I don't consider myself a particularly lucky man. I've never won a lottery nor did I ever find the love of my life. However, where I did score some luck was growing up at a very interesting time in Toronto. I finally got some freedom in staying up late at night around the late 1970s going into the 1980s: music videos were just coming into their own and there were some rather intriguing TV shows popping up on the tube in my area.
I mentioned this in last week's Reminiscings of Youth when I wrote about the late Lalo Schifrin's theme for "T.H.E. Cat" suspense series. I got to (re-)acquaint myself with a number of these old TV shows and even some musical interludes through the lone season of a 1980 program called "The All-Night Show" on the local multicultural channel, CFMT-47 (popularly known as MTV just before a certain music channel down south grabbed the call letters forever). This aired most nights (so about 300 episodes) for about four to five hours overnight...a time when most channels would actually sign off and go to test patterns.
"The All-Night Show" starred comedian Chas Lawther as Chuck The Security Guard, the overnight guardian of MTV, who, out of a sense of boredom and curiosity, would basically take over operation at the station and with some drop-in buddies, engage the viewing audience in conversation and show off some of those old TV shows such as "The Twilight Zone", "The Beverly Hillbillies", the aforementioned "T.H.E. Cat" and other chestnuts. Obviously, even with my newfound nocturnal liberty, I didn't get to watch "The All-Night Show" every night. It was more like Friday and/or Saturday nights past 1 am and that wasn't even for the entire show (I don't think my parents would have been too thrilled to wake up to see that I hadn't gone to sleep).
One of the most bizarre moments on the show that I still remember to this day is when Chuck showed a washed-out video of a man outside somewhere who confessed on camera that he no longer had the will to live and would blow himself up with a homemade bomb right in front of the camera. He took his clothes off right then and there and blew himself up, although there didn't seem to be any gore. I think even Chas/Chuck looked very rattled by the sight and in the next several minutes, "WTF?!" phone calls came pouring in. Another number of minutes passed by before a woman phoned in to reassure everyone that her husband had survived his own suicide attempt of several years prior with surprisingly few injuries and that he was feeling much better with therapy and love but that he would not be willing to provide any further comment. I'm not sure if this had been an elaborate (and unfunny) hoax by the show but from Chuck's expression, it sure didn't look like it.
Along with watching some of the spookier episodes of "The Twilight Zone", one other thing that stuck with me was the de facto theme song for "The All-Night Show" which played after a few minutes of a Chuck intro. I'd heard "Strangers in the Night" before, notably with Frank Sinatra, so the song was recognizable but this version was about as spacey and bizarre and un-jazzy as it could get as it usually played over a montage of clips from B-movies and old TV episodes.
This version was provided by French composer Jean-Jacques Perrey and German-American composer Gershon Kingsley, known popularly known as Perrey and Kingsley, who were known as two pioneers of electronic music in the 1960s. In fact, their take on "Strangers in the Night" can be found in their 1967 album "Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Electronic Pop Music From Way Out", and yeah, it was way out, man!
As I stated above, "The All-Night Show" lasted just a month shy of one year between September 1980 and August 1981. It was a good run and I've seen YouTube comments wondering whimsically if there could be another program like that to pop up in the overnight hours once more, but then again, I have to observe that YouTube is probably doing something like that right now.
Anyways, just for comparison's sake, here is Ol' Blue Eyes' version of "Strangers in the Night" from 1966. But let's go with the starting date of "The All-Night Show" which was late September 1980. What was at the top of the Oricon charts on September 22nd that year?
1. Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi -- Junko （順子）
2. Seiko Matsuda -- Aoi Sangoshou （青い珊瑚礁）
3. Junko Yagami -- Purpletown (パープルタウン）
The title "Strangers in the Night" didn't ring any bells, but as soon as it started playing, I realized that I had heard that song more than once before. My wife and I enjoyed listening to Seiko singing “ Aoi Sangoshou” (青い珊瑚礁) on New Year’s Eve, and my family in-law thought that Seiko's voice hadn’t changed. I wasn't convinced because I know she recently re-recorded the song because her voice has changed at least a little but whatever she is Seiko and she sings it much better than I could and much much closer to the original one she sang than anyone else can. I am amazed at singers like her whose sing voice remain strong through multiple decades.
ReplyDelete"Strangers in the Night" is something that I heard from time to time at karaoke along with "My Way" (which is what Akira Fuse sang on the Kohaku).
DeleteIt was great to hear "Aoi Sangoshou" on the Kohaku at last. But I thought it would have been better if Seiko-chan had been positioned somewhere in the middle of the broadcast, although I understand why she would have requested to be the final performer. For an "Otori", it just seemed a little anticlimactic.