What Our Decorations Sounded Like

We got a portable record player as a wedding gift! (Thanks, Serial Box!) It plays up to six discs at a time. The best part is, this means we can listen to all the 45s we bought as coasters for the centerpieces at the reception. 

We picked the records based purely on how cool the labels looked, since we didn't, at the time, have any way of listening to them anyway. They cost a fistful of quarters. If I do say so myself, they looked mighty handsome strewn about the premises of Lustre Pearl last Saturday, another example of figuring out how to fake extravagance on a doing-laundry budget. But now we can hear them!

We put six singles on tonight and let them scratch and pop at us. The result was a profound shuffle, like a radio station that let a robot make the programming decisions, only it's not a smart Pandora robot that knows stuff about music, more like that dumb, only-good-for-one-game robot that came with some deluxe Nintendo Entertainment Systems in the late 1980s. "Okay, Robbie, or whatever the hell your acronym-for-a-name is, you can play some music for 30 minutes. Only rule is, nothing newer than 1989, got it? I'm just going to step outside for a smoke before I put in a six-hour overnight shift of Frank Zappa and Firesign Theater."

This is, I know from personal experience, pretty much how community radio stations are run, by the way.

So, here it is: what our centerpieces would have sounded like, if only the music in their grooves had been unlocked on the big day.

1 - Jimmy Lifton, "I'm A Man," 1987, Atlantic. This features some truly atrocious synthesizer that was dated even for 1987, in which fake vocals perform backing duties (sounding a half-step up on the evolutionary scale from dogs barking "Jingle Bells") and a "trumpet" synth performs the obligatory sax solo.

Jimmy Lifton currently lives in Michigan, where he runs a movie studio called Unity Studios. Last year, it received an employment and expansion grant from the state of Michigan, which meant a series of YouTube videos showing us the great Lifton as he lives today, apparently wreathed in a white mullet and encased in loud suspenders. He had some trouble paying the rent, nonetheless, one year later.

Lifton's career bounced between making music videos and making music in the 1980s. The song in question was his biggest hit. He filmed a video for it that featured that year's August Playmate Ava Fabian (sadly not online). His biggest notoriety is from a soundtrack for a film called Mirror Mirror. It sounds a bit like the groundbreaking noisework of Mike Patton, if Patton were suddenly drained of creativity. I haven't seen the movie, but it looks like a cross between Beetlejuice and The Room. But look! Karen Black! Steven Tobolowski is also creeping around in there somewhere. Infinitely more interesting (and also featuring music from the mind of our friend Lifton) is Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance. That one features Roddy McDowell and a young Mark Ruffalo.  

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: Bad movies, bad synth, and bad fashion sense. In a way, this song is my biography.

2 - Barbra & Neil, "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," 1978, Columbia. The Barbra, if you can't tell by the spelling, is Streisand. The Neil, if you can't guess based on the year, is Diamond. Here they are in all their hair. And here's a YouTube comment from a version of the song that's set to the love duet in the Phantom of the Opera movie: 

This song saved my marriage... My wife and I had been going through a rough time... Never taking the time to talk...

One night, we were sitting at the table with the radio on and for some reason, we stopped talking and we heard the radio announcer let the listeners or "lovers listening to our station" know that this song was for all of us who were going through a rough patch and needed to look at the love in our couple...

16 years later, I love her as when I saw her for the first time...

What we've learned here is that the world was a more uncertain place, musically, before auto-tune, and that this song is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for at least 16 years. 

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: There's nothing schmaltzier in the world than this song, and it's kind of awesome that it sat there all day underneath a bouquet of flowers.

3 - Carmen Cavallaro, "Dancing in the Dark / Lover," Decca. A two-fer of piano (with a touch of guitar, bass and drums) playing some very ornate versions of old Tin Pan Alley tunes. 

Cavallero was something of a rock star in the World War II era, nicknamed the "poet of the piano" and famous for his arpeggios, which dance and ripple on every bar of this disc. Here he is shredding a Cuban number like Eddie Van Halen in a tux. Stick around to 2:25 to see all those women in the front row. If undergarments weren't so gosh darn complicated back then, you'd be seeing ya-yas right about when he bops into the main melody. What a stud.

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: Dude gets chicks with his piano? This is a lesson that shall be passed down to many generations of Magyar.

4 - Shock, "Get Up," 1989, Atlantic. Basically taking Prince and washing it down to the formula so thoroughly that what's left gets classified (seriously) as cool jazz. This is the b-side for the single "Talk About Love," and it can be explained entirely by this contemporary live performance.

Shock is a collaboration between two Portland musicians, vocalist Roger Sauce and jazz guitarist Marlon McClain. If you're wondering what happened to the fellow in all the biking spandex and acid-washed denim, here he is at the 2010 Oregon Music Hall of Fame ceremony, standing behind a Bernie Mac wannabe and playing a motherfucking keytar.

Sauce spent the years in between video A and video B playing keyboard for Kenny G. He also runs a music production company that creates live cover band entertainment for adults, sort of like amusement park shows taken into bars. Sounds lame, until you realize (Austin) that he produces The Spazmatics. 

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: Veronica and I once had a tremendous night partying with several of our friends (who all attended the wedding) at Cedar Street Courtyard while the Spazmatics were playing. In a way, this man's cheesy enthusiasm already had its day in the sun in our relationship. Now it's had another, albeit underneath a Ball jar.

5 - The Modernaires, "A Salute to Glenn Miller, Part II," Coral (Decca). Every bit as old person as it sounds, with white-tastic covers of "String of Pearls," "Serenade in Blue," "Perfidia," and, most atrociously, Etta James' "At Last."

The Modernaires are still kicking. You can catch them next March at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, if you don't have other plans lined up. The group traces it roots right back to Glenn Miller himself, and their biography page lists a typical long-winded story of comings and goings, starting with the Great Depression and ending with a somewhat depressing set of obituaries. To cheer you up, here's the original gang enjoying a Jukebox Saturday Night.

The record doesn't list a stamping date, but I'm guessing it's somewhere in the powder-blue-suit age of the 1970s, when enough Millerheads still purchased new music to tap toes to at home, as evidenced by the PBS reign of Lawrence Welk. 

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: For starters, it reminds me of my grandma, a wizened old flapper who watched this stuff on TV while downing straight vodka and jonesing for cigarettes. Also, when V and I were trying to find a way to have a "first dance" (an idea we thankfully scrapped), we were going to maybe do it to "At Last."

6 - Spinners, "Wake Up Susan," 1976, Atlantic. Before there were Boy Bands, there were Man Bands, and nobody produced them like Detroit. The Spinners are a forgotten B-class act from the era that produced everyone from the Temptations to, ultimately, the Jackson 5 (the first Boy Band). 

Why I'm Glad This Song Crashed My Wedding: Because, if we could have afforded any wedding band in the world, this is the exact one I would have cut a check for...