UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR JANUARY 2011: HACIENDA
Thirty-some years ago, I picked up a two-record set with a
neo-psychedelic cover called
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. (I always just called it “
Nuggets”, but
Wikipedia uses the whole title). If the dates strike you odd – thinking, wait a minute,
the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t come out until the
summer of 1967 – well, that is true; but
psychedelia had been around a long time before that mainstream hit. (Likewise, by the time
the Bee Gees,
John Travolta and the
Saturday Night Fever crowd showed up, the
disco craze was on the wane). Besides being one of the greatest compilation albums of all time –
Rolling Stone puts it at #196 on the
500 Greatest Albums of All Time, period – this was a record on a mission: By naming “the first
psychedelic era” just three or four years after it had ended,
Nuggets helped ensure that there would be a second (and a third)
psychedelic era.
Lenny Kaye, who would later be the guitarist for
Patti Smith Group, helped put the album together and wrote the liner notes that are almost as well known as the album itself.
Patti Smith has been more or less a recluse all of her professional life – the whole time I was in
NY, her only performance was a poetry reading that I passed on – but she has been getting a little more prominence lately, I am delighted to see: She interviewed
Johnny Depp in the current issue of
Vanity Fair magazine and has an acclaimed memoir out now called
Just Kids, about her life with her late roommate, the brilliant and notorious photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe.
In an introductory note,
Lenny Kaye expressed something that I felt as well while I was reading it: that there was this wonderful music floating around among the
British Invasion bands and the
girl groups and the
Motown sound, and it was gone before we even knew what we were hearing; and wouldn’t it be great to hear all of these songs again in one place.
Kaye called the music “
punk rock” – the first high-profile use of that term – but these days, it is called
garage rock and
psychedelic rock. It is no exaggeration to say that this album told my soul what kind of music I
really love.
Reading between the lines, many of the songs on
Nuggets were apparently chosen by what had hit the
Top 100 at some point during that time period; that would explain the presence of the strangest of the songs, the closing track “
It’s-a-Happening” by
the Magic Mushrooms, which remarkably made it to something like
#94 for a week. Even more intriguing to me were the songs that hadn’t hit the charts at all. One immediate fave was “
A Public Execution” by a
Texas band called
Mouse and the Traps (the song was officially issued under the name
Mouse), doing something that I didn’t think would ever happen: someone else creating music along the lines of
Bob Dylan’s
“Like a Rolling Stone” and
Highway 61 Revisited.
There about midway through the fourth side of
Nuggets was a song that I didn’t think quite fit in: “
Farmer John” by
the Premiers. It was earlier than any of the other tracks, dating from
1964, and it sounded like it was recorded live at somebody’s picnic. The lyrics were simple – “Farmer John . . . I’m in love with your daughter . . . whoa-oh-oooh” – as was the beat and the slow, loping groove; but it just kept growing on me. Eventually
Neil Young recorded a cover of the song in the same style on his excellent
1990 album
Ragged Glory. The songwriter is
Richard Berry – he is not related to
Chuck Berry but has some seminal songs to his credit nonetheless; “
Louie Louie” heads the list, but “
Have Love, Will Travel” is almost as good. (
See below).
Only last year did I discover that
the Premiers were a
Chicano band; there was a show on
PBS that explained how this band and so many other
Latin bands had been chased off the charts by the
British Invasion. They are hardly the only ones;
Question Mark and the Mysterians are a dynamite
Latino garage rock band with a big hit to their credit, “
96 Tears”. Their bandleader had his name
legally changed to ? (though it was usually spelled out) decades before Prince did something similar – at least ?’s was a pronounceable symbol. Thee Midniters is yet a third one familiar to those in the know; generally bands who use “thee” are Latino bands.
Totally unremarked upon in all this time, as far as I know, is that
Ritchie Valens’ real last name is
Valenzuela, the same as the legendary pitcher for the
Los Angeles Dodgers,
Fernando Valenzuela. In
1981,
Valenzuela caught the imagination of the whole country when he won his first 8 games as a starting pitcher in his rookie season for the
Dodgers, including 5 shutouts. If the season hadn’t been cut short by the baseball strike that year, there is no telling how dominant he might have been; but to this day, he is still the only player in
Major League Baseball history to have been awarded the
Rookie of the Year award, the
Cy Young Award, the
Silver Slugger Award, and a
World Series championship, all in the same season. While “
Fernandomania” was a distant memory to most people by the time
La Bamba came out,
Fernando Valenzuela had one of his best seasons the previous year (
1986) and nearly won the
Cy Young Award again.
I was introduced to the band when
Suzy Shaw, who manages Bomp! Records’ online Bomp! mailorder business (among other duties) included three recent releases in one of my usual orders of decades-old music. Besides the second Hacienda album, she also included a delightful psychedelic stew of an album by Mondo Drag called New Rituals; and Brian Olive’s debut solo album, Brian Olive. Olive (ex-Soledad Brothers) is one of those amazing men – like Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Nikki Sudden – to whom songwriting is as natural as breathing; he is working on a second album already. Although I very much enjoyed the albums that I had ordered, I found myself playing these new artists again and again. Anyway, it surely worked, for I have a nice stack of new CD’s and LP’s released by the Bomp labels that I have since ordered.
How to describe
Hacienda’s music has been a problem for me though. Because of their
1960’s sensibility and love of harmony vocals, they are often compared with familiar bands from that era – even their website says: “Think
the Beach Boys meet
the Everly Brothers”. That’s a cute headline but isn’t really helpful in terms of a description: If I were writing about
the Everly Brothers, I certainly wouldn’t say, “They are a lot like
the Beach Boys” – or
Gram Parsons, or
The Band, or any of the other artists that I have heard mentioned.
As I have thought it over though, I realize that
Hacienda sounds more like
the Premiers than anyone else I can think of, so maybe it is a special
Chicano sound that they have. I had originally brought up the latter band as a device to start talking about
Chicano rock bands – and as a way to write a tribute to one of my very, very favorite albums. In any case,
“Farmer John” is not to be missed, so I have included a link to a
YouTube video of the original 45 of this great song:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKVLAiyDIzw. (I am not positive that this is the one that was on
Nuggets, but it probably is, though the odd introduction about “Has anybody seen Kosher Pickled Herring?” is omitted).
* * *
(January 2014)
* * *
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 Jan 2011 – HACIENDA; Latinos in Rock
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
