Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys
Posted in Uncategorized by teabog on April 1st, 2007
Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys”
“Spanish Dagger” (From the album Turntable Matinee)
If you go on youtube and search the word “commercial” along with any year from the 80s to the present day you’ll find one or two users who have posted 10-20-minute long strings of ads from that time period. Try it out; old commercials are really entertaining, especially if you’ve got people over who you want to leave and you can get the internet on your TV through your Wii.
I was going through commercials from the early nineties the other day, after having worked my way up through the 80s, and I was amazed at the strange design phases the commercials went through, and especially how uniformly ever major advertiser would change the feel of their ad campaigns from year to year. In 1994, that feel was entirely 50s throwback, urban but still Caucasian, with clean cityscapes and non-threatening jazz music.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boy are in the same vein as the commercials of 1994: non-threatening, Causcasianized 50s throwback (nevermind that Sandy appears to be Hispanic, I’m talking about the feel of the music). The color scheme and mode of dress are the same as they were in 1954, but everything’s been cleaned up and watered down for contemporary consumption.
The strange thing is that this watered-down sound comes across so earnest. It doesn’t feel strangled or antiseptic. You could almost believe this is how guitar rock actually sounded back then, if you didn’t know better.