A few weeks ago, I had made reference to having owned one of those plastic, two-tone, beige and brown record players made by Fisher-Price, when I was a kid. I had a few toys that were reasonable facsimiles of things used by adults, but some of them were really special to me, as they were realistic and actually functioned in the same manner as the objects they were modeled after. Around kindergarten age, I had a hand-operated kitchen mixer with working beaters that operated just like the one my mom used to prepare Jiffy corn muffin mix. I had wanted to be a cook or a chef as my very first desired occupation.
Another toy I treasured was a sewing machine I owned around age 8. I had been allowed to sew things on my mom’s “big” sewing machine in my early elementary school years until one day when I was in the third grade. I had raised up the main, upper part of the sewing machine to change the bobbin below, when the entire thing came back down on my hand, chopping off a large chunk of one fingernail. It hurt and bled, and of course I cried (it could have been much worse), but it made for a cool story to tell my classmates – that is, before I was falsely led to believe that boys weren’t supposed to sew.
Some toys and things got taken away from me as my parents tried to butch me up in my early, formative years. My dad explained to me much later before he passed away that he was simply worried about what a hard life I might have had absent some more “masculine” interests and qualities, or that I would become a target of the ill intent of certain kinds of people. Dad was born in the 1920s (he was literally old enough to have been my grandfather) and in a foreign country, and raised in yet another non-U.S. culture. I later grew to understand that this was the place where he was coming from, and not necessarily one of judgement, bigotry, and/or being ashamed of me. Ultimately, I feel that my father understood me on at least a few significant levels, and I loved him very much.
My parents did embrace my budding love of cars, but one other toy that neither parent seemed to have any problem with was my affection for the Fisher-Price turntable I shared with my younger brother. He and I ended up collecting a small cache of LPs that we would often play at high volume, sometimes even on Saturday mornings, much to the chagrin of our older brother whose bedroom was directly below ours.
My little brother and I had only children’s records, like Mickey Mouse Disco (one I still love to this day), a Fat Albert album, “The Piggy Polka”, and many others like it. We weren’t allowed any popular music at that young age, which was probably okay, as I am very much a lyrics-minded person today and some words to the songs I still groove to are not necessarily things I’d feel comfortable hearing repeated from the mouths of my young nephews and nieces. My mom listened exclusively to contemporary Christian and gospel music from artists like Amy Grant, the Imperials, and Sandi Patty, with their output sounding very often like alternate-universe mainstream pop music that was on the radio at that time.
Secular music was spiritually and morally beneath my mother, and my dad didn’t seem to care about music that much, outside of a few west African highlife LPs they had in their collection. Thank goodness for my older brother and the records he brought home and played on the hi-fi in the living room, with the music of many of those artists still eliciting fond memories in me to this day. I state all of this to provide some contextual background for what would eventually blossom into an interest I became truly passionate about as an adult, which is the collection and cataloguing of my vast music library, which is almost exclusively on physical media and more specifically, on compact discs.
I do currently own some vinyl, though, and while I do not presently own a turntable, I have occasionally displayed the cover artwork from some of those LPs as framed art in my living space. One such album that has remained on my wall for the better part of the year is Masterjam from 1979 by Rufus & Chaka Khan, an album I discovered in its entirety maybe five years ago. In most any kind of place I’ve ever been to with a jukebox or streaming music service, one of the artists that pretty much everyone can agree on is Chaka Khan. It still irks me just a little bit that the only song that many people seem to be able to identify with her is the multi-format smash and million-selling single “I Feel For You” from 1984. That song and parent album are brilliant, but these days, I’m much more into her work with funk band Rufus from the 1970s. I recently hunted down a used copy of 1977’s Ask Rufus, a masterpiece that I’ve been listening to a lot of this year.
The very first Rufus album I owned, however, was Masterjam. It’s a Quincy Jones production through and through, and it has all the hallmarks of that maestro’s work of that late-’70s period: the dynamic bass lines, punchy strings, and jaunty, polyrhythmic percussion. This set combines so many things I love: Ms. Khan’s expressive vocals, Mr. Jones’ spirited production style, and the band’s down-to-earth songwriting and tight playing. Maybe only a couple of months ago, this album’s cover caught my eye in its frame in my foyer and pulled me in for closer examination. The jubilation in the faces of this multi-racial band as they run in the middle of the street toward the camera is infectious. It makes me wonder what they were saying to each other, or hearing from the art director of this photo shoot. Despite the internal struggles happening within this group at the time, one could never tell it from this picture.
The second thing I noticed was the cars that were parked on the street… and what a collection. On the far left is a car that, initially, I had believed for a long time to be an MGB.
Taking a closer look, I was able to identify it as a mid- / late-1970s Alfa Romeo Spider. Its visible tunneled headlamp didn’t look quite like that of an MGB, so my second guess was going to be a Jensen-Healey, but there was no trapezoidal turn signal in the bumper. The pair of horizontal creases on the body side gave it away, once I blew up the cover photo artwork.
Behind the group are a then-new, ’79 Pontiac Grand Prix and a 1976 or ’77 (Ford) Capri II. The model year of the GP was identifiable by the cross-hatch pattern of the front grille, with both the ’78 and ’80 models sporting grilles with a vertical bar texture.
The ’79 Grand Prix was still a very popular car in the second year of its downsizing, with over 210,000 units sold. This number represented only an 8% drop in sales from the year before, so there was no sophomore slump for this personal luxury midsizer.
As for the Capri II, there were only a total of around 111,000 sold in the United States for the four calendar years starting in 1975 as early ’76 models. (Compare this with the 113,000 Capris sold in the U.S. for just calendar year 1973, at the peak of its popularity here.) Still, any Capri seems to have been a fairly omnipresent sight by the late ’70s, with many Capri IIs seen in traffic in many of the TV shows I still view from that era. My second guess about the silver car on the album cover was going to be a Volkswagen Scirocco, but the proportions and tall greenhouse seem more like that of the imported Ford. The taillamps are similar between both cars, at least from a distance and blurred as they are in this LP cover photo.
The car on the right looks to be a ’68 Pontiac Catalina hardtop coupe, which was the second-most popular configuration of this model that year, at 92,000 units. The most popular Catalina for ’68 was the non-hardtop four-door sedan, with 94,000 units sold.
The overall Catalina sales total for ’68 was 276,000, so the two-door hardtop accounted for a solid third of total production. That there were two Pontiacs in this frame that were separated by a decade speaks to the popularity of that make for so much of the second half of the last century.
The collection of physical media can present its own challenges related to space and storage, but there’s something so satisfying to me about taking a CD out of its case, placing it into the tray of my stereo system, and pressing “play” on the remote before looking through the pictures and reading the liner notes in the accompanying booklet. Even though I have everything backed up digitally, I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of my music collection, barring some unforeseeable circumstances.
I realize this may put me into the same category as some of my former grammar school teachers who used to make me snicker when they would reference their vinyl LP collections, but I’m completely unashamed to want the actual object in my hand for the time I take to make my selections and for the money I spend. There’s something irreplaceable in the tangible experiences of playing music. In response to the question posed by the big, Billboard number one R&B smash hit off Masterjam, “Do You Love What You Feel?”, my answer is an emphatic yes.
Everything here but my own words was as sourced from the internet.
This album (and group) are new to me, but the music was enjoyable. It is Quincy Jones that gets my attention – was there ever anyone with broader musical chops? Anyone who can handle Count Basie & Frank Sinatra and then move on through Leslie Gore, Rufus and Michael Jackson – what couldn’t he do?
As for the cars on the cover, this takes me back to when it was easy to hate on underpowered baroque stuff like the new Grand Prix when there were so many nice, clean older sleds like that 68 Catalina.
I have no idea why my parents allowed me to play records on their “big people” record player (a good sized portable one from the late 50s). I ruined a lot of their LPs, but (fortunately?) most of them are not ones I would prize today. I was also given a batch of old 78s from the 40s that had belonged to my father and his sister, and played the snot out of the ones I didn’t manage to break. I found that I liked the music better, including this one (that is way, way different from Rufus and Chaka Kahn): https://jpcavanaugh.com/2019/02/22/the-most-famous-record-you-have-never-heard-of-alternate-title-the-most-obscure-record-you-have-heard-a-hundred-times/
The song in your link is such a classic – even “kids” my age recognize it thanks to the Harlem Globetrotters!
Quincy Jones is another living legend. I bow down. A few years back, I purchased a CD box set of some of his recordings spanning the late 1950s through the early ’60s (before his string of pop hits producing Lesley Gore), and he was, to reuse the word, a maestro.
That entire family, JP. Rashida Jones pretty much always has me in stitches in anything I’ve ever watched her in. I especially loved her as Karen Filippelli on The Office.
In the early ’80s, my parents would allow me and my sister to buy LPs and 45s from the grocery store (?). We came home with “Thriller,” some Lionel Richie solo stuff, Hall and Oates, and some popular singles at the time, so I was listening to records when I was six or so. I soon moved on to “oldies,” and even today my sweet spot (in cars and music) is the 1960 to 1975 area.
I’ve only listened to a little Rufus, but my favorite is “Sweet Thing.” The Catalina is my favorite car on the cover; I have a picture of a ’68 light green Catalina hardtop that ostensibly belonged to my grandpa. My mom doesn’t remember it, but he was trading in his cars every year at that time.
Aaron, your comment reminded me of looking through the LPs at K-Mart when I was a kid! All of the aforementioned artists / albums were played in my household courtesy of my older brother. Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down from 1983 is another album I wouldn’t mind owning again. He did it all – pop, R&B, adult contemporary, and even a little country. I have mad respect for him.
Love the Commodores, too, both with and after him.
Thanks for sharing, Joseph. I was not familiar with Rufus, but it’s nice listening. Although I mostly stick to the convenience of Spotify & MP3’s, I agree that the sensation of pulling a record or CD out of the package and looking through the artwork is always more satisfying than digital formats. Kinda like the difference between looking through a photo album and scrolling through jpegs on a laptop (unless it’s CC :)).
The front fascia on that Grand Prix bothers me. It just looks so awkward having the turn signal lens between the 2 headlights like that, like it’s a mistake. But it is nice when a record cover becomes a car-spotting venue.
Corey, I agree that the turn signals between the headlamps on the Grand Prix was not my favorite look. In fact, when Oldsmobile recycled that aesthetic for the ’82 Firenza, I was like, why? I suppose it was because there was probably only so much the divisions could do to differentiate the J-cars from one another.
Aside from that, though, I have recently found these GPs to be really great-looking cars – probably my second choice after the rest of America’s (the Cutlass Supreme).
I don’t think I’m in the majority, but I like the parking lamps between the headlamps look on Pontiacs of this vintage. Maybe I’m partial to it in part because my first car was a 1981 Catalina. I do think the 1980-81 Bonneville and Catalina wore the look better than the Grand Prix; their grilles were wider, so things were proportioned a bit better. When the Parisienne came online, it was something of a letdown… they ditched the unique headlamp arrangement and were nigh indistinguishable from a Caprice.
For whatever if may be worth, 1959 Oldsmobiles wore their parking lamps between the headlights. I think they were the first manufacturer to do so.
“One You Get Started”, “Sweet Thing”, “Ain’t Nobody”…all great Rufus & Chaka Kahn cuts aside from “I Feel For You”. She did a cover of Little Willie John’s “Fever” that could melt marble for a CD of roots of rock covers. My parents didn’t have much of a record collection (both born in 1961). Dad loved Steely Dan & Led Zeppelin…Mom is into Etta James, Van Morrison, and bluesmen like Howlin Wolf and Elmore James. Somehow I ended up into early rock & roll/doo wop as well as 60’s-70’s pop/soul.
One vivid memory involving music and cars was Dad driving me to the dentist in his 2000 Dodge Ram Laramie SLT – 2WD/Auto with the 318…by that time the 94 Lincoln TC was used up and he needed something more appropriate for working at a country station. For whatever reason, I decided to change the radio from the classic rock station to the oldies station…only about a half second of the falsetto intro of The Tokens “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” gets out before Dad changes it back, barking “I hate that falsetto shit.”
Now that I have my own damn car I play the song as loud as I can 🙂
Chaka Khan is a treasure. I like your Rufus / Chaka picks, and also find that some of my favorite songs are album tracks or songs that reached only one or two charts (versus more of them, simultaneously). “Clouds” and “Through The Fire” (solo Chaka), and “Open The Door” (Rufus)… there are just too many of great songs for me to pick from.
The rest of your comment also reminded me of the unspoken rule that whoever is behind the wheel gets to pick the music. Hahaha… always true.
Even if you haven’t heard of Rufus, you’ve probably heard Rufus, as they did the hit “Tell Me Something Good.”
I think the first time I remember really paying attention to this song, I was just out of college and listening to a radio station that used to run songs from all one year of the 1970s on Sunday afternoons. This great song got lots of spins on that station when it was “1974 Sunday”.
Thanks, Joseph. I love listening to your posted videos while reading your posts. Puts you into the frame of time and culture.
This is one of my Chaka favorites, from a few years later:
https://youtu.be/kDwms-9hdKw
A classic! I also liked Jaki Graham’s house-y cover of it from 1994.
Thanks for that interesting post Joseph. I like it that you often combine your love for music with the one for cars.
Like you I still prefer to collect my music on physicall media, most on CDs. I have some record too, but also lack a record player. But as you pointed out, the artwork alone is a reason to store this old vinyl.
As for the cars, can’t decide between the big Poncho and the Capri.
Thank you so much. I’m torn between the Capri II (one of which I actually wanted to purchase while in high school) and the Grand Prix.
> It still irks me just a little bit that the only song that many people seem to be able to identify with (Chaka Khan) is the multi-format smash and million-selling single “I Feel For You” from 1984
Surely anyone who knows that also knows “Tell Me Something Good” with Rufus (a #3 pop hit), “Ain’t Nobody”, “I’m Every Woman, and her featured-artist stint on Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love”
The “record players by Fisher-Price” link brings up your writeup of a 1980 Chevy Citation. You’re being mean; Fisher-Price would never use such cheap plastics in their products as GM did in the Citation, and have much better quality control…
Oh hell, I didn’t follow that link. That’s brilliant.
I’m laughing right now because my intent with that link was the final paragraph of that essay, where I actually reference the F-P turntable! But, yes – I suppose the subject car of that essay could (and does) also work. LOL!
About familiarity with the songs of Rufus / Chaka Khan, you’d be surprised. I mean, people with a reasonable amount of breadth of knowledge of American popular music would know some Rufus / solo Chaka songs, but whenever I’ve posted something about Chaka Khan on my own, personal social media, there’s usually someone who chimes in with Melle Mel’s “Let me rock you, Chaka Khan” rap from the beginning of “I Feel For You”. Which is great! But there’s just so much more to her work with and without that group.
“Ain’t Nobody” is my favorite Rufus & Chaka tune. Didn’t know she was also on Winwood’s “Higher Love” Cool.
Learning that was her on “Higher Love” was a more recent discovery for me than I would like to admit! Great reference.
Effyeah! Me too. With the platter in a colour that made it look as though made out of rammed Kraft macaroni and cheese. I used to get in trouble for playing 33s on 45 with it.
la673 is right; that FP turntable was a much better-built machine than the Chev Citation ever was.
Daniel, let’s just be honest. Playing 33s on the 45 speed was part of the magic of owning the Fisher-Price turntable. We all did it. I am not ashamed.
The first time I did that, I was like “that Chipmunks asshole got paid that much to do THIS?” (Then I found out later it was a little more involved. But not much more.)
People throw money at the damnedest things, eh? The Chipmunks thing became a lot easier to reverse-engineer when programs like Amazing Slow Downer came along to allow the speed and pitch of an MP3 to be adjusted independently of each other. Here’s The Chipmunk Song (“Christmas Don’t Be Late”) at its real speed, an octave lower. Give it about 20 seconds to get past the introductory babble. And this (yee!) is from the last album I linked in my reply to J. Dennis below.
Mine had a neutral switch… which meant the joys of playing records at any speed with your finger. Backwards was even better, if you wanted to make your parents crazy. Having my own turntable still didn’t completely deter me from messing with theirs. I would still occasionally flick the speed up to 78 or 16.
Yes , I was a bit of a pest.
Oh, me either. I think the objection was mostly that I was doing it with my parents’ records, such as this one and this one, though I can well imagine the irritation caused by doing it with this one, too.
Anyhow. Here’s the day I got the record player:
RE: Cars on record albums . . .
In the early 1970s a local Washington DC funk rock group, The Black Byrds, put out their first album. The production company contacted me because they knew I had “old cars”, and they wanted to feature 2 cars on the cover, the band members with the cars.
So I used my 1937 Packard 120 sedan, and my 1948 Packard Custom Eight limo for a photo shoot. Much to my surprise and dismay, when the album came out, my cars had been used as templates for an unknown artist to create some “funky artwork” based on my cars. So if you can find a copy of this fairly hard to find album, those 2 Packards are based on my cars. It’s easy to see they are Packards, as the artist was faithful to the overall vehicle designs. They just had VERY funky paint jobs, and my ’37 had been turned into a convertible sedan, with the band members photoshopped into the car!
Bill, thank you for this! I am a casual fan of the Blackbyrds, especially “Happy Music” and “Rock Creek Park”.
I am sorry that you weren’t happy with the end result of the artwork based on the photo shoot with your classic Packards. I could imagine feeling a certain way about it if I had licensed some of my own photography for use and have the end product look not at all like what I had originally envisioned.
With that said, I don’t think the cover for 1976’s “Unfinished Business” looks half bad, but I’m unfamiliar with any of their songs on that album. I still think it is super-cool that you can claim that those are your cars depicted! Lots of rare groove fans would salute you. 🙂
And then there’s the ’64 Valiant on the cover of Archers of Loaf’s VeeVee.
Wasn’t familiar with the band, but if this is the cover I think it’s pretty cool. And thanks for your contribution to it, even if you weren’t totally happy with the end result.
Chris, I don’t know if the photo of the album is yours or from the web, but the “cover” artwork actually follows the fold in the cardboard cover, & the back side is a continuation of the front. So the back side shows the front of my 1937 Packard.
At least the artist kept the side trim of the ’48 Custom 8 limo, my car was a VERY late 22nd series car, and had been updated by Henney to reflect the 1950 23rd series Henney-Packard hearse the funeral home had ordered. I think that limo was probably the only one sold with factory updated side trim.
I’ve got to ask. How did you determine that the car in the photo with the Grand Prix was a Capri II? I can almost always walk past a car cover and tell you what is under it, but I’m not seeing a Capri II in that image.
I didn’t see a Capri II either. The tail lights are too tall, among other things.
I’m just curious – what are your guesses? Taillamp configuration and general dimensions of the car were my cues. It looked to have too tall of a greenhouse for a VW Scirocco, and I don’t know of any other cars of that period available in the U.S. that had the amber/red/white taillamp lens configuration in these same proportions.
To be clear, the car is pretty blurry in the cover photo, but like “face recognition”, it looks like a Capri II to me. Of course, I’ve been wrong before and will be wrong again. Taking another look, maybe a Fox-body Mustang hatch, and that’s not actually an amber lens but the light catching it a certain way?
I’m seeing a Mercury Capri II as well, Joseph. Though the details are fuzzy, the combination of tail lamp configuration, as well as the black or dark brown panel between them and the license plate don’t fit many other cars.
I found a better copy of the album art and blew it up. I think the car is a 450 SL with a hardtop, and that the top looks bigger than it is because there is another car behind it.
https://www.last.fm/music/Rufus/+images/6dc38571df534e24be80b5357f10d043
My my two cents, but I don’t think the car is wide enough, nor are the taillamps wide enough, to be a 450 SL. We may both be incorrect.
Just the same, maybe I saw a Capri II only because I wanted to (I love those), so that was good enough for me for the purpose of writing this. 🙂
Joseph,
Wow, “Unfinished Business” is indeed the album of which I speak!
I never thought my comments would actually have a reply from someone who knew the group, and especially the album. I guess we could say those cars on the album cover began life as my 2 cars. Somewhere among my collections I still have a copy of the album.
Thanks for confirming the group and album do indeed exist, and they are not a figment of my imagination some 40 years later. LOL
Oh yeah… add me to the Fisher-Price record player club. I remember cranking mine up loud enough that Mom came in to tell me to turn it down, and caught me dancing to my favorite (kiddie) record. “Dancing” was pretty much jumping on the bed as high as I could in a vertical plane. She asked what I was doing, to which I replied “I’m just jamming out, Mom!” The whole scene was amusing enough to her that I didn’t get in trouble.
I almost forgot about that record player until I saw the picture up there. I was more interested in the Pioneer turntable and receiver in the living room, which I snuck and used whenever I could, when I got to be a couple years older.
I remember “dancing” the same way on my parents’ Simmons Beautyrest to “Billie Jean”. Then the belt happened. LOL Looking back, and for as much as I paid for my current mattress, I totally deserved it.
I have a thing for the physical versus the audio file, too. My car doesn’t use physical media at all anymore, and I still miss loading CDs into my car stereo.
I had a “real” record player when I was a little kid, the same exact one the local schools had, except mine was red and silver, versus the awful green and silver the ones at school were. Real dangerous as if you were grounded and touched any of the 3(I think) chassis screws, you got zapped, along with a blast level, “BZZZZZZZZT!” out of the speaker. As long as you were careful to not touch the table we had it on, you were fine, but about once a year, my sister or I would, and man, it hurt.
I’m an electrical engineer by education. Assuming we are discussing North American specs, there is a simple fix if you have a older 2-wire 110v power cord with 2 identical flat male prongs. Just unplug it from the wall outlet and turn the plug over before inserting it back into the outlet.
Best solution to this problem is a re-wire to a 3-prong plug, and an easy job for anyone with a basic understanding of household power wiring.