She Really Likes Those Green Mountains!

Here's an example of a song-poem, the specific likes of which I can't remember seeing before. Both sides are both sides written by the same lyricist - which is admittedly hardly a rarity - but both sides also have nearly identical song titles, but for one changed word. And of the two, the song that lyricist Dorothy Deane would presumably have preferred to have sung by a woman is the one sung by a man. I don't think these songs are particularly good - the second one I actually find extremely dreary - but I thought that the pairing of the songs themselves was interesting.

Bobbi Blake takes the lead first with "My Dear Green Mountain Home". The backing is pretty bland, as I find the majority of late '70's MSR records to be, but the lyrics are at least sweet, and Bobbi Blake provides a warm vocal.

Download: Bobbi Blake - My Dear Green Mountain Home
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Dick Kent takes over with "My Dear Green Mountain Sweetheart", which is just enough slwer than the flip side to become more and more tedious as it goes on - this is not helped out by the way that whoever wrote the music drags out the words of the chorus. And then there's "Oh, My, She's Just Swell".

By the way, the hum you may detect on both of these sides is right on the record. It starts off after the lead-in groove, and ends before the trail-off groove on each side. You can even here someone speak softly for a split second at the start of Dick Kent's side.

Download: Dick Kent - My Dear Green Mountain Sweetheart
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Real Pros Bonanza

Before offering up today's super-deluxe posting, I need to offer a giant thank you and an acknowledgement.

First off, thanks go to a man named George Galvas, who wrote me out of the blue last year to offer me this record essentially free, only suggesting that I post it if I felt it lived up to his billing, which it most certainly does. Thanks, George - I can only apologize for the more than half-a-year it took for me to post the record, which has nothing to do with the quality of the material, which is, in a couple of cases, just amazing.

Then, in the meantime, between getting the offer from George and actually receiving the record, something else happened, which is that the fine folks at Roaratorio Records released their newest Rodd Keith collection, which not only includes the song that George thought made this record so special (I would argue that there are actually two special cuts here), but actually made that track - Black Phoenix Blues - the title track of that compilation, which can be found here and elsewhere. Quite a weird coincidence! (NOTE: See correction regarding this track, below.) Take a trip over to Roaratoria and look around - they have some interesting things to offer.

So I called this a bonanza, and it certainly is - SIX song poems on one 45. You probably know that, after a brief period releasing records by a one-man-band, Cinema turned the "Real Pros" name over to the same group of freelance musicians that were appearing on all the larger name song-poem outfits in the Los Angeles of the day.

And so we find the first two songs, both rather pedestrian to my ears, sung by a vocalist I'm pretty sure is Bobbi Blake. First up is "The Dancer". While the line "fall in love and your heart gets bent" shows some promise, much of the lyric is just not that musical: you know that the singer and the producers have thrown in the towel when they have the singer start talking the lyrics half-way through, as happens here:

Download: The Real Pros - The Dancer
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The same singer returns for track two, a number called "Liberated Woman", an uninspired lyrical put down of one of the many women who would have fit that description in 1973 (and since):

Download: The Real Pros - Liberated Woman
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The real (pro) fun, for me, begins with track three, "Lady Lady", with its repeated references to the title lady being "dressed in plastic" and how she has a "plastic mind", all set to an oh-so-sensitive backing and with vocal stylings to match. This one really grabs me - it's pleasingly ridiculous. But speaking of the vocals, this singer is on three of the four remaining tracks. I'm assuming that the folks at Roaratoria believe this to be Rodd Keith.

Maybe my ol' song-poem ears are playing tricks on me, but I can't tell WHO this is - some of the inflections sound like a thicker-throated Dick Kent, other lines have the timbre and phrasing of Gene Marshall, and at moments, I could believe this is Rodd Keith. But in general, the singer doesn't sound like ANY of them to me - Gene Marshall is the closest, to my ears. What say y'all?

Download: The Real Pros - Lady Lady
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Moving on to side two, we're back to Bobbi Blake, with another song which is no match for her abilities, the stilted, obvious lyrics of "Come Back". The only thing that catches my ear here is the poorly chosen line "we built our love on concrete blocks...". I'm sorry, but when I think of concrete blocks, I think of a broken down car outside of someone's garage propped up by blocks (I probably got this from Archie comics) - this is certainly not the image the writer was going for.

Download: The Real Pros - Come Back 
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For the fifth track, we're back to the Gene Marshall-esque singer from track three, heard here singing the requisite "you done me wrong" songs which certainly seem to crop up at least once among any random sampling of six song-poems. In this case, it has the prosaic title "Girl, You Hurt Me So". This is about as stereotypical in lyric and sound as a song-poem can get.

Download: The Real Pros - Girl You Hurt Me So
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None of the above will have effectively prepared you for the final track, "Black Phoenix Blues". Here we have the same singer as the previous track - and please, feel free to tell me who you think this is - in a nightclubby blues sort of setting, singing words that I'll not quote - you should be allowed to experience them for yourself. I would love to know what this lyricist was rambling about.

UPDATE: I had not yet heard the Roarotorio release when I posted this item. As it turns out, The Real Pros recorded this song twice. This is NOT the version on the Roarotorio album, nor is anyone at that label claiming this is Rodd Keith. My error. 

Here it goes!:

Download: The Real Pros - Black Phoenix Blues
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The Intoxicating Sound of Incompetence!

The story behind this record - well, my story of this record begins not long after I started collecting song-poems. This was well before I'd ever looked at eBay, and what little online record buying I did was through independent websites and GEMM. And it was in looking at the latter one day, probably in 1999, that I saw a Tin Pan Alley release called "The Proon Doon Walk" for sale. Being short on funds at that moment, I saved my finding for later, but when I went back to buy it, it was gone. The title stayed with me, and I always wondered about fabulous, bizarre title that got away.

Flash forward more than a dozen years, to a point at which I received one of the occasional e-mail unsolicited offers to be sold some song-poems (this has happened a few times since I started posting song-poems). Among those offered - all of them listed by record number, for easier comparison with my previous collection - was TPA 402. When I got my purchases, I was overjoyed to see that this one was the very same "Proon Doon Walk".

And while great or weird song-poem titles often turn out, once heard, to be among the duller records in the genre, I'm glad to say this is the exception. It helps that this record was clearly recorded around the same time - and I surmise, listening to it, by the same people - as TPA 390, just 12 records earlier, which contains the wonderfully awful "Snow Man", also sung, as are today's songs, by Bob Gerard.

I simply can't get enough of this deeply, deeply weird record, and would love to have been at the recording session to see if everyone was trying not to crack up the whole time. It's an intoxicating listen.

Like "Snow Man", "The Proon Doon Walk" contains some of the most incompetent bass playing ever heard outside of a first timers music lesson. The bass player literally doesn't seem to be playing the same song as the rest of the band. That's okay, though, because even the guitarist seems to be in his own world at times. At the start of this record, it sounds to me as if at least two different songs are beginning.

And all of is just the underbelly to a ridiculous lyric - listen carefully to the directions, and try to do this dance (perhaps you can contemplate what "Proon Doon" means, too). And those words are set to a repetitive, virtually tuneless melody, featuring Bob Gerard's vocal, in which he demonstrates absolutely no recognizable singing techniques, save for the occasional excited interjection ("YEAH!"). Then there's the momentary addition of reverb at the 1:14 point, which then disappears just as quickly (it has to, the whole song is only 95 seconds long!).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this song is that writer Nathaniel Eing submitted it not only to Tin Pan Alley, but also to the notably un-rock-and-roll oriented Noval records, where it was released as Noval 138, as "arranged by Jay". I would LOVE to hear what this lyric sounds like paired with the slow, lugubrious arrangements favored by the folks at Noval. I don't know which one came first, but Noval seems like the older label to me (I could be totally wrong). In imagining the Noval version, I'm also picturing Mr. Eing's reaction to it, his decision to try again with Tin Pan Alley, and then his reaction to this mess.

But that will have to wait until another day, if at all. And really, isn't it enough to hear the Tin Pan Alley version? For my money, it's one of the more off-kilter things I've ever heard on a 45.

Download: Bob Gerard - The Proon Doon Walk
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The flip side, "Wandering Eyes", features some of the same half-assed bass playing - seriously, is that a gut-bucket and string? - but the rest of the band manages to hold it together in workmanlike style for a marathon 107 seconds this time, and Bob Gerard just sounds like a guy singing Karaoke, rather than the completely over-his-head singer heard on the A-side.

Download: Bob Gerard - Wandering Eyes
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Tedium, As Defined By Sammy Marshall

For those of you who enjoy the awfulness which is often displayed in song-poems, this is your day to rejoice. Because this record is truly terrible. I'm sharing it because I haven't posted anything by Sammy Marshall in ages, because it represents a song-poem label otherwise unknown to me, and because it is so laughably bad.

Earl G. Palmer seems to have used the Globe song-poem factory to produced at least one record for the modestly named "E. G. Palmer Records" label. And for side A of record, he chose "Those Hills Down Home". My issue is not necessarily with the lyrics. They aren't very good - at all - but at least they clearly present a deep feelings about the area in which he grew up (certainly not Lexington, IL, where the record label was located - there are no hills of note there). It covers his return to town, his late mother and related issues surrounding thoughts of home.

The folks at Globe, though, didn't do Palmer any favors. That Sammy Marshall makes some rare flubs in sight reading the melody (which he is clearly what he's doing), and that my copy was minted just slightly off center gives the record a slightly woozy feeling. And as the song goes on (and on... and on), that wooziness may turn to seasickness as the tedium sinks in and you realize at the 2:20 point that the song is barely half over!

See if you can make it through!

Download: Sammy Marshall - Those Hills Down Home
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The flip side, "Keep Your Chin Up" is a more manageable three minutes. Well, they are manageable depending on how much patience you have for the variety of lyric which says that everything in the writers life was horribly crappy, until he suddenly saw the light, got religion, and now everything is fine.

Download: Sammy Marshall - Keep Your Chin Up
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That Name Just Trips Off the Tongue!

Late May is always one of the busiest times around our house, and I've fallen behind in updating the site, right past the end of the month! Rather than wait until I have more time to write at any length about a record I'm sharing, I'll just put this nice little Rodd-in-supper-club mode coupling, starting with the A-side, a tribute to a sweetheart with an oddly spelled name, "Neilida": 

Download: Rodd Keith - Neilida
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On the flip side is another winner, "Why Do I Go On Dreaming": 

Download: Rodd Keith - Why Do I Go On Dreaming
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