Category: All Posts

A Capitol Idea

More about Stu Phillips. In the Sixties he was behind the Hollyridge Strings series of albums.

I approached Karl Engemann at Capitol [Records] with a far-out idea of recording an album of Beatles songs in an orchestral setting geared toward easy listening. A sort of “Beatles for the older set.”

Phillips wasn’t the only one with that idea in 1964. Beatles producer George Martin produced instrumental versions of Beatles songs, starting with the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack.

George Martin then released his Off the Beatle Track album. I checked Martin’s memoir, All You Need is Ears, and there’s no mention of the Hollyridge Strings records.

Music from the first Hollyridge album by Phillips is featured on the Capitol album The Beatles Story.

Rogue Redux

Archive.org is back online with some limitations. For example, iframe embedding seems to be disabled, but the things of interest to me that I have checked are mostly functional.

A year ago I shared an outstanding audio book. Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household, is an entertaining, engrossing and influential wartime story of British espionage. With embedding broken on the Archive, I can only link to the page.

https://archive.org/details/rogue-male-episode-1

The reading was by Michael Jayston, who passed away last February. YouTube has the complete audiobook, but the chapters are in need of indexing.

Jayston appeared with Alec Guinness in the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. The best quality video I found likewise lacks chapter indexing.

Ol’ ’55

Old magazines provide some of the best views and insights into 20th century America. With the impermanence of digital storage, along with the constant change in digital formats, will there be anything from the 21st century for far-flung future generations to study?

Here’s a look at September, 1955, when I was less than a month old. After a while, you might prefer watching with the Jean Shepard wannabe muted.