The Stark Reality – All You Need To Make Music
Part of what is great about doing a “Best So Far” show in the middle of the year is that it forces me to dig even deeper and see what new releases and reissues have come out that I might have missed in the preceding months. One of the ones that I was most excited to discover that had been reissued is this legendary album, lovingly reproduced on a 3-LP set by Now-Again. Ostensibly, The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop is a kids record. The music produced on the album was used for a PBS special featuring Hoagy Carmichael sharing songs and teaching kids about music. This period of time was especially kind of children, with all of those amazing Schoolhouse Rock albums, Sesame Street and the like, but this one stands head and shoulders above the rest, just for it’s overall sonic insanity. Original copies of the album, even after earlier reissues from Stones Throw, regularly fetch prices in the $1,000s. For a lot of crate diggers, this is a real badge of honor to have tracked one down in the wild (I’m pretty sure Matthew Africa had at least two copies of this). Just last year this album landed at the top spot of Soul Strut‘s list of albums voted on by members of the forum (interestingly “Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth” ended up at #2). There are lots of records that are rarer than this album, but few are as enjoyable or as much of an experience to listen to. It’s a novelty record for sure, and you have to be in the right mindset to give it a listen, but when that fuzz and those drums and all of those chants, like “the first seven letters of the alphabet is all you need…to make music…A, B, C, D, E, F, G!” come out of your speakers, there’s just no way possible to keep your head from nodding and a smile from spreading across your face.
As a bonus, especially if, like me, you never saw or heard any of this until some beat miners put it on your radar, here’s a bit of the PBS show, with all of the charms you remember (or have discovered) of 1970s kids programming: