Song Of The Day 2/4/2015: Chris Holland & T-Bone - "Get Me Some Help"

(This is actually a picture of "Arnie Corrado")

Alt-Motown: Remember yesterday when I said the trail of information on Motown artist Vincent DiMirco was pitilessly brief? Chris Holland’s is even colder. After a lot of frustrated search strings and accidental hacking of a couple of Dutch sites I was able to find a single measly paragraph on Holland from an excerpt of a book I suppose I’m gonna have to buy now, The Motown Encyclopedia: “Hailing from New Jersey, Chris Holland originally recorded under his real name of Arnie Corrado for Date (Records) as a 17-year-old in 1966.”

Corrado’s first song was called “My World,” and if you click on that song title you can hear it, along with seeing a few disconnected incidences of what looks like an especially fruitful Marin County executive retreat circa 1968. Corrado also tried an intriguing cover of the Bing Crosby standard “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You.”

Adopting the pseudonym Chris Holland, apparently accompanied by an invisible friend named T-Bone, Corrado released the Eurovision-friendly single “Get Me Some Help” in May 1972, again on Motown’s Rare Earth imprint. It’s actually a cut above the usual Eurovision bubblegum pop, in that Holland/Corrado manages to complete the song using real words in a Romantic language, rather than resorting to nonsense phrases like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” or “Inka-Dinka-Doo” or “Wobbledy-Bobbledy-Boo” or “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.” In other words, catchy, but unlike recent visits to Disneyland, not potentially sickening.