UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2012: PHIL AND THE FRANTICS
My definition of an Under-Appreciated Rock Band is simply this: There is no Wikipedia article on them, or at least nothing beyond a couple of sentences. Wikipedia was founded at the beginning of the current millennium (in January 2001) and is one of the most remarkable websites on earth. Everything on Wikipedia is freely available to anyone with a computer, for copying or for any other purpose, with no copyright limitations whatsoever. There are even books that have been published and sold on hundreds of topics that consist entirely of Wikipedia articles. My Wikipedia article on Milan the Leather Boy that I mentioned last month appears in one such book, on psychedelic rock artists; I have no idea whether it has sold more than 2 or 3 copies – I certainly haven’t purchased one.
With some limitations for articles having highly contentious positions on all sides (such as the one on evolution), anyone at all can edit any of its articles and put in whatever they want. Stephen Colbert has famously done that very thing during the broadcast of some of his programs. In some instances, the changes are malicious (known in the wiki-world as “vandalism”), but they are normally changed back rather quickly; I have done some of that myself on occasion (again just this morning as a matter of fact). It takes a while in some cases for the vandalism to be corrected; but then again, there is an item in the Guinness Book of World Records about the longest time that a painting has been mistakenly hung upside-down in an art gallery – and that wasn’t just for a couple of days either.
In the beginning, no one thought that a globally collaborative encyclopedia like Wikipedia would create anything reliable or worthwhile, but it has become the sixth most popular site on the Internet, and there must be dozens of similar “wiki” sites now (some are part of the associated non-profit Wikimedia Foundation while others are not). The number of articles on Wikipedia in English alone passed 4 million recently. Most encyclopedias have fixed articles with named authors; some, such as Encyclopædia Britannica have a scholarly take, while others are more general-interest. That is not true of Wikipedia: Nearly all of its contributors operate completely anonymously – more than a few are identified only by IP addresses, though most (like me) have “handles” (to borrow a CB radio term).
My own handle is “Shocking Blue”, the name of a Dutch rock band that I have been particularly enamored with for several decades. “That is not the name I was born with, that is my Wikipedia name. Some day all of us will have special names,” as Brian O’Blivion might have put it; he is the “television prophet” who appears in the incredible 1983 David Cronenberg horror movie Videodrome that features among its cast members James Woods and Blondie’s Debbie Harry.
Everyone knows Shocking Blue’s big hit song “Venus”, a massive, worldwide Number One hit in 1970 and I believe the biggest-selling single ever by a Continental European band. In 1986, “Venus” was Number One on the charts for a second time as performed by the British pop band Bananarama. A third version of “Venus” by a Japanese singer named hitomi came out in 2005; while not a hit song over here, her version was featured in commercials for the Gillette female razor line called Venus beginning in 2006 (it still is if I am not mistaken). Finally, the curious band Stars on 45 (also from the Netherlands) had a Number One hit in 1981 consisting of a medley of Beatles songs. The opening chords from “Venus” are played at or near the beginning of this song (often called “Stars on 45 Medley”); arguably, then, “Venus” made the top of the charts on three occasions – a feat no other song has ever achieved. Another remarkable fact is that the Shocking Blue version of “Venus” appeared in the soundtrack of two major motion pictures during the same year (1995): The Brady Bunch Movie and Grumpier Old Men.
Shocking Blue’s American album is strangely called The Shocking Blue (the band name itself mostly doesn’t include “The”, even on the record label for that album), and I simply love it. The first time I played it 25 or more years ago, I actually got up from my chair and restarted the record: I could not believe that the opening track, “Long and Lonesome Road” was that good. As I listened to a retrospective album that I found later called Classics over the years, I realized that there were subtle changes in their style and even differences in the basic sound of the recordings that could only reflect a long career spanning several albums. As far as I knew, there was not even a hint of that on this side of the Atlantic, where Shocking Blue is viewed as a “one hit wonder”.
Not a small part of my excitement about going to Europe in 1995 was the anticipation of finding some of those albums in French and Dutch record stores – and I hit pay dirt several times during that trip, bringing back I believe four Shocking Blue albums with me (3 LP’s and one CD). I found out in the process that the LP was alive and well in Europe, whereas over here, CD’s and cassettes had just about pushed LP’s from record stores entirely. An Internet friend that I corresponded with for years who is a true expert on what is known as “Nederpop” (and on European rock in general), Alex Gitlin generously sent me several other Shocking Blue LP’s at a later date. I didn’t have a complete set of Shocking Blue albums, but it was close. When gathering up my albums from the debris of Hurricane Katrina, I paid especial attention to my Shocking Blue albums, and they were among the first that I cleaned up and was able to play again.
The depth of my obsession with Shocking Blue is reflected in the name of my bichon frisé (who just passed away a couple of months ago – his 16th birthday would have been in a few days): Robby van Leeuwen, a combination of Robby the Robot from one of my all-time favorite movies, Forbidden Planet with the name of the bandleader of Shocking Blue, Robbie van Leeuwen.
My general stance in writing these posts about Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists has never been to say to my readers: What you listen to is crap – here is what is good. I have always enjoyed mainstream rock and still do. What I am trying to do is to say instead: Here is something else that is good. Also, I have tried not to put down even artists that I don’t particularly care for; as someone who finds equal pleasure in the music of Carpenters and Ramones (just to give one example), my musical tastes are hardly average, so I am not about to pass judgment on someone else’s.
That is not how everyone does it though, and a lot of people apparently like that sort of thing, since they are everywhere on the Internet. The most prominent post on PHIL AND THE FRANTICS is a really snide piece by Mark Prindle from www.markprindle.com entitled “Frantically Ripping Off Everybody They Can”. (One nice thing about there being a Wikipedia article is that it usually comes up at or near the top of a Google search rather than junk like this). The article calls the band “Phil and the F--kups” (and that was just in the second paragraph) and names the front man Phil “Philthy Animal” Kelsey. (“Philthy Animal” is a real person by the way; that is the nickname of Phil Taylor, the longtime drummer for the British hard rock band Motörhead that also features Lemmy). Needless to say, the Prindle piece has almost no reliable information; it doesn’t even get the name of their hit song right.
The title of the Prindle piece refers to the fact that Phil and the Frantics is best known for a song called “I Must Run”, which was a local hit single in their native Arizona; the song is said to have been adapted rather openly from the flip side of the Zombies’ fourth single, “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move” (the follow-up to one of their biggest hits “Tell Her No”). I was unfamiliar with the Zombies song but have played it recently, and I don’t really see the resemblance; if the song titles weren’t so similar, it might have slipped through the cracks altogether. In any case, “I Must Run” is a superior recording to “I Must Move”, and I am not the only one who thinks so; my view is shared by that of Ugly Things magazine.
However, every source that I have examined mentions the adaptation, so I guess it is there. For instance, it is mentioned in the tongue-in-cheek liner notes on the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP where I first encountered “I Must Run”. The author of the liner notes is listed as “A. Seltzer”, and I think they are supposed to be satirically in the style of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, though I am not positive of that. (Philip Seymour Hoffman played Bangs in the 2000 film Almost Famous). About this song, “Seltzer” writes: “And if you just moved to Dacron from some dumb place like Phoenix, Arizona, take heart cuz they’ve included YOUR favorite band, Phil & the Frantics with their famed plagiarism of the Zombies’ ‘I Must Run’. I’ll bet they did when the real songwriters came after ’em for taking credit for this song! Real sleaze, but a shoo-in for punk posterity.”
Anyway, the Prindle article runs with that and also accuses the band of copying a Beatles song and a Byrds song and a lot of other not-funny stuff. It also starts with a confession that while in college, the author bootlegged copies of the albums in Bomp! Records’ Pebbles Series (more about that later).
Plagiarizing music is not so straightforward to spot as, say, plagiarizing a term paper. There were any number of bands aping the Beatles and the Byrds and the Zombies during the 1960’s; Bob Dylan for instance started out as a Woody Guthrie wannabe after all. On the other hand, theft is theft: Almost no one defends the right to simply steal someone else’s work, whether or not it is resold; the term for that is “piracy”. The “music-sharing” website from the late 1990’s called Napster had millions of songs easily available as free downloads in the mp3 format. When the heavy metal band Metallica learned that their new single “I Disappear” was available on Napster even before it was officially released (and subsequently discovered the rest of their catalogue on the site as well), they filed suit against the service in 2000. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had already done so, and other artists followed suit. In July 2001, Napster shut down their free service; and, for several years, they continued to offer individual songs for download, though this time for a fee. Over the years, this has become the preferred method of purchasing music by a huge slice of the buying public; and eventually, the album as we know it might disappear from the music world entirely – in any format.
The most famous lawsuit that I know of in the rock world involves “My Sweet Lord”, a hit single from George Harrison’s 1970 double-album All Things Must Pass that became the best-selling single in Great Britain in 1971. Bright Tunes Music Corporation – which owns the rights to the Ronnie Mack song, “He’s So Fine”, a major hit for the Chiffons in 1963 – filed suit in February 1971, saying that “My Sweet Lord” plagiarized that song. (If the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, that’s the song with the background vocals “doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang”). The lawsuit didn’t go to trial for another five years, and the judge ruled that George Harrison had “subconsciously” plagiarized the earlier Chiffons song. (For what it’s worth, the resemblance between “My Sweet Lord” and “He’s So Fine” is much clearer to these ears than is the case with “I Must Run” and “I Must Move”).
At that point, the case took a bizarre twist: The hearing to determine damages in the case was delayed for another five years (to the month, as with the original delay in the lawsuit); but by then, George Harrison’s one-time manager Allen B. Klein had purchased Bright Tunes, so he was now the plaintiff. Klein arranged a settlement whereby Harrison himself would purchase the Bright Tunes company for the same price that Klein had paid – $587,000 – and that would be the end of it. Although litigation would continue for more than 10 additional years, this decision was eventually upheld.
George Harrison released the fairly bitter “This Song” about his experience during the lawsuit; it became a minor hit as the first single from his 1976 album Thirty-Three and a 1/3. The Chiffons released their own cover of “My Sweet Lord” in 1975 in an attempt to benefit from the controversy.
The practice of “bootlegging” music, however, is more of a gray area: In this case, music is still being sold without paying royalties, but the product involves recordings that are not otherwise available for sale. (In their defense during threatened and actual lawsuits, the owners of Napster maintained that this was true of many of the songs on their website, though those that were actually downloaded matched in popularity songs available in the general marketplace). Are, say, Bob Dylan or Columbia Records really being harmed when Great White Wonder and the hundreds of other bootleg albums that have been released over the years are offering Dylan records for sale that have never been released? I don’t know of any lawsuits in that regard (or at least none that have been successful), and many artists have a love-hate relationship with bootleggers.
Some bootleg albums have been big sellers. When Prince came up with a funk album scheduled for release in 1987 that he later shelved called The Black Album (where the front cover was completely black without any lettering), the handful of promotional albums that had already been released were widely bootlegged in all formats. Official sales figures are obviously not available, but an estimated 500,000 bootleg copies were sold before the album was officially released in 1994.
Bob Dylan hates bootleg albums, but he has consented to the official release of a series of albums called The Bootleg Series. (Earlier releases that also included songs that were previously available only as bootlegs are the 1975 album The Basement Tapes, which included numerous recordings from the Great White Wonder album; and the 1985 five-LP or three-CD retrospective Biograph). To date, nine volumes have been released in The Bootleg Series, the most recent (The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964) in 2010.
Other widely bootlegged rock artists have similarly acknowledged the bootlegging world; Aerosmith even called their first official live album (in 1978) Live! Bootleg. The cheap-looking printing on the cover perfectly mimicked bootleg albums, and the back cover featured a couple of faux coffee stains. There were even deliberate errors in the song listing. The cover of the Who’s first live album, Live at Leeds (1970) also looks like a bootleg album; ironically, the recording quality on Live at Leeds is the best of any live album that I had previously heard.
I have written about bootleg albums before, but I haven’t mentioned that the Pebbles Series is also a group of bootleg albums (as are many of the retrospective albums and compilation albums of garage rock and psychedelic rock records that have been started since). The recordings on the Pebbles Series were taken from one of the world’s greatest record collections, that of music historian and Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw. He began collecting records at a time when last year’s albums were regarded as being not much above trash, when whole boxes of albums and 45’s could be purchased for a few dollars. He has written of his joy at owning a complete set of all of the records that were released by legendary music companies like Phillips Records and Sun Records. The Pebbles albums were his way of getting some of the impossibly rare songs in his collection out to the general public; the series was started in 1978, about 6 years after the Nuggets compilation was released.
One thing that bootleggers don’t like though is when their records are bootlegged by others, as Mark Prindle admitted to doing at the start of his article on Phil and the Frantics. That is what inadvertently happened with the final volume in the Pebbles Series – Pebbles, Volume 11 among the CD’s (the Pebbles, Volume 12 CD had been released several years earlier) – so it was pulled from the market. I have one of the few extant copies, since I ordered it immediately after it became available.
So to return to the topic at hand: Phil Kelsey was born in Dallas into a musical family; his parents had connections to both jazz and gospel music. His family moved to Phoenix, Arizona when he was in grade school. By the 7th grade, he was already in his first band and played at school dances. For his last two years in high school, he headed the Four Gents, a 1950’s-style rock combo.
Phil and the Frantics came later and consisted of Phil Kelsey (saxophone and vocals), Bill Powell (guitar), Rick Rose (keyboards), John Lambert (bass), and Steve Forman (drums). Forman left the band to join the Eclectic Mouse and was replaced by a new drummer, Joe Martinez.
Phil Kelsey was a hustler, and his band was playing at the Arizona State Fair by 1963. They even had their own nightclub called The Cave, where his band was the headliner. The band attracted the attention of a local character named Jim Musil, Jr., who had a lot of friends in Los Angeles, including the now infamous Phil Spector. Jim Musil, Sr. owned several night spots and leased one of them to Phil, who reopened it as the Frantic Den in 1965; but problems with the Fire Marshal led to their relocation to the club downstairs called JD’s.
Phil and the Frantics were a real hit in their new digs; Phil recalls: “We were really surprised. It was real mania, the kids were going crazy. So they had us back again, with advertising this time, and we drew three times the crowd.”
Meanwhile, future country superstar Waylon Jennings was holding court in the other nightclub upstairs; this was one of the nation’s first double-decker clubs. (Jennings is also well known as being a member of Buddy Holly’s band on “the day the music died”). Waylon Jennings wound up producing the band’s fourth and most successful single, “I Must Run” b/w “Pain”; he also played 12-string guitar on the recording. (A later release of the 45 had a different flip side, “What’s Happening”). In the wake of its success, Phil and the Frantics toured for a time with Peter and Gordon and others. Shortly thereafter, John Lambert and Bill Powell left the band and joined the Beethoven Soul, which released an album on Dot Records. Phil Kelsey put together a third line-up of the Frantics, but by then, their sound was out of step with the current scene.
Phil Kelsey and Steve Dodge – who had been the lead guitarist for another popular local band, the Vibratos – drifted around Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas; they called themselves Phil Mark Five and, with the addition of Bobby Blood on trumpet, formed a band called the Babies (not the same band as the 1970’s British band the Babys). They landed a record deal with ABC-Dunhill Records in 1969 and also toured with several major acts of that period, including Three Dog Night and Blues Image. The band released three 45’s, though none went anywhere, and they later learned that the album would not come out after all.
Afterward, Phil Kelsey operated more behind the scenes, becoming a session musician and songwriter. He worked with Earth, Wind and Fire, Billy Preston and Brenton Wood, among others.
The first album featuring music by Phil and the Frantics came out in 1980 on the Bomp! Records label Voxx Records as Rough Diamonds, Volume 3 in their Rough Diamonds Series that consisted of entire albums by 1960’s garage rock bands that have more than one or two singles to their credit. The first side is in an earlier style and is what I imagine music at a “sock hop” might sound like (I was a little too young to have ever actually gone to one), while Side 2 collects music from the same period as “I Must Run”. Another of the songs on this album, “Till You Get What You Want” has been included on several garage rock compilation albums; I have a copy on Acid Dreams Epitaph. Nothing else is quite as good as “I Must Run”, but several of the other songs on the album are just as enjoyable. Later albums collecting Phil and the Frantics music have come out on Bacchus Archives Records (Phil and the Frantics) and Light in the Attic Records (also called Phil and the Frantics); the latter label also recently released the album by past UARA Jim Sullivan).
As a postscript, when I first started writing about Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists, I figured that it would be one 1960’s band or artist after another. Actually Phil and the Frantics is only the second UARB/UARA this year from that decade, the other being Linda Pierre King.
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Flashback: The Under Appreciated Rock Band for August 2010 – Queen Anne’s Lace
Queen Anne’s Lace is a cool pop-psychedelic band that I really enjoy hearing; my favorite song on the album, “The Happiest Day of My Life” was released on Soft Sounds for Gentle People, Volume 2. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any songs by the 1960’s band on YouTube, though there are several by the more recent band of that name which appears regularly at Renaissance Fairs.
I also included a description in that article of a similar album that I truly love: Nachgedanken, by a German band called Schattenfreiheit. Like last month’s UARB, Dead Hippie, there was virtually nothing about this band on the Internet until fairly recently. (Oddly enough though, this was one of the first albums where I was able to find images of both sides of the album cover; images of back album covers are much more available now but were quite rare 5 or 6 years ago). I am really not trying to show off in my writings about Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Rock Artists, but I mostly want to showcase bands and artists that people might actually be able to locate on CD or YouTube or at a used record store or whatever, rather than albums like this that are crazy-rare. Needless to say, there is nothing on YouTube by Schattenfreiheit either.
