harper's bizarre

I have three albums by Harper's Bizarre. Two of them are ex-radio station from the same record fair where I purchased many ex-3DB (I think?) albums includinng The Springfields and The Equals. These two are scratched to hell. The one I taped last night to listen to in the car was one I had never really spent much time with, The Secret Life of Harper's Bizarre. Now, of course I have a reputation for taking kindly to obscure and ridiculous farcical records from days gone by, but I do quite like Harper's Bizarre. They were a vocal quartet from the mid-60s who didn't do much songwriting of their own but instead created a fairly bizarre melange of old standards ('Sentimental Journey', barbershop) and good stuff from up-n-comers like Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks. Not particularly because of the VDP connection, I think, but probably definitely because of their west-coast-USA-ness, they come across quite Beach Boys-y in some ways; they also sound pretty Simon and Garfunkelish (one of their big hits was a version of the song best known as 'Feelin' Groovy'). To my ears the best stuff is the Newman and Parks material, particularly as these two pretty much get into the swing of it all writing pretty timeless (by which I mean, self-consciously timeless - ahistorical, in a sense) material. TSLOHB is, to my mind, a more subversive record, filled as it is with song fragments and gunshots, though the gunshots appear to be more about the American Civil War than about the American Vietnam War (or are they?).

Last night I started afresh on my De Garis documentary script. Miranda tells me that a page of script equals a page of screentime. So far I have three pages but they're pretty decent pages. Since I have no more lectures to write this week (although I do have three next week!) I am going to do a little more this morning as I wait here for students. It's going to be grouse.