Instructional / Educational

Not really sure what I can add. [audio:speed_kills.mp3]

Unintentionally(?) over the top and hilarious Teacher’s Aid lp from the 60’s highlighting various “problems” the modern teacher/parent might face. It’s all acted out in skits which have a bizarre, stilted, almost John Waters-esque melodrama factor, and few if any seem to actually have any closure or teach any lesson. I’d give anything to be […]

As a second generation Orange Countian who squandered his youth on drugs I can’t help but identify with these youngsters in some strange way. Who knows, it could have totally been Rick from Anaheim* who rode shotgun that one time my Dad, hopped up on Angel Dust, hot-wired a car and cruised to the Long […]

Picked this one up for the great cover. It’s a two record set put out by the Chicago Daily News and WLS Radio in conjunction with forums and broadcasts addressing the problem of school dropout in  1966. Three out of the four sides are dry and boring press conferences. The remaining side contains excerpts from […]

Obscure record offering borderline amateur renditions of okay seventies material. What’s nice about the recording is the ridiculously upfront percussion and the Curtis-wannabe falsetto singing. Even tracks like Get Dancin’ and I Got the Music In Me manage to transcent their originals ’cause of the strange mix, albeit barely. Most tracks are winners if you […]

This record looks to be from the early sixties and was released on Columbia’s budget Harmony subsidiary. It provides rhythm accompaniment for dancers, singers, musicians, instructors and children. Essentially it is a record of drumbeats in a number of different styles. You get fox trots, rock and roll, polka and waltzes on side one.

OK, I was just telling a friend that I was going to stop reviewing crappy records on the site… and I genuinely mean it… so help me god I do. Then I log in tonight and see all the dumb shit I have cued up. They’ve been sitting here for months – a small voice […]

This was another one of those book fair “the records are only 10 cents & this looks interesting even though I have never heard of it before, so why not” purchases (actually the same fair as the Pete Seeger instructional LP I posted here previously). I assume it is a local white label promo or […]

I couldn’t have made this one up if I’d tried.

Pretty unique education themed jazz lp from the bay area. It appears that Soundpiper was a private label run my a husband and wife team named Piper, and based on the back notes there were a small handful of releases. While this one in particular is not completely earth-shattering, it does contain one of the […]

Edition limitee numero 448/500 no label but marked R.P.M. Paris in tiny print on the inner of the beautiful blue gatefold. Spoken word pressure direct from the sweat lodge of the Sorbonne June ’59. The anthropologists who recorded this go uncredited but no doubt they will have canoed up the Boulevard St. Michel and negotiated […]

I don’t know if the dance instruction label Statler catered to strip joints, but that would explain a thing or two about this record. Music is far from jazz. It contains 17 raunchy instrumentals by the group The Night Shift and the “free” instructional flier that comes with it must be seen as totally random (as […]

Pfizer must have handed these out with their pills, wacky Dr Weinberg from Capetown S.A. leads you through baby cries & their meaning. Troubling gatefold inner cover will not be shown, here are some diagnosis Crying Babies

“Learn 475 basic facts quickly and easily through this new audio learning method”. 17 tracks, including “The Atom part 1” and “part 2”, “Halogens”, “Commercial Preparation”, etc. Dare to hear “Metals”?

“This Noise Means Danger!” – a TV tie-in 7″ single from BBC records in 1964. Know Your Car had a signature tune by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but sadly it’s not to be heard on this peculiar mix of deadpan narration and the sounds of ailing motorcars. The commentary is by John F. Miles, manager […]

Listening to this record reminds me that my sense of humor has not matured much in the last 17 years. Lose something down there fella?

I was pretty totally unprepared for an avant jazz freak-out on an Educational Activities Inc. record, but that is exactly what a couple tracks on here are. Prepared piano with bass and percussion that reminds me of something you might hear on an ESP-Disk lp. The rest is quite good too but it’s more of […]

I’ve had like a million of these mind control/relaxation/meditation records, but for some reason I like this one better than most. Maybe it’s the guitar accompaniment. It’s also kind of unintentionally funny because he must say “deeply relaxed” about 300 times over the course of the 2 sides. [audio:deeprelax.mp3]

There’s a lot of words I would use to describe the folkways catalog. But sexy is not one of them. Despite being a rather handsome man himself, Mo Asch resisted the allure of the sexy. And this is probably a good approach for recording the music of indigenous peoples. The Murat musicians of North Borneo […]