Brian J.’s Favorite Soundtracks

So last week, Severian posted a Nerd Fight post about the best soundtrack and invited his commenters to hash out the best soundtrack albums for movies.

Well, we here at MfBJN have owned a soundtrack album or two, and although I did not contribute at his blog, I thought I would steal the theme.

Now, he talks a bit about the history of a soundtrack, but in my post here, I’m going to specify that a soundtrack for my consideration:

  • The songs must have been relatively new for the soundtrack. I mean, you could look at the discs released for Forrest Gump and Sleepless in Seattle. They’re full of good songs, but they were earlier hits collected for the film. Not going to count those.
  • Film scores do not count either. And that’s not just Last of the Mohicans or Lord of the Rings or even Star Trek: The Motion Picture or Star Wars with their soaring classical themes and whatnot but also the works of Henry Mancini (yes, I have both of the Peter Gunn soundtrack albums, and I listened to his work for Charade within the last week. But when I think of soundtracks, I think of collections of vocal music.

Also, this is not a “best” collection, but rather the ones I like best over time.

So here they are, not ranked:

  • Pump Up The Volume
    I have mentioned before that I have this soundtrack which does not have Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” on it). But I have not mentioned that I might have worn out a cassette copy of this soundtrack and bought another before buying a CD of the soundtrack in the 21st century. I have mentioned over and over about the main period when I watched films over and over in my youth (living in a trailer in rural Missouri with nothing but Showtime to keep me company, which oversimplifies it). But when I was in college and had a paycheck, I’d sometimes hit the mall on Friday nights and visit Suncoast and buy videocassettes. Which I would then watch over and over. I watched this movie over and over in those college years when I only had a VCR to keep me company (which oversimplifies it, but my video library was much smaller then). This cassette was one of the ones in heavy rotation in my cheap (but unreliable!) Nissan sports car in 1994-1995, so I heard the soundtrack a bunch, too.
  • Shaft
    I mentioned just recently that I bought numerous blaxploitation films’ soundtracks a decade or so ago. I am not sure whether I saw Shaft and then got the soundtrack or vice versa (I’ve seen all four Shaft movies). I was pleased when I picked up this album on vinyl, too, which I have listened to within the last month. Based on the strength of this album, I’ve bought other Isaac Hayes albums on CD and vinyl.
  • Across 110th Street
    The title song by Bobby Womack plays over the titles of Jackie Brown, so it’s probably on that soundtrack as well. But after watching Jackie Brown, I looked up the song and then bought the soundtrack to the original film (which I have not seen). The title song is on my gym playlist, and I have bought several other Bobby Womack CDs and then records based on his work on this soundtrack.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    It’s a bit thin on the content; a lot of the songs are silly and light (and like a minute long). But it’s one of the more recent soundtracks I’ve bought on CD.
  • Fletch
    C’mon, man, I’ve already talked about this album at length. I will still throw it on when I find it in the disorganized Nogglestead record library. I’ve not bought it on CD, though, as part of the joy of it is in playing the record and remembering what would happen when I did. Maybe if I see it for a buck at a sale I’ll pick it up on CD.

So that’s the top five soundtracks for me, not based on quality, but based on the films and/or where I was when I listened to them a lot.

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Good Album Hunting, March 2, 2023: Stick It In Your Ear Records

Yesterday, my beautiful wife and I went to a record shop in downtown Springfield where I had permission to buy up to $100 of highly priced records.

You see, gentle reader, I suffered a birthday last month, and my wife often gets me a gift certificate or something for the event. But when she got to Relics the day before my birthday, she found a line winding up the aisle to check out, meaning it would have taken her an inordinate amount of time to purchase the gift certificates. And, as you might have read here, the Relics gift certificate is not the best gift, as it has a six month life span, and it is a gift certificate where you must spend all of the value of it, as no change is given. Instead, she allocated $100 for me to spend on fun stuff, which is kind of funny as I tend to buy what I want anyway.

So I decided to make an excursion of it: She and I, together, would go to the record store, and I could spend $100, and I would pick out a record for her, and she would pick out a record for me.

To be honest, I hoped to fill out my Billy Joel collection. When I was visiting Recordhead over on Hampton in Milwaukee in 1990, Billy Joel records were easy to come by as people were replacing their vinyl collections with cassettes or CDs, so I bought a bunch of them. But, oh, gentle reader, what a fool I was a couple of years later when I sold those very records at garage sales for a couple of needed dollars. I recounted all this when I bought (another copy of) 52nd Street last November. But I thought this would be a good opportunity and excuse to splurge on other Billy Joel records.

Oh, but, gentle reader!

The Billy Joel section was but a couple of copies of 52nd Street and a copy of The Bridge. No Piano Man. No The Stranger. No Glass Houses. No Greatest Hits Volume 1 and 2. Oh, the empires I have lost!

I did get The Bridge, though, which I had not owned previously.

I went through the jazz section, looking for Hiroshima, or Keiko Matsui, or Najee, but nothing. I flipped through the Herbie Mann section, and I said Not today. Well, it was more like let’s see what else I can find, but it turned into not today.

My wife pointed out they had $.99 records in boxes along the wall, so I started pawing through them, but the deleterious effects of a martial arts class arose: I could not crouch at the boxes long, and I really had to pee. So I called a lid on it so we could find a restaurant that offered a restroom after our purchases.

We got:

  • The Bridge by Billy Joel.
  • Send It by Ashford and Simpson. I have their earlier album Is It Still Good To Ya? (purchased May 2021). Like previously mentioned artists, Ashford and Simpson had a career spanning 40 years, and I only learned about them by buying their albums and then, today, reading Wikipedia.
  • Fever! by Doc Severinsen. Maybe this can count as the record I picked out for my wife. It was in the dollar section, and although we have numerous Doc Severinsen albums, I was not certain we had this one. And as I grew uncomfortable, I threw the original terms of the trip out the window. Perhaps this should count as the one I picked out for my wife, as I had expected I would pick out a trumpet album for her.
  • Alternating Currents by Spyro Gyra. Since learning that they are not, in fact, zydeco, I have been picking up this fusion jazz band when I can.
  • M.F. Horn 3 by Maynard Gerguson. My wife found this record. I know we have MF Horn 2, and I am pretty sure we did not have this one. We do now.
  • Walk On by Karen Brooks. A Pretty Woman On Cover (PWoC) record. Going by the titles, I’m not sure if it’s pop, 70s folk, country, gospel, or what. The first song is “Country Girl”, but who can tell? (Research indicates: country.
  • Lets’ Dance with the Three Suns by, well, The Three Suns.
  • Super Girls. I didn’t actually buy this one; they have a couple of boxes of “Free with Purchase” up front, and I found the fortitude to paw through them, grabbing this sleeve containing three records. I figured this would be some trashy exploitation band with a couple of extra platters thrown in, but it turns out this is a compilation of girl band hits. With a trashy exploitation cover.

So we didn’t end up spending $100. The records I bought were priced kind of like what you see in antique malls–between $.99 and $10, but the platters themselves were in very good shape, whereas at the antique malls and book sales, they tend to be a little marred.

I did shy away from records close to $20, which means, of course, known and popular acts. Earlier in the week, I rediscovered The Shaft soundtrack in our music library, and I recounted to my beautiful wife how I bought a number of blaxploitation soundtracks about ten years ago and the R&B stars’ other records, such as Isaac Hayes and Bobby Womack, and how I picked them up on vinyl sometimes later. And although I saw Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack. For $50. I passed.

Still, I am thinking about going back and checking out the rest of the dollar records later. Well, when I get downtown again, which is fairly rare.

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Potentially Creepy, But Likely Random

Facebook hit me with this suggested post the other day:

I recognized the album, as I bought it in 2021, and since it’s on the Internet, I assume the AIlgorithms know it.

But Facebook feeds me a diet of hockey players, 80s and 90s nostalgia, and jazz musicians, the last probably because I follow KCSM and WSIE and Herb Alpert on the radio. So it was inevitable that I’d get a record that I own sometime. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t gotten more given how I acquire randomish easy listening and smooth jazz on vinyl.

Speaking of that trip to the library book sale in 2021, I also picked up Najee’s Najee’s Theme, his debut album, that trip, and I just spun that record earlier in the week, mentioning that I liked it an he might be a one-hit wonder.

He is not, and neither is Al di Meola. They’ve both been active for decades, but I guess I’m not that aware of them because the jazz radio stations I listen to do not play a lot of their work. So I keep thinking I’ve discovered something obscure, but it’s really just that I’ve found something new to me.

Perhaps I should watch out for more records by these artists and research them a little deeper when I buy their records. But given that I buy those dollar (or fifty cent) records sometimes sixty at a time, I don’t get to look that closely at each one when I make the Good Album Hunting posts. And when I am listening to records, I am not at the computer.

But what I should really do is use the warming weather to build some new record shelves.

P.S. That’s not a typo beneath the photo. I thought I might portmanteau AI and algorithm in a feat of cleverness, but it looks like a typo. Also I see that it’s already been coined and claimed for a tech company. So let us never speak of it again.

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Ackshually, Steve

At PJMedia, Stephen Green asserts:

This one might only be underappreciated by PJ Media/Townhall readers because while it sold well and earned a Grammy, I’m guessing we don’t have a whole lot of Queen Latifah fans around here. If we do, please speak up now.

[crickets]

I’m here to fix that.

Ya know, I bought both The Dana Owens Album and Queen Latifah’s other jazzy album relatively recently (in 2021) which means I can correct VodkaPundit when he says:

Latifah recorded a follow-up album three years later, “Travelin’ Light.” The second album maybe isn’t as consistent as “The Dana Owens Album.” But its high points — including Phoebe Snow’s “Poetry Man” and Bessie Smith’s “Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl” — reach every bit as high. You could play the two albums back-to-back and think she’d recorded a double CD.

Ackshually, it’s Trav’lin’ Light.

And, as you might remember, gentle reader, I actually have more than one copy of Phoebe Snow’s record with “Poetry Man” on it. But only one of each of Queen Latifah’s jazz CDs.

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Sometimes, The Music Just Reappears

I have mentioned before, gentle reader, that sometimes a song pops into my head and stays there for a while for some undiscernable reason decades after I heard the song (such as “Hearts” by Marty Balin).

So, yesterday, I found myself doo-da-doo-dooing the theme from the Spiderman and His Amazing Friends cartoon while handling the laundry (most of my musical interludes of this nature involve the laundry. This I have heard within the decade: I used to show the intro to my boys on YouTube when they were young, and I recorded episodes of it for them to watch, what, twelve years ago? Not that recently.

This morning, when transferring the laundry, I started singing, “I wish I had a girl who walked like that….” Which was a song by Henry Lee Summers that came out when I was in high school, and I probably have not heard it but once or twice since then:

Being a young man, I understood the longing for someone, although I did not generally approach strangers on the street. Watching that video now kind of makes one cringe, although Western civilization has sort of bred out that sort of behaviour and has taken to importing men with worse predilections.

I guess I just have a slow-motion random playlist in my head for folding laundry or something, and it’s a broader variety than the variety radio stations have these days–I heard two Michael Jackson songs from Bad on two different radio stations whilst running an errand this morning, for cryin’ out loud.

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Subtext: Sissy?

I am not sure what to make of this summary:

The singer crafted an identity around his macho, pro-American swagger and wrote songs that fans loved to hear in his three decades in country music.

So…. he was not authentically macho? Not authentically pro-American? A sissy because a real man doesn’t die of cancer at 62?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but probably not. This clever wordsmith (or AI trained by clever wordsmiths) is making a point.

But never mind. Onto the real news.

Probably the best advice I’ve gotten in a while.

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Jack Baruth Discovers Symphonic Metal

Atop Jack Baruth’s Avoidable Contact Forever yesterday, I saw a familiar face:

It’s Giada “Jade” Etro of the symphonic metal band Frozen Crown, of whom Baruth says:

As most of you know, music isn’t a full-time job for most people nowadays, so you’ll be pleased to know that Miss Etro has twelve years of experience as a dentist and orthodontist. How in God’s name have I had one implant, four veneers, and a dozen crowns… none from her. I don’t care if I die during the procedure like Ye’s mom did during her discount Mexican plastic surgery.

As I did with Kim du Toit, I welcome Baruth’s discovery of the genre, where all the bands have attractive women with pipes on the lead vocals.

And, then as now, I offer some further selections.

Vocalist:
Melissa Bonny
Mizuho Lin
Nicoletta Rossellini
Nationality:
Swiss
Brazilian
Italian
Bands:
Evenmore
Rage of Light
Ad Infinitum
The Dark Side of the Moon
Semblant
Kalidia
Walk in Darkness

Although I don’t put a lot of symphonic metal on my gym playlist (“What Lies Ahead” and “Mere Shadow” by Semblant, “Stay Black” by Battle Beast, “82nd All the Way” by Amaranthe), it’s what YouTube insists on feeding me on those occasions where I type in a song from a metal band (any metal band) and let it run. Which is not a good way to find more songs for my gym playlist, but it does introduce me to new symphonic metal bands. And the infrequent Spanish metal band thanks to Xeria.

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It Never Fails

I go to YouTube looking for a good tutorial on SwiftUI, and YouTube says, “Hey, how about an all Japanese woman steampunk metal band instead?”

So I guess I will, in turn, introduce you to Fate Gear.

You’re welcome.

Looks like CDs go for $27-45 on Amazon, but MP3 albums are under $10.

We’ll see if I remember them when I accrue digital credits.

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Number of Days Since We Referred To That Song At Nogglestead: 3

Borepatch has an interesting trivium about the “Sisters” number with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas:

This scene was ad lib, with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye reprising the song from Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen. It started as Bing goofing around and everyone thought it was funny so they filmed it. They filmed it several times because people were laughing so much that it was hard to get a clean take. The laughter you see here is genuine.

When we were watching the football game on Sunday night, an ad used that song as the background music for…. Well, I don’t remember what the ad was for. But I asked my youngest what film it was from as (I think) we watched it together a couple of years ago. But he could not recall.

I’m working through some Christmas/holiday films to start the month, but I haven’t yet put the true holiday movies (Holiday Inn, White Christmas, The Bishop’s Wife, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Lethal Weapon, Invasion USA, etc.) into the queue yet as I have so, so many movies to watch that I have not seen before and/or which are not hidden somewhere amongst our media library.

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We Wish You A Xeria Christmas

So the company for which I work has been naming sprints after bands starting with the letter A at the beginning of the year and then progressing every two weeks. When they asked for an A band, I said Amaranthe, of course, and the product manager running the video meeting played “82nd All The Way” up until the unclean vocals.

Which means my coworkers rock less than I do, but to be honest, they’re mostly not in QA.

I’ve suggested proper bands for every sprint since then, but have only had a few suggestions elected via poll to the sprint name.

When we came to the X sprint, I was at a bit of a loss. I didn’t have any bands in my library that start with X. So I did some research (visited the Encyclopaedia Metallum) and started working through some bands.

I found one, Xeria, from Spain, who sings metal in Spanish. Which is unlike many European metal bands who sing in English.

So I went to their Web site, in Spanish, and ordered their CD Tierra, paying the Value-Added Tax and everything.

It arrived today, cell-wrapped and unsigned, but it did include a couple of postcards. Which maybe are a thing still in Europe. Also unsigned.

Well. Also on my desk were a couple of Christmas cards. We have traditionally hung Christmas cards on our living room walls during Christmas, and I’ve made room and have put up the Christmas cards from the overachievers who mailed their cards in November, and, well….

We will see if anyone notices.

Just to update you on the Santa Claus I put on the mantel the first weekend of November to see how long it would take anyone to notice: Nobody did. No one really spends much time in the living room except me, and I did the Christmas decorating this year as it was limited to unbreakable things since the Three Negritos would look upon all Christmas lights and decorations as cat toys.

We’re not even putting lights on the trees this year. Probably just wrapping them a bit with garland. And planning to spend December cleaning up shiny hairballs from the rug.

And now if anyone sees the Santa Claus, they might think we’ve had him all along.

The Xeria post card, though–that will likely be noticed. Maybe.

UPDATE: Actually, my beautiful wife noticed it almost immediately. Perhaps because the Christmas cards are hung basically at the top of the steps from the lower level.

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Proper Music For The Reading

Yesterday, Severian started a post by talking about Michael McDonald (What a Fool Believes).

WSIE provided the proper music for the occasion.

Although, to be honest, WSIE plays a hella lot of McDonald, whether with the Doobie Brothers, with a single other Doobie Brother (depicted), solo, or with James Ingram. WSIE has a pretty small playlist, and no matter how often I send a message on the request line to play the Pitch Pockets, no, here’s Steely Dan with “Aja” again.

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Comedy Report: Ron White: A Little Unprofessional (2013)

Book coverThis is a comedy special by Ron White. You know, that other guy from the Blue Collar Comedy Tours from the turn of the century. No, the “Here’s your sign” guy is Bill Engvall (whose book Just a Guy: Notes from a Blue Collar Life I listened to in 2019). Of course, the big two are Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. I get the sense Ron White is really the forgotten man in the bunch.

And, to be honest, that rating probably matches the reality. I have enjoyed Jeff Foxworthy for decades; I’ve seen a Larry the Cable Guy comedy special or two; and I enjoyed the couple of Blue Collar Comedy tour specials I’ve seen. But that’s probably despite White, not because of him.

You know, I get it: Comedy shows are going to have their off-color moments. Gallagher had a couple moments. Charlie Berens, the Manitowoc Minute guy, whom I saw earlier this month, even Charlie Berens had a moment or two that made my poor wife cringe because she was at a comedy show with her children, and she was afraid she would have to explain a joke or maybe she was afraid she would not now that her boys go to public school.

But Ron White’s show, or this one perhaps, did not offer many topical insights into the foibles of human nature that did not involve being drunk, having sex (especially receiving oral sex), or drugs. One party situation or sexual situation after another, and finis!

Not my bag, baby.

I do have to wonder if comedy has followed a similar arc to pop music: that it increasingly has to cater to an audience who comes out to the clubs, and those are the party people and not the, you know, adults. Or maybe there are diminishing adults in the world to entertain.

One good thing came from watching this: I discovered a new jazz artist, Margo Rey.
Continue reading “Comedy Report: Ron White: A Little Unprofessional (2013)”

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Off By One (Decade) Error

Singer Diamante has a new single coming out, entitled “1987”, and the cover looks like this:

I don’t want to go all Lileks on it, but the typeface and dress looks more 1977 than 1987. I guess she could be forgiven as she was not even born yet.

In related Diamante news, when I bought her second CD American Dream from her Web site, it came with a three-quarter sleeve shirt with Diamante on it. I hadn’t worn it as I’m not really a fan of the three-quarter sleeves. Last week, though, I put it on, and as I did, I wondered if my beautiful wife would comment. She did. I defended myself by saying I wear a t-shirt with Miles Davis’ face on it all the time. Apparently, having another attractive woman’s face on my torso is different.

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Another Generation Hearing From

I mentioned a while back that my father and I both enjoyed the music of Billy Joel. I’ve also mentioned on occasion that my boys, especially my youngest, listens to a basic playlist of 70s and 80s music that includes not only selections from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie soundtracks but also a number of Billy Joel songs from The Stranger through An Innocent Man. To be honest, I don’t know where or why he picked them up, as I only have “I Go To Extremes” on the gym playlist, and it and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” from their extra work during the school closures come from Storm Front.

At any rate, in the early 1990s, during my college years, I picked up videocassette versions of Billy Joel’s Video Album Volume 1 and Video Album Volume 2 which contained music videos from Cold Spring Harbor to The Bridge. Most of the older stuff is concert/performance videos, some shot in black and white (“Los Angelenos” and “Everybody Loves You Now”, for example). And I watched them over and over in my college years as was my wont. My father joined me on occasion and mentioned that he liked Billy Joel best when he was sneering, such as “Big Shot”, but he also like the harmonies in “For the Longest Time”.

So I dug the two videocassettes out–I think I have the Storm Front videos somewhere else–and I put one on the other night. I put volume 2 in first, not on purpose but because of the luck of the draw in the darkness, and it starts with “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”:

“You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and “While The Night Is Still Young” (which appears on the other videocassette) are from the greatest hits albums. I also have the former on a single, which skipped (hence it took me a long time to sing it correctly).

Not much tugs at my cynical heartstrings, gentle reader, but hearing my youngest son sing along with Billy Joel songs my father–whom my children know only through stories–enjoyed, well, that’s one of them.

You know, I have not listened to much Billy Joel these days as the music in my library has been ripped from cassettes and is disordered by the songs on the greatest hits album not appearing as part of the original albums–but I’ll have to make a point of it. Billy Joel wrote music that speaks to young men and then grows along with them, so one–I mean I–can appreciate the perspectives in them and can remember appreciating them from a younger perspective as well.

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A Paragraph Short Of A Five Paragraph Essay Blog Post

Well, gentle reader, rest assured I am not writing long form material all of a sudden, although I have had spates of it in the past where I decide to go for it.

Someone at work posted about the band Train, and I mentioned the video for “50 Ways To Say Goodbye” had the Hoff:

And I got to thinking about how he’s also in the video for Brad Paisley’s “Last Time For Everything”:

I mentioned how the song affected me when I first heard it in 2017; six years (?!) later, my oldest has entered his senior year and is experiencing many of the last things from the video, but he will only learn it when he thinks back later. Me, I’ll mourn for him and for myself now.

So, anyway, I got to thinking of other music videos that the Hoff is in…. and I drew a blank.

Well, not entirely a blank. Of course he’s in videos for his own songs. My youngest has “Hooked on a Feeling” on his playlist, so I hear it often, and I thought it was the Hoff’s version because it has the oooka choka part that I associated with the David Hasselhoff version:

I mean, the version my son has is clearly not B.J. Thomas. Apparently, it’s the Blue Swede version from 1974, which also has the oooka choka locka on it and is the one on the soundtrack for the Guardians of the Galaxy movie from…. 10 years ago already?

Speaking of Swedes, here’s the Hoff singing “True Survivor”:

Basically, it is the sound track to Kung Fury (produced by Swedes) which I first mentioned on this blog in 2015.

So a proper five paragraph essay would have an intro, three examples of the Hoff guest starring in videos, and then a conclusion. But I could only think of two examples off the top of my head. He does not appear in music videos that I tend to partially watch these days which are symphonic metal. Which is odd because the Hoff was big in those countries. Maybe still is.

Help me out, gentle reader. What other music videos has David Hasselhoff guested in?

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I Passed Over One of His Records Just Last Night

But not tonight.

Branson, Mo., music community mourns the loss of legendary performer Shoji Tabuchi

Shoji’s After Hours was facing out, that is, in one of the record shelves at the right most position where the record is sort of visible. I tend to go from right to left when looking through the albums so I can see the fronts, and I passed over Shoji last night in favor of some Liona Boyd and a George Benson/Earl Klugh collaboration (called Collaboration for some reason).

But tonight we’ll listen to it.

I have one or two of his other records lost in the stacks.

Tabuchi was born in Japan during World War II, and as a young violinist, he heard a show by Roy Acuff, and he (Shoji) fell in love with country fiddle, so he came to the US and perfected it and eventually bought a theatre in Branson to perform there. My beautiful wife and I saw him once, many years ago. He was a staple of the Branson scene for 30 years, and it seemed as though he would go on performing forever. Perhaps he is.

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His Name Was Spoken Recently At Nogglestead

Last night? The night before last? I mentioned several Italian-American singers who had Americanized their names.

Including Anthony Benedetto, who passed away today.

I have a number of his CDs and records, but he hasn’t been one of my favorites. Higher than Andy Williams, lower than Perry Como.

But KCSM is playing a lot of him today, and I’m sad.

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Taylor Swift: Almost As Good As Herb Alpert

Taylor Swift just made Billboard history, again

Drop everything now: Taylor Swift has just made history as the first woman — and third artist ever — to have four of the Top 10 albums in the Billboard 200 chart at the same time.

Herb Alpert had four albums in the top 10 in 1966.

Which was back when people bought albums. So I would suspect the number of albums sold is quite different.

Also, Herb Alpert has won a Grammy for vocal performance and instrumental performance and has continued to tour and draw crowds into his 80s.

So I guess Taylor Swift is not almost as good as Herb Alpert after all.

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And I Knew Who He Was

The Sun, a British tabloid, doesn’t recognize the importance of the day except for the importance of the delivery of a pop “star” on this date in 2023: JET DIVE TERROR Chesney Hawkes caught in mid-air horror as flight plunges 20,000ft and passengers scream in terror

And Heaven help me, I know who Chesney Hawkes is. He sang a song I mocked endlessly in 1991.

Ah, those were the days of driving around all night with Chris and Deb, playing the radio and sometimes cassette tapes. Chris or Deb liked “The One and Only”, and I think one of them bought the cassette single. Also, WKTI probably had it in heavy rotation as they tended to play the hot hits, or at least selected songs, every hour.

Apparently, the song is from a British movie starring Hawkes (Buddy’s Song), the song–his first–was his high-water mark. Although he released three albums in the 1990s and several in the 21st century, he did not have much chart success worldwide and didn’t climb very high on the charts in Britain.

The article, after all, refers to him as the singer of “The One and Only” thirty-two years later.

Man, is my brain full of one-hit wonders from when I was nineteen, and I cannot tell the modern pop tarts apart at twenty.

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