You Can’t Stump Unorganized Hancock. They Will Survive

My Interfriend Daphne liked Unorganized Hancock’s last effort, They Suffered For Their Music, Now It’s Your Turn. She made a little list:

At last Saturday’s dinner party, we played your sons great collection of work and asked for suggestions of music that would best suit
Unorganized Hancock. Anything by Emerson Lake and Palmer ranked number one, mostly for the similar range of voice. Cake’s version of I Will Survive was a big winner. Elbow’s Grounds For Divorce And my personal favorite, Chris Rea’s Texas.

I’m as game as the next blogger, but I’m not carrying a Hammond organ and a Leslie cabinet up the stairs into that attic. I don’t want to give Mrs. Cottage any ideas with any songs about divorce, either; it’s bad enough I wake in the middle of the night with a pillow on my face from time to time. And I thought Chris Rea was dead. That’s OK, he probably thinks I’m dead, too. But Cake? Cake. And Dave, who’s no stranger to daring the boys to play things, seconded Cake. Two people makes a double dog dare, I do believe. Perhaps the Cake is not a lie, after all.

Of course if you’re of a certain age, this is, and will forever be a Gloria Gaynor song. I lived through disco as a very young man, and I survived it, and Jimmy Carter too. Unlike disco, Jimmy Carter most decidedly did not have a beat, and you couldn’t dance to him, although you could use your rusting Whip Inflation Now button and the shovel you were handed five minutes after graduating high school as a kind of percussion apparatus. I wish I’d kept all the sweaters Jimmah told me to wear back in the day instead of turning the thermostat up above fifty. There’s still no British Thermal Units hanging around where I can lay my hands on them, and they keep installing windmills all over Maine instead of solar panels on the White House roof, and they make it kind of drafty in addition to being colder than Sandy Duncan’s glass eye when she leaves it on the nightstand overnight. Don’t ask me how I know that. I don’t judge you.

The kids don’t know Gloria Gaynor from Gloria Swanson, but they were game to try Cake. They learned it, played it, recorded it, and mixed it entirely by themselves. If you want to show some support for their efforts, there’s a PayPal donate button in the right-hand column. Look at how much progress they’ve made since their first, dark, tinny video in the attic. I never spent money that paid visible dividends like that back when disco was regnant. I just bought Sloe Gin Fizzes for girls in discos, hoping to spend the money before it became worthless the next day.

Suggestions for further Stump the Band songs are welcome in the comments, of course. But I’m not going to tell you again — no Hammond organs!

[Update: Many thanks, Cynthia, for your generosity and friendship]
[Further-Update: Dave is very generous! Kathleen, too! And Leslie is a peach!  Many thanks to all]
[Upper Deck Update: Thanks, Nigel from Merry Old!]