Merryweather and Carey, "Five Days on the Trail" (1971)

Neil Merryweather and Lynn Carey shall live long in my heart for releasing this album containing the absolutely incandescent slab of treacle-thick fugitive blues that is "Five Days on the Trail", a song that damn near breaks my neck any time I drop a needle on it:

Merryweather & Carey - Five Days On The Trail by doggziller

Merryweather and Carey have both had long and varied careers in music (mostly independent of one another, though they were apparently lovers when this album was released) - and with more than a few brushes against  giants of popular culture. For instance, one of Neil Merryweather's earlier bands, the Mynah Birds, was fronted by a young Rick James (not sounding much like his Cold-Blooded era self back in the mid-60s).

Lynn Carey belted out vocals for fictional group "The Carrie Nations" in the Russ Meyer/Roger Ebert collaboration Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - very loosely dubbed over actress Dolly Read's lip-syncing (Roger Ebert - these days notorious for his endorsement of 1997 Jamie Foxx vehicle "Booty Call" - would later claim this and all other flaws in the film were intended for comic effect).



Although Russ Meyer evidently considered her "too flat-chested" for the silver screen, Lynn Carey nevertheless appeared in Penthouse a couple of years later to promote her and Merryweather's new band Mama Lion (a band most famous for a minor scandal surrounding the cover of its first album - Lynn seemingly not especially shy at this point in her life)

A number of young men were to profess a keen interest in Isaac Asimov's article on immortality.

Penthouse December 1972 is also notable for containing "Xaviera Hollander's first advice column", which was to run for about 35 years. Xaviera will of course be familiar to you as the author of the best-selling saxophone sex mystery, Yours Fatally!

Oh Fausto! Your legacy lives on.

Song Chang Sik, S/T (1976)

I'm always wide open to foreign-language LPs, possibly because the capability to understand the lyrics of most songs often reveals how silly they are. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a couple of heaters on this suspiciously weepy looking album from South Korea.

The "sad clown" outfit was nearly a deal-breaker.

Production and mixing is a bit ropey but the bass at least sounds thick and that first moment after the "Slow Jam" intro when your boy's voice floats in is just haunting. Some nice progressive elements pop out of left field on these tunes also with unexpected synthesizer chirps, fuzz guitar and flute soloing all thrown into the mix.

Song Chang Sik by doggziller

I have no idea what the real names of these tracks are I'm afraid nor any clue to the content, but given that South Korea was under military rule at this time I like to imagine these songs circumspectly criticise the regime  through allegorical ballads about the shy, pretty girl-next-door being curb-stomped by riot police.

Silvio and Fausto

Been a bit lax with updating of late I confess, for those occasional readers who don't know me personally, I should explain that much of my time has been consumed by moving house and also organizing my impending wedding... such time available to me has been spent yelling at the ducks on my lawn.

(Turns out shrieking "DON'T YOU DARE SNEAK OUT YOUR BIRD TURD UPON MY LAWN YOU CRETINOUS MALLARD" tends to have the opposite than intended effect - more efficacious: sidling up to whisper the scientific name "Anas platyrhynchos" in their stupid little lizard-hole ears, they pucker right up and they don't come back)

So anyway after Silvio Berluscone's narrow victory in a confidence vote of the Italian parliament last week I had planned to photoshop a picture of him being orbited by a cyclone of Fausto Papetti album covers as a mildly entertaining and semi-racist salute to Italian lechery, but I couldn't get it looking right.

You escape the skewers of my satire for now, Mr Berluscone!

The other problem is that the only Fausto Papetti LP I actually own has just a dumb old saxophone on the cover:

Wah wah wah wah...

Fausto founded his very career on exploiting every permutation of the sax/sex pun to its outermost limit, whatever drove him to sign off on such a bland and bosom-less cover I do not know. Or indeed this one:

Everyone's tired of these nude models. I think the public really just wants to see my face at last.

The "A Saxy Portrait" album itself is nothing special but it does have one track that in the hey-day of my record collecting fever (the early '00s) would have been described as having a "DOPE LIBRARY-TYPE SOUND" and also containing "ILL STABS AND LOOPS".

Fausto Papetti - White Lady by doggziller

I welcome links to your favourite Fausto cover in the comments.

I'm Not Joking About These Albums With Big Shoes On The Cover

Look at this mess.

Just dreadful!

Jump, S/T (early '70s?)

This is one of those albums that winds up in the dollar bin because, in all honesty, ain't nobody want to buy an album with a big old shoe on the cover.

BUT WAIT A MOMENT MY CHILD, WHAT'S THIS???

Why, it's the four disembodied heads of  "Jump", flying out of the shoe on a rainbow!

This catastrophic design decision is probably the reason why an allmusic.com search for Jump contains no mention of this band whatsoever (and instead reads like a team of brain-stormers with lexical constipation were trying to come up with the name for a Christian music aerobics festival).

My initial guess was the the long-hair rockers from Jump never saw this cover until it was too late, and that shortly after they emerged stinking from the studio, someone in the Janus label art department was sent home bloody-faced and weeping to their family. But then I noticed a detail in this posse shot:

Jump: just a fun bunch of guys.

LOOK CLOSER AT THE FEETS

Digitally enhanced image.

Yep, I do believe that's lead guitarist Dennis Tracy sporting the ever-so-distinctive shoe from the cover, and its twin. I think "Jump" were doomed from the first - just imagine if the cover for "Appetite for Destruction" featured Axl Rose's head flying out of one of his nasty old Chuck Taylors and ask yourself whether you'd know the name "Guns'n'Roses" today.

(You would not).

As this is ostensibly a music blog and not a dang old design blog, I should point out that the quality of music on this LP is far better than that ghastly glam-rock-looking foot apparatus would suggest - my fave on here is "Bank of Love", which is about one time when a lowly teller from the Bank of  Love decided to rob the Bank of Love (OMG alert!)

Jump - Bank of Love by doggziller

Vanity 6, "If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)" (1982)

The main thing to understand about Prince is that he is very great, amazing, the best.

Back in the '80s, music was just foaming up out of Prince, it couldn't be checked. If he was down at the dry-cleaners on a Thursday morning having his lavender banana sling cleaned and pressed in time for the weekend, and he started drumming his fingers on the counter while he waited for fifteen seconds, by the time he pulled up the purple Honda 400A into the big driveway at Paisley Park he would have that shit worked up into a dancefloor banger, then lay down and mix all the tracks before lunch and just turf the master tapes atop a huge pile on the back lawn. Followed by an entire afternoon of sex, topped off with coconut rum mojitos by the pool at sundown. 

Warner Brothers weren't trying to release nine Prince albums every weekend, so the man generally had a few side projects on the go under the pseudonym "Jamie Starr", just dashing off classics like 777-9311 for The Time. Reportedly Prince not only composed and produced this tune but laid down all the tracks except Morris Day's lead vocal and Jesse Johnson's guitar solo - not that they couldn't have played it themselves, the band having been put together by Prince primarily so that he could go on tour with a support act that was capable of competently playing the songs that he wrote for them (you get the sense that there's not really any such thing as "collaborating with Prince").

Pretty sure Prince drew this too.

Today's track is from another Prince side-project, "Vanity 6"... this LP includes the excellent "Nasty Girl" but I'm featuring the little-heard "When A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)", built around an entertaining call-and-response quasi-rap in which a couple of "party girls" bitch each other out over the phone - save that one of the "girls" is transparently Prince just affecting a sassy voice. Oh Prince, you delightful little faun!

Vanity 6 - If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up) by doggziller

Sarolta Zalatnay, "Zalatnay" (1971)

Eerily enough this is the exact look that most women will give any time I start to explain about records.

I'm back from my travels and, courtesy of a record store in Budapest that was savvy enough to install a diorama in one of the main subway stations, I was able to smuggle a few of Hungary's national treasures away with me.

This pile of trash is as the most beautiful ikebana to a dude like me. 

I ventured out to this place on my last day in town (getting drenched by the rain in the process), and quickly discovered something astonishing - Hungarian records are not rare in Hungary. Moreover, this place had a decent selection of records from the whole Eastern Bloc and, heaven of heavens, actually allowed the prospective buyer to listen to stuff (in my experience so far this is rare outside NZ - in London, that great Sodom of a town, stores don't even keep the records inside the sleeves, you just have to flip through all these flopsy old empty sleeves, the digging equivalent of having your palm tickled during a hand-shake). I could've easily used another day in Budapest just to go through this place properly - I still have this itchy feeling at the base of my skull like I ought to drop in there again later this week, (despite hundreds of dollars in air fares and hours of travel now being in the way).

I didn't actually expect to have access to a trove of carefully sorted and reasonably priced Hungarian heaters so I felt a bit short on homework - however I did recognize the name Sarolta Zalatnay from some recent exposure in compilations and re-issues.

Zalatnay Sarolta, "Zalatnay" (1971) by doggziller

"Késő Esti Órán" is probably the standout track on the album although it is marred by some shockingly ill-advised backing vocals (SERIOUSLY what is going on with the guy shrieking in at 2:24, was he a commissar's nephew and the engineer didn't feel safe muting him or what). "Hiszed-e Még?" is perhaps less catchy but on the other hand your ears don't have to dodge anything and you get not one but two fine Hammond solos for your trouble.

Listening in the shop, when the needle dropped on "Késő Esti Órán"and I first heard that riff kick in I had a sudden urge to try to ingratiate myself with the taciturn fellow in charge of the place. I took the headphones off and announced "ALL THIS MUSIC IS REALLY GOOD!" to which he flatly replied "yes" without glancing up from his game of Minesweeper (put a Hungarian behind a counter and they seem to don a nigh-impenetrable armour of scorn).

This wasn't all misplaced flattery on my part however as the hit rate seems to be very high among Hungarian 70s music, in the weeks ahead I will doubtless write up a couple more of my Budapest finds in between the backlog of other tracks I have earmarked for attention.

The English leg of my trip also resulted in a few finds, mainly fairly well known 80s dancefloor cuts that I was missing (since I couldn't discover anything by listening) - to which, I should acknowledge, I am indebted to the help of reader Dom of Team Yours! who was amazingly kind enough to write up a guide to London record stores for me, what a real dude.

Team Yours! receives the 2010 Cowabunga Award for Achievements in Realness