Monthly Archives: September 2010

Marty Stuart: Ghost Train- The Studio B Sessions

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Stuart amazes with the honesty and heart of his country music

Like ex-presidents who turn the mantle of their former office into opportunities to improve the world, talented musicians can turn the freedom of their post-hit years into explorations of that which really moves them. And such is Marty Stuart, whose baptism in bluegrass led to a run on Nashville in the mid-80s and, more successfully, in the early 90s with a four year chart run that included Hillbilly Rock, Tempted and This One’s Gonna Hurt You. His subsequent releases kept his core fans, but provided only middling commercial returns. But as his chart success waned, his artistic vision expanded. 1999’s song cycle The Pilgrim was his most powerful and coherent album to that date, showing off both his musical range and his ability to write songs that are literary, but still communicate on an emotional level.

Throughout the current decade he’s explored gospel (Souls’ Chapel), Native American struggles (Badlands: Ballads of the Lakota), and country and folk standards (Cool Country Favorites). And this time out, Stuart salutes the classic country of his youth, but other than a couple of well selected covers, he uses all new originals to conjure the sounds that inspired him in the first place. What will really ring in listeners’ ears is how natural and heartfelt this is. Like a dancer floating through his steps, Stuart plays songs as an extension of his soul, rather than as a performance of words and music. Recording in the legendary RCA Studio B, Stuart amplifies the echoes of performances past, much as John Mellencamp has on his recent No Better Than This.

Stuart is a country classicist, and his new songs resound with the spirits of Waylon, Merle, Buck and Johnny. The instrumental “Hummingbyrd” recounts the playfulness of “Buckaroo” and the Johnny Cash co-write “The Hangman” retains the Man in Black’s gravitas and frankness. The opening “Branded” splits the difference between Haggard’s “Branded Man” and Owens’ “Streets of Bakersfield,” tipping a musical hat to the piercing guitar of Roy Nichols. Don Reno’s “Country Boy Rock & Roll” gives Stuart a chance to roll out his rockabilly roots, and show off the glory of his band, the Fabulous Superlatives. Stuart and guitarist Kenny Vaughan sing a duet and duel on their electric guitars as drummer Harry Stinson and bassist Paul Martin push them with a hot train rhythm – this one’s sure to leave jaws hanging slack when played live.

The album’s ballads are just as good, not least of which for the emotional steel playing of Ralph Mooney (whose own “Crazy Arms” is covered here as an instrumental). Co-writing with his wife, singer Connie Smith, Stuart sings tales of romantic dissolution and regret. Smith joins Stuart for the exceptional duet “I Run to You,” drawing together threads of Gram and Emmylou, the Everly Brothers and classic Nashville pairings of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The album’s saddest song, however, is “Hard Working Man,” which questions the soul of a nation whose work ethic is undermined by globalization. There’s personal salvation in “Porter Wagoner’s Grave,” but the questions raised in “Hard Working Man” is what will really haunt you.

The album ends with “Little Heartbreaker,” the best Dwight Yoakam song that Yoakam didn’t actually write lately, followed by a short mandolin solo that brings things back to Stuart’s bluegrass roots. The sounds of Stuart’s influences are immediate throughout, but as someone obsessed with country music from his teens, and a protégé of both Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash, this is less a nostalgic interlude than a heeding of his mother’s words: “When you find yourself, if in the middle of nowhere, go back to Jerusalem and stand. Wait on divine guidance. It’s the only guidance worth having.” The recent neo-redneck movement may position themselves as modern-day hellraisers, but this rockabilly, Bakersfield twang and heartbroken balladry are the true sounds of rebellion, or as Stuart describes them, “sounds from the promised land.” [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Ariel Hyatt: Music Success in Nine Weeks

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Slim but useful workbook for developing a musician’s on-line profile

Ariel Hyatt is a music publicist who’s reinvented her practice to utilize social media and other on-line channels. Her book provides nine weekly lesson plans for developing your own on-line profile, including suggestions for optimizing your website, blogging, building a mailing list, creating a newsletter, involving your fans with surveys, and building a “continuum program” that incentivizes on-going purchases. The book is task-driven rather than theoretical, with the first written exercise happening only four pages into chapter one. This necessarily leaves out some detail that might be helpful; for example, the suggestion of offering a free MP3 doesn’t indicate you must clear all the rights (including a mechanical license for cover songs), and the section on optimizing your website doesn’t mention SEO. One could argue these topics are outside the book’s scope, but a pointer to follow-up resources would be helpful.

Hyatt stresses the point that many musicians are reluctant to market themselves, and she wisely reframes the musician’s career as a business. She points out that a musician who thinks their only job is to make good music is an idealist who’s not really interested in having anyone hear their work. The steps she outlines will be difficult for some artists to carry out, but taken one at a time, and broken down into smaller tasks, they become part of your larger job as an artist. Her experience as a publicist, and particularly her understanding of what will get people’s attention, is the key to her pitch. She provides compelling advice on how to connect with those who can help advance your career, garnering you more fans, gigs, rehearsal space, private shows, interns, and, eventually, money. She provides valuable guidance on how to make your press kit work on a web site, noting who will be visiting your website and for what purpose.

The downside to this book its brevity. The 184 page count includes 25 pages of fill-in-the-blanks worksheets (which can more cheaply be completed in the blank notebook Hyatt advises you to get), 11 lined end-chapter notes pages, and 43 “bonus” pages on traditional PR. The bonus sections are helpful, but don’t speak to the book’s stated on-line theme. Finally, though one might expect a publicist to publicize herself, the promotion of Hyatt’s PR services on page 82 and the four pages of her company’s offerings (including the ethically ambiguous ReviewYou.com) at the back of the book seem opportunistic, especially given the book’s high list price. Hyatt knows her stuff, and these exercises will methodically help you develop your business as a musician; just don’t be disappointed by the page count. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Tommy James: Me, the Mob, and the Music

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The education and seduction of a rock ‘n’ roll hit maker

Tommy James came of age just as pop was giving way to rock ‘n’ roll. Elvis Presley’s performance on Ed Sullivan provided the initial epiphany, and five-days-a-week of American Bandstand, a job in a record store, junior high school talent shows and a prototypical garage band steeped him in both music and the music business. The early pages of this autobiography provide a great sense of what it was like to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band in the summer of 1963, from the joy of making music to the grind of trying to make a living. But once “Hanky Panky” caught fire in 1966, James was introduced to most of his fans as a fully-formed star; here you get to read about the dues he paid.

James’ rise to fame has been told before, but the details of his first single’s belated success – its initial failure, fluke resurrection in Pittsburgh, and canny national reissue on Roulette – is a great story. It’s also the lead-in to the book’s main thread: the difficult, father-son-like relationship between James and Roulette founder Morris Levy. In contrast to his co-dependency with Levy, his relationships with wives, children and band members weren’t nearly so sticky. James’ first wife and their son are ghosts in the narrative, nearly abandoned in his move to New York and divorced as he takes up with the Roulette Record secretary who eventually became his second wife. His second wife eventually meets a similar fate as he cheats on her and eventually moves on.

He forms and dispatches several iterations of the Shondells, with little expressed emotion. He fires half the band after they fight for monies owed in the wake of “I Think We’re Alone Now,” and is complicit in helping Levy cheat songwriters Ritchie Cordell and Bo Gentry by demanding songs they were pitching to artists whose labels would actually pay royalties. As with the affairs presaging his divorces, these episodes seem to be evidence of a self-centeredness learned from Levy rather than explicitly cruel behavior. But there’s surprisingly little remorse offered here, and what there is – five sentences when his first wife reappears for a divorce – doesn’t measure up to the affronts. Perhaps James wasn’t ready to share his innermost thoughts and personal feelings in an autobiography.

His telling of stories from the music side of his life is a great deal more compelling. Threaded throughout – and really, most successful musicians’ careers – is a surprising amount of luck; for James this includes the revival of “Hanky Panky” in Pittsburgh, the discovery of songs for two follow-up singles, a chance meeting with songwriter Ritchie Cordell, the creation of “Mirage,” and the incidental knowledge of arranger Jimmy Wisner. What you realize is that James put in the work from a very young age, studied and rehearsed, and put himself in a position to make these opportunities pay off. The crossing of paths may have been serendipitous, but the knowledge and ability to execute was hard-earned. The writing is more anecdotal than nuts and bolts accountings of music making, but you get a good feel for how James navigated changes in the industry to maintain a hit-making career across two decades.

As one might expect from a book entitled “Me, the Mob and the Music,” James spends a great deal of time writing about his relationship with Levy and his underworld associates. It’s not clear if he fully understands why his relationship with the godfather of the music industry became the center of his adult life, but it’s evident how it tainted his relationships with friends, wives, family and associates. Now twenty-four years sober and drug free, James seems at peace with who he was (characterizing his second divorce with “she was a good person, I was a flaming asshole”), and he’s still exciting fans with regular gigs. This isn’t the most personally revealing rock ‘n’ roll biography, but it adds some welcome detail to the career of Tommy James. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Richard Barone: Glow

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Eclectic collection of sounds from throughout Richard Barone’s career

Richard Barone was introduced to listeners as the lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the legendary Bongos. Their recording career spanned a handful of singles, two EPs and two albums, but their impact on the Hoboken music scene – and on Hoboken itself – was much larger. Upon the band’s dissolution, Barone developed a solo career that garnered critical notice and fan support, but flew below the radar of the mainstream record buying public. He released an album every few years for a decade, bookended by the live recordings Cool Blue Halo in 1987 and Between Heaven and Cello in 1997, and continued on to produce other artists and collaborate on theater projects. Though he oversaw reissues and compilations of earlier material, this is his first collection of all new solo material since 1993’s Clouds Over Eden.

What makes this album particularly special is Barone’s collaborations with producer Tony Visconti. Barone’s a well-known Bolan-ista, having covered “Mambo Sun” with the Bongos and “The Visit” on his first solo album (and “Girl” here). Tony Visconti was the producer of those seminal T. Rex sides, and had Barone had his way, Visconti would have produced the Bongos 1983 RCA debut. But the label declined, and the pair had to wait another twenty-seven years to collaborate. Surprisingly, for all of Barone’s glam-rock influences and Visconti’s glam-rock bona fides, the cache of vintage instruments they tapped (including E-bow, stylophone, mellotron, moog bass, chamberlain) and sonic references they make (such as the opening of “Candied Babies” borrowed from the Bongos’ “Zebra Club”), the results sound neither nostalgic nor out of time. Instead, the productions combine elements Barone’s explored throughout his career, including slithering glam rock, power-pop chime, cello-lined chamber pop, and punchy dance floor beats.

The lyrics sway from weighty contemplation of middle age to the title track’s celebratory call for shucking off emotional limitations and living freely in the moment. Barone is neither morose in his backward glancing assessments nor blindly exuberant in his forward looking proscriptions, but seems to be discovering original emotional territory in new experience; even the fatalism of “Yet Another Midnight” is expectant rather than downcast. The notions of return and unspoken feelings are threaded through several songs, including a visit to old stomping grounds in “Radio Silence” and the uncertain romantic resurrection of a co-write with Paul Williams, “Silence is Our Song.” The latter production is shorn of Visconti’s ornamentation, pared to guitar, piano and cello for a live performance on Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s Delight. A second co-write, with Jill Sobule, yields the terrific “Odd Girl Out” and its story of a pre-Stonewall lesbian.

Visconti’s rock productions are ornate and imaginative, though on “Sanctified” the volume interrupts the inviting, quiet groove established with the introduction’s combination of voice, strummed acoustic guitar and mellotron. The album closes with a lush instrumental version of the title track, finishing with a lovely coda of violin and cello. Barone was obviously quite excited to finally work with Visconti, and he sounds energized and vital throughout. His new songs retain the hooks and melodic innovations of his earlier work, and his lyrics have grown concrete in character and concept while remaining poetic in their words. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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John Mellencamp: No Better Than This

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Mellencamp visits country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll ghosts

John Mellencamp is an artist whose depth continues to impress and surprise. His populist anthems of the 1980s demonstrated heartland roots that Springsteen could only write of, and even as he was charting with “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” and “Lonely Ol’ Night,” he was filling out his albums with the social commentary of “Rain on the Scarecrow” and co-founding Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. His commentary continued to mature and turned naturally introspective, and though he continued to place singles on the charts, his albums became increasingly whole in tone. He explored urban soul sounds, returned to rock ‘n’ roll basics, explored historic folk and blues songs, and wrote through a dark streak of social and eprsonal commentary on his last few studio albums.

In many ways, the winding path of his career, the early malice of the record industry, the misunderstanding of music critics, the fight to regain his name and his artistic bona fides, is the road that led to this collection of original songs. The roots introduced on Lonesome Jubilee and explored on Big Daddy are now taken for granted, both in Mellencamp’s music and across the Americana scene. The mountain sounds, slap bass and vintage blues tones are no longer seen as affectations or anthropological explorations, but as the foundation that’s always underlined Mellencamp’s music. On this new, brilliantly executed album, Mellencamp visits and records at three historical locations: the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Sun Studios in Memphis and room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.

There’s a bit of fetishism in toting along mono analog equipment, lining up on the marks laid down by Sam Phillips, and reinstalling a wood floor in the hotel room, but the connections made to the musicians who first sounded out these spaces famous was worth the effort. Mellencamp doesn’t attempt to raise ghosts as much as he amplifies the echoes that have always threaded through his music. The slap bass of “Coming Down the Road” catches the excitement of mid-50s Sun records without imitating them. Best of all, the minimalistic live recording – no mixing or overdubs – is mostly shorn of T-Bone Burnett’s influences as a producer. What this record (and yes, it is available on vinyl) shows is that it’s not the recording, it’s what’s being recorded. The primitive sound serves to focus the listener’s ear on the artist’s lyrics and moods.

Mellencamp wrestles with the existence of life-after-death, opting to appreciate his time on Earth in the opening “Save Some Time to Dream,” and taking a more laissez-faire attitude (“I’ll see you in the next world / If there is really one”) in the defeated “A Graceful Fall.” The latter’s misfortune would play more darkly if not for Mellencamp’s large, near Vaudevillian vocal, as would the self-pity of “No One Cares About Me,” were it not sung to a country-rockabilly backing and tagged with an optimistic hint of redemption. That optimism segues into the album’s most touching song, “Love at First Sight,” which is matched by the heartbreaking wistfulness of the 50-years-later “Thinking About You.” The opening lyric of the latter proclaims “It’s not my nature / To be nostalgic at all,” but it’s only a device within the song’s story, as Mellencamp medicates on missed opportunities, unfulfilled desires and youthful lessons that only become clear with age.

This album shouldn’t be as surprising as it turns out to be. The elements have been evident throughout Mellencamp’s career, but never before has he so thoroughly leaned on his influences or strained them through such a vintage sound. The edges of his voice mate perfectly with the live recording and mono production’s punch to make these performances weathered exhalations of emotion rather than manicured studio creations. This is a great example of how the artifice that multi-track recording, overdubbing and other studio manipulations have interjected themselves between artists and listeners; and when an artist is really digging into himself, his life and the history that’s fueled his music, the more immediate the recording the better. These songs capture a reflective time in Mellencamp’s life and the recordings serve to amplify his every thought. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Them Bird Things: Wildlike Wonder

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’60s garage rockers meet twenty-first century Finns

While 1960s garage rock has had its revival in Northern European with bands like the Nomads, this may be the first collaboration that actually mates first-generation American garage rockers to twenty-first century European players. The unusual collaboration brings together Steve Blodgett and Mike Brassard of the upstate New York Mike & The Ravens with a quintet of Finns who radically rework the Americans’ songs. Their initial collaboration, 2009’s Fly, Them Bird Things, Fly, was a more traditional pop-rock record than this sophomore outing; here the band balances electric and acoustic guitars and works with a country-tinged sound that has mandolin providing staccato accents against Arttu Tolonen’s moody lap steel washes. Vocalist Salla Day sings Dylan-y nasal with Tolonen blowing harmonica on the thumping blues “Silver Oldsmobile” and Timo Vikkula’s intricately picked guitar figures on “Raised in Bangor” bring to mind Clarence White. Jake Holmes’ previously unreleased “Marionette” is refashioned here in a slinky Kate Bush style, and a few songs, most notably “Birmingham” and the raga-like drone of “East Colorado Plain,” find a nice psychedelic groove. Perhaps the most bewitching aspect of this album is that even when sung and played by twenty-first century Finns, and even with the new textures and crisp modern production, Blodgett and Brassard’s songs connect across time and space to their garage rock and sunshine psych of the 60s. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

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Ola Belle Reed: Rising Sun Melodies

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Pioneering Appalachian singer, songwriter and string player

Ola Belle Reed is destined for repeated rediscovery. An Appalachian singer steeped in the mix of folk styles born of America’s melting pot, she was discovered at her family’s country music park, by 1950s folk revivalists. By that time she’d already been playing and singing for several decades, and her national emergence at the 1969 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife showcased a talent that was pure in its folk roots and mature in its expression. Her appearances resulted in recordings for the Folkways label and a 1976 audio documentary, My Epitaph. Her songs have been recorded by Marty Stuart, Del McCoury, the Louvin Brothers and Hot Rize, but it’s her own versions that best capture the folk tradition that she so fully embodied. Belle looked, dressed, talked and performed as a folk musician – part of a folk community rather than a commercially-bred folk scene.

Reed was bred among musicians: her father was a fiddler, one uncle ran a singing school and another taught her to play clawhammer banjo. Her father, uncle and aunt started a band in the early decades of the twentieth century, and Ola Belle and her brother Alex played in the North Carolina Ridge Runners before forming their own band in the late 1940s. Her husband Bud was also a musician, and his family combined with Reed’s to open the New River Ranch country music park. The park hosted most of Nashville’s major stars and many of Wheeling’s best acts, with Ola and Alex’s New River Boys and Girls serving as the opening act and house band. Oddly, at the crucial moment when Gei Zantzinger arrived to record the group, Alex chose not to participate – leaving the recording to be billed under Ola Belle’s name.

This set of nineteen tracks collects eleven from her previously released Folkways LPs and adds eight previously unreleased cuts from 1972 and 1976 archival recordings. The titles include Belle’s best-known originals, including the oft-covered “I’ve Endured” and “High on the Mountain,” as well as terrific renditions of fiddle tunes, mountain songs and nineteenth century standards that include “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” “Foggy Mountain Top,” and “Look Down That Lonesome Road.” Her son David Reed provides harmony on Ralph Stanley’s gospel “I Am the Man, Thomas,” but its her solo vocals that show how thoroughly she could imbue a lyric with aching loneliness. As she says in introducing “Undone in Sorrow,” “When I do a song that is as old as the hills and has the oldest flavor, as Betsy said, ‘If it’s a sad sad sad mournful song, when I get done with it, it’ll be pitiful’.”

Reed’s strength as a musician was matched by her humanitarianism as a Christian, both of which you can hear in the life force with which she leads her group through the disc-closing (and previously unreleased) rendition of “Here Comes the Light.” As she’s quoted saying in the 40-page booklet: “That’s what I am saying, that you cannot separate your music from your lifestyle. You cannot separate your lifestyle, your religion, and your politics from your music, it’s part of life.” Jeff Place’s extensive liner notes do a terrific job of telling Reed’s story through quotes, interviews and archival photos. If you haven’t already been clued in to Reed’s original recordings, this is an exemplary way to make their acquaintance. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Ola Belle Music Festival

Heart: Red Velvet Car

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Ann and Nancy Wilson rock back to the glory days of Heart

Heart was long ago reduced to Ann and Nancy Wilson and support staff; fans that latched onto the band in its first-flush of mid-70s fame may never have made the turn that left Roger Fisher, Steve Fossen and Michael Derosier behind. But new listeners climbed on board for the band’s mid-80s renaissance, and together with a helping of longtime fans, the band sustained into the ‘90s. The sisters worked on side and solo projects, but recaptured the rock ‘n’ roll heart of Heart with 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling. Six years later, with Ann Wilson’s 2007 solo debut in the rear view mirror, the duo is back with Ben Mink in tow as co-producer and co-instrumentalist.

Together with a rhythm section of Ben Smith (drums) and Ric Markmann (bass), Heart is more of a concept of the Wilson sister’s musicality than an on-going concern as a working band. Despite that, the productions sound surprisingly fluid and whole. The songs reach back to the band’s 1970s folk-influenced rock glories, skipping past the sounds of their MTV years. Ann Wilson doesn’t hit the spine-tingling high notes of her younger years, but she’s a cannier singer these days, able to find drama within her limitations and deploying the grit in her voice to convey emotion and passion. Nancy Wilson is still charming as vocalist, singing sweetly on the country-tinged “Hey You.”

The Wilson’s lay down the line on “WTF” with hard-charging guitars and a lyric full of angry recriminations. Ann Wilson’s “what’s the matter with you?” is all the more powerful for its near under-the-breath delivery, and the thick middle part is an interesting layer cake of muddily echoed vocals and sharp, insistent rhythm. The album plays up its dynamic range, slamming rock tunes into the gentle abyss of string-lined blues, building the urgency and tension of songs as they lead to dissipated resolutions. Memories of the Wilson’s childhood Seattle are heard in “Queen City,” and though the album isn’t themed on Autumnal years (Ann turned 60 this year, Nancy 56), nostalgia informs optimistic forward plans as much as it contemplates earlier lessons.

At times the album’s instrumental backings outshine the lyrics, with the rhythm section augmented by great guitar figures and Ann Wilson’s vocals riffing on phrases rather than telling stories. The appreciation of “Sunflower” feels like a reverie that was better left in its personal moment and the fear in “Death Valley” doesn’t have the palpable heat of its subject. Better are the Zeppelin-styled folkloric rock of “Safronia’s Mark” and the emotional closer “Sand.” It’s on the last tune that the Wilsons seem to connect most deeply with the lyrics, with Ann straining into her upper register. This may not be the exuberant first press of a rock band, but the Wilsons still have the inclination to rock, and do so with genuine fire. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Allan Sherman: Songs for Swingin’ Livers Only!

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Mid-60s song parodist returns to his Jewish roots

After gaining fame with his 1962 debut My Son the Folk Singer and launching a #2 hit with 1963’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!,” Allan Sherman embarked on a series of high-profile projects and guest spots. By the time he recorded this 1964 release, the mood of the nation had changed radically with the assassination of JFK; the light-hearted parody that felt so effervescent in 1963 seemed a shade more superfluous in the shadows of 1964. In an effort to reconnect with his original audience, Sherman reintroduced the Jewish-rooted humor he’d largely abandoned over the course of several albums. His clever writing and ear for a tune were still sharp, but the record buying public wasn’t as hungry for silliness as they’d been two years earlier. Stories of gluttony, in-laws, modern pharmaceuticals, subway conductors and Jewish Lotharios are still funny, but what was once party entertainment – Sherman having honed his act in impromptu performances at friends’ homes – was now performance laden with expectations. There are many nice moments here, including the memorably anti-consumerist “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas,” but five albums along, the change in national zeitgeist seems to have dimmed Sherman’s fire. Collectors’ Choice straight-up reissue includes new liner notes by Dr. Demento. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Allan Sherman: My Son, the Nut

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Early ‘60s song parodist hits his commercial peak

Sherman’s third album, released in 1963 and recorded less than a year after his debut, was his most solid collection of songs, and spun off his most famous composition, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” As on the previous albums there’s a live studio audience, but with his humor now a known quanity, these feel more like staged performances than impromptu party appearances. The applause and laughs are genuine and well deserved, but they’re polite rather than the uncontrolled punctuations of his first album. Traces of his earlier Jewish humor can still be heard here, but the broader reach of My Son, the Celebrity is the real pay off. The opening treatise on the French crown, “You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie,” is both a funny history lesson and a rocking good time. Sherman’s musical director, Lou Busch, continued to write serious arrangements to contrast with Sherman’s hilarious lyrics, but he also managed to mock musical icons of the time, slipping Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” into the opener and revving up a parody of “Rag Mop” for Sherman’s “Rat Fink.” Sherman unleashes his imagination on the complexities of early computerization, modern medicine, international cuisine, and suburban vexations. The album’s crown jewel, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp),” is like a musical version of a Bob Newhart phone call. Even here, among the numerous hazards that befall the summer campers, Sherman manages to work in an intellectual reference to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The single won a Grammy and peaked at #2 on the Billboard chart, and seemed to be everywhere in the summer of 1963. Collectors’ Choice straight-up reissue includes new liner notes by Dr. Demento. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]