Jump out of the way! Here come some Wild and Crazy Guys!
I met my daughter at the Habitat ReStore over the weekend to pickup up some furniture she bought there. While she was in line to pay for it, I browsed a bit.
Of course, I ended up making my way to the vinyl records department, and was impressed by some of the albums I found there. Lots of stuff from the 1950s.
But I really cracked up when I saw the title of this one: “CAUTION! MEN SWINGING
Jump out of the way, everybody! They are too hip for us!
I took it straight to the register, offered to pay the $1.25 marked on the cover, and found out it was only fifty cents!
The cover was just perfect! What ironic artistry — to pair that ultra desperate-to-seem-cool title with that whitebread gentleman in the Ban-Lon shirt (I think that’s a Ban-Lon shirt; I haven’t seen one in a while) who appears to be out mowing the lawn. In the background, I almost hear his wife calling, “And when you’re done with the grass, please fix our picket fence! It’s falling apart!”
Or maybe — I’m closely scrutinizing for “Paul is dead”-style clues here — Dennis and the guys got too close to that one board on the fence while swinging, and it stripped the paint right off!
OK, now I’m feeling bad, after looking up Dennis on Wikipedia. He was this cat who came down from Canada, and although I had never heard of him, he apparently made a bit of a mark in Hollywood:
His movie credits include the score for the 1966 Tony Curtis film Arrivederci, Baby!. For television, he composed music for the Bat Out of Hell (TV series); some episodes of the British children’s series Follyfoot (1971); and wrote the notable themes for Jay Ward‘s satiric Fractured Flickers (1961-3) and the London Weekend Television production Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1976). In 2002 EMI Records Ltd released “Soho Lounge Heat: Hip Jazz, Funk and Soul Grooves for Films & TV 1969-1977”, a compilation of library music compiled by Dickie Klenchblaize which contains 20 Farnon-composed tracks recorded between 1969 and 1974.
But even if he’d had no success at all, the guy was doing his best and probably loved his music and worked hard at it, so I shouldn’t make fun. But dang, he should have found the way to restrain those wild men in the RCA Victor marketing department when they pinned this label on his work.
Of course, to someone who entered his teens in the ’60s, anything that looks in any way like it had to do with the ’50s is obviously, painfully uncool. (And this was about 1958, according to the liner notes.) Therefore, the idea of this Perry Como-looking fellow’s band “swinging” so hard everyone needed to get out of their way is patently hilarious.
But forgive me, Dennis. You were probably much cooler than I. I see that some of your music was featured on “Ren and Stimpy”, and as we all know, they’re way existential.
By the way, if you want to actually hear how cool, or un-, Dennis and his band were, you can hear the whole album here, without shelling out fifty cents….
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