We've blogged song poems before, but here's a new article about them in the LA Weekly.
Naive would-be poets sent in their lyrics — and a fee (nowadays around $100 to $400), expecting entree to the music business, maybe even a hit song. What they got, instead, was a cheap-ass recording of their words set to music — usually recorded in four or five minutes. One take.
If they were very lucky, Rodd Keith, who worked for several song-poem companies in the '60s and '70s, had composed the accompanying melody and arrangement. In his hands, leaden, awkward poetry sometimes achieved a kind of transcendence; he could actually extract the original intent of the writer, it seemed — or else make something far more interesting, at risk of offending the customer. On "I'm Just the Other Woman," Keith sang in a woman's falsetto over a piano recording played backward. The lyricist demanded a new version.
