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Little Oscar, my favorite geezer lady, is having a birthday for a few more hours, so here's a treat for her from the days when "Doug Stephenson" roamed the earth and Columbia Record Club would send you five---FIVE!---free LPs as long as you'd buy one a month for the rest of your life or send it back within 7 days at your own expense.
Whatever Gary Lewis album this was on, we heard the damn thing about five times a day for the entire summer of 1965 in heavy rotation with Jay & The Americans and Jan & Dean. Probably no one is more responsible for me taking up leaded gasoline for recreational use than Little Oscar and Gary Lewis' goddam Playboys!
I embedded this particular version of the selected tune, however, for reasons that have much to do with me and nothing to do with Little Oscar. See if you can guess what they are. Unfortunately, LO did not have any hot friends like the ones tearing it up above, with the possible exception of Terri W. who I was still slightly too young to "appreciate." But she and her bra-stuffing girlfriends were all nice girls, with no vices other than Pepsi. They were never a pain to be around. And that's about the nicest thing any kid can be expected to say about his big sister.
Happy Birthday, Little Oscar!
Little Miss Go-Go, Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965, Liberty 55778 [45 rpm single; can't track down the album catalog number]), via YouTube, embedded with a claim of fair use because it's Little Oscar's birthday!!!
Editor's note: I read in the liner notes of my CD greatest hits collection that this recording was Take 27! Can you imagine that? I think Brian Wilson must have put together "Good Vibrations" in fewer takes than that.
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It's a sobering thought that many of those hips so hippy, hippy shakin' in 1965 are now pinned, clamped or replaced.
ReplyDeleteI can understand why there were at least 27 takes.
I like to think that these ladies kept in tip-top shape by go-go dancing through the decades. Screw Zumba---the gyms should offer aerobics-based go-go classes for our gracefully aging hippie sisters.
DeleteI was going to poke at you for bringing up Good Vibrations in dissing Gary Lewis. GL&P's best song by far was This Diamond Ring, which came out 18 months or so before Good Vibrations. I've always felt that some of the sound in both songs is similar though I never actually read anything about others noticing that.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, in checking this out before commenting here I found out that This Diamond Ring was not written by Gary Lewis or any Playboy. Not a surprise. But in their recording of it, none of them played their instruments. And Gary Lewis' voice even got overdubbed. The group actually making the music was called the Wrecking Crew, which included Leon Russell at the time. Actually, that studio group would probably be an interesting thing to cover in this blog sometime.
Anyway, whatever merits This Diamond Ring has, none appear attributable to GL&P. Guess they were just a bunch of wealthy suburban kids with a garage band and some very, very good connections.
Hey, Mack---I wasn't dissing the band at all. I was just saying that producer put a hell of a lot of effort into getting exactly the nuanced performance of Little Miss Go-Go that he was looking for. Some versions of Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile have bonus tracks comprising out-takes and developmental edits of Good Vibrations in which you can hear the raw pieces that Brian Wilson forced together into a coherent psychedelic-style pop hit. From what I've read, the process of composing it from recorded "feels" took a huge toll on his mental wellbeing (although there is much reason to believe that his drug use was behind most of that).
DeleteThe Wrecking Crew was everywhere in the early and mid-60s, from Phil Spector's projects to The Mamas & The Papas to... Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations. Hal Blaine, one of the main drummers for the Crew, published a book about it around 10 years ago. It's on my reading list.