Dec 14

Ugly Things

UGLY THINGS
 
 
Ugly Things  (UT) is a music magazine established in 1983, based in La Mesa, California.  The editor is Mike Stax (born 1962 in England).  The magazine covers mainly 1960’s Beat, Garage rock, and psychedelic music (“Wild Sounds From Past Dimensions”).  The name Ugly Things is a pun that refers to the band The Pretty Things.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Morris Levy and Roulette Records also figure in the story of Milan (also known as the Leather Boy), one of the most mysterious figures in 1960’s garage rock.  The Wikipedia article that I wrote about him some years back – now listed under the name Milan the Leather Boy – is the one that I am proudest of.  His sister (who lives in Boca Raton) contacted me later, and she helped fill in a lot of the blanks.  However, even before that, I managed to put together a pretty coherent story from literally dozens of bits and pieces that I found on the Internet.  A retrospective album of Milan’s work finally came out in 2009 – called Hell Bent for Leather – and when I saw that the album liner notes referenced my Wikipedia article, I could not have been more surprised.  An expanded article that I wrote on Milan is scheduled to appear in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of Ugly Things magazine. 
 
(March 2012)
 
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As might be imagined, the Outcasts wasn’t exactly a rare name for a rock band; and the experts at Ugly Things magazine know of at least 10 bands by this name that made records in the 1960’s.  Whichever band called the Outcasts is backing Linda Pierre King on “Hard-Lovin’ Babe” is definitely not the famous Texas garage rock band the Outcasts – former bandmember Denny Turner disavows the recordings on his website – so they are a mystery for now.  
 
 (April 2012)
 
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When his first single “The Gypsy Cried” was released on the tiny C&C Records label, the artist was shown as “Lou Christie” without his knowledge or permission.  He has been quoted as saying:  “I was pissed off about it for 20 years.  I wanted to keep my name and be a one-named performer, just ‘Lugee’.” 
 
Additionally, Lou Christie wrote most of his own hit songs, along with his songwriting partner Twyla Herbert (and that is quite a story in itself:  She was 20 years older than Christie and a classically trained musician who was also a self-proclaimed mystic).  As such, he is one of the first singer-songwriters in popular music, a fact that John Lennon has remarked on, among others. 
 
The above paragraphs from the post on Dead Hippie come from an article which I wrote on Milan that is set to appear (in abridged form) in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of Ugly Things magazine. 
 
Not even Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw – who released several of his songs on the albums in the Pebbles Series – was able to find out much of anything about Milan.  I took it upon myself to dig up what I could for an article on him for Wikipedia, and once I made contact with his sister Dara Rodell Gould, I was able to get the full scoop.  In fact, she is the one who got me to sign up for Facebook.  As you might imagine, I am pretty excited about the Ugly Things article – heck, I was plenty stoked when a 2009 retrospective album of Milan’s music, Hell Bent for Leather mentioned my Wikipedia article.  But enough about me!  
 
(July 2012)
 
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Phil and the Frantics is best known for a song called “I Must Run”, which was a local hit single in their native Arizona; the song is said to have been adapted rather openly from the flip side of the Zombies’ fourth single, “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move” (the follow-up to one of their biggest hits “Tell Her No”).  I was unfamiliar with the Zombies song but have played it recently, and I don’t really see the resemblance; if the song titles weren’t so similar, it might have slipped through the cracks altogether.  In any case, “I Must Run” is a superior recording to “I Must Move”, and I am not the only one who thinks so; my view is shared by that of Ugly Things magazine. 
 
(August 2012)
 
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One fascinating view of the whole story is the history of the British Invasion as told from a musician/fan’s perspective – Cyril Jordan, a founding member of the Flamin’ Groovies (whose roots go all the way back to 1965) – which is the cover story of the current issue of Ugly Things magazine that also includes my own article on Milan the Leather Boy.  
 
(January 2013)
 
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Two years after the publication of Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time, 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. 

 

(May 2013)

 

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What really made an impression after awhile, however, is that more than a few of these bands were completely unknown even to the people who put the Pebbles albums together.  

 

It didn’t always stay that way of course.  We have yours truly to thank for getting the word out about the mysterious rock artist Milan, also known as Milan Radenkovich, also known as Rick Rodell, also known as the Leather Boy, also known as Milan (the Leather Boy); copies of Ugly Things #34 with my article about Milan are still available! 

 

(July 2013)

 

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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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Dick Taylor played bass guitar with the nascent Stones but quit after several months when he was accepted at the London Central School of Art; his replacement in the Rolling Stones was Bill Wyman.  While there, Taylor met Phil May; and together they founded the Pretty Things in 1963.  The band is still active and still vital, and Dick Taylor and Phil May have been there the whole time as far as I know.  Ugly Things magazine, which published my article on Milan year before last, has something on the Pretty Things in almost every issue.  The band name – and that of Ugly Things magazine for that matter –  is taken from yet another Bo Diddley song that is not so well known, “Pretty Thing” – about as close to a love song as the great man ever got. 

 

(March 2014/1)

 

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The first album by the Crawdaddys, Crawdaddy Express – recorded in monaural; talk about looking back! – came out in 1979 as the initial LP on Voxx Records.  Mike Stax, who later founded and edited Ugly Things magazine, was so impressed with the album that he eventually moved to California from London so that he could join the band.  As quoted in the Simon Reynolds book, Stax admitted that the band wasn’t “original in any shape or form”, but that their “total purity was thrilling in its audacity”, and that their debut album was “virtually indistinguishable from the real thing”. 

 

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While these preferences would inform Mike Stax’s sensibilities as the founder of Ugly Things magazine, also in 1982, they created friction within the Crawdaddys.  Keith Fisher for one hated American garage rock music; after finding a very rare 45 by the Texas garage rock band Zakary Thaks, he threw it across the room at Mike Stax on his 21st birthday and ruined it.  Stax quit the band on the spot after that, though he was planning to leave the Crawdaddys in the summer of 1983 anyway. 

 

(January 2015/2)

 

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The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for June 2017 is the Loons, a self-described “psychotic beat music” band founded by Mike Stax – editor of Ugly Things magazine and a former member of past UARB the Crawdaddys. They have been around more than 20 years – a lot longer than I had thought – and arose from the ashes of two other San Diego bands that Mike Stax helped start, the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Hoods. I anticipate naming the Tell-Tale Hearts as a UARB within the next couple of posts; that would give me an Under Appreciated “hat trick”. 
Mike Stax founded Ugly Things magazine in 1982 when he was just 21 years old in order to cover, as he put it, “Wild Sounds from Past Dimensions”. Whereas “fanzines” tended to be thin mimeographed or cheaply printed affairs, Ugly Things is published more or less annually as a slick package with high production values that looks a lot more like a book than a magazine. As an example, Ugly Things #34 that includes my article on Milan has 184 pages. 
From Wikipedia: “The Lama Workshop editor Patrick Lundborg has stated about [Ugly Things] and editor Mike Stax: ‘The 1980s (music) zines have retired into the great recycling container in the sky (it’s down to UT, Shindig!, and Misty Lane now). Mike Stax has managed not only to keep it alive, but expand his trip in various directions, and in the process become one of the very best – perhaps THE very best – 1960s-oriented writer out there.’”  
(June 2017)
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The AARP The Magazine article mentions Mike Stax a couple of times: “Unbeknownst to any Sloths, ‘Makin’ Love’ had become an object of fascination after it landed on an influential LP compilation [Back from the Grave, Volume 4] in the early 1980s. ‘The Sloths were something special,’ says Mike Stax, a San Diego musician and garage-rock superfan who publishes the rock zine Ugly Things. ‘“Makin’ Love” was the standout track on that album. So primal, so elemental. It had that caveman primitivism about it.’” 
After interviewing the bandmembers and writing them up for Ugly Things, a few years later the Sloths started making noises about “putting the band back together”, and Mike Stax gave them a shot by hiring them as the opening act for a concert by the Loons. As reported in AARP The Magazine: “They sounded rough, but kids turned out in droves to see a real-live 1965 band in the flesh. Tommy [McLaughlin] recalls the exuberant reaction at one early show in East L.A.: ‘We were like the Stones up there for them. I was like, We gotta do this.’”  
(June 2017)

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Mike Stax also does not have an article in Wikipedia, though there is a short article on the fanzine Ugly Things that he founded in 1983 (the Tell-Tale Hearts were also formed that year).  To my mind, there can be little doubt of his “notability”.  An article in the San Diego Union Tribune on May 23, 2013 about an upcoming concert over three days celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ugly Things quotes another San Diego musician and rock critic Bart Mendoza (who is in the Shambles):  “To me, Ugly Things is the top music magazine in the world.  It’s even better than (top English music publication) Mojo, because it has more pages and covers more ground with more depth.  Mike’s coverage of music is the template everybody has to match, not only for content but for research.  No one else does such comprehensive articles.” 
 
Mike Stax’s exhaustively researched article over four issues in Ugly Things on the Misunderstood led to the publication of a book on the band called Like, Misunderstood that was co-written with the band’s lead singer Rick Brown; as quoted in the Union Tribune article, Stax says:  “They came pretty close to making it in London, they got a deal with Fontana Records, had a single out and had media (coverage).  Then, the [U.S. military] draft claimed the lead singer, and they were finished overnight, just as they were on the verge of success.  They would have been the first psychedelic band, with an album out before before [Jimi] Hendrix and Pink Floyd.  They were cheated.  Their music was world-class.” 
 
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There are some great covers on the Tell-Tale Hearts CD that run the gamut of the whole Sixties scene, among them “Just in Case You’re Wondering” (originally by the Ugly Ducklings), “Me Needing You” (the Pretty Things – the band who inspired the name of Mike Stax’s magazine, Ugly Things), “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” (the Shadows of Knight), “Satisfy You” (the Seeds), the great lead-off track, “My World Is Upside Down” (the Shames), and “Cry” (the Malibus).  The band’s original songs are steeped in the same Sixties brew; my favorites include “(You’re a) Dirty Liar”, “Crawling Back to Me”, “It’s Just a Matter of Time”, “One Girl”, and “Promise”.  As usual though with the UARB’s, all of their music sounds great to me. 
 
(September 2017)
 
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My proudest achievement is my tribute to legendary underground rock musician Mick Farren, which appeared in March 2014.  I garnered a lot of praise that my friend Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records forwarded to me – from past UARA and fellow bandmember in the Deviants, Andy Colquhoun (who posted a link on the band’s Facebook page), from Mike Stax of Ugly Things Magazine (who published my article on Milan year before last), and from Suzy Shaw herself. 

 

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All of this started I suppose when I began noticing that I was over-writing a lot of my appraisal reports, so I tried to find a more satisfying outlet for my writing.  I joined Wikipedia in August 2006 and almost immediately started my first article there, on a 1960’s psychedelic rock band called the Head Shop.  Milan had been involved in their album as a producer and a musician, and I started trying to get to the bottom of who Milan was.  After meeting his sister Dara Gould on line, I not only had enough for Wikipedia, but it eventually shaped up into the article that got published in Ugly Things. 

 

(Year 5 Review)

 

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Under Appreciated Rock Bands (UARB’s) and Under Appreciated Rock Artists (UARA’s) are hard to come by, but I came up with a fine batch this past year.  The least likely UARB of them all, to my way of thinking, came along in March:  Iggy Pop got his name from his first band called the Iguanas; and somehow, some way, no punk rock fan had yet prepared a Wikipedia article on this band.  Also in the mix this past year were two bands featuring Mike Stax, founder and editor of one of the premier music magazines Ugly Things and one of greatest experts on 1960’s music on Earth:  his current band the Loons and another from the 1980’s, the Tell-Tale Hearts.  Rounding out the quartet this year are the Lazy Cowgirls, a long-time favorite punk rock band whose music is often called “outlaw rock” that put out 11 albums – not counting the 4 albums put out by frontman Pat Todd’s new band the Rankoutsiders.
 
(Year 8 Review)
Last edited: April 8, 2021