Kay L. Gale: Composer-Singer

When I began writing this I couldn’t tell you a lot about Kay L. Gale, the woman behind today’s bagful of badness. However, by happy coincidence, someone else decided to blog about Kay at exactly the same time… that’s serendipity for you! It would be unfair of me to repeat too much of the information on her that the Hometown by Handlebar blog has gleaned, so if you’d like to know more about colourful Kay from the people who knew her I suggest you go take a look HERE 

Kay L. Gale came from Fort Worth, Texas and appears to have released these tracks sometime in the 70s: my guess would be around 1976/77 when the entire country was undergoing bicentennial fever, although How I Love That Flag was originally registered in 1971 as How I Love That Flag, Red White and Blue. Songwriting was clearly only a sideline though; Kay sold newspapers for a living outside the Fort Worth courthouse, and was a popular fixture there, always smiling and always happy to sing you a song – especially if you paid her a couple of bits.

It seems that she had been trying to make it as a songwriter and singer since the early 1950s: she registered the copyright in her first songs, Drivin’ Through Texas and You Won a Heart Yesterday in 1951, and in January 1953 she paid for an advert in trade magazine Billboard advertising her wares as composer and singer and using the Leland Hotel in Fort Worth as her address. My fellow blogger tells me that she was paying $7 a week to live at the hotel in 1960: I guess that seven years prior to that the rent must have been significantly cheaper.

1971, the year she wrote How I Love That Flag, was a busy year for our Kay: she registered copyright in no less than 11 further songs: Come Into My Heart, Fairy Tales for Children, I Love That Bright Green Christmas Tree, If Christmas Could Come to Every Heart, I’m a Poor Poor Peon (The Peon Song) [a derogatory term for a Spanish-American day labourer or unskilled farm worker], It’s Christmas a Happy Christmas Because Someone Loves You, Love Sweet Love, Nickel Beer and Free Lunch, Silver Dollars, The Things That Love Can Do and When God Is With You.

Not a lot happened on the songwriting front for Kay until 1976 when, perhaps in a fit of concern perchance over someone nabbing her work or possibly because she had just recorded her first single, she suddenly decided to copyright another seven songs, including several patriotic anthems, under the name Kay L Millions: Beautiful Are the Roses, The Beautiful Land of the Free, Grand Old Liberty Bell, Tears In My Heart and What a Wonderful World Would Be and Your Love Is Sunshine to Me. She also registered another batch of seven compositions the following year, this time under her given name: Amigos, Fort Worth, Gold Dust, It’s Time to Hear Again ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’, Just Say ‘I Love You’, The Things That Love Can Do (again), and That Old-Fashioned Hayride. The fact that Kay chose to re-register The Things That Love Can Do leads me to speculate that she may well have recorded this song around the same time as Fort Worth Texas (notice the subtle change of name), which appears as an extra track on the download version of Irwin Chusid’s Songs In the Key Oz Z Volume Two.

Kay died in November 1983, sadly leaving no relatives. Luckily she left us a couple of amazing 45s. Here are three of the tracks from Kay’s two known 45 How I Love That Flag, the Team Song of the Dallas Cowboys and Fort Worth Texas. If anyone has that missing fourth track (possibly The Things That Love Can Do) I would be eternally grateful!

Enjoy!

Download Flag HERE

Download Cowboys HERE

Download Texas HERE

What a Blast!

Usha Uthup is my new jam, as the kids might say.

Indian singer and actress Usha - or Didi as she is known to her fans - was born in 1947 to a policeman father and a well-red mother and was raised in Mumbai: her two elder sisters had their own vocal act, the Sami Sisters. Although she had no formal training in music, when she was nine years old her sisters introduced her to Ameen Sayani, then the most popular radio announcer in India. Ameen gave Ushu a spot on the popular Ovaltine Music Hour on Radio Ceylon, where she sang Mockingbird Hill. Other radio appearances followed.

Usha began to pursue a professional singing career in 1969, at the Nine Gems nightclub in Madras. ‘It used to be in the basement of the Safire theatre complex,’ she told The Hindu newspaper in 2019. ‘There’s magic about Madras; there’s a buzz I get every time the plane lands here’. Her recording career around 1972, singing in more than thirteen Indian languages and dialects, including Hindi, Punjabi, Bangla, Gujurati and Tamil, and ten foreign languages:  French, German, Italian, Sinhalese, Swahili, Russian, Nepalese, Arabic, Creole, and of course, English. She has appeared in around 50 Bollywood movies, both on-screen and providing the vocals for other actresses.

According to Usha’s website, she has recorded more than a hundred albums in seventeen Indian languages, sung in several thousand concerts, performed in all major countries and has been on television since its inception in India. Usha has served as a role model for generations of young Indians and has been an unwavering ambassador for traditional Indian values. She has always worn a sari (kanjeevaram), fresh flowers in her hair and her beaming smile has won her many fans. She’s still appearing in movies, and making concert appearances, today after more than a half-century in the business.

Her 1984 album Blast Off! is just insane. For this collection Usha wrote the music, with the off-kilter lyrics provided by Abidur Rahman. I implore you to check it out: Blast Off! is beyond wonderful, with a peculiar mix of shredding electric guitar, great Indian beats, the occasional scat vocal (Usha does a great Cleo Laine), cheesy 70s keyboards, the odd splash of reggae (on Chewing Gum Lips), a Christmas song and a plea to Moses to give her his ‘stick’!

From Blast Off! here are my two favourite tracks: is the magnificent Welcome, Test Tube Baby and the bonkers Lucy Was Crucified, which deals with the taboo subject of unwanted pregnancy. The whole album is an absolute joy.

Enjoy!

Download Baby HERE

Download Lucy HERE

Christmas at Easter

UPDATED 16 APRIL 2020; MY THANKS TO DOREE MILES FOR HER KINDNESS

Happy Easter my friends! Something a little peculiar today, but something that seems perfectly suited to these peculiarly topsy-turvy times we’re living through currently… a Christmas record about the Easter bunny, from Californian country-western label Canary.

Canary was one of two labels set up by songwriter Earl Miles around 1966. First came Canary – named apparently after the birds that Earl kept ('Growing up we did own two yellow canaries: "Pretty Bird" and "Old Ugly",' Doree Miles tells me) – and then the mostly spoken-word offshoot Yellow Bird. The company held a registered office in Redwood City, California but recorded the majority of their material in Nashville (at the Monument Studios) because, as Earl explained, ‘Our artists are all local people, but we want the authentic Nashville country flavor’. After splitting their time between Nashville and Redwood City, at some point in the early 1970s they moved to Portland. It was then that Earl decided to amalgamate, and the company’s sole label became Canary Yellow Bird.

What sets Miles apart from most song-poem/vanity projects is that, initially at least, Miles had some money behind him and was able to employ some decent talent. Kentucky-born but San Francisco-based park ranger and part-time singer Durward Erwin recorded several sides and an album, Mod and Country, for Canary, and some of those tracks were picked up by the Irish company Emerald (distributed by Decca in the UK) for release here in dear old Blighty, and short-lived Philips imprint Nashville for release in Britain and in Germany. Erwin/Miles sides were even issued in New Zealand.

Sadly, despite some success for Miles via Erwin, including the almost-charting single A Girl Named Sorrow, Canary failed to take flight. Mod and Country (issued in 1967) and its related 45s would be about as close as he would come to success.

According to Erwin’s own website, he wrote and paid for the songs on Mod and Country to be recorded, but that is not the case. Of the 12 songs on the album eight are credited to Earl Miles, three to Grace Tindall and one to Gertrude Faith. 'My father wrote most of the songs on the Mod and Country album,' Doree confirms. 'His name is on the original copyright which my sister and I own. I was there as my father wrote many of his songs. He would play his Martin guitar as he created the words and music. I also have the original handwritten scores when he wrote the songs as well as the copyrights. To my knowledge, the songs were not written by Durward. Durward just sang the songs.' At first, I thought that Erwin and Miles could have been one and the same person, but apparently not, although according to later Billboard reports it does seem that Erwin was a shareholder in the business. 

By 1969 money must have been running out, and instead of using talent like Erwin, he was relying on family members to record for him. Linda Rae Miles  issued several sides for Canary Yellow Bird; further releases featured the ‘steel guitar artistry’ (that’s how it appears on the label) of one Smiley Miles, who also acted at Linda Rae’s personal manager. 'Justice (Jud) Miles, nicknamed Smiley, was my father's older brother,' Doree tells me. 'My sister and I referred to him as Uncle Jud. Norm may have been his formal name or middle name [For a while Norm Miles was the third partner in the business, along with Earl and Durward]. Jud was Linda's manager and at some point, they married.'

That same year Earl coughed up the moolah to record a cable TV pilot, Canary Ranch, featuring Erwin, Bobby Wyld, Smiley and Linda Rae singing and playing some of his songs. 'As far as I know, there were other investors in the project too,' says Doree. Canary continued for a few years, but with no hits coming Earl decided to diversify, setting up a country records distribution company and artists booking agency from his office in California in 1971. In 1973 Canary relocated to Portland, Oregon. That same year Linda Rae released what appears to have been the last 45 issued by the company, The Christmas Bunny backed with The Christmas Bunny (Interview), promoting the release by performing in the Palo Alto branch of Macy’s department store.

Earl Miles passed away in 1998, leaving his daughters, Doree and Darla, both of whom appear on The Christmas Bunny (Interview), to look after his legacy.  

Here are both sides of the fabulous Christmas Bunny 45. Enjoy!

Download Bunny HERE

Download Interview HERE

Boy Blunder

 This week I have a disc for you that, I’m sorry to say, I did not know existed until a few days ago. Not, in fact, until regular WWRRS listener Dennis Bookwalter brought it to my attention. And I will never forgive him!

Issued at the height of Batmania, Burt Ward’s 1966 45 Boy Wonder I Love You had somehow passed me by. Odd as I’ve ever-so-slightly obsessed with the recording carers of the actors and actresses who appeared in TV’s first (and, let’s be honest here, best) Batman. I’ve already featured Adam West, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin on this blog and have for some time been planning a special Batman-themed episode of the WWRRS, which will also include some cuts from the ridiculous Jan and Dean Meet Batman.

What makes this insane spin-off even more delicious is that the A-side, based around Burt – as Robin – reading a parody of a fan letter – was written, arranged and conducted by Frank Zappa! The flip side, a godawful off-key rendition of the standard Orange Colored Sky (credited on promo copies as Oranged Colored Sky), was again arranged and conducted by Zappa, and features several members of the Mothers of Invention including Jimmy Carl Black and Elliot Ingber, who would later join Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band under the name Winged Eel Fingerling. Both sides were produced by Tom Wilson, who also produced the Mothers and the Velvet Underground. It’s just nuts. Batman himself, Adam West, performed Orange Colored Sky on TV show Hollywood Palace, in full Bat-drag, but does not appear on these recordings.

As Burt himself recalled in his autobiography, Boy Wonder, My Life In Tights: ‘I should have had the wisdom I now have when I signed a recording contract with MGM Records - I wouldn’t have signed it. MGM staffer Tom Scott [sic] was assigned as my producer. He brought in one of the visually wildest groups imaginable as my backup band, the Mothers of Invention. What a sight! Neanderthal. They had incredibly long, scraggly hair, and clothes that appeared not to have been washed in this century if ever. These were musicians who became famous for tearing up furniture, their speakers, their microphones and even their expensive guitars onstage. They were maniacs!

‘Of all the people in the world to team with this wild and crazy bunch, I can’t believe I was the one. The image of the Boy Wonder is all American and apple pie, while the image of the Mothers of Invention was so revolutionary that they made the Hell’s Angels look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Even I had to laugh seeing a photo of myself with those animals. Their fearless leader and king of grubbiness was the late Frank Zappa. After recording with me, Frank became an internationally recognized cult superstar, which was understandable; after working with me, the only place Frank could go was up.

‘Although he looked like the others, Frank had an intelligence and education that elevated him beyond brilliance to sheer genius. I spent a considerable amount of time talking with him, and his rough, abrupt exterior concealed an intellectual, creative and sensitive interior. For my records, the plan was to record four sides and then release two singles prior to producing an album. After listening to me sing, Frank got a wild idea to make use of my hideous voice to do a hilarious recording with a song that had some of the Batman feel to it. He picked “Orange Colored Sky.”

‘I can’t bear to think of this song. The memories are too embarrassing. Though the intent was to create comedy by putting my lousy singing to good use, the actual result was so disastrous that the studio thought the tape had been left out in the sun and warped. They insisted on re-recording. But first, MGM took a radical step as an insurance policy that my next session would sound better. They sent me to an expensive vocal coach—and no doubt hoped for divine intervention. Back in 1966 they were shelling out about $1,000 a week for those lessons. That was a lot of money, more than three times what I was bringing home after working twelve hours per day in my monkey suit for an entire week. With the coach raking in that much, even I am surprised that after two weeks of training, the lady politely asked me not to come back. I’m not sure if she felt that having me as a student was damaging to her career or if listening to me sing was destroying her eardrums, or both.

‘In an attempt at self-preservation, the record company had me just talk on the second two sides I recorded. That I could do very well! The material for the song was a group of fan letters that had been sent to me. Frank and I edited them together to make one letter, which became the lyrics for the recording. Frank wrote a melody and an arrangement, and we titled the song, “Boy Wonder, I Love You!” Among the lyrics was an invitation for me to come and visit an adoring pubescent fan and stay with her for the entire summer. She wrote, “I will even fix you breakfast in bed. I love you so much that I want you to stay the whole summer with me!” The lyrics ended with “I hope you know that this is a girl writing”.’ Just brilliant! 

Zappa himself expunged any mention of these sessions from his own story; thank goodness Ward had the good sense to record his memories for posterity. Although the disc was recorded and issued in 1966, Zappa did not register his copyright in the A-side until July 1968.

Ward, who also made a guest appearance on Adam West’s 45 Miranda, issued another 45, I’ve Got Love For My Baby, on Soultown records in 1970 (he did not feature on the instrumental flip, Robin’s Theme, credited to Burt Ward’s band) – a pretty awful record which is now something of a collectable in Northern Soul circles. A bonus for lovers of the bad: Orange Colored Sky was co-written, back in 1950, by Milton DeLugg. DeLugg also composed Hooray for Santy Claus, the theme song for the dreadful – but essential - low-budget 1964 motion picture Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and was a long-time collaborator of TV producer and host Chuck Barris, working on The Gong Show, The $1.98 Beauty Show and many other projects.

Enjoy!

Download Wonder HERE

Download Orange HERE