The Film City label is one which utterly fascinates me. It was the label Sandy Stanton created after The Fabulous Fable Label, which I've written about here a few times. And it's where song-poem God Rodd Keith got his start and made many of my favorite song-poem records, using The Chamberlin as a one-man band project like no one else has done before or since. (I've posted many of them on my own site, and I'd link you to them, but unfortunately, recent problems with Divshare have rendered nearly all of the files on my site unplayable.)
Every now and then, Film City seems to have done business with someone who wanted to record his or her own material. More often than not, this seems to have involved utilizing the abilities of that same Chamberlin, which was, quite likely, played on those records by Rodd Keith. They typically feature the same wording as the song-poems that Film City produced, with such backing bands as "The Film City Orchestra" or, as in today's case, "The Swinging Strings". All such fictional bands actually being one man playing one unusual instrument.
I've previously posted two Film City vanity 45's, one created by a man who clearly didn't know how very little he knew about songwriting, and one by a woman who seems to have known that she was making something fairly goofy. It also seems likely, as a friend of mine has pointed out, that the fabulous record I posted many years ago - "Can I Pawn My Teeth to You" / "Man Do I Like Fridays", by Roy Esser, has the sound and feel of Rodd Keith's Film City productions. Although it did not appear on Film City (Stanton created all sorts of tiny labels as offshoots of Film City), I'm betting that one came out of the Stanton/Keith file, too.
Today, another Film City record from the vanity file, and again it's someone who was from the amateur end of things. His name was Scotty Scott, and captured on the two sides of this 45 are a multitude of stultifying couplets. Having written my share of lyrics over the years, I know the feeling of needing to come up with something that rhymes, scans well, makes sense and sounds good. With the lyricist of this record, it often sounds like he settled for "well, it rhymes", including phrases which seem pulled out of thin air, random and non-sequitorial.
An example: The A-side is titled "Chattanooga, Nashville, Battlecreek Trek", and if you can manage to figure out the point of this song, please let me know. He rambles on about people getting jobs and where they've been and where they are for 2 1/2 minutes, along the way offering up this magnificent rhyme.
"One man gets a job, then his brother gets one, too
Then his Uncle Bob, with or without a shoe."
The B-side is "Antique Hunter's Craze". This tells the story of a married couple who threw away all their old things way back when, only to become antique collectors later in life, sung from the perspective of the couple's son, who is none too happy about this development. We are told:
You ought to see them when the find a bauble that's rare
Their eyes light up with a smile that before wasn't there.
I particularly like that one because it just doesn't scan with the melody at all.
Scotty Scott and the "Swinging Strings" - Chattanooga, Nashville, Battlecreek Trek (MP3)
Scotty Scott and the "Swinging Strings" - Antique Hunter's Craze (MP3)
A--Side Label (JPG) | B-Side Label (JPG)
Incidentally, this record was pressed on translucent dark red plastic, with a splash of yellow in one spot along the edge. I don't know how much you can make out, but here is a scan of the entire record:
Wow. these are both horrendous winners! Thanx, Bobbo...................
Posted by: Timmy | June 01, 2015 at 08:56 PM