Sorry about that title. I just finished reading a wonderful, fairly legendary book from the '70's, about the making of the Wizard of Oz. I inherited it from my mother, and finally got around to reading it, after seeing it on her bookshelf, then mine, for 40 years.
I also meant to include, in last weeks post about the plagiaristic song-poems, that the three 45's that I excerpted, sold for a combined total of almost $200.00, which strikes me as excessive. But your mileage may vary.
I have also, as usual, updated yet another month of previous posts, in this case, April of 2010. Discs which had their contents posted that month include a record from early in Rodd Keith's tenure at MSR, a record written by my favorite song-poet, Edith Hopkins - a fantastic teen-idol type tune decrying empty churches - as well as two, count 'em, two, records by Ellen Wayne on Tin Pan Alley, one is quite decent, and is titled "Devil Fly", and the other is an amazing song-poem record for the ages, titled "Don't Touch Me There!"
And, keeping with the Wizard of Oz theme, at least in that the movie features a dog in a key role, and so does today's feature.....
Today's feature, from Sammy Marshall, under the name "Ben Tate", which was his moniker at the fabulous Ronnie label, contains two demonstrations of the "writers who were not nearly as clever as they thought they were" school of song-poemetry. Both records, particularly the first one, contain some lyrical howlers.
The first is "My Poodle", and it is a veritable plethora of tortured rhymes and forced cleverness. Right away, we havelines designed to end with "curly" and "surly" and then some. My favorite stupid lyrical moment comes at 0:55, and I will not give it away here.
Play:
The author of the flip side, "A Half Moon", fails (to my ears, anyway) for a different reason, that being that he starts with what surely seemed like a clever idea, but which doesn't stand up to any level of attention. It contains the following rhyme:
"A half moon is mysterious / as you gaze upon it at night
It can make you delirious / about the half that's out of sight"
My problem is: does anyone actually think a half moon is mysterious? Since the rest of the song is a simile, comparing this moon analogy to the way everyone has a half of us which is mysterious to our loved one, it seems like the initial concept should at least have some truth to it.
What the writer says about we humans (apart from the moon comparison) is pretty accurate. I just wish there was a better analogy behind it.
But maybe I think too much.
2 comments:
A double whammy, big time, duo hitter! Thanx a lot!
I kinda like both of them--it's teenybop music but not unimaginative in that. The melodies aren't much and the lyrics! Wow. Both songs sure do commit to their goofy conceits, don't they? And no, Sammy probably isn't talking about doing it with a dog.
Thank you for posting!
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