Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Hi Old Mistletoe

 As the Christian Church begins Advent, in preparation for the Christmas season, and as the secular world dives headlong into what it calls the Christmas season, I thought it would be a perfect time to both share an EP featuring a couple of song-poems - one Christmassy, and one December-y - and finish off correcting my final posts (Christmassy, as well) from 2008. 

As it happens, I only made 13 posts in 2008 (just before I started this song-poem project), and more than a third of those - five of them - were in December, and all were Christmas related. Today, I have corrected all of those posts, and added a few additional thoughts to some of them. 

These posts featured: two wildly different takes on O Holy Night; another post featuring one song in a stellar arrangement and one song in a deliberately ridiculous setting; a party record about decorating from the 1930's; a children's record which has, in the years since, become my second favorite Christmas record of all; and a slice of life, Randy Newman-esque performance of a song which has, similarly, since become my favorite Christmas record ever

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Let me say in advance that I think three of the four tracks on this EP are pretty stodgy and uninteresting, but I do enjoy that fourth track enough to make it worth sharing. Plus, the Air label - which typically had the most mundane of logos - at one point used what I think is one of the best label designs ever, for any label, song poem or not. I've only featured that design once before, and it's worth sharing again: 


There's sure a lot going on there, all of it interesting!

A quick reminder before I get to the tracks, is that the Air label was some sort of Catch-All for other labels, frequently featuring the output of two or more song-poem factories on the same disc. I have no idea how this system came into being or why. 

Anyway, the first song is titled "Hollywood F-L-A", and is credited to Tony Markham. A quick listen indicates that this is a Film City production, complete with Chamberlin, and unless I very much miss my guess, that's the fairly awful singer usually credited as Jimmie James (or Jimmy James) singing. 

I spent multiple vacations in Hollywood Florida in the late 1970's, when a relative lived there, and the ponderous, energy deficient, and overall deadly dull presentation of this song matches what it's like to spend time there, pretty much perfectly. Presumably, the song-poet did not agree with my lack of appreciation of the town, and I have to wonder what he thought of this arrangement and performance. 

Play:  

Next up, the song that is the reason I chose this particular EP. It's everyone's pal, Sammy Marshall, or, as he's listed here, Sonny Marshall, with a fun, bouncy, yet wistful song called "Hi Old Mistletoe". Sammy, er, Sonny is looking at the mistletoe and being reminded of his lost love. There's not much more to it than that, but the winsome chorus and the mixed group harmonizing with him make these 93 seconds quite enjoyable. 

By the way, the tape stretch (or whatever it is) at the 0:07 point is on the record, and is not a flaw in my digitizing of the track. Such were the high quality standards at the Globe song-poem factory. 

Play:  

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The flip side of the EP features two songs by someone named Jan Snyder, a name that shows up only on a handful of known Air releases and on no other label (at least none documented at AS/PMA. I am admittedly not the best at discerning between certain of the female singers who pop up on song-poem labels, but I don't Jan Snyder's voice is one that I've heard much, if at all. If she sang under another name, I don't know what it is. 

And..... I can find little remotely good or interesting to say about these two bland and uninteresting songs/performances. These remind me of the ultra-vacuous sound of the Ronnie label, but in saying that, I recognize that I'm not actually sure if Ronnie wasn't just an offshoot of Globe. 

At least with the last month of the year starting in mere hours, the first of the two songs is topical. I actually think something decent could have been done with the story told here, although those who produced this disc did not succeed in that way. Here's "December Love"

Play:  

The final song reminds me a bit of those early 1950's ballads that were done using a single singer overdubbing herself  (starting shortly after Les Paul had perfected this technique, but with none of his talent, imagination or cleverness) . And the song itself, "The Turning Point", is about as interesting as one of those typical early 1950's pop double-trackers. That is to say, not at all interesting. 

Play:  



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I made the comments I did on those fixed posts during a time in 2015 when "The DivShare Problem" was an on-and-off thing. I guess we all thought there was a snowball's chance that we'd hear those again, but it became obvious that DivShare wasn't gonna get them working.
I get it, folks - They're all working now! And a big THANK YOU to Bob for making it possible!

Timmy said...

Hollywood, FLA is a real beaut! Diggin' it here in cell block number 13...

Stu Shea said...

While the Sammy track is clearly the most competent and fun, I found "Hollywood F-L-A" to be a most entertaining train wreck. It's at a funereal tempo but they still had to splice together two takes? The line about parking made me spit out my drink.

You're sure right about the label. What a great design!

Thanks for posting!