L.A.'s The Association are pretty well represented on oldies radio today thanks to four of their Top Ten National Hits ... Along Comes Mary (#7, 1966); Cherish (#1, 1966); Windy (#1, 1967) and Never My Love (#1, 1967) are all part of regular oldies rotation.
When we put together our recent True Oldies Channel / Forgotten Hits / Twin Spin Weekend, we included their other Top Ten Hit, Everything That Touches You (#10, 1968) as the "forgotten half" of the featured pair ... but that still left a couple of great tracks on the shelf.
One of my personal favorites is 1968's #23 Hit Time For Livin' ... a nice up-tempo tune that rarely (if ever) gets played.
I've also always been partial to No Fair At All, a #51 ballad from early 1967 that made The Top 20 here in Chicago. To my ears, this one ranks right up their with the best of their other Soft Rock Tracks ... yet it just never received the national chart success that I felt it deserved.
Other seldom-heard Top 40 Hits include Pandora's Golden Heebie-Jeebies (#26, 1966 ... and off the radio for good reason ... it's awful!!! In fact, The Turtles once called this the worst follow-up to a #1 Record in music history!!!) and Six Man Band (#29, 1968). By 1969, the big hits had stopped ... Goodbye Columbus (title track from the Ali McGraw / Richard Benjamin Movie); Names, Tags, Numbers And Labels and an early '80's "comeback" attempt, Dreamer, all fell short of The National Top 50.
Another list favorite seems to be Requiem For The Masses, the B-Side of Never My Love ... the almost chorale-like chant that scored enough of your votes as a Favorite, Forgotten B-Side to rank at #52 on our Top 200 List.
(Visit www.forgottenhits.com to view the complete list!)
The Association are back out on the road again right now with most of the original members intact. A show we attended last summer proved that those impeccable harmonies we fell in love with on their records could most likely be attributed more to studio wizardry than any sense of "live" vocal talent ... there were actually cringe-inducing moments during one of the very few shows I've ever left early!!!
But tracks as good as No Fair At All and Time For Livin' certainly deserve a spin at least once in a while ... so today they're being featured as our very own Forgotten Hits Twin Spin!!!
