Author Archives: Brett Rosenberg

Welcome to another installment of Brett’s Dollar Records!

After curiously pitching their cassettes (always great for some vintage blank tapes still in their shrinkwrap), The East Nashville Goodwill last month redeemed itself by adding a few crates of vinyl. Much of what’s on display is religious music, and much of that is local! Yesterday, I scored (for 99 cents) It Is Good by something called Keith Brudevold & Children Sing. We have here the good work of some nice man from Franklin, singing self-penned Christian nursery rhymes, backed by a makeshift choir of youngsters from Madision’s Stratton Elementary. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Brudevold, the vocalist, may have been made in the image of Fred Schneider. The lead-off track, “It Is Good,” is as creepy as it is catchy.

Keith Brudevold and Children Sing | It Is Good

Now, this may be hep enough for the average 6-year-old, but to touch the souls of all those East Nashville dollar bin scavengers, The Lord will have to try something a LITTLE more groovy. Enter Natural High (99 cents), which proclaims itself “a folk musical about God’s Son” on the album art. Production value puts this around ’72 or so, and the intent of this Waco, Texas team of composers would seem to be: strip Jesus Christ Superstar of its secularity and girl-on-Son-of-God action, substituting instead an up-with-people, anti-drug message. Well…I bet it’s good when you’re high. Put this one in that sparesely-populated bin of accidentally-twisted, proto-They-Might-Be-Giants music (along with The Beach Boys’ ultra-twisted 1977 masterpiece Love You).

Ralph Carmichael and Kurt Kaiser | Sequence of Events

This week in Brett’s Dollar records we meet French chantreuse Claudine Longet. Make sure you check out her wiki page when your done… it’s quite a story.

1960: Actress/singer/dollar-bin-regular Claudine Longet gets her big break in Vegas when crooner Andy Williams (32) spots Claudine (18) on the side of the road having a bit of car trouble. Williams, sensing danger, picks up the teenager, and, by next Christmas, the two are married. Claudine–a petite, French beauty whose big, brown eyes seem to broadcast loops of startled confusion–begins landing bit parts on television dramas, while singing standards in her trademark Paris whisper on her husband’s program. In 1966, Claudine’s airy take on Jobim’s “Meditation” is the highlight of the Season One finale of NBC’s Run For Your Life. The whisper tickles the eardrums of A&M honcho Herb Alpert, to the extent that he signs her in 1967, releasing “Meditation” as the first single. It flops, but the resulting album, Claudine, flies up the charts like a speeding bullet.

Claudine Longet | Lazy Summer Night

Claudine’s formula is repeated for the next four A&M releases: a song or two from popular cinema; some hip tunes (Beatles, Motown, Buffy St. Marie), and a couple numbers in her native tongue. Arrangements are MOR, the singing is 77 percent breath. At best, Claudine’s music is like Isobel Campbell doing sixties karaoke. At worst, it’s like being shot in the abdomen.

Claudine Longet | Everybody’s Talkin’

1970’s Run Wild, Run Free (purchased for 99 cents at The Groove in East Nashville) is about the end of the line for this sort of thing. The selection of freewheelin’, love generation pop hits (A schizophrenically arranged version of “Everybody’s Talkin’” opens the record) is wroght with all the sincerity and insight of Frank Sinatra belting out “See What Tomorrow Brings.” The two songs from Abbey Road are classic dollar bin camp. There’s something not-quite-right about this peppy rendition Harrison’s “Something.” Too many bubbles in the champagne. “Golden Slumbers” is destroyed (murdered, really) as arranger Nick De Caro amputates “Carry That Weight” from the structure and attempts to construct a generic, full-fledged song out of the show-stopping McCartney Side-Two fragment. It’s terrible, but as invaluable for entertaining guests. Listening to the double-tracked-whisper-round-fade-tag here, I can’t help but Wonder: what might Claudine have done with “Junior’s Farm?”

Unfortunately, we’ll never know, as Longet’s career was cut short when she was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman outside her Dakota apartment in December of 1980.

Welcome to the second installment of Brett’s Dollar Records. Brett scours the bins for treasures and shares them with us each Thursday. This week: Barefoot Jerry “Watchin’ TV”

The more old music I listen to, the more I believe there really is no “good” or “bad.” Some stuff, I’m compelled to hear again. Other stuff, I’m not. Cruising the dollar bin, I’ve come to seek out that phenomenon where a “bad” album is at least misguided in enough directions to make me wonder what the artist could have been thinking. By the time I have handle on that, I may have listened the album enough times to get used to what’s wrong with it.

Barefoot Jerry | Watchin TV

Barefoot Jerry’s Watchin’ TV (purchased for 99 cents at The Groove in East Nashville) may be the dumbest album I own. The title (and cover–see above) alone puts it in the top ten. Then then there’s the title track, a Little Feat-flavored paean to the pre-cable stoner tradition of switching on a radio, muting the television, and fucking with the vertical and horizontal hold dials until the picture is an eye-strain-inducing, psychedelic mess best suited to smoking dirt weed while listening to a band from Madison called Barefoot Jerry.

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