First, I want to thank everyone who has been commenting lately. There've been a few folks who have also gone back and listened to things I posted a while ago and sent a bunch of comments back to back. I am much appreciative.
Second, I will point out that I have adjusted the link (at right) to Sammy Reed's site, "Music from the World of the Strange and the Bizarre", which can now be found here.
And now it's time for us all to Be Atlas.
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Nearly ten years ago, I shared a Rodd Keith Record (released under his frequent aka of Rod Rogers) on the B-Atlas label. One commenter related how a search of Billboard Magazine indicated that the label was somehow related to the Jody label, which you can read about here, and which seems to have been a crazy set-up, even by song-poem and vanity standards. But note that they shared the same address. And our friends at Roaratorio Records shared that there was another B-Atlas record in existence, with both of its songs also written by the same song-poet as the record I shared, Anne De Grace, and positing that B-Atlas may have been a vanity set up for Ms. De Grace. I'm not sure how that tracks with them being a subsidiary of the bizarre Jody set up, but there are plenty of things in the song-poem world that I don't understand, and given that she did write all four known songs on the label, that supposition is probably correct.
I now own a copy of that second B-Atlas release (or perhaps it was their first release, as the two records are numbered A-2000 and A-900). And here it is:
Yes, that's right, we are still having Rodd Keith in his Film City, Chamberlin Orchestra, Rod Rogers persona. I do not have a ton of stuff to say about either of these songs, both of which I find fairly turgid. The better of the two, to my ears, is certainly "L'amour C'est Si Doux My Darling", if for no other reason than I love that vibraphone sound. The lyrics are nothing to write home about. In fact, the opening four lines are fairly awful, in a laugh-out-loud sort of way:
Someone says there's no such thing as love
Someone says there's some things in love
Someone says they've never been in love.
Someone says they've always been in love.
Cole Porter it ain't. Then it's into the main part of the song, the vibraphone retreats into the background, and Rodd (or Rod) turns on the smarm.
Download: Rod Rogers - L'Amour C'est Si Doux My Darling
Play:
The flip side is "There's Still Room in My Heart", and the best thing I can say about it is probably that it isn't as long as "L'Amour C'est Si Doux My Darling"
Download: Rod Rogers - There's Still Room In My Heart
Play:
