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‘Glen Campbell Sings for The King’: Listen to the vocal guide demo tracks made for Elvis to imitate
12.10.2018
10:00 am
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It’s well-known that several prominent musicians and songwriters—Glen Campbell, PJ Proby, Mort Shuman and Delaney Bramlett among them—recorded “vocal guides” so that a post-army Elvis could make better use of expensive recording studio time for his Hollywood movie soundtracks. The singers would do the songs in Elvis’s style, he’d listen to them, and then he in turn would let it rip, in a sense, imitating them imitating him. It was nothing, if not efficient. The studio musicians who performed on the demos were often members of Phil Spector’s LA-based “Wrecking Crew” and apparently it was a bit of an assembly line process going on with up to six of them getting recorded per day. One prolific songwriter, Ben Weisman, who wrote or co wrote 57 numbers for the King (including one of his greatest “shits,” the income tax-related song, “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad”) explained how it worked:

“I approached writing for Elvis differently than I did for any other artist. The songs had to have a combination of blues, country, rock and pop [what came to be called ‘rockabilly’]. It was like walking in his musical shoes. With each new Elvis movie, more of my songs were being recorded. It became more and more exciting, for I was becoming the only songwriter to have so many songs recorded by him.

After completing each song, I would make a demonstration (demo) record, using a singer that could copy Elvis’ sound. I used the same type of rhythm section that he used, with the same type of vocal backgrounds. The end result was a tailor-made production, just for him.

One of the first demo singers I hired was Otis Blackwell, who wrote such great Elvis songs as “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and many more. Some of the other talented singers I found were Glen Campbell, Delaney Bramlett, P.J.Proby, Ray Peterson and Dorsey Burnette.

Among the musicians who played on my demos were Phil Spector, Hal Blaine, Leon Russell, Larry Knechtel, plus Ronnie Tutt, Glen D. Hardin and James Burton, who ended up in Elvis’ band.”

Texas-born singer PJ Proby—Elvis once dated his older sister—did twenty such vocal guides for Presley (for just $10 a pop!) mimicking his singing style in a full-throated manner that was said to have mightily amused him. (This talent for imitating Elvis came in handy for when Proby portrayed the “later years” Elvis in a West End musical.) Songwriter Gerald Nelson wrote and performed nineteen songs for Elvis, Don Robertson did at least two dozen, but it was Glen Campbell, who Presley is said to have greatly respected, whose vocal guides—for Weisman and his songwriting partner Syd Wayne—got the most serious attention from Elvis. (When Presley resumed live performances in the late 60s, he’d even asked Campbell, who he’d known since 1956, to be the lead guitarist in his TCB touring band, but by this time Glen Campbell was already far too big a star in his own right with his popular Goodtime Hour TV series and massive hits like “Wichita Lineman,” and so James Burton, recently relieved from his duties in Ricky Nelson’s band, got the gig. During the 70s, Campbell would perform “Loving You” onstage, doing a nearly perfect Elvis imitation.)
 

 
Since Glen Campbell’s death last year, it’s no surprise that his longtime label Capitol Records would trawl the vaults for what they might turn into product, but apparently the cupboard was pretty bare. Then the original reels of Campbell’s Elvis guides were found by producer Stephen Auerbach, the nephew-in-law of Ben Weisman, in a storage locker. The results heard on Glen Campbell Sings for the King—like those found on a decade’s worth of the soundtracks to Presley’s own 1960s films—is pretty, er, spotty, but there is some (admittedly goofy) fun to be found here. I reckon it picks up a bit at the halfway point.

The collection will also be available on limited edition 180-gram clear vinyl only at GlenCampbell.com. There’s even more Glen Campbell on UMe’s terrific new Bobbie Gentry box set, The Girl From Chickasaw County - The Complete Capitol Masters.
 

 
More after the jump, with an exclusive clip of Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine on Glen Campbell…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.10.2018
10:00 am
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‘Someone left a cake out in the rain’: The ‘MacArthur Park’ megapost


 
Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” is one of the most powerfully evocative and epically heart-breaking “love lost” songs ever written. It is preposterous, although it is not kitsch. It is sublime. It’s a masterpiece for the ages.

But it drives some people nuts.

“MacArthur Park” was once ridiculed by “humorist” Dave Barry as the “worst song in modern history” and as having the “worst lyrics.” (Then again if Dave Barry is yer barometer o’ musical taste…) Others, more generously, have called the lyrics to “MacArthur Park” among the most misunderstood in pop music history, but until fairly recently, the great songwriter himself was always somewhat coy about the meaning. And why shouldn’t he have been? What might seem to be obtuse imagery was anything but—and he obviously knew this—but why ruin what people projected onto his words when they heard the song by explaining exactly what it meant to him? Many people probably have their own deeply held versions of what that song is “really” about. To them. It’s one of the key elements that makes “MacArthur Park” so personal for so many people.

After years of listening to and enduring what I’m sure must have been annoying efforts to either perform an exegesis on “MacArthur Park,” or simply lampoon it, Jimmy Webb spilled the beans about one of his greatest songs to the Guardian in 2013:

The lyrics to “MacArthur Park” infuriate some people. “Someone left the cake out in the rain/ I don’t think that I can take it/ ‘Cause it took so long to bake it/ And I’ll never have that recipe again.” They think it’s a psychedelic trip. But everything in the song is real. There is a MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, near where my girlfriend worked selling life insurance. We’d meet there for lunch, and there would be old men playing checkers by the trees, like in the lyrics.

I’ve been asked a million times: “What is the cake left out in the rain?” It’s something I saw… But as a metaphor for a losing a chapter of your life, it seemed too good to be true. When she broke up with me, I poured the hurt into the song.

In an interview with Newsday the following year, Webb further explained:

Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. ... Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.

It was not the only deeply longing love song that he’d write for this same woman. Immoralized as the girl with “the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees,” Suzy Horton was also the muse for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground, Susie” and “Didn’t We.” They’d met when they both attended the same high school in Colton, CA and Webb had carried a torch for her for years. She was apparently somewhat less than sold on him, however. When Webb found out that Horton was getting married, he composed “The Worst That Could Happen” (a hit for the Brooklyn Bridge) with the heart-ripping refrain:

“Girl, I heard you’re getting married, heard you’re getting married…. maybe it’s the best thing for you, but it’s the worst that could happen — to me.”

“MacArthur Park” and its epic musical detailing of the end of their relationship was offered to chart-topping vocal group the Association as a cantata—their producer Bones Howe had asked him to write something elaborate and orchestral for the band, and this was what Webb had come up with—but the composition was rejected for being too long.

Around this same time, Webb got chummy with Irish actor Richard Harris, who he got drunk with backstage at a charity event in Los Angeles. Harris sent the composer a telegram asking him to come to London to record an album, and Webb joined him. “MacArthur Park” was the final song in the pile and when he played it for Harris, the actor told him he’d give him his car—a Rolls-Royce Phantom Five—if the song became a hit (it was and he never did).
 
A shitton of “MacArthur Park” after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.09.2016
03:28 pm
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‘My World Fell Down’: The oddest song The Beach Boys never recorded


 
Yesterday I was listening to a Glen Campbell greatest hits collection (The Capitol Years 1965-77, the one compiled by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, it’s excellent) and in the liner notes, it mentions that Campbell sang and played guitar on a Gary Usher-produced single called “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius, that was included on Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collection, which I have, so I checked it out. It’s odd that I had this song in my possession—I’ve played the Nuggets box set many, many times all the way through—but never took much note. How could I have missed it?
 

A be-quiffed Glen Campbell backstage at the Grammy awards with the Beach Boys
 
“My World Fell Down” is the closest thing we’ll ever get to “Good Vibrations”-era Beach Boys meets LSD-soaked psych rock. Sagittarius was basically a supergroup of session musicians under the direction of Gary Usher, a staff producer at Columbia who had also “discovered” The Firesign Theatre and produced The Byrds. Aside from Campbell, who was, of course, briefly in the Beach Boys himself, the secondary vocalist on the track is none other than Beach Boy Bruce Johnston. Also worth pointing out is that Usher had written several songs with Brian Wilson (”409” and “In My Room” among them) and included in the backing group were powerhouse session players Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye, who had both recorded with the Beach Boys. If someone played this for you and told you it was an unreleased—and especially odd—Beach Boys demo, you’d believe them, no problem.
 

Gary Usher
 
Dig the musique concrète bridge section of carnival (bullfight?) noises and a slamming door. This part sounds like something straight off of Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Rolling Stones album that came out the same year, 1967, but is not included in the album version.
 

 
When “My World Fell Down” got to #70 on the Billboard chart, the label wanted Sagittarius to tour, at which point he revealed that Sagittarius didn’t actually exist as a real group and that it was his song, too. Usher moved forward with Sagittarius and recorded a full album leaning heavily on the talents of a young Curt Boettcher. Prior to the release of that record, Present Tense, in 1968, Usher and co. released a second Sagittarius single titled “Hotel Indiscreet” that had another musique concrète bridge section that utilized Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre ranting about… something:

“What for and how long my children? How long will we be made to suffer the utter degradation of everything we hold sacred? My fellow flowers, the time is upon us to open the door and purify the foul and pestilent air within, standing naked before the eternal judge and proclaiming we are all hip! Two three four… Hip! Two three four… zwei drei vier… Sieg Heil! SIEG HEIL!”

That bit was only on the mono version of the song, on the single. Clive Davis didn’t like the weirdo breaks in “My World Fell Down” and “Hotel Indiscreet” so he had Usher cut them out for Present Tense.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.25.2014
09:31 pm
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Merle Haggard does hilarious impressions of Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and other Country greats
12.05.2013
11:31 am
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On his 1970 live album, The Fightin’ Side of Me, recorded in Philadelphia on Valentine’s Day of 1970, Merle Haggard performs a medley of extremely convincing impersonations of well-known country music personalities including Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Hank Snow and Buck Owens. His 5-minute-long “Medley of Impersonations” includes “Devil Woman,” “I’m Movin’ On,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Jackson,” “Orange Blossom Special,” and “Love’s Gonna Live Here.”

It’s hilarious. Flawless. The man truly could have been the Rich Little of Country & Western should he have wanted to go in that direction (although I’m sure glad he didn’t). It’s even better seeing him do the imitations, as he did on this 1969 episode of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.

Wait for the surprise guests…
 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.05.2013
11:31 am
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Glen Campbell sings Wichita Lineman
07.20.2010
10:29 pm
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A quick ode to a beautiful and enigmatic tune: Glen Campbell‘s hit version of Jimmy Webb‘s Wichita Lineman. Surely one of the most haunting and even creepy of all love songs and packed with unanswered questions. Has he gone mad, hearing voices in the static of the power lines or has he tapped her phone ?  When I hear this song I actually can picture myself up a lonely telephone pole on some bleak and empty highway somewhere, my heart full of longing. Plus: A tasty Fender VI solo !

 
Thanks Nicole Panter !

Posted by Brad Laner
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07.20.2010
10:29 pm
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