Creepy Places IV: Snap, Cackle, Pop!

A case of mistaken identity is at the root of this post, though I would have been freaked out by this tune regardless of the singer. It's a rough one for many people to listen to, so it's appropriate as the climax to my pre-Halloween creepy-song series.

As one of my many Mercury singles, this record caused me some unsurprising confusion when it first showed up. What happened was that I played the song, found it scary, and soon thereafter took it to my mom for an ID.

I took the single to her and asked her the artist's name. She said it was by Brook Benton. Indeed, the 45 I held in my hand was by that master of real soul. But between playing the scary song and taking it to Mom, I set down the 45 I wanted to identify and picked up the Benton disc. The target song, titled "Laughing Over My Grave," was by a different artist altogether. That mistake on my part caused me a lot of difficulty when I got around to searching for the 45 years later.

The Great Vinyl Meltdown robbed me of both the Brook Benton single (the title of which I cannot produce from the depths of my memory) and "Laughing Over My Grave." I started my search by looking at a Brook Benton singles discography. I saw no "Laughing" there. A thorough search of the title proved more fruitful, and soon I knew that "Laughing Over My Grave" was the B side of "Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer" by Ray Stevens (Mercury 72307).

How could I let "Laughing" bother me so much when the A side was a light novelty number? That happened because "Laughing" got to four-year-old caithiseach first, and I never, ever flipped the 45. I barely listened to the whole scary song. It was a really bad one for me.

You know how old movies, usually black-and-white horror, sometimes go quiet except for one female voice, singing mournful notes meant to heighten the viewer's tension? Well, the woman laughing in this song was as creepy as those others, except she was laughing, of course, in a cold, cynical way. My attention was riveted on the laugh, so I barely knew what ol' Ray was saying. And about three seconds into the laughing, I was usually gone, a little cloud of dust hanging in the air where I had been standing.

Once I figured out that Ray Stevens had concocted this masterpiece of terror, the task of finding the darn 45 began. And it is still going on. A couple of times, I have seen it listed online, only to learn that someone beat me to it. Therefore, I still have never heard the A side. I took my recording of "Laughing" off a blog about two years ago. I didn't note which blog it was, so if you're a music blogger, and you put up a bunch of Halloween-appropriate songs, I may owe you credit, and I'm sorry I messed up.

Ray Stevens, for the underinitiated, is a master of the non-parody novelty tune, as well as some amusing songs that aren’t quite novelties, and the occasional serious effort. Born Harold Ray Ragsdale in Georgia in 1939, he has scored ten Top 40 hits, including two #1s, the serious, Grammy-winning “Everything Is Beautiful” (1970) and the fad-exploiting social commentary “The Streak” (1974). An extremely talented musician, he recorded with Elvis, Patti Page and Brook Benton, and later he produced Dolly Parton and B.J. Thomas. He also happened to be around the studio when Jeff Barry was recording hand claps for “Sugar, Sugar,” so you can pick out the distinctive smack of Ray’s palms if you have a discerning ear.

Since I do have a copy of “Laughing Over My Grave,” I can include it here. I have seen just one Ray Stevens anthology that includes it, and it seems to be out of print. That disappoints me, though as the election approaches, I can think of plenty of things that scare me, so I don't need this song on CD right now.

When you are finished with Halloween, it will be time for my first post-Halloween post. No longer even marginally scary, the song will be ultra-pleasant, I assure you. See you Saturday!

Ray Stevens, Laughing Over My Grave

Blue Rubies?

I don’t know how it happened that I acquired so many Mercury singles when I was little. I know my parents bought “Mama from the Train” by Patti Page and “The Stroll” by the Diamonds. I don’t think they went out and bought the handful of non-charting Mercury singles that wound up in my collection. Maybe they went to the Mercury Records Outlet Store, or maybe our milkman from Bowman Dairy, the last dairy in our area to deliver milk in glass bottles, delivered 45s as a sideline, and he specialized in Mercury castoffs.

However it happened, three-year-old caithiseach tended to find the Mercury imprimatur to be a sign that good music sat in the groove of the 45. At some point, most likely, a local distributor ran out of warehouse space and dropped a bunch of Mercury singles at the Big Top where Uncle Tom shopped for me. The difference between the Mercury cutouts and many of the others was that even the Mercury flops sounded good to me.

Considering that today’s artist managed a Hot 100 hit, though not with this single, it surprises me how little information I could find about Jimmy Edwards. Of course, as was the case with another Mercury artist, Michael Allen, these artists with two first names tend to draw lots of search-engine hits, and maybe I narrowed down my searches too much. My chart book helped me out a bit, so I’ll tell you what I know.

Jimmy Edwards (born 1933) was a singer/songwriter with rockabilly leanings. Born Jim Bullington, he recorded his first hit-to-be, “Love Bug Crawl,” in 1957. If you own the version on Wednesday Records, hang on to it, as it seems to be worth about $400. He re-recorded “Love Bug Crawl” (Mercury 71209) after he signed with Mercury, and that version went to #78 in its three weeks on the Billboard Top 100, moving 96-78-100 (tie) beginning 1/20/1958. That’s not the record that came to me from Uncle Tom.

My single was “Golden Ruby Blue” (Mercury 71272), which, according to the amazing database compiled by Terry Gordon, is the B side of “My Honey.” Three-year-old caithiseach cared little for the politics of A sides, especially when neither side was played on the radio, so I never knew that I had latched onto the wrong side of this one.

Both sides of the 45 are uptempo numbers, with “My Honey” following the classic rockabilly pattern, guitar solo included. “Golden Ruby Blue” substitutes a sax solo for the guitar, but that wasn’t my compelling reason for choosing that side to play: the title phrase, repeated frequently in the opening chorus, hooked me.

Mercury 45 labels are very stingy when it comes to production information, and surprisingly forthcoming in other areas. I can tell you that the single was released on March 3, 1958, and that the Anita Kerr Singers accompanied Mr. Bullington, which might strike one as odd for a rockabilly 45. However, Anita Kerr and her singers backed many singers who recorded in Nashville, and the Nashville Sound owes something to them, if not as much as to Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins. Anita Kerr herself produced the LP End of the World for Skeeter Davis, which made Ms. Kerr one of the first women to produce anything recorded in Nashville.

Both sides of the 45 were written by Jimmy Minor and Robert Cloud. Jimmy Minor seems to be the first Country artist signed to United Artists, according to his son, Todd. One of his known recordings, “Reveille,” is still listed as one of the pair’s BMI compositions, but “Golden Ruby Blue” and “My Honey” are no longer part of BMI’s records. Jimmy Minor had enough going for him to earn studio time with the best Nashville Sound musicians, so I hope to come across some of his work someday.

When you listen to the 45, you will hear some surface noise. I was surprised to hear how rough “My Honey” is, considering that I played “Golden Ruby Blue” almost exclusively. The single lived without benefit of a sleeve in my box of records for a really long time, and that probably has a lot to do with the number of clicks and pops on the rarely played side.

That’s pretty much all I have found so far on these artists, so I’ll leave it here for now. Next week, I’ll look at an RCA artist I mentioned in connection with Jeff Barry back in April. They are linked in my mind because they both released obscure singles on RCA. I loved next week’s songs almost as much as Jeff’s tunes, and his story merits a full week of posts. See you Wednesday!

Jimmy Edwards, Golden Ruby Blue

Jimmy Edwards, My Honey

He Could have Picked a More Distinctive Name

Michael Allen. If you know someone named Michael Allen, raise your hand.

I thought so.

If one is trying to do research on a singer named Michael Allen, the common nature of the name will make life difficult. For starters, there are singers named Michael Allen Something, as in first name Michael, middle name Allen. And there are several plain old Michael Allens, not that they (or I) consider them plain or old.

But, by golly, when I search for Michael Allen and add “A Boy with a Dream” (Mercury 72036) to the mix, I get results I can count on.

Four of them.

What I know for sure is that the program director at 910 AM KDEO in San Diego thought enough of “A Boy with a Dream” to include it in the “9-10 Wax to Watch” twice: at #3 on October 12, 1962, and at #1 on October 19. That doesn’t mean KDEO played the song; this was the equivalent of “Bubbling Under” the KDEO Top 40. It never bubbled over.

But that means the Michael Allen 45 I got from Uncle Tom was a whole lot more successful than a number of the 45s he gave me.

The Airheads Radio Survey Archive (ARSA) lists under the name Michael Allen twelve singles, running from 1962 to 1976. If ARSA did their research well, this same Michael Allen kept plugging away for a considerable amount of time. He never reached the Billboard or Cash Box charts.

There is an album called Michael Allen Sings, and some of the ARSA titles are on the album, whose track listing appears, with sound clips, on the All Music Guide. The voice sounds similar enough at times that I could believe it’s the same Michael Allen, but I won’t stake anything at all on it.

The single came into my collection just after Mercury deleted it, and by adding yet another Mercury 45 to my collection, Uncle Tom further fostered a major confusion in three-year-old caithiseach, who had to tell the singles apart by visual memory. (I’ll talk about the big confusion in October.)

I found both sides of the 45 likeable enough, so it was a minor two-sided caithiseach hit, “He Don’t Need You Like I Do” being the flip. Frankly, I had so many good 45s that, by the time I got through the big hits each day, I’d had enough music and opted to do something else, like climb the elm trees in the front yard. Michael Allen simply got crowded out of airtime. Thus, his record avoided being Ground to Dust, and somehow it survived the Great Meltdown as well.

Michael Allen seems to have earned a legitimate shot from Mercury. Whereas the label sometimes picked up recordings that showed regional promise on smaller labels, Allen’s record was produced by a rising star in the Mercury ranks, Shelby Singleton. Singleton’s trademark was to add a twang to a pop recording, as he did with Brook Benton’s take on “The Boll Weevil Song.” Singleton went on to buy Sun Records from Sam Phillips.

The Merry Melody Singers, who backed countless Mercury artists from Brook Benton to Ray Stevens to Patti Page, were called in to work on this recording, so again, it seems that Mercury held high hopes for Michael Allen.

Ramsey Kearney wrote “A Boy with a Dream.” He registered 111 compositions with ASCAP, but he seems to have recorded most of them himself. There is one twist to his music career that I absolutely have to mention.

Ramsey Kearney worked for, and perhaps owned, a business called Nashco Records. What Nashco did was put ads in the back of magazines, offering people the opportunity to send in their poetry to see if Nashco could find a melody to go with the lyrics. Typically, the music publisher in question would praise the lyrics, get the poet to cough up cash to have the song recorded, and that was that.

A prankster named John Trubee sent some really awful lyrics to Nashco in the mid-1970s. The label took $79.95 from Trubee to produce one single-sided 45, with the music written by Will Gentry. Ramsey Kearney sang the song on the 45 sent to Trubee. Eventually, Trubee made more copies of the song, and it has become a cult classic: “Peace & Love (Blind Man’s Penis).” Or maybe it’s the other way around. You must listen to "A Boy with a Dream," the Kearney composition, and “Peace & Love,” the Kearney recording. I don’t think it’s possible to hit both ends of the musical spectrum in one career, but here it is.

You will be amazed by John Trubee’s song, and you should do what I did and buy it at iTunes. Please. He’s a serious musician, and he deserves your support. You should also rent this 2003 film, which tells Trubee’s tale: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story.

After that experience, the source of “He Don’t Need You Like I Do” is somewhat anticlimactic. It was written by Bob Perper, composer of 99 BMI titles, none of which stand out to me.

And so, the dead-end story of Michael Allen and his near-miss 45 ends here. If you know anything about Michael Allen, the one who sang “A Boy with a Dream” and the oh-so-ungrammatical “He Don’t Need You Like I Do,” let me in on the secret. I’ll update this post and praise you effusively therein.

This post owes a lot to http://www.songpoemmusic.com/. If you ever wondered who answers those ads for “Song Lyrics Needed,” this site has your answer, in abundance. Spend an afternoon there.

I said in January that Elvis (Presley) would not figure in this blog. That’s true, but Saturday, you’ll think he does. See you then!

Michael Allen, A Boy with a Dream

Michael Allen, He Don’t Need You Like I Do

Ramsey Kearney, Blind Man’s Penis (Peace & Love)

A Cornucopia of Gee-Lights

A thread that meanders through my blog posts is the frequent discovery that the artists who recorded my 45s, seemingly complete unknowns, turn out to have made something of themselves after all. They just didn’t do so on the cuts Uncle Tom found in the closeout bin.

This past Wednesday, the Roomates (sic) showed how broad their legacy was, well beyond the 45 I have owned since 1963. I have known for several years that today’s trio, the Pixies Three, actually nicked the Top 40. It was not their version of “Gee” that got them into Joel Whitburn’s Top 40 book, though.

Of all the artists who have recorded “Gee,” only the first artists, the Crows, took it into the Top 40 (#2 R&B, #14 pop, in 1954). Perhaps that initial success caused so many other artists to take a shot with it. Then, of course, several poor showings seem to have consigned the tune to obscurity.

The road the Pixies Three took to “Gee” is not laden with twists and turns; it shows a textbook case of how things can go well for a musical act . . . sort of. The Pixies: lead singer Midge Bollinger, with Debby Swisher and Kaye McCool, were discovered at a Philadelphia talent night while they were still in high school in Hanover, Pennsylvania. John Madara and Dave White of Mercury Records (there’s my favorite label again) did the signing honors, and after renaming them the Pixies Three, started rehearsing them with a young piano player named Leon Huff.

The Pixies Three, then, are the intersection of the Girl Group Sound and the Sound of Philadelphia. Huff joined forces with Kenny Gamble to write and produce the O’Jays’ recordings, as well as “TSOP” and numerous other cuts on Philadelphia International Records. They wrote “Back Stabbers,” “Love Train” and “For the Love of Money,” for example.

After the month of practice, the girls recorded “Birthday Party” (Mercury 72130), and it spent one week at the bottom of the Top 40. Their next single, which entered the Hot 100 on December 14, 1963, became problematic for DJs, who split airplay between the two sides of the 45. “442 Glenwood Avenue” reached #56, and “Cold Cold Winter” peaked at #79. Even so, the single as a whole sold more copies than “Birthday Party.”

After that single, Midge Bollinger left the group, and Bonnie Long took her place. By early 1964, the girls were hot enough to be appearing with the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five. They recorded a full album, Party with the Pixies Three. Produced by Madara & White, the album featured orchestration by Leroy Lovett. Lovett (born 1919) had produced some sides for Billie Holiday, among others. The LP included some Madara/White compositions, but the only single released from it was “Gee.”

The album displayed the guitar work of Trade Martin, who had a Top 40 single of his own, “That Stranger Used to Be My Girl,” in 1962. Martin worked on many Phil Spector and Jeff Barry sessions. Vincent Bell played some guitar parts as well; his 1970 “Airport Love Theme” instrumental flew to #31. The piano you will hear on the Pixies Three sides comes from the aforementioned Leon Huff.

The band is tight, and the truth is that the 1964 Long/Swisher/McCool lineup is as solid as any of the other Girl Groups. This is not a “why were the Ronettes more popular than the Pixies Three?” statement. The girls simply were a whole lot more pleasing to the ear than, say, Cathy Jean. They deserved success.

I said on Wednesday that the Roomates (sic) version of “Gee” got more caithiseach airplay. I did enjoy the girls’ version, but after the guys’ more sedate version set the standard for the song, I found the girls’ version a bit frantic when it showed up a year later.

The girls’ intro also has a jazzy chord structure that is absent from the guys’ version. caithiseach didn’t know jazz from zzaj in 1964, so that particular acquired taste would have whizzed right past my ears then. It’s sounding pretty good these days.

The Pixies Three did get “Gee” (Mercury 72250) onto the charts. It entered the Hot 100 on April 18, 1964 and peaked at #87 on Billboard. Cashbox gave it more credit; “Gee” peaked at #79 there. Coming right at the time of the British Invasion, it’s fair to say that the groups with which the girls appeared around that time pretty well shut them out of the charts.

A significant aspect of this 45 in caithiseach’s world was that, since I already had a “Gee” I liked, I was wont to play the flip of this single, “After the Party,” as much as “Gee.” The song fit snugly into the party theme of the LP from which it came, and its sedate afterglow sound suited the voices of the vocal trio very well. A Madara/White composition, it was not filler designed to make the producers another buck.

The songs show surprising vocal maturity from three girls who were not put together by the likes of Simon Cowell or Sean Combs. They just happened to go to high school together in Hanover, Pennsylvania. I didn’t mention their ages before; at the time of “Gee,” these three ranged from 15 to 17 years old.

“After the Party” inadvertently helped my research in an unexpected way. At the end of the song, three young men say goodnight to Bonnie, Debby and Kaye, which confirms that Midge was not around for this recording. The girls reply, “Good night, John-Boy,” or something like that.

The girls recorded a few more singles, then they graduated and split up. Can you imagine going to school in 1965 with three girls who had played the same stage as the Stones?

And that should end the story of the Pixies Three. But their classmates remembered them, and they were asked to reunite for their 25th class reunion in 1991. Bonnie, Debby and Kaye obliged, and they started performing again. In 1997, Midge showed up, and eventually she took a vacant spot in 2000 when Debby left the group. They will still perform for you! Check out more of their history, their merchandise and their booking info at the Pixies Three website, which supplied much of my historical information.

That does end my version of the story of the Pixies Three and “Gee.” But I said there were a bunch of “Gees” out there. I may as well let you hear them, eh?

In addition to the two Pixies Three sides, you get to hear the #2 R&B hit by the Crows, “Gee” (Rama 5). I’ll also include “Gee” by June Hutton with the Pied Pipers, which did not chart. But wait, there’s more: if you click now, you can also hear “Gee” by Jan & Dean (Dore 576), a Herb Alpert production and a #81 smash in late 1960.

All this, and if you stop by this evening, a free dash of snow on May 2. No joke.

On Wednesday and Saturday I’ll feature the two sides of another participant in the early 1960s sci-fi music craze. I’m thinking you haven’t heard that 45. See you then!

Pixies Three, Gee

Pixies Three, After the Party

Crows, Gee

June Hutton, Gee

Jan & Dean, Gee