Chuck Mangione -- Feels So Good

 

Welcome once again to this week's regular Reminiscings of Youth. Y'know, I saw "King of the Hill" on FOX now and then but never caught this particular episode where Luann finally gets married and Chuck Mangione appears to give his musical tribute along with his most famous piece, "Feels So Good". Apparently, the musician and the song was a part of a running gag all throughout the series' run.

Now, "Feels So Good" wasn't a running gag in my life. It's been a treasured musical key to my memories of the 1970s and times riding in the back seat of the car while the AM radio was on. I used to hear this all the time and enjoyed it immensely before I realized that the light and mellow stuff was my music of choice. It really did feel so good. 

It was also the first time that I had ever heard of a flugelhorn which first struck me as a very pregnant trumpet. I assumed that "Feels So Good" had been around since the mid-1970s but it actually first showed up as a track on Mangione's December 1977 album of the same title which got all the way up to No. 2 on US Billboard. Then the single version of the song was released a few months later in February 1978 for which it hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. In Canada, it ranked in at No. 5 which explains the heavy rotation on the local radio.

The Wikipedia entry for "Feels So Good" stated that along with its warm inclusion into the "King of the Hill" family, Mangione showed up in those famous Ella Fitzgerald Memorex commercials and the song was used as a line in the first "Doctor Strange" movie. For me, I think it was used in a lot of golf broadcasts when the camera was panning on some lovely scenery. I'm also surprised that there has been no mention of it being used to accompany the scroll of weather information on the nightly news.

According to my usual source, it looks like both of these songs were released on the same day of February 25th 1978 although I don't know exactly when "Feels So Good" came out.

Jiro Atsumi -- Yume Oi Zake（夢追い酒）

Candies -- Hohoemigaeshi （微笑がえし）

As a PS, I have to also mention about Mangione's soundtrack to the Anthony Quinn movie "Children of Sanchez" which also came out in 1978. Earlier this week, I was having a brief conversation on the blog with someone who was so happy to have re-encountered a "Lupin III" theme song some time ago that he had been seeking for years, and I told him that I certainly could relate to his feeling of joy and relief since I have been in that situation a few times thanks to the blog. It just so happens that in looking up stuff on "Feels So Good", I was able to realize that a certain action-packed segment of the long-running "Children of Sanchez" starting at 3:36 above had been a favourite passage of mine used on the local CBC news broadcasts when I was a kid. Well, my search here is over!😂