One of the neat things about growing up in the ’60s was listening to the incredibly wide variety of music on AM radio. Any given top forty list from any given week in any given year was likely to include tunes from the Beatles and other British invasion bands, Brit songstresses like Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, Motown artists, Memphis soul artists, girl groups and teen idols singing songs by Brill Building writers, West Coast pop acts, folksingers, hard rock outfits, and more. You’d hear three-chord wonders from teenage garage bands and sophisticated compositions from the likes of Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb. You’d hear instrumentals, country tunes, even standard pop numbers from members of the older generation, including Doris Day and Frank Sinatra. Just listen to the radio for a half hour and you’d be exposed to a little bit of everything.
Such is not the case today. Radio started fragmenting back in the late ’70s and over the years has become hyper genre specific. It’s even worse with streaming, where you only hear stuff you want to hear and aren’t exposed to anything you haven’t heard before. We are the worse for it.
Today’s classic song of the day takes us back to the days of the free-for-all that was 1960s top forty radio. It’s one of those tracks from a singer that your parents probably listened to but somehow fit right in next to hipper performers like Beatles and the Supremes. The song is “Everybody Loves Somebody,” it was released by singer Dean Martin in June of 1964, and it went all the way to #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Top 100.
“Everybody Loves Somebody” was written, way back in 1947, by Irving Taylor and Ken Lane. It was recorded by many singers, including Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, and Frank Sinatra, but none of them really made it their own. That happened in 1964, when Dean Martin was in the studio recording tracks for his upcoming Dream on Dean album. They’d run through all the tunes they’d prepared but still had about an hour of studio time left, so Ken Lane (who was playing piano for Dean) suggested Mr. Martin give his old tune a try.
Which he did, backed by only a small rhythm section. Everybody liked that stripped-down version so much that Dean returned to the studio and re-recorded a version with a full orchestra. Dean’s record label, Reprise Records, released that version as a single and the rest you know—it went to #1 on both the Hot 100 and Pop-Standard Singles charts (the latter for eight weeks!) and was a top ten hit in Australia, Canada, Belgium, New Zealand, and Norway. (It fell just short of the top ten in England, hitting #11 on the UK chart.)
By the way, the entire top ten for the week that Dean Martin had his number-one hit (the week of August 15, 1964) was as follows:
- “Everybody Loves Somebody” (Dean Martin)
- “Where Did Our Love Go” (The Supremes)
- “A Hard Day’s Night” (The Beatles)
- “Rag Doll’ (The Four Seasons)
- “Under the Boardwalk” (The Drifters)
- “Wishin’ and Hopin’” (Dusty Springfield)
- “The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)” (Jan and Dean)
- “C’mon and Swim” (Bobby Freeman)
- “I Wanna Love Him So Bad” (The Jelly Beans)
- “House of the Rising Sun” (The Animals)
That’s a hell of a lot of variety right there. And the rest of the top twenty included things like Roger Miller’s “Dang Me,” the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” and “The Girl from Ipanema” by jazz musicians Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto. You don’t get that kind of variety in today’s overly segmented market.
And, for your viewing pleasure, here’s your daily bonus video of the day, Dean Martin doing a little schtick and singing “Everybody Loves Somebody” live on stage back in 1965. The man was the epitome of cool.
