Sit On It!
Flashing back on 1976's flood of Fonz-related toonz
1976 was the year I turned 10, the year I fell head over cleats in love with baseball, and the year I first kinda-sorta started paying attention to the pop music playing on the radio. Here in the US, 1976 was also the year of nationwide Bicentennial celebrations, the CB radio explosion, Frampton Comes Alive, Parliament’s Mothership Connection (more on that in the next CROSSED CHANNELS podcast), and the debut albums from the Ramones and Boston — both of which cost about the same amount of money to make, albeit to remarkably different sonic and social effect.
It’s the year that inspired me to write my second (and favorite) of my three baseball books — Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 — and a year whose legacy still inspires and astounds me in many other ways, even if the pride and optimism I felt for my country 50 years ago now feels like a faded, poignant memory amid the rampant fascism, corruption, cruelty, chaos and ineptitude of our current presidential administration.
Nevertheless, I still carry that irrepressible Spirit of ’76 in my heart, along with my happy memories of that year. And one of the best things about 1976, at least if you were a ten year-old American boy, was that it was also The Year of The Fonz.
Originally a minor Happy Days character when the 1950s-flavored ABC sitcom debuted as a midseason replacement in January 1974, Henry Winkler’s good-hearted hoodlum Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli (a.k.a The Fonz) had become so wildly popular by September 1975 that nearly every episode in the show’s third season was written around his character. Putting the spotlight on The Fonz — and amplifying such immortal Fonzie-isms as “Cool it!”, “Eeeeeeyyyyy!” (an exclamation delivered with a variety of tonal shades and meanings, with one or two thumbs held up when it was meant positively), and “Sit on it!” (an insult definitely not delivered with a raised thumb) — helped propel Happy Days to #11 in the Nielsen Ratings for the 1975-76 season, and then all the way to #1 for 1976-77.
As a result, The Fonz was everywhere in 1976 — on magazine covers, t-shirts, posters, you name it. This period of Peak Fonz (he wouldn’t literally “jump the shark” until Season 5 in the fall of 1977) also coincided with the release of a fair amount of Fonz-related music. But even though this was a time when TV stars with significant teen and pre-teen appeal were commonly rushed into the studio to make cash-in records — like John Travolta, then best known as Welcome Back, Kotter’s Vinnie Barbarino, who scored a Top 10 hit in the summer of ’76 with “Let Her In” — absolutely none of said music featured the vocals of Henry Winkler himself.
Most memorable, at least for me, was the commercial jingle for Mego’s Fonzie action figure, which featured jointed thumbs and special “thumbs up action” triggered by a special lever that jutted awkwardly from his back. “Sticks his thumbs up in the air/Fonzie’s cool/Not a square,” testified the ad’s doo-woppish jingle, just in case you somehow needed reminding or were still unsure on the matter.
Though we all dug The Fonz, my friends and I thought of ourselves as way too cool to actually buy the Fonzie doll; we saw it as something more for those kids we knew who actually thought they were The Fonz — the sad little twerps who wore imitation leather biker jackets to school and drew motorcycles on their notebooks at every opportunity. We did, however, enjoy singing the jingle while substituting some really foul lyrics of our own. (I will not repeat them here; suffice to say that the kids in The Bad News Bears, my favorite film of 1976, had nothing on us when it came to language that would make the proverbial sailor blush.)
March 1976 also saw London Records release “The Fonz Song” by The Heyettes, a studio group featuring vocalists Jessica Smith, Julia Tillman and Maxine Willard. Tillman had previously sung backing vocals on Carole King’s Tapestry, and she and Willard would go on to sing on KISS drummer Peter Criss’s self-titled 1978 solo album — and as musical achievements go, “The Fonz Song” certainly hovers somewhere between those two records. I have no idea who handled the song’s faux-Fonz spoken interjections, but it definitely wasn’t Henry Winkler.
Weirdly enough, “The Fonz Song” was arranged by Tom Scott, the legendary L.A. sax player whose session and arranging credits had already included work with Carole King, Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and Wings, Donovan, Neil Diamond and Glen Campbell. Perhaps Scott was running into some sudden cash-flow issues that week, or did this session as a favor for someone.
In any case, I was completely unaware of this song’s existence until the mid-eighties — an oversight I might ordinarily blame on my lack of regular exposure to pop radio in the spring of ’76, except I’m not sure that even my more pop-conversant fourth grade pals ever heard it. Because, despite London’s full-page Billboard ad to promote it, the single debuted at #99 on the Hot 100 for the week of April 10, 1976… and then, shockingly, vanished from the charts forevermore.
To be fair, “The Fonz Song” did have the misfortune to come out during the same month that Reprise Records released Pratt & McClain’s Happy Days theme song as a single. Even at the height of the show’s popularity, most AM radio programmers were only ever gonna add one Happy Days-related track at a time to their playlists, and the song that millions of TV viewers heard every Tuesday night was obviously the sure bet.
“Happy Days,” which reached #5 on the Hot 100 in the spring of ’76, did not mention The Fonz in its lyrics. But Reprise Records made up for this egregious oversight by including “Cruisin’ With The Fonz” — a peppy instrumental that laid some very 1970s keyboards and a touch of 1950s sax over a classic “oldies” I-VI-IV-V chord progression — on the single’s flip side. It would be another few years before my friends and I discovered that the term “Cruisin’” had an entirely different connotation among a certain sub-set of gentlemen who wore jackets that looked like Fonzie’s; but that’s really a story for another time.
Oh, but do not weep for The Heyettes — for they were at least paid to make an entire album, something that a great many other talented musicians have never been able to say for themselves. Of course, along with “The Fonz Song,” the ladies had to record awful novelty songs for the album like “Fonzie for President” (1976 was an election year, after all), “Do The Fonz” and “Sit On It,” but hey… a person’s gotta eat, right?
The LP was produced by Al Capps, who had recently helmed album projects for TV actors Cliff DeYoung and Rodney Allen Rippy, so you know this is some high-quality stuff. I’ve never actually seen a copy of Fonzie, Fonzie He’s Our Man in the wild, but maybe there’ll be a 180 gram vinyl Record Store Day reissue coming our way in the near future…
“The Fonz Song” also made it onto Fonzie Favorites, a cash-in comp released in 1976 by Juke Box International, a budget label which seemed to specialize in sold-on-TV releases. Much like the soundtrack from American Graffiti — the film that inspired the creation of Happy Days — Fonzie Favorites is primarily comprised of genuine hits from the 1950s and early 1960s like Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” and the Everly Brothers’ “Bird Dog,” which The Fonz has allegedly chosen to share with you in lieu of trying to sing. In fact, several of the songs (like Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya” and The Regents’ “Barbara Ann”) actually overlap with American Graffiti, but maybe Juke Box International just figured that their target market was too young to be aware of a movie soundtrack that had been released three years earlier.
Exclusive to Fonzie Favorites are two of the most unforgettable tracks ever committed to wax, both courtesy of impressionist Frank Lyndon. “Impressionist Track,” which closes Side One, is basically just half a minute of Lyndon intoning “Eeeeyyyyy!” “Sit on it!” “Nerd!” etc. over the Happy Days outro music. Back in the days when I made mixtape cassettes for friends, I always kept “Impressionist Track” on hand in case there were a few empty seconds to fill at the end of the tape. (Whomever uploaded the track to Youtube also reversed it at the end, giving it a psychedelic twist that the original version certainly would have benefitted from.)
Even more jaw-dropping — and frankly, I have deeply mixed feelings about exposing my readers to such a disturbing listening experience — is “The Fonzarelli Slide,” aka “Fonzie Meets Kotter’s Sweathogs (At the School Dance),” in which Lyndon not only imitates The Fonz, but has him facing off on the dance floor against the cast of ABC’s Welcome Back, Kotter, all of whom Lyndon also imitates. What results is a pop cultural battle of the titans not unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla or Freddy vs. Jason, but substantially more depressing. Click the clip below to hear it for yourself, IF YOU DARE…
Lest all these faux-Fonzie waxings give you the impression that Henry Winkler assiduously avoided the microphone during 1976, The Year of Our Fonz, let me direct you to an incredible clip from Neil Diamond’s concert film Love at the Greek. Recorded in September 1976 at L.A.’s Greek Theater (and broadcast on NBC in February 1977 to promote the album of the same name) the concert briefly features the vocal talents of one Mr. Winkler. Neil — who indulges in plenty of “thumbs-up action” of his own during this part of the performance — calls him up to the stage around the 3:40 mark, but watch the whole thing for the full set-up, which really amplifies the all-consuming cringey-ness of Neil hectoring Henry to sing “Song Sung Blue” like The Fonz.
For a brief second, you can actually see Henry’s soul leaving his body as he realizes, “Oh my god, is this really what my life has become?” But then, total pro that he is, he gives it the Full Fonz anyway — even while wearing a Starsky & Hutch-style shawl collared sweater!
Post-script: In the late 90s/early 00s, I attended house party in L.A. thrown by a friend’s interior design company in honor of completing their first full year in business. At one point, I spied Henry Winkler (apparently one of their clients) standing by himself in the backyard with a plate of hors d’oeuvres and contentedly taking in the scene. I really wanted to go up and talk to him, but I found myself a) far more starstruck than I usually am around famous people, and b) worried that my inner 10 year-old would suddenly come busting out with an “Eeeeyyyyy! Fonzie!” or one of his handful of lines from 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush (“My money is on Chico!”) and completely ruin his evening. (And it’s not like I hadn’t already put a foot wrong with a favorite performer in the past.)
So I took the wisdom of The Fonz to heart and played it cool… though I later learned from my designer friend that Henry Winkler was genuinely one of the nicest people in Hollywood, and that I totally should have struck up a conversation with him. I don’t have many regrets in this life, but that’s definitely one of them.
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I enjoyed reading this, thanks. As a die hard Fonzie fan, it brought back alot of memories. I found a stray cat in 1975 and took her in and even named HER " Fonzie". Neil and Henry.....cringe.
"Fonzie Favorites" was one of my very first LPs - alongside Heatwave's "Too Hot To Handle" and somehow the Beach Boys' bizarre "Love You". Using the Fonz's mug to stealth promote The Coasters and Lloyd Price and Little Richard was an act of low-key subversion, and I for one am happy I was co-opted! Sadly, this means I was also aware of "The Fonz Song", which you had to skip over at the top of side 2 to get to Chubby Checker.