Tabishland

that was like getting cotton candy all over your face and in your hair.





disco!!!!!!!!
 

Well, THAT brings me back. Thanks, Nell. Man...did the guys actually wear pants that tight? *Whew!*
 

I think that's just good, solid 1970s-vintage pop: straightforward, tuneful, fun, and nobody is pretending otherwise. Yeah, I could have done without the tight white pants, but it's a fine radio song.
 

Power pop can be a lot like cotton candy. I forgot about this piece of confection as well, so I turned to allmusic.com for some background. The details there were even more interesting, but there was nothing about pants::

Best remembered for the smash "Beach Baby," '70s pop group First Class was the studio creation of the British songwriting and production team of John Carter and Ken Lewis, who together previously enjoyed success under the guises of the Flowerpot Men, Carter-Lewis & the Southerners, and the Ivy League. For "Beach Baby" — a slice of richly harmonic pop in the mold of classic Beach Boys — the duo enlisted the services of singer Tony Burrows, the voice of other pre-fab hitmakers including the Edison Lighthouse ("Love Grows [Where My Rosemary Goes]"), White Plains ("My Baby Loves Lovin'"), the Brotherhood of Man ("United We Stand") and the Pipkins ("Gimme Dat Ding"); upon its release in 1974, the single reached the Top Five on the U.S. pop charts and also scored in the U.K. A self-titled album and follow-up singles including "Dreams Are Ten a Penny" and "Funny How Love Can Be" tanked, however, and after releasing a second LP, The First Class SST, Carter and Lewis dissolved the project in 1976.
 

There's a certain continuity about guys calling themselves "Flowerpot Men" and wearing tight white pants.

The white pants thing was something I had forgotten as well. But I suppose that really we did only know this as a radio song.

Is it just me or do today's pop songs seem much less fun than old 70's tunes?
 

Nell, the innuendo is clear: you think hiphop explains the decline of civilization as we know it.

It's high time you were a little more post-racial on this blog
 

Hey, I wasn't complaining about the tight white pants.
 

You know Tim, it's my own fault. I missed the dance class where they went over all the hip-hop moves. Maybe you could give me some rap lessons.
 

WHAT DANCE CLASS?!!?!?!?
 

I like to dress up my cats in tight white pants and have them lip sync to DeFranco Family songs. The cutest, littlest cat gets to be Tony De Franco.
 

I didn't know you had cats.
 

Going back to Tim's exhortation... Let's face it: this whole discussion is racially coded, beginning with E-mann's claim (coming from West Va., don't forget) that First Class was a "working, uh, hard working, white-pants band."
 

My younger cat Melon is writing a book called "The Audacity of Pants."
 

But my older cat Sophie keeps talking about 1968- but not about Bobby Kennedy. She still holds to her life-long crush on Ed Muskie, even though I have told her over and over again that he wasn't a large freshwater fish. But come to think of it- who hasn't, at one point or another, had a romantic thought about Ed Muskie?
 

Ain't nuthin' wrong with a well-crafted, guiltyu-pleasure 3 minute pop song: "Brandy" is still one of my favorites, as is "Jenny 8674309". Brian Wilson called them "3 minute teenage operas."

But what's this "rap" thing the kids like now?
 

The kids like a LOT of stuff now. Everything from Zeppelin to bands you have never and will never hear of. AND I think it was 867-5309. Not that I ever called her.

I remember Melon!
 

Speaking of kids, the blog's 2nd birthday is almost here. The question is: Does it function at a two-year-old level? Do you still wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if it's breathing? And has it been properly tended by a qualified pediatrician?
 

And, now, speaking of "qualified pediatricians," here's a trip down memory lane (two-fold) with Tim's June 2006 blogomemory of my most infamous Sendracs "FU":

"I was in the audience (cool Joe College thing going down) the night Jeff FU. I truly can still see the idiotic smile and smell the reek of desperation as he sat on a a box waiting for the nightmare to end. He made some feeble attempts at forming words, but like a pithed frog in Bio class, his mouth just opened and closed, slowly ...and repeatedly."

If only Oklahoma was a coastal state I could have sung "Beach Baby" and got through it.
 

No, Tim. I STOOD on a box when that happened.
 

There's a whole round of immunizations recommended for 2-yr-olds. Oops! I digress.

In something completely unrelated but relevant, at least to me, Emily (my Senior daughter who is more than ready to graduate) is painting her own "Sendracs" block tomorrow. For some reason this makes me happier than pretty much any of her "larger" accomplishments.
 

Is Em into the gansta rap thang?

Jeff: then it must have been Mark Anderson sitting on the box, looking up at you, with pity in his eyes, thinking WTF'sup with this shit, fool???
 

Listen again: If you know Pachelbel's Canon, you can hear it's entire chord progression in the verse (beginning with the lyrics "Do you remember back in old L.A....").
 

Yeah but isn't the chord progression from Pachelbel's Canon, like, half the pop songs ever written?
 

And they copped the bass line from Jon Bonham's "When the Levee Breaks", which is the primal rhythm for virtually every song written, which derives form an anonymous sharecropping blues musician from the Delta, which comes to us from native rhythms of Mali flute and drums which is a representation of the cardiac beat, much like we heard in the silence as Jeff stood on the box, looking at Mark Anderson Baffled smile.
 

Mister Fun: You make a good point, but although I don't know half the pop songs ever written, of the two that I do know (one is 'Beach Baby' and the other one isn't), none go that far.

If I may continue to be geeky for a moment, using a 3-4 chord sequence from it wouldn't be so unusual, it seems to me, but using all 8 (with a slight modification in the second-to-last, or may I say "penultimate" among this group?) seems to me pretty unusual.

As for Tim, perhaps I could add: the only thing worse than my silence at that moment would have been your singing voice,...or a rap recitation of your capsule history of American music--which is notably non-post-racial.

The next thing you hear is my silence, at least until the blog turns two. In the mean time, hum the voice-less orchestral accompaniment to "Kansas City."