The Primitives - The Ostrich / Sneaky Pete [7" Single]

The Primitives - The Ostrich / Sneaky Pete (7" vinyl single)

Genre - Rock and Roll, Experimental, Parody

Released - 1964

Length - 4:44

Publisher - Pickwick City Records

Tracklist

Side A: The Ostrich

Side B: Sneaky Pete

Before Lou Reed formed the legendary Velvet Underground, he worked as a staff songwriter for Pickwick City Records. This was essentially a hit factory, one of many in the early 60's. They were quite common and many famous songwriters started out at these businesses writing hits (and misses) for other singers. If anyone remember the film Grace Of My Heart, they'll know what I'm talking about. Not the best film, but it is loosely based on Carole King's early songwriting career at a songwriting firm. It was at Pickwick that Reed honed his songwriting skills and gained experience in the recording studio. Many Velvets songs were written by Reed at this time, and while songs about Heroin and NYC street life were probably not Pickwick executives' idea of marketable hits, they took notice of another song he wrote, a catchy dance number called "The Ostrich".

At first glance, it sounds like a typical flavor of the week dance tune from 1964, but the song is actually kind of subversive and revolutionary. The lyrics parody other dance tunes of the era (at one point Reed sings, "put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it"). Really worth noting is the guitar. Reed tuned every string to the note D for a droning effect (this technique would resurface on The Velvet Underground & Nico, credited as "ostrich guitar" in that album's liner notes). This impressed one of the studio musicians playing on the record, John Cale. Cale was also experimenting with drone as a member of LaMonte Young's avant garde group The Dream Syndicate (not to be confused with the 80's band). The single quickly faded into obscurity but it is notable as the first recording featuring Cale and Reed performing together, and was therefore the seed of a collaborative partnership that would produce some of the most revolutionary and original music of the late 60's.

8 out of 10

To the best my knowledge, "The Ostrich" and it's b-side "Sneaky Pete" have never been re-released, so I'm sharing it here. It's only 128 kbps mp3, so sorry about the low quality.

get it

Future Reference For Album and Music Scoring/Rating/Grading

I'm just going to make a quick post here.  Personally, I like to use a 1-10 scale with decimals to the tenth for scoring and average out the numbers.  So far I'm not sure how Lye wants to grade his.  So upon thinking about this, I thought it might be a good idea to have tags on the posts for the ratings to make good musics easier to find for the readers (assuming we'll get more over time).  Point of this post is to put scoring tags on this post so we can get them lined up in the labels.... just so we can start with some kind of coherent rating system...  Lye if you want to score by a different system, then go ahead and edit this post with them in it (I'm not sure how much more can fit on this post though.  Tagging is 200 characters per post.  If they don't fit, feel free to make a part two post).  I'm going use number's to keep them at the top of the tag list.  I wanted to use the word album but it ended up being too many letters....  I hope some of this made sense....



Scoring 1 -10. 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's, 8's, 9's, 10's

Scoring 1 - 5 "Stars" (doesn't have to say 'star' inside the posts, just whatever. Includes 1/2 'stars' into first number). 1 Star, 2 Stars, 3 Stars, 4 Stars, 5 Stars



note - That didn't quite line up how I though but at least they're at the top of the list I guess....

edit/update: Since Misu and myself both seem to prefer the 1-10 scale, I think I will do away with the star system, mainly because it will make our labels index look a bit less muddled and easier to navigate. Aden, if you absolutely hate the 1-10 system and want to do something else, then I'm sure we can work with that.