ég er john seven

You can read all about Carmen Sevilla here, but prior to this record, I had never heard of her. And I have never see King Of Kings. I found this 1965 record in a pile of Spanish 7 inch EPs in an antique store in Brattleboro, VT, and picked it up because I loved the cover. I figured it would be some form of pop music, so was surprised to find such a Latin-flavored slice of bravado, and doesn’t she have the pipes to pull it off?

Whenever confronted with the song, I wonder why Daydream was such an over-the-top hit in the 1960s. It’s a nice enough song as songs go, but, really? And then I wonder why popular songs these days aren’t as catchy or likable as Daydream. Then I go about my business. 

Jazz interpretations of rock hits are often horrible. Yeah, sure, there are some that work, but … this version of the Booker T song is pretty cool. With James on trumpet and Buddy Rich on drums, dating from 1965. 

If Barbra Streisand was the lead singer for The Doors … Julie Budd was a child star from Brooklyn, started at age 12 or so, and got a lot of support from Merv Griffin.  Poor Julie is so strange that a bunch of whispering guys follow her around. This album is from 1968, but Julie is apparently still at it.  

This seems to be  yet another New Christy Minstrels knock-off, but specifically designed, at least in this release, to romanticize the merry, old post-Civil War south as it pines for the better, shinier antebellum days, at least those pertaining to riverboats. The group even took a four-day journey on one to get a feel for riverboat life. They wanted to feel it. And so these very, very white performers are no doubt highly qualified to deliver “the Civil War lament of a southern Negro who, in the hardships of battle, remembers with a curious melancholy ‘the good old days.’”

But I’m being much too harsh on a group that could produce this kind of amazing song. A corny song, sure, but it gets in your head and you start hearing the rock and roll in it, and POW, you’re sold on it.

And why were they so great? Because Randy Sparks, the same guy who created and ran the New Christy Minstrels ALSO created and ran this group, which was intended to be a “farm team” for the NCM, but actually ended up getting some attention on their own. They appeared on Hullaballoo and entertained President Lyndon B. Johnson! 

They record five albums, including this one from 1965, so I’ve got four to keep an eye out for …

This one taken from an Italian comp from the 1960s, Another Euro pop singer who is unknown to me, Catherine Spaak is apparently French, though most of her career was in Italy as a singer and an actress. She’s still around - she was apparently in the BBC detective show Zen - but is most notable for starring in trashy 70s movies. 

Poor, poor The Haircuts and The Impossibles. You share an album, but no one at Somerset Records thinks it’s worth notating who did what song, leaving it to the imagination who concocted this clunky remake of the Herman’s Hermits hit oddity. I’ll just pray that it was one faceless studio band and the record company just slapped the two names on after the fact to give the package some pizzaz. Usually the point of these records is to present soundalikes, but this track is a prime example of some of the stumbling that goes on here - and the fact that “Winchester Cathedral” is considered a big draw than some of the other covers on the album, including “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” hints at the bizarro world of the past.

You know on old TV shows, like from the ’60s and ’70s, when they have kids listening to rock music and it’s always this groovy, fake instrumental wig out stuff? This seems to be a whole album of that. 

This 1960 album by former brothers of the Sigma Nu fraternity at University of Missouri actually posed a challenge since there were so many astonishing songs on it. It was hard to choose just one. I’m sure I’ll post another track by them, but to start with I chose this beatnik’d-up version of “Sixteen Tons,” a positively smoking rendition that takes the famous riff and noddles with it in an awesome way. I give the boys high marks for this one.

I know nothing of this Italian singer other than what is written on the back of the album - a Eurovision winner, in fact the first Italian one, and a recurring presence on European television. She has apparently become somebody on that continent — Wikipedia will lay it all out for you. I didn’t know any of that when I picked it up at Goodwill, though - I just thought, “Fifty cents, pretty Italian girl, 1960s, this is a recipe for awesome.” I place this around 1965 - it’s charming and fun.