The Jukebox from Hell

[jmyrlefuller]

Yes, this next entry in the Jukebox from Hell features the late and legendary Andy Williams singing in Japanese.

Do you know what's even more bizarre? This entire suite of songs is an advertisement for Aji-No-Moto, a brand of MSG seasoning.

Click on the image to listen to this picture album.

[jmyrlefuller]

From the archives of the infamous Camp Records... here's "Homer the Happy Little Homo."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGpmwyD8mU

[jmyrlefuller]

This song was a major hit for both The Left Banke (its original artists, whose version is by far the more popular today) and the Four Tops.

The latter band decided to record it in Italian... with an extra-heavy dose of schmaltz.

Here are Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops with "L'Arcobaleno," also known as the Italian version of "Walk Away Renee."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HxkZa8tsEQ

[jmyrlefuller]

There must have been a fad in the 1960s for strange Jewish novelty records. This entry in the Jukebox from Hell is from one of them. The artist is Sam Chaplin, and the album is My Father, the Pop Singer.

The song in question has been covered numerous times over the course of history, ranging from the excellent (Otis Redding's rendition received praise from the original artists for capturing the spirit of the original better than they could) to the horrible (Britney Spears's version; although to her 'defense,' most of her music is bad, and most of her fans probably weren't interested in her musical talent—hey, maybe she'll be my next entry).

Here is Chaplin's rendition of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."

http://www.aprilwinchell.com/h/mp3/Satisfaction.mp3

[jmyrlefuller]

This is Dwayne Hickman. Television viewers of a certain vintage probably recognize him best as Dobie Gillis, the star of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis... or perhaps Chuck McDonald, the "crazy teenager" on The Bob Cummings Show. Hickman was a bit of a teen idol. Here's a picture of him as Dobie (he's the one on the top left).



Unfortunately for Hickman, his musical talent was far more lacking than his looks. He could not sing. However, that didn't stop the multimedia wizards at the networks from trying—twice—to make him a hit pop singer. As it's written in Wikipedia:

After the first season of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis had aired, Capitol Records attempted to make a recording star out of Dwayne Hickman, ignoring the fact that he couldn't sing. Recording engineers had to piece together numerous takes to get a usable vocal track from Hickman for each song. Hickman introduced several of the songs from the Dobie! album on the show during its second season, including "I'm a Lover, Not a Fighter" and "
Don't Send a Rabbit." Earlier, while Hickman was appearing on Love That Bob, he had recorded a single, "School Dance," for ABC-Paramount Records, but both the single and the later Capitol album sold very few copies.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Briefing Room, I present as the next entry in the Jukebox from Hell, the debut single from Dwayne Hickman (who is still alive, by the way)… "School Dance."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoTmnsvXoc

[jmyrlefuller]

I don't know who this guy is. His name's Jimmy Mitchell, and his accent suggests an English, Australian or New Zealander origin (the latter two seem more likely). Yet the WFMU write-up on this recording claims Mitchell is from… Dallas, Texas?! It dates to the early 1990s.

Here is Mitchell's version of Mocedades's international hit, "Eres tú."

http://www.aprilwinchell.com/h/mp3/erestu.mp3

[jmyrlefuller]

The subject of this song, a major hit for the group The Divinyls, is pretty self-evident by its title. Thus, a standard warning: NSFW disclaimer applies.

The artist here is Rolf Harris. Harris, who hails from Australia, is best known as a novelty musician; you may recognize his piece "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport," which dates to the early 1960s. Well, Harris manages to take this song and turn it from something titillating to something so over-the-top that it becomes outright disturbing. Harris himself could not keep a straight face, as evidenced during the recording of this piece, which consists only of him and a homemade instrument known as a "wobble-board".

Harris is currently facing accusations of sexual assault and child pornography against teenagers, charges he vehemently denies. His trial started in May.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Rolf Harris with "I Touch Myself."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0rlYSJQkyw

[240B]

Our favorite singer of all time William Shatner, with his inimitable interpretation of music. Enough said.
 
Anyone who actually manages to listen to the whole thing without skipping is a better man than me. I couldn't do it.
 
Oh one point, he seems to say in the song "Bis allah" when the correct term in Arabic is 'Bismillah'. Just a note.
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmPOWJtsEGc

[jmyrlefuller]

If you've never heard of Bob and Ray, here's a little refresher: they're a duo of comedians who got their start in the 1940s doing fake newscasts featuring totally bizarre characters, done in straight deadpan. Their career lasted right up until the early 1980s.

This next recording features "Mary Margarent McGoon," one of their characters, who served as the in-house cooking expert.

Here is Ray Goulding, as Mary Margaret McGoon, with "I'd Like to Be a Cow in Switzerland."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBLRLWzRdgQ

[jmyrlefuller]

I remember my first year of college, my roommate often played his music collection on his laptop speakers. He had an eclectic and unusual taste in music.

Here was one of the songs in his playlist. Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Mountain Goats with "No Children."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk

[jmyrlefuller]

Not sure which is worse, the recording or the video. (OK, the video is worse.)

Here's Mark Gormley with "Without You."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87nkJquHnAU

[240B]

Wow Jimmy, that truely awful.
 
First you have to get past the creepy Grampa lusting after his niece (who is not really all that good looking), then you have to wade through the incredibly repetitive 1 2 3, 1 2 3, riff, then you have to endure the super cheesy backdrops and images.
 
There is nothing at all even remotely good about this project. I give it a 10 out of 10 on the really, really, bad scale. Good job.

[jmyrlefuller]

Today's entry was made famous in advertisements for CDnow. The business model of CDnow was to sell compact discs online. Today, that model seems kind of absurd, but in the dial-up 1990s it worked. Like many dot-coms, their advertisements were memorable: they'd play a song like the one I'm featuring today, followed by the statement “if CDnow has this song, it has the one you're looking for” (or something like that).

Ladies and gentlemen, here's James Kochalka Superstar with “Monkey vs. Robot.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Csif5l_6c

[jmyrlefuller]

Ah, Britney Spears. Never one to be known for her singing talents, Spears had other, er, assets that made her many a teen boy's dream in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Of course, she then went out and had two children, which pretty much wrecked her once-legendary physique. Forced to try to make her comeback on her talents alone, she hasn't fared nearly as well. This track will pretty clearly show why.

Normally, a performer who is only marginally a singer (such as Spears, whose act has always emphasized the dancing, choreography, sex appeal and shock value over the music) can have the benefit of Autotune, the tech nology that can bring even the most off-key singer back on pitch. But somehow, this un-autotuned track found its way onto the Internet today. Her manager says it was a warm-up track, but still, it's not pretty, especially if you have perfect pitch.

Here's Britney Spears with the raw version of “Alien.”

EDIT: The video has already been removed because of a copyright claim. Will try to find a replacement.

[jmyrlefuller]

Wally George was a guy whose allegedly right-wing rantings made him a certain star in the late 1980s. Think Rush Limbaugh on crack, or perhaps the Stephen Colbert of his time. He had a TV show around that time, Hot Seat, that aired mostly on low-end stations, in which he'd verbally abuse his guests, much in the same way his contemporary Morton Downey, Jr. would on his better-known show (Downey actually appeared on George's Hot Seat once).

At the peak of his popularity, this record came out. It's not so much a song, or even a rap, as it is a collection of his rants set to a beat, with the audience chants of “Wal-ly! Wal-ly!” (a trademark of Hot Seat) inserted between, um, verses.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is Wally George with “Wal-ly! Wal-ly!”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF0QMx11p4c

[jmyrlefuller]

A little background on this one:

The original English language version of this piece, done by The Peels, was a novelty hit. It curiously has been mostly covered in languages other than English. This version is in French. To give a rough translation, a young banana farmer's daughter dreams of moving to America and becoming an opera singer, but her father disapproves. Well, one day she finds the money to get out, then indeed becomes a success, prompting the father to burn down his farm and follow in his daughter's footsteps.

This video is probably something best watched under the influence of some sort of drugs.

Here's Henri Salvador with “Juanita Banana…en français.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbe_DIv_Ja0

[jmyrlefuller]

Two words: Yiddish jazz.

Here are the Barry Sisters with “Makin' Whoopee.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69je_Ckt1nQ

[jmyrlefuller]

Admittedly, my featuring of this piece is out of season, but here goes anyway.

I know there's a certain contingent of science fiction fans on this board, and pretty much all of you (and maybe a few others who aren't familiar with sci-fi) are at least vaguely familiar with the long-running British drama Doctor Who. Of course, one of the Doctor's most enduring villains over the course of the series has been the Daleks. For those unfamiliar, they're a race of alien creatures who armor themselves in giant bumpy pepper shakers who have no sense of emotion other than pure hatred and, basically, constantly strive to exterminate everything that isn't them.

Alas, when the show debuted, these murderous tin cans became a national fad in the UK, and Dalekmania was born. Perhaps the worst thing to come out of this was a novelty record, by a band calling themselves ”The Go-Gos” (of no relation to the far more famous 1980s girl group of the same name), who clearly didn't grasp the Dalek concept.

Here is “I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuBJ5H9m3Sc

[jmyrlefuller]

I can't help wonder who thought this next entry was a good idea.

Harold Arlin and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg wrote this next piece as part of the soundtrack to the 1939 film masterpiece The Wizard of Oz. While another song Arlin and Harburg wrote for the film, “Over the Rainbow,” has since become a pop standard, this next one doesn't work so well as a standalone piece. But that didn't stop the band in today's entry from recording it, tweaking the melody so that the call-and-response toward the beginning blended with the rest of the song and adding a tin-whistle rendition of Michael Prætorius's “Terpsichore.” I just don't quite get why they chose this song, unless they had someone who they really hated die or disappear. I guess schadenfreude makes for good sunshine pop. The song was, very surprisingly in my eyes, a major hit, the band's only hit, and reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967—higher than any rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the Briefing Room, I present for your consideration as the next entry in the Jukebox from Hell, The Fifth Estate with “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead!”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT3QhfiGxRI

Not-so-fun fact: after the death of Margaret Thatcher, a number of mean-spirited liberals pushed the original version of this song to #2 on the British singles charts (it also charted at #33 in Ireland).

[jmyrlefuller]

Back a few months ago I featured most of the artists on Irwin Chusid's compilation album Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious World of Outsider Music. There are a few I haven't gotten to yet, including this one, which I couldn't find back then. Well, a copy has now turned up on Youtube.

Here's Peter Grudzien with an off-kilter, in more ways than one, rendition of the World War II anthem “There's a Star-Spangled Banner Flying Somewhere.” (A mild warning: NSFW for some off-color gay slurs.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvHfu-cFgVM

[jmyrlefuller]

Back to the Bad Taste Strange Music compilation album, this one is from Mike Sophia. It's called “Cow.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lKGO0Fidbc

[jmyrlefuller]

This artist is also featured on the Bad Taste Strange Music compilation but I'm featuring a different song than the one featured on that album.

Martin Kippenberger was a strange fellow with a habit for hard drinking and a large inheritance that allowed him to, rather aimlessly, pursue a life as an artist. He died at 44 of “liver cancer.”

Here's “Ja ja ja, nee nee nee” (literally “Yes yes yes, no no no.”)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJxktqTgRlM

[jmyrlefuller]

From the Songs in the Key of Z album, here's Jandek with “They Told Me I Was a Fool” (gee, I wonder why?!).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqc2w2w-rbo

[jmyrlefuller]

The moral of this song: don't tick off an old lady.

Here is Irish actress Georgina Dobson (I presume she's deceased now) with her version of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's seminal hip-hop hit “The Message.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Y8jfYPOAA

[jmyrlefuller]

This recording is from Ergo Phizmiz. He's a very prolific musician with hundreds, if not thousands, of songs to his credit over the past 13 years, much of it given away for free.

Here's a recording from Phizmiz that made it onto the Bad Taste Strange Music album. It's a cover of the Velvet Undeground hit “Lady Godiva's Operation.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-4Luu7oFdA