ALLMUSIC – 2012
The 2008 album that I have, called simply Ron Franklin and released (where else) on one of the Bomp! labels (Alive), is actually Ron Franklin’s third album, and Allmusic gives it four stars. The recording quality is very clean (this is one of those albums where I own both an LP and a CD – not on purpose, but that is how it worked out).
(January 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)
* * *
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)
* * *
The article by Allmusic (by William Ruhlmann) on Arlo Guthrie opens with: “Is it possible to be a one-hit wonder three times?” The whole idea of course is nonsense. Besides “City of New Orleans” in 1972 and “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” in 1967, the third item that Allmusic is remembering is “Coming into Los Angeles”, which Guthrie performed at Woodstock in 1969. But there is also his novelty “Motorcycle Song” (from the Alice’s Restaurant album), which I saw Arlo perform on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson I believe on two occasions.
* * *
Allmusic (by Cub Koda) summed it up well in their article on the band: “Unfairly depicted as a novelty act, the Trashmen were in actuality a top-notch rock & roll combo, enormously popular on the teen club circuit, playing primarily surf music to a landlocked Minnesota audience.”
* * *
Writing for Allmusic, Stewart Mason gives the Tina and the Total Babes album four stars (out of five) and states: “The songs themselves are absolutely terrific; the melodramatic ‘Tragedy’, which sounds like the Go-Go’s covering the Shangri-Las, is alone worth the price of admission; but the presentation and attitude are so equally perfect that She’s So Tuff is every bit the equal of the records that inspired it. In fact, it may be better!”
(May 2012)
* * *
Allmusic does list a second album under Wild Blue called Above and Beyond, but it is a 2004 release by a band called Wild Blue Yonder; as far as I can tell, there is no connection with Wild Blue.
(June 2012)
* * *
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)
* * *
I missed the fact that Sundazed Records had put out a second Stillroven CD in 2003, Too Many Spaces, though Allmusic disputes that it is actually an unreleased album.
(September 2012)
* * *
There is a long article on Trillion in Allmusic (by Eduardo Rivadavia) that starts off: “For every American progressive rock band that found increasing success on commercial radio during the second half of the ’70s – Journey, Styx, Kansas, etc. -- there were additional dozens possessing the same sonic recipe for infectious bombast but which, for some reason or other, just never made the grade, including Trillion.” It is hard to know why some albums grab listeners and others do not, but clearly, no one has the formula figured out yet.
Although Trillion’s debut album Trillion earned a four-star rating (out of five) from Allmusic, they didn’t deign to even review the second album from 1980, Clear Approach.
* * *
I cannot talk about progressive rock without bringing up one of my favorite albums: King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. This was one of the earliest albums in the progressive rock genre; Bruce Eder in Allmusic describes it well as “one of the most daring debut albums ever recorded by anybody”.
* * *
Fergie Frederiksen has also enjoyed a long, prosperous and highly varied career in music; Tom Demalon of Allmusic has written of him: “If a music fan was desiring to create a game similar to the one based upon actor Kevin Bacon and his seemingly endless ties to other actors, singer Fergie Frederiksen might find himself to be a suitable candidate.”
(October 2012)
* * *
But they actually are a pretty cool indie rock band; Allmusic says that Slovenly was “[l]oved by those who were lucky to hear them”.
(November 2012)
* * *
Basically dropping everything and pushing a band to the top of the heap on the UARA/UARB stack has happened only one other time among these posts, and it was quite awhile ago: the UARB for April 2010, the Breakaways. They were only around for a little over a year, and they are actually the third of three bands by that name that are listed in Allmusic.
* * *
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.
* * *
I looked up the band on Allmusic right away, and there is a description of their sound that is about as delicious as any that I have ever heard for someone with my musical tastes: “Generating savage garage punk fueled by switchblade guitars and howling organs, the Invisible Eyes thrive in the musical no-man’s-land where psychedelic rock gets spooky and garage rock goes beyond mere petulance into genuine menace.”
Speaking of Allmusic and maracas, let me add another great quote about blues and rock pioneer Bo Diddley that I picked up from that site. In the article on “Say Man”, Mark Deming writing for Allmusic has this parenthetical note of praise for Bo Diddley: “. . . let’s pause to mention no other artist would be so obsessed with rhythm and such a visionary that they would hire a guy just to play maracas”.
(December 2012)
