Category: Music

Hawks vs. Hunks

In the post right before this one, while discussing the composer Leroy Shield, R. Crumb said that he prefers Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks to the Dutch dance band The Beau Hunks. Let’s do a comparison. First, the Nighthawks…

http://youtu.be/P8y_AglUPR8

… and now the Beau Hunks, with the same three tunes by Leroy Shield.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/26+Look+at+Him+Now.mp3,http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/02+Beautiful+Lady.mp3,https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/05+Bells.mp3|titles=The Beau Hunks – Look At Him Now,The Beau Hunks – Beautiful Lady,The Beau Hunks – Bells]

Desperately Seekering Judith

One of the most distinctive female singing voices of the Sixties, right up there with Mary Travers and Linda Ronstadt, belonged to Judith Durham, who is best remembered in America for this song…

… Georgy Girl was the biggest hit for the Seekers, the folk quartet from Australia. Before that, their breakthrough song was I’ll Never Find Another You, written by Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom.

http://youtu.be/lVL-u09z-io

So why is the name of shimmering soprano Judith Durham not better known in the United States? The short answer is, she broke up the act.

Judith went solo, returned to Australia, and got married. She was not in the New Seekers, who sang I’d Like To Buy the World a Coke…

http://youtu.be/1azQR2LQtKQ

… but Judith sang Things Go Better With Coke.

http://youtu.be/_wp7EFVYyAg

Happiness is feeling Crumb-y

A week ago I called Robert Crumb a curmudgeon, and he is, but he enjoys talking about his collection of 78 rpm records. Michael Cumella, aka MAC, snagged an in-person interview with R. Crumb for his Antique Phonograph Music Program on WFMU. The first hour of two is on the audio player, and some of it is on YouTube. MAC will post the rest of his conversation with Crumb next week.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/WFMU_Crumb.mp3|titles=WFMU – Robert Crumb talks about 78 rpm records]

Roxette’s got something on the radio

I still don’t know if I’ve ever heard something by Lady Gaga, and I’m not even sure she’s not a guy with a gimmick. But thanks to BBC Radio 2 I know about the music duo Roxette from Sweden, aka: ABBAland. When I first heard their new song, She’s Got Nothing On (But the Radio), with its great Europop sound, I was surprised to learn they’ve been cranking out tunes for 25 years.

The Troubadour door

The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.

So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.

“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.'”

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333

This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.

They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.