Graham Gouldman: Animalympics

First things first: you need to see Animalympics (it’s on YouTube, and though it’s out of print on home video in America it’s available on German import DVD). Director Steven Lisberger’s prelude to Tron, Animalympics is a traditionally-animated telefilm-turned-feature with lots of great character animation and some wonderful voice work from Gilda Radner, Harry Shearer, and Billy Crystal. It also has ten songs by Graham Gouldman of 10cc, and got this well-justified vinyl release Stateside on A&M. The movie was perfectly timed with the 1980 Olympiad, sadly making it perfectly timed to be almost completely ignored (the U.S.A. stayed home from the Olympics that year). The movie hasn’t exactly become canon among feature animation fans, and that’s a shame, because it’s the first example I ever saw of an animated film’s songs and story interlocking perfectly; in some ways it remains one of the best. Gouldman wrote and produced the album shortly after his 10cc bandmate Eric Stewart had been seriously injured in a car crash and they weren’t sure whether or not the band was going to fall apart. In a glorious example of forgetting to suck, Gouldman took a pretty wacky scenario (about animals of all species gathering together not to eat each other but to compete for Olympic gold) and treated it with 100% seriousness, delivering ten catchy tunes with hooks aplenty. “Z.O.O.”, the theme for the movie’s fictional TV network, is so emblematic of early 1980s television that it’s a wonder all of network sports broadcasting didn’t form around it. (Footnote: UPN took this song’s three-note figure, raised it a full tone, and made it their network theme in 1995.) “Love’s Not for Me (Rene’s Song)”, basically a marathoner’s inner monologue about how he’ll refuse to let anything as petty as human relationships get between him and a gold medal, is some heavy shit for a kid’s film. And producers please note: there is a WICKED disco-funk break in “Go For It” starting at the 2:44 mark that’s NEVER BEEN SAMPLED. It’s 118 bpm. You’re welcome.

Go For It

Underwater Fantasy

Away From It All

Born to Lose

Kit Mambo

Z.O.O.

Love’s Not for Me (Rene’s Song)

With You I Can Run Forever

Bionic Boar

We’ve Made It To The Top

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.

Gloria Gaynor: I Have a Right

What kind of world are we living in where this album is out of print? This was Gloria Gaynor’s follow-up to her 1978 LP Love Tracks, with its comet-like “I Will Survive” flattening the Tunguska River forest of America’s disco dreams. Sort of like how that metaphor flattened this paragraph. Shut up. Anyway, 1979 was just about the last year that disco could justify these kind of production values, and justify them it had to, because of course quantizing the beat, sequencing the orchestra, and dropping in perfect synthesizer hits had to be achieved through an effective but costly process known as “hiring a bunch of A-list session musicians”. And holy cow is it all there in your headphones: octave-steppin’ bass lines, endless tcka-tschsss hi-hats, kew-wacka-kew wah-wahs on muted guitar strings, and a trumpet solo from Doc Severinsen.

Note that this digital transfer is a virgin, one of just a few on my hard drive: I bought a still-sealed vinyl copy, cracked it open, and put it on the turntable, and that first play is the one you’re hearing now. I needed a new copy because my original copy is, um, (coughing fit). I was gifted this record in first grade, and I listend to it a lot – A LOT a lot. Truly an allotment. How beat up is it? Let’s just say visiting hours are over – forever.

Let Me Know (I Have a Right)

Say Somethin’

You Took Me In Again

Don’t Stop Us

Tonight

Can’t Fight the Feelin’

Midnight Rocker

One Number One

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.

Frank Chickens: We Are Frank Chickens

I’m not sure what the origin story is for Frank Chickens, but 30 years after coming together they are still a thing; they last performed in London in September 2014 and have scheduled dates through July 2015. A comedy/cabaret act, now with a big enough roster of members to call themselves a troupe, the Chickens are mainly a London thing with founding member Kazuko Hohki at the reins. Their “We Are Ninja” was a slyly hilarious dance hit in 1984 (I first heard it on one of John Oswald’s Mystery Tapes). Here’s their out-of-print debut album on Kaz Records, plus six bonus tracks gleaned from their various 7-inch and 12-inch singles also released on Kaz in 1984-5. At times straight-up goofy (“Mothra”), personal (“Shellfish Bamboo”), and wacked-out electro-stomping (“We Are Frank Chickens”), and not afraid to put their claim on some amazingly dunderheaded examples of Western pop ditties about Asians (“Fujiyama Mama”? I mean, wow), what can you say about the Chickens except: Awesome.

Cheeba Cheeba Chimpira
Mothra
Green Banana
Madam Fatal
We Are Ninja
Yellow Detective
Shellfish Bamboo
Pikadon
We Are Frank Chickens
Sake Ballad

BONUS TRACKS:
Blue Canary
Fujiyama Mama
China Night
Japanese Rhumba
We Are Frank Chickens [single version]
We Are Ninja [extended Version]

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.

Sid Feller and his "Friends" (and Enemies): More Music to Break a Lease!

The crate-diggers with the loaded-slingshot eyes will already have noted that Music to Break a Lease (1956) did in fact have a 1958 sequel, Music to Break a Sub-Lease by Don Costa’s Freeloaders (also on ABC-Paramount). I don’t have it, I’m not posting it, and forget I mentioned it. And so too would we all have forgotten this novelty series if, on that tragic evening of January 27, 1961, an unsuspecting America had not tuned into NBC and beget a sight they could never un-see: Sing Along with Mitch. It was an end of innocence, a precursor to an awful knowledge of unison singing and powder blue sweaters and also this album, which dropped one year later. To get some idea of this LP’s psychic impact, imagine everyone in the office where you work getting together in a conference room and singing “Elvira” by the Oak Ridge Boys. A perfect gift for a recently deceased relative. In short, as Phil Proctor once told me: “No. It’s – no. Just – no.”

Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody
Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo
I’m Sitting on Top of the World
Peg O’ My Heart
Dear Hearts and Gentle People
Toot Toot, Tootsie (Goodbye)
Wedding Bells (Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine)
Cruising Down the River
Deep in the Heart of Texas
Lazy River
After You’ve Gone
Goodnight Sweetheart

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.

Sif Feller: Music to Break a Lease

Men and women gather in a room and sing songs in unison! Many of them have actual singing experience! Like the flu pandemic, 8 of these 12 catchy songs were popular prior to 1919. To honor the millions who died, most of these arrangements feature a middle section where the chorus breaks it down and sings each word staccato! As you can see, listening to this record has hurt my brain, and now it can hurt yours, too. Readers who may be concerned about my health should rest assured, however, that it took only five minutes longer to restore this album’s audio than it took to listen to it. This 1956 LP was meant as yer basic one-off joke, yet the true, exquisite horror was yet to come…

Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here
Down By the Old Mill Stream
I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad)
If I Had My Way
(Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up) That Old Gang of Mine
The Beer Barrel Polka
You Are My Sunshine
Shine On Harvest Moon
Oh, You Beautiful Doll
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
(The Gang That Sang) Heart of My Heart
For Me and My Gal

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.

Hearty White: Material you may hear in his forthcoming TED talk

If it wasn’t for fear, we wouldn’t have any economic system. People wouldn’t buy anything. So PLEASE, whatever you do, don’t stop being fearful. That’s why our country is becoming so prosperous, is because there is nothing we don’t fear. Therefore, you can sell the antidote for anything. If everything is poison, then man, the sky’s the limit for selling antidotes. And they don’t have to work, because if the fear isn’t real, then the cure doesn’t have to be real. It’s really a beautiful system. That way anybody can really achieve. All you have to be able to do is be a psychopath. Just not have a conscience. And then it’s fine. Now does everybody have to be a psychopath? No. Just the breadwinners.

Hearty White, "Miracle Nutrition" episode 10/30/2014

Various Artists: Electronic Music Vol. 4

From 1968, the peak of the golden age of analog electronic music, comes this LP of six winners from the First International Electronic Music competition at Dartmouth College. I dug this up while looking for source cues from the Firesign Theatre's Dear Friends radio series (hint: there's a cut on this LP that was played under "Brickbreaking").

Olly W. Wilson - "Cetus"
William Hellermann - "Ariel"
Eugeniusz Rudnik - "Dixi"
Pril Smiley - "Eclipse"
Bohdan Mazurek - "Bozzetti"
Jozef Malovec - "Orthogenesis"

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.