It's Saturday night, so how about a party, and who better to play some party tunes than Les Paul? Well, maybe back in the fifties that was true. Judging from the jukebox in this doodle, Les was popular with the teenagers. This festive sketch is from Les Paul And Mary Ford-The Hit Makers! (Capitol T416).
How about a couple of little nautical themed doodles courtesy of Songs Of The Islands Interpreted By Lawrence Welk Featuring Buddy Merrill (Dot DLP 25251, 1959)? Pretty nice, eh? You'll notice that the pirate below is carrying a treasure chest full of Lawrence Welk records. Those were more valuable than grog in certain circles. These doodles are much more interesting than the last time I brought you Lawrence Welk.
Feel like a little Mexican tonight? No not tacos, I mean doodles! This is from David Carroll And His Orchestra-Mexico And 11 Other Great Hits (Mercury SR 60660). Gotta love it.
I wish I could think of something witty to say here. But I'm tired. And my stat counter hasn't worked since this morning around 8. Something else to try and fix...
From the inner sleeve to the Diamond Head Beachcombers LP below, here are some helpful hints from RCA Victor ("The Most Trusted Name In Sound") to give you "many years of trouble-free listening." Starting out above, you can see how to handle your records. You should palm them, like an NBA All-Star would plam a basketball, only without using your fingers. This is especially easy to do when picking the records up from your 6-disc changers that drops the records onto one another from a height of 4 inches.
Next, we see that we should keep the records in their sleeves. Thus they don't get any dust on them. This advice was rendered obsolete a few minutes later with the introduction of the miracle 317X! After that, it was OK to store your records in a chicken coop between plays.
This is still good advice. Always store your records near a water-filled vase. In the event of spillage, the water will help to remove the dust that accumulated if the above step was ignored.
After the water has spilled onto the records, use your socks to clean it off.
And lastly, keep an eye on that needle. It's very valuable, especially since it's larger than the diamond you gave your girlfriend for your engagement. Unless you opted for the cheap osmium needle. In that case, you may as well play this record on your old hand-cranked victrola.
Don't forget, you got some helpful record care tips before (twice)! And if you have eight questions about stereo, you'll find eight answers here. Also, you can Go Stereo here.
What?!? Two doodles in one day? It's like the good old days around here. Gotta strike while the iron is hot, I suppose, and I don't have anything better to do at the moment. This idyllic island scene is from The Diamond Head Beachcombers-Aloha From Hawaii (RCA Victor LSP-2059, 1959). And you even get a tag, Orchids From Hawaii. If the front cover were in better shape, I'd scan that in, too. Interesting shot of Diamond Head, with some long canoes in the water and a Northwest jet in the air, looking suspiciously like a cut-n-paste job, but what do I know about air travel in the fifties?
When you collect records, people often want to give you more. And sometimes the things they give you aren't exactly what you'd buy for yourself. Case in point: During my trip to Ohio, I was given a stack of records that included such hit artists as Herb Albert, The BeeGees and Three Dog Night. Oh, and this rather curious LP. This was the pride of the collection, the record I was guaranteed I didn't already have. Sure enough, they were correct. This is Johnny Bond and The Willis Bros. Featuring The Red River Valley Boys-The Return Of "The Singing Cowboy" (CMH Records CMH-6213, 1977). I bet you don't have it either.
I've been ignoring the fine folks over at Command for my doodles (with the exception of this Christmas doodle, which really isn't a doodle in the strictest sense of the word), but I've decided I need to right that wrong and start getting some of these excellent bits in here. So I'm starting with this great little sketch from an artist known only as Sandy from Pertinent Percussion Cha Cha's Starring Enoch Light And The Light Brigade (Command RS 814 SD, 1960). Those of you familiar with the Command Records label know about the eye-catching cover art they helped the label stand out on record shelves. They all had a certain style about them, looking more like modern art than album covers. The music on the inside was always well recorded, and technically perfect, if not a little dry. Enoch Light was the mastermind behind the label, and he wanted everything to be his way or no way. The record jackets were almost all large gatefolds, and the doodles all seem to be on the inside of those, along with many, many paragraphs of purple prose about the recorded contents. You'd have to read fast to take it all in before the record ended.
I had hoped to bring you some pictures of the damage from hurricane Wilma today, but there really wasn't too much damage around. The worst thing I could find was this sailboat that had been blown aground. Someone is going to have to spend a pretty penny to get her back in the water. As you can see, the sky was back to clear and blue less than twelve hours after Wilma made landfall less than 100 miles south of here. However, the wind was still blowing at better than 20 mph out on the beaches, so it felt like walking in a sandblaster at times. I tried to get a picture of all the sand blowing around, but they didn't come out very well. I did get plenty of sand in my new camera, though.
Here's another critter I stumbled across out on the flats. I don't know if it's a type of jellyfish, or a nudibrach, or what. But that blue color really made it stand out from the mud.
I was out trying to find something to do after the hurricane today, and I happened upon a large mud flat at low tide. So I put on my wetsuit booties and waded into the muck. One of the things I found was this little snail, climbing up the branch of a mangrove tree. There were hundreds of them, a couple on every branch, yet somehow I'd never seen them before. I've got to be more observant...
This is probably my least favorite of all my weekly calendar pictures. I like the idea of it, but the execution is poor. I should have found something else. This was a field in San Antonio, Florida, that had recently been cut for hay, then baled. I don't know why I don't like it. Not enough contrast, perhaps. It's just missing something...
