Monthly Archives: August 2009

Elektra Records presents: The Folk Box – Disc 2 (1964) vinyl

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Disc two brings us the only two things an honest man ever needs: work and God.  Soul abounds in these tracks start to finish from back in the day when being Irish was to be oppressed.  Now it just means you’re expected to celebrate St. Paddy’s day like a baffoon and carry on a hearty tradition of freckle fetish. With the other tracks I feel like I’m listening to premixed tracks from Moby’s album Play.  Just that sort of southern, sweltering, heart-squeezing music. Like grit under your nails and baptismal water in your hair: righteous.

Don’t forget to check out Disc 1 Disc 3 and Disc 4

Side C: Work Song

1. Leadbelly – Pick a Bale of Cotton

2. Seafarers Chorus – Haul on the Bowline

3. Pete Seeger – Paddy Works on the Railway

4. Harry Jackson – I Ride an Old Paint

5. Cisco Houston – Zebra Dun

6. Horace Sprott – Field Holler

7. Koerner, Ray & Glover – Linin’ Track

8. Willie Turner – Now Your Man Done Gone

9. Josh White – Timber

10. Negro Prisoners – Negro Prisoners – Grizzly Bear

Side D: Many Worshippers, One God

1. Marilyn Child & Glenn Yarbrough – Mary Had A Baby

2. Josh White – Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed

3. Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was The Night

4. Judy Collins – Twelve Gates To The City

5. Theodore Bikel – A Zemer

6. Glenn Yarbrough – Wayfaring Stranger

7. Ed McCurdy – Simple Gifts

8. Leadbelly – Meeting at the Building

9. Bob Gibson – You Can Tell The World

10. Christian Tabernacle Church – Down By The Riverside

Elektra Records presents: The Folk Box – Disc 1 (1964) vinyl

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This is the first disc in a four-party box set that’s everything folk music.  I’m certain I have the booklet for this somewhere so I’ll hold off on getting long-winded and let the disc side and track titles do the talking.  I hope you enjoy this little slice of Americana.

Don’t forget to check out Disc 2 Disc 3 and Disc 4

Side A: Songs of the Old World and Migration to the New

1. Cynthia Gooding – Greensleeves

2. Ian Campbell Folk Group – Down In The Coal Mine

3. Ewan Maccoll – Geordie

4. Irish Ramblers – Whiskey In The Jar

5. Susan Reed – Irish Famine Song

6. Ed McCurdy – Gypsie Laddie

7. Jean Redpath – Tae The Weavers

8. African Traveling Song

9. Navajo Night Chant

10. Gene Bluestein – Skada At America

Side B: Settling, Exploring and Growing in the New World

1. New Lost City Ramblers – When First Unto This Country

2. Susan Reed – Springfield Mountain

3. Ed McCurdy – Good Old Colony Times

4. Oscar Brand – Jefferson and Liberty

5. Pete Seeger – Darling Corey

6. Jack Elliott – Jesse James

7. Leadbelly – Rock Island Line

8. Woody Guthrie – Oregon Trail

9. Erik Darling – Swannanoa Tunnel

10. Ed McCurdy - Kentucky Moonshiner

11. Alabama School Children – Green, Green, Rocky Road

The Lucky Thompson Quartet – Lucky Strikes (1964) vinyl

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From the little known jazz saxophonist Lucky Thompson and his quartet comes Lucky Strikes.  I picked this up early on in my vinyl collecting days simply because I needed some jazz in my collection and I’m really glad I did.  Lucky is a great tenor and soprano jazz saxophonist–some would go as far to say that he’s the greatest soprano saxophonist to ever grace a jazz club.  I don’t have much experience to go on in this field but I would have to go out on a limb and say that he’s pretty damn good. 

Don’t think Kenny G’s screaming baby sax with this album because it’s far from it.  He really knows how to tame the raw upper-range power of the brass mongoose to make it purr just right.  This album mixes of the chipper attitude found in Vince Guaraldi’s work for the Peanuts soundtracks, most notably the Christmas album, with the solemn “Farewell Blues” from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack.  Quite a swirl.

Get Cool Here

8)

Public Image Ltd. – Happy? 12″ (1989) vinyl

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Here’s a dancy little disc conjured up from the brain of John Lydon or, as he’s better known from his day with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten.  Don’t expect any of the Sex Pistols sound here, however.  The Pistols’ punk-in-the-trunk makes way for the supremely 80′s fashion-blasted post-punk slathered in these tracks.  Well, I guess it’s post-punk.  A lot of things came after punk: Miley Cyrus, Y2K, Crest White Strips.  I suppose it’s post-ragtime as well.  Music genre names are retarded.

Anyway, it’s a carnivalesque song dressed up in a hot pink polyester blouse with large foam shoulder pads.  The remixes are a bit more fun than the original but the album cut is peppy enough in its own right.  I also have another full length album entitled Happy? from 1987 by Public Image Ltd which strangely doesn’t contain any songs with its namesake.  Maybe it will make it’s way on here with a bit of encouragement.

Check the original mix.

Tracks:

-Happy 12″ remix

-Happy 7″ dub remix

-Happy Album Edit

Get Happy!

8)

Tom Tom Club – Tom Tom Club (1981) vinyl

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Chris Frantz and Tina Weyworth of Talking Heads stole the show from David Byrne with this tasty little side project from 1981. It started out as a bit of fun for the married couple and evolved into a smash hit that outshined anything by Talking Heads until Speaking in Tongues hit the scene in 1983. And that’s just what this album is, a whole Jello factory full of fun–it’ll make you wiggle and jiggle more than a phantom Bill Cosby tickle ghost. This is a must have for anyone that loves carefree 80s synthpop, post-disco, or whatever you want to call it.  It really deserves a category to itself.  Maybe squigglegiggle. That sounds pleasurable.

Video for the single version of Genius of Love

Mariah Carey trippin’ the riff from Genius of Love

Movin’ and a shakin’ at 320 kbps just around the corner.

8)

Danny Tenaglia – Tourism (1998) vinyl

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“I’m your DJ and I’m going to take you on a tour of a 12 inch.  Yes, a 12 inch.”

Here’s another treat from Sneadles from LAser.  This monster four disc dance, trance, grab-a-man-wherever-you-want-electronic album might go down as the most unapologetic ass-shaking club vinyl collection for the ages.  Imagine yourself in a huge, dark club surrounded by pulsing strobes, dripping bodz, and the smell of lovesweat everywhere.  This is what’s playing in that club–now and forever.  Don’t fight the feeling cuz it’s already done.

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Music From The 21st Century (1980) Vinyl Download

  

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Oh, what creamy dreams 80s electronicos conjured within their oily brainfolds with this Sass-terpiece.  In 1980 the nation was still starstruck with NASA, disco was mysteriously topping the charts, and ex-peanut farmer Jimmy Carter fought  the Cold War by boycotting the Summer Olympics in Moscow.  What a glorious time to be alive and fear atomic annihilation. They weren’t even worried about the terrible 42nd law of binary nothingness! 

 This album gives a glimpse of what monster-truck-sized-synthesizer operators envisioned 20 years in the future. Jesus, were they wrong. So dreadfully wrong. 

Moog Synthesizer

Telephone Switchboard

The tracks on this record are very “Star Trek” (post Kirk and pre-Jean-Luc, you dig) with songs like “On The Throne of Saturn” and “Inside The Black Hole”.  It also features the song “Karavan”, which debuted the previously undiscovered letter K in its title.  As a whole the album perfectly captures the decade’s hope of men living on the moon and women cooking for men on the moon.  

Little did they know that electronica would some day devolve into this:  

  

God damn now my whole body hurts. Luckily I have a little medicine stowed away here.  Ingest before it’s too late.  

Click here for the 320 kbps antidote!  

Track List  

1. Richard Burmer – Intro  

2. Tangerine Dream – Tangram  

3. Alex Cima – Primera  

4.Steve Roach – Karavan  

5. Don Preston – On The Throne Of Saturn  

6. Neil Norman – Dance of the Hyenas  

7. Alex Cima – Lithium  

8. Michael Garrison – Escape  

9. Bruce Curtois – Inside The Black Hole

Snoopy And His Friends The Royal Guardsmen (1967) vinyl

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The back cover of this album perfectly conveys what Snoopy is all about:

I think if one has followed the Peanuts’ comic strip and particularly those segments that deal with Snoopy, one quickly becomes aware that one is reading installments of a fascinating allegory.  Snoopy is a very individual dog and has a special meaning to all of us.  Like all allegories, the significance of Snoopy really depends upon our own experience.  For example–to a child, Snoopy represents everything that a child wants to bein in his or her fantasy world…Snoopy is a pilot, Snoopy is a secret agent.  He can sit on a limb of a tree and hunch himself over and look like a vulture.  He can stalk his prey like a saber-toothed tiger.  He flies his doghouse and calls it his Sopwith Camel.  He plays baseball and, of course, battles the Red Baron.

It is the battle with the Red Baron that I think expresses the primary adult philosophy.  This battle is the battle between good and evil.  Snoopy, of course, representing good and the Red Baron evil.  However, the evil that the Baron represents is not the evil that really exists in the world today.  The evil is a gentle evil and in the battle nobody is supposed to get hurt.  In this conflict, namely of the simple truths that so often get lost in our hectic civilization come readily to the fore.  In its simplicity, this conflict becomes almost a romantic adventure.

Our recording of Snoopy’s Christmas was made with this philosophy in mind.  There is an underlying seriousness.  Snoopy’s Christmas basically exposes the futility of never-ending conflict.  This fact is particularly accentuated at Christmas time.

Side I of this LP presents a drama as fanciful as any child’s dream world involving all three of the Snoopy records.  It uses the medium of radio when radio didn’t really exist to tell the story.  We did this because there is a universality of timelessness represented by Snoopy’s battle against the Red Baron.  The battle against evil is yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever.

-Robert Schwartz

The Story of Snoopy vs. The Red Baron (Track 2)

Snoopy’s Christmas (Track 6)

Download the full album here.

Track List

1) The Story of Snoopy vs. The Red Baron

2) Snoopy vs. The Red Baron

3) The Story of the Return of The Red Baron

4) The Return of The Red Baron

5) The Story of Snoopy’s Christmas

6) Snoopy’s Christmas

7) I Say Love

8) Down Behind The Lines

9) It’s Sopwith Camel Time

10) So Right (To Be In Love)

11) Airplane Song (My Airplane0

12) It Kinda Looks Like Christmas

The Brothers Johnson – Light Up The Night (1980) vinyl

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5 Reasons This Record Kicks Ass

1)  This is a Quincy Jones production, as in the Quincy Jones who molded Michael Jackson into The King of Pop.

2)  Michael Jackson sings backup vocals on track number five, “This Had To Be”.  These guys actually got Michael Jackson to be their backup singer.

3)  Louis Johnson, the non-spectacled brother, plays bass on Michael Jackson’s album Off The Wall so you know the tracks on this LP are funky as all hell.

4)  The Song “You Make Me Wanna Wiggle” is sampled heavily on Justice’s song “Newjack” from their album Cross for a double wiggle piledriver.

Here’s MJ set to both songs.

5) The cover features Louis blasting a purple cocksaber all over George’s face in a triumphant display of sibling domination.


Bring the funk here! << Album Download


Jimmy Page – Death Wish 2 Soundtrack (1982) vinyl

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This is yet another album that I picked up because of the cover.  I hadn’t seen the movie but Charles Bronson just chilling there with his gat resting on a popup map of the city made me all tingly.  I’ve since seen all of the movies and marveled at just how many shady folks were willing to step into the path of Master Marksman Bronson.  I’m pretty sure the body count for the complete Death Wish saga must easily total over 2 million. It also cracked me up how flamboyant the villains in these movies are–I totally expected them to bust into high art choreography at any point during the seemingly infinite gun fights.

Here’s a fab electrocution slaying from Death Wish 2

Anyway, this is a legitimately badass soundtrack scored by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame.  I highly recommend it if you’re a fan of any mind altering drugs; especially sparkly gold spray paint.  It will give you that static zing you’ve been craving.

Here sucka!