DISCOGS
Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and crowdsourced database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. While the site lists releases in all genres and on all formats, it is especially known as the largest online database of electronic music releases, and of releases on vinyl media. Discogs currently contains over 7 million releases, by nearly 4.5 million artists, across over 892,000 labels, contributed from over 280,000 contributor user accounts – with these figures constantly growing as users continually add previously unlisted releases to the site over time. (More from Wikipedia)
The Under-Appreciated Rock Band for this month, the Giles Brothers is not properly a band I suppose; they are basically a rhythm section who both sing, consisting of drummer Michael Giles and bass guitarist Peter Giles. However, they also have a recent (2009) compilation CD called The Giles Brothers 1962-1967; and they performed with numerous other bands prior to Giles, Giles and Fripp.
There is a long booklet included with the CD and extensive annotations, including personnel, dates active, the number of “gigs played”, and even several photographs. However, the CD itself is maddening, since the lists of songs that are so carefully laid out on the back cover and in the booklet don’t match up with the songs as they are actually being played. Still, the CD clearly shows the evolution of their music over time, along with the experimentation that would ultimately reach a crescendo with King Crimson. (The Discogs listing for The Giles Brothers 1962-1967 shows the actual sequencing of the 24 tracks on the CD).
(March 2013)
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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!).
(September 2013)
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According to the eBay, Discogs, MusicStack, GEMM, cdandlp.com, and other listings given on similar sites, the bandmembers in Liquid Faeries – yet another all-female band – are Janette Staton (bass guitar, backing vocals), Ann Murrell (drums, keyboards, percussion) and Sarah E. Denham (guitar). However, there is another bandmember also: Kate Van Orden (lead vocals, guitar) – she is listed first on the back cover. Apparently all of these sites copy from one another; only melodyuniverse shows Kate’s name also.
(February 2014)
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A blog called “Southern Gospel Views from the Back Row” at www.sogospelbackrow.wordpress.com. says that Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters recorded just under 40 albums, with many being reissued on CD. This man’s pick for the best recording is Absolutely Live (1989). Wendy Bagwell also released some solo albums; Discogs lists a half dozen.
(November 2014)
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Discogs notes that the “A” side of their first single, “Moon Dawg!” by the Gamblers is sometimes regarded as the first surf music single (“LSD-25” was the flip).
(January 2015/1)
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The songs by Black Russian are all in English, with Natasha Kapustin handling most of the vocals; they have something of a disco-lite vibe in keeping with the time period. The bandmembers wrote all of the music and also produced and arranged all of the songs on the album. Besides vocals, Serge Kapustin plays keyboards and guitar, Natasha Kapustin plays keyboards and synthesizers, and Vladimir Shneider plays synthesizers. Another eight musicians are listed on the credits at Discogs; Guy Costa – their first contact at Motown Records – is identified as co-producer.
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Shortly after Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday divorced in late 1980, Serge Kapustin and Nan O’Byrne collaborated on a song called “Il Me Fait De La Magie” (“It Reminds Me of the Magic”) with French singer Marie-José Casanova. The song appeared on the French album Sylvie Vartan by Sylvie Vartan that was evidently intended to re-establish her identity as a singer. The album is one of several eponymous albums listed in the Discogs site, but in the extensive “List of Sylvie Vartan albums” in Wikipedia, the album is apparently the one also listed as Ça Va Mal (the opening track on Sylvie Vartan is “Ça Va Mal”). The album was reissued on CD in 2013.
(April 2015/1)
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Thanks to the good people who contribute to the discography website Discogs, I have information on dozens of credits for Natasha Shneider that show her becoming more and more in demand as a vocalist, instrumentalist and songwriter as time went on. Natasha Shneider provided backing vocals on the song “People Like You” on the album V (2001) by the alternative rock band Live; and on “Methamphetamine Blues” by the Mark Lanegan Band on their album Here Comes That Weird Chill (2003), as well as “Sympathy” that appeared on the 2014 Mark Lanegan retrospective album Has God Seen My Shadow? An Anthology 1989-2011.
(April 2015/2)
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Then after I have the disks back into sleeves and covers again, I look around on the Internet for the album covers and print them (as big as possible to fit onto a piece of paper). I then tape them onto the covers. When I first started doing this a decade or so ago, about the only place you could find album cover photos was Amazon.com listings and such as that. Some of the front covers that I found for my more obscure albums were tiny, and after blowing them up, they were practically illegible. Nowadays though, artist websites and other sites like Flickr and discogs have both front and back covers and even shots of the record labels (though I haven’t tried to mess with those). You don’t have to use the boring back covers if you don’t want to; often I will use alternate album covers or even a cover from a different album by the same artist.
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(August 2015)
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My segue to the discussion of the UARB was going to be, “I was first introduced to Amanda Jones on the compilation album Peach Jam I” that I described above. That would not have been entirely true; I had not realized until recently that Amanda Jones was one of the artists on Peach Jam I. Actually, after I replayed that CD, the song by Amanda Jones didn’t sound like the LA band much at all. I looked up Peach Jam I on Discogs, and they have the song “You Were Wrong” as being by Amanda Cole, who was using the alias Amanda Jones. Actually, the website has 10 artists named Amanda Jones in its database (and three Amanda Cole’s for that matter), and evidently none of them are the UARB.
(December 2015)
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(March 2016)
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(June 2016)
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Open Up and Bleed! is just one of the many albums of
Stooges material that have been released in The Iguana Chronicles series; Discogs lists 19 albums altogether, and I don’t think that is all of them (I have at least a dozen of the albums myself). This music is vital and, for my money, hasn’t aged a week since it was recorded 35 or 40 years ago. If I can keep this series up long enough, I will do a piece someday on The Iguana Chronicles.
As to
Kill City itself – included by
Bomp! Records in
The Iguana Chronicles, though not by
Discogs – this album has an entirely different feel from
the Stooges’ albums. Despite his trials in the previous few years,
Iggy Pop has consciously and deliberately taken his music in a new direction – call it “
post–proto-punk”.
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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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(June 2017)
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The Greatest Group on Earth is typical of bootleg records that I have seen for a host of bands and artists over the years, in that it consists of a live concert with middling recording quality that was taped surreptitiously by someone in attendance. My guess is that 90% or more of bootleg records are like this. Listings in the Discogs items about this album say that the songs were taken from the second show performed by the Rolling Stones at the Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California on November 9, 1969.
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As given in Discogs, there are 20 records listed in The Iguana Chronicles (all dating from the 1990’s up to 2000), starting with Kill City – though the original LP releases are not shown, with Kill City being the first LP released (in 1977) on Bomp! Records; previously they had pressed only 45’s.
(September 2017)
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Officially, the
Kill City LP’s were released by
Bomp! Records in
1977; but in order to actually get the albums produced,
Bomp! had made a deal with a leading record importer called
Jem Records, and they were the ones who pressed and sold the original LP’s on ugly green vinyl and also got the licensing rights. (I have
Jem Records and names similar to that, like
GEMA, on who knows how many of my albums, though “
Jem Records” apparently does not appear anywhere on the
Kill City-era records). There are also 8-track tapes of both
Kill City and
Metallic K.O. out there according to
Discogs.
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In fact, as the legend of
the Stooges began to grow almost as soon as the final notes were played by the band in their last concert in
Detroit on
February 9, 1974, putting together albums by
the Stooges has become something of a cottage industry.
Discogs shows a total of 29 albums of
Stooges music, including two CD’s that were released in
2017.
Allmusic lists an amazing 54 albums.
Cub Koda writes in his
Allmusic review of one of the
Iguana Chronicles albums,
Year of the Iguana: “
[The Stooges] have found themselves being exhaustively documented, with seemingly every scrap of magnetic tape bearing their imprint coming up for reissue air at one time or another.”
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Kill City could be viewed as the original
Iguana Chronicles release, although the LP’s were not marked that way in the beginning. The
1992 CD of
Kill City that I have shows
The Iguana Chronicles printed on the back page of the booklet, but the listing in
Discogs showing the same page does not.
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For some reason,
Year of the Iguana is not shown as an
Iguana Chronicles album in its
Discogs listing, though it is clearly marked that way. The songs are mostly taken from finished masters and rehearsals (
“Open up and Bleed” is a live recording) and are often but not always alternate versions of the same songs on the other
Iguana Chronicles albums.
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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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