Johnson's Floral, a small family business in Morton under the shadow of the mass...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:31:26 GMT

Source: www.facebook.com --- Saturday, May 11, 2013
Johnson's Floral, a small family business in Morton under the Shadow of the massive Cat factory across the street, has thrived for 62 years and recently benefited from a grant to help with some renovations. Grant helps family remodel longtime Morton business Johnson's Floral www.pjstar.com It's all about family at the village's oldest retail business, which has been at the same location for 62 years.This is what our family does, said Paul Grethey Jr., 40, who took over ownership of Johnson's Floral at 313 N. Morton Ave., across the street from Caterpillar Inc.'s sprawling Morton fac... ...

Shadow Morton & The Shangri-Las

Fri, 03 May 2013 07:55:56 GMT

Source: mellotone70up.wordpress.com --- Friday, May 03, 2013
Coming upon an obituary of George ‘Shadow’ Morton, who died back in February at the age of 72, inevitably sent me scurrying to the CD racks to find my collection of The Shangri-Las Greatest Hits . Although, as a producer he worked with artists as various as Janis Ian, Vanilla Fudge and the New York Dolls, I suspect it’s for his work with The Shangri-Las that he will remain best known. Introduced to them by songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, Morton was responsible for producing and, in some instances, writing or co-writing the group’s best and best-known songs, all recorded for the small Red Bird label between 1964 and 66. The best known of these, undoubtedly, are “Leader of the Pack” and “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”, followed by, I imagine, “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, each of them miniature stories in song, pungent narratives in which the girls’ keening group sound is broken up by snatches of dialogue and sound effects – revving motor bikes or squawking seagulls. For me, much as I enjoy the tracks mentioned above, by far the strongest and most interesting is “Past, Present and Future” (closely followed by the not dissimilar “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”). “Past, Present and Future” is a glorious melodrama, two minutes, 42 second long, spoken over a backing track that borrows heavily from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” with a swirling burst of Viennese waltz midway through – no singing whatsoever, just the solitary girl’s ...