January 09, 2008
Easy Listening Acid Trip
If you decide to follow Robin's prescription for sanity (see 2nd post below), here's some stuff to listen to. Compiled by George Petros:
Over the course of 13 years I collected the tracks comprising this compilation. Most came from LPs and 8-Tracks that I found in thrift stores and at garage sales all across America. Some came from the LP collections of Joseph Lanza, author of Elevator Music; Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore; Athan Maroulis, proprietor of Stardust Records; and the illustrator Jim Blanchard. Some came from various Lounge-style CDs issued in the mid-90s.
I edited tracks in Peak on a G4. There was no “cleaning up” of the sound; I eliminated only the most blatant scratches and pops. Although many tracks came from beat-up vinyl, or from fragile 8-Tracks, or from umpteenth-generation cassettes, or from out-of-print budget CDs, the sound quality is generally good. Unfortunately, many songs didn’t make it in due to their damaged fidelity.
I was searching for druggy and/or exotic Pop songs reinterpreted by contemporaneous Easy Listening artists, from 1966 through 1971. A few compositions herein pre-date that era, but the performers presented them in the pseudo-psychedelic style of the day.
Go here to listen.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 02:38 PM | Permalink
Comments
Abbas:
I know that I risk giving up my age.
But my summers in the 70's at my parents'summer cottage in Canada were filled with the "music" from a local radio station (the only one with a strong enough signal) that was also too cash-strapped to pay for original licensing, and so played cheesy, anonymous covers: station was a.k.a. CHAY 97 Huronia.
And so it played easy listening covers, such as those collected here.
I have sent the link to my sisters and reminded them that while a stimulant was needed to really endure/enjoy them, since my father yelled if we turned it off, our remedy was of the local herbacious kind.
Acid with this music would have been a very bad trip!
As it was, we laughed a lot.
Thanks for the memories.
And once we burn them to a CD and give them to our Dad?
Well, provided his hearing lasts, he will coast down his own memory lane of a generic love for the "classics".
That you, Abbas, have a resonance with these cheap and awful elevator-music covers just proves to me, again, that you are my brother from the same planet.
Kb
Posted by: KB | Jan 10, 2008 12:44:00 AM
Oh. My. Gawd.
THANK YOU.
Posted by: Richard Cravens | Jan 10, 2008 8:25:52 AM
Oh, Robin. A superb chapter in the history of taste. All the stuff I thought I'd never hear again, if only because I didn't want to. This is genius-level microsociology, enabling time travel with crucially skewed settings: walking into a 1973 book group that's discussing _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_, attending an Edna Hibbel art opening, brunching in a Hyatt Regency with a slowly revolving restaurant...much, much late Mid-century hell.
Someday when he has time, I hope George Petros will turn his attention to the 2008 equivalent of this selection. Unless decades of perspective make up his entire method -- and they could not -- then there's an intelligence at work here that could truffle out post-millennial treatments of grunge and ska hits, with the most formidable refinements consisting in updated easy listening versions of original easy listening. I would love to ask an arranger -- is there a program that could create easy listening out of anything? Stockhausen, say?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 10, 2008 10:55:03 AM
"walking into a 1973 book group that's discussing _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_, attending an Edna Hibbel art opening, brunching in a Hyatt Regency with a slowly revolving restaurant...much, much late Mid-century hell"
My hat is off to you--
a perfect descriiption, that made me wince.
How about a elevator version of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring?
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jan 11, 2008 9:50:34 PM
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