Sunday Jun 07, 2020
Beatles Christmas Records, CB Radio Songs, and Bill Cosby's Tetragrammaton Label
Beatles Christmas Records 1963-1965
The Free Design - Shut Your Mouth (It’s Christmas) (1968)
Sonny Cash - Merry Christmas Polka
The Free Design - Christmas Is The Day (1968)
Akim & Teddy - Santa Claus is a Black Man (1973)
Unknown - Rocking Disco Santa Claus
Bob Seger and the Last Heard - Sock It To Me, Santa (1966)
Clarence Carter - Back-Door Santa (1968)
Doreen Allen, Johnny Collins And The Caravans - Spacey! Santa's Space Ship (1965?) Johnny Collins and the Caravans were a local band from Berwick, PA...they were a polka band and then later played popular music in the Luzerne and Columbia county' of Pennsylvania. Johnny Collins had a music store in Bloomsburg, PA and was an accomplished accordion player and musician.
Second Hand - Death May Be Your Santa Claus (1971)
Mickey Rooney - Be Prepared To Pay (If You Sit On My Lap Today) (1970)
Beatles Christmas Records 1966-1967
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C W McCall - Old Home Filler Up and Keep On Trucking’ Cafe (1975)
C W McCall - Convoy (Movie Version) (1977)
Rod Hart - CB Savage (1977)
Red Sovine - Teddy Bear (1976)
Cletus Maggard - The White Knight (1975)
Shirley and Squirrely - Hey Shirley (1976) From Rate Your Music: The roots of the "80s Chipmunks Revival" actually started back in the mid-1970s.
In the midst of the CB craze, a couple of studio hacks came up with the idea of doing a CB-based Chipmunks song. Originally entitled "Double Nickel Alvin", the song was a rather bizarre piece in which the truck-driving rodent woos a female CB-enthusiast. He lays on the charm pretty thick, dropping tons of CB jargon and pledging to take her "dancing everywhere" if she fixes up her hair and manicures her fingernails.
The only problem? They couldn't figure out how to locate Alvin to ask him to record the thing. (Ends up he was doing dinner theater in Boise ID at the time.) This is something of a shame, because singing ridiculous lyrics absolutely straight, heavy on the charm, making the moves on a female - this was pretty much where Alvin excelled. One presumes the producers didn't know how to contact Simon or Theodore either, although there's no chance either of them would've left their fusion band RowDent to do this trifle.
So the producers cast their net out, and eventually ended up with a squirrel named Sebastian. He wasn't a singer by trade - he was actually studying computer programming when he got the call - but he welcomed the chance to make some extra coin. Ironically, Sebastian's father Scooter had also recorded precisely one song - that's him on "The Witch Doctor Meets the Purple People Eater", the B-side of "Chantilly Lace".
The new singer led the producers to rewrite the song a bit, and it was now "Hey Shirley (This Is Squirrely)". Sebastian says he doesn't remember the name of the girl who took the role of Shirley. "She was a gopher, and she was kinda cute. But she giggled all the time. It was hard to get a good take, and it was kinda hard to understand what she was saying a lot of the time." Her near-indecipherability may have been what led the producers to add the Porky-Pig knockoff asking for directions to Eucalyptus Street. ("No, it wasn't a pig - it was one of the producers. Human. He was actually pretty good at doing voices.")
Sebastian eventually graduated from MIT and went on to a long career at IBM.
Mannheim Steamroller - Chocolate Fudge (1974) The label American Gramaphone was started by Chip Davis.
Bill Cosby's Tetragrammaton Label
The Fat Albert Orchestra - Fat Albert (Hey Hey) (1968)
Elyse Weinberg - Meet Me at the Station (1969) An NPR feature from 2020.
But after too many bad brushes with the music industry, which included a label bankruptcy, a broken deal and a Cher-starring flop of a movie that featured a cover of her song "Band of Thieves" (erroneously re-titled, with songwriting credits going, for some reason, to Sonny), Weinberg left L.A. and the scene altogether, eventually settling in rural Oregon, quietly making music through the '90s and, after developing an interest in numerology, changing her name to Cori Bishop.
Pat Boone - July You’re a Woman (1969) Produced by Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky, two former members of The Lovin' Spoonful.
Rhetta Hughes - Light My Fire (1969)
The Johnstons - Both Sides Now (1969)
Deep Purple - Mandrake Root (1968)
Comments (1)
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This is a wacky thing to say, but the bootleg CD of all of the Beatles fan club records is one of my favorite Beatle albums, in a bittersweet way. It is incredible, as you can hear, very rapidly, the changes they go through year by year. 1963 seems to be the only one where they have fun, and it starts to slowly disintegrate from there, to where they are recording their contributions separately, by 1968, l believe. A couple of them are actually pretty funny and seem to me very Python-esque.
Wednesday Nov 10, 2021
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