Tin Pan Alley Quadruple Play

Wow - it's been over two weeks since I posted. Things have been busy. Because of this absence, I'm going to share two 45's today, both on Tin Pan Alley. I think I'm actually going to try to post two TPA singles at least sometimes, when I feature TPA, because I have so many more singles on that label than any other, and because so many of them are good, weird, awful or interesting in some way. In an unusual side note, today's two singles contain performance from four different artists, including one of the rarest of things on a song-poem record, an instrumental. 

I'll get to the Tin Pan Alley festival in a moment, but as usual, I want to update you as to the old posts that I corrected today. The latest upgrades went to four posts from May of 2009, and included a song of Black pride, inexplicably given to Norm Burns to sing, some happy words from Rodd Keith, Cara Stewart and Sammy Marshall on a custom label out of Minnesota, and a typically awful offering from the mysterious folks at Noval. 

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And now....

I am still at quite a loss for time as I type this, so I will be quite a bit less verbose and pithy as usual. You will need to get your fill of pith elsewhere. 

Today's first offering is from Lance, or rather "Lance" as he was always billed. He was not much of a singer, and this is not much of a song. It does tell a story, however, the charms of which (or lack thereof) I will let you discover, in this tale of a bad man in "Tucson". 

Download: "Lance" - Tucson

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While there was a lot I could have said about "Lance"'s record, if I had more time to type, I don't think, given the opportunity, I would have much to offer about the flip side, which is a rare offering by Nick Fontaine, titled "I Don't Care". 

I do enjoy the utterly incompetent edit at 1:23. 

Oh, and I once wrote a song called "I Don't Care". It was quite a bit better than this song, and even with that, it was still a fairly lousy. This song wishes it was as good as lousy. 

Download: Nick Fontaine - I Don't Care

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Hey, Ernie, LET'S PLAY TWO!!!!

So who do you say is the worse singer, "Lance" or Billy Grey? That's a toughie. But Billy makes a good argument for winning that contest with his performance of "She's My Honolulu Baby". My favorite thing about this record is that someone, mostly likely at a radio station, wrote "NO" and underlined it, right on the record label. 

Download: Billy Grey - She's My Honolulu Baby

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It's harder to fathom quite what was meant by the zero with an off center plus sign through it, which is written on this side of the label. 

As mentioned above, this is that rare bird, an instrumental song-poem, titled "I Cry Over You". There's not much of a melody here, 8 bars long, run through quickly and then taken through variations, with a virtually tuneless bridge thrown in the middle. 

As I always do with song-poem instrumentals, I wonder what the performers - in this case "The Candlesticks" - received in terms of sheet music or other instructions, in order to make this into a record. 

Download: The Candlesticks - I Cry Over You

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My Wild Irish Roses

Here's another attempt on my part to stay relevant with what's on the calendar, by posting a song appropriate for St. Patrick's day tomorrow! In this case, it's a circa 1965 record from Tin Pan Alley, "Two Little Irish Roses", sung by someone named Nick Fontaine.

Mr. Fontaine's name appears on only two documented Tin Pan Alley discs, and only on one side of this one.  His vocal is artless and struggles with varying success to stay on pitch throughout, but as this latter point is true of many who recorded for TPA after about 1963, there must be some other reason for his brief tenure with the label.

Note that although the record is nearly three minutes long, there really aren't even two full verses here, and the record is padded by about 1/3 of its total length by one of the dullest instrumental passages imaginable.

Download: Nick Fontaine - Two Little Irish Roses
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I wanted to make the post a tie-in to the holiday, and have done that, but the real meat on this disc is to be found on the non-Irish side, provided by our old pal "Lance" (as he was always credited), and a rollicking number titled "Darling Teenager".

The surf-styled drum intro and doo-wop chords leading into the vocal tell you immediately that you're in for something fun, and the rest of the record doesn't let you down! Something about the pianist's style leads me to strongly believe this is a jazz guy slumming in the song-poem trenches - his chording, soloing and other licks just don't fit this style at all, which just adds to the sort of wonderful weirdness of the track.

"Lance" isn't really up to the task (and rarely, if ever was, on his TPA sides), but at least he has something resembling a style. On the other hand, his shouted encouragements seemed canned - the one at 1:45 sounds exceptionally fake and cracks me up every time. In addition, this is another song where a couple of verses have been stretched out to the standard 150 seconds by an extended instrumental solo, although at least in this case, it has some energy. All in all, a very entertainingly weird track.

Download: "Lance" - Darling Teenager
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