Category: Music

Hallelujah, K3!

It’s been four years since a Flemish friend got me started on K3 (we Americans hear it pronounced as “kah-tree”). Much has changed since then both professionally and personally for the ladies, but they continue to be popular and ply their trade in music, TV shows, and movies. K3 fan Mia told me the new single from their upcoming movie, Where Are The Angels?, has been posted on YouTube. Lately, some of the K3 videos I’ve embedded from YouTube have been pulled, so I extracted the MP3 audio. I really like this one.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/06/K3-WhereAreTheAngels.mp3|titles=K3 – Where Are The Angels?]

Mia explains the premise for the movie.

K3 has to be nice for 24 hours or they are in big trouble when they get kidnapped by angels.. but in these 24 hours their 3 annoying nieces arrive and they are everything but nice little troublemakers can K3 stay nice? The short teaser trailer is really funny! 😀 It shows K3 thinking they are slim as always but actually they are fat as hell, which is a side effect when you lie or when they are mean.. kinda like a curse.

With all of the overweight and obese kids in America, I wonder how well this idea would work here?

Sixties on Sunday

I think those guys in the white suits were more interested in watching Andy Williams than the girls.

The song Music to Watch Girls By was also an instrumental hit, and when I was a kid I thought it was by Herb Alpert, but it was done by Frankie Valli’s producer Bob Crewe. The influence of the “Bond, James Bond” theme is also apparent.

The tune actually started as a Diet Pepsi commercial, written by Sidney Ramin, with words for the vocal version by Anthony Velona.

http://youtu.be/G1RXYEr4O_g

My confusion about Bob Crewe’s recording was understandable, because of this Sixties TV commercial.

The Teaberry Shuffle was Herb Alpert’s Mexican Shuffle.

Which brings me to my point, that watching the past two seasons of Mad Men didn’t give me a feeling of the Sixties as I knew them, starting in 1965. The series nailed the short-lived Kennedy Camelot era, but as a period piece it seems to have had trouble leaving it behind.

Ethan Russell’s words about photos

Has it already been a week since I last posted something? Yikes! Gotta get back in the groove.

The first time I saw photographer Ethan Russell’s name was in 1970, on the back of the Let It Be album. The next time I noticed Russell’s name was in 1971, on the back cover of Who’s Next. A few years later Russell took the photo for the only album I was ever tempted to buy solely for its cover.

What should I do, put out an ugly picture? People look at it and they go “Uuugh.” It’s incidental, you know what I mean. It’s nice to have pretty pictures. It’s part of the frosting on the cake for the audience.
– Linda Ronstadt, Rolling Stone, October 19, 1978, issue no. 276, page 52.

Here’s an interview with Ethan Russell, who has a new e-book. This one I’ll have to look at on the Kindle viewer for Windows, because my Kindle Keyboard’s E-ink screen isn’t very good at displaying photos.

It was fifty years ago today…

… George Martin told the band to play.

http://youtu.be/i1mgIZrlLSE

From Bruce Spizer’s Beatle.net.

June 6, 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first visit to Abbey Road Studios. The group, consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best, arrived at what was then called EMI Studios on June 6, 1962, for a commercial test (an evaluation of a signed artist). Two days earlier, the band had signed a recording contract with “The Parlophone Company Limited of Hayes in the County of Middlesex.” The group was paid Musicians Union rates for the June 6 session, indicating that the Beatles were in fact EMI recording artists by the time they arrived at Abbey Road.

Engineers attending the session in Studio Two remember the poor shape of the group’s equipment, particularly Paul’s bass amp, which was deemed unusable due to its rattling and rumbling. Engineers Norman Smith and Ken Townsend improvised and created a bass rig by soldering an input jack to a preamp and combining it with an amp and a large Tannoy speaker taken from Echo Chamber No. 1. A string was tied around John’s amplifier to prevent it from rattling. After resolving these problems, the Abbey Road staff was ready to record the group.

Four songs were recorded that day… What four songs were recorded by EMI at the Beatles commercial test held at Abbey Road Studios on June 6, 1962? Besame Mucho, P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why and Love Me Do. The first tune, written by Consuelo Velazquez and Sunny Skylar, was a Latin standard that came to the attention of the Beatles by way of the Coasters, who issued the song in two parts on Atco 6163 in 1960. The other three songs were Lennon-McCartney originals. The tape containing the songs was sent to EMI headquarters for evaluation and is presumed lost; however, acetates of Besame Mucho and Love Me Do survived. These songs were released in 1995 on Anthology 1. All three of the Lennon-McCartney songs were later re-recorded for commercial release, with Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You issued as the Beatles first single and Ask Me Why appearing as the B-side to the group’s second single.

Why they fought

During World War II the English, minus Alfred Hitchcock who had left for America, somehow managed to not only make movies, they made some truly outstanding ones. I am particularly fond of the films that showed life on the home front. One of them is This Happy Breed, by Noel Coward and David Lean, and another is Millions Like Us, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. The latter film has a funny surprise in it for animation fans, because it uses Raymond Scott’s tune Powerhouse in a factory scene.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2012/Millions.flv 400 300]

That double turntable setup with a single tonearm is neat. Powerhouse became a fixture in the Warner Bros. cartoons starting with Porky’s Pig Feat, as seen in this post from about a year ago. Porky’s Pig Feat was released on July 17, 1943, and Millions Like Us was released in the UK on November 5, 1943, so it would seem likely that somebody involved with the making the film had seen the cartoon.