File under "Terribly Catchy": from the Dawn Eden Archives, "You Did Me Wrong", written and sung by Dawn herself, circa 1990, in splendid medium-fi, worthy of your favorite girl-group mix.

You really should play it twice and let it sink in. It's that nifty, and it takes only 4:18 for the twin-spin.

A tip of the bonnet to Joe Ward, who plays all those instruments behind her.

You or I know the words to dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of songs, but they don't just spill out of us: if we're going to recite those words, first we have to sing them, if only in the back of the mind, to get them to come out. It helps, of course, if the actual song is playing, as DragonAttack notes:

Would setting the shopping list to music perhaps help?

Danny Flores, saxman for the Champs who wrote the humongous 1958 hit "Tequila," died in Orange County, California this week at 77.

Flores, credited as "Chuck Rio," also contributed the vocal — all one word of it. "Tequila" is arguably the most popular rock instrumental of all time, with sales over six million worldwide. Flores left the band shortly thereafter; the Champs went on to chart eight singles, including "Too Much Tequila" (by guitarist Dave Burgess) and a B-side called "Tequila Twist," on which Jim Seals (later of Seals and Crofts) did the sax work. (Dash Crofts was also a latter-day Champ.)

A family friend said that they would indeed play "Tequila" at Flores' funeral, which seems only right.

Update, 24 September: Terry reports: "'Tequila' has been banned from high school pep band repertoires here since 1998. That old zero-tolerance thing, doncha know." Sheesh.

Number 3, Abbey Road, St John's Wood was originally a 16-room Georgian townhouse; EMI bought it in 1929 and spent two years turning it into a recording studio. By the time George Martin arrived in 1950, doing mostly comedy records for EMI's Parlophone label, it was already well established. But the Beatles, with Martin at the helm, made it a household word, enough to spur EMI to change the name of the facility officially to Abbey Road Studios.

If, like me, you bought everything the Beatles put out and wondered just how the hell they did it, bits and pieces of the story have been coming out for years, and some of the unreleased tapes surfaced on Anthology. But what I wanted was a frighteningly-detailed look at the band's modus operandi and how it intersected with Martin's own ideas on record production.

And now I'll get it. Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, is out now, and it promises "a detailed look at every piece of studio gear used, full explanations of effects and recording processes, and an inside look at how specific songs were recorded." For someone like me who suspects that the Beatles would never have become icons of an age were it not for whatever alchemy was going on at Number 3, this book promises to be somewhere between guidebook and grimoire. At $100, it's pricey, but the best reference works always are, and as Paul used to say, money can't buy me love. (And yes, I know: the basic tracks for "Can't Buy Me Love" were laid down, not at Number 3, but at EMI's Pathé Marconi facility in Paris.)

Crank it loud when I'm gone:

"Every Breath You Take"? Seriously? Has anyone ever actually listened to this song? Sting supposedly once said it was a metaphor for government surveillance, and I want dead family members watching me about as much as I want Alberto Gonzales watching me, which is to say Not Much.

Inasmuch as I am aging at an appalling rate — one whole year every twelve months or so — it's probably time for me to pick out a playlist to celebrate my own demise. I think it ought to have things like this:

• (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones
  
• Mystery Train - Elvis Presley
  
• 7 Rooms of Gloom - Four Tops
  
• No More Mr. Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
  
• When I'm Gone - Brenda Holloway
  

And I'd be much obliged if someone dug up Nat "King" Cole's "That Sunday, That Summer." It bears no actual resemblance to life as I know it — but oh, how I wish it did.

In the 1960s and 1970s, audio manufacturers played games with specifications, because they perceived that what hi-fi buyers of the time wanted was Really Good Numbers. Eventually the FTC stuck its beak into the proceedings and decreed a standard for power output: that "280-watt" amplifier would become "42 watts RMS per channel, all channels driven, 20-20,000 Hz, ± 2 dB, 0.5% THD, 8 ohms." As with other Federally-approved numbers — cf. "EPA city mileage" — this tells you some things and doesn't tell you others. This particular amp sits in my living room. If I fed it nothing but sine waves, I'd presumably get exactly the numbers the Feds ordered. Music, however, isn't continuous tones: it's peaks and valleys. And for very brief peaks, the box might actually deliver more than 42 watts: as much as 70, in fact. Given that this is a four-channel amplifier, you can multiply 70 x 4 and suddenly there's that "280" rating. But that rating, too, conceals a lot: mostly, that the difference between 70 watts and 42 watts is only about 1.66 dB. And none of those numbers will tell you what you really want to know, which is "How does it sound?"

Back then, there were two markets for sound equipment: hi-fi and lo-fi. Today there are three: Real Crap, Average Crap, and Hideously Expensive But Good. A catalog from a dealer catering to the latter arrived this past week, and its cover photo tells the story: a rack of gear that cost as much as my house, off to the side a tube-powered amplifier, and seated off to the right, a fashion model, presumably expensively dressed, her expression suitably dreamy. I'd hazard a guess that guys who blow $100k on audio gear probably might not date a lot, but not being a member of this class, I could be wrong, and besides, the young lady is quite lovely, which tends to mess with my capacity to rationalize.

And I have to admit, I like the idea of a $13,000 turntable. (Tonearm sold separately.) At the very least, it hews to the idea that the closer you get to Utter Perfection, which of course is denied us mere mortals, the faster the price goes up, a characteristic found in most other activities as well. Most of those dollars seem to have gone into making sure that no stray vibrations of any sort find their way to the stylus and thus into your speakers, a laudable goal. But still: thirteen thousand dollars? I paid $12,400 for a car this past summer. (Don't ask me about its alleged "200-watt" audio system.)

I must disclose here that some of the accessories in this catalog are items I actually own, and there are a couple of them I could see adding to the arsenal, had I a few zillion dollars to spare; this gizmo, for instance, actually de-warps records, assuming you haven't done something foolish like leave them in the sun. And that amplifier of mine is now thirty-one years old, ready for banishment to the dreaded Auxiliary System. I doubt, however, that I'm going to put out five or six digits for new sound equipment: contemporary CDs are mastered for Maximum Loud, and the hell with dynamic range; most of my other new acquisitions are MP3s and/or AACs, which are compressed anyway; and how much good will the finest equipment do for a scratchy old 45? (Dave Marsh once said that the sound of Gary "U.S." Bonds' "Quarter to Three" possessed "peculiar unity": "I've played it on stereo systems ranging from $49.95 to $10,000, and the equipment makes no difference.") Of course, should someone discover that high-end audio does in fact enhance one's ability to lure beautiful women in short black dresses into one's home, I'll grit my teeth and write the check.

I think the last year I followed the pop charts to any great extent was 1986, after which I decided that I really didn't care anymore. And I don't think it was my age, which was thirty-three, so much as the sheer boredom that oozed out of pop radio back then. The ooze has since been supplemented by waste, sometimes toxic, which hasn't exactly encouraged me to come back to the dial; I haven't had a real Favorite Single of the Year since Alanis' "You Oughta Know", which wasn't even released as a single at first.

I still haven't gone back to the radio, but them thar Intarwebs have made finding music a lot more interesting, and I've even got a possible Favorite Single for this year, and it hasn't even been released yet: "Rehab," a glorious Sixties-soul tune by Amy Winehouse, who wasn't even thought of in the 1960s. (She's only twenty-three.) For now, presumably until someone finds out it's there, you can see and hear it on YouTube. I give this one an easy 90; as reworked Sixties soul goes, this might be the best I've heard since Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," which came out in (yes!) 1986.

Someone, I forget the name, once said that the essence of rock and roll was "happy songs about sad things," and I filed that away with "jumbo shrimp" and all the other oxymoronic things I'd heard — until the day I realized that those premises weren't contradictory at all.

Exhibit A: The Moody Blues, "Your Wildest Dreams," 1986. Full of bright synth bits, decidedly upbeat, and a major downer:

That second line, of course, is "once when you were mine."

The answer to this, oddly, had come out seven years earlier: the Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes," arguably the best thing either Michael McDonald or Kenny Loggins ever had anything to do with. And bouncy and upbeat as it is, the answer is no, she never gives him a second thought:

Still makes me think twice, even today.

The lovely and talented Dawn Eden dropped this bombshell on me today:

I looked askance at this, but duly fished the 45 out of the shelf and moved the speed lever over, and by gum, it's true: I'm half-tempted to pass this off to someone as a Pet Sounds outtake.

If you're looking askance at this, here's the last half of the song, picking up at the bridge.

And here's the kicker: Ward (real name Jackie; "Robin" was her daughter's name) was obviously too old to be singing about teenage romance, so the producers (Perry Botkin, Jr. and Gil Garfield, who also wrote it) sped up the tape and released the faster version, going for a "younger" sound. Obviously they didn't speed it up to the extent that I slowed it down, but stuff like this really makes you wonder, and if this disc didn't say "9-63" right there on the label — a lot of Dot 45s include the release date in small print — well, let's not go there.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you, Dawn.

Addendum: "Wonderful Summer" at the correct speed, while it lasts, at YouTube.

Poppy Mom loves her iPod, up to a point:

But (isn't there always a "but"?):

I'm still doing mixes, but I can see the rest of this somewhere in my own future. After all, the turntable is in a different room from the computer, and it's not like I can just click on a vinyl LP and expect a favored track to start.

Perhaps I should consider this a warning?

Zimmerman wasn't exactly wroth, but he was definitely perplexed. He didn't mind so much when somebody called "Bobby the Poet" put out a Hardly-Worthit version of "Positively White Christmas" or something like that, and he admitted to a guffaw or two when that Weird Al guy ran backwards and forwards at the same time. In the same song, yet.

But he didn't quite know what to make of Chastity Rome-Sick Blues. Okay, the girl was way cute, if a tad fumble-fingered, and she looked the part. (Johanna? Forget those visions.) Besides, whoever heard of a music video made to promote a book? He shook his head in amazement and pressed the Watch Again button. "Funny," he finally said. "And it beats the hell out of watching parking meters."

Venomous Kate is looking for the 50 Most Depressing Songs, apparently to inspire her upcoming novel. Please feel free to make recommendations to her.

I suggested Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted," which is a world-class downer, but I didn't mention this: at one time the song contained a spoken-word intro which was perhaps intended to set the mood, but which didn't make it into the version released to the general public. After listening to it, I don't miss it at all:

Somebody, maybe Berry Gordy himself, heard that and thought it was just too much.

This isn't quite an isolated incident: right before the last verse of the Shangri-Las' heartrending "I Can Never Go Home Anymore," at about the 2:30 point, Mary Weiss originally half-cried, half-whispered, "Listen, I'm not finished." The line was mixed out of the 45 and wasn't heard again for decades. (And this, too, is a Depressing Song, what with mother dying and runaway daughter contrite.)

Still, if we want Serious Discomfort in a pop tune, we call upon King Crimson, which in its first two albums was wont to work up implausible titles like "'Epitaph' including 'March for No Reason' and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'," from which we extract this example of finely-crafted angst:

This might be laughable were it not so perfectly orchestrated: the song (which runs over eight and a half minutes, with only one more verse and a repeat of the verse/chorus above) is carefully calculated to resonate against your last nerve, making seemingly-adolescent rubbish into a true Tale of Terror.

(Lyricist Pete Sinfield, incidentally, is responsible for the unofficial name of my workplace, but that's another tale of terror story.)

Paul Mauriat, the orchestra leader whose 1968 recording of "Love Is Blue" is, to these ears, the second-best French instrumental ever, has died in Perpignan, in southern France near the Spanish border.

Born in Marseille in 1925, Mauriat led his own band during the 1940s, subsequently working with Charles Aznavour and honing his own reputation as a classical pianist. Maintenance of that reputation perhaps led him to release his pop records, starting in 1957, under various pseudonyms; in 1962, as "Del Roma," he got his first hit as a composer, cowriting (with Franck Pourcel and lyricist Jacques Plante) "Chariot," a massive hit for Petula Clark. (The next year, an English-language version was a smash in the US for Little Peggy March, under the title "I Will Follow Him.")

You might figure from that particular example that Mauriat was an exponent of strong melodies, and let the words come in where they will, and you'd be correct. Pierre Cour's lyrics to "L'Amour est Bleu," first sung by Vicky Leandros at the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest — it placed fourth — were clearly secondary to André Popp's music, and when Mauriat recorded it in 1968, he cast it as a sort of neo-Baroque string piece with harpsichord accents. It sold zillions on the Continent and (as Philips 40495) made #1 in the States, the fifth-biggest instrumental, as Casey Kasem says, of the Rock Era. I'm on my third copy of the single.

Starting with Blooming Hits, the LP containing "Love Is Blue," the next few Mauriat album covers, at least in the US, could be described as Blatantly Sexy, peaking with the late-'68 Mauriat Magic, which produced two minor singles: "Même si tu revenais," otherwise known as "Love in Every Room," and a version of John Phillips' "San Francisco," which you remember with Scott McKenzie advising you to wear some flowers in your hair.

Mauriat also built a name for himself in the Far East, signing with the Japanese Pony Canyon label in 1994 and touring in Japan as late as 1998. His orchestra, still bearing his name, continues to perform. "Love Is Blue," to my knowledge, has never gone out of print, and Blooming Hits was just reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music.

And that first-best French instrumental? Right here.

Trini and I were talking about Gustav Holst's infamous suite The Planets yesterday — apparently she'd played about three-sevenths of it in band, back in the day — and last night, rummaging through a box of tapes, I found a Deutsche Grammophon cassette, circa 1981, with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

And it was perfectly dreadful: Karajan's tempi struck me as either too fast or too slow, the orchestra sounded disconnected, and DG's recording, though identified as "digital," was below par. For a moment, I wondered if maybe I'd overestimated this piece all these years.

So today I went back to my record rack, where I turned up a 1967 LP by Sir Adrian Boult (Angel S 36420, for those keeping score) with the New Philharmonia, and I remembered why I'd been so fond of The Planets when first I'd heard it in the early Seventies. Boult recorded the suite five times, if I remember correctly, and this was his fourth; in the 1990s, when I looked for it on CD, what I usually found was his 1978 recording (when Sir Adrian was 90 years old), which had slightly better sonics but ultimately less impact.

It occurs to me that this would be a nice workout for Gwendolyn's vaunted Bose stereo, which does seem to be more impressive with classical music than with pop-rock stuff, so I'm wondering if there might be even better recordings of The Planets out there. I am not considering any post-2000 recording which incorporates Colin Matthews' add-on eighth movement ("Pluto: The Renewer"), not because of any particular animus toward Pluto, which I think got screwed out of its planetary status, but because I think Holst's original "Neptune" ending, with the instruments fading and the choir diminuendo, is just about perfect as is.

Of course, should EMI choose to reissue the 1967 Boult, the decision is made. (And yes, I could rip my original LP, and it would sound fairly decent, occasional crackles notwithstanding, but given the amount of time it takes me to do a really good vinyl rip, even a full-price CD starts to look pretty darn inexpensive.)

While I was digging around in the archives for that Karajan version of The Planets, I happened upon an unsolicited mix tape I had done for someone back in 2001 but never actually got around to sending out.

There was a completed J-card in the box, identifying it as one of mine; I figured it had been played once, for quality-control purposes, then stuck away on a shelf, from which it was swept into a box, packed away, and completely forgotten.

I resolved not to read the track listings on the card, and schlepped the tape out to the car, where it's being played during the daily commute this week. After hearing about half of it so far, I have to tell you, I made some pretty damned good mix tapes in those days, and this one, on a good Type II tape with 70µs equalization and Dolby B, clearly lived up to my standards.

That's what it says on her MySpace Music page.

One thing she has in abundance, though, is perspective. I found this on her MySpace blog:

I should point out here that I didn't see this until after I'd bought Shannon's self-released CD Brainstorms, which contains 11 songs that are at least slightly meaningful and definitely catchy. And she would have won me over just from the chorus of "Don't Be Beautiful":

It probably doesn't help her cause that she lives "a drama-free, abnormally normal life," which is seriously déclassé these days: a surprisingly-large number of people seem to crave All Angst, All The Time. Not I. Shannon Thomas is way young — I probably have dinnerware older than she is — but she's made a fan of me.

(Oh, and on Brainstorms, the sticks — and the other instrumentation, except for Shannon's piano — are wielded by John Conrad of Self-Titled Entertainment in Tulsa. And Conrad plays a pretty good drum, even if it's digital.)

From earlier this month, regarding Gustav Holst's suite The Planets:

Trini poked around the Web for a while, then pointed me to a vendor offering a discontinued 1998 EMI disc (66934) which contained Holst's Egdon Heath and his ballet from The Perfect Fool, conducted by Previn — and a complete Boult Planets. The 1967 Boult Planets. Link was sent, Visa was proffered, disc was shipped.

When I opened up the bag yesterday, I stared at it in disbelief: it's not the Holy Grail, exactly, but what do you say when what you've always wanted suddenly shows up out of the blue?

Besides that, I mean.

In 1979, the Musical Heritage Society (remember them?), then at 1991 Broadway in New York, issued an LP (MHS 1060, licensed from the French label Erato) with not one, but three, pieces by Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706).

I bring this up because while I have to agree with Rob Pavonian's premise here, I'm not quite sure the "one-hit wonder" tag is appropriate, since there are plenty of recordings of Pachelbel's Musicalische Ergötzung out there.

Then again, I preferred Zager and Evans' "Mr. Turnkey" to "In the Year 2525," so have your grains of salt handy.

(Via I See Invisible People.)

When I was ten years old, one of the most compelling records I'd ever heard jumped onto the radio and demanded my attention. Matt Lucas, a name I hadn't heard before, had taken a song I had heard before — "I'm Movin' On," by the country legend Hank Snow — and turned it into a wild rockabilly jump which, I said, many years later, "simulated the song's railroad train at least as successfully as, say, Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231."

Lucas eventually found that quote on the Web, perhaps found it amusing, and over the next couple of years, let me in on what he was up to. Most recently, it was cutting a bunch of tracks in Chicago with a solid backing band and some genuine legends, including guitarist James Burton and harpist Charlie Musselwhite. Lucas says there's enough stuff in the can for a second CD, so I figure if I want to hear it, I should encourage sales of the first, issued by Ten-O-Nine Records as Back in the Saddle Again.

Which is no problem for me, since it's a damned fine album. Starting — well, actually, finishing — with that Gene Autry chestnut, Lucas has put out a sterling example of what the pigeonholers insist on calling "roots" music, some of it country, some of it blues, some of it pop, and all of it performed with verve. Lucas is past 70 now, but he can still belt out a tune, and it's no surprise: after all, he's been doing this sort of thing for fifty years or so. Some of the delights: Lucas' own update of his 1963 hit, now called "Still Movin' On"; the bluesy take on Jimmy Reed's "Little Rain"; Burton's gritty guitar on "Little Sister," the Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman Elvis hit from way back when, and solo on Ike Turner's "Cuban Getaway"; the shuffle that turns out to be "Sheik of Araby". (Don't laugh. Even the Beatles did this one, in their audition for Decca Records before their eventual signing to EMI/Parlophone.)

I did miss hearing Matt on the drums, but he says the session engineer wasn't quite prepared for a drummer who also sings. Not to worry: Jon Hiller knows his way around this stuff. The production is clean without being sterile, and the energy never flags. Pour yourself a cold one, then pop Back in the Saddle Again into your CD player. I bet even your beer will taste better.

Nowadays it's all bar-coded, but in the days of wine and vinyl, records were catalogued with numbers that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn't. In fact, I once vowed that if I ever owned a record label, I would number its releases according to the Fibonacci series, a notion I abandoned when it became obvious that the second release, like the first, would be #1, and the third would perforce be #2. Besides, avoiding giving a record the number 1 was a standard practice, if only because it was a dead giveaway to the guy at the radio station who might or might not play your record that your label was brand-new and therefore the chances of your having a hit were fairly minimal.

Some curiosities I've noticed over the years:

• Dave Marsh once noted that the Crows' 1953 R&B classic "Gee" was the second single (following Vola Watkins' "Seven Lonely Days") on George Goldner's Rama label, and indeed I've been able to find no earlier releases on the label, which had only just begun operations. "Gee" was released as Rama 5.

• One thing Marsh was definitely wrong about was Musicor, which, he said, was started by Aaron Schroeder to release Gene Pitney's one-man demo "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away," issued as Musicor 1002. There was a 1001: the novelty record "Sick Manny's Gym," credited to "Leo DeLyon and the Musclemen." DeLyon, I'm guessing, is the same guy who did zillions of animation voiceovers.

• According to legend, Berry Gordy started the Tamla series with 54024, in an homage of sorts to his first hit as a producer: Jackie Wilson's "Reet Petite," which was issued as Brunswick 55024. I have some doubts about this, since two different records have been reported to be Tamla 54024 — which, for Motown, wasn't that unusual an incident — and Gordy's first independent production, Marv Johnson's "Come to Me," which he licensed to United Artists, was initially pressed as Tamla 101. Further, Barrett Strong's pre-"Money" "Let's Rock" came out as Tamla 54022.

• Some co-owned labels combined their numbers: Smash and Fontana through 1964 or so; London and Parrot around 1962-1965; all the Motown labels starting in 1982.

• Stereo LPs presented all sorts of inventory issues. The simplest approach was taken by Capitol and RCA Victor: they changed a letter prefix. Some labels, like Elektra and Decca, prefixed a digit, usually 7. Columbia's pop series wound up as CL-[number] mono and CS-[number plus 6800] stereo. London and Liberty had entirely separate numbering sequences for mono and stereo, but eventually found it simpler to bring them into alignment. (Example: Mantovani's 1962 Moon River and Other Great Film Themes was issued on London as LL 3261/PS 249; the next Mantovani LP, Classical Encores, was LL 3269/PS 269.)

• In 1982, the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic group began numbering their singles backwards. Fleetwood Mac's "Hold Me" was issued as Warner Bros. 29966; the next single issued from Mirage was "Gypsy," which came out as WB 29918. By mid-1985 they were down into the 28000s. The rationale for this was to make sure that when regular catalog lists came out, the newest stuff would be at the top. Really.
  

I, of course, have learned my lessons well. The next CD I grind out on my personal custom imprint will be 111129-2; it is the seventy-ninth disc in the sequence.

Lee Hazlewood is dying, and that somehow seems wrong: it's like he's been here forever. Certainly that voice of his, instantly recognizable yet utterly mysterious, must have originated somewhere in the eternal. Even people who weren't Lee Hazlewood, which is to say everyone, somehow managed to sound like Lee Hazlewood when they did his songs (cf. Sanford Clark's "The Fool," penned by Hazlewood under the nom de disque "Naomi Ford").

This much you and I know: Hazlewood teamed up with Nancy Sinatra in the middle Sixties and wrote "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," a song so full of attitude not even Jessica Simpson could screw it up. The Nancy and Lee duets are legendary, especially the folk-psych "Some Velvet Morning", which continues to defy explanation — until you note that Hazlewood has a granddaughter named Phaedra. "And how she gave me life," indeed. Then again, Phaedra was born in 1998, thirty years after "Some Velvet Morning."

(Aside: One song that turns up on the soundtrack to Allison Anders' 1996 Brill Building exegesis Grace of My Heart is "Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder," a lovely duet by Tiffany Anders and Boyd Rice which evokes the dark shimmer of "Some Velvet Morning" as few other recordings have, or can.)

Hazlewood's Sixties solo albums range from collectible to just this side of the Holy Grail; some of them are finally finding their way onto CD. And his presumed last album is titled Cake or Death. Only Lee Hazlewood could capture the human condition in thirteen characters — including spaces.

(Via Donna, who once asked me if I had a copy of the Sinatra/Hazlewood duet "Sand." I did.)

Over at Mystic Chords, John Salmon links to a YouTube video of Alison Balsom performing Paganini's Caprice No. 24.

Balsom plays trumpet, not violin, so Salmon offers this caveat:

I'm sure such people exist, but I am not one of them. In fact, I've heard this Caprice on piano and guitar — here's a guitar version — and I assume I'd enjoy hearing it on any instrument with comparable range.

Then again, range (I'm guessing) may be the issue for some people, since transcriptions are often in a key different from the original. If you generally dislike transcriptions, I'd like to hear why.

"Hip-Hop Is Dead," says Nas, but there will always be rhythm, and for a while, anyway, there will be the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, which plays music sorta like Leroy Anderson but without all those pesky traditional musical instruments in the background.

Having paid some dues in my time as a typist and occasional 10-key operator, I can understand the urge to produce some serious syncopations from the Smith-Coronas, undulations from the Underwoods, rhythmic rolls from Remington Rands, and that's what BTO (not to be confused with other musical operations with similar initials) does. There's even a CD, The Revolution Will Be Typewritten.

Me, I learned on one of these, though I never did seem to display any real talent.

(Via Rocketboom [video clip])

In 1936, Turkish nationals were directed to choose surnames, one of Atatürk's ideas. Munir, who had been an aide to Atatürk, selected the name "Ertegun," which translates roughly as "living hopefully."

When Munir Ertegun, then the Turkish ambassador to the US, died in 1944, his sons Nesuhi and Ahmet, then in their twenties (Nesuhi was about six years older) opted to remain in the States; Nesuhi and his wife stayed on the West Coast, while Ahmet went to graduate school and sold records at retail on the side.

Eventually the younger Ertegun wanted to get into the business for himself, and after a false start, he, dental student Herb Abramson, and dentist Dr Vahdi Sabit incorporated as Atlantic Records in the fall of 1947. With a strike by the musicians' union looming, the nascent label recorded dozens of sides, though nothing clicked until Stick McGhee's remake of his "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" in the spring of 1949.

Independent labels were perpetually improvident, and Atlantic was no exception. For Big Joe Turner's 1954 recording of Jesse Stone's immortal "Shake, Rattle and Roll," there were no background singers hired; Stone, Ertegun, and newly-installed producer (and partner) Jerry Wexler sang the parts themselves.

Still, the label kept rolling on, and in 1956 Ahmet's brother Nesuhi was brought into the fold; it was Nesuhi who scouted for talent out west, and who built up Atlantic's jazz department. The next year, the Erteguns and Wexler bought out Abramson, his ex-wife Miriam, who had been the label's vice-president, and Dr Sabit. All these things cost money, and by 1958 Atlantic and its sister label Atco (née "Atlas") were just about out of it. What saved them, according to Jerry Wexler, was a pair of simultaneous hits: the Coasters' "Yakety Yak" and Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash," two records with consecutive catalog numbers and titles that sounded onomatopoeic and nothing else in common.

Then in 1967, Seven Arts, which had just acquired Warner Bros., bought out Atlantic. Sensibly, the new owners opted to leave Ertegun and Wexler alone; two years later, Kinney National, later renamed Warner Communications, bought both labels and followed with a third: Elektra. It would be more than a decade before the corporate suits started messing with the individual labels, but by then Ertegun had a bigger idea: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he founded in 1986 — and into which he was himself inducted as a "non-performer" the following year.

In October of 2006, Ahmet Ertegun took a spill at a Rolling Stones concert; while it looked like he would recover, he took a turn for the worse, slipped into a coma, and today he died.

I have no idea how many records I have that Ahmet Ertegun recorded, wrote, supervised, inspired, or had anything else to do with, but there's no doubt in my mind that he was one of the first great record men.

And, as it would turn out, one of the last.

Radio Use Only is dedicated to LP records issued by radio stations, usually a collection of whatever recent hits could be licensed, with photos of the DJs or other local angle. I actually have a couple of these, and I've got one I need to scan and write up, from right across town at WKY.

No, you can't buy any of them — at least, not from her.

Last year, original Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher filed suit for a share of the royalties for the 1967 Procol hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale," arguing that he had developed the tune's distinctive organ line and was entitled to be listed as one of the composers, alongside Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid.

A British court has now found in favor of Fisher, and awarded him a 40-percent share of the take, which is less than Fisher had asked for, but consistent with the judge's finding that his "contribution to the overall work was on any view substantial but not, in my judgment, as substantial as that of Mr. Brooker."

Brooker, who will appeal, called the decision "a darker shade of black," and announced: "It is effectively open season on the songwriter."

Fisher, who left Procol after their third album, A Salty Dog, will not be awarded back royalties from any time before the actual filing of the suit in May 2005.

Stax Records.

Just saying the name takes you back to Memphis, with Booker T., and Otis, and Sam and Dave, and Isaac, and — well, yeah, there were issues.

Shortly after the death of Otis Redding, Stax's distribution deal with Atlantic came up for renewal, but there was a snag: the previous distribution deal was truly heinous, in that Atlantic wound up owning the entire Stax catalog up to that point. Rather than re-sign, Stax allowed itself to be acquired by the Gulf+Western conglomerate. This was the spring of 1968, and after a slow couple of years, original owner Jim Stewart and peripatetic label exec Al Bell bought Stax back and began producing serious hits again.

In 1972, Bell negotiated a distribution deal with Clive Davis of CBS and bought out Jim Stewart. Shortly thereafter, anomalies were found in the distribution chain, Davis was sacked by CBS, and by 1975 Stax was having trouble meeting payroll. The next chapter was Chapter 7: the remains of the label were sold off to Saul Zaentz' Fantasy label in 1976.

And that's where things stood for the next thirty years. Stax catalog product was still to be had, from Atlantic or Fantasy, but the old studio in Memphis was torn down in 1989, and no new recordings were coming out.

Then in 2004, the jazz label Concord Music bought out Fantasy and with it, Stax; Concord is now ready to relaunch Stax as a working R&B label. Among the first signings for the new Stax were soul singer Angie Stone, who will contribute to the first release, a tribute to Maurice White, and the legendary Isaac Hayes, one of the mainstays of the early-Seventies Stax. A 50th-anniversary box set is promised, so get your MasterCards ready.

"The Old Songs" begins this way: "O, you may moan with plaintive tone / Your gormless modern tune / But I will roar along the shore / Beneath a blood-red moon."

Having tried for many years to maintain my supply of gorm, I figured I couldn't pass up the Pratie Heads' reunion CD Rag Faire (Skylark SKY 3002), and it might well be due to this bit from a newspaper clipping reproduced on their Web site:

That darned old oral tradition, always shifting things ever so slightly with each repetition; and it's not like you're going to find original performances on some long-buried YeTube clip. And I say this as someone who once bought a bunch of Mozart keyboard pieces played on an oldfangled fortepiano.

Rag Faire is almost named for one of the tracks on the disc. ("The Rag Fair was like a flea market, and took place in the Jewish quarter in 18th century London. We had to put an "e" on Rag Faire for Googling purposes.") Not to worry: it's a silent "e." And more to the point, this is an hour's worth of rollicking good fun, and if it doesn't sound like it was frozen in amber in 1706, it doesn't sound like much of anything else you're likely to hear this year. Minimalistic yet ornate, simple yet devilishly complex, these are songs that, as they used to say of a good breakfast, stick to your ribs. Try to play them early in the morning — and then try to get them out of your head the rest of the day.

About three hundred radio stations nationwide have adopted temporary Christmas-music formats, and it's really not hard to understand why: it's different from the Same Old Stuff they put out 11/12ths of the time, and the playlists don't seem quite so restricted. Everybody and his elf has put out some sort of Christmas record — the Beatles recorded special seasonal stuff for their fan club — and while the hardy perennials still command their share of airplay, there's something new every year. Some acts seem to aim directly at the Christmas market. (I am, in fact, typing this while listening to the first Trans-Siberian Orchestra disc, Christmas Eve & Other Stories; thank you, Aero.)

That said, though, can we issue a fatwa against José Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad"? I don't object at all to Spanish-language Christmas songs, but why is it always this one? Whoever is running the database for these things — oh, come now, everyone knows that computers program radio these days — needs to do some homework in the off-season.

Artie Wayne has been in the music biz for close to 50 years, mostly as a producer and A&R guy, though he wrote a few tunes along the way: he's responsible for Joey Powers' 1963 hit "Midnight Mary," and he and Ben Raleigh wrote "4,003,221 Tears from Now," an Australian hit for Judy Stone that somehow found its way to my listening post.

In 1995, Wayne was ill, and wound up in USC Medical Center:

Sometimes, though, it takes some serious emotions to recalibrate one's songwriting chops. Wayne dashed off a lyric that night; years later, he found the words, showed them to long-time friend Toni Wine, and this was the result: "I Lose It When I Hear 'White Christmas'."

Extra Muse points: Toni Wine's piano used to be Irving Berlin's piano.

And if there's one song that always gets you, now's the time to admit it.

The hardest-working man in show business has gone to his eternal rest: James Brown died this morning of pneumonia at Atlanta's Emory Crawford Long Hospital. He was 73.

Legend has it that King Records owner Syd Nathan, hearing Brown and his Famous Flames working up "Please, Please, Please" back in 1956, demanded that the tape recorder be stopped, then informed producer Ralph Bass that the song was a bunch of crap. Only he didn't say bunch. Or crap.

Bass finished up the record anyway; Nathan reportedly fired him for insubordination. Brown and his managers eventually persuaded Nathan to issue the track, though it came out on the subsidiary Federal label (as #12258) rather than on King. "Please, Please, Please" eventually moved about a million copies and even hovered just under the bottom of the pop chart; Bass got an apology from Nathan and his job back, though three years later he left King to work for the Chess brothers in Chicago.

The relationship between Brown and Nathan would always be prickly. Brown's live shows were legendary, and he wanted to put out an album recorded at one of those shows. Nathan had never heard of such a thing, didn't see any money in it, and turned him down. Brown kept asking; Nathan kept refusing. Finally, in 1962, Nathan relented to this extent: he would put out the LP if Brown paid for the recording expenses. Brown anted up $5700 and cut an October live show from the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Nathan didn't like it; it was finally released in January 1963, and promptly sold in seven figures, hitting #2 on Billboard's album chart.

I have to believe that had Syd Nathan stuck to his guns, the album would still have eventually come out. Two years earlier, Nathan had balked at recording Brown's new backup group; shortly thereafter, down in Miami, Henry Stone cut a track with Brown called "(Do The) Mashed Potatoes." Stone decided that maybe it was not a good idea to risk the wrath of Syd Nathan, and scraped Brown's one-line-per-verse vocal off the tape, replacing it with the voice of Miami DJ Carleton "King" Coleman. The single, released on Stone's Dade label, was issued as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, Kendrick being Brown's drummer at the time; Atlantic picked it up for national distribution, and while "Mashed Potatoes" sold rather modestly, it kicked off a brief dance craze.

So James Brown wasn't averse to doing things out of Syd Nathan's earshot. Arguing that King owned his contract only for vocal performances, he cut an instrumental called "Out of Sight" in 1964 for Mercury's Smash label, which made the pop Top 20; Nathan took him to court. In early 1965, matters were settled, mostly in Brown's favor; he would get his own publishing company, a higher royalty rate, and almost complete artistic control over his recordings.

Brown's first recording under the new contract was "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," which topped the soul chart and made Top Ten pop despite sounding like nothing anyone had ever heard before. Dave Marsh described it this way:

Which is almost hyperbolic enough to be true.

In 1968, Syd Nathan died. Nashville's Starday Records took over ownership of King; both labels were sold to LIN Broadcasting, which in 1971 sold James Brown's contract to Polydor. King's last pop hit for Polydor ("Body Heat") came in 1977; he scored in 1986 with "Living in America," a song written for Rocky IV, but by then the students had overtaken the master.

A couple of years ago, I was musing on the trend away from "pretty" pop voices, and here's one of the voices setting that trend:

And that, when you get right down to it, was what made James Brown the James Brown of his time: a willingness, maybe even a compulsion, to experiment, and hang the consequences. It's hard to imagine how anyone could possibly fill his shoes.

A lot of them went to these guys:

I, of course, disagree as to the matter of their obsolescence, but they do make some neat trinkets, some of which found their way to my tree.

The following 45-rpm Holiday Ornaments were received:

• Julius LaRosa, "Domani (Tomorrow)" b/w "Mama Rosa", Cadence 1265, 1955
  
• Johnny Rivers, "Summer Rain" b/w "Memory of the Coming Good", Imperial 66267, 1967
  
• Amii Stewart, "Knock on Wood" b/w "When You Are Beautiful", Ariola 7736, 1979

Incidentally, only one of these (the Julius LaRosa) was pressed on actual vinyl; the other two were pressed on styrene.

Also arriving, a set of LP Coasters, as follows:

• The Mills Brothers, Yellow Bird, Dot DLP 25338, 1960
  
• Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, That Travelin' Two-Beat, Capitol T 2300, 1965
  
• David Frye, Radio Free Nixon, Elektra EKS 74085, 1971
  
• Various, History of British Rock, Sire SAS 3702, 1974
  
• John Travolta, Travolta Fever, Midsong International MTF 001, 1978
  
• Terry Garthwaite, Hand in Glove, Fantasy F 9564, 1978
  

Only the Bing/Rosemary disc is mono; the British Rock album was a two-disc set in automatic sequence, and the present specimen is Sides 1 and 4. (The other disc would have been Sides 2 and 3.) The John Travolta album is a compilation of two earlier LPs, John Travolta and Can't Let You Go, which made #18 in Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell's infamous book The Fifty Worst Rock-And-Roll Albums of All Time, which I quote herewith:

I am compelled to point out that #19 in said book was Days of Future Passed.

And while I could mourn the destruction of perfectly good vinyl, I suspect it wasn't all that good. From the manufacturer's FAQ:

(Thanks, Wampy. These are Seriously Neat.)

It's been a while since there's been a Worst Songs Ever thread, and Scott Kirwin is running one over at Dean's World with the expected results. Scott's own bêtes noires:

What all these have in common, most obviously, is an origin in the 1970s, which some people contend represented the absolute nadir in popular music. I'm not sure I believe that, although of the twenty songs I dislike the most, fifteen were Seventies releases.

Actually, I like "You're So Vain," though I'd like it better if it didn't turn up five times a week on the radio. Back when the charts had something to do with airplay, about 500-600 records would chart every year. A station with a Sixties-Seventies format, such as Oklahoma City's KOMA, would therefore have upwards of 10,000 songs to choose from — but they play maybe a twentieth of that. Even Jack FM claims a playlist of only 1000 or so.

Feel free to contribute your own examples of songs which make you want to change the station.

Nielsen SoundScan has put out its annual results, and while most blog attention has been focused on the rise of downloads at the expense of actual CD sales, I'm looking at genre totals (figures presumably in thousands), which came out like this:

Oh, was it, now?

The big news here, if you ask me, is that classical was up a fifth, and rap was down a fifth. I raise a fifth (one drink at a time, you may be sure) in celebration of these numbers.

And here's something else heartening (figures in millions this time):

Current becomes "catalog" at 18 months: catalog becomes "deep" after 18 more (36 total). These numbers suggest a growing belief among the buying public that the newer it is, the more likely it sucks. Radio, of course, demonstrates this every day.

And Johnny Cash outsold everyone but Rascal Flatts this year, which surely proves something.

Who knew that the theme to Hawaii Five-O had lyrics?

(Well, Jalopnik, at least before I did.)

Finally hearing Love, a reimagining, if you will, of the Beatles' recorded catalogue done originally at the behest of the Cirque du Soleil guys, reminded me that last fall I'd gotten a copy of the enormous Recording the Beatles book, and it's about time I filled you in on some of the details.

This item caught my eye at once. It's a letter from Chief Engineer Bill Livy to Studio Manager Alan Stagg relaying George Martin's misgivings about EMI's new 8-track tape recorders, dated 14 May 1968:

In the end, the Beatles' fascination with new technology overrode George Martin's concerns — they recorded "Hey Jude" that summer at Trident Studios on eight tracks — and they requested an 8-track machine from EMI for the remote recording of the Let It Be project. EMI for some reason balked, and George Harrison, who had bought an 8-track machine of his own, arranged to have it delivered to Apple HQ, though by then EMI had had a change of heart, or something. The Abbey Road sessions were all done on 8-track.

One recurring story about "Hey Jude" is that about three minutes into the track you can hear John grumbling an expletive. Malcolm Toft, Trident's house engineer, explained what happened:

It was more neatly excised on the Love remix, but then we have better tools today; I once managed to edit the click-THUMPs out of a cracked 45 to get a passable CD copy, and I'm hardly in George Martin's league.

And then there's this:

Recording the Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, is available from Curvebender Publishing. "Curve Bender," incidentally, was the nickname of the EMI RS56 Universal Tone Control, a three-band equalizer with adjustable center frequencies, gain, and width.

Faster Than The World wants your vote for Best Fake Band. There are fifty nominees; I am surprised and delighted to see that my choice was (1) not running last and (2) had more votes than just mine.

You have through Sunday evening to vote. And the Monkees are not eligible; FTTW management and staff have determined that despite their Prefab Four origins, Peter, Davy, Micky and Mike were in fact a real band.

Update, 12:50 pm: Voting will close at 3 pm Eastern on 14 January.

I once wrote up a frighteningly-detailed history of Whistling Jack Smith, who recorded the ineffable "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman" back in 1967. There wasn't an actual Smith, of course, but it was necessary to put one on tour to support the record, and this is how he looked.

Up until about News of the World or so, Queen albums boasted "No Synths," a tribute to the ability of instruments we know to produce sounds we don't. With this thought in mind, and at Lynn's suggestion, I sought out the first movement of Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail (for 400 Electric Guitars), and it's quite stunning without being particularly guitar-like: reviewer Stephen V. Funk compares it to, among other things, an adagio by Anton Bruckner. Slow but never standing still, Grail — at least this first movement — is exactly what you, or I anyway, would want from a minimalist composition: it synchronizes itself with your very synapses, its motions become your motions. (This is a well-documented ability of the electric guitar, shown to considerable advantage in, for instance, the much-recorded "Shakin' All Over": "quivers down my backbone," indeed.) Composers have been working with massed strings for ages, but seldom these particular strings: the orchestral textures (for indeed they are) are simply gorgeous, sometimes horn-like, occasionally pipe-organ complex, once or twice bordering on actual vocalise. If you've listened to minimalists before and thought the stuff just went on and on and on, Grail might just disabuse you of that notion: the first movement runs about twenty minutes, but seems like eight or nine. I'm going to have to track down the rest of this piece.

Every psychedelic record ever made, according to Lileks:

Which argues forcefully for less-portentous fare. Cue Betty, Veronica, Archie and Jughead Ron Dante and Toni Wine:

Wasn't a sugar cube, either.

You won't want to stop at one: Faster Than The World is collecting your votes for Worst Song of the Seventies through early Sunday.

I am happy to note that no fewer than four items from my list of regular barf inducers made it to the ballot.

It is apparently the will of the gods that our Presidential candidates have execrable musical taste. This quote seems to have upset E. M. Zanotti:

This seems innocuous enough, even though it sounds like "jazz" and "George Benson" are two entirely-separate concepts, a view which I suspect Zanotti endorses:

That said, may I commend unto you George Benson's The Other Side of Abbey Road, recorded right on the heels of that Beatles masterwork in the fall of 1969, and easily the best thing ever put out under Benson's name. It's a classic Creed Taylor production with Rudy Van Gelder twiddling the knobs and Freddie Hubbard contributing some great trumpet bits here and there. Originally it came out as A&M SP-3028, disappeared too quickly, and was reissued when Breezin' hit for Benson at Warner Bros. in 1976. If I ever find myself at a watch party, I'm bringing this along.

Frank Sinatra, 24/7? Siriusly:

The Interested-Participant is skeptical:

Not to worry. When it comes to the Chairman, I am Board-certified.

Did you ever try to sing along with a song despite the fact that you obviously didn't know all the words?

Certainly one of the all-time tongue-twisters in the land of karaoke is "Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)," a project of producer-songwriters Norman Dolph and Paul DiFranco that at first no one would even try to sing. Enter bubblegum veteran Joey Levine — you heard him mentioning love in his tummy once upon a time — who actually could deliver this seemingly-endless string of namechecks without going slowly (or quickly) insane.

The disc, issued under the nom de disque "Reunion," was an enormous hit (#8 in Billboard); the pseudonym was then promptly retired, inasmuch as there was no way on earth to come up with a followup. Nineteen seventy-four being way before the death of the radio star, there was no video.

And then:

I might also note that hardly anyone dared to remake this song — with the notable exception of the always-fearless Tracey Ullman, who did a creditable job on her 1984 LP You Broke My Heart in 17 Places, done for one of those "all the others" labels. (The Reunion original was on RCA.)

Shouting Thomas scales the subject:

This does not necessarily explain George Martin's quandary with "Strawberry Fields Forever" — John Lennon had wanted the first half of Take 7 to be spliced to the last half of Take 26, and 7 was in A while 26 was in C, likely a greater difference than you'd hear by random tuning adjustments — but it does remind me that there was a time when I used to overdub my own instrumental parts onto favored records, and this always seemed to work better with post-1968 tracks.

(In the 1970s, I bought a four-track quarter-inch recorder: it was sold as a quadraphonic machine, but it was capable of doing some of the same studio trickery that went into Sixties hits, albeit with a less-impressive signal-to-noise ratio, and I wielded a mighty splicing blade in those days. Eventually I added, yes, Dolby noise reduction, via an outboard box.)

Incidentally, the invention of the tuning fork is credited to John Shore, sergeant trumpeter to His Majesty's Court, circa 1711. Shore's A was 423.5. (A-flat, in the equal-tempered scale set to A = 440, is about 415.3.)

Maggie Katzen has been doing short record reviews for a while now, and recently she took on this sort-of-classic:

Like the Move LPs before it, No Answer didn't sell all that well Stateside, though attached to it comes one of the weirder stories in pop/rock history. Snopes tells it this way:

ELO's Bev Bevan is cited as a source, and well, he should know, right?

The Orchestra didn't catch on here so quickly — "10538 Overture," the single, a #9 hit in Britain, did not chart in the US, and it would fall to the second album, titled Electric Light Orchestra II, to establish ELO Stateside. A version of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," amped up with bits from Ludwig's Fifth on the strings, cut down from a tad over eight minutes to 4:30, almost made it into the Top 40; the full version got tons of airplay in New England, where actual Move records had sold in small quantities. ("Do Ya," which never made it up above #93 in Billboard, was in moderate-to-heavy rotation on WAAF.)

And to think I was going to be short on material today.

Alastair Ian Stewart isn't entirely unknown in these parts: he did chart five singles in Billboard, and the hit albums Year of the Cat and Time Passages are fairly easy to come by.

But the true Al Stewart fan knows that there is much, much more out there, and Collectors' Choice Music has announced a plan to reissue thirteen of Al's not-such-big-hit albums on CD, including the very rare Bedsitter Images from 1967, his first full-length LP, and the virtually-unnoticed Down in the Cellar, which dates from the last days of the century (sorry) and disappeared at the same time as the record label that released it.

You'll notice that there are thirty-three years between first and last, in case you thought that Al was some sort of middle-1970s phenomenon. CCM is putting these out for $12.95 each, and contrary to their usual practice, they're dropping in a bonus track or two on each title.

It was Billy Joel, I think, who addressed the issue most directly:

But that was 1974; in this era of InstaEverything, even 3:05 is an eternity. I once put together a compilation CD with no songs over two minutes, which if nothing else makes for rather more variety: 42 tracks in just under 80 minutes. Radio wouldn't dare do this.

Well, actually, they would. Enter Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), which unapologetically edits your standard classic-rock tracks down to the essential stuff. Purists, of course, will be horrified. Stations, they say, should be delighted:

I sampled some SASS, and I think I'd notice that they'd boiled down Manfred Mann's take on Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light," which runs around 7:05 in its LP incarnation and 3:48 as a single, to a startling 1:45 — but it would take probably half a minute for it to sink in, and by then they're a third of the way through the next song.

So I'm inclined to think this would work better than you'd think. Try to imagine Iron Butterfly's infamous psychotrope "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" in two minutes flat. I did.

The Consumerist, generally a favorite around these parts, offers a roundup of the "top 10 worst gaffes, flops, and disasters in the history of American marketing and advertising", and indeed the cited items (including New Coke, the Edsel, and Calvin Klein's pubescent hotties) qualify as serious missteps. I take exception, though, to number 5 — the Beatles LP Yesterday and Today and its infamous "butcher" cover — not because I think the record is all that fab, or because I'm amused by the attempt to associate baby dolls with baby back ribs, but because of this offhand closing remark:

Depends on what your definition of "new" is. In the United Kingdom, Beatles albums generally contained 14 tracks; US releases usually had 11. Only six of these tracks had been released before in the States, and none on an album: "Yesterday" and "Act Naturally," a 45 containing two songs that were cut from the US version of Help! (we got bits from the score instead); another 45, "Nowhere Man" and "What Goes On," cut from Rubber Soul; a third single, "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper." That left "Drive My Car" and "If I Needed Someone," also clipped from Rubber Soul, and "I'm Only Sleeping," "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Doctor Robert," which hadn't yet been released on the UK version of Revolver, and which would not appear on the American release.

And it was this butchery by Capitol, EMI's US outpost, which was often cited as the motivation for the "butcher" cover, though in fact this same photo had been used already on a Beatles release: the UK single of "Paperback Writer."

It is, like all such lists, deeply flawed, and there's always the suspicion that there are criteria other than musical merit for the ranking. (There is, for example, no planet in this solar system where Pink Floyd and the Dixie Chicks have comparable musical importance.)

For those who asked, or will ask:

• Number of these I have: 47
  
• Number of the top 10 I have: 7
  
• Earliest: Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours (1954)
  
• Latest: Shania Twain, Come On Over (1997)
  
• Most embarrassing revelation: I originally wrote down for "Latest" Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1995), then sorted the list by date to be sure, and: "Wait a minute. Do I have that damn Shania album?"
  

Also, anybody who prefers Sparkle to Young, Gifted and Black doesn't know squat about Aretha. I'm just saying.

Nice writeup in the San Fernando Valley Sun papers [link goes to PDF file] about classical guitar maker — and actual dustbury.com reader — Greg Brandt, who's been doing this sort of thing for the last quarter-century or so and now has a colossal reputation among Los Angeles-area luthiers.

Brandt keeps no inventory: each instrument is custom-built, and he has some pretty respectable clients. (The name of the late Tommy Tedesco, who played on tons of L.A. sessions, including Phil Spector's, and sustained a solo career as a jazz guitarist, was the first to jump out at me.) Just think: Greg's doing something he finds endlessly fascinating, and he's getting paid for it. Now that's living.

It wasn't that long ago that I got around to writing this:

Don Gant died in 1987; Tupper Saussy made it all the way to this month. (It's reported that he was found yesterday slumped over in front of his computer after being unreachable for a day or so, which is precisely the way I expect to go.)

Last year he cut a new track, "I Think I See," which I think you can see here.

Admit it: wouldn't you rather hear this than that damn José Feliciano thing every farging Yule?

(Alternate title: Raising Arrakis.)

Just received: Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, arguably the niftiest melding of Sarah Vaughan and Martha Reeves available on CD. If you actually buy the CD, though, be advised that an absurd amount of jewel-case (and disc-surface) real estate is taken up by a fatuous "FBI Warning," an attempt by the RIAA to appear badass. (As always with organizations of this size, they are at best half right.)

I suppose, though, it's a good thing it's the FBI and not the CIA; you let the Agency in on this sort of thing and one day, out of the blue, your iPod playlist shows up in The New York Times.

Up until 1948, all records were singles: 78-rpm discs, ten or twelve inches across. Once in a while you'd see a set of five or six of them bound together in one very thick package, which was called an "album."

CBS, which in 1948 began selling a 33⅓ rpm disc which could contain the contents of five or six 78s, eschewed the term "album" in favor of "LP," or more precisely "Lp," which they registered as a trademark. The customers, even then not willing to take their marching orders from record companies, persisted in calling them "albums."

And they still bought singles: from RCA Victor, also in 1948, came a 45-rpm disc, a mere seven inches across, which duplicated the format of the 78 — the hit and the B-side. RCA also developed a 45-rpm record changer that plugged into your RCA television using — yes! — an RCA plug. And despite the higher profit margin on CBS's LPs and such, the record industry learned pretty quickly that there was no way to generate those profits, except in minority formats like classical and jazz, without coming up with some hit singles once in a while. This was the way of the world, and the 45 ruled that world.

So this should surprise no one:

Which, again, should surprise no one:

Further complication: musicians had long been hiding some good stuff, not on the inner tracks of their LPs, but on the B-sides of 45s, where presumably the truest of fans would find them. In 1966, Dylan had sneaked a live version of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" onto the back of "I Want You," a track you simply couldn't get anywhere else. Even Simon and by-gosh Garfunkel did this, dropping the irritable "You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies," never issued on an LP, underneath "Fakin' It." ("You Don't Know..." didn't even make it to the S&G Collected Works CD box.)

Is there a future for the "album"? It might be something like this:

The Beatles, who recorded their singles and their album tracks as wholly separate entities (though their US label tended to mess up their scheme) were very much anomalies in the couple-of-hits-plus-filler milieu, and when Led Zeppelin, for whatever reason, refused to allow "Stairway to Heaven" to go out as a 45 — a few white-label promos were pressed, but no store stock — radio stations treated it as a hit single anyway. The circle, I'm tempted to say, is complete.

Country singer Henson Cargill has died in Oklahoma City from complications following surgery. He was 66.

Cargill graduated from Northwest Classen, studied law and served as a deputy sheriff in these parts before trying his hand at music. In the late 1960s, he was recording for Monument, and in 1967 he cut a track called "A Very Well-Traveled Man." It was not a hit. But on the other side of the disc, someone noticed "Skip a Rope," a casual-sounding but deadly-serious denunciation of adult hypocrisy and its effect on children, and put it on the air. "Skip a Rope" jumped to the very top of the country charts, stayed there over a month, and crossed over to pop stations, reaching #25 on Billboard's pop chart.

"Skip a Rope" sounded like something Cargill's friend Johnny Cash would do, and indeed Cash had contemplated cutting the song, but Cargill and record producer Don Law had a deal with the publishers that gave them first crack at it. It was put on the B-side, I suppose, because its hard-hitting lyrics might have upset the legendarily-hidebound Nashville establishment.

Cargill had other country hits, though he never hit the pop charts again; his last Top 20, a track from his album Uncomplicated, was titled "The Most Uncomplicated Goodbye I've Ever Heard." In the 1980s he owned Henson's, a country-music venue in Oklahoma City that regularly drew top stars; he also appeared on the Reno/Las Vegas casino circuit. A long-overdue Cargill compilation was issued a couple of years ago, and I still have my original 45 of "Skip a Rope": it, too, is well-traveled.

(Note: It is the nature of MP3s to be ephemeral.)

I was never a great Yoko Ono fan, but neither did I understand the rather shabby treatment that she got at the hands of various Beatlemaniacs for many years: yes, she was a few degrees off plumb, but so was John, and if clearly he was the greater musical talent, she made a pretty decent Muse for him, and her own musical explorations weren't the horrorfests they were made out to be. (Well, except for "Don't Worry Kyoko," which was sort of what you'd get if you'd tried to replicate Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music with actual flesh.)

Two lengthy articles about Ono showed up at my desk this week, a new interview by Tony Sclafani in Goldmine (not on their site yet), and a two-year-old (at least) piece by Joshua Rotter for MacDirectory. (Yoko, in case you were wondering, used a G4.) What these pieces have in common is the same Michael Levine photo, in which Ono appears in a dress as short as anything sold on Carnaby Street in the Sixties. I have no idea when it was taken; it was startling, and it certainly didn't reflect the classic Johnandyoko bagism shtick, but what the hell. Ono is seventy-four now; she's paid more than enough dues and should be able to do whatever she pleases.

Well, actually, it was forty years ago come June, but these things require some lead time:

(Note: The album wasn't released in the States until the second of June 1967. Incidentally, the CD version came out on 1 June 1987 worldwide.)

Me, I'm hoping for an appearance by the one and only Billy Shears.

Courtesy of the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons Enthusiasts and Historical Society of the United Kingdom:

Of the boxes I have, the one that hews closest to this particular line is Phil Spector's Back to Mono 1958-1969 box, issued by Abkco back in the Pleistocene era (okay, 1991) for an appalling $80 list and now widely available for about a quarter of that. (Disclosure: I paid $65 for mine.) Departures from perfection: the essays by David Hinckley and Tom Wolfe (yes!) are seriously readable, but while they capture Phil, they give the actual music semi-short shrift — and would it have been so hard to toss in just one of the infamous throwaway B-sides like "Tedesco and Pitman"?

Oh, and the sound is kinda fuzzy, and, as per the title, mono only. (Then again, Spector's bounce-and-keep-bouncing recording technique doesn't lend itself particularly well to stereo mixing, though most of the hits did appear somewhere in stereo at one time or another.) And yes, Spector made records throughout the Seventies, but they were either (1) remarkably unsuccessful for some reason or (2) done on behalf of various Beatles and therefore not available for a compilation.

Nominations for Great Box Sets will of course be happily accepted.

Oh, I'm sorry. These aren't the Ramones. They are, however, in a home.

(Via the ever-youthful Miss Cellania.)

Bobby "Boris" Pickett, whose "Monster Mash" was one of the very few records ever to make the Top Ten in two different decades, died Wednesday night in a VA hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 69.

The Mash, dashed off by Pickett with the able assistance of Leonard Capizzi, one of his buddies in the vocal group the Cordials, was supplemented by wonderfully low-tech sound effects: the opening of the coffin is actually a nail being claw-hammered out of a 2x4, and that bubbly stuff is water being blown through a soda straw. Released in August of 1962, it peaked at #1 right before Halloween, knocking out the 4 Seasons' "Sherry." Producer Gary Paxton put together a whole album on his Garpax label, from which "Monsters' Holiday" was rush-released right before Christmas, topping out at #30. Pickett was capable of non-Karloff sounds, and his next single was a version of the standard "Graduation Day," which stalled near the bottom of the chart. In 1970, signed to RCA Victor, he had no new hits, but Nipper reissued "Monster Mash," which did manage to chart, and in 1973 London Records revived the original Garpax album, this time on the Parrot label (XPAS 71063), complete with original liner notes. As you might expect, they reissued the "Monster Mash" 45, which crept into the Top Ten, albeit in the spring.

And Pickett did manage one non-Monster hit of sorts: his 1975 collaboration with Peter Ferrara, "Stardrek," poking fun at another cultural institution, was a staple of the Dr. Demento Show for many years. ("Into the elevator, Mr. Schlock! Let's beam down to the planet's surface so I can find an alien to fall in love with before the program is over!" orders Captain Jerk.) Ferrara and Pickett did one more item of note, a version of "Respect" sung by the Godfather. Still, the Monster Mash was never far away, and in 2004 Pickett reworked it into the environmental anthem "Monster Slash".

TheMonsterMash.com vends Pickett material and memorabilia, should you want to crank up the ol' Transylvania Twist.

My generation? Maybe the one before.

(A reader recommendation. I have some, um, remarkable readers.)

Former Monkee Peter Tork says the Prefab Four would be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by now were it not for Jann Wenner:

Maybe he'll have better luck with his current band.

(Via Fark.)

Picking three songs for a radio (or podcast) set is something of an artform, and the best such are very good indeed. (I have a few tucked away for possible future use, which, if nothing else, will appall my brother, who did actual time as a Radio Guy.)

One criterion for "best" is sheer effrontery — who in the world would have thought of that? — and accordingly, I award props to Monty for her Sammich set last weekend: two Bread tunes, with Meat Loaf in between. Delicious, in a couple of senses of the word.

Usually inscrutable, it is: