Just Call Him Rodd Presley

Before I get to this week's songs, I want to ask one last question to anyone who has an answer: have you used Opendrive? I've used Box the last few weeks, but they have extremely limited downloading for free users (it will likely run out well before the end of each month), and their prices are exorbitant for paying users. I do not believe I'll be using them at length.

Divshare was the cheapest by far (and i guess now we know why), but Opendrive seems to be the next cheapest - it was suggested by someone who posted a comment to a previous song-poem posting (thank you very much!). Unfortunately, I can't actually tell if I can share downloadable materials via Opendrive, as their free version does not allow this. And I don't want to start paying for something, only to find that it doesn't meet my needs. So, has anyone used it, and found it an acceptable way to share downloads?

At the same time, I guess I could ask if anyone has another service they'd like to recommend. I don't want to pay a lot of $$ for something that I do for fun, and even the cheapest of the other sites want as much for two months of service as Divshare charged for a year. And for reasons I'll explain in a few weeks, if all goes well, I will be uploading and sharing perhaps two to three times as much material (in terms of file size - and it won't all be song-poems) starting in August, via this and another site, all of which I'm going to have to pay for....

To my ears, this early Preview single, "Great-A Big-A Blue Eyes" sounds like it was cut out of the same cloth as many of Elvis' 1962-64 singles, and I hardly think that's a coincidence. Perhaps song-poet Don Gaydick (!) even asked for it to sound like those Elvis hits. Rodd doesn't really sound like he's doing an Elvis impression, but the rest of the track (featuring "The Go-Getters") does the trick for him. I enjoy this one a bunch.



Here's a switch. I'm not sharing the flip side of this record, because it has not only been released on a compilation album (Saucers in the Sky), which I encourage everyone to buy, if you haven't done so already. You can hear a clip of the song here.

Instead, I grabbed another Rodd Keith Preview 45, one with an exceedingly dull Dan Monday (not Rodd) song on the flip side, and thought I'd share the better of those two sides here. While not as wonderful as the song above, this one is a mid-tempo number reminiscent of any number of mid-'60's Baroque styled hits, if quite a bit more simple on the instrumentation. I really enjoy Rodd's vocal here.

By all means, chime in if you have words of wisdom about what site to use for links.