Song Of the Day, March 18, 2005
The Cedars - For Your Information
Decca (Turkey) 45, 1967
Decca (Turkey) 45, 1967
The first time I heard this song, on WMBR's great '60s-obscurities show Lost and Found (weekdays 12-2 p.m. Eastern at www.wmbr.org, archives available online), I assumed that the Cedars were a British freakbeat band playing with the same kind of belly-dance rhythms as, say, the Hollies' "Stop Stop Stop," to which this song bears a passing resemblance. Discovering the song on volume three of the excellent freakbeat/UK psych anthology A Perfumed Garden (Past and Present Records 2002) confirmed that for me, but in doing further research just now for this write-up, I was surprised to learn that the Cedars came by their Middle Eastern rhythms naturally: the group was actually from Lebanon. (Cedars of Lebanon, geddit?) This is what I gleaned from a few minutes' Googling (corrections and amplifications welcome): thanks to the success of their self-financed 1966 single "Thanks A Lot," the Cedars were signed to Decca and traveled to London to record a few follow-ups. None of these singles ever troubled the UK charts and they broke up in 1968, but the Cedars were huge in Turkey, where apparently "For Your Information" is the local equivalent of "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone," the Ur-text of Turkish garage rock and a song that nearly everyone has covered at some point. Who knew? Incidentally, I also learned that that slightly distorted twangy sound's not an overmiked sitar, as I had originally assumed, but an electrified saz.
7 Comments:
Holy shit this is a cool song! I'm so happy littlehits exists..
I love this blog! I have a request though for a band you mentioned sometime last year. I've been trying to track down the Libertines, "Everybody Wants To Be My Sister". I heard the song years ago, but the albums are near impossible to find.
Yeah, those Perfumed Garden comps are a blast. There's another, even better, Cedars track ("Hide If You Want to Hide") on the second volume of the similar (and similarly great) We Can Fly series.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss doing college radio.
oh yeah. This song was also on the Exploiting the Plastic Inevitable bootleg the folks who did the Pre-Kraut Pandemonium records did. Also turned me onto Mogollar.
Great song...and I'll play it on MY humble little college radio show, if ya don't mind...
Thanks for the post!
There were literally thousands of such crazy songs in Turkey in the '60s (some very badly recorded and some astonishingly of high quality -that I've been discovering in the last few monthsnow that I've started to take an interest in this material. Although I lived in Turkey in Turkey most of the '60s, I was never intereste in the what is now called crossover stuff; it was considered very naff at the time, especially the Cedars. They were thought of as being the cheesiest of them all -some of the worst bands and solo singers covered them -and they were the favourites of the followers of the lowest taste listeners.)
Zeki.great song.always listening and back to my memories.thank yuo Cedars.ı love you
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