Rose Maddox Month

Rose Maddox - Move It On Over

Honky Tonkin'

Rose Maddox  -  Honky Tonkin'

The Hot Rod Jordanaires

 
Jordanaires  -  Malibu Run  (2:04)

Recently, while scrounging for 45s out in the Atlanta suburbs I found this mystifying head-scratcher by the Jordanaires.  Who would've figured these tame but talented background vocalists for Rip Chords wannabes with a passion for hot rod sounds?  Certainly not I.  And how about the fact that this extraordinarily unlikely disc was produced by Don Law and Frank Jones, Columbia's in-house go-to guys for classic Nashville country sounds by people like Ray Price, Carl Butler and Pearl, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell and others.  And I have no idea who author R. Wilkins is but I wonder if he's somehow related to Bucky Wilkin (no "s" at the end) who wrote and recorded a substantial body of hot rod work in Nashville as a member of Ronny & The Daytonas. 

Louis Nye, Silly Guy

He would have turned a hundred this year. Gordon Hathaway. Sonny Drysdale. Raise a glass (better still, as Gordon advised on his Heigh-Ho Madison Avenue album, hoist some “Martinis and Miltown”). Or offer a heartfelt “Boola boola” as raccoon-coated Sonny did on more than one episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Steve Allen, it’s been persuasively argued, was the first hip spy in the house of TV, abetting the earliest visitations by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jack Kerouac, Frank Zappa, the Collins Kids and countless other outsiders to millions of American living room; he “had the true spirit of a comic anarchist fluttering like a red flag in his soul,” wrote James Wolcott.

 Louis Nye (1913-2005) was among the more subversive offerings of Allen’s late-Fifties/early-Sixties show. Appearing weekly in skits and ‘Man on the Street’ bits, Nye’s Gordon Hathaway wasn’t merely funny, batting his eyes, cocking coy smiles, dropping Mad-Ave and Greenwich Village jargon into his exchanges with Allen. He was a cultural signifier of a half dozen things that, much like race and ethnicity, official America found too taboo to talk about. He was a louche aesthete and style cat, an uninhibited wit who couldn’t tell you who won last week’s big game, who was maybe gay, who hung with bohemians and cracked about getting high. Walking into frame in his thin tie, button-down Gant and Tyrolean hat, Gordon (whose shtick was usually written by Allen staffers Stan Burns and Herb Sargent) confounded prevailing notions of how guy-hood was supposed to play. If Lord Buckley was the Fifties’ avatar of the Sixties, Gordon Hathaway was, in his own way, the coal-mine canary that brought news of much that society would eventually accept and respect.

Nye’s brief (1962) run as Clampett banker Mr. Drysdale’s playboy son Sonny was juicy if wildly anachronistic; The Beverly Hillbillies’ writers wrote the eternal college student as a prancing refuge from the Thirties. It was as Gordon Hathaway that Nye killed, with heavy doses of sly and silly—not just on Allen’s show, but on singles like “Teenage Beatnik” (“I like to cha-cha in my Bermuda shorts” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPh6fxIxBiM) and LPs like Heigh-ho Madison Avenue and Here’s Nye in Your Eye, where the proto-Mad Men tropes fly fast and furious (“Let’s toss it down the well and check it for splash”). If you can find the latter set, dig “Hipster in a Bank” and be set free.

A SCORPION by any other name...

I while back I wrote a blog about Jimmie McConville's amazing contribution to the Instrumental genre; Scorpion. It was released under his own name, and later by his band The Carnations.

Well, as an adden-dumb to that post, I present this. An outright theft of Scorpion by a band called The Dawn Beats. Not sure what year this is from, probably early 60's. 

Here is the original post:

Three_Scorpions!

And here is Road_Block.

Notice the similarities...

Star Time

B.B. Kings Blues Club is celebrating the Girl Group Sound this coming Sunday, September 8th!!  Be there for an amazing line up of the original ladies behind all the hits.  Ichiban favorites Baby Washington, Maxine Brown, Louise Murray, Lillian Walker, Margaret Ross, Barbara Harris, Toni Wine, Nanette Licari and Beverly Warren.  The ladies will be backed up by the Boyfriends, featuring members of Yo La Tengo, Loser's Lounge and the Uptown Horns.  Directed by Jeremy Chatzky and produced by Jill Sternheimer.  WFMU's Gaylord Fields and Dave the Spazz will MC.  Don't miss this historic event!!

Cookies - Up On The Roof

Rose Maddox Month

September is Rose Maddox Month here on Ichiban.  

Wild Wild Young Men 1955

On Any Sunday

Pace Magazine

The Guitar Sheik

Get a load of this fantastic 1955 photo borrowed from the pages of Jet magazine.  Bobby Walker, in full sheik regalia, strolls the streets of Philadelphia serenading the lucky citizens with his guitar.  Photo by Gaston DeVigne.

She's The Girl On The Billboard...

Joyce Paul  -  I'm The Girl On The Billboard

Here's the answer song to the record posted by Debbie yesterday.

By Request

Del Reeves sings Girl On The Billboard

Louis Jordan For President!

It's only 2013 and I'm already tired of hearing about the next Presidential election.  Now if Louis Jordan were in the race, things might be different.  Via the fantastic JET archives.