The Rivingtons – Pop Your Corn Pts 1&2
Too much popcorn…
Listen/Download – The Rivingtons – Pop Your Corn Pt1
Listen/Download – The Rivingtons – Pop Your Corn Pt2
Greetings all.
I’m going to try to make this short and sweet (like I always say, and almost never do…)
I’m trying to get this week finished up and next week’s stuff all prepped and swinging, since the Funky16Corners fam is going to try to slip some vacay into the shed-jool and my days of dragging my laptop with me on the road resulted in a lot of web surfing when I should oughtta be having real fun, so I won’t be doing that.
I am planning on a mix to keep your ears happy while I’m off the grid, so stay tuned for that.
The Funky16Corners Radio Show will be dropping this (and next, and the one after that, and so on) Friday night at 9PM at Viva Radio. It’ll be quite groovy, so strap yourselves in with a cold beverage and the snack food of your choice and let your ears fill up with the best in funk, soul, jazz and rare groove. It will of course be archived and ready for download over the weekend, right-cheer at the old blog.
The tune I bring you today is another one of those cool, late career revivifications wherein an artist best known for their work in an earlier era gets back on the horse and drops something of a more contemporary (at least at the time) nature that allows those of us who follow such things to reconsider their place in the musical landscape.
The group in question is the Rivingtons, and the tune is ‘Pop Your Corn Pts 1&2’.
The Rivingtons, who’s members had been recording in other groups since the very early 50s, released their first and best remembered record, ‘Papa Oom Mow Mow’ in 1962. It was a minor hit, and followed the next year by another one called ‘The Bird Is the Word’, which, when stolen and stitched together by a group of Minnesotans called the Trashmen the year after that, became a much bigger hit by the name of ‘Surfin’ Bird’, after which the members of the Rivingtons hired a lawyer and took the Trashmen to court, where they successfully sued for redress of griveances.
That said, though the Rivingtons recorded fairly steadily through the 60s for labels like Liberty, Reprise, Vee Jay and Columbia, they weren’t meeting with much success.
The record I bring you today was the last thing they recorded in the 1960s, and sees them glomming onto the Popcorn wave on 1969.
There are countless dance crazes through the 60s that inspired a lot of records (i.e. the Popeye, the Twist etc) but few of them took off like the Popcorn. Not only were there a grip of Popcorn 45s in 1969, but for a while James Brown turned the dance into something of a cottage industry (see Funky16Corners Radio v.14 Butter Your Popcorn).
The Rivingtons of ‘Papa Oom Mow Mow’ are not entirely absent on ‘Pop Your Corn’ (dig the bass vocals) but the buttery flavor is much funkier than they were known for, with some tight, snappy, break-y drums, a guitar riff lifted directly from the JB ‘Popcorn’ and some wailing soul vocals.
Make sure you listen to both parts of this one, since the drums get a little bit heavier in Pt2.
It’s cool one and I hope you dig it.
See you on Monday.
Peace
Larry
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Themocracy
Big fan of The Rivingtons…think they were mainly on the Liberty label..this is new to me. All of a sudden the Belgian designation of the Popcorn genre comes a little more into focus. Cool.
James
Belgian popcorn has nothing to do with the late 60s “popcorn” dance. I’m not an expert but the Belgian scene is based in a slightly slower-tempo pop/r&b/soul dance scene. There’s a short film out there (https://www.laid-back.be/blog/?p=4234)that goes over how the scene came about.
L
I thought it was cool that another Minnesota band, the Rave-Ons did a cover of the Rivingtons’ “Love Pill.”