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.
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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.
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1 comment:
Thanks for posting these. They're really well made, except for that weird decision to feature a rickety old 'player piano' sound on a purportedly Teen record. This really is prime song-poem stuff--it has elements of familiar things, but the mixture is weird in a way that "legitimate" record labels just weren't. I would give a 7.5 to "Tinsel and Tin," but I also really like that "Outside of That" seems like a ridiculously weird title for such a commercial piece of music. (Can you imagine Biondi? 'Here's the new one from Gene Pitney, "Outside of That"'?)
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