It's time to put on make-up

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

14/08/77 : The Muppet Show - The Muppets

This nearly got rejected, but it doesn't quite fail any of the obvious benchmarks (it's not strictly a soundtrack album and there are original songs on it) and it certainly has enough cultural significance to be included - I'm expecting a curious fish though...

Well, it's not quite as curious as I was expecting, but if I didn't have any knowledge of The Muppets then this review would simply read "WTF?".  Most of the "tracks" rely on you having some knowledge of the characters involved and I had to drag some of that knowledge from the furthest recesses of my mind - the lack of visuals really didn't help here.  With that knowledge though, I found the whole thing mildly amusing at times (The Muppets were never really my thing so they can take that as a win) but some of it was particularly bizarre - given that one of the tracks is "The Great Gonzo Eats a Rubber Tyre to the Flight of the Bumblebee" that probably doesn't surprise you.  So kudos to Jim Henson and crew for sneaking such lunacy into the commercial mainstream, but that doesn't stop it being lunacy.

This week we're all the way down at #15 in the charts on their eleventh week of a seventeen week run, with it also having further eleven and six week runs over the next year.  And what was the highest it got to?  Why, #1 of course in its third week - it had a seven week run in the top five!  The top five this week were Yes, A Star Is Born, Johnny Mathis and Connie Francis best-ofs and Donna Summer with the highest new entry being Jean Michel Jarre (#18).

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the album at first glance - it won a Grammy and that's pretty much it.  But, if you look at some of the track entries, there's gold in them there hills.  "Mahna Mahna" (or more accurately "Mah Nà Mah Nà") isn't (as I thought) a Muppet Show original but was written by Italian composer Piero Umiliani in 1968 and has appeared in all sorts of things - as well as The Muppets, Benny Hill used it frequently.  Apparently there's also a Giorgio Moroder cover from 1969, but the internet seems to have no copies available to satisfy my curiosity.  "Bein' Green" is the other track of most interest - this is a Muppet Show original but it's been covered by a very strange collection of artists including Frank Sinatra, Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Mandy Patinkin, Tony Bennett and Cee Lo Green.  It was also sung at Jim Henson's memorial service by Carroll Spinney, who's somewhat better known as Big Bird.  Commercially, the album did best over here but also got to #8 in New Zealand.

"Customers also listened to" - unfortunately I'm unable to tell you because this album is heinously not available on Amazon.  Shame on them!  For lots of people, this will be a lovely reminder of their childhood whereas I merely found it bearable and curious - but that would not have been the case if I wasn't previously aware of The Muppets.

07/08/77 - A most peculiar album indeed
21/08/77 - Yes.  Quite.