Old Enough to Forget

The late '60s were an awesome time for so many reasons - not least among them was the music. Music was exploding and splintering into a million (okay, maybe a dozen) different directions and the generation gap was widening, and if you were over 30 you weren't to be trusted. There was no middle ground. Maybe not, but there was middle of the road. For a brief period of time up to the late '60s there was this strange no man's land, where popular artists had their songs filtered through the lens of other artists who were considered safe for consumption and that somehow made it palatable to an older generation who wanted to be hip to what the kids were down with, but who couldn't stand what the kids were actually listening to. This is what I believe at any rate. How else to do explain this type of stuff. It's too easy to blame Herb Albert and Jerry Moss who founded A&M and unleashed The Tijuana Brass in 1962 with a range of originals and homogenized versions of p...

For a buck I'll pretty much take a chance on stuff that I'd normally ignore. The Sandpipers felt familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it - but I figured it was going to be an easy listening experience that would be in the same vein as "Up, Up and Away" by The 5th Dimension ... yeah, for all the reverence Jimmy Webb gets as a songwriter, particularly his collaborations with Glen Campbell - it was a surprise the goofy balloon song was a Webb composition. Well, I came home and cleaned the record, which was in remarkably good condition. As with so many records from the '60s there was no date on the cover, or the album, but a quick search revealed this was released in 1968. The credits are sparse, to the point of being non-existent aside from Tommy LiPuma who produced the album, and a few others on the engineering side. The first track was the title track which was a cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song. It was indeed in the easy listening style with an emphasis o...

White Christmas was a pretty hard album to date - there doesn't seem to be a lot of good information on it, but the nearest I can figure is Capitol licensed this out to Pickwick and they packaged it up and released it in 1970. It's a compilation likely taken from some of Jackie Gleason's prior holiday releases, and from what I've read about the budget re-issues is less is more, but most of the time, just less.  This was one of the many Christmas albums I snapped up from the dollar bin, and this cleaned up amazingly well. It's nearly perfect, what a score. Here we have The Great One (who was the great one long before old 99 laced 'em up) pulling out all of his lush strings and easy listening magic and applying his touch to nine holiday classics. I'll admit, this was never my favourite style of music, but there is a certain nostalgic charm to this stuff - in small doses, and I can deal with a short collection of relaxing and "happy" strings. It'...