Phil Is a Beat Off

I have a lovely treat for all of you today. Well, at least, it's a treat for me. It looks like this: 

As frequent readers of this site know, I love Calypso - whether the authentic model from the 1930's in Trinidad or the Americanized version from the mid-1950's - more than just about any genre of music that's ever existed. And Tin Pan Alley was active right in the middle of the Calypso boom of 1956-58. And as one of the few labels who actively sought to make their releases sound like the current trends, TPA released several calypso flavored singles during that time period. 

That includes today's 1957 model, which not only lifts the Calypso feel, but also makes reference to one of the biggest hits of the previous year, "Blue Suede Shoes". The track is "Off Beat Blues", and it features frequent label warbler Phil Celia doing his best (or perhaps worst) Caribbean accent. Please note that the lyricist for this number - I think it's Francis M. Kadolph - inscribed this copy with a signature and gave it to someone named Jack. I hope Jack enjoyed it as much as I do, as I think it's is wholly wonderful. 

Download: Phil Celia - Off Beat Blues. 

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The flip side is no slouch, either. In this case, Phil is joined by The Silver Tones, who only turn up on one other documented TPA release (and who are not to be confused with The Silva-Tones). The Silver Tones, presumably, are the chirpy singers who back Phil up here, and who clearly only knew how to sing one wordless phrase. The other TPA release featuring the Silver Tones - titled "Keep On Smiling! Pay Your Taxes!" can be heard here, and as you'll hear, they sing nearly the exact same part on that record! In this case, the guitarist and the pianist play the same chirpy pattern, when the girls aren't singing. Anyway, this is a fun side, as well, even though Phil sometimes seems to be imitating Paul Anka here, something that no one, should ever, ever do. . 

Download: Phil Celia and the Silver Tones - Too Late! 

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 Okay, today, I also have what I think is the last of the mash-ups I made in 2005 - at least the last one which will make sense to those of you out there (I also made a few using parts of Star Ads on top of each other, and using other private recordings that I own). 

Anyway, this one was pretty easy. I just took the entirity of The Beatles' "Wild Honey Pie" (well, it's actually Paul McCartney by himself), and added a looping of the drum intro from Adam Ant's "Goody Good Shoes", and labeled it "Two Shoe Pie". 

I'm not claiming any greatness or even anything special for this one, but as long as I was digging into the mash-ups, I thought I'd share what I had left. 

Download: The Beatles and Adam Ant - Two Shoe Pie (mash-up)

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The Mixed Up Life of a Real Pro

Greetings!

First, I would like to make sure everyone gets to see and download an album which was linked in the comments of a previous post. It is a full Hollywood Artists album, and it is available here. Thank you, anonymous poster!

And now, for today's main feature: 

For those who haven't read any of the 18 or so places I've written it before, I really get a kick out of the early Cinema releases, all billed as being by "The Real Pros", but largely featuring one guy with one of those early '70's console all-in-one keyboards. 

While today's two offerings will never make my "all time favorite Cinema releases" file, I think they do, in a way, offer up the quintessential song-poem experience, or at least we have the scam (or, if you prefer, the design of the business plan) boiled down to its most basic essence: A person writes a lyric and sends it in. It gets set to a superbly generic, sort of loungey arrangement and is sung by a soloist who accompanies himself on an all in one cheesy organ. The performance is one that any decent composer and musician could throw together in a quarter hour. 

No big arrangement, no band, nothing particularly professional sounding about it at all. The lyric gets written - "Mixed Up Life", in this case, happily with the sort of utterly cookie cutter lyrics found so often in the genre - and a short while later, it is a demo-level-sounding generic song. And you have a perfect record with which to explain and demonstrate the song-poem to the uninitiated. 

Oh, and the last vocal note is worth the price of admission.

Download: The Real Pros - Mixed Up Life

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I chose to write all that about "Mixed Up Life", but I could pretty much say the same things about the flip side, "Nobody's Baby Am I", which has the added feature of a mess up in the bass notes during the first seven seconds. Would have been that hard to start over, after just getting seven seconds into your performance? Undoubtedly no, but clearly that option was considered unnecessary. 

Also note the producer note at the bottom of each side of the label, which in each case falsely co-credits the song-poet herself for production work. This is one of the earliest Cinema releases (1971 - as evident by the "71" in the label number), and this bit of fiction is a feature that Cinema would eliminate by its 1972 releases. 

Download: The Real Pros - Nobody's Baby Am I

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And now, let's return to our Cut-Up / Mash-Up feature, after a one week break. 

I'm sticking with the Mash-Up theme of the last few posts, and returning to circa 2005, when I was doing a bunch of these sorts of things. I focused on one of my favorite Beatles' tracks, "Julia". As you may know, this is the only song to ever come out under the Beatles name to feature a solo John Lennon performance. It's also one of the fairly few Beatles songs not to feature any percussion. 

I thought maybe I'd like to hear how it sounded with some rhythm behind it. And I'd like to break down what I did. In order to understand where, exactly, I took some of those rhythms from, you have to hear two of my beloved Star Ads. In case you aren't familiar with Star Ads, I wrote about them here and here, and quite recently, I was featured on a podcast talking all about them and sharing a bunch of them. 

Anyway, I thought of two of them which featured significant and interesting percussion in spots, and in which that percussion was heard, by itself, at times. 

First, I thought about this bizarre little ad, specifically the two bars of percussion at about the 0:03 point, which I would loop and slow down for the first verse of "Julia", then return to it more and more as the song continues: 

Download: Star Ads - Speedway's Guided Tour

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Then I thought of this high powered car ad, specifically, the drums heard between the sales pitches and at the end, which I would slow down to an extreme degree, and use on the bridge and, again, more and more, near and at the end of "Julia".

Download: Star Ads - New Tiger in Town

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Finally, I swiped the opening drum intro from "Why Don't We Do It In the Road", which I'm guessing nearly all of you are familiar with, and which occurs a few moments before "Julia" on The White Album. I used that bit of drumming extensively, too. 

I called the resulting creation, "Rhythm of the Ocean Child", and it sounds like this: 

Download: The Beatles with Star Ads - Rhythm of the Ocean Child

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Gold Stars and Changing Hearts

 

Today, I have a Rodd Keith record that may resonate more with me than it does for others. And that's because the backing track is nostalgic for me - the track heard here is the exact same track heard on the very first Rodd Keith record I ever found, when I started looking for song-poem records way back in 1996. That was a song titled "Where Is the One?", which, oddly, I've never actually featured here, and I'll have to rectify that. 

Anyway, this is Rodd in country-pop mode, with a bit of a twang, over that loping backing track, with "Gold Star", a bit of a story song that perhaps contains one verse too many - it's that rare song poem that lasts nearly three minutes and twenty seconds. 

Download: Rodd Keith - Gold Star

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The flip side is "The Changing Heart", and I find this record positively weird. The song itself is straightforward enough, with a backing track this is mostly notable for some really nice drum fills, as I find to be the case on Preview records of this era. 

But then, at the one minute point, and throughout the rest of the record, Rodd made a production choice what is one of his very rare misfires, as his production and arrangement was usually stellar. But in this case, he added some very ineffectual backing vocals, and more to the point, mixed them at the same volume as the lead vocal. The first time I heard the record, they seemed so ham-fisted, I thought maybe someone had turned the TV on - that's how out of place I found them. See what you think! 

Download: Rodd Keith - The Changing Heart

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And now, rather than another one of my cut-ups, I have another one of the Mash-Ups I did, while briefly feeling inspired to work in that area, back around 2005. 

In this case, I noticed a very similar rhythm that "Getting Better" from the Sgt. Pepper album, had to a big hit from the summer of 1966, and decided to put them together. I think it turned out quite nicely, and I also managed to get this one onto our local Breakfast With the Beatles program a few years later. 

Download: Better Take Me Away (mash-up)

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Storytime! With Teacho Wiltshire

Hey there, 

Before I get to today's rockin' offering, I wanted to share something that Sammy Reed, who has offered so much to this site over the years, wrote about this Halmark posting from two weeks ago. 

I will say right off the bat (a little pun there) that I don't know anything about the various sites and discussions that go on about Rite pressings. That's not my area at all, and if you explained to me what they are and why they mattered, I'd probably be looking at you blankly within 27 seconds. 

But what Sammy found is that the numbers on that Halmark disc line up with a gap in a Rite discography quite nicely, and that the Halmark release is probably the missing disc in that discography. Here's where it gets interesting for me: assuming he's right (or Rite) about where those numbers come from, then the Halmark disc in question is from 1966. The song poem archives website has Halmark ramping up to a start in 1967, and most of what I've read and learned has them doing most of their work in or after 1970. I just thought that was interesting enough to mention. 

And now, let's visit with my sixth favorite Marx Brother, Teacho:  

Have I mentioned that I tend to really enjoy records by Teacho Wiltshire? His tenure with Tin Pan Alley was brief, at the very start of the label's history, and I think I now own a copy of all but one of the records that came out under his name on the Tin Pan Alley label. (He also went on to a successful and distinguished career in the more legit music business.)

I really like both sides of this record, which is from 1956, but my vote for the better of the two goes to "I've Got a Story Tonight!". It's a rockin' slab of vintage R & B, in which the first person narrator tells his sad-sack tale to a bartender. Sometimes, I think I write to much in describing a record, so I'm gonna stop there, and let this one speak for itself. 

Download: Teacho Wiltshire, His Piano and Orchestra - I've Got a Story Tonight!

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On the flip side, there's another pretty good mover and groover, titled "Check Your Heart". I enjoy Teacho's vocal mannerisms, and I think in this case, they - as well as a pretty hot band - make the song better than it would otherwise be. I could even easily imagine someone liking this one more than its flip. Good stuff!

Download: Teacho Wiltshire, His Piano and Orchestra - Check Your Heart

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And now, it's cut-up time. Or rather, one cut-up and one mash-up. The appetizer is the cut-up, and it is about as brief as a joke can be. Every now and then, while playing around with records, I would get an impulse to take a record that I found particularly wretched and/or annoying and dispense with it with a quick one-off joke. Too many of those, and it'd become repetitive, so I just did it now and then. Here's what I did with a # 1 song from 1963 that I've always thought was aggressively stupid: 

Download: The Angels - My Boyfriend's Back (cut-up)

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And that mash-up: In 2005, when mash-ups were still (I think) a fairly popular thing, I got the impulse to do a bunch of them, from my own weird perspective. I posted two of them, many years ago, here, and here. 

But before I did either of those, I put together the following little item, which I think is quite inspired. I was listening to "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" by Bob Dylan, and got to thinking about the the rhythm played in the opening drum beat. What song, I wondered, had that distinct rhythm, and might make for a good mash-up. 

What I thought of was a song from 1956, which is about as innocent a record as you can get, the polar opposite of the Dylan track. But they both had that rhythm, and in that way, they fit together perfectly. Over the bridge section, which occurs twice, I layered altered elements of another song, one from 1967. I suspect many of you will recognize where that sample comes from, as well. Quite simple work, actually, but very effective. 

I hope you'll enjoy this. It's one of my favorites. 

Download: Tonight You Get Stoned (mash-up)

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My Favorite New Song-Poem Purchase This Year

Hey, there, Hi there, Ho there, you're as welcome as can be!

Let's get right to it: 

If you've read this site (and my posts at WFMU), you may be aware that I am a devotee of the music of the Caribbean, as well as the larger world of Latin music, circa the 1930's to the 1950's, particularly the Calypso music of Trinidad (and the somewhat faux Calypso that became a fad in the US during the 1950's), which I consider the best sub-genre of popular music ever devised by humankind. . 

Given that fact, there's no doubt that I would have jumped at the chance to snap up today's offering, once a partial sound file of it appeared on eBay. "That's the Life For Me!" appeared on the Tin Pan Alley, one of the few labels which (at the time, anyway, 1958 or so), was making an ongoing attempt to make their releases match the music styles of the day. 

Thus we have a lovely, lilting and energetic island sound backing up Jimmy Dee, who only made two documented records for the label, pretty much back to back. The percussionists here deserve special praise, driving the track along, but the guitarist is doing some really nice things, too, especially in the solo section. Jimmy Dee does a fine job, offering up a fairly passionate vocal. I'd say he's emulating Jackie Wilson, except that at the time this record was cut, Wilson probably only had one single out. But he's in the style, for sure. 

Download: Jimmy Dee - That's the Life For Me!

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The flip side is "You Mean All the World to Me". I continue to hear Jackie Wilson-esque vocal stylings from Jimmy Dee, but they seem pretty over-the-top on this very, very slow number. Your mileage may vary, but this just doesn't do anything for me at all. 

Download: Jimmy Dee - You Mean the World to Me

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~~

And now it's time for our "cut-up" of the week. Previous posts have explained this feature enough that I hope I don't need to explain further. 

Anyway, today's offering is, I think, the most recent "cut-up" I've made (although I'll share something I did this year, which is not quite in the same genre, soon). It's not really "recent" - it's from 2015 - but I haven't done any since. 

It's an overhaul of the great Beatles' track "Norwegian Wood". As compared to the "cut-ups" I did in the early and mid 1980's, this one benefited fully from the excellent sound editing software I have now, compared with the cassette recorder pause button I had then. 

Multiple friends have said it's the best thing I've done in this area, mostly (or entirely) because of the way I fooled around with the sitar segments (and not so much the drop-ins heard throughout the vocal). But I think the whole thing is way above my average, and it's one of my favorites. 

A caveat: This is an extremely rude and off-color sound file. It is loaded with four letter words and other "blue" imagery. It is probably as foul-mouthed as anything I've ever done in a cut-up. If you're likely to be offended, maybe you should skip it, and it's absolutely not safe for work. 

On the other hand, those instrumental passages may just make you laugh out loud. 

Download: The Beatles - Norwegian Wood (cut-up)

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The Shortest Halmark Release Ever?

 Hello, everybody, hello!

Before I get started with today's items, I wanted to share that I have again been invited to be part of a podcast. It's the same show - Ephemeral - which has featured elements of my collection four times in the past, and has had me on, as an interviewee, three of those times. 

This time around, I am sharing the world of the Star Ads. Those of you who have been with me since the WFMU days, or the 2003 365 days project before that, might remember the Star Ads, but in case you don't know what I'm talking about, I have shared excerpts from them here and here. 

The new podcast, which features several more , previously unshared Star Ads, can be heard at: 

https://www.ephemeral.show/episode/star-ads

~~

I would also like to share that, as of this coming Monday, I will again be gainfully employed. Thanks to everyone who chimed in with encouragement and/or condolences regarding the loss of my previous job. 

~~

And now, a Halmark release that I found very interesting!

First, this is one of the comparatively few Halmark discs which names the singer, and what's more, it gets the singer right on both sides. This really is the vocalist most often identified as "Bob Storm" (of those which do feature performers' names, multiple Halmark releases have the wrong singer named on them). 

But more to the point, this is, by a significant degree, the shortest Halmark release I've ever come across. Halmark tracks tend to be lengthier than their song-poem compatriots from other labels, usually at or beyond three minutes, and regularly stretching to - and far beyond - four minutes. They often also seem to go on longer than those on other labels, but that's another story. 

But the lengths of both tracks on this release add up to less than four minutes and fifteen seconds. The longer of the two - "Goodness Can Still Prevail" - is just 2:09. 

"Goodness Can Still Prevail" seems to have been an exercise in rhyming for the song-poet, as he threw in a bunch of words that end in the "Ale" or "Ail". That made me laugh. Bob Storm certainly Bob Storms it up, offering his most unctuous vocal style, to entertain us. 

One last note: the absolutely cruddy sound quality that permeates the much of this track is from the record and not from anything I did in turning it into an MP3. That Halmark sold such a poor product, which sounds like it was recorded on damaged recording tape, says a lot about them.

Download: Bob Storm - Goodness Can Still Prevail

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The flip side, "Fallin' Tears", stands out for me, in that I don't recall ever hearing this backing track before, on a Halmark release. Additionally, it certainly sounds like a track which was created for a specific hit song, as we've discovered to be the case for multiple other Halmark tracks. If there is another Halmark release in circulation this backing track - one I find more pleasant than most of what they used - please remind/inform me of it. 

It's also worth noting that the lyrics here are fairly direct, simple but effective, and not at all like many of the overwrought efforts that frequently found their way to Halmark's storefront. 

This track lasts just 124 seconds, and I'm having a hard time recalling a shorter Halmark track. 

Oh, and see below, after the label scan....

Download: Bob Storm - Fallin' Tears

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The song-poet in this case was apparently quite happy with his creation and with Halmark's work with it. As seen below, from the 45 sleeve, he stamped it with his name and address, and in another spot on the sleeve, offered a signed copy to someone named Ethel. 

And here's a quick update: please see the comments for a link that my pal Stu offered, to a Google Maps view of that very address.

~~~

And now, it's time for a couple more Cut-Ups. Please see previous posts, going back to the end of January, for an explanation of these tapes, which I made in the early '80's, while in my early 20's. I have two of them today. 

First up, a very, very short example, which is more of a "fun with the pause button" example than a true "cut-up". For here we have what I've called "We Will Rock You (Sliced and Diced)", 20 seconds of the first measure of that Queen classic, rearranged radically and somewhat violently. Hopefully, this will make you laugh. 

Download: Queen - We Will Rock You (Sliced and Diced)

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And then there is this rearrangement of the opening track from my choice as the greatest album ever made, The Beatles' "Abbey Road". I've indicated, in the track name, that this is a "composite" version of "Come Together", and that's because I cut-up that track twice, in quick succession, way back when, and while neither of them was funny enough to share on its own, they each had some great moments, so I have combined the best of each of them into one single cut-up. 

The inserts here rely heavily on excerpts from Monty Python albums, and also - as very many of my cut-ups did - ridiculous things said by Gary Owens on his wonderful show "Soundtrack of the '60's", which was in production at that time. 

Oh, and there are two four letter words mixed in here, along with at least one loud expression of another word not often said in polite company. 

Download: The Beatles - Come Together (cut-up)

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A question: are people enjoying these? Should I continue to share them?

Things I Did Last Summer

Wow - Two months without a post. Well, I do hope things are about to settle down, but between things getting WAY too hectic at work, and several musical and CD projects I owe to friends and aquaintences coming due at the same time (none of which I've finished, weeks later), I've not been paying attention to much of anything else. 

So, although these will be old news for some of the people who read this, but I've uploaded two sound manipulating tracks I worked on, last summer. The first is one of my "cut-up's", the likes of which I used to do, nearly to exhaustion, back in the early '80's, and just recently started doing again. This one started with a friend's suggestion that the English and German versions of "She Loves You" could be merged to create a new, interesting title phrase. 

Download: The Beatles - She Loves You (cut-up)

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The other is a mash-up featuring, as it's basic track, the original recording of "Yesterday", paired with bits and pieces of 16 other records, 15 of which are from the 1976-80 era, and therefore retitled "Now I Long For the Late 1970's". See how many of these songs you can "spot"!

Download: Now I Long For the Late 1970's (mash-up)

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