“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder he committed. The victim was an old man with a filmy “vulture-eye”, as the narrator calls it. The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by dismembering it and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator’s feelings of guilt, or a mental disturbance, result in him hearing the dead man’s beating heart. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and is one of Poe’s most famous short stories. (More from Wikipedia)
Members of the Crawdaddys went on to populate many other California bands; I have already mentioned several of them. The future UARB (probably by year’s end) and another like-minded San Diego band called the Tell-Tale Hearts (named after a famous Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”) has numerous connections with the band. Former Crawdaddys bass guitarist Mike Stax was a founding member, as were Mystery Machine alumni Bill Calhoun and Ray Brandes (I praised and heavily borrowed from Brandes’s fine biography of the Crawdaddys in preparing this post). Another past Crawdaddy, Peter Miesner contributed guitar on two tracks on the Tell-Tale Hearts CD that I have, High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces), with the name adapted from that of the first Rolling Stones retrospective album, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) (1966).
(January 2015/2)
