This week in 1965, amid the burgeoning folk revival and the first tentative stirrings of folk-rock, a band named The We Five emerged from San Francisco to claim a sudden and fleeting place in the pop landscape. Their single, “You Were On My Mind,” hit number one on the WKNR Music Guide. It would become both a defining anthem and an enduring enigma: a one-hit wonder whose resonance outlasted its creators’ brief moment in the spotlight.

The song itself was not originally theirs. It was written four years earlier by Sylvia Fricker, half of the Canadian duo Ian & Sylvia, in a modest hotel room in Greenwich Village, where the bathroom , ironically the only roach-free refuge , served as the incubator for what would become a quietly anguished meditation on memory and loss. Fricker’s lyrics, simple, spare, and suffused with a plaintive longing, caught the aching aftertaste of a heart half-broken, half-hopeful. Yet it was We Five’s interpretation that transformed the song into something altogether new: brighter, sharper, tinged with an electric edge that heralded a change in the musical winds.

We Five’s rendition introduced drums and electric guitar into a folk idiom that until then had been largely acoustic and contemplative. Their arrangement, helmed by Michael Stewart, who was at once band leader and architect, carried the song forward with an urgency and polish that contrasted with its plaintive core.

But it was Beverly Bivens, the band’s lead vocalist, who truly made the song unforgettable. Her voice, capable of swooping from a warm low tenor to an almost ethereal soprano, imbued the song with a depth of feeling that was both theatrical and intimate. The line, “When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind,” was delivered with such clarity and vulnerability that listeners found themselves caught in its orbit, suspended between heartbreak and hope.

Yet, like many fleeting sparks of the 1960s music scene, We Five’s ascent was brief. The cultural milieu was shifting rapidly: the British Invasion was in full swing, psychedelia was just on the horizon, and audiences’ tastes were evolving with dizzying speed. Subsequent releases by the band failed to capture the same alchemy. Internal changes and the departure of Bivens in 1966 fractured the group’s cohesion. Though the band continued with new personnel, the original magic never quite returned, and by the late 1960s, We Five quietly dissolved.

But “You Were On My Mind” persists, not simply as a nostalgic relic, but as a document of a transitional moment, a song that straddled folk’s earnest introspection and rock’s burgeoning electricity. It embodies the restless creativity of the era and stands as a reminder of how singular moments of artistic synthesis can capture something timeless, even if the artists themselves drift out of view.

Listening today, the song still carries a bittersweet weight: the ache of a love remembered, the clarity of youthful yearning, and the bittersweet knowledge that some moments are destined to be singular, shining bright before fading into memory. In that glow, We Five’s brief chapter in music history remains illuminated , a testament to the beauty and poignancy of transience itself.

For those of us who grew up addicted to broadcast radio, with its open mics and closed-door politics, “WKRP in Cincinnati” offered both affection and satire. And in that sound booth of a sitcom, no one held the frequency quite like Loni Anderson, who left us this weekend at age 79. As Jennifer Marlowe, the station’s receptionist, gatekeeper, and quiet oracle, Loni brought an impeccable poise to the role, turning what might have been just another dumb blonde into a strategic triumph, a lesson in misdirection, elegance, and the sly power of feminine competence.

Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1945, Loni Kaye Anderson’s rise was not meteoric but calculated, the result of careful self-shaping, and a determination to redefine the narrow lens through which American audiences viewed beauty. When “WKRP” debuted in 1978, it was Anderson’s turn not only to perform but to reimagine what it meant to be a woman in the workplace—on screen, yes, but also behind the scenes.

Jennifer Marlowe was a triumph of composure amid absurdity. In a workplace full of buffoons and blowhards, Anderson’s character was a fixed star—cool, efficient, unflappable. She didn’t chase the spotlight; it adjusted itself around her. She may have been written as set dressing, but she directed the room, calibrated the tone, and ran the station with the arch of an eyebrow. Her performance was a study in balance, glamour with wit, strength in stillness. It was a new archetype for a new age: the receptionist as CEO-in-waiting.

Her impact went beyond the laugh track. In 1980, Anderson renegotiated her salary, publicly and unapologetically, a quiet but seismic assertion of professional value. In an industry where women were often ornamental, she refused to be background.

Her off-screen life, of course, played out in full view of the tabloids, particularly her high-profile marriage to Burt Reynolds. Their romance was box-office gossip, punctuated by “Stroker Ace,” a cinematic misfire that could have tanked lesser stars. But Anderson emerged, as ever, with a sense of timing—comic and otherwise. When the marriage ended in 1994, she handled the divorce with a kind of practiced grace, turning personal upheaval into another moment of public poise.

Later in life, Anderson shifted focus. She embraced family and advocacy, trading scripts for causes. But her legacy was already inked into the cultural DNA. Jennifer Marlowe, with her icy-cool detachment and quiet command, had helped rewrite the sitcom woman, less sidekick, more anchor.

Loni Anderson made it look easy, which of course meant it wasn’t. She moved through the business with a rare blend of self-awareness and sparkle, a performer who understood the machinery of the image and knew how to quietly steer it. Her blonde hair became a Trojan horse for the kind of wisdom that doesn’t announce itself, but leaves a mark.

In an industry still prone to confusing sparkle for substance, Loni Anderson was a reminder that the two could, in the right hands, be the same thing. Her presence never needed to shout. It simply adjusted the orbit of the room.