The Box Tops - NonStop (1968)

This one got deleted a few times, which I think is kind of odd considering all of the other stuff on here. I don't feel like re-writing this, so here is what I wrote about a year ago:

Here is another Box Tops/Alex Chilton item - this one was released in 1968 just under a year after the chart-topping The Letter. Here, Alex Chilton is only about 16 or 17 years old, playing in a poppy-bluesy kind of outfit, and his voice is deeper and more gravelly than it is on anything else that I've heard by him. If you listened to that Big Star album below, you'll notice that he talks about The Box Tops leading a kind of 'scummy' existence and being controlled by their producers - Dan Penn and others, who wrote all of the songs for their album and often replaced the band members (except Chilton) with studio musicians during recording. However, Chilton managed to get a song of his own on Non-Stop, "I Can Dig It", which is one of my favourites. Other favourites include the darker "Yesterday Where's My Mind" and the classic sounding "I Met Her In Church".

Track Listing:
Side One
1. Choo Choo Train
2. I'm Movin' On
3. Sandman
4. She Shot A Hole In My Soul
5. People Gonna Talk
Side Two
6. I Met Her In Church
7. Rock Me Baby
8. Rollin' In My Sleep
9. I Can Dig It
10. Yesterday Where's My Mind
11. If I Had Let You In

NonStop - 320kbps

KJR 16 All American Hits (VA) (1967)

This compilation was made in 1967 for a radio station in Seattle, KJR, by a record company that seems to have specialized in making compilations, Take 6. In fact, it seems like Take 6 specialized in making many of the same compilation and putting different labels on them (sometimes). Like those custom wine-makers that have bad wine and put peoples' labels on them. What is that called? Private label wine? But these songs are actually pretty good, and a lot of the artists have either faded into obscurity over the years, have hits that have become dissociated with their names, or have members that have moved onto bigger and better things under different names. For example, here we have the original version of Gloria by Them, aka Van Morrison's old band. And also, despite the title, these are not all necessarily "All American Hits". About half of the artists are part of the British Invasion. For example, Them.

But I liked about all of the tracks. A lot of them are pretty garagey (The Seeds), and others totally fit the bill for 60's pop. Which is a lot of fun. My favourites were probably the tracks by the Association, B.J. Thomas, The Leaves, and the Shangri-Las. For a little trivia, See You In September by The Happenings was part of a list of songs that Clear Channel suggested be taken off the airwaves following 9/11. Which makes the song that much more intense, despite the obvious anachronism.

Track List:

Side One

1. Association - Along Comes Mary

2. Five Americans - Western Union

3. Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy vs. Red Baron

4. B.J. Thomas - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

5. Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City

6. Them - Gloria

7. Neil Diamond - Cherry, Cherry

8. The Happenings - See You In September

Side Two

9. Tommy James and the Shondells - Hanky Panky

10. The Leaves - Hey Joe

11. The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard

12. Ian Whitcomb - You Turn Me On

13. Canibal and the Head Hunters - Lord of 1000 Dances

14. The Sonics - The Witch

15. Shangrilas - Leader of the Pack

16. The Standells - Dirty Water

KJR - 320kbps

The Box Tops - The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967)

Another Alex Chilton post. This time, though, is the big stuff. This is the first album that the Box Tops made, and it is also their most famous - featuring the eponymous songs The Letter, and Neon Rainbow. Well, eponymous in the sense that the songs lend their name to the album. Not to the artists. This is the first time I've used the word, but I've seen it used in relation to music so often that I felt I had to. The Letter was #1 on some charts in US and Canada for a little bit. Neon Rainbow was a bit further down. Anyways, it's a pretty cool album. It's way hard to find, too, but it finally happened on a trip down to Burlington at Burlington Records.

The quartet is often classified as "Blue-Eyed Soul", a classification that I kind of like. It's not just saying that they're white, but that they're also...I don't know. And they are from Memphis, Tennessee and most of the music is written by their producer, Dan Penn, which is mentioned in an interview on the Big Star live album (below). Here, I think Chilton is only 16, but he died just recently (RIP). This record doesn't seem to feature his low growling voice as much as in Non-Stop, which is a little bit interesting. Another thing that's a little bit interesting is the way that Gonna Find Somebody was mixed. The vocals are way drowned out and echoey compared to the vocals on rest of the album.

See my other Alex Chilton posts:

Box Tops - Non-Stop

Alex Chilton - No Sex EP

Big Star - Live At Max's Kansas City (1973)

Track Listing:

Side One

1. The Letter

2. She Knows How

3. Trains & Boats & Planes

4. Break My Mind

5. Whiter Shade Of Pale

6. Everything I Am

Side Two

7. Neon Rainbow

8. People Make The World

9. I'm Your Puppet

10. Happy Times

11. Gonna Find Somebody

12. I Pray For Rain

The Letter (1967) - 320kbps

The Fleshtones - Roman Gods (1982)

I don't know much about these guys, I just bought them from some guy's record collection on the outskirts of the city. But allmusic says that they are often classified as a garage rock revival band, which seems to fit pretty perfectly with what they sound like. They seem like they could be from the 60's, but there's something that doesn't fit with that era, which makes sense because it was made in '82. Actually, it's kind of reminiscent of that newer 80's-ish kind of music like The Killers, which can sometimes be disconcerting, particularly in "Stop Fooling Around".

It's an okay album. These guys are still pumpin' em out, though, which is pretty cool. This is their first.

Track Listing:

1. The Dreg (Fleshtones '77)

2. I've Gotta Change My Life

3. Stop Fooling Around

4. Hope Come Back

5. The World Has Changed

6. R-I-G-H-T-S

7. Let's See The Sun

8. Shadow-Line (To J. Conrad)

9. Chinese Kitchen

10. Ride Your Pony

11. Roman Gods

Roman Gods - 1982 - 320kbps

Ennio Morricone Ringtones

Uck, this is a little embarrassing, but I just made some ringtones from a couple of Ennio Morricone's tunes. Namely, one from "Jokes on the Side" off of Duck You Sucker, and two from the main theme of "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly".

On the "Jokes on the Side" one, you can still hear the turntable rotating, it's pretty awesome.

I think that, for iPhones, you can just open them in iTunes and it will automatically add them to your ringtones. From there you just sync them up. But for other cell phones, I'm guessing that you have to convert them to MP3 first and then upload them to your cellphone. You can convert them by changing the file extension from ".m4r" to ".m4a" and then using iTunes or another program to convert the m4a file to an mp3.

In other news, I have moved out of Montreal and don't have my LP's yet and haven't been buying too many. Hence the lack of updates. But I found this weird one that I'm thinking of putting up soon if I get the time to hang out in my basement. I guess that putting records from Detroit on this blog would kill our mission statement, though.

Ennio Morricone Ringtones