My First Rodd

Just under 30 years ago, in the fall of 1996, I got my first taste of song-poems when I bought the MSR Madness Volume 2 CD, "The Makers of Smooth Music". Once I had a better handle on the ins and outs of this genre, I went to the biggest used record store that was anywhere near my home, probably in November of the same year, and looked for song-poems. I found about ten, as I recall, including two early Real Pros records which are still among my favorites. The other records that I found, as I recall, were by Gene Marshall and Rodd Keith. 

By this time, I was already in email contact with song-poem maven extraordinaire Phil Milstein, and we started a nice tape exchange - me sending him cassettes of everything I found, as I found it, and him sending me his cassette compilations of tracks he considered just below good enough for his upcoming releases. 

I came across an auction on eBay recently, for a copy of one of those first ten 45s that I found, and discovered, to my astonishment, that it was not available anywhere online. I truly thought that, for all of my early Preview Rodd 45s, I had already determined that they were already available online or that I had already shared them. This one fits neither of those parameters. So.... here it is: 

Yes, indeed, this song - "Into My Dreams" - is quite likely the first Rodd Keith record that I owned. It's more than a bit beat up, but definitely worth sharing. It's worth sharing for the first couplet alone, which contains one of the dumbest lines I've ever heard in any song, song-poem or not. 

I guess it's possible that the song-poeta (there are three listed) were trying to be funny, but nothing else in the lyric suggests a sense of humor about the words or their creators. And the next following rhyme also sounds to me like the team simply grabbed a word that rhymed and contrived a line that fit, but that made little sense, too. The other two rhymes (it's a VERY short lyric) make more sense in context, so maybe I'm wrong and they were just an the hairy edge of competent writers. 

Still, it's always nice to hear Rodd at the start of his Preview career, freed up from the Film City chamberlin and working with a full group, including, herein, a violinist. 

Download: Rodd Keith - Into My Dreams

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The flip side features Judy Layne, who appeared very regularly on the Preview label around 1966 before disappearing completely from the label by 1968. The song is "Days Gone By" and it's a snooze. It's got quite the supper club style, with the trumpet obbligato and it's recitative sections interspersed with waltz sections, all in the service of a bit of very hackneyed words about a reminiscence . Eh.

Download: Judy Layne - Days Gone By

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He Does it ALL For You, But Apparently Only Once

 

Nearly three years ago, I shared my choice for Sammy Marshall's Greatest Hits, each of which are is one one side of the same 45. That post is here, and one of the songs is called "I'd Do It For You", and it lists all of the wonderful things that Sammy would do for his beloved, including obtaining "the B'loon, with a gold star in it". 

Today, we have the very similarly named "I'd Do It All For You", but in this case, Sammy is, for some reason, under the impression that his beloved wants him to do such things as jumping into mud, being swallowed by a whale, and even drowning and being blown up in a exploding rocket. And these are, literally, the only things he is choosing from. What the hell? 

The song is bouncy enough to be one of of Sammy's better releases - I love his rocking (and near rocking) numbers. But who wants to have their lover kill himself? And who wants to be the lover who kills himself? 

Incidentally, this label - Land Mark (not Landmark) seems to have been one of the most vanity-esque of vanity labels created by the Globe song-poem factory. I can find no trace of this label, and given that this is release 1001, it's possible that it's the only release on this particular Land Mark label. The fact that the same person wrote both songs also suggests this label having been a personal creation.

Download: Sammy Marshall - I'd Do It All For You

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On the flip side is "Your World of Pictures". Musically, this is pretty much a meh, but lyrically, it seems like it's meant to be an epic putdown of a well regarded stage and film actor, who the writer/singer apparently has nothing but contempt for. At least, that's what I get from it - the wording of the lyrics, particularly the use of the title phrase, comes across to me as downright weird. Maybe someone out there has a better take on this. 

Download: Sammy Marshall - Your World of Pictures

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Disco Norris

I'm here today to continue the unique saga of Norridge Mayhams, better known (when known at all) as Norris the Troubadour. If you follow this link, you will find all of my previous Norris postings (including this one) and hopefully some text to explain who he was and my fascination with him. 

Norris was only on the fringes of the song-poem world, but I include him here because, although he wrote all the lyrics and music to his songs (including an actual bona fide hit song), once he discovered song-poem companies, he gave up singing his own songs and let the professionals (or near professionals) do it. Despite the fact that at least a half-dozen performers sang his songs from then on (if not far more), the records usually came out baring the artist name "Norris the Troubadour", adding, in later years, "The Seaboard Coastliners", as it does in this offering. 

And he never stopped hawking that one hit song he wrote. It was called "We'll Build a Bungalow" and it was a hit in 1950. A protracted legal battle over its copyright followed, and Norris never stopped trying to parlay it into another hit record. 

So it was that Norris engaged yet another company to re-record his song in 1978 or so, in a thoroughly disco-fied setting. I don't know which company he contracted with (perhaps others can make a suggestion of this), but he most clearly told them to "Make it Sound like that "Yowsa Yowsa" record that's so big right now ("Dance Dance Dance" by Chic), which the producers did, right down to the old-timey megaphone announcer heard now and then on the track.  

 

To my ears, the result is resolutely awful, amateurish in the extreme and almost comically overlong (all of them common faults of disco records of the time). But I am dedicated to getting as much of Norris' story out there, and as this one does not seem to have been shared on the internet before, I'm presenting it here.  

Download: Norris The Troubadour, The Seaboard Coastliners - We'll Build a Bungalow (You Spell It For Two)

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On the flip side is "I've Got Soul Love Burning In My Heart". It's a wisp of a song and of a performance - didn't anyone tell this band that disco records aren't meant to be 123 seconds long? - sung in the falsetto style and instrumental backing favored that decade by the makers of Philly Soul (quite possibly my least favorite genre of popular music ever, or at least in the running). As a result, I can't stand this record. The fact that it's pressed a tiny bit off-center adds an appealing level of wooziness, but still, this side is a no-go for me. At least it's short. 

Download: Norris The Troubadour, The Seaboard Coastliners - I've Got Soul Love Burning In My Heart

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