Comedy/Spoken — All Formats  

A real mind-trip – and an incredible document of the times – not just ideas floating around in the late 60s, but also new ways of making records too! The album is loosely based around ideas and writings from The Medium Is The Massage – McLuhan's important 1967 book, co-written with Quentin Fiore – and represented here as a wild sound collage that blends together music, sounds, media snippets, and readings by McLuhan, Fiore, and a host of other voices! The album's actually much more of a "happening" than a spoken word album – a real studio party that's cut up and messed up by all the added effects, sounds, and music – genius that comes from Jerome Agel, who put the whole project together – and delivered it to the loving hands of John Simon, who produced some other wonderful records of this nature for late 60s Columbia. A real delight throughout – and the kind of an album we wish people still kept making! Great reissue package – in a gatefold LP-styled sleeve, with additional artwork, rare photos, full notes on the sessions, and more!

A real mind-trip – and an incredible document of the times – not just ideas floating around in the late 60s, but also new ways of making records too! The album is loosely based around ideas and writings from The Medium Is The Massage – McLuhan's important 1967 book, co-written with Quentin Fiore – and represented here as a wild sound collage that blends together music, sounds, media snippets, and readings by McLuhan, Fiore, and a host of other voices! The album's actually much more of a "happening" than a spoken word album – a real studio party that's cut up and messed up by all the added effects, sounds, and music – genius that comes from Jerome Agel, who put the whole project together – and delivered it to the loving hands of John Simon, who produced some other wonderful records of this nature for late 60s Columbia. A real delight throughout – and the kind of an album we wish people still kept making! Great reissue package – in a gatefold LP-styled sleeve, with additional artwork, rare photos, full notes on the sessions, and more!

Wild! The Nutty Squirrels were an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of Alvin & The Chipmunks during the late 50s – a studio-trickery session handled with the voices of Don Elliott and Sascha Burland – but to our ears, honestly, the album's a lot better! You see, both Elliott and Burland had their jazz chops down pretty tight – and the record is less an album of novelty pop numbers, than it is a set of jazz vocal tunes, scatted along over small combo backing, with the voices sped up on tape so that they sound like a pair of jazzy squirrels! The album's got none of the cloying aspects of The Chimpunks' work – and if you can get past the squeakiness of the vocals, you'll actually find the record pretty appealing from a jazz perspective. Titles include "Bob White", "That's Owl, Brother", "Yardbird Suite", "Flamingo", "Bird Watching", "Sparrow In The Treetop", and "Didee Bird". Imagine Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert locked in a studio with a tank of helium – and you'll get the idea!

A bit dated at this point, but it still has it's moments. With "Singers", "Ice Cream Man/Shoe Throwin' Mothers", "Modern Women", "The Barbecue", "The Fart Game", "Politics/Racism", "Languages" and "TV".