I've Been Obsessing Again

 

For tonight I'm doing up more records while I type.

I've been obsessing over Duke Ellington radio transcription bootlegs of programs from the 40s.
Some fucking brilliant stuff. Lots of hits of the day that didn't get recorded otherwise as well as great performances in front of a live audience.

So in the past month or so I've picked up about another dozen.
It's like the Duke was recorded almost as much as the fucking Dead. (But I can listen to him without wanting to punch a hippie in the throat so I enjoy it much more.)

I even went so far as to pick up an extra shift with an extremely desperate bonus for picking up just so I could justify spending a shit ton of money getting a hard copy of the 24 disc Ellington Centennial Collection of his complete recordings for RCA Victor.

You can never have enough Duke Ellington. Never.

So that's where my head's at lately and at some point may end up here.

But in the meantime have some Punk/New Wave nonsense...

Chronic Alkie (1981)

Wilma & the Wilbers. From Minneapolis, MN (or maybe St. Paul, I don't know)

A blink and you missed it band that really should have been comped more.

"Chronic Alkie" is a fine tune but the other two are also worthy.

Tiger Beat (1982)

Yeah, this one's even better.

The hit for me is "I Like It Thick" about a girl's love for milkshakes. 

She likes them thick when she's hot and wet on a summer's night.

Absolutely about milkshakes.Nothing else implied. No sir. She just loves those cold dairy products. Yep yep yep. Milkshakes.

This too needs to have been comped more.

I'm a Bit Behind

 I've been kind of wasting my time lately. The need to unstress from work these days is pretty fucking overwhelming, so I end up turning my brain off and playing video games for hours at a time. Long hours where I leave all the adulting and such on the backburner.

So here we are.

I had set up some posts the last stretch off to take me out until the next one. And when I looked yesterday I noticed that the last of them had already posted and I was a couple of days away from missing a post in the seven plus years I've been doing this.

Can't let that happen. I want to be nothing but at least consistent.
Plus there's only about three gigs left of space on that Mediafire account. When it's full I'm gonna go back and delete the files backwards one gig at a time. There's still a while to go before I need to do that, but it's a heads up.
(I know I could open more storage accounts, but I really don't feel like it and those things have already been up for a lifetime in internet terms. It's time to move on.)

So with that being reiterated. 

Alpha Romeo (1982)

Dangerous Birds. 

The band including a young Thalia Zedek who would go onto forming Uzi and then Come.

But that's beside the point as far as I'm concerned really.
I just love the song "Alpha Romeo"
I played the shit out of it when I got it way back in high school. It was a staple of compilation tapes made for girls. It's a great fucking pop song.

The only time I for sure remember seeing them live (though it's possible they played on or another all ages shows I attended but don't remember) is when they were one of the openers for the infamous afternoon All Ages show at the Bradford Ballroom for the final Boston appearances of Mission of Burma.

Yeah, that was a hell of a day.

I managed to grab a poster off the wall on my way out after having survived the experience and recently because I'm a posh bastard and middle aged person had it adequately framed. 

The Captain looks on approvingly.

11.13.81 (1981)

Not much I could come up with about the Roys.
There's some live footage on YouTube, but nothing particularly enlightening.

It's guitar based New Wave stuff like your mother used to dance around to in her underwear to in her high school bedroom. Or was that just  me....

I'll Find It Someday

 

I've spent a few hours tonight poring over the new arrivals and playing some of them while doing it.

I've got Arson Garden on in the background while I type this. (I think it's likely to be something to add to this pile at some point.)

Anyway.

Let us continue from where we left off.

The Oranj Album (1998)

The second and unfortunately only other album by the Oranj Symphonette.

Here they do a version of  "Dreamsville" which I discussed in the previous post but they've also expanded their repertoire to cover tunes by Duke Ellington, Marvin Hamlisch and Burt Bacharach among others.

All with the same manic glee. All tongue in cheek and arranged in entirely unexpected ways. Things shine differently when they're reinvented and  rearranged. It's the wonder of taking music that exists and making it your own. And so long as everyone's having fun it's all game.

Which doesn't mean that everyone gets it.

Christopher Howard in the Jan. 21, 1999 issue of the Orlando Weekly certainly didn't.

"The jazz parodists of Oranj Symphonette have their work cut out for them. This eclectic troupe performs oddball renditions of Henry Mancini film scores, tongue-in-cheek versions of revered jazz standards, and even a deadpan take on the absurd pop hit “Up, Up, and Away.” The opening track of The Oranj Album, a cover of Quincy Jones’s “Call Me Mr. Tibbs,” combines the cheesy Farfisa organ of a B-movie surf band with disco funk. The second tune resembles the background music at the Olive Garden, and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” is blasphemed with banjo, Mellotron, and fuzz bass. The Oranj Album puts the concept of elevator music to very good use. But do we really need to hear “A Man and a Woman” twisted into a cruise-ship classic or a forty-second breeze through the theme from Woody Allen’s Bananas? As entertaining as this CD is, I hope these versatile, talented players rise above novelty status."

He certainly sounds like he didn't get invited to a lot of parties.

Anyway. This is actually the second copy of this I've bought.

At some point I had been playing the first copy and when I switched to another compact disc. The actual case for it wasn't handy for whatever reason. I was in the middle of doing something else that I didn't want to interrupt by getting up to look for it. But I also didn't want to just leave a loose disc lying around unprotected. So I stuck it in the case with another disc that I'd been listening to and had every intention of putting it away properly when I was done with whatever it was that I was doing.

I didn't.

And then I forgot that I'd done that and subsequently the cd it was put in with got filed.

Now I can't remember which one it was. 

So there's an extra copy somewhere among the 2.5k compact discs I currently have.

I'll find it accidentally some fine day before I die.
(Maybe.)

Jumping the Line

 

I got two packages of records and miscellaneous compact discs and a smattering of seven inches in the mail today. Including the other two volumes of Duke Ellington live at the Click Restaurant in Philadelphia in 1948. Plus one of the two Jethro Burns solo singles from after Homer's untimely death with a song called "Dolly Parton's Sweet on Me"

But I also got a replacement for a disc I lost somewhere along the line and I'm jumping over everything to just put both of them up because they are both fucking brilliant fun.

I will also warn regular viewers that this is something more akin to Jazz than the usual rock and roll based nonsense that is the most regular feature of this exercise in silliness.

Plays Mancini (1996)

The Oranj Symphonette were all part of the backing band for Tom Waits so first off you know that they are/were some really talented and versatile musicians. Secondly Henry Mancini was a really amazing composer who had an incredible knack for writing indelible hooks and earworms but for some reason gets kind of lumped in with a kitsch mindset because of it's association with campy movie soundtracks. But there it is ingrained deeply into people's pop culture back brain such that you can instantly hum along with the "Pink Panther Theme" or "Moon River" without consciously knowing you're doing it.

I mean, I used to sit in for a while with a local "Jazz Workshop" for a bit. Everyone got to pick a tune during the session. One time I chose "Dreamsville" (from the "Peter Gunn" tv soundtrack) for my pick. There was some grumbling amongst the serious folk until they played it. It's a fucking beautiful and lush song. There were no grumbles after.

So there's this. 

A group of A-List musicians who then take up some of these well known and not so well known songs and then proceed to turn them inside out with a mixture of equal parts love, respect and malicious glee.

 
I live for shit like this.

Ow!

 

I've had a huge knot in my left shoulder for a few days now that I just can't seem to loosen up.
It's terrible. I can kind of ameliorate it a bit with massaging it, taking a hot shower etc.. but it just doesn't quite go away.

I think it's related to sitting here and typing. Maybe I need to do something about my posture.

Or have a really strong muscle loosening drink

I think I may go that route...

A Gift From Sing Sing (1996)

A sweet little compilation of bands from the short lived Popfactory label which should be sort of self explanatory about what you're getting yourself into here.

It's pop. It's an indiepop compact disc.

If you need a songlist it's on Discogs.

Another Night, Another Abandoned Website

 

Yeah, I'm still binging on the Everly Brothers.
I mean, check this shit out. They're backed by an uncredited Hollies on this Lp and just fucking kill it with stuff like this. (and also make me realize that I've lost a few more notes on my singing range. It didn't used to be such a strain to sing along....)

 

But that's neither here nor there as far as this particular exercise is concerned. You're not here to listen to me hype up the Everlys. You either already know or don't. I'll just say that it's worth your time.

Here's what you, and I mean you, actually came for.


 

Flex Time (2005)

The Dials were from Chicago. They made a sweet farfisa garage rock and pop sound and looked good doing it. Not that I ever saw them or even knew that they existed. I got this as an add-on to a large online order based on Youtube and it being really cheap.

It's unfortunate. I would like to have dug them live. Garagey stuff is always better sweating with a beer in your hand...

But on the plus side, their Discogs entry has been updated with the existence of a second album since I last looked over there. So there's more to hunt down.

As it is, they have a website, but it hasn't been updated since 2009 so it's probably a pretty safe bet that they've been defunct for a long while...

Tipsy

 

I'm a bit tipsy from a very strong gin and tonic that I made for myself while digitizing yet more Duke Ellington bootleg radio transcriptions. Just great stuff.

But in the meantime, until I figure out what to eventually do with them

Here's something completely different....
.

Nothing La-di-da (1993)

I don't even remember why I picked these up.
 
Probably a combo of it being on Elefant , a Spanish indiepop label and it being cheap enough to take a risk on.

It was worth it.

 

Somer-Runner (1994)

I can't find much right now about this band that called itself the Lovelies from Portsmouth in the UK (not be confused with another band with the same name that hailed from Milwaukee) except the bio on the Elefant page for them which compares them to Wedding Present.

I can sort of hear it, but they remind me somewhat more of Yeah Yeah Noh, personally. (which admittedly is probably a pretty obscure reference for most people, but it's what I think of and you have some Youtubing to do which you probably won't regret.) I think it's in the vocals...)

Matters of Convenience

 

Blah blah.

Some days everything is much more inconvenient and annoying than you might normally want it to  be. Which, speaking for myself, is a solid zero.

But alas, we live in a world of imperfection and bad grammar and poor typing skills.

90-95 (1995)

I'm a lazy fuck and didn't scan this myself and the only jpg I could find are all this tiny and shit.

Maybe I'll fix this some day.
But probably not.

This is however a nice compilation of the majority of the Laurels singles and miscellaneous output during their short and noisy rock existence. I have all off these, but not the full lengths for some reason.  I'll rectify that at some point, I'm sure but for now this is what I have to offer in one neat digital package which I can present as a single post rather than split across several.

It's so much more convenient this way.
I have shit to do.