The Return of Rodd

 Howdy, folks, 

For the first time, I have no updates, having completed that project, except for two lengthy tribute posts, last time around. 

And by chance, I found this week that somehow, I have gone since last fall without sharing a Rodd Keith record. I've had a few which seemed likely to feature his production magic in those ensuing months, but there have been no Rodd vocals on this site in months and months. So I'm going to feature Rodd for at least the next couple of post, or perhaps every other post. 

Part of the problem is that I'm running out of Rodd singles which I own, and which haven't been shared here or elsewhere, but there are still some left. And today, I have one of them, I will also return to sharing one of my cut-ups, after skipping that feature, the last time around: 

Today's Rodd 45 finds our man Keith in a country mood, and, if my perception of his vocal is correct, subtly mocking the genre, as he did from time to time when singing country-ish numbers. The backing track will surely be familiar to some of you, as it was used repeatedly on Preview 45's. 

This song, "I Love Him So", strikes me as oddly incomplete, starting a story and not really finishing it. It's the story of a blind boy and his lost dog. I can't think of too many story songs (or those that seem to be telling stories) that never actually complete the story, or even move it beyond the basic set-up, but that's what happens here. In addition, this record seems to go on forever, lasting a very un-song-poemish three minutes and 27 seconds. 

I will also acknowledge here that both sides of this record are beat to hell. Sorry about the poor sound. 

Download: Rodd Keith - I Love Him So

Play:

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The flip side finds us in more of a country-flavored pop setting, a song with the remarkably unwieldly title "You Are the One and Only One For Me". The song and backing band sound are pretty dang bland, but I do have a soft spot for what Rodd did with the (double Rodd) duo singing backup. 

Download: Rodd Keith - You Are the One and Only One For Me

Play:  

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And now, yet another "cut-up". This one was done in tandem with my best pal Stu, way back around late 1982. In this case, we turned Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" into "The Big Boy Rock", with lots of references to food (among other things), much of those taken from the Big Boy ad that you can hear in its original version near the end of this post, which I contributed to the 365 days project way back in 2003. 

By the way, a couple of the drop-ins are from private recordings that Stu and I had access to, including the first one, "restaurant", which came from one of my own songs. 

And again, I will mention that this is not safe for work, on account of a single four letter word early in the cut-up. 

Download: Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock (cut-up)

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The Wolf-Tex Label

 Greetings, dear readers, 

Well, today is the day. Today, I have reached back and corrected the first handful of posts that I wrote on this site, way back in June and July of 2005. So now, with the exception of two very labor intensive posts (which I will repair later), every record described in this site's history is paired with a download link and a playable link to that record. Yay!

To reach that conclusion, I had four posts from the summer of 2005 to refurbish. And as I said with the last batch of corrections, as it turns out, I later shared all of this material at WFMU, but I wanted the posts on this site to be able to stand alone. And so, we have the following: 

1.) The introductory post I wrote on June 24th, 2005, a few days after my 45th birthday, which is here. 

2.) My first musical post, featuring a favorite of mine by Thurl Ravenscroft. 

3.) A much beloved track by Harley Luse and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, complete with an addendum containing further information. 

4.) My first mention (here) of Merigail Moreland, in a post featuring the song "Head Cheese". 

5.) A song I knew nothing about, from a Russian album I'd bought years earlier. This one also contains an addendum, including photos of the record labels, and a request for anyone to tell me the name of the song, and whatever else the label says. That post is here. 

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Today's spotlight is on the Wolf-Tex label, a label which I have never featured before largely because I only have a few releases on the label. And Wolf-Tex fascinates me, as there are things about the label which can only really be said for one other label, and that is Fable. 

For in addition to being the sort of label (such as Air and a few others) which did business collecting tracks from multiple song-poem labels and releasing them - a system I already don't really understand - Wolf-Tex also made at least a handful of attempts at releasing potential hit records (without success), records which have gone on to be highly collectable in the rockabilly collector's world. Those are by Harold Montgomery (father of John Michael Montgomery), and have sold for as much as $1000.00. 

The combination of a highly collectable subset of records released along side song-poem records is a bit like Fable, but the level of success of those few collectable discs is outside of anything else found in the song-poem world. 

Here is what one side of today's Wolf-Tex release looks like: 

This record has what appears to be three tracks from the Globe song-poem factory, and one from Film City. Oddly, as you'll see on the flip side (below), both of these companies are credited by name on the other side of the record, while the first song credits "M.G. Guitar" rather than Globe, in Nashville, and the second one here does not credit a company at all, which is odd, only in that the other three songs have credits. 

The first song up is my favorite of the four, by far. It certainly sounds like it's from Globe, but admittedly, I do not recognize the singer, credited here as Roy Biggs. And as the song is written by "C. Biggs", maybe this is more of a vanity project, commissioned with Globe, then a true song poem. 

Anyway, the song, "Play Boy" has a groovy beat, a swingin' vocal and some chirpy back-up singers, and it's a catchy tune, to boot. It even has a pretty good story song lyric, about a guy who achieves fame but loses love in the process. Good stuff!

Download: Roy Biggs - Play Boy

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Staying with Globe, we have an artists credited as Gene Brooks, but who is quite clearly Sammy Marshall, here joined, very nicely, but I singing group credited as "Coquettes", which sound to be, at least at times, like three Sammy Marshalls. The song, with the rather clunky title, "That Thing Would I Do", doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, as it's bland, with lyrics reflected in 300 other song-poems. But I do like the harmonies. 

Download: Gene Brooks (Sammy Marshall) - That Thing Would I Do

Play:

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Now, let's flip the record over and take a trip from Nashville to Film City in Los Angeles. 

The Chamberlin playing and vocal on "She Meant So Very Much to Me" cause me considerable confusion. The AS/PMA website reports this record to have been released in 1965, and those dates were usually based on considerable research, or at the very least, a dated ad from a music publication. 

Yet this track - credited to "Val Norman" - has a singer who sure sounds to me like Jimmie (or Jimmy) James (the music sounds like other James tracks, too - from the post Rodd Keith period). James is not known to have recorded for the company until the late 1960's at the earliest. On the other hand, "Val Norman" has one credited performance on the Film City label itself, on one of the first dozen or so releases from the label! So I'm confused. Anyone out there have any insight? 

Anyway, musically, this is no great shakes, but the lyrics have a twist which caught me off guard, and rendered them sweeter and more endearing than I think they would have, without that unexpected element. 

Download: Val Norman - She Meant So Very Much to Me

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The EP ends with by far its weakest cut, and for once, we have a singer credited under a name she regularly used on song-poems. It's Damita (who also recorded at times as Joan Auburn and as Kris Arden), and of course, for someone billed under a name she regularly used, in this case, the folks at Wolf-Tex put her name in quotes. 

The song, "I See the Lord", sounds more like a demo than a produced song-poem, featuring, as it does, simply a piano accompaniment and vocalist. The lyrics, while no doubt heartfelt, are fairly trite, and there's not enough in the arrangement to make the performance interesting. 

Download: Damita - I See the Lord

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ADDENDUM: Please see the comments for some nice, additional research regarding the credits on this record, done by my pal Stu. 

A Song Title For the Ages

Howdy, everyone, 

Well, last week I mentioned being short of time, and that I'd be brief in my comments. Little did I know how much time I would have starting the next afternoon. For one day later, I learned that, due to COVID's effect on my agency's finances, my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. After 29 years with my agency, I am out of a job, and this is the first time in about 40 years that I've neither been employed or in school. Hopefully, it will be just a hiccup in time, but who knows. 

Anyway, I have updated another three posts from way back in the summer of 2005. To explain two of the three posts, I should mention that, as I was flailing around for something to post, I decided to offer up my listening list for the month of June, and offered to share anything from that list on my site. My friend Michael asked for six of the tracks, and I posted them, in two posts. The first featured three tracks from a Latin flavored Percy Faith album from 1952, along with a detailed explanation of how I had known two of these tracks since I was a toddler, the story of my family's first reel to reel tape, which I've subsequently told elsewhere a few times. The other featured three moderately large hit songs from 1959 and 1960. All of these have subsequently become easy to find on YouTube, but hardly anyone knew what that was in 2005, so I'm fixing these posts to get this site back the way it once looked and worked. 

The other "fixed" post is one which was meant to be part of a series (which I never really got very far with), called "The Perfect Record", in this case featuring a wonderful Nordic-flavored record from around 1950, which I later also shared at WFMU. 

And now, for a title as unique as anything I've ever seen on a song-poem: 

~~~

I try not to feature the same label - and certainly not the same singer, within two or three posts of each other. But when something comes this far out of left field, I have to share it with y'all. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I thought Ellen Wayne did a fairly poor job on the two songs I featured in a post at that time, while also allowing that she has been quite entertaining on certain, more "out there" material. 

And that's what we have here. with the bewilderingly titled "A Bellingham Playday Song", which immediately has become one of my favorite song titles ever. The Catalog of Copyright Entries shows that Edna Rice copyrighted this lyric in 1962, along with a song called "Bellingham Children". Bellingham is a city in Washington State, and I'd put money on it that Ms. Rice lived there at some point, probably when she wrote these lyrics. 

Okay, so I'll give you 150 guesses as to what "A Bellingham Playday Song" is about. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Give up? Well, it's about how much the writer loves Jesus, how much Jesus loves her, how mean the devil is (there's actually more text about the devil's meanness than there is about Jesus). Then there's a bridge section about Jesus as a child. 

Ellen Wayne provides her typical over-the-top, so bad it's good style, stretching out words so much that there are words in that bridge that I can't make out - enough of them that I have NO idea what the point of that lyric is. And those are the ONLY words in the song besides the chorus that I already summarized.  

And this may be nit-picky, but I also get a kick out of how this is "A" Bellingham Playday Song, and not "THE" Bellingham Playday Song. Like, maybe there's a whole series of Bellingham Playday Songs, and this is one of them. I'd love to hear the others. 

If they were still making song-poem compilations, I have to believe this would have been one of the selections. It would absolute have to be. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - A Bellingham Playday Song

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If someone out there has an insight as to what the title might mean, and how it relates to the lyrics, I'd LOVE to hear it. 

~~~

The flipside is called "The Feeling", and it starts out great guns, with a driving piano/bass/drums arrangement, similar to several other TPA records from the period. To my ears, though, it doesn't sustain. The lyricist's work is all over the map. Within the first verse, the singer has professed her feeling that she and her lover will never part, AND that they are drifting apart. 

We quickly move into a piano solo, one which is marked by a few clams, and far less of the energy I felt in those opening bars. When Ellen returns with her vocal, she's now sure that she has lost his love. That was quick. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - The Feeling

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~~~

And now, one of my favorites of all of the Cut-Ups I've ever done. If you are just now hearing this term from me, please check the last several posts, as I've explained what these are and where they came from a few times. 

By the way, if any of the inserts I've used intrigue you, and you want to know where they came from, simply ask, and I will answer, if I remember, which will usually be the case. 

I don't have much use for Lionel Richie's body of work, except for a couple of records with the Commodores and one solo release. But I think that solo release - "Hello" - is quite a good song and record. So it was a natural for me to chop it into bits and make fun of it. 

I think this came out quite nicely, and, as I said with a couple of my other cut-ups, this is not safe for work. 

Download: Lionel Richie - Hello (cut-up)

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On a side note, you may have noticed the word "edit" on some of these cut up files. This is an indication that I've tightened up or slightly changed the original tapes, in order to improve them in some way.