Wow - it's been over two weeks since I posted. Things have been busy. Because of this absence, I'm going to share two 45's today, both on Tin Pan Alley. I think I'm actually going to try to post two TPA singles at least sometimes, when I feature TPA, because I have so many more singles on that label than any other, and because so many of them are good, weird, awful or interesting in some way. In an unusual side note, today's two singles contain performance from four different artists, including one of the rarest of things on a song-poem record, an instrumental.
I'll get to the Tin Pan Alley festival in a moment, but as usual, I want to update you as to the old posts that I corrected today. The latest upgrades went to four posts from May of 2009, and included a song of Black pride, inexplicably given to Norm Burns to sing, some happy words from Rodd Keith, Cara Stewart and Sammy Marshall on a custom label out of Minnesota, and a typically awful offering from the mysterious folks at Noval.
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And now....
I am still at quite a loss for time as I type this, so I will be quite a bit less verbose and pithy as usual. You will need to get your fill of pith elsewhere.
Today's first offering is from Lance, or rather "Lance" as he was always billed. He was not much of a singer, and this is not much of a song. It does tell a story, however, the charms of which (or lack thereof) I will let you discover, in this tale of a bad man in "Tucson".
Play:
While there was a lot I could have said about "Lance"'s record, if I had more time to type, I don't think, given the opportunity, I would have much to offer about the flip side, which is a rare offering by Nick Fontaine, titled "I Don't Care".
I do enjoy the utterly incompetent edit at 1:23.
Oh, and I once wrote a song called "I Don't Care". It was quite a bit better than this song, and even with that, it was still a fairly lousy. This song wishes it was as good as lousy.
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Hey, Ernie, LET'S PLAY TWO!!!!
So who do you say is the worse singer, "Lance" or Billy Grey? That's a toughie. But Billy makes a good argument for winning that contest with his performance of "She's My Honolulu Baby". My favorite thing about this record is that someone, mostly likely at a radio station, wrote "NO" and underlined it, right on the record label.
Play:
It's harder to fathom quite what was meant by the zero with an off center plus sign through it, which is written on this side of the label.
As mentioned above, this is that rare bird, an instrumental song-poem, titled "I Cry Over You". There's not much of a melody here, 8 bars long, run through quickly and then taken through variations, with a virtually tuneless bridge thrown in the middle.
As I always do with song-poem instrumentals, I wonder what the performers - in this case "The Candlesticks" - received in terms of sheet music or other instructions, in order to make this into a record.
5 comments:
9/14/21:
I no longer have the "Wonderful & Obscure Songs of the Past" post in my "Strange & Bizarre" blog.
Because with the return of Norm Burns' "Black and I'm Proud", all the songs on that post are back here where they belong!
Excelsior, keep up the great work, etc. & so forth!
That 'cross and circle' could mean the second album was owned by the Zodiac Killer...!
There's a reason the word "NO" is written on the Billy Grey side.
The zero and the plus could indicate a target, as in, "shoot this record".
Man. This is some kind of mess. Four songs, not one of them even competent! It sounded to me like "Lance" and "Nick Fontaine" might be the same singer? Neither one seems to be able to project much. At least "Tucson" had two great spit-take moments for me.
The Billy Grey song is a new kind of music: the music of hopelessness. I assume that the radio station program director wrote "No" on the label after ripping the 45 from the turntable four seconds in?
Do you think that other labels had quite this much contempt for their customers?
Thank you for posting. Entertaining as heck!
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