MIKE STAX – Ugly Things
The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for June 2017 is THE LOONS, a self-described “psychotic beat music” band founded by Mike Stax – editor of Ugly Things magazine and a former member of past UARB the Crawdaddys. They have been around more than 20 years – a lot longer than I had thought – and arose from the ashes of two other San Diego bands that Mike Stax helped start, the Tell-Tale Hearts and the Hoods. I anticipate naming the Tell-Tale Hearts as a UARB within the next couple of posts; that would give me an Under Appreciated “hat trick”.
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Mike Stax founded Ugly Things magazine in 1982 when he was just 21 years old in order to cover, as he put it, “Wild Sounds from Past Dimensions”. Whereas “fanzines” tended to be thin mimeographed or cheaply printed affairs, Ugly Things is published more or less annually as a slick package with high production values that looks a lot more like a book than a magazine. As an example, Ugly Things #34 that includes my article on Milan has 184 pages.
From Wikipedia: “The Lama Workshop editor Patrick Lundborg has stated about [Ugly Things] and editor Mike Stax: ‘The 1980s (music) zines have retired into the great recycling container in the sky (it’s down to UT, Shindig!, and Misty Lane now). Mike Stax has managed not only to keep it alive, but expand his trip in various directions, and in the process become one of the very best – perhaps THE very best – 1960s-oriented writer out there.’”
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AARP The Magazine had a neat article in their June/July 2016 issue recently about a virtually unknown garage rock band called the Sloths that were putting together an album 50 years after the 1965 release of their crude single “Makin’ Love”. The article was about as long as a companion piece in the same issue about the Rolling Stones. (I believe that this is the article where Mick Jagger expressed his wonderment about how it must feel for most people who live in a world where the Stones have always been there).
AARP The Magazine has gotten to be a great musical resource in recent years; when Bob Dylan released his first album of standards a few years back, Shadows in the Night (2015), the only interview he granted was with this magazine. The reporter had previously worked at Rolling Stone magazine. From Wikipedia: “The album has received universal acclaim from critics for its unexpected and strong song selection and for the strength of Dylan and his band’s performance and arrangements. The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, making Dylan the oldest male solo artist to chart at number one in the UK.”
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While the other members of the Sloths moved on after the band broke up, Mike Rummans stuck with it. As reported in the AARP The Magazine article: “His musical résumé is a kind of pocket history of American pop. There he is on bass in the bubblegummy Yellow Payges [I just ordered an album, finally, by this band], the glam-tastic Hollywood Stars, the neo-rockabilly Kingbees. His Beatle bangs blossomed into a magnificent ’70s shag, then retreated as the ’80s arrived. Often, his bands flirted with success — the Stars were hyped as the West Coast’s New York Dolls, and the Kingbees charted two singles.”
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The AARP The Magazine article mentions Mike Stax a couple of times: “Unbeknownst to any Sloths, ‘Makin’ Love’ had become an object of fascination after it landed on an influential LP compilation [Back from the Grave, Volume 4] in the early 1980s. ‘The Sloths were something special,’ says Mike Stax, a San Diego musician and garage-rock superfan who publishes the rock zine Ugly Things. ‘“Makin’ Love” was the standout track on that album. So primal, so elemental. It had that caveman primitivism about it.’”
The same “unbeknownst” thing happened with Milan the Leather Boy. After I wrote up my Wikipedia article on him, I was contacted by his sister Dara Rodell Gould, who along with her husband Ricky Gould had been trying to interest people in Milan’s music for years. They had no idea that Milan had attained a cult status in the garage-rock community, or probably that there was even such a thing as the garage-rock community.
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After interviewing the bandmembers and writing them up for Ugly Things, a few years later the Sloths started making noises about “putting the band back together”, and Mike Stax gave them a shot by hiring them as the opening act for a concert by the Loons. As reported in AARP The Magazine: “They sounded rough, but kids turned out in droves to see a real-live 1965 band in the flesh. Tommy [McLaughlin] recalls the exuberant reaction at one early show in East L.A.: ‘We were like the Stones up there for them. I was like, We gotta do this.’”
In 2015, the Sloths put out their first album, Back from the Grave, named after the garage-rock compilation album, Back from the Grave, Volume 4 that brought the band back from obscurity, and with similar album art.
(June 2017)
