Reasons to be Cheerful, Part Four

Since this is officially the day I turn “another year old and deeper in debt,” I’m going to just slip backwards in time (which comes easily most of the year, even easier on birthdays). I’ve talked before on this blog about Sixties and Seventies “easy listening” music (aka elevator music) that was burnt into my brain at a young age, and continues to conjure sensations of that era when I hear it.

You can find entries about punk artists and psychedelic artists and bubble-gum artists elsewhere on this blog, but for this entry, there are no lyrics, and it’s just “MOR” easy listening tracks that were hits and became the wallpaper to our daily activities back then. (And remain a sorta “comfort music” for those who had this piped into their consciousness.)

Most of the songs I’ll be linking to are in the Herb Alpert/Burt Bacharach/bouncy pop number category (I’ve already paid tribute to numbers like ”Classical Gas”), but I thought I’d start off with one that predates those songs and instead has a nice little depressing edge to it. It’s an evocative little number called “Last Date” by Floyd Cramer, the master of the “slide piano” who was a legendary session player in Nashvile. On its own the song has a sort of downbeat, last-call-at-the-bar feel, but when you find out the title, you sorta get the drift:



And since I don’t want to slide into a “saloon song” coma with these tunes, I’ll offer another Cramer number, this time incredibly fuckin’ bouncy and catchy. This was recently used in the soundtrack of the movie An Education (which I still haven’t seen; I found this on, where else, YT). It’s called “On the Rebound” and although “jaunty” is a word you’re supposed to use to describe people and not music, it’s pretty damned jaunty:



I’m going to skip past two of the most obvious songs that belong in the category of cheerful instrumental, “Java” and “Alley Cat,” and proceed onto one that most people of a certain age (what a remarkably diplomatic phrase, that) know, but don’t know the title of, Dave Baby Cortez’s “The Happy Organ” (all genitalia jokes will be happily skipped past too):



And one of the other songs that seeped into the brainpan back then was this sucker, which was recorded and became a hit by Billy Vaughn and Bert Kaempfert. This version has a jungle girl-themed video, so it seemed to be the one that needed linking:



Continuing on with Kaempfert, there is only one pop tune I know of to have a chart status (in the U.S. at least) that had the word “Afrikaan” in the title. That was “Afrikaan Beat,” and Kaempfert definitely led the way to the style of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, although Herb “Latin-ized” the sound.



Most of these songs are best-remembered in their single versions, but here’s a live rendition by Kaempfert of “That Happy Feeling.” The word “bouncy” doesn’t even convey the damned thing, but it must also be noted the tune has a special resonance for those in the NYC area in the early Sixties, as it was used as the theme to the afternoon children’s show The Sandy Becker Show. And what makes the vid special? You get to see the handclaps, a key part in any mercilessly hooky Sixties tune:



There's a bottomless pit of instrumentals you may know the tune of but can’t name, like “Wheels” by the String-a-longs. Then there are the songs that AM-radio listeners knew all too well, but are still as pleasant to re-hear decades on, like “Grazin’ in the Grass” by Hugh Masekela. The hit with vocals (and the insane “Icandigityoucandigithecandigitshecandigit”) was done
by the Friends of Distinction. But the Masekela original is the instrumental great:



Months ago when I did a little Deceased Artiste tribute to
Raymond, Lefèvre, the man who gave us the infectious instrumental “Soul Coaxing,” I was of course reminded of the best-known French instrumental of the Sixties “Love is Blue” by Paul Mauriat. Since I am fixated by the unnecessary vocal versions of these songs, I offer you the vocal version by Al Martino, but here is the Mauriat originaL:



On an album-cover associative level (painted womyn), here is the indelible Burt Bacharach-penned Casino Royale theme by Herb Alpert. I’m not a soundtrack aficionado per se, but this is one of the OST LPs I will dig out and spin every few months. It definitely buoys the spirits:



Since we’re on the infectious route, here’s “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In)” by the T-Bones, which was used in a TV commercial about heartburn which is here:



And if we’re going to go deep-Sixties, you’d have to resurrect
Andy Williams’ “Music to Watch Girls By” clip which is endearingly corny as fuck. Andy sang many, many of the instrumental songs that they wrote ridiculously impromptu lyrics for. One YouTube uploader maintains that the Andy song was the original in this case, but the Bob Crewe Generation (nobody calls their band the “Generation” anymore, more’s the pity) had the hook-ridden instrumental hit:



And I’ll close out with two tunes whose titles I didn’t know until recently. The first is the insanely infectious “Soulful Strut” by Young Holt Unlimited. This is supreme stuff:



Since we must move leave the Sixties behind, let’s do that to enter the Seventies, with the 1972 hit “Joy” by Apollo 100, which was sort of the 45 RPM super-pop version of the more pretentious art-rock stuff Emerson Lake & Palmer were carrying out in that era. Alternately brilliant and immaculately cheesy, it won’t exit your noggin anytime soon:



If anyone has any infectious instrumentals they want to leave links to, drop 'em in the comments! UPDATE: The comments contain a bunch of suggestions from M. Faust that include at least two songs I know had (natch) unnecessary lyrics sung at one point by Andy Williams! (The "Romeo and Juliet theme" and "Love's Theme") The Midnight Cowboy theme is almost too sublimely movie-related to have fit in here (but musically it does), and Hot Butter's "Popcorn" is infectious as hell (and well utilized in a party scene in Shriek of the Mutilated; the sequence is not on YT).

Of drinking songs and the "Aintree Iron": I'm led to the Scaffold

When I interviewed Neil Innes (more info above!), he brought up a British band that I had heard for what I think was the first time ever earlier that very day — the oddly organized site that is Pandora.com had supplied me with “music that is related to” the Bonzo Dog Band, and thus I was presented with the insane catchiness of the Scaffold. It turns out Innes wasn’t just personal friends with the members; his second post-Bonzo band was in fact GRIMMS, which was composed of the three members of the Scaffold, himself, a gent named Andy Roberts, and the one and only Viv Stanshall.

The Scaffold existed off and on for 11 years (1966-77), and was composed of a trio of Liverpudlian poet-songwriters who sang their own material but played no instruments. They were Mike McGear, Roger McGough, and John Gorman; McGear’s name was actually McCartney, and he was indeed the brother of that guy Paul. It is noted on the group’s Wikipedia entry that on their early records they were backed by, among many others, Graham Nash, Jack Bruce, Elton John (still named Reg Dwight at the time), and Jimi Hendrix.

All the above is merely trivia — what matters most is the insane catchiness of the band’s four best-remembered songs. Three of them function as drinking songs, and all of them have a chorus you can not forget. In the case of their first big hit, “Thank U Very Much” (spelled that way three decades before Prince and four before texting), I was familiar with the song, but as covered (and lyrically altered for American viewers) by the Smothers Brothers on their Sixties variety show.

The phrase “Aintree Iron” means nothing to Americans, and I found that most English folk can’t even agree on what it means: it is noted on various sites that the phrase could refer to a noted English footballer, an area in Liverpool, or Brian Epstein! In any case, the song’s chipper hookiness can’t be disputed. You do know you’re listening to something from the Sixties when the singer brings up both “the family circle” and the napalm bomb as things to be thankful for.



A Scaffold song that is both catchy as fuck and also has the simplicity of a kids tune is “Gin Gan Goolie.” And the band’s last chart hit was a sort of anthem for their hometown, “Liverpool Lou.”

The one that got me, though, was this totally bouncy ditty that pays tribute to Lydia Pinkham’s pills for women. It’s called “Lily the Pink” and a somewhat awkward live TV performance of it can be found here, but the recorded version is the one that will stick in yer head. Never has the phrase “medicinal compound” been used so musically (then again, this was the Sixties…).

When "Stinky" Met Sky: "The Mothers-in-Law"

Two posters have already uploaded to YouTube the legendary moment when garage rock burst onto America’s TV screens in the odd guise of a “hippie band” appearing on a very square sitcom: the Seeds, led by the late, great Sky Saxon, doing their hit “Pushin’ Too Hard” on “The Mothers-in-Law,” the Desi Arnaz-produced sitcom starring Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. One upload is here, my own addition folllows... (the color on the first clip is very washed out)



Now that’s all well and good, but I noticed that no one had uploaded the episode’s finale, in which the Seeds encounter a certain Mr. Joe Besser, the fey-est Stooge and well-known as grown-up man-child "Stinky" on The Abbott and Costello Show. Thus I provide the missing link. And just in case this sitcom meeting of immortals isn’t weird enough, let me just note for the record that Desi himself directed this episode. The Sixties were a strange, bizarre time for popular culture….

AM pop heaven: part the second

Continuing on from last week’s post, I offer two more hook-driven Sixties hits that will never, ever exit my cranium. First, the tale of a young lad who love the daughter of his bossman, the melodramatic and catchy-as-hell Billy Joe Royal 1965 chart-topper “Down in the Boondocks.” The song was written by Joe South, who had hits of his own around the same time. The song can be heard in in its thoroughly produced single version or you can view Billy Joe singing it live on Shindig:



And because one hook conjures another, I salute one of my fave-ever pop ditties which, unbeknownst to me, has been revived a whole buncha times. I was introduced to the awesome “Concrete and Clay” by the admittedly Seventies-mellow version of the tune by Randy Edelman. The original is the faster-paced and thoroughly awesome version by the Sixties group Unit 4 + 2 (which, naturally enough, had five members).



The song has the simplicity of a doo-wop tune with a bossa nova beat, a rock-solid hook, and blissfully corny lyrics. Little did I know that the sucker had come back several more times, including an oh-so-Eighties version by a German band named Hong Kong Syndicat. None of the cover artists produced as weird a visualization of the tune (well, actually there's neither concrete nor clay involved) as this 1999 bit of gender-bending bizness from former Dexys Midnight Runners’ lead Kevin Rowland. It’s a nice little what-the-fuck music-vid (Kevin does not make a good lingerie model) that proves the song is as indestructible as any great pop tune.

AM pick to click (in another era)

The sheer hookiness of old pop can't be beat, and for discovering these songs at a moment's notice, YouTube is quite the inescapable destination. To wit, a ridiculous publicity film for a song I haven't heard on the radio in three decades, Bobby Bloom's terminally catchy "Montego Bay":



And since we're saying goodbye to the season this weekend (although, as we all know, the seasons are staggered now that the planet is being melted off its fucking axis), I evoke this ditty, which is actually in occasional "rotation" on oldies radio:

The Sixties: The gift that keeps on giving...

Am glad the page views are growing by the week. And what pray tell brings people to this here blog — or any website for that matter? Well, the first two answers are always sex and music, but you can forget about the first one until the second clip below (then resume your unwholesome gaze). I offer you music from that "rupture in time" that was the Sixties — of course, that decade in reality ended somewhere around 1974 when Tricky Dick left office, and so we have a broad field in which to play in. And we find such odd moments as this, wherein two singers on the staid and oh-so-square Lawrence Welk Show warble a tune that I don't believe they understood:



Offering a nice cross-section of certain interests in the era, we have this poster, who has done some nice work setting girlie reels to excellent Sixties tunes:


Here’s another nice one. And another one that, yes, includes nudity. On YouTube (gasp!).



I’m assuming most of you have seen this wonder, the all-too-trippy Raquel Welch special from 1970:


I’m sure some’a you also know where this groovy scene originated, but I don’t.

I recognize Annie Girardot in this beyond-mod scene, but I don’t know what film it’s from. It is another slice of unabashed Sixties.

Pure pop: "Music to Watch Girls By"

We salute you Andy Williams, oh Tiki-headed god of easy listening. Andy had a big-time string of hits in the early ’60s, but what I have been endlessly fixated on was the number of times he “sang” instrumentals — as in, they wrote special lyrics to popular instrumentals for ol’ Anj to warble (or he just wound up warbling them). By the time I became aware of his existence (around the time I became aware of existence itself, in the early 1970s), Williams had sung a big number of songs to which they had added ridiculous lyrics. Probably the most memorably pointless example from the Seventies was his version of Barry White’s “Love Theme,” for which they simply added some feeble rhymes with the phrase “love theme” thrown in a bunch’a times. Andy had his own easy-lis’nin’ tracks that did blow me away in terms of their pure bubblegum spirit (”Happy Heart” being one of the highwater marks), but this little ditty, a lyricized version of a popular instrumental, is one of the catchiest of all. The lyrics are ridiculously grafted on but, hey, that’s the way it goes when you’re “making music to watch girls by….”



In searching for a proper link to “Happy Heart” above, I came up with an Andy impersonator (didn’t know there were any!), who mostly specializes in Fifties and Sixties rock impressions (it also turns out that venerable Eighties warbler Marc Almond tried the song on for size).

And because I’m daydreaming about the urban fantasies of the time in which I was born, lemme pass on this commercial, which became a hit instrumental (which, unfortunately, no one — even Andy! — wound up singing)



Here’s the instrumental, which was a hit for the T-Bones, accompanying somebody’s home-movie footage of L.A. in 1965 (scope out Sonny and Cher at the end):

Forgotten '60s sitcom gem 2: He and She

Courtesy of the same poster who put up the item below, who calls himself “Mr. Retro” (thank you, Senor!) we have another lost Sixties sitcom gem, a one-season wonder called He and She starring the real-life married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. The show ran from ’67-68, and revolved around a cartoonist and his cute-as-hell wife who were young cosmopolitan folk along the lines of Rob and Laura Petrie, and Anne Marie and Don Hollinger.

Benjamin is an unusual performer who was very good as the filmic alter-ego of Philip Roth in two films (Portnoy’s Complaint must be seen, it is fucking amazing!), but he is better remembered by fans for his sci-fi turns in Westworld(1973) and the cult sitcom Quark (1977). I think he actually gave his best performance as the scumbag husband in Frank and Eleanor Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). He has worked as a director for the past quarter-century, but hasn't ever really lived up to the promise of his first two pics (My Favorite Year and Racing with the Moon). Prentiss made her debut as an attractive ingenue in Where the Boys Are but is best known for The Stepford Wives (1975).

The show features one of my all-time fave character guys, Kenneth Mars, who was the once and future Teuton from Mel Brooks’ classic Producers and Young Frankenstein, and the best-ever guest from the tip-top Fernwood 2-Night (the only guy who made the unflappable Martin Mull and Fred Willard start to break up on camera).

The whole damn thing is stolen, though, by Jack Cassidy as uber-ham Oscar North, a preening TV actor playing “Jet Man,” the character created by Benjamin. Cassidy was quite a show-biz pro, who is seen to best advantage in this clip from Dinah! doing a song used on SCTV as a theme for the Jackie Rogers Jr. character, “She Loves Me,” from the B’way play of the same name. It’s often been noted that Cassidy’s turn on He and She was the precursor to Ted Baxter on MTM.

Aaaaaaand, just in case you were wondering how was behind such the show, it’s the exact same team that did The Good Guys: producer/scripter Leonard Stern (also writer Arne Sultan, his cohort from Get Smart; Jerry Fielding did the music and Reza Badiyi put together the cute-as-hell opening and closing credit montages.

Forgotten '60s sitcom gem: The Good Guys

Fifties sitcoms are the blueprints for the genre (borrowed liberally from the radio and certain master comedians like Fields), while the Sixties sits moved into the very high-concept area with flying nuns, talking cars, goofy castaways, and sea-captain ghosts. This find is a low-key buddy comedy that I remember watching as a very tiny kid, but had no clear memories of. I’m happy to report it’s cute as hell, with some decent gags. The Good Guys ran only a season and a half (1968-70), and involved the dynamic between a down-on-his-luck diner owner (the blessed Herb Edelman) and his cabbie friend (uber-sidekick Bob Denver, fresh from his stint with the Skipper and Mary Ann). The show is charming and simple — Edelman tries to avoid the stupid plans hatched by Denver, while long-suffering spouse Joyce Van Patten puts up with it all. This particular episode finds Denver getting involved with a heartsick young musician and Edelman trying to avoid a rich rival (played by the priss exemplar William Daniels).

The show was created by veteran scripter Jack Rose (who worked on Bob Hope pics in the Forties and wound up doing things like A Touch of Class in the Seventies), and was produced by Leonard Stern (who produced comedies from Get Smart to Grace Under Fire). It's 40 years old this year. DAMN, I wish the “classic TV” networks would put stuff like this on.

Check out the pilot episode here:


Or just sample the super-’60s theme song here. The credits sequence was done by the long-unheralded director/title designer Reza Badiyi, who directed countless TV episodes of classic shows, was once Jennifer Jason Leigh's stepdad, and helped craft many credits montages, among them Hawaii 5-0 and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

What the Swingin' Sixties did to Busby Berkeley (and Nelson Eddy for that matter)

This muscial number from the pretty much entirely forgotten Roseland from 1970 evokes the great movie musicals of Hollywood's Golden Era, on a shoestring budget and with a wonderfully bent sense of humor. The guy doing the Eddy-like vocal turn looks a helluva lot like Howard Kaylan of Turtles/Flo and Eddie fame, but it's his moves that really sell the bit. Dig it.



Click here if the above doesn't work.

A rare underground pic featuring vintage '60s NYC, and one of my all-time fave Donovan tunes

Since I'm on a '60s kick with these latest posts, I link to a wonderful bit of vintage NYC footage from filmmaker Robert Steinbrecher. The film is called "What the hell is this?" and is scored to one of my extreme faves, Donovan's "Epistle to Dippy," a film that sounds extraordinarily trippy, but "Don" himself claims it merely was intended as a note to a childhood friend he hadn't seen in a while. "Looking through crystal spectacles/I can see you had your fun...."


Click here if the above doesn't work.

"Roller Girl": a definite Funhouse favorite! (Anna, 1967) (from the old Funhouse blog)

Exuberance is the only word for it. Anna Karina, bored at home, lamenting her dismal romantic condition, dancing around in a hastily assumed outfit, declaring herself “the Lolita of comics,” the “Rollergirl!” This ye-ye-meets-garage-beat gem could only have sprung from the mind of Serge Gainsbourg, and it stands as one of many highlights in his score for the dazzling pop-art musical Anna, which aired as the first French color telefilm back in 1967 (and what color it is!). The “Anna” in question is Miss Karina, who is the elusive subject of a rich playboy’s obsession — only he (New Wave stalwart Jean-Claude Brialy) is too dim to realize she works right in his own photography studio…. I was quite proud to present the U.S. TV premiere of clips from this mind-warping delight on Media Funhouse a few years back, and I’m equally proud to present the Internet debut of subtitled clips from this unjustly neglected bit of pure Sixties joy. Clips from the film do appear on YouTube in the original French, but I was lucky enough to acquire a subtitled copy of the film, so those who do not understand French can follow along with Serge’s wonderfully dippy pop lyrics. Other songs from the film display his songwriting skills to more refined effect, but this little number is perhaps his most rockin’ ye-ye tune, interpreted by a goddess of the New Wave, Ms. Anna Karina. Best known for her transcendent appearances in the films of Godard, she was split from Uncle Jean by the time this film appeared (she looks radiant here, but director Pierre Koralnick couldn’t match the evenly-lit, god-does-she-look-beautiful close-ups of her onetime husband/genius). Anna is instantly loved by those who see it, but it’s been barely seen on these shores — to date, no American distributor has ever acquired it, and I know of no theatrical screenings in the U.S. All the more reason to spread the word — this is a musical I never, ever seem to grow tired of.



Click here if the above doesn't work.

One of my favorite commercials, EVER (psychedelia from the old blog)

See the light, man!

I have literally hours and hours of vintage commercials on tape, but I decided that this little item should be the one I first preserve in this format [the original blog], as it presents the groovy psychedelia that permeated some corners of 1970s TV (particularly anything aimed at kids or even teens, who you’d think might’ve moved on by that time), a sort of leftover from the rupture that was the Sixties. This commercial aired in the mid-1970s (or so says the narrator of this commerial-comp, the dubiously-named David Leisure) and it engrained itself into my childhood consciousness. It obviously is modeled on the Peter Max artwork that was literally every-freakin’-where during the early ’70s (up to and including the NYC phone books, which all featured covers by PM — anybody remember those?). My animation and psychedelia-minded chums would of course want me to note that Max was popularizing the super-psych style of art masterminded by Heinz Edelmann who developed the designs for Yellow Submarine. I still hold this to be my personal fave ’70s ad (the visuals are what burnt into my brain, but that catchy song has never left it either), but did discover that another intrepid collector produced an earlier Seven-Up “trip” commercial, and deposited it on the all-inclusive (until the hammer comes down) YouTube:
Click here.

I of course ain’t endorsin’ 7-Up by putting this up, that goes without saying. I’d also note in closing that the Elvis-impersonator voice of course preceded the King’s kick-off, so we can mark this up to the era (all through the 1960s and ’70s) where celebrity impersonations were used all the time in TV ads.


Click here if the above doesn't work.

Obscure psychedelia, scored by Syd and the Floyd (the number 1 most-viewed post on the old Funhouse blog)

In reviewing the material I’ve got on a certain Deceased Artiste, namely Roger Barrett (aka Syd the Madcap), I found this short film on a Floyd compilation tape. It’s called San Francisco, and was made in 1968 by Anthony Stern (the assistant director on Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967). The soundtrack is composed of an alternate take of “Interstellar Overdrive” from the band’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I’m pretty sure viewing this on a computer could induce either a mind-roasting trip or pure insanity. The images are pure history, but the film is primarily a sensual assault. I’ve opted to upload the last third or so of the pic, when things settle down to a very nice little get-together. The girl who moves around topless of course makes this clip a no-no on our fave little clip-commune, YouTube.com. Settle back, and enjoy the ride.


There were some fascinating comments that were made about this clip on YouTube, with one or two folks claiming the take of the song used was in fact after Syd left the band, but then other folks would respond with the exact session date, at which Syd was indeed in attendance.


The version below is missing the naked hippie chick. If I find a place to freely upload the uncensored version, it will appear again! In the meantime, a little mindwarp is better than no mindwarp at all....


Click here if the above doesn't work.