Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Various Artists - The Year Without A Santa Claus (Unofficial Soundtrack)

 

Can you BELIEVE this TV Christmas special is FIFTY YEARS OLD today?  Out of all the holiday specials released by producers Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass from the early '60s to the late '80, this show is, in my opinion, part of the great triumvirate of classic Rankin/Bass productions, along with 1964's Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and 1969's Frosty The Snowman.  When I was young, I always looked forward to seeing this one the most (to be honest, I always found Frosty to be a little annoying, as the main character seemed borderline mentally impaired - and having Jimmy Durante as the narrator seemed sort of an odd choice to me...  Rudolph is redeemed by the presence of the great Yukon Cornelius and the Burl Ives snowman character).

This program is chock-full of beloved scenes and songs... probably none more memorable than the outstanding Snow Miser introduction and song, performed by the great Dick Shawn::

 
(that little cymbal 'stinger' that plays as Snow Miser sits in his chair has ALWAYS had a special place in my heart!)

Not to be outdone by his brother Heat Miser's entrance:  


I was going to put together a longer, more detailed writeup regarding this show's golden anniversary... (un)fortunately, People Magazine already beat me to it - I can add nothing further to this story, located here.

Unlike a couple of other Rankin/Bass Christmas specials (including Frosty, Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town, and 'Twas The Night Before Christmas), no official soundtrack for this program was ever produced.  However, over the years, a number of bootleg versions of the tunes from this show, culled from the audio track, have been released.  Here's the lineup of songs provided here:

1. Leroy Anderson - Sleigh Ride (Instrumental)
2. The Wee Winter Singers - The Year Without A Santa Claus
3. Shirley Booth - I Could Be Santa Claus
4. Ron Marshall & Mickey Rooney - I Believe In Santa Claus
5. Ron Marshall (ft. The Wee Winter Singers) - It’s Gonna Snow Right Here In Dixie
6. Dick Shawn - The Snow Miser Song
7. George S. Irving - The Heat Miser Song
8. Christine Winter - Blue Christmas
9. The Wee Winter Singers - Here Comes Santa Claus
10. Mickey Rooney – There'll Be No Year Without A Santa Claus
11. The Wee Winter Singers - The Year Without A Santa Claus

So here for your listening pleasure is the unofficial soundtrack to The Year Without A Santa Claus, originally released in 1974.  Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Grateful Dead - American Beauty: The Angel's Share

 

Since I did this during last year's Day Of The Dead, I suppose I'll try to make this an annual thing now, and continue posting some hard-to-find Grateful Dead here on this date. 

To commemorate the day, her for your listening pleasure is American Beauty: The Angel's Share, like all of the other "Angel's Share" discs, a digital-only release of alt mixes, outtakes and demos from The Grateful Dead's classic album.  I'm a lazy man, so for a more detailed description of this release, I'm taking the liberty of utilizing the Discogs.com write-up, rather than my own words; all credit for the following goes to them and that site:

American Beauty: The Angel's Share brings together never-before-heard studio recordings compiled from dozens of recently discovered 16-track reels. It includes multiple outtakes for several album tracks along with demos for every song on the album (except “Box Of Rain”) plus one for “To Lay Me Down,” which was later included on Jerry Garcia’s first solo album, Garcia. All 10 demos are available today for streaming and digital download with the full 56-track American Beauty: The Angel's Share to be released as a digital exclusive on October 15, shortly before the 50th anniversary of the album’s original release date: November 1, 1970.

Like its predecessor, the latest incarnation of The Angel’s Share was made possible by the tireless work of engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson who – operating under the supervision of Grateful Dead legacy manager David Lemieux – spent countless hours compiling and piecing the reels together to create this revelatory experience.

American Beauty: The Angel's Share opens with 10 demos that were recorded in August 1970 at Pacific High Recording Studio, the same place the band recorded Workingman’s Dead just a few months earlier. While fans are accustomed to hearing songs evolve through the band’s live recordings, this installment of The Angel’s Share offers them a rare opportunity to hear songs like “Ripple” (then titled “Hand Me Down”) grow from its first demo into the final version.

The vast remainder of The Angel’s Share features a mix of partial and complete takes from these sessions including multiple takes of “Friend Of The Devil,” “Ripple” and Pigpen’s “Operator,” an alternate mix of “Truckin’” and a different version of “Candyman.” These intimate in-studio performances are interspersed with conversations that make it feel like you’re in the studio with the band (Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir) along with producer Stephen Barncard and engineer Phil Sawyer.

The Angel’s Share is rounded out with an acoustic mix of “Box Of Rain” and a version of “Attics Of My Life” that spotlights Garcia alone on electric guitar, both newly mixed from the band’s recording sessions for the album later that summer at Wally Heider Recording

That's that - here you go.  Enjoy the day, have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.  Happy November 2nd!!

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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Thursday, October 31, 2024

Disney - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1964 & 1979)

 


A few memories and vignettes from past Halloweens in my life:

*********

...When I was ten, my younger sister and I were walking back home through the wooded area between our home, a townhouse in Arundel Estates, the Navy officer housing across the street from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the officer's apartment housing in nearby Perry Circle.  It was late afternoon on Halloween with dusk and the time for trick-or-treats rapidly approaching, with an orange glow from the setting sun brightening the sky, and the air was full of anticipation for the activities to come that night. The residents in Perry Circle used to deck out each apartment foyer with fun, spooky regalia, and we could already hear the recorded "scary" sounds of cackling witches and moaning ghosts floating through the air as we stomped through the leaves, eager to get home so we could get our costumes on. As we walked, I turned to my sister and said, "Hey Syd - guess what?"

"What?", she answered.

"It's HALLOWEEN!!!", I screamed joyously, and we laughed and screamed together as we ran down the hill.

While innocuous as that passing remark was at the time, we always remembered it... and every Halloween since then over the past fifty years, the holiday hasn't passed where one of us, either in person, over the phone or via text, will greet the day by contacting each other and repeating that phrase - "It's HALLOWEEN!!!" It's a silly "tradition" between us, I know - but we've never forgotten it. It's a reminder to us of just how great and thrilling this date was when we were kids.

*********

...When I first moved to New Zealand in the early '90s, Halloween was still an all-but unknown holiday, celebrated chiefly by American expats and their families. At that time, it was almost unthinkable for Kiwi kids to go door-to-door that night, looking for treats. But I held out hope and kept with the ritual, buying candy my first year there and having it ready by the door in case someone came knocking (like every other American military family in Christchurch, I lived out in town like a local, renting a place in Casebrook).  But my first Halloween there, I had no visitors.  It was somewhat disappointing, but I hoped that the activity would eventually catch on.

During my second October 31st there, I once again purchased candy, and again had it ready to pass out, should someone stop by. A hour or some passed by that night, and again I had no nighttime visitors.  However, at around 6:30 pm, just as I was about to give up, there was a ringing at my door. I opened it to find a little Kiwi boy and girl, no more than seven or eight years old, standing shyly and somewhat shame-facedly on my stoop.  Neither of them were wearing any sort of costume; they stood there in street clothes.

"Hello, sir," the boy began. "We're awfully sorry to bother you... but, you see, in America, they have a thing on this night called -"

I cut him off instantly, happily shouting "TRICK-OR-TREATERS!  FINALLY!  WOO-HOO!!!" I'm sure my yelling initially scared the living bejesus out of them... but they quickly recovered, glad that they had come to the house of someone who knew why they were there!  We all laughed together, and I piled candy into their waiting sacks and sent them merrily on their way. Thus ended my first real Halloween in New Zealand... Nowadays, the holiday is well-established in the country, and on this night the crowds of kids roaming neighborhoods seeking candy in many ways resembles the same activity back in the States... thank goodness.

*********

...Halloweens in my early/middle teens in Massachusetts were always interesting times. After the candy was gathered and deposited safely at home, the later evenings of October 31st were unofficially the times when scores got settled, power struggles culminated and lines and alliances were redrawn between the kids in our suburban neighborhoods on the South Shore.  In many ways, it was open adolescent "warfare", a toned-down version of the Castellammarese War, but without casualties and between youngsters.  

Guys would prepare for Halloween weeks in advance, burying cartons of eggs in the woods to rot and use as projectiles... hoarding firecrackers and cherry bombs... and filling old Christmas tree lights with paint to throw at opposing parties.  During that post-trick-or-treat period, the sequence of events was that your respective group/gang would meet up, load up with these things, then start roaming the area, seeking out opposing groups to battle in the streets and in the woods.  I know that, in some ways, it sounds sort of mean-spirited, street thuggy and semi-deliquent-y... but believe me when I say it was all done for fun, by suburban teens/pre-teens with time on their hands.  I distinctly recall standing on a low hill overlooking the town near the end of one of those nights, and in all directions hearing the bang/pop and occasional flash of fireworks in every direction, and the distant roars of gangs of kids "battling" all over the place.  For me at that time, that was the definitive sound of Halloween.

*********

I don't have any long-winded story in relation to these album offerings.  I dug both of these up a few years ago while searching for Halloween-related music and sound effects.  Disney released these records under the exact same name fifteen years apart. The first half of the 1964 release is clearly geared to a younger audience (ages three through eight), with the tracks presented in a Disneyesque storybook manner by a narrator, Ms. Laura Olsher (whose other claim to fame was participating in voice work for Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, one of the first animated holiday specials, playing Mrs. Cratchit).  The second half dispenses with that story-time tone, and just provides the expected "spooky" holiday sounds (thunder, explosions, space alien sounds, etc.).  The original liner notes and insert for this release (initially issued on vinyl) included notes and suggestions on how to host a "scary" holiday party; it was all very wholesome and of-its-time.

The 1979 version of this record is simply straight-ahead 'haunted house" sound effects - shrieks, groans, wind and torture devices.  Here's the reverse side of the album with track details:


So, here you are - two superb holiday releases, both on Disneyland Records put out in their respective years, that I hope will set the tone for your Halloween festivities tonight and in the future, and help you and yours create the sort of lasting memories of this date that I still cherish and hold.

Have a happy and delightfully frightening Halloween!

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:
  • Various Artists - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1964): Send Email
  • Various Artists - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1979): Send Email

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

More Mary Hansen (Stereolab) Obscurities


I was in the casino last weekend to play a little poker and make a couple of bets on the NFL playoff games scheduled for that weekend. The place I go has a huge sports book, with multiple giant screens covering a vast back wall, showing every current game (football, college and pro basketball, hockey, etc.) being played at that particular time on various broadcast networks.

As I was walking in to the space to place my bet at one of the automated machines (go Kansas City!), I was jolted when I suddenly heard Stereolab's "Lo Boob Oscillator" blasting at top volume all around me. Now, Stereolab isn't generally what you'd expect to hear coming out of a casino's music system... so needless to say, I was momentarily confused, as I couldn't immediately place the source. Then I looked up and one of the display screens, and saw it was running the following commercial for Hotels.com:

I couldn't believe it - a huge corporation choosing to set their ad to a tune by a band that I'll wager the vast majority of Middle American viewers had never heard of, and one of my favorite songs of all time, as I've related in a previous posting here! Now, I'm not overly superstitious... but I took that out-of-the-blue Stereolab encounter as a good omen... as it turned out to be. I not only won my football bet that night, but also came away with a solid win at the hold 'em tables.

As I've detailed time and again here, I adore Stereolab, and over the years have managed to gather up pretty much all of their recorded output as a group (or "Groop", if you will), both albums and singles, along with many of the band collaborations and individual member side projects. In the past, I've posted a couple of these harder-to-find releases here earlier, including the Rose, My Rocket-Brain! tour EP from 2004 and the Eaten Horizons Or The Electrocution Of Rock art-house release from 2007.

I was ecstatic when they reformed in 2019 after a ten-year hiatus, and went running like a bastard to their show at Boston's Royale back in September of that year, a couple of months before COVID hit (damn, hard to believe that show was THAT long ago...). The concert was superb, and even with the long break, they didn't seem to have missed a beat (and yes, they played "Lo Boob Oscillator"). But seeing the group up on stage that night once again made me wistful for the presence of Mary Hansen, their late percussionist, keyboardist and background vocalist, who died in 2002. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mary brought an ineffable quality to Stereolab's music:

Hansen's voice was the perfect complement to Sadier's; their singing styles and vocal range were very similar . . . but different enough to add nuance and color to many of the band's songs.

So, in the wake of a previous request for these items from an intrepid blog visitor, I thought I'd post a few more releases I have that feature Mary's work.

  • Europa 51 - Abstractions

Over the years, Stereolab's drummer Andy Ramsay has been the catalyst behind an number of the band's experimental singles/EPs, offshoots and collaborations, Either with his bandmates or working independently, Ramsay has appeared on, written for or arranged releases with artists as diverse as The High Llamas, Ui, Wire, The Charlatans, Add N to (X), and many, many more. In the past, I've featured some of his work here on this blog. But this release was probably his most eclectic.

Named after Roberto Rossellini's early '50s Italian film starring Ingrid Bergman, Europa 51’s lone album, Abstractions, is the work of Ramsay and fellow Stereolab member Simon Johns, also featuring Mary Hansen, High Llamas members Dominic Murcott and John Bennett, jazz bass player Simon Thorpe and classical harpist Celine Saout. The album was a hybrid project that combined styles like lounge, jazz, bluegrass, and folk. While this album sounds somewhat like Stereolab from time to time, in many ways it goes far beyond anything The Groop had ever done - unfortunately, with somewhat uneven results. Mary's vocals are featured on tracks 4 through 7 ("Voyeurism", "Three Steps In The Sun", "Golden Age Of Gameshows" and "Free Range Corona"), and are lovely as always. But be sure to check out the entire album - it may not all be to your taste, but you will definitely find sounds that pique your interest.

  • Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP:

Another Ramsay one-off, a short-lived project with Stereolab's sound engineer Simon Holliday and Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom (Spaceman 3, Spectrum, etc.). Only 2,500 copies of this EP were pressed for release on black vinyl, making it one of the rarest Stereolab-related discs. Mary Hansen added vocals to one track here.

Trivia: "Monkey Brain" (vinyl pops and all) was later used as the soundtrack to a short film/digital video called "four" by Man and Martin, described as "four whole minutes of pulsating thought muesli, ultra-violet and ultra-compact bulletproof adventures for ages four years and above" (Man and Martin is graphic designer, sculptor and AppleMacintosh convert Andy Martin). "four" premiered at the onedotzero2 digital film festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in May 1998. Here it is, if you'd like to see it:

  • Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now:

An ostensibly Halloween-themed compilation CD - plus a very cool comic collection in book form ("Spooky Tales", subtitled 'Spirit Summoning Stories', edited by Mark Baines) - all housed in a lidded box. In addition to inclusions from alternative heavy hitters such as Jad Fair, Yo La Tengo and The High Llamas, this release also includes a short track by Blips, "Blip^/Blip~", featuring Stereolab's Tim Gane and Mary along with Sonic Boom once again. It sounds a lot like what was released on the Turn On side project, also released that year - hard to tell if it was an outtake from that session or not. No matter - it's a pretty good tune.

Here's the full track list:
1. Dymaxion - The Haunted Radio
2. Blips - Blip^/Blip~
3. Jad Fair & Jason Willett - Werewolf of London Town
4. Two Dollar Guitar - The Lonliest Monk
5. Herald - It's Under The Waltzers
6. Kooljerk - Mailor Jeune
7. Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Scooby Don't
8. Cylinder - Red Moss
9. Pink Kross - Spooky Dooky
10. Mystery Dick - Screambirds
11. Amplifier - Cat Whisker
12. The Yummy Fur - Saturday Night Mo-Mo
13. Dick Johnson - Vertigo
14. Angel Corpus Christi - Clown Sex
15. Project Dark - Full Length Mirror
16. G. Mack - Red Moss [Frame Trigger]
17. the Dramatics - Hallucination of a Deranged Mind [Inspired by Coffin Joe]
18. Yo La Tengo - 3D
19. Supermalprodelica - L'etat De Grace
20. High Llamas - Spool to Spool
21. Will Prentice - Singing Floorboards

  • Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording:

In June of 1977, England's Anglia Television aired a documentary called 'Alternative 3' on its weekly Science Report program. The episode was presented as a factual expose, in that the show's investigators had found evidence that life on Earth was soon to be doomed to extinction from global warming, and the two superpowers of that time (Russia and the United States) had been secretly working together for decades to terraform and eventually
colonize the Moon and Mars with selected superior humans - leaving the rest of us here on this planet to die off when the inevitable end came. The show detailed what appeared to be a global 'brain drain', with scientists, engineers and other highly skilled technicians and thinkers from all over the world seemingly disappearing or dying - but, in the course of the program's investigation, finding that they all had been recruited for the interplanetary program, and sequestered at a secret base to work on it. 'Alternative 3' was filled with interviews with authoritative personnel and film footage showing the level and scope of work on this secret plan up to the present day.


Within minutes of its airing, network and government phone lines were inundated with thousands of calls from jolted viewers, demanding more information on this all-too-real effort. Needless to say, 'Alternative 3' was all just a big hoax, a spoof of similarly styled conspiracy documentaries from that period. It was originally planned to air on April 1st (April Fool's Day) of that year, in order to drive that point home, but due to production issues was not broadcast until June 20.

Needless to say, it freaked a whole lot of people out, in the same manner that Orson Welles' radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds caused mass hysteria almost forty years earlier. Although Anglia Television and the show's producers freely and readily admitted that it was fake, the basic points and premises of 'Alternative 3' live on to this day in various forms in other global cabal/UFO/extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.

The score for the 1977 broadcast was composed by no less than Brian Eno, who subsequently released a portion of it on his 1978 album Music For Films. And in 2001, a collective of musicians (including Stereolab, Add N to (X), Richard Thomas and others, all recording under the Alternative 3 moniker) recorded and released an 'alternative' version of the film score, allegedly for a feature film on the hoax that was scheduled for release that same year (I didn't find any evidence that this movie was ever produced or released, however).

This album is promoted on the label's website as "Super fried electronic madness. Long lost sessions mostly recorded at the Centre of Sound in London plus some dubs done at the ‘labs studio, stretched and twisted into dense and filmic slices of electronica." Can't really argue with any of that description!

 

So here for your listening pleasure is a smorgasbord of Stereolab's Mary Hansen-related ephemera:

  • Europa 51 - Abstractions, released by London-based experimental music label Lo Recordings in 2003;
  • Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP, put out on Stereolab's own Duophonic Super 45s label in 1997;
  • The Spooky Sounds Of Now compilation, launched by Scottish independent label Vesuvius Records, also in 1997; and
  • Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording, another Lo Recordings release, put out on April 30th, 2001

Have a listen and once again contemplate and revel in the artistry of the late, lamented vocalist, who left this world way too soon - you are still missed, Mary, by multitudes of music fans.

And as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:
  • Europa 51 - Abstractions: Send Email
  • Splitting The Atom - Spiltting The Atom EP: Send Email
  • Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now: Send Email
  • Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording: Send Email