Disco Country Style: Ray Merrell - President 1978

There were three orphaned Ray Merrell albums in a row in the box when I picked this up. Either a fan has bitten the dust or else seen the light and renounced Merrell and his works because I don't think it's a co-incidence they all showed up together. Not wishing to sound judgemental, but I guessed that just one of these would be enough for anyone, and I chose this one over the other two because 'Country Sunshine' and 'Country Cream' sounded like....well not much really, whereas 'Country Disco Style' made me wonder what hardcore Nashville fans would feel about their genre given a disco makeover.

In truth, it put me in mind of The Blues Brothers playing 'Rawhide' behind chicken wire at 'Bob's Country Bunker' and as that always makes me laugh it was reason enough to buy this. It's only when I got it home that I realised that sly old dog Ray had wrong footed me and that the album is actually called 'Disco Country Style', which in a way is even more of an enigma - good disco is all about the groove, so once you take that out to re-fit it country style then what on earth is going to be left?

Before we find out, let me say recount a few facts about Ray Merrell. Fact number one: although he puts on the accent, he's not actually American. He's British. Fact number two: in 1970  Merrell co-wrote and released the upbeat soul stomper 'Tears Of Joy' on the Jay Boy label, which not only became a much sought after Northern Soul rarity ,but is actually a pretty good song in its own right.* So why am I going on about a single recorded in a different genre released on a different label eight years before this album? Well it's because 'Tears Of Joy' shows what Merrell can do when he's on form and it provides a stark contrast with what he doesn't do on this album. And the first thing he doesn't do (except perhaps for one song which I'll come back to later) is play disco in the style of country. Hell, some of the songs on here aren't even country in the style of country.

True enough, some of them are bona fide country classics ('Distant Drums', 'Green Green Grass Of Home', 'Send Me The Pillow That You Dream On') but then elsewhere 'Freight Train' is a cover of an American folk song turned into a skiffle classic by Chas McDevitt, 'How Lucky You Are' is a Des O'Connor cover, 'My Prayer' is a 1930's croonathon made famous by The Platters while 'Morning Has Broken' is what it's always been. Turning this lot into disco, country style would have been no small ask and something to behold - maybe Zappa could have pulled it off, but with him it would have been an act of knowing subversion designed to poke fun at both genres; for my money, Merrell has enough on his plate making this all sound country at all, let alone adding any disco motifs.

Maybe too much on his plate in the event because, truth be told, Merrell and his band don't even try that hard. Instead, each song is lightly coated with a backing arrangement from the 'Country Clichés R Us' firesale; despite the pile up of mismatched songs and genres, you can drop the needle into any groove at random and it will all sound exactly that same musically, and just as adding a drop of cordial into a glass of water doesn't create orange juice, adding squealing fiddles, steel guitars and vague boom chicka boom rhythms to a disparate collection of songs does not make them 'country' or anything like.

Each song is taken at a fair clip suggesting eyes were on watches and there were trains to be caught, while Merrell himself dials in a monotone, club singer vocal over the top that never veers from the mode marked 'indifferent', regardless of what he's singing. The only variations from this are a bizarrely (in this company anyway) straight take on 'Morning Has Broken' that throws all the previous country stylings out the window, and a version of the Frankie Laine yellathon 'Jezabel' as the final song which, being a country (ish) song given a rubbery disco makeover actually does live up to the album's billing. And it's horrible. Sorry, Ray may be dressed up for a rodeo down at Studio 54 on the cover, but nobody walks away from 'Disco Country Style' a better man, either them for playing it or me for listening to it.


* A third fact was going to be that Ray could probably earn a decent living as a Gene Wilder impersonator if the singing didn't pay the bills, but I'm man enough to admit this is something of a childish opinion rather than fact.

Big Party Hits: The Ray McVay Orchestra & Singers - Phillips 1972

Ah yes, we've all been there - it's all thumbs aloft, good clean groping fun until someone launches a sexual assault charge forty years later and you wind up in jail. I think if I were one of the current crop of seventies television personalities in the dock then I'd be putting this album cover up as Exhibit #1 for my defence; I put it to you that middle aged men with their arms around inappropriately younger Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes was how it was 'back then'. 

The judge and jury probably wouldn't buy it, but it's no less true because of it - there was a culture of casual sexism where women were frequently treated as items of distraction and your actions toward them seemed to require no thoughts of consequence, much the same way footage of cute cats are viewed on YouTube these days. But enough of the sociology lesson.

'Big Party Hits' presumably refers to the promise that the music therein will be a big hit at a party rather than any of the songs being big hits in their own right which, 'Rock Around The Clock' and 'Lily The Pink' aside, would be fair enough - the 'tracklist' on this is a mind boggling mix that zig zags eras and genres with all the care of a drunk driver weaving across motorway lanes. Some of them are rendered as instrumentals, others have singalong vocals while others again have vocals that phonetically pick out the main melody as a kind of separate instrument. The common thread that holds it all together is a constant 4/4 beat that keeps everything grounded like an urtext of a Black Lace megamix, and the between track 'applause' and 'chatter' that's designed to give the impression this was recorded live down your local (though it's actually just a bad dub job).

Aspirations as a proper 'party in a can' record then; Chas and Dave used to do this stuff and do it well, but that was partly because they had songs that could stand up in their own right but - and more importantly - they also brought a huge amount of personality and goodwill to everything they did. We all knew who Chas and Dave were and you could imagine them belting their stuff out in the pub or at your party even when they weren't. And that's the problem with 'Big Party Hits' - there's no 'personality' here. None whatsoever. The vocals and the playing are competent, but that bare minimum is all you get; the rest is up to you the listener, which is probably why I found listening its forced jollity such a joyless exercise.

And ok, like watching 'The Exorcist' on a mobile phone on an August beach, maybe my hearing it solo through clenched teeth and suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis meant I wasn't hearing it in the spirit or context it was intended. But then whilst there's something undeniably sad about drinking alone and putting this on and doing a one man conga to try and cheer yourself up, it's no less sad to imagine a party that needs a record like this to jump start it either. If you have to 'buy in' the party atmosphere from elsewhere then something's gone badly wrong before you start, and if you've enough about you to be able to put on a good bash then you're not going to need nonsense like this are you? Put her down mate or you're going to regret it.

Hot Hits 11: Various Artists - Music For Pleasure 1972

I'll be honest, I only picked this up because its got Caroline Munro on the cover, and you can't have too many pictures of Caroline Munro. Well I can't anyway. Not that you'd know it's her from the album itself mind; the back tells us who designed it, who took the photos, who supplied the archery equipment (Lillywhites of Piccadilly, London) and who supplied the boots that Ms Munro is so fetchingly wearing (Anello & Davide), but as for Ms Munro herself, well it might as well say 'some bird with big tits'. Ah well.

So much for the cover then, what about the music? Well it will come as no surprise when I say this is another compilation of cover versions/facsimilies of greater and lesser hits from the first quarter of 1972. From my experience of this genre to date, the trepdiation as the needle hits the groove of side one is akin to sitting in the dentist's waiting room and so it's a relief to find that root canal work is not required and that 'Hot Hits 11' does in fact have more 'hits' than 'misses' to its name.

Side one is the strongest - 'Sweet Talking Guy' doesn't have the harmonies of The Chiffons but it's a fine version in its own right. 'Debora' is too fussy but has a certain charm, there's a passable Johnny Cash on 'Thing Called Love' while the unknown singer belts out 'Come What May' as a gutsy power ballad that stands alongside the Vicky Leandros version with ease. Truth be told, nothing on here is truly awful except the version of 'Amazing Grace' that boils the already hideous sound of The Pipes & Drums & Military Band Of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards into a single piper with grisly results, and 'Stir It Up' which strips out almost all of its reggae roots to give it a mainstream makeover and adds a parping trumpet over the top. It's even more horrible than it sounds. But all in all, one of the better examples of the genre I think, and Caroline Munro too.

Stereo Special: The Hiltonaires - Stereo Gold Award 1971

Ah now, this is an odd one, but before I tell you why I'm going to let the back cover have its say: 

This stereophonic recording was originally produced in an acoustically perfect studio equipped with Telefunken microphones that were placed within the band to enhance the 'pin pointing' of the musical effects scored in the program.

The performance was mixed and amplified to a four track Sculley Tape Machine running at 30 I.P.S. The four track program was then edited and reduced on an Ampex No 300 two track stereo machine for subsequent transfer to disc on a Nueman heated stylus cutting lathe. The maximum frequency response of the original performance has been faithfully maintained through the use of the latest quality controls to give you this program of exciting stereo dimensions.

Well that sounds impressive doesn't it? It goes on to claim this as 'The revolutionery (sic) sound that puts you in the centre of the music', but alas, it's all just so much snake oil designed to sucker in the gullible - they may as well have said 'we recorded some music and transferred it to vinyl in much the same way as everybody else does'.  And much of my evidence for this conclusion is supplied by my own ears - I can categorically state that the music on this record sounds not much different in terms of sound quality to any other record I've come across so far. And what's more, unless my faculties are failing me at an alarming rate, I'll go further and say I can barely hear any stereo on it at all.

From the cover, title and the label it's on, I thought this might be a companion piece to the earlier 'Sounds Astounding' and so would be choc full of artificial speaker to speaker ping ponging trickery, but not a bit of it - 'Stereo Special' plays itself out on a flat plane of virtual mono, and I say this after listening to side one with my head equidistant between two speakers and side two with headphones pressed tightly to my ears. And in both cases I'm hearing almost identical sounds in both ears - certainly not enough to make 'stereo special' as a main selling point. So go figure.

And the oddness doesn't stop there; the tracklist on the back is another mix of songs popular ('The Happening', 'Ob La Di Ob La Da', 'Lili (sic) The Pink'), traditional ('John Brown's Body', 'Yellow Rose Of Texas', 'My Bonnie') and classical ('Barcarole', 'Humoreske'), yet after each (except for The Beatles song), they are credited to 'L Muller', giving the impression of authorship, which is patently not true. It's corrected slightly on the record label itself where it states, for example - 'The House of The Rising Sun (Trad Arr L Muller), but it also leads to the curious credits 'Dvorak Arr L Muller' and 'Hoffman Arr L Muller'. So who is this L Muller when he's at home hijacking publishing rights? Well a quick search online reveals Leo Muller to be a pseudonym of entrepreneur D. L. Miller, a Croatian entrepreneur who owned the 'Stereo Gold Award' label. Which I guess makes 'Stereo Special' a kind of vanity project where 'the boss' stamps his authority on one of his own releases (the back cover also carries the boast of 'Recorded Under Direction of D L Miller').  Not a crime in itself I suppose, but the question is what exactly does Mr Muller do to earn that credit?

And the answer is - not that much really; the overall thrust of the music on this is horn led, Tijuana Brass style instrumentals but without the Tijuana styling. The tunes are all taken more or less at face value and are delivered in a uniformly upbeat and chipper manner with none of them arranged or re-arranged in any way that does not make them instantly recognisable - it's telling that 'Ob La Di Ob La Da' is given a straight Lennon & McCartney credit - presumably L Muller knew better than to goad the Apple lawyers - whilst sounding no different in its presentation or arrangement in context here than anything else around it.  It's an approach that hammers flat any rough edges that may have popped up when The Supremes and Dvorak are pushed up against each other, and whilst it creates a unifying theme that otherwise would simply not exist amongst such disparate pieces of music, it also removes any interest that such juxtaposition may have generated, making for rather a bland whole.

Ultimately, I find 'Stereo Special' very odd; the music is more than competent and is played well by professional musicians ('The Hiltonaires' are credited as the band though I'm guessing that's another pseudonym for a bunch of session musicians) - time and effort has clearly been put into it, but to what end? It  has a run of the mill predictability in how it sounds, while at the same time the flat out randomness of the tracks make it almost uncategorisable. It doesn't do what it says on the tin, but then what it does do isn't exactly awful either. The cover boasts that this is 'For listening or dancing pleasure', and I guess you could certainly listen to this or dance to it, but my own view is that this is mutton dressed as lamb via a load of hi falutin' talk that promises far, far more than it actually delivers. As I said upfront, all rather odd really.

Sunday Evening Fire-side Hymns: Maurice McKenzie On The Hammond Organ - Emerald Gem 1970

Back in the day when I was a young lad in school, one of my classmates stood out through coming from a very religious family background. He never seemed that involved with it himself and he pretty much managed to keep a lid on it during the week; the main manifestation of the dogma he was living under came through never being allowed out on a Sunday. As we all grew older, rebellion entered into the picture in the form of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a genre of music that was officially a VERY BIG THING 'round 'our way' in the early 1980's. 

 

AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Saxon, Rainbow, denim jackets and tight jeans - all were grist to the metal mill and all were indulged in by myself and my contemporaries, including my religious mate, but it was with Iron Maiden's 1982 'The Number Of The Beast' album that his parents decided they knew a final straw when they saw one and to nip all this nonsense in the bud they sat him down to watch 'The Exorcist' on video. And not just watch it, they told him it was a documentary and that what happened to Regan McNeil would happen to him too if he didn't mend his ways and get back on the right path. Needless to say, it worked, and his next brush with the world of metal was when he brought his albums to school and gave them away because (he claimed) he could hear the devil tempting him through the drum beats. He was thirteen years old.

 

I have to say that the cover here reminded me of him for the first time in decades, and it kind of gave me an insight into what his home life must have been like back then - all starchy discipline in a strait laced humour vacuum where unhappy looking kids, togged out to the nines in a style more 1870 than 1970, sit grouped around a blazing fire while a stern patriarch torments them with readings from a well thumbed text, only putting his pipe and glasses down to reach for a just out of shot bamboo cane that's flecked with the dried blood of misremembered Bible passages past. Whatever your own views on this sort of carry on are (and I have plenty), let me say that whilst by no stretch am I a religious person (in fact, I'm about as atheistic as they come), I will own up to liking a lot of gospel. A good call and response revivalist holler can uplift and inspire even at a secular level and I don't mind straight ahead hymns either as long as they're belted out with joy and enthusiasm. That's what I like anyway, so shame then that 'Sunday Evening Fire-side Hymns' delivers an opposite that's as polar as night is to day.

 

For a start, there are no vocals here to impart anything; this is a purely instrumental affair. From the title, I'm assuming the idea is that you gather the family of  Sunday evening, put this on the stereo then sing along to it.* That's ok in itself I suppose, but there's no room here for anybody to cut loose with the abandon I favour; McKenzie tackles every single one of these hymns in the manner of a beaten dog cowering before his master, eager to please but more scared of causing offence to risk putting a foot out of place. The pace of his playing is so leaden that the gaps between the notes mean that, over time, the hymns themselves become meaningless - almost unrecognisable - as they leak into and over each other in a low key ebb and flow of continuous, ambient misery until I'm dazed to the point I can't tell where 'How Great Thou Art' starts and 'I Am Thine O Lord' stops.

 

There's no joy to be had here whatsoever, no spreading of the good news, no spirited Hosanna's or shouted 'praise be's, nothing except the weary sound of an organ played at the sodden pace of a funeral in the rain and with just as much spirit - oh never mind funereal; if the mother of those children were lying in state in the room next door then the funeral directors would probably think twice about playing this on the grounds that it would be inappropriately maudlin. It's morose to the point of it being positively unhealthy, a suffocating dirge that clings like a plastic bag pulled tightly over your head, the oxygen slowly depleting until all you want to do is open a window and let some air in. As if Sunday evenings needed to be made any more depressing - this, I'm afraid, is dreadful stuff. Time to put some Maiden on I think.

 

 

* Looking at the set up there though, I'm not sure that a record of this sort would be of any use to them anyway; they look like the sort of family who'd consider disembodied sounds emanating from a gramophone as the work of he devil and refuse to let one through the door.

Hammond Organ My Way: Michael Conradd - Happy Face 1977

My heart skipped a beat or two when I fished this one out of the crate - from the cover, I thought at first blush I'd stumbled upon some obscure Brian Wilson/Beach Boys bootleg that I wasn't previously aware of. Alas though, it wasn't to be; Hawaiian of shirt and pudding bowl of haircut he might be, Michael Conrad is not a beach boy from the West Coast. He's actually from the north of England. Tant pis I guess.

The bootleg mistake was an easy one to make though; from the cheap cardboard to the sparse design, the way 'Hammond Organ My Way' is packaged has a definite 'knock off' lack of quality to it. I don't know if this is a private pressing, but it doesn't look like much time, money or effort went into it - they've even manage to spell Conradd's name as 'Micheal' on the back. It's the music that matters though and, once again, what we have here is another mixed bag of tunes ('Amazing Grace', 'Send In The Clowns', 'Una Paloma Blanca' to name three) played as instrumentals on a Hammond organ.

And played at a very low volume at that - I commented on the previous entry that Stef Meeder's playing was dull and pedestrian, but he plays like Steve Vai fronting Metallica compared to Mr Conradd. Maybe the neighbours had been complaining about the noise, but for whatever reason the volume of the mix here is set firmly at the lower end of the dial and the music is played as slowly as treacle dripping off the end of a wooden spoon. Even the fist pumping patriotism of the 'Dambusters March' is reduced to an arthritic crawl and whisper by Conradd's organ burbling away on a very low flame.*

Unlike most releases of this genre that I've come across so far, most of the tunes here are played self contained and whole instead of as part of a medley, though at just 10 tracks, it's not the longest album in the world. Not that I'd particularly want to hear any more you understand; there's enough here for me to get the measure of Michael Conradd and his album is an inoffensive as they come, yet criticising it feels almost like criticising a painting done by a five year old child for a lack of realism, poor perspective and childish use of colour. If that 'Hammond Organ - My Way' is a like it or lump it, stall setting statement of intent, then fair enough, but I'm afraid in that case I'm just going to have to lump it. This is Dullsville USA all the way.


* A word too about his sidekick Horace Jeffery on drums. Though his name is given prominence on both sides of the cover, I'm not at all sure that this isn't some kind of 'in joke'. Because whilst I wasn't expecting Keith Moon, the drum sound and patterns on display here are indistinguishable from the pre-set drum tracks you find on most home organs.

Games That Lovers Play 30 Hits For Hammond Organ: Stef Meeder - Gemini 1969

Oh I say, steady the buffs there - I'm no mystic, but I know I don't have to look much past that cover to know this isn't of British origin. We don't have too many problems in decking our cheapo compilations out in candid cheesecake shots of women in their underwear, but we're far more squeamish when it comes to adding a bloke in the same state of undress. A chap in a tux or dinner jacket arriving to take his fiancée out to a meal maybe, but bare chested and skin on skin with a female? You won't see that staring out of the cheap racks down at Woolworth's.

And sure enough, Stef Meeder is from the Netherlands and 'Games That Lovers Play' is a Dutch release. That though is where the exoticism ends; this is yet another album of Hammond organ led, instrumental versions of contemporary songs with no obvious thematic link that vary from 'Puppet On A String' to 'Sloop John B' to 'Lara's Theme from Dr Zhivago' via more obscure tracks that were probably big news on the Continent during the sixties but which have passed me by. 

That '30 Hits For Hammond Organ' title is a bit disingenuous though - as far as I know, none of these tunes were actually scored specifically for a Hammond, and there's not really 30 in content either as most of them are excerpts performed in clusters of three songs as a medley. It's like marketing a DVD full of trailers as '30 Films'. What's also highly misleading is that cover shot and album title; from that evidence alone I'd be expecting music of wild, lid-off abandon or else the sound of sensual, red light lit sleaze, but not a bit of it - 'Games That Lovers Play' is another faithful but pedestrian stroll through the tunes that's not going to pop anyone's cork; that cover is just about the most exciting thing about it.*

The act here is billed on the back as 'Stef Meeder with rhythm section' with the four players of his quartet listed individually, yet despite that we're never in any doubt as to who's running this show - there's no jazzy improvisation or spark of individuality between the players and the only purpose of the other three seems to be a glorified click track to keep Meeder's organ on course and to fill in the gaps between the notes of the melody; I'm no musician, but I'm pretty sure I could pick up a bass or sit behind the drums and play along to this. It's all rather safe and dull all told, music more suited for a rainy Sunday indoors than a day in the sun down at the topless beach. Which, I suppose, is the last place you'd expect to find a Hammond organ anyway.


* That's not quite true - the producer is listed as one Joke Van Halen, which made me laugh as it sums up everything the band put out when Sammy Hagar was fronting them.