A few weeks ago, a record popped up on eBay for a very reasonable price, one which I dedicated myself to obtaining. As it turned out, I needn't have worried about cost; no one else bid.
I'm more than a little surprised by that, although certainly pleased, given the prices that accompany a lot of song-poem sales these days.
But maybe this one was such a niche item that the vast majority of those who look for song poems were either uninterested or didn't catch onto what this is. Because it's on the tiny, but wonderful, Dolly-O label and sung by a definite second-tier singer in the song-poem world, Frank Perry. The usual Sandy Stanton group names, such as "Singing Strings" or "Film City Orchestra" has been superseded here by the appellation "The Busy Bees Orch.", which seems almost definitely to have been the choice of the woman behind the Dolly-O label. (Technically, this 1972 release would have been made for Stanton's later label "Action", and not the soon-to-be mothballed "Film City", but he was still using the Chamberlin for the "Action" label, as well.)
For that person was the one and only Dolly-O Curren, who sent out her masterwork lyrics to various song-poem concerns, initially allowing them to come out on those various labels (including the great "I'm the Wife" on Preview) and then later, with her husband Jack Curran, set up the Dolly-O label in order to share them with the world in a more Dolly-O-Centric manner (including re-releasing, on her label, some of the previously released Preview/MSR/other tracks, such as "I'm the Wife").
Several of Dolly-O's lyrics are concerned with Indiana-related themes, and she just seems to have been an interesting person with a cockeyed way of expressing things at times. Her magnum opus, from where I sit, is "Lady Off Pedestal at Notre Dame", which she commissioned with the folks at Halmark, and which resulted in fairly insane mashup of idiosyncratic lyrics, marching band music and Bob Storm ridiculousness. (I should mention that the song is credited, on the record label, to Halmark's resident tenor, Jack Kim, but it's very clearly NOT him.) For a time, early in my life collecting song-poems, "Lady Off Pedestal at Notre Dame" was my favorite song-poem of all, and it's still way up there on my list. You can hear that song, and 26 other song-poems (including a whopping 15 from my own collection) in this post.
Okay, so that's a long way around explaning, for perhaps the third time, why I would be jazzed to buy a Dolly-O 45 EP. But in this case, there was even more about this record that had me jumping up and down in front of the eBay screen. Four - COUNT 'EM FOUR - good to great song titles. Now, it's a song-poem truism that a great title often reveals itself to be attached to an average or even flat out sucky song. But what were the chances that all four of these titles, particularly the two on the A side, were going to let me down.
As it turns out, they didn't. To my ears, Dolly-O goes three for four here, with the double play A side hitting it out of the park twice, to mix my baseball metaphors. Let's dig in.
The record starts out strongly, with a song dealing with a subject which is not the focus of musical forms nearly often enough: Bowling. I find "A Bowler's Glee" delightful. In just over two quick minutes, Dolly-O explores the reasons to join a bowling team, the movement of the bowler, the preferred results of any given frame, the reaction of the crowd, the amount of pins found in a decent score, and the need for a team to avoid "washout" players, among many other points. Being that I am someone who watches televised bowling whenever it's on - All Hail Jason Belmonte! - this was, like I said, a delight.
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - A Bowler's Glee
Play:
But as much as I love bowling, and that song, the killer track here has got to be the second one, "The Nose". This one goes on quite a bit longer, because Dolly-O had a lot to say. It starts off as a tribute to the nose owned by the protagonist's beloved, but quickly turns into a treatise on the larger subject of noses, everything from famous noses of the day to the importance of smelling, and all the ways that the nose and its functions enhance our daily lives. Then we are told:
"Each Nose is Special to the Face it Grows On"
The rhyming phrase that comes after that line is worth the price of admission to this entire record.
As with all of the other songs on this weird little record, the odd... no, that's not a strong enough word... the fairly bizarre backing provided by the Chamberlin adds a certain "Je ne sais quoi" to the proceedings
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - The Nose
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For my money, the song that leads of side two of the EP is easily the weakest of the four, a bit of pathos that doesn't really move me (but your mileage may vary) called "Two Little Glasses".
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - Two Little Glasses
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The last of the four songs is the one I find genuinely intriguing. First, we again have the downright weird Chamberlin arrangement, with unusual voicings chosen and some clattery percussion that I've rarely heard out of that contraption.
But more than that, it seems like a song such as this - in which the narrator is extoling the unusual virtues of a person - typically identifies the person being described by the end of the song. And particularly in the song-poem world, a song of praise of this style is about someone famous, and again, somewhere along the way, that someone is identified by name.
In this song, that's not the case. This engaging, friendly and happiness-providing man is never identified by Dolly-O, beyond a list of very specific descriptions. an interesting choice, and fairly far off the beaten path.
Download: Frank Perry and the Busy Bees Orch - The Man of a Million Smiles
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By the way, you can see a trade paper advertisement for this 1972 release on the AS/PMA Dolly-O page.
