WIKIPEDIA – 2012
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.
(February 2012)
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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.
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Every so often, I check on Allmusic and Wikipedia and see whether anyone has come along and updated the scant or nonexistent information on the UARB's that I have written about in the past. Usually nothing has changed. However, there is a lot of information on Bang in Allmusic now, and the stub in Wikipedia has been expanded quite a lot as well.
(March 2012)
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I determined to purchase all of the Pebbles Series albums (LP's and CD's) including the Highs in the Mid-Sixties Series records that had been released by Greg Shaw and Bomp! Records – that's more than 60 albums right there. I also wrote up Wikipedia articles on all of the Pebbles albums.
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As I remember, I already had an article partially written on somebody else when an order from Bomp! Records came in that included a specially priced package of new CD's by three related power-pop bands: the Nerves, the Plimsouls and the Breakaways. I already knew the Plimsouls' hit "A Million Miles Away", but just about everything else was a revelation, including the Nerves' original version of "Hanging on the Telephone" that became Blondie's follow-up hit after their monster "Heart of Glass". I quickly checked Wikipedia and determined that the Breakaways did not have an article, so I dashed off a UARB post on them, hoping to interest others in this amazing music.
(April 2012)
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The third release by John Mellencamp was simply John Cougar; in Australia (according to Wikipedia), the album was called Miami.
(July 2012)
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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!
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I was introduced to Dead Hippie in their performance on New Wave Theatre, the punk rock showcase on late night TV that originated from Los Angeles. Dead Kennedys is about the only band that I had previously heard of which I saw on that show, but most have landed articles in Wikipedia (punk rockers have a lot of fans it seems). To date, the only other UARB from New Wave Theatre that I have included in this series is the Unknowns.
Dead Hippie didn't make it, sadly, but Simon Smallwood later joined a band called Würm, which does have an article in Wikipedia.
(July 2012)
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I had gotten into the habit of Googling rock band names as I came to the albums that I had cleaned up after Katrina. Somewhat to my surprise, as I recall I found nothing at all on Dead Hippie. There was nothing in Allmusic or Wikipedia, and that wasn't too surprising; but there were no hits anywhere else either (which is not to say that "dead hippie" didn't come up at all – it just wasn't a rock group). This was also one of the first albums I came across where I couldn't come up with a front cover shot to put on the blank record cover where I was storing the album; it wasn't the very first, but there hadn't been many.
(July 2012)
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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).
(August 2012)
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The bandleader and songwriter for Code Blue, Dean Chamberlain is best known as one of the founders of the 1980's new wave band the Motels, which was formed all the way back in 1971.
The hidden history of the Motels includes a total of eight albums; I have half of them and enjoy them all, with their second album Careful being my most recent purchase. What would have been their third studio album, Apocalypso was rejected by the suits at Capitol Records and wasn't released in its original form until 2011. Apocalypso was reworked in 1982 and became their first hit album, All Four One. The Wikipedia article on the Motels lists a remarkable 35 current and former bandmembers.
(September 2012)
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Although Wikipedia has zip-a-dee-doo-dah on Trillion itself, there are numerous connections to well-known bands, and some of the individual members of the band have articles in Wikipedia. In fact, there are so many of them this time that, just for fun, I will mark all of the connecting bands, previous bandmembers and others that have a Wikipedia article with a "(W)". If I also marked the albums and songs that have individual Wikipedia articles, all you would see in this article is (W).
Only a handful of the UARB's that I have written about have so many current and former bandmembers that have individual Wikipedia articles, even though there is none on the band itself. The only ones I can think of are the Rip Chords (July 2011) and the Eyes (July 2010). Wikipedia is loaded with many, many articles on rock bands that are more lightweight than Trillion, and/or have no star power at all, and/or haven't had their albums released on CD as recently as 2009, and/or aren't in the process of putting new music together. There is already what amounts to a stub about Trillion in the article on Fergie Frederiksen. I would be very much surprised if there is still no article on Trillion this time next year, based upon what I have found about them so far.
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I was almost through with my piece, only to find out that there was a Wikipedia article on the Piltdown Men after all, but I wasn't about to pass on posting it just because of that.
(October 2012)
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It has been a long time since a record grabbed me the way the Invisible Eyes did. I was reminded of the first time that I heard "Kryptonite" by 3 Doors Down (the most successful rock band from the Mississippi Gulf Coast region) on the local alternative-rock radio station WCPR: I cranked the radio up full blast after I heard the first four or five notes, and I bet I hadn't done that for at least 20 years. This was long before they got their national label contract, when they were just a local band.
A year or more before all that happened, someone told me that they had recorded a CD; and I went all over the Coast looking for it, only to be told that they hadn't gotten it in, or they had sold out, or whatever. Finally – I believe it was in the Sound Shop at the mall in Gautier – I found a copy of 3 Doors Down; and it was every bit as good as I thought it would be. It is one of the true treasures of my record collection; it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia or Allmusic article on the band, and I have never seen it listed on eBay. About half of the tracks on this CD are on their debut album; I still hear the original version of "Kryptonite" on local radio once in a while.
(December 2012)
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The post on Trillion in particular was long because this band is/was chock-full of extremely talented musicians that included Patrick Leonard, one of the major forces behind Madonna’s incredible musical career – and that was just the beginning. In my mind, this band is second only to Wendy Waldman as the most unexpected absence from having a Wikipedia article (the sole criterion I have for marking Under-Appreciated status). The only reason that it wasn’t even longer is that I had already discussed guitarist Frank Barbalace as a member of previous UARB Wild Blue.
For Trillion, I decided to mark the myriad connections to musicians and bands that do have Wikipedia articles by the use of the symbol “(W)”. By the way, I did not use duplicates – there was only one (W) in all cases. Wikipedians are mostly young and hip, so Wikipedia articles are heavily skewed toward video games and rock musicians, as opposed to what you find in, say, Encyclopædia Britannica.
People who don’t use Wikipedia regularly probably don’t realize that, in addition to articles on the band, there are also individual Wikipedia articles on all or most of the members of second- and third-tier rock bands like Toto and Survivor, as well as articles on many of their albums and individual songs. For major rock bands like Led Zeppelin, there are Wikipedia articles on virtually every song that they have ever released. The Trillion post gives the reader a hint of the breadth of coverage that Wikipedia has in the world of rock music within its 4,000,000-plus articles. In any case, I finally counted up the (W) symbols in the Trillion post this morning, and there are 53 of them – and 3 of those are articles on bandmembers in Trillion itself. As I mentioned in the post, there would have been dozens more if I had also marked albums and songs having Wikipedia articles with a (W).
(Year 3 Review)
