Pop Records

Not content to have captured the bulk of the pop record market with their singing, the industry's goslings have lately turned to the menacing practice of writing and warbling their own tunes. Paul Anka, 17, a Canadian boy with a voice like a grouse's cry and a compositional style to match, wrote and recorded (for ABC-Paramount) an amatory yawp of pain entitled So It's Goodbye, saw it become a favorite of the jukebox set. A carrot-haired New Jersey girl named Beverly Ross, 22, deserted the chicken farm where she grew up, traveled to Manhattan, made a hit record with her own song called Lollipop. Later, she moved Columbia's Mitch Miller to frenzies of promotional enthusiasm with two more of her darkling juvenile fancies--Headlights and Stop Laughing at Me ("I will always have that memor-ee"). Most promising of the fledgling singer-composers is a 19-year-old Juilliard piano student named Neil Sedaka, who scored a hit with his recording (for RCA Victor) of a loosely rocking ditty called The Diary ("When it's late at night/ What is the name you write/ In your dia-ree").

Once chosen by a jury including Pianist Artur Rubinstein to play on a radio teenage talent program (Prokofiev. Debussy), Brooklyn-born Neil Sedaka explains his turn from serious music in a flack-flavored burst of prose: "The kids who used to throw rocks at me now roll with me." Sedaka's lyrics, like those of his contemporaries, have the air of frenzied discontent that hooks the teen trade. "Today," says one record executive, "you gotta have Weltschmerz with the beat."

Other recent pop records:

This One Is the Toni (Toni Carroll; M-G-M LP). Songstress Carroll, billed as a onetime Miss Missouri, belongs to the whisper-from-the-navel school. Her incendiary reading of such ballads as I'm in the Mood for Love and I Only Have Eyes for You will bump the pulse, the album guarantees, "of any red-blooded American man." Toni's signature song (Call Toni) sets the pitch: "I'm all yours and ready to do/ Anything you want me to/ Just dial TONI oh-five-six-eight-three."

Other Worlds Other Sounds (Esquivel and His Orchestra; RCA Victor LP; Stereo). Mexico's mood master transmutes a gaggle of standards--Begin the Beguine, Night and Day, It Had to Be You--into something new and cunningly deranged with the aid of bongos and a conga drum and a chili-flavored beguine tempo. Stunningly opulent sound.

Fancy Meeting You Here (Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney; RCA Victor LP; Stereo). An infectious musical dialogue between two of the sassiest fancy talkers in the business. C. & C. give slick and witty readings to a selection of retreads --On a Slow Boat to China, You Came a Long Way from St. Louis--and introduce a punchy, potential hit named Calcutta. One of the most intriguing vocal entertainments since Noel Coward had his famous chat with Mary Martin.

L'Air de Paris (Jacqueline Francois; Columbia LP). Unlike her world-weary compatriot, Juliette Greco, Chanteuse Francois breathes her Paris airs with the garlicky gusto of a clothesmonger in the Flea Market. Her best number, Java Mondaine, is a Gallic shrug at a titled ancestor "who put his head on a well-sharpened guillotine."

The Tinkling Piano in the Next Apartment (Herm Saunders; Warner Bros. LP). "Caution!" says the record jacket. "Play softly, it's cool inside." The menace is not the heat--or lack of it--but the humidity; in a mystifying effort, the record makers have dubbed in sounds of cheetering sea gulls and the tumbling waves of "a mythical Malibu." The Sea-Around-Us effect is unfortunate only because what comes filtering through the combers--in These Foolish Things and I'll Remember April--seems to be a fine and lacily fanciful cocktail piano.

The Girl on Page 44 (The Four Lads; Columbia). An upbeat quartet is driven by the mail-order economy into a fine state of mail-order passion. "I'd like to get," carol the boys with a slogging beat, "a girl from Sears and Roebuck/ Like the one that I saw ... on Page 44."

I Got Stung (Elvis Presley; RCA Victor). Pfc. Presley may be out of sight, but he is never out of whine. His latest message to the folks on the home front: "Ah got stung by a sweet honeybee . . . " If Ah live to be a hunnerd 'n' two,/ Ah won't let nobody sting me but you."

The Chipmunk Song (The Chipmunks; Liberty). No escape from this one. Songwriter Ross (Witch Doctor) Bagdasarian's clamorous fable about a trio of quarreling, caroling chipmunks sold more records (an estimated 3,500,000) in a shorter time (five weeks) than any other disk in the past year and probably in recording history. The "chipmunks" are actually Bagdasarian's own voice recorded at varying speeds. Having screeched their way through Christmas at the top of the pop charts, the little beasts seem destined to meet the Easter bunny.

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