It’s always been my intention to not make my posts comprehensive. I try to keep each one focused on one thing, and provide what I can from my collection of stuff, without doing a lot of research. Tom Tastewar, who shall henceforth be called just Tastewar, because it sounds edgier, has done some checking into Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. 
In this instance, a little looking on my part would have served me well, because Tastewar found a link with animated GIFs of something that was included in Brother, the Van Eaton’s Apple LP. Here’s the link. I had totally forgotten about this! It’s a strip of paper with slits, printed on both sides, that you put into a loop, placed on the turntable, and played like a zoetrope. One side had Lon, the other had Derrek. It’s the next step up from a flip book in animation technology. Mine has been lost for ages. I remember the first time I realized it was missing, but I have no idea what happened to it.
Category: Music
Petula Postcard
One of my relatively rare eBay acquisitions is this Nostalgia Postcard from England, reproducing a magazine cover from late 1949 with Petula Clark, just turned 17. Picturegoer called itself The National Film Weekly, and Petula was a movie star, and not yet a chart-topping hit singles singer. Of course in America we knew nothing of Pet’s 20+ year career when she hit it big here, stateside.
Eaton An Apple
Way back in high school, in the November 23, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, was a review of a record by a pair of brothers, Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. Click the thumbnail picture to see a scan from my original copy of the magazine. The LP was on the Beatles’ Apple label, and it was called, fittingly, Brother. The cover looked a bit weird, with the brothers bare-chested and embracing, but the review was a rave, it was on Apple, and George Harrison was involved, so I bought it. I enjoyed the record a lot, and being very much into church at the time I liked the religious theme that ran through many of the tracks. The Van Eaton brothers had a follow-up record, but by then Apple Records as a recording studio was gone, so they were on a different label. I forget which one (A&M) because I was a totally broke college student and my record purchases were very few.
A brief account of the demise of Apple Records as anything but a logo and a legal entity (albeit a significant one, ably run by the late Neil Aspinall), is told in the memoir of recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere. Emerick also describes his involvement, or lack of it, with the recording of the Brother album.
One of George Harrison’s new signings was the Von [sic] Eaton brothers–Lon and Derrek… Harrison started out producing the brothers’ album, with me doing the engineering, but then he got fed up and frustrated, so he had his old friend Klaus Voormann take over as producer. I knew him from as far back as the Revolver days, when he’d come into the sessions to talk about the album cover he was designing. He and I just didn’t click, though, so I begged off from the project and turned the reins over to another engineer.
I’ll play a couple of tracks from the album. First, the song produced by George Harrison, “Sweet Music,” that the Rolling Stone review characterized as being similar to, and as good as, “My Sweet Lord.”
To hear this song, buy this CD.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/SweetMusic.mp3]
And this is “Sun Song,” produced by Klaus Voormann.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/SunSong.mp3]Pet’s Serenade To Love
Let’s make it a Petula Clark triple post for today. From an appearance on the American TV show The Hollywood Palace, she sings “This Is My Song.”
[flv:/Video/2008/APR/PetHollywoodBowl.flv 440 330]
Thirty five years later Petula did what I feel is an ever better rendition of the same song. Be sure to check out the other Petula clips that are linked in the YouTube menu.
A Sing Of The Times
I’m going to do one of my rare reruns. It’s a video that’s so much fun it’s worth watching again. It’s Petula Clark’s 1966 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, performing the Tony Hatch song, “It’s A Sign Of The Times.” The set, the clothes, and the colors really are signs of those times. I remastered the video yet again, for bigger and better quality than the one I did before.
As I’ve long joked, in a perfect world Petula Clark, Julie Andrews, and Diana Rigg would all have been on the American scene at the same time, each dominating their respective fields of entertainment. Oh! Wait! They were! They did! 😉
[flv:/Video/2008/APR/SignOfTheTimes.flv 440 330]
I particularly love the way the music moves along when Pet sings the lyric, “Maybe my lucky star, at last decided to shine… maybe somebody knows how long I’ve waited to make you mine.” This is pop music perfection. As a bonus, this time I’ll toss in the original studio recording of the song, taken from a well-worn LP.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/SignOfTheTimes.mp3]Another track from the same LP is a Pet-penned autobiographical tune, “Two Rivers.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/TwoRivers.mp3]Pet Pitches For Coca-Cola
It’s already been over a year since the PBS program The British Beat, hosted by Petula Clark, first aired. Take a look at this video clip I posted, and you’ll see what Comcast analog cable TV looked like, and why I switched to Verizon FiOS digital.
That show wasn’t the first time Pet had been paired, in a sense, with legendary New York DJ Bruce Morrow, aka: Cousin Brucie. Pet did some radio spots for Coca-Cola in the sixties, with Cousin Brucie doing the intro.
[flv:/Video/2008/APR/PetCocaCola.flv 440 330]
I know that Pet greatly admires the late Dusty Springfield, but as a kid I had a hard time recognizing Dusty’s new songs. Versatile to a fault, is how I would now describe her work. In this regard Springfield was similar to Bobby Darin.
Petula Clark, on the other hand, has a distinctive and immediately recognizable sound that’s all her own, whether she’s belting out a pop tune or a love song. She’s done it all, from small French cabaret performances to lavish Broadway productions. For myself, growing up when I did, Pet represents the same thing the Beatles do — the absolute finest in popular music.