Author: DOuG pRATt

Frank’s hot dogs

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

Note to Larry Ellison: Shut Up!

Can’t the board of directors at Oracle tell Larry Ellison to keep his stupid mouth shut?

In a letter to the New York Times, Ellison said, “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”

I agree that firing Steve Jobs from Apple was one of the worst corporate decisions in history, and that John Sculley as CEO was a joke, but why is Ellison commenting on the situation at HP? Stick to your own concerns, Larry. Mark Hurd isn’t a founder of HP, and from what I can tell he has absolutely no involvement with product. Hurd is a money guy, who wants sales targets met, and costs cut. In other words, he’s a corporate hack. Firing Hurd is not like firing Jobs, it’s like firing John Sculley.

Hewlett-Packard is a company that badly needs different leadership, despite doing well recently, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. For corporate computing, the only story that HP has to tell right now is the XP-series of storage area network systems, but it isn’t their story, it belongs to HDS — Hitachi Data Systems. HP needs to get back to being an engineering company. Hurd has zero conception of what a SAN is, or even what USB is, and that’s why he needs to go, regardless of anything related to money mismanagement and sexual impropriety.