Happy Walpurgis Night Everyone!

Happy Walpurgis Night!

Tonight we're kicking back, drinking some wine and listening to Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" on vinyl!  Who knows, the night is young and maybe before its done we'll conjure a demon or two!

Here's the plot to Berlioz's psychedelic symphony:

(from http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/fantas.htm)

Programme of the Symphony

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

This Tiki Bar has Seconds to Live

Sorry Kids,

Save your sweaty bare midriffs for the next customer.

Free drink tickets and prizes from a tee shirt gun aren't going to lure me out to the bars either.

I'm just not interested.

I'm staying in tonight. I'll be in the condo drinking, chain smoking, and wind-milling an imaginary guitar
So Who's a loser, now?

There is nothing we can say about this incendiary 1971 album that hasn't been said. It is a classic, a kickstarter, a tearjerker and a pantydropper. This is a powder keg erupting from every wood panelled basement in suburbia. In its entirety, the record is as sentimental as it is visceral.


No tiki drinks tonight.

We prefer ice cold beer with this one.

Ladies and Gentlemen....THE WHO!

XO,
Tiki T.

Hello Blues

Floyd Cramer - Hello Blues (1960)

Hello Friends and Hello Blues!

Pour that bourbon neat and smoke 'em if you got 'em because tonight you're in for a real treat featuring the "slip note" piano stylings of the late, great Floyd Cramer.

Cramer-- one of the progenitors of what became known as the "Nashville Sound"-- tickles the ivories on this very laid-back and easy-going country-blues LP.   The highlights include the lead track-- "I'll Never Be Free"-- the standard-- "Stormy Weather"-- and Cramer's version of "Re-Enlistment Blues"-- from the 1953 film, From Here to Eternity.

Great album cover too!

Cramer, incidentally, died of lung cancer in 1997.  Don't smoke, kids! 

RATING: 4 sweet-looking sweater vests out of a possible 5

Wunderland bei Nacht!

Bert Kaempfert and his orchestra - Wonderland by Night (1960)

Hallo friends!

As the sun sets on a chilly, late April evening, we open a bottle of Blue Nun, drop the needle on this enchanting Long Player and reminisce about the good old days (before the War) in Das Motherland.    

Being served at "key parties" since '68

And like that bottle of Blue Nun, this album is lush and nostalgic and gives you heck of a hangover!  


Hailing from Hamburg, orchestra leader and arranger Bert Kaempfert served in the German Navy in WWII before turning full time to composing and playing easy listening music.  In addition to writing the standards, "Strangers in the Night" & "Danke Schoen", Kaempfert is also famous for hiring the Beatles to record "My Bonnie" with Tony Sheridan in 1961.

The highlight of the record are the piercing trumpet solos by Charly Tabor.  They're enough to make you shout "Willkommen!"

RATING: 3.5 Goosesteps out of a possible 5

Tiki Tips: A Taste of Honey

While the below review is in bad taste, make sure your cocktail is not!

Nothing beckons the fun of Herb Alpert like a limey gin fizz or a deceptively strong rum punch.

Midnight will find you chasing your significant other "Benny Hill Style" around the tiki bar! Hope the neighbors brought binoculars!

XO,
Tiki T.

Whip it good!

Suddenly, her lactose intolerance went from being "mildly inconvenient" to downright uncomfortable.

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass - Whipped Cream and Other Delights



Hello friends!

This 1965 LP boasts one of the most iconic album covers of any era! 

The music is loungey Mexican-stripper music featuring Herp Alpert's "famous trumpet." [wink, wink]

The title track, in fact, was used as the theme song for "The Dating Game".

The cream-covered model on the cover, in case your were wondering, was a young woman named Dolores Erickson.  She seems nice.

Anyways, she worked out much better than the first model.  [after the jump]

Setting the Bar...

Hello Friends!

Tiki Tuscadero chiming in here with a few tips on home bar decor.

While the central focus of "Vinyl in the Valley" is the record at hand, your living room lounge should be nothing to sneeze at. The most industrious scrapper can make a living room bar out of some stuff from Goodwill and Job Lots...so strap on your "Can Do" Pants, bucko!

Should Ned and I ever have the opportunity to get this record show on cable access, I feel you would better understand what we're trying to achieve with the red light bulbs and stolen Chinese restaurant napkins. But for now, I suppose I can only try to best use the written word...

1. I like colored light bulbs in the lamps at the bar. We favor red ones, actually. What better color to set a sultry tone for tiki records? Or a spacey tone for prog rock records? Or a glowing backdrop for your triumphant fist pumps and leg kicks at 2 am?
2. Frame your cooler album covers for the walls around the bar. Why didn't you think of that, dummy?
3. As mentioned before, lots of Chinese restaurants have kitschy paper napkins that are yours for the taking. Set up little piles of cheerfully designed ones for your delighted guests (or no guests, as is often the case for us!)

See you next week. Until then, happy vinyl!

XO,

Tiki T.

Get Lei'd!

Martin Denny - Hawaii Goes A Go-Go

Lounge music was largely on its way out by the late 1960's.  This 1966 LP was an attempt to cross-over to a more youthful audience and keep the party going!

In an effort to stay contemporary, Martin Denny does away with his fuller, more orchestral sound in favor of a lighter, discotech atmosphere.  In lieu of wild bird calls and exotic-sounding instruments, there's saccharine piano, hand claps, upbeat tempos and some real tinny-sounding electric guitar. 

Even the LP's cover art--  featuring a smart-looking blond with a confident gaze (and her finest go-go slacks!)-- pales in comparison to the surreal and forbidden women and landscapes from the exotica albums of a decade earlier. Like this one.

Overall, its not terrible... just seems like its trying a little too hard to stay relevant. 

RATING: 3 pairs of checkered hipster slacks out of a possible 5.

 

Music from The Valley

Obscured by Clouds was Pink Floyd's last album before the immensely successful, Dark Side of the Moon.  Its a soundtrack record to the Barbet Schroeder film, La Vallee-- a trippy little film about an upper-class French woman who gets knocked down a few notches when she gets lost in the primeval jungles of Papua New Guinea. 

The movie is missable, but this soundtrack LP is tops!

Half the songs are instrumentals.  Short, straight-forward rock'n'roll instrumentals, nothing too long or too weird or too proggy.

The songs with vocals are equally as accessible.   David Gilmour's "Wot's...uh the Deal?" and "The Gold its in the..." are standouts.  As is Roger Waters's "Free Four"-- in which he starts exploring some Daddy-issues and other dark motifs that would become a running theme throughout Pink Floyd's later, much more famous works.

I guess one of the best things you can say about this album is that it really doesn't sound like Pink Floyd at all. 



RATING: 4.5 New Guinean cannibals out of a possible 5.

Santo and Johnny

Wow!


The debut album by Brooklyn-born Italian brothers, Santo & Johnny Farina, is pretty effing amazing!  Or to put it in Brooklyn terms, "Hey Vinny! Haveya heard dese greaseballs?  Itsa good!"


Sparsely produced with some virtuosic pedal steel guitar work, this 1959 release is both haunting and frenetic. Its like the soundtrack to a orgy on the backlot of "Happy Days"!  


This is the LP that includes their huge, ubiquitous hit, "Sleepwalk", but it's also chock full of other great early rock'n'roll/loungey guitar-based instrumentals like "Caravan", "Blue Moon", Chuck Berry's "School Day" and Bill Justis's "Raunchy."


RATING: 4.5 bowls of pasta out of a possible 5

Record Store Day 2012

http://www.recordstoreday.com/

Support your local record stores!  (If you have any local record stores!)


If you don't have a "local" record store, there's definitely one driving distance from where you are right now so you should go.


People have driven further to go to Taco Bell for chrissakes.

Dueling Pianists



"I see you!"

Pianos in Paradise?  Yes please! 

How about dueling pianos in Paradise?  I say, pass the mojito!

Ferrante & Teicher are in fine fingered form on this 1962 release.  They take a break from their usual fare of piano-laced movie themes and the usual pop standards and invite us into a virtuosic world of "Jungle Rhumba", "Taboo" and "Moon of Manakoora."  

Oh, have you seen these two btw? 

"We're here for the gang bang..."

RATING: 3 1/2 creepy moustaches out of a possible 5
  

The night they drove old Levon down

RIP Levon Helm.

The boy from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas done good.  With a voice that sounded like he was singing from the bottom of a moonshine still, Levon Helm helped create some of America's greatest roots-based rock'n'roll while serving as full-time drummer and part-time vocalist in The Band.           


Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz is still one of the best concert movies ever.  If you have never seen it, stop what your doing, buy a bottle of whiskey, dim the lights and watch it now!

In addition to being a fantastic final concert by The Band, The Last Waltz also features Neil Young with coke boogers and Van Morrison in a leotard!

Thank you Levon for so many great songs and sorry about having to put up with that dick, Robbie Robertson!

"Sssssh... stop talking and look into my eyes."

Way to go, Ohio!

Learning to Crawl (1984) is the third Pretenders LP and pretty much every song is good.   The album's title probably refers to the baby Chrissie Hynde recently had with Kinks frontman, Ray Davies.  A lot of the songs (especially "Back in the Chain Gang") contain hints of longing & regret most likely due to the fact that two former members of the band had recently passed away from drug overdoses.  Just say no kids!

Besides "Chain Gang", there's "Middle of the Road", "Show Me", "My City was Gone" and the xmasy, "2000 Miles."  This is Chrissie Hynde at her peak.  Her voice is gritty and sultry, oozing her devil-may-care sexiness.  Her lyrics poignant and nostalgic.  Great riffs throughout.  

RATING: 4.5 black eyeliners out of a possible 5

RAM & Wild Life

Hello friends...

Tonight on Vinyl in the Valley we've got two early Paul McCartney albums on tap.  RAM and Wild Life both came out in 1971.  The former was the only album released as "Paul & Linda McCartney" and features the ex-Beatle McCartney grabbing a goat (er, ram) by horns on the cover.   

"Get baaaaaa-ck!"

Our second LP tonight, Wild Life, is the first-- and oft-overlooked-- Wings album. 

Both LPs are criminally underappreciated masterpieces filled with pretty melodies, quirky lyrics and subtle & not-so subtle jabs at John Lennon.  Both LPs are also much more lo-fi than is usually thought of with Paul McCartney/Wings songs. 

From the cover art to the sound effects to the sounds of the recordings, there's a pretty cool DIY attitude with these that kind of foreshadows a lot of the American Indie rock that will succeed them by 20 years or so.

The biggest "hit" on either of these is "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" from the RAM LP.   However, the title track from Wild Life is the crowning jewel of these two amazing records.   In 1971, I guess the only thing Paul was more passionate about than hating John Lennon was singing about hanging out with animals.

These albums would both pair well with a nice veal shank.

RATING(S):

Both Albums: 4.5 out of 5

This shit's better than Nyquil

This is like audio Ambien.    Seriously, if you're having trouble sleeping put this on.  Its so lush and smoldering that it will probably put you to sleep before you even have to flip it to side B.  

The Jackie Gleason LPs on Capitol are all pretty stellar examples of lounge music from the late 1950's and early 60's.  The funny thing is that Jackie Gleason was best known for his portrayal of the brash, Ralph Kramden, on television's "The Honeymooners"-- his albums, however, are quite the opposite of that fat, sweaty, manic, spousal-abusey loudmouth. 

Also, he's on my top 10 list of favorite drunks.

Ssssh... its Quiet Village

What a horribly-named album.  This village is not quiet at all!  Its full of ocean sounds, angry Hawaiians, exotic-sounding birds, sci-fi sounding organs and weird, spacey percussion.  Its like a tiki drink for your ears!


Great album cover too... wish my porch looked like that!


That's one Miss Sandy Warner gracing the cover.  Known as "The Exotica Girl", this saucy brunette with the "bedroom eyes" appeared on a bunch of album covers for Martin Denny in the 50's & 60's.  Not too shabby!  


I wonder if she held up with age... I couldn't find a recent photo.   Back in the day though, I certainly wouldn't kick her off my bamboo porch.  [winks and nudges guy next to me]