Over the years the music industry has provided the listening public a treasure trove of musical excrescence, but only an elite few deserve recognition as instruments of torture. I humbly offer a few examples of these Olympian earwigs. Please feel free to offer your own suggestions in comments.
Caution: not safe for work. Not safe for home. Not safe for anywhere.
Click if you dare.
UPDATE CAUTION: NOW CONTAINS 27% RUPERT HOLMES ADDITIVES
White Plains -- My Baby Loves Lovin'
Terry Jacks -- Seasons in the Sun
Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods -- Billy Don't Be a Hero
Captain & Tenille -- Muskrat Love
Tony DiFranco & the DiFranco Family -- Heartbeat (It's a Love Beat)
Bobby Goldsboro -- Honey
Sammy Johns -- Chevy Van
Debbie Boone -- You Light Up My Life
RUPERT HOLMES UPDATE
For whatever reason (I blame trauma), I neglected to include the astonishing cannibalism-stalking-alcoholism soft perv rock oeuvre of Rupert Holmes in the initial posting. Consider it fixed, and you're welcome.
The Buoys -- Timothy
Written by Rupert Holmes and performed by the Buoys, the soft rock pride of Wilkes-Barre PA. Perhaps the finest cannibalism ballad ever to reach the top 20.
Sunday before the Super Bowl I met up with a few other Chicago area jokers to participate in the Bare Bones Car Club's annual Polar Bear cruise. This year's edition wended from the Felony Hot Rods shop in Itasca to the Suicide Axle Hot Rods shop of my pal Drew Didio in Sycamore. It was a balmy 28 degrees Farenheit, a good 20 degrees warmer than last year's run.
Fun had, extremities frozen, memory of Buddy Holly toasted (it being the 49th anniversary of The Day the Music Died and all). Here are some moving pictures to illustrate. Cheesy department store Musak from the vaults of K-Mart progenitor S.S. Kresge!
Yesterday my friend Cal Spitzer electrogrammed this snazzy 8x10 publicity shot of the delightfully named (and delightfully shod) Stark Naked and the Car Thieves. Research reveals that this combo had its beginnings as a conglomeration of several Indianapolis area garage and doo-wop groups, finally relocating to Los Angeles where they had several minor hits, and rotating list of members. Despite the wild name (and a reportedly crazy Vegas stage show), their surviving recordings are decidedly tame. Further research reveals that their name was eventually stolen by a New Zealand band who went on to record a minor hit cover of another name-thieving band: the Monks' (UK) "Nice Legs, Shame About the Face."
The thing that really struck me, though, is the small print: SN&CT's booking agency is listed as "Jimmy O'Neill Management." I believe this would be the very same DJ Jimmy O'Neill whom I listened to on WOW Radio 590 Omaha during the '70s. Before his days of spinning hot Top 40 wax in Omaha, Jimmy managed several L.A. bands; before that he was a Los Angeles DJ, but best known as the host of ABC's mid-60's teen music program Shindig. The program was created by O'Neill and then-wife Sharon Sheeley, an accomplished songwriter who penned the #1 hit "Poor Little Fool" for Ricky Nelson and co-wrote the Eddie Cochran classic "Come on Everybody."
Sheeley and Cochran later became boyfriend and girlfriend, and she (along with Gene Vincent) survived the car accident that killed Cochran in England in 1960. Their ill-fated romance later became the subject of a 1980's Levis 501 commercial. Following the wreck, Cochran's car and its contents were impounded at the local
police station. A police cadet at the station named David Harman borrowed Cochran's impounded Gretsch guitar and taught himself how to play. As "Dave Dee" he later led the 60's British pop chart-toppers Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, who had a mini-revival last year when their nugget "Hold Tight" was featured in an ironically bloody car wreck scene in Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof":
Where was I? Oh yeah, Shindig. It was a brief but big TV hit with Jimmy introducing many of the big acts of the day. Despite solid ratings it was canceled in 1966 to make room on the ABC schedule for a second weekly episode the red-hot Batman series (delighting a young Batman fanatic named Quentin Tarantino who would pay homage to Adam West's Bat-dance in Pulp Fiction). Shindig performers included TheBeatles and this rival quartet of English Invaders:
The Who, as fate would have it, would later score a US Top 20 chart hit with a cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues." Jimmy's O'Neill's spotlight on Shindig also brought him immortality in 1965 as a Flintstone character -- here's "Jimmy O'Neillstone" introducing "The Beau Brummelstones" on "Shinrock."
My favorite nugget from the real Shindig is this Halloween '65 bit with Jimmy introducing Boris Karloff for a cover of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's Monster Mash:
In the background, those cute go-go girls included Terri Garr, who would go on to have a starring role in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and earn an Oscar nomination for "Tootsie." Another was Toni Basil, the 80's one-hit wonder of "Mickey" fame. Between her Shindig go-go gig and MTV mall rat celebrity, Basil was a bit player in films, including Mary the prostitute in 1969's "Easy Rider" with Jack Nicholson, who received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Basil teamed up with Nicholson again the next year as Terry the hitchhiker girl in "Five Easy Pieces," which earned Nicholson his first Oscar nomination for best actor. Here you can see her sitting in the diner booth during the film's famous sandwich scene:
Nicholson, of course, went on to star in dozens of films, including Batman and a cameo appearance in Tommy, the rock opera written by The Who a few years after their Shindig appearance. As noted here previously, that film also spawned a totally bitchin' pinball machine -- the model I frequently played while listening to Jimmy O'Neill on WOW.
Along the way Nicholson earn a boatload of Oscar nominations, most recently for the Omaha-based "About Schmidt." In that film, Nicholson's character works as an actuary at the downtown HQ of the Woodmen of the World insurance company, once Omaha's tallest building. Woodmen of the World insurace, incidentally, owned WOW Radio and gave it its call letters. When Jimmy O'Neill was a DJ there, his studio was in the same building.
But my personal favorite Nicholson screen moment occured a few years earlier, as Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup in 1992's "A Few Good Men." Another Oscar nomination, likely clinched by this memorable scene:
Recognize Nicholson's Marine lawyer in the scene? Yep, inevitably, KEVIN BACON. But that's another story.
I don't think anything permanently warped me as much as exposure to the work of Jay Ward, the animator who created "The Bullwinkle and Rocky Show" and "George of the Jungle" (not to mention cereal superstar Captain Crunch). That signature combination of flat, planar UPA art with Tom Lehrer -style intellectual gags made us preteen viewers feel we were part of a subversive, sophisticated club. Even if we didn't get all the jokes about Norman Mailer and Everett Dirksen.
My favorite Ward efforts were some of his lesser known. Obvious top of the list is Tom Slick, who ran third banana to George of the Jungle and Super Chicken.
Speaking of Super Chicken: The Case of the Missing Rhode Island!
Old chum A-Bone McCabe forwards some video of Belgian chanteuse Annie Cordy, a popular entertainer in Europe for over 50 ans. Here she is belting out "Cigarettes et Whiskey et P'tit's Pepees" on French TV in 1957. Turns out "P'tit's Pepees" has nothing to do with poorly endowed Frenchmen -- this sounds to be a cover of the old Country Western standard "Cigarette and Whiskey and Wild Wild Women."
A couple decades later: Annie does a disco / Carmen Miranda bit, "Tata Yoyo," on a 1980 French variety show.
And for our old pals Mark, Xeni and David -- Annie and a puppet pal rock out to "Boing Boing."
