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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
I've never seen the movie, but the exploitation song Burt Bacharach wrote with Hal David for The Blob is in the Bacharach box set, and I'm glad of it, with its catchy guitar licks, super tasty high-vibrato sax, shuffling cha-cha in the bass & drums, utterly anonymous bland-TV-theme male baritone vocal (studio band credited as The Five Blobs!), and one of David's most economical lyrics, here in full:
Beware of the Blob
It creeps
And leaps
And glides and slides across the floor
And through
The door
And all along the walls
A blotch
A splotch
Be careful of the Blob
The Bacharach box overflows with quirky great melody & drama & lyric & tone color -- superb arrangements. The song that melted me today, several listens in a row, was the 1970 Dionne W. epic "Check Out Time," Burt in Broadway-meets-Brian-Wilson mode, elegant dramatic melody with the most immense production of his I've ever heard, real luscious Brian-esque cascade of power-sonics. Made the hair on my arm stand up. And a fine, fit David lyric, the pained precise soliloquy of a woman fleeing a loveless marriage.
Bacharach: one of the great melodists.
* * *
This afternoon I bumped into the woman who booked my band's show a couple of weeks ago, part of a monthly first-Friday-night single-cover-charge event that runs in the neighborhood of my workplace. She said that the venue we played is probably going to back out of the events next year. The event draws too many parents with children who don't order enough food or drink enough alcohol, and they make less money than they do when they don't have music. The booker didn't single me out, but what she said applied to me -- the place was packed, and there were a lot of parents and children there for the first 2 sets. Kids got kicked out for the third set, when the kitchen closed and the whole venue became a bar.
I had to smile. The job of a musician is to attract drinkers to bars. My band did not succeed in doing this. This does not surprise me. Made me wonder whether I'll ever have the chance to play 3 sets with a band again. Would love to, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen. At my advanced age, I'm damned lucky I had the chance to do it at all.
The music business is a foreign country. I enjoy being a tourist. Hope I get to do it again.
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