Internet

INTERNET (WORLD WIDE WEB)
 
 
The Internet  is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide.  It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.  The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.  Although the Internet protocol suite has been widely used by academia and the military industrial complex since the early 1980s, events of the late 1980s and 1990s such as more powerful and affordable computers, the advent of fiber optics, the popularization of HTTP and the Web browser, and a push towards opening the technology to commerce eventually incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of contemporary life.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Some of these albums were easy finds, and others were really tough.  I found one of the Pink Fairies’ albums plus a retrospective album right away, but I didn’t get my copy of the album that I actually heard, What a Bunch of Sweeties until I ordered it off the Internet 20-some years later. 
 
(March 2010) 
 
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I am up to Rack 28 now, just a few months shy of the fifth anniversary of Katrina (and with the Gulf full again – not with a blockbuster storm, but with barrels and barrels of leaking oil that are heading our way as I write); and for those of you with a calculator, that totals well over 500 cleaned up albums that I am now able to play again and enjoy.  I have them sitting in plain covers and sleeves that I get from Bags Unlimited, with full-color covers (including the back covers on occasion) that I have downloaded from the Internet; after printing them out, I tape them onto the blank covers.  I also have information on the album down the spine just like they had originally. 
 
(May 2010)
 
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Beyond the limited information that is given on the two albums (only the first album even has photographs), I have been able to find out next to nothing about Waterlillies, except that they have a lot of fans in the Internet who are rather incensed at their being ignored so thoroughly. 
 
(June 2010)
 
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My fondness for this album is echoed in an even better and much more obscure album that is among the greatest treasures that I have rescued from the mud of Katrina:  Nachgedanken by Schattenfreiheit.  Like Queen Anne’s LaceSchattenfreiheit is basically a male/female duo.  Their album is self-published with amateurish drawings on the cover (including the band’s name written in the shape of a performing porpoise) and is a luscious pop-psychedelic masterpiece that is probably my favorite rock album that is sung in a foreign language (as is apparent from the long words, that would be German).  According to Google Translate, the band name means something like “shadowy freedom” (though maybe it is really “freedom from shadows”), while the album name is “after thoughts”; most of the Internet translation devices don’t seem to know either word though.
 
(August 2010)
 
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So there I was a couple of weeks ago, working up a UARB article on a 1960’s garage rock band (Phil and the Frantics).  I found practically nothing on the Internet about them (except for a really snide piece with lots of putdowns and profanity); there were some nice (though incomplete) liner notes on a compilation album that I have on them, but it just wasn’t coming together.
 
(December 2011)
 
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There is nothing about Ja Ja Ja in Allmusic or Wikipedia, but there is a Facebook fan page (see www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=116444666173 ) and some other stuff about them on the Internet, so I was quite surprised to find that their front-woman Julie Jigsaw (real name:  Julie Ann Ashcraft) isn’t German at all:  She is originally from Dallas, Texas
 
(February 2012)
 
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I managed to put together a pretty coherent story on Milan (also known as the Leather Boyfrom literally dozens of bits and pieces that I found on the Internet.  
 
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I guess I am stalling a little because no one seems to know much about Stratavarious, or their lead singer, who goes by the name of Lady
 
As an example of the mystery about the band, on one YouTube video, the band is listed as “Stratavarious a/k/a Johnny Usry”; while a short piece on a blog on the Internet says that it was an all-female disco band.  (The latter gentleman mentioned that their hit was “Lady”, when Lady was actually the name of the lead singer; though to be fair, there is a track on the album called Let Me Be Your Lady Tonight”)
 
(March 2012)
 
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One curious fact about the Trashwomen:  The Internet is littered with song lyrics on just about every singer and rock band you can think of, but I have not been able to find any lyrics out there of the songs by this band, for some reason. 
 
(May 2012)
 
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But what is interesting about this offer is that this is the only reference on the Internet that I have been able to find of a second album by Wild Blue called Primitive Prayer
 
(June 2012)
 
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Bob Friedman also has posts on the Internet saying that he had played with Dead Hippie
 
(July 2012)
 
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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). 
 
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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. 
 
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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).  
 
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I also included a description in that article of a similar album that I truly loveNachgedanken, by a German band called Schattenfreiheit.  Like last month’s UARBDead Hippie, there was virtually nothing about this band on the Internet until fairly recently.  
 
(August 2012)
 
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Some people are now putting their music collections “in the cloud” and then somehow accessing it over the Internet; as painful as it was to lose my collection to Katrina, I cannot imagine doing that myself. 
 
(November 2012)
 
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Also known as the Incredible Beast (and if you are trying to find them on the Internet, that’s a much easier search), there isn’t much out there other than what is available on a website managed by Bob Yeazelwww.bobyeazel.com/Beast.htm .  This band Beast set the standard for what I was trying to accomplish in all of my posts:  showcasing unknown bands that didn’t sound like anybody else. 
 
(December 2012)
 
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The last album by Les Sinners is scarcely mentioned at all on the various Internet sources that I researched about this band; it came out in 1976 on the CBS Records label (basically, Columbia Records outside of the USA) and is called Le Chemin de Croix De Jos Roy (“The Way of the Cross for Jos Roy”). 

 

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Typically the Internet sources that I investigated had only sketchy and somewhat contradictory information on the band.  There is what appears to be a complete singles discography of Les Sinners at faintlyblowing.blogspot.com/2008/03/les-sinners-sinnerisme-1966.html .  Overall, the most reliable information on Les Sinners came from a website called Badcat Records, at the link badcatrecords.com/BadCat/SINNERS.htm .  In addition to write-ups on the band and their various albums, Badcat also has information on solo work by the bandmembers as well as links to related bands. 

 

(April 2013)
 
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When the operation was moved to the Internet  www.bompstore.com/ – I was a little behind the curve and just thought I had dropped off their mailing list for some reason.  It is not as tactile an experience anymore, and I kind of miss that.  I also might be the very last Bomp! mailorder customer that still sends a paper check! 

 

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On one of my beloved Bob Dylan bootleg albums, I have a live performance of When the Ship Comes In – one Internet source says that it was in Carnegie Hall – that has this memorable introduction:  “I wanna sing one song here recognizing that there are Goliath’s nowadays.  And, er, people don’t realize just who the Goliath’s are, but in olden days Goliath was slayed and everybody looks back nowadays and sees how Goliath was slain.  Nowadays there are crueler Goliath’s who do crueler, crueler things, but one day they’re gonna be slain too.  And people 2,000 years from now can look back and say, remember when Goliath the second was slain.” 

 

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I have not found a whole lot on the Not Quite on the Internet other than what is given on the Dark Lord Rob website – www.americanentropy.com/music/not_quite/ – that gives the long history of the band, its predecessor bands, other bands that they knew and played with along the way, etc.  I hope that it is okay by him that I use these photographs; I’ll happily take them down if he is not pleased.  Their Voxx Records album, . . . Or the Beginning is pictured earlier in this article. 

 

(May 2013)

 

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Any in-depth discussion of Bob Dylan inevitably comes to the supposedly controversial and dramatic “going electric”, where he was booed at some concerts and called “Judas” at another.  The single “Mixed Up Confusion” – the very first 45 released by Dylan – muddies those waters considerably, and this is perhaps the reason that this ground-breaking recording is given short shrift in both Wikipedia and Allmusic.  In fact, I found almost nothing about the song except YouTube videos, lyric sheets, download sites, and the other usual Internet folderol. 

 

(June 2013/2)

 

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For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent Pebbles CD’s on AIP normally have a copyright notice for BFD Productions – someone else was brought in to write the liner notes, since the ones that Greg Shaw did were said to be mostly geared to serious collectors.  This gentleman’s name is Nigel Strange, and he is supposedly the editor of a magazine called Web of Sound.  I haven’t been able to find out anything about this person on the Internet, and I suspect that he is yet another fiction, as is “A. Seltzer” (clearly a reference to Alka-Seltzer) who wrote the crazed liner notes for the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP.  I loved reading the liner notes as I played the Pebbles albums (still do in fact). 

 

(July 2013)

 

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As happened with another previous UARB Queen Anne’s Lace, I have scoured the Internet pretty thoroughly and have found considerable information about the players but very little about the original Silverbird band.   

 

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Vic Ortiz also contributes to Silverbird’s Broken Treaties album, at least as a songwriter; how he is related to the others is unclear.  While he is almost certainly not the boxer Victor Ortiz – Ortiz also appeared earlier this year on Dancing with the Stars – Vic Ortiz is still listed on innumerable Internet sites with the boxer’s nickname:  Vicious Vic Ortiz

 

(August 2013)

 

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I feel no need to restate what I have already written on Wikipedia, since those articles are more readily accessible on the Internet than these Facebook posts. 

 

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A while later, I started scouring the Internet for information about Milan himself, and as I have written previously, that Wikipedia article became the genesis for the more complete article that I wrote about Milan for Ugly Things magazine.  I still haven’t updated the Wikipedia article on Milan with the information that was in the Ugly Things article, but I’m sure that I will get around to it one day.  That article can be found here:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_the_Leather_Boy .  

 

(September 2013)

 

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Lisa Bankoff of Chimera was quoted on one Internet blog as saying that Mal Luker is their record producer; Luker also plays guitar and keyboards on Sad Song for Winter

 

(November 2013)

 

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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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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 . 

 

(February 2014)

 

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In 1991Michael Erlewine founded the All Music Guide as an Internet-based consumer guide; he later launched All Movies Guide and All Games Guide.  

 

What I have found about most Internet music sites is that they are mostly geared toward modern music and don’t help me very much.  Even Rolling Stone only goes back to 1967; the Rolling Stone Record Guide that I had pre-Katrina covered only albums in print except for the biggest artists.  Allmusic truly tries to cover everything, though some of the UARB’s and UARA’s don’t show up in their database.  Generally speaking, Allmusic has more bands and artists than Wikipedia, though some bands with a big write-up in Wikipedia have almost nothing in Allmusic

 

(March 2014/2)

 

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There is some misinfomation out there about the Sons of Fred – such as the caption on the above photograph – and I found a letter from Pete Sears that was reprinted on the Radio London website at:

www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/65fabs/jun65/fab130665/fab130665.html .  Much of what I am presenting in this post is based on this letter.  Contrary to what Allmusic saysthe Sons of Fred are not from the coastal town of Great Yarmouth.  The band was actually based in Dulwich and Beckenham, where Ray Redway and Alan Bohling were from.  Mick Hutchinson and Tim Boyle were from Chislehurst, while Pete Sears grew up in Hayes, near Bromley.  However, Sears does not know where the band name the Sons of Fred came from.  Also, the Sons of Fred are not at all related to another band called Odyssey, despite what is shown on Allmusicalong with plenty of other Internet sites. 

 

(March 2014/2)

 

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Every once in a while, I see something on the Internet that makes me just step back and marvel.  As usual, I went on the Internet to see what I could find about the Soul Agents.  I immediately uncovered a blog called The British Sound that is run by an Italian rock historian named Bruno Ceriotti.  His most recent creation was what he called “The Soul Agents Day-by-Day Story”.  He describes the Soul Agents as “undoubtedly one of the best British rhythm ’n’ blues bands of the early 60’s” and thanks 30 people who assisted him over the 20 years of research required to put this information together, among them Eric Clapton and Keith Emerson.  This truly amazing history of the band can be found at:  thebritishsound.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-soul-agents-day-by-day-story.html . 

 

(May 2014)

 

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Cristy Lane’s remake of One Day at a Time hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles, and the song became the cornerstone of a television and Internet marketing juggernaut for Cristy Lane’s music. 

 

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The brightly-colored cover on the self-titled album by this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Artist of the MonthMikki has only the name in large lettering, and there are no photos included; so I really didn’t know what to expect when I uncovered the LP a decade or so back.  The first two song titles on Side 1 are the same, so that usually indicates a dance album.  However, there is a remarkable variety of material on the album; most Internet sources put it in the Soul and Funk categories. 

 

I had to dig around quite a lot on the Internet (as usual); one entry on Mikki is by a kindred spirit who writes about Rare and Obscure Music on Facebook:  www.facebook.com/pages/Rare-and-Obscure-Music/133581693333210 . 

 

(July 2014)

 

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Trying to uncover what was behind this dramatic change in Bob Dylan’s music was hard enough to figure out at the time, and there are several competing stories on the Internet from people who often seem to have an agenda.  There is a film out there called Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born Again, books such as Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan, and numerous magazine articles.  

 

(August 2014)

 

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Some years later, I saw a piece on a national news show about snake-handling churches.  I was able to find the video for this story on thInternet not long ago; but now that the National Geographic Channel had a reality-TV show in a snake-handling church where someone died, and with Gary Tuchman broadcasting a story about them on CNN in 2012, I can no longer find it.  Anyway, the news reporter had grown up within or at least near that religion; and he knew that, at some point, he would have to revisit his past.  The story was mesmerizing to me – when the reporter took up a snake himself, he was taken by an overpowering ecstasy.  At some point, the feeling left him, and he realized what he was doing and gave the snake back. 

 

What I remember most was the music – the reporter called it a cross between gospel music and acid rock, and it is unlike anything else that I have ever heard.  I spent many years without success trying to hunt up an album of snake-handling music, and I actually have a picture in my mind of an album that I came across a long time ago. 

 

(November 2014)

 

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In 1995Phil Gammage founded PreFab International Recordings as a way to present his music on the Internet; their site can be found at:  www.scarletdukes.com/prefab/index.shtml .  Many records by Phil Gammagethe CorvairsCertain Generalthe Scarlet DukesVoodoo Martini, and others can be found there.  

 

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I sold this disco band short somewhat in my post.  I was depending on the basic Internet info on the band that was repeated in a myriad places.  But it wasn’t until a year or two later that I was able to locate a copy of the back cover of the Stratavarious album, where most of the best information and credits can usually be found.  There I determined that the person so beautifully playing the harp on many of the songs is Erica Goodman, a renowned concert harpist.  There is also nothing on the back cover about the lead vocalist going by the name of “Lady, although she is listed this way on at least one of the 12” singles

 

(March 2015)

 

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I used to hear the Elvis Presley recording of “Love Me Tenderand the Linda Ronstadt recording of Love Me Tenderplayed together on the radio as though they were singing a duet of the song, and the result is simply gorgeous.  Thankfully, disc jockeys have freedom in their job that others in the music industry do not, since I understood that is the only way the faux duet could be heard; because there were too many obstacles to releasing the combination as a single recording (i.e., for purchase).  I did locate a photo of a disk on the Internet that does have the duet on it though; perhaps that was intended to be strictly for use by disc jockeys. 

 

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As quoted in the blog What Fresh Hell is This (overall the best source on information on Black Russian that I was able to find on the Internet), People magazine said of the group in their October 16, 1980 issue:  “The Kapustins were members of Sovremennik, a state-run pop orchestra, with Natasha [Kapustin] on vocals and piano and Serge [Kapustin] on guitar and percussion.  Vladimir [Shneider] produced and played piano for the Singing Hearts, which was one of Russia’s hottest groups in the mid-’70s.  But, as Vladimir notes, they were pumping out more agitprop than pop.  ‘We’d sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end — if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like ‘Killing Me Softly’ or ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’.  But never rock.” 

 

Most of the posts that I found on the Internet seem more interested in the Black Russian story than in the music.  Writing for Orange Coast magazine of Orange County, CaliforniaKeith Tuber stated in an article entitled “Black Russians Mix Well Socially”:  “The problem with the album, which is musically interesting and contains an assortment of classical chord structures – a manifestation of the trio’s early training – is the lyrics.  Only ‘’Cause I Love Youis entirely written by one of the bandmembers (Serge [Kapustin]), while the others are collaborations.  To my mind, the words are vastly inferior to the music.” 

 

Along with links to two of the songs, “Move Together” and ’Cause I Love You, the blog called The Homoerratic Radio Show says of the album:  “Unfortunately, most of their songs sound like numbers cut from the final version of a mediocre Broadway musical.  Still, the group’s got an interesting story, and these two songs aren’t that bad.” 

 

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I did not find anything else going on with Serge Kapustin of Black Russian until recent times, when he worked on several recordings with singer John Pagano.  Pagano is from Rhode Island and combines R&B and easy-listening stylings; he is best known as the long-time lead vocalist in Burt Bacharach’s touring band.  Three songs are available at several Internet sites by the pair:  “Destiny”, “Hope”, and “A Time in Space”. 

 

(April 2015/1)

 

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I often had trouble figuring out the lyrics to songs by the Rolling Stones; they are easy enough to snag off the Internet now, but sometimes it was hard for me to get it from playing the songs back in the day.  In some cases, I even went down to Reznick’s Records and leafed through their sheet music for Rolling Stones songs to find out what the lyrics said – occasionally on multiple occasions for the same song. 

 

In the last verse of “Get off of My Cloud”, I wasn’t driving then of course, and I had no clue about what the last two lines meant – I’m sure I had seen parking tickets on a car before, but not a whole cluster of them.  And the British term for a car’s windshield, “windscreen” was totally foreign to me.  As a matter of fact, the website on the Internet where I got these lyrics just now didn’t even have it right – they had “window screen”. 

 
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Johnny No by the Primitives is identified by Mal Ryder and others as being a cover of “Thunder and Lightning”; I have been unable to find the connection, however.  Most of the songs called Thunder and Lightning that are mentioned on the Internet were released long after this song. 

 

(May 2015)

 

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I don’t know anything about the Fourmost except that I think they were the band that I saw in an early booklet or paper about the Beatles who were holding their guitars as though they were violins.  I haven’t been able to find that photo on the Internet though.  Hello Little Girl by the Fourmost opens Side 2 of an album called The Songs Lennon and McCartney Gave Away

 

(June 2015)

 

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Anyway, the music is the hard part when doing psychedelic rock; for many would-be psychedelic rock bands, just about any lyrics will do, and the stranger the better.  I was planning to come up with some examples of those lyrics, but they were a little scarce on the Internet.  However, this excerpt from the Allmusic review by Todd Kristel of the Pebbles, Volume 3 LP actually does a better job of describing the songs than the lyrics themselves would: 

 

“This compilation features Higher Elevation’s ‘The Diamond Mine’, a showcase for the nonsense rambling of disc jockey Dave DiamondTeddy & the Patches’ ‘Suzy Creamcheese’, which manages to rip off both Frank Zappa and ‘Louie Louie; Crystal Chandlier’s ‘Suicidal Flowers’, which sounds like the Doors drenched in fuzz guitar; William Penn Fyve’s ‘Swami’, which is such a self-conscious attempt to evoke 1967 that it’s hard to believe it was actually released that year; Jefferson Handkerchief’s ‘I’m Allergic to Flowers’, which was presumably intended as a novelty songCalico Wall’s ‘Flight Reaction’, a fascinating acid-damaged glimpse into the mind of a passenger who’s sitting in an airplane before takeoff and worrying about a possible crash; the Hogs’ (allegedly the Chocolate Watchband under a different name) ‘Loose Lip Sync Ship’, which consists of an instrumental passage that mutates into Zappa-influenced weirdness; the Driving Stupid’s ‘The Reality of (Air) Fried Borsk’ and ‘Horror Asparagus Stories’, which feature precisely the kind of grounded lyrics that you’d expect; the Third Bardo’s ‘Five Years Ahead of My Time’, a genuinely good number even though it doesn’t sound five minutes ahead of its time; [and] the Bees’ ‘Voices Green and Purple’, which made the Nuggets Box Set along with the Third Bardo song . . . ”  
 

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The Human Zoo wrote all of their own material for the most part, with everyone except the drummer writing or cowriting at least one song.  Unlike the usual situation, where one bandmember does most of the songwriting, no one is shown as a songwriter on more than three of their eleven songs.  There are two other songwriters listed in the credits, Al Morettini and D. Leonards; they might be friends of the bandmembers or something, but they aren’t otherwise listed on the Internet

 

(July 2015)

 

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What I was faced with was a little more involved – the devastation from Hurricane Katrina that happened 10 years ago.
 
After a day or two, one of my neighbors said that she could see many of my record albums through the windows in part of the wreckage from the house. I had my albums (around 2,600 at that point in time) on several nice wooden racks that I had found on the Internet
Then after I have the disks back into sleeves and covers again, I look around on the Internet for the album covers and print them (as big as possible to fit onto a piece of paper). I then tape them onto the covers. When I first started doing this a decade or so ago, about the only place you could find album cover photos was Amazon.com listings and such as that. Some of the front covers that I found for my more obscure albums were tiny, and after blowing them up, they were practically illegible. Nowadays though, artist websites and other sites like Flickr and Discogs have both front and back covers and even shots of the record labels (though I haven’t tried to mess with those). You don’t have to use the boring back covers if you don’t want to; often I will use alternate album covers or even a cover from a different album by the same artist.
 
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The genesis of Crystal Mansion was in an R&B covers band called the Secrets from Mount Laurel, NJ that was active from 1962 to 1968 – they had the same name as the girl group called the Secrets that David White and John Madara had worked with in 1963, though there was apparently no other relation between the two groups. Early bandmembers in the Secrets included guitarist Ronnie Gentile and drummer Rickey Morley; lead vocalist Johnny Caswell and keyboardist Sal Rota were added by 1968. The band came up with a 45 for Capitol Records, “The Thought of Loving You” b/w “Hallelujah”; at that point, the band changed its name to Crystal Mansion. Several Internet sources speak glowingly of Crystal Mansion, particularly with respect to New Jersey music clubs where they often appeared. The success of the single, which reached #1 on the local Los Angeles charts, led to an album for the label in 1969 called Crystal Mansion.
 
In his Allmusic review of Crystal Mansion’s 1971 album, The Crystal Mansion (though granting that album only two stars), Joe Viglione calls their 1968 single The Thought of Loving You “a little mini-pop masterpiece” and “a timeless pop song”.  This song, “The Thought of Loving You” was released by Cher in 1968 (as a single only) and was later recorded by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, the Manhattan Transfer, Spiral Starecase, Lou Christie, Astrud Gilberto, and Wayne Newton.  Unfortunately, the earlier Capitol album Crystal Mansion (1969) sold poorly – Allmusic describes it as “an album that turned out a disappointment for all involved” – and information on the Internet about this album is hard to come by.
 
* * *
Tepid opinions of this album [The Crystal Mansion] are fairly commonplace on the Internet; besides the two-star review by Allmusic already mentioned, Badcat Records also grants the record only two stars. Crystal Mansion is compared unfavorably to the namesake of the Motown label, Rare Earth; while Johnny Caswell certainly lacks the propulsive pipes of their drummer and lead singer Peter Rivera, Caswell and Crystal Mansion are after a completely different groove on their album.
(August 2015)
* * *
I bought a CD by another local rock band at about the same time as 3 Doors Down; it was Super Feinds by Level with the Ground.  It is an excellent album, and everyone thought that they might hit the big time also.  I read on the Internet years later that the album sold an amazing 5,000 copies; I have never heard how many copies of the 3 Doors Down demo CD were sold.  Level with the Ground began performing with another hot local band, Stereo Crisis; and later the two bands merged to form Seven Left.
 
*       *       *
 
Jon Pierre Gee & TouchThe Time is Now – This 1995 album has smooth soul sounds with funk touches and is a delight to the ears.  I haven’t been able to find much about him on the Internet, so I have to go with his own website; this is a nice summary of what I hear on the record (italics in the original):  “Jon Pierre Gee (born May 14th Greenwood, MS) is an example of an old school artist who has stayed current while remaining true to the heartsoul and messages of classic, gospel, jazz, blues, he was born listening to.”
 
Bruce Hornsby and the RangeA Night on the Town – I signed up for one of those Internet music services at about the time I got these CD’s (Pandora probably); I guess I was supposed to buy a lot of songs and albums through the website, but I never even got around to downloading the 20 free songs that they offered me.  I’m just too old-school I guess!  In any case, it was an easier way to play CD’s than what I have on my computer at work now; and one bonus was that I could easily call up a short review of whatever CD I was playing rather than having to pull one up on Wikipedia or Allmusic.   
 
New MarinesBonfire – There is virtually nothing about this 1998 album on the Internet.  I remember it as a fine rock album, though I haven’t played it lately.  The Discogs website describes New Marines as a post punk band; Bonfire is their second album. 
 
Robert TepperModern Madness – I have seen this record show up on the Internet in a few slots, since it features Tori Amos among the background singers.  Her under-rated debut effort Y Kant Tori Read – technically an album by the rock band Y Kant Tori Read rather than an album by Tori Amos individually like all of her later records – came out in the same year. 
 
*       *       *
 
Amanda Brix had been in an all-female band called the Lame Flames that was active in the Los Angeles area in the 1980’s.  They are described variously on the Internet as a rap trio and a heavy metal act (with Amanda Brix called a “sex goddess”).  Though the band has a Facebook page – www.facebook.com/The-Lame-Flames-137156196321030/ – they apparently did not release any records, and I am not sure that there are any YouTube videos out there either.  There are oodles of photos and posters on the Facebook site and elsewhere on the Internet though. 
 
*       *       *
 
Mandy Brix of Amanda Jones shows up in a lot of Internet searches because in 1988, she married bass guitarist Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses.  She is now happily married to a recording industry executive named Steven TolandJeff Drake says that Mandy is “[j]ust being a very glamorous housewife . . . with a couple of kids”. 
 
(December 2015)
 
*       *       *
 
I initially had Katrina and the Waves confused with a rock band that I remember from some years earlier that did pretty good music (live, not just recorded background music) in a recruitment video I believe for the U. S. Air Force. I have no idea who they were (and can find nothing on the Internet about them); but their female lead singer looked a little like Katrina Leskanich, and the Waves were the female section of the U. S. Naval Reserves, so that sure made sense to me. Since they are a British band, I doubt very much if they were the ones; though in actuality, Katrina and her then-boyfriend Vince de la Cruz are from America, so who knows.  
* * *
Surprisingly little is available on the Internet about the Ramrods (and also the Lovemasters for that matter); I cannot find so much as a 45 that was released during the band’s brief history. The best information that I have found is in a November 2014 post by John Perye on a website called berlinlovesyou.com; it includes a quote from drummer Robert Mulrooney: “The Ramrods were the first band in Detroit to play in the style of the Ramones.” Perye also writes: “I have heard countless stories from many Detroiter’s who argued that during the 1980’s there was no better soul-funk-party-new-wave band than the Lovemasters.”
 
* * *
At the beginning of (Santa’s Got a) Bomb for Whitey by the Lovemasters is a bit of wacky but intriguing dialogue. I found precisely one reference to it on the Internet, a blog post by A. Templeton Goff answering a question about a different skit. He says: “[It is by] the Credibility Gap, the first group that featured Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and David Lander (McKean’s partner from Laverne & Shirley). It’s from their album A Great Gift Idea. . . . Pretty hard to come by these days (it’s never been released on tape or CD), but it’s well worth the effort to find. IMHO, it ranks with National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner, Firesign Theatre’s Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, and Stan Freberg’s United States of America as one of the all-time great comedy albums.”
 
As laid out by A. Templeton Goff, the dialogue is taken from a sketch by the Credibility Gap called Kingpin, the story of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. if told in a “blaxploitation” film. (Only the first two lines plus the fistfight are actually on the Lovemasters album):
 
BUS DRIVER: Sorry, fella, you’ll have to get to the back of this bus.
KINGPIN: Listen, you honky-donkey! No one tells Kingpin to get back!
(Sounds of a fistfight)
BUS DRIVER: I . . . I thought you were nonviolent, Kingpin!
KINGPIN: Sure, man. Only when I’m . . . dreamin’!
 
(March 2016)
* * *
There are probably at least a dozen dirty versions of Louie Louie that are available on the Internet. The FBI closed its investigation in 1965 with the famous conclusion that the lyrics for Louie Louie are “unintelligible at any speed”.
 
* * *
Song lyrics are hard to come by on the Internet for songs by the Gynecologists, and what is being sung is usually hard to understand. John Barge quotes some of the song lyrics in his liner notes. For instance, “Ron and Nancy” imagines sexual antics not far removed from those envisioned in Sex Orgy with the Bradee Bunch: “Even Ed Meese got a piece!” In Kent State, Tommy Afterbirth sings: “Those traitors don’t even deserve a decent burial.” As Barge puts it: “Those who seek succor from politically correct song lyrics will find little sustenance here.”
 
(June 2016)
* * *
In the post-MTV era, YouTube has become an important venue for new artists, although the blizzard of posted videos makes this a daunting task to say the least. Barely a decade old, YouTube – the second most popular website on earth (after Google) – has ballooned to the point that 400 hours of new videos are being uploaded every minute (as of February 2017). According to Wikipedia: “It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.” 
* * *
Greg Shaw and the Bomp! Records crew even came up with a cool term for the kind of music that they like: “Bomp-Worthy”. Sadly, in the 12+ years since Shaw’s untimely death in 2004, this term has largely dropped out of sight on the Internet. I remember one “thread” (in the pre-blog era) talking about Linda Ronstadt’s Bomp-Worthy music that was still findable not so long ago, and I wish I could remember more about it. It was one of the references for the Wikipedia article that I wrote on the Stone Poneys. Now, there are only 20 results on Google for Bomp-Worthy
(June 2017)
*       *       *
 
Also, I am going to try to add a bonus to the articles:  A “Flashback” to the band from two years earlier if I can find a YouTube video to post.  I am a little leery of this kind of link myself since I evidently picked up a couple of nasty viruses that way early this year.  What I have heard you can do to keep it safe is to copy the link rather than click on it directly, and then paste the copy into the Internet box.  Anyway, wish me luck; supposedly there are millions of YouTube videos on any band imaginable – and I have come across several as I have been writing these posts.  But I don’t expect to find one on all of the Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists, that’s for sure. 
 
(Year 2 Review)
 

*       *       *

 

Marking my fourth year of Facebook posts on Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Under-Appreciated Rock Artists (I have last month’s band, Chimera on as I write), I began to appreciate that there is a lot of good information here that needed more exposure.  As I suppose most of you know by now, I write about much more than just a rock band that hardly anyone has ever heard of; for instance, in November, I started off Part 2 of “Women in Rock” with a piece on the 1970’s cartoon show, Josie and the Pussycats
 
Thus, I launched a website on Google Sites and put all of my previous posts on the regular Internet.  Here is the URL:   .  My Facebook friends get first crack at the new posts; I don’t put anything on the website until the next month. 
 
(Year 4 Review)
  
*       *       *
 

I have tried to work out my approach to rock and roll writing, and this is what I have come up with. 

 

Keep it Interesting – Decades ago, when I first started doing this, it came to me that posts about rock should crackle. 

 

Keep it Positive – Most rock critics tend to put down other rock artists and bands while they write about the ones that they like; I try not to do that. 

 

Keep it Informative – I am not trying to show off here or to talk over someone’s head.  I am not afraid to call somebody an ex-Beatle for instance.  

 

Keep it Engaging – I try to show the same enthusiasm for something that I found out long ago and not go, ho hum, everybody knows that.  

 

Keep it Clean – I will use offensive language when needed, but without the words fully spelled out, and I keep nudity to a minimum. 

 

Keep it Sweeping – Many if not most people like a lot of kinds of music, so the writing and the UARA’s and UARB’s come from pretty much the full spectrum. 

 

Keep it Personal – I will connect up what I am writing about to my personal life when I can – but not too much; this is the Internet after all. 

 

*       *       *

 

I also keep these pieces personally informative; in short, I learn a lot myself from putting these Facebook Notes together.  While most of the kernels of what I write about are lodged in my brain somewhere, I coax the details from simple Google searches, with my primary sources being Wikipedia and Allmusic.  For the UARB’s and UARA’s, I sometimes find myself mounting searches for hours.  I often put in extended quotes that I find on-line, particularly for matters that I don’t know too much about.  That is perfectly fine with Wikipedia, but not so much with other Internet source material.  

 

(Year 5 Review)

 

* * *
 
Also on tap this coming year is an overview of New Wave Theatre, a fascinating public-access show that presented LA-area punk rock bands amongst other assorted weirdness that would air at the end of the popular late-night program Night Flight on USA Network.  I have poked around on the Internet, and even though all of the episodes are now available on YouTube, not much has been written about the show – the Wikipedia article on New Wave Theatre has basically two or three paragraphs.  Thus, I am going to have to do some primary research before I can get this post put together.  I do plenty of that with the UARB’s and UARA’s, but for the remainder of the posts, I typically lean on Wikipedia and Allmusic.  In other words, that is something else that I have been putting off.  I had always hoped to at least keep this up for at least 10 years, but I am not there yet.
 
(Year 8 Review)
Last edited: April 7, 2021