{"product_id":"0837101367103-collection","title":"Collection","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePRODUKTBESCHREIBUNGEN \u003cbr\u003e Peter Neushul's Musings; There is something very important about singing harmony. The most important thing about it is that it isn't important at all. As American children we are taught that we should only work and win and never just enjoy ourselves. Even our recreation seems to be about winning some sort of contest. Growing vegetables turns out to be a competitive sport, my car is bigger than your car, my lawn is greener than yours, etc. Even the sublime art of barbershop quartet singing is perverted into a huge contest where the best stadium shouting freaks usually win. 139th is about pure pleasure for pleasure's sake. We picked songs because they were amusing or interesting for some reason. I think that there is a big difference between art and drafting. Art is what you do and drafting is what someone else tells you to do. This is not to say that drafting isn't attractive or that art is always good art. I suppose art could be an oil painting or drawing with crayons on butcher paper or even a barbershop quartet. 139th St quartet almost always went wherever their artistic bent took it. It didn't always work but here it is as well as we can present it. We didn't have studio recordings of everything so some of it is recorded a bit rough but it will give you an idea of what we had in mind. The quartet sang from 1975 until 2000 something. In fact it still gets together (2007) and sings. We even wrote and sang a new intro to a song in 2005. Something that I don't think many people understand is that the quartet was about exploring various areas of music. If you look at the entire CD set you can sort of work it out. We started singing a lot of Harry Von Tilzer upbeats like Can You Tame Wild Wimmin, Don't Put A Tax On The Beautiful Girls, etc. Then we listened to what George Burns was singing and cadged a few of those like \"Where Did You Get That Girl.\" Another area that interested us was the very old barbershop standards like \"Down By The Old Mill Stream\" and \"Swanee.\" We also wrote several and sang some originals that people gave us. Most of the originals were semi-autobiographical. We went through a long Ragtime craze that went on for years and is still my favorite. There are several classical and classical put-on songs that we found funny. When we sang with Larry we did quite a few slurpy ballads that he and Jimmy liked. We sang a few modern numbers as well. We did lots of silly stuff and we sang with quite a few others, Hal Purdy, our kids, Neil Diamond, et al. Mostly we did songs that we loved. • Life is very short and if it isn't amusing, what is it for? Oh wait, (for) is a preposition and a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with. Life is very short and if it isn't amusing then for what is it? That isn't right either is it? • There is a lot of humor arranged into the songs. It isn't jokes necessarily but musical things that made us laugh, like changing the key on the last note of Crazy Words. We couldn't seem to get a good tag and Larry was noodling on the keyboard and made the key change and we all fell on the floor. It stayed. We also thought that the itinerant baritone pick up on the third of the chord was very amusing. We used that a lot. Before anyone else, we started sporting spectator shoes. Today there probably isn't a championship barbershop quartet singer who doesn't have a pair in his closet. We wore them as a joke not a fashion statement! The little whistle on an ess sound is there because someone laughed when we did it in a rehearsal. Doug used to put in unfeasibly high Chinese sevenths with the baritone singing a high L (sometimes it sounds like L) and the tenor even higher just to spice things up. That quirkiness did not go over well with the judges and the contests that we entered but they seem to have worn well. Another thing that I think we were the first to do was to sing a major chord with the third and fifth on top. (The tag on My Mother's Eyes) It is now pretty much standard but at the time we were severely criticized. Anyway, here it is. We hope you are amused. Remember, no one's last words have ever been; \"Gee I wish I had spent more time at work.\" CD#1 Notes on some of the songs; 1) Coney Island Medley; Doug and I got together one night and tried to think of every New York song that we knew and then he strung them all together. It has our first ever, irrelevant baritone pick up on the third. I accidentally did it while we were rehearsing and everyone laughed so it stayed in. I still think it is funny. This is probably our most imitated piece, probably because it is fairly easy. We later put a bass re-bum-biddley-bye run on the tag just for old times sake. It's Jim Mehan singing lead. 2) Wait 'Til The Sun Shines Nellie; A great old Barbershop song with no gymnastics. Just singing it as straight as possible. Larry is the lead. 3) Bach's Fugue; It was originally Vivaldi. Bach stole it. Vivaldi's was an Italian military song called, \"She Was Nice To The Regiment But Rotten To The Corps.\" This was a bear to learn but about the easiest thing to do after that. Larry maneuvered it around so that it would fit our voices. If I ever do it again I am going to write some words for it. Perhaps it will be about my dog Max. 4) Down By The Old Mill Stream; Another classic ballad. We thought it would be amusing to add the birds. That's Dan singing lead. There is something that I find very clever about the way that Doug arranged the tag. Listen closely, the bass (Jimmy) descends chromatically, i.e. in half notes for an octave. It is really interesting but makes the baritone part is a killer trying to stay out of his way. 5) 1927; Doug is a history teacher and was interested in 1927 so we got a book of 1927 newspapers and wrote down pretty much everything that happened that year. Larry, Doug, and I wrote it. 1929 was the Stock Market crash in case you forgot. Howard Scanlan was a great old friend of ours. He could sing more obscure songs than anyone I ever knew. We took him with us on several trips and he stayed up the latest and sang the longest of any of us. 6) Don't Put A Tax On The Beautiful Girls; In 1917 the Income Tax was begun. This song was a reaction to that. We changed the melody some to accommodate us and got in some ca-fuffle with the judges of barbershop at the time. As a result we skipped the 1978 International contest. The judging system has since changed. We haven't. 7) Jean; At least I hope it is Jean and not Gene. Larry loved the slurpy ballads and this is he doing one. It is a pretty song that went over well with audiences. 8) I'm Just Wild About Harry; This is my favorite song. We heard the Amherst Saxophone quartet do a version of this one and we just had to do it. Larry got so into it that he stayed up all night making our version. We have always been interest in Ragtime and this in one of many that we did. I love it. 9) Girl Friend Of A Boy Friend; I really love this song. It was originally done by Eddy Canter. It was from a 1930 musical called \"Whoopee\", I think the lyrics are really terrific. We also managed to sneak in the irrelevant baritone pick-up as well. 10) Lulu's Back In Town; This is a little upbeat song with lots of high parts for the baritone and tenor. Sing this more than twice and you can't talk for about a week. 11) My Mother's Eyes; This is an early ballad that we learned. Doug put in the 1-1-3-5 tag on it and we we're severely criticized for it. Of course today it is de rigeur for all the top quartets to hang one out like this. 12) My Dear Old Irish Mammy; We wrote this because it seemed that every old barbershop ballad was either about Ireland or the South. We thought that it would be amusing to combine the two. We over-dubbed the spoken \"In Tuscaloosa\" about 25 times just for laughs. 13) Good Old Zenith; In 1988 we did a three month run of Sinclair Lewis's \"Babbit\" at the Los Angeles Music Center. It was an original adaptation of the book which is about the emptiness of small\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41016058773601,"sku":"0837101367103","price":21.11,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_827362_868673_jpg.jpg?v=1724074124","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/0837101367103-collection","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}