WIKIPEDIA – 2016
There is more fun to be had in the rock world also, as opposed to actual laughs. The B-52’s is one of the greatest fun bands ever, and they back it up with killer music as well. One of their early hits was “Rock Lobster” (1978); from Wikipedia: “Its lyrics include nonsensical lines about a beach party and excited rants about real or imagined marine animals – ‘There goes a dog-fish, chased by a cat-fish, in flew a sea robin, watch out for that piranha, there goes a narwhal, here comes a bikini whale!’ – accompanied by absurd, fictional noises attributed to them (provided by Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson — Pierson providing the higher-pitched noises and Wilson the lower-pitched ones); the chorus consists of the words ’Rock Lobster!’ repeated over and over on top of a keyboard line.”
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The Deee-Lite song “Groove is in the Heart” was a truly mountainous hit; as Wikipedia tells it: “Slant magazine ranked the song second in its 100 Greatest Dance Songs list, adding: 'No song delivered the group's world-conscious Word as colorfully and open-heartedly as “Groove is in the Heart”, which flew up the Billboard charts while goosing stuffed shirts.' NME and The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop annual critics' poll named ‘Groove is in the Heart’ the best single released in the year 1990.
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From Wikipedia: “When Hurricane Katrina and its storm surge devastated much of the U.S. Gulf Coast in [August-]September 2005, the MSNBC news program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, dubbed its coverage of the hurricane, ‘Katrina and the Waves’; the name also appeared in numerous headlines and blog postings. A New York Times reporter contacted Katrina Leskanich [of Katrina and the Waves], who said: ‘The first time I opened the paper and saw “Katrina kills 9,” it was a bit of a shock. . . . I hope that the true spirit of "Walking on Sunshine" will prevail. I would hate for the title to be tinged with sadness, and I will have to do my own part to help turn that around.’" She had the same or similar sentiments posted on her website for several months. Anyway, I still hear "Walking on Sunshine" on the radio frequently, and it has the same joyful spirit to me.
The Katrina and the Waves album discography is a bit tangled to say the least. Their first two albums, Katrina and the Waves and Katrina and the Waves Vol. 2 came out on small labels in 1983 and 1984, respectively. The latter is also known as Katrina and the Waves 2, but the cover shot doesn’t have a “2” in sight (the first album only has lettering on the cover). Wikipedia has the debut album listed as Walking on Sunshine and says that it was released only in Canada, though that seems doubtful.
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From Wikipedia: “Other notable [Detroit] bands from this time period include Alice Cooper, the Amboy Dukes (featuring Ted Nugent), the Bob Seger System, Frijid Pink, SRC, the Up, the Frost (featuring Dick Wagner), Popcorn Blizzard (featuring Meat Loaf), Cactus, and the soulful sounds of Rare Earth and the Flaming Ember.”
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As reported in Wikipedia, following the break-up of the Ramrods, Peter James was an early member of the power pop band the Romantics, and Mark Norton and Dave Hanna formed a band called the 27.
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Dark Carnival was sort of a Detroit punk supergroup that was assembled by Detroit music promoter Colonel Galaxy, whose name was a nod to Elvis Presley’s longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Bootsey X was the first bandmember to be recruited; others included his bandmate in the Ramrods, Mark Norton, plus (as listed in Wikipedia): “Gary Adams from the Cubes [who was also a sometime bandmember in the Lovemasters], Mike McFeaters from What Jane Shared, Jerry Vile from the Boners, Sarana VerLin from Natasha, Greasy Carlisi from Motor City Bad Boys, Robert Gordon and Art Lyzak from the Mutants, Joe Hayden from Bugs Bedow, Pete Bankert from Weapons, [and] Larry Steel from the Cult Heroes.
“Later, Dark Carnival saw some turnover, with the ‘big’ names signing on: Niagara from Destroy All Monsters, Ron [Asheton] and Scott Asheton from the Stooges, Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys, Jim Carroll even came in from New York.”
(March 2016)
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The Kingsmen released "Louie Louie" in 1963, and that is the one that became such a hit. I remember hearing "Louie Louie" on the radio just about every summer when I was growing up after that. The beat meter was accidentally changed, as was the style of the song; lead singer Jack Ely is the one who mumbled the lyrics.
From Wikipedia: "The Kingsmen transformed [Richard] Berry's easy-going ballad into a raucous romp, complete with a twangy guitar, occasional background chatter, and nearly unintelligible lyrics by [Jack] Ely. A guitar break is triggered by the shout, ‘Okay, let's give it to 'em right now!’, which first appeared in the Wailers‘ version, as did the entire guitar break (although, in the Wailers‘ version, a few notes differ, and the entire band played the break).
“Critic Dave Marsh suggests it is this moment that gives the recording greatness: ‘[Jack Ely] went for it so avidly you'd have thought he'd spotted the jugular of a lifelong enemy, so crudely that, at that instant, Ely sounds like Donald Duck on helium. And it's that faintly ridiculous air that makes the Kingsmen's record the classic that it is, especially since it's followed by a guitar solo that's just as wacky.’"
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The Brady Bunch has an unusual premise for a sitcom: A man with three sons marries a woman with three daughters. I don't know whether this was intended originally, but the males and females are not related to each other, so it wouldn't really be incest for any of them to have sex with each other – not even within the context of the show, never mind in real life. Wikipedia never brings it up, but this was a definite undercurrent in the show that was on a lot of (dirty) minds. As notoriously randy as actors and actresses are, it is not surprising that plenty of rumors and scandals have seen the light of day.
(June 2016)
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Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted this statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end. On its face, the idea is absurd: The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries. But Miranda has connected the dots: Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age. Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience. And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772. His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, 'Hamilton's famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons: For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’ The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
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At least as bold as this move was the decision by Lin-Manuel Miranda to tell the stories in Hamilton of the Founding Mothers who are usually relegated to set pieces on the gowns that they were wearing. Four of the 14 principal roles listed in the Wikipedia article are women, all tied closely to Alexander Hamilton: Hamilton's wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton; her sisters Angelica Schuyler Church and Peggy Schuyler Van Rensselaer; and Maria Reynolds, with whom Hamilton had a two-year affair in the 1790’s in one of the nation’s first sex scandals.
From Wikipedia: “Hamilton has received unanimous acclaim from professional critics, being deemed a cultural phenomenon by many.”
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Musically, according to Wikipedia, a “break” can mean several different things but, relevant to this discussion, generally refers to a dramatic passage in a musical performance “where all elements of a song (e.g., pads, basslines, vocals), except for percussion, disappear for a time. . . . A break may be described as when the song takes a ‘breather, drops down to some exciting percussion, and then comes storming back again’ and comparable to a false ending. Breaks usually occur two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through a song.”
As the idea of a break was refined (again from Wikipedia), “the term break refers to any segment of music (usually four measures or less) that could be sampled and repeated.” If the same passage were to be used repeatedly, it could be recorded and replayed, freeing the DJ to play other music along with the break.
As usual though in popular music, it is the vocalist who became the focal point; in rap music, the vocals are not singing, but they are certainly not just talking either. “Rapping” (also known as “MCing”), according to Wikipedia, “is ‘spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics’. The components of rapping include ‘content’, ‘flow’ (rhythm and rhyme), and ‘delivery’. Rapping is distinct from spoken-word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat (external meter).”
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MFSB was basically the house band for the Gamble and Huff production team – it is analogous to the famed group of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew – and was based at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios. To the public, MFSB stood for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother” and was a reference to how MFSB was like a family; the “other” name used among the musicians, however, was Mother-F--kin Sons of Bitches, “referring to musical prowess” according to Wikipedia.
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According to Wikipedia, this was the first prominent hip hop song to have social commentary; “The Message” led directly to the “gangsta rap” era with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. but was enormously influential in its own right.
From Wikipedia: “‘The Message’ has been reused and re-sampled in so many different ways that it would be easy to reduce its legacy to cliché. Music critic Dan Carins described it in a 2008 edition of The Sunday Times: 'Where it was inarguably innovative, was in slowing the beat right down, and opening up space in the instrumentation – the music isn't so much hip hop as noirish, nightmarish slow-funk, stifling and claustrophobic, with electro, dub and discoalso jostling for room in the genre mix – and thereby letting the lyrics speak loud and clear.’ Not only does the song utilize an ingenious mix of musical genres to great effect, but it also allows the slow and pulsating beat to take a backseat to the stark and haunting lyrical content.”
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Speaking rather than singing vocals did not originate with rap music, nor did the term “rap” either for that matter. I wasn’t sure anyone else felt the connection, but I did find this in Wikipedia: “By the late 1960s, when Hubert G. Brown changed his name to H. Rap Brown, rap was a slang term referring to an oration or speech, such as was common among the 'hip' crowd in the protest movements; but it did not come to be associated with a musical style for another decade.”
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The best known of these talking blues songs can be found on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, “Talkin' World War III Blues” (1963). The singer is telling his psychiatrist about the dreams he has been having about the aftermath of a nuclear war; Wikipedia quotes one of the verses: “Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell / And I leaned my head and I gave a yell / 'Give me a string bean, I'm a hungry man!' / A shotgun fired and away I ran / I don't blame him too much, though . . . he didn't know me”.
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LL Cool J – the initials stand for “Ladies Love Cool James” (his real name is James Todd Smith) – is one of the forefathers of pop rap according to Wikipedia. To date, he has released 13 albums and 2 greatest-hits collections.
About his first album, Radio (1985), Wikipedia says: “Reflecting the new school and ghettoblaster subculture in the U.S. during the mid-1980s, Radio belongs to a pivotal moment in the history and culture of hip hop. Its success contributed to the displacement of the old school with the new school form and to the genre's mainstream success during the period. Its success also served as a career breakthrough for LL Cool J and [producer] Rick Rubin. Radio has been recognized by music writers as one of the first cohesive and commercially successful hip hop albums.”
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Ice-T – whose debut album Rhyme Pays (1987) was “the first hip hop album to carry an explicit content sticker” (according to Wikipedia) – is well-known for his prominent role in the long-running television series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
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The sampled break that repeats throughout “U Can't Touch This” is the monster opening riff of Rick James’s “Super Freak” (1981), one of the catchiest and funkiest instrumental passages ever (and I am certainly not alone in feeling this way). According to Wikipedia: “‘Freak’ is a slang term for a very promiscuous girl, as described in the song's lyrics, '. . . a very kinky girl / The kind you don't take home to mother'."
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“Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice took a lot of heat at the time and in later years for not being authentic, etc. I don’t have a dog in that fight myself; I found “Ice Ice Baby” then and I find it now to be a well crafted piece of music. Whatever else might be said about “Ice Ice Baby”, as noted by Wikipedia: “‘Ice Ice Baby’ was the first hip hop single to top the Billboard charts. Outside the United States, the song topped the charts in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom, thus helping the song diversify hip hop by introducing it to a mainstream audience.”
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Of more importance though is the ground-breaking song "Rapture" by Blondie – with a rap section that was performed by Deborah Harry – that was released in 1980 on their album Autoamerican. As noted in Wikipedia, this was the first song to top the American charts that featured rap, and also the first rap video to be broadcast on MTV.
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From Wikipedia: “The group entered the music industry at a time when hip hop music was believed to be a fad, and major record companies were reluctant to sign hip hop artists. . . . With lots of concerns about sexist lyrics and video clips that objectified women's bodies in hip hop music, many feminists disliked rap and hip hop music because of its bad portrayal of women. However, Salt-N-Pepa changed the look of hip hop. They wore scantily clad, sexy clothing and were not afraid to talk about sex and their thoughts about men. Their song ‘Let's Talk About Sex’ was a huge hit.”
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The generally acknowledged original rap song is “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) by the Sugarhill Gang. (Both Sugar Hill Records and the Sugarhill Gang are named after the Sugar Hill section of Harlem – by the way, Harlem is adapted from the Dutch place-name Haarlem). As noted in Wikipedia: “Bill Adler, an independent consultant, once said, ‘There was hardly ever a moment when rap music was underground; one of the very first so-called rap records [“Rapper’s Delight”], was a monster hit.’"
The Blondie frontwoman comes up again in this story of the genesis of “Rapper’s Delight” that is taken from Wikipedia: “In late 1978, Debbie Harry suggested that Chic's Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to. Rodgers experienced a hip hop event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx. On September 20, 1979, and September 21, 1979, Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with the Clash in New York at The Palladium. When Chic started playing 'Good Times', rapper Fab 5 Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang ('Big Bank Hank' Jackson, Mike Wright, and 'Master Gee' O'Brien), jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band.
“A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards's bass line from Chic's 'Good Times'. Rodgers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of 'Rapper’s Delight', which also included a scratched version of the song's string section. Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers. Rodgers admitted that he was originally upset with the song, but later declared it to be 'one of his favorite songs of all time' and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled (or in this instance interpolated) Chic. He also stated: 'As innovative and important as "Good Times" was, “Rapper’s Delight” was just as much, if not more so.' 'Rapper’s Delight' is said to be the song that popularized rap music and put it into the mainstream.'”
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Hip hop culture predates the development of rap and hip hop music by nearly a decade. From Wikipedia: “Hip hop is a subcultural movement that was formed during the early 1970s by African-American and Puerto Rican youths residing in the South Bronx in New York City. . . . It is characterized by four distinct elements, all of which represent the different manifestations of the culture: MCing (oral), turntablism or DJing (aural), b-boying (physical), and graffiti art (visual). . . . The origin of hip hop culture stems from the block parties of the Ghetto Brothers, when they plugged in the amplifiers for their instruments and speakers into the lampposts on 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue and used music to break down racial barriers, and from DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where Herc mixed samples of existing records with his own shouts to the crowd and dancers. Kool Herc is credited as the 'Father of Hip Hop'. DJ Afrika Bambaataa of the hip hop collective Zulu Nation outlined the pillars of hip hop culture, to which he coined the terms: MCing or 'Emceein', DJing or 'Deejayin', 'B-boying' [break dancing], and graffiti writing or 'Aerosol Writin'."
The origin of the term “hip hop” is interesting; again from Wikipedia: “Keith ‘Cowboy’ Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five has been credited with coining the term in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing the words ‘hip/hop/hip/hop’ in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the ‘hip hop’ cadence into his stage performance. . . . The song 'Rapper’s Delight', by the Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the line, 'I said a hip, hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don't stop'.”
(September 2016)
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The emergence of punk rock in the 1970’s was in large part a reaction to progressive rock and also the tamer musical styles of that time. Punkers felt that rock music had strayed far from its roots and wanted to bring back the energy and excitement of the earlier years of rock and roll. As quoted in Wikipedia, drummer Tommy Ramone of Ramones summarized these feelings in a January 2007 interview: “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of [Jimi] Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bulls--t rock 'n' roll.”
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Interestingly, Wikipedia notes: “One of the earliest written uses of the ‘punk’ term was by critic Dave Marsh who used it in 1970 to describe the group Question Mark and the Mysterians, who had scored a major hit with their song ‘96 Tears’ in 1966.” Here is what I have to say about this album: .
The Wikipedia article on the album starts out this way: “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 is a groundbreaking compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles released in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was assembled by Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, and Lenny Kaye, later lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. The original double album was released on LP by Elektra in 1972 with liner notes by Kaye that contained one of the first uses of the term ‘punk rock’. It was reissued with a new cover design by Sire Records in 1976 and expanded into a four-CD box set by Rhino Records in 1998.”
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Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records started a long series of albums in 1978 called Pebbles that dug deeper into the mine than Nuggets for obscure garage rock and psychedelic rock songs. The initial album, the Pebbles, Volume 1 LP was subtitled “Original Artyfacts from the First Punk Era”, in a takeoff on the full name of the Nuggets album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. The Wikipedia article on this album is largely my work, and there are dozens more articles on the albums in this series that I put together as well, in my first major Wikipedia project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebbles,_Volume_1 .
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From Wikipedia: “The lyrics of the Sonics’ original material dealt with early 1960s teenage culture: cars, guitars, surfing, and girls (in songs like ‘The Hustler’, ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Maintaining My Cool’) alongside darker subject matter such as drinking strychnine for kicks, witches, psychopaths, and Satan (in the songs ‘Strychnine’, ‘The Witch’, ‘Psycho’, and ‘He’s Waitin’’, respectively).”
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In retrospect though, most rock scribes view Fun House as the peak album in the short, frantic life of the Stooges, with more than a few calling it the greatest album of all time. As an example, as quoted in Wikipedia: “In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Scott Seward claimed that, although saying so ‘risks hyperbole’, Fun House is ‘one of the greatest rock & roll records of all time’ and that, ‘as great as they were, the Stones never went so deep, the Beatles never sounded so alive, and anyone would have a hard time matching Iggy Pop’s ferocity as a vocalist’.”
As a measure of the popularity of the Stooges album Fun House, as reported in Wikipedia: “In 1999, Rhino Records released a limited edition box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, featuring every take of every song from every day of the recording sessions, plus the single versions of ‘Down on the Street’ and ‘1970’. On August 16, 2005, the album was reissued by Elektra [Records] and Rhino as a two-CD set featuring a newly remastered version of the album on disc one and a variety of outtakes (essentially highlights from The Complete Fun House Sessions box set) on disc two.”
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The Iguanas has taken first place among the least likely UARB or UARA of them all, even beating out the Rip Chords and Wendy Waldman, who was just the second rocker that I wrote about. One would think, with Iggy Pop’s unparalleled punk credentials, that every aspect of his musical life would have been examined in detail in Wikipedia long before now. But not even the band that gave him his name is there. Amazing. To cap it off, the Iguanas band that Iggy Pop was in is listed in Allmusic after another band called the Iguanas, from New Orleans; and they are the third Iguanas band in the Discogs list.
(December 2016)
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Although I have typically written about several better known rockers as well in my posts, my “hook” is to write about an Under Appreciated Rock Band. What most people mean by that is their opinion that a band or musician should be a lot more popular than they are among the general public and/or rock critics. I have a lot of those feelings myself, but for these purposes, I took a more rarefied definition: Since I began this by writing Wikipedia articles, these Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Under Appreciated Rock Artists in my posts do not have a Wikipedia article yet. I still write in the dispassionate style of an encyclopedia, though I also put in the kind of colorful language that Wikipedia discourages.
The English Wikipedia now has well over 5 million articles – there are also Wikipedias in nearly 300 other languages, with 10 of those having more than a million articles – and includes something on just about any musician or rock band that you can name. You can give it a try yourself – think of the most obscure band or rock artist that you know about, and chances are that they are in Wikipedia. As an indication of what is there, their category on “Rock music groups from North Carolina”, my home state, includes 19 alternative rock groups, 29 indie rock groups, 6 hardcore punk groups, 28 heavy metal musical groups, and 32 others (a total of 114). I don’t know the great majority of them myself, and only a handful could be considered at all well known among rock music fans, such as the dB’s, Nantucket, the Connells (they are from Raleigh, and I believe it was their drummer who lived in the same apartment building where our appraisal office was located for many years), Let’s Active, Corrosion of Conformity, Arrogance, and Fetchin Bones.
Others have Wikipedia articles but aren’t on the “Rock music groups from North Carolina” list. I wrote about Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts earlier this year for instance – I have read about them being called one of the early punk rock bands in North Carolina, believe it or not – and another fave is Squirrel Nut Zippers. These two bands are both listed in the “Musical groups from Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina” category, but not the general North Carolina category.
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I have also noticed a lot of deaths, particularly it seems in the past year; Leon Russell passed away the day after I set up a modest web page on him, as just one example. Clearly these musicians mean a lot to people, and not just the most famous among them. As I write this, Leonard Cohen’s death was more than two weeks ago, yet his photograph still shows up on the “In the News” block on the Wikipedia main page. Cohen’s death notice is in the middle of the list, while Donald Trump’s election the following day is at the bottom.
(Year 7 Review)
