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Steve Martin Caro, RIP


Teasing the Korean

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RIP. One of the members of The Left Banke, who wrote Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee was the son of the famous studio violinist Gene Orloff. 

Orloff helped them with string arrangements, and even had his own studio where they recorded. Orloff even recorded some jazz violin albums of his own. 

They had some internal struggle in the band, and kicked out Orloff's son, who had changed his name to Brown.

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2 hours ago, sgcim said:

RIP. One of the members of The Left Banke, who wrote Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee was the son of the famous studio violinist Gene Orloff. 

Orloff helped them with string arrangements, and even had his own studio where they recorded. Orloff even recorded some jazz violin albums of his own. 

They had some internal struggle in the band, and kicked out Orloff's son, who had changed his name to Brown.

Orloff senior (The Sinister Dr. Orloff)  told his son Michael Brown that he could take home all of the money rather than having to split it five ways with those four losers.  This led to the breakup.  

The remaining four recorded a second album that is remarkably good, considering that their main songwriter was booted.  

Caro used to frequent a bar I went to.  We were always told not to approach him, as he would deny who he was and would then abruptly cut off the conversation.  He was bitter about the whole thing.

Considering that they had only two hits and recorded only two albums, their influence is huge.  "Shadows Breaking," which I posted above, is like proto-Raspberries.

What a voice.  RIP. 

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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3 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Orloff senior (The Sinister Dr. Orloff)  told his son Michael Brown that he could take home all of the money rather than having to split it five ways with those four losers.  This led to the breakup.  

The remaining four recorded a second album that is remarkably good, considering that their main songwriter was booted.  

Caro used to frequent a bar I went to.  We were always told not to approach him, as he would deny who he was and would then abruptly cut off the conversation.  He was bitter about the whole thing.

Considering that they had only two hits and recorded only two albums, their influence is huge.  "Shadows Breaking," which I posted above, is like proto-Raspberries.

What a voice.  RIP. 

Yeah, Gene Orloff (nice Jess Franco reference!) was a real operator. He acted as their producer, so he could get those poor four kids to sign anything.

Cool story about Caro!

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54 minutes ago, sgcim said:

Yeah, Gene Orloff (nice Jess Franco reference!) was a real operator. He acted as their producer, so he could get those poor four kids to sign anything.

Cool story about Caro!

We may be the only two here who pick up on these obscure film references!  It's nice to know a jazz guy who loves Bernard Herrmann as much as you do!  

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I just got a huge book written by Stephen Thrower, a rock musician (Coil) out from the library on Franco's films. Since JF made close to 200 films(!) it's in two huge volumes of about 500 pages each. The maniac spent ten years watching JF's films, and he analyzes each film according to their music, connections to other films, etc...

Franco was a jazz fanatic, and always used jazz in his films, even if he could only afford film library music on some of his cheapo films. However, on films where he had a decent budget, he used various Spanish jazz composers, and would sometimes feature himself playing jazz piano solos in one of his infamous nightclub scenes.

His main composer was Daniel White, who was able to write in any idiom, and according to the author, has some interesting stuff available on you tube.

Thrower has written another huge, two volume work on US exploitation films of the 1970s called American Nightmares. Since he is a musician, and goes deeply into the music of all the films he analyzes, who knows what he came up with in that exhaustive study. He convinced Clive Barker to let his band Coil score the music for Hellraiser, but it turned out to be a disaster, and they had to hire a film composer to do the score.

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2 hours ago, sgcim said:

I just got a huge book written by Stephen Thrower, a rock musician (Coil) out from the library on Franco's films. Since JF made close to 200 films(!) it's in two huge volumes of about 500 pages each. The maniac spent ten years watching JF's films, and he analyzes each film according to their music, connections to other films, etc...

Franco was a jazz fanatic, and always used jazz in his films, even if he could only afford film library music on some of his cheapo films. However, on films where he had a decent budget, he used various Spanish jazz composers, and would sometimes feature himself playing jazz piano solos in one of his infamous nightclub scenes.

His main composer was Daniel White, who was able to write in any idiom, and according to the author, has some interesting stuff available on you tube.

Thrower has written another huge, two volume work on US exploitation films of the 1970s called American Nightmares. Since he is a musician, and goes deeply into the music of all the films he analyzes, who knows what he came up with in that exhaustive study. He convinced Clive Barker to let his band Coil score the music for Hellraiser, but it turned out to be a disaster, and they had to hire a film composer to do the score.

In the 1990s, did you pick up the Crippled Dick/Hot Wax releases of Franco soundtrack collections Jerry Van Rooyen at 200 MPH by JVR and Vampyros Lesbos by Hubler & Schwab?  Absolutely top-shelf collections.  

 

 

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20 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

In the 1990s, did you pick up the Crippled Dick/Hot Wax releases of Franco soundtrack collections Jerry Van Rooyen at 200 MPH by JVR and Vampyros Lesbos by Hubler & Schwab?  Absolutely top-shelf collections.  

 

 

No, but VL is all over you tube.

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