Stagger Lee Saturdays - Spencer and Spencer

Here's a tie-in post. This ties in Stagger Lee with my recent series of posts on Break-In Records. Spencer and Spencer were actually Dickie Goodman, king of the break-in records, and Detroit DJ Micky Shorr.

A bit of clarification before you download: This isn't actually a break-in record per se, using song lyrics as dialogue. In fact, it only samples two records: Lloyd Price's then-current hit version of Stag, and Stan Freberg's epic takedown of Lawrence Welk. The Freberg record was still very well-known in 1959, two years after its release, and in fact this uses a few of the same jokes ("The Lemon Sisters," a similarly deadly impression of Welk, and even the same sound effect to signify the crushing of Welk's accordion). This whole thing feels like Freberg Lite to me, reusing the diction correction of Stan's "Sh-Boom" and the running back into the studio of his "Day-O." But, in all fairness, even Freberg Lite is still funnier than the SNL parodies of Welk they've been doing lately.

So, to sum up, this isn't the funniest novelty record of 1959, or the funniest version of Stag. But it's good for a few giggles, and if you're a completist of Freberg, Stagger Lee, or even Welk parodies, it's essential listening.

Spencer and Spencer - Stagger Lawrence
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Silly Sundays - John and Ernest - Superfly Meets Shaft

Remember how I was supposed to be doing a month of break-in records, right before my computer broke itself? Well, here's post #2. In 1973, some seventeen years after his first break-in release, Dickie Goodman produced (and presumably helped write and edit) this record by John and Ernest (wiki). It tells the story of Superfly, who's gone missing, and Shaft, who is called in to investigate.

I bought my own copy of this 45 long before I knew it was connected to "The Flying Saucer," on the title alone, and in fact on first listen it sounded like a familiar formula for a comedy record, but I couldn't quite place it. I didn't put two and two together until I got a cheap cheap copy of the now long-OOP Buchanan and Goodman anthology "Politically Correct?" and it was included therein.

Anyway, the samples used here are the obligatory Mayfield and Hayes, along with Billy Paul, Spinners, Four Tops, etc. (The samples are mostly identified, oddly enough, in the YouTube comments here.) Side two was a short loop of the final few seconds, which I won't be posting, but you can find it over at Jukeboxmafia, who apparently did a whole string of break-in posts a while back (at least one of which I don't currently have in my collection).

I've got at least one more post scheduled on this topic, so stay tuned, folks!

John and Ernest - Superfly Meets Shaft
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Stagger Lee Saturdays - Frank Morey

Frank Morey (official AMG FB MyS profile) is a Massachusetts blues-folk type of guy, with a perfect gravelly voice. Like Waits and Wolf before him, he uses his voice to express not just beauty but pain and anger and wrecked ennui and all sorts of other things, and even occasionally that beauty but through a cracked window.

This version of Stag has a slow, tuning-up kind of start, but soon begins swinging hard and loose. Then it turns into a medley, with quotes from "Delia" (the two songs share a few lines in the folk canon), and in between there and the end there's also a rambling a capella break and a big finish, and a little coda at the end.

There are no screaming guitars, or drum solos, but this is rock and roll at its finest: take traditional American music from a couple of different sources, get a few talented people in a room and have them run through it, with the freedom to do what they want and follow their own musical ideas.

It's too bad I "discovered" Frank Morey right this second -- as of this writing I don't have the money or the time to invest in five new albums from a completely new-to-me artist, but I really really really want to. (His MySpace and Facebook pages also include a mindblowing cover of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song" I might be sharing sometime soon, but you shouldn't wait. Click and listen.)

Frank Morey - Stack O'Lee
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Otis Redding - A Man And A Woman (Things Go Better With Coke)

So while my computer was broken, I was stuck with what I had uploaded to my MP3 player, which turned out to be this wonderful Otis Redding box set. Over the course of a few weeks, I spent at least 36 hours listening to those four discs, over and over and over, and I never got tired of it. Otis Redding was an amazing performer, and if I ever get time machine access, he's one of the top ten concerts I'll be attending with it.

Case in point -- soda commercials don't have to be great. Especially if the song's already written, and you just have to teach your band the chords and half-heartedly sing it, then whole-heartedly cash the check. But listen to this: it's 90 seconds long, and the product isn't even mentioned for the first fifth of it. If you're not listening carefully, or expecting a commercial, it just sounds like a classic Redding song. Otis and the band worked up a huge arrangement, and wrote a whole new framework around a pre-existing jingle, and Coke approved it. Coke's ad agency was full of geniuses; compare with this ad by Ray Charles. They hired every pop singer they could, and that's one reason they built such a large market share.

Otis Redding - A Man And A Woman (Things Go Better With Coke)
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Stagger Lee Saturdays - Foghorn Stringband

Foghorn Stringband (official bio AMG MyS FB) are an old-timey bluegrass band from Portland, OR. They just completed a major European tour and have their whole summer planned out (including a folk fest next weekend -- if you're in the area, I'm jealous).

This is fast and furious (in a slightly different way from this take on Stag), and the speed and energy the band put into this are almost punishing -- I can't imagine any group of five people keeping this up live for an hour. This is from the band's major label debut in 2005, and their devoted network of fans have kept them touring ever since.

The main original lyrical motif in this version is that we can't find out exactly what time of day the shooting happened -- but it was rainy.

Foghorn Stringband - Stagger Lee
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