Category: Music

Bridging the Generation Gap

1967! The year that my favorite musical genre — Psychedelia — came into its own. Youth culture was taking over! The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix joined the Beatles and the Stones on the Pop charts. But there was still plenty of music for adult contemporary audiences.

On ABC-TV that year was a remarkable special. The show was a tribute to the songs of Rodgers and Hart, when Hart had been dead for almost 25 years. It featured a one-of-a-kind lineup of performers:

  • Bobby Darin
  • Petula Clark
  • The Mamas and the Papas
  • The Supremes
  • Count Basie
  • The Doodletown Pipers

Petula, The Mamas and the Papas, and The Supremes had hits in ’67 that kids liked, but they were also acceptable to a middle-aged audience. The Doodletown Pipers were a group of TV singers in the 60’s.

Petula’s duets with Darin are very nice. Bobby was obviously very happy to be singing with Count Basie.

Note: Embedding isn’t allowed for the first video, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube. Don’t know why the same requirement wasn’t made for the second.

Part 1

Part 2

When Tower Lost Power

Another free music documentary on YouTube. I haven’t watched it yet, but the subject is good enough for me to recommend it.

Tower’s flagship store in Boston was at the Mass Ave. end of Newbury Street, the namesake of Newbury Comics, a longtime music retailer that’s still in business. The Tower Records store in Burlington, MA was a relatively convenient stop on the way home, where I used to live, but most of my purchases were made at Newbury Comics, at the other end of the same shopping center.

Before all of that, THE place to buy records in Boston was actually in Cambridge. The Harvard Coop, in Harvard Square, as in Harvard University. My first visit there was almost 50 years ago, spending some of the fifty bucks I earned one night, helping to close down the annual town fair.

…

I’ve watched the documentary, and definitely recommend it. The amazing thing about the rise of Tower Records is that most of the core team members were — let’s be honest — uneducated drunks, who were following the grand vision of a smart man who was as drunk and uneducated as they were. Their success is proof of the power in doing what you love for a living.

Tower’s over-expansion on borrowed money was technically what led to the chain’s bankruptcy. But even if they hadn’t taken on debt, that would only have softened the crash landing. Tower’s demise was inevitable, and the end was predicted not long after its beginning.

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form). — “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.

Twirlin’ Girls

While Marvel Comics fans wait in the hope that Southern Methodist University in Texas will post more Stan Lee video, let’s see what else my new favorite YouTube channel has to offer. Here’s one that’s a sociology lesson all by itself, showing how much American culture has changed over the past 50 years.

If you don’t know what that first tune is, it’s this.

Post-Pandemic Punk

A teen band in Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, have a viral video.

The girls have been signed to a small record label. They got the idea for their band from Linda Linda Linda, a 2005 Japanese movie.

Schoolgirls are the subjects of countless Japanese movies, anime, and manga. From sweet, innocent and charming, to super-powered, to graphically pornographic, girls in school uniforms are everywhere in Japanese media. I rented Linda Linda Linda back when I had a 3-disc Netflix subscription. The movie is safely at the sweet and charming end of the spectrum. The DVD is out of print, and whoever owns the rights would be smart to make the movie available online as soon as possible.

Are there cybernetic assassin schoolgirls? Of course.

A song in English by a Scottish band really is the theme to the anime series. Here’s the complete recording. It’s one of the most remarkable productions I have ever heard.

Straight Talk

I’ve been wasting time watching audio-related YouTube videos, with turntables being a favorite topic. Back in the 80’s, electronics manufacturers did what they could to modernize turntables, while at the same time promoting their CD players. Along with direct-drive turntables and P-Mount cartridges, there were linear-tracking tonearms.

The music that’s played to demonstrate the turntable is by Jeremy Heiden. Something about the first track reminded me of an early 80’s Steve Miller song, with maybe an added splash of the Police from the same era.