Friday, April 30, 2010

A Mighty Wind


Verble points to this album cover and says, "The highest pinnacle of satire is that which gently spoofs, or, maybe it'd be better to describe it like this - something that actually loves and honors the very thing that it's satirizing. Good examples, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, which obviously loved the Western and the Gothic Horror that it was spoofing. The best example, movie-wise, is Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, which I call the best movie that no one's ever seen. Martial arts movie, perfectly satirizes the genre, especially down to the bad English overdubbed translations.


"But back to the album - this is a soundtrack to the movie, and the movie spoofed all the folk singers of the sixties. The same guys are the ones who did This is Spinal Tap, which gets my vote for one of the greatest movies of all time - it spoofed hard rock of the seventies, but it can't go up on the wall because it's not an acoustic album, see?


"And, yeah, I know - my criteria for going up on the wall is an album that actually has at its main focus - the acoustic guitar. This one does that - in fact, every song spoofed on that album highlights the acoustic guitar - and even though all the bands and the songs are take-offs of the uber-cheesy sixties folk scene, you can listen to this album and actually know exactly what those years were like, without ever having actually to go back to bands like Ian and Sylvia or the Kingston Trio or Harper's Bizarre or any of those others.


"I made a mix of it with audio clips from the movie interspersed between the songs, I'll play it in the cafe sometime - it's hilarious! And not in the movie, but they do a cover of the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' that makes me split my guts laughing each and every time!


". . . aw what the heck - hold down the fort, wouldya? I'm going home to get my CD. Be right back."


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