(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