Here's another one of those very early period Cinema singles, from the period in which house band "The Real Pros" was nothing but one guy with one of those cheap home-model rhythm-chord keyboards. The featured song is "If At First I Don't Succeed", and calls into question for me what the songwriter (and performer) considered "success". Certainly they failed at creating a catchy song or performance. But on the other hand, maybe the intent was to set succeed in setting a record for the number of cliches shoved into one song poem lyric. By the end of the first verse and chorus, we've had "climb the highest mountain" "swim the sea" "prove my love", "give it one more try" and "do or die" as well as the title phrase, and several more follow. See how many you can count!
Download: The Real Pros - If At First I Don't Succeed
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And here's something keen that I never noticed, but which is true of ALL of these earliest Cinema records. The songwriters not only get the standard songwriting credit (despite usually having had nothing to do with the music part of the song, they typically were the only person listed as the writer), but on these records, each of the writers also get a CO-PRODUCER credit. Click on the link for all of the Cinema postings, and see what I mean. Once they got out of their one-man-band period, they seem to have stopped doing this, but what a weird feature!
The flip side "Dancing in the Wine" is yet another one of those "I let you slip away and now I'm at your wedding, watching you with him" songs that I'm sure we've all had quite enough of.
Download: The Real Pros - Dancing in the Wine
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1 comment:
OUCH!
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