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Musical Chinese Whisper


yoda-jag
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Half Man Half Biscuit recorded, in 1986, a song entitled "The B*stard Son of Dean Friedman", a claim Friedman considered improbable, as he was only seven years old when lyricist Nigel Blackwell was conceived. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2003, The Scotsman newspaper arranged a get together between Friedman and the band, in which he acknowledged that Blackwell had at least surmised right the underlying story in the song "Lucky Stars": "That guy Nigel was hip to the fact Lisa and I didn't just do lunch. You can't interpret a song that way unless you understand what it's about." (Nigel IS very thorough!) It also transpired that Blackwell had a copy of a rare vinyl version of Well Well Said the Rocking Chair.

 

In 2009, Friedman wrote a 'reply' called "Tale Of A Baker's Son", in which he firmly placed Blackwell's parentage as being that of the local baker, posting it on Half Man Half Biscuit's MySpace site. The band mentioned it on their own website as "Dean Friedman's Revenge/Dean Friedman strikes back". On September 15, 2010, Dean Friedman appeared at a Half Man Half Biscuit gig at the Robin 2 venue in Bilston, West Midlands (UK) and performed "Tale Of A Baker's Son" to rapturous applause from the partisan crowd. Half Man Half Biscuit's riposte was, naturally, The B*stard Son of Dean Friedman.

 

"The B*stard Son Of Dean Friedman" by Half Man Half Biscuit

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE_CUkUeWk8

 

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

 

Well I heard a lovely rumour that Bette Midler had a tumour

So gleefully I went to tell my friends

But they said it was a lie and she wasn’t going to die

“And by the way, have we got news for you?”

 

And they told me that the man I had always known as Dad

Hadn’t met my Mum when I was born

And they reckon that I am but I hope to god I’m not

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

 

And my schoolwork fell behind with this bombshell on my mind

The art teacher said he understood

But he could only sympathise with the sadness in my eyes

Even though he showed me his Magritte

 

And in the corridors of fear I would shed a lonely tear

And ridicule flew at me from both sides

And they mocked me in my mocks and embroidered in my socks

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

 

SupercalifragilisticBorussiaMoenchenGladbach

 

And you can thank your lucky stars that you’re not

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

The b*stard son of Dean Friedman

Edited by The Jukebox Rebel
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^ Dean's response was class, he left the stage to Biscuit's fans chanting "Dino, Dino, Dino" - a great moment in musical history. These are the great untold stories of rock! I shall attempt to link in "Tale Of A Baker's Son" by Dean Friedman at the next available opportunity...

 

Next up, a classy recording by the piano bluesman Ivory Joe Hunter which was made on October 1st, 1949. Hunter's sublime original was a number one hit on the R&B charts when it was released in 1950.

 

Somewhat tragically, the best selling version would prove to be the lame cover by Pat Boone, which hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1956. :(

 

"I Almost Lost My Mind" by Ivory Joe Hunter

 

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Almost Saturday Night - Gene Clark and Carla Olson from their ' So Rebellious A Lover' album. Gene Clark was one of the founder members of The Byrds, Carla Olson was in the Textones a pop country band in the 80's. It's a good album and well worth tracking down. The song was written by John Fogerty and has also been covered by Dave Edmunds.

 

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I think before you listen to the next insanely brilliant work of art, a little background is required. Co-Creator Nick Zammuto tells the story:

 

“This track was one of the first tracks we made for ‘The Way Out’ and we knew when we started it that it was going to push things in a very new direction for us.

 

A little back story: The movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was released in 1992, and you might recall that Macaulay Culkin used a tape recorder in that movie (to disguise his voice I believe). Kids wrote letters en masse requesting that a retail version of the tape recorder be made, and sure enough in 1993 Tiger Electronics released a version of it called the Talkboy. Many many were sold, you may have had one! You can still get them on eBay in fact.

 

The salient thing about the Talkboy is its speed control. You can adjust the speed of the tape during playback and recording to get very strange vocal effects. The opening sample in ‘A Cold Freezin’ Night’ is a perfect example…listen very carefully… you will unmistakably hear a line from a well known kids’ song, distorted to the edge of recognizability, but I promise you it’s there!

 

You know, since we’ve started touring we’ve been raiding thrift shops looking for good audio and video tapes. We have many thousands of them.

 

Among these tapes were at least a half a dozen talkboy tapes. And, as you may know first hand, when a kid gets his first tape recorder all inhibitions disappear. These tapes are full of outrageous moments that no fully conscious adult could ever duplicate.

 

The primary tape that you hear in ‘a cold freezin’ night’ is a game of one-upsmanship between a brother and a sister (I think). Their conversation escalates until the younger sister has no choice but to drop the A-bomb. It’s very musical how it unfolds, so it was not a stretch to turn it into a pseudo-techno-dance mix.

 

The rest of the sounds in the mix range from bass guitar that I recorded with my brother Mikey, a collection of amazing vintage synth samples that Paul collected from various sources, fragments of outdated radio jingles (including the best harmonica solo ever) and an electro-acoustic polyrythm generator that I invented. I’ll describe it, along with some of my other inventions later.

 

Hope you like the track! We’ll release the video soon, which consists mostly of samples taken from the dozens of summer camp videos in our collection.”

 

Well, that was a few years ago in 2010, and the video duly arrived - suitably bonkers…

 

“A Cold Freezin’ Night” by The Books

 

Edited by The Jukebox Rebel
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Same Size Feet is fromWord Gets Around, the excellent debut album from Stereophonics. The album reached #6 in the UK albums chart, and is only one of three (out of eight) Stereophonics studio albums not to reach #1; the other two being the bands last two longplayer releases, 2009's Keep Calm And Carry On, which reached #11 and 2013's Graffitti On The Train, which went to #3.

 

This video ver sion is taken from a rainsoaked T in the Park in 2010, just a month after the death of their former drummer, Stuart Cable, and this song is dedicated to him by Kelly Jones.

 

same size feet ..... stereophonics

 

http://youtu.be/-VJ4n_L2TV8

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I'm pleased to report this is my first off the cuff response - clearly, once heard, the next tune is never forgotten! This improve version was broadcast on Channel 4's Earsay. Said the band: "We were expecting to do a proper studio session, but they said "You're a busking band, you can play outside", so we ended up playing on the pavement outside Wandsworth Bus Garage."

 

"Get Your Feet Out Of My Shoes" by The Boothill Foot Tappers

 

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All Just to Get to you - Joe Ely. A song from his 1995 album Letter to Laredo. The song was co-written by Bruce Springsteen who you can hear sing in the background. There are quite a few versions on You Tube of Bruce singing this, some with Joe Ely. This is not my favourite song from the album but how the hell am I going to get the title 'Gallo Del Cielo' on this?

 

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Like Sunnylaw with his "Gallo Del Cielo" I'm resigned to never being able to play you "Umculo Kawupheli" by The Mahotella Queens. But there's a chance for a little taster. This one comes from their 1991 album "Mbaqanga". They might have hit their most glorious peaks in the 1970s but, as this TV performance shows, they still had much joy to give.

 

"Stop Crying" (sung in English and Swahili) is about a man who is back home after a very long time, left his wife and children and apparently the world wasn't how he expected it to be. The family is telling him to stop crying about the past, it's time to face the future. Since nobody chased him away, he should stop punishing them for his own mistakes.

 

"Stop Crying" by Mahlathini and The Mahotella Queens

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bWdOAjbYGE

Edited by The Jukebox Rebel
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next up on the jukebox, is this offering from me - originally by Buddy Holly, this rocking live version is by Marty Stuart and Steve Earle, in 1996.

 

"cryin', waitin', hopin' " was released in 1959 less than two months before his death (at 22) as B-side to "peggy sue got married". the song was first recorded on December 14, 1958 by Holly (only himself with guitar) in apartment 4H of "The Brevoort", 5th avenue, manhattan (some other sources say apartment 3B). After Holly's death on February 3, 1959, his home recordings of his last six compositions were turned over to record producer Jack Hansen. Hansen hired studio musicians and a backup vocal group, the Ray Charles Singers, to augment Holly's vocal and guitar. The idea was to match the established sound of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as closely as possible.

"Cryin', Waitin', Hopin'" is technically the most successful of the six overdubs; it turned out so well that it was originally intended as the "A" side of a 45-rpm single. Holly wrote and recorded the song with pauses ("Cryin'... waitin'... hopin'... you'll come back"). Hansen ingeniously turned the solo into call-and-response verses, so the backup singers fill in the pauses with an "echo" of each word. (for a German reissue of this song, the producer took the "echo" idea literally, and played the Hansen recording in an echo chamber.)

 

Hansen's studio version of "Cryin', Waitin', Hopin'" was recorded on June 30, 1959 at Coral Records' Studio A, along with "Peggy Sue Got Married". Both sides were released as Buddy Holly's first posthumous single. (The remaining four tunes on Holly's tape were re-recorded by Hansen and company in 1960. All six were issued on an album, "The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2.")

 

because "Cryin', Waitin', Hopin'" was popular in englands merseybeatscene, the song was recorded by others, including The Beatles, with George Harrison doing the vocal and replicating studio guitarist Donald Arnone's instrumental bridge, note for note. one of the recordings was officially released in 1994 on The Beatles Live at the bbc.

In 1987, Marshall Crenshaw portrayed Buddy Holly in the film la bamba, he is featured singing the song on what is supposed to be February 2, 1959, Buddy's final show before dying in the plane crash in the early hours of February 3.

 

Marty Stuart is an american country music singer-songwriter, known for both his traditional style, and eclectic merging of rockabilly, honky tonk, and traditional country music. in the early 1990s, he had a successful string of country hits.

 

Steve Earle is a god.

 

and he is wearing what looks like a beatles american college style baseball jacket in this video.

 

a longer version of this track can be found on Steve Earles tremendous hidden gems Magnetised Motherf*ckers series (four excellent cd's of rare and unreleased material from the god himself)

 

Earle and Stuart's version was also released on decca records in 1996 as part of a double A-side single, two versions of the same song, with The Nitty Gritty Band's version on the other side, and both versions also appeared on the Decca Album "Not Fade Away- Remembering Buddy Holly"

 

 

 

cryin', waitin', hopin' ..... steve earle and marty stuart

 

 

 

http://youtu.be/rL1Cx3VrIKA

Edited by yoda-jag
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King Hiram "Hank" Williams was born on September 17, 1923, in Mount Olive, Alabama. Early in his career, he developed the habit of singing preaching type songs under the name of "Luke the Drifter," a nom de plume for an idealized character who went across the country preaching the gospel, and doing good deeds while Hank Williams, the drunkard, cheated on women, and was cheated on by them in return.. Williams died in his cadillac in Oak Hill, West Virginia, at the age of 29, while on the way to a scheduled performance on New Years Day, 1953, in Canton, Ohio. That same year MGM released Luke The Drifter ( nrs. 30755 - 30758 )in a 78 RPM box set. The lyrics of these songs are a well-guarded secret among the great minimalist Country and Western troubadours. They are considered recitative morality fables incorporating a sort of "drawling blues" done on the spur of the moment. ~ poetspath.com

 

"Just Waitin'" by Luke the Drifter

 

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Just Like an Arrow - Magnum. I first heard Birmingham Pomp Rockers Magnum on the Dougie Donnelly album show which was on Thursday nights on Clyde in 1978. Not sure which song it would have been but it was from The Kingdom Of Madness album, which I bought a few days later. Magnum are still going today although I haven't heard any of their recent stuff. I saw them live twice once at the Apollo on a joint tour with Def Leppard and then a few years later at the Barrowlands. This from their best album IMHO ' On a Storyteller's Night' Enjoy.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LZrsq9KMM4

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video taken from 1979 TV broadcast "Back to the egg special" and from 1979 Wings LP called "Back to the egg", "arrow through me" was the A-side of the third US single released from the album and peaked at number 29 on the billboard charts. the B-side was "old siam, sir", which was the A-side of the first UK single taken from the album.

the rumour that it inspired ABC's 1982 hit "poison arrow" is false, although there are similarities in its music video to that of Wings' "goodnight tonight", released the same year.

the song was used with the opening credits of, and as a main melody line through, the 1980 movie "oh! heavenly dog", starring chevy chase and jane seymour. in 2010, neo-soul artist Erykah Badu sampled "Arrow Through Me" on an album track called "Gone Baby, Don't Be Long" on her CD 'New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh'.

 

 

arrow through me ..... wings

 

 

http://youtu.be/7lFBq8t5kdw

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^ Seems you boys posted at the exact same time :lol:

 

Might I be so bold as to make a proposal?

 

Rid - you delete #2122 and repost it under Billy Bragg?

Yoda - once that's done you delete #2123?

 

A young Mr. Bragg sets out his manifesto in a stylish manner - a cappella dontcha know. One of the 2 b-sides on his "Days Like These" single in 1985.

 

"I Don't Need This Pressure Ron" by Billy Bragg

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0crTJ5apq8

Edited by The Jukebox Rebel
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