The Enoch Light Singers – Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You (1968)
New Hope Quartet – A Crippled Boy’s Prayer (1969)
Steven Newton – A Crippled Boy’s Prayer (2017)
Don Julian & The Larks – Shorty The Pimp (1972)
Electric Piano Playground – Good Vibrations (1968) A one-off attempt to cash in on the quickly fading psychedelic zeitgeist from our old friend Shelby Singleton.
From the back cover:
The Nashville Sound will probably out last [sic] the phrase, “Mother’s Apple Pie”. Everyday {sic}, more and more record producers and recording artists pour into Tennessee to get the “Nashville Sound” on their discs.
Is it their recording equipment? Maybe it’s the easy going atmosphere that seems to inspire musicians and singers into giving their best performance. Whatever it is, it works!!!!
Producer Shelby Singleton, certainly not a stranger to Nashville, has once again taken advantage of the “Nashville Sound”, and recorded the first psychedelic album to come out of Nashville.
If you enjoy firsts, which now-a-days are called “happenings”, sit back (if you can) and enjoy this happening called Psychedelic Seeds by the Electric Piano Playground.
The flowers of San Francisco will never sound as soulful and sweet as the sincere stylings of psychedelia Nashville style…
Virginia Greco
Electric Piano Playground – The Flower Song (1968)
Electric Piano Playground – Wild Thing (1968)
Graduate – Bad Dreams (1980)
Graduate – No Second Troy (Alias Sam) (1980) Pre-Tears For Fears Smith and Orzabal. You could hear, in places, what greatness was to come.
Jerry D. Brown – A Crippled Boy’s Prayer (197?)
Millington – Heaven Is In Your Mind (1977)
Please – Something New (1977)
The Sounds of Sunshine – Rainy Days and Mondays (1971)
Relax – Radio Hör’n (1981)
Tears for Fears – Me and My Big Ideas (1995) TFF’s work with Oleta Adams is among the best that the decade had to offer.
The Fuller Family – A Little Crippled Girl’s Prayer (1975)
The Hal Webb Team – I’m No Kin To The Monkey (1967)
The Heckels – Folsom Prison Blues (1972)
The Move – Falling Forever (1970) BBC Session recorded March 23, 1970
The Move – Morning Dew (1968)
The New York Underground – Love Is The Key (1973)
Renaissance – Song Of Scheherazade (1975) Live At Carnegie Hall
Chatham – Hump Up (197?)
Bill & Lisa – Koobamanah (1973)
From the back cover:
Music today is so open to style and expression that we enjoy the challenge of always presenting a wide variety of songs to reach as many people as possible. They have been entertaining alternately between the Montauk Golf & Racquet Club and Gurney’s Inn for the past three years. Off season, Bill and Lisa perform on cruise ships, including trips to the South Pacific and the Orient.
R. Pultek – The Voodoo Ju Ju Obsession Part 1 (1970)
Rowan & Martin – Cuckoo Laugh-In World (1968)
I happened upon a great YouTube channel called Obsolete Video Services, which specializes in bringing obsolete historical videotape formats (and media) back to life. One old recording I recently enjoyed was a 1970 episode of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. First one after Goldie Hawn won her Oscar.
It was, for two years, the highest-rated show in the USA. There had been nothing like it. What other show could boast, in one season, Richard Nixon, Kaye Ballard, John Wayne, Guy Lombardo, The Monkees, The Temptations, and other impossible pairings bringing old showbiz relics with the new hippy ethos? Fast, frequent cut-aways, sexy dancers, black people, technicolor, all things that felt revolutionary at the time, young ones.
But comedy has changed, and there was nothing funny about the particular show I watched. In fact, it was embarrassing at times. The show treated the neo-revolution like another fad to be co-opted, packaged, sold, and forgotten. And old showbiz took it down without anyone caring much.
In its day, the show willingly branded itself in a mawkishly sterile petri dish. There was no government satire unless it was within the patina of slapstick, unlike, say, The Smothers Brothers. I think the reason the show was so successful was that, regardless of the groovy colors and scenery, old showbiz stars were a reassuring presence to the parents of the time. No one was afraid of Arte Johnson or Jo Ann Worley. They were merely a living-color reimagining of Burns and Allen. With even LESS cultural subversion, if you can imagine.
There were lunch boxes, a movie, commercials, TWO albums featuring all your favorite characters. Trading cards. A lame send-up of horror movies, a daytime spinoff, a CAR, All gone in three years, but they didn’t know it yet.