Posts Tagged ‘Way Out Junk’

Way Out Wednesday: Johnny Whitaker, “Friends: Music from the Television Series ‘Sigmund and the Sea Monsters’”

friends johnny frontThis being Way Out Wednesday, you knew I’d eventually have to wander into teenybopper territory, but I promise I won’t go for the usual suspects.

Friends is a TV tie-in album by Johnny Whitaker, best known for playing Jody on the sitcom Family Affair (1966-’71). After doing guest shots on other shows and a couple of Disney movies, including 1972’s Napoleon and Samantha with Jodie Foster, he landed the role of Johnny (how convenient!) on Sid and Marty Krofft’s Saturday-morning children’s show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973-’75). I guess he became a preteen heartthrob, because here he is posing on the Friends album cover almost topless! Anyway, on to the songs …

The first track is one of the themes to Sigmund. If you have any recollection of the show, you can — and will — sing along to this one.

Friends (Sigmund and the Sea Monsters)

Next we have “Alley Oop.” No, wait, I’m sorry — we just have a song that starts off sounding an awful lot like it. “Monster Rock” is a pretty silly song, made even sillier by having Sigmund sound like Boris Karloff with a touch of helium in his voice.

Monster Rock

Of course for any album of this type, you’ve got to have tender love ballads. I picked the following one because I kind of like it, even though the background singers seem to be doing most of the work here.

Can’t Get You Off My Mind

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Way Out Wednesday: “The Fabulous Beats Go Country Style!”

fabulousbeats frontWell, since we’re in a Beatles state of mind here at Popdose, I wanted to find something relevant to the topic, and here it is. Sorta. This is a group called the Fabulous Beats, whose act was strangely reminiscent of a certain Fab Four. To take it even further, the songs on this album were originally country songs. That’s right, you have country songs sung by guys who are trying their best to sing and play like the Beatles. Folks, I can’t make this stuff up!

The first song featured is called “Let Me Be the One.” My research shows that it was originally sung by Hank Locklin. I don’t know the guy or the song, but I had to include it because it follows the first rule of Beatles imitators: find a spot in a song to sing “yeah yeah yeah” and repeat as necessary.

Let Me Be the One

Next we have the Patsy Cline classic “Walkin’ After Midnight,” complete with jangly guitars and two part harmonies. The crazy thing here is that, as Beatles, they don’t sound much like the originals. However they could have possibly made a career from being Everly Brothers impressionists. I guess there wasn’t as much call for that, though.

Walkin’ After Midnight

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Way Out Wednesday: The Bat Boys, “Batman”

batmanbatboys frontWith the Batman: Arkham Asylum game coming out this week (for PS3, Xbox360 and PCs), I thought I’d throw out another Batman-related album for you. When the Batman TV show came out it seemed like you couldn’t swing a dead bat without hitting some sort of Caped Crusader tie-in, and record albums were no exception. Some were pretty good. Some, not so much. I’ll let you judge where this one falls.

This first song is the Bat Boys’ version of the Batman theme song. This really isn’t too bad, with a nice swinging organ solo.

Batman Theme

I hope you liked the previous song because, despite the name Batman and all the sound effects on the album cover, absolutely nothing else on this album is remotely Batman related! There’s not even any name checking in the song titles. What the songs I picked from this album do have in common, though, is that they’re jazzed-up versions of classical tunes. The first, “Uppercut Blues,” borrows heavily from “Flight of the Bumblebee” (which was actually the Green Hornet’s theme song). The titles of these songs seem to be pretty random. You can maybe imagine people punching each other while listening to this song, but there’s nothing bluesy about the song at all!

Uppercut Blues

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Way Out Wednesday: Cabbage Patch Kids, “Cabbage Patch Dreams”

cpdreams frontIf you were a child of the ’80s, you or somebody you knew probably owned a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. They were so popular that stores were inundated with customers wanting them at Christmas. (For those of you too young to remember, imagine the frenzy of the Tickle Me Elmo and the Nintendo Wii Christmases put together.) The album Cabbage Patch Dreams attempts to put together a storyline for these characters.

In the first song, a stork introduces the concept of the Cabbage Patch Kids, which somehow involve magic cabbages and bunny bee crystals. Don’t ask me to explain that. I don’t get it either.

Cabbage Patch Theme

You can’t have an adventure without a villain, and in this case we get three of them: Lavender McDade (your typical scary little old lady), Beau Weasel (a weasel), and Cabbage Jack, a rabbit who’s upset that his favorite food is being turned into babies and flirts precariously close to sounding like an African-American stereotype.

Villains Three

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Way Out Wednesday: “The Happy Hamsters Go Ghostbustin’”

hamsters ghostbustin frontIt’s Tony from Way Out Junk, and I’ve got another crazy one for you. Remember the high-pitched singing rodent craze started by Alvin and the Chipmunks and then all the rip-off groups that appeared afterward? This album is from the second renaissance of the Chipmunks, and features the Happy Hamsters. What’s their back story? Who knows? I don’t even know what their names are, or if they’ve got a human father figure or anything. Admittedly this is the Happy Hamsters’ second album, but I don’t think continuity is their strong suit here. Anyway, on to the songs!

Well, since this album is called The Happy Hamsters Go Ghostbustin’, you have to expect the song “Ghostbusters.” The singing isn’t that bad, all things considered. The problem is all the jabbering they do during the instrumental parts. It’s just a little bit here, but it gets worse, trust me!

Ghostbusters

Next, as a salute (?) to Michael Jackson, here’s “Thriller.” Again, the singing’s all right, and there’s not too much chatter this time. Extra points for including the Vincent Price part of the song as well. Of course, it does lose the effect hearing it done by three helium-filled voices.

Thriller

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Way Out Wednesday: Wayout

Hello, my name is Tony, and I run a blog called Way Out Junk that focuses mostly on out-of-print children’s and novelty albums. Jeff contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a weekly column for Popdose, highlighting songs from some of these albums. I said I’d give it a try, so here goes!

Wayout

Here are two Public Service Announcements for an organization geared to teens called “Wayout.” I still don’t know much else about the organization itself, other than the fact that they were able to score two celebrity endorsement deals. The first, by Johnny Cash, sounded natural and unforced all the way. With his song “What Is Truth?” playing in the background, Cash tells you that if you need guidance and are going “the route” like he did, contact “Way Out” for help.

Johnny Cash – Hello, I’m Johnny Cash

Dorsey Burnette, on the other hand, sounds like he’s reading off a piece of paper handed to him as soon as he stepped up to the microphone. It doesn’t help that he got stuck doing a PSA about venereal disease. After rattling off some statistics, Burnette says, “That makes V.D. kind of a hangup, don’t it?” He also informs us that “V.D. is a bummer by anybody’s standards.” I don’t even think he gets the name of the booklet right. I show it listed as “How the Bad Bug Bites,” and he calls it “How the Big Bug Bites.” If these are the people who wrote the literature for the organization, I can understand them not being around anymore!

Dorsey Burnette – How the Bad Bug Bites

If you know more about this organization, please share it with the rest of us. And if you’d like to hear more PSAs from them, including ones on teen suicide, getting along with your parents, and witchcraft(!), you can download them here.