The Dovells were an important part of Bernie Lowe, Kal Mann and Dave Appell’s Cameo-Parkway juggernaut, which included Chubby Checker, Dee Dee Sharp and Bobby Rydell. Hitting hard and fast with classic records like “You Can’t Sit Down” and “Bristol Stomp,” the quartet survived lineup changes, the departure of their original lead singer Len Barry (famous for “1-2-3″) and their eventual diaspora from the top ten.
Monthly Archive for August, 2006
It’s strange how many folks are visiting Bostworld just to look at the menus. What began as little more than a personal promise to rescue a box of clutter from my attic has become nearly a quarter of all traffic to this site. Not bad for a rather anemic pile of what amounts to little more than the odd design element and some barely legible text describing ridiculously cheap, heart-attack-inducing meals and old-fashioned exotic adult beverages.
Producer/songwriter Bob Crewe enjoyed initial success in the fifties, scoring with records like “Silhouettes” for the Rays and “Tallahassee Lassie” for Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon. He’s even better known for the stunning series of hits he cut with Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons. He also created such classics as “Navy Blue” for Diane Renay, “California Nights” for Leslie Gore and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More” for the Walker Brothers. In the mid-sixties, he turned a Coca Cola Pepsi commercial into a smash with “Music To Watch Girls Go By” with his own studio conglomeration, The Bob Crewe Generation.
Continue reading ‘The Luxuriant Sounds Of The Bob Crewe Generation’
The Great Depression actually started long before most of us took notice. I’m not talking about a status-quo cultural landscape of capitalist exploitation and class division. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of subsistance farmers, isolated for generations, cut off from the latest advances in agricultural best practices, turning region after region of fertile land into fallow, erosion-damaged rural slums.
Continue reading ‘Documenting American Squalor: Farm Security Administration’
Recently, I was dismayed to discover a certain post in one of our prominent share blogs. Offering tracks by the legendary singing phenomenon The Young Americans, the blogger then proceeded to bite the hand that feeds him in what I can only describe as a full frontal attack.
After calling them “fucking geeks,” our blogger goes on to describe the level of his feelings of superiority over The Young Americans as “infinite,” and winds up the attack by proclaiming, “You can bet none of my kids would be caught dead standing on stage showing off their pearly whites and singing schmaltzy crap for old folks in Saticoy.” Then, after having successfully driven traffic to his site with files by these “schmaltzy fucking geeks,” he proceeds to add injury to insult (and this is where he really tears it): he offers a mere three tracks by the group — and not even my favorite three!
This is grievous wrong that demands redress.