PLEASE NOTE:
In order that I can make room for other new material, this set of files will be deleted from my server on or about September 15, 2015 and this discussion will be closed or removed.
I grew up in Brooklyn. As a kid, i was fascinated by the street-lamp and subway entrance singers who populated the borough. I could listen to their acappella serenades until I was summoned home. Then i would turn on the radio and listen to the Philly, DC and national groups.
Over the years, I've collected a large number of vinyl and CD sides of popular and abstruse doo-wop artists.
Help yourself to any or all of the collection HERE
Password: B0wser_Bass (that's a 'zero' )
Bob
Replies
Time, gentlemen, time!
LAST CALL!
bump
I tried. I downloaded a bunch, I only listened at night, in the car.
I haven't found that one tune that will open the whole genre for me.
Maybe its Billy Joel's surgically clean "For The Longest Time" or
five years of watching GLEE with my daughters.
No, I know what it is. Some of the first real music I ever heard was
when my sister's boyfriend moved in with us. I'd sneak through his
record collection, his Zap Comix, the rubber-stamped "Great White
Wonder" with a blank label.
I centered on an album with a strange cartoonish cover and a high
school photo of some greaser on the back.
"Cruisin' with Reuben and the Jets"
I was in sixth or seventh grade, so "Jelly Roll Gum Drop" set me off.
"Cheap Thrills (in the back of my car)", "Desiree", and more darkly,
the album closer "Stuff Up The Cracks", the creepiest teen-age death
song I'd ever heard. This was no "Leader of the Pack" or "Tell Laura
I Love Her".
When he caught me going through his records, he explained that
Reuben & the Jets was actually the same band that did
"We're Only in it for the Money" with its strange Sgt Pepper's
parody cover -- The Mothers of Invention and
that 'greaser' on the back cover was Frank Zappa.
I still have a scratchy copy of Reuben and listen to it every summer.
Zappa did a Stravinsky-like deconstruction on the Doo Wop genre
that still holds up, longer that the originals on which it was based.
I saw The Grandmothers' final tour. After performing "Cheap Thrills",
Jimmy Carl Black said "Out of all the recordings he did with Frank,
Reuben is the one he likes best".
Great, great stuff, Bob. I had to get the Coasters, the Clovers, and the Brooklyn Boys. Many thanks and see you at Joe's.