2 posts tagged “novelty records”

  Back in 1979 or so, MAD Magazine  came up with this pretty nifty novelty included in one of their quarterly Super-Specials- a flexi disc called “A Super-Spectacular Day”, which would play a total of 8 different endings...which one would it play?

 Man, this was a fun disc! With a catchy tune the singer sang about how great the day felt like it was going to be

“It’s…A…
Great Big Beautiful Wonderful Incredible
Super-Spectacular Day
And your Heart is hummin’ with good times comin’
And you’ve got the happy feeling things are going your way
All the bells are ringing and a little bird’s singing while he sits on your window sill, saying, “Yessiree, I can surely see this will plainly be MOST DEFINITELY a Super- Spectacular Day!”

…then an obnoxious voice yells out “UNNTIIILLLLL…..!”

Then the “surprise” second half of the song sang about bad things happening all day, ending with the refrain “It’s not such a Super- Spectacular Day”

After a few days of spinning that disc, me and my friends started wondering if we’d heard all 8 tunes yet. We tried comparing notes with each other to get an accurate “list” of what each “surprise” ending  consisted of. Trouble was, the song endings had no official titles, and so we inevitably had to describe them thusly: “OK, I heard that one where he gets abducted by an alien”… and so on, making it EVERY hard to keep track of!

 After much discussion and arguments about what was heard and remembered, we more or less nailed it down to SEVEN tracks, and trust me when I tell you, we were entirely SICK of the intro part of the song by then! Funny, it seemed so CATCHY the first 65 times we heard it!

1. Alien Abduction
2. Blind Date
3. Labeled School Nerd
4. Afflicted by Strange Disease
5. Stalled on the Train Tracks
6. Beaten by the Mob
7. Relations show up

 SO…what was that 8th track? We couldn’t remember if we’d heard any more than the seven we confirmed, so we grudgingly went BACK to spinning the record, hoping in VAIN to hear the final song!

One thing my brother noticed upon careful examination was that though it seemed like the song played the first half of the song, then went into one of the eight variations, it actually was eight complete songs fitted onto that flexi, so your ending was already decided when you first dropped the needle on the beginning of the disc…not that it helped us any.

So after days of attempting to uncover the elusive eighth track without success, we became convinced that there was, in fact, no eight track to be found! Plus, this was MAD Magazine we were talking about, and it would be JUST LIKE “the usual gang of idiots” to have their readers losing their minds trying to find an ending that didn’t exist!

Fast forward to a few years ago- through the wonder of the internet, SOMEBODY (I forget exactly WHERE I got it- but whoever you are- a BIG THANKS!)  finally came to my rescue- they had the original flexi disc (mine had long gone the way of most childhood things- worn to death!) and took the time to rip all the different endings! I was finally able to take a listen to that wonderful flexi of my childhood again, and YES, there WERE in fact EIGHT songs after all!

Wow, listening to the tune really brought back great memories of those days back then, when my friends would come over after school and we’d sit there spinning that flexi til the tune was spilling out of our ears! Ah, Great Times!

And that elusive eight track? Turns out it was some version about neighbor problems or something…really had a hard time understanding the lyrics! But you know, it DID sound familiar, so maybe we DID hear it a few times, after all!

Back in the seventies, K-Tel Records (ah, the immortal K-Tel records…!) released these compilations of novelty songs from various eras, some oldies and some only a few years old. The first of these was called “Looney Tunes” and the second that came out (I think) a few years later was called “Goofy Greats”. Now, I don’t remember these two LPs being advertised, but somehow, it seemed like all our classmates had them…and BOY, were we jealous!

  These albums had some GREAT songs for kids, catchy and fun songs to sing, songs like the Royal Guardsmen’s SNOOPY VS THE RED BARON, the Rivingtons' PAPA-OOM-MOW-MOW, Jumping Gene Simons’ HAUNTED HOUSE and other zany songs like Ray Stevens’ THE STREAK, Sam The Sham and the Pharaohs' WOOLY BULLY and the awesomely demented TRANSFUSION by Nervous Norvous! We’d go to our friends houses and listen to the songs, wishing with all out might that we might get our very own copies of these great albums, but to no avail!

 Then one day (around…oh…1977 or so), during our afternoon cartoons, Mighty K-Tel announced their LATEST novelty record collection!! It trumpeted a new bunch of songs to love- we got snippets of songs like “Pink Shoelaces” by Dodie Stevens, “Monster Mash” by Bobby Boris Pickett, “Beans In My Ears” by the Serendipity Singers and “I’m a Nut” by Leroy Pullins, among others! We begged to get this album for Christmas, and our Grandma granted our wishes, bestowing the highly anticipated album upon us!

 

Well, the album didn’t disappoint, and as we listened to the songs we’d learned from the TV commercial, we started falling in love with almost all the other songs,too! I think I mentioned in an earlier post that back then, me, my sibs and our friends would get together and act out New Mickey Mouse Club skits? Well, the “Dumb Ditties” album became THE new source of entertainment, as we learned the songs and designated “roles” to specific friends, all to put on insane “shows” for my Mother and her friends-our “audience/victims, as it were!

 

Yes, “Monster Mash” was a gimme, with everyone staggering around like zombies, as well as “Martian Hop” by the Galaxies and that fun “I’m A Nut” song . These were the “free-for-all” songs that basically was us running around being crazy, but then there were the songs like “Alvin’s Harmonica” and “I Tawt I Taw A Puddy-Tat” that required actual concentration! Nobody better forget their line! Ahahahahaaa…I have distinct memories of my little brother acting out the part of Alvin, but not being old enough to memorize the words to "speak", would just open and close his mouth during his lines!

One song I really ended up loving was this one by Paul Evans called “Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat” about this guy driving around with a bunch of chicks who only have eyes for his friend in the back seat with them.
I remember we’d drag out the kitchen table chairs and set them up so they looked like a car, and we’d crack up acting out the song, but it was one of the first times I noticed what a great pop song sounded like- the “structure” of a tune, the sweet backing vocals, the way that each verse went a little higher, and the last verse back to normal, as the guy gives up, and I remember thinking how great the song was!

But of all the great tunes on the album, by far the one we loved the MOST was Ray Stevens’ absolutely explosive “Bridget The Midget: The Queen Of The Blues”!  This was a little masterpiece of his: An overzealous announcer introduces the energetic Bridget who proceeds to belt out the tunes while a drunken fan continually tries to get onto the stage…this was a song just MADE for us to act out, and all our friends would get into it, and I remember my little sister and me cracking up whenever  it came to the part for our brother to be the drunken fan! I didn’t realize at the time that the voices were probably ALL Ray Stevens, sped up or slowed down, and now I can appreciate it on a whole new level! (and another side-note is that whenever I used to listen to this song, I never imagined Bridget to look like a midget.. In my head I always imagined the only “Bridget” I knew of: Richard Scarry’s character Sergeant Murphy’s little daughter! Ahahaha!)

Of the 15 or so tracks on Dumb Ditties, there were about three or four songs everyone wanted to “skip” (especially “On Top Of Spaghetti”, for some reason!), and then about half of the songs just couldn’t be “acted” out (like “My Ding-A-Ling” by Chuck Berry), and the remaining songs, or the “cream” of the LP, were all part of our “repertoire”!
What a bunch of crazy hams we all were…miniature Shecky Greenes, that was us!

But the point is how much we embraced and adored that album. All the songs were new to us, and I think we learned “Alvin’s Harmonica” before we’d ever heard of “The Chipmunk Song” (that Christmas one),  “My Ding-A Ling” by Chuck Berry before “Johnny Be Goode, and my sibs and friends may be the only people around who consider The Kingsmen’s song “Louie Louie” as the OTHER song sung by the group that sang “The Jolly Green Giant”!!!

And here’s a funny thing: We had no idea just how “old” some of the songs were. For the most part, we thought these songs were made for the album! I remember my mother telling us that “Monster Mash” came out when she was a teenager, and well, THAT was a shock! When I was older, and listened to the Oldies channel, I was surprised how many of these “Dumb Ditties” like “If You Wanna Be Happy” By Jimmy Soul (Fave quote: I seen your wife the other day, and she’s UGLYYYYYYYY- but she sure can cook, baby!) Dodie Stevens’ “Pink Shoelaces”  and Barry Mann’s “Who Put The Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp) were real, respected songs being rotated on playlists all the time! I was also pretty surprised to find that almost all of the tunes from Dumb Ditties were “edited”, and was constantly surprised to hear extra verses I never knew playing on the radio!

When I was older, and I’d hear some of those tunes on the radio, it would always remind me of my childhood, and I’d wished our Dumb Ditties LP had survived so I could sit down and maybe listen to it again. But it hadn’t. There was just no WAY..we really loved that album to death! So I kind of always hoped in the back of my head that they’d have the humor to re-release some of those compilations on CD.

Occasionally I’d see Novelty CD compilations, some even with the same names like “Goofy Greats, Looney Tunes, etc, but they’re (for the most part) unrelated  packaged novelty songs; fun, but NOT the ones I grew up with. So the next hope was, of course, ebay.! After almost a year of (on and off) perusing the listings, one day I came across a seller offering a “like new” copy of the album, the very album these MP3 rips are from…YES, I HAVE a copy in my possession once more!

Ah, the nostalgic times are here again…