The Original Twisters, no less--accept no substitutes. I think I LOL'ed when this showed up at Goodwill. Basically, we have an independent label acting like Golden Tone, Design, or SPC. I guess Mercury Wing was eager to jump on the junk-label Twist-ploitation train.
And we know that the Original Twisters was a "fake" group. We know this, because their name sounds fake--plus, they have only one LP to their credit at Discogs. This one, of course.
That being said, the musicianship is first-rank, even if the tenor sax is featured a bit too prominently for my ears. The titles are the standard P.D. specials--Red River Valley, Little Liza Jane, Clementine, Golden Slippers. And this is how and why we know that the Twist--even though the dance was treated, in its day, like some evolutionary step in pop music--was basically boogie-woogie redux. In its most basic form, boogie-woogie equals instrumental blues, though any song could be (and was) given the boogie-woogie treatment, regardless of its structure. (It's even possible to tease a non-twelve-bar blues toward twelve-bar-blues territory.) Hence, all the boogie-woogie songbooks of the c. 1941 era. Just as one could give the boogie-woogie treatment to just about any number, so could just about any number be rendered in Twist fashion. You simply need a straight-eighth-note accompaniment pattern (or, in piano terms, a straight-eighth-note left hand).
Fats Domino did a boogie on Swanee River with his 1953 Swanee River Hop, and so the Original Twisters do a twist on the same song. This is history repeating itself. It's fun when that happens. Well, usually.
We have to wonder if the anonymous dancers on the jacket are supposed to represent the Original Twisters, at least subliminally. That, or Mercury Wing simply tossed the cover together in as little time as possible. That sounds reasonable.
Confusingly enough, the cover promises "fake" stereo with its "This is an electronic re-processing to permit reproduction on stereo players of a performance originally recorded monaurally." Yet, the stereo is genuine. Not that I object, but it's odd that Mercury Wing would promise reprocessed stereo and yet provide the real item.
From (when else?) 1962.
DOWNLOAD: Come On and Do the Twist--The Original Twisters (Mercury Wing SRW-16217; 1962)
The Twist
Little Liza Jane
Clementine
When You and I Were Young, Maggie
Swanee River
When the Saints Go Marchin' In
Let's Twist Again
Red Wing
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
Red River Valley
Camptown Races
Golden Slippers
Come On and Twist--The Original Twisters (Mercury Wing SRW-16217; 1962)
Lee
13 comments:
The twist craze was interesting for precisely the reasons you mention. This enabled record companies to relabel records as twist records that probably weren't born that way. If I remember correctly King Curtis had a hit with "Soul Twist" then some other company repackaged his old records as twist numbers.
Your mentioning "Red River Valley" got me to thinking that Johnny and the Hurricanes' "Red River Rock" of 1959 easily could have been relabeled as the "Red River Twist" a few years later and it would have worked very well.
Buster,
I was thinking the exact same thing about the Hurricanes' hit!
I love these old twist records. I collected a few cool ones at one point to make a comp, but it was hard to find good unique ones. Not sure if any of these count, but it's a good record none-the-less. Thanks!
2/9/22
RobGems68 Wrote:
Wing Records was another of the long line of budget labels that were found in department stores in the 1960's. Most Wing releases handled Mercury/Philips artists, but rarely on anonymous recordings like this one. The twist was popular between 1959 (when Hank Ballard first came up with the first twist song originally aimed at the black teenager market) up to 1963, when it was replaced by dozens of other inspired dances (the pony, the monkey, the jerk, etc.) Dick Clark took notice of The Twist when he saw two black teenagers dancing it on his show, and wanted to know what it was. when informed that it was by Hank Ballard, Clark flinched in horror by the fact ("By Hank Ballard, that guy who does all of those dirty "Annie" records? There's no way I could ever have him on Bandstand unless he cleans up his act!")and sought out to find another sound -alike singer. He landed his resources in Philedelphia with a then 18 year old chicken plucker named Ernest Evans, who was rechristened as Chubby Checker by Clark's wife, who thought he sort of resembled Fats Domino. With the massive success of "The Twist" (#1 on Billboard twice-in 1960 & 1961)came many of these Twist exploitation discs came from. Every budget label from Crown to Design Records issued a Twist album (I have a couple myself in my collection. The one by the fictional "Tubby Chess" on Pickwick Records has been said to be R&B singer Charlie Francis in disguise.) This one is Mercury Records just cashing in on a dance fad by using P.D. standards so they won't have to pay extra to music publishing rights. Was it recorded in Nashville? If so, then it would be under the production of then Mercury producers Jerry Kennedy or Shelby Singleton, later to set up SSS International & Plantation Records and later in 1969 to buy out Sun Records from Sam Philips (except for Elvis Presley's masters, which RCA Victor owned.)It's pretty competent, if generic twist album, meant for buyers who wanted to pay 99 cents for the twist songs instead of paying $1.99 for the genuine items by Chubby Checker on a full album.
I'm sure I encountered a lot of Mercury Wing at Arlan's--I remember buying a group of budget Classical LPs. I knew that Checker covered Ballard, but I didn't know the full Dick Clark story--i.e., Clark's attitude toward Ballard because of the "Annie" songs. (Which were highly risqué, we have to admit!) But I think a lot of the pop audience was oblivious to the actual meaning of "Work With Me"--just a guess. What's cool about Ballard's singers is how "surf" they sound, stylistically.
Were Mercury Wing LPs on 99 cents? And should they be called simply Wing LPs? I ask because I'm not sure--my understanding is that Mercury and Wing were two entities working in partnership.
I meant to type, "Were Mercury Wing LPs only 99 cents?"
2/10/22
RobGems68 Wrote:
Mercury's Wing imprint was originally used as a separate label for second-string Mercury acts who didn't get a release on the Mercury imprint. These were issues as 45 r.p.m. releases in the 1950's. By 1959, Mercury decided to jump into the 331/3 market by reusing Wing as a budget label featuring many Mercury/Philips/Smash artists for sales in department stores. The price of the budget albums depended on the policies of the department store owners. Some were sold at 99 cents, while others were sold at $1.99. The lowest prices I've ever seen at a department store were remaindered cut out copies that didn't immediately sell that were marked down as low as 44 cents, and either had an annoying notch or tiny drill hole in the sleeves, which I always felt ruined the artwork, but at least you were buying the albums for a lower price. The same goes for 45's that had drill holes in them during the late 60's-mid70's; they were sold as cut outs at lower prices. Mercury continued use the Wing imprint until 1971, when it was discontinued, and then was brought back as a soul/R&B label in 1995. I have at least one Anita Baker 45 on the revised 1990's Wing label.
Rob,
Thanks for the info! And I fondly remember 44-cent markdowns at Arlan's. With the ten bucks we got each Christmas, we could usually buy a pile of LPs and 45s! I think my first time hearing Chuck Berry was when my brother bought a marked down 45 of "No Particular Place to Go." Didn't care for it then, but now it's one my favorite Berry tracks. Thanks for the label history rundowns!
Oh, and as I mentioned before, I remember buying a pile of Mercury (or, probably, Mercury Wing) classical titles that were marked way down at Arlan's. I was eager to have a recording of "Invitation to the Dance."
2/10/22
RobGems68 wrote:
Chuck Berry re-recorded his classic Chess hits for Mercury in 1966, and they released the new versions of the songs in 1967 in a compilation package called "Chuck Berry's Golden Hits". Fans & critics alike have called these stereo re-makes "mediocre" compared to the mostly mono Chess originals, but in spite of that, Mercury, Polygram, and UMG/Universal has kept re-issuing these re-makes in many packages over the years, including the budget market. While I haven't seen any Wing issues of Chuck's recordings (strangely, for some reason), I've seen budget cassette tapes & compact discs of these 1966 remakes. As for the classical section of Wing, Mercury did issue a few of those during the 1960's. They were lower budget than Mercury's high class "Living Presence" classical line (prices for those at the time could go up as high as $4.99 in stereo, and $3.99 in mono back in the 60's, as they were considered higher quality for classical and operatic recordings.) Wing managed to do the trick for people with lower incomes by issuing some of the "Living Presence" recordings, as well as some of the older classical recordings from 1947-1958 were issued as budget classical albums for as low as $1.99, or even lower if the albums were remaindered down as low as 44 cents at Arlan's (or at Federal's or Kresege's when I was a child.) Of course, beware of the re-channeled "stereo" versions of some of these releases if you prefer mono only. I have a Jan August (a Liberace-like pianist from the 1950's who was on Mercury) collection of light classics on Wing (in fake electronic stereo, unfortunately. I have yet to find a mono copy of this one.) Despite the electronic stereo gimmick, the album is very good, with ten selections from the early 1950's (1950-1956 at least)(Wing prefix number# SRW-16129.) It features such classics as "Miserlou" & "Intermezzo", and eight others, played in a light classical piano variation. Speaking of Wing's re-booted label in the 1990's, I just read in one of Billboard Magazine's books that the biggest selling artist for Mercury's re-booted version of Wing in the 1990's was former disgraced Miss America, turned successful soul singer Vanessa Williams (no, really!) Many of the artists for the 1990's version of Wing were black recording artists singing R&B & Soul, so it was considered a specialty label for (then owned by Polygram, before the big buyout by Universal/UMG by way of Seagram's.) Really, a whiskey/spirits company handling a record company was pretty shaky at best, so no wonder they had to sell it to Universal. Seagram's also bought out Polydor, Verve, A&M, & Island Records at the time, and Universal wound up with all of these label imprints by 1999.This made as much sense as an insurance company (Transmerica) buying out United Artists/Liberty Records in 1967. They wound up selling the labels to Capitol/EMI in 1979.
That's a LOT of information there! And thanks again, Lee, for the music, too. Let's twist again!
After listening to several cuts from this record, I think I can safely verify for you that this record was recorded in Nashville with Mercury Staff producers Jerry Kennedy and Shelby Singleton at the board. To my ears, it is stocked with several of the top players of the era, primarily Homer "Boots" Randolph on the saxophone (I know that it is him because he ends "When The Saints Go Marching In" with the same kind of screaming saxophone riffs that he used on the flip side of Joe Dowell's "Wooden Heart", "Little Bo Peep"), Floyd Cramer on electric organ and Ray Edenton and Grady Martin are probably on electric guitar. Either way, this album does get some high marks for putting some new "twists" on some old favorites. Some of the cuts work better than others, yet their unique takes on "The Twist", "Red River Valley","Clementine", "Let's Twist Again" "Camptown Races" and the aforementioned "Saints" are actually pretty good. They recorded this album probably around the time that Patti Page cut "Most People Get Married." For a twist with twang LP, it is actually pretty good and I will most definitely be on the lookout for this record whenever I crate-dig at Goodwill and other thrift stores in my area. Thanks for posting and bringing this to my attention! MusicMan1979
MusicMan1979,
Sure! And thanks for the very interesting personnel and producer suggestions. It's clearly a very professional effort.
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