Internet

When the operation was moved to the Internet – www.bompstore.com/ – I was a little behind the curve and just thought I had dropped off their mailing list for some reason.  It is not as tactile an experience anymore, and I kind of miss that.  I also might be the very last Bomp! mailorder customer that still sends a paper check! 

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I have not found a whole lot on the Not Quite on the Internet other than what is given on the Dark Lord Rob website – www.americanentropy.com/music/not_quite/ – that gives the long history of the band, its predecessor bands, other bands that they knew and played with along the way, etc.  I hope that it is okay by him that I use these photographs; I’ll happily take them down if he is not pleased.  Their Voxx Records album, . . . Or the Beginning is pictured earlier in this article. 

(May 2013)

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Any in-depth discussion of Bob Dylan inevitably comes to the supposedly controversial and dramatic “going electric”, where he was booed at some concerts and called “Judas” at another.  The single “Mixed Up Confusion” – the very first 45 released by Dylan – muddies those waters considerably, and this is perhaps the reason that this ground-breaking recording is given short shrift in both Wikipedia and Allmusic.  In fact, I found almost nothing about the song except YouTube videos, lyric sheets, download sites, and the other usual Internet folderol. 

(June 2013/2)

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For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent Pebbles CD’s on AIP normally have a copyright notice for BFD Productions – someone else was brought in to write the liner notes, since the ones that Greg Shaw did were said to be mostly geared to serious collectors.  This gentleman’s name is Nigel Strange, and he is supposedly the editor of a magazine called Web of Sound.  I haven’t been able to find out anything about this person on the Internet, and I suspect that he is yet another fiction, as is “A. Seltzer” (clearly a reference to Alka-Seltzer) who wrote the crazed liner notes for the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP.  I loved reading the liner notes as I played the Pebbles albums (still do in fact). 

(July 2013)

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As happened with another previous UARB Queen Anne’s Lace, I have scoured the Internet pretty thoroughly and have found considerable information about the players but very little about the original Silverbird band.   

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Vic Ortiz also contributes to Silverbird’s Broken Treaties album, at least as a songwriter; how he is related to the others is unclear.  While he is almost certainly not the boxer Victor Ortiz – Ortiz also appeared earlier this year on Dancing with the Stars – Vic Ortiz is still listed on innumerable Internet sites with the boxer’s nickname:  Vicious Vic Ortiz. 

(August 2013)

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I feel no need to restate what I have already written on Wikipedia, since those articles are more readily accessible on the Internet than these Facebook posts. 

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A while later, I started scouring the Internet for information about Milan himself, and as I have written previously, that Wikipedia article became the genesis for the more complete article that I wrote about Milan for Ugly Things magazine.  I still haven’t updated the Wikipedia article on Milan with the information that was in the Ugly Things article, but I’m sure that I will get around to it one day.  That article can be found here:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_the_Leather_Boy .  

(September 2013)

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Lisa Bankoff of Chimera was quoted on one Internet blog as saying that Mal Luker is their record producer; Luker also plays guitar and keyboards on “Sad Song for Winter”. 

(November 2013)

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When I first looked up the Liquid Faeries album, Eggshells & Snake Leaves on the Internet, nothing helpful was coming up; so I entered the band name and album name together.  Amazingly, I got only about 20 hits on Google – by contrast, I got 18,100 hits for past UARB Blair 1523, and they are plenty obscure as well.  I suppose I spelled something wrong, because later on, I had hundreds of hits. 

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I had to dig around some, but I did find some classy Ja Ja Ja videos on YouTube.  This is their classic “Katz Rap” (“Cat Rap”), the first female rap song released in Europe:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf5410itOkU .  I found a post by Julie Jigsawnovich on the Internet saying that this song, “Graffiti Artists International” is the first rap song that was completely about graffiti:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEp__hk3Gi0 .  Those two are audio-only, but this is a perfectly delightful video performance of “I Am an Animal”, featuring lots of face painting, cool clothes, Stegosaurus costumes, and neat dance moves:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=allIpI84D_0 . 

(February 2014)

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In 1991, Michael Erlewine founded the All Music Guide as an Internet-based consumer guide; he later launched All Movies Guide and All Games Guide.  

What I have found about most Internet music sites is that they are mostly geared toward modern music and don’t help me very much.  Even Rolling Stone only goes back to 1967; the Rolling Stone Record Guide that I had pre-Katrina covered only albums in print except for the biggest artists.  Allmusic truly tries to cover everything, though some of the UARB’s and UARA’s don’t show up in their database.  Generally speaking, Allmusic has more bands and artists than Wikipedia, though some bands with a big write-up in Wikipedia have almost nothing in Allmusic. 

(March 2014/2)

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There is some misinfomation out there about the Sons of Fred – such as the caption on the above photograph – and I found a letter from Pete Sears that was reprinted on the Radio London website at:

www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/65fabs/jun65/fab130665/fab130665.html .  Much of what I am presenting in this post is based on this letter.  Contrary to what Allmusic says, the Sons of Fred are not from the coastal town of Great Yarmouth.  The band was actually based in Dulwich and Beckenham, where Ray Redway and Alan Bohling were from.  Mick Hutchinson and Tim Boyle were from Chislehurst, while Pete Sears grew up in Hayes, near Bromley.  However, Sears does not know where the band name the Sons of Fred came from.  Also, the Sons of Fred are not at all related to another band called Odyssey, despite what is shown on Allmusic, along with plenty of other Internet sites. 

(March 2014/2)

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Every once in a while, I see something on the Internet that makes me just step back and marvel.  As usual, I went on the Internet to see what I could find about the Soul Agents.  I immediately uncovered a blog called The British Sound that is run by an Italian rock historian named Bruno Ceriotti.  His most recent creation was what he called “The Soul Agents Day-by-Day Story”.  He describes the Soul Agents as “undoubtedly one of the best British rhythm ’n’ blues bands of the early 60’s” and thanks 30 people who assisted him over the 20 years of research required to put this information together, among them Eric Clapton and Keith Emerson.  This truly amazing history of the band can be found at:  thebritishsound.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-soul-agents-day-by-day-story.html . 

(May 2014)

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Cristy Lane’s remake of “One Day at a Time” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles, and the song became the cornerstone of a television and Internet marketing juggernaut for Cristy Lane’s music. 

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The brightly-colored cover on the self-titled album by this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Artist of the Month, Mikki has only the name in large lettering, and there are no photos included; so I really didn’t know what to expect when I uncovered the LP a decade or so back.  The first two song titles on Side 1 are the same, so that usually indicates a dance album.  However, there is a remarkable variety of material on the album; most Internet sources put it in the Soul and Funk categories. 

I had to dig around quite a lot on the Internet (as usual); one entry on Mikki is by a kindred spirit who writes about Rare and Obscure Music on Facebook:  www.facebook.com/pages/Rare-and-Obscure-Music/133581693333210 . 

(July 2014)

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Trying to uncover what was behind this dramatic change in Bob Dylan’s music was hard enough to figure out at the time, and there are several competing stories on the Internet from people who often seem to have an agenda.  There is a film out there called Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born Again, books such as Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan, and numerous magazine articles.  

(August 2014)

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Some years later, I saw a piece on a national news show about snake-handling churches.  I was able to find the video for this story on the Internet not long ago; but now that the National Geographic Channel had a reality-TV show in a snake-handling church where someone died, and with Gary Tuchman broadcasting a story about them on CNN in 2012, I can no longer find it.  Anyway, the news reporter had grown up within or at least near that religion; and he knew that, at some point, he would have to revisit his past.  The story was mesmerizing to me – when the reporter took up a snake himself, he was taken by an overpowering ecstasy.  At some point, the feeling left him, and he realized what he was doing and gave the snake back. 

What I remember most was the music – the reporter called it a cross between gospel music and acid rock, and it is unlike anything else that I have ever heard.  I spent many years without success trying to hunt up an album of snake-handling music, and I actually have a picture in my mind of an album that I came across a long time ago. 

(November 2014)

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In 1995, Phil Gammage founded PreFab International Recordings as a way to present his music on the Internet; their site can be found at:  www.scarletdukes.com/prefab/index.shtml .  Many records by Phil Gammage, the Corvairs, Certain General, the Scarlet Dukes, Voodoo Martini, and others can be found there.  

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I sold this disco band short somewhat in my post.  I was depending on the basic Internet info on the band that was repeated in a myriad places.  But it wasn’t until a year or two later that I was able to locate a copy of the back cover of the Stratavarious album, where most of the best information and credits can usually be found.  There I determined that the person so beautifully playing the harp on many of the songs is Erica Goodman, a renowned concert harpist.  There is also nothing on the back cover about the lead vocalist going by the name of “Lady”, although she is listed this way on at least one of the 12” singles. 

(March 2015)

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I used to hear the Elvis Presley recording of “Love Me Tender” and the Linda Ronstadt recording of “Love Me Tender” played together on the radio as though they were singing a duet of the song, and the result is simply gorgeous.  Thankfully, disc jockeys have freedom in their job that others in the music industry do not, since I understood that is the only way the faux duet could be heard; because there were too many obstacles to releasing the combination as a single recording (i.e., for purchase).  I did locate a photo of a disk on the Internet that does have the duet on it though; perhaps that was intended to be strictly for use by disc jockeys. 

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As quoted in the blog What Fresh Hell is This (overall the best source on information on Black Russian that I was able to find on the Internet), People magazine said of the group in their October 16, 1980 issue:  “The Kapustins were members of Sovremennik, a state-run pop orchestra, with Natasha [Kapustin] on vocals and piano and Serge [Kapustin] on guitar and percussion.  Vladimir [Shneider] produced and played piano for the Singing Hearts, which was one of Russia’s hottest groups in the mid-’70s.  But, as Vladimir notes, they were pumping out more agitprop than pop.  ‘We’d sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end — if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like ‘Killing Me Softly’ or ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’.  But never rock.” 

Most of the posts that I found on the Internet seem more interested in the Black Russian story than in the music.  Writing for Orange Coast magazine of Orange County, California, Keith Tuber stated in an article entitled “Black Russians Mix Well Socially”:  “The problem with the album, which is musically interesting and contains an assortment of classical chord structures – a manifestation of the trio’s early training – is the lyrics.  Only ‘’Cause I Love You’ is entirely written by one of the bandmembers (Serge [Kapustin]), while the others are collaborations.  To my mind, the words are vastly inferior to the music.” 

Along with links to two of the songs, “Move Together” and “’Cause I Love You”, the blog called The Homoerratic Radio Show says of the album:  “Unfortunately, most of their songs sound like numbers cut from the final version of a mediocre Broadway musical.  Still, the group’s got an interesting story, and these two songs aren’t that bad.” 

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I did not find anything else going on with Serge Kapustin of Black Russian until recent times, when he worked on several recordings with singer John Pagano.  Pagano is from Rhode Island and combines R&B and easy-listening stylings; he is best known as the long-time lead vocalist in Burt Bacharach’s touring band.  Three songs are available at several Internet sites by the pair:  “Destiny”, “Hope”, and “A Time in Space”. 

(April 2015/1)

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I often had trouble figuring out the lyrics to songs by the Rolling Stones; they are easy enough to snag off the Internet now, but sometimes it was hard for me to get it from playing the songs back in the day.  In some cases, I even went down to Reznick’s Records and leafed through their sheet music for Rolling Stones songs to find out what the lyrics said – occasionally on multiple occasions for the same song. 

In the last verse of “Get off of My Cloud”, I wasn’t driving then of course, and I had no clue about what the last two lines meant – I’m sure I had seen parking tickets on a car before, but not a whole cluster of them.  And the British term for a car’s windshield, “windscreen” was totally foreign to me.  As a matter of fact, the website on the Internet where I got these lyrics just now didn’t even have it right – they had “window screen”. 

(May 2015)

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I don’t know anything about the Fourmost except that I think they were the band that I saw in an early booklet or paper about the Beatles who were holding their guitars as though they were violins.  I haven’t been able to find that photo on the Internet though.  “Hello Little Girl” by the Fourmost opens Side 2 of an album called The Songs Lennon and McCartney Gave Away. 

(June 2015)

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Anyway, the music is the hard part when doing psychedelic rock; for many would-be psychedelic rock bands, just about any lyrics will do, and the stranger the better.  I was planning to come up with some examples of those lyrics, but they were a little scarce on the Internet.  However, this excerpt from the Allmusic review by Todd Kristel of the Pebbles, Volume 3 LP actually does a better job of describing the songs than the lyrics themselves would: 

“This compilation features Higher Elevation’s ‘The Diamond Mine’, a showcase for the nonsense rambling of disc jockey Dave Diamond; Teddy & the Patches’ ‘Suzy Creamcheese’, which manages to rip off both Frank Zappa and ‘Louie Louie’; Crystal Chandlier’s ‘Suicidal Flowers’, which sounds like the Doors drenched in fuzz guitar; William Penn Fyve’s ‘Swami’, which is such a self-conscious attempt to evoke 1967 that it’s hard to believe it was actually released that year; Jefferson Handkerchief’s ‘I’m Allergic to Flowers’, which was presumably intended as a novelty song; Calico Wall’s ‘Flight Reaction’, a fascinating acid-damaged glimpse into the mind of a passenger who’s sitting in an airplane before takeoff and worrying about a possible crash; the Hogs’ (allegedly the Chocolate Watchband under a different name) ‘Loose Lip Sync Ship’, which consists of an instrumental passage that mutates into Zappa-influenced weirdness; the Driving Stupid’s ‘The Reality of (Air) Fried Borsk’ and ‘Horror Asparagus Stories’, which feature precisely the kind of grounded lyrics that you’d expect; the Third Bardo’s ‘Five Years Ahead of My Time’, a genuinely good number even though it doesn’t sound five minutes ahead of its time; [and] the Bees’ ‘Voices Green and Purple’, which made the Nuggets Box Set along with the Third Bardo song . . . ”  
 

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The Human Zoo wrote all of their own material for the most part, with everyone except the drummer writing or cowriting at least one song.  Unlike the usual situation, where one bandmember does most of the songwriting, no one is shown as a songwriter on more than three of their eleven songs.  There are two other songwriters listed in the credits, Al Morettini and D. Leonards; they might be friends of the bandmembers or something, but they aren’t otherwise listed on the Internet. 

(July 2015)

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