Halloween

One of the great attractions of the 45 rpm record is its populist ideal. Record companies, independent labels, bands, even individuals - they all could afford to record and press a 45, no matter the eccentricity of the musical vision at hand. America, after all, had a great precedent for fluke hits, and, even if yours wasn’t the next “Psychotic Reaction” or “Monster Mash,” it could be, at the very least, a vanity to amuse you and your friends, if not something to sell at your high school auditorium gigs.

Thanks to its low overhead costs and its potential for infinite self-expression, the 45 rpm record was a principal vector for the more uncommercial, unusual, and exotic impulses of the American pop consciousness; consequently, there are millions of Halloween records. Trillions of them. I thought I’d stay clear of the wacky monster voices, though, and instead opt for three selections that, while not marketed specifically as Halloween fodder, still make for a nice, unseemly brood.

1. The Last Word, Sleepy Hollow (Downey)
It’s set in the gloomy 18th century woodlands of New York’s Westchester County, but the Last Word’s update on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is so authoritative that, for 2 minutes and 54 seconds of tremolo guitar and creepy Munsters-style organ, it’s easy to forget the Headless Horseman was not actually some bogeyman found lurking around the dumpsters behind Valley Plaza Shopping Mall.

The Last Word may have sounded like the real thing, but they weren’t actually a band proper; rather, they were a group of Las Vegas studio musicians. No matter, though, their musical competency only adds to the wickedly potent “Sleepy Hollow,” which they pulled from some forsaken corner of their collective psyche in 1966. Moreover, the Last Word were like so many American ‘60s garage bands in that they did an impeccable job at both emulating the British Invasion sound (in this case, emulating two of the grittier mid-'60s R&B groups: the Animals and Them) and simultaneously carrying matters into territory much deeper and more demented. (See also Overhauling the British Invasion.)

2. Little John and The Monks, Black Winds (Jerden)
Little John and co. had other options. They could have taken their time and their Chelsea boots and used this backing track to enumerate their various girl troubles, or, say, to lament the passing summer. But to their credit they did not chose an easy lyrical route, forging ahead instead with what I can only describe as an Appalachian-style murder ballad. Which is its own weird, gloomy variant of girl trouble, but, still, "Black Winds" must have confused the hell out their classmates.

Hailing from Blue River, Oregon, Little John and The Monks recorded this droning and wonderfully dark dirge in 1965 for Jerden records, one of the Pacific Northwest’s great rock ‘n’ roll labels of the ‘60s. This was their only record.

3. Albert DeSalvo, Strangler In The Night (Astor)
I don’t know a woman
And yet I crave on.
My mind tells my body,
“Don’t just stand there - GET ONE!”

Yes. YES. The Bugs - the brainiacs behind “Strangler In The Night” - were Boston’s novelty response to the British Invasion, and it was their fractured imaginations which dropped the first person testimonial (or “thoughts, feelings and emotions,” according its sleeve) of putative Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo into an otherwise unassuming ‘50s-style ballad.

An unsubstantiated story has it that Dick Levitan, tough-guy reporter for WEEI (Boston’s CBS affiliate), provided the voiceover narration on this 1964 oddball. Regardless, this character comes across like some square-jawed comic book hero unable to prevail against his darker impulses. I also sort of feel for the guy.

Which is more disturbing?

** Note: be sure to check out Steven Wintle's fabulous Horror Blog, where he recently featured my guest post on Creed Taylor. Steven's site is an effusive, literate, and wonderfully self-effacing take on the popular idea of "Horror." Not only does he post with a sort of unnerving frequency, but he also features a lot of music. See you on the dark side. - Dan **

Sunshine, sunshine

Porpoises, candy canes, flowers, rain, flowers in the rain. Such images were tossed around pretty indiscriminately in the pop music landscape for a few blissful years, thanks in part to West Coast vocal harmony groups like the Mamas & the Papas and the Association. More than mere vogue words, these images suggested the very mecca of warmth and good feeling that California had become by the mid-1960s. Most of all, though, it was sunshine (replaced shortly thereafter by the more countercultural love), which prevailed as this music’s dominant lyrical image. Bright, warm, harmonious, yellow, basically harmless, and, like David Crosby, hurtful to your eyes if you stared at it too long: sunshine was the perfect metaphor for this self-invented Pacific Eden, and the perfect summation of its beatified version of pop music.

Filled with hip Aquarian accoutrement like chimes, flutes, fuzz tone guitars, sitars, and tambourine and, of course, distinguished by its soaring and sunny vocal harmonies, it was a form of pop music which seemed to resonate with starry-eyed, suburban adolescents everywhere. Perversely, its easygoing sophistication resonated with an older generation as well, swingers who respected the idea of cultural currency but who might have otherwise been scared away by the more aggressive and increasingly political strains of rock music.

See also this early post for more sunshine.

1. The Gordian Knot, The Year of the Sun (Verve)
I’ve never heard it, but San Francisco’s Gordian Knot released a full length album (from which this ethereal 45 was taken) that seems to be regarded with near-universal disdain by enthusiasts of ‘60s psychedelia. Due in part to a sensitivity to mellow candy cane vibrations, however, I’ve welcomed “The Year of the Sun” into my own life. I hear lines like “The rhythm of the summer wind calls me again” and I do exactly as I’m told. You just have to learn to feel the flute.

2. Chapter V, The Sun is Green (Verve Folkways)
“The Sun is Green” was the first and best of two psychedelic pop 45’s produced by Chapter V in 1968. They seemed to have been a vehicle for then-Toronto native (and future country producer and husband of Emmylou Harris) Brian Ahern, but little is otherwise known about Chapter V. You’re also not alone if you’re wondering what one takes to make the sun turn green, and where you can score some.

3. The Hard Times, Sad, Sad, Sunshine (World Pacific)
This particular sun seems to be a reminder of love lost. Further details are somewhat hazy, however, since the Hard Times obscured their lyrics in a blanket of gorgeous, echo-splashed harmonies. Obviously they realized the importance of paying lip service to the sun somehow, and, satisfied that they’d fulfilled that obligation, the Hard Times relax on “Sad, Sad, Sunshine,” enjoying their God-given right to jangle.

From San Diego, the Hard Times released one fine, eclectic album and a handful of 45s between 1966 and 1968.

Funk and the blues

While I cringe when I hear talk of authenticity or purity in music, I’ll readily admit to some prejudices if pressed. Latin and jazz, Liberace and chinchilla capes, psychedelics and any kind of music: they're concepts which generally improve each other’s company. Rock and opera, jazz and exercise, on the other hand: no. Presently, it seems “funky” blues (or, worse, blues-rock) is what passes for all blues. It's come to sound clichéd and a bit pandering, like what you'd hear blaring from sports bars and lite beer commercials, which it does.

Blues progressions and funk rhythms are one of those fusions which worked well for a time, though. Like, say, the 1960s - a time of blues-inflected top 40 hits from cities like New Orleans and Memphis - a time of R&B and soul records with earthy flavor and hard, spare drumming. (Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp” - as O-Dub notes - and Alvin Robinson’s “Down Home Girl” spring to mind here.)

This week's selections adhere to that earlier aesthetic.

(Ed. note: Thanks to JD for her help with this week’s post.)

1. Buddy Conner, Half-Way Loving (Early Bird)
The organ, the Memphis-style horn section, the shuckin’, the jivin’: “Half-Way Loving” is as resolutely Southern as a bag of hog maws. Never mind, then, that Buddy Conner and company were actually from the Bay Area - it didn’t seem to bother them at all. A burst of organ and a few walloping drum beats later, they wasted no time getting into the proper down home spirit on this off-kilter bit of late-60’s funky soul.

2. Shelley Fisher, I’ll Leave You (Girl) (Kapp)
Fisher can toss out every cliché from the book of blues one-liners I wouldn’t care. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard lines like “I don’t need that kind of treatment, girl / Your love is the choking kind.” Sometimes a selection can succeed on the sheer gutbucket strength of its drums alone.

The Mississippi-born Shelley Fisher recorded “I’ll Leave You (Girl) (For Somebody New)" shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles in 1970, and near the beginning of his long career as a singer, songwriter, and performer. He is still active today.

3. Lee Harris, I’m Gonna Get Your Thing (Get You) (Forte)
Singer & guitarist Lee Harris’s raucous “I’m Gonna Get Your Thing (Get You)” was committed to vinyl around 1970 and released on one of Kansas City’s fine independent soul labels, Forte. (See this page for an excellent overview & discography of Forte.)

There’s warping tape near the song’s beginning (an audible “whooshing” sound), there’s the stylistic shift of the song’s last loopy minute, and, in between, there’s a roomful of musicians, manic background vocalists, and two strategically placed microphones. It’s exciting to hear things captured in such visceral fidelity, and I get excited too at the prospect of sorting out exactly whose thing is whose. Maybe it’s your thing, I don’t know.

The Naked City

The late 1950s through the mid-1970s: they were golden years for television, Hollywood and the crime jazz soundtrack, years when staccato piano chords lurked around every dark corner, and every chase scene was heralded with a steady gallop of bongos. This was a stylized version of jazz - and sometimes Latin jazz - and it was used to indicate all the grit, glamour and underworld drama of the big city.

There was the music heard in film and television scores, and there was music which sounded like it should have been in such scores, and that’s what our sights are set upon this week.

1. Harvey Anderson - Modern Jazz Quartet, Monday Night At 8 P.M. (Bayou)
Harvey Anderson played saxophone and flute and led small jazz combos in the Dallas of the 1950s and '60s. He also showed that Texas - with or without skyscrapers, wharfs, fogs and other pulp earmarks - sustained its own undercurrent of suspense and stylish skulduggery. You can tell by the walking bass line and flute - universal cues for “danger” and “speakeasy tete a tete.” The title sounds like a fugitive from the opening pages of a hardboiled 1950s crime novel.

Anderson knew that real action wasn’t always heating up at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, though. Bad men could be found skittering out into the shadows at all hours, even at a sensible time on Monday night. On the other hand, if they were like me, they may have been pouring themselves another cup of tea at that moment, thus altogether avoiding the question of whether they were bad men or not.

Fort Worth’s very own Major Bill Smith was somehow involved with this record (see the Mark II for more on the “Maj”). Producer Emmett Spinks was later an owner of Ft. Worth's notorious Skyliner Ballroom.

Much of the information herein was taken from this neat personal history of Dallas’s 90th Floor Club, and the jazz scene there.


2. Billy Saint, Midnight Freeze (Seafair)
Seafair was a Seattle record label with terrific tastes in label design, and which, along with its sister label Bolo, produced a series of rockin’ pop, R&B and instumental releases in the 1960s. 1961's “Midnight Freeze” is an anomaly in the Seafair/Bolo catalog, though, an unclassifiable nocturne writ in solitary tones by Billy Saint, whistler. That's Saint, against the black cat atmosphere of “Midnight Freeze.” And - poof - he's gone.

The flipside - early '60s tweaked-out teen pop - bears no resemblance to “Midnight Freeze” and no further clues as to the identity of Billy Saint. A real mystery, this.

3. Johnny Frigo Sextet, El Negro (Orion)
The Chicago-based Johnny Frigo is recognized today for a long career as a jazz bassist and, later, as a violinist. Frigo is also known as the composer, leader and bassist on a series of obscure albums commissioned in the late 1960s by dance instructor and choreographer Gus Giordano. It was a series intended for use in Giordano’s jazz dance classes and workshops, and, performed by the Johnny Frigo Sextet, it comprised an idiosyncratic, if not highly listenable, body of originals and covers of then current rock, soul and soundtrack numbers.

The jazzy horn riffs, the suspenseful piano chording, the flute, the relentless patter of the bongos - no surprises here. This was the music lingering like Kent cigarette smoke around any private dick worth his salt in the 1960s. Frigo throws things into a different gear - an upbeat Latin cha cha - in the last minute of this selection, something one did to survive in the high-stakes world of jazz dance records.

The crème de la crème of Frigo’s Orion recordings was later anthologized by Ubiquity records.

Boogaloo!

The boogaloo was a fascinating musical phenomenon of 1960s Spanish Harlem, an organic consequence of both the Puerto Rican community’s proximity to the city’s African-American neighborhoods, and the popular, pervasive influence of 1960’s soul music. Joe Cuba (“Bang Bang”), Ray Barretto (“El Watusi”), the TNT Band (“The Meditation”), and Mongo Santamaria (“Watermelon Man”): they all had hits by wedding jazzy horn lines, jumbles of English and Spanish lyrics, and vamping piano motifs to Afro-Latin styles like montuno, rumba and guajira, fitting, in turn, these elements into an R&B sensibility. It was perfect for the side of a 45 rpm record, it was perfect for radio play. This was the boogaloo, and it transcended El Barrio and the Five Boroughs in its day.

There'd been similar musical composites before the boogaloo; there was Latin jazz - and then there was the mambo and cha-cha-cha, styles which enjoyed massive popular success in this country after World War II. The boogaloo, however, was the first to attain national success with an identity distinct to New York City's Puerto Rican (i.e., Nuyorican) community and culture.

Despite its appeal amongst and beyond New York’s heterogeneous audiences, the boogaloo was dismissed by the older generations of the city’s Latin musicians. In retrospect, they really didn’t have much to worry about, as the boogaloo was a transitory phenomenon. By the late 1960’s, a formalized group of Latin styles had coalesced as salsa, replacing everything as the predominant musical voice of Nuyorican identity.

The boogaloo is sometimes referred to as the shingaling, distinct from - though sort of spiritually related to - this species of shingaling.

1. King Nando and His Orchestra, Orchard Beach Shing-a-Ling, pt I (Swinger)
It's King Nando exhorting us to do the shingaling - and, later, on side two, to join him at the Bronx’s Orchard Beach, where again we do the shingaling. I think it’s understood that lyrics were generally not the point of the boogaloo. The boogaloo was no anomaly in the great arc of American popular dance music. If present at all, the lyrics were an afterthought, another means for exciting an audience into motion. Any sort of catchy, shouted interjection might do.

2. King Nando and His Orchestra, Orchard Beach Shing-a-Ling, pt II (Swinger)
Fernando “King Nando” Rivera was the singer and guitarist responsible for this summertime anthem. As a bandleader King Nando exercised great taste. Nando's group’s rhythmic and melodic drive was distinguished by his attractive electric guitar parts, parts which replaced what would have normally been a piano’s role. “Orchard Beach Shing-a-Ling” was taken from the first (circa 1965) of King Nando’s three excellent boogaloo albums of the 1960s, all released on the tiny Swinger label.

3. Pepe Fernandez & His Orchestra, Having Fun (20th Century Fox)
It’s a similar atmosphere as “Orchard Beach Shing-a-Ling." Pepe and his co-vocalist don’t really sound like they’re having all that much fun, though, the “having fun” chant seems a bit perfunctory. Who knows? There is, after all, a fine line between a party and a shouting, angry mob.

Either way, I have no further details on Pepe Fernandez’s whereabouts. 20th Century Fox, the brief-lived record division of its better known parent company, 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, was a label with West Coast affiliations. I’m positive, however, that Fernandez hailed from New York City. Producer Jackie Mills was working in New York City in 1967, when this was recorded, but, mostly, “Having Fun” just has that hard-driving New York City sound.

The “L. Reed” given the co-credit here is probably not Lou Reed, unfortunately.

4. Diane & Carole & The Watchamacallits, The Fuzz (Speed)
Diane and Carole were the rare female lead vocalists during the boogaloo era. “The Fuzz,” a cautionary lesson to all you would-be delinquent types, is also a clear demonstration of an old adage. Songs with references to local beaches are cool, songs with references to the police as the “fuzz” are much, much cooler. Coincidentally, there is a discrete handful of boogaloo records about drugs: the buying of drugs, the doing of drugs, and/or the lamenting about the buying and the doing of the drugs.

“The Fuzz” was written and arranged by Louie Ramirez, one of the biggest, hippest names on the New York City Latin scene of the '60s and '70s. This selection was taken from Diane and Carole and company's full-length album on Speed records, yet another tiny, short-lived Latin record label from the era.

** Note: Oliver Wang has graciously invited me aboard the mighty Soul Sides steamship for what will hopefully be an ongoing, fortnightly series of guest posts, a series which will focus more on LP's - and various trippier, funkier, and exotic forms found therein. And, hey, here’s my inaugural post. Which, in classic form, is not an LP, but a 45. Hope you enjoy! -Dan **