Songs We Taught Great Gaylord

Squattin' with Great Gaylord - Billy Miller @Montreal

Rochell and the Candles - Squat With Me Baby
Little Luther - Du Dee Squat
Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs - Deputy Dog
Guitar Crusher - The Monkey
The Rolling Stones - Rice Krispies
Jessie Hill - Ooh Poo Pah Doo
Donald and the Delighters - Wang Dang Dula
The Contours - Whole Lotta Woman
The Falcons - Sent Up
Gino Washington - Gino Is A Coward
The Duvals - Cotton (Squattin')
Don and Dewey - A Little Love
The Righteous Brothers/Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels - Little Latin Lupe Lu
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - All Night
El Pauling and the Royalton - Solid Rock
Little Johnny and the Thundertones - Rock Till the End of time
The Stooges - TV Eye
The Contours/The Del Rays - Don't Let Her Be Your Baby
Syl Johnson - Falling in Love Again
Yvonne Fair - It Hurts to Be in Love
Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction to Your Mind

Do The Squat (Download)

The Great One roof side at Our Wicked Lady in Bushwick

Summer Soul-stice With Gaylord Fields!!

Worried that there would be no Summer Soul-stice program with Gaylord Fields this year?  Ichiban to the rescue!!  Soul is our music at 11 AM on DJ Roulette.

Playlist

Happy Winter Soul-stice!

Gray Georgia

Please enjoy the annual Winter Soul-stice celebration with yours truly and the one and only Gaylord Fields!

Soul Is Our Music!

Take the radio outside and listen to the Summer Soooooul-stice programs with me and Gaylord Fields!

2011

2010

And be sure to tune in live this Sunday from 5 - 7 PM for this year's edition.

Summer Boogaloo

Ichiban New Bin

Takeshi Terauchi & The Bunnys - Summer Boogaloo

Of course, Summer doesn't really start until June 24th, when the Summer Soul-stice airs!

Jerry Landis Belongs in the Hall of Fame

Let's not exhaust this space to quibble over whether the mere existence and propagation of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is warranted or not. And we shall similarly pay minimal heed to the immutable truth that Paul Simon is in said Rock Hall not once but twice (as a solo performer and as half of Simon and Garfunkel), which to some may indicate he's been inducted either one too many times or two too many times. All that concerns this author is that as long as they let Rhymin' Simon in, those doors should open even wider to accommodate his late-'50s/early-'60s rockin' incarnations Jerry Landis, True Taylor, and Tico and the Triumphs.

It may be difficult to reconcile that the very same person who composed "A Simple Desultory Philippic" could also give birth to "Get Up and Do the Wobble," but one doesn't require a postage stamp contest à la Elvis to determine which manifestation of the singer and songwriter in question the typical Ichiban reader and listener would favor. So now that your preference has been duly presupposed, please enjoy this guaranteed Garfunkel-free trio of top teen tunes from the days when Paul Simon resided on the greaseball side of Music Town (all songs YouTube).

True Taylor — "True or False" (Big, 1958)
Here Paul yelps a rockabilly bopper that alternately could have been titled "Blue Moon of Kew Gardens."

Tico and the Triumphs — "Motorcycle" (Amy, 1961, Billboard No. 99)
Simon's sonata for the 'Sicle Set puts the "J.D." in early Jan and Dean.

Jerry Landis — "The Lone Teen Ranger" (Amy, 1962, Billboard No. 97)
His "Western Movies"-referencing dum-dum doo-wop ditty exposes a different kind of Olympics doping.

That Don't Make No Sense No. 1: 'Ling Ting Tong' — Chinatown, My Chinatown?

In this ongoing series, we shall explore the incongruities, illogic and idiocy to be found in many of our favorite songs.



The Five Keys announced themselves as the progenitors of "wok 'n' roll" with "Ling Ting Tong," their Top 5 R& B smash from 1955. This work of proto-doo-wop vocal harmony from Column A, coupled with a lyrical penchant for exoticism from Column B, became the recipe for a veritable pupu platter's worth of "chop suey rock" singles to follow.

And while one shouldn't have much of an expectation that a quintet of R&B slingers from Newport News, Va., would be Geography Bee champs, their curious knowledge of matters of a municipal nature can only be called, for lack of a better word, inscrutable.

Just take in the opening lines of "Ling Ting Tong" (okay, to be precise, the first words that are actually delivered in English, following the beautiful nonsense of "Tie-sa-mokum-boo-dye-ay/Tie-sa-mokum-boo"), and make sure to have your favorite head-scratching finger poised and at the ready:

I went to Chinatown
Way back in Old Hong Kong
To get some Egg Foo Yung
And then i heard a gong

Now, this author can't claim to be an absolute expert on provincial affairs as they pertain to Sino-British colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, but under what line of reasoning would someone presume that Hong Kong has its own Chinatown? That would be akin to singing about picking up a couple of scoops of gelato in Rome's Little Italy!

Why, the whole thing makes me throw my hands up and exclaim, "That don't make no sense!"