I know, it should be obvious. Really, they’ve both just got a moon goddess first name and a one syllable last name who are jazz singers and pianists. But that was enough to confuse me. Not that I gave it a lot of thought, but….
I mean, they don’t sound that much alike:
Diane Schuur:
Diana Krall:
Diana Krall gets more play on WSIE, though, and every time until I heard her yesterday, I thought she was Diane Schuur. Because the names are close.
Gentle reader, although I have not actually employed the one-for-me, one-for-you Christmas gift buying protocol this year, I did pick up a couple of inexpensive records at Relics the week before Christmas whilst Christmas shopping. I also spotted some Chuck Mangione records at Vintage Stock whilst I was scoping out Pink Floyd CDs for my oldest who has come of that age. As I am still present, I am trying to steer him into more David Gilmour than Roger Waters, but I can certainly speak intelligently about something he likes.
At any rate, on Monday night, we stopped by Vintage Stock for the Chuck Mangione records with the power of a $25 Visa gift card of unknown provenance that has been in my gift card collection for a while.
At Vintage Stock, I bought:
Fun and Games, Encore, and Chase the Clouds Away by Chuck Mangione. No “Feels So Good”, his biggest hit I think, because that’s on Feels So Good, but Encore has “The Land of Make Believe” which also appears on WSIE from time to time. I paid $5.99 each for these, which might be a record (ahut!) (actually, no I bought Eddy Grant’s Killer on the Rampage and probably some Tommy Reynolds records for more). But I will definitely enjoy these three records.
The Four Freshman, Funny How Time Slips Away. I used to listen to the one Four Freshman album I owned, The Swingers, a lot. Partly because I owned fewer records then. I have bought a bunch of Four Freshmen records since and don’t play them as often. Also, I am not playing records as often.
Evie, Come On, Ring Those Bells. You see a lot of Evie records around. She’s a Scandinavian-influenced (second generation Norwegian) Christian music singer from the 1970s. So it might fit in with The Swedish Gospel Singers and The Teen Tones.
Two by Al Jolson: “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet” and The Immortal Al Jolson
Anything under four dollars was buy one get one free, so I only paid for one Al Jolson record (at $2.99) and the Four Freshman (Evie was free). The total came to only $24 roughly, so I had some left on the gift card for Barnes and Noble.
At Relics, the week before Christmas, I got:
Frank Sinatra, “My Way”. For $2.00. Friends, are we reaching a stage in history where even the young hipsters driving up the price on records everywhere are not driving the price of Frank Sinatra records up? I mean, $2? More for me, then.
Henry Mancini, Big Screen, Little Screen movie and television themes. From the Mancini Orchestra and Chorus. I have a tape or two of theirs from when tapes were a thing. I was old before I was old.
Frankie Carle, Play One For Me.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Together: The Genius of The Oscar Winners. Given that Gene Pitney sings, it sounds an awful lot like a country album.
Donna Fargo, Shame On Me bought because it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWOC, in the MfBJN nomenclature). Turns out this is mid-70s folk country. As are so many PWOC records in Brian J.’s collection.
Perry Como, Close To You and Perry Como Sings Just For You. Now that the Christmas records are put away, these will help ease the transition into the normal record life.
Those were less than $10 after discounts and whatnot.
I have a gift certificate for an actual record store from Christmas, gentle reader, and to be honest, I am not sure how to shop for records. Basically, I tend to acquire LPs browsing through unsorted bins or bundles at thrift stores, book sales, antique malls, and used game and music shops. So to browse records in good condition and that cost real money? I will be lost. I’ll probably find a single Herb Alpert record from the 1980s that I don’t have and that will be that.
At any rate, I think the Chuck Mangione will be the real score of the trip. I need to take another $1 flyer on a band I have not bought before to see if I can find something else to acquire cheaply. Because one day, I will organize my records, and I will be able to pick out something to fit my mood instead of what’s closest to the front of the records that matches my mood. Won’t that be nice?
It’s true: At Nogglestead, the lights will be up probably for another week, but the Christmas records get re-sorted to the bottom and back shelves until next year. By which time, I expect I will have gotten more. But that’s neither here nor there.
I didn’t get a chance to comment on this YouTube video, entitled “Cheddar Explains Why Almost All Christmas Music Is From the 1940s and 1950s”, which I saw on Neatorama:
Ah, well, Cheddar explains. Apparently, this is a YouTube channel that explores, explains, and in a brief ten minute clip condenses things for you.
It starts by comparing a Justin Bieber song to Nat King Cole singing “The Christmas Song” and says the only difference is time. Even though you can hear, quite clearly, that the orchestrations are completely different. The video goes on to interview a single expert on camera and circle a paragraph in a New York Times article and to say that, basically:
The changing of the music industry from selling sheet music to selling records;
Television;
World War II;
The commercialization of Christmas
All of which can sort of explain why the music of the 40s and 50s remains the stuff of our shared Christmas canon and more recent stuff does not.
Although the YouTube video says that sometimes a song breaks into the canon, like:
I guess Cheddar never heard of Spike Jones, does not own the Reader’s Digest Christmas Through The Years box set, or has not listened to DirecTV’s Christmas station, which plays the 1952 Spike Jones version of this song every night or so:
So, yeah, that comes from the 1950s, too, not a late-breaking 1970s addition to the canon. So, yeah, it looks like the 20-something on YouTube has an obvious gap in the knowledge she’s presenting. Say it ain’t so!
Off the top of my head, what other factors influence this affection for the old songs?
World War II and troops away are pat, easy answers to the changes taking place in the 1940s and 1950s. Other changes across the country include electrification of rural areas and the actual transition from many rural people from carts and sleighs to cars. Not to mention urban population movements and migrations. So many of the most urban of people remembered sleighs, carts, and some of the trappings of simpler Christmases with family in the country–unlike our second-hand memories of the songs talking about them. These people in the 1940s and 1950s hearkened back to that time when they were young, and that’s how Christmas was.
After the 1940s and the 1950s, the sound of popular music changed. They went from big band orchestrations and crooners to smaller arrangements with a guitar or two, drums, and a singer–rock and roll. The transition wasn’t immediate and simple, but if you flip through the music charts, you’ll see what I mean. So even when people released Christmas albums, the new kids didn’t generally sound like the things people had heard on their radios back in the day.
Let’s talk about the content of the modern Christmas songs. All the way back to “Blue Christmas”, “This Christmas I Spend With You” (shudder), “Hey, Santa”, and the new canon “All I Want For Christmas Is You” are songs about the singer and the significant other. Not the singer and family. I cannot emphasize enough that the most resonant Christmases, er, resonate because they’re shared with family, not just the significant other (see also the film The Family Man, which is actually a Christmas movie but forgotten for some reason). The ones I remember most are from my youth that I spent with my parents and the ones that I have spent with my own children. So of course songs that play up the family will hit me and the Christmas music consumer more than ones about being young and in love (although, I hasten to say, I am still both). It’s kind of like how pop music (and country music to a lesser extent) has narrowed even in the most recent decades to targeting a very young demographic. So, yeah, these songs are not going to be favorites throughout the years.
Also, the music industry has diversified greatly in the last decades; the popular songs on the radio (the music expert in the Cheddar video says radio drives popular music–really? In 2020? I am unconvinced) and the popular songs on the charts sell far fewer copies than popular music of the previous decades. So even if you write a “popular” song, a lot of people aren’t going to hear it, and it won’t reach a critical mass of “canon.” Not to mention that songwriters looking for a payday are no longer writing songs for the movies–many examples from the Cheddar video, such as “White Christmas” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” were written for movies. Instead, they’re writing for the clubs and for the WAP fans. That’s where the money is. Not music a family can share, even though Christmas songs and Christmas records represent a good backlist item to have.
This blog post, too, is not really enough to explore in great detail all the forces that made those songs from that transitional time so resonant (that word again!) with the generation that experienced the transitions in the early part of the twentieth century and how their appreciation of those songs carried through the generations–their children (the Baby Boomers) and their children’s children (us) and onto our children (the people making YouTube videos as ways to share “knowledge”). But it recognizes the complexities the Cheddar video misses.
Now that I’ve finished this post, I can put the last of the Christmas music on the back shelf in my head, too.
As you know, gentle reader, I have numerous Christmas albums acquired over decades (well, I inherited some eleven years ago and have added to the stash since) and I have a working record player this year. So am I listening to Christmas records 24/7? Unfortunately, no–as I am not spending much time in the kitchen/parlor/living room area where you can hear the records on the record player.
Instead, I have been listening to other, more limited, playlists of Christmas songs in other venues.
I started with the local Christmas radio station. This year, 106.7 The River (don’t ask me the call letters–radio stations rarely mention them any more, and you can’t spell “River” from any combination thereof) started very early–the beginning of November–to get a jump on 105.9 KGBX (all right, make a rule and suddenly there’s an exception). As a radio station, it focuses more on the secular songs of Christmas and the more recent poppy versions of them. It mixes in a little Perry Como and Bing Crosby, but not a lot. Since it was the first source of Christmas music at my disposal, I let the radio play a lot, and after a couple of nights of a couple of hours at dinner and thereafter, we got very familiar with the radio-sized playlist–which is to say, it’s not very big.
At night, in the recliner, I used my phone to play some of the albums I have in CD form streaming to a Bluetooth speaker. Unfortunately, my set of Christmas CDs is pretty limited: Erin Bode’s A Cold December Night; Alberti’s Merry Christmas; Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Christmas Album; Jessy J’s California Christmas; Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas, Christmas Extraordinaire, and Christmas in the Aire (as I mentioned); and Natalie Cole’s Holly and Ivy. I was starting to think of this as the “The Holly and the Ivy” Christmas as the song was over-represented in the CD streaming rotation (that is, Erin Bode and Natalie Cole sang it repeatedly).
At the end of November, I remixed our audio equipment here, which allowed me to spin records and stream the DirecTV more traditional Christmas station through the speakers downstairs.
Well, a couple nights of addressing Christmascards made me very familiar with the satellite provider’s Christmas list which is almost as small but different than the radio’s.
For example, perhaps the person who programmed the playlist is a bigger fan of Robert Goulet than Fillyjonk, but you get multiple tracks every night, including “This Christmas I Spend With You”:
I mean, topically, it’s not that different from Natalie Cole’s “No More Blue Christmases”:
However, the Goulet song sure does have an “I’m God’s gift to you” vibe, ainna? As you might remember, gentle reader, I actually have that album, and we play it once every year just because we have it (kind of like the Mario Lanza Christmas album we have). I don’t actually think we made it through the whole album yet this year, but with the satellite television music playlist, we’ve probably listened to more Goulet Christmas music overall than ever before.
Another song in heavy rotation is “Up on the Housetop”. The satellite music playlist includes several versions, including the one by the Jackson 5:
So it’s not uncommon to hear the song several times a night. Which is more striking because I was not familiar with the song before this year, but I am now. My boys know it–the youngest sings along with it–but it’s not heavily represented on the records I own, and if you hear the Jackson 5 on a Christmas radio station, it’s probably “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. I know it because I’ve heard it a bunch.
The satellite radio station also plays selections from Ella Fitzgerald, but Santa Claus Got Stuck In My Chimney” is in such heavy rotation that we’re sick of it. And Allan Sherman’s “12 Days Of Christmas”, another song I was not familiar with. And the Spike Jones Orchestra renditions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”. So novelty Christmas songs go way back, but you can have way too much of them.
Additionally, WSIE has worked some Christmas music into its playlist, which is kind of nice as the playlist has seemed to shrink quite a bit towards the end of the year–but it’s not that broad, either. Maybe when I drop them my annual contribution, they’ll be able to afford additional music.
So what have I done?
I have worked to switch between the Christmas music sources frequently enough to keep them fresh. As we’re only a couple days away from Christmas itself, I think I’ll make it without being driven crazy. Because although we will probably have the trees lit until New Years weekend, the Christmas music comes pretty much to a full stop on December 26 here at Nogglestead.
Does that sound like the lead singer of a-ha to you? And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the poet-narrator, as he sings:
All you folks back home
I’ll never tell you this
You’re not supposed to know
Where your daughter is
And later:
Just think of the girl I used to be
You were my age once, mama
Is he singing about the daughter? Was he the daughter? In this timeline, the song from the 1995 album Wild Seed is smack dab between “Lola” and “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” and 2020, man.
The rest of the album sounds more like the voice of a-ha, though, and it occurs to me that although I have his first English solo effort (the aforementioned Wild Seed, he has released six solo albums, all the way up to 2014. Perhaps I will think to get them when I am feeling profligate.
So I have been thinking about writing some more Christmas album reviews, since they’re popular parts of the deep content here around Christmas time, and I have been thinking of including CDs I own instead of just record albums. Of course, I was thinking about that because I was without a means of playing records until I recombined the electronics here in late November. So, clearly, the idea of resurrecting the Christmas album reviews is another plan I’ve meant to put into action but have not yet.
Not being able to listen to the records meant I piped things from my phone a bunch, which is why I had been listening to Christmas CDs (ripped and streamed). One of them is Erin Bode’s A Cold December Night which opens with a song called “Skating”.
St. Louis Blues announcer Charles Glenn and Larry Barker have a single song called “My Attorney Bernie” which is not available for purchase, but is on Soundcloud.
I would buy a Charles Glenn jazz album. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any such thing.
As you know, gentle reader, I have often postulated that metal makes all music better and have pointed out how much better Leo Moracchioli’s covers sound than the originals (see Transgenre Music from 2018 and many, many postings in the Legion of Metal Friends Facebook group or build a time machine to travel back to the Redeemer Trunk or Treat in 2018 where we did a heavy metal concert theme and played Frogleap Studios on a loop).
Well, B.P. has a more thoughtful post called Making Metal Out Of Rock which makes the same point, albeit with significantly less Noregianness.
My beautiful wife was playing some playlist in the kitchen whilst cooking. I heard a song and said, “That’s Bach, ainna?”
She said it was.
I don’t know if she was impressed or not–I always assume she is impressed with every utterance and impressive bit of trivia I know. So I immediately ruined any positive impression by admitting I knew it because it was the song that played when you went into the church in the Commodore 64 Friday the 13th video game which I played a bit in my youth. In a pirated copy downloaded from a l33t BBS somewhere, which is the only way a kid in a trailer park got games to play that he didn’t have to type in out of magazines himself.
“It must have been a Lutheran church,” she said.
I was going to post about it earlier this week when it happened, but I needed to research it as I did not look to see what it was and didn’t want to have to go through random Bach songs to find it.
Which I recognize because it was in a video game I played over 30 years ago.
It’s kind of like knowing classic works because they were in old Looney Tunes cartoons. But in 8-bit Commoodore SID chip sound with a dash of software piracy thrown in for spice.
Christmas time in, what, 1984? We’re at the house that my maternal grandmother rented in High Ridge right next to the firehouse. My brother and I are lying on the floor watching MTV because my grandmother had cable, and we could watch MTV which would have been important to a twelve-year-old at the time. We would have been visiting on a weekend, as we were still living with my aunt in St. Charles at the time. The television is a big console unit that would be in our trailer too soon as my grandmother would pass away in a year or so.
But this Christmas song comes on. A science fiction sounding Christmas song.
We’re lying on the floor, and as it finishes up, my brother and I turn to each other and say, “Whoa.”
It’s Mannheim Steamroller’s “Deck the Halls” from the then-new Christmas album. I liked it so much that I bought it on audiocassette whilst I was in college; it would have been the first Christmas album I bought.
As our latest inexpensive bookshelf system failed, again, after six or seven months of playing records, I’m not spinning platters for a second year in a row. I’m reduced to listening to songs via Bluetooth. Somewhere in the recent decades, my beautiful wife spent time ripping audiocassettes to MP3 files, so I have a copy of my old tape on my phone now, and I listened to it the other night and remembered how I was introduced to Mannheim Steamroller.
So I asked my brother if he remembered it.
He did not.
So many of the things I remember, I am unsure if they actually happened like that or not. And more and more, nobody can tell me differently.
And as I’m getting older, my wife or increasingly my children ask me if I remember some incident that seemed more important to them than to me, and I cannot. So I am a little gratified that other people my age–namely, my brother–cannot remember some things, too.
As long as it actually happened. I suppose it would be no consolation if it didn’t and I was just recalling it wholesale.
At any rate, I am thinking of reviewing some Christmas “albums” that I have in non-record format as the posts about the Christmas albums are popular, especially this time of year.
So I was trying to play Naz’s album Time After (yes, the one with "Time After Time" on it, not that Naz has made a second album for you to confuse the two).
But on my Portable Device, I tapped and held the artist, and it came up with a photo.
As you might know, gentle reader, I pretty much think that Eydie Gorme did the best rendition of every song she ever recorded, andall other artists who attempt to record new versions of the songs are fools.
However, as I recently picked up a new copy of the album Eydie In Love since the copy I got in 2015 (that long ago? Already?) skipped. I would like to acknowledge that my beautiful wife bought me the CD for my birthday, but when presented with the chance to buy another record (for fifty cents!), I did. I put it on the turntable the other day, and it includes her rendition of “It Could Happen To You”:
But I had recently heard Ashley Pezzotti’s version:
As you know, gentle reader, I am not generally a fan of scatting, but Ashley Pezzotti might be the best I’ve heard.
The two interpretations have a bit of a difference. Eydie is more wistful and mournful–she warns it’s not necessarily a good thing. Ashley is more playful, and although she might have given you that advice previously, love has happened to her, and she’s happy it did.
So does that mean that I think that Eydie Gorme might be trumped by an upstart? Heaven forbid! The interpretations make them completely different songs (and you thought the difference in pronouns was a dodge!).
But I also got a new copy of Eydie On Stage, which has a rendition of “But Not For Me”:
Ms. Pezzotti’s debut album We’ve Only Just Begun has her rendition:
And, erm….
Well, they’re different songs because Eydie’s has the take of an older, more world-weary poet-narrator, and Ashley’s has the perspective of a younger person who is only, hopefully, temporarily discouraged.
Jeez, Louise, I am walking on a thin line here. I love Eydie Gorme, but I’m also quite fond of Ashley Pezzotti. Whereas I am ever hopeful to find a new record of Eydie Gorme’s vast discography when I go to antique malls and book sales, I am also hopeful that the Quarantine Sessions are building up a repertoire for a new Ashley Pezzotti album sometime soon.
According to this article with one of them ahead of her first new album in almost thirty years, it happens frequently:
Do people still confuse you with Patti Smith?
It happens all the time, and it’s insane that it still happens. To tell you how far back she’s been haunting me … when I was a teenager, I was getting her mail in the East Village. And I’m not kidding. I had no idea what she did or who she was, but I knew that she existed.
Time will tell whether I get the album, but I probably owe it to her.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to confuse myself with the question Is she the one who is married to John McEnroe or the one that had the hit with Don Henley?
Somehow, over the past few months, the paper of record omitted obituaries for Steve Priest bass player, singer and co-founder of The Sweet; Pete Way bass player and co-founder of UFO, Fastway and Waysted; guitarist Paul Chapman, also of UFO; Lee Kerslake drummer for Ozzy Osbourne and Uriah Heep; and Franke Banali drummer for Quiet Riot and W.A.S.P..
To be fair, though, I have only known one of these fellows, Frankie Banali, by name and only because I recently read Louder Than Hell. And I am a fan of metal music, although more modern metal than the recently departed.
Also, I am not twenty-six-years-old and a professional.
UPDATE: After I scheduled this post, the news came out that Eddie Van Halen passed away. He shall get an obit in the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal for sure.
Well, my friends, I have bought my first LPs in what seems like a long time. I guess my last purchases were in July when I bought a handful of records while spending gift cards at Relics Antique Mall, but, come on, it doesn’t feel like I’ve bought LPs unless I’ve been to this book sale and have bought fifty.
Which I did, sort of.
I got:
Charlie Byrd
Countdown Time In Outer Space The Dave Brubeck Quartet
One Hell of a Woman Vikki Carr
For All We Know Vikki Carr
The Lord’s Prayer Perry Como
Easy to Love Frankie Carle
Praise the Almighty The Lutheran Hour Choir with the St. Louis Symphony
Albany Park Lani Hall (I have a couple of her CDs, but I’m glad to get her on LP outside of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66)
Radioland Nicolette Larson
Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 Val Cliburn (I read something recently about how good of a pianist he is, so I thought I’d get one of his albums)
Hit Parade International Tom Jones; this is an Italian greatest hits album with a book cover.
TWB The Tim Wiseberg Band
Das Lied der Berge; I am not sure if it’s the title or what as it’s completely in German
A Very Good Year The Columbia Treasures Orchestra and Chorus. PWC.
It’s Impossible Perry Como
Wild Heart of the Young Karla Bonoff (PWC)
My Favorite Brahms Van Cliburne (as it stands, I got two of his LPs)
The Best of The Three Suns
Together Again Tierra
Song of Norway The Original Cast Album
Bouquet of Love The Percy Faith Strings; there’s a lot of Perry Faith in the wild. I might as well see if I like it.
Tiger Rag Jo Ann Castle and Her Wild Piano!
Fool on the Hill Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. I know I have this album cover, but I bought it a long time ago to discover it had a different SM&B66 album in it. I might have already bought another copy with the right platter. But I know I’ve got it now.
Great Verdi Arias Anna Moffe
Sandy Posey Sandy Posey
Temptation Roger Williams; one finds a lot of Roger Williams available. For fifty cents, I’ll take a flier on an album with a Pretty Women on the Cover (PWC).
April in Portugal Frankie Carle
Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music Perry Como
Alone Too Long Charly McClain
I’m Jessi Colter Jessi Colter
The Best of Perry Como Perry Como
Joyous Music for Christmas Time Various
J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Wanda Wandowska
Not purchased: A copy of Phoebe Snow’s debut album, which I bought in July at Relics for $7.99 and $1.99 as I bought two copies (remember, I had been looking for this album for a year and half at Relics after spotting an unpriced copy of it, so when I saw them this year, I bought both). I could have had it for fifty cents were I but patient! But you never know what you will find today or tomorrow while hunting, so it’s best to buy it when you see it if it’s not too expensive. Note that I did not buy a third copy; this isn’t Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights of which I have three or four copies. I’ve stopped buying all of them that I see as the early Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass albums–The Lonely Bull, Going Places, South of the Border, What Now My Love, and Whipped Cream and Other Delights are still fairly common at book sales. And they will be, undoubtedly, until I need to replace one.
So for $24, I got a bunch of Perry Como along with a lot of late 70s and early 80s pop, jazz, and country.
Did I get any books, you ask? I’ll answer tomorrow.
Unfortunately, two things:
Given that I do not spend as much time in my parlor or kitchen these days, it will take me a long time to listen to all these records;
I don’t actually have room for these in the record shelves that I made last year, so I’ll have to make another set of them sometime soon.
First world problems, I know. But if I don’t hoard, how will my children sell enough things for a quarter each at my estate sale to amount to anything?
Actually, I am in pretty good shape for a couple of reasons. One, I have not been to the gym lately, so I have not been listening to metal at max volume in earbuds much this year. Second, I don’t tend to go to actual metal concerts because in my youth, metal heads tended to give me the business, so I avoid them in large groups.
That’s an animated GIF of Judas Priest singing “Breaking the Law” in someone’s comment on something followed by a WSIE post about Count Basie.
Kind of like how my home library is all female-fronted metal bands like Amaranthe:
(Can I call Elize Ryd a metal songbird?)
Followed by jazz songbirds like Nicole Zuraitis:
Clearly, Facebook has been listening to me. Or I interact with a lot of metalheads and follow a lot of jazz stuff on Facebook. FALSE DILEMMA! Like metal or jazz.
In 2018, I stopped at the Classic Rock Coffee location in Springfield for, well, coffee, and I took pictures of the album covers on the wall beside the booths where I sat. I then quizzed myself on which of the classic rock albums I owned (here and here). I scored 2 out of 16 (roughly 12.5%).
Whilst cleaning off the desk in the parlor, where I spin records and stack them as I play them, I found a paper inner sleeve from some LP that looks to be RCA Victor from roughly 1960. The kind that depicts other albums on the label you might be interested in. The sleeve itself contains sixteen records.
I’ll treat it as a quiz and bold the records I know I own:
Cool Water by the Sons of the Pioneers. Actually, I have two copies of this album somewhere in the mixed-up record library. As I mentioned in 2012, my father used to play this album on Christmas for some reason. I got the second copy last year to double my chances of finding it on Christmas this year.
Last Date by Floyd Cramer.
Glenn Miller’s Original Recordings by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. I might have this one, actually; although it looks like a single record, I have a box set with a very similar cover. I think. Hard to say; the albums are packed in so tightly that it’s hard for me to find anything.
Inspirational Songs by George Beverly Shea.
Teen Scene by Chet Atkins.
Souvenirs by Hank Snow.
The Student Prince by Mario Lanza. I have a couple by Lanza, but not this one, and I probably won’t get it as I’ve not really gotten into operatic show tunes.
My Favorite Chopin by Van Cliburn. I don’t think I have any of this pianist, but he’s not on my “nah” list. So maybe this September, if they actually do have the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale that they’re advertising, I will find some.
Calypso by Harry Belafonte. Nah. Which often is only short for “Naht yet.”
South Pacific. Nah. I am also not into non-operatic show tunes.
Oliver!. Ditto.
Honey in the Horn by Al Hirt. I have a lot of Al Hirt because my beautiful wife plays the trumpet, but I am not into Al Hirt qua Al Hirt because I’m not into the Dixieland sound. I don’t think I have this one.
The Pink Panther by Henry Mancini. I have a lot of Mancini, too, but I don’t think I have this one. But if I see it, I will probably pick it up. Coincidentally, WSIE played “The Pink Panther Theme” by Mancini whilst I was scanning this record sleeve.
Cattle Call by Eddy Arnold. You see a lot of Eddy Arnold about. I shall probably pick something by him up sometime.
Songs I Love by Perry Como. I don’t think I have this one yet, but I like Perry Como, so if I see it, I will buy it.
Miriam Makeba by Miriam Makeba. I bought this one last May.
So that, too, is 2 of 16 with a slight chance of more than that.
To be honest, part of me thinks it’s cooler that I have 13% of these RCA Victor titles from 1960 than the classic rock albums that a lot of people own (which is why they became “classic” albums).
Whenever I see these “also available” sleeves, I like to look to see what I might already have. I tend to do better on A&M Records, that is Herb Alpert’s label, than others because I have a lot of Herb Alpert, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, Burt Bacharach, and even Claudine Longet.
Could the designer who put together this sleeve in 1950-something have ever guessed it would be an Internet listicle quiz seventy years later? I think not!
Every so often, I go to LP Cover Lover to glance at the record covers there. The blog focuses on older LP covers, so things from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s abound. Although the blog focuses a lot on foreign issues, I’m ever hopeful I’ll spot something I own there (I also feel hopeful I will eventually see something I own on Lileks’ Friday Bleature on vintage vinyl).
So I went through one of my periodic reviews of LP Cover Lover, and I saw this, and I thought, Man, that’s a metal album I should own!
We’re Going To Tear Your Kingdom Down by Satan. or Satan by the band We’re Going To Tear Your Kingdom Down. Sounds heavy, with a lot of down-tuned guitar work.
Wait a minute: “Satan” is supposed to be a noun of direct address here. The religious music artist is actually the Young Adult Choir from the First Mt. Olive Freewill Baptist Church in Baltimore.
At any rate, my perusing of LP Cover Lover not only misled me in that misled-for-hopefully-humorous-effect-on-the-blog way, but also cued me to an EP and/or album I really want to find now:
A Christmas album with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra (and Keely Smith)? Definitely something I would start spinning in November at Nogglestead.
