The band at Tin Pan Alley must have thought they knew exactly what to do when they received the song-poem lyric "Steel Guitar Waltz". We know how to play a waltz!!! However, having heard the output of the TPA gang from the mid 1960's on into the late '70's at least, I am pretty sure that none of the members of this small, extremely limited combo knew anything about steel guitars. You could even convince me without trying to hard that some of them had no idea what a steel guitar waltz.
So here we have the "Steel Guitar Waltz" put forth by Mike Thomas with his usual level of aplomb - that is to say, frightfully little of it - backed by a band performance that is noticeably sans steel. That's okay - their oom-pah-pah style would fit better in a German beer hall anyway. "Lederhosen Waltz", anyone?
This is also one of the many, many song-poem submissions where even someone who has never written a lyric can guess the rhyme that's coming up long before it gets there. In an all to quick mercifully short 122 seconds, it's over.
Download: Mike Thomas - Steel Guitar Waltz
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If "Steel Guitar Waltz" contained rhymes one could probably sniff out in advance, the flip side, "Country Boy Going Home", contains to obvious a five year old might guess some of them.
Even so, getting to those rhymes is a really fun ride at a couple of points, wherein the words ending the line are just as expected, but the syntax is odd, at the very least.
For example, why, exactly, is the word "though" doing in this phrase?:
And though it's pouring down outside, I'll leave here in the rain.
I was also a little befuddled by the line "there won't be a town". Nice home you're going back to, country boy.
And this one - in the same key as its flip (helpfully, I'm sure, for the band) takes two seconds longer than the other side.
Download: Mike Thomas - Country Boy Going Home
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