Hello all...no doubt when you're browsing the internet and looking for Ray Stevens images you've come across the album cover of this 1990 release, Lend Me Your Ears. It's a comedy album from Ray Stevens, as if you couldn't tell from the photo, and it turns 30 this year. The photo session took place in Nashville's Centennial Park where there's something of a tourist attraction located there...a large replica of the Parthenon. Ray in Shakespeare attire is seen in front of the Parthenon replica and firmly taking hold of a rabbit. The album's title has various meanings. The most obvious is the request for music consumers to take a listen to the album but another reason for the album's title is tied into the photo and it's recreation of Marc Antony from the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar. It is in that play where the phrase "...lend me your ears..." comes from. There's probably some people out there that looked at the album's title and seen the photo and thought that Ray was being literal and asking the rabbit to lend him his ears...completely missing the point of the album's photo design and title...but yet that's another interpretation one could take away when looking at the art work and album title. This comedy album was not only his first in a brand new decade (the '90s) but it was his first studio album for Curb Records who, at the time of this album's summer 1990 release, were in a distribution partnership with Capitol Records. This is why this particular studio album from Ray is credited to Curb/Capitol Records. Ironically another 1990 release was credited solely to Curb Records, the Gold selling His All Time Greatest Comic Hits. The new decade and his move to Curb Records after a 5-year stay at MCA (1984-1989) also ushered in new directions for Ray that were bubbling under the surface.
As promotion for Lend Me Your Ears there were two music videos taped. "Sittin' Up With the Dead" is the lead off song from the album and it became a music video. The album's third track was Ray's comical rendition of "Help Me Make It Through the Night" and it was performed very much in the vein of one of Ray's music influences, Spike Jones...the recording featured heavy use of sound effects and vocal mayhem but it remained tightly controlled in the execution of it's music. In television appearances that year he promoted the existence of the music videos and how fans could see them on the various music video programs airing on The Nashville Network. Ray's video for "Help Me Make it Through the Night" became a hit and landed on the network's most-played music video list. In addition to those two notable recordings Ray was also performing "Barbecue" and there's an appearance on Hee Haw where Ray performs "Where Do My Socks Go?". There were promotional vinyl singles issued to radio stations of "Sittin' Up With the Dead" and "Help Me Make It Through the Night". They were never sold in retail stores but every once in awhile copies of those vinyl promo singles come up for sale on eBay. They're really obscure and would be of value to Ray Stevens fans given how the quantity is limited. The 1990 album contains ten comedy songs:
1. Sittin' Up With the Dead (live action music video)
2. Jack Daniels, You Lied To Me Again
3. Help Me Make It Through the Night (live action music video)
4. Used Cars
5. Bwana and the Jungle Girl
6. Barbecue (animated music video)
7. Where Do My Socks Go
8. This Ain't Exactly What I Hand In Mind (animated music video)
9. This is Your Daddy's Oldsmobile
10. Cletus McHicks and His Band from the Sticks
Tracks six and eight were turned into limited animation music videos more than 15 years later. The live action music videos were released in 1990. Now, bubbling under the surface right around the time Lend Me Your Ears hit the market, Ray was in the planning/development stages of building a theater in Branson, Missouri. This theater had it's grand opening in 1991 and Ray performed there for three seasons (1991, 1992, and 1993). The concept of a music video being seen as something of a commercial product, rather than a marketing tool, combined with the proliferation of a commercially viable VHS market in the early '90s enabled Ray's career to take on dramatically different directions as the decade continued...yet the decade started off with Lend Me Your Ears in 1990...and several years later one could say the public was lending their eyes to Ray Stevens, too, during the heyday of televised VHS mail-order advertisements.
Hello again...in my previous blog entry I spotlighted the upcoming Christmas season of concerts at the Ray Stevens' CabaRay showroom beginning November 1st. However, we don't want to forget about Halloween this coming October 31st. I sometimes post a blog entry each year spotlighting the novelty songs Ray has recorded with a Halloween theme...they're the same songs, of course, because to date he hasn't recorded any new songs with a Halloween theme...but in order to prevent my blog entries surrounding his Halloween songs from being buried in the archives I sometimes resurrect the concept this time each year. Oh I could easily instruct readers of this blog to search the archives on the right hand side of the screen for the month of October in each previous year but that could be a bit time consuming and so I bring back the topic with, hopefully, a different take or angle each time.
On the YouTube front Ray's been issuing audio tracks and performances from his CabaRay Nashville television series of Halloween themed songs from his career. The first of these happened to be a performance from his television series of "Spiders and Snakes". Now, for those very familiar with the song, you'll know that is has nothing to do with Halloween but the title of the song lends itself to creatures you might find slithering and crawling around in any number of deep, dark dungeons and basements. The song was a huge hit for Jim Stafford but Ray recorded a version of the song in 2012 for his 9-CD comical bonanza, The Encyclopedia of Recorded Comedy Music. Ray performed the song on an episode of CabaRay Nashville and here's the performance...
Elsewhere on that 2012 project are Ray's versions of several other novelty songs that have long since been identified with the Halloween season: "The Purple People Eater" (originally recorded by Sheb Wooley in 1958), "The Witch Doctor" (originally recorded as David Seville, alias of Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., in 1958), "Monster Mash" (originally recorded by Bobby 'Boris' Pickett in 1962), and "Haunted House" (originally recorded by Jumpin' Gene Simmons in 1964). A bit more obscure is Ray's take on "Transfusion"...itself not explicitly a song dealing with monsters and ghouls but, in my mind at least, it's title conjures up imagery of mad scientists. That particular novelty song was originally a hit in 1956 by Nervous Norvus, a pseudonym for Jimmy Drake. Ray uploaded an audio track of his 2012 recording of "Haunted House". Ray's version features vocal effects not heard in the original from Jumpin' Gene Simmons as well as the prominent vocal presence of Ray's female harmony singers (a big part of his sound) but keep in mind this is an audio track and not a music video...
Ray unleashed a couple of Halloween-type novelty singles in 1965. One of those happened to be titled "Rockin' Teenage Mummies". The novelty was written by Ray and produced by Shelby Singleton and Jerry Kennedy. Bill Lowery was the publisher and it was issued on Mercury Records. Recently the audio was uploaded onto YouTube and I've embedded it below. You can hear the profound influence The Coasters had on his earlier novelty songs...he does an impeccable vocal impression of Billy Guy, the lead singer of The Coasters, in the 1960 novelty single, "Sgt. Preston of the Yukon"; you'll hear Ray using a Billy Guy vocalization throughout most of that song. The scat-singing from Ray heard in "Rockin' Teenage Mummies" has the gravelly vocal cadence associated with Coasters classics like "Searchin'" and "Poison Ivy".
The second Halloween-type song from Ray Stevens in 1965, also on Mercury Records, and written by Ray...produced by Shelby Singleton and Jerry Kennedy...and published by Bill Lowery...was "Mr. Baker the Undertaker". This novelty was far less jaunty, if that's the proper description, of "Rockin' Teenage Mummies". The mummies, in my opinion, was satirical but you'll have to dig for examples of it underneath the layers of frenetic vocalization and uptempo delivery. The story about Mr. Baker, on the other hand, maintains the same uptempo delivery but Ray is far less frenetic vocally and the lyrics create a scene of an undertaker and his assistant, an Owl named Al, cheerfully awaiting the next mistake from the hospital. You can hear the audio of the song on a site called 45cat which features an embed originating from YouTube. I'm not embedding the clip due to it not being officially uploaded from Ray but I'll share a link to the 45cat website with the embedded audio clip. The site also contains audio of the novelty song's B-side, too. You can visit the site by clicking HERE.
One of the later recordings from Ray, from 1988, tackles the Halloween concept head on...a bluesy novelty titled "The Booger Man". Ray sings about a fictional monster that could put the classic movie monsters to shame...by song's end the focus shifts to Ray and a nameless woman parked near the woods. Ray uses the story of the previously unseen monster to coax the woman into getting a bit more intimate and cozy...suggesting that he hears something out there and she better slide closer...proclaiming the monster's now sitting on top of the car. A couple of years later, in 1990, Ray released "Sittin' Up with the Dead". This song, also adopted as a Halloween novelty, is about an archaic southern custom of keeping the recently departed company until an undertaker/funeral director is able to get to the residence to retrieve the deceased. A very famous music video from Ray was released on the song in 1990 and it's available for viewing on YouTube (it's received more than two million unique views since being uploaded). It was part of Ray's Multi-Platinum 1992 VHS, Comedy Video Classics, as well. I'm going to embed a performance of the song from CabaRay Nashville, however. The reason being is that it's a song that Ray rarely ever performed on television or even in concerts, even though it was made into a very popular music video, but he performed it once on his television series and here it is...
Hello all! For me Friday happened to be more busier than usual and so I didn't get any extra time to upload the Rayality TV webisode from Friday. In the installment, portraying the fictional Reverend Ray once more, we are treated to a mini sermon and then the classic music videos of "Sittin' Up with the Dead" and "The Haircut Song".
In the first, taped in 1990 (the song was released that same year on the Lend Me Your Ears album), Ray tells the story of a man that has to sit up with a deceased uncle...but to his horror, the uncle sits up, too. "The Haircut Song", originally recorded in 1985, the music video came along a full fifteen years later in 2000.
The music video is of the single release radio edit. In the radio edit, verse 2 is omitted, and so there are only 2 visits to an out of town barbershop instead of the 3 visits originally heard in the unedited recording on his I Have Returned album (a Gold certified, #1 country music album in the early part of 1986).
"The Haircut Song" music video made it's debut on a VHS home video release called Funniest Video Characters in 2000. In this installment of Rayality TV, however, only the final barbershop visit is seen due to the barber being a preacher (to keep it tied to the overall religious theme of this installment).
If you want to see the entire music video of "The Haircut Song" click HERE.
Halloween always causes me to highlight Ray Stevens recordings that have a Halloween theme of some kind. He's rarely recorded songs about ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and the like but there are a few exceptions sprinkled throughout his career. The earliest happens to be 1963's "Laughing Over My Grave" which takes the concept of the love song to extremes. In it we're told of a couple who've hit bad times...the man's caught cheating and the wife wants to seek revenge on her husband. The man's guilt is reflected in the song's title as he says that's what he can hear her doing. It reaches a climax when the wife approaches him holding a gun...ready to pull the trigger. I have no information about when the song was actually recorded but I'd say 1963...it appeared as a B-side to a single that Mercury Records issued on Ray titled "Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer". The catalog number is Mercury 72307. The single was officially issued in 1964 even though Ray had ventured to Monument Records in 1963. I believe Mercury still had the contractual rights to release singles on Ray for a few more years...and I believe Monument had to wait until his recording association with Mercury wrapped up and that's why Monument couldn't release any singles on Ray until 1966...at least that's how it appears. I take it that Ray was free to play on sessions for any record label in addition to working with artist's on the Monument label...all the while recording for Mercury Records through 1965.
Anyway...a couple more releases on Mercury also carried a Halloween theme...first off is 1965's "Rockin' Teenage Mummies" about a band of mummies that become rock stars. For bandages they wear band-aids...which create a fury of excitement amongst the band's female fans. Along the way we hear a brief impression of Ed Sullivan...as the band made their way onto his television program. Their singing style, perhaps as a jab at rock bands of the time, features nothing but groans and howls with an added touch of scat singing. It's catalog number is Mercury 72382. That particular single was an A-side...and he followed it up with another Halloween style 1965 novelty, "Mr. Baker the Undertaker". That particular song deals with the happenings at a mortuary where Mr. Baker and his owl assistant, Al, eagerly await each call from the local doctor. Throughout the song we're treated to some undertaker jokes and light-hearted references about death. It reminds of the kind of song that could've been sung by Digger O'Dell from the Life of Riley radio program given all of the morbid, yet funny, one-liners about death. It's catalog number is Mercury 72430.
Much later Ray recorded the bluesy ode to all things Halloween in "The Booger Man". This song was issued in 1988 and can be found on his comedy album I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like. In the song Ray sings about a monster that never got much recognition or fame but it's a real creature preying and spying on people...and much of the reason why the monster slips by without much fanfare is because his victims don't survive the attack. Two years later, 1990, Ray issued "Sittin' Up With the Dead". As of this writing that's the last Halloween-style recording from Ray Stevens. The song deals with an old-time tradition of sitting up with dead people in an effort to make sure the departed isn't robbed or taken advantage of in the hours or days prior to an undertaker arriving and taking the body to the funeral home. The song is funny, of course, and it takes a slight detour from the innocent sitting up with the dead concept and makes a turn toward the surreal. Ray sings about an uncle that's so affected by arthritis that when the uncle died he was stooped over so much that they needed a chain to keep the body laying flat in the casket. However, a thunderstorm erupted and the chain snapped and the Uncle sat up in the casket! This was followed by a loss of electricity, which created more chaos. The song was made into a music video in 1990...and it's available on You Tube. Shifting gears...
This particular single has a catalog number of CBS-7235. Barnaby Records material was at one time distributed by CBS. There were also associations with GRT and the Janus label, too. This particular picture sleeve accompanied the release in France and the more I think about it the more I assume that since "Bridget the Midget" is written in big, bold letters that it's the A-side and "A Mama and a Papa" is the B-side in spite of how the songs are arranged on the picture sleeve. I assume "A Mama and a Papa" was recorded at some point in 1971 around the time he recorded "Turn Your Radio On" and "All My Trials" and when it came time to issue "Bridget the Midget" in France they tacked on "A Mama and a Papa" as the B-side. In case some didn't know, "A Mama and a Papa" reached the Adult-Contemporary charts here in America in 1971...peaking in the Top-5 during the summer. The chart was officially referred to at the time as Easy-Listening. It's B-side is a very rare, obscure recording with the unique title of "Melt". This song, as far as I know, has never appeared on any Ray Stevens compilation and it's only available as a B-side on that 1971 single. The "Melt" song is a love ballad in spite of it's title...it has to do with a romantic and the way he feels whenever the woman in his life gets around him. The very first time I heard the song I instantly loved it.
I know rattling off all of those single releases may sound confusing to some but this may help...
"Bridget the Midget" originally was issued with "Night People" as it's B-side late in 1970. Then along came "A Mama and a Papa" in the summer of 1971 and it was issued with "Melt" as it's B-side. Then, later, "Bridget the Midget" gets released overseas where in this case the B-side is "A Mama and a Papa".
