Thank you. Would your same comment fit for "Eres Tu (Touch The Wind)", the Top 10 hit by the Spanish group Mocedades? On the B-side of the original single, there is the English version "Touch The Wind (Eres Tu)". On Top 40 radio, I always heard the Spanish version, and may have heard the English version, like only once. I can see how an all instrumental version could have been made.
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"1900 Yesterday" song
- Thread starter johnbasalla
- Start date
Oh, yeah. There are tons of covers of "Eres Tu", and I'm guessing (I don't remember specifically) that most BM/EZ's just went with Percy Faith:
A left-field choice---Country legend Sonny James did a guitar instrumental album, and included it:
Ray Conniff was late---his cover didn't make it to the market until 1975, but this could have played on BM/EZs, too:
The difference between "Lo Mucho Te Quiero" and "Eres Tu" is that "Lo Mucho" has a distinctly and somewhat traditional (@davideduardo correct or amplify, please) Mexican melody and rhythm. "Eres Tu" is from Spain, and is simply a modern pop song.
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The song made No. 14 on the Hot 100, and No. 2 on the Easy Listening chart. No more ethnic sounding than Freddy Fender... Easy listening at the time also a lot of styles, like Brazilian music from Sergio Mendes.
I like the Percy Faith instrumental version. Sonny James take is ok. Although the Ray Conniff version isn't as good as the Faith version, it's the most curious. They sing most of the lyrics in English, but they don't sing "Touch The Wind". They sing "Eres tu" and "Yes, it's true".
I've, often, chuckled at, and been interested in seeing what songs these Easy Listening albums have recorded on them.
The trouble is that (especially for the Columbia Records artists like Percy Faith and Ray Conniff) they were formula. Name of a big hit pop record for the title "and other great hits of today", many of which they had no business doing:
A classic example---bad enough that Percy's covering the Partridge Family, but Stephen Stills' "Love The One You're With"?
For what was supposed to be music in "good taste", it was often remarkably tasteless:
Seriously? We're going to cover "Dueling Banjos" and Deodato's "Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)"?
My favorite example of how bad it got (and my apologies to those who've seen me mention it before) is Conniff's cover of "Alone Again (Naturally)".
A reminder---the song is about a guy whose dad died, whose mom lived in heartbreak until she died and now this guy's been stood up at the altar. He quite literally says that in a little while from now, unless his mood changes, he's going to throw himself off a tower.
So---suicide.
Tricky, right? Not if you're Ray and the singers, who just do it like it's a toothpaste commercial:
I've only heard that because it was inadvertently memorialized---KFOG played it in its last half hour of Beautiful Music before flipping to album rock, and it lives on in infamy on the aircheck.
The off-kilter Ray Conniff version works for those who consume the pleasant tune, but don't really "hear" or consume the lyrics.
They walk among us.
This is the thing that always killed Beautiful for me back in the day, and even now when I run across one of the (really rare) airchecks.
It's soothing, it's calming and then there's just an egregious lapse of taste and/or sense.
I could deal with an instrumental of "Alone Again (Naturally)" in that arrangement. I wouldn't like it, I'd still know what the song's really about. But the moment grown humans who are reading the lyric sheet are delivering it that way, it descends below parody.
Dear God, that's awful.
It only works as parody:
Or at least I thought it only worked that way, until Paul Anka did it straight and got away with it:
Or at least I thought it only worked that way, until Paul Anka did it straight and got away with it:
Look at that cover of the "I Think I Love You" LP by Percy Faith, His Orchestra and Chorus. This was a thing back then... trying to look cool, youthful and hip when the Percy Faith's, Ray Conniff's, Andre Kostelanetz, and the 101 Strings of the world were anything but. And, if that is not done, put a pretty girl, or two, on the album's front cover (Andre Kostelanetz's LP "Greatest Hits of The 60s" is an example, although the girl there isn't super-hot, imo).
Yeah, they all did it, but that was more a Conniff thing...and he generally got the best-looking models:
I'm sorry----the theme from SHAFT? The black private dick that's the sex machine to all the chicks? The one who's a bad mother....?
I'm sure I'll hate myself for this, but...
I'm astonished. And I do hate myself for posting that.
This was pretty close to the end of the line for the formula for Ray:
He made it through disco, but I always wished he'd gotten at least one album in the early new wave era:
RAY CONNIFF AND THE SINGERS
"WHIP IT"
and other great songs of today including:
Brass in Pocket (I'm Special)
Turning Japanese
Tainted Love
Cars
Hungry Like The Wolf
She Blinded Me With Science
88 Lines About 44 Women
Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That is an extension of a curiosity of the original 45, where the English lyrics are nowhere near a translation of the Spanish ones. Maybe Mr. Conniff got confused.
Weird trivia #693: His name actually has the accent on the second syllable, not the first as we have always pronounced it.
Also, a LOT of this dreck goes back to Columbia Records still running its MOR and Easy Listening artists via the A&R department rather than letting them make their own choices, resulting in stuff like this:
Lately, I've been doing a deeper dive on music from before my time, and I was astonished to find that the very earliest albums of all five of those artists are really, really, good. Peter Nero's piano style isn't to my taste, but he's still remarkable...and Johnny Mathis' debut album is beyond good.
The trouble began when Columbia decided (around 1966-67) that its MOR/Easy artists all needed to do covers of Top 40 hits, with maybe one or two new things thrown in.
Only Barbra Streisand was big enough to tell them no and get away with it. Tony Bennett had to walk away without a recording contract to re-invent his career and re-establish his reputation.
Lately, I've been doing a deeper dive on music from before my time, and I was astonished to find that the very earliest albums of all five of those artists are really, really, good. Peter Nero's piano style isn't to my taste, but he's still remarkable...and Johnny Mathis' debut album is beyond good.
The trouble began when Columbia decided (around 1966-67) that its MOR/Easy artists all needed to do covers of Top 40 hits, with maybe one or two new things thrown in.
Only Barbra Streisand was big enough to tell them no and get away with it. Tony Bennett had to walk away without a recording contract to re-invent his career and re-establish his reputation.
He also actually did a disco remake of "A Summer Place" right around the same time Frankie Avalon released a disco remake of "Venus."
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
OMG, Ed, you just caused me to flashback on Al Martino's disco cover of "Volare".
He kept doing it well into the 1980s:
That seems to be his last U.S. album with a pretty model on the cover... 1988.
If you're gonna mention Ray Conniff, you can't ignore these classics....
And who can forget 101 Strings' version of "Good Vibrations"?