5-25-68 WDGY Minneapolis, Minnesota
WDGY and KDWB went toe to toe throughout the 60's as the great top 40 stations battle of the twin cities. It's great seeing the NC6 up near the top here and Robert John's Lou Christie imitation at #15. The local Minneapolis band, T.C. Atlantic, ranks appropriately at #20 with their local Candy Floss Records release "20 Years Ago (in Speedy's Kitchen)." Sounding quite British, the 45 would make enough local noise to be bought and released nationally by Parrot Records, ala the Ides of March break in '66 from Chicago with "You Wouldn't Listen."
-- Clark Besch
-- Clark Besch
*Survey courtesy Gary Pfeifer and ARSA site
Yes, The New Colony Six jump from #12 to #4 on this Minneapolis chart with their hit "I Will Always Think About You" ... it had already hit #1 here in Chicago a couple of weeks ago.
In fact, this chart looks pretty similar to the way these songs ranked here in Chi-Town.
A personal "Forgotten Hit" favorite would have to be "The Son Of Hickory Holler's Tramp" by O.C. Smith, who would go on to top the charts all over the country a few months later with his version of "Little Green Apples," a song we've already seen on our 1968 charts as performed by Roger Miller.
Other big movers this week include The Ohio Express (up eleven spots from #13 to #2) with "Yummy Yummy Yummy," "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris, which climbs sixteen spots from #26 to #10, "Master Jack" by Four Jacks and a Jill (#22 to #13) and Clark's mentioned Robert John track, "If You Don't Want My Love" (up from #29 to #15), a move of fourteen places.
BONUS CHART:
WCFL distributed its last chart in stores with the survey dated "Week Ending May 23, 1968."
After skipping a week, they began shipping large poster versions of their surveys for in-store displays only. (WLS would do the same thing for part of 1972 and 1973.)
Fortunately, there were enough of us crazy chart collectors out there to go into the stores and write down the results of each chart posted every week! (Yep, we were WAY into our hobby!!!) What the heck ... we were still going into the stores to pick up the WLS Survey anyway!
As such, with a few gaps missing here and there (some of which may be because WCFL simply didn't post a chart for those weeks) we still have a virtually complete collection of all of our local Top 40 Surveys from 1960 - 1985. (WCFL would resume printing and distributing the weekly charts in 1970 ... and carry on until they signed off the air in February of 1976 with a chart they labeled "fini 1976." (They flipped to a "World's Most Beautiful Music" format the week after that ... and Super Jock Larry Lujack was under contract to continue with this new shift. Thankfully, he was eventually able to negotiate his way out of this spot and return to WLS where he once again became one of the top Top 40 Jocks on the air.)
In any event, it seemed only fitting to run a copy of the last 1968 WCFL Chart ever published as part of this year's Saturday Surveys / 50 Year Flashback Feature ... so here it is!!!
Both The Buckinghams and The Cryan' Shames have "Chicago Premiers" this week, with "Back In Love Again" and "Young Birds Fly" respectively.
Our Local Heroes are also represented on the chart this week by The American Breed (#30 - "Ready, Willing And Able") and Spanky And Our Gang (#19 - "Like To Get To Know You") while Tommy James and the Shondells hold down the top spot with "Mony Mony," a record that spent three weeks at #1 on the WCFL chart.
THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS:
Here's what was happening in music news, this week in '68 ...
5/22/68 – Cream earns a gold record for their album “Disraeli Gears”
5/23/68 - The Beatles’ second Apple Boutique opens, 161 New Kings Road, London
5/24/68 - Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull arrested for drugs ... again ... in London
5/25/68 – Simon and Garfunkel’s album “Bookends” hits the #1 Spot on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums Chart, knocking their own Soundtrack Album to “The Graduate” out of the top spot in the process!
5/26/68: Spanky and Our Gang and Nancy Sinatra make another appearance together on The Ed Sullivan Show, each performing several songs that NOBODY cares about!
Also on 5/26 – Little Willie John dies of pneumonia while locked up in a Washington State Prison.
