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Illuminate vintage reviews11/8/2023 Sylvester’s Private Recordings, August 1970 is only essential for superfans, but there are gorgeous moments that illuminate how he would become a chart-topping star. Like Stevie Nicks warming up with “Wild Heart” while getting her makeup done, this rehearsal tape feels like listening in on a casual hangout, free from the pressures of onstage performance. We don’t hear the final version he and Mintun may have finished together, but it’s a happy conclusion to their lonely laments. The tape ends with a brief attempt at “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” as Sylvester works out the melody in real time. “Indian Love Call”-familiar thanks to the appearance of Slim Whitman’s yodeling rendition in Mars Attacks! and Asteroid City-becomes a full-throated duet before the singers collapse into giggles. The session’s most lively song is the dance tune “Carioca” (“It’s not a foxtrot or a polka”), as the duo messes around, pausing to allow fellow Cockette John Rothermel to join on maracas. On their incomplete reading of “Viper’s Drag,” a ragtime number adapted by Fats Waller from the original version by Cab Calloway, Sylvester’s wordless scats can’t keep pace with Mintun’s fingers flying across the keys. Yet in the snippets of conversation between him and Mintun, they sound like two friends at ease.Īs the afternoon goes on, both the song selections and performances become more playful. The narrator of “Stormy Weather,” written by The Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen, laments the rain “since my man and I ain’t together.” Even the clear skies of “Happy Days Are Here Again” have a trace of melancholy as Syvester stretches notes out over twinkling keys. George and Ira Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” turns London’s pea-soup air pollution into a metaphor for loneliness. If there’s a throughline to be found in their chosen cuts, it’s the theme of love and loss as represented by changes to the environment. Their recordings weren’t intended for public consumption, just used to learn songs they would perform in the Cockettes’ midnight shows. One summer afternoon in 1970, Sylvester and Mintun sat down with a collection of sheet music, setting up a fancy microphone and a tape recorder next to an upright piano. With his pencil-thin mustache and the keys to his father’s 1936 Ford Coupe, Mintun drove Sylvester around San Francisco, snapping the time-warping photos that accompany this album. He met an ally in Cockettes piano player Peter Mintun, who shared Sylvester’s love of vintage fashion and popular songs from the Prohibition Era. According to his biographer, sociology professor Joshua Gamson, Sylvester wasn’t a perfect fit for the LSD-laced hippies he joined in the early 1970s: “He usually stood a few feet back, among the Cockettes but never quite one of them.” While they dropped acid and painted their faces in psychedelic colors, Sylvester sipped champagne and wore pretty dresses like Josephine Baker.
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