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Monday, July 04, 2022

From The Record Canister

We used to have a canister which might have originally held potato chips, but which was about 8" across, making it suitable for a stack of 45s and kiddie 78s. At a point in my life at which I had less control, I turned left and they turned right, and I never saw or heard them again, but my mind's ear provides replays of them, nestled in with the ringing.

One of the more peculiar of these kiddie disks was on the flip side of "Tattle-Tale Duck" ("Tattle-tale, tattle-tale, quackity-quack! / He tattles in front and he wiggles in back! / So watch your step, / You're out of luck / If you get caught by the tattle-tale duck!"), with the mild title "Ducks On Parade." 

It doesn't seem to be online. I checked, but you check as well. Sometimes I miss things.

Unlike most of the songs I'd hear in this enigmatic stack of clues to the greater world (such things would come my way, and I'd puzzle over their meaning as I labored to get the words right) this one had no lyrics. It was a pure instrumental, and if I'm any judge, it was made up on the spot. The instrumentation eludes my mental track, but the underall obbligato was a rhythmic quacking sound. Not a real quack, but a quacking sound. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was obviously a toy duck of the sort Lucy Van Pelt might have pulled around in a desultory fashion in a 50s Peanuts strip. And I'm not sticking my neck out very far by boldly asserting that someone had a wheeled duck toy and put it on one of the turntables in the studio and held it while the table turned, producing a quasi-quack-quack track.

And heck, that's really the interesting bit, right there. The melody is a series of tentative beginnings of phrases.

Doo.
Dooby dooby doo.
Dooby dooby doo; dooby dooby doo; dooby dooby doo.

(repeat a note higher; keep fumfering with it, and eventually back out more or less the same way)

It didn't have to be long. A 5" 78 record isn't good for much more than a minute, if that. So I guess either someone was screwing around with the ducky and the producer said "Let's record it," or else they were sitting around desperate for one more side that day, and the guy at the turntable said "How about this?" and put the duck on, and then the piano guy made up this tune, and eleven minutes later, they'd recorded it and mastered it and gone out for drugs.

You'll let me know if you find it, won't you? I haven't heard it in over fifty years. I mean, outside of  my head. Also, if you happen upon it, I'd really like a copy (even just audio) of the ~1970 ad for Clearasil or Noxzema that has the obnoxious "I am an Acne Pimple!" song that haunts my inner ear, where it threatens to overturn my balance.
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