#100 the week of May 30, 1964
What was #1? “Love Me Do” by The Beatles. “Love Me Do” in its sole week at the top of the chart.
It’s a fairly well known bit of trivia now that woolly mammoths roamed the Earth at the same time that the Egyptians built the pyramids. That’s how it feels to see Steve Lawrence here at the bottom of the chart while the Beatles reign supreme. While this is the only week that “Love Me Do” held the top spot, the Fab Four would have six different songs reach #1 in 1964, claiming the top spot for 18 weeks over the course of the year.
With the dawn of Beatlemania, the pop charts firmly became the domain of the teenager. A few adult oriented acts held on*, with Louis Armstrong and Dean Martin taking the top spot with late period classics “Hello, Dolly!” and “Everybody Loves Somebody,” respectively, but rock and roll was here to stay with acts like The Beach Boys, The Supremes, The Animals, and Roy Orbison all scoring number ones that still get played to this day.
*Most confusingly, Bonanza actor Lorne Greene held the top spot for one week with a spoken word piece called “Ringo.” The song (more accurately, a monologue with instrumental backing) was about Wild West outlaw Johnny Ringo and wasn’t intended as a Beatlemania cash in. Chart historians speculate it likely reached number one primarily due to Beatles fans buying it by mistake.
My only real exposure to Steve Lawrence is as a joke, portrayed by Mike Myers in the classic SNL sketch “The Sinatra Group” as a simpering toady to Phil Hartman’s bullying Frank Sinatra. However, Lawrence was a huge star in the ’50s and early ‘60s. Lawrence’s big break came when he was hired (along with Andy Williams and Lawrence’s future wife and duet partner Eydie Gormé) to be part of the musical talent on Steve Allen’s original incarnation of The Tonight Show. A genuine triple threat as a singer, comic, and actor, Lawrence became a regular guest star on television, a career that continued into the 21st century with guest appearances on CSI and Two and a Half Men. His career as a pop hitmaker though, was significantly shorter lived.
In 1957, just as Allen’s Tonight Show wrapped up, Lawrence scored his first hits, a cover “The Banana Boat Song” that went to #18, and “Party Doll” that peaked at #5. The period from 1959 to 1963 was Lawrence’s brief imperial phase, scoring four top ten hits including the #1 single “Go Away Little Girl” and three other top 40 hits. However, the combined youthquakes of Beatlemania, the British Invasion and Motown would bring an end to the era of second tier crooners like Lawrence. “Everybody Knows” slumped to #72 and it was the highest Lawrence would ever chart again.
“Everybody Knows” is a lightweight vaguely country tinged song of unrequited love. To paraphrase Sondheim, it’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just nice. It’s a nice song for nice people who don’t understand why their daughter keeps yelling about that loud racket made by those English boys with the dumb hairstyles. It’s the last gasp of a species not realizing it’s going extinct. Just as an isolated wooly mammoth survived on what is now Russia’s Wrangel Island until circa 1000 BCE, Lawrence (with and without Gormé) would continue performing on the nostalgia circuit until his retirement in 2019. He died in 2024 at 88 years old.
4/10