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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Twin Cities Vinyl Oddities: From atrocious to zany
Wednesday 08 November @ 12:41:15 |
 by MAX SPARBER
Since Edison invented the mechanical cylinder phonograph in 1877, Minnesota artists have pressed a lot of platter. It’s a growing graveyard of vinyl, most of which will never enjoy any sort of reissue as a CD. Some of it doesn’t deserve to molder away in obscurity—St. Paul rocker Augie Garcia, as an example, is long overdue for a retrospective. But for every pressing of Garcia’s “Hi Yo Silver” (a terrific minor regional hit) there are literally hundreds of recordings of artists with suspect ability, questionable taste or uncertain audiences. Idly flipping through the records at any local record store will produce a bonanza of local albums with titles such as More Hymns from the 4th Synod Singers or The Ramsey Lutheran Church Singers present Songs Our Father Taught Us.
Local cocktail singers often produced their own albums, selling them at long-forgotten local watering holes with names like “The Preston” or “The Pike Lounge.” Local radio stations held weekly barn dances and released albums of obscure regional fiddlers scratching their way through Norwegian folk tunes. Local television stations created minor celebrities out of their morning cartoon show hosts, releasing singles of them singing themes of public domain animated characters from the ’30s. If you’re looking for quality, well, there is some forgotten greatness buried in these stacks of battered old records, but not much, and it’s hard to locate. However, if you’re looking for weirdness, well, bravo. You hit the motherload, and sometimes you need look no farther than the record cover.
Even major record companies have blundered when packaging their albums—one need only point to the notorious first cover of The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, which showed the Fab Four dressed in butcher smocks and draped in cuts of meat and severed doll parts. If the most popular band in the world can produce so astounding a horror, even with the backing of Capitol Records, a staff of experienced and highly skilled photographers and designers, and a veritable army of publicists, then what can we hope for from the local recording artist who hires his friend at an ad agency to whip together a photo for the 200 copies of a self-produced vanity LP?
Total chaos, of course. Bizarre photographs that must have been humiliating mere hours after they were taken, incomprehensible album titles written in unreadable, hand-drawn fonts and color schemes that could cause seizures in pigeons. Here is just a brief sampling of some of Minnesota’s offering, drawn from the enormous collection of Vinyl Oddities (vinyloddities.blogspot.com)—go online for larger images, plus more LP mayhem.
 Chmielewski Brothers Orchestra
Chmielewski Funtime
The fellow in the back—that’s right, the grinning man in the plaid jacket and enormous freaking tie—is none other than former Minnesota State Senator Florian Chmielewski, otherwise known as “the Swinging Senator.” So you know the Chmielewskis were in for a fun time when they all hopped into their long red Chmielewskimobile, tossed the boys up on the roof, and headed out to tour the North Country with their accordions. Oh, there were endless games of “Name Six Products Manufactured on the Iron Range” and “List Every Single Secretary of the Interior,” but the real challenge was to stump the old man at his favorite travel game: “Speak Extemporaneously on The Subject Of —” and then a Chmielewski would fill in a political topic culled from the day’s headlines. Of course, one day Florian Jr. called out the subject “marijuana” from the roof of the Chmielewskimobile, and the old man hit the brakes so hard that junior nearly flew all the way to Crow Wing County.
 Dale Lundgren
I Shall Come Forth as Gold
You can almost hear the photographer taunting poor Dale: “Just come up the steps and we’ll take the photo, Dale,” he’s saying. “What’s the matter, Dale? Don’t you want your photo taken for the cover of your album? Why won’t you join me at the top of the stairs, Dale?”
Dale, always a good spirit, smiles at the photographer’s joke. But, inside, Dale is crying.
 Jack Muralt
Muralt Sings Muralt
From the LP’s back cover: “In the spring after Pearl Harbor, Jack and one of his brothers enlisted in the Marines. Four years later after many harrowing experiences and being buried alive by the enemy on Iwo Jima, he returned to the States and spent some time in a Navy hospital. In this Universal Audio album, Jack sings some of the songs he has written. As they are varied in topic and tempo, he hopes they will have wide appeal.”
 The Parrish Brothers
The Parrish Brothers
Of course, it’s illegal to hunt them now, but the North Woods used to be so filled with Parrish Brothers that after a weekend of hunting, my father had enough meat to stock the freezer for the entire winter, and we’d have enough spangled blue jumpsuits with flyaway collars to last the whole school year.
 Father Frank Perkovich
More Songs & Hymns from the Polka Mass
Thanks to Vatican II (popularized Masses done in regional languages), Father Frank Perkovich of Eveleth, Minn., led his church in prayer to Serbian, Croatian and Polish melodies played by the Perkatones and the Polka Massters Orchestra. One imagines even Jesus would have been inspired to lead Mary Magdalene in a triple-step, a scoot and a strolling vine.
 Six Fat Dutchmen
6 Fat Dutchmen
Before Har Mar Superstar, before The Suburbs, before Prince, even before The Trashmen, it was a local polka band that attracted national attention to Minnesota and signed to a major label. H. Loeffelmacher’s Six Fat Dutchmen, which actually featured 11 fat Minnesotans, enjoyed national distribution through RCA Victor, and the company found the perfect illustrator to represent the band’s oompa-oompa sound on the cover of their first album. That illustrator was Jack Davis, of Mad Magazine fame, and the imaginary crowd of lederhosen-clad musicians he created is, for our money, the single greatest image ever placed on a Minnesota album. Some of the details Davis crowded into his picture: a band-aid on the drum, a nude painting of a portly woman on the back wall and his and her steins. This is what we want polka bands to look like, and they never do. ||
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