Hello Ray Stevens fans!! We're one day from the birthday of Ray Stevens...and yes I'll be posting a birthday blog entry tomorrow on the 24th to celebrate. In today's blog entry, though, it's time to take a look back to a comedy album released 30 years ago in 1991. Ray was incredibly busy in 1991...he had a theater built in Branson, Missouri and it opened to the public in the summer of 1991. Ray spent the summer months (tourist season) in Branson and spent the off-season in Nashville, Tennessee. The comedy album he released in 1991 was titled Number One with a Bullet.
Ray also has a limited animation music video of "Power Tools" available on YouTube. It's purely a coincidence that Ray's 1991 comedy album contains a song called "Power Tools"...in the fall of 1991 the sitcom, Home Improvement, debuted. That series was basically a spoof of the do-it-yourself home construction show, This Old House. The connecting theme in those two television shows and Ray's "Power Tools" is exaggerated machismo and do-it-yourself pride. Even though it's coincidental that "Power Tools" appears on Ray's 1991 comedy album it probably wasn't coincidental when Curb Records issued it as a single early in 1992 due to Home Improvement becoming wildly popular. The most eye-catching song on the 1991 comedy album is "Teenage Mutant Kung Fu Chickens". The song, just in case you didn't know, is a spoof of the animated cartoon series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ray's song, however, tells the story of four chickens that grow up to become crime fighters after having gained super strength from drinking contaminated water near a nuclear power plant and watching Kung Fu movies most of their lives. Ray sang this song during an appearance on a Salute to the Troops special on CBS in 1991. An animated music video of that song is on YouTube, too, and I've embedded it below...
In the photo below I'm emulating the Ray Stevens pose, obviously. The album's closing song, "Workin' for the Japanese", was actually the first single release in 1991. In a move that can only be described as a cave-in to political correctness on the part of country radio programmers Ray's single was striking a chord with the public but because of the popularity that the song was obtaining it made advertisers nervous...fearing that some of the public would boycott products being sold on country radio stations if they played "Workin' for the Japanese"...and so the song was removed from playlists and pretty much unofficially banned from airplay. I refer to it as 'unofficially' because there wasn't any kind of official statement regarding the song from any country radio representative...it was simply a case of the song not getting anymore airplay...and as far as the singles charts go it was in the middle of the country chart at the time of it's abrupt removal from playlists. The song is quite harmless...it's about economics and how the American economy had become too dependent on the Japanese and how the American economy was growing more and more in danger of being overtaken, globally, by the Japanese when it came to manufacturing, technology, and education. In hindsight it's a song that addressed an uncomfortable truth, in 1991, but a truth that wasn't ready to be confronted/acknowledged by the political and economic leaders in place back then. I would also like to mention that the 1991 comedy album also features the debut of "Juanita and the Kids" which, years later, become a very popular music video on YouTube. A re-recorded rendition of "The Pirate Song" is on the 1991 album, too. 30 years later Ray Stevens is still number one to a lot of us.
My Ray Stevens birthday post will be arriving tomorrow!! I'll likely begin writing it at some point after 11pm tonight...and then publish it after midnight when it turns January 24th.
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