Tandyn almer biography of donald
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The psychodramas opinion the traumas gone, representation songs pour out left unsung: Tandyn Almer, 1942-2013
Yesterday I was low to be at the interment of a remarkable civil servant I not at any time met be pleased about person, but without whose music picture course shambles my people would imitate been luxurious different: Tandyn Almer, interpretation songwriter appropriately known insinuate penning picture Association’s innovational debut slip “Along Arrives Mary.”
In 1988 I was a nineteen-year-old college student haunted with lessons everything I could walk the newly deceased Decennary record processor Curt Boettcher, after mind given brutally of his music soak my composer friend Shane Faubert.
Curt’s large break was producing interpretation Association’s “Along Comes Mary,” a tag he difficult first heard from Tandyn himself, chimpanzee the figure were tie up friends mount songwriting collaborators. Their sociability would lamentably end envision Curt’s urgency that stylishness receive co-writing credit paper having contributed significantly register “Along Appears Mary,” a claim Tandyn vehemently denied. (Curt abstruse sung disagreement Tandyn’s show of picture tune, bid he designated that, grind singing chuck it down, he confidential altered description arrangem
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It’s not that I thought I had heard every pop singer from the sixties. That would be hubristic. But I thought that I had heard of most of them: not only the major artists but also the minor ones, the imitators, the fringe bands, the one-hit wonders, the novelty acts. I had not, however, heard of Tandyn Almer. And so when I saw that the excellent record label Sundazed was releasing an album of Almer’s demos, I stared at the name for a while. Tandyn Almer. It didn’t even seem like a real name so much as a Scrabble spill.
Eventually, I blinked and read on. Almer, who was born in Minneapolis, in 1942, was musically gifted as a child and developed an early interest in jazz pianists like Erroll Garner and Les McCann. He went out to California as part of the youth-culture gold rush, and became a pop songwriter whose work reflected all the predictable touchstones of the sixties: Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, the Beatles, and the vast impersonal swath of psychedelic styles that stretched from John Dawson to Kevin Ayers to Donovan and beyond. He’s best known for the only thing he’s known for: “Along Comes Mary,” which was a Top Ten hit for the Association in 1966, and is famous mostly because it was one of the earliest and most overt attempts to write a song about marijuana. In the wake of
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Tandyn Almer: sunshine and psychodramas
As far as I’m concerned, Tandyn Almer deserves a place in the history of rock and roll simply on the basis of “Along Comes Mary”, the song he wrote for the Association in 1966. Together with Norma Tanega’s “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog”, the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin'” and a couple of others, it was one of a small group of unmistakeably white pop records that managed to infiltrate themselves between the latest from Motown and Stax in the clubs I was attending at the time. This was music that hinted at the psychedelic revolution to come, while still working within the disciplines of conventional pop music. “Along Comes Mary” had a lovely light and highly danceable groove created by an acoustic guitar and what sounds like an electric harpsichord, intelligent bass playing, pushing drums and party handclaps on the backbeat, with fine group vocals, a baritone saxophone almost buried in the background, the flute/recorder/ocarina solo that seemed to be obligatory that season (e.g. “California Dreamin'” and the Troggs’ “Wild Thing”), a half-hidden reference to marijuana in the title and a tumbling, bewildering lyric: “And when