(Fake) Village Stompers, Roger Williams, Billy Vaughn, The Ventures, Reg Owen, and more!

 

Given the loving care that Diplomat (Synthetic Plastics Co.) devoted to the cover design, it's obvious that huge sales were anticipated.  I mean, every detail spells "excitement," from the barely noticeable upper-margin font, "Greatest Instrumental Hits," to the square turquoise border, inside of which we find a blue border, plus green and blue font.  This release screams "Buy me!"  By not calling attention to itself, it, um... calls attention to itself?  Wait a minute...

$2.99 at the nearest Goodwill (better than the $5.99 vinyl over at Goodwill Unlimited), and I grabbed this because 1) It was senior discount day, plus 2) I knew that these were genuine fakes.  Meaning, except for the two big-font titles (which we'll have to assume were provided for this release by "Tony Vincent"), all of the rest are previously-issued Promenade label knockoffs.  For-real knockoffs.  The real fake deal.

Not surprisingly, I was unable to track down any previous instance of Washington Square on Promenade, even at 45cat, nor any Promenade release of More (The Theme From Mondo Cane), and so we can be reasonably sure that their release year was 1963--that these are the first (and, probably, only) pressings of these fakes.  Ye olde routine of placing the titles of two current hits in huge font, with everything else in not-so-huge font--but, for once, the LP was not padded with retitled filler numbers.  All but one of these were for-real instrumental hits.  Fakes thereof...

We get the "Promenaders" covering the Ventures' Walk, Don't Run, and the "Promenade Orchestra" with Humoresque (and sounding for all the world like a small jazz combo with an amazing Carmen Cavallaro-style ivory tickler).  I can't honestly say that I ever possessed such keyboard skills, though I could always lie.  Also, there's Josh Logan (normally credited as a vocalist) apparently providing the alto sax for a swipe of Billy Vaughn's 1958 La Paloma, and a twangy guitar for his cover of Bill Justis's Raunchy.  That, or else S.P.C. was being especially careless with its attributions.  Nah, that's not possible...

Bert Kaempfert receives the knockoff treatment from the Promenade Orch. and Chorus for Wonderland By Night, and Bill King (Bill King?) covers Manhattan Spiritual.  And the Roger Williams hit (penned by Norman Petty) Almost Paradise is knocked off by Harvey Jay, for whom this fake is Harvey's (you guessed it) sole Discogs credit.

Works for me: The perfect means by which to get clean pressings of some classic Promenade knockoffs, and at half off of the unreasonable GW price of three bucks.  Of course, had this not been mono, I'd have left it in the bin (placed, as ever, on the floor), since the only thing worse than S.P.C. fake stereo is, say, Pickwick's.  Anyway, despite my snarky observations, a decent group of classic instrumental hits, reasonably well simulated.

DOWNLOAD: Washington Square--Tony Vincent Orch.zip

Washington Square--Tony Vincent and His Orch., 1963?

Wonderland By Night--The Promenade Orch. and Chorus, 1961

La Paloma--John Logan, 1958

Walk, Don't Run--Promenaders, 1960

Humoresque--Promenade Orch., 1958?

More (From Mondo Cane)--Tony Vincent and His Orch., 1963?

Manhattan Spiritual--Bill King, 1959

Patricia--Jose Gonzales, 1958

Raunchy--John Logan, 1957

Almost Paradise--Harvey Jay, 1957

"Fine Records Need Not Be Expensive."--Back cover.  

Lee

Three Shades of Blue; Mississippi Suite (Grofe): Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orch., 1928 and 1927

 

From the original 78s (are there any other kind?), the premiere recording (from 1927) of "Ferdie" Grofe's  charming Three Shades of Blue, written in 1927 and recorded in 1928.  Plus, Grofe's "other" concert work (re Grand Canyon Suite), Mississippi Suite (A Tone Journey), written in 1926 and recorded in 1927.

I last posted these in 2020, using Wokeupload.  Meaning, those files are now in Workupload Heaven (and having a great time, I hope).  Who knows how long that link had stayed active, anyway--prior to the banning of my shares, I mean?  And Blogger is refusing to play nice, and so my 1933 image of Ferde will have to go here, instead of above:

Ripping shellac with VinylStudio has seemed like a long journey, but it's probably only been a couple of months.  Yet, we don't always measure time in terms of hours or days.  And I have no idea why I typed that--it seemed appropriate.  It just tumbled out of my Bag of Cliches.  But, yes, VS is such an incredibly fussy program (unlike MAGIX, which almost runs itself), it required any number of attempts, including test CD-Rs, until I have started to feel as if I know how to use the program.

Much--maybe most--of the problem is that VS is (to put it lightly) not designed for what I'm doing with it.  Despite all the handy 78 rpm response curves included in the software, the general template presumes that the user is digitizing his or her 1960s and 1970s rock vinyl collection.  Hence, I'm pushing the software into areas it doesn't want to go.  And that glitch I reported to VinylStudio, which VS told me it would fix?  I have no idea whether or not it has been.  But, to the music...

Three Shades of Blue consists of "Indigo," "Alice Blue," and (on side B) "Heliotrope."  As ever, Grofe makes superb use of PW's expanded "concert" orchestra, and I'm blessed with a fine copy of the single 12-incher (as opposed to the less-than-fine but serviceable Mississippi Suite shellac).  I don't have the sheet music handy (Lord knows which stack it's sitting in), but I recall that the clever shifting meters of Heliotrope were accommodated within 4/4--no Burt Bacharach-esque time-signature shifts.  Grofe was working well beyond Zez Confrey, then famous for his polymetrical tricks--Kitten on the Keys, in particular.  In spots, the band seems slightly confused, but overall an expert presentation.  And accomplished in only 2 and 3 takes (I forget the distribution, side-wise).

Mississippi Suite (A Tone Journey) was composed in 1926, and recorded on 9/7/1927.  The first movement, "Father of the Waters," was cut (to fit things on a single 12-incher, probably), so things start with the fun, cartoonish "Huckleberry Finn," then proceed to the languid "Old Creole Days" (well, almost languid, had the session not been rushed), then (after flipping to side B) the justly famous showstopper, "Mardi Gras."  I'm guessing Henry Busse provides the muted trumpet for the second movement--it really sounds like him (we hear the famous "sour" Busse tone), though I can't be sure.  Of course, the song standard Daybreak was adapted from the middle section.

Years ago, a friend listening to the full-orchestra Mississippi Suite had only one gripe about the piece--the drawn-out climax.  Maybe he had a point, but at this rapid tempo and in a smaller setting, the closing doesn't seem at all padded.  And I've always wanted to type, "at all padded."  Now, at last, my wish has been fulfilled.

Mississippi must have made quite a splash in 1926, given that portions of it were interpolated into the 11/15/1926 Fred Rich and His Hotel Astor Orch. recording of George and Ira Gershwin's Do-Do-Do.  Around that time, there was also a British recording of either the entire suite or Mardi Gras alone.  And I don't recall what that record was, or by whom, and it's probably because I've blocked out the painful memory of receiving that 78, years ago, in pieces: The eBay dealer had packed the 12-inch disc so incompetently as to leave a portion uncovered.  By no small coincidence, that exposed section didn't survive.  She gave me a prompt refund, insisting that she'd never before broken a 78 during shipment.  I figured she was either unusually lucky or prone to embellishing her USPS past.

Oh, and since I started with the weird and wacky OneDrive cloud service, Microsoft has made at least one major design change.  Not sure why--All was well prior to the alteration.  In Cyber-Land, program tweaks are often made simply for their sake...

DOWNLOAD: Three Shades, Mississippi.zip

Lee

Happy Easter, 2025 (actually, 2024)!

 

I decided I can't improve on last year's playlist, so...

Happy Easter!

DOWNLOAD:  Easter 2025  (Please ignore the "2024" on the zip title...)

Peter Cotton Tail--Meadowlarks (Irene Records)

Old Rugged Cross--Mac MacFarland--(Same)

Easter Parade--Eddie Brandt and (His) Hollywood Hicks, V: Ruthie James (Same)

Christ Arose--Collegiate Choir, 1920

Easter Bunny Polka--Eddie Brandt and (His) Hollywood Hicks, V: Eddie Brandt and Ruthie James (Irene Records)

Jesus Died for Me--Smith's Sacred Singers, 1929

Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb--Smith's Sacred Singers, 1929

Power in the Blood--The Cincinnati Baptist College Quartet, c. 1971

How Great Thou Art--Jerome Hines, 1965

The Old Rugged Cross--Jerome Hines, 1965

Unknown Choir, Word Records--He Lives

He Arose--Haydn Quartet With Orchestra, `1908

Victory in Jesus--Church of the Nazarene Male Quartet, 1959

Bunny Hop--Peter Pan Orch. and Singers, Dir. by Vicky Kasen (1955)

Love Led Him to Calvary (Webster-Gabriel)--Mrs. William Asher-Home Rodeheaver, With Pipe Organ, 1925

Funny Little Bunnies--The Cricketts, Feat. "Hoppy" the Bunny, Peter Pan Orch.

Reapers Are Needed (Charles H. Gabriel)--A.T. Humphries and Lee College Choir, c. 1959

Awakening Chorus (Charles H. Gabriel)--Same

Peter Cottontail--Ray Heatherton (The Merry Milkman), 1951

Eggbert, the Easter Egg--Same

Lee

Shellac Attack for April, 2025! Victor Military Band, Paul Whiteman, Blue Steele, Van Eps Banjo Orchestra, Ted Lewis, more!

The thing I love most about this kind of post is that any number of typos are possible.  It helps make music blogging an exciting adventure...

This is a set that I carefully ripped with my VinylStudio program--as in, completely ripped with that program.  For years, I've been exporting my VS tracks to MAGIX after establishing the response curve and utilizing the amazing VS declicker filter, with the fine-tuning accomplished on  the latter program (because of its more user-friendly design).  But, since my old MAGIX software has finally stopped working usefully (that it works at ALL in Windows 11 is astounding), VS has become my all-in-one program.  Its more complicated design has so far proved to be more than worth the learning curve.  (Until I encounter my next snag...)

Nineteen rips, with a number of them new to the blog, and others making a repeat appearance after five or more years.  New rips, all intended for my YouTube "Shellac City" channel, but not likely to show up there for a while.  What happened was that, after a period of channel inactivity, YouTube decided to provide less "support" for my channel.  It sent me a notice to that effect.  My best guess: The platform is providing less visibility--i.e., sending my stuff to fewer user feeds.  So, I'm getting views, but far fewer than I'm used to.

I can't improve on my previous (2020) description of the two Ted Lewis Jazz Band numbers: "..two weird 1920 Ted Lewis sides--the Ted Lewis Jazz Band, no less.  Fair One, a hit song by Lewis and George Mallen, comes first, and it frankly sounds like something dying.  That's my best description of the side.  It has a Dixieland sound, but it's all treble and mid-range--either 1/3 of the band missed the gig, or the engineer screwed up.  The saxophone work is awful, and I suspect it's Ted Lewis on alto sax--the pointless flourishes and the ascending chromatic runs sound like Ted's notion of clarinet playing transferred to the sax...The sax is less destructive on Gypsy Moon, on which Lewis mostly plays fill-in phrases when he's not stating the melody." 

The Lewis sides aren't that painful, and they do (far as I'm concerned) qualify as Dixieland jazz, but the editing of individual passages turned both sides into a "When will this be over?" ordeal.  Much of the problem is that the sharply-defined playing style of, say, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Paul Whiteman's subgroup The Virginians, is epically absent.

The (Fred) Van Eps Banjo Orchestra sides, from 1914, couldn't offer more of a contrast to Lewis' sides.  The acoustical audio is incredibly sharp, and the dynamics are anything but soupy.  Speaking of soupy, Soup to Nuts (the title almost obliterated on the label) contains, not only some brilliant sound effects, but wonderful (and easily heard) drumming.  With horn recordings, percussion could be clear as day, or buried someplace in the background.  Naturally, smaller groups had the advantage in this regard.

And we have the Victor Military Band, which had been presenting music in a dance-band style as early as 1911, from the very start of the Joseph C. Smith/Art Hickman period--1918--with Indianola, written by arranged by Domenico Savino, and the entertaining rural-style (for its day) Long Boy-Medley, and both graced by superb, up-front percussion and expert sound effects.

And... the blog premiere of the 1941 Misirlou version by Harold Grant and His Orch.--a very MOR (middle of the road) rendering, but quite well cone.  For unknown reasons, IA gives the "publication date" for this side as 1922.

Two more repeats: The Ferde Grofe-arranged Got No Time and Sonya (vocal: Billy Murray), from 1925, two of my favorite Paul Whitman "shellacs."  And two premieres: The 1915 Pigeon Walk and the Irving Berlin Watch Your Step medley, as expertly performed by the Victor Military Band--again, in more of a dance-band than a military-band fashion.  Directed by Henry T. King.  How I managed to get halfway decent sound from a G+ copy, I can't explain.

And my two favorites: Earl Fuller and His Rector Novelty Orch., from 1918, with Spencer Williams' I Ain't Got Not Nobody Much, a song most often associated with Louis Prima, and Wilbur Sweatman's timeless Down Home Rag.  My rip managed to capture the percussion on the latter, which (by acoustical-recording standards) is only slightly muddy.  I suspect that, minus the up-front xylophone, the drums would have registered more clearly.

And, with both Fuller and Yerkes Jazarimba Orchestra (the latter not in this playlist), the xylophone(s) and marimba(s) are very much a part of the harmonic texture, and thus not present merely for the sake of novelty.  Well, except in the sense of "novelty" as defined in pre-Spike-Jones days: As "new" or "latest."  And so we have to try to imagine a time when the Rector Orchestra's sound was the latest thing.  Exactly when "novelty" came to mean "cornball" or the like, I'm not sure, though I have a long and boring theory which I'll skip.

And the highly enjoyable 1915 Medley of Indian Songs features popular Tin Pan Alley Indian-themed numbers like Red Wing and Silver Heels.  Hardly actual Indian music, but terrific tunes, nonetheless.  Far as I know, all of them are by Charles N. Daniels, better known as "Neil Moret."  But DAHR is taking years to respond, and my patience just clocked out...  Let's just call this a medley of Neil Moret titles.  The flip is a cool survey of "familiar" tunes, 1915-style.  It's always fun to encounter old collections of "old" songs.  That's when we fully ken the relativity of "old."  And, if we're in the mood, we can extend that to the relatively of "now," and then we can start wondering things like, "Am I really existing in the NOW?" and other fun metaphysical questions.  ("If pigs could fly, would they get airsick?" etc.)

DOWNLOAD: Shellac City 3 25.zip

Indianola (Savino, Arr: Savino)--Victor Military Band, 1918

Long Boy--Medley--Same

That Certain Feeling (Gershwin, A: Grofe?)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch., 12/24/1925

Misirlou--Harold Grant and His Orch., V: Frank Knight, 1941

"Gimme" a Little Kiss, Will "Ya"? Huh?--Jean Goldkette and His O., V: bandmembers, 1926

Got No time (A: Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Orch., 1925

Sonya (A: Grofe)--Same, Vocal: Billy Murray

Pigeon Walk--Victor Military Orch., c. Edward T. King, 1915

Watch Your Step--Medley--Same

In Alabama, Dear, With You--Medley--Conway's Band, 1915

I Want to Go to Michigan (Irving Berlin)--Van Eps Banjo Orchestra, 1914

Soup to Nuts (Felix Arndt) --Same

Sugar Babe, I'm Leavin'!--Blue Steele and His Orch., V: Blue Steele, Kenny Sargent, Pete Schmitt, 1927

I Ain't Got Nobody Much--Earl Fuller's Rector Novelty Orch., 1918

Down Home Rag--Same

Fair One (Mallen, Lewis)--Ted Lewis Jazz Band, 1920

Gypsy Moon--Same

Medley of Indian Songs (Moret)--Prince's Band, 1915

Bouquet of Familiar Melodies--Same

Lee

 

Johnny Douglas and His Orchestra: "Dance Party Discotheque" (RCA Camden CAL-833; 1965)

 

Not quite what I expected, but after a little research, it seems to me that British discotheques of the 1960s--or even the U.S. kind--might have provided music which potentially could have appealed "to EVERY member of the family," as the liner notes claim.  Certainly, in providing music for the many dances presented on this LP--twist, pony, hitch-hiker (yes, hitch-hiker), mashed potato, and so on--discotheques (those which utilized recordings) could have placed the needle down on a Vicki Carr, Si Zentner, Wayne Newton, OR Rolling Stones platter.  Instead of Satisfaction, dancers might have been greeted with Frank Sinatra's 1964 Somewhere in Your Heart.  Or Barbra Streisand's insufferable People, though I'm not sure what dance might go with same.  ("Hey, gang!  Let's do the People Who Need People!!")

Since AM radio was mixing "adult" fare with the Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys, Manfred Mann, et al., it's not inconceivable that latter-day big band music might have been heard in 1960s dancing clubs.  This is just speculation.  I was there, but I was very young, and I wasn't going to dance clubs.  But I vividly recall hearing Red Roses for a Blue Lady on my mother's car radio around 1965, and since I didn't know that "blue" meant "sad," I thought the title was hilarious. 

And there's one track in this list which I was sure could not have been a 1960s hit--The March of the Mods.  No way.  But it was, in fact, a big hit 1965 hit for Joe Loss and His Orchestra.  Oh, and apparently the Finnjenka is either a Finnish dance or based on one.

This LP has me thinking of that wonderful "Dance Time Discotheque" side I featured (in February) from the Columbia Special Products set, The Unforgettable Years, which has five teen Top 40 hits in charming big-band-ish arrangements.  So, were such sounds really happening in discotheques, or were the major labels reinventing popular music trends on the spot, as opposed to after the fact?  Like, for example, Rolling Stone has done with the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting these years as a time dominated by Bob Dylan, protest numbers in general, and Eric Clapton?  I sure as heck don't recall every second hit sounding like Bob, and I remember B.J. Thomas, The Ides of March, The Carpenters, Glen Campbell, The Beginning of the End, The Royal Guardsmen, The Buckinghams, and Gary Puckett.  Rolling Stone remembers an infinite number of Dylan wanna-bes, and maybe in their multiverse that was the case.  But not in mine.  But I'll check again, just to be sure.

And just to make the point that received memories of the popular past are often... lacking.  Sparse.  Reductionist, even.  Products of wishful thinking.  We might remember an era as we'd have wanted it to happen vs. having to admit, for example, that Gimme Dat Ding was a monster 1970 hit.  Or that Tiny Tim was burning up the charts starting in 1968.  No, it was all British blues-rock.  And people trying to sound like Bob Dylan.

This was recorded in England, with vocals by "The Eagles."  The material doesn't especially move me, but it's opened my mind to the possibility that discotheque music of that period may have been more varied, more generationally inclusive, and whatnot than Shindig or Hullabaloo could lead us to believe.  Or, maybe Enoch Light's discotheque LPs weren't as far off the mark as I thought.  (And I wish I'd kept those.)

Oh, and the only written-for-this-collection number is We Got a Good Thing Going.  My favorite track: Downtown--wish there'd been more like it.  And don't miss the clever but hilariously dated liner notes.

DOWNLOAD: Dance Party Discotheque.zip

Rock 'n' Roll Music (Twist)

We Got a Good Thing Going (Pony)

Somewhere in Your Heart (Fox Trot)

Popeye (Hitch-Hiker)

Hawaii Tattoo (Merengue)

The Huckle Buck (Huckle Buck)

Call Me (Fox Trot)

The Loco-Motion

Downtown

The March of the Mods

Dance Party Discotheque--Johnny Douglas and His Orch. (RCA Camden CAL-883; 1965)

Lee