One thing I love to hear on easy listening records is plucky electric bass, like it was picked or plucked close to the bridge. It creates a tight foundation for the more airy elements to soar. In general, so many of these LPs have thick, clear, lush production sounds (especially the German ones). Picture yourself in a Kmart in the mid-’70s, munching on popcorn while Mom looks for husky bootcut dungarees for your new school year.
Kaempfert, born in Hamburg in 1923, was a songwriter (“Strangers in the Night”) and bandleader whose most famous footnote is probably (while working A&R for Polydor) hiring The Beatles to back English singer Tony Sheridan in 1961. He started releasing LPs in the late ’50s, and some of his material starting a decade later falls nicely into the Now Sound genre (middle-aged, mostly white orchestra leaders covering “hip” rock and pop sounds of the day), with a plucking electric bass underpinning pleasant brass melodies. He died in 1980. The label on this one brags “Recorded in Europe.”
A demented desert island disc in this home. This was the first collection of song poems, short-run records (mostly 45s), the result of the “send us your lyrics” shuck found in gossip magazine ads back in the 1960s and ’70s. The king of this strange corner of the record world was the sad genius Rodd Keith (aka Rod Rogers and many other names), a musical prodigy who met an early demise, the result of drugs and/or mental imbalance. He could bang out multiple one-take songs per day, a lot of them sounding genuinely good and catchy with an air of someone having actual fun at their work, so he’s since had several anthologies of his own. Other singers come across as d-level lounge crooners, and hearing them sing these bizarre poems sent in by suckers who paid money to have a record of their own often results in some strange accidental works of sick inspiration. Released by Byron Coley’s Carnage Press label, which was created for that cool Jim Jones Trading Cards set.
Now here’s what they call one of them ironical situations. As a rule I’ve always loathed that whole precious, “cuddle-core” strain of independent rock music that flourished in the 1980s. You know, fey liberal arts majors in sweaters from upper middle class households strumming chimy chord changes, so shy they might just urinate their $100 jeans if you so much as gave them the stinkeye. Surely never grew a callous due to manual labor. I remember, when living in North Carolina in the 1990s, waiting for the buyer in a Chapel Hill used bookstore to raise some spending cash by selling some records, and off to my side was this delicate little creature of a student, singing his mousy little songs to a smug audience of coffee drinkers. It made the blue collar metalhead in me want to go Belushi on the kid.
SOOO, imagine the situation as someone so in contempt of this species of entitled sleeve-wipers to be into a band like Beat Happening. A band from one of the steaming breeding grounds of this musical archetype, Olympia, Washington. A band with two jock-looking normies and a dykey chick right out of Art School Confidential. An intentionally-amateur-sounding band who write songs with two chords and nursery rhyme melodies, and switch instruments to sound “worse.” Does not compute, but there it is. Since their earlier stuff never hit me, I’m thinking it’s the deft touch of producer Steve Fisk who sprinkled the right shades of musical fairy dust on this record that did it. Also, these guys were one of the earlier artists of their generation to reference the non-teen pre-hippy sixties as cultural touchstones (it took me years to realize Calvin Johnson took his whole baritone singing style from Lee Hazlewood). I get nauseous and angry when hearing any other groups that sound like this, but Beat Happening makes me happy. Go figure.
