What’s up, every bizzle? It’s Jizzle-ohn in the hizzouse with another Lost in the Izzle.

Before you grab the flaming torches and pitchforks, let me just say that’s my li’l way of introducing you to today’s artist, hip-hop pioneer/legend Frankie Smith, co-author of the classic “Double Dutch Bus” and progenitor of “izzle”-speak. That’s right, Frankie Smith gets all the credit/blame, not Snoop Dogg, who appropriated the izzle to big success a few yizzears ago.

A song about both the jump-rope technique and public transportation in Philly, “Double Dutch Bus” (download) was a nearly instantaneous smash on the R&B charts after its release. Smith wasn’t quite an overnight success, though, having spent some time in the trenches as a writer for acts like the O’Jays, Billy Paul, and other artists in the Philadelphia International Records stable. Smith got the idea for “Double Dutch Bus” after being turned down for a job as a city bus driver. He ended up in the studio at two in the morning, where he recorded a profanity-laced tirade about the bus system that, once cleaned up, became a single.

After massive success on the R&B charts (it spent eight weeks at the top), “Double Dutch Bus” crossed over to the pop side of things, where it had a little more difficult time, peaking at just #30. The chart position belies its importance in hip-hop history, however, since the song has been remade, sampled, stolen, etc., over and over, most recently by Missy Elliott with “Gossip Folks” in 2003, and this year’s travesty, a more straight-ahead remake by former Cosby Show cutie Raven-Symoné.

As for Smith, he had trouble following up, failing to chart any more singles on the pop side of things. Smith went into acting with parts in Beloved (1998) and various B movies. His Wikipedia page claims he currently works as a delivery driver, which I sort of want to believe because it would mean he finally got that dream driving job he always wanted, yet I don’t want to believe it because that’s a little depressing after scoring a gold single. Can you imagine Frankie Smith delivering your package? “Here you gizzo. I just need your sigizznatizzure right hizzere.”

“Double Dutch Bus” peaked at #30 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and at #1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart in 1980.

Get Frankie Smith music at Amazon or on

We all know Charo for her ubiquitous variety show and Love Boat appearances throughout the ’70s, but did you know the former María del Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza Rasten was also an accomplished flamenco guitarist? Of course you did. A young Charo learned guitar from Andres Segovia, considered an icon of modern classical guitar music. After she moved to the States and married Spanish bandleader Xavier Cugat, Charo began forging her “cuchie, cuchie” persona with countless stints on The Tonight Show, The Mike Douglas Show, even the infamous Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Throughout her years of campy shtick on TV, Charo never stopped recording, both classical-guitar works and more dance-oriented Latin-fusion disco with the Salsoul Orchestra. In fact, she scored three hits on the Hot Dance Club Play chart in the ’70s, starting with “Dance a Little Bit Closer,” which reached #18 in 1978. Later that year “Ole Ole” climbed to #36, while the second single from her Ole Ole album, “Stay With Me” (download), didn’t get quite so far. But “Stay With Me” is an excellent salsa/disco hybrid, with “let’s spend the night together”-type lyrics that were de rigueur in the disco era, and a more restrained vocal than you’d expect from the hyperactive Spaniard. While the track didn’t do much here, it was a big hit overseas, helping Ole Ole sell more than half a million copies worldwide.

(more…)

Hardcore David Bowie fans are probably familiar with the name Ava Cherry, but for the benefit of everyone else, Ava was Bowie’s lover in the early to mid ’70s, as well as one of his backup singers in the Astronettes during the Diamond Dogs/Young Americans Tour.  Bowie had plans for Cherry and the other Astronettes, producing an album for the trio that was New Wave before the term existed.  It also ended up being shelved for twenty years when things with their mutual management MainMan went sour.

That setback didn’t stop Cherry from pursuing a music career, though it was tough for her to break away from being “David Bowie’s lover.”  A 1980 album for RSO (Ripe!!!) caused a minor ripple on the Billboard Black Albums Chart, so when RSO bit the dust, Ava found herself with a new deal on Capitol Records.  The resulting album, Streetcar Named Desire, was a bit of a throwback, a funk/disco affair when New Wave and the music industry had finally caught up to Cherry.  It’s too bad, since while the title track and lead single (download) is perfectly serviceable, Cherry deserved a more forward-sounding approach that matched her image.  As it was, Streetcar sank with nary a trace.  Ava tried again with a dancier attempt, Picture Me, in 1987, but short of a couple of dance chart hits, it wasn’t the breakthrough she or Capitol were looking for.

Cherry went on to reunite with Luther Vandross, whom she sang backup with during the Bowie days - this time, however, she was singing backup for Luther.  Ava continues to record now and then, her most recent offering being a dance remake of “Hopelessly Devoted To You” from Grease that’s not half bad.

Since there’s no video for “Streetcar,” instead here’s a clip of a rough, haggard, coked-up Bowie warbling his way through a cover of “Footstompin’” on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1974 with the Astronettes on back-up.  While she doesn’t sing on this track, Cherry steals the show with her dancing and fashion forward look … remember when you spot her, this is 1974, not 1983.

“Streetcar Named Desire” did not chart.

Get Ava Cherry music on Amazon or on

Combining shoegaze and dreampop with straight-ahead power pop, Washington D.C. indie-rock darlings Unrest were the brainchild of Mark Robinson, founder of the TeenBeat label.  After a few post-punk experimental years, Unrest tamed their sound a bit (with plenty of more unorthodox tracks here and there) and snagged a distribution deal with famed 4AD Records, which was itself distributed in the U.S. by Warner Brothers.  This is a roundabout way of basically saying their 1993 album, Perfect Teeth, was the first to get a major label push which resulted in the band getting some MTV play on “120 Minutes.”

It was there that I first saw the video for “Cath Carroll.” (download) a swirling, manic pop confection that sounded like Catherine Wheel covering the Partridge Family.  The song was an ode to the NME journalist and Factory Records artist, and a Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of Carroll was used for the cover of Perfect Teeth.

However, it was the second video taken from the album, “Make Out Club,” (download) that finally drove me to the record store.  Brandishing a definite Pixies/Frank Black vibe, the single’s infectious dueling jangly guitars and stop/start structure made it irresistable.  The trouble was finding a copy of the album to buy.

(more…)

If at first you don’t succeed … fail a second time.  Third time’s the charm!

That twist on two hoary old clichés pretty much sums up the long struggle of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, of techno band Underworld.  Sure, you know them now as the “Born Slippy”/Trainspotting soundtrack band, or perhaps the more geeky among you (hand up, me!) knew them as the New Wave-y Underworld that scored a minor MTV hit with “Underneath the Radar” in the late ’80s.  But Hyde and Smith tried for rock stardom years before…

Beginning life in 1981 as a band known as nothing other than a graphic design squiggle (take that, Prince!), the group got signed to CBS Records in the U.K., who demanded a “real” name for the combo.  Dubbing themselves Freur, their first single “Doot-Doot” (download) charted in the upper 50s of the U.K. chart in 1983.  Not quite a smash, but the song got some underground exposure here in the States via the more adventurous New Wave and college radio stations.

Freur tried a few other singles and a second full album (which got only limited European release) before dissolving.  Hyde and Smith regrouped as Underworld, who began life as a more pop-oriented dance/rock act before heading full steam into clubland with later releases.  “Doot-Doot” is interesting, since it reflects a consistent line from Underworld’s humble beginnings to the current day.  The single is a quiet, yet tense affair that presaged the combo’s later explorations in ambient techno.  The Doot-Doot album was released on CD twice, the most recent pressing from 2000 currently fetching $80+ on Amazon.  “Doot-Doot” the song got a new lease on life when it was featured on the soundtrack of the Tom Cruise vehicle “Vanilla Sky.”

“Doot-Doot” did not chart.

Get Freur music at Amazon.

Anyone who’s ever worked at a record store that buys and sells used CDs can tell you what titles they see over and over again.  Jagged Little Pill, Cracked Rear View, the entire Cranberries catalog … these are discs that clog the bins coast to coast, as music buyers buy, absorb, and ultimately get sick of these huge mega-hits.  The second type of disc you see a lot is the one-hit wonder album - Vanilla Ice’s To The Extreme or today’s featured artist’s album, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumper.

A loose collective of musicians who had been making music in the U.K. since the early ’80s, Chumbawamba had a number of indie releases under their belt before signing to EMI in 1997.  Tubthumper, their major label debut, was their 7th overall (or so, depending on whether you count live sets or offshoots), so calling them a one-hit wonder, while technically correct in the States, seems a little unfair.  But that one hit, “Tubthumping,” was a doozy, blasting out of radios and MTV for what seemed like an hourly basis.  The single went Top 10 and it brought the album along with it, eventually selling over three million copies.  Trouble is, most people who bought it listened to the hit and had little time for the other eleven songs.

That’s a bit of a shame since at least one other song on the album isn’t bad at all.  It just happens to be the second single “Amnesia,” (download) a charging, horn-accented driving song that should be used as the theme music to some sports highlight show somewhere.  While American radio seemed to embrace the single, sending it fairly high up the airplay chart, singles buyers were nonplussed and the song failed to chart on the Hot 100.  Perhaps it was Alice Nutter’s, um, uncertain vocal that kept it from being a hit.  While a little Nutter went a long way as an accent on “Tubthumping,” perhaps a lotta Nutter was too much.  Or maybe it was the tango break in the middle of the dance/rock hybrid that threw people off. (more…)

Let’s get all the cute little jokes about the title of today’s featured song out of the way first, shall we?  I’ll pause while you do so.

G’head, get ‘em all out.

All done?  Good.  Moving on…

I don’t have to tell any of you guys about the Cure, since you’re all much more knowlegable and have a higher taste level than 90% of the blogosphere.  And you’re all so lovely and good looking and very susceptible to shamless flattery.  The Cure’s American breakthrough probably started in earnest with 1985’s, The Head On The Door, their most accessible and cohesive album up to that point.  While “Let’s Go To Bed” and “The Walk” got a bit of MTV play, the videos for “In Between Days” and “Close To Me” got maximum spins on the channel, probably thanks to their new U.S. record label, Elektra.  Elektra tried to get more mileage out of the album with a third video for “A Night Like This,” accompanied by a new four-song EP called “Quadpus.”

“Quadpus” is a strange little artifact, two songs (”A Night Like This” and “Close To Me”) alongside two b-sides, including one of my favorite Cure non-album tracks, “A Man Inside My Mouth” (download).  The track is a sort of throwback to the strange little singles like “The Walk” the Cure released when reduced to the duo of Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst.  And in typical Cure fashion, the lyrics can be about any number of things — a pregnant woman?  Someone coming down off drugs?  Someone going to the dentist?  Only Robert and his therapist know for sure.

Instead, let’s pour a 40 in remembrance of the EP, the Jan Brady of record releases in the ’80s.  Not as cute as a single, not as essential as a full album, the EP was where tossed-off tracks and baby musical acts went to wither and die.  While some EPs were launching pads for huge success (hi, Missing Persons!), the vast majority served merely as filler between albums or for acts that didn’t quite have enough good material to fill a whole album (hi, Industry!).  As the digital age zeroed and oned its way to the front of the line, the EP soon fell to the wayside, essentially replaced by the CD single packed with far too many unneccesary remixes.  This one’s for you, little EP.  You made those weeks when I didn’t have enough money to buy an album worthwhile.

“A Man Inside My Mouth” did not chart.

Get Cure music at Amazon or on

Boy, we’d buy anything in the ’70s, wouldn’t we? Laverne & Shirley, the most successful spin-off from Happy Days, was riding high in 1976, overtaking its parent show to capture the number-one slot in the Nielsen ratings. It was time to cash in.

Lunch boxes, Mego “action figures” (don’t call them “dolls”!), Colorforms sets — you name it, the L&S logo was slapped on it. Then someone had a bright idea: since Laverne and Shirley were often shoehorned into painful musical numbers (remember the annual Shotz Brewery Talent Shows?), why not release an album of Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall singing their favorite ’50s and ’60s hits?

Because they can’t sing, that’s why not!

Logic has rarely stopped anyone from making a cash grab, so 1976 saw the release of Laverne & Shirley Sing, a charitable title at best. While Cindy Williams has a, um, passable singing voice, I think we all know how Penny Marshall handles a tune. Thankfully, her nasally whine was kept to a bare minimum on the album’s single, a remake of the Connie Stevens hit “Sixteen Reasons,” (download) where “Laverne” simply keeps a number count.

What’s amazing is the number of professional musicians who lent their expertise to the project. Melissa Manchester is credited with backing vocals, Kenny Loggins plays some percussion, and Elvis Presley arranger Jimmie Haskill did, well, the arrangements. In fact, Haskill gets name-checked along with Michael “Lenny” McKean in the one nonmusical skit on the album, “More From Our Yearbook,” (download) where the girls recite what fellow students wrote in their high school yearbooks.

Sadly, Laverne & Shirley Sing wasn’t nearly as funny as the first few years of their sitcom. It’s an artifact of a simpler time in the record industry, when novelty records were both a traffic driver and a gateway drug for young consumers into the world of music buying. Strangely enough, Collector’s Choice brought the album to CD for the first time in 2003, and more amazingly, it’s still in print (and on iTunes!).

(more…)

Riding a rockabilly/Motown revival during the early ’80s that also included the Polecats, Roman Holliday and the Stray Cats, Britain’s JoBoxers (with American lead singer Dig Wayne) barely scraped the Top 40 in the States with “Just Got Lucky,” another one of those hits that got bigger as the years rolled on, being featured in plenty of movies, most notably The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But while “Just Got Lucky” is what the band is best known for here, it was actually their first single in the U.K., “Boxerbeat” (download), that was the bigger hit. And hey, how about that spoken word intro ripped off fresh from Madness’ “One Step Beyond?”

“Boxerbeat,” an infectious if goofy mission statement, hit #3 in the U.K., predating “Just Got Lucky’s” success. It was released here as the second single off the band’s debut, Like Gangbusters, complete with another Bowery Boys-inspired video. Unfortunately, MTV didn’t shine to “Boxerbeat” like they did with the group’s first single.

In the U.K., the success of the first two singles led to a third, the relatively nondescript “Johnny Friendly,” (download) which goes on about three minutes too long. More interesting is the album’s fourth single, the hopefully winking “She’s Got Sex.” (download) I say “hopefully,” because I want to believe the band was being somewhat cheeky with the junior high lyrics about a girl who’s gotta have it. The video leads me to believe the band was in on the joke: (more…)

So, who worries about the music their kids listen to?

I don’t have any kids myself, but when I was visiting my 13-year-old niece recently, she asked me to get her the new Ting Tings and Office CDs (very hip, that one). At first I didn’t even think about it, until I remembered there were a few naughty words on both and I checked with her mother.

“Oh, she’s heard much worse than that. Go for it,” she told me. I was taken aback for a minute thinking, wait a minute…don’t you care that your child is being exposed to this? Thankfully, it was only a momentary flash of 40-year-old old fogey thinking, quickly dashed when I started to recall my record collection at 13.

From the Village People chanting about “My Roommate” (winkwink), to Barry Manilow bragging about feeling his “blood flow” (nudgenudge) in “Weekend in New England,” not to mention the gem of my 45 collection, Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City,” my pre-teen records were just as racy, if perhaps a little less direct. Heck, even something as deceptively benign as Neil Diamond’s “Desirée” (download) had a saucy little subtext:

It was the third of June
On that summer’s day
When I became a man
At the hands of a girl
Almost twice my age

Ooooo, young Neil got some cougar action for his first time! Granted, I don’t think I knew what that opening verse really meant when I was ten years old, but now it really jumps out.

“Desirée” is a strange little single in Neil’s canon, coming at a pre-Jazz Singer time in his career when the hits were far from guaranteed. “Desirée” broke a bit of a losing streak he was having, hitting the Top 20. It’s been included in a few greatest hits packages since, but it’s not a song you ever hear on oldies radio and it’s not a tune people normally bring up in Neil Diamond conversation (and who doesn’t engage in Neil Diamond conversation at least weekly?).  For some reason, my ten-year-old self loved it, though, and the scratched and dusty 45 still sits in a box somewhere in storage.

“Desirée” peaked at #16 on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart in 1978.

Get Neil Diamond music at Amazon or on