06 October 2016

My Dear Lou [clarified]

OK, so back in the mid-60s, my musical taste went to what we would likely today call "adult contemporary folk", which was saloon singers doing Pete Seeger style songs; a sort of folk music despised by true believers. My favorite brand was "The Limeliters", a trio of late 30-somethings. Not many of my peers had heard of them, except possibly from myriad commercials, and not knowing who the singers were. Only one of the trio still lives.

A few minutes ago, during the usual horrible Thursday NFL game, I watched the commercial for "Mafia III", and was shocked. After the trio disbanded in 1963, they later had some reunion concerts and recordings in the 70s and 80s. One of their gigs was to record "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven" by Charles Larson as part of a songwriting competition.

Somehow the producers of "Mafia III" found the tape, and sampled out Lou Gottlieb's phrasing of the tagline, "but nobody, aaah nobody wants to die". Gottlieb died in 1996, way too soon.
The idea is to make "Nobody Wants to Die" available for download, though details are still being worked out.

That would be so cool. A 70s reunion of a 60s trio doing a songwriting contest winner (sung by an aging Jew, since, of course, the Jewish religion offers neither heaven nor hell) backing a 2016 video game which thinks the song is from the 60s. Only in America could such a confluence of irony happen.

2 comments:

Robin said...

I also happened to hear this song on a commercial and was shocked right out of my prone position on the sofa. It flashed me back to the early 1970s at a club called The Zodiac on the strip in Virginia Beach. My then husband and I spent most weekends listening to our favorite band there. Chuck Larson was Known as Coyote, and there were various incarnations of his group; Coyote and Robbie, Coyote, Robbie, and Mike, Pearl, and Snuff. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven was one of our favorite originals by Coyote, and we watched him on the American Songwriters Awards when the song was recognized. Wow, what a blast from the past! I still have an old cassette we recorded from the radio when the band performed live on a local station. Lots of great original songs from them on it.

Robert Young said...

well, a bit of truly obscure karma. I wonder the probability that an obscure, mostly techy, blog would have devotees of an obscure 60s folk trio and an obscure 70 folk singer/writer? perhaps the End Times have arrived.