Highly recommended – very fun stuff. Especially when they find endless variations of chord patterns which repeat throughout musical history and make a big mix out of it. Incredible stuff. Apparently been together for 28 years – with showmanship and chops to match!
Here’s the homepage.
Here’s their music at iTunes.
They have a CD and live DVD out. Review to follow here. Today I got the info they’re in Hamburg for the next two weeks – so don’t miss them!
I don’t have that many of his records – but I sure found a lot of his tracks at iTunes! He was very busy covering any style of popular guitar playing you can think of during the 60s and 70s. I guess most of you don’t know him, so for starters I made a little 42 track Buddy Merrill iMix, which you can find at Itunes.
Here’s what I wrote about it:
The versatile Buddy Merrill!
We start with a surfy/Ventures-style division before going into a nowsound/funky part. This turns over into his best bossa tracks on iTunes. After this we are exposed to a little gang of country favorites leading into Buddy’s steel guitar skills featured on his coolest hawaiian offerings. We go Exotica for the second to last bunch of tunes. This leaves us to close this collection with three tunes pulled from the classical catalogue – Where Czardas had briefly taken us during the bossa section.
Clayton Hula Hottie guitar picks – now those look great! Have never used or seen Clayton here in Germany.
This is a re really good online radio show with usually two hours of big band, lounge and exotica music, mostly old but some really good new stuff thrown in during the second hour. The Retro Cocktail Hour has been going for years and years and Darrell Brogdon keeps the quality level nailed on a high level – he’s deep into this, obviously.
Quote from his homepage:
the likable, eager-to-please instrumental pop of the 1950s and ’60s is back! Sparked by CD reissues from such major labels as RCA and Capitol Records, the lounge music craze encompasses a diverse array of music – the Polynesian sway of Les Baxter and Martin Denny, the eccentric pop confections of Juan Garcia Esquivel, the mambo madness of Perez Prado, “private eye jazz” from TV’s 77 Sunset Strip and Peter Gunn and the cartoon-like caperings of Raymond Scott, among others.
Kansas Public Radio’s Retro Cocktail Hour (Saturdays at 7:00 pm) is our weekly nod to the Space Age Pop revival. Here you’ll find vintage recordings from the dawn of the Hi-Fi Era – imaginative, light-hearted (and sometimes light-headed) pop stylings designed to underscore everything from the backyard barbecue to the high-tech bachelor pad. Darrell Brogdon serves up two hours of incredibly strange music on Kansas Public Radio, so grab a cocktail shaker and join us for The Retro Cocktail Hour.
This I found today at Dumb Angel Gazette:
quote from site
Thursday, December 7, 2007. 7:00-11:00 p.m.
Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th Street at Valencia, Mission District, San Francisco, CaliforniaAuthors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester (Beatsville, Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece, Dumb Angel #4: All Summer Long) will present a unique one-hour slide show documenting the Beat Generation’s long stretch over the Greater Los Angeles area between 1956 and 1966, via visuals of coffeehouses and Jazz joints from the Sunset Strip to Malibu, Venice and Newport Beach.
Legendary locations only heard about in books or in liner notes, from the Gas House and nearby Venice West, to the Unicorn and Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and Insomniac Cafe in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned, operated and painted by Burt Shonberg) in Laguna Beach.
Artists from John Altoon to Eric ‘Big Daddy’ Nord gave these places a colourful splash, as did the wide variety of Folk singers and poets who performed on their stages. Accompanying the slideshow will be a rare screening of Dirty Feet (1965), shot primarily at the Prison of Socrates coffeehouse in Balboa. Special guest speakers TBA, there will be another short Beat film or two (including a color one shot inside Venice West), plus a few new routines by San Francisco’s own Devil-Ettes to jazz the room.
Now I discovered this project (book and website) a couple of years back and just realized they changed the website to a blog, which is reason enough to try and make you aware of Legendary Surfers.
Very thorough reading, from various knowledgable people. Just reading the free articles will keep busy and well informed about the history of surfing. I guess a complete historical overview is obtained through buying the book or the PDF-files.
House Industries sell a redesigned set of Ratfink T’s.
John Severson book Surf Fever.
And in limited (1000) edition Taschen published the Leroy Grannis book, which is really gorgeous!
I know the image says “sold out”, but I still saw them in several stores, in Berlin that is.
read more here
Tonite on German TV channel Pro7 at 20.15 CET they will be broadcasting the carchase movie Autobahnraser. Gogo Sitar is on during the pizzadelivery scene. Nothing special, really, just thought I’d let you now about it.
04.11.2006, 20:15 Uhr
Autobahnraser
Spielfilm, Actionkomödie, D 2004Der Polizeineuling Karl-Heinz wird auf eine Gang von Autobahnrasern angesetzt. Langsam gewinnt er ihr Vertrauen, und die Gruppe zieht ihn mehr und mehr in ihren Bann. Schließlich entsteht sogar eine echte Freundschaft. Mit Hilfe seiner Autobahnraser-Freunde gelingt es Karl-Heinz letztlich sogar eine Bande von lang gesuchten Autodieben zu überführen …
Darsteller:
Luke Wilkins (Karl-Heinz)
Niels Bruno Schmidt (Knut)
Alexandra Neldel (Claudi)
Manuel Cortez (Bülent)
Collien Fernandes (Nina)
Kristian Erik Kiehling (Ecki)
Regie: Michael Keusch
Here’s an online article about the tune Miserlou, that has always been an Exotica favourite, and proven to be a great guitar melody over the years as well.
picture: Dick Dale