Saturday, November 01, 2003 Phil Harris, "The Thing" (December 2, 1950) A jolly novelty tune about a man who rescues a box from the ocean, a box whose contents delight him and horrify everyone else, including St. Peter at the gate. We're never told what's in the box, as every time Harris is about tell us, his words are replaced with a big THUMP-THUMPTHUMP. Like the thing thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge in "Ode to Bilie Joe," it's an absence that seems to demand that the listener fill it in via argument and speculation with others. I'm positive that even the folks of the ultra-repressed 1950 must've been thinking along the same lines as I am right now -- that the THUMP-THUMPTHUMP must be something super-naughty and awful, and anything that might incite that kind of horror in people might be sexual in nature and has to be dead, like a pickled penis, maybe. (Boxes have their own sexual and morbid connotations, too.) But gruff Phil Harris sings it -- talks through it, really -- as if it's a big nothing of a lewd joke, as if, three years from now, when he's catching fish or golfing with his Hollywood buds in 1953, his mind will wander and it'll suddenly occur to him that he actually had a number one hit. And whereas some musicians treat their number one records as personal turning points, or just notches on a belt, he'll briefly muse about it, mutter "Hm. Weird." and then kick back another cold one. 3 (link)

Wednesday, October 29, 2003 Sammy Kaye, "Harbor Lights" (November 18, 1950) Tom Servo on the Platters: "Gee, they're so smooth they're almost not singing!" Ambient fake Hawaiian pop glory. A record like this would make something recorded twenty-plus years prior like Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives or anything from the Anthology sound histrionic, voices and instruments fighting a bloody death battle to be heard within the murk. Only once recording technology reaches a certain threshold of fidelity, can something like the drowsy murmur of "Harbor Lights" begin to register on vinyl. (It's still a wonder any sound on it ever broke through AM radio static.) There is nothing remotely hard on this record, even the lead singer's consonants are reduced to mere toothy puffs of breath at the end of every phrase. There is just the drift of a man in such drugged sorrow he sounds like a helpless spectator in his life: "I longed to hold you close/and kiss you just once more/But I was on the ship/and you were on the shore." And every time I listen to it, I have to skip through forty-five seconds of insufferably slurpy horns. 8 (link)