Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

On 4 December 1964 The Beatles released their second LP of the year, just in time for the Christmas. Sandwiched between the masterpieces A Hard Day’s Night (released just six months earlier) and Help!, and released just a year before the game-changer Rubber Soul, the album — titled perhaps not unironically Beatles For Sale — looks like the runt of the litter.

The cover image is emblemic. The guys look tired and irritated. It was a busy year. In 1964 they had recorded A Hard Day’s Night, for which Paul and John had written all the songs, filmed the movie of that name, promoted both, and toured extensively in Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, and the USA, where they had broken big with their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (which is recalled HERE, with a great jazz mix of Beatles covers).

Beatles For Sale was recorded over seven days between August and October. For the last time on a Beatles LP, it included covers of songs by the band’s rock & roll heroes: Chuck Berry (Rock and Roll Music), Buddy Holly (Words Of Love), Carl Perkins (Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby), Little Richard (Hey Hey Hey Hey), Wilbert Harrison (Kansas City, also recorded by Little Richard), and Dr. Feelgood and the Interns (the much-maligned Mr Moonlight).

The covers were obvious fillers, but it would be wrong to dismiss Beatles For Sale on their account. There are several underrated gems among the Lennon/McCartney compositions. The opening trio is as good as almost any on Beatles album: No Reply, I’m A Loser and Baby’s In Black. Eight Days A Week, I’ll Follow the Sun and Every Little Thing are stone-cold Beatles classics. The latter is a rare thing: John singing lead on a McCartney song.

The compilation of cover songs of tracks from the album, presented here in the original order, is great fun. I don’t know if I really like the version of Every Little Thing by Yes, but if I approve of Isaac Hayes totally reworking a sing in psychedelic style, then I should at least express my admiration for this 1969 version, recording of which might have involved the use of drugs.

1. Les Lionceaux – Ne Ris Pas (No Reply) (1965)
2. Eels – I’m A Loser (2003)
3. John Doe – Baby’s In Black (2004)
4. Humble Pie – Rock And Roll Music (1975)
5. The Brothers Four – I’ll Follow The Sun (1966)
6. The Hollies – Mr. Moonlight (1964)
7. Little Richard – Kansas City Hey Hey Hey (1959)
8. Alma Cogan – Eight Days A Week (1965)
9. Jeff Lynne – Words Of Love (2011)
10. Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band – Honey Don’t (1990)
11. Yes – Every Little Thing (1969)
12. The Savoys – I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party (1970)
13. The Fantastic Dee Jays – What You’re Doing (1965)
14. Johnny Cash feat. Carl Perkins – Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby (2003)

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More Beatles Recovered:
Beatles Recovered: A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles Recovered: Beatles For Sale
Beatles Recovered: Help!
Beatles Recovered: Rubber Soul
Beatles Recovered: Revolver
Beatles Recovered: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club  Band
Beatles Revovered: Magical Mystery Tour
Beatles Recovered: White Album
Beatles Recovered: Yellow Submarine
Beatles Recovered: Abbey Road
Beatles Revcovered: Let It Be

Wordless: Any Major Beatles Instrumentals
Covered With Soul Vol. 14 – Beatles Edition 1
Covered With Soul Vol. 15 – Beatles Edition 2
Any Major Beatles Covers: 1962-66
Any Major Beatles Covers: 1967-68
Any Major Beatles Covers: 1968-70
Any Bizarre Beatles

Beatles Reunited: Everest (1971)
Beatles Reunited: Live ’72 (1972)
Beatles Reunited: Smile Away (1972)
Beatles Reunited: Photographs (1974)
Beatles Reunited: ’77 (1977)
Beatles Reunited: Let It See (1980)

Here”s the second of three mixes of full versions of well-known TV themes, including the highly-rated one for True Detective, and two of the all-time greats, Dragnet and Hawaii Five-O. Especially the latter is fantastic in its full length. And listen out for the theme of S.W.A.T..

Most are well-known, but two themes here are from German TV: from the detective series Derrick, which ran from the 1970s to the “90s, and the music show Musikladen (née Beat Club), footage of which regularly turns up on VH-1 type shows and on YouTube. Both themes are excellent; the latter was a single from 1966 which was borrowed as a TV theme. The theme of Derrick was written and arranged by Les Humphries, who also was the leader of the Les Humphries Singers, a multi-national, multi-racial bunch of hippie-looking people who were phenomenally successful in Germany in the early 1970s.

A good number of themes here have scored sitcoms, going back to I Love Jeannie. Not all of them were good, and some pretty bad (Growing Pains!). But it occurs to me that even as people are talking about US television experiencing a golden age, it doesn”t really apply to sitcoms, animated shows aside. Some of the current sitcoms were very good when they started, but have outlived their welcome (Big Bang Theory) or have fallen into a rut (Modern Family); some are just awful (Two And A Half Men, for pity”s sake), some are just overrated (Girls). I had hopes for Blackish, alas”¦ So, we”re left with the genuinely good Brooklyn Nine-Nine and”¦ what else?

No, the golden age of the sitcom was the 1990s: Seinfeld, Friends, Murphy Brown, Frasier, Larry Sanders, the first few seasons of Mad About You, or  Married With Children stood out above much of the crap we watched anyway on TV, because we had no broadband Internet and DVD box-sets.

The first mix of full TV themes is HERE.

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R and includes home-couchpotatoed covers.

1. Family Guy – Full Theme Song
2. Valley Lodge – Go (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver)
3. Aloe Blacc – I Need A Dollar (How To Make It In America)
4. Regina Spektor – You’ve Got Time (Orange Is The New Black)
5. Dave Porter – Breaking Bad Theme
6. The Handsome Family – Far From Any Road (True Detective)
7. Ryan Bingham – Until I’m One With You (The Bridge)
8. Dandy Warhols – We Used To Be Friends (Veronica Mars)
9. Lazlo Bane – Superman (Scrubs)
10. Malvina Reynolds – Little Boxes (Weeds)
11. Frank Sinatra – Love And Marriage (Married With Children)
12. Ray Anthony – Theme from Dragnet
13. Hugo Montenegro – Jeannie (I Dream Of Jeannie)
14. The Monkees – (Theme From) The Monkees
15. Mood Mosaic – A Touch Of Velvet-A Sting Of Brass (Musikladen/Beat Club)
16. Orchester Les Humphries – Derrick
17. Morton Stevens – Theme from Hawaii Five-O
18. Ja’net DuBois & Oren Waters – Movin’ On Up (The Jeffersons)
19. Waylon Jennings – Good Ol’ Boys (Dukes Of Hazzard)
20. Andrew Gold – Final Frontier (Mad About You)
21. B.J. Thomas & Dusty Springfield – As Long As We Got Each Other (Growing Pains)
22. Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams – Without Us (Family Ties)
23. Dave Grusin – St Elsewhere
24. Jack Elliott – Theme from Night Court
25. Rhythm Heritage – Theme from S.W.A.T.

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More TV Themes
More CD-Mixes

In 1980 I turned 14, and shortly before that I bought my 100^th single — that is, the 100^th single in my collection since I had dumped all my old Schlager platters and started accumulating proper pop records. The honour of providing my century went to Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers, a song he also recorded in very broken German. I preferred the English version. Within a year I would almost stop buying singles in favour of albums (though I’d rediscover the joy of the single when I lived in London in the mid-’80s).

A couple of months later I bought in short order a quartet of singles which, along with New Musik’s Living By Numbers, define my year 1980: Tim Curry‘s I Do The Rock, The Pretenders‘ Brass In Pocket (to this day I have no idea what Chrissie Hynde is singing much of the time), the Ramones‘ version of Baby I Love You, produced by Phil Spector, and Dexys Midnight Runners‘ Geno.

If forced to choose, I’d call Geno my favourite single ever. It’s not the best single ever, of course, nor is it even my favourite song to be released as a single. It is my favourite single because never before or after have I loved a single — as an item and a song at a particular place and time — as much as Geno. I remember vividly buying it and sitting on the bus home, staring at its stark cover, anxious not so much to play it, but to own it, to place it in my collection of singles, as if this new acquisition was going to complete it.

The song may be somewhat derivative, but it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before: the urgent chants of the titular name, the minor notes of the stirring brass, and then Kevin Rowland’s distinctive style of staccato singing. It caused a weird sensation in my guts. I’ve heard Geno many, many times since then, and I can still feel that sensation of hearing it 34 years ago.

New Musik‘s Living By Numbers is perfectly situated in 1980: the paranoia of the 1970s anticipating the computer age of the 1980s. Towards the end, there is a series of different English-accented individuals proclaiming: “They don’t want your name” (they want “just your numbah”, apparently). I derived much fun, and still do, from imitating the different voices as I sang along; correctly locating the strangely shrill and nasal women’s moment at 2:46 being a moment of particular personal triumph. I associate the song with another new innovation: it was one of the songs I recorded off a music show on our new video recorder, a machine using a format that was already obsolete in 1980!

1980 was indeed an exciting time for music. Lots of new sounds emerged from Britain. The lyrics, to me as German-speaking teen, were secondary.  And so it was only a couple of years ago that I discovered that The Vapors‘ Turning Japanese is not an ode to acquiring a taste for sushi and saki, nor a narrative about the notoriously difficult act of assimilating to life in Tokyo, Osaka or Fukuoka. Turning Japanese apparently refers to the narrowing of the male’s eyes as he reaches the point of orgasm, in the case of the song brought about by masturbation. It might not be true, but I’ll accept that interpretation as fact.

It seems Germany in general didn’t care much about lyrics. How Frank Zappa‘s Bobby Brown received wide airplay, to the point of turning this 1979 song into a big hit in 1980, is something I shall never understand.

1980 was, of course, also a year bookended by the deaths of two favourite singers. In February AC/DC‘s Bon Scott died in London. Not long before that I had bought the Highway To Hell LP. On 9 December the radio alarm clock went off with more terrible news. I was just rising when the announcer said that John Lennon had been shot dead while we were sleeping. On my turntable was the second LP from The Beatles 1967-70 collection, which I had listened to, for the first time in a long time, the night before, when John was still alive.

As always, this mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R and includes covers. PW in in comments.

1. Status Quo – Living On An Island
2. Electric Light Orchestra – Confusion
3. Cheap Trick – Dream Police
4. Cherie & Marie Currie – Since You”ve Been Gone
5. AC/DC – Touch Too Much
6. Peter Gabriel – Games Without Frontiers
7. New Musik – Living By Numbers
8. The Vapors – Turning Japanese
9. Tim Curry – I Do The Rock
10. Marianne Faithful – The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan
11. Pretenders – Brass In Pocket
12. Dexys Midnight Runners – Geno
13. Ramones – Baby, I Love You
14. Frank Zappa – Bobby Brown
15. Randy Newman – The Story Of A Rock And Roll Band
16. Joan Armatrading – Me, Myself, I
17. The Police – Don’t Stand So Close To Me
18. Robert Palmer – Johnny & Mary
19. David Bowie – Fashion
20. Kate Bush – Army Dreamers
21. John Lennon – (Just Like) Starting Over

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More A Life In Vinyl
More Mix-CD-Rs

A reader asked me to re-up the broken link to this mix, first posted in early 2010. So here I post the whole shebang again, this time with covers, since I suspect some thoughtful children and grandchildren of people who witnessed the time this compilation recalls might want to give the mix as a Christmas present. As always, the thing is timed to fit on a standard CD-R. PW in comments.

I hope that this collection of songs about or set in New York, spanning 30 years, will find an audience. And I hope that some of these songs will inspire the listener to seek out more music by some of the artists who are largely forgotten now.

Here I think of the great Anita O’Day, featured here twice, an extraordinary vocalist whose lifestory would mirror any sordid rock & roll tale. Or Red Nichols, the innovative jazzman who is said to have recorded 4,000 songs before he turned 25. Danny Kaye played him in the 1959 biopic The Five Pennies, which also starred Bob Crosby, the younger brother of Bing, who was a vocalist and bandleader in his own right, though here he appears as a guest of The Dorsey Brothers, both of who feature in this mix heading their own bands.

Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey played with Sam Lanin as did two other future bandleaders included here: Red Nichols on the cornet and saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer. Lanin was more an arranger than he was a musician, but a 1920s hit factory nonetheless (Bing Crosby got his break with Lanin’s orchestra). By the late 1930s, Lanin had retired from the music business.

The Mills Brothers may be most widely remembered better for their 1952 proto-doo wop hit Glow Worm, but by then they were veterans in the music game, having started in 1928, paving the way for the similar Ink Spots. The brothers stopped performing 61 years later, in 1989 (by then having been decimated to two by death).

Dolly Dawn, known to her mother by the more demure name Theresa Maria Stabile, was a massive singing star in the 1930s and early ’40s. She was one of the very first female singers to lead her own band, the Dawn Patrol. Her career was cut short when many members of her band were drafted to serve Uncle Sam in WW2.

The 1920s and ’30s were the golden age of African-American vaudeville acts of the age of the tap dance and the soft-shoe, silver-capped canes and gleaming cufflinks, the Bojangles scene. Jimmy Lunceford, whose orchestra began as a high school band which Lunceford taught in Memphis, is perhaps the best example here of that influence on jazz, incorporating humour in the music (in much the some way the Italian Louis Prima would). Rumour has it that Lunceford died in 1947 after being poisoned by a restaurateur in Oregon who resented the presence of a black patron in his establishment. More extreme things happened in the sorry history of 20th century US racism.

TRACKLISTING
1. Anita O’Day – Take The ‘A’ Train (1958)
2. Tommy Dorsey & Jo Stafford – Manhattan Serenade (1943)
3. Dolly Dawn and her Dawn Patrol – Blossoms On Broadway (1937)
4. Mound City Blue Blowers – She’s A Latin From Manhattan (1935)
5. Louis Prima and his Orchestra – Brooklyn Bridge (1945)
6. The Dorsey Brothers feat. Bob Crosby – Lullaby Of Broadway (1935)
7. The Quintones – Harmony In Harlem (1940)
8. The Mills Brothers – Coney Island Washboard (1932)
9. Tempo King’s Kings Of Tempo – Bojangles Of Harlem (1936)
10. Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson – Sixth Avenue Express (1941)
11. Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra – Cowboy From Brooklyn (1938)
12. Judy Garland & Fred Astaire – A Couple Of Swells (1948)
13. Lee Wiley & Ellis Larkins – Give It Back To The Indians (1954)
14. Dinah Washington – Manhattan (1959)
15. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – Autumn In New York (1956)
16. Gene Krupa feat. Anita O’ Day – Let Me Off Uptown (1941)
17. Cab Calloway Cotton Club Orchestra – Manhattan Jam (1937)
18. Mills Blue Rhythm Band – There’s Rhythm In Harlem (1935)
19. Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra – Slumming On Park Avenue (1937)
20. Artie Shaw and his Orchestra – To A Broadway Rose (1941)
21. Red Nichols and his Orchestra – The New Yorkers (1929)
22. Sam Lanin’s Orchestra with Jack Hart – The Broadway Melody (1929)
23. Frankie Trumbauer – Manhattan Rag (1929)
24. Leadbelly – New York City (1940)

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…
More New York songs.

More Music in Black & White

I fear this blog is becoming a death trap: Of the songs featured on the first two Life in Vinyl compilations, covering the years 1977 and 1978, three musicians died in October. First there was Lynsey de Paul (Rock Bottom, 1977), then Tim Hauser of The Manhattan Transfer (Chanson d”Amour, 1977), and a few days later Raphael Ravenscroft, the man who played that great saxophone on Gerry Rafferty”s Baker Street.

Raphael  Ravenscroft was not only a session sax man who tried his hand, unsuccessfully, as a solo recording artist, but also wrote books on saxophione technique. Other than on Baker Street and other Rafferty tracks, you might have heart him on Pink Floyd”s The Final Cut and Roger Waters” The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking, or Marvin Gaye”s Heavy Love Affair.

Among the great 1960s rock trios, two stood out: Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. And while the members of the latter was all dead by 2008 (the only big rock act I can think of whose members are now all dead), Cream lost its first member in October: bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce (his were the vocals on hits like Sunshine Of Your Love, Crossroads, I Feel Free etc). I think it”s fair to say that Bruce pioneered the electric bass as a central element in rock.

Before Cream, Bruce had played with Ginger Baker in the Graham Bond Organisation (apparently they hated each other) and with Eric Clapton in John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, with whom he later joined a trio named Powerhouse, featuring Steve Winwood. In between he played on UK #1 hits such as Manfred Mann”s Pretty Flamingo and The Scaffold’s Lily the Pink. After Cream he recorded solo and played with artists such as Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gary Moore and others.

Reggae legend John Holt led the way in what was to be called lovers rock, with his reggae ballads which often drew from the word of pop and soul. He had hits with songs such as Help Me Make It Through The Night, Just The Way You Are and Touch Me In The Morning “” but he also wrote a pop classic with The Tide Is High, which he first recorded with his band The Paragons in 1967 and became a global hit for Blondie in 1980.

For those who complain about the artificiality in pop today, the answer is Read more…