UNDER APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR DECEMBER 2015: AMANDA JONES
The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for December 2015 is AMANDA JONES, a punk/pop quartet from Los Angeles that is best known for their song “The First Time”. As far as I know, it was not actually released as a single; but the song was included on the two-CD retrospective album, Straight Outta Burbank, that was released on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Bomp! Records.
As is true of the UARB from a few years back, Hollis Brown, Amanda Jones is a band, not a woman, though the lead singer is named Amanda Brix. Also, like Crystal Mansion, the UARB from last time, the musicians have some experience and are not just starting out.
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My segue to the discussion of the UARB was going to be, “I was first introduced to Amanda Jones on the compilation album Peach Jam I” that I described above. That would not have been entirely true; I had not realized until recently that Amanda Jones was one of the artists on Peach Jam I. Actually, after I replayed that CD, the song by Amanda Jones didn’t sound like the LA band much at all. I looked up Peach Jam I on Discogs, and they have the song “You Were Wrong” as being by Amanda Cole, who was using the alias Amanda Jones. Actually, the website has 10 artists named Amanda Jones in its database (and three Amanda Cole’s for that matter), and evidently none of them are the UARB.
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The name of Hollis Brown is taken from a Bob Dylan song “Ballad of Hollis Brown”. (Did I mention that I have a cover version of “Ballad of Hollis Brown” by Iggy and the Stooges? Quite good also). Like “Ruby Tuesday” (which became the name of a major American restaurant chain) and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (Jumpin’ Jack Flash is also the name of a Whoopi Goldberg film, and as I remember, the song lyrics figure into the story also), Amanda Jones is a character in a Rolling Stones song, “Miss Amanda Jones”. The song appears on one of my favorite Rolling Stones albums, Between the Buttons – “Ruby Tuesday” also appears on that album, at least the US version. I don’t think it a coincidence that the UARB shares its name with this song, though I suppose it is possible.
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According to the promotional material by Bomp! Records for the band’s EP, Amanda Jones, Amanda Jones was born in March 1995 as a collaboration of Amanda (Mandy) Brix and Jeff Drake, previously in the punk rock band the Joneses. The combination of her first name and his former band name clearly brought about the band name Amanda Jones, but they were almost certainly mindful of the Rolling Stones connection also: Their sound has the same kind of playful spirit as early mid-period Stones albums like Between the Buttons (released in January 1967); besides “Miss Amanda Jones” and “Ruby Tuesday”, the album also includes the song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” that got the band into so much trouble with The Ed Sullivan Show – Mick Jagger sung the title lyric as “let’s spend some time together” as Ed Sullivan insisted, though he and bassist Bill Wyman were rolling their eyes at the time. A few months back, I discussed the controversial lyrics in their first big hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”; the Rolling Stones were able to sing that number on The Ed Sullivan Show with no censorship.
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Other fun songs that the Rolling Stones put out in the same period include “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” (the photo of the band in drag that was on the 45 cover has to be seen to be believed) and “Mother’s Little Helper” – this song was a reminder that it wasn’t just the kids who were often on drugs.
Speaking of which, Between the Buttons ends with a song called “Something Happened to Me Yesterday”; from Wikipedia: “At the time of the song’s release, [Mick Jagger] said: ‘I leave it to the individual imagination as to what happened.’ Matthew Greenwald calls it ‘one [of] the most accurate songs about LSD’.”
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Amanda Brix had been in an all-female band called the Lame Flames that was active in the Los Angeles area in the 1980’s. They are described variously on the Internet as a rap trio and a heavy metal act (with Amanda Brix called a “sex goddess”). Though the band has a Facebook page – www.facebook.com/The-Lame-Flames-137156196321030/ – they apparently did not release any records, and I am not sure that there are any YouTube videos out there either. There are oodles of photos and posters on the Facebook site and elsewhere on the Internet though.
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Jeff Drake was the lead singer for a punk rock band called the Joneses; another of their bandmembers was Paul Mars Black, who was a bandmember in the past UARB Dead Hippie. This is not the same band as the 1970’s Boston hard rock band called the Joneses or the Pittsburgh R&B band also called the Joneses that was part of the Philly Soul scene of the 1970’s. This band called the Joneses was formed in 1981 and was active in LA through the end of the decade. They have a Wikipedia article but no notice in Allmusic, while the Boston and Pittsburgh bands have Allmusic write-ups but nothing in Wikipedia. The Joneses released several singles and EP’s but only one full-length LP, Keeping up with the Joneses (not surprisingly I suppose, the Pittsburgh band also released an album called Keepin’ up with the Joneses).
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Amanda Brix and Jeff Drake rounded out Amanda Jones by adding the rhythm section from the early LA punk rock band called the Skulls – their first release, “Victims” was on only the third single from What Records? – Keith Michael on bass (who had been a good friend of Jeff Drake from Huntington Beach) and Sean Antillon on drums and percussion.
In an interview for SugarbuzzMagazine.com, Jeff Drake mentions that Brian Walsh was also a sometime drummer for Amanda Jones; he was previously in teen heart-throb Leif Garrett’s band and was also in Slow Motorcade, who recorded a cover of one of my favorite New York Dolls songs, “Vietnamese Baby”. The Slow Motorcade version of “Vietnamese Baby” was included on a New York Dolls tribute album called Jetboys of Babylon (2005).
Jeff Drake also mentioned that Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records signed Amanda Jones after he saw their first show at Coconut Teazser, a Hollywood rock and roll club located at the eastern end of the Sunset Strip, where they became the house band for a while.
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Amanda Jones’ sole album Amanda Jones came out on Bomp! Records in 1996, with the five songs being a delight from end to end. The opening cut is “The First Time”, about a girl bringing a boy home to her place. With lyrics like “It’s my first time / Please be kind / It’s my first time / Don’t hurt me” interspersed with “oh . . . oh oh oh . . .”, the song focuses more on the angst rather than the sexiness of the coming-of-age event; unlike the way that, say, Rod Stewart did in his hit song “Tonight’s the Night”. And in a nice twist, it turns out that the boy admits with tears in his eyes that it is also his “first time”.
“The Back & Forth” is a lively song about an imaginary dance craze of that name that also sounds like a stand-in for sex. “Kathy’s Kiss” and “Put You on Hold” are also fun songs, with both bringing up jealous feelings: “I can taste her on your lips . . . Kathy’s kiss is poisonous . . . gonna clean her up with turpentine” and “I left you hanging on / I put you on hold and you were gone . . . I called my favorite number, Star-69”.
The final song, “Private Enemy No. 1” has the singer in the thrall of a bad boy: “He’s my private enemy number one / held my heart for ransom / private enemy number one / he’s so f--kin’ handsome” – not “hot” or “sexy” or something like that, but the old-fashioned “handsome”. The album ends with the comment “oh, yes, he is” after the final chorus that always makes my smile.
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Before Amanda Jones was formed, Amanda Brix and fellow Lame Flame Iris Berry started a band called Pink Sabbath. A website called www.theeyeshadows.com says that they are not a Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath cover band; that might be true of another band called Pink Sabbath that is still active. Other bandmembers were James McCrone (guitar), Dawn Laureen (bass), and Eric Blitz (drums). They were one of the performers at the Hollygrove Orphanage Benefit at the Roxy, where they shared the stage with Henry Rollins and with River Phoenix (in his last acoustic performance before his untimely death).
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Mandy Brix of Amanda Jones shows up in a lot of Internet searches because in 1988, she married bass guitarist Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses. She is now happily married to a recording industry executive named Steven Toland; Jeff Drake says that Mandy is “[j]ust being a very glamorous housewife . . . with a couple of kids.”
(December 2015)
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Items: Amanda Jones
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
December 2015 – 1990’s pop/punk band AMANDA JONES; Story of the Month on the early American singles by the Beatles; also, Rochelle Harper, Lisa Loeb, 3 Doors Down, Level with the Ground, Chris Stamey with Yo La Tengo, Meri Wilson, Bobby Brown, the Cruzados / the Plugz, Terence Trent d’Arby, An Emotional Fish, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Hunters & Collectors, Looters, Shakespear’s Sister, Robert Tepper, Y Kant Tori Read / Tori Amos, Ugly Kid Joe, Paul Young, the Rolling Stones, Mandy Brix, the Joneses.
(Year 7 Review)
