Thought I’d made a sensational find at a thrift shop in Middletown—one of those rare Strawberry Shortcake LPs featuring Flo & Eddie (in a career lull between their Zappa phase and the nostalgic rebirth of The Turtles).
But when I went to play it at home, the actual record inside the sleeve was not Ms. Shortcake but a generic album of “Kindergarten Playtime Songs.” Damn you, unregulated thrift shop record racks!
Which brought into sharper focus the attributes of the albums I bought which actually had the correct disks inside them:
A six-LP “Treasury of the Golden West” from the oft-mocked Longines Symphonette Recording Society, supplemented on this yee-haw! project by Ken Carson and the Cavaliers.
Gene Pitney’s Big Sixteen, which the liner notes call “a collection of a dozen-and-a-third of the lad’s greatest musical triumphs.” My daughters know “Town Without Pity” from the original Hairspray film, which they’ve now seen several times. They also know who Burt Bacharach is. This LP will singlediskedly increase their knowledge of Pitney songs arranged and conducted by Bacharach by three, since besides “Pity” it includes “Liberty Valance,” “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and “True Love Never Runs Smooth.”
Redd Foxx—Laff of the Party, the comic’s debut party record on the Dooto Novelty label. Far from a first edition, since it lists four subsequent volumes of the series on the back of the record cover, plus other intriguing Dooto comedy titles such as “Sloppy’s House Party, Allen Drew’s Stag Party (tracks on that include “High Nuts” and “The Queer Burglar”) and Gene and Freddie’s Party Record Party (with “Superman’s Balls” and “Short Arm Inspection”). Despite the success of these records, though, later editions still came in shabby covers with amateurish artwork that’s so appalling it’s appealing.
Mr. President—original Broadway soundtrack of Irving Berlin’s ill-fated final Broadway musical, starring Robert Ryan, Nanette Fabray and Anita Gillette.
A couple of those well-remembered K-Tel “original hits, original stars” compilations hawked incessantly on UHF TV stations in the 1970s. Block Buster, from 1976, contains “Sky High” by Jigsaw, “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns, Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Doi Something Freaky to You,” 5000 Volts’ “I’m On Fire,” the Johnny Rivers rendition of “Help Me Rhonda” and Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” which has had its title prudishly condensed to “Only Women” and, as they say, much much more. Music Power, released two years earlier, shows how schizophrenic top-40 radio could be in those days, jumping from novelty songs like Jim Stafford’s Spiders and Sankes and Gordon Sinclair’s recitation “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion)” to the hearteningly popular soul-bearing of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” The Chi-Lite’s “Oh Girl” and Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Where Peaceful Waters Flow” to the variety show theatrics of Tony Orlando & Dawn (“Sweet Gypsy Rose”) and Sonny and Cher (“When You Say Love”) to the mainstream incursion of glam and power pop represented by Brownsville Station (“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room”), The Sweet (“Little Willy”) and The Raspberries (“Tonight”).
The real prize out of the record stack turns out to be “Selections from Porgy and Bess and Other Standard Hits” performed by the National Concert Dance Orchestra. It’s copyright 1957 on the Halo label, whose motto is “The ‘Colorful’ Line”—is that a euphemism for African-American artists? The recording is, I think, wondrous and warm, low-key and straightforward without sounding cheap. It’s skillfully orchestrated on a budget such that it completely brings out the “folk opera” conceit of the Gershwins’ magnum opus. Interestingly, while there are five “Porgy & Bess selections, as advertised, on Side One, another song from the show (“Bess You Is My Woman Now”) is shunted onto Side Two among a passel of Gershwin songs from other places—“An American in Paris,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “S’Wonderful,” like that. And the rest of Side One consists of non-Gershwin material: Schumann’s “Traumerai,” Dietz’s “Hoops,” Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, Bach’s Minuet in G and Arthur Schwartz’s pop composition “Hoops.”
This is the kind of record which I would have played until it wore out had I owned it as a child—and which would have warped me for life into thinking that the Minuet in G was part of Porgy & Bess somehow.