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Re: blasts from the pasts
At 12:57 AM 11/30/00 -0500, Elmer Elevator wrote:
Hmmm ... very scary about Patty Duke and her album ... thanks for
transcribing the liner notes (which I notice are unsigned)!
That album also includes Patty's rendition (and it *is* a rendition) of
"What the world! needs! now! is! love! sweet! love!".... But I don't think
she was trying to cash in on the Glenn Gould School of Pointillistic Delivery.
As she reminisced in _Call Me Anna_:
'While the appeal of "The Patty Duke Show" is not hard to understand, I
still don't have a handle on the success of the six albums I made for
United Artists. (...) I wanted to sing so much, but when I hear what I
did, it sounds awful. Even the covers still give me a pain in the stomach.
(...) Sometimes I'll be eating spaghetti or something in a restaurant and
someone will come up to me out of nowhere with one of those awful things,
saying, "Oh, guess what I found? Would you sign this for me?" There goes
my appetite.
(...) The idea was that the acting and the recording would reinforce each
other, each area would help you become popular in the other. Whether you
could actually sing or not didn't matter; the technology was getting so
good that if you could get out three notes in a row, the record people
could splice a performance together. And, note by note, that's exactly
what they did with me. (...) I can't read music, never could, probably
never will. I don't know from bars, that's where my father was! Nobody
told me when to come in, when to get out, when to be quiet, when to speak,
and I became absolutely petrified about the whole experience. I knew I
didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't have the confidence to reveal
that until the situation reached crisis proportions. (...) They must have
suffered so, those poor record producers. They all kept saying, "But you
really can do this. You really can sing." And something that had been
joyful to me became and absolute nightmare. Each one of those "sides," as
they say, was a painful extraction from my psyche as well as from my body.'
-----
But that album's cover is nothing compared with this other one. It is a
reissue of Dvorak's "New World" symphony played by Rodzinski and the
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London: electronically rechanneled to
simulate stereo. The reissue is in the "ABC Music Guild Now Generation
Series," obviously an attempt to make classical music hip to the Now
Generation. Y'know, marketing a serious product as bubble gum.
The back cover has a completely serious and straightforward musicological
essay about the composition, obviously reproduced from the original issue.
The front cover has the headline "I REALLY DIG DVORAK". The background is
slightly crumpled green paper. A man stands in the center, naked from the
waist up except for a wide leather watch band and a pair of sunglasses. He
has the 1970's sideburns and a Richard Gere haircut. He displays his
biceps in a typical muscle-man pose. Written on his chest in pink and red
marker is "DVORAK". His trousers are the style that the Meathead wore in
"All in the Family." Clutching him around the waist and legs are two
barefoot young girls, drawn in by an amateurish comic strip artist. The
one on the left has a dialogue balloon that says "Me too". The one on the
right has a beatific smile on her face, and her balloon says "Sock it to me
Dvorak".
I am not making this up; see a small scan of it at
http://www.vaix.net/~bpl/digdvo.gif
The credits attribute the Cover Design to Byron Goto and Henry Epstein;
Body by Mother (Lance's). Evidently the name of the man on the front cover
is Lance.
This was the milieu into which Glenn Gould launched some of his LP's. It
was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Sock it to me Dvorak.
Play it again, Glenn.
Sing it to me Patty.
"Do it to me, Sheldon." - Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally"
(http://www.filmsite.org/when.html)
So back to Buffy and her First Peoples music and Sesame Street -- 10
stars, sez Bob. Nice, talented, dedicated woman with all the right
instincts. (And I think Canadian, too, n'est-ce pas?)
"I'm sorry, sir, we don't have any n'est-ce pas." - Alec Guinness in
"Murder By Death"
I like those arrangements that Peter Schickele did on some of the Buffy
Sainte-Marie albums.
Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
clavichord CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
trumpet and organ: http://www.mp3.com/hlduo
"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot