The Now Spinning crew gathers to discuss another fun playlist, sharing a mix of strange, surprising, and unforgettable songs from the latest club meetup. With gems like Tiny Tim's Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Boots Randolph's Yakety Sax, and Weezer's El Scrocho, the episode celebrates the joy of discovering quirky and rare music.

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Website: LCC Vinyl Record Club

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Now Spinning, the official podcast of the Lansing Community College Vinyl Record Club. We meet twice a month to listen to vinyl and talk about music. Stay tuned to learn about how you can get in touch with us and attend our meetings.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Now Spinning. I'm your host, Simon. With me today, we have

Andy,

Tyler

and Jacob.

Welcome back, everybody. We have a fun little show for you today.

Today we're gonna be talking about our meeting that was held on the 19th of March, two days after my birthday.

Happy birthday.

Just like you. It was very weird.

Incredibly weird.

Sorry.

That's funny.

And, of course, you know, starting off this playlist with my very favorite artist of all time, Tiny Tim.

Oh, he probably shouldn't be. He was a very weird dude with some very, very weird beliefs.

But big music Guy, we felt like starting this one just because it is such a intro song that really is weird. And then we float it right into Tiptoe through the Tulips, which is, like, easily his biggest hit.

Yeah.

And is also pretty dang weird.

I mean, there's the spongebob, the song that was in spongebob too. That's the one I always.

That was the song after it's.

Oh, the first episode.

Yeah.

Where he's, like, throwing all those burgers out at the end.

Yeah, that was.

I'm pretty sure that was the pilot or something like that.

Yeah, that was. That's Tiny Tim.

Yeah. Tiptoe through the Tulips is pretty good. It's most closely associated with, like, Halloween and Spooky Season and all that stuff.

Mainly because he was performing the song on stage and then he died mid performance. That's a song which is like.

I think he, like, dropped dead on stage. I think he had a heart attack and then like, proceeded to die a little bit later.

Oh, yeah.

Pretty spooky. Yeah, pretty spooky.

That's true.

Delightful little song.

Also, speaking of fun, we have a little bit of imitating with Imitation Situation 1 by Fever Tree. This is a good kind of psych rock band. Little, like acidy psych pop sort of stuff. I like them. There's a little bit of Toccata and Fugue in there.

Right. Kind of at the beginning. Very cool. And fading into that because there's a strict cutoff in that song.

Goes to Piggy in the Middle by the Roodles, which are the essentially Beatles kind of copy thing.

Parody thing.

Yeah. Featuring Ricky Fitar from the contemporary music Beach Boys.

He also was created by. What's his name again? That Was some of the Monty Python cool? Yeah. And they got like direct approval from George Harrison. I know, to make that.

He was a big friends with Eric Idle and all the Monty Python people. He funded Life of Brian.

Yeah. With a mortgage on his Friar park mansion.

Idol was big in the music scene. Apparently back in that he knew all the people anyway.

Oh, I mean, this song is like literally like almost shot for shot of I Am the Walrus with goofy nonsense lyrics and the beat too, you know, Funny.

Yeah, it's a. It's a well made parody album. They.

They're making fun of them a little bit, but they have a, you know, a lot of respect for the Beatles, obviously, since they're friends with a few of them. And they.

Doesn't Monty Python make fun of.

Well, yeah, that's the whole thing. That's their whole thing.

But I know who they don't make fun of. Jan and Dean.

Sure.

And that's all I have to say.

There's quite, quite a bit of that here today.

And as a result, it's a little weird. It's an oddity.

It's Jan and Dean. They're like a little odd.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, a little bit.

If anybody needed to get made fun of.

A little bit.

If anybody needed to get made fun of.

It was probably ruthless.

But cycling back slightly, I was gonna mention George Harrison, we played the song no Time or Space off of the electronic sound album, which is probably the strangest thing any of the Beatles have kind of made. It's just the story of it was they got like a new like, Moog synthesizer installed at the studio, like before they recorded Abbey Road, I believe.

And then George Harrison just messed around with it for like an hour and he just decided, hey, let's release that. Let's put it out and make people pay for it. And they did. And they just like re. Released it on like.

Like the weird Zootrope vinyl thing, whatever it's called. Yeah.

Zo Trope.

Zo Trope. And that's one of those albums that, like, I. Technically, if I wanted to be like a super completionist, I would have to buy it. But I.

Lucky, I don't know.

I've got a second copy. No, I'm kidding. I only. I only have one copy. It's on their Zappa label.

Yeah, that was a weird one off thing.

Yeah. Next up we've got Mommy and Daddy by the Monkeys. And this is. The lyrics are a little like rated R a little bit.

Because it talks about asking, you know, your mommy and daddy who killed jfk. Like, ask your mommy if she enjoys taking all of her pills and ask your daddy why doesn't the soldier care who he kills?

And you know, it boils into a whole thing. If you know, mommy, daddy, would it matter if the. You know, the bullet went and da, da, da. And you can, you can. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

It is pretty weird for the monkey.

All sung through like a Beatles style rock.

Yeah. This was originally for their follow up album To Head called the Monkeys, Present Mickey, Peter, Michael and Davey. But Peter left, so they had like.

They couldn't do it, you know, without Peter, so they made a different album. And then this Present has this song on it.

But this title of Present is no way related to the original concept of Present other than like Mommy and Daddy, you know, it's. It's a crazy thing and all that stuff, but this is a very crazy playlist.

Yeah.

Some pretty weird stuff on here.

Yeah, I didn't. The Monkeys, they got. They took a turn in like the second half of the 60s. They started getting it too though.

I mean, wasn't.

They wanted to break out of the.

Yeah, they like didn't want to be remembered as just those guys from the TV show.

Yeah.

That makes her know. I think that they. They probably succeeded as far as this club is concerned. I have.

I mean, I personally, I didn't know very much about the Monkeys other than they were like, you know, that band from the TV show. But I've heard a lot of very, very strange stuff from them.

Yeah.

I have to give them a lot of credit. They were doing. They were doing something not a lot of. Not a lot of other people were doing.

Especially not people who had their level of like mainstream.

Yeah.

Accessibility, popularity.

They've certainly made it onto quite a few of these playlists. Definitely what we got.

Actually, I wanted to mention something that's not on the playlist and I don't exactly remember when I played it, so we're just gonna drop it now. I brought in an album by Geese, a recently released album that was a exclusive thing that's not on streaming. It's called Live at Third Man Records.

It was recorded live at Third Man.

Records in Detroit, Michigan.

In Detroit, Michigan. Shout out the city of Detroit. And it's a. It was a live album that was recorded before the album Getting Killed came out.

So a lot of the Songs that are being played on that album are like songs that were. End up on getting killed, but they were. This was like the first time that they were ever played.

Not the first time, but one of the first times that they were played. And I think it's really great. I saw them live. I won't stop talking about how cool it was to see them live.

And this album definitely translates the energy that I saw there on the vinyl pretty easily.

And I played a song on that record, which is an exclusive thing, which is a song called I will let you down, which I think originated as a solo song from the lead singer, Cameron Winter. It didn't end up on the album, but it was, like, pretty wildly. I don't say.

So this is.

This is an oddity in. In. I mean, rarity. Always weird. That's kind of part of their shtick now, you know, I don't want to say weird, but I get it.

Pushing the lines of what is normal. But this is an oddity in Morrowind one in that it's also a bit of a rarity.

That's. That was what I was going for. Like, it was oddities, rarities. That was what I wanted to bring in.

Very clever.

It's a very good song. I advise people to seek it out if you can.

This album, I don't know if they're like, there's any left to buy, but if you could find one, get one, it's really great.

So next we got Yakety Sax brought in by me. And I thought, hey, what song epitomizes odd things than, like, the wackiest song ever made?

Yakety Sax, like, used in From Benny Hill and then just used in a ton of other shows and stuff ever since to indicate, like, there's some goofy stuff happening right now.

Yeah. And this particular artist I found in a dollar bin named Boots Randolph, apparently, I guess he's like a Nashville studio artist. Yeah.

So he's like, on the backtracks of many, many things.

A lot of music comes out of Nashville, so makes sense. I, like, unironically, do also really enjoy this song because it is so fun. It is weird. It is very silly, but it is. It's a good one. I agree.

Next up, I'M gonna group a couple songs in together. We got two weird tracks that I brought. Like, I played them before in a meeting. The weird disco meeting. You know, the weird music and the disco music.

But I guess the weird music didn't really like it kind of like got.

Why don't you play this go then?

Weird.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah, man, disco's weird enough already. You don't need to be making it more weird.

You can just play disco any with the whole thing, you know, those kind of got some flack. So I thought, oh, bring him the weird meeting. And I brought him and it's same spiel as always.

Most Peculiar man is about a guy who's isolated and lives alone and ends up passing away because he turned on the gas and he went to sleep with the windows closed so he'd never wake up to his silent world in his tiny room. Or wasn't he a most peculiar man? I believe that's lyrics, but I don't know.

And Cobwebs and Strange is just a weird Keith Moon song because it's like the drumming is crazy, but it's Keith Moon. It's his song. Of course the drumming would be weird and strange.

Yeah. That Simon and Garfunkel album, what was that? Sounds of Silence. That's a very. There's a very depressing album.

I mean, like, obviously from the title, it's very depressing. But like, they get. I don't know, I enjoy it quite a bit. And it's not my favorite of theirs, but like.

Oh, it's not my favorite thematically.

Consistent with that. Everybody's having a very bad time on it.

Yeah. I mean, especially like with Richard Corey. I mean sounds. There's like a Depressing too.

It's like a Wings cover of that.

Song for Some Silence. You actually think about it. Lyric wise, it is kind of depressing. But then what doesn't actually make it depressing is the drum beat and like the up.

Yeah, that was where they just smacked that on there, like after the fact. And they got back. That was like. It was like some person who was completely unrelated to it just heard the song and like, you know what?

This needs to rock.

The best part of a song.

Yeah. That is what happened though. Remember, it was acoustic before, and then Paul Simon went off to England. Art Garfunkel went to.

To college to study architecture and all that stuff. And somebody saw it and was like, oh, added electric guitar thing and a drum beat and stuff. And it became a big hit and brought them back together.

The world Was never the same again.

Can I sneak one in? For the world Was never the same again yes. Just gonna mention Sonic Youth real quick.

Oh, yes.

I'm not a huge Sonic Youth fan, but I like quite a few of their songs, but their influence is just incredibly widespread and it really did change, like how alternative music was working at the time. A lot of it was pretty basic, pretty punk rock before that. And they really pushed music in a direction that was very, very weird and.

And they were an oddity for a while there. But even when they kind of mainstreamed their sound, it was pushing other bands. Big, big influence on Nirvana.

I was going to say Nirvana, stuff like that. Fighters, that kind of stuff, they owe a lot to food to.

I like that one. I really did. I was listening to on the way over. You know, it's like. It's good punk stuff at least I think, you know, it's very punk reminiscent.

I think that's where they.

I don't know.

And it is.

I don't know that much.

Pretty different. It is.

It is like functionally different from punk in many ways, but it's like very obviously grown out of that movement and that's why it changed that movement in some subtle and some not so subtle ways.

Yeah, speaking of punk and something completely unrelated to punk, but kind of further down this, like, alt rock rabbit hole by way of Nirvana. Weezer.

Yeah. El Scorcho.

Yeah, I mean, that was the. I mean, I don't want to say Weezer's inspired by Sonic Youth, but they're inspired by bands who are inspired by.

Sonic Youth, for sure.

I mean, any band that's ever inspired by Nirvana and Reezer was. I mean, Rivers Cuomo was a huge Nirvana fan.

And this, this whole album was weird in that, like, yeah, Pinkerton, he. He wrote it going like, okay, I'm not gonna do the same as the Blue album.

Yeah, we're just gonna knock it out and I'm gonna talk about, like, myself and being a weird guy and like the way I feel about things and stuff. And like, you know, we were talking about influence, like, would go on to be like a huge influence in like emo and stuff like that. And that's like.

You can definitely hear it in this. And ultimately it's. It doesn't seem that weird now, but it was pretty weird at the time.

Oh yeah.

Even Weezer fans were like, what is this?

That album definitely got a bit of like a glow up, like, reviews wise, after like the years following when it came. When it first came out.

I agree I totally Savage did. They hated it.

Like, Rolling Stone magazine was like, this is a terrible, terrible album. Everybody was just making fun of Rivers Cuomo for it. He took it very much to heart. Never wrote like a personal song ever again.

Because it's. I. I mean, I think it's like arguably their best Blue. The Blue albums. One of my favorite albums of all time.

But this one's, like, artistically, I think probably those two.

Those two are the. Accept the socially acceptable favorite Weezer albums, I think. Yes.

Socially. How dare you. No, no, how dare you.

I do agree with this the Green album, but I agree with you guys saying that it's Pinkerton being all the stuff that she said. Because I can't really remember a bit of it. Well, I can remember some, but I don't want to regurgitate what you said.

But like I mentioned this previously, but I never knew Pinkerton even existed until somebody brought it into a meeting.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I've said before.

Sorry.

Oh, you know. And that's this Weezer. There's more Pinkerton. What's that? I've heard most of the modern hit. Well, modern. Well known, well known Weezer stuff on Blue.

But El Scorcho doesn't get played on the radio. None of society gets played on the radio. And that's like. It is ultimately still weird. We fans love it, A lot of people love it.

But it is still kind of an oddity in that, like, yeah, don't hear it on the radio.

It's like a rap rock song almost.

He's like, okay, I don't want to like, go on a tangent here, but I think my, my conspiracy theory is that River Squamo, deep down has always wanted to make like a hip hop project, but he knows he ever did that. If he ever, like went all in on that, he would get just completely, just thrown out of society. Was.

When did he do that collab with Lil Wayne?

We're not talking about. Okay, that's true gratitude. He. That was as close as he got. I don't want to. Oh, gosh, was it. I can't stop partying.

Yeah.

If anybody ever brings in Ratatouille to a club meeting, they will. We're going to make an award of some kind for them. I don't really know where you'd find.

I respect.

And it's like. There's some good songs on there.

Yeah.

Some weird stuff. Anyway, we're pictures into ratitude.

Yeah.

How we doing?

You didn't even look at the list right there. That was just off the dome.

Yeah. The name is so long that Spotify cuts it off at Trident.

I was gonna.

It references Valerie by the Monkees, what She's Doing Tonight by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who wrote aforementioned Valerie. It talks about yummy, yummy, yummy a bunch of times. You know, it mentions that in the chorus.

You could just name a band, anything back then, and you could get away with it. Especially if it's like a bubblegum.

Bubblegum Was that like.

It was like it. Was it like an actual band? You know, if these were like a real thing or was it like a fictional band created by a studio to make bubblegum music?

Because there's a lot of those.

Well, yeah, I mean, the Archies is a good example of what you're just saying. Yeah, they. They're a band that is, you know, exists but doesn't exist.

There's, you know, band that doesn't have.

It's the whole thing, Don. It's. I'll reel it back. Don Kirschner wanted control of a band. You know, he made the Monkees, and they rebelled because they're people.

And so he wanted. I want control of a band where they won't act up and they'll just do what I say and all that. And boom, animated band, the Archies is born.

And, you know, he had a whole bunch of Brill Building people kind of join in on that, which I wouldn't be surprised if this group with the extremely long name is just a bunch of Brill Building people. Not real. You know, but I think they only had that 45.

That makes me think that more they might not actually be real people. That's. Well, they're real people, but they're like. It's like a fake band.

It's. Yeah.

Studio thing.

No famous people. Just artists that no one knows.

Yeah. Which is too bad.

There's a lot of bands like that. But speaking of actually bands that are, well, faceless artists, here we have another not real guy, Donald Duck.

Donald Duck isn't real.

Well, I mean, I've seen him like one time, like, I was at Disney World. He was out there. It was pretty strange.

Yeah.

Didn't get to talk to him. Sure, he's a cool guy. He made a disco song back in 70 something. I don't know what year this was.

1970 Disc.

So this entire thing comes from a Disco Mickey record. Don't ask me why I have this. I don't know where it came from. It's part of my original collection.

I originally brought this in for the weird disco as Tyler's talking about. I did not end up playing this one. I played the Sesame Disco. Sesame Street. But yeah, it's a weird song.

Yeah.

And it has like the. You could tell that they tried to base it off of the Village People.

With Macho man and Disco Duck. It's like a mashup of that.

Jacob, you said something earlier about it being Donald Duck. Just talking randomly. How are you.

But how are you going to get Donald Duck to sing? He's got it like it's not going to happen.

It's like he's just doing commentary the entire song.

We tried doing a Donald Duck impression,.

But, you know, not on the radio. Let's not. Let's not tempt it. Let's not tempt it. Now, I would like to talk about a real band that I'm sure some people here might be familiar with.

There's these people called Ween. They're pretty. Okay.

Check it off your bingo card.

Yeah.

Well, we got. Okay, we got.

I didn't play it, though. In my.

And wean.

Sure. I didn't.

That's a bingo.

I didn't play. I didn't play it. Be in my defense. I'm just talking about him. The song Mononucleosis off the album the Pod, that's their strangest album.

I think the whole thing, the song sounds like how the title sounds. It's just a strange time. It makes you feel like you're the one who's like, dying on a couch somewhere. It is.

This whole album is kind of a fever dream. I love it very much, but a lot of people don't like it for that exact reason, I would say. If you're like, want to get into Wayne, don't.

Don't listen to this one until you're already through everything else. Because it's a tough listen, but it's very rewarding once you get into it. There's a lot of hidden gems in here. You just have to accept it as it is.

The pod. Great album. Highly recommend it. After you listen to everything else Wayne did.

Can I hop in here real quick? Last song I played. Da Da Da by Trio. This is a song that is kind of weird when you listen to it now.

It was kind of in style for what was happening in Germany at the time. They were experimenting with very, like, simple music production, or rather complex music production, but very simple song structure.

And this is literally just a drum beat off of the Casio VL1 with just like drums and guitar in the chorus and weird, like, sort of half spoken, half sung vocals. And it's just a nice, happy sounding song. Like, it's just nice. I really enjoy it for all of that.

A lot of their other stuff is also very simple and based in this and a bit less weird sounding. This song is definitely. You go like, this is a song like, somebody released this and said, no, that's done. But I kind of.

I kind of like the vibe as it goes along. And then I'm gonna real quick sneak in here. The last song that I played was the Fontana Mix from this electronic music album.

Oh, gosh.

John Cage.

Yeah, John Cage, a hugely influential musician. He got into some weird stuff and this is just him experimenting with electronic tape. And like there's weird moaning on it and it's. I don't. Weird.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Not to mention.

Is that the one where it's just some random guy just moaning into the mic?

I. I believe it's a random woman, a famous vocalist, but just doing weird stuff.

We made it even more weird by splitting the sound for the channels in the middle and having that play and Wild Honey Pie by the Beatles at.

The exact same time where they closed off.

That was a wonderful ending, I have to say.

How funny that all these things that we normally talk about are still weird. Maybe. Maybe people in the club are sometimes a little bit weird, but that's fine. I love it.

That's the variety. That's what we love to see at these meetings.

And you know what else we'd love to see at these meetings? You, the people.

Yes, we would. If you're interested at all in checking out any of these meetings, you could check out our website. All of our information about our meetings there.

Future meetings, past meetings, playlists, events, anything that you need to know. You'll all find it all there. We might have some summer stuff coming up. Stay tuned for that. If you're interested in all.

Just like I said, stay tuned and you will find it all on the website. Thank you all for tuning in. We hope to see you next time.

Bye bye.

Goodbye, Sam.