sam the sham

There's the widely held if rather snooty view that fart noises and belching are only amusing to adolescent boys. This rather ignores the obvious: that there will always be adolescent boys, and even more people who have been adolescent boys. Which perhaps explains the enduring if low appeal of this outing by Mad magazine's Alfred E Neuman....
> fromthevaults/3235/alfred-e-neuman-its-a-gas-1963/

Mainman behind Superturtle Darren McShane certainly has prior form, among other things he formed Chainsaw Masochist (on Flying Nun, for those old enough to remember) and more recently he was in Figure 60 as well as having been a sound engineer -- which is how he met some of the fellow travelers here (bassist Ben Furniss from the Broken...
> music/3223/superturtle-about-the-sun-ode/

It's not unusual for studio experiments to end up on records, less common that they become the record itself -- as was the case with this single. To backtrack a bit. The successful British songwriter Graham Gouldman who had penned hits for Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today), the Yardbirds (For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You)...
> fromthevaults/3194/hotlegs-neanderthal-man-1970/

Not everything in life is serious and Henry Phillips takes a skewed view of the world. The title track of his album On the Shoulders of Freaks notes that all those great Greek philosophers "had a thing for little boys", that Katherine the Great enjoyed large animals, Hemingway put a bullet through his head, Salvador Dali's paintings...
> fromthevaults/3177/henry-phillips-the-bitch-song-1995/

Britain's Ivy League were one of those bands which appeared in the wake of the Beat Boom and the Beatles and scored a couple of quick hits -- Funny How Love Can Be, then Tossing and Turning -- in '65. And that would seem to be it because a couple of key members left and . . . But there is more to their story that that. The band were...
> fromthevaults/2987/the-ivy-league-four-and-twenty-hours-1966/

I'm sure the heavily tattooed Curran from Austin, Texas wouldn't make any claims of great originality (although he does pen more than half this album, his song titles include Reel Rock Party, Psycho, Lusty L'il Lucy, Filthy and so on). But he simply slices off large and rowdily enjoyable slabs of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Little Richard, Gene...
> music/3064/nick-curran-and-the-lowlifes-reform-school-girl-eclecto-grooves-southbound/

In 1980 EMI released an excellent double vinyl on the Joker imprint entitled The Easybeats: Absolute Anthology 1965-69. It might well have been titled The Rise and Fall of a Pop Group because across 43 tracks in chronological order it traced Australia's Easybeats from their first tentative attempts at being the antipodean Beatles, through...
> fromthevaults/2903/the-easybeats-sorry-1966/

The Twist wasn't the first dance craze of the pop era but it was certainly the biggest -- and the last. When Chubby Checker demonstrated the dance on American television in mid 1960 -- "Just pretend you're wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower, and putting out a cigarette with both feet" -- the simple...
> fromthevaults/2900/hank-ballard-the-twist-1958/

There has been a long tradition of mocking the pretentions of rock and pop singers, which isn't that hard. Many of them take themselves very seriously. When National Lampoon for example got stuck into a Pink Floyd-like musician who wanted to create a massive rock opera (on their '75 album Goodbye Pop, helmed by Christopher Guest of Spinal...
> fromthevaults/2814/peter-sellers-the-trumpet-volunteer-1958/

It wasn't really the name of the song that Sakamoto recorded, but that hardly mattered. When this catchy piece of MOR pop from Japan made it to the West it enjoyed enormous success. Sakamoto, who was 22, was the first and last Japanese artist to top the Billboard charts. It was also his first and last international success. Back home of...
> fromthevaults/2922/kyu-sakamoto-sukiyaki-1963/

Little Brenda Lee -- who stood 4'9" -- was never a threat. Not to girls in her audience. "My image wasn't one of a heartbreaker," she once said. "I was the little fat girl your mother didn't mind you playing with." When Lee went to number one with this powerful and aching performance she was one of the few women --...
> fromthevaults/2852/brenda-lee-im-sorry-1960/

As Nick Tosche revealed in his remarkable biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, Dean Martin didn't have to try hard at anything: he was good looking, could sing whatever was put in front of him, was a natural straight man and comedian, and he'd just turn up on a movie set and do his lines with charm, ease and utter...
> fromthevaults/2817/dean-martin-my-rifle-my-pony-and-me-1959/

The British Invasion of the mid Sixties saw any number of bands shoot into and out of the spotlight very quickly: Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Freddie and the Dreamers . . . And the Ivy League (John Carter, Ken Lewis and Perry Ford) who had been session singers but scored two self-penned hits -- Funny How Love Can Be and Tossing and...
> fromthevaults/2851/the-ivy-league-for-and-twenty-hours-1967/

With Will Birch's biography and the film of his life Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Andy Serkis as Ian), there is something of a revival and re-appreciation of Ian Dury going on, a decade after his death at age 57. Dury came to the punk era as someone more than a decade older than most performers, and he had considerable stage experience:...
> fromthevaults/2853/ian-dury-razzle-in-my-pocket-1977/

Blues and jazz artists often used coded language to get their lyrics past record companies and radio programmers, so you would get a song like When I'm In My Tea (by Jo-Jo Adams, 1946) about marijuana or Dope Head Blues by Victoria Spivey about cocaine. Sex was everywhere and there is no mistaking the meaning of songs like Poon Tang (by the...
> fromthevaults/2809/dirty-red-mother-fuyer-1947/

For someone who was only semi-professional, tiny Lesley Gore (5' 2") was astonishingly busy in the Sixties: Between '63 and '69 she released 29 singles (19 of them went Top 100) and eight albums - outside of greatest hits packages. And she had some great hits: her first was It's My Party ("and I'll cry if I want to") when she...
> fromthevaults/2830/lesley-gore-you-dont-own-me-1963/

The offspring of Hollywood were just as swept up in Beatlemania as anyone. The two sons of comedian Soupy Sales -- Hunt and Tony, drums and bass respectively -- were in Tony and the Tigers who appeared on Hullabaloo and had a couple of records out . . . although went on to more interesting things later when they joined Todd Rundgren, Iggy...
> fromthevaults/2847/gary-lewis-and-the-playboys-this-diamond-ring-1965/

Whatever his style was, fame wasn't interested in embracing it. The closest this rockabilly blues screamer -- who started in the mid Fifties -- came to wider recognition was when the Cramps covered this song. But for Hasil (pronounced "hassle"), he just had to make do with juke joints and bars, and being a punk rocker long before...
> fromthevaults/2849/hasil-adkins-she-said-1966/

Jackie De Shannon (born Sharon Lee Myers) had great hits and an even better life: As a teenager in Illinois she recorded and wrote a few songs; Eddie Cochran heard a couple of her country tunes and got her to California where she teamed up with Sharon Sheeley to write (notably Dum Dum for Brenda Lee and The Great Impostor for the Fleetwoods);...
> fromthevaults/2848/jackie-de-shannon-she-dont-understand-him-like-i-do-1964/

When this out-of-the-blue single raced around the globe at the height of Beatlemania it sounded like a typically gimmicky hit of the period (the band name, Sam wearing a turban and the group dressed like Arabs didn't exactly deny it) and you might have expected them to disappear immediately. But they didn't. They came back with a slightly...
> fromthevaults/2796/sam-the-sham-and-the-pharoahs-wooly-bully-1964/