Casey's Record Review; "Diamond Girl", Seals & Crofts (1973)

Seals & Crofts has always gotten a bad rap. Sure they were, briefly, the kings of seventies soft rock with a string of AM radio hits that even your mom thought was cool. But they were were great songwriters, superb musicians and put out some eclectic weird interestingly produced albums.

1973's Diamond Girl album is a perfect example.

My brother owned this 8-Track when I was a kid and, like all 8-tracks, it played on an endless loop. Sure it had a couple big hits, the title track and "We May Never Pass This Way, Again" but also weird mystical hippie cuts ("Intone My Servant" and "Nine Houses"), folkie love tunes, ("Jessica", "Rubie Jean & Billie Lee") and even a Marty Robbinseque cowboy tune ("Dust On My Saddle").

Both musicians really shine instrumentally. Dash Crofts was a gifted mandolinist and he gets a lot of room to stretch out. The real reveal, however, is Jim Seals sax work. I was aware that back in the sixties he played tenor with The Champs but I never knew how good he was. The final cur on the album is an instrumental jazz-rock (ie."Fusion") cut called, "Wisdom" and Seals really cooks. It's worth checking out.

Casey Redmond

02-11-2023

Logan, Ohio

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Casey's Movie Review; "The Dundee Project" (2017)

In 2017, Mark Borchadt, of American Movie fame***, released a forty minute documentary called, The Dundee Project. For many years, Borchadt had been attending and filming a UFO convention in the small town of Dundee, Wisconsin.  To call it a "convention" is an overstatement. It's basicslly a bunch of drunken UFO believers drinking beer in a parking lot waiting for aliens to fly by. To call The Dundee Project a "documentary" is an also overstatement. It's more like a home movie but that's what makes it fun.

Nothing much happens, to be honest, but it's a quirky character study of a moment captured in time. The hero of the film is a local crank named  UFO Bob. The elderly goodnatured UFO believer spends most of the movie pontificating on various pseudo scientific theories, laughing and downing bottles of Samuel Adams beer. 

The Dundee Project is not a great movie, to be honest, I'm not even sure you can call it a movie. But if you have thirty minutes or so to spare, take some time to hangout and drink some beer with the denziens of Dundee, Wisconsin. They're worth it.  Checkout the trailer below.

***On a sad note, I recently read that Mike Schank of American Movie passed away late last year. Checkout the obituarry in Rolling Stone Magazine HERE

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Six Cool Songs About Winter

 Winter has arrived. Rather rudely, I might add. Like a drunken dinner guest, it showed up late and knocked over the dessert cart. What can you do but hunker down, have a few drinks and crank up some tunes. Here are a few of my favorite songs about winter. There aren't many but these are pretty good.

CALIFORNIA DREAMING: Possibly the Mamas & Papas greatest tune. "I'd be safe and warm, if I was in L.A" sums up many people's thoughts on the subject. Warm? Yes. Safe? Maybe, not.

HAZY SHADE OF WINTER: One of Simon & Garfunkel's rockiest tunes. I always wonder who came up with the guitar lick? Paul Simon, maybe? Simon is actually a pretty good acoustic guitar player, so it could have been him. The Bangles had a hit cover version in the eighties. Susannah Hoffs has such a cool voice. Both bands do it better live, see YouTube for proof. 

VALLEY WINTER SONG: Fountains Of Wayne was such an underrated band. Best known for their 2003 hit, Stacy's Mom, they released five albums of great guitar pop. Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger wrote jangly pop songs with Beatlesque harmonies and insightful understated lyrics. Think The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society. Valley Winter Song is no exception. Sadly, Adam Schlesinger died in 2020 at the age of 52 from Covid.

TEN DEGREES AND GETTING COLDER: A folkie Gordon Lightfoot song about a traveling musician freezing his butt off on the side of the highway, trying to catch a ride and pining for a woman. There are a couple of bluegrass cover versions of this song, one by J.D Crowe & The New South and the other by Tony Rice. Both are better than the original. Tony Rice released an album of Gordon Lightfoot covers that is worth checking out

IN THE BLEAK MID-WINTER. This is song is based on a poem that was written back in the 1800s. The poem was popular with soldiers during World War I. If you are a fan of the Netflix series Peaky Blinders, which takes place in the years following World War I, you may have noticed they utter the phrase, The bleak mid-winter, whenever somebody dies. There are many versions of this melancholy winter dirge. Two of my favorites are by James Taylor and Shawn Colvin. 

BABY, IT'S COLD OUTSIDE. For some reason this is now considered a Christmas song, although it never mentions the holiday. (Winter Wonderland, Let It Snow & Jingle Bells have suffered the same fate.) It has also become controversial in some circles, but we won't get into that. There are dozens of versions, but Dean Martin's is still the best. Both the original and the one he recorded with Martina McBride. (Of course, he was dead for the later recording, but we won't get into that one either.) I imagine this would be a very difficult duet to sing. Goes down even better with alcohol. But don't they all.

Casey Redmond

January 27, 2022

Casey's Record Review; The Story Of Frankenstein, Dracula And The Wolfman (Sellthrough Entertainment, 1999)

 I am a sucker for Halloween. All of it. The crummy plastic pumpkins, the drugstore Halloween costumes, the low grade B horror movies, the carving o the 'lanterns and cheesy horror spoken word recordings.

As a child, we had a scratched up copy of Alfred Hitchcock's "Ghost Stories For Young People". We used to listen to this on long humid air conditionless (hey, it was the seventies!) summer nights. Sitting in a dark room, trying to scare each other. I also was a big fan of Disney's "The Haunted House", an album from the early seventies that actually went gold. 

Even though I have been a "grown up" now for going on forty years, I still love Halloween..When the days grow short and the leaves begin to fall, I love nothing more than sitting in the dark on my front porch and listening to these old recordings. Which brings us to, "The Story Of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman".

Most of the spoken word Halloween records I have collected over the years are from from the sixties and seventies but I found this recording on CD back in the nineties. There is no copyright date on the package and what little information I can find says that it was released in 1999 or 2006. I remember listening to this with my kids when they were grade school age which would make the date closer to 1999.  

The album was released by an entity called, Sellthrough Entertainment out of Tampa, Florida. The company formed in 1995 and, as far as I can tell, this is the only audio recording they ever released. In addition, there is no information on the voice actors or producers. It's a mystery. 

What exactly was Sellthrough Entertaiment? A multi-national conglomerate? A shell company for a shadowy South American arms dealer? A fifteen year old kid making scary spoken word recordings in his bedroom? I like to imagine, all of the above.

This was defintiely a low budget enterprise. From the pakaging to the sound effects to the actors, you can tell this was done with a budget in mind. That being said, it is a fun listen. As the title indicates, the CD containes the tales of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman. Frankenstein is definitely the strongest and the Wolfman the weakest but all of them are enjoyable listen and probably not scary to anyone over seven years of age.

It's worth picking up a used copy on Amazon or Discogs or you can listen to it for free HERE

Happy Halloween

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Casey's Record Review: Super Stars, Super Hits (1968)

 

I have a soft spot for compilation albums from the sixties and seventies. In my youth, I was a big consumer of K-Tel "hits" compilations.  Like K-Tel, Columbia Records put out a large amount of compilation albums featuring their own artisits but, unlike K-Tel, usually offered only a handful of hits filling out the rest record with B sides, failed singles and album cuts. 

"Super Stars, Super Hits, No.2" continues the formula with middling success. Yes, they include some bona fide hits; "Brown Eyed Girl" (Van Morrison), "The Letter"(Box Tops), "How Can I Be Sure" (Young Rascals) and "Do You Believe In Magic" (Lovin' Spoonfu), among others. But it's the more obscure songs that make it interesting.

Some of the highlights/lowlights include;

Out Of The Blue (Tommy James & The Shondells) This song was released as a single within' a year or so of a lot of his big hits but it failed to make the charts in the US. It did hit the lower reaches of the top 40 in Canada. The song was written by Bo Gentry and Richard Cordell who co-wrote other Tommy James tunes like "Mirage", "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Mony, Mony". One of the reasons for it's lack of succsess could be that it sounds like Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons. Perhaps the kids didn't realize it was Tommy James. Maybe it is an homage to The Four Seasons. Who knows. A rather weird entry in his catalog. 

You Better Sit Down Kids (The Union Gap) A terrible but fascinating song by Gary Puckett and the gang. The song was written by Sonny Bono and was a top ten hit for his then wife Cher. A pretty bad song even when Cher does it, this version is even worse with the slowed down tempo and way over the top sixties "kitchen sink" pop production (schmaltzy strings, Vegas horns, corny background vocals etc..) "You Better Sit Down Kids" is a divorce song. It's the words of a Father saying goodbye to his children with fluctuating time signatures and confusing stops and starts. This is a poigniant subject and the Union Gap pull at the heartstrings for all they're worth. It was probably pretty controversial in it's time but the subject matter was covered more creatively by other artists

We Belong Together (Peaches & Herb) An interesting cover of the old Ritchie Valens' classic. Stays pretty loyal to the original but with a nice sixties soul twist. 

Pennies (The Cowsills) A great slice of sixties pop from the Cowsills. This is from their self-titled debut, the same album that spawned the hit single "The Rain, The Park And Other Things". The Penny Lane-esque trumpet makes the song. I have seen the 'Sills three times over the past couple of years. How many people outside of Rhode Island can say that!

My copy of this record is really scratched and beat up.. It was obviously played many, many times and not well taken care of. One of the things I enjoy about collecting used records is that it is actually an artifact from another age. I don't believe this album was ever reissued which means my copy is almost sixty years old. By the unhip song selection and the condition of the disc, I imagine it was owned by someone between, say, twelve and sixteen. Maybe it was a birthday or Chrismas gift. They probably played it on a cheap plastic record player in their room. Maybe they played Twister or Operation while listening to it. Come to think of it, it seems like the type of record one of the Brady Kids would have owned back then. Maybe Greg had a copy in his pre-Johnny Bravo days. Alice and the kids probably grooved to it all night long or at least until Mike came home for dinner.

Greg Brady; Pre-Johnny Bravo

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Lori Partridge: Unsung Prog Rock Hero

 

Lori Partridge unsung prog rock hero? Absoulutely. When we think of amazing keyboard players from that era, who comes to mind? Keith Emerson (ELP), Rick Wakeman (Yes) Daryl Dragon (Captain & Tennille) but, for some reason, Lori is largely forgotten.  

Sure, she never got to play twenty minute classical music solos at mach-speed (Keith Emerson) or got to wear a super groovy cape (Rick Wakeman) or make her keyboard sound like love mad muskrats (Daryl Dragon) but she had chops. Check out her harpsichord break on "I think I Love You". Do you need more evidence than that?

Emerson, Wakeman & Dragon

Unfortunatley, Lori was over-shadowed by her ego-maniacal brother, Keith, and her overbearing Mother.  After the Partridge's broke up, I thought she might join King Crimson or start her own prog-rock band (The Lori Partridge Experience, perhaps) but, alas, it was not to be.

Instead she joined a law firm in L.A and her hair turned yellow. A sad ending to a once promising career.

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Rust Never Sleeps or Neil’s Upsetting Haircut

It was forty-two years ago this week that Neil Young released Rust Never Sleeps. I saw the movie at a Midnight showing in the early 1980s with some high school friends. We were jacked up on Genesse Cream Ale.

The movie was great but I remember being disappointed that Neil had cut off his long hair. At the time, I wanted long hair in the worst way. But, being a Catholic school kid, we couldn’t have long hair because Jesus was against it.

I remember finding this confusing because there were pictures of Jesus all over school and he looked like a Deadhead. He also had blonde hair and blue eyes but was supposedly born in the Middle East. Needless to say, this was a confusing time for me.

Despite Neil’s haircut, it’s a good movie. Check it out.

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