“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go … downtown.”
I had my iPod set on Shuffle the other day and Petula Clark’s biggest hit ever from the mid ’60s came up, and just for a moment or two, it was 6:30 a.m. in the late winter of 1964-65 and my clock radio was awakening me.
You may have seen “Groundhog Day,” where Bill Murray’s repeating day always started at 6 a.m. with Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” but this isn’t that at all. When I was in high school, radio stations had rigidly enforced playlists and essentially played the same song at the same time every day.
Since “Downtown” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, it was a big part of those playlists.
Is there a point coming?
Of course there is. In 1965, there were only two days to hear a song you liked. You could catch it on the radio when the station chose to play it or you could buy the record — 45 or LP — and play it on your phonograph.
It was even worse with movies and TV shows. With no videocassettes or DVDs, once a movie disappeared from theatres, pretty much the only way you could see it again is when it was shown on television or if you were in a big enough city to have a theater that showed old movies.
Seeing a movie on television was no bargain either. Unless a movie was rated G, there were usually things cut to protect the sensibilities of children, old people or the overly sensitive.
That made it ridiculous to show R-rated movies, and a wonderful example came when “Midnight Cowboy” won the Best Picture despite an X-rating at the time. A 110-minute running time was cut to 90 minutes, and a classic movie was turned into a jumble that made little or no sense.
Times did change, though. First with the advent of cable television and then with cassettes and discs, there were few limits to what anyone could see at home. And what was almost as good with the ability to tape or later to TiVo shows, it was just just the freedom to choose your entertainment but also to choose when to see it.
And I can still wake up to “Downtown” every morning thanks to Alexa and streaming music.
As long as it’s what I want.