Las Chicas Del Un, Dos, Tres

Artist: Las Chicas Del Un, Dos, Tres

LP: 7" single

Song: "Un, Dos, Tres...Responda Otra Vez"
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I did finally make it to Vinil Vintage, also on Carrer de Ramón y Cajal. It's a good and messy little store with a lot of vintage vinil to dig through, but I only ended up leaving with seven singles and a copy of Throwing Muses' "The Real Ramona" LP on 4AD (CAD 1002), which was something I was hoping I'd find on my trip to Europe. Seven singles may sound like a lot, but I'd just picked up 25 at the previous store, so I hope you appreciate my exercise in self-control. 

When I saw the cover of this 1972 single by Las Chicas Del Un, Dos, Tres it hardly mattered that there was no listening station on which to give it a spin. I would have bought it with no record inside! These Chicas didn't actually form a music group, from what I can gather, but were actually contestants (or stewardesses?) on some sort of Spanish TV beauty pageant that ran in the '70s, '80s, '90s and 2000s. This single is from the premiere season of the show, and it was evidently N. Ibáñez Serrador who decided to set these lovely ladies to music. The girls were always easy to recognize by their huge glasses of pasta, and many of them went on to make a hole in the television star system. Actress Victoria Abril got her start as one of Las Chicas Del Un, Dos, Tres! You can read more about Las Chicas and their television show in an awkwardly translated online article here.

[ Las Chicas Del Un, Dos, Tres ]

[ Vinil Vintage — Barcelona, Spain ]

Dolly Dots

Artist: Dolly Dots

LP: Dolly Dots

Song: "(They Are) Rollerskating"
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Song: "Moviestar"
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This 1979 Dolly Dots record is one of the things I found at Rocade Musikk in Bergen, Norway earlier this year. The Dolly Dots have come up with one of the best album covers I've ever seen! They're all on roller-skates, apparently skating through outer-space, and they've named themselves "Dolly Dots," for heavens sake. I was certain I'd struck roller-disco gold. (Rocade doesn't have a listening station, so I was judging books entirely by their covers.) 

At the height of their popularity in The Netherlands and Belgium and Turkey and Japan, Dolly Dots had their own television show, there were Barbie dolls fashioned after each of the Dots, and you could reportedly even paste Dolly Dots wallpaper upon your bedroom walls (of course no one's actually dared to post photographic evidence of this online). But the music. What about the music? Well...to be honest, it's like what you'd expect if you were to put on a soundtrack for a sloppy, half-baked off-Broadway GREASE impersonation set at a 1958 post-sock-hop slumber party, replete with lots of jazz hands, pillow fights, and jumping on the mattress. But on roller-skates! This record is fucking awful.

[ Dolly Dots ]

The Shirelles

Artist: The Shirelles

LP: Happy and In Love

Song: "No Sugar Tonight"
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Song: "Dedicated to the One I Love"
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I love Albany. After a hot breakfast at Jack's Diner I walked all around downtown, snapping photos of the city. Then I hit Last Vestige Music Shop, where they've got a basement and loft full of records, back behind the main front part of the store, pictured below. I found lots of great stuff here, including a sealed copy of "Happy and In Love," the 1971 Shirelles 'comeback' record on RCA, which instead somehow managed to keep them away. Boo on the American public. This is a dynamite record.

Originally a quartet (Doris Coley left the group between 1968 to 1975 to tend to her family) The Shirelles initially came together for a talent show at their New Jersey high school, but then went on to land a string of top ten hits between 1960 and 1963. Their popularity waned as a bunch of other girl groups crowded them off the charts, along with a band of unruly Brits. "No Sugar Tonight" was the sole single released from "Happy and In Love," but it, too, failed to chart. Only Beverly Lee and Shirley Owens are still with us from the original lineup. Time for another comeback LP, ladies?

[ The Shirelles — 1971 ]

[ Last Vestige Music Shop — Albany, NY ]

The Cake

Artist: The Cake

LP: The Cake

Song: "Baby That's Me"
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You know how when your birthday is coming up people always ask, "What's your favorite kind of cake?" Well I've just found a new favorite kind. This is perfect end-of-summer-start-of-autumn music, don't you think?

The Flirts

Artist: The Flirts

LP: 7" single

Song: "Dancin' Madly Backwards" 
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I've been watching lots of movies lately, but one of the best I've seen is THE FITS, directed by Anna Rose Holmer and starring an 11-year-old powerhouse named Royalty Hightower. (I sure hope she becomes famous, but somehow without being destroyed.) The film is unusual, creative, powerful, tender, brilliant, and basically just astoundingly good. Outside The Uptown after the screening I snapped a photo of the poster to prove that THE FITS had been shown in Seattle, even if for only one week. The famous Seattle Space Needle has gotten caught in Royalty's hair. 

This 1985 single by The Flirts is something I picked up at a record store in Munich when I was 16. If you just remove the 'l' and the 'r,' you get THE FITS! Anyway, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine has this to say about the film:

Remember the name Anna Rose Holmer, who makes her feature directing debut with this unique and unforgettable mesmerizer. And while you're at it, keep an eye on Royalty Hightower, the 11-year-old dynamo doing a radiant star-is-born turn as the quietly observant protagonist of THE FITS. Holmer, who wrote the screenplay with the film's co-producer Lisa Kjefulff, and its editor Saela Davis, isn't much for exposition and there's hardly any talk in the film's fleet 72 minutes. Hightower plays Toni, an Ohio kid who hangs around a recreational center in Cincinnati where she works out at the boxing club with her older brother, Jermaine (Da'Sean Minor). For Toni, doing sit-ups becomes an act of asserting independence. 

Things change when Toni's eye hits on a girl dance troupe that bills itself as the Lionesses, played by the real-life members of a dance team called the Q-Kidz. Dishing about boys and smearing on lip gloss, the Lionesses rep everything tomboy Toni can't articulate in terms of beauty, power, gender, coordination, confidence and body image. She joins up, becomes pals with another newbie, Beezy (Alexis Neblett), and slowly comes home to a world she never knew before. 

In a conventional movie, which THE FITS most assuredly is not, we'd be in for an uplifting journey into self-awareness. Holmer's not having it. She and her gifted cinematographer Paul Yee simply ask us to watch, to catch their rhythms, to let the film play like a ballad that ranges from lyrical to startling. The girls start having seizures, fits that leave their bodies shaking and convulsing for reasons unknown. The score by Stenfert Charles (Last Days in the Desert) provides just the right jangling notes to keep us all on edge. The real world offers lame explanations, everything from contaminated water to sexual hysteria and demonic possession. But this movie won't squeeze itself into easy categories. Watching the girls defy gravity as they whirl into scary, seductive, hallucinatory patterns, you realize THE FITS is more than a transporting film experience. It's cinema poetry in motion.

[ The Flirts ]

Bananarama

Artist: Bananarama

LP: 12" single

Song: "Do Not Disturb"

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I know I probably shouldn't let it disturb me, but the El Camión taco truck up the street has really been stressing me out lately. I went there the other night and waited in line behind a man who seemed slightly annoyed that I was standing so close to him as he got to the counter to place his order (mostly I just didn't want to get run over by a car). But then I heard him tell the cashier that he was homeless and he asked if they had any food they were getting rid of that he could have. As the cashier asked the cook, I decided that, if they told him they didn't, maybe I would offer to buy him something to eat. The cashier told him they had nothing to give and, as the man walked away, I thought to myself: "I think I should; no, maybe I shouldn't; I really should; but maybe I shouldn't; I should. Should I?" By the time I realized that of fucking course I should, the man had already walked around the corner. At that point I would have had to stage an elaborate, attention-grabbing musical production to retrieve him and bring him back to the window to order some food. So instead, I stepped quietly forward, ordered my food and paid for it. After all, I'm not homeless and I have a job. I can order a huge burrito that's way bigger than any burrito reasonably needs to be, but I will still eat it all because I have the money to pay for it, and so well why not. I realized pretty quickly that I'd just missed a golden opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and I was ashamed. What kind of man am I anyway?

Then last night I went back to El Camión because I needed another burrito—un burrito de carne asada. Unfortunately, just as I arrived there, the truck was beset upon by one of those flash mobs made of young urban professionals who all have the same personality, one that doesn't really have a lot of features to speak of. They probably like sports. Some of the youngsters were in line ahead of me, but two of them were directly behind me in line. I overheard one of the guys behind me reveal to the other that he was totally burned out at work; he's just been showing up there each day and going through the motions. He's been completely unproductive. Then they began to discuss what they were going to order for dinner, which involved yelling at each of the other young professional flash mobsters to ask what they had ordered for dinner, or what they were planning to order for dinner. It was the most banal conversation I'd heard in months. When one of the two guys behind me in line told the other that he had decided to order a carne asada burrito, I knew instantly and without a doubt that, when my own carne asada burrito order was called out at the pick-up window, that guy there was gonna' take it. Moments later, when the gal at the window called out, "carne asada burrito!" and I stepped forward, the burned out young professional moved in ahead of me and nabbed my food. He gave me a sideways look, after which I resigned myself to waiting for his burrito to appear at the window for me. Of course I realize that he didn't take my burrito on purpose—he did it without thinking, like he does everything else in life. I realized pretty quickly that I'd just missed a golden opportunity to put my mouth where my money is and I was ashamed. When I got home and was eating that guy's burrito, I had to pick three big cilantro stems out of it. I thought to myself, "I bet my burrito only had two." 

Now I've earned a free burrito with my El Camión punch card, but I'm scared to go back since I keep having to take such a cold, hard look at myself there.

On a completely unrelated note, I bet I've got more Bananarama 12" singles than anyone else in Seattle north of the ship canal.

[ Bananarama ]

The Turuttaret Trio

Artist: The Turuttaret Trio

LP: From Finland With Love: Folk Songs and Dance Music

Song: "Tammerkoski" 
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Song: "El Porompompero" 
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The Turuttaret Trio performed on Finnish television and in leading hotels and nightclubs (the ones with high ceilings that could accommodate Hannele's hair) throughout Finland before releasing this collection of native folk songs and dances in 1974. The Turuttarets even completed a tour of the USA! (Does anyone remember if they performed in Seattle? Maybe even in Ballard?) You can read a little more about The Turuttaret Trio on Wikipedia here—and no offense, Finland, but I definitely prefer your dance music to your folk songs.

 [ Amelita Tammela ]

[ Hannele Lehtonen ]
 

 [ Maire Tammenlaakso ]

 [ The Turuttaret Trio ]

The Meditation Singers

Artist: The Meditation Singers

LP: Don't You Want To Go?

Song: "Don't You Want To Go?"
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Song: "Shelter Me"
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One of the oldest settlements in the South, Mobile is one of the places I was most excited to visit on my trip. Located on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, the city was founded as the capitol of the French colony of Louisiana in 1702, but was moved a ways downriver (due to regular flooding) to its present location in 1711. (The capitol of Louisiana was relocated to Biloxi in 1720.) I was only in Mobile for a single afternoon and evening, which wasn't nearly enough time. I would love to go back to check out some of its museums, its gay bars, and to take in a movie at The Crescent, Mobile's antique independent movie theater. 

One place I did manage to visit, as you've probably guessed, is the record store—Mobile Records. I only had about an hour or so before they closed, but I still found an armload of neat old LPs, including this 1966 release by The Meditation Singers. Formed in Detroit in 1947, the group initially included Della Reese, who left in 1953 to pursue a solo career, though her sister, Marie Waters, stayed with the group. Reese was replaced by Laura Lee, though she had left the group too to pursue a solo career by the time this "Don't You Want to Go?" LP was released. The front of the album features the 1966 lineup of members, all except co-lead singer Donna Hammons, who evidently had better things to do that day than to stand around posing for pictures. Anyway, I've included an older photo of The Meditation Singers below that does include Donna. She looks like such a nice woman. You can read more about The Meditation Singers on AllMusic here and go here to read all about Mobile, Alabama.

The Meditation Singers on YouTube:

[ "Sanctified Lord" ]

[ The Meditation Singers ]
[ back: Verlene Rodgers, Earnestine Rundless, Marie Waters ]
[ front: Laura Lee, Donna Hammons ]

[ Mobile Records — Mobile, Alabama ]

Honey Cone

Artist: Honey Cone

LP: Love, Peace & Soul

Song: "Ace In the Hole"

[ listen ]

Edna Wright, Shelly Clark, and Carolyn Willis recorded and performed together as Honey Cone from 1966 to 1973. Their "Love, Peace & Soul" LP from 1972 was, unfortunately, their last. Honey Cone had their biggest hit with "Want Ads," which went to #1 on both the pop and R&B charts in 1971. You can see the lovely trio performing the song on Soul Train by clicking the link below. "Ace In the Hole" was the third single to be released from "Love, Peace & Soul," but unfortunately it failed to make an appearance on either the pop or R&B charts. I know it's a little late, but I've mailed in the Hot Wax Records feedback postcard I found inside the record sleeve, listing "Ace In the Hole" as my favorite track. I think 2012 could be the ideal year for the single's successful re-release! You can read more about Honey Cone on Wikipedia here and go here to read about Hot Wax Records.

Honey Cone on YouTube:

[ "Want Ads" ]