Bostworld

Though it happened over two months ago, word of the death of Les Humphries in England is just starting to trickle out onto the internet. Apparently, he died on the day after Christmas, of heart failure brought on by a severe case of pneumonia. He was 67 years old. Unreported in his native country, Humphries’ death didn’t come to light until eight weeks later when his son contacted Les’ estranged ex-wife, German singer Dunja Rajter. Since Humphries was a bona fide pop star in Germany, that country’s press and blogosphere has reported it dutifully. European tributes are not hard to find, but as far as I know, Bostworld is the only outlet originating from America that has given the matter any space at all.

I don’t feel like rehashing the details of Humphries’ brief but prolific career. You can read about him the same way I did, on the German news sites. Google Translate reveals the sad story: “Les Humphries had in recent years lived very withdrawn…. He was sick, he had incredibly many problems, which he probably only by a certain amount of living could compensate.”

Continue reading ‘Les Humphries, R.I.P.’

I’ve been running a WordPress plugin called ShortStat for most of the life of this site. It’s a great little time-waster at work, offering the standard innacurate hit counts, plus referral links that I can visit when I get bored. Occasionally, a new one will appear, but usually it’s the same dozen or so sites whose readers apparently can’t resist visiting good old Bostworld (god bless ‘em).

This last week, ShortStat and I reached a milestone of sorts. No, we didn’t log our millionth hit — that’s still a long way off. But we did banish a certain now-defunct share site from the list of the top most frequent referrers. A lot of you music lovers will remember this site, run a former music biz guy with an axe to grind (more so than the rest of us, anyway), posting every album he could get his hands on. He linked to our very first share post, “The Genius In Harmony” by the Anita Kerr Singers, and brought in so many referrals that we were swamped for the better part of two weeks. We were new back then, and the massive hit counts made the future seem very sunny indeed.

Continue reading ‘Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Ten’

I had the recent pleasure of spending a cross-country plane ride with “The New Kings of Nonfiction,” a collection edited by “This American Life” host, Ira Glass. As usual, despite the book’s focus on “the new,” it was the old I was most drawn to — specifically, an article on World War II by Lee Sandlin. Though this article was new to me, “Losing The War” is already being hailed as a classic. You can read the whole thing on Lee’s web site.

Continue reading ‘Wurzburg 1945-1955′

I saw “Doctor Dolittle” starring Rex Harrison and Anthony Newley during its maiden 1967 release. I was seven then, far too young to know I was witnessing a train wreck. On the contrary: my three year old brother and I thrilled to the film and the temporary relief its magical world provided from our own mundane existence. Afterwards, my brother and I pouted while our babysitter stopped at a drugstore on the way home. It was there I spied this album, and — seizing upon the balm it promised to my aching, fading memory — I threw a tantrum until the sitter bought it for me. But when I got home, I discovered to my disappointment that I had been taken in by a time-honored bait and switch tactic. What we had purchased was not the original soundtrack recording that I had imagined, but an album of faceless easy listening versions. This was a common fraud perpetrated on unsophisticated consumers back in those days, and I had fallen for it.

Continue reading ‘Camarata And The Mike Sammes Singers: Songs From Doctor Dolittle’

Here’s an article I wrote last year for a proposed column over at LuxuriaMusic. The column never materialized, and they never used it, so I decided to offer it up here as part of this week’s national President’s Day hoopla. As for Lux, they are poised to unveil a long anticipated, Drupal based site redesign. Once in place, their new account management and RSS feed aggregating features will hopefully give them all the fancy new content their heart may desire!

Whenever I’m in the vicinity of Austin, Texas, I always try to make time to visit the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. It’s terrific facility; it’s even got a presidential automaton. But instead of spouting pithy patriotic sentiment like Disneyland’s Lincoln robot, the LBJ automaton tells jokes. My favorite gag has the punch line, “I know doctor, but I like what I drinks a lot better than what I hears” (you can fill in the rest of the joke yourself).

Continue reading ‘Presidential Tchotchkas’

Nowadays, it’s pretty much over. We’re all slowly coming awake to the realization that we’ve squandered vast tracts of our future for an illusory past, our intellectual capitol for a culture that’s lost its memory, our once-noble ambitions for a population hooked on cheap thrills, our emotional strength for a brittle autophobia. Boxed in by increasingly limited options and driven to near madness by denial and distraction, the population casts about uselessly, desperate to ignore the darkness at the periphery. Eruptions occur with increasing frequency, stressing the structure at all strata, applying constant pressure on the facade, laying more and more bare the true face of what’s in store for us. The smart ones are just trying to keep still while they wait for the other shoe to drop — best to not stir up the dust any more than necessary.

Continue reading ‘1975: And The Changes To Come’

I’ve gotten good use out of the “Activity and Funny Songs” album over the years. It was volume eleven of “My First Golden Record Library,” a twelve record set that I got shortly after it was released in 1962. I had the whole thing committed to memory before I was five years old. Later, as a pot-smoking punk rocker, I used to party with it at 45 RPM speed. Now in my later years, it serves as the perfect fodder for a blog post. Listening to it all these years later, it evokes as many memories of intoxicated adolescence as it does early childhood. As you can imagine, this makes for a potent combination.

Continue reading ‘Activity And Funny Songs’