There's Room for Everyone

Note: This is my second post of the day. The primary post follows this one.

The first music blog I ever read regularly was Echoes in the Wind, to which I was introduced by its creator, whiteray, after we met at a book club gathering. In my online searches for particular songs, I had previously bumped into music blogs, but they were all two-sentence posts with a song link attached.

Whiteray’s blog was different. He shared his personal feelings about songs and memories of when he heard them and how he acquired his recordings. caithiseach dug his style and became a daily reader. Eventually, inspiration struck me, and caithiseach became a music blogger as well.

The premise of my blog, as many of you know, is to share roughly 110 singles I have owned since the early 1960s in 104 posts, each Wednesday and Saturday in 2008. When I was doing what would pass for a feasibility study of the concept, I laid out a table and slotted the songs on my 45s into it. Once I got the song order to where I liked it (a matter of a couple of hours; I don’t know how it can take an artist two months to sequence twelve songs on an album. Good golly.), I decided to write a couple of trial posts, to see if my voice suited the medium.

After I wrote those trial posts, I realized that what I was writing was free of time constraints, a music history that could have been told at any point in the past 35 years. It is also, in a sense, a childhood memoir. It deals with loss, both of perfectly good 45s and of people who gave me that music. Since it is a 104-chapter life story, I want to make it robust and compelling.

To make it robust, I scour the internet for data on the artists, producers, songwriters and label owners who made up the pipeline that got the vinyl to my box of 45s. To make it compelling, all I can do is pray that my internal editor kicks in before I get too wordy, maudlin or flat-out boring.

Since I can write these posts in advance, I do write them in advance. First of all, the stories have been in my head for so long that they pour out in a matter of minutes. Second, it behooves me to write in advance, because each post takes close to three hours to write, by the time I finish my research.

caithiseach, like whiteray, is usually a deadline-driven writer. How I have been able to write this blog ahead of deadline is a question worth pondering. I’ve done it before; I wrote a 400-page novel from March to July of 2007 with no deadline. But the best college paper I ever wrote got written from 2am to 4am on its due date. It’s possible that some texts just want to come out so much that they allow themselves to be typed long before they’re due.

In contrast to the Great Meltdown posts, the posts for my Spanish version of the blog, La Gran Fusión, get written under deadline pressure. And thus it was that last Wednesday, January 30, I was so dizzy from sinus pressure on my inner ear that I didn’t write the Spanish version on time. It took me so long to feel well that I just combined the Wednesday and Saturday Spanish posts. As with most blogs, there was no economic downside to taking a day off, so I did what I needed to do.

Right now, I am glad I’ve written my posts through April 2, because I am working on a 24-HOUR scholarly presentation on the history of American music-chart hits for my school. I am also coordinating the National Spanish Contest interviews for the state of Minnesota. And my boss asked me this week to come up with a plan for a one-week summer Spanish camp for THIS summer.

I would surely be skipping posts now were it not for the ones I already have in the can.

I don’t think my approach is less valid for having prepared for lean time-times. Every word I write is written in the moment, just not this moment. When I wrote a lot of posts over Christmas break, it felt like February, then March, as I wrote. Mel Torme wrote “The Christmas Song” in July. I have no qualms about my pragmatism regarding this blog-to-memoir I am writing.

But whiteray takes a much more daring and exciting approach to music blogging: he lets his music collection tell him what to write the morning of a post. He has to improvise, associate songs and memories, and make it all work in a matter of minutes.

When you consider that his prose comes out at least as clean as mine, and more evocative on a daily basis, you know you’re witnessing superb writing when you read his blog. If he doesn’t need three hours to research his posts, it’s because he has so much more music history stored in his brain than I have available to me on Wikipedia. It’s no wonder that he won an Any Major Dude award this year.

With this on-the-edge approach to blogging, which in whiteray’s case produces professional-quality work, unexpected glitches can mess up a blog’s rhythm. It’s to his credit that his readers would be so hungry for his posts, and he so much a part of their reading routine, that they would gripe when illness or just plain busy-ness keep him from posting.

One thing you can’t do, though, is look to me as an example of consistency against which any other blogger should be compared. As I said, I already blew one Spanish blog deadline because of overstuffed sinuses. That’s the blog I write on the edge. If I ever do a more random blog of any type, I assure you that I will turn up missing from time to time. It’s the nature of the game, and within that game’s parameters, I know of no one as consistent as whiteray, both for quantity and quality.

While I’m at it, I want to thank the people who show up on my counter all the time: Pittsburgh, Toronto, Minneapolis, Adelaide, Sydney, Winnipeg, Poughkeepsie, St. Paul, Calgary, London, Denver, Aliso Viejo, Los Angeles, Lake Mary, Washington, Halethorpe, Green Bay, Heerhugowaard, Edinburgh, Lexington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and all the rest of the regulars. Seeing that you are still with me makes me glad I started the blog and keeps me writing and posting. I’m grateful, and I hope you’ll say hello sometime.

Since every post deserves a song, here’s one that seems appropriate for the theme of the blog. It’s obscure, well-loved by caithiseach and worth sharing. It’s a tune recorded in 1969 by Ronnie Dante and Jeff Barry. Just update the population numbers as you listen. The rest remains the same.

Thanks for reading this hot-off-the-press editorial. See you Wednesday!

Archies, A Summer Prayer for Peace

Angels to the Rescue

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

Some cross-pollination has occurred in the past couple of days. My friend whiteray mentioned on February 6 in his blog, Echoes in the Wind, that he and I have differing approaches to blogging. He and I know that, but it seems pertinent to give some details on that matter, so look for a second Saturday post coming shortly. Now, on with the scheduled program:

I feared this might be a spectacularly short post. I told you everything I know about Danny Kellarney last time, which is next to nothing. I told you what I know about the songwriters for the A side, “Jealous.” I told you about the orchestra leader. Thank goodness the B side, “You Can't Fool an Angel” (Fraternity 783) was written by a different set of guys. That gives me another bit of history to develop for this post.

Or not. You can see from the label that, because the song had four writers, Fraternity Records didn’t even give first initials, much less the whole names.

So, I looked up the last names anyway. ASCAP reports no Herig or Fiume, no likely Henn, and a couple of weak possibilities for Moss.

Just look up the title, you say. ASCAP shows no record of the song, though it was published originally by Windy City Music, ASCAP. No BMI record, either.

The song probably was not written as far back as “Jealous” (1924), but that could account for its disappearance into the ether, or it could have gone into the public domain and not been restored to copyright protection. In that case, if you’re looking for a song to cover for your next album, have a listen to this poor wee tune that no one loves any more. You can record it for free.

I can tell you that, despite losing this 45 in the Great Meltdown in 1972, I remembered the label name, the artist, and the title of the B side. How did I remember all that? 1. The Fraternity label was fairly distinctive, 2. I didn’t think people should try to fool angels, and 3. I associated the singer’s name with Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. Doing so made the online search for his name more difficult, but I found his record, obviously. And that’s all I can say about Danny Kellarney. There is one more tidbit I can add once I confirm it, and if that happens, I’ll make a special update post.

Rather than stop writing here, I’ll use the leftover space to reminisce about another tune I lost in the Great Meltdown, one I will most likely never see again. The title, as I recall, was “I’ve Got to Lose These Blues.” The label was Hi-Hat Records, blue with a silver logo. If you do a search for the label name, you find a current label that specializes in square dance/hoedown calling records. Their logo, a high top hat with a walking stick, is very similar to the label of the 45 I owned, so they may have bought the rights to the name and logo.

This new label has interesting wares. You must listen to this square dance version of “Don’t Be Cruel,” called by Masaru Wada! If you are a square dancer, I endorse their products.

But, oh, do I ever digress. So, Hi Hat Records released in the late 1950s a song with the aforementioned title, or one very similar to it. I don’t know the artist. But the songwriter was Bernie O’Neill, my uncle by marriage.

Let me tell you, when you’re a little music fiend like three-year-old caithiseach, you think it is very cool that your uncle wrote a song that made it onto a record. It may well be that I learned what the names in parentheses on a 45 meant when my mom told me Uncle Bernie had written the tune. Once I was old enough to read, I saw that she wasn’t kidding: B. O’Neill was listed as the songwriter. And now I have neither the 45 nor a recording of the tune, thanks to the Great Meltdown.

I can tell you about as much about Uncle Bernie’s music career as I did about Danny Kellarney’s. I can tell you that he was serious about breaking into the music business, and he may have been taken for a bit of a ride by his publishing house. I can tell you he and my mother’s sister, Aunt Anita, didn’t get along so well, and they divorced in the 1960s, when Roman Catholics just did not do that. I remember that people always whispered the word “divorce” whenever it came up regarding Aunt Anita.

But Uncle Bernie was a good guy. His two children, my cousins Chip (Bernie Jr.) and Kathy, were good to me. Chip was murdered in his home in Gary, Indiana in the 1980s, and that is the biggest externally produced tragedy in my family.

Does anyone have a copy of Uncle Bernie’s song? I’d love to have it.

For now, take a listen to Danny Kellarney’s other tune. He also recorded “Never Til Now”/“You Opened Up My Heart” (Fraternity 785), but that one never made it into the bins where my Uncle Tom shopped for the 45s he bought me at twenty to a dollar.

After this dose of obscurity, look for a couple of weeks of homages to personal favorites of significant musical fame whose 45s happened to join my collection when I was a tot. See you Wednesday!

Danny Kellarney, You Can't Fool an Angel mp3

Masaru Wada, Don’t Be Cruel sample mp3

You Can't Fool an Angel label jpg

Those Annoying Deadly Sins

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

If you’ve gotten into the groove of this blog, you know I am mixing some known songs with real obscurities. (If you’ve discovered me late, you may want to read from the beginning on January 2, as the posts build on each other to some degree.) Today’s post is the first really tough essay I’ve had to write.

It’s a strain for two reasons. The first is that the artist is a true unknown. The second is that I didn’t like the songs on the single when I was a kid, and they haven’t aged well. Part of the fun for me, though, is knowing that I am disseminating information that only one in ten million of you has ever discovered before.

I mentioned previously that in the 1960s I owned several 45s on the Mercury label, and a few from Specialty, Imperial and Hi, though those all came from one artist per label. Another successful indie label, Fraternity, made it into my collection just once. Fraternity Records, despite having hit records from the likes of Cathy Carr, Jimmy Dorsey and Bobby Bare, was capable also of delivering such product as “Jealous” by Danny Kellarney, Fraternity 783 (1957).

There’s nothing wrong with Kellarney’s voice, which sets him apart from a few of the artists I’ll discuss later in the year. But three-year-old caithiseach put the other side of this 45 (to be profiled Saturday) on the turntable one day, listened to a few seconds of the yawner of a chorus and orchestra, and yanked it. I don’t know if I ever played the A side, “Jealous.” I don’t remember it from my childhood, and since the 45 managed to fall prey to the Great Meltdown in 1972, I couldn’t play the song as an adult to see if I liked it. Frankly, I don’t know how this 45 got stacked high enough in the box of 45s to be melted by the sun, but it warped, and I tossed it.

Once I replaced the 45 a couple of years ago, I got the impression that I hadn’t missed much. The song is very much a product of its time and its label: orchestra plus electric guitar, vocal chorus and everything that a three-year-old dislikes in a song. Nowadays I would have to say that I have heard worse recordings, and I’ll even share some via this blog, but “Jealous” is not a tune I play often.

If the recorded song is not very interesting, the back story is a bit better. The song was written by Tommie Malie, Dick Finch (1898-1955) and Jack Little (1899-1956). Malie registered just 18 titles with ASCAP, Finch just 5, but Little composed 95 tunes, including “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town.” He had tunes covered by artists as disparate as Jimmy Durante and Fletcher Henderson.

Little got some of his work into the movies. “Jealous” showed up in a 1941 film, The Feminine Touch, starring Rosalind Russell and Don Ameche, and also in Somebody Loves Me (1952), starring Betty Hutton. The song was very appropriate for The Feminine Touch, as the plot concerned a jealous husband. But the song was written in 1924, so the writers got lucky by its inclusion in the film.

“Jealous” was a #3 hit for Marion Harris in 1924, and Ben Selvin’s version reached #13 the same year. The Andrews Sisters took it to #12 in 1941. Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford both recorded it, probably around 1941, though I can’t confirm the date. Les Paul & Mary Ford sang it later as well.

A figure of considerable notoriety connected with this recording is the orchestra leader, “Dom Frontieri.” With his name spelled correctly, you may recognize Dominic Frontiere (born 1931) as the composer to the theme from The Outer Limits. He composed music for the TV shows Branded, The Flying Nun and Rat Patrol, among others, as well as the score for Clint Eastwood’s Hang ’Em High, which was a Top Ten hit for Booker T. and the MG’s in 1968-69.

In 1980, Dominic’s ex-wife, Georgia Frontiere, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams (who died on January 18, 2008), gave him some tickets to that year's Super Bowl. He scalped them. The big problem was that she gave him 16,000 tickets, and he made half a million dollars from the sales. Oopsies, he forgot to report the income to the IRS, and he did nine months for his bad memory.

It would be intriguing to learn why the people involved in the Kellarney recording decided to resurrect this song, which didn’t even chart during its second film life. The Kellarney trail is pretty cold, though I have one tidbit to follow up before Saturday. I am going to hope one of my readers has a clue to warm up the trail again. Let me know.

For my amusement, please consider taking the opinion poll on this song. (It’s off to the right.) See you on the flip side Saturday!

Sources: IMDB, Wikipedia

Danny Kellarney, Jealous mp3

"Jealous" label

Fraternity Records sleeve

Summertime After Dark

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

When I was five years old, I was not a very discriminating listener. That’s why half of the 45s my Uncle Tom bought for me didn’t get dumped in the trash. I’d like to think I was open-minded and saw value in everyone’s attempts at musical expression. My keeping all the 45s I received as gifts doesn’t mean I gave them all equal playing time, though.

The B side of Epic 45 5-9299, “When the Sun Goes Down” by the Jamies, struck five-year-old caithiseach as a far better tune than the A side, “Snow Train.” For one thing, “Snow Train” was a winter song, and while I loved Christmas and making snowmen, who would want to play a song about winter in the summer? That was a dumb idea. And while trains were cool (my mother’s father was an engineer for the EJ&E railroad), what was a Snow Train? If the songwriter, Sherm Feller, couldn’t sell that corny idea to a little kid, how could the Jamies sell it to the hip teens who had found the saucy lyrics of “Summertime, Summertime” so attractive?

The hip teens ignored the winter sequel, of course. But I wonder what might have happened if DJs had flipped the 45 over and begun to play “When the Sun Goes Down.” Epic was big enough to work the B side of the 45 when the A side tanked, so maybe they tried, and the B side was also a flop.

“Summertime, Summertime” survived on a sparse arrangement (harpsichord and someone beating on a cardboard box with his hands), thanks to clever lyrics. This second single required a typical pop arrangement to attract what little audience it drew. I believe, frankly, that the perceived need for a sequel to the hit, and the route taken to create that sequel, doomed the Jamies.

Sherm Feller wrote “Snow Train” by himself. Apart from writing a song that had a lot in common with late-1950s Christmas recordings and thus was sentenced to two weeks of annual sales, the lyrics are not particularly evocative. Here’s the entire song:

Here comes the Snow Train!
(tepid yay from the Jamies and train whistle)
Snow Train, Snow Train, merry merry merry go-go-go train
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Up hills, down trails, stocking caps and flying pony tails
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Rain, rain, go away
Come again some April day
When you see the snow is flyin’
We’re all through with
summertime, summertime, summertime, summertime
Snow Train, Snow Train, rockin’ rollin’ ho-ho-ho train
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Key change and repeat all lyrics.

The song has nothing in common with the writing style of “Summertime, Summertime.” It has nothing in common with hit songs, either. That doesn’t make it a bad song, but it was never going to make anyone a lot of money.

The in-your-face rebellious nature of “Summertime, Summertime” made it a hit. Compare these lyrics, the first set from “When the Sun Goes Down” and the second from the hit. (I am tired of writing “Summertime, Summertime.” Sorry.)

“When the Sun Goes Down” (partial)
Early to bed and early to rise is what some people say
But the gals I know and all the guys, they just don’t live that way
The night was made for people like us who enjoy the finer things
We live our lives without the fuss that normal living brings

Come on, you sun, roll across the sky and sink into the west
’Cause I can hardly wait till I start living the life that’s best
When the sun goes down, I’ll be goin’ to town
Just to look around for you
Just to look around for you

“Summertime, Summertime” (partial)
Well shut them books and throw ’em away
Say goodbye to dull school days
Look alive and change your ways
It’s summertime . . .

Its time to head straight for the mills
Its time to live and have some thrills
Come along and have a ball
A regular free-for-all

Well are you comin’ or are you ain’t
You slowpokes are my one complaint
Hurry up before I faint
It’s summertime

Well I’m so happy that I could flip
Oh how I’d love to take a trip
I’m sorry, teacher, but zip your lip
Because it’s summertime

“When the Sun Goes Down” shows some of the liveliness of the hit, with the added feature of an internal rhyme in each phrase. Both “Sun” and the hit ooze teen perspective, whereas “Snow Train” is close to sterile in both teen appeal and Christmas validity.

The difference? Tom Jameson contributed his songwriting skills to both the hit and “Sun,” while he was absent from "Snow Train." An astute music detective might hypothesize that the hit was mostly written when Sherm Feller discovered the Jamies, and that “Sun” was mostly the work of the writer who gave the hit its cleverness.

If that hypothesis is correct, then Tom Jameson might have been a writing talent worth developing. As it is, he wrote just five tunes, four with Feller and one, “Evening Star,” by himself. That song’s lyrics would be a key to deciding who was the bold lyricist of the pair, but to be fair, I would also have to examine a number of Feller’s solo composition (42 total registered works). So far, I haven’t been able to gain access to other songs by either songwriter, so I hope to revisit the topic sometime this year.

I’m not knocking Sherm Feller’s legacy. It would make more sense (in the way things were done then) for the unestablished writer (Jameson) to give some credit for minor tweaks on a song to Feller, rather than Feller adding Jameson to the song’s writing credits out of kindness. Keep in mind that I am speculating on the song's authorship and could be completely wrong.

Now, take yourself back to a time in your personal music history when everything was new, and what was good was what you liked and not only what Rolling Stone endorsed. The Jamies, with their innocently broad Dorchester accent, seem to be having fun on this side. Listen to the song, and be sure to comment!

Next week, I’ll look at an artist who really is obscure. See you then, and thanks for reading.

Jamies, When the Sun Goes Down

When the Sun Goes Down label