoying it, and I knew that already because we already have three HDTV in our home, and they all needed a bit of work—mainly attaching to cables—to get the maximum out of them.
 
But this latest purchase—for our living room TV—was certainly the most annoying, for a variety of reasons.
 
First off, getting the old TV out of the house—one of the last analog models made by Panasonic that my family  used for more than two decades--was a major hassle, as it must have weighed about 200 pounds if not more. Getting it out of the living room and down the stairs was a complete catastrophe, but since it didn’t really work anymore, it was something that had to be done.
 
I discovered early on that the TV did not have any handles to grip on, so my son and I somehow lugged it “plop plop” down the stairs and out to the curb.
 
It was really like carrying 200 pounds of dead weight, making it so unlike today’s TVs, which you literally can pick up with zero effort.
 
And not wanting to spend any extra money if I didn’t have to, I brought up my son’s old TV from the basement, just to see if it would work.
 
That was another old analog TV, and no, it didn’t work anymore, but at least I tried it.

 
This one also weighed a ton, but at least it had grips on it, and I was able to bring it out to the curb myself, with little problem.
 
Then we had to go to the store to get a new TV, which we did in late morning yesterday.
 
What TV do we get?
 
We have an entertainment center in the living room, one which dates from the pre-HDTV days, so the space for the TV is large, but is based on analog TV dimensions.
 
Thus, it is vertically large, but not so much horizontally, which is the way TVs are made today, so after measuring, I figured we needed a 28-inch TV.
 
Well, go find one.
 
We went to the store, looked at about 100 different TVs, and there was not a single 28-inch TV in stock.
 
I knew the space could not fit a 32-inch TV, and I knew that whatever we purchased, we would have to perch on something to bring it up to eye level—again, the space is tall but not wide.
 
So we settled for a 24-inch TV, made our purchase, asked about installation just in case, and went home with it …
 
And then the fun began.
 
The legs of the TV had to be attached first, and the screws were so small that you had to drop them into the legs from the back, and hope you hit the target. Only then could you attach them to the bottom of the TV.
 
That part of the procedure must have taken my son and I about 20 minutes to do, but the best was yet to come.
 
We discovered that the TV did not come with an HDMI cable—or any cables—so we could not hook it up to the Dish Network satellite dish we use in the living room for our TV (we have Verizon in the bedrooms—don’t ask.)
 
So we had to set it up without the HDTV for now, and crawling under the entertainment center to locate the connections was something I hope that I never have to do again.
 
I was contorted worse than a pretzel, and several times I lost the wires we needed for at least an analog connection.
 
It took probably two hours to hook it up so we could watch some TV, and then we had to load up the remote with batteries, which, of course, took a lot of time because the batteries that were provided were dead.

 
So by 4 p.m., the TV was hooked up, but we had to find something to put it on to put it at eye level. I found two old VHS tape holders that we had, and right now, the TV is perched on them, to the chagrin of my wife, who came home from work and was not too happy a camper about the whole thing … but she did acknowledge the fact that the space we had was not conducive to the current TVs, she just didn’t like how the whole thing looked.
 
But the TV works!

I did call in for service to get it right, and I purchased an HDMI wire so when the workman comes next week, everything can be hooked up like it should be.
 
Yes, my back and neck still hurt from all the contortions I made, and one day, I will have a good laugh about what transpired yesterday afternoon.
 
But I am not laughing just yet. There is only a limit that I can go to to do certain things, and I reached that limit yesterday.
 
But as I said, I just love TV, and I will love it even better when this thing gets fully hooked up the way it should be, not the “Larry” way.
 
Goodness, I do miss the old TVs … just plug in and play.
 
“Those were the days, my friend.
 
We thought they’d never end.”
 
But I am sorry to say that those days are as dead as those old TVs I got rid of yesterday.

Rant #2,681: The First Cut Is the Deepest

June 23 is a day of infamy for two not very nice people who had their 15 minutes of fame on this day … or maybe their couple of inches of fame, depending on how you slice it.
 
On June 23, 1993, Lorena Bobbitt had had enough of her marriage to John Bobbitt, and the alleged abuse reached a point where not only did she want out of the marriage, she wanted to make sure that her husband knew why she wanted out of the marriage.
 
So that night, as he slept, she took out a knife, and to his horror, chopped off his … well … lower extremity.
 
She discarded it, and made sure he would never find it again.
 
This case set off a firestorm of talk that actually lasted way longer than 15 minutes, and for a few years, the two new media personalities were ubiquitous on every form of media that was available back then, and they literally became the butt of jokes related to the incident.
 
Just to make a long story short about the legalities of the case, John was acquitted of rape and other sexual charges against this wife, while Lorena was found not guilty of her actions due to insanity, which basically blinded her to what she was doing, giving her an irresistible urge to dismember her husband. She served some type in a Virginia mental hospital, and then was released.
 
But of course, the story did not end there, making it certainly one of the most exploitive stories in history.
 
The two did not divorce until 1995, which kept them in the news for two years beyond the actual incident.
 
And after they were divorced, John kept in the news, related to the aftermath of his dismembering.
 
Although his wife discarded the lower extremity hoping that it would never be found, it actually and incredibly was found, and John had it surgically reattached to his body in a series of procedures that had begun earlier in this episode.
 
The procedures cost thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have, so he launched several endeavors to try to pay his bills.
 
He tried rock and roll, forming a band called The Severed Parts, but when that venture failed, he proved to the world just how well his surgery actually went by appearing in an adult movie, where … well … I think you can figure it out.
 
But although he was acquitted of raping his wife, in the intervening years, he was arrested several times for assaulting others, and the last time that he made the news was in 2014, when he was in an auto accident and broke his neck.
 
I can find no further word about him, but from what I have read, he isn’t in the best of shape.
 
Lorena attempted to keep a low profile after she left the mental hospital, but like her ex-husband, she made news again when she assaulted her mother, a charge she eventually was acquitted of.
 
Currently, she is in a long-term relationship and has a young child.
 
Incredibly, the duo appeared together on “The Insider” TV show in 2009, and it was revealed that John still loved his ex-wife, to whom he apologized to on air, and that he still sent her Valentine’s Day cards and flowers each year to show his love to her.
 
And last year, to further exploit the legacy of this incident, Lifetime aired a made for TV movie of which Lorena was executive producer and narrator.
 
This story was really a cut above the rest, and its exploitive value may have only been topped by the O.J. Simpson trial and possibly the “Long Island Lolita” situation.
 
Can you imagine if this happened today, what with the Internet and social media having a chance to swirl around it?
 
But even without those things to catapult it into some other world of chatter, the case still held its own in the annals of yellow journalism.
 
I mean, who couldn’t be entranced by not only a story about sex, but a story pitting a wife against a husband where the wife actually did what many women could only dream of doing to someone they believed sexually abused and attacked them?
 
It is almost funny—or maybe serendipitous—that the actual trial came out a wash, with neither party being convicted of anything. Lorena had to serve some time in a mental institution, and John got whatever he may have deserved by the act itself, but there were no convictions at that trial, so I guess you can say that they both got what they deserved, with neither one of these heinous people getting what they wanted.
 
So there you have it.
 
What is just another day on the calendar for most of us is a day that completely changed the lives of two people who didn’t deserve the notoriety that they received, but became media darlings because of the very nature of what got them that notoriety.
 
I guess the moral to the story is to do what you can to say in one piece—
 
Both figuratively and literally.