Thursday, May 7, 2009

Ah... YouTube: part the first

As our friend Stephen has quite accurately remarked (and I and several friends have conveniently appropriated), YouTube is quite possibly the deepest single “rabbit hole” site on the Net, where one clicks on one clip, thinks of another, gets a sidesearch suggesting a third, and on and on, until you’ve lost a good two or three hours watching insanely rare material that violates copyright, but let’s be honest, who really gives a shit when it comes to the propagation of material that is never going to show up in another format (no cable network, DVD release, or iTunes downloads for these suckers, folks).

In that spirit I offer a Seventies one-hit wonder clip that was a pleasant surprise: the 2008 Deceased Artiste “Hurricane” Smith performing his big hit “Oh Babe, What Would You Say?” on The Tonight Show. I was extremely happy to see this up on YT, as a bunch of One Hit Wonder fans had been querying the posters of other OHW artists, asking for Hurricane doing his big number. Here we have not a lip-synch or a fully accurate version of the song, but a retooled rendition using the Tonight band. For those who don’t know who Hurricane was, he was Norman Smith, a sound engineer and record producer who engineered the Beatles work from ’63-’65, and produced the first two Pink Floyd albums as well as the landmark S.F. Sorrow album by the Pretty Things. Not a bad resume to add to full-fledged status as a One Hit Wonder.

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