Sammy Marshall and the Teen Notes on Crescendo Records

Here is a record that has been sitting on my "consider using these" pile for at least six months, possibly a lot longer. And I'm not sure why I've left it sitting there, as it is quite good. Also, I've barely featured Sammy Marshall this year, so that's another reason to grab it right now and plop it onto my site. 

This is early Sammy Marshall (identified on this record as being backed by "The Teen Notes", for the first and likely only time). This is an early entry from the Globe song-poem factory, before they threw up their hands and started making every record sound lifeless and very much just the same. It's one of a handful of records that Globe released on their Crescendo imprint (not to be confused with the LA label GNP Crescendo, which was a legit outfit and had hits with both 45s and albums).

I have only heard a few Crescendo records (there only are a few), but most of those I've heard are much better than the average song-poem at sounding like what was being released by the "real" record companies of the day - they consistently sound like something which could have been legitimately produced for, and targeted at, the teen market in the early 1960's. Maybe not the best effort in the world, but there is nothing here to indicate that amateurs or scammers were involved. 

The only other Crescendo record I've featured here - 14 years ago - is the most excellent "Picture in the Fire", which you can hear here. 

If you play a Halmark, Film City or Noval record for a music buff who is unfamiliar with song-poems, that person is going to wonder what the hell produced such an odd, weird or perhaps awful record. If you play this record for the same music fan, the response is likely to be that it was a failed attempt at a hit. 

The A side is "Tinsel and Tin", and it has a loping beat, an effective piano part, winning backing vocalists, a memorable and catchy melody, and a first rate vocal from our man Sam. 

Download: Sammy Marshall and the Teen Notes - Tinsel and Tin

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The flip side is called "Outside of That", and I would say that most of what I said about "Tinsel and Tin" applies here. In fact, the lyrics here are pretty damn effect and fit quite well into what one might have heard on what Billboard would have called a "Rock-a-Ballad" in 1961, which is when this record was released. In a somewhat different arrangement, I could absolutely hear Gene Pitney (a favorite of mine) singing this song and these lyrics. 

Download: Sammy Marshall and the Teen Notes - Outside of That

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George and Kay! Who Are They?

Today we visit the land of MSR Records. As long time readers of this site may recall, I'm not much of a fan of this label, or really of anything that the "MSR" crew was doing from the early 1970's (at this label and others, such as Cinema). That puts me at odds with the powers that were behind the song-poem boom and CD releases of 25-30 years ago, who actually named their series after the label. Perhaps it puts me at odds with my readership, too - I dunno. I just find their material far more frequently sterile and boring than other labels. Plus, the early '70's to the mid '80's are simply not my favorite era, and those are the sounds they were aping. For what it's worth, I like the sound of the Columbine label (which operated in the same eras) even less than MSR, and for the same reasons. 

But I do like to throw out an MSR track every now and then, if for no other reason than to provide a more full picture of the song-poem world. And at those times, I also try to offer something interesting. 

To that end, today I have a record for which both sides were written by song-poet Fred L. Chitester. Mr. Chistester was a prolific song-poet, and apparently had enough money to throw around to have nearly two dozen documented releases of his handiwork on the MSR label - and those are just the records discovered before the song-poem archives website was mothballed. He submitted a handful of songs to the label around 1974-75, and then at least a dozen during 1979-80. This includes a couple of albums in that period which each featured five Chitester songs. 

The song that intrigues me here is "George and Kay", sung by the always incompetent Bill Joy. Bill Joy was the dominant male singer during the last days of MSR, starting in 1976 or so, and, by 1980, was singing all but a handful of the male vocals on the label until its demise in the mid 1980's. And he was awful. The first time song-poems were explained to me (by Dr. Demento), the song used to demonstrate the genre was a Bill Joy special, "How Long Are You Staying?" (I had heard song-poems before that, but hadn't known their provenance.) 

"George and Kay" intrigues me because of its lyrics. It seems to be about a famous couple - or at least locally famous, somewhere. They are seen every day, but what the song-poet appreciates about them is how they always do right, and are always bright, smiling and happy, and in particular, how they make a point of not ever telling anyone else to do. Mayhap I am spacing on a couple who were famous in 1980, but I have no idea who he is singing about. The music is vapid, particularly that awful synthesizer which is omnipresent on MSR releases of this area, and Bill Joy provides his typical supper-club awfulness. 

Anyone know who he's singing about? 

Download: Bill Joy - George and Kay

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The real horror here is the flip side, "When You Are Low and Feeling Blue", in which the solution for clinical depression is to "Change Your Ways", or perhaps move somewhere where you can pretend to be upbeat and "no one will know" that you're depressed. 

Have I mentioned my 35 years working in behavioral health? This is an infuriating lyric - because I know there is a certain subset of people out there who think like this. God help 'em if they developed a behavioral health condition. 

Download: Bill Joy - When You Are Low and Feeling Blue

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First Person Christianity

In the notes to the fourth song-poem compilation album, "I'm Just the Other Woman", there was a section in which was pointed out an uncommon aspect of the song "The Will of God", that being that it was sung from the perspective of the singer being Jesus Christ. And I agree that such a conceit is a fairly unusual one. 

Here we have another one, from the waning days of the once-great Sterling label. Sterling's greatness came from one man - Norm Burns, a singularly great singer - with a large assist from one other man - Lew Tobin, the arranger and frequent composer who set the song-poems to music. Well, Norm died in 1974, and was followed by a series of much-lesser lights, and Lew's name - which showed up as a bandleader and/or co-composer on the vast majority of Sterling records releases into the mid-1970's, disappeared from the credits, never to return, right around the time this record was made. 

The singer on this side is Mel Moore, heard here with "The Starlets", who was the dominant performer for Sterling from around 1977 until their demise around 1984. I have a few Mel Moore 45's, but had never featured him before, largely because Sterling records after the departure of Norm and Lew are often deadly dull. 

But I do get a kick out of this one. Jesus is singing the song, you see, exhorting his listener to "Walk On" and "Stand Tall", those being the two parts of the title of the song. Jesus doesn't actually get around to identifying himself until nearly half way through, by which point he's clearly irritated at not being asked "Dude, who are you anyway", and gives away his secret. I can commiserate with him there - it seems like that might be a conversation you'd have with some random stranger who was telling you how to live, somewhat earlier in your interaction. 

For all I said about the suckiness of late era Sterling records, this one is actually bouncy and even sort of swings, with a Johnny Cash, "I Walk the Line" beat on the drums, a really nice interplay between the piano and the guitar, and an equally nice give and take between the lead singer and the backing gals. It's a sweet sounding track. 

Download: Mel Moore and the Starlets - Walk On - Stand Tall

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Shelley Stuart (whose name I now see I have misspelled on more than one occasion here) is the singer on the flip side, another religious number from the same song-poet. Shelley shows up on a few of the earliest tracks on Sterling, and then made well over a dozen records for the label during the period just before Norm Burns' death, but this is a later release for her on the label that I can find reference to online, exactly one hundred label numbers later than her previously known last release. For a label that seems to have released only 40 or 50 records a year, that's a significant gap of time between recordings. 

Anyway, Shelley's song, "Live For Jesus" is awful. It goes on for about 17 days, or at least it seems to. The folks at Sterling did do an effective job of creating the sort of dashed-off gospel/inspirational sound that could have been heard on a dozen religious fund-raising TV shows or cheapo Christian albums of the time. It's not a good sound, but they did a good job capturing it. 

Download: Shelley Stuart and the Starlets - Live For Jesus

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