From the Vaults

Frank Maya: Polaroid Children (1988)

3 Apr 2014 | <1 min read

Stupid song from the late Eighties, but just kinda one-time fun too. Drum and synth programmer, and vocalist of course, Frank Maya was part of the New York Downtown scene at the time in that post-Talking Heads world. He was poet, performer, musician and openly gay when the latter wasn't quite as easy as you might think. He had a band (the Decals) but his career didn't move too far... > Read more

Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy: Thriller (1987)

2 Apr 2014 | <1 min read

The late Lester Bowie (who died in '99 age 58) was very serious about some things -- he was part of the politically and socially active AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians -- but also had a sense of humour. In a profile/obituary at Elsewhere -- under a title borrowed from Frank Zappa, "Does humour belong in music" -- we noted one of his pieces (designed... > Read more

Kronos Quartet: Sorrow Tears and Blood (2013)

1 Apr 2014 | <1 min read

For many decades the Kronos Quartet has been commissioning, performing and recording material by contemporary composers, but also adapting rock classics (JImi Hendrix's Purple Haze) and world music to their will. We're not going very far back into the Vaults for this one, their version of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's classic Afrobeat song Sorrow Tears and blood about opression in NIgeria during the... > Read more

Bob Dylan: John Brown/Mama You've Been on My Mind (live 1998)

31 Mar 2014 | <1 min read | 1

At a concert in Birmingham in June '98 Bob Dylan went way back into his scrapbook of obscurities and pulled out this anti-war song which he had written in 1962. There was a demo version of it done for the music publishers Witmark and Sons which appeared on the Bootleg Series Vol 9 album in 2010, and he did in fact record it (under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt) for a hard-to-find folk... > Read more

Pat McMinn: Geddes Dental Renovations advertisement (1949)

26 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

It's an odd but understandable thing that advertising jingles can often make as much, if not more, impact on our consciousness than serious music. The reason is perhaps simple: they are short, catchy and you hear them a lot. Few if any advertising jingles in New Zealand were heard more than this one by Pat McMinn whose other claim to fame was the song Opo The Crazy Dolphin which was... > Read more

Buckner and Garcia: Pac-Man Fever (1982)

25 Mar 2014 | 1 min read

Few things guarantee a short career more than a gimmick song cashing in on some pop culture trend. There were dozens of songs about hula hoops in the late Fifties (one even by the great Teresa Brewer, see clip), Beatlemania (one by the young Cher under another name) and Rubik's Cubes. Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, two songwriters from Akron, Ohio, had previously breached the lower... > Read more

James Ray: Got My Mind Set on You (1962)

24 Mar 2014 | 1 min read

Pub quiz question. Who was the first Beatle to set foot in the United States? If you are thinking back to those famous images of them coming off that PanAm Clipper in February 1964 in New York you are actually on the wrong track. The first Beatle to step out in America was George Harrison, and he went there in 1963 when he and his brother Peter went to see their sister Louise who was... > Read more

George Harrison: Dream Scene (1968)

21 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

This appropriately entitled piece is serious headphone listening for the wee small hours and is perhaps among the most strange things George Harrison's name was ever attached to. It appeared on the soundtrack to the Joe Massot film Wonderwall (Massot is interviewed here) and as you may hear involves Indian musicians, washes of sound, strange voices, some electric guitar and just generally... > Read more

Double J and Twice the T: Mod Rap (1989)

19 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

While going through a pile of old New Zealand singles I chanced on this. They may not have been gangstas or even remotely hard, but if you check the clip below their hearts were in the right place. But for this they pulled together Ray Columbus and the Invader's She's a Mod hit from '65 with rap and beatbox, and it wasn't as bad as some at the time said. The haters (did we have them then?)... > Read more

Moby Grape: Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot (1968)

11 Mar 2014 | 1 min read | 1

Varying the speed of tapes in the studio is not uncommon, but asking that your listener get up and change the speed of their record player on an album is another thing entirely. Certainly there have been singles which play one side at 45 and the other at 33 (often 12" singles or EPs from the Eighties) -- but in '68 the increasingly drug-addled Skip Spence of San Francisco psychedelic... > Read more

George Harrison: Danny Boy/Bridge Over Troubled Waters and studio noodling (c1970)

10 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

One of the great things about being filthy rich (like George Harrison was post-Beatles), at last having time on your hands and your own studio in your mansion (although admittedly he did have to do a lot of work on the place which was in derelict condition) is you get to fool around. And clearly from the evidence of this five minutes of playing around with vocal effects, slide guitar and so... > Read more

Perrey and Kingsley; Strangers in the Night (1971)

7 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

Taken from the album Kaleidoscopic Variations; Electronic Pop Music of the Future by innovators and composers Jean Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, this might be better subtitled "When Moog players go wonky". And oddly enough for "future pop" they drew mostly on material like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Lover's Concerto, Winchester Cathedral, the theme from The Third Man,... > Read more

Maria Dallas: Lonely For You (1967)

6 Mar 2014 | <1 min read

In the minds of many New Zealanders and on the pages of popular histories, country singer Maria Dallas was a one-hit wonder with her version of Jay Epae's very catchy Tumblin' Down. That song won her the Loxene Golden Disc award in '66 but if she mostly disapeared frpm the pop charts thereafter (although did have a huge hit with Pinocchio four years later) it was because she was never a pop... > Read more

Tom Waits: Young At Heart (2006)

4 Mar 2014 | <1 min read | 1

According to Tom Waits, "My wife just thinks it's hilarious," he said of this cover of Frank Sinatra's popular song. "She says, 'You sound so goddamned depressed singing it . . . I don't believe that bullshit for a minute. Young at heart, my ass!' " When Waits did cover this lovely if sentimental song -- which was a hit in 1953, so big that the 1954 Sinatra/Doris Day... > Read more

Billie: Honey to the Bee (1998)

25 Feb 2014 | 1 min read

That the innocent wee Billie Piper -- 16 when she did a promo tour in New Zealand on the back of her debut album (see here) -- should later go slightly off the rails and start behaving in an "adult" way should have come as no surprise. Her short-lived marriage to UK DJ Chris Morris in 2001 -- she 19, he 16 years her senior -- was just the beginning, after that there were the... > Read more

Jody Miller: He's So Fine (1971)

24 Feb 2014 | 1 min read

In his recent insightful and unflinching Behind the Locked Door -- a biography of the life and conflicted emotions of George Harrison -- the British writer Graeme Thomson discusses Harrison's propensity for "borrowing" musical ideas and lyrics from others. The Beatles had always been great adopters and adapters, but Harrison appears to have taken it to a different dimension. The... > Read more

Adam Faith: We Are In Love (1963)

18 Feb 2014 | 1 min read

Britain's Adam Faith -- born Terence Nelhams-Wright -- was one of the few late Fifties/early Sixties teen pop stars of his era who managed to survive the limitations of his voice and establish a very creditable career . . . although most of it was in acting. On his early hits like What Do You Want? in 1959 he affected the Buddy Holly style, but -- despite doing songs like Johnny Comes... > Read more

Bobby Rydell: Ghost Surfin' (c 1964)

17 Feb 2014 | <1 min read

The cover of this British album from '64 gives the title as "Bobby Rydell Sings" . . . but the most interesting two tracks are where he doesn't. Rydell was one of those lightweight US teen-pop artists whose success far outweighs his talent, and these days he has become a footnote in pop culture. In Grease the college the kids went to was Rydell High, and McCartney has said... > Read more

The Nomads: Five Years Ahead of My Time (1983)

11 Feb 2014 | <1 min read

Formed in 1981 (and still going today with two original members) Sweden's Nomads were considered garage punks and this track appears on a collection entitled A Real Cool Time Revisited; Swedish punk, pop and garage-rock 1982-1989. But on the evidence of this song they might well have been around in the late Sixties because they sound closer to a Sonics/Stooges take on psychedelic rock of... > Read more

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: The Intro and the Outro (1967)

10 Feb 2014 | 1 min read | 1

Few indie.rock followers would perhaps know the band Death Cab for Cutie took their name from a song by this group of musical surrealists, the song of that name appearing in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film in late '67 when the band were invited to sing it. The Bonzos enjoyed some patronage from various Beatles -- McCartney produced their hit I'm the Urban Spaceman under the name... > Read more