Victor Banana: Split

Tim Hensley (aka Neil Smythe, aka Vic Hazelnut) is kind of a genius. Now best known as a cartoonist, Tim recorded two albums with his band Victor Banana; this was the first, released on DJ Splat Winger’s San Pedro imprint SplatCo in 1989, and featuring cover art by Dan Clowes. The band’s second and last album was the record/CD Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron in 1993. There’s lots of great bloggage elsewhere about Tim’s musical adventures as himself and other personae (see links below). I’ve asked Tim several times over the years whether he’s got any more music in him and he’s always said no, so until such time as the muse Euterpe picks up her flute and whacks Tim with it, we’ve just got these tunes to hum along to.

Convoke
Strange Things Are Happening
Surfin' Is the Most Easy Sport
Here Comes Santa
Shiver Me Timbers
Vitrified
Do the Jalopy
The Cash Cow
The World's Most Gruesome Monster
Planet Xylak
Teen Anthem
Aggravation
If I Was Elected President
Partly Cloudy
Let's Go for a Ride on a Dinosaur
Paul Bunyan
Iamatology Walking Through Lineal Theanthropism
What I Did Last Summer
Dr. Goodbeard
Parker
How Far Away Are the Stars?

LP audio & artwork

mrowster’s “Pig State Recon” blog
Steve Zdanio’s “Domino Rally” blog
Tim Hensley’s “Blog Flume” blog
The Jenkins-Peabody home page (not sure whether this has been updated in the last eight years)

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Various Artists: Beatlesongs! The Best of the Beatles Novelty Records

Rhino Records flexed their novelty muscles with this 1982 collection of songs inspired by The Beatles, including tunes by the Neil Innes / Eric Idle collaboration The Rutles and Peter Cook & Dudley Moore’s uptempo psychedelic ditty “L.S. Bumble Bee”. Meanwhile the packaging is basically very cute, very innocuous, move along, nothing to see here. (The infamous cover art includes a caricature of Mark David Chapman, the first Beatles superfan who, as illustrator William Stout points out, collected a Beatle.) Please note: "Beatle Rap" is a stone classic.

Buchanan and Greenfield: The Invasion
The Rutles: Hold My Hand
The Carefrees: We Love You Beatles
Donna Lynn: My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haircut
Casey Kasem: Letter from Elaina
Jack Nitzsche: Beatlemania
The Qworymen: Beatle Rap
Peter Cook & Dudley Moore: L.S. Bumble Bee
Wild Man Fischer: I’m the Meany
Allan Sherman: Pop Hates the Beatles
The Four Preps: Letter to the Beatles
Gary Usher: The Beetle

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Irving Taylor: The Whimsical World of Irving Taylor

I bought this while looking for a version of “Pachalafaka” that Firesign Theatre played on one of their old radio shows. It turns out that Irving Taylor plays demolition derby with a dozen deathless pop trends on this LP, smashing together sing-along folk songs and hillbilly teenybopper tunes, crooners and car salesmen. The roster of guest vocalists is pretty impressive, including Mel Blanc, Key Howard, Robie Lester, and Bea Benaderet, and the record has production values so fine you might just mistake the songs for rejects from an Eisenhower-era hit parade. Almost rises to the level of Tom Lehrer, but without Tom's penchant for the sick-sick-sick. Hightlights for me are “Zeekie, Zeekie, Lend Me Your Comb” and the simply breathtaking “Domestic Wine”.

Hawaiian Worm Raiser
In a Cafeteria With You
Honest John Henry
Domestic Wine
Pachalafaka
Garbage Collector in Beverly Hills
Prison Interior Decorator
Make It a Chocolate Soda
When the Crab Grass Blooms Again
Zeekie, Zeekie, Lend Me Your Comb
Separate Bar Stools
I'll Never Forget Those Unforgettable Never To Be Forgotten Memories

LP audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Henry Gibson: ...by Henry Gibson

Between 1957 and 1962, a short, nebbishy white dude started appearing on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, doing poetry readings that all started with the name of the poem followed by a declaratory “…by Henry Gibson”. The poems, which featured the accent and cornpone subject matter of the author’s Alabama hometown, had the carefully enunciated prose cadence of a sixth-grade school report, were structured like laundry lists, and often had a closing summary line that he’d repeat. And all of America heard this man describe counting alligators on a Saturday night and asked: Is this man really a fucking idiot? There was, of course, no Wikipedia to tell people instantly that, no, this guy was not for real: this was actor James Bateman of Philadelphia, and Henry Gibson was a character he’d been putting on for fun for years (say “A Doll’s House” and the name of this album, and you’ll get the drama-school joke behind the alias). It’s all very wholesome, friendly, and sprinkled with a lurking surrealism like an unexplained whiffle bat on the wall at the dentist’s office. What could be more fun for an actor than telling a supper club audience how to skin a polecat? Originally recorded and released in 1962 under the title The Alligator, this reissue dates from 1968 when Henry was enjoying renewed popularity thanks to his recurring walk-on appearances on Laugh-In.

How To Write A Poem
The Alligator
Why I Like Soap
The Newspaper
How To Skin A Polecat
How Now, Calpurnia
The Feather
Here Today—Gone Tomorrow
A Little Bit About Myself
How To Take Care Of The Plum Tree
Happiness Can Be Yours For Little Or No Money
Reflections Of New York
The Coyote
Two Functional Poems
Education Is Important
What Freedom Means To Me In 25 Words Or Less
Why I Like Poetry

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: The Third Woody Allen Album

Woody Allen’s third and last album of stand-up comedy, from 1968 (now buy this CD!).

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: Woody Allen Volume 2

Woody Allen’s second stand-up album from 1965 (again, you need to buy this ASAP).

The Moose
The Kidnapping
Superman
Science Fiction Movie
Eggs Benedict
Footnote
What's New Pussycat?
Reminiscences
Swedish Movie
Taking a Shower (A Pantomime)
Lost Generation

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Woody Allen: Woody Allen

Here’s the first of Woody Allen’s albums of stand-up comedy from 1964. Honestly, this one’s for reference only. Now buy the Rhino Stand-Up Comic CD (which contains all the same material as the Stand-Up Comic double LP from Casablanca in 1979, which in turn contained the same material as the United Artists Stand-Up Comic: 1964-1968 double LP from United Artists in 1978, which in turn contained the same material as United Artists’ The Night Club Years 1964-1968 from 1972. If you ever see used copies of those collections, leave 'em in the bins and get the CD instead). The collected material is brilliant, just genius. The original LPs contain that material plus some stuff that didn’t date very well, or was about a film he was making at the time, or was kinda skeevy and misogynist. But if you’re an Allen fan, you should get a chance to make that characterization for yourself, and the original albums are pretty scarce, so here you go.

Album audio & art

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Firesign Theatre: Station Break / Forward Into the Past

What kind of Firesign Theatre archivist would I be if I didn’t post goodies from their archive from time to time? Here’s the complete artwork for their scarce 1969 single “Station Break” b/w “Forward Into the Past” (with the reminder that both of these cuts are available cheap from iTunes & Amazon).

7-inch artwork

Dwight Fiske: Songs His Mother Never Taught Him

 

Dwight Fiske (1892-1959) was a wildly popular night club entertainer and a prominent gay voice in comedy in the first half of the 20th century. He was a Rhode Island native who grew up in Providence and Boston, then attended Harvard and the Paris Conservatoire. When the Great War ended he found himself in Europe entertaining American socialites looking for fun overseas during Prohibition, and he developed his signature delivery of ribald stories with piano accompaniment. After Tallulah Bankhead gave him the good word, leading to a nine-month gig at the Bat Club in London, Fiske spend the last half of the 1920s and most of the 1930s bouncing between high-class joints in Europe and New York City where he entertained high society as their swishy musical mascot into the world of S-E-X. Through innuendo and witty double-entendres, he became the king of the party record, releasing no less than 30 sides on his own Fiskana imprint between 1933 and 1937. After World War II he hooked up with Gala Records, basically re-recorded his entire catalogue, and sat back as they released a flurry of brand-new songs, new versions of old songs, and straight dubs of his older records, until he eventually won an injunction against them from the New York Supreme Court for non-payment of royalties (he sued them for contempt in 1952, claiming he hadn’t been paid since 1948 and they were still selling his records). You’ll find loooots of different Fiske 78s floating around, but his LPs are more scarce – Gala released four of them; Jubilee released this one in 1955; there’s a very iffy LP on Monarch called “Song Satires”; and there’s a split LP with Fiske on one side and Nan Blackstone on the flip called Tongue With Cheek, which incidentally features one of the all-time great covers. It’s hard to get very excited about Fiske today, mainly of course because the power of innuendo has dripped away to nothing like an Italian glacier, but also because Fiske’s stories were surprisingly topical (sometimes a little TOO topical; in 1941 Fiske was successfully sued for libel by a Mr. Philip Pratt because of his song “Coney Island Honeymoon”). This LP was recorded very near the end of Fiske’s career, and if you’re a real trainspotter you get 100 points for knowing which Del Close LP cover was also designed by this LP’s designer, Burt Goldblatt.

Senorita Margarita Del Campo
Elizabeth and Raleigh
Fountain of Youth
Salome
Mrs. Pettibone
Mr. America

LP audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Warner Bros. Music Show: Monty Python Examines The Life of Brian

Here’s a terrific interview with Eric Idle, George Harrison, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and Michael Palin, all talking about Monty Python's most unintentionally controversial film, Life of Brian, just as the film was coming out in the United States in 1979.

LP audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Temple City Kazoo Orchestra: Some Kazoos

From 1978, the very first EP from Rhino Records. Big. Bold. Brassy. Epic. Epochal. A pop culture cyclone. A demarcation point for classical music. The record that redefined New Wave. Everyone who bought this record may not have formed a band, but they bought this record. A game-changer in the history of motion pictures. The 800-pound gorilla in the basement of every indie-pop songwriter’s mind. One hell of a nice guy, a real mensch, my best and greatest friend. Makers of the finest steak I’ve ever tasted. They lived the dream. They tasted the big rock candy sandwich. They ate the purple pea. They ingested the microdot of fame. We looked on the breadth of their empire and wept. We listened to their message of love – and bought a small colored plastic tube with two sheets of wax paper inside.

2001 Sprach Kazoostra
Stayin’ Alive
Miss You
Whole Lotta Love

EP audio & art

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Totem Pole of Losers: Jesus, I Am Loving You / My Compromise

Here’s a favorite 7-inch from college: Before he was America’s Funnyman Neil Hambuger, Gregg Turkington founded his own San Francisco-based label, Amarillo Records, and was co-conspirator in a number of bands including The Easy Goings and The Zip Code Rapists. Totem Pole of Losers was one of his projects, and the two songs on this 7-inch represent 66% of the band’s total recorded output (I only see evidence of one other TPOL song, “Look What You’ve Done”, released on a Japanese various artists comp in 2005). Like the best avant-snot-rock of 1993, it’s sludgy and drolly hilarious at the same time. The A-side, “Jesus I Am Loving You”, features vocalist Lizzy Kate Gray detailing her maybe-too-intimate relationship with her saviour. The B-side, “My Compromise”, is a real anvil-beater with vocals by Turkington sung from the point of view of a commercial composer who’s about to remove his lover’s name from a song before submitting it as the jingle for a frozen chocolate-covered waffle. Included with the artwork is the original lyric sheet plus the enclosed Amarillo / Nuf Sed mail order catalogs.

Jesus, I Am Loving You
My Compromise

7-inch audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

An unidentified Egyptian mix tape, circa 1989

In 1989, Mom was President of The 99s, an international organization of women pilots, and she introduced me to an Egyptian pilot who handed me this mix tape. It includes 14 cuts of Middle Eastern pop music. I can’t read the J-card and I don’t know what I’m listening to. If you can help, please post a comment!

Cassette audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Dion McGregor: The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks In His Sleep)

Lyricist and somnologuist Dion McGregor (pronounced “Dyin”) remains the only recorded example of someone who riffed in his sleep. In the 1960s, his best-known professional gig was a collaboration with his roommate Michael Barr: the song “Where Is the Love”, which Barbra Streisand recorded in 1965. But his best-known gig overall was an unpaid one, also with his roommate Michael Barr: a giant archive of open-reel recordings of McGregor talking in his sleep. Barr captured McGregor on tape as he sleep-talked hilarious, frightening, surreal, sometimes very dirty monologues, while car horns and white noise drifted in from the open windows of their New York City apartment. As word of Dion’s dream tapes got around, eventually they reached the ear of producer Jules Green, who pitched Decca on the idea of an LP, and helped compile this series of (safe-for-work) cuts that Decca released in 1964 replete with artwork by Edward Gorey. The voice you hear on this LP – and the several CD compilations that followed in the years to come, including this one, this one, and this one coming soon – is sometimes the voice of a made-up character (as in the amazing “The Mogul”), but most of the time it’s just Dion narrating what he sees in the cadence of a child talking to his toys: patiently expositional, gossipy, and slightly scandalized by all the bizarre goings-on. Some of this comes off today as camp, but in fact a lot of this material remains deeply subversive and full of deathless one-liners. I finally scored a copy of this LP recently after a long search, but the record was badly scratched and practically unplayable. Fortunately others have digitized this out-of-print LP for your enjoyment. In the meantime, here’s a nice high-res, cleaned-up copy of the album artwork.

LP artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Quincy Jones: The Hot Rock - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and More

Quincy Jones delivers a sultry jazz score to the greatest caper film ever made. This baby has been sampled a lot in the last four decades, and it's not hard to see why - I mean, damn, look at his house band: Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, Grady Tate, Ray Brown. The perfect soundtrack to waiting out that trance state you get into every time someone says "Afghanistan banana stand." This LP was designed with a gatefold sleeve cut down to a 3.5-inch flap that folded down over the cast photo when closed.

Listen to the Melody
Main Title
Talking Drums
Seldom Seen Sam
Parole Party
When You Believe
Hot Rock Theme
Miasmo
Sahara Stone
Slam City
Listen to the Melody / Dixie Tag
End Title

LP audio & art

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

ドリフターズ (The Drifters): ドリフのズンドコ節 (Drif No Zundokobushi) b/w 大変うたい込み (Taihen Utaikomi)

Zun-zun-zun-zun-zun-zun-Doko! The Drifters, Japan's answer to the "Laugh-In" crew, were pop tunesters and sketch comedians with their own hit network TV show in 1969, The A-side of this 7-inch, "Zundoko Bushi", was their theme song, an actually quite melancholy tune about an all-too-brief wartime affair (Pink Martini talk about it here, and you can find the lyrics here, although you're on your own for a good English translation). The B-side, "Taihen Utaikomi", is about, um, maybe something Navy-related, maybe something laundry-related (lyrics available here).

7-inch audio & art

Lenny & Squiggy: Lenny and the Squigtones

Michael McKean and David L. Lander do Lenny & Squiggy do really good comedy pop that mines the pop trends of their 1950s childhoods, in this live/studio album from 1979 on the Casablanca label. (Which reminds me, I've got an out-of-print Big Daddy album that needs to go up here soon.) Also features Chris "Nigel Tufnel" Guest.

Vamp On
Night After Night
Creature Without a Head
King of the Cars
Squiggy's Wedding Day
Love Is a Terrible Thing
Babyland (For Eva Squigmann)
(If Only I Had Listened To) Mama
So's Your Old Testament
Sister-In-Law
Honor Farm
Starcrossed
Only Women Cry
Foreign Legion of Love
Vamp Off

LP audio & art

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.