Look who’s talking
The Many Heads of Dickie Goodman Rori Records (1962) Dickie Goodman wrote and recorded novelty songs and parodies beginning with the 1956 top ten hit “The Flying Saucer” His career-long shtick was to act as a “reporter,” while the responses from the “people” he was interviewing would be soundbites from popular records of the day. As the original sampling gangster, he had 17 different labels sue him for using samples on “The Flying Saucer” without permission. But the judge in the case ultimately sided with Goodman, stating that “he had created a new work” and didn’t simply copy another’s work. In the early seventies he put out singles like “Convention ’72” “Superfly Meets Shaft” and “Watergate” and in 1975, he released probably his best-known song, “Mr. Jaws,” a spoof of the movie “Jaws” which peaked on the U.S. pop charts at #4 and sold over 500,000 copies. He died in Fayetteville, NC, on November 6, 1989 (from an apparent suicide).
(20 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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April 12th, 2009 at 7:45 am
I bought Mr. Jaws in ’75 (or my parents bought it for me….) 3 times! They kept breaking for some reason! Then, years later, I have a Canadian pressing that is on vinyl, and it’s fine, and recently I found a U.S. pressing on polystyrene, like I had as a kid, got it home and it cracked. Seriously!
I now have Energy Crisis ’74 and Mr. President (1983) in my collection as well. His records are so much fun, but rather hard to find. Kind of a sad story. Apparently he would never even BUY the discs he sampled from…he recorded bits from the radio and used them!
Can anyone confirm this?
eric
April 14th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I have many of the 45’s and have the Mr. Jaws LP which compiles Goodman’s stuff back to the 50’s. On the LP some of the cut-ins are obviously re-recorded versions, as if he had clearance problems in getting the originals. Again, anyone know the story?
April 14th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
clearance problems check out on son’s website, but radio recording still a rumor.
anyone else?
April 14th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Sorry…clearance problems confirmed on WikiPedia.
September 28th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Goodman – a good man who’d kept on laughing for as long as everbody else out there imagined.