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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