(Christopher Arnott continues to convert his 7″ vinyl collection to mp3s.)

1. The Turtles, Elenore/Surfer Dan.
I remember when Peter Sellars, at the height of his ubiquity in the 1980s Boston arts scene—when he was running the Boston Shakespeare Company, staging special events at his Harvard alma mater, contriving one-act spectacles for local arts festivals, directing operas around the country and even programming a film series at a big Boston Cineplex—he was included in one of the local-celebrity surveys of “what’s your favorite song of all time?” and chose this one.
“Elenore”’s the famous follow-up to “Happy Together.” Its inexperienced composer Howard Kaylan, better known as one of the band’s lead vocalists, tells of how he carefully studied the specific strengths of “Happy Together” (by the not-all-that-much-more-experienced songwriting team of Bonner & Gordon) and refashioned them into a song that exemplified those elements without just aping them.
It’s a sterling example of rousing by-the-numbers songcraft, but what everyone really loves about “Elenore” is not how it honors conventions but how it mocks them. The line “Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell, and you really do me well, you’re my pride and joy etcetera” has brashness at every turn. Kaylan’s said folks often ask him if he knew how comical it was to use “etcetera” in a love lyric, which is an amazing example of how an audience can make themselves feel superior to a performer. Of course he knew—hadn’t he also put a “gee” and a “do me well” in the same line. The Turtles were the most whimsical band of the ‘60s, and only got crazier when, as Flo & Eddie, Kaylan and fellow Turtles vocalist Mark Volman joined Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and later formed their own subversive act.

This copy of Elenore is cracked and unplayable, but no way am I throwing it out. The Turtles were one of the first bands I ever loved—when I was seven years old, I had two pet turtles I named Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman—and “Elenore” is a key reason why. (“Can’t You Hear the Cows,” from the same album, The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, is the other, but that’s a passionate reckoning for another time.) The flip side (also from “Battle of the Bands”), “Surfer Dan,” is a reminder that Volman and Kaylan had been gigging since their mid-teens, when they were in the surf combo The Crossfires.

2. Dinky Doo, Slow Motion/Superdrag, “Sleeping Beauty.” At a time in the mid-‘90s when it seemed that all the good songwriters were going alt-country, bands like Superdrag (and Splitsville and Best Kissers in the World) held out hope for good ol’ power pop, even if some of them did later soften. This split single, which I’d forgotten I’d owned and maybe even never have heard before now (stamped “No. 00104” of a limited edition and probably purchased along with a mountain of other stuff when the Tune Inn went out of business) has power chords to match the powerful emotions—the antithesis of the whispery maudlin strains alt-country was peddling. Both sides are loose live-in-studio takes that sound like club shows you wish you were at. I did get to see Superdrag once, but it was at Toad’s, where they were playing at rock stars rather than ruling a smaller room the way they surely could.
So, who Dinky Doo? No idea, and no Superdrag, but enough like them to make this a well-conceived single, a double-shot warning for those who would soften pop.

3. Richard Chamberlain, Love Me Tender/All I Do is Dream of You.
I am of the opinion that Richard Chamberlain should have had more of a singing career. This single, however, is not the evidence, Chamberlain’s thin voice buttressed by Jimmy Haskell’s overreaching orchestra. The band’s jaunty take on the flapper standard “All I Do is Dream of You” (the song during which Debbie Reynolds jumps out of a cake in “Singing in the Rain”) practically moves into Louis Prima swingersville, while Chamberlain gets behind. “Love Me Tender” benefits from what we now know of the erstwhile Dr. Kildare’s personal life. Sung by a man who seemed (from his memoirs) to be comfortable with his homosexuality, yet unable to come out to the legions of young female fans, the song choice of “Love Me Tender” seems loaded and clouded.
Where I began to appreciate Richard Chamberlain’s singing potential was when he toured in the musicals The Sound of Music and Scrooge and made me cry both times.

4. Willie Loco Alexander, Kerouac/Mass. Ave.
One of the seminal singles of the 1970s Boston music scene, and thus a major part of my life. This is the studio version of Kerouac, which also appeared in a live version on the Live at the Rat album in 1976. For years, due to shoddy turntables and such, I had no idea what was being said in the line which I now clearly hear as “you’re on the top of my shelf.” Mass. Ave. is an anecdotal slice of Boston life as detailed and vital in its way as Lou Reed’s vision of New York in “Walk on the Wild Side.”

5. The Gravel Pit, The Devil/Paul Westerberg. Recorded at Wallingford’s Trod Nossel studios but mastered at the world-famous Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, where The Gravel Pit travelled to record their first full-length album, this 45 was released on the New Haven-based Caffeine Disk label in 1992. The B-side joke of naming a song after the man who named a song “Alex Chilton” is somewhat ruined by having a text clarification on the record sleeve stating “The song on the flip side is called “Paul Westerberg.” This is a band that appeared to plan their conquests carefully and, in any case, did things differently than a lot of other bands around at the time. This single marked a pivotal moment for them, a break from the prolific demo tapes and frequent live shows into fewer but heftier well-produced statements. I couldn’t get enough of these guys, and saw every local show they played for a period of several years (OK, I did miss one; still regret being sick the night they played the Little Theater on Lincoln Street.)

6. Willie Alexander, Perfect Stranger/Lonely Avenue.
One of my idol’s releases for the French label New Rose, which I found at the Mystery Train used record shop in Cambridge for $4.50 some years ago. Both were recroded at Boston’s Studio Outlook and are part of what could be considered Alexander’s dance-rock period, when the eclectic singer/composer/keyboardist seemed obsessed with synthetic rhythms. These aren’t really dance records, of course—Alexander’s jazz and rock instincts intersect over throbbing steady beats, adding warmth and unpredictability to stolid beats and familiar riffs. The Doc Pomus cover “Lonely Avenue” is in keeping with Willie Alexander reworkings of “Bebopalula” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’”—profound meditations on the insidious simplicities and symmetries of basic rock & roll.

7. Banana Pad Riot EP: Boris the Sprinkler, We’re the Banana Splits; The Vindictives, Two Ton Tessie; Young Fresh Fellows, Doin’ the Banana Split; Mr. T Experience, Don’t Go Away (Go-Go Girl).
Young Fresh Fellows and Mr. T Experience are arguably the best known and most accomplished of the four bands here. But Boris the Sprinkler, who once covered The Ramones’ End of the Century album in its entirety and was made for wacky cover concepts such as this Banana Splits tribute, is justly rewarded the lead-off track, “We’re the Banana Splits,” and sets a pace the other bands can’t quite keep. Mr. T. Experience gets the best-written song of the bunch, “Don’t Go Away (Go-Go Girl),” which jibes nicely with the band’s unique ‘60s perspective as proffered in “Love American Style” and “Danny Partridge Busted.”

8. Dash Rip Rock, Dosed/Living the Lie I Love
Woke up this morning feeling like toast.
Was then I realized that I had been dosed.
Every line of this understated, effects-laden mindbender is quotable. It’s a singular kind of psychotic rock—rootsy rather than psychedelic, depicting the after-effects of a hallucinogenic trip as equivalent to a bad alcoholic hangover.
The flip side, “Living the Lie I Love,” is a much more conventional rockabilly barnburner. Nothing wrong with that, but “Dosed” is something miraculous, a real non-chemical mind-expander for those who don’t see how capable and far-reaching traditionalist rock & rollers can be.

9. The Contours, Do You Love Me.
At the season-end party for a bunch of us summer camp counselors from the Boston area who’d helped bring urban kids out to the wilds of Maine, I badgered the host incessantly to play this record I’d found deep in his collection, but he was feeling much more current that night (this was the era of Michael Jackson and New Edition), I finally snuck it on, whereupon I threw up, passed out and chose not to return to camp the following summer, lest my camp moniker change from “Chief Archie” to, as threatened, “Chief Upchuck.”
This is a record that really should only be owned as a 45 vinyl single. I’ve always dug that the title is unpunctuated. The flip side of my copy, which is a bargain reissue on the Motown Yesteryear label, is “Shake, Sherrie” (aka “Shake Sherry”) which marries The Contours to the then-gestating subgenre of garage frat rock, was the follow-up single to the huge hit of “Do You Love Me,” and shares its Carrie-esque false ending surprise gimmick.

10. The Ben Yost Singers, Let’s All Sing EP
No less than “16 Old Time Favorites,” arranged as four medleys and all fit on two sides of a 45 rpm single (“unbreakable”) on the Royale label. The cover art is of a striped barbershop pole with a bowler hat and curly mustache, crooning and waving his skinny barbershop-pole arms. So it’s not really “Let’s All Sing”—it’s extravagant four-part barbershop harmonizing that you don’t want to get in the way off, especially when they flit so quickly from one melody to another. From “School Days” right into “East Side West Side” right into “The Bowery.” From a bunch of drinking songs to “How Dry I Am.” From “Little Annie Rooney” to “Frivolous Sal.” Music to get a crewcut by.

The band knows him as “glasses guy,” their pet nickname for him. But who’s petting who? They giggle about his interest in them, and don’t understand the relevance of the articles and recordings he’s continually loaning them for their “elucidation.” Yes, that’s how he talks.
The band is the all-female teen “skunk’ combo The Candy Christians. Peter Whiffle, associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the college on the hill, has been studying them for a paper he hopes to present at an international conference on what he calls “rock linguistics.” He picked them for analysis when he heard their cupid song “The Blind-Bow-Boy’ over the college radio waves. But sassy friends of the band say Professor Whiffle has also been dogging Tattooed Countess for no apparent academic elucidation, that he probably just has a thing for black hennaed hair, and that he’s kind of creepy.
We’ll clarify that The Candy Christians themselves have no kick against the prof. If they did, they’d surely spit at him during shows, as they done to members of Spiderboy who gave them an, ahem, improper introduction when the bands played back-to-back at the Bullfinch a few weeks back.
This story bears more research. Next Candy Christians gig is three weeks hence, which coincidentally will be college vacation week. You never know how these weird hook-ups will work out, anyhow. Maybe a few years from now “Blind-Bow-Boy” will be part of a bestselling $100 humanities textbook. All bands crave that sort of notoriety, no?

Very little happening tonight, despite all the love in the air. Except dance parties. Let’s not forget dance parties! Wait, we were struck by something sharp and pointy there for a second. Of course we should forget dance parties. We should banish them altogether to the sunken depths of the netherworld. It’s their fleet-footed fault that the only live show of note tonight is The Floyd Dells, Briary Bush and Moon Calf at the Bullfinch. Thank the god of Love for the Bullfinch…

“It’s very clear…,” sang Mar.
“Our love is here…”
“Tuesday!”
“Uh, it’s only Monday. Where is our love on Monday?”
“It’s over there.”

1. Stardust. I try to play this on the ukulele, and my voice always cracks when I get to the bit about “The nightingale tells his fairy tale, of Paradise where roses bloom.” But, truth be told, this song made me weep before I even heard the lyrics (and there were several hit records made of the tune before words were even penned for it, by Mitchell Parish). The solo piano recording of “Stardust” by its composer Hoagy Carmichael is one of the most beautiful records ever made.
2. This Guy’s in Love With You. I’m a child of the ‘60s, so this song (and Herb Alpert) have always been a part of my life. There was a little train-car diner in Northampton which had this on the jukebox for decades, just proving its timelessness. The barely sung, understated vocal here is a masterstroke of soft-pop production, contrasting with the trumpet blasts the way a later Bacharach/David cover, “Close to You,” would set Karen Carpenter against a booming angelic synth-choir. Due to the fact that you don’t need a strong voice to sing it, “This Guy” is one of the few Burt Bacharach tunes which Burt Bacharach himself can pull off as a concert vocalist; his recorded version is darn good, though of course no rendition can compete with Alpert’s.
3. Mr. Bojangles. A man who has nothing left mourns the dearest friend he ever had. I always start bawling when that line about the dog up-and-dying comes along. Doesn’t matter who’s singing—Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Stafford, the cast of Bob Fosse’s Dancin’…
4. Marie. From the finest concept album ever made, Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys. It’s a song of regret and vulnerability and and great, great love. Newman’s voice wobbles dramatically when he repeats “I loved you the first time I saw you/And I always will love you Marie,” showing how hard it is for his self-admittingly weak, lazy and hurtful narrator to say the words he needs to say.
5. When She Loved Me. Randy Newman again. I think there’s something in the chords he chooses that sets my tears flowing on so many of his songs, but his lyrics—which nail the fragility of affection—surely help. This is the song Sarah McLachlan sings to illustrate how a young girl in Toy Story 2 grows up and forsakes her former favorite toy, the cowgirl Jessie.

Like fingernails on a fretboard.
We know it’s cool to include string squeaks on lo-fi recordings—adds to the purity of the exercise. But, as the new solo CD from Moon-Eyed Horse ably demonstrates, if you do it on every track it’s not lazy. It’s a reason for some of us to avail ourselves of the suicide prevention hotline. M-EH isn’t the only offending excavator of the rustic-miner veins-of-gold-amid-a-lot-of-slate sound hereabouts, however: There’s Scarebird’s “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” (how haunted can you get?), the amusingly titled (if you like fart jokes) “Big Wind” by Mr. Mysterious & Company, not to mention Bo and Mizz Mad’s entire album “The Ghost on Saturday Night.” If we want to scratch a tune out of a dish plate and clothesline on our back porch, we’ll do it ourself.

Cover band Giant Rat of Sumatra is at Hamilton’s Wednesday, oblivious to everything that’s going on in the region formerly known as Sumatra… Jim Ugly and The White Elephant rage at the Bullfinch, together and separately, with new songs promised… And finally, a band we can all agree is too cool for D’ollaire’s: The Bullwhip Griffins, who remain hip despite a massive mainstream hit we won’t mention, with Clancy and the Grand Rascal opening. Here comes McBroom!!…

An anorexic hippie stayed the weekend. Not even sure whose friend she was. We made popcorn and she insisted on putting soy sauce on hers, said it’s the only condiment she ever used. (She had a better word than condiment, but I’ve forgotten it.) Gar said he only ever put fresh lard on his popcorn, and went to the farm down the street to get some. She’d fled the room before he got back. I just ate plain popcorn—couldn’t top that.

In vaguely chronological order from their release dates, here are ten worthwhile songs with the word “Love” right in their titles which emanated from the fertile, love-stunned New Haven music scene.

Pearlean Gray and the Passengers, The Love of My Man. Sweet early ‘60s soul/R&B balladry released on the New Haven-based Co-op label, available on that label’s comp Connecticut’s Greatest Hits.

I Love the Way You Love Me, Bram Rigg Set. A garage tune credited to Trod Nossel studio founder Doc Cavalier, enlivened with ratty keyboards, hummingbird drumming and the squeakiest guitar solo ever created. The Bram Rigg Set ruled the New Haven scene in the mid-‘60s, and featured among its membership one Beau Segal, son of Ben Segal, founder of the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford. Beau became an L.A. session drummer at the center of the ‘70s folk-rock scene, and later took over the reins of the Oakdale when his father retired.

The Stratford Survivors, Need Your Love. A yowly, power-chorded ode which is as much about when (“Tonight!”) as what (“Need your love!”). The Stratford Survivors were one of Connecticut seminal punk/new wave act in the mid-‘70s. They occasionally reunite—you can see them a couple months from now at the 2011 Meriden Daffodil Festival.

Epitome 5, The Thief of Lover’s Lane. A chunky rock tune from New Haven’s New Wave era. I was turned on to this rangy, if riff-ruddered, slab by Hank Hoffman of the Suburban Poser local-music archive.

The Huntingtons, The Only Love. A late-‘80s 45 featuring Derek & Tom of the fantabulous Furors alongside timbales/claves rhythmatist Maria Murphy. A self-reflective act of esteem building and coming-to-terms.

She’s in Love, The Ghost Shirts. Janglingly abrasive wordiness from an eclectic area band from the late ‘80s, who later relocated to NYC. From the diverse 1990 Incas label comp Getting Noticed, from which I could have also have picked for this project “Hey My Little Love” by Tsunami Poets or “Long Lost Lover” by Secret Smile.

Miracle Legion, Say I Had a Lovely Time. From Miracle Legion’s overlooked and misunderstood final album, which—for a band flummoxed by record company betrayals and an uncertain future—seems full of optimism and blissful meditation. Unless it’s all supposed to be ironic, of course. This one’s refrain pleads “Just as long as you say ‘I had a lovely time.’”

The Gravel Pit, Loved One. The patented Jed Parish wail has never been used more assuredly to pace and structure an entire song. This has got everything The Gravel Pit was great at: the sharp shifts of style and decibel level, the overpowering vocals and solos, and the tender open lyrical sentiments that descend into snide remarks about the world at large: Inthese droning crowds of nothing, ooh, you were actually something.”

Rohn Lawrence, Have You Ever Loved Somebody. Smooth jazz recording by the guitar virtuoso who owns Monday nights at Toad’s Place’s Lilly’s Pad. Chris Parks, who plays keyboards on the track, co-wrote the tune with Joe Cunningham.

Mocking Birds, All the Love. James Velvet’s written lots of love songs—there are three with that word in the title on his old band The Mocking Bird’s retrospective CD Last Call alone. This jauntily paced one’s about the apprehension of loving and losing.

Christine Ohlman & Rebel Montez, Love Make You Do Stupid Things. A gritty layered electric blues penned and passionately crooned by the Bee Hive Queen, who’s never let her tough demeanor mask her honesty about those who act like fools. Gorgeous, concise backing vocals and winding, fluid production on this thing, one of several stand-out tracks on Ohlman & Rebel Montez’s 2009 album The Deep End.

The First Hipsters didn’t even have a band until a benefactor (drummer Benny’s dad) bought them matching outfits for a Mardi Gras party. Then it was inevitable.
FH play their own style of party rock, mixing colorful cocktails of sound out of a literally random assortment of instruments. Benny totes a snare just in case, but prefers to bang on a stainless steel cocktail shaker which once belonged to his grandmother. Keyboardist ginny Gilbert has taught herself to play tuned water-filled martini glasses (at least she says it’s water). Likewise, B. Diamond plays guitar in his other bands (bar band extraordinaire Maverick Head-Kick and the blues duo The Troubles I’ve Seen, with Ginny– the two are also married), but for First Hipsters gigs has built and learned to play… a lamp.
“It’s this atrocious old tacky tasselled thing I found at a garage sale. It was already strung all around with these hard wires, and I found I could ping them and even tune them. So I took it as a challenge. I can get least six real chords out of it now.” And how many do you really need?
So far, the First Hipsters have only played living rooms– we caught them at our (full disclosure) girlfriend Millie’s house on her mom’s birthday. They have only four or five “real songs” (including “Hungry Mental Lion,” “See You in Hell, Alligator” and “American Mystery Man”), B. and Ginny admit, yet they played all night. It’s a relaxing ambient sound that catches your attention afresh when Benny starts beating his sticks on the furniture, on Ginny’s glasses, on dripping faucets, on whatever’s handy.
It’s the best party trick in town, and may eclipse their blues duo in popularity. Which should improve everyone’s mood in the process.

Maverick Head-Kick has its own gig this week, a full-bore blues nite at Hamilton’s also featuring Trucking Through the Tears and Little Bit West of Chicago… The Bullfinch has yet another mosh marathon, a real free-for-all this time with City of Scars, The Failure Business, Suicide in Toyland, Our Lunacy in America, Blackburn and Kiss the Blood Off My Commercial Realism… At D’ollaire’s, the same old party-band drivel with Making It!, Studs Daley, Hearing the Roar and—what’s this?—a bonafide HOST, as in Master of Ceremonies, for the otherwise by-the-fakebook show: Lox-and-Bagelman, an undergrad comedy act from the college on the hill. Nice of them to spread it around a little…

Mar says she decided to join or house when she looked out the little window of her little suite in little dorm and saw that one of a family Ogg pigeons that had built a nest on a tiny ledge outside the window had died. The other pigeons, pinched for space, had left the body there and built a nest on top of it. “bad vibes,” mar said. “and bad architectural planning.” Gael said he would nominate it as the worst wildlife safari attraction ever.

The Friday before Valentine’s Day should be given over to the loveless, and made into a Black Friday of Broken Hearts.
I am not among the afflicted—indeed, I expect I might be the most happily married man you’ve ever met. But just as I prefer novels about sin to ones about virtue, I have a thing for break-up songs. And there needs be a designated day on which to share them, not just those awkward times when a friend is getting over a busted relationship

Here are five that rock rather than whimper.

The Continental Co-Ets, “I Don’t Love You No More.” The most haunting track on the extraordinary anthology Girls in the Garage Volume 2, a red-vinyl treasure on Romulan Records released in 1987 and gathering girl garage groups from the mid-‘60s. Many are Beatlesque, but this one has a nifty surf beat.

The Real Kids, “Who Needs You?” A delirious cathartic riff blows all of the love right out of the room on the highlight from Live at the Rat (which I’ve already mentioned in an earlier post is the Album That Changed My Life)

Harry Nilsson, “You’re Breaking My Heart.” Might not hold up to repeated listenings, but just about everyone laughs the first time they hear it, and the tune actually sustains itself beyond that funny “Fuck you” lyric.

Leslie Gore, “I Won’t Love You Anymore (Sorry)” A lot of orchestral sass on this single. I like the way the “Sorry” part actually overlaps the “I won’t love you” part. Zippy strings and an exceptionally busy drummer.

Groucho Marx, “Hello, I Must Be Going.” Groucho sings it in the beginning of Animal Crackers, where it’s augmented by chorus shouts and vocal contributions by Zeppo, then segues directly into “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” Over 40 years later, it’s the opening number for the live “An Evening With Groucho” concerts.