So, what have you been listening to lately?

[Dave W]

Of course it's not country, but it's all right. The boy can sing and play.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the huge dump of 78s from Mark Lee Allen on YT. Some unfamiliar names, some songs I've never heard from names I do know, and then there are old favorites like this.

[westen44]

I looked this up just now.  That song was in the movie "The Girl Can't Help It."  The movie had a  satirical subplot involving teenagers and rock 'n' roll music.[3] The unintended result has been called the "most potent" celebration of rock music ever captured on film.

[uwe]

Hey, even I know that one!

Fats is a recurring theme with Herr Westheimer. Notable for the fact that it is piano driven music which normally doesn't rate that high with him, am I right?

[Dave W]

I looked this up just now.  That song was in the movie "The Girl Can't Help It."  The movie had a  satirical subplot involving teenagers and rock 'n' roll music.[3] The unintended result has been called the "most potent" celebration of rock music ever captured on film.

LOL. It was a third rate gangster comedy to showcase the talents of Jayne Mansfield, although talent and Jayne Mansfield really don't belong in the same sentence. Oh well, she did give us Mariska Hargitay. But it did have a lot of good rock and pop acts.

Fats' performance in the movie.

[Dave W]

Hey, even I know that one!

Fats is a recurring theme with Herr Westheimer. Notable for the fact that it is piano driven music which normally doesn't rate that high with him, am I right?

Piano and horns drove a lot of early r&r. Little Richard, Larry Williams, Lloyd Price etc. And then there was Jerry Lee Lewis.

[uwe]

although talent and Jayne Mansfield really don't belong in the same sentence.

How needlessly cruel you are, Dave. I thought she was versatile



and had real peaks in her illustrious career.



PS: I'm sure she is not holding above that cooking pan what I think she's holding ...

[Pilgrim]

Of course it's not country, but it's all right. The boy can sing and play.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the huge dump of 78s from Mark Lee Allen on YT. Some unfamiliar names, some songs I've never heard from names I do know, and then there are old favorites like this.

Dave, if someone has put a bunch of 78s online, did they say anything about resolving rights for them?

I have a couple of big boxes of 78s that I'd love to put online (some of them dating back to the 20s,) but resolving the rights is an impossible task.  I'd be willing to preserve them by putting them online if I didn't have to worry about lawsuits.  I waver back and forth about whether that's likely to happen.

[uwe]

I remember 78s! My parents had a few dozen, my favourite ones as a kid were these two here:







Weirdly, they both dealt with sunken ships. I'm not a maritime person at all, we didn't even live remotely close to a beach!  "Geisterschiff" means ghost ship.

"Stan Oliver", as you might have guessed, wasn't a real name, it was the moniker an Amercian opera singer working in Germany named Kieth Engen (from Irazee, Minnesota, would you believe?) used for his secret Schlager career. Hired by the Bavarian State Opera, he was not allowed to record "silly stuff" under his real name. You can hear on the recording that he has a classically trained voice. Amazingly, he doesn't even have the slightest trace of a Yank accent, they must have beaten that out of him during his classical training (he had Norwegian, not German ancestors, in case you wondered).

[westen44]

LOL. It was a third rate gangster comedy to showcase the talents of Jayne Mansfield, although talent and Jayne Mansfield really don't belong in the same sentence. Oh well, she did give us Mariska Hargitay. But it did have a lot of good rock and pop acts.

Fats' performance in the movie.

But that song is one of the best representatives from its genre that anyone would be able to find.  A killer song. 

[uwe]

Bare-chested and naked men working out, in showers and with sauna infusions, and still people thought Rob liked women? Talk about videos of revelatory nature.

[Dave W]

Dave, if someone has put a bunch of 78s online, did they say anything about resolving rights for them?

I have a couple of big boxes of 78s that I'd love to put online (some of them dating back to the 20s,) but resolving the rights is an impossible task.  I'd be willing to preserve them by putting them online if I didn't have to worry about lawsuits.  I waver back and forth about whether that's likely to happen.

I have three online friends (including Mark) who are vintage record collectors with thousands of records, they've been putting records from their own collections on YT for years (45s and 78s) from their collections without incident, by taking a photo of the actual record. This apparently satisfies YT that they own a physical copy of the music and that seems to be good enough.

I could ask, if you'd like.

[westen44]

Muse's latest song.  Not great, but maybe a little better than usual.

[TBird1958]

Bare-chested and naked men working out, in showers and with sauna infusions, and still people thought Rob liked women? Talk about videos of revelatory nature.

oh! Who dropped the soap?! I'll get it! 

[uwe]

Cliff "root note ain't a bad place to be" Williams with some tasty introspective playing.

[uwe]

In our largely ignored, yet continuing series of "obscure and uncool AOR bands no one gives a rat's ass about" meet Stingray!









They hailed from South Africa in the late 70ies, I remember their debut album getting a gushing review in one of the teen rock mags I read at the time (I always wanted to buy that album, but never got round to, in 2021 it was finally released on CD). They swam in that no man's land between Starcastle, Toto (like them they had two keyboarders in the line-up), Styx, Kansas and Boston, but even poppier (vocals are a bit too dominant in the mix, I come from the Deep Purple school of production where the vocals are just another color, not overshadowing everything else). Their songwriting is lauded to this day in AOR circles. Of course (and understandably so), being from South Africa (with no musical ethno content whatsoever, they could have just as well been from the Midwest or the UK) at the height of that vile system called Apartheid doomed any semblance of an international career.

Anybody here ever heard of'em? They should have fared better.