The flip side of this record has actually been available, off and on (currently "on") for several years now, but I thought it was worth posting this record since "Raindrops" doesn't appear to be previously available anywhere, and also, the flip side, "My Wife Ain't Lazy" is downright funny and clever.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Raindrops Downtown
The flip side of this record has actually been available, off and on (currently "on") for several years now, but I thought it was worth posting this record since "Raindrops" doesn't appear to be previously available anywhere, and also, the flip side, "My Wife Ain't Lazy" is downright funny and clever.
Saturday, September 09, 2023
Hurt Me! Hurt Me! I'm Sure! No Way!
I offer apologies to Moon Unit Zappa, but her lyrics seemed too good to pass up with regard to today's offering:
Saturday, August 26, 2023
A Veritable Master Class in Bass Playing
Well, I only got two posts up this month. I spent the middle of the month enjoying working (from home) while experiencing a COVID infection, and didn't really feel like doing anything I didn't have to do.
I'm going to use this space here to respond to a few comments and also link folks to some comments that have been made. A poster calling him-or herself "Doctor Future" offered a very interesting comment, complete with a couple of links, regarding my post about a song-poem regarding Lt. William Calley, which you can find here.
On a completely different subject, Sammy Reed took me up on my wish to hear a song called ""HOOPA LOOPA HOOPA LOOPA DOOPA", which you can read about here, and, in the comments therein, provided a link to that song!
And Rock Smith of Spectropop just wrote TODAY to offer up a photo which features Rodd Keith among several others, at a party in 1974. That picture is at the bottom of an article here.
Thanks to all of you!
Also, a fantastically named poster ("Bob") wrote asking if I own a couple of specific Tin Pan Alley singles. Due to the fact that I am not provided the e-mail address for the sender of most of the comments I get, including this one, I will offer up here that, sadly, I do not have those records. If anyone has early TPA releases by Carmen Taylor, please let me know and I'll let that other Bob know in a future post.
I'd also just like to again thank everyone else who has written in offering thoughts and comments. They are deeply appreciated.
Okay, let's hear some amazing bass playing!
The most spectacularly awful of these are "Snow Man" (TPA-390) and "The Proon Doon Walk" (TPA-402), the latter of which is among the most amazingly incompetent things I've ever heard.
Happily, I've now found another record featuring this giant of bass playing originality, and it features Cathy Mills singing a tribute to Johnny Appleseed, who here has been renamed "Apple Seed Johnny". Our hero happily plucks essentially the same two notes, with a tiny bit of variety throughout the 93 seconds of the song. As a bonus, the guitarist screws up the little ending figure, then he and the rhythm guitarist seemingly can't quite agree on how to play the final chords. Delicious!
Download: Cathy Mills - Apple Seed Johnny
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On the flip side, "What Can I Do?", the bass player has expanded his or her attempts, playing a series of three notes - same notes, same pattern of four beats- through out the 111 seconds of this number. The lyrics also take a sort of startling turn - the singer spends the first 2/3rds of the song wailing about how alone she is and wishing her man would return. He seemingly does return, very suddenly, between 1:17 and 1:19 of the song, over the course of which the lyrics go from "I'm so all alone" (before) to "Thank you for coming back" (after). Glad that was solved.
Download: Cathy Mills - What Can I Do?
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Sunday, August 13, 2023
LIVE FROM THE HOLIDAY INN LOUNGE! A REAL PRO!
It's been a busy couple of weeks here at song-poem central, and if I don't get this out today I probably won't for another week. So I'm not going to say much about these sides, in order to get y'all some music.
Today's offering is another one of those early Cinema releases where the label's credited band, "The Real Pros" was actually one guy with one of them all-in-one home chord-and-rhythm accompaniment organs. And this is from the earliest days of Cinema, when they were also crediting each song-poet as a co-producer of his or her track, for some odd reason.
As they have in the past, this guy's recordings on today's 45 put me in the mind of a particularly chintzy act, performing (in 1971, of course, when this record was produced) in the corner of a Holiday Inn Lounge, being ignored by roughly 90 of the 12 people present.
And while I do adore some of the records this guy made (one of them is in my top five favorite song-poems ever), both of these sides leave something to be desired. "Where Has She Gone?" has a bit more energy and slightly less (very slightly) hackneyed lyrics, so we'll spin that one first. Have at it, dude!:
Download: The Real Pros - Where Has She Gone
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I chose the word "hackneyed" up there on purpose, because... well, let's just say that if the dictionary came with sound file links, the word "hackneyed" might come with a clip of "Be the Girl of My Dreams". Our man at the organ has chosen equally dumbed down musical backing for this masterpiece.
Download: The Real Pros - Be the Girl of My Dreams
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Sunday, July 30, 2023
Sammy Marshall's Greatest Hits
It was five months ago, when, while writing a post about an Inner-Glo records release, I discovered, to my great surprise, that I'd never featured my favorite two Sammy Marshall recordings, which are on the two sides of the same 45. I'd like to rectify that now. The record, as you might surmise from that introduction, also came out on the Inner-Glo label, and like all Inner-Glo releases, was written (or, in the case of these two songs, co-written) by label creator and head honcho (honcha?) Edith Hopkins, my all time favorite song-poet. I've rhapsodized about her quite enough, including in the post linked above, so I'll get right to the music.
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Thoughts on Life and Words from Adam
Today's record is quite fun, on both sides. Because what is more fun than a song observing that we all grow old and become forgotten? Maybe a song sung from the point of view of Adam after being cast out of the garden?
Song-Poet Stephen Karvec seemingly had quite a bit to get off of his chest - sounds like his friends left him behind at some point, and he was downright philosophical about it. Unfortunately, philosophy is not always expressed in phrases that fit nicely into musical patterns. As a result, we get to hear Norm Burns - one of my favorites - doing all he can to sing the following: "you'll have to face life as it is, as it was, and how it will be later on". Catchy!
Download: Norm Burns and the Satellites - Life
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The flip side, "Divine Love", is, as I've alluded to, pretty clearly sung from the point of view of the legendary first man. He's deeply sorry for listening to that serpent and greatly relieved to have been the recipient of forgiveness and, as the title says, "Divine Love". The final line, repeated three times, is a masterpiece of half-assed lyric writing: "I'm so grateful, father, that you still love me, still".
Download: Norm Burns and the Satellites - Divine Love
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Monday, July 10, 2023
Gene's Mammie
Monday, June 26, 2023
Four Great Titles from Dolly-O!!
A few weeks ago, a record popped up on eBay for a very reasonable price, one which I dedicated myself to obtaining. As it turned out, I needn't have worried about cost; no one else bid.
I'm more than a little surprised by that, although certainly pleased, given the prices that accompany a lot of song-poem sales these days.
But maybe this one was such a niche item that the vast majority of those who look for song poems were either uninterested or didn't catch onto what this is. Because it's on the tiny, but wonderful, Dolly-O label and sung by a definite second-tier singer in the song-poem world, Frank Perry. The usual Sandy Stanton group names, such as "Singing Strings" or "Film City Orchestra" has been superseded here by the appellation "The Busy Bees Orch.", which seems almost definitely to have been the choice of the woman behind the Dolly-O label. (Technically, this 1972 release would have been made for Stanton's later label "Action", and not the soon-to-be mothballed "Film City", but he was still using the Chamberlin for the "Action" label, as well.)
For that person was the one and only Dolly-O Curren, who sent out her masterwork lyrics to various song-poem concerns, initially allowing them to come out on those various labels (including the great "I'm the Wife" on Preview) and then later, with her husband Jack Curran, set up the Dolly-O label in order to share them with the world in a more Dolly-O-Centric manner (including re-releasing, on her label, some of the previously released Preview/MSR/other tracks, such as "I'm the Wife").
Several of Dolly-O's lyrics are concerned with Indiana-related themes, and she just seems to have been an interesting person with a cockeyed way of expressing things at times. Her magnum opus, from where I sit, is "Lady Off Pedestal at Notre Dame", which she commissioned with the folks at Halmark, and which resulted in fairly insane mashup of idiosyncratic lyrics, marching band music and Bob Storm ridiculousness. (I should mention that the song is credited, on the record label, to Halmark's resident tenor, Jack Kim, but it's very clearly NOT him.) For a time, early in my life collecting song-poems, "Lady Off Pedestal at Notre Dame" was my favorite song-poem of all, and it's still way up there on my list. You can hear that song, and 26 other song-poems (including a whopping 15 from my own collection) in this post.
Okay, so that's a long way around explaning, for perhaps the third time, why I would be jazzed to buy a Dolly-O 45 EP. But in this case, there was even more about this record that had me jumping up and down in front of the eBay screen. Four - COUNT 'EM FOUR - good to great song titles. Now, it's a song-poem truism that a great title often reveals itself to be attached to an average or even flat out sucky song. But what were the chances that all four of these titles, particularly the two on the A side, were going to let me down.
As it turns out, they didn't. To my ears, Dolly-O goes three for four here, with the double play A side hitting it out of the park twice, to mix my baseball metaphors. Let's dig in.
The record starts out strongly, with a song dealing with a subject which is not the focus of musical forms nearly often enough: Bowling. I find "A Bowler's Glee" delightful. In just over two quick minutes, Dolly-O explores the reasons to join a bowling team, the movement of the bowler, the preferred results of any given frame, the reaction of the crowd, the amount of pins found in a decent score, and the need for a team to avoid "washout" players, among many other points. Being that I am someone who watches televised bowling whenever it's on - All Hail Jason Belmonte! - this was, like I said, a delight.
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - A Bowler's Glee
Play:
But as much as I love bowling, and that song, the killer track here has got to be the second one, "The Nose". This one goes on quite a bit longer, because Dolly-O had a lot to say. It starts off as a tribute to the nose owned by the protagonist's beloved, but quickly turns into a treatise on the larger subject of noses, everything from famous noses of the day to the importance of smelling, and all the ways that the nose and its functions enhance our daily lives. Then we are told:
"Each Nose is Special to the Face it Grows On"
The rhyming phrase that comes after that line is worth the price of admission to this entire record.
As with all of the other songs on this weird little record, the odd... no, that's not a strong enough word... the fairly bizarre backing provided by the Chamberlin adds a certain "Je ne sais quoi" to the proceedings
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - The Nose
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For my money, the song that leads of side two of the EP is easily the weakest of the four, a bit of pathos that doesn't really move me (but your mileage may vary) called "Two Little Glasses".
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - Two Little Glasses
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The last of the four songs is the one I find genuinely intriguing. First, we again have the downright weird Chamberlin arrangement, with unusual voicings chosen and some clattery percussion that I've rarely heard out of that contraption.
But more than that, it seems like a song such as this - in which the narrator is extoling the unusual virtues of a person - typically identifies the person being described by the end of the song. And particularly in the song-poem world, a song of praise of this style is about someone famous, and again, somewhere along the way, that someone is identified by name.
In this song, that's not the case. This engaging, friendly and happiness-providing man is never identified by Dolly-O, beyond a list of very specific descriptions. an interesting choice, and fairly far off the beaten path.
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - The Man of a Million Smiles
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By the way, you can see a trade paper advertisement for this 1972 release on the AS/PMA Dolly-O page.
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
BANG! BANG! MR. BADMAN!!
Download: Sammy Marshall - Bang! Bang! Mr. Badman
Play:
The flip side has the bland title "Be My Girl", and both musically and lyrically, it reminds me of one of my favorite Sammy Marshall sides, "I'll Do It For You", which I'm just now discovering I have never shared - horrors! - I'll have to rectify that, and soon.
Anyway, in "I'll Do It For You", Sammy promises to do such things as "Work in the Rain", "Outrun a Train", and most spectacularly, "Buy you the Balloon with a Gold Star In It". Two of those three promises don't seem to me to be the sort of thing that will inspire life long devotion
"Be My Girl" is much the same, right down to the same beat, and even similar chord structure at times. In this case, Sammy's promises include trying to stay freshly bathed, wearing clean socks (that are fully intact!), trying to wear a tie and working odd jobs, among many other behaviors which would probably be the base expectation from just about any woman out there. I hope this was written to be humorous, and if so, it succeeds, and Sammy and the band make it work by not doing a thing to indicate how ridiculous the material they're performing is. I love it.
Download: Sammy Marshall - Be My Girl
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Monday, June 05, 2023
Howden Records, Part Three
Betty Bond is not totally unknown. She is documented to have appeared on Tropical and a few of its spin-off vanity labels, and I featured her here once before.
Anyway, here she is again with "Face of an Angel". I enjoy the warm band sound here, and both that sound and the chord changes strike me as a bargain basement version of some of the late 1950's and early 1960's country arrangements that I just love. I could do without the chirpy backup singers, but several moments of Betty Bond's aching vocal appeal to me.
Download: Betty Bond - Face of an Angel
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The flip side of this record is Betty Bond's take on "It's the Natural Thing", which was also on the first Howden record I shared, sung there by Ella Howard. I'm quite partial to the Ella Howard version, entirely because the arrangement is better. I think I like Betty's vocal better, but the backing here is tinny, the backing vocalists are chirpier and less appealing here, and the track is not as interesting as is Ella's version. You're mileage may vary.
Download: Betty Bond - It's the Natural Thing
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Monday, May 29, 2023
Bonnie Graham on Preview
First, I was alerted to the fact that this site was recently added to a site called "The 35 Best Obscure Music Blogs and Websites". This is part of a larger website called Feedspot. I'm hoping - and pretty sure - that they mean the music I share here is obscure, and not that the site is obscure. Both statements are probably true, however. In looking around the internet, I've found multiple references to Feedspot, a couple of which say it is a scam of some sort. If anyone out there has information about this, please let me know and I will remove this section of the post and the link.
Anyway....
I am surprised to find that I have gotten through 14 years of this song-poem project without ever featuring Bonnie Graham. I know I own a least a few of her two dozen or more releases on Preview, but perhaps I've found, over the years, that those have been shared elsewhere (I try not to feature music that's already been posted). I'm really not sure. I posted one record which an online site claimed featured her, but a quick listen to that record proved that it wasn't her, and, in fact, that it was likely a different singer on each side of the record! You can read about Bonnie Graham (aka Charlotte O'Hara) here.
Anyway, here's today's offering: