Elvis Tribute Albums - Part One

If there's one thing that's been consistent over the years of my thrift store shopping, it's been Elvis Presley tribute albums. There's tons of them!

So here's how a tribute album works... A bunch of half-talented studio musicians get together, record a bunch of songs, throw it on an album with deceiving artwork (and sometimes no artwork at all), and use fine print to warn the buyer that they are not buying a real album - and that's if they put fine print on the album at all. Lots of people have been duped into buying tribute albums all the way from the 1960s up to the present day.

Judging from the sheer amount of Elvis tribute albums, it seems to me that at one point EVERYONE wanted to be Elvis. NEWS FLASH: You are not Elvis. I am not Elvis. You don't sound like Elvis. You don't smell like Elvis. However, I'm in favor of you DYING like Elvis.

The Golden Ring - Tribute to Elvis Vol 1 & 2



Believe it or not, these two tribute albums sold incredibly well. I run across them very frequently. My guess is they came out right around the time that Elvis died. Combine that with the real picture of Elvis on the cover and a somewhat successful hole-in-the-ground record label (thanks to Anne Murray) and you've got a hit album. I was duped into buying these when I was around 7 years old, and I've seen at least a hundred copies of them.

The Golden Ring didn't just stick with Elvis tributes though. I have a few albums by them singing songs by other artists, including Glen Campbell. For some reason, bands who try to sound like Elvis also like to try sounding like Glen Campbell which I've proven once before.

So here a song from each volume.

Listen to Jailhouse Rock

What the hell is the drummer doing on this one? He puts lots of extra beats in there. There's also no electric guitar. The guitar was the coolest thing about the original version. Instead, the song has turned into a drunken piano ragtime piece of shit.

Listen to I Just Can't Help Believing

Oh, listen to that crowd applause that's faded in and out! It sounds like there's a concert hall full of people enjoying the balls out of a Golden Ring concert. I personally don't believe that The Golden Ring has ever played a live show, and I don't believe that ANYBODY would ever attend one based on their tribute albums. Thankfully for them, there's a large selection of Sound Effects records out there to help boost their egos and make them sound like they've successfully played in front of hundreds of excited fans. Then they woke up and found their penises cum-glued to their bed sheets.


Ronnie McDowell - The Original Soundtrack from the New Motion Picture: "Elvis"



This is apparently the soundtrack for a NEW movie called "Elvis". When you print the word "new" on your album, you automatically look like an asshole. In this case, 8-tracks haven't been mass produced in about 30 years, so I highly doubt that this is a new movie anymore. It's not even a fucking classic because nobody has ever heard of it. I don't think the movie is even available on DVD, VHS, Laserdisc, CED, Betamax, or 16mm. If by some chance I'm wrong, I'll most certainly have the machine to play it on since I own all of those formats.

However, I need to give Ronnie McDougall credit. He duplicates Elvis Presley VERY well.

Listen to Are You Lonesome Tonight


Various Artists - A Tribute to Elvis Presley



Up until this point, we've focused on releases on the Arc label. Now we move onto one of the most celebrated and shitty tribute album labels on Classical Gas Emissions... Sound Alike Music! The phony sticker says it's performed by various artists, but every single tribute album I have by them (with the exception of the compilations) have each been performed by a single band, whether it be The Chancellors, Phil Shields, or Cabbage.

Sound Alike Music is also notorious for doing paintings of original album covers (with the exception of the Grand Funk one which uses the real artwork). So I searched the net and found the original one here.

This is the worst of the four. Not only does the singer NOT sound like Elvis, the band doesn't even try to duplicate the arrangements to be remotely similar to the originals. Even the arrangements they came up with are stupider than a group of retarded children licking ant hills. Heartbrake Hotel (yes, that's how it's fucking spelled on the album) has too many trumpets, an organ, and a guitar player who thinks he's way cooler than the rest of the band by going off and doing something that isn't even part of the song. Have you ever eaten a microwaved peanut butter and cheese sandwich? That's how well these guys work together, and you're going to taste the fail of an album that should have never reached your ears.

There were so many bad ones to pick from, and Heartbrake Hotel ended up being just a little less bad than Blue Suede Shoes. The band is most obviously made up of deaf musicians who can't hear each other play. Poor fake Elvis has to try and make them look better by calling them "cats" as if they're the coolest backing band an Elvis Impersonator could ask for. After the recording, he went and took a shit because it felt better than the entire recording session. Then he died of a heart attack, realizing that taking a shit was more satisfying than being an Elvis Impersonator working at Sound Alike Music.

Listen to Blue Suede Shoes

And that's it for the first installment. I have at least four more Elvis tribute albums to tackle, and I'll most likely own more than that when I finally get around to reviewing them.

Speaking of which, I'm going to be featured on Amateur Hour again by Kent Davies. If you live in Winnipeg, that's 95.9 FM. The show is on August 21 at 5:00 pm. I'll be featuring some stuff that I've previously posted along with stuff that I've haven't got around to posting as of yet. It will be enjoyable for everybody!

Organ Grinding and Humper Dincking

Before we get on to the albums, I'd like to share the inspiration for this entry. I received an interesting email from a reader named Mike who shared his thoughts on the idea of the electric organ as a musical instrument:

At least someone hates the electric organ (both theater with "tabs," how retarded, and drawbar) as much as I do. You mentioned that somewhere on your site (I forgot where). I will not start on some of the "gospel" music that is on Classical Gas Emissions either.

I don't even consider any kind of organ to be a musical instrument because it makes nothing noise and sound effects. Anything that requires nothing but classical music training, extensive use of the feet, an attitude reminiscent of a bitchy person, expensive, black dress clothes, very complicated process (construction), and a Halloween state of mind...is not, and should not be a musical instrument. 

I knew a few goths that loved such gibberish like this, and not surprisingly, they are very mentally insane people. They are in awe with the "talent" and devotion required to play such irate, livid, and disgusting garbage. That's the number one reason why I don't go to church. I worship God in the comfort of my own home, in comfort, not in fear. I never understood why church has to involve such rubbish like that. Good old Eurotrash started it (i.e. Bach, Handel, and other composers that goths worship like idols).

I can't discern or hear actual, musical notes on any organ either. There's always "growling," "ringing, or other kinds of noises that obscure the "music" being played. No matter how loud or soft it's played at, it always sounds as delusion as a mental home resident, or as retarded as my some of my brother's friends.  

So, let's see how well these recordings compare to Mike's evaluation of the electric organ...

Don Thompson - The Organ Grinder Live!



Maclean & Maclean defined an "organ grinder" as a cocksucker with a chipped tooth. Given that, I'm assuming that Don Thompson isn't very fond of visits to the dentist.

The album as a whole is a very interesting find. First of all, it has no company markings with the exception of "Pipe Organ Presentations" on the label, which is probably something that the asshole making the record label came up with on the spot. I very much doubt that this is part of a series of organ recordings. However, it seems they made more than one, although it has a confusing catalog number: It's got OP-003 on the cover and OP-002 on the label. Typical when you hire alcoholics to work in your record plant.

Second, the album is autographed by Don Thompson himself to someone named Isobel.



Whenever I find albums that are autographed (and I've come across a lot of them) I automatically deem them as worthless pieces of shit. For big name artists, an autograph adds value to the album. For musical nobodies, it's just an ego boost.

Third, the album came with a menu:




Apparently, The Organ Grinder was a pizza place in Ontario which was shut down in 1996. Pizza selections consisted of stupid names such as "The Opening Number", "The Mighty Wurlitzer", and the "Piper's Delight". Don Thompson played there from 1976-1982 and cut this album somewhere in that time period.

Fourth, the album was very much recorded live with two microphones, probably one at each side of the organ. It has a nice "tape recorder sound", very much like the recordings my mom makes when she plays her organ.

So with this album being such a masterpiece, let's listen to a song off it. Wait... my mistake. When people play the organ, they never play entire songs. They play medleys. There's no point in playing one song on the organ because it usually sounds boring, so you have to play a shit load of songs in a small time frame to keep it interesting. This is a children's medley which consists of the theme from Sesame Street, the Rubber Duckie song, the Mickey Mouse song, It's a Small World, the Popeye song, and the theme from The Lone Ranger (I'm only guessing it's the theme because I never watched the show)

Listen to The Children's Medley


Hans Martens - Do You Like Humperdinck? Engelbert's 30 Biggest Hits at the Organ



Look at the cover. I'll bet these hotties like Humperdinck!

This is a fucking terrible recording. Remember what I said about organ players playing medleys? Well, we're seeing the trend continue on this record. You get three songs in each medley. Hans seems to have an obsession with the damned foot pedal volume control. His performance consists of very quiet spots where he's drowned out by the shitty rhythm section, and very loud spots where he's drowning out the rhythm section. I suppose organ players do this to give their music "feeling", but they just make their music sound like a screaming psych patient speeding up and down the hallway of a mental institution in their electric wheelchair.

The guy who produced the album (who wisely chose to remain anonymous) could have fixed Hans's performance if he compressed the hell out of the organ track. Instead, he decided to simply not give a shit about the end product and left Hans's retarded wavering volume control as is. The end result is the listener fucking around with his stereo hookup because it sounds like there's a bad connection causing the sound to go loud and quiet.

Listen to The Last Waltz / Les Bicyclettes De Belsize / There Goes My Everything


The Cosmopolitans

I had to throw this one in for fun. The Cosmopolitans were an elderly duo from Winnipeg- one on the drums and one on the organ & vocals. I used to have a video cassette with some of their performances, but it was lost throughout my many moves during my 20s. The only existing recording I have is this audio recording of a song which was originally penned by Paul McCartney.

I have this song on my Save The Jets Fundraiser, but I figured I'd bring it back here since it prominently features organ playing. If you want to see The Cosmopolitans perform, someone lovingly uploaded them to youtube.

Listen to A World Without Love

So, does Mike have a point? Quite possibly. Personally, I think the electric organ has one useful purpose: playing music at a funeral home. It has such a miserable, dreadful sound that you can't help but weep upon hearing it's depressing noise. What I would love to find is an album of classic rock songs played on the organ, but I somehow doubt it exists. It's just a really stupid idea.

Songs About a Cat

A couple weekends ago, I picked up a Hi8 VCR for five bucks. For years, I've been trying to acquire a working Hi8 video camera for the sole purpose of playing the video tapes I've been picking up, and I've been unsuccessful for years. Most of the cameras I found were in non-working order. Now I have a working standalone machine. I'm surprised I was able to get it for so cheap because these players are quite rare.

So I dug into the "in queue" box and dug out all my Hi8 video tapes. About four tapes came from one family, namely one of their daughters. Meet Sarah:



(Did I ever tell you how much I love finding pictures of the equipment used to make the content?)

Sarah is probably in the ballpark of 9-12 years old in these videos. I skipped the boring family vacation videos in order to find the good stuff. Sarah enjoys video taping herself dancing around in the basement with her older sister. But the best videos were of Sarah singing about her cat, Pepper. The songs are fucking terrible but highly amusing, especially the one where she adds in the subject of a boy who picks his nose and bum.

At the end of the video, I tacked on her performance in a school talent show (which was about 2 years after she recorded her cat songs). She sings the Bryan Adams song "Heaven" and for the most part, she does a half decent job at it. I think she would have received a better response with the 'nose and bum picking cat song', but that's just my personal opinion.

Enjoy the video:


My cat was sitting beside me while I was transferring this video. Sarah's grading voice made him leave the room.

And just as a side note, I found some home-made gay porn on one of the tapes. Click here to enjoy a NSFW screenshot while I book an appointment with my therapist.

The Family Stuff Tape

Someone recently used one of my audio clips in their podcast (specifically the Nirvana interview with my mom) and it reminded me that I haven't posted anything from my personal collection in quite some time. So, let me introduce a cassette that I created 21 years ago:



There's all kinds of scraps of stuff on here ranging from school concerts to my dad arguing on the phone with my drunken uncle. It's all here, preserved in living mono.

As a child and a teenager, I recorded damn near everything. If I had a video camera, I probably would have recorded even more. However, that didn't happen until I was about 17 years old, and my fascination with recording everything only lasted for about a year after that.

My recording obsession as a teenager got to a point where I had blank cassettes loaded up in various recorders all around the house. I even wired up a concealed microphone in the kitchen to record various stuff my parents said and argued about. Some of the more funny moments were preserved on the "Family Stuff" tape. My mother eventually found the microphone and angrily ripped it off the wires.

When I was about 13 years old, I hacked an old answering machine and modified it to play regular cassettes over the phone line. I also hacked it to be a telephone recorder. It gave birth to a whole new dimension of recording things, and I recorded a LOT of things. I have cassettes full of conversations with girls I had crushes on, prank phone calls me and my best friend made, and of course conversations my parents had with other people.

I'm bringing you one of the more interesting and funny moments from the Family Stuff tape. Most of it is clips of my mother conversing with her screwball friend Kim (you can read her journal here.) There's one collection of snippets here where I added my own stupid commentary. I think I was about 14 years at the time.

Anyway, enjoy the sample of the Family Stuff tape.

Listen to it here!

50 Top Hits of 1972

Many, many times I will pick up a cassette, a tape, or even an LP and it will have a title that's something like "Top hits of 1975 volume 16" and I know that the chances of me tracking down the other 15 volumes are pretty slim. In this incredibly rare case, I have all three volumes. I found them at an estate sale for 25 cents each. I'm only guessing that listening to these crummy tapes shortened the guy's lifespan, so if you care about your health, feel free to skip over this entry. I've got one foot and two hands in the grave already.

There were a lot of really good songs that came out of 1972, and I know probably 75% of the songs in this collection. That's why I put the entire set up for downloading. That's right, you get 50 hit songs done remotely in the style of the original artists for FREE! You can't even get a great deal like this from iTunes or Amazon! These are the real deal! Well.... they're the cheap imitation deal, but it's FIFTY FUCKING FREE SONGS! Load up your iPod and groove away to the cheap imitation sounds of 1972! They're grrrrrreat!

I'll have to give Avenue of America credit for two things. First of all, the sound quality of these recordings is actually pretty good. It doesn't sound like it was recorded onto a piece of string. The second thing I'll give them credit for is not chopping any of the songs between programs. The task of splitting fifty songs equally into 12 programs requires someone who knows his shit, so it's no doubt that they hired a mathematician who studied clocks for five years in university. I hope they paid him well. They probably didn't though. He probably sued Avenue of America after that. That's probably why they don't exist anymore.

Now that we've given credit to Avenue of America in the areas they did well, it's all downhill from here. Let's go through the tapes one by one...




Tape A
AVE 8X-3703-A
Download it!

This tape is probably the least painful of the three because the songs are actually duplicated not too badly ("How Do You Do" is a good example of this). But there are some painful moments. For instance, I absolutely love The Hollies, but this version of Long Cool Woman has a guy who sounds NOTHING like Allan Clarke. He sounds more like a fat black dude who drank a few too many beers. The evidence of alcohol is very clear because he fucked up half the lyrics.

Listen to Long Cool Woman

The next example I have is the Rod Stewart song "You Wear It Well". It barely sounds like the original one. The singer sounds identical to Michael Bolton. Perhaps it is Michael Bolton. After all, good old Mikey was into Rock n' Roll before he turned into a fucking pussy. Don't believe me? Look up the band Blackjack. It was actually pretty good stuff.

The instrumentation on this song sounds like the band smoked six joints before going into the studio to record it. I'm guessing that Avenue of America made enough money selling these tapes to maintain the studio musicians' drug and alcohol addictions.

Listen to You Wear It Well




Tape B
AVE 8X-3073-B
Download it!

And we blast into tape B with the incredibly amazing smash-hit.... Amazing Grace??? I had to verify it, and yes it was a hit in 1972, bagpipes and all. This song is so fucking annoying that I genuinely wanted to take a hammer and smash the end of the cartridge that was sticking out of the end of the player. But if I did that, I wouldn't have been rewarded with the other amazingly bad covers on this tape.

Let me be blunt and say that any bagpipe version of Amazing Grace is interchangeable with another bagpipe version, so this might be the original hit version for all I know. I almost find it hard to believe that a little recording studio functioning out of a shit house had the resources to locate someone who owned and could play a set of bagpipes. Anyway, feel free to skip over this one. There's nothing amazing about Amazing Grace.

Now I generally hate Eric Clapton's music, but Layla (the Derek & The Dominoes version) is a cool song. Thankfully, they cut the atrocious version on here nice and short. No piano solo part because they'd probably fuck it up and start playing something else like Beethoven.

It seems that these cheap imitation companies like to pick on Elton John quite a bit. Poor guy. Tape A has Rocket Man, Tape B has Honky Cat (spelled "Honkey" here to correct any desire you may have had to pronounce it incorrectly). Tape C contains "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar". Oh wait, that might not have been Elton John.

The first song I'm going to feature is an atrocious cover of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love". The guy doesn't even try to sound like Elvis and it sounds like half the back up singers are missing due to their paychecks bouncing. The more likely story would be that a couple of the married studio musicians dragged their wifes into the recording. Those poor women probably though they were marrying REAL rock stars. I'll bet they're divorced now and took their husbands for the fortunes they made while becoming hit sensations under the wing of Avenue of America.

Listen to Burning Love

And we plow through other crappy covers like Alice Cooper's "School's Out" and Ringo Starr's "Back off Bugaloo" (does anybody actually LIKE that shitty song?) We finally get to a man who sings like a pedofile-ish Mr. Rogers performing what is probably my least favorite song of all time.... The Candy Man! I'm surprised nobody shot Sammy for doing that song. I really, really hate it. If you wanna hear it, you'll have to download the tape because featuring ANY version of that song would bring shame upon this blog, and I just can't afford any more shame here.

It's rare that you can find someone covering a Neil Young song who doesn't do a better job of it. Well, I found one! This guy sounds like he just doesn't want to sing it and puts very minimal effort into it. Luckily, these musicians don't get fired for doing a bad job. As I've said it before, these tapes were released solely to make money. This guy could have farted the lyrics and it would still get released.

Listen to Heart Of Gold




Tape C
AVE 8X-3703-C
Download it!

We arrive at the last tape! It's been one hell of a rocky ride, and the ride gets even rockier with this tape. First of all, this tape had quite a bit of damage when I ripped it apart to do the typical maintenance I do on every single 8-track I get. The tape was really bunged up inside which probably came from repeated storage and transportation over the 35-40 years that it remained unplayed. But I got it going and you get to enjoy the craptastic music, the potholes and the tape hiss that emulates the sound of the ocean into your iPod!

We slog through Program A with a bunch of songs I never gave a damn about, including "Sylvia's Mother" which is regularly used to test-drive the sound system at a karaoke place I frequent. This is the first time I've ever heard it with the lyrics intact. For all I know, they could be the wrong lyrics. It's also one of the most miserable songs I've ever heard. Get over her already, you whiny little bitch!

Program B offers a crappy re-invented version of Paul Anka's "Puppy Love", another shitty version of "Lean On Me" which joins the pile of shitty versions I've collected over the years. We also get to hear a Mott The Hoople song, and a severely disabled version of "American Pie" which has about three of it's limbs hacked off. I guess we can't have 8 minute songs when we're trying to pack 50 songs onto three 8-track tapes.

The gem of this entire collection is Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling". I highly doubt that this song was genuinely recorded live. They likely worked at re-creating the 'live sound' with studio magic (aka reverb and a sound effect of a crown applauding). The married studio musicians brought in their kids so they could record them singing about their penises. In today's society, that would be considered as child pornography. It also sounds like they added a little bit of vibrato to the singing "audience". Why? It doesn't make it sound more life. It sounds like everyone's singing in the sewer. Perhaps that why this version is so shitty.

Listen to My Ding-a-Ling

Speaking of playing with one's Ding-a-Ling, we move onto Gary Glitter's biggest throbbing hit to penetrate the charts titled "Rock & Roll Part 2" If you don't know the song by the title (which most people don't), it is used regularly at sporting events. That's the only help I can give you since you may have trouble recognizing it from this recording. This cover is so bad that the guys singing can't even get the one word in this entire song right, and I'm pretty sure the bass player added some extra shit in there which isn't in the original version. Gary Glitter is rolling in his grave.... er I mean his Vietnamese victim's bed.

Listen to Rock & Roll Part 2

We step through the squishy "Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast" and a lousy version of Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue", then clunk on over to Program D which starts with something that sounds kind of like Three Dog Night's "Black & White". The layout of the song is totally wrong and I don't remember hearing a goddam oboe ANYWHERE in the original. But the singer kinda sounds like a drunk version of the guy from Three Dog Night, so at least they got that part right... Sort of...

This version is so far from Three Dog Night's version that I had to do a Google search to make sure it was Three Dog Night who had a hit with it in 1972. It was, so I don't know what the hell they were trying to do to make it better. The studio musicians forgot to bring their kids in that day to sing the backup, so they just did it themselves. Good enough! One take! It's a hit! Or a miss! Who cares! Money in the bank!

Listen to Black & White

Then we barf our way through "I Am Woman" and onto Michael Jackson's "Ben". I think it's funny that every time I hear a cheap imitation of Michael Jackson, it's always a woman singing it. Then we gag and choke on yet another shitty version of Popcorn, and end it all with "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do"? Huh? This was released in 1962 although it's entirely possible that some other one-hit-wonder had a VERY minor hit with it and it's been duplicated here. I would have been happier with two more verses in the wheelchaired version of "American Pie", but I guess "49 Top Hits of 72" wouldn't have been as good of a title.

And that's it! I really can't help but wonder how much this three tape set cost in 1972. 50 super hits by people who had absolutely nothing to do with the original writing or recording of them, but occasionally put their own spin on it. It really made my day. I hope it made yours. Feel free to let this tape collection enhance your summer barbecues and beach parties. Your friends will love you! You will get laid more! And you have me to thank for all of that.

Also, if you haven't voted for the song I entered into the songwriting contest, you can do that here!

See you next time with something really cool or crappy! Sorry, I haven't figured out what I'm doing for the next entry yet.