"Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away/With Every Beat of My Heart" Shawn (1971)

It's like this; You remember an old record and you finally drop everything and go on a mission.

The record in question came to our family in a box of 45s my uncle gave my mom. He worked for an amusement company which serviced jukeboxes. Every now and then, he'd bring us a box of random 45s. There were a few well worn hits ("Ode To Billie Joe" Bobbie Gentry, "I Love You" by People) and a few lesser Jeannie C. Riley and Otis Redding songs. But one 45 in particular stuck out.

It was a single released on Kapp Records in September of 1971 at the peak of the Donny Osmond craze shortly after he struck teenybopper gold with his cover version of Steve Lawrence's "Go Away Little Girl".

The artist was someone (or some group) named Shawn. Who this monosyllabic Shawn was is completely unknown as far as verifiability goes. I simply hit dead ends everywhere I go trying to track down any deeper session information.

The A-Side was an answer song to "Go Away Little Girl", titled "Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away"

The B-Side was also a cover version. "With Every Beat of My Heart", which was probably better known as a 1970 song from Josie & The Pussycats.

Both of the Shawn songs had some popularity, the novelty A-side of course. But Shawn's B-side cover of "With Every Beat of My Heart" appeared on the 1995 Varese Sarabande compilation CD Bubblegum Classics Volume Two.

The A-Side, "Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away", remains available only on the original Kapp 45.

From the number of these Shawn singles with holes drilled in the label area, which is nearly every copy I have ever seen, it didn't do very well in sales as most "answer songs" tend not to. Drilling holes in the 45 RPM label area or cutting a corner of an album was a practice amongst record labels with returned stock of records that didn't sell initially to prevent retailers from reselling them at full price. These records were what occupied the "cut-out" or "budget bins" for $2.98 or lower in record shops.

But a look at the credits on the single reveals two important clues; Producer Danny Janssen and arranger Jimmie Haskell. Janssen had produced the original Josie & The Pussycats album and was the producer of several early '70s TV based pop acts including The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch LPs. Jimmie Haskell was a pop arranger, best known for his TV work as well as with '60s pop band The Grass Roots. He also arranged horns and strings on Blondie's Autoamerican album.


It was pretty much a one-off novelty single to cash in a pop fad as "Go Away Little Girl" was one of the biggest hits of 1971.

Shawn never had a follow-up single or released a full album. And was never heard from again.

Six Star Factory Outlet Stores

Hello Dumpster Divers,

My kitty, Mr. Smokey Gato

Sorry for the lack of action, I'm caring for a terminally ill kitty right now. Mr. Smokey Gato has feline cancer and it's advanced. He is getting weaker and thinner. And this kitty has been my buddy, always there for me. So I'm paying a lot more attention to him. Because I don't know how long I will have him. 

I recently made a list of vanished retail chains, mostly in Puget Sound, I had a few requests to post about some chains. But it's not easy to find information on most of them. There are a few chains that have simply no hard information I could research on them and others I have memories of shopping at, but little else overall to go on. 

One of those is Six Star Factory Retail Outlets (best known as Six Star) Six Star was a discount store from 1987 to 2009 that also specialized in craft supply merchandise. Six Star was once a rising chain in the Western America, mostly in suburban areas as far east as Colorado. My local Six Star was in Lynnwood, WA

Six Star was mostly a dollar store, with some items going as high as $6. But no higher for most merchandise. Some products, such as an aluminium cookware set were available for $6, plus the balance in "Bonus Bucks" coupons, which for each $5 of things you buy, you got one Bonus Buck coupon. 

Six Star also expanded full tilt into craft merchandise in the early '90s by opening Super Star locations (there was one in Lynnwood across the parking lot from the Six Star), which offered craft supplies only. These were meant to offer all craft supplies and an employee there once told me they were planning to transition the craft supplies out of the Six Star stores and into the nearby Super Star locations, freeing up shelves for even more general merchandise in Six Star locations.

But there was one thing I looked for specifically at Six Star and it were these.

On the cashier counter, there sat a rack of compilation cassettes, mostly of the cornball country/religious crud that Gusto Records specializes in as well as warmed over mini-compilation cassettes from any given major label's special products division. But amongst them were Canadian compilations from Quality Records. They sold for $4.00 each

They were K-Tel like and offered a pretty good mix of pop tunes. Including at least 3 Canadian tracks. OK, so Zappacosta, Frozen Ghost and The Parachute Club aren't exactly the first names that jump off American tongues when you bring up '80s pop music. But they were a pretty good deal for the money. And I could only find them at Six Star.

The last store closed in 2009 in Poulsbo, WA.

Wing Over America

Her name is Wing. Wing Han Tsang, to be exact. She's from Hong Kong by way of New Zealand and she's gonna rock your world.....



You might have heard of Wing from an episode of South Park (they dedicated a whole episode to her)


She has recorded 20 CDs of cover versions of songs ranging from Elvis to AC/DC (in fact, she recorded TWO albums of AC/DC covers!)

Here's her rendition of AC/DC's "Hells Bells"


She actually has a huge worldwide fan base, proving that talent and singing on key and coherently are simply overrated.

But sadly in June of 2015, Wing announced her retirement from music.

http://wingmusic.co.nz/

Before They Were Stars: Billy Joel

In 1970, just three years before his solo commercial breakthrough with Piano Man, Billy Joel released a psychedelic hard rock album on Epic Records with partner Jon Smalls under the name Attila.

With Joel on Hammond organ and Smalls on drums (there were no guitarists or bassists on this album) and everything cranked to 12, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Besides everything.

 

Attila was not only a massive flop, going nowhere on the charts. Billy Joel himself hated the record, calling it "psychedelic bullshit". AllMusic even called it the "worst record ever made".

Accolades like that make this an automatic classic here at History's Dumpster.

Alas, we would never see a follow up to Attila, Billy Joel ran off with Jon Smalls' wife, whom he later married (which usually puts a wrinkle in things, creatively.) But the two later made up and Smalls produced two of Joel's later concert albums.

10-10 Dial-Around Numbers

In the late 1990s, before cell phone service became affordable and nearly ubiquitous for nearly everyone, there were dozens of phone numbers offering super cheap long distance and other gimmicks via a 10-10 prefix number for land line phones. (Image: Chris Stewart/The San Francisco Chronicle)  

The 1990s were the last decade where home land line phones were still dominant. Cell phones were still prohibitively expensive, very few people had them and they had no features. Just voice.

In the 1990s, there was no unlimited talk, text messaging was still mostly unheard of and there was no mobile web/data access either. Charges for voice calls were still by the minute and at the rate of $2 per minute, they added up real fast. Plus you needed a perfect credit score or a massively huge deposit to even get cell phone service.

So the land line phone was status quo for most people. Which meant if you had to call someone in a different area code, you had to pay by the minute for it, often at the rate of 25¢ to as high as $1.00 per minute (or more!) for international calls. However after 7pm local time and on weekends, these rates came down, but not by much.

In 2015, with the concept of area codes considered nearly obsolete (I live in the Seattle area and my cell phone number has a 415 - that's San Francisco, area code - long story, but no problems thus far) and nearly unlimited everything on your smartphone and zillions of apps you can do nearly everything with for around $30 month, it's hard for most younger people to imagine such a backwards and expensive system. But that's really how it was back in the day.

But to get a further glimpse into our topic, you need to go back even farther.


Making a long distance call in most of the 20th century was a complicated procedure. On top of expensive. Plus, there was only one provider of cross country long distance. It was called The Bell System (it's also been referred to as "Ma Bell" because of the ubiquitously female phone operators and automated voices. Plus it was the "mother" of the entire American phone system and dated all the way back to the very first telephone system in the 1870s.)

There were a few companies that provided local and regional phone service, such as GTE (the predecessor to today's Verizon.) But most long distance calls went through The Bell System.

But in spite of the Bell System's snazzy, friendly commercials and happy brochures, they could charge whatever they wanted if your call went through their lines. Because screw you. That's why. They were a monopoly, they set the rates, they provided the means of communication. There was no competition. So whaddya gonna do about it? Punk.

It frustrated millions of Americans who longed for some level of competition and better rates. So if you wanted to cheaply talk to friends and family across the miles in the days long before the internet, email and social media and today's smartphone services, you had to rely on old fashioned snail mail. Which took days or even weeks to arrive. And breaking family news and emergencies just couldn't wait. But more than anything else, people just wanted to hear the voices of their loved ones far away.


In 1984, the U.S. Justice Department ruled what everyone knew for over 100 years, that the Bell System was indeed a monopoly and ordered the break up of Ma Bell. This led to a flurry of complicated and strange new providers such as US Sprint (later just Sprint) and the now defunct MCI. And Ma Bell became AT&T.

This did lead to more competitive rates, but barely. The initial long distance rates of these new providers were in reality not much different than Ma Bell's. And sometimes, depending on where you were calling, they were even more expensive. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to yet even further fragmenting to the land line telephone systems.

A typical landline phone of the '90s. By this time, cordless phones had begun to overtake corded models.

The 10-10 numbers were created by the newly minted sub-long distance provider US Telecom (then a subsidiary of MCI, now operated by Verizon) as a workaround to your regular home long distance provider. Offering rates as low as 10¢ per minute. Which was actually not a bad rate for 1998 home long distance. Plus they were the same rate, 24/7. No need to wait until after hours.



But by 2004, these services themselves were becoming increasingly antiquated  as cell phone services became more and more affordable and offered far more than the standard land line could provide. And even the 10-10 numbers began increasing rates to compensate. First to 18¢ and now at 30¢.

Surprisingly, some of these 10-10 dial-around land line services are still in business today, even as the use of land lines has dropped dramatically and land lines today are mostly used by businesses, the elderly and the vision and hearing impaired today. But 30¢ is a crazy rate to pay per minute for domestic long distance in 2015 when most people don't even pay for it at all. It just comes gratis with their cell phone service.

More on the 10-10 dial-around numbers 

(Note: I know I'm probably going to hear from those who still have land lines about their virtues and yes, they do have clearer sound and one major benefit. When power is out, the phone lines - with corded phones - usually still work as their source of power is within the phone line itself and in areas that are disaster prone, that's a major benefit. But Seattle rarely has extreme weather or natural disasters. So I can live without one. Just the thought of having to go back to the Luddite old system just gives me the creeps - L.W.)