In the early 1980’s a short-lived phenomenon burned strong across the country. It was called the lip-sync contest. Basically, it involved a person, or group of people, pretending to sing and play instruments along with a recording of a popular song. There would be organized contests of these performances, as people pretended to be rock…
Author: Rob
“You Don’t Care”: Terry Callier’s Enigmatic Song About Apathy
It’s one of the strangest songs of the 70’s, but it’s no prog rock freakout, no barbed Frank Zappa commentary, no underground outsider art music. Rather, it’s a mellifluous tune, bathed in sweet harmonies, strings and horns a la Burt Bacharach. It’s the juxtaposition of the lyrics- a repetition of the phrase “you don’t care”-…
Incommunicado in Cedar Key
Jimmy Buffett’s 1980 song “Incommunicado” contains the line “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key / That’s what old John MacDonald said”. McGee was the main character in MacDonald’s series of Florida mystery/adventure books, published between 1964 and 1984. A sort of James Bond/Magnum P.I. type of character, McGee lived on a houseboat. Buffett, however, used…
Taking a Bite Out of 2013: Year End Wrap-Up
I’ve written about a few of my favorite things (why do I hear Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music singing “these are a few of my favorite things”?), musically speaking, that were released this year. Some of my words were published on PopMatters (Dent May, Bobby Whitlock, Tommy Keene, Robbie Basho, etc.) and some…
Laura Nyro’s “Christmas and the Beads of Sweat”
For somebody who used to wear Christmas ornaments as earrings, it’s surprising that Laura Nyro never released a Christmas album. Oh, she did release an album with ‘Christmas’ in the title, of course. But, you have to wonder how Columbia Records and the record buying public reacted back in 1970 when Nyro presented them with…
Swan Dive’s “Wintergreen”
Partway to Christmas Wintergreen, the 1997 album by Swan Dive – the duo of Bill DeMain and Molly Felder – doesn’t come out and say it’s a Christmas album. The title, the inclusion of two Christmas songs, and the snowflakes artwork lean it heavily in that direction, though. Yet, the rest of the album has…
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