Today’s coupling comes from the stable of song-poem stalwart
Tin Pan Alley, courtesy of the
uniquely untalented Madelyn Buzzard:
Our Own USA - a fine piece of flag-waving patriotism - and its terrible, tuneless flip What Will Love Do?
But what do we know about Madelyn Buzzard – apart from the
fact that she simply cannot sing? There’s absolutely no info out there on the
internet, and nothing in the Billboard archives – TPA had long since stopped
advertising their wares there.
Her name first appears in the Tin Pan Alley catalogue around
June 1968, while the company was still operating from its Broadway offices. During
this period, post the passing of TPA founder Jack Covais but before the company moved to Florida, TPA employed a
number of sub-standard vocalists, but none quite as inept as our Madelyn. This
particular coupling appears to have been one of her final releases: of the
half-dozen 45s I’ve been able to track down, all appear to have been issued in
the summer of 1968.
An actress by the same name appeared in the cult horror Three on a Meathook (based loosely on
the real-life story serial killer Ed Gein), the Blaxploitation drama Combat Cops (as Whore #1) and on stage
in a number of plays including Twelfth
Night and Here Lies Jeremy Troy
– but is she the same person? No doubt someone out there knows.
This week’s post was prompted by regular WWR contributor
Ross Hamilton: thanks Ross!
Charles Eugene
“Pat” Boone – who has claimed to be the great-great-great-great grandson of
the American pioneer Daniel Boone - was born on June 1, 1934 in Florida, but
grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where his family moved to when he was just two
years old. He left school in 1952 and less than a year later, shortly before
his 19th birthday, married Shirley Lee Foley. The couple are still together
today.
He began recording in 1954 – managing to fit in a burgeoning
career around his college studies (he finally graduated college in 1958). Boone
became a huge (and I mean enormous, second only to Elvis in record sales during
the 50s) star: his safe, wholesome image won him a long-term advertising
contract with General Motors and the company sponsored his hit TV show The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, which ran for three years and 115
episodes. At the time Boone was the
youngest host of a prime-time TV variety show and would remain so until Donny and Marie Osmond launched their
show in 1976.
Early on in his career he made the decision to concentrate
on covering R&B and rock ‘n roll songs by black artists, toning them down
for the white American market. In 1955 his version of Fats Domino's Ain't That a
Shame was U.S number one hit, and his covers – although bland and sappy,
stripped of sex appeal and with the lyrics bleached clean – did much to help
sneak black artists into the back door of middle America’s homes. Hearing these
songs covered by a good, Christian white college boy encouraged others to
follow suit: Doris Day and Frank Sinatra have both covered Boone’s covers (if
you see what I mean). Some of the accompaniments are rather fine: he certainly
had a powerful and accomplished studio band, but his vocal performances are Ned
Flanders’ nice, with no energy, vigour or danger. His insipid album of Elvis covers – Pat Boone sings…Guess Who? is simply embarrassing. This is rock n’
roll for people who don’t like rock ‘n roll.
He also hit it big on the silver screen, with roles in a dozen
movies; however his conservative Christian beliefs made him (or his management)
back away from songs or roles which they felt would harm his career. A complete
Renaissance man, in the early 1960s he began writing a series of self-help
books for adolescents, including the bestselling Twixt Twelve and Twenty, and his likeness was licensed to DC Comics, who gave him his own (short
lived) series which began in 1959.
During his career he has sold over 45 million albums and
has enjoyed 38 Top 40 hits in the U.S, but by the time he hit 30 it was all
over. His cover of Rolf Harris’s Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport failed to
set the charts alight and the British Invasion in 1964 all but ended Boone's
career as a hit maker, thankfully. Unable to compete on the charts with the
likes of The Beatles and –
apparently – starting to turn to the bottle he switched instead to gospel and
country music, no doubt influenced by the fact that Boone’s father-in-law was
country great Red Foley. The Boone family toured as gospel singers and made
gospel albums; Boone founded the Christian record label Lamb & Lion Records and made plans to open a centre exclusively
for Christian musicians.
And that was that. Or rather that would have been that if
it hadn’t been for his bizarre decision, in 1997, to release In a Metal Mood: No More Mr Nice Guy, a
collection of heavy metal covers. He’s since followed that with an album of classic
R&B covers. Boone’s version of the Ozzy
Osbourne classic Crazy Train
became (in a cover-of-a-cover version) the theme to MTV’s hit series The Osbournes, and the two families
were next door neighbours for three years. Not everyone thought this peculiar
move was funny: an appearance at the American
Music Awards dressed in black leather and a priest’s dog collar caused him
to be dismissed from Gospel America,
a TV show which he had presented for several years…although a grovelling
apology in which he declared that his aim was to parody his own squeaky-clean
image caused Trinity Broadcasting to reinstate him.
In recent years Mr Boone has turned his hand to political
punditry, whose particular stock in trade is repeating the oft-cited claims
that Barak Obama is an African-born Muslim and a Marxist bent on destroying
American society. In 2010 it was announced that the Pat Boone Family Theatre would open in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
the following year, featuring a 600 seat auditorium and a Pat Boone Museum. As of today the theatre has still to open.
So, on to the music. And today I’m bookending Pat’s
career with a couple of his earliest attempts at rocking out and one of the
most recent: his whiter-than-white version of Little Richard’s blisteringly brilliant Tutti Frutti (which appeared on the charts in 1956 at the same time
as the original and, to the world’s shame, was a bigger hit). As an interesting
side note, it is said that one of the reasons Little Richard co-wrote Long Tall Sally was that he wanted to
produce a record that was so fast that Pat Boone could not possibly cover
it…although, unsurprisingly, he did and, in doing so, created what must be one
of the worst cover versions of all time! Hear it now in all of its toe-curling
glory.
Finally here’s his 1997 version of Dio’s Holy Diver,
featuring no less than Ronnie James Dio
himself on backing vocals.
Here’s a nice slice of bad country and
western I picked up recently, courtesy of the otherwise unknown Frank And Tom – Port Griffith, PA.
I know so little about this record it’s
embarrassing! I can’t even tell you when it was issued, although the Knox Coal Mine cave-in which is
documented on the A-side and in which 12 people died occurred on January 22,
1959, and the Airy Music Company (credited as publishers of this masterpiece)
seem to have been most active around 1961-62, so it’s safe to assume that the
disc appeared at some time around the beginning of the 1960s.
Put out by Mask Records, with writer credits Frank M – Tom M on the A-side and
Frank M on the flip (maybe Frank and Tom Mask?) the B-side is a straightforward
piece of Hillbilly Christian inanity - titled I Wish I’d Been on Earth - with little to recommend it apart from
the flat vocals, but I particularly like the percussive effect on Port Griffith, PA, which sounds to me
exactly like one of those ill-fated miners chipping away at the cave wall with
a pick as his life slowly ebbed away.
If anyone out there has any more info on
this awful record please do let me know.
First up, an admission. I do not own a copy of this record
(although I wish to God I did); I originally found it when scuffing around eBay
recently looking for oddities to purchase on your behalf (it went for $86…well
out of my price range!)
Issued in 1972 on the obscure Pennsylvania-based Country
Boy Records (as CB-102) by Donna
Kramer, the Velvet Underground-esque Bowl
of Cherries was backed with the country
ballad My Memories of You. The
backing band is woefully out of tune on the B-side but it’s just a dull slice
of standard-fare country: it doesn’t have the wonderfully inept, garage band
joiedevivre of the lead track.
Country Boy Records was owned by one Howard Vokes; the company appears to have issued a handful of 45s
(the only other ones I’ve found listed are CB-103 by Bill Beere and CB-106 by
Mel Anderson). Vokes had been a recording artist himself, his first 45s were
issued in 1960 credited to Cowboy Howard Vokes and the Country Boys, and the Vokes’ canon includes the brilliantly-titled
It Takes Six Men To Carry A Man To His Grave (But Only One Woman To
Put Him There), issued on his own Vokes
Records in 1970. That same year he
launched his second imprint, the short-lived Country Boy label, named after his
own backing band.
Little is known about Donna Kramer. I can tell you that she hailed from Hyde,
Pennsylvania, and that she performed live on at least one occasion with Vokes
and his band: Vokes held a residency at the Griltz Hotel, Verona (PA, not
Italy) and three years after her debut 45 she sang as part of his regular Sing,
Neighbor, Sing review. Kramer told the Clearfield
Progress newspaper that she hoped to sign
with Vokes’ other label, the previously mentioned (and nationally-distributed)
Vokes records, but it appears she would never record again. That’s all I’ve
got. There are a number of Donna Kramers still living in Pennsylvania, but I’ve
no idea if any of them is the same Donna Kramer who wrote and performed this
brilliant little disc.
Today’s tracks come from Tammy Faye Bakker, the late, over made-up kabuki doll wife (well, for
more than three decades, anyway) of the disgraced televangelist Jim
Bakker (pronounced Baker, apparently, not
Backer).
We’re lucky here in Great Britain; we’ve never had to suffer
(well, unless you’re a fan of the 50 or so religious channels available on Sky)
the evil, pseudo-religious diatribe that spews across America’s cable
television network day after day: poisonous preachers demanding money with
menaces from gullible idiots who believe that they can pay their way to
salvation. In the Bakker’s case it was the Praise the Lord (PTL) network and their ridiculous Christian theme
park – Heritage USA - that
systematically emptied the pockets of its parishioners and landed a tearful
(and now, surprise, surprise, wholly repentant) Jim in jail. No wonder that
many people insisted that PTL actually stood for Pass the Loot.
Jim and Tammy met when they were students at North Central
Bible College in Minneapolis. The couple married on April Fool’s Day 1961 and,
the following year, moved to South Carolina, where they began their ministry
before heading off to Portsmouth, Virginia, where they became the hosts of Jim
and Tammy, a children's Christian puppet
show. Their success led to the pair joining Pat Robertson's Christian
Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1964,
bringing their puppets with them. which they left in 1973 to form the PTL
Club, an hour long Christian chat and
variety show, which made its on-air debut in 1974.
During the PTL shows (later renamed the Jim and Tammy
Show) Tammy Faye would often lead the
obligatory evangelistic singalong – and this section proved so popular that
Tammy Faye would go on to release more than a dozen albums (Jim and Tammy Faye
also issued ‘joint’ recordings) of her dreadful caterwauling. Tammy Faye became
known for her schmaltzy stories, hideous makeup (her eyes were often caked in
mascara which would run as she turned on the tears) and her histrionic vocals
style. Unusually, for someone on her chosen career path, she was an early
advocate amongst Christian broadcasters of gay rights.
The Bakkers' control of PTL collapsed in 1987 when it was
revealed that reverend Jim had been a bit naughty with the company secretary,
Jessica Hahn, and reportedly used $287,000 of the church’s funds to buy her
silence (that was a waste of money!). Further investigations into the Bakker’s
extravagant lifestyle questioned their dodgy, and vastly oversubscribed,
Christian hotel time-share scheme and the funds they had poured into their
Christian theme park, Heritage USA.
With the couple in disgrace and Jim facing a stretch in
jail, fellow televangelist and friend Jerry Falwell offered a lifeline, but
under his stewardship PTL soon went bankrupt. In 1989 Bakker was sentenced to
45 years in prison on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts. Falwell and the (by now
divorced) Bakker’s fell out, primarily it seems because Falwell was only
interested in using PTL to boost his own television career, but also no doubt
because the equally self-absorbed Falwell had the temerity to call our Jim a
liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and “the greatest scab and cancer on the
face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history”. Phew!
Jim and Tammy Taye divorced in 1992; a year later she
married former PTL bigwig Roe Messner – the man who provided Jim with the cash
to pay of Jessica Hahn and who claimed, during the bankruptcy hearing for PTL,
to be owed $14 million by the church. Messner filed for bankruptcy himself in
1990 and, just like his former friend Jim, wound up being convicted of fraud.
Today’s first cut Jesus Keeps Takin’ me Higher and Higher is from the awful (and hideously-titled) Tammy
Faye: Tammy Bakker sings PTL Club Favorites. Tammy
Faye had an okay voice when it came to singing the country-inspired gospel she
usually stuck to, but ramping it up on this track (fondly known to fans as Disco
Jesus) she’s beyond awful. The
second track – The Ballad of Jim and Tammy – is Tammy’s own countrified take on the whole Jerry
Falwell/PTL/Heritage USA saga. Tammy Faye may have hated Falwell at this point
(the song was released in both 7” and 12" formats in 1987) but, despite their very public falling
out, she managed to find enough Christian charity to forgive him before his
death in 2007, two months before Tammy Faye herself passed away after an
11-year battle with cancer.
And just because I’m feeling generous today, I’m giving you
a third track from Tammy Faye – the ridiculous Run Toward the Roar from her 1980 album of the same name. Hideous.
One of the few star DJs of the 70s not to
be implicated in the Jimmy Savile sex scandal (so far), Dave Cash was born in
Chelsea in 1942, although his family moved to Canada by the time he was seven.
While working as a
copywriter for a Vancouver-based Men’s Wear Shop, Dave was offered the chance
to record a radio voice-over when the original actor assigned to the job became
ill. Cash was an instant smash and he was quickly signed up for more commercial
work and the occasional presenting stint.
The burgeoning pirate
radio scene brought Dave back to Blighty in the early 1960s, and he soon came
to the attention of Radio London, where he teamed up with the late, great Kenny
Everett for the Kenny & Cash Show, which became
enormously popular and influential.
Dave left Radio London to
join the even more influential Radio Luxembourg before, in 1967
becoming one of the first DJs heard on the fledgling Radio One. And it was here
that Cash perpetrated the audio crime I present for you today.
Radio DJs in those days
had an endless stream of regular jingles and fictional characters which they
used to fill airtime or simply to give them space to think whilst reaching for
the next piece of vinyl to whack on the deck. Who can forget Tony
Blackburn’s Arnold, Jimmy Young’s Raymondo and the
endless cast of crazies which spewed out of Kenny Everett’s fertile mind?
Amongst Cash’s repertoire was a winsome toddler known as Microbe.
The voice of Microbe was
performed by Ian Doody, who was son of Radio 1 newsreader Pat Doody. A huge
hit on the show, his catch phrases (the ‘Knock Knock’ joke about Doctor Who and
his signature ‘Groovy Baby’) are still known today by a generation (people of
my age) who grew up next to the radio.
But Cash and Doody
weren’t satisfied with radio stardom for Microbe – they wanted something bigger
so, in 1969, the three year old Ian Doody was dragged off into a recording
studio – along with backing singers Madeline Bell, Leslie Duncan and
(allegedly) Dusty Springfield (although this seems highly unlikely as her career
had recently been revitalised and she was making it big in the States at the
time) to record Groovy Baby. Issued by CBS in the UK, by May of that year the single had reached the heady
heights of number 29 in the charts. The song’s B-side Your Turn Now was credited to
the Microbop Ensemble and featured Cash himself offering listeners the
chance to imitate Microbe for their own amusement.
Cash left the BBC for
Independent Local radio (ILR) in 1973, first at Capital where, with Everett, he
relaunched the Kenny & Cash Show, before resigning in 1994 to spend
more time writing and to develop his other interests. After six years he
rejoined the BBC, presenting programmes for Radio Kent, Radio Cambridgeshire,
and Radio Essex.
Released on Brunswick in 1959 – therefore predating Bobby
“Boris” Pickett’s ubiquitous Monster
Mash by three years – The Mummy by Bob McFadden and Dor was an early attempt to cash in on American
obsession with horror movies, particularly the screen classics of the 1930s
which padded out the late night line up of most TV channels. A silly little
comedy song, The Mummy scraped
into the Top 40 in September that year, but proved so popular that it spawned
several cover versions and a note-for-note copy by Florida-based outfit Bob
and Bobbi. It’s popularity also led to the
song becoming attached to the Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Hammer remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff classic The Mummy, with starlet Norma Marla touring the States with a sarcophagus, giving away
copies to radio DJs, even though the track did not (and does not) appear on the
film’s soundtrack.
The single’s popularity also led to Brunswick releasing a
full-length album, Songs Our Mummy Taught Us, which appeared in the shops in February 1960.
Mcfadden, who would
later provide the voice for cartoon characters Milton the Monster,
Cool McCool and Snarf from Thundercats, was a well-known voice-over artist, famous for
appearing on TV commercials for Wisk detergent and Frankenberry cereal. Dor would find fame under his real name; Rod
McKuen (Dor is Rod backwards. Oh,
how clever!) went on to earn a brace of Oscar nominations and a Pulitzer
nomination for his compositions. McKuen's adaptations of Jacques
Brel’s songs were instrumental in making
the Belgian songwriter popular in the English-speaking world, whilst his own
books of poetry sold millions of copies.
But there’s no way that Songs Our Mummy Taught Us would have ever earned the nascent poet and
songwriter a major award. It’s just terrible. The haste in which this
collection was thrown together is apparent throughout. The Mummy is ‘adapted’ (or, if you prefer, dicked around
with) liberally; then-current dance crazes are sent up (poorly) and the rest of
the album is made up of bad parodies – including two of the tracks I present
for you today: The Children Cross the Bridge, a piss-poor piss-take of the Ingrid
Bergman film Inn of the Sixth
Happiness and the peculiar I Dig
You Baby, which to me sounds like it was
written by the bastard child of Jimmy Cross and Alan Titchmarsh.
Apparently McKuen later claimed that the uncredited backing
musicians on the album were none other than Bill Haley and His Comets. Although the group were also signed to Brunswick
this has never been confirmed. In 1961 McFadden and McKuen would regroup to
record the single Dracula Cha Cha
backed with Transylvania Polka –
which, unsurprisingly, sank without a trace…an example of lightening resolutely
refusing to strike twice.
