Retro Reviews
by David V. Matthews
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Title
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Baroque n' Stones
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Artists
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The New Renaissance Society
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Label
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Hanna-Barbera Records (yes, that Hanna-Barbera, creators of Inch-High Private Eye)
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Purchased
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Goodwill (Rochester, PA)
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Price
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49 cents
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Year of release
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1966
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 In 1994, RCA released Symphonic Music of the Rolling Stones, an album by Stones frontman Mick Jagger, the London Symphony Orchestra and other respected Establishment creative types. Although I've never heard that album, I doubt it can match the twinky entertainment provided by Baroque n' Stones, Hanna-Barbera's entry in the mid-Sixties, lowbrow-into-highbrow, sanitized-for-your-protection Baroque-rock craze that The Baroque Beatles Songbook probably initiated. (Even in this precious hybrid genre, the nasty Stones shadowed their lovable Liverpudlian rivals.)
Maybe to counteract the twinky n' in the title and the "Broken Stones" pun, the liner notes for Baroque n' Stones emphasize its seriousness, calling the album neither an "outgrowth of someone's warped sense of humor" nor an attempt "to achieve some satirical end," but a legitimate "musical treatment" of the Rolling Stones' songs, which "are structurally melodic and lyrically tender" just like "the Baroque form" but with nubile young groupies on the Pill.
Ian Freebairn-Smith (who would go on to compose music for The Muppet Movie and Magnum, P.I.) provides unique arrangements for seven early Stones songs that The New Renaissance Society (presumably session players — the group remains anonymous) perform with competence and very little hauteur. Old-fashioned woodwinds, strings and "vocalese" (melodic phonemes) abound. "Play with Fire" contains delicate oboe and harpsichord (and four movements!). "19th Nervous Breakdown" soothes with prominent flute. A brief, regal "Get off of My Cloud" segues for some reason into a string-heavy "Under the Boardwalk," the only non-Stones tune. The album's best track, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," opens with an unrelated orchestral snippet before breaking out the vocalese ("Doo doo doo doo doo") layered over more-delicate-than-usual harpsichord.
Did this album sell as well as other Hanna-Barbera albums, such as Yogi Bear and the Three Stooges Meet Dr. No-No, yet another album I haven't heard?
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Title
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Janet Greene Sings (part of the four-LP set What Is Communism?)
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Artists
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Janet Greene
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Label
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Chantico Records
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Purchased
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Goodwill (Rochester, PA)
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Price
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$2.00
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Year of release
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1966
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The first seven sides of this four-LP set contain fourteen lectures from Dr. Fred C. Schwarz, "a former medical doctor from Sydney, Australia" who "has conscientiously studied communism as the pathologist studies disease." The bespectacled, skinny-tied Schwarz, president of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and author of the 1960 paperback You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists), most likely didn't disappoint his fans with this set. I wouldn't know for sure, as I can't claim fanhood and have listened to only five minutes of his antediluvian sociopolitical analysis.
I have listened to side eight in its entirety: Janet Greene Sings, the reason I bought this Cold-War dust-catcher. I'd never heard of her, but the printed lyrics looked priceless. (Well, some of them did.) Greene, a dark-haired Blair Brown lookalike, hated those darn Russkies so much that she quit her job as a children's TV star in Columbus, Ohio, to become CACC's musical director. She wrote the "eight anti-communism folksongs" here and plays acoustic guitar on them well enough, but sings in a slightly strangulated tremor.
Her tracks, in order (if you pinko creeps can stand it):
- "The Hunter and the Bear" relates a tale in which the former meets his doom trying to "co-exist" with the latter. ("He's smarter than the av'rage bear," the poor dumb sucker says in Greene's only pop-cult reference.)
- "Inch by Inch," which moves the audio equivalent of that, declares "I'm gonna fight for my Uncle Sam/Because there's trouble in South Viet Nam" and likens Communism to "a cancerous cell" in a comparison Dr. Schwarz must have liked.
- "Fascist Threat" spends over two interminable minutes equating fascism to guess what.
- "Commie Lies" has a bouncy chorus and not much else.
- "Termites" calls the Commies just that.
- "Comrade's Lament" has a dancing-Russian melody ("When our liquidation duty's to be done, to be done/A comrade's lot is not a happy one").
- "I'm Just a Poor Left-Winger," her best and liveliest song, has a twangy electric guitar backing comically verbose lyrics bashing those darn college protesters ("Those dialectic phrases made a marvelous spiel/But hidden behind that beard beats the heart of a frustrated heel").
- "Run," the closing track about families traveling "the angry sea" to escape Communism, bears slight melodic similarity to the Velvet Underground's "Run Run Run," released the following year.
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Title
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Over & Over
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Artists
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Tina Yothers
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Label
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Tri-Tab
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Purchased
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Eide's Entertainment (Pittsburgh, PA)
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Price
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99 cents
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Year of release
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1987
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The title must refer to how many times clichéd lyrics pop up in this two-song, 12-inch Eighties cheesefest from child star Tina Yothers, who played Jennifer Keaton on the 1980s NBC sitcom Family Ties. Like so many other TV celebrities at the height of their fame, Yothers earned extra cash by recording disposable music that some smart-aleck reviewer would savage years later in an interactive literary journal. Her bleached-out front-cover photo typifies the era's feminine aesthetics: big, garish blonde hair; kohl-powered raccoon eyes; lots of pink pastel rouge.
Side one contains "Baby I'm Back in Love Again," shopping-mall music written by Bruce Wooley, a Briton best known for co-writing the Buggles' 1980 hit "Video Killed the Radio Star." Other than that, the side is utterly unmemorable. Sugary, blaring synths accompany her as she gamely sings "I've been hurt/So many times before" and "You came along to set me free" and "Baby I'm back in love again/In love again ooh ooh."
Side two offers the much more interesting "Girlie Girlie," written by one A. Davis (Angela Davis?). Great opening lines: "The news is in!" Yothers yells in the worst and most echoey Jamaican accent ever affected by any teen-pop singer. "From the four corners of the world-deh! Young man, you're too girlie-girlie! Ooh!"
She sings the whole song in this accent, which comes and goes (though she never forgets, when singing the chorus, to make "young man" sound vaguely like "yo mon"). Sugary, blaring synths trying to sound Jamaican (but instead sounding like asthmatic moose) accompany her as she describes the unnamed male slut's galpals: "One she's a lawyer, one she's a doctor/One where they work with a little contractor" and "One getting pretty, one fretty fretty" and "He's got a bee-bop one who's a go-go dancer/And now he's seeing one who's a radio announcer."
Did A. Davis own a rhyming dictionary? Did Yothers feel degraded as a human being by song's end, where she yells more clichés, apparently at random? ("I may have to put you under the lock and key…")
And did I degrade myself as a human being by so blatantly trying to exploit the Eighties revival via this snide review? 
Copyright © 2002 David V. Matthews.
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