I’ve been away from the blog for a bit. The laptop was in the shop for repairs and I didn’t have the courage to post from my phone. Here’s hoping I can get back to daily posts.

The Coca-Cola Company has a new product, which is funny since it killed off a couple hundred brands during the pandemic. (RIP, Tab.) The new juice is Coca-Cola with Coffee. That’s not the same as the new Coca-Cola energy drink, which is confusing because both come in Red Bull-style tall cans.  I got my hands on both of the Coca-Cola with Coffee Zero Sugar varieties – “Dark Blend” and “Vanilla.” If you go full sugar, there’s also a “Caramel.”

I wish I had some big reveal for you, but it tastes like Coke with coffee in it. It’s not sharp or acidic, more like a coffee hard candy. As you go, the coffee flavor will start to fade until it’s mostly just there on the finish. The “Vanilla” version didn’t taste that “vanilla” to me at all – just less coffee. That’s probably because vanilla is already in colas. Brand recipes vary, but they’re all vanilla, cinnamon, and a citrus.

Continue reading

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while because it’s the perfect example of thinking you know who’s singing that song you’ve heard a million times. “Rock Me Gently” has that flawless Neil Diamond vibe – a voice that both belts and croons, cornball lyrics, a Brill Building level of pop songcraft … but that’s not Neil Diamond. It’s Canadian singer/songwriter Andy Kim.

1974’s “Rock Me Gently” was Kim’s only #1 in the US, but he’s not a one-hit wonder either. Kim had a total of six other songs in the Top 40 between 1968 and 1974. “Baby, I Love You” got to #9 and “Be My Baby” hit #17 – both covers of hits originally by The Ronettes. Kim sings both of those in a higher register than “Rock Me Gently,” although he could have raided Neil Diamond’s closet for this TV appearance.

Continue reading

I don’t remember the name of my fourth-grade music teacher (or maybe it was fifth grade).

I don’t remember any of the songs we sang from the official music book. What I remember is Teacher handing out purple ditto machine pages of current pop songs. Boys and girls together, we’d all sing in unison. Looking back, none of the songs were really appropriate for schoolkids.

“Seasons in the Sun?”  A dying man saying goodbye. “Rhinestone Cowboy?” A failed singer clinging to dreams. “Beth?” A rock star choosing the band over his girlfriend. Even “Sloop John B” is about a drunken fight, food poisoning, and LSD (“the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”) As a kid, I was just happy to be singing songs I knew from the radio. Complicated harmonies are magical, but there’s also something special about a big pack of children’s voices all singing the melody together in a big room with no acoustics.

Continue reading

“Aruba, Jamaica, Ooh, I wanna take ya…”

It’s one of the sloppiest rhymes in pop music and The Beach Boys’ last #1 hit. You might remember “Kokomo” from the Tom Cruise flair bartending movie, “Cocktail,” but did you know the music video was shot in Orlando at Walt Disney World?

It’s 1988 and Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort was built, but not yet open. The white sand beach would be a perfect place to fake a Beach Boys concert and with no one staying there, production could make all the noise they wanted. A friend who was on-set tells me it was rainy all day, so the sunny concert scene turned into a nighttime bonfire party.

Some of the guys and gals dancing along with Mike Love and the Boys were recruited at Downtown Disney (now Disney Springs) and yes, big Disney fan John Stamos is playing various percussion in the back.

Non-Orlando trivia – Credited writers on “Kokomo” include Mike Love, Scott McKenzie (“San Francisco – Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair”), John Phillips (The Mamas & The Papas), and Terry Melcher (the song’s producer who also did The Byrds’ first two albums).

Who doesn’t like free? Sometimes, you write a blog post and you need a pic to draw those eyeballs, something colorful but also cheap. The New York Public Library has more than 600,000 images online at digitalcollections.nypl.org and if you click “Search only public domain materials,” anything you find is yours to download and use however you want for free. (Make sure you click “public domain.”)

The NYPL collection has everything from scans of menus to greeting cards to publicity photos to stereograph slides – which are like an early version of a View-Master disc. It’s two images that blend into a 3D picture in the right device. If you want to try it out on the image below, try crossing your eyes like one of those Magic Eye pictures that hides a sailboat. That might work too.

Continue reading