Chuck’s Record Collection: “Midnight Hustle”

In the 1970s, U.S. music lovers could get their Top 40 fixes through vinyl collections hawked by Philip Kives’ K-tel and Ron Popeil’s Ronco.

Our Canadian friends had their own home-grown label:

Ed LaBuick’s TeeVee Records.

Like Kives and Popeil, LaBuick, a record and advertising executive who formed the TeeVee label in 1973, released products other than record compilations.  

For instance, according to this 1976 article, LaBuick and Tee Vee collaborated with Canada’s independent television outlet CITV on a series of 1-hour TV concerts featuring notable middle-of-the-road artists of the period.

By contrast, TeeVee’s 1979 two-record set Midnight Hustle is many things, but by 1970s’ definitions, only tangentially middle of the road.

This odd but appealing collection offers up 18 tracks – some pop, some rock, a little soul, and an entire album of disco.

What makes it odd is the packaging: The vinyl version has two LPs, one about as strong a set of Top 40 music from 1978 as you can get. LP two is a disco collection…

…and it’s all over the place.

Standout tracks that crossed over to AT40 (Sylvester’s Dance (Disco Heat), the Michael Zager Band’s Let’s All Chant) share space with disco and R&B gems like Cissy Houston’s Think It Over and Peter Brown/Betty Wright’s You Should Do It.

Then, there are the real curiosities that were hits in Europe, but not in the U.S:

Giving Up, Giving In by the Three Degrees

Dee D. Jackson’s Automatic Lover

Pussyfoot’s Dancer Dance

Lacking access to the Canadian charts, I don’t know whether these tracks did well enough there to justify their inclusion in a collection sold up north.

While on the subject of “up north,” it’s clear that the “Can Con” regulations that applied to TV and radio broadcasts didn’t apply to record collections – only two of the 18 tracks have any Canadian connections.)

The main asset of Midnight Hustle is its sonic superiority to the K-tel and Ronco compilations.

Spreading 18 songs over two LPs rather than one, as the U.S. labels would have done, allows for a less compressed sound.

On tracks like Meatloaf’s Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad and the Commodores’ Three Times a Lady, the full-length album versions are featured rather than the inferior 45 edits.

Unfortunately, in the case of Eddie Money’s Two Tickets to Paradise using the longer album version robs the listener of the hot guitars heard on the remixed 45.

A listener could wonder about the album title, given that Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You and Stonebolt’s I Will Still Love You aren’t disco rave-ups or slow jams. I guess someone on staff chose the name to reflect LP two, where Joe Thomas’ Plato’s Retreat makes a compelling argument.  

Top-shelf:

• Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
• Gerry Rafferty’s Right Down the Line
• I Will Still Love You
• Little River Band’s Help Is On Its Way
• Three Times a Lady
• Dance (Disco Heat)

Decent:

• Let’s All Chant
• Two Tickets to Paradise
• Think It Over
• You Should Do It
• Plato’s Retreat
• Nick Gilder’s Here Comes the Night

Yuck:

The faceless vocals of Dancer Dance, Giving Up, Giving In, Automatic Lover and Karen Young’s Hot Shot make me yearn for a Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor, who know how to provide the right kind of power and depth to dance songs.

And I’ve previously taken Can’t Smile Without You to task. It’s Manilow’s worst. 

Question marks:

Often, K-tel compilations throw in an old track. TeeVee does so here, starting the collection with Boston’s 1976 More Than a Feeling. It’s especially odd because at this time (late ’78-early ’79), Boston had released its second album, making Don’t Look Back a much better candidate for inclusion. Guess it was simply too current (and expensive) to license.

If you find “Midnight Hustle” in a used record shop, as I did in the early aughts, you might want to snap it up. You’ll get an eclectic set at a bargain price.

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