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Leftover Wine by Melanie (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Leftover Wine
  • Artist name: Melanie
  • Year: 1970
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Buddah Records
  • Collection: Brenner / Gessner
  • Distinguishing characteristics: RMP / ΤΕΦ is written on the album sleeve[1]
  • Buy it on Amazon: $39.97

Leftover Wine by Melanie

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but I’ve previously reviewed two others by Melanie:

What I expected

The album cover says, “Recorded live at Margie’s birthday party.” I don’t know who Margie was (or is), but I guess that means it will be Melanie doing folk rock in concert.

What it was actually like

Based on the song Happy Birthday, it seems that Margie’s name is pronounced with a hard G, which is clearly psychopathic. Also, I hope Margie was not upset with this performance, since most of the songs seemed pretty serious for a birthday party: the style was quite spare, with just guitar and voice.

Anyway, Melanie’s voice still reminded me of Joanna Newsom’s, but at other times it really soared, like in The Saddest Thing and the title track Leftover Wine. I also did not know until listening to Leftover Wine that Melanie’s speaking voice had a rather strong Queens accent!

When reviewing Affectionately Melanie I wrote:

Beautiful People is the song that Melanie got famous for performing at Woodstock, and I thought it was fine, but I’m not such a fan of it.

It was still fine, as was Uptown Down, also from that record.

Her line in Animal Crackers about eating the animal crackers so that children would not starve in Europe was so fascinating to me because, when I was growing up, it was the children in Africa who could be protected from starvation only if I finished my meal, and I knew it had been the children in either China or India, or both, at other times (Melanie was born in 1947, so when she was growing up, starvation in Europe was still a very real threat).

Animal Crackers also had a cute Alice’s Restaurant shoutout, and I took note because I had already noted that she and Arlo Guthrie had both performed at Woodstock.

I Don’t Eat Animals was the most obnoxious song. Even 50 years ago (and even 100 years ago), those people had that reputation.

The song Psychotherapy was definitely the weirdest song on the record by far, and one of the weirder songs out of the 306 records that I’ve reviewed to date. It was an ode to Freud, but sung to the melody of Battle Hymn of the Republic (which itself is sung to the melody of John Brown’s Body), some of the creepiest and most disturbing music ever to become popular, and it immediately brought me back to that morning in March 2019 when I visited the largest electronics store in the world, Yodobashi in Akihabara, Tokyo, and realized that
its theme song was sung to the very same melody (in that context, I described it as “both disorienting and highly charming”).

The final song Peace Will Come (According to Plan) was a studio recording with vocal effects, percussion and a bit of organ, and was the most out of place with the whole rest of the record.

Grade

3/5: interesting, but not for me

References

References
↑1 ΤΕΦ was my father’s college fraternity (his copy of Beggars Banquet is also marked with the ΤΕΦ symbol) and “RMP” means that the album belonged to Richard Pearlstein.

Affectionately Melanie (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Affectionately Melanie
  • Artist name: Melanie
  • Year: 1969
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Buddah Records
  • Collection: Brenner / Gessner
  • Who owned it: my mother
  • Buy it on Amazon[1] : $34.69

Affectionately Melanie

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m not familiar with this record, but several months ago I listened to Candles in the Rain, which Melanie recorded after this, and I rated it 4/5.

What I expected

Folk and folk rock.

What it was actually like

This was a good record, less folk than I anticipated, but with a lot more soul style. I liked Melanie’s childlike voice throughout and her vocal adventurousness, but I did not like that the second side was a bit scratchy.

Soul Sister Annie was a standout with a blues style and a bit of soul, good guitars and drums, pretty slow, and I thought that it still would have been a strong song without the vocals, but that the vocal part was great.

Uptown Down was another song that was very interesting to me, since at the beginning I thought it was going to be a soul song, but the verses sounded almost like a kind of proto-rap, which was not what I expected to be hearing on a record from the late 1960s. The very slowly sung chorus was a little weak, though.

Beautiful People is the song that Melanie got famous for performing at Woodstock, and I thought it was fine, but I’m not such a fan of it.

For My Father and Baby Guitar were two more that were pretty simple, but substantially elevated by recording them as soul songs instead of folk, which I enjoyed a lot. I also really liked the guitar distortions and choppy piano at the end of the latter.

One song that I couldn’t figure out was Any Guy, which sounded a bit like musical theater – she sung it in her own very distinctive voice and vocal style, but with kind of a different accent.

Grade

4/5: would listen again

References

References
↑1 I’m not sure why, but the album cover on my copy appears to be a different version. Maybe there was a later pressing? Or maybe one of the versions was made to be more limited and/or special than the other?

The Bitter End Years by Various Artists (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: The Bitter End Years
  • Group name: Various Artists
  • Year: 1974
  • Number of discs: three
  • Label: Roxbury Records
  • Collection: Selman
  • Buy it on Amazon: $9.99

The Bitter End Years

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’m familiar with the Bitter End and have even been there, but didn’t know that this compilation existed.

What I expected

It looks like The Bitter End Years, a three LP set, is divided into three sub-compilations, one on each LP: “early years” of folk music, such as Judy Collins, the Everly Brothers, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger; “comedy years” including Woody Allen, George Carlin and Joan Rivers; and “rock years” including John Denver, Arlo Guthrie, Curtis Mayfield, Melanie, Bette Midler, Van Morrison and James Taylor. So folk, standup comedy and late 1960s / early 1970s pop music.

What it was actually like

Early years

I really liked the Limelighters’ version of If I Had A Hammer. Tom Rush’s Who Do You Love was also pretty good, though definitely more electric and more of a rock song than folk. Hearing Dodi Li was pretty surprising and it was faithful to the original[1], though with the addition of some Spanish-style guitar.

I think the worst song from the “early years” has to have been Pete Seeger’s version of Where Have All The Flowers Gone, which has always been one of my least favorites.

Comedy years

There was nothing particularly funny about any of this “comedy.” Low points included the joke that Richard Nixon’s face looked like a foot, as well as the extended Godfather parody that would be right at home on “Saturday Night Live” of the early 2000s. I guess the William F. Buckley, Jr. impression was the funniest part.

Rock years

This collection of songs was so weird. There were twelve songs on this LP and, with one glaring exception, I was unfamiliar with all of them. Why would they have chosen second-rate and somewhat unknown songs for this compilation? Some kind of licensing issue?

The exception, of course, was Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, a childhood favorite of mine and the best song on the record by far.

Curtis Mayfield’s Gypsy Woman and the Isley Brothers’ Pop That Thang were the worst and didn’t qualify as rock at all… though I guess it only says “rock years” and doesn’t explicitly say anywhere that there wouldn’t have been funk songs from the rock years. But yeah, that was strange.

Another thing that was odd, and this is true of both the “early years” and the “rock years” LPs, is that none of the songs were live recordings, let alone live recordings from the Bitter End. Instead, they were all studio versions. I kind of assumed that, this being a celebration of a specific club, the songs on it would have had something specific to do with that club.

Grade

3/5: interesting, but not for me

References

References
↑1 Well, maybe not to the original original, but to the XX century original.

Candles in the Rain by Melanie (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

Candles in the Rain by Melanie

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I wasn’t sure that I’d ever heard of “Melanie” so I looked her up, and she’s the artist who was responsible for the song Brand New Key, which you have heard, and which you will never hear the same way again after listening to the Wurzels’ version. I’ve never listened to this record or any of Melanie’s records.

What I expected

Folk.

What it was actually like

It was folky, but also folk rock, and rock. Lovin’ Baby Girl was good and that was more of a rock song with some funk elements. What Have They Done to My Song Ma wasn’t terrible, but it was Oompa-Loompa music, so I didn’t listen that closely.

I started off hating Melanie’s cover of Ruby Tuesday, then in the middle I started liking it a lot more, and then by the end, I thought it was ok.

Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) is the record’s outstanding song, but mainly because of the incredible gospel-style chorus that’s extremely distinctive.

Grade

4/5: would listen again