Here Come the Mad Hatters

One of those albums that is forever turning up in ‘bad album cover art’ lists, for years I had assumed that the sole album by the Mad Hatters (or the Mad-Hatters, as they appear on the disc’s labels) was the product of some evangelist folk duo.

 

How wrong I was.

 

I had presumed, you see, that the crucifix-like symbol emblazoned across the artist’s ensemble had some sort of religious connection. Now, thanks to the ever-wonderful Thrift Store Vinyl YouTube channel I know better. It is, in fact, the logo of the National Tuberculosis Association, for the Mad-Hatters (or the Mad Hatters) album – believe it or not - is a collection of ‘comedy’ songs about tuberculosis. 19 of them, some under a minute long, with titles such as I Had Tuberculosis, T B Girls, Soft is the Voice of a Fungus and the singalong hit Pneumonoultramicroscopic-silocovolcanokoniosis.

 

A product of the Greene County Tuberculosis Society of Springfield, Missouri, the album carries no date, but I would suggest it pre-dates Van Morrison’s T B Sheets by a couple of years. The cover mentions Admiral Asterbloom, a character from US comic strip Mr. Abernathy, which ran for three decades from 1957, and the song Pneumonoultramicroscopic-silocovolcanokoniosis references Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the soundtrack to the 1964 film Mary Poppins, so it would be a fairly safe bet to say that the album dates from no earlier than 1965 and, judging by the quality of the cover – one of those old-type US covers with a slick pasted onto a blank white cardboard sleeve – I would suggest that it was most likely issued before the end of the decade.

 

But who were the Mad Hatters themselves? Were they two nurses – or volunteers – working on a Missouri TB ward who thought they could raise a few dollars by selling an album of their silly songs? No doubt a few copies sold, as it turns up for sale now and again, but not many I would assume. The album originally came with an insert offering people the chance to purchase more copies at $3.25 apiece; I wonder how many actually took them up on that offer?

 

As usual, if you have any more information please feel free to share it. In the meantime, enjoy a couple of tracks from the brilliantly bonkers The Mad Hatters.

 

Download I Had Tuberculosis HERE

Download Nurses Marching Song HERE

The Greatest Record Buy in the History of the Business, Apparently

According to whoever wrote the Discogs blurb, ‘Hit Parader was a music magazine. Which also sometimes produced rare EP's and 7" vinyls [I could stab them just for using that utterly unnecessary ‘s’]. These records include coversongs. The covers are very well done and are very close to it's original artist. The names of the different artists who sung these tracks are unknown. For a reason. These records were made as a statement to the music industry; that the record prices are too high. They wanted to show that it could be done cheaper with the same quality’ [sic].

 

True, there was a magazine called Hit Parader. A pop music monthly, it ran from 1942 until 2008 and printed song lyrics, articles, pin up pictures and the usual teen fare. There was clearly a link between that and the label – both were based in Derby, Connecticut, and the discs were advertised extensively in the pages of the magazine - but that’s about where the truth in the Discogs description ends. 

To claim that the covers featured on the Hit Parader Records EPS are ‘Very well done and are very close to [the] original artist’ could not be further from the truth. Sure, some are more than passable, and not unlike the quality of the UK’s Embassy label, which put out copycat covers of pop hits in the 1950s and 1960s. However, frankly, many of the cover versions featured on these EPs are nothing short of diabolical. So cheap and shoddy as to be embarrassing.

I would seriously question the notion that ‘These records were made as a statement to the music industry’, and that the magazine ‘Wanted to show that it could be done cheaper with the same quality,’ too. The records were not produced to ‘stick it to the man’, but to make money, and the quality is nothing like as good as that of the similar product marketed by a major label. 

The label began, in the late 1950s, as Song Hits, offering six covers of recent chart singles by anonymous performers for ‘The giveaway price of just 69 cents’, as their own advertising claimed. Handily, readers of the magazine could pick up the latest disc at their newsagent. Similar schemes had existed since at least the 1930s: Hit of the Week and Durium, both launched in the early 1930s, were flexible records sold at newsstands in the States, but by the 950s and the advent of the 45, hard vinyl records marketed in this way were becoming more popular, and far cheaper to produce.

 

Hit Parader Records may have started with good intentions, but by the time the beat boom came around they had all but given up. In early 1964 they issued an EP containing a cover of I Want To Hold Your Hand that is so abominable it defies belief: it should not surprise you that I featured this very same recording on this very same blog five years ago. This very same cover version would turn up time and time again, issued by a number of different budget and cash-in labels and credited variously to Billy Pepper and the Pepperpots (on the album Merseymania), the Liverpool Beats (on the eponymous album issued by Rondo records), and others including the Beats and the Mersey Beats of Liverpool (not The Merseybeats). Confused? You should be.

 

Anyway, here are a couple of tracks from the Hit Parader label: from HP-31, issued in 1964, is a reasonable version of Leader of the Pack, complete with the most pop art, Joe-Meek-esque bike smash I’ve ever heard, and from 1966, a wonderfully naïve version of the Beach Boys classic Good Vibrations. You can find the version of  I Want To Hold Your Hand and read all about Billy Pepper and the Pepperpots HERE 

If you tune in to the World's Worst Records Radio Show next Wednesday (August 16, Episode 231) you'll hear me play Good Vibrations, alongside a truly ghastly version of the Trashmen's Surfin' Bird. 

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Leader HERE

Download Vibrations HERE