Where Do You Go...?

Gale Garnett is a singer and actress best known for "We'll Sing In The Sunshine", a wistufl little proto-hippie ballad from the Sixties. This clip, for another song, "Where Do You Go To Go Away" is something else againin a big way, a weepy ballad done in a production style somewhere between Busby Berkeley and the Fifties "Bachelor Pad" sensibility promoted by the likes of Playboy Magazine at the time. Like the equally bizarre Joi Lansing clip I posted a few days ago, it's a Scopitone, an early form of music video from the Sixties and there's an entire site, www.scopitones.com, that tells the entire story of these things and shows a lot of other examples of these things. Don't let anybody tell you the early Sixties couldn't get very weird.

The Real Folk Blues

Might as well finish up old business. Here is the closing theme of Cowboy Bebop, "The Real Folk Blues". I love how the title is the only English phrase in the lyrics and really has little bearing on the rest of the words.

Mr. Davis and Friends

I'm going to try to post a video once a day for a while to see if that can get me into the habit of doing regular posts. At least it will put some of my varied musical tastes out there. Here is the great Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams doing their thing on "'Round Midnight" in 1967. I've seen a more dramatic version where Miles practically sucks all the air out of thr building on his solo before Shorter explodes with his, but this one is good too. Wayne is on fire and Tony Williams is just remarkable.

The Road To Cairo

I probably won't post videos every day but now that I know how to embed, I can put up a few of the good ones I've found. Here is Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger and the Trinity from 1968 doing David Ackles' "The Road To Cairo".

Happy Happy! Joi Joi!

That Seatbelts video went up so easily that I thought I'd go for broke and put up something really strange. The star of this video is Joi Lansing, a popular TV and film actress of the 50's and 60's who always seemed to show up in shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and Love That Bob! whenever a blonde bombshell type was needed, for obvious reasons. Sadly she passed away in 1972 at the age of 43 and is largely forgotten today, but here she is singing a song called "Web Of Love" in ersatz jungle surroundings. I was going to post another video of her doing the Dean Martin movie theme, "The Silencers" but one look at the "Web" and I couldn't pass this one by.

Let's Jam!

A few years ago while watching Adult Swim I stumbled onto the anime Cowboy Bebop and was immediately blown away by its music which covered big band jazz, blues, rock and whatever else seemed handy. I eventually found out that the score was the work of a composer named Yoko Kanno who is well known for doing the soundtracks for anime and video games. It turns out there are even four CDs available covering all the Cowboy Bebop music and I've somehow managed to buy the two that contained the show's opening and closing themes, "Tank" and "The Real Folk Blues" without having to take out a mortgage.

So I'm looking around on YouTube the other day and guess what I find? Clips of Kanno and her band, Seatbelts, playing the Cowboy Bebop tunes in live concert. I also found clips of this music played by an American high school band and a South American rock group which suggests this is far more well known than I realized. Anyway now that I know how to post videos, here is Yoko Kanno and Seatbelts with "Tank".

Three Caballeros

Watching the cartoon The Three Caballeros reminds me of how underrated some Disney cartoons are though it's weird to think of a billion dollar company that set the standard for animated cartoons in North America as being underrated in any way.

This cartoon was the second of two features Disney's animators made in the 1940's inspired by Latin American culture and the first part of it is conventional stuff featuring Donald Duck. Then after Joe Carioca, the Brazilian parrot featured in the previous Saludos Amigos and a Mexican rooster named Pancho show up, things get really insane with surreal trips to a Mexican fiesta and a Brazilian beach done in wild and imaginative style that goes way beyond the then established Disney house style with bits that recall Busby Berkeley and Salvador Dali.

This stuff goes way beyond what is normally thought of as a Disney cartoon and it proves how creative Disney's animators could be when given the chance. We never think of them this way because the company has practically hidden this part of their past from the general public. Generations of us grew up watching the craziness of the MGM and Warner Bros studio product endlessly on TV while Disney kept their cartoon shorts locked in their vaults on when cable came along, in carefully edited form presumably to protect the "kiddies" from lord knows what.

The result is most of us completely overlook stuff like Caballeros or the innovative work like "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom" and "Jack And Old Mac" which I discovered on the Disney Rarities DVD set, post-war cartoons in the stylized, semi-abstract manner of the concurrent UPA work. It's a shame this has become so forgotten.

Movie roundup

I've seen a bunch of movies lately. Innocence was a French film about a mysterious girls' school that had a David Lynch-like air of sinister weirdness about it but really emerged as a beautiful, optimistic story about childhood. The Wrong Road was an odd little B movie about two young people who chase down money they stole while pursued by a kindly insurance agent who pleads with them to go straight. The weird part is that the "kindly insurance agent" is played by perennial bad guy Lionel Atwill! I kept expecting him to steal the money himself by the end.

The most interesting in many ways has been Sinners In Paradise. This was a late James Whale film, one of the ones they always talk about when they mention his dismal later directing career. There wasn't much of his style in this picture about a group of disparate people stranded on a tropical island after a plane crash. The only Whale touch about it was Dwight Frye showing up for a second at the beginning.

The most intriguing part was that one of the writers on the movie was Lester Cole, one of the later Hollywood Ten. You could definitely see some Leftist sentiments in this film, at least leftist for 1938. One character was the thoughtless owner of a factory trying to get away form workers who were striking for a (oh, the horror!) 40 hour work week. She ends up changing her attitude and falling for the plane's steward. That was really only a subplot though. There was also a scene where two characters start burning thousands of dollars because money is no use to them on the island and the two real villains are a pair of violent munitions salesmen. It's amazing that stuff like this was once considered so inflammatory that it eventually cost Cole his career.