Irving Taylor: Terribly Sophisticated Songs (A Collection of Unpopular Songs for Popular People)

 

This 1958 Warner Bros. album featuring twelve songs by Irving Taylor was the precursor to the Irving Taylor LP released the following year, The Whimsical World of Irving Taylor (also on Warner Bros.), which shared four tracks from this long-player. As with the latter record, this one has a lot of subtle, absurd satire to turn your head ("I'm Filled with That Empty Feeling", "We Did the Samba in Shamokin", "The Brooklyn Beguine"). I'm happy to own a copy for the sake of owning an Irving Taylor product but equally happy to own it as a record with cover art by William Box, whose work graced the covers of six immortal jazz titles on the Mode Records label from 1957, including the record you wished you owned the most right now, the Warne Marsh Quartet's Music for Prancing.

Jimmy Joyce "When the Crab Grass Blooms Again"
Allan Davies, Earl Brown, Joe Pryor "In a Cafeteria with You"
Robie Lester "I'm Filled with That Empty Feeling"
Joe Pryor "Myrtle"
Sue Allen "All of the Time"
Gil Mershon & Ginny O'Connor "I'll Never Forget Those Unforgettable Never To Be Forgotten Memories"
Earl Brown "Pachalafaka"
Key Howard "Anywhere on Earth"
Robie Lester "Just My Sol"
Allen Davies "I'll Write a Symphony"
Ginny O'Connor, Sue Allen, Loulie Jean Norman "We Did the Samba in Shamokin"
Gil Mershon "The Brooklyn Beguine"

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.

 

Amelia Earhart: The Fun of It

 

Cardboard record included in the first edition of Amelia Earhart's autobiography For the Fun of It, published by Harcourt Brace & Co, 1932.

Record 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.

Hub City Movers: The Chicken Song b/w I Can't Know Tomorrow

 

A deathless classic from the Hub City Movers of Austin, Texas, one-time house band at the Vulcan Gas Company club and the first act to play the Armadillo World Headquarters. After reading Gilbert Shelton's one-page comic about dropping LSD and setting chickens free in Feds 'n' Heads (1968), the band recorded their own musical version with Gil's permission and included a reprint of the cartoon.

The Chicken Song
I Can't Know Tomorrow

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.

Ville de Lourdes: Lourdes Centre Mondial de Pèlerinage

 

Carillon de La Basilique - Procession Nocturne - Ave Maria - Credo - Bénédiction Par L'Evèque - Salve Régina
Grand'Messe - Procession Du Saint-Sacrement - Prière Pour Les Malades - Fin Du Pélerinage

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.

Jack Costanzo: Learn—Play Bongos (Demonstration Record)

 

Dicky-dicky-dicky-docky! Seven-inch record promoting Jack Costanzo's "Learn—Play Bongos" LP. Note the egregiously inconsistent spelling of Jack's last name on both sides of the sleeve (at least Liberty spelled his name right on the LP, which is more than Tiara Records could manage in 1958.)

Introduction: I Got a Bongo (Excerpt)
El Diablito (Excerpt)—Instruction
El Diablito (Play Along)
Peanut Vendor (Play Along) ("El Manisero")

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.

GAF Salesmakers: Everything's Coming Up Profits

 

This single-sided record from 1969 is an industrial musical soundtrack produced by the GAF Corporation, Floor Products Division, performed by the "GAF Salesmakers". Iconic title! Music's pretty meh, though.

Everything's Coming Up Profits
Open Some New Markets
With a Little Bit of Luck
Talk to the Dealer
We Welcome You Now
Salesmaker-Salesmaker
Finale

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.

Lady Pepperell: Tailgate Rambles—Featuring The Big Blanket

 

 

 

Advertising LP from 1963 that included two ad inserts, suggested ad copy, a reply mailer, and a double-sided poster. "It's like when you push up a pillow. You like when it's fluffy."

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.

Rosebud Baldwin: The Best of Rosebud

 

THINK BEAUTIFUL.

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.

Norm N. Nite: Rock & Roll—Evolution or Revolution?

 

"What is rock and roll?"
"[Teenagers] have been made either happier or sadder because of a certain song that was popular at the time."
"There was a different form of music being enjoyed by some people that originated from the rhythm and blues sounds of the negro spirituals."
"True rhythm and blues were songs of emotion and feeling; however for more general acceptance by the public, the tempo was changed somewhat, and the lyrics were changed to themes of love and romance."
"One popular disk jockey, Alan Freed, thought this new beat was so different that he could feel a definite rocking movement every time he played one of these songs."

If any of the preceding sentences made you laugh, cry, or simply reflect on your own impending death, this is the record for you. Norm N. Nite, owner of possibly the whitest voice ever committed to vinyl, had idle hands one day as a student in the radio studio of Ohio University, and he decided it was the perfect opportunity for "putting down on tape everything that I knew or could remember about those Rock N' Roll years". He eventually sold the idea of his "definitive history of Rock N' Roll" to Laurie Records, original home of Dion and the Belmonts, who released this LP in 1967.

Laurie licensed huge chunks of original rock hits, with the songs mixed hard left and Norm's narration mixed hard right, to create this 29-minute documentary program split over two sides. I've included a homemade bonus track for your enjoyment, a cutdown version of the whole LP in which I trimmed every tune, whenever possible, to a single sample of the vocalist saying the name of the song: thirteen minutes of pure ADHD ear candy that'll have you reaching for pen and paper to take down that 800 number!

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.

Audiophile Records: Adventures in Cacophony

 

From engineer/producer E.D. Nunn's Audiophile Records of Saukville, Wisconsin comes this sequel to their 1952 sound effects record "Echoes of the Storm", the liner notes of which concluded with the ringing endorsement "This record is just a lot of noise but if you like this sort of thing here it is". Considering Nunn's label spent the first three years of its existence releasing jazz, dixieland, and classical records designed to be played on standard microgroove players but at 78rpm, not 33 1/3, the buyer might infer a basic reluctance on the part of an up-and-coming label to produce a sound effects test record for no reason other than to prove their high-fidelity bona fides. By the time they produced this 1956 sequel they weren't even disguising the fact that it existed only as a piss-take on the entire genre; the selections include barking dogs, crying infants, roosters, cows, caterwauling cats, Milwaukee River traffic, and a car playing chicken with a train. "We leave [this record's] fate to the tender mercies of our more understanding friends," say the liner notes, "who may now hear such exotic sounds as hogs squealing—in high fidelity". Thanks Ewing!

Burglar's Nemesis (parts 1 & 2)
Infant Lament
Salute to Sunrise
Cackle-Berry Collection
"This Little Pig Went to Market..."
Bovine Blues
Feline Kindergarden
Tomcat Serenade to a Willing Widow
Rural Evening
Milwaukee River Traffic
Tempus Fidgets
The →Big← RR Crossing Episode
Syncopated Steno
Saukville Water Pump—Vintage Circa 1905

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.

Anne Soulé: She's Gone!

 

Anne Soulé was a UC Berkeley graduate circa 1951 who wrote the music for the University's dramatic society Mask & Dagger's '51 revue "Look Out Below". That summer she joined local satirical theatrical group Straw Hat Theatre, then in their sixth year of existence, and was featured in their 1951 revue "No Strings Attached", their '52 show "No Worse for Wear", and their '53 revue "One Moment, Please!" The latter two revues were major hits, and Anne appeared with cast member John Tomaschka reprising their roles as a tourist and tour guide in Tyrolean costume yodeling while climing the Alps in the sketch "Globe-Trotter's Lament" on KPIX in June of that year. Another notorious skit from the show was "Opera Made Easy", where she accompanied William Rush on the piano as Rush lectured on "Ring of the Nibbledingunlied" to a ladies' club.

In 1953 she joined the cast of children's play "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" touring the Northwest. In 1955 she briefly joined the cast of avant-garde local troupe the New Theatre operating from the Town Hall, a 100-seat converted storefront in Oakland, performing in an e.e. cummings play, "Him", before joining the cast of the Actors Workshop production of Tennessee Williams' "Camino Real", followed by "The Rose Tattoo" at the Playhouse and "Twelfth Night" at Theater Arts, both in San Francisco.

The next year, after a solo stint at the hungry i, Anne directed and wrote the music and lyrics for "Too Much for TV", a revue at the Theater Arts Colony, San Francisco, which closed in June. In July San Francisco label New Sound released this, her only record. (I've no idea why the cover refers to her as "The Sweetheart of Sigmund Freud", but since the early 1950s a novelty song of the same name had been making the rounds recorded by multiple artists, riffing on the title song of the 1933 musical comedy "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi".) Beyond this biographical information, I've got nothing - marriage? Death? No idea.

"She's Gone" is much in the Tom Lehrer vein of the "Sick, sick, sick" school of satire, with a little blue humor thrown in. Highlights include "Oedipus" (you can't go wrong writing a comedy song about Oedipus, it's an old show-biz rule); "Raven" (a Yiddishkeit recitation of Poe's immortal poem); "Do de Do" (a song from the point of view of an obnoxious girl who can't figure out why her boyfriend left her flat); and "Alone with You" (a slightly more fetish-skewing Noel Coward sound-alike that would have been the perfect theme song to the imaginary musical "Sport-Fuckers of '33").

Angelique
Oedipus
Raven
Riding Jacket
Always a Princess
Amanda Barefoot
Do de Do
Dr. Lapdad
Myrtle Mavis & Maude
Caubel
Alone with You

 

 

 

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.