A Really Interesting Globe Acetate

Greetings!

I am doing a LOT of rearranging the various types of recorded material I have in my basement - shelving things differently, putting some things in boxes to get them out of the way, etc. And last month, I came across a Globe acetate that - according to my carefully saved eBay email - I bought over 11 years ago (for five dollars!), and then seemingly just put with some other 10 inch records in my basement. I'm not sure I ever even listened to it before last week. 

I'd like to correct that oversight right now, because this is a really interesting record. It is, as mentioned, a 10 inch acetate but, like several others I've owned, it is recorded at 45 RPM and only the internal seven inches are recorded, as if it were a standard 45 that just got cut too big. 

The vocalist is Oscar Franck, who does not turn up on any other song-poem releases that I've been able to find. A man with the same name did work for a time as a songwriter, and is listed with more than 50 renditions recorded of his songs on Discogs. The obituary for that Oscar Franck is here. Is this the same guy? Who knows!?!

The writer of both sides is Earl Green, who perhaps is related to Earl Grey of Tea fame, but who also does not show up in the song-poem database. And that's far too common a name to search for. However, neither of these song titles (combined with his name) bring up anything. 

These are not full band performances of the type that you'd have found on one of the many, many 45's that the Globe song-poem factory churned out for literally dozens of labels. Both sides feature very small combos, and these were almost certainly seen as demos. But they both strike me as pretty darn good, for what they are, albeit with that special "something" that sets them apart as the work of  an amateur songwriter. 

The better of the two, to my ears, is "I'll Walk a Million Miles or More". This strikes me as a solid performance of a genuinely well constructed song. But I'm partial to the pop sounds of the late 1950's, anyway. In his best 1958ish Conway Twitty-esque voice, Oscar Franck emotes some (almost) typical pimple-rock lyrics. Meanwhile, the chords leading up to each individual line of the bridge are pretty interesting. I wonder if Earl Green wrote the whole song, or, as was usually the case, someone put the music together for him, and provided those weird guitar patterns. 

About those words, though - this is what I was referring to earlier. Two odd turns of phrase signal this as the work of an amateur, and both would have been cleaned up by someone if this was meant for anything beyond a piece of vinyl for the lyricist to take home. The first is "to kiss your lip". Not lips, lip. And the other is the deeply clunky "I'd walk another million miles, just for you and hold your hand". 

Enjoy!  

Download: Oscar Franck - I'll Walk a Million Miles or More

Play:

The flip side is "Don't Cry Little Girl". On this one, Oscar Franck sounds more like he's channeling any of a number of late '50's or early '60's teen idol types. I hear some Bobby Darin, some Gene Pitney, some Del Shannon and at least one other singer whose name is escaping me at the moment. If the other side sounded straight outta 1958, this one sounds like the music of 1962 to me. It even sounds - as did the flip - like something that, with a bit of professional help, might have been a song actually offered for the 1962. But I think the main conceit of the lyric - that not only does the boy not know "the other woman", all she did was ask him what time it was - would probably have needed to be reworked. 

Download: Oscar Franck - Don't Cry Little Girl

Play:
 

All in all, a very interesting record. Sorry it took me 11 years to get to it!