Saturday Matinee – Giant Snail, Giant Slug, Doug & The Slugs, Sharks Took The Rest, & Tokyo Ska Paradise

Glad those things don’t leap, but these slugs did:

We’ve featured Doug & The Slugs before. That vid dates to 1980, and 20 years later (the late) Doug Bennett was still singing the same song.

There just aren’t enough snail and slug songs IMO, but here’s “Snails” by Sharks Took The Rest. Not exactly my cup of gastropodia, but at least they contributed to the movement.
MOR SNALE SONGS PLZ

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra is just the thing to wind up this Saturday Matinee. Have a great weekend, folks, see you back here tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Cat Fail Sail, Mechanical Principles, & Tom Waits

[Tip ‘o the tarboosh to Mrmacs who found it here and insisted that we post it.]

“Mechanical Principles” – Simple gear actions from 1930 by Ralph Steiner, set to classical music. From the UToobage comments:

Some of the mechanisms featured:
0:16 Positive displacement pump
0:26 Four-stroke engine piston;
0:50 Simple steam engines or pumps;
2:00 Steam engine reversing gear as on ships;
3:10 Differential gear;
4:05 Worm gear;
4:10 Archimedes screw;
5:22 Geneva gear;
5:32 Pawl and ratchet;
5:55 Grasshopper escapement;
7:15 Scotch yokes;
8:07 Positive displacement pump (same as 0:16);
9:29 Wheel and disc integrator used in analog computers;
9:54 Possibly a turbine.

The only other soundtrack I can think of that might go along with that vid would be something by this guy:

Tom Waits’ Private Listening Party. I’m there if you need to get in touch with me. Have a great weekend, be back here tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – The Channels, Little Isidore, The Hooters, Aswad & SRV

Earl Lewis & The Channels in 1997. “The Closer You Are” was a regional hit in New York in 1956. (It was covered by Frank Zappa in 1984 who made it sound kinda creepy.)

Little Isadore & The Inquistors’ early R&B style is spot on. Can’t find much about LI, and maybe that’s a good thing. A googoyle search provides little, except that it lead me to Rob Hyman and a band I’d forgotten about.

Hyman was a founding member of The Hooters. I have one of their CDs, but I don’t remember what caught my ear aside from the eclectic sound. “Karla With a K” would have fit my playlist in the late 80’s.

Lessee, what else was I listening to back then? A wide variety, including these guys:

Aswad live at Sunsplash 1984. No, I was never a stoner, but I liked de riddims.

Before anyone thinks I was some kind of pre-hipster indie weenoid back then, this was what I cranked after the sun went down.

Have a great weekend folks (and remember that real dads hate Fathers Day).

Saturday Matinee – MMA Mismatch 1998, LogoRama, Brother Phelps, The Kentucky Headhunters & Roy Buchanan

600 lbs vs 169 lbs. in a match from 1998 – 431 lbs. was apparently the greatest weight differential in MMA history. Place your bets, then hit play. [h/t garycooper]

Great animation and concept, despite the not-so-subtle message. PG13 for language & violence. [h/t Internet Septic Tank Engineer]

UPDATE – Here’s the background from Wiki:

Logorama is a 16-minute French animated film written and directed by H5/ François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, and produced by Autour de Minuit. The film depicts events in a stylized Los Angeles, and is told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and mascots.

Brother Phelps from 1995, with “Any Way The Wind Blows.” Naming the band after their Minister father, brothers Rickie Lee and Doug Phelps previously recorded with The Kentucky Headhunters.

“Honky Tonk Walkin’.” First I heard The Kentucky Headhunters was their electric version of Sons of the Pioneers‘ “Davey Crockett” and it cracked me up.

Bill Doggett‘s “Honky Tonk” was a classic instrumental hit in 1956 . Here’s the late Roy Buchanan‘s version.

Okay, that’s enough for today. Have a great weekend, be back here for more tomorrow.

Hot Links From Around The Globe

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Great watercolor paintings of scenes from war-torn Afghanistan by British illustrator Matthew Cook. [Kudos to TR reader Nikolay Kotev for posting it.]

If you haven’t seen the vid posted here, it’s worth the 15 minutes. An OWS boy learns about collectivism from someone who lived in Soviet Russia… and he LISTENS.

Orlando Florida, home of Disney World, Epcot Center, and these pretty people.

Give your kids nightmares the easy way. Buy these. Sin duda todos estaremos de acuerdo en que el mejor sitio es delante de la taza del váter.

The latin name for it is Blobimus Maximus.

Any of you on Twitter? I am, but only for the purposes of collecting followers with the promise of tweeting absolutely no content. 20 or so get the joke. I haven’t “followed” anyone, yet I’ve been pre-blocked and reported as a spammer by some.
Think about that.

This a must read for everyone. We’re talking Freedom of Speech.
[Parental Advisory – disturbing content.]

Saturday Matinee – Doc Watson, Chet Atkins & Leo Kottke

Doc Watson, one of the most influential guitar pickers, passed away 29 May 2012. Blind before he reached the age of 1, he overcame his handicap with hard work and earned talent.  Here he is with Chet Atkins (d.2001) and a young Leo Kottke. I’m guessing the vid is from the late 70s.

[Personal gripe: Peeps who post these vids on the Utoobage should give some detail in the descriptions. Many do, but too many don’t.]

Here’s Chet Atkins, early 1960s, with “Black Mountain Rag.”

In 1982, Leo Kottke performed Tom T. Hall‘s “Pamela Brown” on a late night variety show.

Well I think three vids are enough for one post these days, so have a great weekend and we’ll see y’all pickin’ and flickin’ back here tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Savage Chickens, Rufus Thomas, Jaco Pastorius


Savage Chickens animation [via].

Rufus Thomas‘ “Funky Chicken” live at WattStax 1972.

Jaco Pastorius‘ “The Chicken,” live in Montreal. Bob Mintzer-sax, Randy Brecker-trumpet, OthelloMolineaux-steel pans, Peter Erskine-drums, Charles “Don” Alias-percusion.

As talented as Pastorius was, he was diagnosed as bi-polar, and despite medications, lived on the streets for weeks at a time. He died in 1987 at age 35 from head injuries incurred during an altercation with a bouncer at a nightclub in Florida.

Have a great weekend folks, see you back here tomorrow.

Saturday Matinee – Hey Baby ’59

Before you click on that first video, I gotta tell you something. Bunkarina sent it to me from the living room last night. Although I recognized the song immediately, I couldn’t name it or identify the original artist, let alone date it correctly. Had I been betting, I would have lost my shorts.

Now THAT is how to ask a girl to Senior Prom. Had I only known.

Hey Baby. On the beach.

In the rec hall. From the comments: Ha! – check out :34 – :36, looks like she’s popping her head in the door and thinking about being your girl!

DJ Ötzi’s version is cool, too.

That’s Bruce Channel and Delbert McClinton in 2003. Channel wrote it in 1959, recorded it, and it became a No 1 Hit in 1962.

50 years later, it’s still a hit for a high school prom invitation, and that makes me smile. Have a great weekend folks. See you back here tomorrow, when I will explain why “boobs” is now in the tagline.

Saturday Matinee – Vinyl Throw, Blackboard Jungle, Groovie Movie, & Hellzapoppin’

Even though it looks like a hoax, it makes me sad – no respect.

Yeah Daddio, Blackboard Jungle, 1955. Not much has changed since then, and they busted 78s in that movie, too. On the other hand, it introduced Bill Haley & The Comets, redefined them from rockabilly into rock and roll.

“Groovie Movie” short from 1944 – How to Jitterbug. Pay attention – there’s some hot stuff there, but nothing beats the Slim Slam Allstars.

Slim Galliard (piano, guitar) and Slam Stewart (bass) from the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin’. Killer stuff, that. Yeah, we posted it before, but so what. It’s great, especially because the clip begins with a tribute to jazz that was still popular just a few years prior.

Have a great weekend, folks, and tell your mom Bunk said Happy Mothers Day.

Saturday Matinee & Cinco de Mayo – Tijuana Brass, Snacktime, Tim Armstrong & HorrorPops

Cinco de Mayo has its roots in the French occupation of Mexico, which took place in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the Mexican Civil War of 1858, and the 1860 Reform Wars. These wars left the Mexican Treasury in ruins and nearly bankrupt. On July 17, 1861, Mexican President Benito Juárez issued a moratorium in which all foreign debt payments would be suspended for two years. In response, France, Britain, and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz to demand reimbursement. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew, but France, at the time ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to establish a Latin empire in Mexico that would favor French interests, the Second Mexican Empire. [Wiki]

So in other words, a nearly bankrupt country stopped paying bills until three big debt collectors showed up. Two of them settled, but the third took it a step further. Mr. Françoise (aka Lucky Pierre) knocked on the door and said, “Nice place you got here. Shame if anything should happen to it.” The rest is history.

In celebration of Cinco de Mayo, here’s Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass with some very embarrassing people of European heritage dancing. (No one in Alpert’s band was actually Hispanic.)

Jonco finds stuff on the internest that nobody else can see, and here’s proof.

Tim Armstrong Ska. [via]

Any band named HorrorPops gets my vote (and we’ve posted about them here before). There’s something inherently cool about a mashup between punk, psychobilly, hotrods and Denmark. Besides, they got a curvy girl with tatts on stand up bass singing lead.

With that, have a great weekend, folks.