Another Collection of Cacophony from Columbine

Another four tracks from my personal Columbine stash for you this week, this time the entire 1983 release, Columbine EP-189. It's a fairly mediocre release, but the final cut is a real pip!

 

Katherine Maynard’s They’re Coming After Me is a deeply confusing song. A typical country shuffle, the lyrics make it sounds as if the protagonist, presumably Maynard herself (although here voiced by Kay Weaver) has some sort of death wish and is praying to the Lord above for release. Who are the two little angels though? Has Katherine murdered her own twins, presumably back in Nashville if any kind of sense is to be extrapolated from her lyric, and now she’s on the run from the law and seeking absolution from the divine? Perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

 

G.B. Tan’s lounge bossa nova Whene’r I Make My Wish is a peculiar little song about yearning. Ms. Tan’s wishes she had been brought up in the country, win a room that had a window sill (not a window, you understand: G.B. seems to have the ability to be able to see through wood or concrete) so that she could gaze out into the night. Now, irrespective of what part of the country she had been raised in, what kind of parents bring up a child in a windowless – and window sill-less - room? The Fritzl-esque monsters!

 

There’s not much to say about the third track on the EP, You Bring Tears to My Eyes. With lyrics penned by W.G. Lassetter, it is a slow, dull plod delivered in Miss Weaver’s usual slow and plodding style. The tune owes something to the Beatles’ This Boy, but there’s little to recommend it apart from the rather wonderful line ‘I’m flying high in a gay paradise’.

 

Finally, the reason we’re all here: Pansy Loop’s marvellous Disco Blues, credited like all four tracks on this particular EP to Kay Weaver, but clearly sung by the unctuous John Muir, who of course worked for Preview as Gene Marshall, but whose real name is Gene Merlino. The lyrics are wonderfully inane and often downright stupid - just what does ‘let’s rent out those blue jean shoes’ actually mean? – but our Pansy was lucky enough to also have her song included on one of Columbine’s many, many The Now Sounds of Today compilations, this time correctly attributed to Muir. They may have given her this as a sop for miscrediting the original release, or more likely conned poor Pansy out of even more money to have her song featured as the album’s opening track.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Coming HERE

 

Download Wish HERE

 

Download Tears HERE

Download Disco HERE

Four More Columbine 'Hits'

Another bunch of cuts from Columbine for you today, another four song-poems for you to ‘enjoy’… if that’s possible.

 

I had intended to give you all four tracks from one EP, but on playback I realised that two of the cuts had flaws, so instead here are four tracks from two different EPs, ripped from my own collection.

 

First up is a brace of cuts from EP-176. This particular EP is undated, but the subject matter of at least one of the tracks makes it clear that it cannot have been released before 1981. It also features one of the later Columbine vocalists, Kate Markowitz on three tracks, with Sonny Cash – the veteran singer who also recorded as Buddy Ray and, for MSR, under the names of Dick Castle and Dick Kent, but whose real name was Elmer Plinger – on the opener.

 

And it is Sonny who kicks off side one of the disc with Why Should You Care, a question that collectors have been asking of song-poem lyricists for decades. It’s a dull little song with Sonny’s vocal accompanied by a trio featuring bass guitar, a plodding piano, and a clearly bored drummer. The lyric was written by Prince O. Williams, born in 1929 in the colourfully-sounding Prosperity, South Carolina, and who passed away in New Jersey in November 2014.

 

Peter Sirbopoulos’s tribute to the recently murdered John Lennon was penned, according to the author, shortly after the former Beatle’s death, and copyright registered in May 1981. Of Greek heredity, his great Grandfather (also called Peter, or Petros) emigrated to the United States in November 1902 but it seems as if, in later life, our Peter moved back to Athens: he was certainly living there between 2001 and 2003, but has dropped off the radar since then. Performed by Kate Markowitz, John Lennon could be viewed as a companion piece to Sonny’s To Yoko, which I featured on this very blog last September: https://worldsworstrecords.blogspot.com/2020/09/sonny-buddy-elmer-and-dick.html

 

Talking about Sonny brings us nicely to the next track. As well as working under the names mentioned above, Sonny Cash has also been credited, erroneously, as Ralph Lowe, leading several writers – including me – to assume Sonny/Elmer and Ralph were one and the same, but the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe (if indeed there was a ‘real’ Ralph) has a deeper, more stentorian voice. And, as if to prove my point, next up is the ‘real’ Ralph Lowe with Kenneth Skasick’s C.B. Heartbreak

 

Issued in 1977 on Columbine EP-39, on C.B. Heartbreak Ralph is accompanied by the same piano/bass/drums trio that act as sidemen to Sonny Cash on Why Should You Care. Authorship of the lyric is credited to one Kenneth Skasick, and I’ve only ben able to find two men with that name: one was born in Missouri in 1930 and seems to have spent much of his working life in the employ of the US Air Force. He passed away in 2002. The other, born in 1972 (so he would only have been 25 when this disc was issued), was once arrested for stealing a cooker from an abandoned house and several years later needed hospital treatment after being attacked by a pair of pit bulls while trespassing, and for some reason, to my mind, this makes him a less likely candidate.

 

The final track comes from the same 1977 EP, and is once again performed by Ralph Lowe, with the ubiquitous trio now augmented with an electric guitar player. Nobody Else For You Except Me was written by James Travagline, who I believe may have come from Saskatoon and (if that is the case) passed away in 2015. 

I really cannot tell you anything else about it, but as the other two cuts on the EP were performed by the dull and derivative Kay Weaver I simply thought that you would appreciate this more.

 

 Enjoy!

Download Care HERE  

Download Lennon HERE  

Download Heartbreak HERE  

Download Nobody HERE  

A Crop of Crap From Columbine

It's been a little quiet around here of late, hasn't it? Well, let's make up for that right this very now, with the first of a bunch of stiffs from the ever-popular Columbine label of Hollywood, one of the greatest - and most prolific - song-poem outfits of all time.

Best known for the hundreds of compilations issued in the 70s and 80s, under such titles as the Now Sounds of Today, Music of America, New Favorites Of…, Gospel Jubilee and so on, for the next couple of posts on the blog I'm going to be concentrating on their 45 and EP output, a series of releases less well documented, but which also adds up to hundreds of discs.

First up we have all four tracks from a Columbine EP issued in 1977, with two songs each from Kay Weaver and the redoubtable Ralph Lowe. 

The first cut, the opening track of the EP if you will, is the fairly forgettable You're My Spark, composed by John P. Kane, and performed in her usual disinterested style by Kay Weaver. The song, copyrighted in October 1977, is dull, and Weaver's performance lacks any of the 'spark' that the title infers. Kay Weaver had a secondary career as a performer of religious music, and her bland country-western rambles might work quite well in that genre, but for me she only really gets going as a song-poem stylist when offered rockier tunes to torture.

Next up is Ralph Lowe, and My Love Is Going Away, composed by the colourfully-monikered Alvaro de Jesus Buenfil. Copyright in this 'classic' was registered in November 1977, and Alvaro had already submitted other songs to Columbine for their careful consideration: Lowe performed his classic In The Way of Dancin' on one of the company's Music of America collections. Confusingly the title of the song does not appear in the lyric at all.

Flip the disc over and we're back with Kay Weaver and Dola Lindsay's When Our Song Starts To Play. Dola Lindsay came from Port Orchard, Washington and, like our friend Alvaro, had also contributed other songs to Columbine: her composition Shadow of Your Heart appears on the seventeenth iteration of the New Favorites of Kay Weaver series.    

The final track on the disc is the real highlight. From erstwhile lyric writer Glenn Aldrich comes the harrowing My Darling's Grave. Like John Kane, Glenn registered copyright for the song, words and music no less, in October 1977, and this performance, by song-poem titan Ralph Lowe, is simply wonderful. Glenn's lyric is rendered utterly devoid of emotion, and Ralph's doleful delivery is driven by boredom, not sentiment, plodding along like a carthorse rather than a funeral cortege.  

Enjoy!

Download Spark HERE

Download Love HERE

Download Song HERE 

Download Grave HERE