 Various Artists I found this album quite by accident within the cover of a Mario Lanza LP, of course discovering the error only when I had already gotten home. However, instead of becoming all disappointed and surly, I decided to put it on to see what we could see. What I heard was one of the most singularly strange experiences of my young life: an enormously depressing exercise album. The record begins with Ms. Muriel Davis Grossfeld (credited on the label as "Olymic gymnast 1956, 1960, 1964" and "Teen-Age consultant Campbell Soup Company") giving brief instructions as to the exercises which will need to be executed, then the exercises are counted off to unobtrusive piano accompaniment. Grossfeld narrates a series of positions the two girls are to be forming for purposes of exercise, but the unintended sexual tone gets more and more prevalent as it goes on. The obvious humour in the situation was only augmented by the record skipping several times on the word "down" ("Up … down … down … down …") and by the increasingly homoerotic edge of the whole excursion. But through the course of the thirty or so minutes of exercise, the cheap laughs wear off, giving way to a disconcerting feeling that the pianist was suicidally depressed, because the playing becomes more minor-key and slow. Perhaps they were all drinking; even Muriel loses her wind after awhile. The music becomes extravagantly inappropriate for any type of exercise at all, unless taking an overdose of sleeping pills qualifies as exercise. Maybe it should have been retitled Lovemaking Session and Suicide Pact for Teen-Age Lesbians '64, admittedly a bit less catchy but definitely more apropos. (Besides, Lovemaking Session and Suicide Pact for Teen-Age Lesbians '62 hadn't been that big a hit.) This record is utterly transfixing, and I can't stop listening to it. If you can find Club 15, snap it up immediately. You may want to check the Mario Lanza section. Hm … there's got to be a Heavenly Creatures angle in here somewhere …
Review by Patrick Tempus-Fugit |