It looks like this blog is finished...

Workupload has banned any number of my posts.  Apparently, Tops material is making money for someone, and when someone makes money from "content," then that entity is presumed to own the content.  Whether it does or doesn't.

As ever, sharing for free is the ultimate crime, whereas some jerk label claims ownership to, say, a pre-1923 78, and copyright law be damned--I'm dealing with a YouTube "copyright claim."  Anyone who wants to make a few pennies from a label which went defunct in 1962, as did Tops--they are protected.  They do it with the blessings of the latest copyright act.  You and I are screwed.

I was afraid workupload might take that idiot route, and it has.  MEGA won't let me use it, and I don't know where else to turn, unless I want to pay a pricey subscription fee (I don't).  If anyone has any helpful suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I mean, for God's sake, we can't have me potentially robbing some "content manager" or streaming service a buck and a quarter.  And we've seen rogue content managers swiping material from major labels--and in rips made by yours truly.

I'm terrified to look, since at least one of my "fake hits" offerings has been banned.  What a mess.

Want to profit from material you don't own?  No problem.  Want to share it for free?  Sorry.  Can't be allowed.

YouTube allows "copyright claim" material (including PD pre-1923 sides) to be posted at their platform, so maybe I can switch to YT.  I don't know yet what I'm going to do.  I may not have any options.

And Workupload has such a charming "banned" display (see below).  Isn't they precious?  I guess they can afford to find humor in this situation.  Hope I don't get a copyright-violation notice for using their idiot image.

My big error was in not demanding money for my rips.  Then, I'd be fine.  

Lee

The Million Sellers by the Today People (Vocalion VL73868, 1969)--1968 Top 40

 

My thanks to those who have stuck with my blog--My long absence was due to two factors: 1) bad allergies (it's ragweed time), 2 the fact that I had a post all ready to go, only to realize that it was already at the blog.  Oops.  Posted it in 2020.

I may not have even discovered my error had I not found a preexisting Living Guitars Shindig Zip file in my Music folder.  "Don't tell me..." I thought.  But I had.

And today, we have the Now People.  Er, I mean, now we have the Today People.  An outfit which has two credits at Discogs--this LP, and its follow-up, More Million Sellers (also 1969). All tracks having been recorded in England.  And now you know as much about the Today People as I do!

Like most albums of this type, the emphasis is on "pop" instead of rock, though we do get Ob-La-Di..., Fire (ugh!), and Mony, Mony.  And I only barely remember Fire from its Top 40 days.  Maybe my brain mercifully suppressed the memory.  (Having said that, the "You're gonna burn..." part was used very effectively by the late horror movie host The Ghoul.)

These are all 1968 hits, far as I know.  And I vividly remember not caring for the 1968 Top 40 at the time.  But, in retrospect, the 1968 Top 40 wasn't all that bad.  I think the main irritant was Those Were the Days, which was being featured on an every-other-song basis on AM radio.  I despised the song then, and my opinion has not changed with time.  As to why I despise it, who can say?  Any reasons I might offer would be purely subjective.  Opinions, after all, are belief statements.  They're not empirically testable.  Well, save to the extent that you can "observe" that I despise Those Were the Days.

And why did they have to go with This Guy's in Love With You?  It's one of the few Burt songs that does nothing for me, including in this rendition.  However, I'm sure no one decided, "This is a Burt song Lee isn't crazy about, so let's feature it."  Or... did someone?  (Theremin music)

Fire, meanwhile, is a forecast of awful things to come in rock, though for some reason I lack much back-in-the-day memory of it.  Did my brain suppress the experience?

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Harper Valley P.T.A., and Little Arrows have their virtues, however, and I recall that I loved the guitar licks on P.T.A.  I remember an outbreak of fellow elementary school boys mimicking it.  So, maybe my memory of disliking the 1968 Top 40 isn't totally accurate.  (Of course, in real life, there are no degrees of "accurate.") 

And I like What a Wonderful World, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Love Is Blue, though I was, at the time, more into youth-oriented pop.  The best thing about this album is the expertise of the covers--the excellence of the musicianship.  

The follow-up, More Million Sellers (also 1969), actually looks like something I'd genuinely dig.  Goodbye, Get Back, Games People Play, Israelites...  But that one has yet to make a thrift showing.

And some of the local Goodwills have stopped putting out vinyl for store display--they've chosen to auction it on line.  And any sensible collector wouldn't hesitate to spend money on ungraded thrift vinyl, especially minus any chance to examine it.  At any rate, once the news got out that vinyl was collectible, this was interpreted by unsophicated minds as "Records are worth a million-billion dollars."  The auto-generated false dichotomy goes something like, "Vinyl has no particular value/Vinyl is worth tons of dough."  No middle choice--just that ridiculous either/or.  It's also a consequence of the human love of overgeneralizing.  All A are B.  "All vinyl is valuable."  Or, all A are not B.  "All vinyl is not valuable."  Antony Flew's solution?  "Not all A are B."  As in, "Not all vinyl is valuable."  True proposition.

Oh, the Today people.  Here they are.  At concerts, were they introduced as, "Tonight, the Today People!"?

DOWNLOAD: The Million Sellers by the Today People (Vocalion VL73868, 1969)

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

This Guy's in Love With You

Fire

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Those Were the Days

Harper Valley P.T.A.

What a Wonderful World

Love Is Blue (L'Amour Est Bleu)

Little Arrows

Mony, Mony

Lee

Twisters in the Night: "The Big Twist Hits"--The Charlie "Hoss" Singleton Combo (1962)

 

"Twisters in the Night" is not a reference to tornado activity: It's just terrible word play on my part.  For you see, Charlie (Don't Forbid Me) "Hoss" Singleton wrote the words to Frank Sinatra's best-selling single.  It's not every day that I get to present a twist LP by the lyricist of Strangers in the Night.  And I imagine this will be my one and only opportunity.

Be sure to check Discogs, Wikipedia, etc. for Singleton's many other accomplishments in the music biz, but for the purposes of this post, we simply need to know that between Charlie and RCA Camden's Living Stereo, we have one of the very best of the (approximately infinite number of) budget twist-ploitation LPs.  Fantastic sound, terrific performances--though only one Singleton-penned title: Ukie Dukie (The Twistin' Boy).  And, needless to say, Singleton's covers of The Twist, Peppermint Twist, and Let's Twist Again are exemplary.  And does Charlie sing on these tracks?  I wish I knew.  So far, no info on the vocalists.

The other "authentic" twist numbers are Dear Lady Twist (orig. Gary [U.S.] Bonds), Twist-Her (orig. Bill Black's Combo), and The Continental Twist (from the 1961 movie).  But my favorite track is the twist-ified Night Train.  The highlight of the set, in your blogger's opinion.

For this LP, at least, the twist can be defined as marcato 8-to-the-bar boogie, with an accent on each eighth note.  Otherwise, there was nothing new about the twist, which made things very convenient for the rack-jobber labels--they could market plenty of pre-twist material as the real thing.  And who would know?  Just grab a blues instrumental and tack on a new title.

Only ten tracks--RCA's policy for its budget line (and Columbia's, too, I believe)--but one of the finest twist-ploitation efforts of them all--again, with marvelous fidelity.  So, let's twist the night/day/afternoon/morning/late evening away!  Mid-a.m.; whatever.  Guys, get out your jackets and ties and join the young folks on the cover.

DOWNLOAD: The Big Twist Hits--Charlie "Hoss" Singleton (RCA Camden CAS-713; 1962)

Dear Lady Twist

Twist-Her

The Continental Twist

The Twist

Peppermint Twist

The Big Twist

Little Brown Jug--Twist (Arr: Singleton)

Let's Twist Again

Night Train

Ukie Dukie (The Twistin' Boy)

Lee

Could have been trippier, but not bad: The Galaxy Generation--Aquarius, Good Morning Starshine, Hair (1970)

 

So, um... Who is "The Galaxy Generation"?  Well, in at least four instances, it's Maurice Montez and his groovy organ.  Specifically, four tracks from this LP:

Namely, Star Fall, No Love But Your Love, Lover's Dream, and We Found Our Paradise.

The rest are by ?.  The opening track, which is quite cool, features a small orchestra, whereas Good Morning Starshine and Hair feature a combo with an organ.  Those two might have made good canned music for a hippie-hangout scene in Mannix or Mission: Impossible.

The Sign of the Zodiac, Sun Quadrant, and Gemini feature an accordion and are obviously repurposed--and, needless to say, would not have made the hippie-hangout-music cut (because accordion).  Even Paramount Television wasn't that out of touch.  ("Wait a minute--do college kids dig accordion sounds?  No, let's go with the organ.")  

As tossed-together hit-exploitation Pickwick albums go, this is a very pleasant, if not all that exciting, product.  That is, no one got ripped off if he or she paid a buck.  $1.99?  Then we're getting into ethical territory.  

I wish that the Aquarius musicians had stuck around long enough to give us the other two actual Hair titles--Good Morning Starshine and Hair--but I guess their contract called for one title only.  Too bad, because Aquarius has such a wonderful period vibe, complete with genuinely decent stereo and musicians who sound like they rehearsed.  It's good enough to have merited a legit release on, say, Columbia Special Products.

As for Maurice Montez's "groovy" organ, maybe it sounded groovy upon release in 1966 (when the bar was lower), but come 2023 it sounds more like, um, hip lounge jazz.  Swinging numbers to dine by, but hardly trippy or hippy.  But at least they make good listening.

And I love the cover photo, even if it says "Cheap" in loud font.  And it's not all that bad--it's rather artistically done.  Some genuine thought went into it.  And it certainly conveys the musical's title, Hair, though the LP's main title is actually Aquarius, despite "HAIR" in huge font on the cover.  You want consistency, then stay away from Pickwick.

Frankly, I'm impressed that an entire three tracks are from the show, leaving only seven dishonestly marketed numbers.  By budget standards, that's "as advertised."  And, you ask, how many clicks did I manually remove on MAGIX, even after a pass through VinylStudio's awesome Declicker?  Gosh, at least thirty.  But something pleases me about putting extra work into a junk artifact.  It demonstrates my devotion to vernacular-culture ephemera.  Yeah, that has to be it.

DOWNLOAD: Aquarius--Good Morning Starshine--Hair, Featuring the Galaxy Generation (Design SDLP-302; 1970)

Aquarius

Good Morning Starshine

The Sing of the Zodiac

Star Fall--Maurice Montez

Sun Quadrant

Hair

No Love But Your Love--Maurice Montez

Lover's Dream--Maurice Montez

We Found Our Paradise--Maurice Montez

Gemini

Lee

This Month's 16 Top Hits--Allied TM-2: Unusually good (likely, Pickwick) fakes!

 

So, I had a post nearly ready to go, but then I got a request for this LP (This Month's 16 Top Hits) at the Brand "X" Records Facebook page, and that struck me as such a good idea, I switched projects.  The rip turned out mostly okay, with the first side sounding fabulous, and the second side sounding... well, not quite so terrific.  Some needle wear and, therefore, some distortion, but nothing too grave.  (I tried a higher VTF with my Stanton 500 cartridge--3 grams--but in vain.)

And a public reminder that vinyl grooves are much more likely to be damaged by 1) a worn stylus and/or 2) tracking error than high tracking force.  Seriously.  We Boomers were fed the urban legend that tracking force is the main consideration--the lighter, the better.  In fact, if the VTF is too low, the needle bounces around in the groove.  And, obviously, that's not good for the integrity of the groove walls.

At least one of these tracks--Surfin' Safari--appeared on a Top 30 Tunes EP, which was a Pickwick product, and so I'll take a chance and name Pickwick as the source for all of these.  And the performances are well above par, with even Safari perfectly decent.  And the Beach Boys rarely received competent budget covers, so this is a track to be savored.  Things start with the famous bossa nova hit (listen for the Bo Diddley beat!) Desafinado, which is so well performed, it's almost suspect!  And the vocals throughout the LP are competent to outstanding, from James Hold the Ladder Steady (a John D. Loudermilk song employing a melody commonly used for Jacob's Ladder) to Susie Darling to He's a Rebel to the Bacharach-David Only Love Can Break a Heart.  Though the latter is an early Burt/Hal hit, the earliest Bacharach budget fake was probably 1957's The Story of My Life (superbly faked on Top Hit Tunes).

All of these do justice to the originals, and, in addition to the surprisingly good Safari, there are expert imitations of Next Door to an Angel, Limbo Rock, Mr. Lonely, and Popeye.  Hard to believe the same outfit later dumped on us the record-settingly awful fakes of Help Me Rhonda and Good Vibrations, the former appearing on Hurrah! Pops and A.R.C. EPs.  Maybe a "Why bother with quality?" ethic had taken over by that point.

And... Here's where things get weird, as they so often do with rack-jobber material.  Namely, this Canadian "Allied Record Corporation" may very well not be the famous Allied Record Corporation (different address, for one thing).  Furthermore--and this is just my intuition; no proof--this Allied label seems related to the American A.R.C. (Allied Record Company) mentioned above (and shown below).  As in, a different Allied Record Company than the Los Angeles label.  Just a hunch, but I strongly suspect a link between this LP and my A.R.C. EPs.

Further proof (though possibly circumstantial) resides in the Premier 16 Top Hits of the Week albums, which seem to be a continuation of this concept.  And Award AS-16-1 (Premier) includes in its 16-track lineup a stereo version of the dreadful Rhonda fake.  Dual-channel awfulness!  I posted the Award LP in 2019 (see above link).

Allied Record Corporation, Premier, Pickwick, and a possibly alternate Allied Record Corporation--wow.  All swapping tapes.  Could Pickwick have been the chief supplier of fake-hit masters?  No, that would be too easy...

DOWNLOAD: This Month's 16 Top Hits (Allied TM-2)

Desafinado

James Hold the Ladder Steady

Next Door to an Angel

Limbo Rock

Susie Darling

That Stranger Used to Be My Girl

Workin' for the Man

Mr. Lonely

All Alone Am I

He's a Rebel

I Remember You

Only Love Can Break a Heart

Popeye

Surfin' Safari

Warmed Over Kisses

Close to Kathy

Lee