Heartaches By The Gallon?

Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down

 Rose Maddox - Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down

Sally Let Your Bangs Hand Down appeared on Rose Maddox's 1960 Capitol LP, The One Rose, one of her earliest efforts at striking out on her own after the demise of the Maddox Brothers & Rose.

Rose Maddox Month

Dedicated to Matt Fiveash.

"C'mere, Loverboy!"

Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me

Rose Maddox  -  Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me

Plastic Eyeball Debut

 

Via the JET magazine archives, here's the photo run by the mag to let everyone know about Sammy Davis Jr's new eyeball in June, 1955.  For the search engines:

"Sammy Davis Jr. Doffs Eyepatch: Removing his now-famous eye patch for the opening performance at Las Vegas' New Frontier Hotel, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. unveils his new plastic left eye for the scrutiny of his uncle, Will Mastin.  Sammy lost his eye in California auto crash."  

Rose Maddox

Hillbilly Music...Thank God!

Ichiban Achievement Award goes to Marshall Crenshaw for this compilation.

Rose Maddox & Buck Owens - Mental Cruelty
Rose Maddox - Take Me Back Again

Step Right In - Rose Maddox

Here are a couple of tough honky-tonk numbers Rose Maddox released in 1967.  Somehow, neither side charted, but they're well-worth checking out.

Rose Maddox  -  Step Right In  (2:25)

Rose Maddox  -  Through The Bottom Of The Glass  (2:27)

The Rose & The Killer



Rose Maddox & Jerry Lee Lewis



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.

Take a trip to Monkey Jungle!

"Recycled" Records

Self-explanatory...to listen to the mix, CLICK HERE.

Track list:

Ralph Smedley & the Breathers - Suffocate
Ernie Freeman - Jamboree
Duke Mitchell - The Lion
The Spinners - Boomerang
The Sandabs - Crab Louie
Larry Verne - Tubby Tilly

Surfing Hollow Days (1960)

Who Is That Knocking?

1 "Boodle It" Wiggins: Keep A Knockin' An You Can't Get In

2 Rex Allen: Knock Knock Rattle

3 Faye Adams: The Hammer (Keeps A Knockin')

4 The El Dorados: At My Front Door

5 Fletcher Henderson & His Orch.: Knock, Knock, Who's There

6 Boys And Girls Together: Knock Knock

7 Jimmy Work: Don't Knock (Just Come On In)

8 Bob Dylan: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

9 Earl Scott: Stop You're Knocking

10 Juanita Nixon: Stop Knockin'

11 Paula Watson: Stop That Knockin' At My Heart

12 Victor: Stop A Knockin' (courtesy Tom Taber)

13 Eddie Hodges: I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door

14 The Sonics: Keep A' Knock'in

15 Eileen Todd: Knock, Knock, Knockin'

16 Aimi Stewart: Knock On Wood

17 Ike & Tina Turner: A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)

18 Randy Rudolph: I Kept A-Knocking

19 Legendary Stardust Cowboy: Who's Knocking On My Door

20 The Genies: Who's That Knocking

21 The Genies: No More Knockin'

22 Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five: Keep A-Knockin'

23 Smiley Lewis: I Hear You Knocking

24 Billy Adams: You Heard Me Knocking

25 The Pastels: Don't Knock

26 Pete Best Four: I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door

27 The Stereos: The Big Knock

28 Half Japanese: Knock On Wood

29 The Rolling Stones: Can't You Hear Me Knocking

30 Billy Fury: Don't Knock Upon My Door

31 Carol Fran: Knock Knock

32 Carol Fran: I Quit My Knocking

33 Conway Twitty: Knock Three Times

34 Bernd Spier: Klopf Dreimal

35 Grazina: I Ain't Gonna Knock On Your Door

36 Harpers Bizarre: Knock On Wood

37 Little Richard: Keep A Knockin'

38 Pat Shannon: Knock Knock (Who's There)

39 Nilsson & Cher: A Love Like Yours

40 The Go-Betweens: Knock Knock

41 The Green Beans: Knock On My Door (Tap On My Window)

42 The Isley Brothers: I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door

43 The Orlons: Knock! Knock! (Who's There)

44 The Primates: Knock On My Door

45 Brent Dowe: Knock Three Times

46 Death: Keep On Knockin

47 The Humane Society: Knock, Knock

KNOCK KNOCK

Surf Crazy 1959

Slippery When Wet 1958

Bruce Brown shot 8mm films of surfers when he was stationed in Hawaii back in the 1950's.  After moving back to California, Dale Velzy gave him $5000 to shoot a 16mm film promoting the Velzy surf team.  Brown narrates and Bud Shank provides the soundtrack.  The goofy narration in these films is what makes it for me.

The Sandals

 

The Endless Summer  (mp3s)

Side 1:
Scrambler
6-Pak
Driftin'
Theme From The Endless Summer
Good Greeves
Decoy

Side 2:
Out Front
Wild As The Sea
Trailing
Jet Black
Lonely Road
TR-6

August Is Bruce Brown Month

Louis Armstrong

Happy birthday to Louis Armstrong, born 112 years ago today (08/04/1901) in the world's most musical city, New Orleans.  In 1961, he worked with another musical genius, Duke Ellington, on the soundtrack for the film Paris Blues, which featured Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward.  In addition to his soundtrack contributions, Armstrong appeared in the movie, playing a character, a trumpet player naturally, called Wild Man Moore.  Here's the song by that name from the soundtrack.

Duke Ellington featuring Louis Armstrong  -  Wild Man Moore


Photo: the Jet magazine archives.

Goodbye Slim Harpo

Ridin' with the Grumpy King: Broderick Crawford's 'Highway Patrol'

 

“Twenty-one-fifty to headquarters…What’s your ten-twenty?....Ten-four…Twenty-one-fifty by…”

 

If that numeral sequence is all Greek to you, you’re probably not familiar with the most utilitarian cop-show of all time. By comparison, Dragnet was high style, its dialogue sculpted like stanzas of Milton, Jack Webb’s Joe Friday a commanding presence every bit as authorial as Orson Wells. If The Untouchables was noir, Dragnet the boiled-harder reduction of a Forties radio drama, then Highway Patrol (1955-59) was the crime series that dispensed with all pretense and got down, most expediently, to the genre’s basic hood-bull transactions.

It helps that Broderick Crawford’s Lt. Dan Matthews is a gruff superior whose barked orders, issued from flapping jowls, betray nothing but an impatient drive to wrap the case pronto. Invariably, this means a quick trip to the wall map and a plan to “Put roadblocks here, here and here! Tell Twenty-one-ten to meet us there! I’m off to Centerville!” Matthews then hops into Car Twenty-one-fifty (a giant Buick) and burns rubber down open roads leading to Centerville and Capital City—which are, in reality, the palm-dotted country lanes of an as yet unsprawled San Fernando Valley.

The show’s thugs are generally great types: uncaring gunsels who’d just as soon plug a human obstacle as park illegally outside the gas station they’re robbing, and a fair amount of them are tough, good-looking dames who’d easily make a Miriam Linna bad-girls compendium. All, of course, are brought to justice, thanks to the unbeatable combination of roadblocks and Matthews’ bulky pursuit; Crawford’s weight doesn’t permit long chases, but he’s light on his tiny feet and has no problem hacking through the brush of a chaparral canyon in his dark suit and hard shoes if it means a brief shootout and swift apprehension of the perp.

Time constraints make mercy a luxury Matthews can’t afford. Wounded baddies are left to lie in the dirt, clutching exit holes. Victims are consoled with “Sorry about the loss of your husband and son, Mrs. Johnson. Now let’s get back to headquarters!” Nor is empathy or imagination wasted on the episode titles of the half-hour series: “Car Theft,” “Plane Crash,” “Released Convict.” An obvious promo tie-in with some SoCal aeronautics firm explains such riveting installments as “Desert Copter,” “Mountain Copter” and “Blast Area Copter.”

We’re talking functional, get-it-over-and-done TV. No brooding detectives, no smart-ass junior dicks, no quirky Goths manning under-lit crime labs. And each show closes with Crawford, anxious to get to his favorite after-work watering-hole, delivering a terse public-service announcement couplet—“If you care to drive, drive with care” or “Leave your blood at the blood bank, not on the highway…” Ten-four.

Now playing: on MGM DVD’s and the Antenna TV channel. Sample show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2sA5hiI7ZI

 

Slim Harpo LIVE!

via oldies.com

David Kearns and Joe Drago recorded Slim playing live at the Sage Avenue Armory back in 1961.  The sound isn't the greatest, but it's all we've got.  Here's a sample.

Slim Harpo Live - "I'm A King Bee", "Got Love If You Want It" and "When The Saints Go Marching In"

Junco Partner

via Billboard.com

Tune it to Music To Spazz By tonight, when Dave the Spazz welcomes Lily Keber, the director of Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius Of James Booker.  Catch a screening Sunday or Monday as part of the Sound + Vision festival at the Film Society Of Lincoln Center then head to the Great Jones where WFMU DJ, Matt Fiveash will be serving up unlimited Abitas.  Also, don't miss Charles Bradley: Soul Of America, the story of Daptone's latest star, which opens the festival Friday at 6:30.  (Also streaming via itunes and highly recommended).



  

That's Alright Baby (Don't Start Cryin' Now)

Don't Start Cryin' Now (1961)

Slim Harpo

Blues Hangover (1960)
b/w
What A Dream 

Are In-Laws Really Outlaws?

1 Art Linkletter: mother-in-law joke

2 Calvin Arnold: Mama-In-Law

3 Jimmy Witherspoon: Don't Ever Move A Woman Into Your House

4 Champion Jack Dupree: Mother-In-Law Blues

5 Bing Crosby: The Whistler's Mother In Law

6 B.K. Anderson: Mother-In-Law Cha Cha

7 Ernie K-Doe: Mother In Law (incorp. alt. & studio chatter)

8 Gary Paxton: Mother-In-Law

9 Ernie K-Doe: My Mother-In-Law (Is In My Hair Again)

10 Bo Diddley: Husband-In-Law

11 Jim Nesbitt: Husbands-In-Law

12 Charlie Rich: Hawg Jaw

13 Champion Jack Dupree wtih Mr. Bear: Lonely Road Blues

14 Jamo Thomas: Jive Mother-In-Law

15 Little Junior Parker: Mother-In-Law Blues

16 Kursaal Flyers: Monster-In-Law

17 Kui Lee: Ain't No Big Thing

18 Lee Perry: Mother-In-Law

19 Lucas & Mike Cotton Sound: Mother-In-Law

20 Jim Nesbitt: Mother-In-Law

21 Chiquita: Father-In-Law

22 James Spencer: In-Law Trouble

23 Marion Harris: Brother-In-Law Dan

24 Paul Peek: Brother-In-Law (He's A Moocher)

25 Peetie Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-In-Law

26 The Nashville Teens: Devil-In-Law

27 The Blossoms: Son-In-Law

28 Louise Brown: Son-In-Law

29 The Satintones: You'd Make A Fine Son-In-Law

30 Edward Gates White: Mother-In-Law

31 Mack McQuire: Mother-In-Law Blues

32 Rod Bernard: My Old Mother-In-Law

33 The Allen Brothers: Mother-In-Law Blues

34 The Misfits: My Mother-In-Law

35 The Volumes: Oh My Mother-In-Law

36 Clarence Carter: Mother-In-Law

37 The Brochures: My In-Laws Are Outlaws

38 Sir Douglas Quintet: Are In-Laws Really Outlaws?

ARE IN-LAWS REALLY OUTLAWS?

Mondo Topless Radio Extravaganza

Thanks to my pal Phil for sending along these fantastic screen captures of radio shots from Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless. 

James Moore aka Slim Harpo

1924-1970

Slim's first record was produced by Jay Miller for Ernie Young's Excello Records out of Nashville.  Jay claims it was his idea for Slim to have a gimmicky, nasal sounding voice.  "I'm A King Bee" b/w "I Got Love If You Want It" is a good place to start.

I'm A King Bee (1957)

I Got Love If You Want It

July Is Slim Harpo Month

Freedom Wins Again

Thanks to Jim Blanchard for sharing this patriotic themed comp!

Get it!

Adiós, Black Belt Jones

From FUNKY CRIMES: A radio spot for BLACK BELT JONES (R.I.P. Jim Kelly), plus "Get It" by Wilmer & the Dukes.

Get it, Jim...