Get Well Card

I just saw over on Gavin Edwards' site that frequent OPC commenter Scraps, otherwise known as Soren DeSelby, had a hemorrhagic stroke last week and is in intensive care in a Brooklyn hospital. I have never had the good fortune to meet Scraps, but he has certainly been a welcome addition to this site, and is by all reports a great guy. All of us here at OPC wish Scraps the best and hope he's soon back to his beloved Carla Bley records.

Born to Cover

Hey, do you know who was the first person to record "Born to Run"? Nope, not the Boss, but Allan Clarke, the lead singer of the Hollies and a childhood friend of Graham Nash. Springsteen began performing the song onstage in early 1974, but he didn't get around to cutting his epic take on it until that summer. In the interim, Clarke tried to pull a Manfred Mann and recorded both "Born to Run" and "Blinded by the Light."

His record label, not knowing what it had (which may not have been much, if you can imagine the voice behind "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" singing "Born to Run"), failed to release Clarke's version until Springsteen's had come out the following year. The Clarke records quickly faded into oblivion.

Clarke did go on to sing lead vocals on the Alan Parsons Project hit "Breakdown." So that's something.

Duh

There are little enunciation tricks vocalists use to make sung syllables more understandable, like pronouncing a long I as "aaa-eee." But I heard one today, on the Platters' "Only You (and You Alone)," that I never noticed before: The lead singer, Tony Williams, actually sings, "Only you/Can-d make this world seem right." Or maybe it's "Only you/Can d'make this world seem right." There's a distinct D tucked between "can" and "make" each of the four times Williams sings it.

I had never noticed that before. But once you know it's there, it's hard to hear anything else.

Never Heard of 'Em

In Liz Phair's "Stratford-on-Guy," which I heard this afternoon, she describes herself "pretending to be in a Galaxie 500 video." Is that the most obscure band mentioned in a song by a major artist? I can think of the Mugwumps geting name-checked by the Mamas and the Papas in "Creeque Alley," and then there's the line in They Might Be Giants' "Twisting" that goes: "She doesn't have to have her Young Fresh Fellows tape back."

More often, though, you get things like Mott the Hoople with their Beatles and their Stones, as well as T. Rex, who show up in the Who's "You Better You Bet" as well. It would have been cooler if they'd given a shout-out to Desmond Dekker or the Casinos or somebody like that.

Thinking About 'Think Fast, Mr, Moto'

As part of my newfound obsession with all things Peter Lorre, I recently caught up with the 1937 film Think Fast, Mr. Moto. Lorre is one of the most watchable actors ever, and he is endlessly fascinating even in this otherwise humdrum outing, the first of the Mr. Moto series. Mr. Moto is the smartest person in every scene (he's a lot smarter than me, too, since he was able to figure out the convoluted plot), and Lorre constantly finds new ways to convey that slyness, with an endless array of little smiles. His hangover cure, with Worcestershire sauce, absinthe, and a raw egg, is not to be missed. Lorre also never falls into Asian stereotypes, while also, somehow, always coming across as Japanese.

The story takes Mr. Moto, some exporter-importers, and some smugglers on a ship from San Francisco to Shanghai. There's not much to look at here besides Lorre, except for some colorful scenes in San Francisco's Chinatown. Perhaps my favorite non-Lorre moment comes after one character says he's got to go to the International Club in Shanghai, and another says he wouldn't even go there in the daytime, much less at night; when we finally do get to the International Club, it's filled with Caucasian guys in white dinner jackets. Ooh, scary!

Top of the Charts

As you may have noticed, I know an awful lot about crappy pop songs, a lot more than is probably healthy. Still, every time I listen to one of those old American Top Fortys from the 1970s, I learn many things. Today I heard part of one from September of 1973, and I gleaned the following:

* Looking Glass, which seemed like the consummate one-hit wonder after "Brandy" hit Number One in the summer of '72, followed it up with another Top Forty hit the next year with "Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne." It wasn't very good.

* "In the Midnight Hour," the old Wilson Pickett hit, re-entered the charts in a cheesy soft-rock version recorded by a group called Cross Country in 1973. You've probably never heard of Cross Country, but they were the same group as the Tokens, the vocalists who took "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to Number One back in 1962.

Mostly, I was reminded of how wonderfully eclectic Top Forty radio was back in 1973. Down in the upper Thrties, we had the following run of hits:

"Heartbeat - It's a Lovebeat," by the DeFranco Family
"To Know You Is to Love You," by B.B. King
"I've Got So Much to Give," by Barry White
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door," by Dr. Bob Dylan (Casey's intro described a college dropout who went on to become the youngest person ever given an honorary doctorate by Princeton University)

Who wouldn't listen to a radio station like that?

Political Comment of the Day

Isn't it weird for the candidate in the presidential race known prominently as a religious conservative to go on and on about her identification with "Joe Sixpack"? I know that people like her participate in as many ordinary vices as anyone else, but those folks are supposed to at least pretend that they don't drink.

May Be Too Graphic for Some Viewers

Friend of OPC Gavin sends over a link to the hardy souls at Very Small Array, who have spent an inordinate amount of time recently sorting hit-record records into multicolored graphs. For me, the fascinating thing is trying to figure out what fits into the odd corners of the charts: What doo-wop hit went to Number One in 1978? "Kiss and Say Goodbye"? No, that was 1976. What Belgian song went to Number One in 1963? Wait, I know that one: "Dominique," by the Singing Nun.

They're using Cashbox, rather than the canonical Billboard rankings, so I can't look these things up. In a way, that makes it more fun.

If You Could Read My Mind

It may or may not have been a good idea for the Who, with only two surviving members, to release the band's first studio album in more than 25 years back in 2006.

But what was really a bad idea was naming it after an old Gordon Lightfoot record:

The Hobgoblin of Small Minds

When I bought my vinyl copy of John Lennon's Shaved Fish back sometime around 1980, one of the songs listed on it was "Instant Karma." This was a slight change from the original single, which had never before appeared on an album but was issued on its own as "Instant Karma!" back in February 1970. On what I believe is the most recent Lennon compilation, Lennon Legend, it's been restored to "Instant Karma!" Thanks, guys.

Meanwhile, on the Criterion Collection DVD for David Mamet's 1987 movie House of Games, the title on the cover is listed as House of Games, the onscreen title is given as House of Games, the booklet includes what is purportedly the cover of Mamet's screenplay, and it reads House of Games. The disc itself, though, has a hand-painted logo circling the hole in the center that reads, very clearly, The House of Games.