Sam The Sham (official fansite wiki AMG) is best known as the be-turbaned lead singer of The Pharaohs, who had the two rockin' novelty hits "Wooly Bully" and "Li'l Red Riding Hood." The year after "...Riding Hood," Sam (born Domingo Samudio) took off the turban and released his tarot-card covered album, Ten of Pentacles. In addition to his cover of Lloyd Price's take on Stag, it also includes covers of "Stand By Me" and two songs by The Coasters, along with quite a few originals.Sam's sax player and co-songwriter, Frank Carabetta, is featured heavily on this track, along with a lovely piano really high in the mix. I know this makes two weeks in a row with really horn-heavy pop versions of Stag, so we'll have a bluesy version next Saturday.
(Note: this song is long out of print, except on an imported German 3-disc box set, so the buy link is probably wishful thinking yet again.)
5 comments:
I've got his version of Red Hot somewhere on vinyl - that's very good too.
I'll look around for that -- it's one of my favorite obscurer Sun hits.
Here's one - not the greatest quality, but likely as good as my vinyl would be after all these years.
http://stashbox.org/505892/SamTheSham-RedHot.mp3
Cool, thanks!
Somewhere around here I have a 1980s-ish interview with Lou Reed wherein he names "Red Hot" as one of his favorite songs, and proceeds to sing the chorus...
'tis one of my faves too - I have fond memories of a Robert Gordon version, that if memory serves, bunches up the call-return part ( poor explanation, err, they skip a cuppla beats ). His was the first one I heard, & was then surprised to find the others done 'straight', as it were.
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