Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Apollo

Artist: Apollo
LP: Apollo
Song: "Apollo"
[ listen ]
Song: "Space Cannibals"
[ listen ]

After my appointment at the Doctor's office in Fairhope, I headed north to the small town of Daphne to visit a record store there called Bay Sound. It's a small store, but loaded with lots of neat vinyl at good prices. I picked up a pile of old soul, R&B and funk, in addition to a weird Spanish-language clown record that I'll likely be posting here soon. The guy working at Bay Sound was friendly and willingly sampled tracks from my pile of interesting-looking LPs. His assistance was only interrupted once, when he accidentally charged a customer $1,095 for a $10.95 CD using the store's new credit card payment system. Understandably, he had to stop playing my records to make a few calls.

Anyway, this 1979 self-titled album by Apollo is one of the things I picked up at Bay Sound. The group was originally called Kryptonite, after the rocks that could destroy Superman, but the folks at Marvel Comics realized that allowing this group of musical youngsters to name their band Kryptonite would surely destroy their enterprise, so the group had to come up with another name...Apollo! Though their lineup featured talented future record executives Benny Medina and Kerry Gordy (the antics and escapades of Benny living with the Gordy family in Beverly Hills is evidently the basis for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!), Motown wasn't interested in funding a second Apollo album. So this is, unfortunately, Apollo's one and only LP. You can read all about the group on Wikipedia here and go here to read a harsh and humorless Apollo review.

[ Apollo: 1979 ]

[ Bay Sound — Daphne, Alabama ]

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