Long time WWR contributor Ross Hamilton, aka The Squire, has just posted his latest podcast - featuring yours truly prattling on about my 20 favourite bad records. The track listing (below) will be familiar to many, but it includes a couple of songs I've not featured here before.
You’re The Only One For Me – Hank & Jimmy
Moon Crazy – The Planets
Der Holler Rache (Queen Of The Night Aria) – Florence Foster Jenkins
Downtown – Mrs. Miller
Yodel Blues – Sam Sacks
Sweet Angelina – Mister “G”
Jenny Beloved – Dick Kent
How Long Are You Staying – Bill Joy
Portland Rose Song – Bert Lowry
Prends Moi – Mme St. Onge
I Love Little Pussy – Little Macy
Jesus Loves Me – Baby Lulu
Phase “1 2 3” – Ken ‘Nevada’ Maines
Marinella – Larry London
Cousin Mosquito – Congress-Woman Malinda Jackson Parker
Fluffy – Gloria Balsam
It’s All Rite… - Barbara Markay
Mr. Tambourine Man – William Shatner
Paralyzed – The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
I Want My Baby Back – Jimmy Cross
Fancy a listen? You can find it (and download it if you wish) right here
. Many thanks Ross, it was great to finally meet you, share a pint and chat about our joint obsession.
Happy Easter everybody. And what better way to celebrate the
season than another round of creepy Christian ventriloquism? A couple of real
oddities for you today courtesy of Bob
Bradford and his daughter Debbie Ann,
and the utterly nuts Geraldine and Ricky.
First up are Geraldine
and Ricky. Hailing from Datona Beach, Florida, (although she later moved to
Alabama to continue her ministry) Geraldine Ragan and her puppet Ricky have
been active since the end of the 60s. Married to professional golfer Dave
Ragan, Geraldine and Ricky
have performed across the U.S and are (or were as recently as 2011) still surprisingly
popular on Christian cruises.
Geraldine
believes her talent is a gift from God. Her future path was shaped when she
attended a youth camp while she was still a teenager. “There was a
ventriloquist there,” she told the Shelby County Reporter, “And I thought ‘If
God can use a ventriloquist, he can use me.’” Geraldine immediately set out to
learn her art. After high school she was offered a job at Disneyland, but
declined in order to dedicate her life to full-time Christian service.
I just don’t get the
weird world of Christian ventriloquism. But then again I’ve always thought
ventriloquism was a little creepy. I can see how it works in front of an
audience, but on record or on the radio it’s just someone putting on a stupid
voice. So why are there so many of them?
The track
presented here is from side one of her seminal album Trees Talk Too. Recorded in the studio in front of a small
(presumably invited) audience, unfortunately
the album is unbanded, so I’ve given you the first four minutes or so of side
one: the Nickel and the Dollar/the Grand
Canyon and A Million Dollars. If
you want more get Googling; it’s out there. Geraldine and Ricky have issued a number of other recordings,
including the High Cost of Being Lost
(with E J Daniels) and a couple of live videos if you’re at all interested.
The second track,
and I have to thank the good folk at WFMU
for bring this to the world’s attention, comes from the album Fun and Inspiration With… released
around 1964/5 by ventriloquist and youth evangelist (as it says on the cover) Bob Bradford.
Bob's act, which
debuted around 1953, included his ‘friends’ Jiggers Johnson (who introduces the track), Leo the Lion, Alfred
the Dragon, Snooky Snitzel and Whiskers the Wabbit. A decade later he decided
to incorporate daughter Debbie Ann in his ministry, teaching her the art of
ventriloquism and allowing the little moppet both air and studio time.
On Joy Joy Joy Debbie Ann Bradford is
joined by her own group of ‘friends’, namely Ann Slanders (clearly a play on Ann Landers, the pen-name used by various advice columnists from
1943 onwards) and Donny the Donkey.
Although the track begins with Debbie and Ann limping their way through the
classic children's inspirational tune, it starts to get downright weird once Donny the Donkey appears. Debbie’s own
talents are limited to say the least, and her attempt at voicing both Ann and
Donny are pretty stilted – the peculiar exchange which occurs between Debbie
and Donny is clearly supposed to reduce the pre-teen audience to fits of
laughter, but it’s about as funny as a punch in the face. Apparently Debbie is
still working today, under her married name Debbie Gaccetta.
Still, spare a
thought for poor old Jesus as your tucking into you chocolate eggs this weekend:
it’s him these crazies are working for!
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that (seemingly)
never ends. Apologies for being missing in action last week, but we were moving
house and I was without internet access for a few days.
Still, let’s get back to work. The oddity I present for
you today does push the boundaries a little in as much as this is clearly a
novelty record – albeit it a particularly bad one. I usually try to avoid novelties but as long
time followers of The World’s Worst Records
will know, sometimes they are simply unavoidable.
This particular disc ‘celebrates’ the crimes of one Dennis Andrew Nilsen, serial killer and
necrophiliac who is also known as the Muswell
Hill Murderer. Nilsen murdered 15 young men in London between 1978 and 1983,
retaining his victims' bodies before dissecting their remains and disposing of
them via burning or flushing the remains down a lavatory. Convicted of six
counts of murder and two of attempted murder in November 1983, he became known
as the Muswell Hill Murderer as a number of his crimes were committed at his
home at 23 Cranley Gardens in the Muswell Hill district of North London.
Released before Nilsen was found guilty (which is why the murderer is never name checked), Somebody’s In My Drain (they got the
title right on the label if not the sleeve) and its pointless sub-dub B-Side Somebodies Parts 1 & 2 (Chopped
version) were issued on Secret
Records by the unknown Dinah Rod
and the Drains - a play, for those who didn’t immediately get the sledgehammer-subtle
humour, on the name of Dyna Rod, the
nation’s favourite drain unblocking service. Secret was better known, at that
time, for issuing records by acts involved in the second wave of British punk: the Exploited, Info Riot, 999, the 4 Skins and Chron Gen among them. It’s widely
believed that Dinah Rodd was either one of these groups masquerading under a
pseudonym or a ‘supergroup’ made up of members of some of them. Unfortunately
no-one has dared own up to committing this audio crime. Secret also released a 45 by Keith
Chegwin and his brother Jeff. Wouldn’t it be wonderful…
The unnamed singer/lyricist of these tasteless tracks clearly hasn’t
done his homework. He mentions living at 22 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, yet Nilsen
began his crime spree at 195 Melrose
Avenue. He was arrested after problems in the drains at 23 Cranley Gardens,
Muswell Hill. Still, what do facts have to do with anything?
Anyway, here
are both sides of this rightfully-obscure 45. Enjoy!
One of the most enjoyable aspects of compiling music for
this blog has been discovering (or re-discovering) music, artists or companies
that are now all-but forgotten. In the song-poem field this happens all the
time: although the American Song-Poem
Music Archive is exhaustive it hasn’t been updated for almost a decade, and
collectors are constantly turning up new recordings. During the years I’ve been
collecting song-poems I’ve ‘found’ at least four companies not listed there or
on any other song-poem resource, including Circle-D
(with at least two Rod Rogers/Rodd Keith
releases), Globe imprints HFC and Kandee, and 50s New York outfit Vanity. I’ve also discovered UK companies who licensed song-poem
material – Emerald (a Decca imprint) and Polydor offshoot Nashville.
I’ve also been able to bring you almost-lost recordings
by people such as the great Leona
Anderson and the inestimable Mrs
Miller, and lay claim to having rediscovered the genius of Grace Pauline Chew. But one thing I
never thought I would turn up would be a previously undocumented release by one
of the all-time giants of bad music: Marcy
Tigner.
You all know Marcy
Tigner: she’s the Christian trombonist-turned vent act who releases a slew
(anything up to 40) albums under the Marcy
or Little Marcy tag. You know this.
You also know that before she was encouraged to take up ventriloquism that she
released a couple of instrumental albums under her own name.
Yet I doubt if many of you knew that, between her brace
of trombone albums and the first Marcy
release, she released a bizarre, three-track EP under her own name using her
own, odd, childlike voice rather than employing her later shtick of masquerading
as a wooden dolly. Get Googling: pretty much all you’ll find are links to the eBay
auction for the very EP I now own. None of the Marcy fan sites mention it: none of the weirdo music blogs I
frequent seem to have featured it. A genuine rarity: the real missing link. Dating from the very early 1960s I guess.
Here, in its entirety, are the three tracks from that EP:
Marcy Tigner’s version of the standard
Mairsie Dotes, plus Me and My Teddy Bear and Shake Me, I Rattle. None of the songs
are credited: Mairsie Dotes is a
novelty song composed in 1943 by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston;
Shake Me, I Rattle (written by Hal Hackady
and Charles Naylor) has been recorded a number of times, including in 1958 by
the Lennon Sisters and by Marion Worth in 1962. Me and My Teddy Bear (Winters-Cootes) has been recorded by dozens
of artists – including those as disparate as Mitch Miller and Peter Gabriel.
Enjoy! Download Shake HERE Download Mairsie HERE Download Teddy HERE
Today's slice of nonsense is a piece of ear shattering,
head banging heavy metal from the rock god that is Billy Joel.
Yes, you read that right: Billy Joel.
For before Mr Joel began his career as a simpering,
piano playing songsmith, before he married a model wrote an international smash
about her and divorced her, before his attempted suicide by drinking furniture
polish and before his box office-busting tours with Elton John, Billy Joel was a sub-Jon Lord-esque keyboard player in
a heavy metal duo called Attila.
Formed from the ashes of his previous band the Hassles,
Attila consisted of Joel on keyboards and vocals and drummer Jon Small. Small was Joel's best
friend; it was he who rushed Joel to hospital after his attempted suicide and
he who was repaid when Joel ran off with Small's wife. The pair seem to have
patched things up though, and have collaborated on several projects since.
But back to Attila.
The duo released just one album, the self-titled Attila in 1970, and it’s just about the
most ridiculous, bombastic piece of rock dross you’re ever likely to hear.
Housed in a ridiculous sleeve, featuring the pair dressed as medieval soldiers surrounded by hanging animal carcasses like a brace of dark ages butchers, it was described by Joel himself as ‘psychedelic bullshit’. Pleasingly, the album features such inspired
song titles as Amplifier Fire Part 1: Godzilla,
Amplifier Fire Part 2:March of the Huns and Brain Invasion. Says Joel: “We had
about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It
was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs.”
Called ‘the
worst album released in the history of rock & roll’ by critic Stephen
Thomas Erlewine, why not have a listen to a couple of tracks of this
preposterous drivel and decide for yourself? Here, for your delectation, is Attila with Wonder Woman and Rollin’
Home.
Long time WWR contributor Ross Hamilton, aka The Squire, has just posted his latest podcast - featuring yours truly prattling on about my 20 favourite bad records. The track listing (below) will be familiar to many, but it includes a couple of songs I've not featured here before.
