Welcome, kids, to a new and somewhat regular segment of the show here where I unleash to the world some of the music I’ve collected over the years. Some of it’s good. Some’s bad. Some’s just absurd.
First, some backstory: ages and ages ago, when I was still young and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I received one of the greatest birthday gifts ever–a record player. Sure, it was cheap, and the tone arm had no balance to it whatsoever, and it had cheap sounding speakers, but it was my own record player. I joined the RCA Music Club (bad idea), and thanks to a friend, I frequented a neighborhood record store (remember when both of those things existed–record stores AND neighborhood record stores?), and slowly built up a record collection. I picked up more music at garage sales– in fact, the single greatest musical score of my pre-teen years was purchasing the entire collection of 45s from a former baby sitter (over 50 records) all for just $2. The finest pop recordings that the early 1970s had to offer were now mine!
Somehow, I’ve always enjoyed collecting music. Even though it’s so much easier these days, it’s still fun to find music I want.
But back to the story. My sister and I at one point purchased an album that just had to be the result of one of the world’s most horrific creative meetings in history: we bought Sesame Street Fever.
I envision the meeting going something like this: “Hey, we should cash in on this disco thing and do an album of disco music.” “Cool! We wouldn’t have to even rewrite anything because we could just take existing songs and put them to a disco beat!” “Ooh! What if we get one of the Bee Gees? Is there one who isn’t popular who we could call and get cheap?”
A couple of coffees later, and Robin Gibb was enlisted, songs were rearranged for the disco format, and someone actually wrote one entirely new song. Because disco.
By the way, yes, Bert’s wearing a gold chain on the album cover there…Because that’s how Bert rolls.
So what say we get this train wreck moving, eh? First, I give you the title track from the album. Feel free to shoot your computer at any time.
Oh, it goes on from there. Five more songs worth, but I’ll spare you a bunch of them. Though I do need to inflict this one on you, in which Cookie Monster tells Robin Gibb that he’s a “cookie eating, cookie dancing fool!” You just can’t make this stuff up…
Sadly, all I can say is that Julie and I listened to that album endlessly. We adored it and got to know the songs. And it stuck in my brain so much that over 30 years later, I found that damned album and downloaded it. Because those six songs would help complete my music collection. Dammit…
Or course I wouldn’t actually pay to download it, but don’t worry I got it for free (gratuitous plug for Freegal, if offered by your library…Hennepin County offers it, and you get three free downloads per week from an admittedly thin library, but this was in there…).
I’ll give you a few days to sleep this post off and get over the nightmares. I’ll be back with another What I’m Listening To This Time post in a few days. In the meantime, I’ll post something hopefully more normal here later.
See you tomorrow.