EARLY '70S RADIO: Bobby Goldsboro - "Watching Scotty Grow" (1970)

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Bobby Goldsboro - "Watching Scotty Grow" (1970)

"Watching Scotty Grow" (1970) - Bobby Goldsboro

Written by Mac Davis * Produced by Bob Montgomery and Bobby Goldsboro * 45: "Watching Scotty Grow"/"Water Color Days" * LPs: We Gotta Start Lovin', Watching Scotty Grow * Label: United Artists * Billboard charts: Hot 100 (#11), easy listening (#1), country (#7) * Entered: 1970-12-19 (easy listening), 1970-12-26 (Hot 100), 1971-01-23 (country)

Bobby Goldsboro's #1 hit "Honey" (1968), with its maudlin arrangement, gawky narrative, and crocodile tears, established him as one of pop music's emperors of melodrama. He'd been vying for the crown as far back as 1962, when his first charting single ("Molly") expressed the words of a soldier returning home and revealing to his family that he could no longer see.

Even so, throughout his entire eleven-year run of hits, Goldsboro's material would demonstrate the odd ability to yo-yo from bathos to pathos, drawing listeners into a realm of meaningful reflection against their better judgment. With "Watching Scotty Grow," for example, you hear its smiley-face trumpet hook and Mac Davis's lyrics about a little boy doing little boy things, and you grimace. But then you find yourself caught up in reflection. "You can have your TV and your nightclubs and you can have your drive-in picture show," Goldsboro sings. "I'll stay here with my little man near and we'll listen to the radio, biding my time and watching Scotty grow."

Because I considered the song, as I still do, to be a perfect signature record for the era's pop music preoccupation with children, I titled the first chapter of my Early '70s Radio book "Watching Scotty Grow: The New Top 40 and the Merging Spheres of Parents and Preteens." The song even presented the very scenario I was discovering, a world where kids and adults hung around together and listened to the same station, with everything that implies. ("This mutual radio-listening environment," as I put it then, "was a contradictory affair.")

"Watching Scotty Grow" originally appeared on a late 1970 Goldsboro album called We Gotta Start Lovin' but, presumably because of its radio success, it became the title song to a revamped early 1971 album (with the same track listing and United Artists serial number). Its new cover depicted Goldsboro and a youngster in father-son mode.

Billboard conducted a rather sloppy handling of this album's chart run. Released on November 20 (according to an 11/28/70 ad), it debuted on January 23, 1971, and resided on the chart all the way until March 6, 1971, as the mistitled "You Gotta Start Lovin'." On March 13, the album disappeared from the chart altogether, and on March 20, Watching Scotty Grow appeared as a new entry. On March 27, though, it appeared as an album that had been on the chart for nine weeks, ignoring the fact that it had vanished for one entire week. (It peaked at #120 on February 20, by the way.)

On the single's flipside is a badly dated paint stroke by Kenny O'Dell and Larry Henley. On November 11, 1970, Billboard had spotlighted this "potent interpretation" as the A side. (It also recommends a competing version by a vocalist named Randy Horan.)

Side A: "Watching Scotty Grow"

Side A: "Water Color Days"

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Good Words About Early '70s Radio

"Kim Simpson does a superb job analyzing the manifold factors that contributed to the radio format revolution while advancing the reader’s understanding of a transformative period in American culture. Ultimately, Simpson’s astute assessment of radio’s second heyday adds richly to the ever-growing canon of media studies. Early '70s Radio is must reading for anyone interested in the unique role specialized audio programming played in an era of historic social change."

–– Michael C. Keith, Author of The Radio Station

"All of the men and women, though the latter were few in music radio for many years, took radio programming seriously not only as a career, but also with passion for its viability. This included the disc jockey, the program director, and the general manager as more and more of them graduated from programming into management. Thus, I’m pleased to read this wonderful, compelling book by Kim Simpson. He treats with respect what all of us in the 60s and 70s took seriously. It was our life! And he employs penetrating wisdom and astonishing perception to correlate music with the cultural mores of our times and depict what really was and why. Great book!"

–– Claude Hall, B.J., M.Ed. Radio-TV Editor, Billboard, 1964-79, and Assistant Communications Professor, State University of New York at Brockport, 1983-89

"Too often we separate the agendas contained in business plans from the decisions of daily life. Kim Simpson’s Early ‘70s Radio reunites the items found on playlists with the passions and polemics that infused a complicated decade. His skilful scholarship and attention to detail clarify that what we listen to and how we lead our lives do not march to separate beats, for our actions and our aesthetic preferences bear subtle and significant harmonies."

–– David Sanjek, Professor of Music Director, Salford Music Research Centre University of Salford, U.K.

"Early '70s Radio is a fast-paced romp through the formatting revolution that changed the ways pop music continues to be sliced and diced. Surprises pop off every page. Examining everything from monster hits to obscure and often-hilarious novelty tunes, Kim Simpson shows how Top 40 splintered into middle of the road soft rock, album-oriented hard rock, crossover soul and disco, and country pop. Each format promised to serve up a distinct listening demographic to hungry advertisers. Yet Simpson uncovers fascinating commonalities across the dial—including the increasing desire of stations to attract women instead of men—that fundamentally changed the sound of pop music. And who knew there were so many songs featuring children in the era? If you ever wondered about the roots of the Miley Cyrus/Justin Beiber phenomenon or how Glee learned to appeal to parents and their kids at the same time, Early '70s Radio delivers. I’ll never listen to 'Yummy Yummy Yummy' or 'Rubber Duckie' the same way again."

–– Karl Hagstrom Miller, author of Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow

"Music historians are only now discovering what most everybody in the 1970s already knew: commercial radio formats really really mattered. Looking at the five key strands (Top 40, MOR, rock, R&B, and country), Kim Simpson surveys a moment when identity politics and counterculture were becoming niche marketing and new kinds of mainstreams. You can't explain what happened to American popular music after the 1960s without understanding these processes, and Simpson provides an able, accessible guide through a daunting range of sounds and contexts."

–– Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama and editor, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music