Serene Dominic presents…Friends of Antarctica!
With the rash of charity records glutting the charts in 1985 from the likes of Band-Aid, Hearing Aid, USA for Africa, Northern Lights and Artists United Against Apartheid, artists not invited to participate on those awareness raising platters were left scrambling for whatever viable charities remained. Intercoursing difficult penguins to keep the population from being endangered wasn’t one of them, but that didn’t stop Friends of Antarctica from assembling.
Among their ranks was Atlanta singer Letter Seventeen who noted of the session, “Everyone was told to check their egos at the door, but we subsequently couldn’t squeeze into the studio so we had to record it somewhere else.”
How much money or awareness was actually raised by FOA remains a mystery as most of the funds were swallowed up by a costly lawsuit from Barbra Streisand’s ‘people.” When the Funny Girl turned down an invitation to sing her trademark “people who need people” over the coda, a Barbra Streisand impersonator from Lake Tahoe was prominently featured in her place, and in the ensuing legal skirmish nearly every unsold copy of the single was confiscated and destroyed. And then destroyed again. Ironically in 2011, with global warming actually threatening the penguin population, no Friends of Antarctica exists when it could’ve been really useful.
credits
from 24 Originals Happening Now!,
released September 14, 2011
Guest vocalists Letter Seventeen, Monopoli, Kid Presentable, World Weary and Wise, Hate Mail, Keith Landry and uglifruit
Drum pattern by Joe Nugent.
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