UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR MAY 2013: HOLLIS BROWN
(New full-length album by Hollis Brown, this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, released on March 5, 2013 on Alive Records)
One name that has come up repeatedly in these 40-odd posts is Greg Shaw, a widely respected music historian and the founder of Bomp! Records – which also includes the labels AIP Records, Voxx Records, Total Energy Records, and Alive Naturalsound Records (usually just called Alive Records) – and their associated Bomp! mailorder music service. It would not surprise me at all if I haven’t mentioned Greg Shaw in a third of these UARB articles. In addition, more than a few of the Under-Appreciated Rock Bands have released albums or EP’s on one of the Bomp!-affiliated labels. If I also included the albums on non-Bomp labels that I ordered through the Bomp! mailorder service, close to half of the UARB’s and UARA’s would likely have a Bomp! connection.
At least as important as Greg Shaw’s work as a music historian and rock critic are his many writings about the future of rock and roll; these were mostly but not entirely published in the hundreds of newsletters and magazines that he put out over the years. Shaw had strong ideas about where rock should be heading; and, not incidentally (and not coincidentally either), he was present for the birth of punk rock, new wave, power pop, psychedelic revival, and other rock genres. Most rock journalists simply report what is going on; Greg Shaw was one of the few who attempted through his writing and his record labels to actually steer the music itself.
No rock music fan could fail to notice that other musical forms have been pushing rock and roll from the musical mainstream; this is particularly true over the past 20 to 25 years. Country, hip hop, boy bands, teen pop – all of these musical genres and more arose, expanded or were revived over this period, and yet a poll shown on the CBS Sunday Morning television program still shows rock music as being America’s favorite, though not by much: At the moment, rock edges out country by 23% to 21%.
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(What? Stuff, the compilation album that introduced me to the UARB for July 2010, the Eyes, released in 1998 on Bomp! Records)
Many of the seminal bands in these rock movements released albums on the Bomp!, Voxx, Alive or Total Energy labels; most of them are not household names by any means, but they are recognized by those in the know as being important bands that shaped the history of rock and roll. Some of these better-known bands and artists are the Romantics, the Modern Lovers, the Dead Boys (and Stiv Bators individually), the Plimsouls (and Peter Case individually), the Beat (and Paul Collins individually), the Stooges (and Iggy Pop individually), Devo, Nikki Sudden, the Black Keys, and Soledad Brothers.
I have collected most or all of the albums in several of the various series of garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums that Greg Shaw has released in the past few decades, including Pebbles, Rough Diamonds, Highs in the Mid-Sixties, English Freakbeat, and Electric Sugar Cube Flashbacks. Pebbles in particular is often cited as one of the chief inspirations behind the punk rock movement of the mid-1970’s – even more so than the better-known Nuggets album. Thus, even Greg Shaw’s historical albums have helped direct the future of rock music.
From my perspective, I found out almost immediately that Greg Shaw and I have the same basic taste in music, and that is why I continue to come to the well decades after I first encountered his records with the Pebbles, Volume 9 and Pebbles, Volume 10 LP’s.
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(Retrospective album of the Breakaways, the UARB for April 2010, released on November 10, 2009 on Alive Records)
Greg Shaw died too young in 2004, but his legacy lives on to this day. Greg Shaw and his wife Suzy Shaw eventually divorced, but she and her current husband Patrick Boissel continue to operate Bomp! Records. Boissel is actually the founder of their most active label, Alive Records and previously operated Marilyn Records in the 1990’s. Bomp! Records celebrates its 40th anniversary next year and advertises itself as the oldest independent record company in the nation.
In my dealings over the years with the Bomp! mailorder service, I have gotten to know Suzy Shaw. I was flattered that, in the advertising copy for some of the albums Bomp! was advertising, she was using some of the articles that I had written in Wikipedia on the Pebbles albums and on the Stiv Bators compilation album, L.A. L.A.; and I told her so once when I was making one of my many orders She wrote back that she had wondered who had done those great write-ups, and she even sent me an autographed copy of the Bomp 2 – Born in the Garage book in appreciation. We have swapped emails many times over the years.
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(Ear-Piercing Punk, the compilation album that introduced me to the UARB for April 2011, Bohemian Vendetta, released clandestinely in 1979 by Bomp! Records on Trash Records)
Greg Shaw began as an amateur journalist and wrote hundreds of newsletters and fanzines early in life; many revolved around science fiction and the work of Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, but they also included one of the earliest rock magazines that Shaw started in 1966 with David Harris, called Mojo Navigator Rock and Roll News. The magazine was said to be an inspiration for Rolling Stone magazine; Greg Shaw wrote for Rolling Stone also, but he and RS founder Jann Wenner apparently didn’t get along that well.
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(Second album by the UARB for January 2011, Hacienda, released on April 6, 2010 by Alive Records)
By the way, let me give me a shout-out and congratulations to Hacienda for being featured in a current series of television commercials for the “cool ranch” promotion by Taco Bell.
After Greg Shaw and Suzy Shaw moved to Los Angeles, the first issue of a new magazine came out – at the very end of the 1960’s (in January 1970) – under the title of Who Put the Bomp. A loose-knit organization called Rock Enthusiasts Amateur Press (R.E.A.P.) – which only had a membership of around 13 – was started by Louis Morra, and he invited Greg Shaw among others to rush a fanzine to press. Greg Shaw was an inveterate publisher in this period and was also publishing several other newsletters having various arcane purposes; these include Karnis Bottle’s Metanoia, Liquid Love, Alligator Wine, and Rock You Sinners!.
The name is taken from “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)”, a Top-40 hit by Barry Mann. This was basically a one-hit wonder, but Mann always concentrated mostly on his songwriting, and he is well known for numerous songs that were co-written with his wife Cynthia Weil – “Blame it on the Bossa Nova” by Eydie Gorme, “Hungry” and “Kicks” by Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Here You Come Again” by Dolly Parton, “Looking through the Eyes of Love” by Gene Pitney originally, etc. Others that he co-wrote with others include two hit duets by Linda Ronstadt, “Don’t Know Much” (with Aaron Neville) and “Somewhere out There” (with James Ingram); “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers; and “On Broadway” by the Drifters and later by George Benson. Barry Mann’s songwriting credits include an astounding 635 songs.
“Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)” – which was co-written by Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin (an even more famous songwriter who co-wrote numerous 1960’s classics with his then-wife Carole King) – parodied and also honored the doo-wop songs of early rock and roll. The singer is thanking the authors of these songs who helped his girl fall in love with him. The “bomp bomp bomp” itself comes from the Marcels’ marvelous, over-the-top version of “Blue Moon”; another famous nonsense chorus, “rama lama ding dong” is also referenced, from “Rama Lama Ding Dong” by the Edsels.
No known copies of this first issue are known to exist; it probably contained only 2 to 6 pages. Greg Shaw himself thought that another fanzine called Trash was the best among what he termed a “terrible” bunch. But from these quite humble beginnings grew a substantial rock and roll empire.
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(Album by the UARB for December 2012, the Invisible Eyes, released on November 22, 2005 on Bomp! Records)
The idea for the magazine originally was that the title of each issue would be taken from the name of a great rock song; thus, the second issue was to have been called Da Doo Ron Ron. Greg Shaw was persuaded that this was not a good idea for an ongoing publication, so the issue was named Who Put the Bomp #2, with Da Doo Ron Ron as the subtitle. This practice was dropped after the third issue, although the initials R.I.A.W.O.L. were frequently present on the front page, standing for “Rock Is a Way of Life”.
“Da Doo Ron Ron” was a #3 hit in 1963 for the girl-group the Crystals; and it was written by another famous 1960’s songwriter couple, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, together with Phil Spector (now infamous for his 2009 conviction for a murder in his home in 2003). This song is a classic example of Spector’s legendary “Wall of Sound” production technique.
The third issue of Who Put the Bomp was subtitled Whenever a Teenager Cries; whereas I grew up with the other two songs and loved them both, I wasn’t familiar with this song. Their 1964 song “Whenever a Teenager Cries” was by one of Greg Shaw’s favorite girl groups, Reparata & the Delrons. (I did find the song on YouTube, and it is another great one without a doubt).
The songwriter is Ernie Maresca; while I didn’t really know that name either, I certainly know his work: He wrote or co-wrote several of the biggest hits by Dion, including “Runaround Sue”, “The Wanderer” and “Donna the Prima Donna”. Maresca was also the songwriter behind one of my own favorite lesser known early 1960’s songs, “Party Girl” by Bernadette Carroll. I stumbled upon the song again on a compilation album not that long ago.
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(Retrospective album by the UARB for August 2012, Phil and the Frantics, released in 1985 as Rough Diamonds, Volume 3 on Voxx Records)
Now, of all of the songs that Greg Shaw could have used to name and then subtitle his magazine, two of them came out in 1963, and the other in 1964, though that one could just as easily have been made in 1963. Why 1963? Greg Shaw was 14 in 1963; and, according to neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music, this is when the brain is most susceptible to the influence of music. As quoted in Bomp 2, Levitin writes: “Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.”
Many years later, Greg Shaw wrote in 2001: “One of my favorite phases of 60’s garage was 1963, when nobody had ever heard of England, and songs like ‘Louie Louie’ [by the Kingsmen] and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ [by the Trashmen] were drawing on 50’s R&B to create something new.”
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(Retrospective album by the UARB for December 2010, the Poppees, released on April 20, 2010 on Bomp! Records)
I was born a couple of years later than Greg Shaw, so I turned 14 in 1965. By then, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were old news; and while I was still paying attention, what was really grabbing me at the time were American artists and bands. First and foremost was “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan; that song – plus the flip side “Gates of Eden” that was nearly as long and every bit as good – captivated me in a way that I just couldn’t keep quiet about. Other great folk-rock sounds of that period included the release of the cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds and the revamped “The Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel. Bob Dylan himself preferred the Byrds’ cover to his own recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man”; but in my usual contrarian way, I preferred Dylan’s original – it was a lot longer for one thing.
These songs were followed closely by the glorious sounds of garage rock and psychedelic rock that were then in their infancy. Songs like “Pushin’ Too Hard” by the Seeds, “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” by Blues Magoos, and “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” by the Electric Prunes really made an impression on me. It wasn’t until I picked up the Nuggets collection and then the numerous Pebbles albums that I plumbed the depths of this scene, but it was by no means brand new to me either.
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(Third album by the UARB for November 2012, Thomas Anderson, released on October 30, 1995 on Marilyn Records)
Greg Shaw continued publishing Who Put the Bomp with ideas both modest and grandiose; in the sixth issue for instance, he introduced a bold mission statement: “Prelude to the Morning of an Inventory of the 60’s”. The name of the magazine would eventually be shortened to just Bomp!, and the 22nd issue that was due to come out in 1981 was never published.
Shortly after Greg Shaw’s death, his ex-wife and business partner Suzy Shaw had her own mission: to cement Shaw’s place in the rock and roll firmament. The result was a gorgeous 2007 hardbound book called Bomp! that was subtitled Saving the World One Record at a Time. In the “Dedication”, Suzy Shaw writes: “The idea for this book came in the early 1980s right after BOMP! magazine first folded. . . . When Greg died I knew it was the most important job I had, as this book is not just the story of BOMP! and Greg Shaw, but a unique document of a time, place, and perspective in the history of rock and roll.”
The co-writer is one of my very favorite musicians (and a prolific writer as well), Mick Farren of the bold English underground rock band, the Deviants. The book opens with the modestly titled “Introduction” by Farren that is as good an overview of the rock music scene as any that I have ever read.
Two years later, Suzy Shaw and the editor of Ugly Things magazine, Mike Stax edited another book, Bomp 2 – subtitled Born in the Garage and sub-subtitled Greg Shaw and the Roots of Rock Fandom 1970-1981!. This book looks a lot like a big issue of Ugly Things and consists of a detailed catalogue of Greg Shaw’s publications over that period, and numerous excerpts from Who Put the Bomp and the other fanzines that were published over this period that were not included in the first book. These books are among my most treasured publications, and they are both autographed by Suzy Shaw.
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(Retrospective album by the UARB for June 2011, the Unknowns, released in 1994 on Marilyn Records)
The genesis of the Bomp! mailorder service came about from the way that Greg Shaw and many of the early collectors found records in those days: Old albums and 45’s were so available and so cheap that many times, Shaw would simply buy several boxfuls and then come home and see what was there. Before long, they were offering the duplicates to friends, then acquaintances, then through ads in his various ’zines. The prices were often about what he paid, 10¢ or so; but times change, just as they have on the recent MetLife ads featuring the Peanuts gang: “Everything can’t be 5¢ (or 10¢)!”
Greg Shaw was a visionary and a legend, and he also had a genius I.Q. of 240 (as I recall). However, he wasn’t good at everything, particularly the business side of Bomp! Records. . . . Well, I certainly can’t tell this part of the story any better than Suzy Shaw did in the Bomp 2 book:
“Being more of a historian than a collector, [Greg Shaw] often said that he hated collectors. All that really mattered to him was getting the general information about the record – it was meant to be played once for the purposes of knowing what type of music it was. If a record was so shattered that it had to be scotch-taped together (this was not unheard of in his collection), it was at least useful for knowing the label, title and catalogue number, and he would file it away with the others without hesitation. So legendary was the generally horrendous condition of his vinyl that certain record dealers still use a grading system to this day that starts with ‘Mint’ and ends with ‘Greg Shaw Minus’. [I have been to record stores myself that posted this grading system.]
“Thus it was no surprise that Greg had not the slightest qualm about merely tossing a customer’s order into a paper grocery bag, stapled at the top to keep the records from spilling out (that’s if you were lucky). The odds of a buyer getting what they wanted or having the vinyl arriving unbroken were quite slim. This was bad enough when you were dealing with friends, but the mailing list had begun to branch out to include the general public. These newcomers had the annoying habit of not only insisting that they receive the exact records that they had paid for, but getting them in one piece, and soon enough the angry letters and threats began pouring in. Never one to be bothered by such minor details, or the law (federal, state and local!), Greg simply ignored the whole mess, continuing as he had before, until the registered letters from the Post Office began arriving, and the government was actually threatening to file charges. I was nothing short of terrified, and in a move that was to be oft repeated in our lives together, my choice seemed to be between going to prison or to take over that part of the business. And so mail order slid over to my side of the game board for once and for all.”
Well I remember poring over those Bomp! mailorder sheets that would arrive in the mail periodically years ago, listing hundreds of albums and 45’s in tiny print with a few tantalizing words of description. I would circle album after album, and then when it came time to actually write the check, I would have to cull the order back to something that I could actually afford.
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! customer that still sends a paper check!
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(Final album by the UARB for May 2010, the Not Quite, released in 1990 on Voxx Records)
This month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, HOLLIS BROWN is not a person, but the name of a band. It is taken from the name of a Bob Dylan song, “Ballad of Hollis Brown”.
Mike Montali, lead singer of Hollis Brown has stated: “Well, I guess naming our band after one of his [Bob Dylan’s] songs is kind of like wearing your heart on your sleeve. I personally think he’s the greatest artist of the 20th century. It’s strange because although we are big fans, we also are influenced by so many other things that we don’t want to get pigeonholed as folk rock. We don’t really cover much of his music, I think because we have the name Hollis Brown, so we feel like to do his music would be a bit too much.”
“Ballad of Hollis Brown” is on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and I imagine that this is the album that most people think is his most overtly “protest” album. I beg to differ; Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan includes four songs that are much closer to being protest songs than any of the songs on Times: “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, “Oxford Town”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bob Dylan is much less of a protest singer than he is generally perceived to be. I speak as someone who is as big a fan of the acoustic Dylan as of the electric Dylan, and I own dozens of songs from this time period that never made it onto any of Bob Dylan’s major-label albums – and there are hardly any protest songs among those recordings either.
I dare say that I was one of the few Dylan fans who was disappointed when The Basement Tapes came out. I eagerly put on the supposed legitimate release of the classic double-LP bootleg album Great White Wonder, only to find that not a single one of the great early acoustic songs that made up most of that album were present; it was all electric songs that Bob Dylan recorded with The Band at the famous Big Pink house (and honestly, there weren't all that many of them on Great White Wonder).
To return to the topic at hand, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is much more typical of the kind of truly wonderful song that Dylan was doing in those days: social commentary, and not protest. The song is based on a true story of a South Dakota farmer named Hollis Brown; desperately poor and at the end of his rope, he kills his wife, his children and then himself. As taken from Wikipedia, critic David Horowitz writes of this too-little-known Dylan classic:
“Technically speaking, ‘Hollis Brown’ is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense, so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown’s plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other.”
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(Third album by the UARA for January 2012, Ron Franklin, released on March 11, 2008 on Alive Records)
Generally speaking, politicians (and even “the Establishment”) are rarely in Bob Dylan’s sights. As an example, “Oxford Town” was written in direct response to an invitation from Broadside magazine for folk singers to write a song about the black student, James Meredith who enrolled at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962. That’s about as close to a pure protest song as anything Dylan ever wrote. However, I imagine that most people living outside the state of Mississippi have no idea that “Ole Miss” is located in the city of Oxford, and Dylan never mentions the student or the university. In a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel, Bob Dylan talked about “Oxford Town”: “It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn’t. . . . I wrote that when it happened, and I could have written that yesterday. It’s still the same. ‘Why doesn’t somebody investigate soon’ – that’s a verse in the song.”
About “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Bob Dylan’s most famous song along these lines, I can hardly improve on what Wikipedia has to say: “Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war and freedom. The refrain ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind’ has been described as ‘impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind.’”
As to the other protest songs on Freewheelin’, Dylan’s angriest song by far, “Masters of War” is directed not at the politicians who get us into wars, but at the war-machine corporations who profit from them. Dylan states in the liner notes on the album: “I’ve never written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out . . . a feeling of what can you do?”. More than any other song that I can think of, in later years Bob Dylan dramatically altered the arrangement of “Masters of War” in concert performances to the point that it is almost unrecognizable from the original version.
In a 2001 interview published in USA Today, Bob Dylan linked this song to the famous farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961: “‘Masters of War’ . . . is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.”
The most complex and imaginative of these songs, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is sometimes mistakenly linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis; but actually, Bob Dylan had already written the song before the crisis happened. In the liner notes on the album, Dylan famously spoke of this song: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Author Ian MacDonald described “A Hard Rain” as one of the most idiosyncratic protest songs ever written.
In the Studs Terkel interview mentioned above, Dylan uncharacteristically laid out what he meant by some of the lyrics in “Hard Rain”: “No, it’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen. . . . In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.”
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(Debut album by the UARB for January 2011, Hacienda, released on September 16, 2008 by Alive Records)
On the following album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, the targets are even more diffuse. A careful listen to the title song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” makes it clear that Bob Dylan is not sending out some clarion call for protest and change, although the tone of the song makes it seem that way. The lyrics are an acknowledgement that the train has already left the station – that the world has irrevocably changed – along with a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet.
“With God on Our Side” relates a litany of various wars, the Cold War and other historical events – such as the slaughter of Native Americans in the 19th Century and the Holocaust – in the context of the oft-believed notion that God or some other higher power is “with us”. Tellingly, nothing is said about the Vietnam War at all in the song originally, although a verse was added for live performances in the 1980’s. I had never heard that before, and I doubt you had either; here is the added verse: “In the nineteen-sixties came the Vietnam War / Can somebody tell me what we’re fightin’ for? / So many young men died / So many mothers cried / Now I ask the question / Was God on our side?”.
“Only a Pawn in Their Game” is about the murder (Wikipedia calls it an “assassination”, and that is not really an overstatement) of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in his own driveway. The conviction of the unrepentant Klansman Byron de la Beckwith for the murder took place in Mississippi in 1994; two other trials of this man 30 years earlier resulted in hung juries. I don’t know how much visibility this murder has in other parts of the country, but it is still pretty fresh in Mississippi. One reason is that Medgar’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams is a civil rights activist in her own right – she was on the local news just this month.
This song is unquestionably a protest song, and Bob Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the same event where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. later gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. However, the song is really less about Evers and more about the murderer (and the other poor whites in Mississippi in those days). As Wikipedia says it: “The song suggests that Evers’ killer does not bear sole blame for his crime, as he was only a pawn of rich white elites who incensed poor whites against blacks so as to distract them from their position on ‘the caboose of the train’.”
According to Joan Baez (speaking in the documentary No Direction Home), the genesis of “When the Ship Comes In” came from Bob Dylan’s own mistreatment at a hotel when a clerk refused to give him a room. The rousing music and vivid Biblical imagery gives the song’s theme – people rising up against oppressive forces that are mistreating them – an air of inevitability that is in the spirit of the title song on the album, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.
The structure of the song was inspired – by way of the cultural tastes of Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo – by a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song “Pirate Jenny”; the song comes from their play, The Threepenny Opera. The song is closely associated with Weill’s wife, the Austrian singer Lotte Lenya, and her breakout role was in a 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera. The most famous song from that play is “Mack the Knife”, which was an unexpectedly huge hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. The lyrics in his version of the song even reference “Miss Lotte Lenya”. Lenya is best known to Americans for her role as the villainous Rosa Klebb in the 1963 James Bond movie, From Russia with Love.
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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(Debut self-titled album, Hollis Brown by this month’s UARB, Hollis Brown, released in 2009 on Vibe Theory Records)
About his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which was released later in 1964, Bob Dylan told Nat Hentoff in New Yorker magazine: “There aren’t any finger pointing songs [here]. . . . Now a lot of people are doing finger pointing songs. You know, pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.”
His song “My Back Pages” is most direct about this new direction in his music and is blatantly self-critical – particularly in the chorus line, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”. The Byrds released a version of “My Back Pages” in early 1967, the seventh and last Bob Dylan song that the band covered and released as a single.
However, this album is not devoid of his earlier musical styles either. Another Side also includes “Chimes of Freedom” that – like “When the Ship Comes In” – is rich with social commentary on the downtrodden and those who have been treated unfairly. However, to me, this is really the kind of song that Bob Dylan was singing throughout this period.
About the changes in his songwriting on Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan told the Sheffield University Paper in May 1965: “The big difference is that the songs I was writing last year . . . they were what I call one-dimensional songs, but my new songs I’m trying to make more three-dimensional, you know, there’s more symbolism, they’re written on more than one level.” Later that year, speaking of “My Back Pages” specifically, Dylan told Margaret Steen in an interview for The Toronto Star: “I was in my New York phase then, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for fear they’d be misunderstood. Now I don’t care if they are.”
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(Single called “Cold City” by this month’s UARB, Hollis Brown, released in 2012 on Band Camp Records)
In like manner, I don’t view the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan as a radical break from the past, but rather a natural evolution of his music. For that matter, I feel the same way about Bob Dylan’s “going electric” on his next two albums, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited; and also his Christian period in the trilogy of albums from 1979-1981: Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. Bob Dylan is very much undervalued as an instrumentalist, in my judgment; his guitar playing – and his harmonica, and his work as a pianist – is so strong that I often don’t even notice whether a song is acoustic or electric. As an example, until I saw it pointed out in Wikipedia while I was researching this month’s post, I had not realized that one of my Top Ten favorite Bob Dylan songs – the last and longest track on Highway 61 Revisited, “Desolation Row” – was the only non-electric song on the album.
As to his Christian period, I have already mentioned the Biblical imagery in “When the Ship Comes In”. The opening verse of the title track, “Highway 61 Revisited” on Highway 61 Revisited is a hip retelling of God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his long-awaited son Isaac. One of the songs on his very first album, Bob Dylan is a traditional folk song called “Gospel Plow”. So none of this is brand new either as I see it.
In conclusion, I am not trying to say that Bob Dylan didn’t perform protest songs; clearly he did, in the broadest sense of the term at least. However, Dylan never vented his outrage in the way that you expected, and he never went after the easy targets. While I am certainly no expert, from what I know of Woody Guthrie – Bob Dylan’s direct inspiration and even his mentor to a limited extent – much the same could be said of his music as well.
I welcome any comments that you might have on what I have written about Bob Dylan here. I suppose you could say that he has been my favorite rock artist for nearly 50 years, and I have strong feelings about his music that don't seem to be echoed in many places. However, I was certainly gratified to find quotes from Bob Dylan himself that support much of what I am trying to say.
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(EP called Nothing and the Famous No One by this month’s UARB, Hollis Brown, released in 2012 on Band Camp Records)
Suzy Shaw wrote me in an email recently that Hollis Brown is her personal favorite among all of the bands that Bomp! Records has worked with over nearly 40 years. And it is easy to see why: Their music is remarkably bright and sunny while still being roots music and infused with the blues. Hollis Brown are true professionals also; the songwriting is first-rate, and the performances simply shine. (Wow, I just gave a lot of references to “light”, didn’t I!). I guess you can tell that I am a real fan of these guys as well.
If I had to succinctly characterize the current musical period – having just watched the first hour of the 2013 Billboard Music Awards – I would use the phrase “overdoing it”. American Idol and the other television singing contests encourage contestants to go all out in their performances, and that attitude has suffused much of today’s music. On at least one occasion, I have heard one of the renowned producers who craft many of today’s hit songs (I forget who exactly) piece one together in a few minutes on National Public Radio during an interview, so studio wizardry has also become available to just about anyone – and it is all too tempting to take that too far. Refreshingly, Hollis Brown holds back in this regard; as Steve Leggett of Allmusic puts it in their rave review of their album Ride on the Train: “[The album has] a sharp, taut sound that only includes what is necessary to put the song over. . . . This is a band with a bright future.”
The bandmembers are native New Yorkers and originally included Mike Montali (vocals and guitar), Jon Bonilla (guitar), Mike Wosczyk (bass), and Mike Graves (drums and percussion). Their first release is an eponymous album, Hollis Brown that came out on Vibe Theory Records at the beginning of 2009. In 2012, the band released a couple of singles and an EP, Nothing and the Famous No One; and then their new album, Ride on the Train (with Dillon Devito replacing Mike Wosczyk on bass) was released on Alive Records this year. For some odd reason, I have seen every all three of these records described as their “debut” album.
The promotional material on the band by Alive Records lays out their basic template: “Taking cues from classic pop, rock ’n’ roll, and Americana, Hollis Brown combines raw rock sensibilities with sweet melodies and heartfelt lyrics to create a rich, warm sound that can fill any room. . . . You’d be hard-pressed to find a Beatles song these boys don’t know by heart, and you can hear it in the music. Classic rock with a New York state of mind, Hollis Brown is a throwback to an era when music felt fresh, songwriting was revered, and performances routinely inspired.”
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(Single called “The Fly” by this month’s UARB, Hollis Brown, released in 2012 on Band Camp Records)
Frankly, I am a little exhausted after what I have already written, and I don’t at all mean to give Hollis Brown short shrift in this post. But before I go, let me illustrate their versatility by mentioning their early 2012 single, “The Fly” that was recorded with D.M.C., the rap pioneer who was one-half of Run-D.M.C..
You can learn more about the band and get links to songs on their website – hollisbrown.com/ – and their Facebook page – www.facebook.com/hollisbrownmusic . Information on some of their music from last year is also available on the Band Camp Records website, hollisbrownmusic.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-the-famous-no-one . That label also shows a band called Biloxi that I will have to check out; as far as I know, they are not from around here.
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Artist of the Month for May 2011 – THE LONESOME DRIFTER
The artist behind the stompin’ song “Eager Boy” that has become one of the most valuable 45 collectables, The Lonesome Drifter also has a wealth of other country and rockabilly tracks that were collected on the Norton Records album shown above. YouTube has a number of Lonesome Drifter songs on its website. The LP includes several alternate versions of the song, but I think this is the actual single version of “Eager Boy”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg3oi1-6oO4 . The flip side, “Tear Drop Valley” is more in the country vein – at www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=-EzLcBWbqaY&feature=endscreen – and gave the man his goal as a recording artist: a spot on the Louisiana Hayride (a direct predecessor to the Holy Grail of country music, The Grand Ole Opry). Here is a third song with some fine guitar work that I really love, “Honey, Do You Think of Me”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdyMEx0V0EU . Finally, a fourth song that is listed as Unissued (though it is still on the Norton LP), “I Wish it Wasn’t So”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZupPW_1H60 . There are several other songs on YouTube as well.
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Photo Gallery: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for May 2010 – THE NOT QUITE
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.
Here is a photo of the Starship Troopers, the direct precursor to the band playing in concert around 1979 at a high school:
This is an early poster designed by Rob, from about 1980:
The Not Quite in concert at a club called Cellblock Eleven, though I am not sure it was the same concert advertised in the above poster:
This promotional photo – which looks like it has been stretched in the same way as the cover shot for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album – was also turned into a poster by Rob:
This photograph was taken in a cemetery in about 1988. That’s Dark Lord Rob and his wife Colleen around the tall monument; they were calling her “the Dark Lady” even before she joined the band.
