WIKIPEDIA – 2017-2020
The B-52’s hail from the fertile music center of Athens, Georgia whence came R.E.M., Pylon, and other fine bands. Wikipedia notes that “Athens was home to the first and most famous college music scene in the country, beginning in the 1970’s”. I had an appraisal job there in the early 1980’s and remember well the wealth of record stores and the local radio station that had a “psychedelic lunch” program around the noon hour.
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Some musical terms give me a thrill just reading them; “rockabilly” is one, and another is “outlaw rock”, the term often applied to the music of this month’s Under Appreciated Rock Band, the Lazy Cowgirls. I mentioned them in a post not too long ago, and I had to look a half dozen times before I really became convinced that they were not in Wikipedia yet. Could I actually live in a universe where no one among what should be millions of fans (certainly thousands) has taken the time to write a paean to these dragon-slaying head-knockers? Anyway . . .
(March 2017)
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Like most, I was introduced to Green Day with Dookie. I imagine that I found out about them through their music videos on MTV and/or VH1, as the rock-video era was winding down. As Wikipedia notes: “Dookie produced five hit singles for the band: ‘Longview’, ‘When I Come Around’, ‘Basket Case’, a re-recorded version of ‘Welcome to Paradise’, and the radio-only single ‘She’.” The whole album rocks though, not just the hits.
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Twenty-three years after the release of the punk-rock concept album Only Lovers Left Alive by past UARB the Wanderers, Green Day released their classic rock-opera album, American Idiot. From Wikipedia: “American Idiot (2004) marked a career comeback for Green Day following a period of decreased success. It charted in 27 countries, peaking at number one in 19, and eventually sold 16 million copies worldwide. The album spawned five successful singles: ‘American Idiot’, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’, and ‘Jesus of Suburbia’.”
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The name “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” has a long history in music and elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, there have been six previous uses of the phrase as a song or album name by everyone from David Cassidy to Smokie to Hanoi Rocks, beginning with a 1930’s standard called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – in all, there are 14 items listed on the phrase’s “disambiguation” page. Green Day created a combined rock video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Holiday”; as mentioned in Wikipedia: “MTV’s Green Day Makes a Video described ‘Holiday’ as a party, and ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ as the subsequent hangover.”
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is Green Day’s biggest hit single to date, with 2 million copies sold. Wikipedia notes: “As of 2017, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ remains the only song in history to win both the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and the MTV Music Video Award for Video of the Year.”
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“Wake Me Up When September Ends” is Billie Joe Armstrong’s tribute to his father, who died in September 1982. Later, as reported in Wikipedia: “In the United States, the song became symbolic after Hurricane Katrina [in August-September 2005], where it was dedicated to victims of the disaster and also regarded as a dedication to the victims of the September 11 attacks that occurred in 2001.”
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The cast album, American Idiot: The Original Broadway Cast Recording “debuted at #43 on the Billboard 200, becoming one of the highest-charting musical soundtracks” (according to Wikipedia).
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But Green Day is easy; everybody knows about them. When I tried to come up with other punk revival bands to talk about in this post, I started coming up short. The Wikipedia article mentions: “Green Day was widely credited, alongside fellow California punk bands Sublime, Bad Religion, the Offspring, and Rancid, with popularizing and reviving mainstream interest in punk rock in the United States.” I really don’t know much about those four bands other than a few stray tracks, like the Offspring song “Self Esteem”.
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In the post-MTV era, YouTube has become an important venue for new artists, although the blizzard of posted videos makes this a daunting task to say the least. Barely a decade old, YouTube – the second most popular website on earth (after Google) – has ballooned to the point that 400 hours of new videos are being uploaded every minute (as of February 2017). According to Wikipedia: “It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.”
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Justin Bieber is the most successful musician to get his start on this video hosting service; a talent scout with So So Def Records clicked onto one of his videos on YouTube by accident in 2008, and he began singing for Usher shortly thereafter when he was just 13. Besides selling more than 100 million records, Wikipedia reports: “[Justin] Bieber also became the first artist to surpass 10 billion total video views on Vevo.”
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Greg Shaw and the Bomp! Records crew even came up with a cool term for the kind of music that they like: “Bomp-Worthy”. Sadly, in the 12+ years since Shaw’s untimely death in 2004, this term has largely dropped out of sight on the Internet. I remember one “thread” (in the pre-blog era) talking about Linda Ronstadt’s Bomp-Worthy music that was still findable not so long ago, and I wish I could remember more about it. It was one of the references for the Wikipedia article that I wrote on the Stone Poneys. Now, there are only 20 results on Google for “Bomp-Worthy”.
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I have previously noted that the Black Keys were profiled on CBS Sunday Morning several years ago. During their interview, they mentioned that they frequently allow their music to be used for commercials and other similar purposes. They kept expecting to hear cries of “sellout!”, but they never came. Wikipedia mentioned: “The band continued to gain exposure through continued song licensing, so much so that they were Warner Bros. Records’ most-licensed band of the year [2010].”
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In an interview on the National Public Radio radio program Fresh Air, as reported in Wikipedia: “The group’s name ‘the Black Keys’ came from an artist diagnosed with schizophrenia, Alfred McMoore, that the pair knew; he would leave incoherent messages on their answering machines referring to their fathers as ‘black [piano] keys’ such as ‘D flat’ when he was upset with them.”
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After making a six-song demo and sending it to a dozen or so record labels, the Black Keys signed with Alive Records, since they were “the only label that would sign [them] without having to see [them] first” (according to Wikipedia). Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney recorded the entirety of The Big Come-Up on an 8-track tape recorder in Carney’s basement, accentuating their raw blues rock sound. They released one single from the album on Isota Records, the blues standard “Leavin’ Trunk” backed with their cover of the Beatles song, “She Said, She Said”. At a later date, another track from their debut album, “I’ll Be Your Man” was used as the theme song for the HBO series Hung.
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The Black Keys signed with Fat Possum Records for their next two albums, Thickfreakness and Rubber Factory (I picked up a copy of the latter album on vinyl in Atlanta a few years back). Continuing their lo-fi ways, Thickfreakness was recorded in a single 14-hour recording session and again in Patrick Carney’s basement. Wikipedia notes: “Time later named Thickfreakness the third-best album of 2003.” For their third album, the Black Keys set up a recording studio in a former tire-manufacturing plant in Akron (hence the name, Rubber Factory).
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The cover of their breakthrough album, Brothers has a plain appearance and simply states: “This is an album by the Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers.” The cover of their hit single “Tighten Up” has similar packaging. (This is not the same song as the 1968 hit by Archie Bell and the Drells also called “Tighten Up”). According to Wikipedia: “Inside the package, the album's disc was coated with a thermal film that changes colors (black and white) at different temperatures.” Remarkably, Patrick Carney’s brother Michael Carney, who has designed the album art for all of their records, won a Grammy in 2011 for Best Recording Package for Brothers.
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Besides his work with the Black Keys, Dan Auerbach has had several side projects and has released two solo albums. He handled the production duties for the three albums by past UARB Hacienda. From Wikipedia: “In addition to winning several Grammy Awards as a member of the Black Keys, Auerbach received the 2013 Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for co-producing his band’s 2011 album, El Camino, and for producing records by Dr. John (Locked Down) and Hacienda.”
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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.’”
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AARP The Magazine has gotten to be a great musical resource in recent years; when Bob Dylan released his first album of standards a few years back, Shadows in the Night (2015), the only interview he granted was with this magazine. The reporter had previously worked at Rolling Stone magazine. From Wikipedia: “The album has received universal acclaim from critics for its unexpected and strong song selection and for the strength of Dylan and his band’s performance and arrangements. The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, making Dylan the oldest male solo artist to chart at number one in the UK.”
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The same “unbeknownst” thing happened with Milan the Leather Boy. After I wrote up my Wikipedia article on him, I was contacted by his sister Dara Rodell Gould, who along with her husband Ricky Gould had been trying to interest people in Milan’s music for years. They had no idea that Milan had attained a cult status in the garage-rock community, or probably that there was even such a thing as the garage-rock community.
(June 2017)
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That memorable time – I always thought it was late 1969, but based on the dates I see in Wikipedia and elsewhere, it must have been in 1970 – I went by the Record Bar in Raleigh near the North Carolina State University campus, and there were several tables full of bootleg records that had been set up in the middle of the store. I picked up four that day: two by Bob Dylan, Great White Wonder and John Birch Society Blues; one by the Beatles, Kum Back; and one by the Rolling Stones, The Greatest Group on Earth. The music I got that day was a revelation and has informed my record collecting habits ever since.
According to Wikipedia: “It [Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!] was reported to have been issued in response to the well known bootleg Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be” (the alternate name of The Greatest Group on Earth).
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Get Back was the original working title for the Let it Be project, meant to be “a return to the Beatles’ earlier, less complicated approach to music” (as expressed in Wikipedia). As an illustration of this, the photograph for the planned cover for Get Back was taken in the same location as the one on the Beatles’ first British album, Please Please Me, and the cover had a similar design.
At nearly 6 minutes in length and almost 2 minutes longer than any of the other songs on Kum Back (according to the Wikipedia article), “Teddy Boy” seems even longer; while there are two verses, the song mostly consists of the chorus line – “He said, Mommy don't worry, now Teddy boy's here / Taking good care of you” – repeated multiple times with very minor wording changes.
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As to the Beatles’ attitudes toward the Let it Be . . . Naked reissue, Wikipedia notes: “[Paul] McCartney in particular was always dissatisfied with the ‘Wall of Sound’ production style of the Phil Spector mixes of three tracks, especially for his song ‘The Long and Winding Road’, which he believed was ruined by the process. George Harrison gave his approval for the Naked project before he died. McCartney’s attitude contrasted with [John] Lennon’s from over two decades earlier. In his December 1970 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Lennon had defended Spector’s work, saying, ‘He was given the s--ttiest load of badly recorded s--t – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it. . . . When I heard it, I didn't puke.’ Harrison and Ringo Starr also remained complimentary about Spector's contribution, with Starr saying: ‘I like what Phil did. . . . There's no point bringing him in if you're not going to like the way he does it – because that's [Wall of Sound] what he does.’”
So how did Let it Be . . . Naked go down 33 years after the original release of Let it Be? The same sort of muted comments that greeted the new version of Raw Power were in evidence here as well; Wikipedia lists some of them: Allmusic notes that Let it Be . . . Naked “is overall slightly stronger [than Let it Be] . . . a sleeker, slicker album”; Pitchfork notes that Let it Be . . . Naked is “not essential [. . .] though immaculately presented”; and Salon commented that Let it Be . . . Naked “stripped the original album of both John [Lennon]’s sense of humor and Phil Spector’s wacky, and at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, grandiosity.”
For myself, some tacky items stood out when I scanned the changes made in Let it Be . . . Naked that are listed in Wikipedia; they seem to go beyond adjusting whatever Phil Spector had added to the recordings. For “Dig a Pony”, Wikipedia states: “[The] error in second verse (the ‘because’ in [John] Lennon’s vocal track) [was] digitally corrected.” Similarly, in “Two of Us”, a “minor error in Lennon’s acoustic guitar performance [was] digitally corrected.” One of the live tracks, “I’ve Got a Feeling” is actually composed of “[a] composite edit of two takes from the rooftop concert”. After reading this, I have an image in my mind of a high school art student touching up an old master.
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From Wikipedia: “Written by [John] Lennon as an anguished love song to Yoko Ono, [‘Don’t Let Me Down’] was interpreted by Paul McCartney as a ‘genuine plea’, with Lennon saying to Ono, ‘I’m really stepping out of line on this one. I’m really just letting my vulnerability be seen, so you must not let me down.’ . . . Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called it ‘one of the Beatles’ most powerful love songs’.”
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Anthology 3 includes numerous Beatles tracks from the Let it Be sessions that (as I remember) are likely the corresponding songs on Kum Back; in all, 12 of the 23 songs on the second CD are identified in Wikipedia as “Savile Row Sessions”, with recording dates ranging from January 22 through January 29, 1969. Among these songs are “Teddy Boy”, but with a much shorter running time of 3:18. Other performances on Anthology 3 from the Savile Row Sessions that have no connection to the Let it Be album are two of the Abbey Road songs, “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” and “Oh! Darling”; a song called “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues” that had been recorded by Buddy Holly in 1957 and was part of the Beatles’ live repertoire until 1962; and a medley of three rock and roll classics – “Rip It Up”, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Blue Suede Shoes”.
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The first cut, “Mixed Up Confusion” was my introduction to Bob Dylan’s very first 45, as I have written about previously. With Dylan backed by an electric band, the song dates from November 1962 and was released on December 14, 1962 – 6 months before Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and fully 2½ years before the electric Dylan hit with full force on “Like a Rolling Stone” – but it was almost immediately pulled from the market and is now a great rarity. The flip side of this single, and the only song that I recognized on John Birch Society Blues was “Corrina, Corrina”; an alternative take of the song was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but I had heard the song previously before I heard it there, by somebody somewhere. Wikipedia lists so many recorded versions of “Corrina, Corrina” that I have no idea which one it was; probably it was the Ray Peterson recording of “Corrina, Corrina” in 1960 that made it to #9 on Billboard Hot 100.
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According to Greg Shaw, James Williamson was instrumental in saving the Stooges’ musical history; besides the treasure trove given to Shaw as part of the Kill City release deal, he had saved the tapes that became Metallic K.O. (1976), from live performances by the Stooges at Michigan Palace in Detroit on October 6, 1973 and February 9, 1974 – the album originally purported to be entirely from the 1974 show, which was purportedly the Stooges’ last live performance until reforming in 2003, but later releases of Metallic K.O. cleared up the confusion on the dates. The same thing said about Metallic K.O. in Wikipedia – “Considering [James] Williamson’s involvement, and the endorsement of Iggy, it was considered a ‘semi-official’ bootleg, when released on the Skydog label in 1976” – would apply to the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as well.
According to Wikipedia: “The album proved popular, due to its release in the first era of punk rock and the Stooges’ growing legend as proto-punks. Metallic K.O. outsold the Stooges’ major label official releases, selling over 100,000 copies in America as an import in its first year alone.”
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The main reason that there are Under Appreciated Rock Bands in the first place, in the way that I define the term (i.e., they do not have an article in Wikipedia), is the idea of Notability; quoting from the Wikipedia article on this topic: “In general, notability is an attempt to assess whether the topic has gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time as evidenced by significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic.”
For rock bands, having two albums released on a major record label automatically makes a band “notable”; beyond that though, whether someone is notable is up for interpretation – Wikipedia articles are deleted frequently for that reason alone. In almost every case, the UARB’s and UARA’s that I write about are also “notable”, whether or not Wikipedia would agree, in that they have numerous fans throughout the country and around the world. Again, nearly always, there are comparatively recent reissues of the album(s) by the UARB’s; these aren’t forgotten records that no one else knows about.
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".
(September 2017)
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I wrote up several Wikipedia articles on this music, including the Choir and the Starfires; and I greatly expanded the article on the Outsiders and came up with articles on their albums as well. Another Wikipedia article (much of whose content has been deleted, I was distressed to find out just now) was on the compilation album of music made by Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators for Bomp! Records, called L.A. L.A., which includes a cover version of the song by the Choir, “It’s Cold Outside”.
However, I had not gotten around to writing up a Wikipedia article on a Cleveland band called Cyrus Erie, a rival of the Choir whose lead singer was Eric Carmen. Carmen was the future lead singer of the Raspberries and also had a successful solo career afterward as both a singer and a songwriter with hits that include “All by Myself”, “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again”, and “Hungry Eyes”. As only my third Under Appreciated Rock Band post, my entry on Cyrus Erie also talked extensively about the 1960’s Cleveland music scene.
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The Wikipedia article notes some of the critical reaction to Kill City: “Nick Kent of New Musical Express called it ‘a great album’. Mark Deming of Allmusic called the album ‘a minor triumph’, writing: ‘The music is more open and bluesy than on Raw Power, and while [James] Williamson’s guitar remains thick and powerful, here he’s willing to make room for pianos, acoustic guitars and saxophones; and the dynamics of the arrangements suggest a more mature approach after the claustrophobia of Raw Power.’ Martin Aston of BBC Music praised the album, calling it ‘Iggy’s most underrated album’ and one that ‘helped him get back to real life’. The Wire placed Kill City in their list of ‘100 Records that Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)’.”
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I also found a quote from Iggy Pop in the Wikipedia article that was taken from the liner notes of the new mix of Raw Power that was released in 1997: “Very few people recognized the quality of the Stooges’ songwriting, it was really meticulous. And to his credit, the only person I’d ever known of in print to notice it, among my peers of professional musicians, was [David] Bowie. He noticed it right off.”
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There are several rock bands that have this name, oddly enough. The SS-20 is what NATO called one of the Soviet Union’s intermediate-range nuclear missiles; why exactly this name became so popular in the punk rock world is hard to understand. Discogs lists a dozen bands named SS20, SS 20, or SS-20. One of these, which later took the name Dezerter, has a Wikipedia article that calls them one of the most popular punk rock bands in Poland.
The Wikipedia disambiguation page for SS-20 says that there are also punk rock bands with this name from Cincinnati, Ohio and from Mexico. Allmusic lists an album from the Cincinnati band SS-20 called Capital Class; Discogs calls both of them hardcore punk bands and shows 4 albums for each, noting that the band from Mexico is fronted by a woman.
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Wikipedia notes that the Seeds performed “Pushin' Too Hard” live on an episode of The Mothers-in-Law that starred Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. Like He & She, which came along in the same time period, The Mothers-in-Law is one of my very favorite sitcoms but did last two seasons.
From Wikipedia: “Allmusic’s Richie Unterberger wrote that ‘“Pushin’ Too Hard” [by the Seeds] is one of the songs most commonly cited when people are trying to celebrate or denigrate 1960s garage rock, and sometimes championed for precisely the same reasons as others put it down, though in time the critical balance tended toward praising the tune rather than dumping on it.'”
(December 2017)
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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.
Also on tap this coming year is an overview of New Wave Theatre, a fascinating public-access show that presented LA-area punk rock bands amongst other assorted weirdness that would air at the end of the popular late-night program Night Flight on USA Network. I have poked around on the Internet, and even though all of the episodes are now available on YouTube, not much has been written about the show – the Wikipedia article on New Wave Theatre has basically two or three paragraphs. Thus, I am going to have to do some primary research before I can get this post put together. I do plenty of that with the UARB’s and UARA’s, but for the remainder of the posts, I typically lean on Wikipedia and Allmusic. In other words, that is something else that I have been putting off. I had always hoped to at least keep this up for at least 10 years, but I am not there yet.
I also have a CD or two of potential UARB’s in the religious category, but I have already written extensively about “rock and religion” in five earlier posts, so coming up with something new to say is also going to take some time. As it turned out, I had more to say about rock and religion than I had UARB’s to talk about: One of the UARB’s had “Christ” in the name but that’s it, Mötochrist; and another was a gospel group called Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters that was not in the least a rock band. Same thing about “women and rock” – I have five posts on that also, but that will be an easier topic to expand on. Anyway, we’ll see how the year goes. It is going to be hard for me to top the list of UARB’s for this past year, that’s for sure. I have even considered changing the definition of UARB to include those that do have a Wikipedia article but nothing in Allmusic, but I haven’t gone that far yet.
There are plenty of rock bands out there that do not have a Wikipedia article yet, and I already have the LP or CD in hand. I alphabetized my CD’s a year or so back, and picking a row almost at random, here are some potential future UARB’s and UARA’s: King Richard and the Knights (a wonderful 1960’s garage rock band from Albuquerque that actually I was pretty sure had a Wikipedia article, though I can’t seem to find it now), Level with the Ground (a local band that came along about the same time as 3 Doors Down – as with Schattenfreiheit though, a German duo who put out a self-published album that is among my all-time favorites, they are too obscure to make the UARB list), Looters (I have written about them before but had not realized they were a potential UARB – an inventive world-music band that, unaccountably, was a favorite of many Bay Area punk rock bands, including Dead Kennedys), the Love Drunks (an Alive Records punk rock band, with quite affected vocal stylings), and Martin (how could I resist that one? His full name is Martin Kember). That is actually a pretty good list of potential UARB’s and UARA’s; I will have to do this more often!
(Year 8 Review)
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I knew that Holly Ramos had worked in film as well as music in my research for the post on her punk rock band Fur more than five years ago. In silent testimony to her acumen in the acting field, Holly appears in four different photographs on the cover and in the booklet and also on the Fur CD itself. By looking closely, you can tell that it is Holly in all four pictures, but her look is startlingly different in each of them.
Holly Ramos was one of the actors in a 2001 independent film that was the debut feature by Ilya Chaiken called Margarita Happy Hour. The Fur song “Sex Drive” was featured in the soundtrack for this film. The movie was nominated for a Prism Award; from Wikipedia: “The Annual Prism Awards honor the creative community for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction and mental health in entertainment programming.”
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The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, the Iguanas; once again, as with past UARB the Rip Chords (who had a big surf rock hit in 1964, “Hey Little Cobra”), I started my UARB post on the Iguanas during the month before someone finally wrote a Wikipedia article on the band. As I said before in one of my recent posts, I don’t think I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being among the UARB’s.
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Right now, I am making a pass through all of the Google Sites webpages, one by one; so that they will have the same features and the same colors and the same links. One of the most time-consuming aspects is putting in the curly quotes everywhere; they were probably in less than 20% of the webpages before, and in hardly any of the Wikipedia excerpts at the beginning of most of the webpages. Mostly I am using the [ALT] key plus four number keys to put them in. The left quote – “ – for instance is [ALT]-0147, which are all of the left hand keys in a row. This isn’t just a vanity thing; having two kinds of apostrophes also throws off the alphabetizing in the index.
(Year 9 Review)
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Ten years ago, in December 2009, I wrote the first of my 82 posts on Under Appreciated Rock Bands, i.e., rock bands (and artists) who did not have a write-up as yet in Wikipedia. It wasn’t much to look at, just four short paragraphs, but I got a lot wordier and more wide-ranging as the years went by. I had hoped to keep this up for at least 5 years, if not 10 years; as it happened, my last post was dated December 2017 – 8 years later, and 2 years ago.
For two of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands – the Rip Chords (who had a major hit in the surf era with “Hey Little Cobra”) and the Iguanas (punk icon Iggy Pop’s first band, and the reason that he came to be called “Iggy”) – I managed to write my post literally the month before someone started a Wikipedia article on them. For another two – the Piltdown Men and Haymarket Square – it turns out that there was already a Wikipedia article on them; for the latter band, I just plain forgot to look! And one of the UARB’s, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters was not even a rock band – and I just found a Wikipedia article about them also, so I suppose I didn’t look closely enough when I started that post either. But I don’t care at this point: They are all Under Appreciated, from one end to the other, even for the handful who do have a Wikipedia article these days.
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I also recently picked up Thomas Anderson’s The Moon in Transit, another amazing album. Only heard that one once so far. The name is similar to that of the first album of his that I got, the Marilyn Records album Moon Going Down. When I put up the “Flashback” on Thomas Anderson five years ago, I could not find any songs at all on YouTube; I had to settle for listing lyrics instead. There are lots of his songs on YouTube now. Also, Thomas Anderson is one of the few UARB’s and UARA’s that has a Wikipedia article currently. (Another time, I ordered two more albums by a Thomas Anderson, not knowing whether it was the right guy or not. One of them, Is This Love? turned out to be a different Thomas Anderson, and I assumed that was true of the other CD as well. However, I discovered last month that the other one, Heaven is another great record by the right Thomas Anderson, so that’s four albums of his that I have now!)
(Year 10 Review)
