Here's one you might not know. In 1967, British singer-songwriter Jonathan King had a modest (exceedingly modest) hit with a song called "Round Round," which I stuck on my mixtape. I didn't have his much bigger hit, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" on there nor did I have any of the dozens of other songs on there that he reportedly recorded under other names. He was quite prolific, though his career hit some major blocks some years later when it was alleged he'd had indecent contacts with underage boys. I won't claim I understand enough about it to say if he was innocent or guilty; just that he was charged and tried and convicted but there were appeals and some dismissals and…oh, go look it up yourself if you're interested.
What interested me was "Round Round," which was an anti-drug tune released at a time when there were a lot of songs glorifying drugs. It felt to me like Mr. King's song was getting some airplay on KHJ on something like an "equal time" basis…so the station wouldn't be pilloried for some of the other records they were broadcasting to a young, perhaps impressionable audience. Or maybe I was just imagining this about a song that was about people imagining things that weren't there. Here it is…
