Tin Pan Alley Twin-Spin!

Hello, everybody, hello, 

Okay, so I continue to march through the earliest days of this blog, repairing old posts in backwards order. Today, I have added the sound files to three posts from October and December of 2005, the first year of this project. 

These include: 

1.) A posting of my own live rendition of "The Night Before Christmas", as it was rendered after I put it through the wringer of eight language translations with a now-long-defunct (and fairly poor) free translation site. I later posted this same recording to WFMU.

2.) A set of two examples of the way I was playing with sound that year, one of them the first "cut-up" I'd done in years (of "She Loves You"), and one a layering of elements of 16 pop hits, most of them from the late 1970's, over the original recording of "Yesterday". 

3.) A post about my mom, as she entered the hospital at the beginning of her decline (she died two years later), featuring two of my favorites of her performances. 

All in all, a very Bob-centric set of posts. Sorry about that. Must have been where my head was at, at that moment. 

Oh, and I did get a request for the Merigail tracks that I mentioned last time. Since I'm already sharing two singles this week (and two more "cut-ups"), I'll try to get to that one next time. 

And now: 

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So I realized with a bit of surprise that I hadn't featured Tin Pan Alley in over three months, and thought I'd rectify that with a double offering, one record from the early 1960's, and one from circa the Summer of Love. We'll start with the latter, and better, of the two. 

I truly expected Cathy Mills' "I Was a Dry Wishing Well" to have a lyric which used the Wishing Well as a metaphor, but I was wrong. Instead, it's a fairly delightful and bouncy rendition featuring a lyric in which the wishing well tells us about the people who wish at her location and what they wish for, and entreats those who doubt her power to give it a try. 

And delightful is absolutely the word - if I didn't know better, I'd  have thought Rodd Keith had a hand in this backing track - it has some of the hallmark's of his work at Preview around the same time (roughly 1967), particularly the opening guitar figure, but even more so just the general feel of the thing. This is a really cute and fun record. 

Download: Cathy Mills - I Was a Dry Wishing Well

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The flip side has the clunky title - one which sounds as if it were coined by a non-native speaker of Enlgish - of "My Romance For This Summer-Time". It turns out to be a supper-club-ish number, meandering and unfocused, with a melody I find genuinely hard to follow. 

Download: Cathy Mills - My Romance For This Summer-Time

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The other record, featuring an earlier and more interesting Tin Pan Alley label design, is from roughly 1962, and featuring two songs in styles I would peg to the very late 1950's:

I have greatly enjoyed some performances by Ellen Wayne, mostly on novelty or lighthearted TPA releases. Judging from this record, and some others, I would say that her style on more serious is not my cup of tea. 

Here we have a song with one of the quintessential song-poem titles, "You Hurt Me". The lyrics are pretty standard cookie-cutter song-poem level. Ellen's vocal is, to my ears, over the top, with an almost ridiculous level of vibrato at times, and a degree of emoting via stretching out words and syllables which draws attention to her and away from the words. Your mileage may vary. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - You Hurt Me

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The flip side, "Hold Out Your Arms to Me", bears some resemblence to what the Platters and others were doing in 1956-57, with the exception of that weird stopped beat at the start, which doesn't work for me at all. Ellen tones it down a bit, but only a bit. The song is pretty disposable. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - Hold Out Your Arms to Me

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And now, to my offering up of more of my "cut-ups". Please see the bottom of the my previous two posts, and indeed, the link above to another posting of a "cut-up" for what this is about. 

I'll start with an aperitif, perhaps the briefest "cut-up" I ever did, all two-and-a-half seconds of it. It's another Beatles tune, chopped down to a very basic interaction. 

Download: The Beatles - We Can Work It Out (cut-up)

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For the other one, I just played around with the sounds on one tune, rearranging things within that record. You may need to familiarize yourself with the song.

You see, when I was six, we got the album "The Return of Roger Miller", and I fell in love with it, and it's still one of my dozen favorite albums. I could go on about that album for an hour. Anyway, while this song, "Our Hearts Will Play the Music" is not among my favorites from the album, it is ripe for playing around with the lyrics. 

If you haven't heard the song, I suggest you listen to it first. You can hear it here.  

And now, here's the cut up. You might note a change in tonal quality early on, as I think I switched from a cassette copy of the song over to the original reel, in the midst of playing with the song. 

Download: Roger Miller - Our Hearts Will Play the Music (cut-up)

Play: