Saturday Slugfest! Dept.

The magnificent pipe organ at th' Foam-O-Drome©

It's Saturday! [huh? - Ed.] Older readers may remember, in rare moments of lucidity like fugitive sunbeams in a thick, gloomy forest, our popliar FoamFeature© Slugfest Saturday™, where th' 4/5g© get axed to place their bets for a musical cagefight! "That's some swell fun right there!" avers IoF© poster boy Clarence Pune!

Bellying up to each other in the ring are The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Keith Hudson! Whom [grammar - Ed.] do you think will emerge victorious from th' Foam-O-Drome®, and whom [are you sure about this? - Ed.] will be stretchered away in a tsunami of boos and phlegm? 

Study form below, place bets in comment - justify choice, else we think it's guesswork, ya lazy-ass bum. To the victor, not only the spoils (who wants spoils yet?) but Featured Album loaddown!

Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Two hundred Christian souls - number prescribed by the number of boils on Job's butt [Leviticus XVI, LSMFT - Ed.] - and every sphincter crimped on a Brigham Young™ Hickory Buttplug. At weigh-in: 52,000 lb. If they can get a punch together between them, they're looking good!

Keith Hudson: The Dark Prince of Reggae is just one guy, but he's stoned enough for a couple hundred. Tipping the scales at 190lb, and that's just his stash, Keith says confidently, "I and I victorious on Judgement Day."

EDIT: It was Hudson for the win (see comments).  He awards his personal non-fungible digital iteration of Flesh Of My Skin to those who made the effort to place a bet. The rest of youse lazy-ass bums ain't eligible. G'wan- amscray!

If you enjoyed this post, please support Fabulous False Memory Foam© Island by patronising your local record store! Like this: "My! Aren't you a splendid little record store! Well done, little record store!"

Darkness On The Edge Of Pop Dept.

Cover art © Isle O'Foam© Department Of Art Dept. - ain't it swell?

This is a Prune protein shake. Not a complete archive, but the Greatest Hits are present, plus, minus the filler. The R.S.D. cover (printed on clear vinyl with a light show silver Mylar inner sleeve) lacks taste and restraint, but there's no room for either on Planet Prune - everything amped to the max and shuddering in hallucinogenic haze. There's a bitter, dark edge to their pop, sometimes snarly, sometimes sinister, so what's with the jokey name? Prunes are what old guys eat to help them shit. Did nobody mention this? Suggest, I dunno, rutabaga instead? These guys were plagued by fried logic and bad business advice, but at their best, as here, their psychedelia is as real as it gets. Be here now, and wake up where you are.

This most made feasible by grants from the Fly Me, I'm A Banana Foundation, Cucamonga.

The Cross-Eyed Cowpoke At Carnegie Hall

That's one of his time signatures above the barn door.

In his own words: "As far as the polyrhythms are concerned a lot of that came from riding. When you’re on a ranch like that, you’re alone a lot and you’re sent for miles and miles on horseback. You either go crazy, or you start thinking. When I was riding around those hills, the sense of space and the sounds a horse’s hooves made affected me. Someone once asked me how it worked and the easiest way to explain is just for me to beat out those rhythms. You could be bored unless you have an imagination. So I'd always be thinking musically when I had jobs to pump water or ride horseback. I'd lie there under the gasoline motor that was vibrating and I'm singing rhythms against that."

Taught some pianny by his Mom, he's fudging music class at college when he meets Totally Smokin' Hot Babe Iola Whitlock [with one lucky dude, left - Ed.]. Sez she: "At the time we were married, Dave was in the army and he said to me ‘I don’t know what the future is going to be like at all, but I promise you one thing, you will never be bored.’ And he’s kept his promise.”

Spool forward to 1963, when I first hear his Greatests Hits, one of the handful of records in my parent's baffling collection, and he's gigging at the Carnegie Hall, fercrissakes. And here we hand over to Thom Jurek at the ever-unreliable Allmusic, who nails it, once and forever: "For all those who have a big axe to grind with Brubeck,  for all those who claim the band was only successful because they were predominantly white, or played pop-jazz, or catered to the exotica craze, or any of that, you are invited to have all of your preconceptions, tepid arguments, and false impressions hopelessly torn to shreds by one of the great live jazz albums of the 1960s."

Amen to that. I hate that "whitebread" dismissal. It's inverse racism. I hear more earthy authenticity in his playing than (say) Oscar Peterson's salon soirée swing. He makes supposedly difficult time signatures as natural as clopping hooves, or the arhythmic clatter of a water pump. He wrote some swell tunes, led great musicians, changed how we listen to music, and every note was a blast. I saw him late in his life, when he had to be helped across the stage. He was still having a blast.

Who's In Mrs. Myra Nussbaum's Clam? Dept.

Foam-O-Graph© - It's like being there, only closer!™

It's been a while since Body Positivism Anti-Ageism Icon Mrs. Myra Nussbaum had a FoamFeature™, and today she's inviting the Four Or Five Guys© to take a squint inside her clam! That's right, subscribers! Nestling in the moist, glutinous interior is an entertainment-adjacent homunculus! Can you perchance identify the miniature show-biz simulacrum?

Impress confreres with allusive hint, recondite reference, cryptic clew in comments to showcase your savoir-faire! (Allow for possibility of Your Genial Host not immediately reading your mind, FFS.)

Lucky winners of this swell competition will win A ALBUM by featured star! Sayy - why not invite your monobrow pals around for a Clam Party?!

UPDATE: I made this kwizz insultingly easy on account which youse bums gots a lamentable recent histry in this-type thing. Yell ya why this album is swell: It's a well-recorded Vegas gig from his Imperial years, from soup to nuts, insanely professional (check the contractual run-time), and a lot of fun. Even the cover and the title are cooler than an eskimo's nuts.

This post made possible thru Class A drugs.

Pete's Picks Dept. - Gorgeous George

I found [writes Pete] the book Gershwin A Biography by Edward Jablonski in a free box not long ago and realized how little I knew about him. The education has been an absolute joy. And there are even some recordings of the great man, who was a much more accomplished pianist than I knew, as well as a mainstay of Broadway (usually writing with lyrics by his brother Ira, sometimes to my delight PG Wodehouse).

Gershwin also had classical ambitions and kept trying, up till well after he was both rich and famous, to apprentice himself to “real composers,” who generally warned him off, on the grounds that (as Ravel said) making him write bad “Ravel” would damage his great gift of melody and spontaneity. The renowned Parisian Nadia Boulanger turned him down as a student on the grounds that there was nothing she could teach him. He still caught some shit from the old school (too much “jazz”) but whaddyagonnado?

To the music, partly informed by Jablonski & the Internet (notably Allmusic), partly because this was what I could easily get my hands on, sometimes at lowish mp3 rates. Feel free to offer additions! First off, Piano Rolls, a recording mechanism of the early 20th century, many examples of which survive but need work to translate effectively to modern technology. Then more of George, a whole host of great singers who were his contemporaries (he died in 1937 at the sickeningly early age of 38; what did we all miss?), and three moderns, if we can still call Willie modern.