Showing posts with label Billboard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Billboard. Show all posts

Friday, April 27, 2018

We dropped some brown acid, man

"To get back to the warning that I have received -- you may take it with however many grains of salt you wish -- that the brown acid that has been circulating around us is not, specifically, too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that. Of course, it's your own trip, so be my guest. But please be advised that there is a warning on that one, OK?"
-- Chip Monck
Master of ceremonies,
Woodstock, 1969

Many odd and sometimes disturbing things about the 1960s and '70s, for those of us who came of age during those decades, can be explained or put into context merely by saying "It was the (fill in the blank)."

If that explanation does not suffice, blame the brown acid, man.

As we consider the person and "music" career of the late Tiny Tim -- seen here in a record-label ad from the June 8, 1968, edition of Billboard magazine -- I'm going straight to the brown-acid excuse.

Dude. Tiny Tim, born Herbert Buckingham Khaury in 1932, was the brown acid. Listening to Tiny Tim on your AM or FM radio . . . watching him on your 21-inch Magnavox . . . it was like being in the presence of an off-key castrato undergoing electroshock treatment.

Boy howdy.


MY UNFORTUNATE double- and triple-knit sartorial choices from the end of 1969 until marrying into a wardrobe-control regimen in 1983? "It was the '70s."

That Tiny Tim sold records and was all over network television and the radio, too? "The brown acid that had been circulating around us was not, specifically, too good."


Seriously. It was some bad shit, man.


You bet your sweet bippy, it was.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

Tonight's night music


My favorite used-record store in the world is closing, so I've been stocking up the past week.

And it is from this new/old and growing stash that tonight's "night music" comes -- Warren Covington and the Commanders with "Shall We Dance?" The label: Decca. The year: 1957.

Here's what the Billboard reviewer had to say in the weekly's edition of Feb. 2, 1957:
Pleasant dance set devoted mostly to slow fox trot tempos. Selections are nearly all standards, with sweet trombones given featured billing. Covington solos for ear-easy effect instrumentally, and similarly and supplies vocals by a group at intervals. There are more kicks here for mom and dad, probably, than for the kids, but enough, in any case, to make a fair seller. Attractive cover.
I'M NOT SURE, but I think the reviewer is saying, four years before I arrived on the scene, that I would be born much, much too late.

As I say . . . to be a young man in New York in the 1950s.

Nighty night.

Thursday, September 01, 2011

The frightening '50s



You want to know what those love letters in the sand said?

"I want to eat your brains!"


The Billboard: It wasn't fit reading for the faint of heart.