Today's BROSH-Ball Score: Cara 3, Sammy 1

This is post # 700. Wow. 

Today, let's attend a little BROSH-Ball game. You remember the BROSH label, right? I don't actually understand how this works, but it released the products of a variety of other small and large song-poem outfits, often mixing two to four different outfits on one EP. And what's more, given the address on this record, it seems to have operated out of a non-descript four bedroom house in the middle of nowhere, better known as the furthest reaches of the Chicago suburbs, a town called Carpentersville, IL

Today's game features a match-up between the Globe company stalwart Sammy Marshall, playing against Lee Hudson's favorite chanteuse, Cara Stewart 

Sammy Marshall, playing for the Nashville Globes, scores first, with "The Chimes of Heaven", although given the nature and low quality of this song and performance, I imagine his run came in on a cheap error or a wild pitch, 'cause he didn't earn his run honestly with this track. It's as sappy as they come - it's a wedding song, backed by a truly bland and boring band arrangement, and bathed in echo. 

Download: Sammy Marshall - The Chimes of Heaven

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Up comes Cara Stewart, the star player of the California Lee Hudsons, and she ties the game, hitting one - a number called "Dance With Me" - right out of the park. The debt owed to Les Paul and Mary Ford has rarely been more clear on a Lee/Cara record than it is on this number. Slinky and sexy, with some great guitar, and yet another killer vocal from Cara, and a lovely overuse of reverb (there is no such thing as too much reverb, in my book). The song is cool, too. And instead of the usual Lee Hudson "downward chord" effect at the end, in this case, the chord moves up a notch for the final bit.  

Download: Cara Stewart - Dance With Me

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The Lee Hudsons take the lead for good, with what must have been a workmanlike series of walks and hits, with the second side opener. This one isn't really much better, as a song, than Sammy's number, sort of draggy and some stale "poor little me" lyrics, but Lee and Cara elevate the material, as they so often do, with that same winning combination of slinky guitar, sexy vocal and irresistible reverb. 

Download: Cara Stewart - Love, What Is It All About

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Cara scores an insurance run with the final number, "I'm Coming Home to You", perhaps a single and a double, or vice versa. Honestly, much of what I wrote about "Love, What Is It All About" would apply here, and yet.... well, Cara Stewart is one of those proverbial people who could sing the phone book and make it sound great. I'll just let her voice wash over me, and wish that I was the one she was coming home to. 

Download: Cara Stewart - I'm Coming Home to You

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Raindrops Downtown

Just a word at the top of the post to share that fellow blogger, song-poem fanatic and great friend of the site Sammy Reed has returned to blogspot and reopened his "Music from the World of the Strange and the Bizarre" at this location. The link to Sammy's site, below and to the right, has also been updated. There's only one post so far, but it's a doozy - another example of someone literally taking the words, verbatim, from a pop hit and submitting them as his or her own, to a song-poem company. 

On the preview label, Rodd Keith most often appeared under his own preferred name (Rodd Keith), and sometimes, particularly on poppy, lightweight numbers, he was credited along with a backing band labeled "The Raindrops", and, on less than two dozen occasions, Rodd tracks were released credited to "The Downtowners". On even fewer occasions (three which are listed at AS/PMA), those latter releases were credited to "Downtowners", sans "the". This is one of those releases. 

Given it's light pop feel, this certainly could have been one of those records which were credited to "Rodd Keith and The Raindrops". However, in a bit of a coincidence, given that name of Rodd's typical backing band, the song itself is titled "Raindrops". Rodd offers his typical sterling arrangement, melodic excellence and heartfelt vocals. 

Download: Downtowners - Raindrops

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The flip side of this record has actually been available, off and on (currently "on") for several years now, but I thought it was worth posting this record since "Raindrops" doesn't appear to be previously available anywhere, and also, the flip side, "My Wife Ain't Lazy" is downright funny and clever. 

Plus, it gives me an always welcome chance to again link to Darryl Bullock's wonderful "World's Worst Music" blog. This song was part of a full CD length set of mostly terrible song-poems (this was no doubt one of the exceptions, as he explains in the post), that you can download, complete with a CD booklet, in this post, and I heartily recommend doing so. 

Anyway, "My Wife Ain't Lazy" is, as I said, catchy, bouncy and fun, with some great lyrics. The verse that starts around 1:30, and the spoken word section at the end feature one comical image after another.  The band is cooking, as usual, and Rodd again chooses just the right tone and style of vocal to match the material. 

Download: Downtowners - My Wife Ain't Lazy

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Hurt Me! Hurt Me! I'm Sure! No Way!

I offer apologies to Moon Unit Zappa, but her lyrics seemed too good to pass up with regard to today's offering: 

On the first side, we have the queen of MSR records, Bobbi Blake, or, as she was known in the early days of the label, Bobbi Boyle, with a request for some pain - well, at least psychic pain - in a slightly countrified setting, one which reminds me at several moments of one of my favorite song poems, Dick Kent's "In Loving Is the Doing". Not surprising, as that record's label number was barely 20 releases later. Bobbi Blake offers up her typically solid vocal performance, but after four or more listens, I'm still not sure I understand what is exactly being asked for, or why. Maybe the concept is just too foreign to me...

Download: Bobbi Boyle - Hurt Me Just a Little. 

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The flip side of this record is credited to Nancy Cole, a singer credited on only two documented MSR records. I do not recognize this vocalist - maybe someone out there does? She's competent enough, and the makers of smooth music provided a fairly catchy tune for the lyricist's work, which has the unwieldy title "This Little Fool Has Had Her Fill of You". However, the words are almost comically artless, featuring very direct descriptions of wrongs done. And there is only so much you can do fit lyrics which don't fit the same pattern into a repeating melody, so Nancy sometimes has to quickly squeeze in extra words, and other times she has to stretch out lines such as "You Treat Me Like Dirt" over several beats. 

Download: Nancy Cole - This Little Fool Has Had Her Fill of You

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