My thanks to those who have stuck with my blog--My long absence was due to two factors: 1) bad allergies (it's ragweed time), 2 the fact that I had a post all ready to go, only to realize that it was already at the blog. Oops. Posted it in 2020.
I may not have even discovered my error had I not found a preexisting Living Guitars Shindig Zip file in my Music folder. "Don't tell me..." I thought. But I had.
And today, we have the Now People. Er, I mean, now we have the Today People. An outfit which has two credits at Discogs--this LP, and its follow-up, More Million Sellers (also 1969). All tracks having been recorded in England. And now you know as much about the Today People as I do!
Like most albums of this type, the emphasis is on "pop" instead of rock, though we do get Ob-La-Di..., Fire (ugh!), and Mony, Mony. And I only barely remember Fire from its Top 40 days. Maybe my brain mercifully suppressed the memory. (Having said that, the "You're gonna burn..." part was used very effectively by the late horror movie host The Ghoul.)
These are all 1968 hits, far as I know. And I vividly remember not caring for the 1968 Top 40 at the time. But, in retrospect, the 1968 Top 40 wasn't all that bad. I think the main irritant was Those Were the Days, which was being featured on an every-other-song basis on AM radio. I despised the song then, and my opinion has not changed with time. As to why I despise it, who can say? Any reasons I might offer would be purely subjective. Opinions, after all, are belief statements. They're not empirically testable. Well, save to the extent that you can "observe" that I despise Those Were the Days.
And why did they have to go with This Guy's in Love With You? It's one of the few Burt songs that does nothing for me, including in this rendition. However, I'm sure no one decided, "This is a Burt song Lee isn't crazy about, so let's feature it." Or... did someone? (Theremin music)
Fire, meanwhile, is a forecast of awful things to come in rock, though for some reason I lack much back-in-the-day memory of it. Did my brain suppress the experience?
Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Harper Valley P.T.A., and Little Arrows have their virtues, however, and I recall that I loved the guitar licks on P.T.A. I remember an outbreak of fellow elementary school boys mimicking it. So, maybe my memory of disliking the 1968 Top 40 isn't totally accurate. (Of course, in real life, there are no degrees of "accurate.")
And I like What a Wonderful World, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Love Is Blue, though I was, at the time, more into youth-oriented pop. The best thing about this album is the expertise of the covers--the excellence of the musicianship.
The follow-up, More Million Sellers (also 1969), actually looks like something I'd genuinely dig. Goodbye, Get Back, Games People Play, Israelites... But that one has yet to make a thrift showing.
And some of the local Goodwills have stopped putting out vinyl for store display--they've chosen to auction it on line. And any sensible collector wouldn't hesitate to spend money on ungraded thrift vinyl, especially minus any chance to examine it. At any rate, once the news got out that vinyl was collectible, this was interpreted by unsophicated minds as "Records are worth a million-billion dollars." The auto-generated false dichotomy goes something like, "Vinyl has no particular value/Vinyl is worth tons of dough." No middle choice--just that ridiculous either/or. It's also a consequence of the human love of overgeneralizing. All A are B. "All vinyl is valuable." Or, all A are not B. "All vinyl is not valuable." Antony Flew's solution? "Not all A are B." As in, "Not all vinyl is valuable." True proposition.
Oh, the Today people. Here they are. At concerts, were they introduced as, "Tonight, the Today People!"?
DOWNLOAD: The Million Sellers by the Today People (Vocalion VL73868, 1969)
Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
This Guy's in Love With You
Fire
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Those Were the Days
Harper Valley P.T.A.
What a Wonderful World
Love Is Blue (L'Amour Est Bleu)
Little Arrows
Mony, Mony
Lee