Tune Wedgie Alert!! Do you remember,”Little Children” ~ Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas ?

[Parlophone Records, 1964]

Hey! lol Stop asking why and how these songs come to my jukebox mind until you understand how you put a dollar in the machine, it sucks it in and then you get to choose your songs.

Oh, nyet, just kidding.  That is not how my mind works! Sadly, I do not get paid for my recollections, it is just a function of time, my mind and having been a radio disc jockey across so many genres, especially overnight Top 40 or “CHR” for almost forty years, that tunes actually stuck and play randomly, from  a time when music was actually played by musicians and the (new at the time) synthesizers would just dress it up a bit.

Billy J. Kramer (love the hair do) and the Dakotas were part of the Beatles-spirited “British Invasion” of the 1960s. Born Billy Ashton, he was, as you can see from the Shindig video below, one of the most unassuming, neat, mild-mannered performers of those years.

This tune appeared to me last night, without any special reason and as often when I was in bed trying to fall asleep! It is my special type of harmless mental illness and insomnia, I guess.  Maybe I need to get laid more. “Little Children” has a kind of banjo sound, don’t you think?

I remember “Little Children” as a kind of obscure tune played on Rick Scklar’s greatest station in the nation at the time, “Music radio 77 WABC“, New York City, mostly leading up to the top of the hour station identification jingle package (that is what short tunes like this are good for from a disc jockey standpoint – timing). it is an interesting tune because he seems to sing to being annoyed by his girlfriend’s little sister busting them when they are making-out.  I am not one to judge…“around“…

Do you remember “Shindig” on (ABC TV, I think) and “Hullabaloo” followed to compete on a rival network at that time?  There were only seven channels on television back then.  What a scene and so much music to be recalled and now, via YouTube, seen again.

I love how the whole band bows with thanks at the end of the last note. It is so classy!

 

 

Remember to check out my krates-full-o-jointz-musik-only blog, https://achilliadsmyvinylrecordshoppe.wordpress.com/ for the latest reviews, public comments and retrospectives as they happen.

My Mind Is Like A Jukebox…I Share Some Songs So I Can Mentally Move On

I am “cursed” with a “DJ Mind” by dint of my many years playing for people on the radio and doing events and parties in nightclubs. On the regular, I can hear music from Neil Diamond to The Intruders at any time of the day or night playing in my mind. Like this oldie by The Intruders that kept me up all night last night

What happened to the rest of that clip?

Am I insane or just musically challenged? lolol

Or this one by The Continental Four who I hung out with briefly at an old theater turned brief concert hall near Parsons Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, New York called ‘The Creep’

Or at any given moment in my life a cut from Niel Diamond will start playing in my ears! Like this!

What is a “Cracklin Rosie” anyway? lol

Yes, I know, it is form of lunacy, but it doesn’t hurt nobody and I bet if you like music you have experienced it too! (That Neil Diamond is a “heartthrob” isn’t he, lol!)

Or sometimes out of my somnolence, my brain will play David Ruffin of the Temptations brother, Jimmy’s one hit wonder – I know not why…

I am at work one day in a totally different sales field from music radio, when along comes this one by Carol King which I played during my days as a Top 40 disc jockey in the early 1980s

Again, dear reader and listener, I do not know why except that I have played so many tunes and listened to so much contemporary music since the 1960s until today, that my brain has become a kind of “jukebox”. And yet, many times, I would like to [as I know that you also might to] perform a “system restore”, change my mind and…start all over again…

I can be sitting at my desk at “the day job” and Tyrone will sing unto me; its a favorite melody!

And then there is this one spawned because I lived through the nightmare of a stalker female which reminds me of this one by Elvis

Just leave me alone…

And you’d be lying to yourself if you, at some point, didn’t want to “turn back the hands of time” right?

And so, when you are inhaling a loving rainy spring, summer or autumn breeze, just remember that you are not all that unusual from the “Achilliad” and my natural “DJ” mind.

Maybe I just miss dee-jaying..

PICKHIT: This post could go on forever with song and will likely have sequels…Oh and that was the late Barry White on the phone, “Baby I’m Home…” ( :

Yikes!, I thought I was gone and then Dru Hill came to my jukebox mind.

Only a “PM” can quiet my mind from the endless endurance that peeps put into my mental jukebox tonight. This might be the beginning of a new category for my blog, so check back with me soon.

Even Everly Brothers encroach, eventually editing my sleep! OMG!

Therefore, the moral of this blog post is, when you get a “tune wedgie” that drives you “crazy”, the best way to dispel it is to just play it live by whatever means or media. “Ain’t it fun reminiscing”?

Oh, by-the-way, how did YOU get in? it’s member’s only tonight…

We miss you, Mr. Bobby “Blue” Bland. My Jukebox mind will always keep you real.

Book Excerpt: “The Girdler”

Nightly he leaves a piece of paper and a pen upon the headboard of his bed, along with a small tape recorder, so that he can jot-down or record in gibberish, thoughts and dreams that come to him during the night while he tries to sleep. Dream scenarios before they disappear into the vault of subconscious. Often his brain does not lend to sleep soundly, what with the ever-present vault entrapment around money worries of the times.

When he awakens, hardly am able to read those scribbled etchings from the dark, reaching for his water jug to quench his throat and flush his mouth of post-nasal mucus. Ideas forgotten in the morning’s haze, or whenever neglected to have written them down; scary past and unfutured monstrous episodes, often with people unknown, or with friends know do not know each-other nor the antagonists!

Like the time that he felt something trying to surround and envelope him just as he was falling asleep in the favorite coffin-like, darkened bedroom. Sitting up in a sudden start and swiping away whatever presence that was!

He struggled to open his eyes with his fingers and turn over from his right side under the covers, to the left – and then “it” was gone! As he lay there, still and scanning the darkness in the aftermath, pondering what just happened and what “it” was that he really felt grabbing him in a strong, snake-like constricting attempt. After briefly turning on the headboard light, He saw a mouse along the base of the wall head towards his kitchen and threw off the bedclothes to give chase – to no avail. “Buy traps in the morning”, he jotted down on the bedside “to-do” pad. Finally he drifted to sleep for the night, thinking that maybe it was death itself – the Grim Reaper – that just tried to take him.

During ensuing days, he contemplated “the presence”, but had not felt its return to try and capture him again – yet. Recently he had been, at the owner’s request months ago, trying to shop this house he’d rented for a dozen years, and researched that it was built in 1950. Therefore, there could be any number of “spirits” trying to return to their original haunts from time-to-time. Then an acquaintance who’d snagged his drawers by talking racist shit on Christmas Eve 2011 and who he had not heard from since, showed on his doorstep – without calling first which is his #1 visiting RULE – like the Reaper’s bad penny and furthered future anti-somnolent waking discomfort and itching fear.

He named it The Girdler’s spirit of his father wanting to handcuff and demonize him while preparing the masonry to encase him in the wall for violating his space while a favorite of all his seven offspring with his wife. He kept bones of unknown souls in there.

That is how it began…

Sleep is a premium at any day or night these days as we toil to solve our monetary shortcomings. He tells his brain, “Quiet Your Mind!“, listen to a guided meditation or his old talk radio show audition, and most times, off drifts to another dreamscape of horror or past lovers before listening to all of it.

**Pickhit: What about your dreams? Do you find that your subconscious had taken over after you’d laid down to sleep upon waking UP?