DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

The Agony, Inspiration and Exultation Of Charles Allan Rich -  December 14, 1932 – July 25, 1995. Never Forget To Remember Such Brilliance. Enough Said. Listen In Friends.

When people think of Joe South, they generally think first of Games People Play , one of the most successful protest-related songs of the late 1960s, with its distinctive electric sitar accompaniment, played by the singer and composer himself, and a bitingly prescient lyric directed at pseudo-hippy types who "while away the hours / In their ivory towers / Till they're covered up with flo...

With the single “I Only Want to Be with You” (1963), Springfield went solo and made her way into the heart of “Swinging London.” Part cartoon, part unresolvable desire, part bruised despair, she peered through heavy mascara and a stack of peroxided hair while singing with breathy sensuality. Bringing a fragile uncertainty to her cover versions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that had been...

I guess it’s time to share my John Prine story - my “encounter with greatness.” Stop me if I’m repeating myself. It was 1971, my freshman year at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. A group of us heard that John Prine was going to be playing at Grinnell - a smaller, hipper school, and we decided to make the trek, and sleep over in our sleeping bags.  John was appearing - for free - in the...

This is the unlikely musical tale of a 1950's Italian kid from New York City not named Dion DiMucci. We're talking about John Henry Ramistella. This artist has been inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame but the big door prize still eludes him. It's possibly the contention that a career delivering mostly vivid, colorful cover versions of brilliant material makes him a melodi...

https://punkgirldiaries.com/mary-weiss-shangri-la/ "Oh, no, Oh no, Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Remember (Walking In The Sand)".   The song and it's production were the child of a music business misfit named George "Shadow" Morton"  But it was the urgent hurt of Mary Weiss that has lived within me going on 55 years.  I recall ruminating upon hearing her plea in 1964, &quot...

k. d. Lang was my wife’s lesbian crush. She made the pilgrimage to see her perform live twice in quick succession, during those heady days when the gender-fluid superstar first altered the zeitgeist with her meteoric power. k.d.’s vocal prowess was undeniable, and other-worldly. And, coming from the hinterlands of Canada she seemed to me, in 1989, like an alien from another planet. When I saw that...

"Who Can We Turn To- Tony Bennett's Long Ride Home". Even though we all knew The Mystery Train had been patiently awaiting the arrival of this great man , the depth of sorrow felt for such a loss combined with the immense gratitude for such a life is not discovered until the moment of truth. Tony Bennett was the truth, as he was incapable of exuding even a single false note. Anthony...

There have been a few performers in my life that have hosted a secret clubhouse gathering, which provided me a respite from the grueling business of living - people whose comforting, yet compelling personalities, who, by sharing secrets, made me laugh heartily, or pulled me into a safe harbor of balanced perspective: Late nights under the covers with Jean Shepard, lonely, frustrating mornings of b...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/arts/music/prince-buster-trailblazer-of-ska-dies-at-78.html Cecil Bustamente Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 24, 1938. He performed with teenage groups in Kingston; he also became a boxer, taking the name Prince Buster. In the 1950s he began working for one of Jamaica’s top producers and sound-system disc jockeys, Coxsone Dodd. By the end of the de...

https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/life-and-violent-death-of-a-genius-called-joe Music producer Joe Meek was never going to die a natural death. That is the verdict of Clem Cattini, drummer of The Tornados, for whom Meek produced the groundbreaking record Telstar in 1962 – the first British record to top the US singles chart – in his poky studio at 304 Holloway Road. Fans of Meek, named by...

Ooh, Baby, Ooooh wee! Ooh, baby, oooooh wee! It’s that Million Dollar Bash. I hear that chorus and I’m smiling. It’s a celebration, a party. Dylan and the boys are off the hard road, and they’re just having fun in the Big Pink basement with the Revox tape recorder.  There has been some interpretative gobble dee gook about it being Dylan’s satirical payback to Andy Warhol and his pretentious Factor...

Mickey Newbury was born Milton Sims Newbury Jr. in Houston Texas, May 19, 1940 to Maime and Milton Newbury. As a child, he was inseparable from younger brother, Jerry; a friendship that continued throughout his life. In high school, Mickey decided to write songs. As a teenager, he shut himself up in his room, writing poetry and learning to play guitar. He organized a doo-wop group called The Ember...

Born Charles Westover in Grand Rapids, Michigan , in 1934, the singer-songwriter known as Del Shannon dies by suicide on February 8, 1990. In a period when the American pop charts were dominated by cookie-cutter teen idols and novelty acts, he stood out as an all-too-rare example of an American pop star whose work reflected real originality. His heyday as a chart-friendly star in the United States...

This is a fun one… (but, they’ve all been fun for me).  It’s  being performed by the immortal Stubby Kaye, or “Unkie” as he’s known around our house because he’s the great uncle of my daughter-in-law. Her brother is the spitting image of the musical comedy great, which demonstrates the endurance of Stubby’s DNA. The other performer on the recording is Mr. Jonny Silver.  This jaunty track, composed...

This example of a “sunny song” is a little different from the previous ones because what makes me happy when I hear it is not the message itself. Or, rather, the medium is the message. The message is under the surface, or perhaps on the surface, or threaded throughout it. It’s a message about team work - a premier example of interracial / inter-gendered cooperative, coming together to create a mos...

Songs are sometimes much more than a mere confection of words and music. Take the enduringly popular Irish ballad “Raglan Road”, whose ingredients are a dark-haired beauty, a lovelorn poet, a sublime ancient melody and one of Ireland’s finest folk singers. In 1944 Patrick Kavanagh, who was to become one of Ireland’s most popular poets, fell hopelessly in love at the age of 40 with a beautiful medi...

The first of the six covers that appear on Please Please Me is a mid-tempo ballad called “ Anna (Go to Him) ,” which was written and first recorded by Arthur Alexander. Chances are that most people who hear the version sung by John Lennon have no idea who Arthur Alexander is—but the Beatles certainly knew, and so did the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan : Alexander is reportedly the only songwriter wh...

What is a “buttermilk sky?,” I asked myself. It’s such an evocative image, and for years I would simply envision a magnificent sunset of red and gold, suffused through a canopy of fluffy clouds. I googled it, and I was right! Up came rows of beautiful celestial pics, and although those photos are fantastic, the image in my mind’s eye had them all beat - attached as it was to an indefinable, stirri...

Fervent fans of The Doughboys know their whole history, detailed on the Rock N’ Raw DVD – they first got together in ‘64 and played in various permutations through the rest of the 60’s. They gigged incessantly, won a battle-of-the-bands on Zacherle’s Disc-o-Teen TV show, were the house band at the legendary Café Wha? in New York City in the summer of ’68. They opened for every act imaginable inclu...

AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE Another problematic remnant of our conflicted cultural history: one of America’s all-time greatest popular lyricists, from Savannah GA, scion of the Confederacy, raised on minstrelsy, who has bequeathed unto us some of the most sublime songs of the 20th century. What do we do with such an ambivalent inheritance?  At least Johnny Mercer credited the inspiration for his...

TIGHTEN UP by Archie Bell and the Drells (Atlantic, 1968) Tighten up isn’t really a song at all (even though it’s listed as #265 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Top 500 Songs of All Time). It’s a riff, a groove, a vibe - and it’s FUCKIN’ AWESOME. It also made it to number one on both the R&B and Pop Charts of 1968. Some people say it was the beginning of funk - maybe so, I don’t know, but, what...

" Is That All There Is? ", a song written by American songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller during the 1960s, became a hit for American singer Peggy Lee and an award winner from her album of the same title in November 1969 . The song was originally performed by Georgia Brown in May 1967 for a television special. It was first recorded by disc jockey Dan Daniel in March 1968, but...

THE SQUARE OF THE HYPOTENEUSE by Danny Kaye (from the film “Merry Andrew”, 1958) Danny Kaye resembled my uncle Teddy, dad’s older brother, the middle of three fatherless products of the depression. (My father told me he never tasted ice cream until he was a teenager). Whenever Uncle Teddy came over he gave me gifts or money, and he was always laughing. In fact, that was his response to any rebuke:...

On June 1st, 2023,  we lost the prolific Cynthia Weil who in partnership with husband Barry Mann gave us the most played recording of all time, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. Cynthia boarded The Mystery Train at 83 years of melody.  If the songs, “I’m Gonna Be Strong”, “ I Don’t Know Much”, “Soul and Inspiration”, “Blame It On The Bossa Nova”, “Kicks”, “ Magic Town”, “On Broadway”, “ Walking I...