UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK ARTIST OF THE MONTH FOR APRIL 2012: LINDA PIERRE KING
When I first realized that I was a record collector ' which happened while I was still in high school, maybe even junior high ' I had many "dreams" of what I wanted to accomplish. I was an instant Bob Dylan fan from the first time I heard "Like a Rolling Stone", so naturally, I wanted to get all of the Dylan albums, and I started ordering those albums from Columbia Record Club soon thereafter. That sounded easy enough to do back in the 1960's; but as it turned out, Dylan's first album came out a full 50 years ago, and he has been releasing albums continuously over that period. I am probably still missing several of them, because I started to get careless about keeping up sometime in the 1980's; however, I have really been enjoying his recent releases, from Time out of Mind on. Another artist that I loved a lot is the Rolling Stones, and getting all of their albums was a little tougher, since I didn't really start buying them in earnest until around the time of Let It Bleed. The early albums in particular were not that easy to find. I did locate an original copy of their first album and another that was almost as old for $2 each as I recall. Like those that I ordered through Columbia Record Club, they were mono copies (that was a simple decision for my junior-high self: stereo albums cost a dollar more, though with some records I definitely wish I'd have bitten the bullet).
Before you stick up your noses at mono, the early British Invasion albums were typically recorded in monaural; thus, when you got a "stereo" album, it was electronically reprocessed in some way and, these days, sounds pretty cheesy. Even the early stereo efforts aren't the greatest in the world: Many Beatles records run the instruments through one channel and the vocals through the other, and then call that stereo. The first album that I can recall which was released only in stereo was the soundtrack album for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Pink Floyd's debut LP The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is worth about twice as much in mono as in stereo, because the original UK release was only in mono, and it was mixed differently from the stereo albums. I had a chance to buy Piper for 99 cents at the Record Bar in Raleigh and didn't get it ' can't win them all! I did pick up a copy later; and, of course, it went through Katrina. The album looks a little like a Pringle's potato chip now; but amazingly, it still plays almost perfectly, except for a little warble on "See Emily Play".
As for the Beatles, I took care of them by ordering the acclaimed Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab box set The Beatles / The Collection in 1982, with half-speed mastered copies of all of the British Beatles albums that were taken from the original master tapes. Copies of the album covers were also made directly from the original album art and were printed in a booklet; the album covers instead were photos of the master tape boxes plus the song rosters and check-out listings that were pasted inside the boxes ' pretty exciting! They even left a couple of slots blank for future albums of songs that weren't included in The Collection, though as far as I know, none were ever released. It was a while before I realized that one of the songs that wasn't on any of the albums was none other than "I Want to Hold Your Hand", the Fab Four's first big American hit.
I still picked up Beatles albums when I could; many that I have seen over the years were and are too rich for my blood, but I found an original pressing of Meet the Beatles for $6 once. I remember walking into the back corner of a record store many years ago (sometime in the late 1970's as I recall); they had every Beatles album on sale at the same prices as when they were originally released. I wish I had bought the lot that day!
Sadly, the albums (all but one) from The Beatles / The Collection were the last that I found from Katrina. They rested, still in their metal rack, beneath the waters of the little bayou behind our former house for probably six months before I finally noticed them. Some of the discs even have barnacles on them. I pulled them out of the water and cleaned them up as best I could with a hose, but I haven't tried to do the final cleaning on any of them yet.
Linda Ronstadt is another singer where I determined to get all of her albums; besides her regular studio albums, I picked up numerous compilation albums of various kinds. Not all of them are terrific, and I am mostly lukewarm about her country period; but I became a big fan of all three Stone Poneys albums. They were all tough finds throughout the 1970's and 1980's, particularly the original release of the first album before they had their hit with "Different Drum"; even the post-Heart Like a Wheel reissue in 1975 wasn't that easy to find. Ronstadt albums have remained available for years and years; her 1980 new-wave album Mad Love went out of print just last year.
There were other dreams though that were not meant to be. Not long after I first got to college at North Carolina State University (probably in late 1969), one of the big record stores in Raleigh, the Record Bar (which was within walking distance of the campus) had several tables set up in the middle of the store that were piled high with bootleg albums. I had never heard of such a thing before, so I snapped up four right away: The Greatest Group on Earth by the Rolling Stones (a live album, like most bootleg albums); Kum Back by the Beatles (practice sessions for the Let It Be album for the most part, sounds like, and including an 8- or 9-minute version of "Teddy Boy" ' that song was originally going to be on Let it Be but instead is on Paul McCartney's solo album McCartney); and two by my man Bob Dylan: the famous Great White Wonder double-album set, plus John Birch Society Blues.
I loved those bootleg albums and played them all the time, as did Dylan fans everywhere. It was actually not until I bought the "legitimate" 1975 release of the G.W.W. music as The Basement Tapes that I realized that most people were not enamored, as I was, with the songs that Dylan had recorded early on that never made it onto any of his albums. Obviously, what most people loved were the later electric songs that he recorded in 1967 with the Band, because that is what is on The Basement Tapes.
At any rate, long before The Basement Tapes came out, I decided I wanted to try to get all of the Bob Dylan bootleg albums, and I searched long and hard (though it was rare that I would find one in a major record store after that big treasure trove from long ago). On one of my early trips to the semi-annual Record Convention in Hillsborough, NC, I found rack after rack of bootleg albums right up front. I picked up a lot of them then and at future Conventions ' something like 40 in all (and several were two-album sets). One day when I was going through them, I realized that I had purchased recordings of two live Dylan concerts that took place during the same month. I started getting a lot more particular then and basically quit buying anything that looked like a latter-day concert.
It was probably an impossible task anyway: There are over 500 of them according to one article that I read many years ago. As I mentioned above, most bootleg albums are concerts that were recorded clandestinely by a member of the audience. The quality of the recordings depended to some extent on where they were sitting and how noisy the people nearby were. The Grateful Dead famously started setting aside an area near the stage for bootleggers to place microphones so that the quality would be better. However, concert albums are almost certainly a minority of Dylan boots; the songs are mostly demos, practice sessions, alternate takes in the studio, etc. Some songs are live performances all right, but from the applause, many sound like they were played for an audience of a few dozen people. Also, Bob Dylan more than anyone else I can think of wrote and recorded dozens of songs that he never released on an album, and not just back in the 1960's either; that is the gold in the Dylan boots. (If you are interested in learning more, the definitive source on Dylan bootleg albums is www.bobsboots.com).
The main reason I got the John Birch Society Blues album is due to the history of Dylan's second album, The Freeweelin' Bob Dylan. Early pressings of the album included "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and three other wonderful songs that I got to know on bootleg albums as I bought them: "Gambling Willie's Dead Man's Hand", "Rocks and Gravels" and "Let Me Die in My Footsteps". The fact that the latter song is omitted was even mentioned on the album's liner notes. When the JBS song became controversial, Columbia Records pulled back the albums and reissued them with the familiar song set that we know today. Those first few albums with the alternate songs are worth a fortune today: A 1998 record pricing catalogue that I have values them at $10,000 to $15,000 in mono and $15,000 to $20,000 in stereo (though the catalogue recommends actually playing the album before ponying up that kind of cash).
Another amazing Dylan rarity is one of his first singles, "Mixed-Up Confusion"; it is surely Dylan's first electric song and was released in December 1962. It was only on the market for a few months before being pulled and becoming yet another song that never got on an album. If Columbia had stuck with it, the folk-rock movement could have been launched several years earlier.
One last Dylan story, and then I'll move on: I was walking through a big record show (I think it was one in San Francisco that featured many non-record items also ' one item that I remember is a wrapper for Beatles bumble gum that was all ripped up and priced at $20). I saw a copy of Highway 61 Revisited ' the album that has "Like a Rolling Stone" on it ' and I could not for the life of me tell any difference between that album and the one that I own. I then turned to the vendor and said, "Okay, I give up; why is this album worth $125?" It turns out that some copies of the album have an alternate take of "From a Buick 6"; the only way to tell is to look for a "-1" at the end of the number that is printed on the vinyl disc itself.
Other dreams that went by the wayside were to collect all of the records issued by Rhino Records (like the Dylan boots: just too many) and to get all of the garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums. There were too many of them also; I remember going into a record store once and seeing a rack with several dozen different comp albums ' just overwhelming for my little budget. As an alternate dream, I determined to purchase all of the Pebbles albums (LP's and CD's) including the Highs in the Mid-Sixties records that had been released by Greg Shaw and Bomp! Records ' that's more than 60 albums right there. I did manage to get them all finally ' including the Pebbles, Volume 11 CD that was never officially released ' but it wasn't easy, since they started going out of print over 10 years ago, and since they were still being released in 2007. (I also wrote up Wikipedia articles on all of the Pebbles albums). Of course, the great majority went through Katrina, and I remember seeing some of the broken pieces of Pebbles albums on the ground among the debris, so . . .
One thing is that I was disappointed in some of the garage rock compilation albums that I purchased; some of the records just weren't as good as the Pebbles albums. One that I picked up by mailorder sometime along the line is We Had the Beat / The Heart Beats & Other Texas Girls of the 60's. The Heart Beats were a good enough band, as were the other featured bands; mostly they recorded serviceable covers of songs like "Little Latin Lupe Lu", "Poor Side of Town" and the Nancy Sinatra hit "How Does that Grab You, Darlin'?".
But my ears really perked up when I heard toward the end of the album "Hard-Lovin' Babe" by LINDA PIERRE KING: That song had a pounding beat, great organ work, and haunting vocals with about as strong a vibrato as I have heard this side of Buffy Sainte-Marie. Somehow, among all of these teen combos, the CD also includes this unknown folksinger. And she didn't just rate a track or two: There are a total of eight songs by her on the album ' more even than the Heart Beats (who had six). The King songs were all put at the end of the album, maybe so that they would be easy to skip by diehard garage/psych enthusiasts, but they are far and away my favorite songs on the album.
Mostly it is just Linda Pierre King and her guitar, but that is a full-blown band backing her on "Hard-Lovin' Babe". They are named the Outcasts, and the people at Collectables Records hinted that they were the famed Texas garage rock band that won the statewide Battle of the Bands in 1966 (the peak year for the garage rock genre) and whose records include classics like "I'm in Pittsburgh (and it's Raining)" and "Blair 1523". As might be imagined, the Outcasts wasn't exactly a rare name for a rock band; and the experts at Ugly Things magazine know of at least 10 bands by this name that made records in the 1960's. Whoever is backing King is definitely not the famous Outcasts ' former bandmember Denny Turner disavows the recordings on his website ' so they are a mystery for now. One other song on the CD also features these Outcasts, the final track "My Boot Heels are Travelin'" ' this is an original song, though the title is clearly based on a lyric from Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man". She also covers Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind".
Speaking of "Blowin' in the Wind", several Peter, Paul and Mary albums turned up recently in the latest batch of records that I rescued from Katrina. It was there that I discovered an earlier version of one of the standout Linda Pierre King songs, "Tiny Sparrow"; the song is also known as "Little Sparrow" and "Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies". The song is included on PP&M's second album Moving and is recorded in the urbane style of the folk trio. King though wrings every last bit of emotion out of the song in her performance.
Another great song with an interesting history is "Scotch and Soda". The song has all of the earmarks of a very good 1930's standard; however, the first known recording is by the Kingston Trio on their 1958 debut album, also called The Kingston Trio. The song was discovered by the parents of legendary pitcher Tom Seaver of the New York Mets while on their honeymoon in Phoenix in 1932. When they heard the song being played in a piano lounge, they knew immediately that it was going to be "their song", so they had the pianist write it down for them. One of the members of the Kingston Trio, Dave Guard was dating Tom's older sister Katie Seaver for a time and heard the song while visiting at her parents' home. The bandmembers searched for years to try to find the real songwriter, but they never figured out who it was; Dave Guard is the placeholder songwriter in the album credits.
The chilling song "Blackness" features a false start where you get to hear Linda Pierre King talking a little (she has a great Texas accent that you don't hear at all in her singing). Another original song included on the CD is a protest song called "Who Cares?"
So who is she? Linda Pierre King is a native of Houston and moved to New York in the mid-1960's. She became active in the folksinging circuit and spent a lot of her time at a beatnik coffee house called Beanie Baby's Java Hut. Apparently the recordings featured on the Heart Beats CD were made in New York but had never been officially released before this.
Meanwhile, Norm Wooster was adrift in the Big Apple after seeing his musical career evaporate. The self-styled "king of barbershop" had numerous hit songs in the 1950's and later became a talent scout for Play-Tone Records. After a bitter dispute in 1962 with Play-Tone chairman Sol Siler, the #1 hit "Lovin' You Lots and Lots" was released in 1964 under the name Norm Wooster Singers, though Wooster did not perform on the record and had his songwriting credits excised. This song was also the opening track on the soundtrack album for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do about a one-hit wonder rock band called (naturally) the Wonders.
Norm Wooster then immersed himself in the folk music world in New York and saw Linda Pierre King perform at the Beanie Baby club. He fell in love with her, and they were later married. Through her, Wooster eased his way back into the music scene and performed in a variety of styles from psychedelic rock to disco to country.
Linda Pierre King might also have helped moderate Norm Wooster's right-wing political beliefs; he had been friends with members of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whereas King was a follower of philosopher and author Ayn Rand. The HUAC connection had exacerbated the falling-out with Sol Siler, since HUAC was investigating actress Suzanne Pleshette, whom Siler was dating at the time.
I have also been reading about another CD that came out more recently which featured a lot of the same music, called It's a Happening! Texas Girls of the 60's. Because the CD features the Heart Beats and Linda Pierre King, I assumed that it was basically a reissue of the earlier CD that I had. Actually, the 26-track album mostly features other bands; but more importantly from my standpoint, there are four songs by King that did not appear on the Heart Beats CD: the South Pacific chestnut "Bali Hai", the traditional ballad "Jack-A-Roe" ("The Train" is another traditional song that is on the earlier CD), an original song called "Where Are We Going?", and a second Bob Dylan song, "Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)". That's a total of 12 songs and is enough for a full-blown album for Linda Pierre King herself. I guess I'm going to need to track down that CD also!
* * *
Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for April 2010 ' The Breakaways.
As I remember, I already had an article partially written on somebody else when an order from Bomp! Records came in that included a specially priced package of new CD's by three related power-pop bands: the Nerves, the Plimsouls and the Breakaways. I already knew the Plimsouls' hit "A Million Miles Away", but just about everything else was a revelation, including the Nerves' original version of "Hanging on the Telephone" that became Blondie's follow-up hit after their monster "Heart of Glass". I quickly checked Wikipedia and determined that the Breakaways did not have an article, so I dashed off a UARB post on them, hoping to interest others in this amazing music.
It is really not surprising that there was no article on the Breakaways, since it was mostly just two guys from the Nerves ' Peter Case and Paul Collins ' who were jamming together for about a year. No one even knew that much of anything by the duo had been recorded until a tape showed up in the late 2000's.
The only record on YouTube by the Breakaways is "Walking out on Love"; this song was often performed in the Nerves' live shows but had never been recorded by them. You can hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9sYvy4G3NA . Green Day performed the song as their last encore following the final performance of their musical American Idiot on Broadway; that version is also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgKwA7-GLI&feature=related .
Another artist that I loved a lot is the Rolling Stones, and getting all of their albums was a little tougher, since I didn't really start buying them in earnest until around the time of Let It Bleed. The early albums in particular were not that easy to find. I did locate an original copy of their first album and another that was almost as old for $2 each as I recall. Like those that I ordered through Columbia Record Club, they were mono copies (that was a simple decision for my junior-high self: stereo albums cost a dollar more, though with some records I definitely wish I'd have bitten the bullet).
Before you stick up your noses at mono, the early British Invasion albums were typically recorded in monaural; thus, when you got a "stereo" album, it was electronically reprocessed in some way and, these days, sounds pretty cheesy. Even the early stereo efforts aren't the greatest in the world: Many Beatles records run the instruments through one channel and the vocals through the other, and then call that stereo. The first album that I can recall which was released only in stereo was the soundtrack album for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Pink Floyd's debut LP The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is worth about twice as much in mono as in stereo, because the original UK release was only in mono, and it was mixed differently from the stereo albums. I had a chance to buy Piper for 99 cents at the Record Bar in Raleigh and didn't get it ' can't win them all! I did pick up a copy later; and, of course, it went through Katrina. The album looks a little like a Pringle's potato chip now; but amazingly, it still plays almost perfectly, except for a little warble on "See Emily Play".
As for the Beatles, I took care of them by ordering the acclaimed Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab box set The Beatles / The Collection in 1982, with half-speed mastered copies of all of the British Beatles albums that were taken from the original master tapes. Copies of the album covers were also made directly from the original album art and were printed in a booklet; the album covers instead were photos of the master tape boxes plus the song rosters and check-out listings that were pasted inside the boxes ' pretty exciting! They even left a couple of slots blank for future albums of songs that weren't included in The Collection, though as far as I know, none were ever released. It was a while before I realized that one of the songs that wasn't on any of the albums was none other than "I Want to Hold Your Hand", the Fab Four's first big American hit.
I still picked up Beatles albums when I could; many that I have seen over the years were and are too rich for my blood, but I found an original pressing of Meet the Beatles for $6 once. I remember walking into the back corner of a record store many years ago (sometime in the late 1970's as I recall); they had every Beatles album on sale at the same prices as when they were originally released. I wish I had bought the lot that day!
Sadly, the albums (all but one) from The Beatles / The Collection were the last that I found from Katrina. They rested, still in their metal rack, beneath the waters of the little bayou behind our former house for probably six months before I finally noticed them. Some of the discs even have barnacles on them. I pulled them out of the water and cleaned them up as best I could with a hose, but I haven't tried to do the final cleaning on any of them yet.
Linda Ronstadt is another singer where I determined to get all of her albums; besides her regular studio albums, I picked up numerous compilation albums of various kinds. Not all of them are terrific, and I am mostly lukewarm about her country period; but I became a big fan of all three Stone Poneys albums. They were all tough finds throughout the 1970's and 1980's, particularly the original release of the first album before they had their hit with "Different Drum"; even the post-Heart Like a Wheel reissue in 1975 wasn't that easy to find. Ronstadt albums have remained available for years and years; her 1980 new-wave album Mad Love went out of print just last year.
There were other dreams though that were not meant to be. Not long after I first got to college at North Carolina State University (probably in late 1969), one of the big record stores in Raleigh, the Record Bar (which was within walking distance of the campus) had several tables set up in the middle of the store that were piled high with bootleg albums. I had never heard of such a thing before, so I snapped up four right away: The Greatest Group on Earth by the Rolling Stones (a live album, like most bootleg albums); Kum Back by the Beatles (practice sessions for the Let It Be album for the most part, sounds like, and including an 8- or 9-minute version of "Teddy Boy" ' that song was originally going to be on Let it Be but instead is on Paul McCartney's solo album McCartney); and two by my man Bob Dylan: the famous Great White Wonder double-album set, plus John Birch Society Blues.
I loved those bootleg albums and played them all the time, as did Dylan fans everywhere. It was actually not until I bought the "legitimate" 1975 release of the G.W.W. music as The Basement Tapes that I realized that most people were not enamored, as I was, with the songs that Dylan had recorded early on that never made it onto any of his albums. Obviously, what most people loved were the later electric songs that he recorded in 1967 with the Band, because that is what is on The Basement Tapes.
At any rate, long before The Basement Tapes came out, I decided I wanted to try to get all of the Bob Dylan bootleg albums, and I searched long and hard (though it was rare that I would find one in a major record store after that big treasure trove from long ago). On one of my early trips to the semi-annual Record Convention in Hillsborough, NC, I found rack after rack of bootleg albums right up front. I picked up a lot of them then and at future Conventions ' something like 40 in all (and several were two-album sets). One day when I was going through them, I realized that I had purchased recordings of two live Dylan concerts that took place during the same month. I started getting a lot more particular then and basically quit buying anything that looked like a latter-day concert.
It was probably an impossible task anyway: There are over 500 of them according to one article that I read many years ago. As I mentioned above, most bootleg albums are concerts that were recorded clandestinely by a member of the audience. The quality of the recordings depended to some extent on where they were sitting and how noisy the people nearby were. The Grateful Dead famously started setting aside an area near the stage for bootleggers to place microphones so that the quality would be better. However, concert albums are almost certainly a minority of Dylan boots; the songs are mostly demos, practice sessions, alternate takes in the studio, etc. Some songs are live performances all right, but from the applause, many sound like they were played for an audience of a few dozen people. Also, Bob Dylan more than anyone else I can think of wrote and recorded dozens of songs that he never released on an album, and not just back in the 1960's either; that is the gold in the Dylan boots. (If you are interested in learning more, the definitive source on Dylan bootleg albums is www.bobsboots.com).
The main reason I got the John Birch Society Blues album is due to the history of Dylan's second album, The Freeweelin' Bob Dylan. Early pressings of the album included "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and three other wonderful songs that I got to know on bootleg albums as I bought them: "Gambling Willie's Dead Man's Hand", "Rocks and Gravels" and "Let Me Die in My Footsteps". The fact that the latter song is omitted was even mentioned on the album's liner notes. When the JBS song became controversial, Columbia Records pulled back the albums and reissued them with the familiar song set that we know today. Those first few albums with the alternate songs are worth a fortune today: A 1998 record pricing catalogue that I have values them at $10,000 to $15,000 in mono and $15,000 to $20,000 in stereo (though the catalogue recommends actually playing the album before ponying up that kind of cash).
Another amazing Dylan rarity is one of his first singles, "Mixed-Up Confusion"; it is surely Dylan's first electric song and was released in December 1962. It was only on the market for a few months before being pulled and becoming yet another song that never got on an album. If Columbia had stuck with it, the folk-rock movement could have been launched several years earlier.
One last Dylan story, and then I'll move on: I was walking through a big record show (I think it was one in San Francisco that featured many non-record items also ' one item that I remember is a wrapper for Beatles bumble gum that was all ripped up and priced at $20). I saw a copy of Highway 61 Revisited ' the album that has "Like a Rolling Stone" on it ' and I could not for the life of me tell any difference between that album and the one that I own. I then turned to the vendor and said, "Okay, I give up; why is this album worth $125?" It turns out that some copies of the album have an alternate take of "From a Buick 6"; the only way to tell is to look for a "-1" at the end of the number that is printed on the vinyl disc itself.
Other dreams that went by the wayside were to collect all of the records issued by Rhino Records (like the Dylan boots: just too many) and to get all of the garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums. There were too many of them also; I remember going into a record store once and seeing a rack with several dozen different comp albums ' just overwhelming for my little budget. As an alternate dream, I determined to purchase all of the Pebbles albums (LP's and CD's) including the Highs in the Mid-Sixties records that had been released by Greg Shaw and Bomp! Records ' that's more than 60 albums right there. I did manage to get them all finally ' including the Pebbles, Volume 11 CD that was never officially released ' but it wasn't easy, since they started going out of print over 10 years ago, and since they were still being released in 2007. (I also wrote up Wikipedia articles on all of the Pebbles albums). Of course, the great majority went through Katrina, and I remember seeing some of the broken pieces of Pebbles albums on the ground among the debris, so . . .
One thing is that I was disappointed in some of the garage rock compilation albums that I purchased; some of the records just weren't as good as the Pebbles albums. One that I picked up by mailorder sometime along the line is We Had the Beat / The Heart Beats & Other Texas Girls of the 60's. The Heart Beats were a good enough band, as were the other featured bands; mostly they recorded serviceable covers of songs like "Little Latin Lupe Lu", "Poor Side of Town" and the Nancy Sinatra hit "How Does that Grab You, Darlin'?".
But my ears really perked up when I heard toward the end of the album "Hard-Lovin' Babe" by LINDA PIERRE KING: That song had a pounding beat, great organ work, and haunting vocals with about as strong a vibrato as I have heard this side of Buffy Sainte-Marie. Somehow, among all of these teen combos, the CD also includes this unknown folksinger. And she didn't just rate a track or two: There are a total of eight songs by her on the album ' more even than the Heart Beats (who had six). The King songs were all put at the end of the album, maybe so that they would be easy to skip by diehard garage/psych enthusiasts, but they are far and away my favorite songs on the album.
Mostly it is just Linda Pierre King and her guitar, but that is a full-blown band backing her on "Hard-Lovin' Babe". They are named the Outcasts, and the people at Collectables Records hinted that they were the famed Texas garage rock band that won the statewide Battle of the Bands in 1966 (the peak year for the garage rock genre) and whose records include classics like "I'm in Pittsburgh (and it's Raining)" and "Blair 1523". As might be imagined, the Outcasts wasn't exactly a rare name for a rock band; and the experts at Ugly Things magazine know of at least 10 bands by this name that made records in the 1960's. Whoever is backing King is definitely not the famous Outcasts ' former bandmember Denny Turner disavows the recordings on his website ' so they are a mystery for now. One other song on the CD also features these Outcasts, the final track "My Boot Heels are Travelin'" ' this is an original song, though the title is clearly based on a lyric from Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man". She also covers Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind".
Speaking of "Blowin' in the Wind", several Peter, Paul and Mary albums turned up recently in the latest batch of records that I rescued from Katrina. It was there that I discovered an earlier version of one of the standout Linda Pierre King songs, "Tiny Sparrow"; the song is also known as "Little Sparrow" and "Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies". The song is included on PP&M's second album Moving and is recorded in the urbane style of the folk trio. King though wrings every last bit of emotion out of the song in her performance.
Another great song with an interesting history is "Scotch and Soda". The song has all of the earmarks of a very good 1930's standard; however, the first known recording is by the Kingston Trio on their 1958 debut album, also called The Kingston Trio. The song was discovered by the parents of legendary pitcher Tom Seaver of the New York Mets while on their honeymoon in Phoenix in 1932. When they heard the song being played in a piano lounge, they knew immediately that it was going to be "their song", so they had the pianist write it down for them. One of the members of the Kingston Trio, Dave Guard was dating Tom's older sister Katie Seaver for a time and heard the song while visiting at her parents' home. The bandmembers searched for years to try to find the real songwriter, but they never figured out who it was; Dave Guard is the placeholder songwriter in the album credits.
The chilling song "Blackness" features a false start where you get to hear Linda Pierre King talking a little (she has a great Texas accent that you don't hear at all in her singing). Another original song included on the CD is a protest song called "Who Cares?"
So who is she? Linda Pierre King is a native of Houston and moved to New York in the mid-1960's. She became active in the folksinging circuit and spent a lot of her time at a beatnik coffee house called Beanie Baby's Java Hut. Apparently the recordings featured on the Heart Beats CD were made in New York but had never been officially released before this.
Meanwhile, Norm Wooster was adrift in the Big Apple after seeing his musical career evaporate. The self-styled "king of barbershop" had numerous hit songs in the 1950's and later became a talent scout for Play-Tone Records. After a bitter dispute in 1962 with Play-Tone chairman Sol Siler, the #1 hit "Lovin' You Lots and Lots" was released in 1964 under the name Norm Wooster Singers, though Wooster did not perform on the record and had his songwriting credits excised. This song was also the opening track on the soundtrack album for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do about a one-hit wonder rock band called (naturally) the Wonders.
Norm Wooster then immersed himself in the folk music world in New York and saw Linda Pierre King perform at the Beanie Baby club. He fell in love with her, and they were later married. Through her, Wooster eased his way back into the music scene and performed in a variety of styles from psychedelic rock to disco to country.
Linda Pierre King might also have helped moderate Norm Wooster's right-wing political beliefs; he had been friends with members of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whereas King was a follower of philosopher and author Ayn Rand. The HUAC connection had exacerbated the falling-out with Sol Siler, since HUAC was investigating actress Suzanne Pleshette, whom Siler was dating at the time.
I have also been reading about another CD that came out more recently which featured a lot of the same music, called It's a Happening! Texas Girls of the 60's. Because the CD features the Heart Beats and Linda Pierre King, I assumed that it was basically a reissue of the earlier CD that I had. Actually, the 26-track album mostly features other bands; but more importantly from my standpoint, there are four songs by King that did not appear on the Heart Beats CD: the South Pacific chestnut "Bali Hai", the traditional ballad "Jack-A-Roe" ("The Train" is another traditional song that is on the earlier CD), an original song called "Where Are We Going?", and a second Bob Dylan song, "Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)". That's a total of 12 songs and is enough for a full-blown album for Linda Pierre King herself. I guess I'm going to need to track down that CD also!
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for April 2010 ' The Breakaways.
As I remember, I already had an article partially written on somebody else when an order from Bomp! Records came in that included a specially priced package of new CD's by three related power-pop bands: the Nerves, the Plimsouls and the Breakaways. I already knew the Plimsouls' hit "A Million Miles Away", but just about everything else was a revelation, including the Nerves' original version of "Hanging on the Telephone" that became Blondie's follow-up hit after their monster "Heart of Glass". I quickly checked Wikipedia and determined that the Breakaways did not have an article, so I dashed off a UARB post on them, hoping to interest others in this amazing music.
It is really not surprising that there was no article on the Breakaways, since it was mostly just two guys from the Nerves ' Peter Case and Paul Collins ' who were jamming together for about a year. No one even knew that much of anything by the duo had been recorded until a tape showed up in the late 2000's.
The only record on YouTube by the Breakaways is "Walking out on Love"; this song was often performed in the Nerves' live shows but had never been recorded by them. You can hear the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9sYvy4G3NA . Green Day performed the song as their last encore following the final performance of their musical American Idiot on Broadway; that version is also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgKwA7-GLI&feature=related .
