(Just Like The) Son of Sam

If you’re a fan of Sam Sacks’ Sing It Again, Sam then Sam Chalpin’s My Father, the Pop Singer is the album for you: 10 songs mangled in the best Sam Sacks fashion, only with an au courant pop beat. With a title half-inched from comedian Allan Sherman (whose debut album was entitled My Son, the Folk Singer), My Father, the Pop Singer is a little treasure.

However, I must admit that I was confused when I first saw the sleeve (which, you’ll understand was before I had listened to the contents). I assumed that the girl on the right was Sam, and that the Bono-alike was her father Ed Chalpin, Jimi Hendrix’s former manager. Chalpin was the man responsible for those awful Hendrix and Curtis Knight jams, and for the so-called Hendrix and Knight studio tracks (Flashing, Hush Now etcetera) that have been endlessly recycled since their first appearance in 1967. It did not take long to discover that the young lady on the sleeve was an agency model with no connection to the recording at all, and that the uncomfortable looking man in the bell-bottom trousers was, in fact, Ed Chalpin’s own father, Sam, who provides the vocals on the album.

So how did this unusual record come about? The story on the reverse of the sleeve, which tells how 65-year-old Sam strolled into a recording studio and announced that he wanted to make a record is pure hokum. The simple truth is that Ed, always on the make, saw the success that Mrs Miller was enjoying and felt that he could come up with something that would sell just as well. And do it quickly.

He had form: Ed ran his own New York recording studio, Studio 76, and production company (PPX Productions), located on the 7th floor at 1650 Broadway, just around the corner from the famous Brill Building. Studio 76 was an unusual setup, specialising in quick soundalike copies of chart hits which Ed would license to countries outside of the States, meaning that they could often get carbon copies of the big US hits weeks before British or other European labels had gone through the lengthy process of licensing, mastering and pressing the originals.

Assembling a crew of musicians well-versed in Ed’s methods, he dragged his dad in and, over the course of two days, made him bark and bray his way through a selection of pop hits, including the Singing Nun’s Dominique, a couple of Beatles tracks and – in line with the image on the front cover – a version of the Sonny Bono-composed Cher hit Bang Bang. It’s a riot! Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder and president of Atlantic Records, clearly thought so too, snapping the recordings up for his Atco imprint which, with beautiful Irony, was also home to Sonny and Cher. The album was issued in July 1966, just four months after Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits had hit the stores.

That’s it in a nutshell: if you would like to read the whole story from someone who was there, engineer Mike Rashkow (who sadly passed away in 2013) wrote a feature for the Spectropop website that is well worth perusing. Mike goes into great detail about Chalpin’s studio set up and explains exactly how the album was recorded, edited, and produced.

As I’m feeling generous today, and because the whole thing only lasts for a little over 20 minutes, here’s the entire album. I defy you to keep a straight face while you listen to Sam Chalpin massacre the classics!

Enjoy!

Download Side One HERE

Download Side Two HERE

Jet Lady

Angela Masson is a true Renaissance woman: an artist, inventor, a decorated pilot, television host and – naturally – musician whose life we can but marvel at.

Born in California, Angela began flying lessons at age 15 and, shortly after obtaining her pilot’s license, she started air racing. At 21 years-old, while flying in the Powder Puff Derby, an annual transcontinental air race for women pilots which ran for 30 years from 1947, she set a record as the youngest person to fly coast to coast in a high-performance aircraft.

In 1971 she trained armed forces pilot cadets at fellow aviatrix Claire Walters Flight School to build her flight experience, getting over 1,000 flight hours in less than a year. “The place where I was teaching had two bathrooms,” she told reporter Benjamin Gleisser in 2019, “and both were for men. So I wrote ‘WO’ in lipstick in front of the word on one of the doors. There was a law on the books that said, essentially, ‘Women shall not fly for the military.’ I thought, Wait a minute, why can’t we be pilots? The military’s excuse was they didn’t have helmets that would fit us.” She then went on to fly as a charter pilot for Express Airways out of Naval Air Station Lemoore on a civilian contract for the Navy and became a full-time commercial pilot the following year.

Frustrated to see her former male students flying jets while females were barred (bizarrely they were allowed to fly helicopters, the US military not considering whirlybirds proper aeroplanes!), she went back to school, writing her Ph.D. dissertation “Elements of Organizational Discrimination: The Air Force Response to Women as Military Pilots”. That paper was read by Robert Crandall, president of American Airlines, who hired her, initially as a flight engineer on a Boeing 727, in 1976. Shortly after she became a pilot and was the first woman to fly as First Officer on the Boeing 707, 767 and Douglas DC-10. The Ph.D. that had so impressed Crandall was presented before Congress during the Hearings about opening military the Academies to women. In 1978, as airlines began investigating the idea of commercial flights into space, Angela’s name was being put forward, the first and only woman considered to pilot such a enterprise.

By the late 1990s she was living in Florida, still mixing and making and applying for patents for her various inventions. As their most senior female pilot, she finally retired from American Airlines in December 2007 after 31 years’ service. But of course, she had many more strings to her bow. In 1980 Angela decided to run for Mayor of Los Angeles. She didn’t win, and we should probably be grateful for that, because if she had become a politician we may never have heard her 1982 opus, Jet Lady.  

Jet Lady, released under the name Tangela Tricoli, is Angela’s her one and only album… but what a marvel that is. Released independently (and now worth a fortune) the disc features Angela/Tangela singing her own compositions, accompanied by her own solo acoustic guitar. Sounding like a cross between Frances Baskerville the Singing Psychic and Lucia Pamela, Jet Lady contains such stone-cold classics as Stinky Poodle (surely the inspiration for Phoebe Buffay’s Smelly Cat), Life of a Housewife and Space Woman. Occasionally, as on the original Stinky Poodle she double tracks her voice; many of the tracks are slathered with echo and reverb, producing a unique, ethereal sound unlike anything else. It’s just wonderful. As she herself said (in a 2010 interview), “I sing about everything I do. I can’t sing on-key, but that doesn’t stop me.” It’s a sentiment very close to my own heart.

She followed up the release with her own cable TV show, which ran for four years in the Hollywood area. By the late 1990s she had retired and was living in Florida, although still mixing and making and applying for patents for her various inventions. Sadly she would not record a whole album again, however in 2003 Arf! Arf! Records reissued the album on CD, complete with extra material, campaign ads, unreleased demos and a brand new re-recording of Stinky Poodle.

Angela may have retired from commercial work, but as recently as last year she was still passing on her love of flight, teaching at the St. Augustine High School Aerospace Academy and at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “Every day, I try to share with my students the love of flying,” she explained to Benjamin Gleisser. “Aviation is a lifestyle. There’s something sparkly in it for everybody. It gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and play with the reality of being alive.”

Here are two tracks to get you started – the original recording of Stinky Poodle and the wonderful Space Woman, but I urge you to go buy the CD of Jet Lady and wallow in the brilliance of Angela Masson, aka Tangela Tricoli.

Enjoy!

Download Poodle HERE

Download Space HERE

Raving

Just a quick post today… I’ve been a bit distracted working on the new book and have not had a lot of time to search out new material to share with you, so today I’m delving into my song-poem archive once again.

These two tracks come from one of the many, many, many Columbine compilations that appeared in the 1970s and 80s: this particular release being one of the earlier Now Sounds of Today collections, of which there were around 300 iterations. There’s no date on the record label or cover, as is usual with the vast majority of song-poem releases, but this would have been issued around 1977 or so.

Douglas Mac Arthur Tsosie’s Curse of an Evil Woman and Grace Dorsey’s wonderfully bizarre Miraculous for Miracle were recorded by Columbine’s in-house band of seemingly hopeless amateurs, the Rave-Ons, the most inept bunch of musicians you’re ever likely to come across, and a band who recorded the vast majority of tracks on the first 13 Columbine albums – well over 200 songs – before vanishing completely from the Columbine roster.

These two tracks are the first two cuts on side one of this particular Now Sounds of Today: back in April 2010 (yes, over a decade ago) I featured tracks three and four from the same album but at that time posted the wrong cover… oops! At some point I’ll get around to ripping the whole thing and sharing it with you, but for now here are a couple of horrors to blight your day.

Enjoy!

Download Evil HERE

Download Miracle HERE