Shellac Shanty

After working a 50 hour week, including a Friday night shift followed by a Saturday day shift, I'm wiped out. Oh yea, include the having to call a plumber because someone left a perfectly wonderful pork shoulder roast out on the counter all night then decided to put all the remains down the garbage disposal. $110 later....

I did get to taste some of the roast though. It was good.

We'll start with the Clanker of the Week. This was an absolute BOOGER to get cleaned up to any kind of hearable file. Took at least 4 days of cramming in time to try this, and finally on the third attempt I got something workable.

The song is "Rock Love" by a group called The Three Belles. The recording is on a 7-inch polystyrene 78rpm disc on the Bell label. Yes, Bell records, same label that brought you groups like Bread and the soundtrack of Godspell. Bell did these right at the end of the 78 era (late 50s in the US), and had absolutely NO 'name' artists. Why these sold, I'll never know. This release is actually one of the more 'rocking' releases on Bell, most of their 78s were the usual dentist-chair pap (or poop, according to your taste). The musicians on Bell at that time were pretty much all house groups, and nothing of any real noteworthy distinction. In other words, Drek-on-78.

To show you how much of a challenge this was to get cleaned, here's an excerpt of the disc BEFORE any processing: "Rock Love" - pre-processing excerpt.

Why did I spend all this time working on a disc like that? To show all you fine folks that I'm dedicated. Or should be institutionalized maybe (grin).

Just hearing the lyrics makes me wonder, is this a love song? A gospel song? Certainly not rock-n-roll, even with the 'catchy' (NOT!!!) background vocals....

A clanker, a cringer, and certainly a melt-into-an-ashtray candidate. I give it a solid 9 on the Cringe-o-meter, plus points for having a hook that you CAN'T GET OUT OF YOUR MIND.

.....whew.....

I'm making up a surprise to make up for inflicting Rock Love (shudder) upon you, so the remainder of today's post will be older encodes that I went through and re-cleaned up as best I could.

I was looking back through the Shanty postings and noticed that I mis-named Charles Trenet. What finer excuse for a side from such a fine chanteur! Here'tis: "'Y'a d'la joie'". Recorded on Columbia (a French recording) and repressed for the US in the late 40s, and one I encoded sometime in 2001. Perhaps earlier than that, because of the original bitrate, and the fact that there was a lot of noise in the encode. But, I managed to make it listenable, but I need to find those discs and re-encode them. That way I can get all the corrent numbers on the ID3v2 tag. With springtime coming on fast, I think I'll put more of these French chansons on, if for naught else than that they make me feel all happy and spring-time-y and stuff.

Here's another, MUCH nicer encode of a band called the Frivolity Club Orchestra. I suspect, from the sound quality, that this was also on a Columbia Vita-tonal recording, and that this MIGHT have been a Harry Reser group. He had the Cliquit Club Eskimos, and a couple of other bands in his recording stint for Columbia, and this just has the Harry Reser 'sound'. Here's "All I Want Is You". Again, no definate dates or personnel, because I was a twit and didn't save such things. But it's a good encode, for 2001 technology, one that I didn;t have to do much cleanup on.

Anyways, if I'm gonna get your next posting off, I'd better finish this one. Sorry it is a bit short, but I guarantee that the next one will be worth the wait.

Cheers!

the Impaler