The Orioles are tops all the way and so are you, my good friends. Happy New Year, everybody.
The Orioles - “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
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The Winkies were a short-lived UK band who collaborated at one point with Brian Eno but released only one album. And in honor of our Vice President’s ever-judicious remarks at Gerald Ford’s funeral this special evening, I’m gonna go ahead and march in step. Coincidence: Ford was still President when this came out.
The Winkies - “Trust in Dick”
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The Sunrays are the group that overbearing Beach Boys dad Murry Wilson started producing after the BB’s asked him to kindly stop being their manager. The Sunrays’ records are thus a unique mixture of sixties teen rock, grandiose production and cornball lyric and repertoire ideas that sound, in fact, like they came from someone’s old man. The glorious “I Live for the Sun” is their most famous song (I remember first hearing it as a teenager in ‘82 or so as a cover version on the Surf Punks’ My Beach record), but another one of my big Sunrays favorites is the fun and atmospheric “Hi How Are You,” released only as a single in ‘66.
The Sunrays - “Hi How Are You”
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Rackstraw Downes is a British painter who has communicated Texas to me clearer and more powerfully than any artist specializing in any other art form. And he does this in spite of (or because of?) the fact that he’s a no-nonsense duplicator of images as he sees them. I’ll post a better-sized image or two of his stuff later.
The Kingston Trio - “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
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I like this original album cover art much more than the generic version currently in print. (The current one, incidentally, does give credit to Terry Robb on the cover. The original just mentions him on the back.)
John Fahey - “Christmas Time’s a-Coming”
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My list of ten favorite Christmas records changes a bit every year, but here’s how it looks now. Definitely reveals me as a bit of a slowed-down geezer. This realization hit me pretty hard last month when the piano music in an airport shuttle van caught my ear and I asked the driver what it was. “Piano Therapy,” he replied.
The Kingston Trio - The Last Month of the Year (1960)
Sy Mann - Switched on Santa (1970)
A Child’s Christmas Revels (1993)
The Ventures - The Ventures’ Christmas Album (1966)
Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel - The Gift (1989)
The Beach Boys - The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album (1964)
John Fahey - The New Possibility (1968)
David Grisman - David Grisman’s Acoustic Christmas (1983)
Phil Spector - A Christmas Gift for You (1963)
Small-Torres Guitar Duo - Winterlight (1993)
Here’s one of the three snappy instrumentals included on this classic.
Buck Owens and His Buckaroos - “Christmas Morning”
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