Vinyl Junkies by Brett Milano

Author:Brett Milano [Milano, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 0312304277
Amazon: 0312304277
Barnesnoble: 0312304277
Goodreads: 63752
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2003-11-10T10:00:00+00:00

Our final stop may be the most unlikely place of all: The Holiday Inn in Salem, Oregon. That’s where the act known as Silk & Silver recorded its one and only album on August 13, 1976. This, Major explains, is one of the many oddities that came out of cocktail lounges around the country. Every cheap motel had a house band, and far too many of them were tempted to immortalize their acts. This, of course, led to multiple versions of the same songs. “My favorite is when the groups attempt to do ‘MacArthur Park.’ Nobody can do that last high note at the end, and everybody has a different way to avoid it.” Silk & Silver didn’t succumb to that particular temptation, but their disc does contain the least promising biography ever to appear on a rock album: “Working at the local plywood mills provided the funds for Del to obtain his B.S. in sociology from the University of Oregon. The insurance career followed.”

Silk & Silver’s lasting gift to the world is an Elton John medley that proves one thing: nobody sounds sillier than an insurance salesman from Oregon trying to imitate a sexually ambiguous Englishman. Indeed, when he goes for the falsetto notes in “Rocket Man,” it sounds like he’s being goosed with a watermelon.

Yet there’s a certain joie de vivre in this performance that you won’t hear in Elton’s original, and it’s the sound that Major quests for: music as a spontaneous outpouring, unhampered by any notions of commerciality, quality or good taste. Am I tempted to forego all future trips to Memphis and New Orleans and instead make a musical pilgrimage to Salem, Oregon? Maybe so, if it will help get the damn squirrel out of my head.

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