I have not meant to suggest in these various Women-in-Rock posts that women have just been doing what men do when they do rock and roll. Sometimes women are the ones blazing a trail. When Cheap Thrills, the breakthrough album for Big Brother and the Holding Company came out in August 1968, Janis Joplin had already wowed the crowd at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
To some extent, the psychedelic movement in rock was winding down, or at least it was old news: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out the year before, the Summer of Love in San Francisco was also in 1967, and Hair opened on Broadway in late 1967. There was even a mock funeral for “The Death of the Hippie” in San Francisco in October 1967.
Still, Cheap Thrills was a true sensation – as happened so often with the Beatles, Big Brother and the Holding Company staked out territory on this album that other rock artists could only admire; no one tried to follow them. The front cover art by top “underground comics” artist R. Crumb still looks amazing; almost as well known is the dramatic pose by Janis Joplin on the back cover.
But of course it was the music that made a true impression on me. An old friend from my model-rocket days had introduced the album to me, playing the devastating live track “Ball and Chain” first and then Side 2 in its entirety after that (including “Ball and Chain” again). The song that closed the first side, “Piece of My Heart” was one of my two favorite songs in my first year at college in 1969-1970 – the other was “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the Band.
Within two months of its release, Cheap Thrills was the #1 album in the country on the Billboard charts where it remained for most of the rest of the year. Surrealistic Pillow from the Jefferson Airplane made it to #3, and the Grateful Dead had a #6 album with In the Dark – but not until 1987.
* * *
When Joan Baez took the stage at Live Aid on July 13, 1985, she addressed the crowd: “Good morning, children of the ’80s. This is your Woodstock, and it’s long overdue.” It seemed so obvious and yet I remember being surprised at her saying it. Joan Baez of course was there in 1969 – the full name was Woodstock Music & Art Fair – and she was there whenever peaceful protest was needed also.
And Joan Baez was there beginning in 1960 when the folk music revival was in its heyday; and she wasn’t political at all in the beginning. Folk music has always been fairly gender-balanced – besides Joan, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell were leading lights who went on to have long careers. The folk groups often had at least one woman – there was Mary Travers in Peter, Paul and Mary, and Ronnie Gilbert in the Weavers.
Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York and is the daughter of a scientist father. The Baez family converted to Quakerism when she was a child, and Joan’s political bent basically continued the pacifism tradition of the Christian denomination. Joan saw a concert by Pete Seeger (who recently passed away) when she was 13, and she was strongly moved by his music.
Following her performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, Joan Baez recorded her first album for Vanguard Records, Joan Baez, which was produced by Fred Hellerman of the Weavers. While not a big seller right away, it has been certified “gold”, as were Joan Baez, Vol. 2 and Joan Baez in Concert. Her early studio albums were mostly collections of traditional folk ballads and blues songs sung in her lovely soprano voice. However, Joan’s early concert albums were unusual in that they included new songs rather than traditional material or established songs.
Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 (1963) included the first Bob Dylan songs that she recorded, “Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right” and “With God on Our Side” – she says that the latter song is the first Dylan song that she learned. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were starting to become closely associated with one another (and perhaps romantically) as the two leading folk artists of the day; a few months prior to the release of this album, the two had appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, and Bob and Joan were photographed together on the back cover of his album Bringing it All Back Home (1965).
My favorite Joan Baez song is “Diamonds and Rust” (1975) – she had already put together an incredible career, but I was stunned by the power of this song.
* * *
Patti Smith grew up in Chicago and is of Irish descent. She moved to New York City in 1967 and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; they had a tumultuous romantic relationship that was exacerbated by their poverty and Mapplethorpe’s struggles with his sexuality. In her multiply-award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids about their time together, Patti Smith refers to Robert Mapplethorpe as “the artist of her love”. His photographs of her became the album covers for the Patti Smith Group albums.
Patti Smith was under consideration as the lead singer for the psychedelic/hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult, and she contributed to several songs by the band, including “Debbie Denise” and “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” on what for my money is their best album, Agents of Fortune (1976); the latter song features the memorable spoken introduction: “You’re boned like a saint / With the consciousness of a snake”. Agents of Fortune also includes the biggest hit single by Blue Öyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”.
Patti Smith began performing rock music in 1974 – another year that popular music changed irrevocably, much like 1963 with the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion – with music archivist and guitarist Lenny Kaye. While not actually inventing the term “punk rock”, he had popularized it in his liner notes for the first compilation album of garage rock and psychedelic rock music, Nuggets, so this was most appropriate.
The band that became the Patti Smith Group was created when Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums) and Richard Sohl (piano) joined Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye. The piano player’s name is fitting, since his understated work at the ivories is in many ways the soul of the Patti Smith Group. The proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges added Scott Thurston as a frantic pianist in 1973, but a keyboard player in a punk rock band is rare.
Many years ago, I wrote of Patti Smith that she resembled nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s; but that really is only one side of her music persona. She is a rocker pure and simple as well as a poet and a first-rate vocalist and one hell of a writer besides.
Patti Smith is renowned for reworking well-known rock standards to fit her vision and also of adding shock value to her music that surely made Alice Cooper smile; and that was true of the band’s first single from 1974, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory”. Patti Smith included a monologue about Patty Hearst (who had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army earlier that year) in the middle of her rendition of the 1960’s standard; while the latter song relates the salvation she received from the helplessness of her job on an assembly line after discovering a book by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Jim Morrison of the Doors was similarly enthralled with Rimbaud).
Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis to a major-label contract with Arista Records; and their debut album Horses was one of the first punk rock albums, being released in December 1975 (four months before the Ramones’ first album came out). Actually, through most of the 1970’s, punk rock was mostly found on 45’s and an occasional EP; except for the biggest punk rockers, LP’s were pretty rare.
While recording their third and most successful album, Easter, Patti Smith Group encountered Bruce Springsteen who was recording his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town in the adjoining studio. The Boss had recorded “Because the Night” but was unsatisfied with it and did not include it on the album. Jimmy Iovine was the producer and engineer on both albums; he passed along a copy of the tape of the song to Patti Smith, who recast the song and included it on her album. The first performance of “Because the Night” was at a Patti Smith Group concert on December 30, 1977 at New York’s CBGB club, with Bruce Springsteen joining in on guitar and vocals. Bruce and Patti share songwriting credits on “Because the Night”, which is probably Patti Smith’s best known song. Easter also includes several songs about Patti Smith’s feelings on organized religion; and her debut album, Horses includes her version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” that had the spoken-word introduction, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.
Patti Smith Group’s previous album, Radio Ethiopia was influenced by the fiery 1960’s Detroit band MC5; and Patti Smith later met the band’s guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. They married in 1980, and the couple raised two children. The joke at the time was that she married him only because she wouldn’t have to change her name. Their son, Jackson Smith married White Stripes drummer Meg White in 2009; interestingly, Meg didn’t have to change her name either when she had previously married the band’s guitarist Jack White.
The Patti Smith Group album Wave (1979) included a lovely tribute to her husband called “Frederick”; “Dancing Barefoot” on the same album was also dedicated to him.
* * *
In 1988, Patti Smith released a well-received album called Dream of Life that included a hit song, “People Have the Power” – in that song, she seemed to anticipate the momentous changes that were coming in the world, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but not just that.
Patti Smith suffered a series of losses in quick succession beginning with the death in November 1994 of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, followed by the unexpected death of her brother Todd Smith – her band’s keyboard player Richard Sohl and her early love Robert Mapplethorpe had died four and five years earlier. She reemerged from that pain more visible than ever; her next album, Gone Again (1996) was perhaps her most self-assured effort and included a tribute to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, “About a Boy”. The final track is a heartbreaking tribute to her late husband, “Farewell Reel”.
More recently, Patti Smith made news around the world when she was photographed with a beaming smile while meeting Pope Francis.
* * *
Fetchin Bones formed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1983 and released a total of six albums. Initial bandmembers included two women, lead vocalist Hope Nicholls and bassist Danna Pentes, plus guitarist Gary White and drummer Marc Mueller. Writing for Allmusic, Michael Sutton said that the band was “highlighted by Nicholls’ powerhouse voice, which recalled Janis Joplin in its dirty intensity”. North Carolina studio wizard Don Dixon produced their second through fourth albums, but Fetchin Bones’ no-nonsense hard rock was quite different from the jangle pop that Dixon was normally associated with, such as the fine band Let’s Active.
With their final album, Monster (1989), Fetchin Bones had mastered a sound that presaged the grunge sound that was to come in the following decade; but the band was always out of step. In the beginning, they were alternative rock even before anyone really knew what that was, and their sound became the template for the riot grrrl movement as well. Their albums are quite good; I used to see their videos occasionally on MTV’s late-night alternative-rock showcase 120 Minutes, and they were briefly college-radio favorites. They should have been FM Radio hitmakers as well, though it never happened.
When I first arrived at the ruins of our home after Hurricane Katrina, I picked up a mud-covered disk that turned out to be a Fetchin Bones album – Galaxy 500 as I recall. I laid it back in the grass and then noticed when I was leaving that it had warped into a flower shape. With the baking sun beating down on hundreds of albums strewn across our yard and our neighbors’ yard (where most of the debris from our home wound up), I was at a loss as to how any of those albums could be saved.
As it turned out, my mistake was to flip the album over when I laid it back down; the soaking-wet album covers and the mud were fairly effective protection until I could gather the albums together and stack them in our neighbors’ carport. I returned dozens of times and was continually amazed when I found ever more albums tucked into every possible corner of the yard and bushes and foundation and creek. Bad Pumpkin, Fetchin Bones’ second album is the only one of their albums that I have cleaned up so far; I hope there are others to come.
* * *
When I first encountered the music of Tori Amos, it sounded so different from everything else on the music scene that I wasn’t even sure it would be filed in the Rock category at the record stores. Tori was born in North Carolina as the daughter of a Methodist minister, though she was raised in Maryland. She was a musical prodigy who knew her way around a piano as a young girl. Tori Amos received a scholarship at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, though she lost it at age 11, possibly because of her growing interest in popular music, particularly Led Zeppelin.
Her first foray into music was to front a rock band called Y Kant Tori Read; their sole album release was also called Y Kant Tori Read (1987) and sold very few copies. (Remarkably, Tori Amos still didn’t lose her recording contract with Atlantic Records). Many years later, I saw an original copy of the album at a record collectors show in San Francisco; it was priced at $115. After holding it awhile, I remembered coming across a copy at a used record store (also in San Francisco I think but before I moved there). It was priced rather high ($8 or $10), and I wondered why I had never heard of it. I passed on the purchase and thought of it (and others that got away) often over the years, but I don’t dwell on it anymore: Y Kant Tori Read would have gone through Hurricane Katrina like all the rest.
Tori Amos then began developing the highly personal and often confessional style that would mark the rest of her career. Initially she mainly sang in her idiosyncratic and versatile vocal style while accompanying herself on the piano. Her posture during concerts is also unusual – she sits side-saddle on the piano bench facing the audience, often writhing at the time.
What brought Tori Amos early attention was an even sparer performance of a true story: an a capella rendition of her being raped by an acquaintance, and what was going through her head during the ordeal. The song, “Me and a Gun” was the title song on an EP called Me and a Gun; it is also included on her first solo album, Little Earthquakes (1992). Her slow-tempoed cover of the Nirvana hit song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” later became a tribute to Kurt Cobain following his death.
But Tori Amos’ higher profile went beyond only record sales and television appearances and such: Women across the country and around the world identified strongly with what she was saying and were also listening closely to the intensity of her feminist voice in the struggles with religion, relationships and abuse that were outlined in her songs. She became the first spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest such organization in the country.
In later albums like Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, Tori Amos brought rock embellishments back to her music that had not worked out successfully on her initial album. In all, she has released 15 albums.
* * *
Rarely does a band name all by itself make me want to buy an album, but that sure was the case for We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It; this was also the name of their first album that came out in 1985. The group featured sisters Maggie (Magz) Dunne (guitar and vocals) and Jo Dunne (bass), plus Vickie (Vix) Perks (vocals) and Tina O’Neill (drums). The band’s name is often shortened to Fuzzbox (what else can you do?).
Their flamboyant look and their savvy meld of new wave and punk a la the Go-Go’s with fuzztone made the British band indie rock darlings for a time. Allmusic gripes that, if anything, they don’t use their fuzzbox enough; but I was always satisfied. We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It includes mostly cool original songs but also a cover of the fuzz classic “Spirit in the Sky”; the song was originally released by Norman Greenbaum in late 1969, reaching #1 on the British charts, and was a #1 hit in the UK by another British band Doctor and the Medics in 1986.
* * *
When I first looked up the LIQUID FAERIES album, Eggshells & Snake Leaves on the Internet, nothing helpful was coming up; so I entered the band name and album name together. Amazingly, I got only about 20 hits on Google – by contrast, I got 18,100 hits for past UARB Blair 1523, and they are plenty obscure as well. I suppose I spelled something wrong, because later on, I had hundreds of hits.
* * *
According to the eBay, Discogs, MusicStack, GEMM, cdandlp.com, and other listings given on similar sites, the bandmembers in Liquid Faeries – yet another all-female band – are Janette Staton (bass guitar, backing vocals), Ann Murrell (drums, keyboards, percussion) and Sarah E. Denham (guitar). However, there is another bandmember also: Kate Van Orden (lead vocals, guitar) – she is listed first on the back cover. Apparently all of these sites copy from one another; only melodyuniverse shows Kate’s name also.
I have seen many incompatible labels applied to their music: new wave, goth rock, indie rock, and world music among them. I have run across several outlets that have the same long promo using these music labels for the Liquid Faeries; it is bold and all caps and in German, and there are almost any as many exclamation points as there are words.
The band was among several in an outfit called La-Di-Da Productions; I think they were also based in Brighton. On a blog called CloudberryRecords.com, there is an interview with Mark “Sparky” Marrable, who was a member of another La-Di-Da band called How Many Beans Make Five. He said that Liquid Faeries started out as four women; one male guitarist and bass player was added later. Then after playing one gig with the band, Kate Van Orden asked Marrable to join so he could bring “a commercial element to the songwriting”.
Mark Marrable said of the demise of the Liquid Faeries: “The band split when Ann (Suzanne) [Murrell] left and we replaced her with an over trained jazz drummer who couldn’t get the hang of it, and the two couples in the band also split! Very messy.”
* * *
As can be seen, I have found out virtually nothing about this band, and it is frustrating. The LP that I have was released on a Dutch label (Fundamental Records), but the band is evidently from Brighton in England. The above EP, Milkstar came out on an Austrian label, as did the CD.
But I can at least describe the music; indie rock fits for sure – the vocals float nicely above the dense keyboards and guitars. The only thing “goth” about the music is that the repeated chords tend to be toward the bass end – the album isn’t at all gloomy. It is a little late to be “new wave”; the album came out in 1990 and would be better characterized as alternative rock. The album is quite cohesive, but the best songs I suppose would be “Raven Eyes”, “Carousel” and “Cocktails”.
I have another album in my collection called Demonic Forces by a group called Shakti (not Shakti, the jazz-rock band of that name apparently) that has the same sort of Indian/Middle Eastern influences resonating through their music. They might become a future UARB.
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Flashback #1: The Under-Appreciated Rock Artist of the Month for January 2012 – RON FRANKLIN
I forgot again last month, so I have to double up, again.
There are several Ron Franklin songs on YouTube; here is a live performance of “The Elocutionist” from the album that I have, Ron Franklin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-job_-MxAZE . “Dark Night, Cold Ground” is a little tougher, and this song comes directly from that album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSWAXfpXVxM . “Pontiac”, from that album, is also available, apparently as a live track at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHDt66toxAM . There is an older gentleman also named Ron Franklin who has many more videos on YouTube than the UARA does.
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Flashback #2: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for February 2012 – JA JA JA
I had to dig around some, but I did find some classy Ja Ja Ja videos on YouTube. This is their classic “Katz Rap” (“Cat Rap”), the first female rap song released in Europe: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf5410itOkU . I found a post by Julie Jigsawnovich on the Internet saying that this song, “Graffiti Artists International” is the first rap song that was completely about graffiti: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEp__hk3Gi0 . Those two are audio-only, but this is a perfectly delightful video performance of “I Am an Animal”, featuring lots of face painting, cool clothes, Stegosaurus costumes, and neat dance moves: www.youtube.com/watch?v=allIpI84D_0 .
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Picture Gallery #1: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for January 2011 – HACIENDA
These are the first two albums by Hacienda on Alive Records that I have:
This third album I do not have as yet:
This is a group shot of the band:
And another:
Here is the band in concert:
And here:
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Picture Gallery #2: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for February 2011 – THE WANDERERS
This is the original LP cover (the CD cover is virtually the same):
This is the picture sleeve of one of their 45’s:
This is the plain cover for their other single, but is it red:
This is a photo of the band:
This is evidently the Wanderers in concert:
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Story of the Month: Hasil Adkins (from May 2011)
A 1986 article in the Kicks fanzine on Hasil Adkins caused a sensation; and Norton Records was born when they released Out to Hunch later that year, the first of several albums collecting Adkins’s music. I had heard the most successful of his singles on one of the Born Bad CD’s, “She Said”; and even that one song demonstrates that Hasil Adkins can burp and beep and howl his way through a song better than anyone this side of Charlie Feathers (he is known as the “king of rockabilly” and is the co-author of one of Elvis Presley’s earliest hit songs, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”). However, I didn’t get an entire album until last year.
Hasil Adkins is a true wild man; Allmusic calls him a “rockabilly lunatic” and “a frantic one-man band who bashed out ultra-crude rock & roll tunes about sex, chicken, and decapitation into a wheezing reel-to-reel tape machine in a West Virginia shack”. He was born in a small town there in 1939 and lived in obscurity for most of his life. After buying a Hank Williams record, he naively assumed that Williams was playing all of the instruments, since there were no other musician credits shown. By the time he figured out the truth, he had already taught himself to be a one-man band, so he stuck with that.
When rock and roll came along in the mid-1950’s, he jumped in with both feet. He released about 15 singles back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, though none were big sellers. In a charming affectation, he always mailed a copy of his records to whoever was President at the time it came out; and Richard Nixon sent him a thank-you note one time.
The Hasil Adkins album that I got is called White Light/White Meat (subtitled: “Authentic West Virginia One Man Band Home Recordings 1958-1965”) and provides a representative slice of his output: raucous rockers (“Hot Dog Baby”), Hank Williams-style love songs (“You’re Gonna Break My Heart”), songs about dance crazes (“Come on and Do the Shake with Me”), and country weepies (“Lonely Graveyard”).
There’s plenty more out there: Allmusic reports that he released 5 or 6 songs about a “lascivious but non-existent dance craze called ‘the hunch’” – collected in that first Norton album, Out to Hunch – and another song about eating peanut butter on the moon. Norton also released Poultry in Motion, a full album of Adkins songs that all have “chicken” in the title. Thanks to the exposure from Kicks magazine and Norton Records, Hasil Adkins got to enjoy a minor celebrity status during the last 20 or so years of his life.
Rockabilly survives as echoes and grace notes in a dozen or more rock and country subgenres but, in its purest form, might be too kinetic and sinewy for the general public to bear for very long. Thankfully, in this modern era, nostalgia has morphed into what might more properly be called musical appreciation; and forgotten and unknown gems from all types of popular music are available to connoisseurs like never before. Reissue CD’s from Norton Records and many other labels abound with rockabilly nuggets, as just one example. Norton – now celebrating its 25th anniversary – has released at least 8 albums of Hasil Adkins’ music and continues to do so (the album I have came out in 2010 and wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Adkins until I added it); and several other record companies have also put out Hasil Adkins albums.
I have not meant to suggest in these various Women-in-Rock posts that women have just been doing what men do when they do rock and roll. Sometimes women are the ones blazing a trail. When Cheap Thrills, the breakthrough album for Big Brother and the Holding Company came out in August 1968, Janis Joplin had already wowed the crowd at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
To some extent, the psychedelic movement in rock was winding down, or at least it was old news: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out the year before, the Summer of Love in San Francisco was also in 1967, and Hair opened on Broadway in late 1967. There was even a mock funeral for “The Death of the Hippie” in San Francisco in October 1967.
Still, Cheap Thrills was a true sensation – as happened so often with the Beatles, Big Brother and the Holding Company staked out territory on this album that other rock artists could only admire; no one tried to follow them. The front cover art by top “underground comics” artist R. Crumb still looks amazing; almost as well known is the dramatic pose by Janis Joplin on the back cover.
But of course it was the music that made a true impression on me. An old friend from my model-rocket days had introduced the album to me, playing the devastating live track “Ball and Chain” first and then Side 2 in its entirety after that (including “Ball and Chain” again). The song that closed the first side, “Piece of My Heart” was one of my two favorite songs in my first year at college in 1969-1970 – the other was “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the Band.
Within two months of its release, Cheap Thrills was the #1 album in the country on the Billboard charts where it remained for most of the rest of the year. Surrealistic Pillow from the Jefferson Airplane made it to #3, and the Grateful Dead had a #6 album with In the Dark – but not until 1987.
* * *
When Joan Baez took the stage at Live Aid on July 13, 1985, she addressed the crowd: “Good morning, children of the ’80s. This is your Woodstock, and it’s long overdue.” It seemed so obvious and yet I remember being surprised at her saying it. Joan Baez of course was there in 1969 – the full name was Woodstock Music & Art Fair – and she was there whenever peaceful protest was needed also.
And Joan Baez was there beginning in 1960 when the folk music revival was in its heyday; and she wasn’t political at all in the beginning. Folk music has always been fairly gender-balanced – besides Joan, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell were leading lights who went on to have long careers. The folk groups often had at least one woman – there was Mary Travers in Peter, Paul and Mary, and Ronnie Gilbert in the Weavers.
Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York and is the daughter of a scientist father. The Baez family converted to Quakerism when she was a child, and Joan’s political bent basically continued the pacifism tradition of the Christian denomination. Joan saw a concert by Pete Seeger (who recently passed away) when she was 13, and she was strongly moved by his music.
Following her performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, Joan Baez recorded her first album for Vanguard Records, Joan Baez, which was produced by Fred Hellerman of the Weavers. While not a big seller right away, it has been certified “gold”, as were Joan Baez, Vol. 2 and Joan Baez in Concert. Her early studio albums were mostly collections of traditional folk ballads and blues songs sung in her lovely soprano voice. However, Joan’s early concert albums were unusual in that they included new songs rather than traditional material or established songs.
Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 (1963) included the first Bob Dylan songs that she recorded, “Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right” and “With God on Our Side” – she says that the latter song is the first Dylan song that she learned. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were starting to become closely associated with one another (and perhaps romantically) as the two leading folk artists of the day; a few months prior to the release of this album, the two had appeared at the 1963 March on Washington, and Bob and Joan were photographed together on the back cover of his album Bringing it All Back Home (1965).
My favorite Joan Baez song is “Diamonds and Rust” (1975) – she had already put together an incredible career, but I was stunned by the power of this song.
* * *
Patti Smith grew up in Chicago and is of Irish descent. She moved to New York City in 1967 and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; they had a tumultuous romantic relationship that was exacerbated by their poverty and Mapplethorpe’s struggles with his sexuality. In her multiply-award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids about their time together, Patti Smith refers to Robert Mapplethorpe as “the artist of her love”. His photographs of her became the album covers for the Patti Smith Group albums.
Patti Smith was under consideration as the lead singer for the psychedelic/hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult, and she contributed to several songs by the band, including “Debbie Denise” and “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” on what for my money is their best album, Agents of Fortune (1976); the latter song features the memorable spoken introduction: “You’re boned like a saint / With the consciousness of a snake”. Agents of Fortune also includes the biggest hit single by Blue Öyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”.
Patti Smith began performing rock music in 1974 – another year that popular music changed irrevocably, much like 1963 with the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion – with music archivist and guitarist Lenny Kaye. While not actually inventing the term “punk rock”, he had popularized it in his liner notes for the first compilation album of garage rock and psychedelic rock music, Nuggets, so this was most appropriate.
The band that became the Patti Smith Group was created when Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums) and Richard Sohl (piano) joined Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye. The piano player’s name is fitting, since his understated work at the ivories is in many ways the soul of the Patti Smith Group. The proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges added Scott Thurston as a frantic pianist in 1973, but a keyboard player in a punk rock band is rare.
Many years ago, I wrote of Patti Smith that she resembled nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s; but that really is only one side of her music persona. She is a rocker pure and simple as well as a poet and a first-rate vocalist and one hell of a writer besides.
Patti Smith is renowned for reworking well-known rock standards to fit her vision and also of adding shock value to her music that surely made Alice Cooper smile; and that was true of the band’s first single from 1974, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory”. Patti Smith included a monologue about Patty Hearst (who had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army earlier that year) in the middle of her rendition of the 1960’s standard; while the latter song relates the salvation she received from the helplessness of her job on an assembly line after discovering a book by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Jim Morrison of the Doors was similarly enthralled with Rimbaud).
Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis to a major-label contract with Arista Records; and their debut album Horses was one of the first punk rock albums, being released in December 1975 (four months before the Ramones’ first album came out). Actually, through most of the 1970’s, punk rock was mostly found on 45’s and an occasional EP; except for the biggest punk rockers, LP’s were pretty rare.
While recording their third and most successful album, Easter, Patti Smith Group encountered Bruce Springsteen who was recording his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town in the adjoining studio. The Boss had recorded “Because the Night” but was unsatisfied with it and did not include it on the album. Jimmy Iovine was the producer and engineer on both albums; he passed along a copy of the tape of the song to Patti Smith, who recast the song and included it on her album. The first performance of “Because the Night” was at a Patti Smith Group concert on December 30, 1977 at New York’s CBGB club, with Bruce Springsteen joining in on guitar and vocals. Bruce and Patti share songwriting credits on “Because the Night”, which is probably Patti Smith’s best known song. Easter also includes several songs about Patti Smith’s feelings on organized religion; and her debut album, Horses includes her version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” that had the spoken-word introduction, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.
Patti Smith Group’s previous album, Radio Ethiopia was influenced by the fiery 1960’s Detroit band MC5; and Patti Smith later met the band’s guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. They married in 1980, and the couple raised two children. The joke at the time was that she married him only because she wouldn’t have to change her name. Their son, Jackson Smith married White Stripes drummer Meg White in 2009; interestingly, Meg didn’t have to change her name either when she had previously married the band’s guitarist Jack White.
The Patti Smith Group album Wave (1979) included a lovely tribute to her husband called “Frederick”; “Dancing Barefoot” on the same album was also dedicated to him.
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In 1988, Patti Smith released a well-received album called Dream of Life that included a hit song, “People Have the Power” – in that song, she seemed to anticipate the momentous changes that were coming in the world, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but not just that.
Patti Smith suffered a series of losses in quick succession beginning with the death in November 1994 of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, followed by the unexpected death of her brother Todd Smith – her band’s keyboard player Richard Sohl and her early love Robert Mapplethorpe had died four and five years earlier. She reemerged from that pain more visible than ever; her next album, Gone Again (1996) was perhaps her most self-assured effort and included a tribute to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, “About a Boy”. The final track is a heartbreaking tribute to her late husband, “Farewell Reel”.
More recently, Patti Smith made news around the world when she was photographed with a beaming smile while meeting Pope Francis.
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Fetchin Bones formed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1983 and released a total of six albums. Initial bandmembers included two women, lead vocalist Hope Nicholls and bassist Danna Pentes, plus guitarist Gary White and drummer Marc Mueller. Writing for Allmusic, Michael Sutton said that the band was “highlighted by Nicholls’ powerhouse voice, which recalled Janis Joplin in its dirty intensity”. North Carolina studio wizard Don Dixon produced their second through fourth albums, but Fetchin Bones’ no-nonsense hard rock was quite different from the jangle pop that Dixon was normally associated with, such as the fine band Let’s Active.
With their final album, Monster (1989), Fetchin Bones had mastered a sound that presaged the grunge sound that was to come in the following decade; but the band was always out of step. In the beginning, they were alternative rock even before anyone really knew what that was, and their sound became the template for the riot grrrl movement as well. Their albums are quite good; I used to see their videos occasionally on MTV’s late-night alternative-rock showcase 120 Minutes, and they were briefly college-radio favorites. They should have been FM Radio hitmakers as well, though it never happened.
When I first arrived at the ruins of our home after Hurricane Katrina, I picked up a mud-covered disk that turned out to be a Fetchin Bones album – Galaxy 500 as I recall. I laid it back in the grass and then noticed when I was leaving that it had warped into a flower shape. With the baking sun beating down on hundreds of albums strewn across our yard and our neighbors’ yard (where most of the debris from our home wound up), I was at a loss as to how any of those albums could be saved.
As it turned out, my mistake was to flip the album over when I laid it back down; the soaking-wet album covers and the mud were fairly effective protection until I could gather the albums together and stack them in our neighbors’ carport. I returned dozens of times and was continually amazed when I found ever more albums tucked into every possible corner of the yard and bushes and foundation and creek. Bad Pumpkin, Fetchin Bones’ second album is the only one of their albums that I have cleaned up so far; I hope there are others to come.
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When I first encountered the music of Tori Amos, it sounded so different from everything else on the music scene that I wasn’t even sure it would be filed in the Rock category at the record stores. Tori was born in North Carolina as the daughter of a Methodist minister, though she was raised in Maryland. She was a musical prodigy who knew her way around a piano as a young girl. Tori Amos received a scholarship at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, though she lost it at age 11, possibly because of her growing interest in popular music, particularly Led Zeppelin.
Her first foray into music was to front a rock band called Y Kant Tori Read; their sole album release was also called Y Kant Tori Read (1987) and sold very few copies. (Remarkably, Tori Amos still didn’t lose her recording contract with Atlantic Records). Many years later, I saw an original copy of the album at a record collectors show in San Francisco; it was priced at $115. After holding it awhile, I remembered coming across a copy at a used record store (also in San Francisco I think but before I moved there). It was priced rather high ($8 or $10), and I wondered why I had never heard of it. I passed on the purchase and thought of it (and others that got away) often over the years, but I don’t dwell on it anymore: Y Kant Tori Read would have gone through Hurricane Katrina like all the rest.
Tori Amos then began developing the highly personal and often confessional style that would mark the rest of her career. Initially she mainly sang in her idiosyncratic and versatile vocal style while accompanying herself on the piano. Her posture during concerts is also unusual – she sits side-saddle on the piano bench facing the audience, often writhing at the time.
What brought Tori Amos early attention was an even sparer performance of a true story: an a capella rendition of her being raped by an acquaintance, and what was going through her head during the ordeal. The song, “Me and a Gun” was the title song on an EP called Me and a Gun; it is also included on her first solo album, Little Earthquakes (1992). Her slow-tempoed cover of the Nirvana hit song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” later became a tribute to Kurt Cobain following his death.
But Tori Amos’ higher profile went beyond only record sales and television appearances and such: Women across the country and around the world identified strongly with what she was saying and were also listening closely to the intensity of her feminist voice in the struggles with religion, relationships and abuse that were outlined in her songs. She became the first spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest such organization in the country.
In later albums like Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, Tori Amos brought rock embellishments back to her music that had not worked out successfully on her initial album. In all, she has released 15 albums.
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Rarely does a band name all by itself make me want to buy an album, but that sure was the case for We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It; this was also the name of their first album that came out in 1985. The group featured sisters Maggie (Magz) Dunne (guitar and vocals) and Jo Dunne (bass), plus Vickie (Vix) Perks (vocals) and Tina O’Neill (drums). The band’s name is often shortened to Fuzzbox (what else can you do?).
Their flamboyant look and their savvy meld of new wave and punk a la the Go-Go’s with fuzztone made the British band indie rock darlings for a time. Allmusic gripes that, if anything, they don’t use their fuzzbox enough; but I was always satisfied. We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It includes mostly cool original songs but also a cover of the fuzz classic “Spirit in the Sky”; the song was originally released by Norman Greenbaum in late 1969, reaching #1 on the British charts, and was a #1 hit in the UK by another British band Doctor and the Medics in 1986.
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When I first looked up the LIQUID FAERIES album, Eggshells & Snake Leaves on the Internet, nothing helpful was coming up; so I entered the band name and album name together. Amazingly, I got only about 20 hits on Google – by contrast, I got 18,100 hits for past UARB Blair 1523, and they are plenty obscure as well. I suppose I spelled something wrong, because later on, I had hundreds of hits.
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According to the eBay, Discogs, MusicStack, GEMM, cdandlp.com, and other listings given on similar sites, the bandmembers in Liquid Faeries – yet another all-female band – are Janette Staton (bass guitar, backing vocals), Ann Murrell (drums, keyboards, percussion) and Sarah E. Denham (guitar). However, there is another bandmember also: Kate Van Orden (lead vocals, guitar) – she is listed first on the back cover. Apparently all of these sites copy from one another; only melodyuniverse shows Kate’s name also.
I have seen many incompatible labels applied to their music: new wave, goth rock, indie rock, and world music among them. I have run across several outlets that have the same long promo using these music labels for the Liquid Faeries; it is bold and all caps and in German, and there are almost any as many exclamation points as there are words.
The band was among several in an outfit called La-Di-Da Productions; I think they were also based in Brighton. On a blog called CloudberryRecords.com, there is an interview with Mark “Sparky” Marrable, who was a member of another La-Di-Da band called How Many Beans Make Five. He said that Liquid Faeries started out as four women; one male guitarist and bass player was added later. Then after playing one gig with the band, Kate Van Orden asked Marrable to join so he could bring “a commercial element to the songwriting”.
Mark Marrable said of the demise of the Liquid Faeries: “The band split when Ann (Suzanne) [Murrell] left and we replaced her with an over trained jazz drummer who couldn’t get the hang of it, and the two couples in the band also split! Very messy.”
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As can be seen, I have found out virtually nothing about this band, and it is frustrating. The LP that I have was released on a Dutch label (Fundamental Records), but the band is evidently from Brighton in England. The above EP, Milkstar came out on an Austrian label, as did the CD.
But I can at least describe the music; indie rock fits for sure – the vocals float nicely above the dense keyboards and guitars. The only thing “goth” about the music is that the repeated chords tend to be toward the bass end – the album isn’t at all gloomy. It is a little late to be “new wave”; the album came out in 1990 and would be better characterized as alternative rock. The album is quite cohesive, but the best songs I suppose would be “Raven Eyes”, “Carousel” and “Cocktails”.
I have another album in my collection called Demonic Forces by a group called Shakti (not Shakti, the jazz-rock band of that name apparently) that has the same sort of Indian/Middle Eastern influences resonating through their music. They might become a future UARB.
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Flashback #1: The Under-Appreciated Rock Artist of the Month for January 2012 – RON FRANKLIN
I forgot again last month, so I have to double up, again.
There are several Ron Franklin songs on YouTube; here is a live performance of “The Elocutionist” from the album that I have, Ron Franklin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-job_-MxAZE . “Dark Night, Cold Ground” is a little tougher, and this song comes directly from that album: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSWAXfpXVxM . “Pontiac”, from that album, is also available, apparently as a live track at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHDt66toxAM . There is an older gentleman also named Ron Franklin who has many more videos on YouTube than the UARA does.
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Flashback #2: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for February 2012 – JA JA JA
I had to dig around some, but I did find some classy Ja Ja Ja videos on YouTube. This is their classic “Katz Rap” (“Cat Rap”), the first female rap song released in Europe: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf5410itOkU . I found a post by Julie Jigsawnovich on the Internet saying that this song, “Graffiti Artists International” is the first rap song that was completely about graffiti: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEp__hk3Gi0 . Those two are audio-only, but this is a perfectly delightful video performance of “I Am an Animal”, featuring lots of face painting, cool clothes, Stegosaurus costumes, and neat dance moves: www.youtube.com/watch?v=allIpI84D_0 .
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Picture Gallery #1: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for January 2011 – HACIENDA
These are the first two albums by Hacienda on Alive Records that I have:
This third album I do not have as yet:
This is a group shot of the band:
And another:
Here is the band in concert:
And here:
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Picture Gallery #2: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for February 2011 – THE WANDERERS
This is the original LP cover (the CD cover is virtually the same):
This is the picture sleeve of one of their 45’s:
This is the plain cover for their other single, but is it red:
This is a photo of the band:
This is evidently the Wanderers in concert:
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Story of the Month: Hasil Adkins (from May 2011)
A 1986 article in the Kicks fanzine on Hasil Adkins caused a sensation; and Norton Records was born when they released Out to Hunch later that year, the first of several albums collecting Adkins’s music. I had heard the most successful of his singles on one of the Born Bad CD’s, “She Said”; and even that one song demonstrates that Hasil Adkins can burp and beep and howl his way through a song better than anyone this side of Charlie Feathers (he is known as the “king of rockabilly” and is the co-author of one of Elvis Presley’s earliest hit songs, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”). However, I didn’t get an entire album until last year.
Hasil Adkins is a true wild man; Allmusic calls him a “rockabilly lunatic” and “a frantic one-man band who bashed out ultra-crude rock & roll tunes about sex, chicken, and decapitation into a wheezing reel-to-reel tape machine in a West Virginia shack”. He was born in a small town there in 1939 and lived in obscurity for most of his life. After buying a Hank Williams record, he naively assumed that Williams was playing all of the instruments, since there were no other musician credits shown. By the time he figured out the truth, he had already taught himself to be a one-man band, so he stuck with that.
When rock and roll came along in the mid-1950’s, he jumped in with both feet. He released about 15 singles back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, though none were big sellers. In a charming affectation, he always mailed a copy of his records to whoever was President at the time it came out; and Richard Nixon sent him a thank-you note one time.
The Hasil Adkins album that I got is called White Light/White Meat (subtitled: “Authentic West Virginia One Man Band Home Recordings 1958-1965”) and provides a representative slice of his output: raucous rockers (“Hot Dog Baby”), Hank Williams-style love songs (“You’re Gonna Break My Heart”), songs about dance crazes (“Come on and Do the Shake with Me”), and country weepies (“Lonely Graveyard”).
There’s plenty more out there: Allmusic reports that he released 5 or 6 songs about a “lascivious but non-existent dance craze called ‘the hunch’” – collected in that first Norton album, Out to Hunch – and another song about eating peanut butter on the moon. Norton also released Poultry in Motion, a full album of Adkins songs that all have “chicken” in the title. Thanks to the exposure from Kicks magazine and Norton Records, Hasil Adkins got to enjoy a minor celebrity status during the last 20 or so years of his life.
Rockabilly survives as echoes and grace notes in a dozen or more rock and country subgenres but, in its purest form, might be too kinetic and sinewy for the general public to bear for very long. Thankfully, in this modern era, nostalgia has morphed into what might more properly be called musical appreciation; and forgotten and unknown gems from all types of popular music are available to connoisseurs like never before. Reissue CD’s from Norton Records and many other labels abound with rockabilly nuggets, as just one example. Norton – now celebrating its 25th anniversary – has released at least 8 albums of Hasil Adkins’ music and continues to do so (the album I have came out in 2010 and wasn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Adkins until I added it); and several other record companies have also put out Hasil Adkins albums.
