TRACK LIST of the Vinyl record "Music To Read Lady Chatterley's Lover By!" Richard Shores And His Orchestra:
A1 Love 2:49 A2 Hate 1:35 A3 Sorrow 2:44 A4 Gay 2:24 NOPE! A5 Blues 2:44 NOPE! B1 Surprise 2:14 B2 Frustration 2:36 B3 Nostalgia 3:07 B4 Fear 2:25 Yes*******USED!@ B5 Hysteria
How can you not buy an album with a track list like that? Love! Hate! Sorrow! Gay! Are you kidding me?! Yes sir, I’ll take two copies, one for me and one for my friend!
Of course, it’s a total lie.
Most of the tracks are vague as hell, emotionally speaking, like a 23 year old Goth girlfriend; all label and no content.
This connotes and purports to be a companion for the novel “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”, by D.H Lawrence. Which is ridiculous as the only true companion to “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence is your other hand. The book has sex in it, and some good sex, though viewed through that somewhat misty-eyed sexual vocabulary of the Twenties: some terms will need translating into our urbane and blunt vocabulary. There is other stuff in it too. Professional word persons love to praise it, hold it up highly, and tell us that DH Lawrence is a good writer. So it must be. We’re still talking about it, Right? So, hats off to Mr. Larry. But despite what ever literary gold lies between the stickier pages, the producers of this album were not seeking that shiny stuff, no sir. They were merely looking to give me an erection. Oh, not me in particular,(though that would be an interesting gift service, the Boner of the Month Club) but to every single man who saw the album. Isn’t that nice?
In 1959 however, you weren’t allowed to put a picture of naked women on an album titled “Masturbation Soundtrack”. Not legally, anyway. But if you could add some sort of intellectual gravitas to your lurid product, then it will be easy for Mr. John Q. Public to walk a copy up to the counter and proudly proclaim, ‘No, my fine purveyor of vinyl discs, there are no perverted un-American thoughts here! I’m buying this for Art’s sake!” Then when Mr Public went home and realized the album is vapid, boring, inaccurate and, shall we say, limp of content, he would be pissed off because he couldn’t engage in Un American perverted thoughts. And you know he had the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of ‘Lady Chattery’s Lover” to read from while he listened.
This record had to be a curated list of orchestral music culled from a Film Studio’s archives. Ten tracks were selected and then they made up a category that was a salacious as the the Record Store Window would allow. Even for a rip-off, the album is poorly curated. Most of the tracks are not as advertised, and do not achieve the emotional state they claim to evince.
This album is a lesson in Advertising, not literature. A lesson which takes us to Uncle Jarry’s Rule Number 13, “By definition, all advertisements are lies.” This album is still an Album to listen to ‘Lady Chatterly’s lover’ to. But it will not get you laid. And the definitions of “Blues”, “Gay”, “Nostalgia” and “Hysteria” are sonically subjective. So too bad if you don’t like it. What are you going to do? Return it? “Excuse me, this track sounds nothing like ‘frustration’, which I know by being so damn frustrated from listening to this album!” “Sorry sir, you can’t return porn.” “It’s not porn, it’s art.” “….::blank stare::….”
In The Hidden Groove, there is nothing new under the sun. Caveat Emptor, my friends, is not just something Mr Brady said to the kids. But the act of not knowing exactly what is in the package when you buy it, is fading away. We now can assure ourselves of the content of any article of Media we buy by looking it up on the Inter-tubes. No more the mystery of wondering if others songs on the album are also good. If a new flavor of potato chip that just appeared on the Mr M’s shelf really tasted like bananas. What about that new TV show? The new local band? Sure there were always some reviewers of that stuff, but they weren’t You! You had to taste it, see it, hear it to find out, and that wasted a crap-pile of money and time! Yeah, this is not a nostalgia piece. Screw the way things used to be! Guessing and fishing around and hoping that finally, one day, sometime somewhere, the product will be as good as the package! Pathetic! Now I can find out what 13 million people think of a single song, and I will never have to buy any tune sound-unheard! I will never, ever again be cheated into buying crappy music!
Or surprised by good music I didn’t expect to like.
I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover for this Episode. Well, I skimmed it. Which is something I would not have done without listening to this album. I also read some Gwyneth Paltrow and I found a great recipe which I will never, ever, use. All of which has made my life better. There are better things to get better with, but I’ll take what betters I can get. And to the producers of this album I will say nothing, because by now they are all dead. I’ll spend that time on finding more vinyl, so I can dig up more chunks of light from the Hidden Groove.
Caveat Emptor? Sure. But Excelsior, too.
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