MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

It’s still Father’s Day in the West, so this will also count as my post for that.



I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my dad was a session musician in Nashville in the 1950s/60s, and also played with The Bluenotes (sort of the de facto house band for Colonial Records in North Carolina). His biggest claim to fame is working with Roy Orbison, but according to AllMusic – and I only just learned about this today – his credits also include Grandpa Jones. And apparently Ann Margret recorded one of his songs.

So, wow.

Anyway, he recorded and released this solo 45 in 1961. It’s the B-side of another song of his, “Lover’s Holiday”. Apparently Billboard was impressed.

So naturally the 45 was in our house. I listened to this a lot when I was a kid, but I’m not sure I still have it anymore. It may be in storage somewhere in the US.

Anyway, point being, I hadn’t heard this in something like 35 years, and had in fact completely forgotten about it. Then I decided to Google up something of his for Father’s Day and this popped up. As soon as it started playing, I recognized it and remembered each part of it – the boingy distorted riff, the mournful backup singers, the fadeout.

It’s been a sort of strange year for me in regards to my dad. We didn’t have the greatest of relationships, and just when we were on the point of reconciling that in 1984, he died suddenly of a heart attack.

So it goes.

But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, and … well, let’s just say I’ve come to terms with it all, and it’s cool. I just wish I’d put more effort into archiving his music when I still had it all in the house.

Anyway, I dig this record. I think it stands up with some of the better (if obscure) rockabilly records of the era.

But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

All in the family,

This is dF

With Vitamin B1!



[Via Sloth Unleashed]

Pure, wholesome and delicious,

This is dF

You know by now that David Letterman announced his retirement. And while he won’t be leaving the air for at least another year, I might as well post this now.

For obvious reasons (location) I haven’t watched Letterman for a long time, apart from a short period where one local station struck a deal to run The Late Show for about a year.

But I was a regular viewer of Late Night since it started on NBC. I already knew Letterman from his stand-up act and his guest host slots on The Tonight Show. But Late Night brought something new to the table. I liked the offbeat “we’ll try anything” humor, the World’s Most Dangerous Band (as they were known before they became the CBS Orchestra), and the now-famous rapport between Dave and Paul Shaffer.

Lots has already been written on his career and his legacy. I’d recommend this Rolling Stone piece from a few years ago, which sums it up nicely.

For myself, I’d highlight the following:

1. Despite the fact that he desperately wanted the Tonight Show gig, I’m glad he didn’t get it. I doubt he would have been able to take the chances he did, and it's always possible he wouldn’t have bothered. He might have succeeded Johnny Carson, but he would have always been known as Carson’s replacement, rather than his equal.

2. He championed Warren Zevon. Points for that.

3. He championed lots of cool music, actually – Late Night and then The Late Show tended to showcase new and upcoming bands, as well as obscure veteran bands, that The Tonight Show wouldn’t touch until The Late Show made it cool.

4. He handled scandal better than just about anyone else – what little there was that he had. When he was blackmailed for cheating on his fiancé and sleeping with some staffers, he went proactive with it and handled it with as much class as anyone could in that situation. Anyone else would have tried to cover it up, blame the women or milk the sympathy/victim card. Letterman went straight to the police, then confessed and apologized to everyone. And the blackmailer went to jail. It doesn’t excuse Dave’s actions, but you have to admire the way he handled it.

The same goes for his retirement announcement, as NPR has pointed out. No press conference, no drama, no tabloid gossip – he just said it while they were taping. It was a typical Letterman move.

5. There was also the Bill Hicks episode, where he not only restored a deleted routine, but also brought on Hicks’ mother to personally apologize to her. Who else would do that?

6. Bob Rooney Day (who knows why I remember this – but I do).

Well, this list could go on, so I’ll stop here. (I know I should do ten, but the secret is knowing when to stop.)

As for Stephen Colbert being named as his replacement … I confess I’m surprised, if only because Colbert has proven his hosting chops by playing a fake character. That said, it’s not like I have any better suggestions. (Though I would have suggested Team Coco, personally – or maybe Craig Ferguson, though the ultra-late slot seems to fit him better.)

It will be interesting to see how Colbert does by being himself. But I expect some people will be disappointed. His fans may expect him to continue with the overt Republican-bashing – I doubt Colbert is going to make that a centerpiece of The Late Show (and I doubt Les Moonves would let him).

Real conservatives are of course very sad about Colbert getting the job (and by “sad” I mean “outraged at liberal CBS for endorsing Colbert’s ultra-liberal agenda gawdammit”). But these are the same people who never forgave Letterman for that Willow Palin joke.

As you might expect, I find it odd that some people think a late-night talk show has to pass some kind of political objectivity litmus test. And even if we accept the premise that Dave and The Late Show were liberally biased (with the caveat conservative pundits tend to assume everyone on TV who isn't on Fox News is a flaming liberal Communist), I’m not sure who they’d accept as a reasonable, fair replacement anyway. Papa Bear? Rush Limbaugh? Victoria Jackson?

Well, why not? While we’re at it, Paul Shaffer’s replacement could be Ted Nugent.

Admit it. You’d watch that, if only for the train-wreck value.

Meanwhile, there’s the much more pressing and important issue: who will replace Colbert on The Colbert Report?

There’s a long list of candidates. I’d like to see Samantha Bee take a shot, personally. But as it’s meant to be a parody of conservative talk shows, she should dye her hair blonde. For verisimilitude. 

Dave has left the building,

This is dF

I understand a few of you are interested in this Doctor Who bloke.

As you may have heard in passing somewhere, the Doctor Who series is now 50 years old as of Saturday (albeit that includes 16 years of inactive service, interrupted once by Paul McGann in 1996).

And what with everyone posting all kinds of Doctor-Who related stuff (even Google and Yahoo are doing it), I thought I’d just toss in a link to this post about the Doctor Who novels:





They were really just novelizations of TV episodes. But when they started popping up in Waldenbooks in the early 80s – by which time Doctor Who was playing on my local PBS station – I ended up reading a lot of them. They were good research for earlier Doctor Who stories.

You see, children, back then we didn’t have these fancy YouTubes and on-demand TVs and Netflixes and Amazons that you have today. We didn’t even have DVD boxsets of TV shows. We had reruns. And in the case of Doctor Who, we didn’t even have that, because PBS generally does not do reruns. In Nashville, they started with Doctor No. 4, so if I wanted to watch any of the previous shows, there was really no way to do it. At all.

But I damn well could read them, thanks to the cheap Target novelizations of the episodes. That was my version of Catch-Up TV. And I have to say, they were well written – which is to say, they were quick and entertaining reads that delivered what my relatively undemanding 17-year-old self expected. I’m not sure what the current 48-year-old model of myself would make of them.

I could find out, except that I can’t remember if I ever kept any of them. If I did, they're buried in my mom’s storage shed along with all the other books I left behind when I moved to Hong Kong. I figure there’s a 60% chance they’re still there. And there’s a 42% chance that they’re still in readable condition.

There is another option: some of the novels have been reprinted by BBC Books, and a few bookstores in HK are carrying them. I’m tempted to get one and see what happens.

Back to the future,

This is dF

This was the coolest thing ever in 1979.



[Via The Cult Of Ray]

Well, possibly. But yes, children, at one time Styx really were huge enough to rate a contest like this.

And I should know. I was a fan.

It seems funny now, but Styx really seemed bad-ass when I was in junior-high school. “Renegade” was the big hit on the main rock stations, and sure, they followed that up with “Babe”, but still, a lot of their album cuts were pretty heavy. Also, they were the first band I ever saw live (the Paradise Theatre tour, even – “no opening act”, the ticket said).

And for all that, of all the bands I loved during that time, Styx is the one I haven’t really reconciled myself with yet. I’ll wear my love for Electric Light Orchestra and Wings on my sleeve, but I don’t talk about Styx much.

I’m not sure why.  I haven't really listened to them since I graduated from high school, apart from whatever of their hits get played in the background (usually “Babe” or “Come Sail Away”), but in my head, at least, Styx hasn’t aged well as a band. Certainly the lyrics haven't – good as Dennis DeYoung and Tommy Shaw were at writing hit songs, their lyrics often veered between corny and pretentious on any given song. Which works when yr 15, but not when yr 47. 

Still, nice van.

PRODUCTION NOTE #1: Notice that the ad is for record store retailers, not Styx fans. I think the idea was to use the van as a promotional tool, or possibly a giveaway.

PRODUCTION NOTE #2: Notice also the “Beta-format Videotape units”.

Oh what a giveaway,

This is dF

Recently spotted on the Facebooks:



It’s a fair question – at least if yr from the generation that actually grew up with Saturday morning cartoons and get nostalgic about it. That’s okay – I do it too.

The thing is, as always, it’s too easy to compare yr experience to the kids today and feel that something important has been lost. Just because it’s something important to you doesn’t mean it’s important to the next generation whose experience is completely different from yrs.

It pays to remember the context of Saturday Morning Cartoons, which is this:

There were only three TV networks at the time, and Saturday morning was the logical place to put new cartoon programming. A kid in the 70s had two main options for watching cartoons: (1) Saturday morning, or (2) whatever the indie UHF stations were showing after school, which in the 70s was mainly older syndicated Japanese shows like Battle Of The Planets, Speed Racer, Bullwinkle and all the Warner Bros toons that didn’t make the cut for the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner show on CBS. Otherwise, you were more likely to be watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, Addams Family, The Munsters, and so on.

Saturday morning was when all the best and NEW cartoons were on. Sure, by the 80s you had new shows like GI Joe and Transformers and He-Man and Thundercats in the afternoons. But Saturday morning was like a ritual. We couldn’t wait for the new season to start so we could see what new cartoons would come our way. And it was a shared experience mainly because it was the only experience to be had – the only difference was which shows you watched (or which network you liked more).

What kids have today that we didn’t have is cartoons 24/7 or on-demand (provided they have cable and/or a broadband connection), and a more diverse range of toons to choose from (many of which are arguably better than a lot of the stuff they used to show in the 70s and 80s). You can get Blu-Ray box sets of full collections of various cartoon series and watch them whenever you want, or you can watch them on VOD if yr family can afford that service package. And thanks to social media, you can share yr love of them with other kids not only in yr school but anywhere in the world.

And let’s admit – if anyone from the Saturday Morning generation had been told this was the future, we would have drooled at the very thought.

So if the question is “Are the kids today missing something?” I’d say:

No. Ask them to trade the current situation for one morning a week of pre-programmed toons, and they’d tell you to go jump in the lake.

I’m paraphrasing, but you see what I’m saying.

PRODUCTION NOTE: And by the way, it's HANNA, not Hanna.

Overture, curtain, lights,

This is dF

“Eternal Rectangle” = The good guys, the bad guys, the Stingray and a million dollars.



See also: 



Yes, that IS Luke Skywalker and the Ghostbusters receptionist.

I remember going to see this solely because Mark Hamill was in it.

Which is something you don’t hear a lot of people say.

Little red corvette,

This is dF

Previously on "dEFROG On 45":




And his second.



I can explain.

For one thing, I grew up watching The Partridge Family, which featured David Cassidy, and The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, which featured Shaun Cassidy. So inevitably – mainly via my sister, but I was also complicit in this – their music found their way into our home.

For another, c’mon, they’re both pretty catchy songs.

A lot of people tend to write off Shaun Cassidy as the Justin Bieber of his day (only relatively less successful, if only because Cassidy didn’t have the benefit of a huge Disney marketing/cross-promo machine behind him). And I suppose a case could be made. On the other hand, Cassidy stuck to tried-and-true 50s-era three-chord pop-rock at a time when it wasn’t yet quite fashionable to do so – which in a sense puts him in the same league as The Ramones.

Ha ha. Okay, not really. Still, I can appreciate Cassidy’s musical approach more than Bieber, who has never been adventurous musically.

Aaaaaaaand when she took me home,

This is dF

Previously, I blogged about how K-Tel Records was a key (and cheap) tool for discovering new music. 

That was for the 45-single market.

If you wanted to stock up on complete albums, there was this.



[Via Beatnik Daddio]

Some of you may remember this. Columbia House and RCA Record Club (later known as BMG Music Service) were the two big mail-order music companies of the day. The magazine offers varied – I remember RCA offering six (6) albums for a penny. There was also a direct mail version, where they’d send you the forms and a bunch of stamps with album cover art for each available selection. You pasted the stamps in the order form and mailed it off.

This was, of course, very seductive to my teenage self, who not only loved music and had limited funds for it, but also collected stamps. A lot of those stamps ended up as decorations.

Like a lot of kids my age, I paid a lot more attention to the hook (13 albums for cheap) than the fine print (i.e. every month you get a brochure featuring the Album Of The Month, which would automatically be mailed to you – at which point you had to either pay for it or go to the trouble of sending it back – unless you actively responded by mail and told them not to send it. The business term for it is “negative option billing”).

Consequently, like a lot of kids my age (or at least the ones who weren’t very detail-oriented, and were really poor at mail correspondence), I paid for one or two albums but ultimately ended up defaulting on my obligation to buy “x” number of records in three years, and also ended up with a number of albums I normally wouldn’t have owned.

Happily, one of them was Black Sabbath’s Mob Rules, which is one of my favorite albums to this day.

Anyway, I look back on this and wonder how Columbia House and RCA ever managed to keep it running as long as they did. Reportedly, one way they did it was by paying sub-par licensing fees to the publishers, and by getting the master tapes and making their own cheap copies of albums instead of buying them direct from the labels.

Even so, the business model had to be susceptible to all kinds of fraud. Making it a cumbersome process for the customer could only have exacerbated the problem.

If you’ve ever seen A Serious Man, the scene where Michael Stuhlbarg gets a call from CRC’s collections dept is not only brilliant nostalgic cinema, it also cuts to the heart of the main flaw in the mail-order record-club model: no age verification, or even identity verification. I can’t have been the only minor who filled out that form, got my albums, defaulted, and turned out to be a dead end in terms of collection.

Certainly a lot of adults tried it. There’s an urban legend about how lots of people knew this guy who sent in a fake name and a friend’s address to scam some free records. Some of them are probably true. In an extreme case, one guy acquired nearly 27,000 CDs, using over 2000 fake accounts and 16 P.O. boxes, which he then sold at flea markets. Of course, we know this because he got caught and was convicted for mail fraud.

I wasn’t nearly that devious or calculating. Still, it’s accurate to say I suckered both companies out of something like 21 albums.

Take that, Corporate Rock.

EPILOGUE: In the end it wasn’t fraud that ended Columbia House (which actually eventually merged with BMG Music Service), but licensing lawsuits and – what else? – digital music. That said, the Columbia House brand still survives as a DVD/Blu-ray service.

Join the club,

This is dF

Hands up if you remember K-Tel Records.



Michelle Catalano of Forbes does. She’s written a nice piece about how K-Tel was the 70s version of Spotify – at least when it comes to discovering new music.

That was sort of true for me as well. Until Al Gore invented MTV in the 80s and the Internet in the 90s, radio was pretty much the only way to discover new music, and you were limited to whatever the local program/music directors felt like putting in rotation.

K-Tel was really good at compiling singles from bands and artists that weren’t necessarily getting airplay in yr local market, as well as collecting them in different formats, from disco, soul and Top 40 to novelty records and "southern rock". In that respect, it’s safe to say I learned a lot about the art of making mix tapes from K-Tel.

I admit I bought them more to listen to music I already knew about (after all, a $6.00 album of 20 hits was way cheaper than buying the same 20 songs on 45rpm records – value for money!). But I did manage to hear a lot of music I otherwise never would have heard, although I can’t say my life was necessarily changed from hearing, say, Kenny Nolan. And it's not like they were turning anyone on to bands like (say) The Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

Meanwhile, of course, the TV ads are almost as famous as the comps themselves.

It’s only fair to add that K-Tel wasn’t the only comp game in town. Ronco (which was better known for selling kitchen gadgets on TV) was their main competition. I had a few of their comps as well (like this one here) and they seemed to be better at coming up with music I’d never heard before (for example, Patti Smith Group, whose “Because The Night” sounded sultry and dangerous somehow when I was 15).

Amazingly, K-Tel is still around, and they license old music for ads, films and TV shows.

Ronco hasn’t done so well, having filed for bankruptcy in 1984, and again in 2007.

As seen on TV,

This is dF