The mention in the Wikipedia article on the Fuzztones about Link Protrudi and the Jaymen makes it appear that the band was a one-off project in the 1986-1987 period; besides Missing Links, they also had a 1987 album, Drive it Home!. Actually, Link Protrudi and the Jaymen also had a 2006 release, Slow Grind, and another album called Drive it Live (1992).
One of the most unusual novelty songs has to be the 1967 hit "Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)" by the Hombres. Here is a sample verse, chosen almost at random: "Saw a man walkin' upside down / My T.V.'s on the blink / Made Galileo look like a Boy Scout / Sorry 'bout that, let it all hang out". Not only that; but, as I originally put it in Wikipedia (naturally, the keepers of the Wikipedia universe took out some of the best wording): "The spoken-word introduction – 'A preachment, dear friend, you are about to receive on John Barleycorn, Nicotine and the Temptations of Eve' – goes all the way back to 1947, when it served to introduce a song that was every bit as strange for its era as this one was in 1967: 'Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women' by Red Ingle and His Natural Seven."
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As described in Wikipedia: "Co-host Dan Rowan announced that Laugh-In believed in showcasing new talent, and introduced Tiny Tim. The singer entered carrying a shopping bag, pulled his soprano ukulele from it, and sang a medley of 'A Tisket A Tasket' and 'On the Good Ship Lollipop' as an apparently dumbfounded co-host Dick Martin watched."
(March 2013)
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As I have mentioned many times before, I am a major fan of Dutch rock music from both the 1960's and 1970's. Some of the bands have non-English names, like Bintangs, a future UARB (as it turns out, I waited too long; Bintangs have a nice Wikipedia article now).
(April 2013)
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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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To return to the topic at hand, "The 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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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'".
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On the following album, The Times They Are A-Changin', the targets are even more diffuse. "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.
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'."
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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.
(May 2013)
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The impact of this one Elvis recording can hardly be overstated. "Heartbreak Hotel" was one of the biggest influences on John Lennon that inexorably led to the formation of the Beatles. In a quote given in Wikipedia, John Lennon speaks of his feelings about the song: "When I first heard 'Heartbreak Hotel', I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We'd never heard American voices singing like that. They always sung like [Frank] Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there's this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn't know what Elvis was singing about. . . . It took us a long time to work out what was going on. To us, it just sounded like a noise that was great."
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The changing nature of Bill Haley's music made the band name "Saddlemen" increasingly incongruous, and by the fall of 1952, the band had changed its name to Bill Haley and His Comets.
Following Bill Haley's death in 1981, there were at least six bands using the name The Comets that claimed (with varying degrees of authority) to be the continuation of Haley's band. Three were still touring as late as 2008 according to Wikipedia.
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So, you might well ask, what is the earliest song on the list of contenders for the first rock and roll record? According to Wikipedia, that would be the 1944 recording "Strange Things Happening Every Day" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. As might be imagined from her name, Tharpe was a traveling evangelist who became the first superstar of gospel music in the 1930's and 1940's. As Wikipedia puts it, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.was "willing to cross the line between sacred and secular by performing her music of 'light' in the 'darkness' of the nightclubs and concert halls with big bands behind her". However, she never abandoned her first love of gospel music.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the only woman mentioned in the Wikipedia list, but she is not the only one that I have heard talked about. Rosemary Clooney had one of her biggest hits with "Hey There" b/w "This Ole House"; both songs individually reached #1 in 1954 on the Billboard singles charts (in case you think – as I had – that the Beatles were the first to have double-sided #1 hit singles). The latter song is one that I have heard discussed as the first rock and roll record – or at least, one of the first (before doing the research for this post, I had thought that her recording dated from 1953).
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Chuck Berry grew up in a middle-class family in St. Louis and began working as a musician in local nightclubs in the early 1950's. Influenced by the guitar stylings and showmanship of Texas bluesman T-Bone Walker, he was performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio by early 1953. As Wikipedia tells it: "[Chuck ]Berry's calculated showmanship, along with mixing country tunes with R&B tunes, and singing in the style of Nat King Cole to the music of Muddy Waters, brought in a wider audience, particularly affluent white people."
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Buddy Holly's impact on American music is immense; Wikipedia succinctly sums it up: "Holly set the template for the standard rock and roll band: two guitars, bass, and drums. He was one of the first in the genre to write, produce, and perform his own songs."
(June 2013/1)
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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.
I did find this brief mention of the song on the Wikipedia article on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "Unlike the other material which Dylan recorded between 1961 and 1964, 'Mixed Up Confusion' attempted a rockabilly sound. Cameron Crowe described it as 'a fascinating look at a folk artist with his mind wandering towards Elvis Presley and Sun Records.'"
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It was clear that Bob Dylan's second album would be very different from Bob Dylan, where only two original songs were presented. Wikipedia notes: "Many critics have noted the extraordinary development of Dylan's songwriting immediately after completing his first album. Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin connects the sudden increase in lyrics written along topical and political lines to the fact that Dylan had moved into an apartment on West 4th Street with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo in January 1962. Rotolo's family had strong left-wing political commitments; both of her parents were members of the American Communist Party. Dylan acknowledged her influence when he told an interviewer: 'Suze was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked out the songs with her.'"
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At any rate, another producer was brought in to help out – an unlikely though inspired choice as it turned out. As described in Wikipedia: "Because of [Albert] Grossman's hostility to [John] Hammond, Columbia paired Dylan with a young, African-American jazz producer, Tom Wilson. Wilson recalled: 'I didn't even particularly like folk music. I'd been recording Sun Ra and [John] Coltrane. . . . I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. [Dylan] played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted.'
"At a recording session on April 24, [1963,] produced by [Tom] Wilson, Dylan recorded five new compositions: 'Girl from the North Country', 'Masters of War, 'Talkin' World War III Blues', 'Bob Dylan's Dream', and 'Walls of Red Wing'. 'Walls of Red Wing' was ultimately rejected, but the other four were included in a revised album sequence."
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Prior to beginning work on his next album, Highway 61 Revisited, Wikipedia reports: "In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling tired and dissatisfied with his material. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: 'I was going to quit singing. I was very drained.' The singer added, 'It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you.'
"As a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a 'long piece of vomit'. He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus – 'Like a Rolling Stone'. He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: 'It's like a ghost is writing a song like that. . . . You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song.'"
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Wikipedia describes what happened next: "On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of 'Like a Rolling Stone', [Tom] Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 version [of "The Sounds of Silence"], and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell), electric bass (Joe Mack), and drums (Buddy Salzman), and released it as a single without consulting [Paul] Simon or [Art] Garfunkel. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson's re-mix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a 'working entity'. Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who in spirit with the success of the Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song. Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they technically superimposed on the original acoustic piece."
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You might remember "We're Not Gonna Take It" as a classic music video on MTV back in the day; as Wikipedia describes it: "The song is notable for its popular music video directed by Marty Callner, with its emphasis on slapstick comedy, where a parent gets the worst of the band's mischief. Controversy arose when the depiction of the family in the video caused a public outcry long before the 'explicit lyrics' warning was placed on records, cassettes, and CD's.
This led to the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore (who later became Second Lady of the United States). Mark Metcalf, the actor portraying the father in the video, had previously played Neidermeyer, the ROTC student commander in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). In a reference to his role in the film, Metcalf says in the video, 'A Twisted Sister pin? On your uniform?!'. [Lead singer Dee] Snider himself can also be heard cursing and swearing the question 'A pledge pin? On your uniform?' at the end of the song."
(June 2013/2)
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Pebbles, Volume 10 is also how I came to find out about the Human Expression, one of several garage-rock and psychedelic-rock bands that I wrote about in Wikipedia in the pre-UARB days. The album also includes a song by the Ides of March that came out before their hit song, "Vehicle"; as well as an early song by the Five Americans of "Western Union" fame. "Primitive" by the Groupies, one of the best songs on this album was later featured on one of the Born Bad CD's.
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Anyway, word's out now about the Klubs, even if no one has gotten around to putting anything in Wikipedia or Allmusic about them. The band has a website – http://www.theklubs.com/ – and they also have a listing on the online British Music Archive: http://www.britishmusicarchive.com/K/339-the-klubs .
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Much to my surprise, I finally found a rock band that did not have a listing in Wikipedia with a genuine hit song; a single by the Rip Chords, “Hey Little Cobra” was one of the biggest hit songs in surf music, making it to #4 in early 1964, even though the surf scene was already in significant decline following the recent arrival of the British Invasion.
As it turned out, the Rip Chords got in just under the wire as the UARB for July 2011: An article on the Rip Chords was started in Wikipedia on August 18, 2011. It has developed into an extensive examination of the band and can be read at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Chords_(band) .
(July 2013)
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The music on Destination: Bomp! is amazingly good from end to end, but the next to last song really caught my attention: "Fantasy of Folk" by Blair 1523 that comes from (as Greg Shaw put it) "a place with the unlikely name of Praze-an-Beeble, somewhere in Cornwall".
Praze-an-Beeble – the name translates as "meadow on the River Beeble" – is large enough to have its own Wikipedia article, where it is identified as the largest village in Crowan parish; it is located in Cornwall near the very end of the southwestern tip of England.
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There are actually a lot of websites out there that talk about Blair 1523: It might be surprising to some that a search of the band name in quotes brings up 18,100 hits on Google. The first page of Google hits has a YouTube video of "Fantasy of Folk", the Bomp! Mailorder site where the "last copies" of the CD can still be purchased plus another listing on Amazon.com, the mention of the band in my Wikipedia article on the Outcasts, the Allmusic review and the Julian Cope blog mentioned above, a listing on last.fm that actually has some information and even a photo of Blair 1523, and more barren listings on mtv.com, Discogs, and Rate Your Music . Further Google pages bring up other barebones listings – the one on Ticketmaster that offers concert tickets and tour schedules for a band that broke up 20 years ago is particularly hilarious – and other places to buy the CD and rate the music and see the lyrics and download "free" MP3's (Napster lives!).
So how can there be so many Google hits when, on one of these sites, Blair 1523 has a 94.0% rating on the "obscurometer"? Simple: The album exists, and it is easy for web pages to be generated for even unknown albums by websites that pride themselves on knowing about all of the music that is out there. But trying to get a handle on actual information about the band is difficult indeed among all of that dross. That is the reason that Wikipedia typically comes to the top of a Google search.
(September 2013)
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David Bowie is a big fan of Fanny; in Wikipedia, he is quoted as saying: "One of the most important female bands in American rock has been buried without a trace. And that is Fanny. They were one of the finest . . . rock bands of their time, in about 1973. They were extraordinary . . . they're as important as anybody else who's ever been, ever; it just wasn't their time."
(October 2013)
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Kim Fowley eventually put together a retrospective album of the music by Venus and the Razorblades in 1978, Songs from the Sunshine Jungle; Wikipedia says that the album is extremely rare today, and I was delighted to find a copy at Criminal Records in Atlanta a few years ago.
(December 2013)
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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.
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I go back a long way with Under Appreciation. When watching TV as a kid, I of course paid a lot of attention to the stars, but I would also notice the character actors that showed up in small parts in a lot of the shows. One of my favorites back when was Dabbs Greer; he just seemed to show up all the time on TV, and eventually I picked up his name from the credits in one of those shows. Scanning his write-up in Wikipedia, he was in an episode of The Twilight Zone and several of the Perry Mason shows; but it was mostly Saturday morning shows where I remember seeing him.
Imagine my surprise decades later when Dabbs Greer appeared in some of the first scenes in The Green Mile; he played the Tom Hanks character in later life who was relating the story to a friend at the nursing home where he was living.
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I go back a long way with Under Appreciation.
Probably the most memorable events of my schoolboy days were seeing the early spaceflights. Regular school went by the boards; the teachers brought in their portable TV sets, and we would all crowd around to watch, beginning with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight in 1961 and John Glenn’s trip in orbit the following year.
I was amazed to find that the intervening sub-orbital flight by Gus Grissom was almost completely forgotten; I just couldn’t understand it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was reminded that all didn’t go smoothly with that mission; though the whole flight was barely 15 minutes long, the capsule started filling up with water upon splashdown, and Grissom very nearly drowned when water started getting into his space suit also.
Besides this second American flight into space, Gus Grissom was also on one of the Gemini spacecraft and thus the first American to go into space twice. Gus Grissom was among the three astronauts that were killed in the cabin fire during a test for the planned launch of Apollo 1 in January 1967, twice illustrating that being an astronaut is one of the most dangerous professions today. Virgin Galactic had a disastrous launch just last October, killing the pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring the co-pilot Peter Siebold.
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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.
Over the next several years, I wrote up numerous articles for Wikipedia, mostly on other 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock bands and nearly all of the albums in the Pebbles series. In all, I started over 100 articles and made contributions to Wikipedia that number more than 2,500. Most of these rock bands are quite obscure to most people, but some are not: The Outsiders had a major hit with “Time Won’t Let Me” that still gets a lot of radio play. The same is true of Stone Poneys, Linda Ronstadt’s first rock band who scored with “Different Drum”. Both of these bands had only a few sentences – what is called a “stub” on Wikipedia – so I fleshed out their stories and also wrote up an article on all of their albums.
With Milan though, I ran into one of the Wikipedia rules: notability. I fought hard for several months against other Wikipedians who threatened to delete the article that I had put so much into. I had thought that a musician was automatically “notable” if they had an album released on a major record label, but actually the rule was two albums. Eventually I was able to get over the hurdle by demonstrating that Milan had recorded more than 30 songs.
But the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. By now I had developed into something of a music historian; and as far as I am concerned, every great musician’s story deserves to be told, notable or not notable.
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It was Dara Gould who got me to sign up for Facebook, sometime in late 2009. Not really knowing what to do with Facebook now that I was on it, I made a modest announcement on November 10, 2009:
Coming soon: UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH. An article in Discover Magazine once said that the “beloved, unwieldy” Wikipedia included “scads of articles on virtually unknown rock bands”. I had to laugh out loud since I have done my part to add to those scads! Still, many great bands don’t yet have a Wikipedia article, or even an entry on “Allmusic”: www.allmusic.com. So I will try to remedy that.
My first post (on December 1, 2009 – they have been showing up very late in the month recently) was on Beast, a 1960’s “hippie-flavored” rock band that was introduced to me through a friend of a friend back while I was still in high school. On my third post, about the 1960’s garage rock band Cyrus Erie, I expanded the post to talk about the band more in context – in this case, as part of the 1960’s Cleveland music scene. Thus, in most cases I not only had to come up with a band that had no Wikipedia article yet (or only a “stub” at least), I wanted to find some aspect of music that I could talk about at the same time that hopefully had some sort of a connection to the UARB or the UARA.
I was not sure how long I would be able to keep this up; but every month, these articles seem to expand to fill up a sizable post and then some. With the Mick Farren tribute, I exceeded the Facebook limit of 65,536 characters for an entry under Notes, for the second time.
(Year 5 Review)
