Saturday, May 09, 2009

NICOLA PAONE - Hold Your Horses & Wait For Me


If you've spent any time in the forum and blog world, you've noticed the "sayings" or "slogans" that sum up a person's philosophy of life. Everybody has words to live by. Sometimes a blog's title is a piece of good advice like:

"Ride your pony."
Or
"Never Get Out of the Boat."

In a forum, you might find, at the end of every single post a person makes, his favorite motto, "Mmmmmm, more chocolate!" Or his favorite witticism: "When things smell fishy, it may not be fish necessarily, but simply an old twat"

Seriously. All the above are real. Just ask an old twat sitting on a pony in a boat covered in chocolate.

And so in that spirit of profundity, here's Nicola Paone's most earnest advice: "Hold Your Horses and Wait For Me."

Perhaps he got this from some Persian King who wanted the perfect phrase to say on any occasion. "All Things Must Pass?" Nah, that sounds like a laxative commercial. Stick with "Hold Your Horses and Wait For Me." The song has no other lyrics, just the pithy motto...and Paone on the piffero. Yes, the piffero, a home-made flute carved out of a sugar cane stalk.

The late great Nicola ran a (high priced) Italian restaurant all through his days of churning out ethnic tunes and novelty singles ("The Telephone Song" and "Blah Blah Blah" among them). In addition to the peculiar piffero, and Mr. Paone's words to live by, there's some scat singing that falls somewhere between Spike Milligan suffering from epilepsy after a spaghetti dinner, and Danny Kaye gone berserk on Cresta Blanca.

Hey Wild Bill, Wait for Me!

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