My Mad Music Corner: russian bootlegs

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The discography of Baltimora, in the form of Russian bootleg CDs

Not familiar with the song Tarzan Boy? Where the hell have you been? Really though, Tarzan Boy was a great Italo-disco song that made a surprising amount of impact on American pop charts; not enough to Milli Vanilli levels, which could have potentially exposed that Jimmy McShane was not the main vocalist on that song (although actually being able to speak English certainly would've helped to cover it up), but enough to stay in the hearts and minds of people in the mid-80s. It even showed up in that one really bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie where the Turtles went to Japan, and Seth MacFarlane loved it enough to reference it in A Million Ways To Die In The West.

Tarzan Boy was the most famous song by Italo-disco project Baltimora, which was spearheaded by producer Maurizio Bassi with Irish singer Jimmy McShane playing visual performance, as well as background vocals and occasionally songwriting. The surprise success of Tarzan Boy pushed sales of their album Living In The Background to push Bassi to doing a rare feat for Italo-disco: a second album. The resulting album, Survivor In Love, failed to approximate Tarzan Boy's success, but I can't fault Bassi for trying. (Jimmy's actual singing voice shows up to solo on the title track to this album for a couple seconds, if you're curious.)

While Living In The Background was given an official CD release by EMI in Italy, Survivor In Love wasn't given one, as far as I can tell. "What are these CDs then", you may ask? Russian bootlegs, of course! These albums were released through ESonCD, which is an amazing unofficial distributor of Italo-disco albums onto CD; the albums of Max-Him, Wish Key and Video Kids were also re-released through ESonCD, for example.

Although I can't tell if they are actually 24-bit mastered from vinyl copies, Living In The Background seems to be sourced from the EMI CD, since the bonus tracks match up, and Survivor In Love sounds nice, with no noticeable audio dropouts or glitches. It provides a cheap way to obtain these albums digitally, and I will strongly recommend them to anyone interested in Baltimora or Italo-disco in general. The only complaint I have is that my copy of Living In The Background seems to have heavily stripped down liner notes from prior issues of this album: whereas earlier copies had full lyric booklets, my copy only has the first two pages, presumably an unfortunately cheap way to save on production costs.

The tracklisting for Living In The Background is as follows:

1. Tarzan Boy (6:12 extended version, not the 3:50 single version)

2. Pull The Wires

3. Living In The Background

4. Woody Boogie

5. Chinese Restaurant

6. Running For Your Love

7. Tarzan Boy (Summer Version)

8. The Jukebox Boy

9. Up With Baltimora

10. Tarzan Boy (Remix 1993)

11. Jungle Life (Dub)

12. Tarzan Boy (Extended Remix 1993)

The tracklisting for Survivor In Love is as follows:

1. Key Key Karimba

2. Global Love (feat. Linda Wesley)

3. Jimmy's Guitar

4. Come On Strike

5. Set Me Free

6. Survivor In Love

7. Call Me In The Heart Of The Night

8. Eye To Eye

9. Global Love (Mix Version)

NOTE: As a CD-collecting alternative, you can buy a compilation from EMI called The World Of Baltimora, which looks complete at first glance, but the tracks are rearranged out of order, it only has the 3:50 single version of Tarzan Boy, and it's missing Eye To Eye from Survivor In Love, as well as the bonus tracks on Living past Jukebox Boy. If you don't think you'll miss those, go for it, I guess.

Monday, September 15, 2014

P4F - Hustle & Bustle: The Bootleg CD Edition

Of course Al Festa isn't the only Italo-disco producer I'm a fan of, but him directing this Italo-disco group's video for Winner led me to discovering them. The group in question is P4F, also known as Propaganda For Frankie according to the cover of their first single, which is a medley/cover of both Propaganda's song P: Machinery and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's song Relax. (I imagine litigation forced them to shorten that clever name.)

This project was spearheaded by Italo-disco producer Claudio Cecchetto, and most of the tracks on it are covers of pre-existing, obscure Italo-disco songs, when they aren't taking bits from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Duran Duran or Chic. Cecchetto himself wrote some of these songs, such as the cover of Via Verdi's Diamond (while mostly stripped down of some of the original's bells and whistles, it keeps the female background vocals directly from the original), while he had seemingly nothing to do with the Roncuccy & Crazy song Winner, which is also covered here.

While it's certainly not uncommon for European pop or dance producers to reuse their compositions for newer projects (Al did this a few times, German producer Frank Farian reused a Boney M. song for Milli Vanilli, and Italian-French producer Romano Musumarra has done it several times with songs he originally did in the late 80s), it's odd to see a project predominantly based around this practice.

This album, like 99% of Italo-disco records, was issued mainly on vinyl throughout Europe, the sole exception being an official French CD through Polygram which is apparently expensive as hell. This CD of that album is not that version; rather, it is an apparent bootleg of the German vinyl through ZYX Records, which oddly credits the release through their heavy metal sublabel ZYX Metallic. The origin of the bootleg is completely unknown to me, but Discogs credits it as Russian, which makes sense to me. While these bootleggers were nice enough to add an additional B-side as a bonus track to this CD release, the track White Storm (In The Jungle) was removed, and Diamond has a noticeable audio dropout from a glitch in ripping the vinyl.

I have to give this bootleg some credit, though... it has more songs than the French CD has (the French CD also drops White Storm), and it's actually pressed onto an actual CD. I have to give points for that. However, I have to take points off for the faulty ripping of Diamond. The album itself is pretty good for late 80s Italo-disco, so if you're into stuff from that era, this is a good collection of it.