If Robbie Leff keeps pointing out videos like this fantastic Petula-Beatles mash-up, I won’t have to think up any more ideas for blog posts!
The official Beatles mash-up is, of course, the Love CD, which has me thinking of the infamous Beachles mash-up of Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper that resulted in a cease-and-desist order for its creator from Capitol/EMI.
More vis Mitch Miller, compliments of Denro:
This the 1st song from the 1st “Sing Along With Mitch” album, from 1958. The odd thing, which I didn’t realize, is that the album contains several WW II era songs!!! He knew his audience — so he did songs from their childhood, their parents’ era and their own adulthood! “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Bell Bottom Trousers” are on there, alongside “The Old Mill Stream” and “Silvery Moon”.
This was how Miller started the sing-a-long craze? But it’s such a sad song! How sad is it? It’s “Snoopy with a root beer” sad!
Recently I posted a couple of items about Mitch Miller. It’s been said that the low point of Frank Sinatra’s recording career was towards the end of his contract with Columbia, when Miller had him record Mama Will Bark. Cactus Lizzie wrote to say…
WCBS New York is doing “the dog days of summer” today on-air. They mentioned “Mama will Bark” and said it was available for review on their web site. There’s a write-up of it here at this link below, and the video which they took from YouTube.
http://wcbsfm.radio.com/2010/08/12/mama-will-bark/#more-14660
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRaMToK1g
Follow-up: Denro saw Cactus Lizzie’s comment about the flip side, “I’m A Fool to Want You”, and he says…
Here’s a link to the 1951 version. Mitch may have made him record “Mama” but he also let him record and release this song — co-written by Sinatra himself (one of the few). By the way, Mitch remembers Frank being okay with recording it at the time. He seems to be having some fun with it and even gets a good last line in. It’s no better or worse that some of the stuff that Perry Como or Rosemary Clooney were doing during the same period. The worst part was probably having Dagmar try and do the vocal, in retrospect an early TV flash-in-the pan. That’s the real novelty part. Then again, it’s still pretty poor!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEQm–gWvfA
I don’t have an iPhone 4, and I’m no longer on AT&T, but despite that, or because of it, I think this is very funny…
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I should ask former “Jazz snob” Margo Guryan if she can guess who this is. Starting at 2:30 it’s fairly obvious, even for me. There’s a lot of Big Band in this Sixties Jazz sound.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/OdeToBillyJoe.mp3]I’m going through some old files. I’d forgotten about this animated GIF somebody sent me five years ago.
