UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR DECEMBER 2010: THE POPPEES
For Lucky 13 among these monthly entries, I am going back to 1970’s power pop, mainly because I am really enjoying Pop Goes the Anthology (which came out earlier this year), a retrospective album for one of the pioneering power pop bands, THE POPPEES. Bandleader, rhythm guitarist and sometime drummer Bob Waxman and bass player Paddy Lorenzo first began putzing around New York as part of a cover band in 1972 until they started writing songs together. They ran an ad in theVillage Voice and found lead guitarist Arthur Alexander that way; once Donny Jackrel was brought in, who had been the drummer in their earlier cover band, the Poppees were born.
After a few false starts, they were signed by
Greg Shaw as the first new band for
Bomp! Records –
Bomp is still going strong, issuing the
Poppees anthology album this year among other great records, and has several allied labels, such as
AIP,
Alive,
Total Energy, etc. The comprehensive website
Allmusic (specifically,
Mark Deming) says of the Poppees: “[T]hey lasted just long enough to provide a link from the first stirrings of the power pop movement to the dawn of New York’s New Wave scene.” Greg Shaw himself has said: “In its usual fashion, history has over-simplified what happened in New York; the Poppees are a reminder that it wasn’t all ‘blank generation’ posing”. (Blank Generation is the title of the first album by Richard Hell and the Voidoids).
But you won’t be thinking about any of that when you hear
the Poppees; what will be going through your mind is “
Beatles!” In his liner notes for the anthology album,
Arthur Alexander recalls that the
Village Voice ad that brought him to the band mentioned “must be into
the Beatles” – and were they ever! You might miss the connection on individual songs buried on a compilation CD as I did; but put two or three songs together, and there is no doubt that this band loved
the Beatles as much as anyone ever has. And not just any
Beatles: “
I Want to Hold Your Hand”-era
Beatles.
Back in
1973, that was about as unfashionable as it got; but the world would soon catch up with them, and
the Poppees found themselves right in the thick of one of the most exciting music scenes in rock history, playing clubs throughout
the City, including
CBGB, the epicenter of
New York’s
punk/
new wave scene. At the weeklong
Easter Rock Festival in
April 1976 at the equally storied
Max’s Kansas City – with a line-up that makes me salivate just looking it over –
the Poppees opened for
Blondie and
Ramones on
Easter Sunday.
Though I have had fun trying to pick up which
Beatles song is echoing through the tracks on the album,
the Poppees are not
Beatles imitators or a cover band. Mostly they play their own material; in fact, the closest they ever came to covering a
Beatles song is when they recorded
“Love of the Loved”, an obscure
Lennon/McCartney song that the Beatles never recorded. (Actually, it turns out that this song was included among the 15 songs on their famed Decca Records audition tape; Pete Best was still drumming then, so it wasn’t really the Beatles that we all know at that point). Instead, they passed it along to Cilla Black, a protegé of their manager Brian Epstein who had been a coat-check girl at the legendary Cavern Club, where the Beatles were honing their skills in 1961. Though virtually unknown on these shores, Cilla Black was the only important female artist to emerge from the British Invasion – and the second-biggest-selling recording artist out of Liverpool (after you know who) – and has been a beloved entertainer in England for decades. While “Love of the Loved” wasn’t a big hit, her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, which came out in January 1964, eclipsed the original by Dionne Warwick and became the biggest selling record in Britain by any female artist in history: Cilla Black sold 800,000 copies of the single in England and another 1,000,000 worldwide.
* * *
The
Honor Roll of the
Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists follows, in date order, including a link to the original
Facebook posts and the theme of the article.
Dec 2009 – BEAST; Lot to Learn Mar 2010 – BANG; Record Collecting I Jul 2010 – THE EYES; Los Angeles Punk Rock Dec 2010 – THE POPPEES; New York Punk/New Wave
Mar 2011 – INDEX; Psychedelic Rock (1960’s) Nov 2013 – CHIMERA; Women in Rock II Jan 2014 – BOYSKOUT; (Lesbian) Women in Rock IV Apr 2014 – HOMER; Creating New Bands out of Old Ones Jul 2014 – MIKKI; Rock and Religion I (Early CCM Music) Sep 2014 – NICK FREUND; Rock and Religion III (The Beatles) Mar 2015 – PHIL GAMMAGE; Songwriting II (Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan) Dec 2016 – THE IGUANAS; Iggy and the Stooges; Proto-Punk Rock Jun 2017 – THE LOONS; Punk Revival and Other New Bands Dec 2017 – SS-20; The Iguana Chronicles
