As the American baseball season has drawn (at last!) to a close, I’m pulling from the immense scrap heap of musical history a semi-obscure piece of jazzy pop named after a baseball player with the unusual name of Van Lingle Mungo. Mungo was a talented pitcher–a five-time All-Star, playing 11 seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers and three for the New York Giants in the 1930s and 1940s–but we’d have zero reason to recall him at this point were it not for Dave Frishberg’s weirdly compelling song. With lyrics that are nothing more than names of baseball players from the 1940s strung artfully together, the song “Van Lingle Mungo” was a favorite of the legendary NYC radio DJ Vin Scelsa back in the day, which is how I came to know of it as a relative youngster. Something somewhere reminded me of it this fall, leading to its inclusion at the bottom of this month’s mix. Enjoy the autumnal mood and marvel in particular at the way the players’ names scan perfectly as lyrics.
“Van Lingle Mungo” also acts as an idiosyncratic, unintended bookend to the playlist’s opener, which is another song, now that I think about it, that features lyrics that are merely a list of items: King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk,” in which each verse is comprised of words related to talking, the verses going in alphabetical order from A to E. My favorite moment is in the fourth verse, when vocalist Adrian Belew breaks the format to sing “These are words with a D this time.”
In between these two odd but potent songs you’ll find the usual brew of different sounds and decades intermingling as one extended listening experience. Here, specifically, is what you are in for; extra notes below the widget:
1. “Elephant Talk” – King Crimson (Discipline, 1981)
2. “Bootleg Firecracker” – Middle Kids (single, 2023)
3. “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles” – Captain Beefheart (Clear Spot, 1972)
4. “Driven Away” – Mary Lou Lord (Speeding Motorcycle EP, 2001)
5. “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” – Tammi Terrell (Irresistible, 1965)
6. “That Tone of Voice” – Amy Rigby (Diary of a Mod Housewife, 1996)
7. “Australia” – The Shins (Wincing the Night Away, 2007)
8. “Dreaming” – Blondie (Eat to the Beat, 1979)
9. “Eucalyptus” – The National (First Two Pages of Frankenstein, 2023)
10. “Haunt Me” – Sade (Stronger Than Pride, 1988)
11. “Ugly Beauty” – Thelonius Monk (Underground, 1968)
12. “The Big Show” – The Extraordinaires (The Postcard EP, 2011)
13. “Inbetweener” – Sleeper (Smart, 1995)
14. “I’ve Got a Need For You” – David Ruffin (David, recorded 1970-71; released 2004)
15. “Down in the Valley” – The Broken West (I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 2006)
16. “The Voice” – The Moody Blues (Long Distance Voyager, 1981)
17. “Red Horse” – Corinne Bailey Rae (Black Rainbows, 2023)
18. “Wanderlust” – Polly Scattergood (Arrows, 2013)
19. “Talisman” – Air (Moon Safari, 1998)
20. “Van Lingle Mungo” – Dave Frishberg (single, 1969)
Random notes:
* “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” was Tammi Terrell’s debut single for Motown, recorded when she was only 20. When her first few records didn’t gain much commercial traction, Berry Gordy partnered her with Marvin Gaye for a series of singles that became major hits, starting with the indelible “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1967. But health problems, which dated back to severe headaches suffered as a child, soon began to interfere with Terrell’s ability to perform. Later that same year she collapsed on stage while singing with Gaye. She was subsequently diagnosed with a brain tumor. After an initial operation she continued to record and perform but her condition would steadily decline. When she died in 1970 she was only 24.
* The National’s cryptically-named album First Two Pages of Frankenstein may be the first release of theirs that captured my ears without hesitation. “Eucalyptus” is one of a number of excellent tracks. That said, I have yet to find time to investigate their surprise follow-up recording, Laugh Track, which shares cover art but offers up 12 new songs just five months after Frankenstein‘s release. It’s almost as if my mind and/or heart can only absorb a certain amount of input from any given artist in the course of a year or so. I’ll get to Laugh Track, which is probably quite good too, but it may yet take a while.
* I missed the memo on this but I am now belatedly glad to know that Mary Lou Lord started singing again in the mid-’10s. I had heard about the serious problem she had with her vocal cords some ten years earlier; it didn’t sound good at the time. And then I lost track of her. (There’s so much to keep track of!) So I’m just now realizing that she returned in 2015 with her first album since 2004, the self-released Backstreet Angels. More recently, the British label Fire Records released a career retrospective double-album last year called She’d Be a Diamond, with all the good stuff–a great introduction to a special artist if you’re not familiar with her. “Driven Away” is a song from the 2001 mini-EP Speeding Motorcycle, and can also be found on the 2022 Fire Records release.
* It’s a bit startling to listen to “The Big Show” and realize that the Extraordinaires, from Philadelphia, released the song in 2011. Were things already that bad back then? They wrote this when Twitter was still on the upswing, and the idea of President Donald Trump would have seemed a bad joke. Here’s how it starts:
We say it like it’s true then watch it put down its roots
And blossom from the gossip into truth
We’re in the weeds up to our knees
It’s hard to tell the poison from the fruit
Little did they know! The Extraordinaires have been a duo, a four-piece, and a five-piece band, while in recent years settling into a trio. Of their dozen or so releases of various lengths, the single “Monika,” from 2020, is their most recent. “The Big Show” appeared on their 2011 EP Postcard. You can explore the whole catalog over on Bandcamp.
* David Ruffin was one of the lead singers for the Temptations during their classic run from 1964 to 1968. “I’ve Got a Need For You” is from a solo album that he recorded in 1970 and 1971 but which, somehow, wasn’t released until 2004. And while I didn’t do this at all on purpose, in doing a bit of research I came upon the slightly uncomfortable fact of Ruffin’s abusive relationship with the aforementioned Tammi Terrell, which included the fact that he proposed marriage to her while (surprise!) it turned out he was already married. Life, in case you aren’t yet aware, is pretty messy.
* The Australian trio Middle Kids remain one of my favorite bands to come on the scene in recent years. Attentive readers here may remember seeing “Bootleg Firecracker” briefly featured here earlier in 2023; I had to take the review down when it came to my attention that the download had been removed from the site that initially hosted it. So here it is more permanently. The other new single the band released this year, “Highlands,” is also excellent. A new album is expected early next year.
* Standard-issue rock music history has it that the mighty prog-rock dinosaurs who ruled the scene beginning in the late ’60s were killed off, asteroid style, by the punk rock assault of the late ’70s. The truth is more nuanced than that, as seen in two divergent entries in this month’s mix. We have the aforementioned “Elephant Talk,” which saw a prog-rock band shift nimbly into new wave territory, managing to create an up-to-date identity while maintaining the King Crimson name. And we also have the Moody Blues, who let the new wave crash all around them, informing some new sounds while they remained true to their musical core; the in-the-moment effort, 1981’s Long Distance Voyager, stands as one of their best, with the lead single “The Voice” sounding at once familiar and fresh. The band’s long and complicated history is too much to get into here; note simply that they persisted, with some commercial success, well past the punk rock interruption, before devolving in the 2000s into a live nostalgia act.
* For those who enjoy these extra notes each month, you should know that visitors who receive the Fingertips newsletter get a few additional blurbs in the email accompanying each playlist. Sign up details are in the sidebar to the right.
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