Part 2 of Friday’s Post

With this many used LPs staring me in the face, there just HAD to be at least one or two that would fill in some kind of gap in my TSV collection. About ten minutes into my perusal at the Northlake Festival Goodwill, I saw this “WTF?”  LP: (click on images for a bigger version)

Tom Bosley doing sex jokes? That’s good enough for me. This comedy LP from 1976 led by stand-up veteran Jackie Vernon also features Louisa Moritz who, as the liner notes say, “…has a lot going for her more than talent.” That’s kind of a code that she was destined to end up doing a lot of topless scenes in B-movies. Tom Bosley talking about sex provides a good contrast to his role as Mr. Cunningham on Happy Days or his pitches for Glad Heavyweight Trashbags. I’ll listen to it this Sunday.

With time running out, I saw the LP I was destined to find before some hipster grabbed it on Saturday:

 

 

This Smeck guy is HUGE. Just go to the tubes and put in Roy Smeck and see what you get. He ineveted is own Uke, played anything with strings, and had a really long career. This LP features Smeck playing lots of different instruments. Here’s just one of several Smeck tubes:

So, at 77-cents each, I felt I had really scored some good TSV on my day off. So when I got home, I decided to play my Smeck LP first. WTF? WRONG RECORD INSIDE!! Instead of Smeck, I wound up with a childrens’ record on the Golden Records label. Oh well. That was a lesson I will not forget. And there’s always the e-bays, but that’s like cheating for a real TSV digger like me.

 

Blog at ya later, and keep diggin!

Another WGGTB LP And More (Part 1 of 2)

Hello, boys and girls.  Welcome back to TSV, your home for stories about, and images of, vintage vinyl records.  Here’s Part 1 of my most recent adventure in TSV land.

I took a day off to visit my physical therapist and was able to squeeze in some intense TSV shopping at two Goodwill stores near my doctor’s office. And I got to thinking, as a federal employee, what with this whole sequestration thing, why doesn’t the government just do an across-the-board switch to a four-day work week? G-people like me could just sequester themselves at home, put on a crock pot filled with some vittles  and listen to some vintage vinyl. Or they could hit the thrifts and take care of some personal errands when it’s less busy on the roads. Whatever.

OK, on to today’s first TSV find.

I almost shat my pants when I saw the huge stacks of LPs when I walked into the Lilburn, GA Goodwill. However, after about 30 seconds of perusal, it was clear that some guy named Ray Brown had either lost his religion or died. It was 99.9% pure praise and gospel (P&G) music, with every LP cover scrawled with a big “RAY BROWN” in thick magic marker. Literally hundreds of praise and gospel music LPs, with Mr. Browns favorite group being these gospel dudes called The Florida Boys. But, as you folks might know from some previous TSV posts, there is one genre of P&G LP that I will grab every time: the White Gospel Group Tour Bus (WGGTB) LP. Nothing like a WGG posing in front of a vintage 1960s bus. I just kept thinking there just HAD to be WGGTB LP in such a huge pile of P&G records. I swear on a stack of praise LPs that, in the last 10 records, THERE IT WAS!

Some of you may recognize the bus as a “Silver Eagle,” a German-made model that comprised much of the bus fleet of  Trailways bus lines. The author has spent many hours on such buses,  but not with the Happy Goodman Family. This makes about 10 WGGTB LPs in my collection.

You don’t get to ride in your own Silver Eagle bus unless you bring in the money, and the Happy Goodman Family were no slouches when it came to hitting the road and singing gospel music.  It may not be my favorite genre, but I respect their hard work in the name of Jesus.

Having tapped out the Lilburn Goodwill, it was off to the Northlake Goodwill.  I was again confronted with a HUGE selection of TSV, almost as many LPs as I encountered in Lilburn.  RAY BROWN was not in evidence in this new pile, so I felt I had a good chance to score some good stuff.  Little did I know I was going to experience a tragic phenomenon that afflicts many a hasty TSV collector. That will be in Part 2. Stay tuned.

 

Just because I haven’t blogged on this blog for a while does not mean that I have not been consistently trying to find some new thrift store vinyl.  So rather than go into “deep” analysis, I provide here some of my latest finds with a brief synopsis of each LP and, all importantly, the track listings which can really make or break the decision to purchase a thrift store vinyl LP.  Here we go!

The amazing and underrated  guitarist Billy Murre arranged and conducted this GREAT newstalgia LP that just blows me away every time I listen to it.  Highly recommended!

Palm Beach Band Boys ~ Strike Again LP

RCA Victor LSP 3808 Stereo 1967

Arranged and Conducted by Billy Mure

Track List :

The Object Of My Affection

Me & My Shadow

Josephine

At Sundown

You Tell Me Your Dream

Wildflower

Strangers In The Night

Mean To Me

I Don’t Know Why

I’ll Get By

Suzette

This is a soundtrack LP arranged and conducted by “Johnny Williams,” who later went on to become simply “John” Williams of movie music (and Boston Pops) fame.  Let me tell you that his earlier stuff, like this LP, is MUCH more interesting than Jaws and Star Wars and all that crap.  Good stuff at 99 cents:

Penelope (Soundtrack)

MGM Records E/SE-4426 ST

1966

Mono.

Composed and Conducted by Johnny Williams

Track listing

1. Penelope (Sung by the Pennypipers) (01:59)

2. Poolside (03:12)

3. Penny’s Arcade (02:30)

4. La Bostella (02:14)

5. The Girl in the Yellow Dress (02:40)

6. Penelope (Instrumental) (03:24)

7. Penelope (Love Theme) (03:15)

8. Girl Chase (03:25)

9. The Sun Is Gray (Sung by Natalie Wood) (02:20)

Composed by Gale Garnett

10. Sadaba (02:30)

11. At the Art Museum (03:14)

12. The Mad Professor (01:52)

Wow.  Found in an Alabama thrift store.  Too amazing to explain here.  57 Cents.

Track Listing

Cumana

Blues in The Night

Gypsy Rhapsody

Main Title From “The Man With The Golden Arm”

Blue Tango

La Macarena

Malaguena

Come Back to Sorrento

Misirlou

Beachcomber Blues

April in Portugal

Rhapsody in Blue

This is just a crazy-ass LP that has alleged “authentic” African songs from various tribes.  Who am I to complain?

 

Mercury Records MG 21013

Track listing

1. Feast of the Strong Men (02:06)

2. Dingaka Lullaby – Tula Baba (01:23)

3. Dingaka Lullaby – Tula Baba (Onika’s Song) (01:02)

4. Tribal Prayer (01:31)

5. Funeral Drums (01:20)

6. When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder (02:39)

7. Song of the Labourers (01:21)

8. Mineworker’s Song (01:14)

9. Body and Bones (01:54)

10. Cheeni Cheeni (00:45)

11. Drinking Song (01:00)

12. Friday Night (01:54)

13. Gumboot Dance (01:27)

14. Song on the White Mountain (01:30)

15. Down-and-Out Song (01:31)

16. Song of the Convicts (01:45)

17. Python Dance (02:00)

18. Thunder Orgy (00:47)

19. Placating the Gods (02:33)

20. Song of Joy (01:38)

21. Shosholoza (Go In Peace) (01:38)

 

 

 

 

TSV Score! At St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store

By the time I got to the third of the three bins of LPs that were on the floor down at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store (SVDPTS) in Chamblee, USA, I was getting discouraged; but low and behold, there it was!

It’s unfortunate that Ferrante and Teicher tend to get discounted by many TSV collectors.  F&T brought that situation upon themselves in their later career by churning out album after album of piano-duo pablum. You can’t sift through the record bins of a thrift store without finding one or more of their dozens of Lps that catered to the suburban comatose set (their cover of the original Ernest Gold theme to Exodus is a good example).

But if you’re lucky enough to find and listen to one of their earlier LPs, those on the Winchester or the ABC-Paramount labels, you will recognize how F&T were one of the more progressive and fearless piano duos of the post-war period (eat your heart out Ronnie Aldrich):

These two F&T Lps remain TSV gold for any collector…

The reason why early F&T is the shit is the way they “played” their pianos. The liner notes from the LP I found at the SVDPTS  notes how F&T used “…self-designed mutes, picks, mallets and other assorted paraphernalia -all constructed by themselves.”  F&T were DIY innovaters.  Luckily, there is ONE Intar-Tube that shows them in action:

 

And here is a less frantic piece from the LP I scored:　

 

 
F&T are both dead now, but they still have a Web site.

Le Grand Orchestre De PAUL MAURIAT (Chilean Pressing)

Finding a Paul Mauriat LP at a thrift store is not exactly a big deal; he ranks among the most popular easy listening artists in the global easy listening catalog. I say “global” because, outside of his monster smash version of Love is Blue, France’s Mauriat sold way more LPs overseas than he did in the USA. That’s why you often find foreign pressings like the one I recently found at my Buford Highway Goodwill.

 

The mint condition, stereo version of Mauriat’s Vol. 4 that I picked up (71 cents) is a Chilean pressing, a tribute to Mauriat’s global reach, with the Japanese audience being unusually enthusiastic.

 

So, for your listening and visual pleasure, here is a YouTubes of a track from this thrift store LP. One could say that the title is a truism: Black is Black. What else could it be?

TSV Straight Outta Natick!

I didn’t know it at the time when I picked this up on my recent trip, but this George Roberts LP is a fairly sought-after recording:

It hasn’t been re-released on CD, so it remains steeply priced on the Intar-Webs.  Roberts was known as “Mr. Bass Trombone,” and he is certainly that and more on this LP.  It’s hard not to like the bass trombone as played by Roberts.  No gimmicks on this LP;   just straight-ahead playing of American standards with a great embouchure and sound.  And the sextet rocks along the whole way.  Every song’s a winner, and if you’ve never heard a bass Tram-Bone, you don’t know what you’re missing (and John Williams of movie-music fame is on the piano).  

I found a youtubes of George Roberts playing on the Lawrence Welk show.  Dig the product placement in this one:

Pow Pow Satisfaction!

OK. Here are two more recent finds, fresh purchases from this morning’s brief visit to the Buford Highway Goodwill.

First, here is a pretty hot Cha Cha Cha LP on the Fiesta label:

Fiesta is a now-defunct NY, NY label that recorded a lot of cool Latin bands. This particular LP features Monchito -not to be confused with the more-recognized Machito- and his very tight orchestra of Cha Cha Cha musicians and singers known as the Mambo Royals. And wouldn’t you know it, track one of side one, a Ramon Monchito original entitled Pao Pao (Pow Pow), shows up on The YouTubes as a minor hit; check it out:

Can anyone out there, perhaps Fleischmanns in Spain, help me out with the lyrics (other than the “Pow Pow”)?

Some people collect nothing but Latin vinyl, as well they should. New York City, in particular, had some kick-ass record labels that produced some very authentic Latin dance music with its roots in the rich, cultural cross pollination between New York City and Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Latin countries.  Fiesta was just one of many Latin labels, including Seeco, Tico, and Fania.

The next LP I picked up just because any easy-listening cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” has to be good (maybe). David Rose is famous for writing “The Stripper,” but most of his later fare is pabulum, except for, perhaps, his version of Satisfaction:

ADENDUM

I’m gonna send out the above cover tune in honor of Glen Leslie over at Jet Set Planet…he’s probably familiar with it.

He Presides Over The Hammond Organ

 

Just how a nice copy of a Blue Note Jimmy Smith LP ends up among the Andy Williams and Mantovani seems a mystery that could never be solved; yet there it was, a small-but-interesting portion of the prolific jazz organist’s famous 1957 session with guitarist Eddie McFadden and drummer Donald Bailey (among others).  My favorite track from this LP just happens to be on the YouTubes, albeit with only 95 views.  It deserves a lot more.

This particular track is interesting to me for 3 basic reasons:

 

1. Jimmy Smith has set the stops on his Hammond to create a warbling, trill like effect that you don’t usually hear on most of his recordings.

 

2. Maybe because of reason # 1, Jimmy plays in a straight-forward, smooth and un-flashy style that really lets the song take center stage.

 

3. The Eddie McFadden guitar solo that kicks in around 3:15 is natural and restrained; you can actually “see” his fingers on the strings.

 

Enjoy:

 

Soul Music From Hanna Barbera? WTF?

If I told you that the famous American cartoon concern, Hanna Barbera, the folks that brought you Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla, and The Flintstones (among dozens of other Saturday morning TV fare) had their own record label, you would be correct to assume that it featured kiddie records that exploited parents by inducing the knee-jerk demands of their childdren to buy them a record that had their favorite cartoon character on the cover.  

 

 

  

But what if I told you that, in the short-lived history of Hanna Barbera Records (HBR), they were also responsible for producing some of the more obscure and collectable garage rock, soul, and psychedelic rock LPs of the 1960s? As WFMU’s Beware of The Blog has noted in an amazing post about HBR, “HBR’s obscure garage rock oddities are one of the reasons the label attracts plenty of attention from record collectors and nerds.”

 

 

So call me a nerd record collector. All I know is that I found a cool thrift store HBR LP last weekend and had no idea what to expect:

 

 　

 

Turns out that these Dynatones, some white boys from West Virginia, can lay down some pretty funky instrumentals. Their particular shtick on this LP is to use a fife to add a sort of jazzy backdrop to some Booker T. And The Mgs-sounding soul.  The title track, Fife Piper, blew up to become a big hit with the kids, especially with the kids over in Britain.

 

Why Britain? Well, the Dynatones, like dozens of other American soul groups of the 60s, were adopted by the British “Northern Soul” movement. The latter featured all sorts of crazy attributes in terms of clothes, dances, clubs, scooters and, most important, music.

  

If you’ve never heard of the Northern Soul movement, the Wiki entry for the topic is a good place to start:

 

Wikipedia Entry For “Northern Soul”

 

And here, for your listening pleasure, is the Dynatones hit, “Fife Piper,” along with some vintage moving images of some British Northern Soul kids doing their thing.  Still amazed at how that kid does that bounce-up dance move; WTF? 

Here is a better-sounding, audio-only version:

A King in The Land of Thrift Store Vinyl

There is, I admit, a certain level of frivolity associated with TSV; after all, much of the music associated with these LPs IS frivolous, existing in the throw-away world of temporarily popular music; that’s why it (thankfully) ends up in thrift stores.

 

But every once and a while a band and its creator represent an interesting intersection in popular music that is worth a little more digging.  And with the Intar-Webs, the digging usually provides some good context for a band that seems, at first, utterly ridiculous. I present here a group from a recently purchased thrift store LP: King Richard’s Fluegel Knights:

 

  

 

The “King Richard” of this Tijuana Brass-with-a-twist band was Dick Behrke. His name won’t ring any chord unless you are really into Bobby Darin, for it was Dick Behrke, Darrin’s high school buddy, bandmate, and eventual arranger, that helped to launch the latter to astounding and rapid success.

 

As the name and “family” crest of the Fluegel Knights suggest, this is a band with a slightly medieval shtick, with Baroque-like trumpet intros and bridges throughout, and some medieval-related song titles like “Camelot” and “Castle Holiday.” But most of the music is that happy, bouncy “now sound” that evokes the world of TV game shows Like Celebrity Bowling.  Try out this YouTube of the Fluegel Knights instrumental rendition of the well-worn tune “Everybody Loves My Baby:”  

 

 

Gotta love an instrumental tune that clocks in at 1:54. For a lot of people, that is probably all they could take; for me, however, I could listen to this stuff all day. Evidently, a lot of people did listen to the tune as it reached #11 in 1967 on the easy listening charts.

 

But “King” Richard Behrke was no fly-by-knight (sorry) slacker trying to ride the coattails of the Great Herb Alpert and his TJB. Berhke was active in many areas of music, including composition, arranging, and teaching, not to mention being a competent horn player and pianist. And his work with Darin was pivotal for both artists. You can go here to read more about the partnership of Darin and Behrke.

 

There is also that movie with Kevin Spacey playing Darin that elicited a pretty divided criticism.  I think I’ll watch it just for heck of it, and because maybe the Dick Behrke character may show up.  Have any of you folks out there seen it yet?

 

 

There are plenty of free download sites with Fluegel Knights LPs out there, but there is nothing like holding that nice, Thrift Store Vinyl.   Mmmmmm.  Smells so good.