Well, we're back from vacation and I'm ready to rock and roll you... TO THE MOON!!!!
But before I get to that, I wanted to make sure everyone knew that, as promised, I have begun to re-up the broken files from prior to the summer of 2015. Today, I have restored three posts from spring of that year, a Gene Marshall post featuring the song "Beer Belly Polka", which can be found here, a Rod Rogers Film City classic featuring two patriotic ditties, which you can find here, and a ridiculous Mike Thomas record (but I repeat myself) from Tin Pan Alley, which can be found here.
I will try to continue to fix the broken links as frequently as possible.
And now, back to that satellite we all know and love!:
As you've probably been unable to miss out on hearing, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, which took place on July 20th, 1969. Since there is an entire sub-genre of Astronaut-related song-poems, I'm going to take the rest of the month, once each weekend, and treat you to one of Gene Marshall's musical treatises, one fanciful and the other two in tribute to those intrepid outer space explorers.
Since we're not yet on the actual anniversary just yet, I'll start with the imaginary trip to the moon, on a record which was likely made not long after the actual moon shot. It has the completely unwieldy title of "Fly With Me Darling On a Rocket to the Moon", and for some reason it features some backup singers who sound as if they've never read music before (well, it is likely that they'd never seen this music before singing it). The lyrics smack of someone using a rhyming dictionary while trying to shoehorn those rhymes into her poem.
Gene, on the other hand, does a wonderful job, and the peppy band does its job, too, particularly a fairly wonderful, at times hyperactive drummer - that drummer gives more to this backing track than this simplistic, sing-songy lyrics had a right to expect
Download: Gene Marshall - Fly With Me Darling On a Rocket to the Moon
Play:
The flip side, "Masque", has little to offer, aside from trying to figure out why the song-poet decided on the unnecessary alternate spelling of "Mask". The backing band sounds more like the minimalist, barely talented folks on late '60's Tin Pan Alley records than the usual stellar Preview band.
Download: Gene Marshall - Masque
Play:
2 comments:
Geez, the b-side is as dull as the a-side is great. Thanks for posting these! I love the drumming on the moon song.
Thanks VERY MUCH for starting to get those older links fixed!
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