Until the end of the last year there was some kind of second hand store just around the corner of my house. The shop mostly cared for furniture, books or clothes but offers also some boxes of records. I went in nearly every day and over the 12 months the shop was around i found some amazing stuff, in the likes of The Times “Go With The Times“ to “Demonstration Tapes“ by Dolly Mixture. Beside this i picked up some rare funk and soul lps on regular basis, not to forget about some nice goth records as well.
It should be around may or june the last year when i walked in with my brother to show him some german 70's radio drama vinyl which looked unfamiliar to me. Between those stuff he picked up an LP by an guy called Georgie Rizzo. Both of us never saw this piece of vinyl before so i asked him to let it to me. I payed an euro and back at home i didn't played the album for a couple of days and i nearly forgot about it. Gladly one week later i finally gave it a spin. From the start i was more than inspired and did not listening to anything else over the next days. Until now i'm still not so sure how i should describe Georgie's music, maybe it's folk, ? I'm not sure and tell you what, for me it doesn't matter, it's just sounds like an perfect pop album! “Only Me“ was released in 1971 on (as it seems) private GWP label which was based in New York. The sleeve's back let us know that Georgie grew up as the youngest in a family of fourteen children. To my surprise, the internet did not list many infos about Georgie, there might be one 7“ single, released the same year. Apart from it the album get some praise on a couple of japanese webpages, that's nearly all i could locate about him. “Only Me“ did contains at least four tracks which are real classics, from the fantastic opener “Scarlet Lace“ over “Fly“ up to his absolute masterpiece “Next Summer“. All those songs contain some of the most finest acoustic guitar lines i've ever heard, beside this Georgie's voice sounds amazing to me.
While listening again to “Only Me“ i have to think on the album by pre Dream Academy outfit Alfalpha which was released some years later. I was never that much into 70's music but those two albums makes me very curious into more. Someone out there who can recommend similar stuff or who has any further infos about our Georgie?
