Drifting and Dreaming--or, Drifting n' Dreaming: Bennet Roy and His Orch.

A fairly easy rip, for a change.  I first ripped it at 3 grams with my after-market Stanton 500 cartridge stylus, but I needed heavier tracking--too noisy, with the audio breaking up in the loud parts on at least one track.  So I used my 680 cartridge and the superb DJ stylus whose number I don't have handy.  Made all the difference with this VG- LP whose pressing is the usual Synthetic Plastics Co. quality--namely, crap.  With this label group, the recordings were much better than the pressings, so the cleaned-up results are usually a pleasant surprise.  Shame that they'd have such decent masters but such lousy pressings, but I guess they believed in giving people what they didn't pay for.

Then again, we know that many of the phonographs of old didn't track lightly, so maybe the pressings were adequate for the time, unless you had good gear.  SPC probably didn't expect people with good gear to buy their albums.

Whether this LP is titled Drifting n' Dreaming or Drifting and Dreaming depends on which side of the jacket you believe. I'm going with Drifting and Dreaming because I prefer "and" to "n'."  Besides, the proper contraction of "and" is "'n'," with the apostrophes filling in for the missing a and d.

Can you imagine the Diplomat label, of all labels, getting this wrong?

I regard this as a fake-hits LP with filler.  The ratio is half and half.  The six fake hits are Canadian Sunset, Manhattan Spiritual, Fascination (possibly), Lisbon Antigua, Almost Paradise, and Tequila, which is misspelled as Tequilla.  Maybe they'd had too much.

Speaking of misspellings, Ciribiribin, is presented as Ciribibin on the jacket and Chiribiribim on the label.  They should have stayed with the jacket spelling, since its only problem is a missing letter.  The liner notes are classic: "In this age of zooming jets and super-sonic rockets, our prescription for relaxation is a delightful music tonic 'Drifting and Dreaming.'"  Even with a colon before "Drifting and Dreaming," that sentence would still fail grammatically, but what's with "super-sonic rockets"?  "Those super-sonic rockets are driving me nuts.  I'll be in the stereo den, honey."

Speaking of stereo, in addition to the hilarious essay, the back jacket contains a "Stereophonic Recording" blurb which nicely bills the bottom portion but doesn't pertain to the disc, which is mono.  A "delectable pot-pourri," the notes promise us, and I really enjoyed the 31 minutes of music offered here, even if "potpourri" has no hyphen.  I guess I should say that I really en-joyed it.

If you want some fun fake hits and entertaining filler, or if you just want to escape the maddening clamor of super-sonic rockets, here's your best bet.







DOWNLOAD: Drifting and Dreaming--Bennet Roy and His Orch.




Canadian Sunset
Ciribirbin (sic), (or, on the label, Chiribiribim, also sic)
La Paloma
Manhattan Spiritual
Fascination
Guitars A Swinging (or, on the label, A Swingin')
Lisbon Antigua
Tequilla (sic)
Stars of Love
Samson and Delilah
Almost Paradise
Billy Bailey

Drifting and Dreaming--Bennet Roy and His Orchestra (Promenade/Diplomat 2251)


Lee