darvocet21
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 31, 2021
- Messages
- 25,756
Author Joseph Lanza is an expert’s expert on some of the more enigmatic corners of popular and unpopular culture. In numerous books he’s written about Muzak®, long forgotten crooners, obsessive film directors like Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, bland pop songs, the history of cocktails, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Possessing an expertise on matters from Mantovani to Leatherface, Lanza’s work is quirky and unique. His latest book, Easy-Listening Acid Trip: An Elevator Ride through Sixties Psychedelic Pop (Feral House) covers a musical genre that most people have no idea even existed.
How did you become interested in, and an expert on, elevator music and pop orchestral cover versions of psychedelic hits?
I’ve been curious about this kind of music since my high-school days. While listening to the garden-variety rock and pop along with my peers, I was also fascinated by the easy-listening instrumental FM station that my parents often kept on in the background. They seemed to be broadcasting phantom orchestras and choruses that covered many current songs, and I remember being amazed to hear the Ray Conniff Singers do a version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.”
Though their vocals were engineered to be more background than foreground, the song seemed all the more haunting with its references to old-time movies and ghosts. Its subject matter was close to the ideas and images in Roger Corman’s 1967 movie The Trip, which helped to introduce LSD themes to the masses. The Conniff recording has a spectral appeal that, for me, brought out this message more than the original record.
continued at Dangerous Minds
The Hollyridge Strings drop "Strawberry Fields Forever"
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