Double Alvin Cash 45s

My love of Alvin Cash is already documented and while these may have slight deviations from what's seen there, each 45 has all of the requirements for an Alvin classic

*High on danceability
*Moronic lyrical content
*Showcasing a stupid dance
*Alvin sounds like a happy dude!
*"Oooh-Wee!"
*"Awwww but you're lookin' good baby!"
*"Awwwwwww have mercy!"

and of course, the Twine still gets nods.

The earlier 45 (1965): the Penguin (Tuxedo Bird)/Un-Wind the Twine is especially close to the content of the twine time LP. Sometimes I think he just goes to the zoo and comes back with all sorts of inspiration

Alvin Cash - The Penguin (Tuxedo Bird)


Unwind the Twine is of course his umpteenth reference to his favorite dance. What rules about this track is that it seems to have a neat little marimba in the background!

Alvin Cash - Unwind the Twine




1967's Doin' the Ali Shuffle / Feel So Good is two years later but does show a little bit of a change. Ali Shuffle (MUCH different from his 1976 Dakar records release) is the more familiar of the two. Still a goofy (but killer) dance, with some of his goofiest lyrics like "I want you to float like a butterfly, baby, and I want you to sting like a bee" duhhhhh



The B-Side instrumental "Feel So Good" honestly doesn't feel so good with me. I like a lot of his earlier instrumentals but this is a little too smooth saxxy. Though I think it demonstrates a pretty good bridge to his later career (he is, after all, now with the Registers when he used to be with the Crawlers, a comment on his age)


It's worth noting that both of these were different producers than his Twine Time days (which means no more Andre Williams). Penguin and Un-Wind the Twine have Hayes, Burrage and J. Jones despite being released around the same time as songs like BARRACUDA. Ali Shuffle and Feel So Good are both produced by Eddie Silvers. I don't know much about either of these guys and I'm so close to hitting "publish post" that I think I might take care of that later.

By the way, here's a pretty good resource of Alvin

Learn to dance while I nurse my server back to health

Welp, looks like my hard drive crashed, so almost all the 45s will be down while I figure out what to do.

In the meantime, somebody on flickr posted some hints out how to do THE FRUG and all sorts of other dances. These never work as well as watching it being done, but this is the closest thing I've found

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevira/59407915/

Steven Garrick and His Party Twisters - Come On Everybody, Let's Twist

UPDATE: It's been re-upped!

This album is a cash grab. But really, before Rock & Roll became thought of as an art form (around Pet Sounds/Sgt. Peppers) it was probably more worth your while to identify what wasn't done with money as the primary focus than what was. Chubby Checker's version of the twist set a huge gravy train in motion with so many people wanting to take a ride. Plenty of groups tried to fill a niche in another dumbass dance move like The Frug. This album went straight for the honey hole, to the point where the artists' name isn't even on the front cover. 

And I like their approach. Here we have 12 instrumentals that try to expand twisting to whatever ridiculous activity you may be enjoying. Chew gum to the Doublemint Twist! Do the Scientwist in your laboratory! Bullies, intimidate the puny to the Intimitwist(or is it meant for intimate situations?)

It's no surprise the album hasn't found its way into the rock & roll history books yet. That's because those books are horseshit. But also because these are pretty straightforward twistin'. No memorable hooks, though some pretty impressive use of stereo. Some of these, especially the Astrotwist, wouldn't be too out of place in a Las Vegas Grind et. al. compilation, though I wouldn't really say these are raw or raunchy... just simple, well done and enjoyable twistin' tunes.

Anywho, here you go

Alvin Cash & The Registers - Twine Time

Y'all are going to think I'm insane, but this is a desert island disc for me. The subject matter is stupid, the recording is muddy as hell, the cover art sure ain't much, but I'm going to have more fun on my island than yours. This is the sort of gleeful boogaloo nonsense that bypasses your frontal lobe completely and is strictly built for dance.

Normally, I don't know anything about what I post and google's not a help. This time, there's all sorts of information on Alvin Cash, and I'm not the first one to rip this record, but I haven't seen it on blogspot (his singles, on the other hand, are all over). In fact, for once the information on the back of the album is surprisingly informative: Born in St. Louis, starts a dancing troupe with his brothers, catches the ear of Andre "Bacon Fat" Williams and gets picked up on Mar-V-Lus. Twine Time shoots to the top (and sure enough, it's not hard to find covers of it), he keeps at it for a while and never gets quite the same success and, correct me if I'm wrong, never releases another LP. He also appeared in a couple of movies. 

Seriously, everything on this has an addictive sort of bounce to it, and I actually kind of like the semi-nonsensical lyrics. One song is about not being able to see a hawk. One claims that a girl "shot him through the grease" and the album is packed with "awwwww but you're _____in ____, baby!"

I've heard this LP is a collectors item. I don't know, I got it off the amazon used marketplace for $20 lookin' pretty mint except for the holes in the cover, nothing claiming it's a reissue. The original Twine Time/Bump 45 (TWO SIDES OF FIRE) had a real badass Mushroom Cloud on the label, which might have been why I listened to Alvin in the first place

Listen and love it y'all

The Nitecaps - Frug

The Nitecaps play that raucous saxophone-fueled kind of instrumental rock & roll that gets forgotten behind the monstrous word that is "surf". Here they've prepared a fiery lineup of covers and pun-titled songs to promote their dance move of choice and mine: The Frug. I would kill to know how to do the frug, but my dreams of having an RRHHWW reader releasing a slew of Youtube oldies-dance instructional videos are mostly abandoned, though Wikipedia hasn't forgotten this particular dance.

Anyway, this is a good one. The worst songs are still worth a hipshake and tracks like "Sassy Frug" their rendition of "You Can't Sit Down" are an outright riot. 

Here's where you can get it

The Ed Townsend Orchestra - Ed Townsend's Boogie Woogies (Part 1)

We've got a simple one for you. If you want to know about Ed Townsend, it's not hard but I haven't seen much about him in this orchestral form. Well, what you get is a great dancing number with Ed only chiming in for hype purposes. The B-side had a few dings on it and would skip, so I'm keeping it off (it was more or less an more instrumental version of this mostly instrumental song). But as you'll see, it's a pretty cool song and not nearly as lovey dovey as the stuff he's recognized for writing.

The Ed Townsend Orchestra - Ed Townsend's Boogie Woogie (Part 1)