Two More from Lillay Deay

I thought today we would drop in on our old friend Lillay Daniels, aka Lila F. Daniels, aka Lillay Deay, singer, songwriter and owner of the wonderful Timely record label. Although I have written about her before, I have managed to uncover more details of her fascinating career – so an update feels TIMELY…

 

When I first posted about Lillay, back in April 2018, I was only aware of one single issued on Timely, the remarkable I May Look Too Old/He’s a Devil. Since then, several other discs have surfaced, and the Timely catalogue now stretches to five 45s.

 

Born in 1896, Lila and her husband William hailed from Houston, Texas and had two sons, Robert and Dan (who would perform on the debut release from his Mom’s company). Lila/Lillay began her songwriting career in 1959 with The Christmas Star (a song that would not appear on record for another decade at least), written around the same time that she and her husband retired to Tujunga, in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, the town where she would set up her record label.

 

For a reasonably complete list of Lillay’s other compositions, check out the post HERE 

 

My most recent purchase, Our Beautiful Lady backed with Appreciation, seems to have been the first disc issued by Timely. Although none of the Timely 45s I’ve seen so far has any dates on either the labels or the sleeves (although my copy of I May Look Too Old has a rubber-stamped date on the label, from a local radio station), this more than likely appeared around 1967 judging by the matrix number, and the fact that Lillay registered copyright in Appreciation in April of that year. Performed by Lillay’s son Danny Daniels, Our Beautiful Lady is a song dedicated to the Statue of Liberty, a source of inspiration Lillay would return to. Appreciation is a perfectly decent country-pop song, with nothing particularly remarkable about it, but the A-side is the pip, with a wonderful spoken word interlude from Danny and a great military snare drum beat throughout.

 

Lila is second from the right in this press photo from 1973 

This was followed by the classic of outsider oddness, Lillay singing her own compositions I May Look Too Old/He’s a Devil (incorrectly listed on the accompanying picture sleeve as You’re A Devil), which you can find HERE

 

The third 45 on the label, Lady of Liberty (Timely 1002), a song Lillay wrote in 1966, was sung by Harrison ‘Harry’ Clewley, from Tujunga, the same town that Lillay and Timely were based in. Clewley had been performing on the local circuit since at least 1958 when, as a 15-year-old he was known as ‘everybody’s boy’. A former member of the Mitchell Boys Choir, he spent some years working for the US post office before, in the 1980s, he joined former 50s hitmakers The Lettermen. Although I have found a 1960 newspaper article that claims Clewley acted in films including Giant, Black Beauty and Lassie, he is unlisted at IMDB. Lady of Liberty is once again inspired by Lillay’s favourite watery icon, the Statue of Liberty, yet despite stealing its title from the opening line of Our Beautiful Lady is an entirely different song. The other side, Los Angeles was copyrighted in 1967, at the same time as Appreciation, however the legend on the single’s picture sleeve ‘a song for the 70s’ would suggest that it was not issued until at least 1969.

 

Lila was 70 by now, a God-fearing woman who believed that pasteurised milk caused arthritis, but was entering into her most productive period. Soon came another 45, again credited to Lillay Deay: Our Beautiful Flag is Crying (written in 1968) backed with Angels of Mercy (from late 1969) issued as Timely 1003. Again, you can hear that HERE

 

The final release from Timely (well, the final one discovered so far) was a Christmas novelty from Lillay’s pen, Dancing Prancing Reindeer coupled with Christmas Star (Timely 1041) and credited to the Daniel Singers. This would not be Lillay’s final venture into vinyl though: In 1969 she penned Is Santa the Man in the Moon, and in 1973 wrote another Christmas-themed song, Santa Clause Sweetheart. These were recorded in the mid-70s by Dick Kent for song-poem supremos MSR Records. Outside of Lillay’s composing the music for the songs Have a Happy Birthday and The Happy Birthday Clown, to words written by Daisy Blackwood (both dated 1974), that MSR release appears to be the last record that Lila F Daniels was involved with. Later that decade she moved to Rainier, Oregon and gave up songwriting and performing for good.

 

Here are both sides of the first Timely 45, Our Beautiful Lady and Appreciation. Enjoy

 

Download Lady HERE

Download Appreciation HERE

Beware, the Kirchner Boys

Advertised as ‘the biggest little band in the land, with a sound three times their size’, the Bantams were three pre-teens from Venice, California who, in 1966, achieved a modicum of fame locally and scored a national record deal thanks to their garage band pop stylings.

 

12-year-old Mike, Jeff (10) and Fritz Kirchner (the baby of the bunch at just nine years old), were just three of the eight children of Mr and Mrs Earl Brown, all of whom lived cheek-by-jowl in a little house near the Venice Post Office. Seven-year-old sister Brenda also harboured dreams of pop stardom, but she was considered too young to join the act. With Mike on guitar, Jeff on bongos, and Fritz on bass, the boys were inspired – like so many Americans – to form a group after seeing and hearing the Beatles in 1964. That was the same year that the family moved from their previous home in Milwaukee to sunny California.

 

The move was a fortuitous one. They were spotted by a talent scout, either playing for nickels on Ocean Park Pier (as the official publicity would have it) or, more reasonably, after winning a trophy in a local band contest held at Pacific Ocean Park. Whichever, before 1965 was out they had made their first film of a four-picture deal, the 1965 Mamie Van Doren vehicle Methuselah Jones. That movie was eventually released to US cinemas in 1967 under the title You've Got to Be Smart, with the boys credited as Mike, Jeff, and Fritz Bantam. They also appeared in the Roddy McDowall film the Cool Ones, which featured a performance from the wonderful Mrs Miller. 

Through 1966 and 1967 The Bantams made appearances on dozens of TV shows, including Hullaballoo, Hollywood A-Go-Go (sister Brenda came along to join in the fun, and can be seen on the show, dancing along to their performance of I Should Have Known Better), Cartoon Express (aka the Engineer Bill show), Showdown (a quiz show presented by confrontational talk show host Joe Pyne) and Where The Action Is. The boys even filmed an advert for instant drink mix Kool-Aid, beating the Monkees to it by two years.

 

In January of 1966 the band signed a five-year contract with Warner Brothers, who promoted the act as ‘the youngest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’. The Bantams released two 45s and an album, Beware: the Bantams in the States, and one highly-collectable EP in France, which compiled four of the most Beatle-y tracks from their album... which was pretty much all Beatles covers or covers of songs the Beatles had already covered themselves. The album was, according to Cash Box, recorded in just four hours. The tracks are huge fun, and the band Warners put together to back the boys is smoking hot, but despite Billboard claiming that the ‘brothers with talent have smash hit possibilities… Could go all the way,’ none of these releases made the US charts, and Warners soon dropped them.

 

In 1967 the boys played for wounded army veterans in San Francisco, along with ventriloquist Jimmy Gunther and his doll Maxie. But with both their film and recording careers stillborn, they soon seemed to have turned their back on music, to continue with their schooling, playing on their skateboards and being kids. 

For a time in the 1970s, Mike played in a band called the Canaligators, and Jeff played drums with a number of bands including Fluid Drive (a correspondent tells me that all of the brothers played in the band at some point), and Monkey Chow. Post-fame, all three of the Bantams carved out perfectly nice lives for themselves, with wives, children, grandchildren, and cousins a-plenty. 

Sadly, Jeff passed away, quite suddenly, in December 2015: he was 60 years old. His brother Mike joined him in July 2016, after a long illness, leaving Fritz as the band’s only surviving member. 'Brenda Bantam' joined her two eldest brothers in 2019.

 

Here are a couple of tracks from the magnificently off Beware: the Bantams, their covers of the Beatles classics From Me To You, and Ticket to Ride.

 

Enjoy!

 

Download From HERE 

Download Ticket HERE