Revisiting A&M Records No. 34
Claudine Longet: ‘Love Is Blue’ (April ’68, possibly earlier)
Say this much for that ingenue de chanson then equally known as Mrs. Andy Williams: back in the ‘60s she had exquisite taste. Or, at least, the men (entirely men) shaping her sound and style did, though I can’t fathom even such a lightweight artist agreeing to sing just anything placed before her.
Revisiting A&M Records No. 32
‘Liza Minnelli’ (February ’68)
Despite its self-titling, this is far from the debut of Judy’s daughter. By the time she was about to turn 22 and relaunch her recording career via the auspices of Mr. A & Mr. M, Minnelli had already issued three LPs for Capitol Records, starting with ‘Liza! Liza!’ in ’64, the same year she embarked on her first national theatrical run as Luisa in the touring production of ‘The Fantasticks.’
But the reality remained that after four years of working her young tail off — including landing the lead in ‘Flora the Red Menace,’ her Broadway debut — Liza was still struggling to step out from her mother’s formidable shadow.
This is a very fine Randy Newman record, perhaps not among his all-time greatest (that’s a tall order) yet teeming with cleverly caustic commentaries that rank among his best.
My mom got the cassette soon after it arrived in January ‘83 and it remained a constant for months, until I had every line of it memorized by the time she took me to see Newman live for the first time that April at Universal, when I was 14.
Fellow Still-Sheltering Observers of the Ever-Raging Inferno Known as 2020: How ya been? Ah. Alive. Good. Me? Same.
Yes, you’re right: It has been a scalding hot minute since I last laid a playlist on you. I’d like to say this was my plan all along, and that the previous mondo mix — Emergency on Planet Earth, and hey, thanks, I too think it’s the best of the bunch so far — was designed to provide enough fodder to keep your boomboxes blasting through Independence Day.
Future bleach guzzlers: here comes another mondo playlist. “Seriously,” I imagine some of you mocking, “ANOTHER 100 SONGS?!?” Serious as covid on asthma, yes. But I’ll keep this one’s introduction brief.
Fellow armchair warriors, musical comrades, any and all in need of screaming relief:
Having spent the past two weeks devoted to very personal playlist pursuits — my admiration of the late producer (and covid victim) Hal Willner, followed by a subjective 5th-anniversary reconstruction of the Coachella at which Jessica and I met — I have amassed a stockpile of two highly volatile things: my fury over (parts of) our government’s stupefyingly inept response to this ongoing nightmare, and songs that express it.
Thus, I have put a soundtrack called Chaos & Disorder to that Charlie Brown version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” a T-shirt parody I once identified with enough to make my Facebook profile when I (mostly) abandoned that platform a presidential cycle ago.
