UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR MARCH 2013: THE GILES BROTHERS
It is not really a rare event for a song to come out of nowhere and grab the zeitgeist – that’s virtually the definition of a novelty song – but there have been a host of songs that are just as sideways compared to the recording charts at the time without truly being of the novelty variety. I have written of several in previous posts: the Trashmen’s 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird”, the Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop” (also from 1963), and “Rip Van Winkle” by the Devotions from 1961. They were among my very favorite songs for years after I first heard them, so it is easy to see that I am partial to this kind of song.
One of the most unusual has to be the 1967 hit “Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)” by the Hombres. Here is a sample verse, chosen almost at random: “Saw a man walkin’ upside down / My T.V.’s on the blink / Made Galileo look like a Boy Scout / Sorry ’bout that, let it all hang out”. Not only that; but, as I originally put it in Wikipedia (naturally, the keepers of the Wikipedia universe took out some of the best wording): “The spoken-word introduction – ‘A preachment, dear friend, you are about to receive on John Barleycorn, Nicotine and the Temptations of Eve’ – goes all the way back to 1947, when it served to introduce a song that was every bit as strange for its era as this one was in 1967: ‘Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women’ by Red Ingle and His Natural Seven.”
Speaking of true oldies, there is also another great 1947 hit song by Tex Williams (co-written by Merle Travis) called “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (that Cigarette)”. The chorus goes: “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette / Puff, puff, puff, and if you smoke yourself to death / Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait / But you just gotta have another cigarette.” Phil Harris – best known for his comedic talents and voiceover work these days, if at all – also had a hit with the song in 1947.
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It is more difficult for someone to make a career out of novelty records, but there have been a few. Ray Stevens started with “Ahab the Arab” (it hit #5 in 1962) and had a series of other hits later in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s: “Harry the Hairy Ape”, “Gitarzan”, “Santa Claus Is Watching You”, “The Streak”, etc. He did some serious songs also, notably “Everything Is Beautiful”.
Country music and rockabilly artist Johnny Horton had a good streak of his own going with several “historical ballads”, beginning with “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1959; the song won the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. Horton continuing the following year with two more hits, “Sink the Bismarck” and “North to Alaska” (the latter being the theme song for the John Wayne movie called North to Alaska). There is no telling how much further Horton might have been able to take this craze had it not been for his tragic death in November 1960.
Shel Silverstein had a long series as well, but mostly as a songwriter, not a performer (he was also a fine cartoonist). He wrote most of the music for the rock band Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, including their hits “The Cover of the Rolling Stone”, “Sylvia’s Mother”, and “Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball”; he is also the author of a famous novelty hit by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue”, and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It” for Jim Stafford.
The Royal Guardsmen had a million seller in 1966 with “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”; I guess I have been reminded of it since the local paper has been running some of the “Classic” Peanuts comic strips featuring Snoopy riding his Sopwith Camel into combat, always with the battle cry: “Curse You, Red Baron!”
The Red Baron was a real person – Manfred von Richtofen, who is credited with 80 air victories during the First World War – and his name is referenced in the song (though never in the comic strip as far as I know). The Royal Guardsmen followed that hit with “The Return of the Red Baron” and “Snoopy’s Christmas” and managed to release four albums with Snoopy/aircraft themes in the mid-1960’s, which also featured other novelty songs that had been released earlier by different bands. They had other original songs as well; their first single, “Baby Let’s Wait” eventually made the Top 40 when it was re-released after the “Snoopy” hits.
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So when the Miss Winston-Salem Pageant decided to come up with the entertainment one year (probably 1968, though I don’t know that for sure), I guess they figured that the Royal Guardsmen would be a safe bet. I knew two or three of the girls who were competing, and this was my chance to see a band that I had actually heard of before. I had been to a few “battles of the bands”, even one that featured a quite good local band that had one of the coolest names ever, Captain Speed and the Fungy Electric Mothers; but I am pretty sure that this was my first real concert, and I was psyched.
First, for those who aren’t familiar with my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina: We are mainly known as a manufacturing town, and mostly of cigarettes; R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company is headquartered there. Though the brands “Winston” and “Salem” have waned in popularity some, our nickname “Camel City” highlights what I always thought was the best of their brands – from back in the days when I was a smoker myself, now almost 35 years ago – the original Camel non-filters and also Camel filters. If there is a more iconic cigarette pack than Camel, I don’t know what it would be. I also went to R. J. Reynolds High School; and the site of the Pageant, Reynolds Auditorium is located on that campus. I grew up in two different houses on a short street with a long name, Horace Mann Avenue, that is located just one block from the high school.
The Hanes hosiery mill and the Hanes knitting mill that makes men’s underwear are also located in Winston-Salem; originally they were two different companies (owned by first cousins, if I remember right), but they merged a long time ago. Krispy Kreme doughnuts were founded there back in the 1930’s, and the line of Royal snack cakes that I have seen from coast to coast is also made by a local company.
Winston-Salem also has a reputation as being kind of prudish. Their feud with the rock band Steppenwolf is rather well known in rock circles, as the City fathers attempted to keep the band from singing “goddamn” when they performed their hit song “The Pusher” there. (Lead singer John Kay obliged, though the concert crowds always enthusiastically filled in the offending word).
I was rather surprised years later to hear my home town come up again as I played one of the songs on the two excellent Mermaid Avenue CD’s, consisting of a set of performances of the lyrics to several of literally hundreds of unrecorded songs by Woody Guthrie that were set to music by the American rock band Wilco and the English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. One of the songs, “Aginst th’ Law” goes on and on about all of these illegalities – “It’s against the law to talk, and it’s against the law to walk”, etc. – and later in the song, there is the lyric: “Everything in Winston-Salem is against the law!”.
The Pageant itself was enjoyable enough – my first and last attendance at one of those – and while I didn’t know Miss Winston-Salem herself, Miss Congeniality that year was a friend of mine, Karen Nielsen. But then the Royal Guardsmen took the stage; and somehow, they had morphed into a really nasty punk rock band! They were rocking the house down as far as I was concerned, but you could even see from the audience that the Pageant promoters had no idea who they had hired; and they were scrambling to try to get the concert cut short. After around four songs, the Royal Guardsmen were told to do their hit song and beat it; and even that performance of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” was unlike anything I had expected: At one point, it sounded like there was cannon going off! As far as I know, this incarnation of the Royal Guardsmen never made any records, but I have sure looked hard for them over the years.
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The trouble with introducing yourself to the public as a novelty act is that no one tends to take your follow-up recordings seriously. One of the best new wave albums I have acquired in recent years is Dangerous Dreams by the Nails; and Allmusic states the problem well in their review of the album: “Now a new wave novelty, and forever burdened with a ‘one-hit wonder’ albatross because of the monolithic ‘88 Lines About 44 Girls’, the Nails demonstrate on Dangerous Dreams that this Boulder, CO band still held some clever moves in their repertoire. . . . The grandeur of the Doors, the propulsion of Iggy Pop, and the moroseness of the Sisters of Mercy, combine with the Nails’ own talent to create the perfect vessel for riding high on a dark wave of depression.” However, with all of that praise, the album still merited only a 2½-star rating.
I caught their hit on YouTube, and it really is a hoot; but their follow-up “list” song on this album, “Things You Left Behind” is every bit as good. At one point, they even break down the “fourth wall”: “A dozen contraceptive sponges / Anyone here got a rhyme for sponges?”. Other highlights from the album are the opening song, “Dig Myself a Hole”; and on “Voices”, they come up with a religious-themed song (I seem to have a lot of those in recent Notes) – Moses (among others) insists that “He talked to me!”. The Nails remind me of the Hives in their ability to generate infectious grooves in an offbeat way.
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Much as stand-up routines allow performers to say things that they would never get away with if spoken with a straight face – Larry the Cable Guy comes immediately to mind – offbeat popular music recordings have served over the years to introduce previously taboo subjects to the larger society. One of the Kinks’ most popular recordings is their 1970 hit “Lola”; and from the very first line, it is clear that nothing is what it seems – “I met her in a club down in old Soho / Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola”. Lola “walked like a woman and talked like a man” and – after dancing together “under electric candlelight” – “smiled and took me by the hand / And said dear boy I’m gonna make you a man”.
The final verse – “Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola” – has all of the power and attitude and finality of someone “coming out”; yet even there, the singer doesn’t quite lay it all on the line with the final words: It is actually Lola who is glad that the singer is a man – s/he remains as mysterious as the androgynous Saturday Night Live character “Pat” (played by Julia Sweeney) whose romantic companion is “Chris” (originally played by Dana Carvey).
Other 1970’s recordings have danced around gay issues, such as Rod Stewart’s 1976 minor hit “The Killing of Georgie” – about the murder of a gay friend of his in New York back when he was in Faces – and it was an open secret that Freddie Mercury was gay though closeted; he was the frontman of a band called Queen after all. It was many years later though before openly gay songs and performers would arrive on the popular music scene, such as British musician Tom Robinson in the late 1970’s (he collaborated with Peter Gabriel on one EP that I own), and mid-1980’s sensation Frankie Goes to Hollywood. By the way, it is interesting that the first hit songs by arguably the two most famous Liverpool rock bands – the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” – deal fairly openly with the topic of oral sex.
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For those in the know, Lou Reed’s remarkable hit “Walk on the Wild Side” – which peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976 – is a sleazy romp through the world of artist Andy Warhol. As a member of The Velvet Underground – the house band of Warhol’s legendary studio The Factory – Lou Reed was certainly a familiar denizen of the Andy Warhol milieu. However, this background was primarily in-jokes that most listeners knew nothing about it, nor did they need to: The song’s under-stated musical arrangement provides an ideal setting for Lou Reed’s deadpan delivery of lyrics about an entire litany of taboo subjects – transsexuality, drugs, male prostitution and oral sex. And that’s not to mention the chorus line – “And the colored girls go doo dah doo, dah doo, doo dah doo, doo dah doo . . . ” – and the use of gay slang like “backroom” and “soul food” (the latter in the line “. . . looking for soul food and a place to eat”).
Speaking of under-appreciation, don’t listen to the film critics who slammed the third entry in the Men in Black Franchise, Men in Black 3. This one has all of the cleverness that was largely missing from the second film (though I have come to enjoy that one as well after the fourth or fifth viewing) and features time travel back to 1969, where Andy Warhol is portrayed as an undercover “man in black”. I thoroughly enjoyed MIB 3 myself.
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When she was just 13, folksinger Janis Ian – perhaps the most relentlessly soul-baring folksinger ever – began writing a heartbreaking song about interracial dating that she called “I’ve Been Thinking”; it was ultimately released in 1965 under the name “Society’s Child”. Unable to bear the hatred of her parents and the taunts of her schoolmates, she eventually breaks under the pressure and calls off the romance herself at the end of the song. Though slow to gain airplay (not to mention record sales), the song eventually peaked at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 – the same year that the similarly themed film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released.
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If there is anyone more left-field than Tiny Tim, I don’t know who it might be. He is named of course after the crippled child at the heart of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This story, more than any other single thing, brought about modern Christmas celebrations worldwide (it had become a minor Christian holiday previously over the centuries).
Tiny Tim (real name: Herbert Khaury) was introduced to the world on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an immensely popular comedic variety show in the 1960’s that (among other things) also introduced Goldie Hawn as a bikini-clad dancer decorated with painted graffiti. Tim was hardly tiny (he was both large and tall); and though he had long stringy hair, he really didn’t look like a hippie either.
As described in Wikipedia: “Co-host Dan Rowan announced that Laugh-In believed in showcasing new talent, and introduced Tiny Tim. The singer entered carrying a shopping bag, pulled his soprano ukulele from it, and sang a medley of ‘A Tisket A Tasket’ and ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’ as an apparently dumbfounded co-host Dick Martin watched.” One of the show’s running gags from then on was Martin asking Rowan in consternation whenever he was about to introduce something new: “You’re not gonna bring back Tiny Tim, are you?”.
Most people think that Tiny Tim played “Tiptoe through the Tulips” the first time he was on Laugh-In; but that was actually at his third, more elaborate presentation on the show, where he also used another of his trademark moves: throwing kisses at the audience. “Tiptoe through the Tulips” was, however, Tiny Tim’s hit song; sung in his distinctive falsetto and accompanying himself on his tiny ukulele, it charted as high as #17 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Tiny Tim continued to make periodic appearances on Laugh-In and later on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, where he became known for endearingly addressing the host as “Mr. Carson”. His shyness around women was a frequent topic of his interviews with Carson, and the wedding of Tiny Tim with Victoria Mae Budinger (known as “Miss Vicki”) on the Tonight Show was viewed by 21.4 million viewers, one of the largest American television audiences for many years, particularly in late night.
I saw Tiny Tim once in a while in later years, but he seemed a little dissipated and had put on weight. It was also sad to see that he had lost that seemingly permanent twinkle in his eye – the marriage didn’t work out for one thing, though they did have one daughter, who naturally was named Tulip (married name: Tulip Victoria Khaury Stewart).
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In Tiny Tim’s version, “Tiptoe through the Tulips” came off as a novelty song, but that is certainly not how the song started out. Written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke, “Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me” was a featured song in an historic film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway and became a #1 hit recording by one of the film’s stars, the “crooning troubadour” and guitarist Nick Lucas later that year. Only the second all-color “talkie” film (and using an early version of the Technicolor process), it quickly became the best-selling film of all time that year, a record that it held for 10 years until eclipsed by (you guessed it) Gone with the Wind. (Sadly, Gold Diggers of Broadway is now a partially lost film; the loose remake, Gold Diggers of 1933 is better known these days).
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On the other hand, most people think of Tiny Tim as being just a joke; and however he might appear to the outside world, that is not truly the case. He was a serious student of early American music (mostly from the 1890’s to the 1930’s); and though his performances of both classic and contemporary songs were often bizarre, they were always earnest. His albums were remarkably good; Allmusic gives his debut album, God Bless Tiny Tim four stars, and it features his takes on several classic tunes, some corny ghost stories, and other fun stuff. On his follow-up album, Tiny Tim’s Second Album, Tiny Tim posed with his parents; and his third album, For All My Little Friends (a collection of children’s songs), was nominated for a Grammy.
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If anything, Leon Redbone had an even more stylized appearance than Tiny Tim; and he became known for his performances of old songs like “Champagne Charlie”, “My Walking Stick” and “Shine On Harvest Moon” in a creaky voice while playing a guitar. Though his was basically a novelty act also, Redbone got a lot more respect. Bob Dylan for one was impressed when he performed at the Maricopa Folk Festival in the early 1970’s; and Rolling Stone magazine praised his singing as “so authentic you can hear the surface noise [of an old 78 rpm]”. Like Tiny Tim, Leon Redbone was also a frequent guest on the Tonight Show as well as Saturday Night Live.
Leon Redbone generally performed while sitting scrunched up on a stool, wearing a Panama hat with a black band, along with dark glasses; and there was always a mysterious air about him, leading to rumors that he was an alternate identity of Frank Zappa (his mustache and bit of beard looked a lot like Zappa’s would if it were trimmed back) or comedian Andy Kaufman. We went to a concert of his once but eventually lost interest and left at halftime; the same thing happened another time when we saw folksinger Burl Ives.
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Speaking of Frank Zappa, he is a musical genius who will be discussed at greater length some other time. But one of Zappa’s most successful ventures from the standpoint of record sales is the song “Valley Girl” that he put together with his daughter Moon Zappa. Behind a rock beat with Dad singing a chorus that said in part “Okay, fine, fer sure, fer sure / She’s a Valley Girl, and there is no cure”, Moon delivered a whiny, stream-of-consciousness monologue in “valleyspeak” featuring teenage slang of the time. Several phrases from the song entered into popular culture, like “grody to the max” and “gag me with a spoon”.
Moon Zappa had a follow-up song called “My Mother is a Space Cadet” where she was accompanied by her brother Dweezil Zappa on guitar. I can only remember hearing the song once or maybe twice, and there didn’t seem to be a lot to it; but the song kept replaying in my head for what seemed like decades.
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Then there are the celebrities (mostly movie and TV stars) who decide that the country just has to hear them sing. While I have never been able to bring myself to purchase a record by one of the Star Trek duo – William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy – I actually own one by Telly Savalas, Telly. This album includes a spoken-word version of the Bread song “If” (written by David Gates), which got to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the UK charts in 1975. The album is not as bad as it could be, and Telly Savalas actually released at least two more albums and topped the Billboard country charts with his version of Don Williams’ “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend”.
If anything, the practice of virtually any celebrity deciding to lay down some musical tracks has been accelerating in recent years; sometimes the results aren’t bad at all actually. On their 2009 Varshons album – made up entirely of covers of mostly unfamiliar songs – the Lemonheads are accompanied by model Kate Moss on one track, Arling & Cameron’s “Dirty Robot”; while actress and model Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and model/singer Bebe Buell) contributed vocals to their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”.
I got Varshons myself, because it includes a cover of one of my TOP TEN favorite songs of all time (maybe my VERY FAVORITE even): “Green Fuz”, a minimalist song by a Texas garage rock band called Randy Alvey & Green Fuz. The Cramps previously included “Green Fuz” as the opening track on their album Psychedelic Jungle. Any version of “Green Fuz” is welcome in my record collection; but (despite truly terrible sound quality) the original is simply untoppable, with 15-year-old Randy Alvey’s growling lyrics backed by a fine band that includes drums that are unlike any that I have ever heard before. To this day, when the original “Green Fuz” comes up on an album I’m playing, it is as if the world stops spinning: My mouth goes slack, my muscles freeze up, and my mind focuses entirely on this incredible recording.
The Cramps were careful to match the timing of their recording of “Green Fuz” to that of the original song (2:06) – though they made only a half-hearted attempt at the drum solo toward the middle of the song – but the Lemonheads took a more leisurely approach to the song.
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Even in the context of the late 1960’s, King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King seemed to come out of nowhere, even after other bizarro albums had already come along (both of which are excellent by the way): the 1968 debut Gris-Gris by Dr. John the Night Tripper (the stage name of premier New Orleans pianist Mac Rebennack, and later shortened to Dr. John), which features voodoo rhythms and chants; and, in the same year, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, which spawned the hit single “Fire”. In the Court of the Crimson King featured powerful music and dense lyrics, particularly on the title song, “In the Court of the Crimson King” and “21st Century Schizoid Man”, interspersed with quieter songs like “I Talk to the Wind” and an extended free-form jazzy interlude on “Moonchild”. I have already discussed this album at length on an earlier post about another UARB, Trillion.
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I have always been fascinated about where this music came from, and while I certainly don’t have all of the answers, I heard about a predecessor psychedelic rock band called Giles, Giles and Fripp not too long ago. This band includes the only constant member in the ever-changing line-up of King Crimson over the years, guitarist Robert Fripp. The other bandmembers were two English brothers, drummer Michael Giles and bass guitarist Peter Giles; the two had advertised for a singing keyboard player, but they hired Fripp anyway. The band released one album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp in 1968, along with a couple of singles; all sold poorly (Robert Fripp claimed that they only sold 500 copies of the original album, though that figure is disputed).
The band later added Ian McDonald – who played saxophone, clarinet and flute – and vocalist Judy Dyble, the original lead singer of the legendary British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. After Peter Giles left the band, Michael Giles, Ian McDonald and Robert Fripp formed the original line-up of King Crimson with vocalist Greg Lake and lyricist Peter Sinfield. Peter Giles later returned as a bass guitarist on the band’s second album in 1970, In the Wake of Poseidon; though both of the Giles brothers left the fold by the time of King Crimson’s third album, Lizard.
In 1971, two ex-members of King Crimson – Ian McDonald and Michael Giles – along with Peter Giles released an album under the name McDonald and Giles; I actually saw a copy of the album cover last year in a local junque store called Garage Sale. Even though the disc itself was missing, I bought the cover anyway (that’s how much of a collector I am!). The entire album is actually available on YouTube, so maybe I don’t need the disc anymore?
I recently picked up a retrospective album of Giles, Giles and Fripp, a 2001 CD called The Brondesbury Tapes (1968). This album shows a lot of experimentation as well as the folk-rock side of what would later become King Crimson, including two fully-formed renditions of “I Talk to the Wind”, one of which features Judy Dyble on vocals.
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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).
Most of the songs are apparently originals – or at least I’ve never heard them before – with the exception of a fine cover by the Brain of Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)”, featuring Mike Blakesley on trombone (!). Blakesley also performed on the 1971 McDonald and Giles album.
The two brothers first played with Johnny King & the Raiders and with Dave Anthony & the Rebels in 1960 and 1961. Though neither band ever made any recordings, Al Kirtley of the Rebels played piano on “Hypocrite”, the first track on the Giles, Giles and Fripp CD, The Brondesbury Tapes (1968).
The Giles Brothers later connected with the Dowland brothers in a band called the Dowland Brothers & the Soundtracks. I suppose there have been other rock bands that featured two pairs of brothers in the line-up, but one doesn’t come to mind right away. (Well, there is Sparks, originally known as Halfnelson, founded by the Mael brothers, Ron Mael and Russell Mael, and including the Mankey brothers, Earle Mankey and Jim Mankey, on their first two albums). The sound of these earliest recordings (from 1962) sound a lot like another set of brothers, the Everly Brothers. Several of these songs were produced by the legendary Joe Meek, one of the most innovative figures in early British rock music; his best known recording is the instrumental “Telstar” by the Tornados (released in December 1962), the first rock song (and only the second record, period) by a British artist to reach the top of the American charts.
After a few gigs with the Sands Combo and the Interns in 1963 (not the same as the Welsh band called the Interns that was active from 1964 to 1967), the Giles Brothers played the longest (“758 gigs played”) with a band called Trendsetters, Ltd., from 1964 to 1967. They released four singles on Parlophone Records (the Beatles’ label in the UK). After guitarist/vocalist Bruce Turner left the band in 1967 to join the Troggs, the band continued to record under the names the Trend and the Brain.
Subsequently, the Giles Brothers reunited when Michael Giles released his 2002 solo album Progress with his brother Peter Giles on bass. Along with fellow King Crimson alumnus, Ian McDonald plus Jakko Jakszyk (who had previously played with Level 42, Tom Robinson, Robert Fripp and Dave Stewart, among others), the Giles Brothers formed a band in 2002 called 21st Century Schizoid Band, which was named after the King Crimson song, “21st Century Schizoid Man” (the opening track on In the Court of the Crimson King). Though not exactly a tribute band – since they were the original musicians on much of the music – 21st Century Schizoid Band mainly played music from the first four King Crimson albums. They disbanded within a few years.
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for March 2011 – INDEX
Index is reportedly one of the most legendary psychedelic rock rarities out there, though you couldn’t prove that by me. They released two albums actually, and the reissue of the one that I have I got at a reduced price because the corners of the LP were bent or something. (Actually it looked fine to me when I got it).
YouTube has several Index songs in its database: Their version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” can be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybyi8XBgjY8 (as taken from the original album, not the reissue that I own). Their original song, “Shock Wave” is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d4xRwhrbDM . Here is another, this time from their second album that I don’t own, “Paradise Beach”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=738VNGV8sYQ .
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Photo Gallery: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for March 2010 – BANG
Here is Bang’s first album, Bang, the one I looked so hard for:
This second album, Mother / Bow to the King actually had what looked like two front covers; I always assumed that these were each going to be separate “concept albums”, but instead, they put the two half-albums into a single disc.
This was their final album, Music; all three are quite good, though the first is still my favorite.
This record, Death of a Country was to be their first album actually, though it remained unreleased until 2004:
The band has since released two more albums, Return to Zero (2001) and The Maze (2004). This is the front cover of an ambitious offering of all four of their 1970’s albums in a single four-CD box set called Bullets.
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As I feared, some of my early Notes seem to have disappeared from my Facebook page. I’m going to have to get some sort of website set up so that they are more available and won’t be lost. I had already printed out the first 18 months’ worth, but I took the time last weekend to print out the rest of them so that I at least have a hard copy of all of them. I was amazed at how much paper it took: I must have half a ream of copy now in these posts – this one is my 40th!
It is not really a rare event for a song to come out of nowhere and grab the zeitgeist – that’s virtually the definition of a novelty song – but there have been a host of songs that are just as sideways compared to the recording charts at the time without truly being of the novelty variety. I have written of several in previous posts: the Trashmen’s 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird”, the Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop” (also from 1963), and “Rip Van Winkle” by the Devotions from 1961. They were among my very favorite songs for years after I first heard them, so it is easy to see that I am partial to this kind of song.
One of the most unusual has to be the 1967 hit “Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)” by the Hombres. Here is a sample verse, chosen almost at random: “Saw a man walkin’ upside down / My T.V.’s on the blink / Made Galileo look like a Boy Scout / Sorry ’bout that, let it all hang out”. Not only that; but, as I originally put it in Wikipedia (naturally, the keepers of the Wikipedia universe took out some of the best wording): “The spoken-word introduction – ‘A preachment, dear friend, you are about to receive on John Barleycorn, Nicotine and the Temptations of Eve’ – goes all the way back to 1947, when it served to introduce a song that was every bit as strange for its era as this one was in 1967: ‘Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women’ by Red Ingle and His Natural Seven.”
Speaking of true oldies, there is also another great 1947 hit song by Tex Williams (co-written by Merle Travis) called “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (that Cigarette)”. The chorus goes: “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette / Puff, puff, puff, and if you smoke yourself to death / Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait / But you just gotta have another cigarette.” Phil Harris – best known for his comedic talents and voiceover work these days, if at all – also had a hit with the song in 1947.
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It is more difficult for someone to make a career out of novelty records, but there have been a few. Ray Stevens started with “Ahab the Arab” (it hit #5 in 1962) and had a series of other hits later in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s: “Harry the Hairy Ape”, “Gitarzan”, “Santa Claus Is Watching You”, “The Streak”, etc. He did some serious songs also, notably “Everything Is Beautiful”.
Country music and rockabilly artist Johnny Horton had a good streak of his own going with several “historical ballads”, beginning with “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1959; the song won the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. Horton continuing the following year with two more hits, “Sink the Bismarck” and “North to Alaska” (the latter being the theme song for the John Wayne movie called North to Alaska). There is no telling how much further Horton might have been able to take this craze had it not been for his tragic death in November 1960.
Shel Silverstein had a long series as well, but mostly as a songwriter, not a performer (he was also a fine cartoonist). He wrote most of the music for the rock band Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, including their hits “The Cover of the Rolling Stone”, “Sylvia’s Mother”, and “Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball”; he is also the author of a famous novelty hit by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue”, and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It” for Jim Stafford.
The Royal Guardsmen had a million seller in 1966 with “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”; I guess I have been reminded of it since the local paper has been running some of the “Classic” Peanuts comic strips featuring Snoopy riding his Sopwith Camel into combat, always with the battle cry: “Curse You, Red Baron!”
The Red Baron was a real person – Manfred von Richtofen, who is credited with 80 air victories during the First World War – and his name is referenced in the song (though never in the comic strip as far as I know). The Royal Guardsmen followed that hit with “The Return of the Red Baron” and “Snoopy’s Christmas” and managed to release four albums with Snoopy/aircraft themes in the mid-1960’s, which also featured other novelty songs that had been released earlier by different bands. They had other original songs as well; their first single, “Baby Let’s Wait” eventually made the Top 40 when it was re-released after the “Snoopy” hits.
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So when the Miss Winston-Salem Pageant decided to come up with the entertainment one year (probably 1968, though I don’t know that for sure), I guess they figured that the Royal Guardsmen would be a safe bet. I knew two or three of the girls who were competing, and this was my chance to see a band that I had actually heard of before. I had been to a few “battles of the bands”, even one that featured a quite good local band that had one of the coolest names ever, Captain Speed and the Fungy Electric Mothers; but I am pretty sure that this was my first real concert, and I was psyched.
First, for those who aren’t familiar with my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina: We are mainly known as a manufacturing town, and mostly of cigarettes; R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company is headquartered there. Though the brands “Winston” and “Salem” have waned in popularity some, our nickname “Camel City” highlights what I always thought was the best of their brands – from back in the days when I was a smoker myself, now almost 35 years ago – the original Camel non-filters and also Camel filters. If there is a more iconic cigarette pack than Camel, I don’t know what it would be. I also went to R. J. Reynolds High School; and the site of the Pageant, Reynolds Auditorium is located on that campus. I grew up in two different houses on a short street with a long name, Horace Mann Avenue, that is located just one block from the high school.
The Hanes hosiery mill and the Hanes knitting mill that makes men’s underwear are also located in Winston-Salem; originally they were two different companies (owned by first cousins, if I remember right), but they merged a long time ago. Krispy Kreme doughnuts were founded there back in the 1930’s, and the line of Royal snack cakes that I have seen from coast to coast is also made by a local company.
Winston-Salem also has a reputation as being kind of prudish. Their feud with the rock band Steppenwolf is rather well known in rock circles, as the City fathers attempted to keep the band from singing “goddamn” when they performed their hit song “The Pusher” there. (Lead singer John Kay obliged, though the concert crowds always enthusiastically filled in the offending word).
I was rather surprised years later to hear my home town come up again as I played one of the songs on the two excellent Mermaid Avenue CD’s, consisting of a set of performances of the lyrics to several of literally hundreds of unrecorded songs by Woody Guthrie that were set to music by the American rock band Wilco and the English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. One of the songs, “Aginst th’ Law” goes on and on about all of these illegalities – “It’s against the law to talk, and it’s against the law to walk”, etc. – and later in the song, there is the lyric: “Everything in Winston-Salem is against the law!”.
The Pageant itself was enjoyable enough – my first and last attendance at one of those – and while I didn’t know Miss Winston-Salem herself, Miss Congeniality that year was a friend of mine, Karen Nielsen. But then the Royal Guardsmen took the stage; and somehow, they had morphed into a really nasty punk rock band! They were rocking the house down as far as I was concerned, but you could even see from the audience that the Pageant promoters had no idea who they had hired; and they were scrambling to try to get the concert cut short. After around four songs, the Royal Guardsmen were told to do their hit song and beat it; and even that performance of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” was unlike anything I had expected: At one point, it sounded like there was cannon going off! As far as I know, this incarnation of the Royal Guardsmen never made any records, but I have sure looked hard for them over the years.
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The trouble with introducing yourself to the public as a novelty act is that no one tends to take your follow-up recordings seriously. One of the best new wave albums I have acquired in recent years is Dangerous Dreams by the Nails; and Allmusic states the problem well in their review of the album: “Now a new wave novelty, and forever burdened with a ‘one-hit wonder’ albatross because of the monolithic ‘88 Lines About 44 Girls’, the Nails demonstrate on Dangerous Dreams that this Boulder, CO band still held some clever moves in their repertoire. . . . The grandeur of the Doors, the propulsion of Iggy Pop, and the moroseness of the Sisters of Mercy, combine with the Nails’ own talent to create the perfect vessel for riding high on a dark wave of depression.” However, with all of that praise, the album still merited only a 2½-star rating.
I caught their hit on YouTube, and it really is a hoot; but their follow-up “list” song on this album, “Things You Left Behind” is every bit as good. At one point, they even break down the “fourth wall”: “A dozen contraceptive sponges / Anyone here got a rhyme for sponges?”. Other highlights from the album are the opening song, “Dig Myself a Hole”; and on “Voices”, they come up with a religious-themed song (I seem to have a lot of those in recent Notes) – Moses (among others) insists that “He talked to me!”. The Nails remind me of the Hives in their ability to generate infectious grooves in an offbeat way.
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Much as stand-up routines allow performers to say things that they would never get away with if spoken with a straight face – Larry the Cable Guy comes immediately to mind – offbeat popular music recordings have served over the years to introduce previously taboo subjects to the larger society. One of the Kinks’ most popular recordings is their 1970 hit “Lola”; and from the very first line, it is clear that nothing is what it seems – “I met her in a club down in old Soho / Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola”. Lola “walked like a woman and talked like a man” and – after dancing together “under electric candlelight” – “smiled and took me by the hand / And said dear boy I’m gonna make you a man”.
The final verse – “Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola” – has all of the power and attitude and finality of someone “coming out”; yet even there, the singer doesn’t quite lay it all on the line with the final words: It is actually Lola who is glad that the singer is a man – s/he remains as mysterious as the androgynous Saturday Night Live character “Pat” (played by Julia Sweeney) whose romantic companion is “Chris” (originally played by Dana Carvey).
Other 1970’s recordings have danced around gay issues, such as Rod Stewart’s 1976 minor hit “The Killing of Georgie” – about the murder of a gay friend of his in New York back when he was in Faces – and it was an open secret that Freddie Mercury was gay though closeted; he was the frontman of a band called Queen after all. It was many years later though before openly gay songs and performers would arrive on the popular music scene, such as British musician Tom Robinson in the late 1970’s (he collaborated with Peter Gabriel on one EP that I own), and mid-1980’s sensation Frankie Goes to Hollywood. By the way, it is interesting that the first hit songs by arguably the two most famous Liverpool rock bands – the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” – deal fairly openly with the topic of oral sex.
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For those in the know, Lou Reed’s remarkable hit “Walk on the Wild Side” – which peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976 – is a sleazy romp through the world of artist Andy Warhol. As a member of The Velvet Underground – the house band of Warhol’s legendary studio The Factory – Lou Reed was certainly a familiar denizen of the Andy Warhol milieu. However, this background was primarily in-jokes that most listeners knew nothing about it, nor did they need to: The song’s under-stated musical arrangement provides an ideal setting for Lou Reed’s deadpan delivery of lyrics about an entire litany of taboo subjects – transsexuality, drugs, male prostitution and oral sex. And that’s not to mention the chorus line – “And the colored girls go doo dah doo, dah doo, doo dah doo, doo dah doo . . . ” – and the use of gay slang like “backroom” and “soul food” (the latter in the line “. . . looking for soul food and a place to eat”).
Speaking of under-appreciation, don’t listen to the film critics who slammed the third entry in the Men in Black Franchise, Men in Black 3. This one has all of the cleverness that was largely missing from the second film (though I have come to enjoy that one as well after the fourth or fifth viewing) and features time travel back to 1969, where Andy Warhol is portrayed as an undercover “man in black”. I thoroughly enjoyed MIB 3 myself.
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When she was just 13, folksinger Janis Ian – perhaps the most relentlessly soul-baring folksinger ever – began writing a heartbreaking song about interracial dating that she called “I’ve Been Thinking”; it was ultimately released in 1965 under the name “Society’s Child”. Unable to bear the hatred of her parents and the taunts of her schoolmates, she eventually breaks under the pressure and calls off the romance herself at the end of the song. Though slow to gain airplay (not to mention record sales), the song eventually peaked at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 – the same year that the similarly themed film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released.
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If there is anyone more left-field than Tiny Tim, I don’t know who it might be. He is named of course after the crippled child at the heart of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This story, more than any other single thing, brought about modern Christmas celebrations worldwide (it had become a minor Christian holiday previously over the centuries).
Tiny Tim (real name: Herbert Khaury) was introduced to the world on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an immensely popular comedic variety show in the 1960’s that (among other things) also introduced Goldie Hawn as a bikini-clad dancer decorated with painted graffiti. Tim was hardly tiny (he was both large and tall); and though he had long stringy hair, he really didn’t look like a hippie either.
As described in Wikipedia: “Co-host Dan Rowan announced that Laugh-In believed in showcasing new talent, and introduced Tiny Tim. The singer entered carrying a shopping bag, pulled his soprano ukulele from it, and sang a medley of ‘A Tisket A Tasket’ and ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’ as an apparently dumbfounded co-host Dick Martin watched.” One of the show’s running gags from then on was Martin asking Rowan in consternation whenever he was about to introduce something new: “You’re not gonna bring back Tiny Tim, are you?”.
Most people think that Tiny Tim played “Tiptoe through the Tulips” the first time he was on Laugh-In; but that was actually at his third, more elaborate presentation on the show, where he also used another of his trademark moves: throwing kisses at the audience. “Tiptoe through the Tulips” was, however, Tiny Tim’s hit song; sung in his distinctive falsetto and accompanying himself on his tiny ukulele, it charted as high as #17 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Tiny Tim continued to make periodic appearances on Laugh-In and later on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, where he became known for endearingly addressing the host as “Mr. Carson”. His shyness around women was a frequent topic of his interviews with Carson, and the wedding of Tiny Tim with Victoria Mae Budinger (known as “Miss Vicki”) on the Tonight Show was viewed by 21.4 million viewers, one of the largest American television audiences for many years, particularly in late night.
I saw Tiny Tim once in a while in later years, but he seemed a little dissipated and had put on weight. It was also sad to see that he had lost that seemingly permanent twinkle in his eye – the marriage didn’t work out for one thing, though they did have one daughter, who naturally was named Tulip (married name: Tulip Victoria Khaury Stewart).
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In Tiny Tim’s version, “Tiptoe through the Tulips” came off as a novelty song, but that is certainly not how the song started out. Written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke, “Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me” was a featured song in an historic film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway and became a #1 hit recording by one of the film’s stars, the “crooning troubadour” and guitarist Nick Lucas later that year. Only the second all-color “talkie” film (and using an early version of the Technicolor process), it quickly became the best-selling film of all time that year, a record that it held for 10 years until eclipsed by (you guessed it) Gone with the Wind. (Sadly, Gold Diggers of Broadway is now a partially lost film; the loose remake, Gold Diggers of 1933 is better known these days).
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On the other hand, most people think of Tiny Tim as being just a joke; and however he might appear to the outside world, that is not truly the case. He was a serious student of early American music (mostly from the 1890’s to the 1930’s); and though his performances of both classic and contemporary songs were often bizarre, they were always earnest. His albums were remarkably good; Allmusic gives his debut album, God Bless Tiny Tim four stars, and it features his takes on several classic tunes, some corny ghost stories, and other fun stuff. On his follow-up album, Tiny Tim’s Second Album, Tiny Tim posed with his parents; and his third album, For All My Little Friends (a collection of children’s songs), was nominated for a Grammy.
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If anything, Leon Redbone had an even more stylized appearance than Tiny Tim; and he became known for his performances of old songs like “Champagne Charlie”, “My Walking Stick” and “Shine On Harvest Moon” in a creaky voice while playing a guitar. Though his was basically a novelty act also, Redbone got a lot more respect. Bob Dylan for one was impressed when he performed at the Maricopa Folk Festival in the early 1970’s; and Rolling Stone magazine praised his singing as “so authentic you can hear the surface noise [of an old 78 rpm]”. Like Tiny Tim, Leon Redbone was also a frequent guest on the Tonight Show as well as Saturday Night Live.
Leon Redbone generally performed while sitting scrunched up on a stool, wearing a Panama hat with a black band, along with dark glasses; and there was always a mysterious air about him, leading to rumors that he was an alternate identity of Frank Zappa (his mustache and bit of beard looked a lot like Zappa’s would if it were trimmed back) or comedian Andy Kaufman. We went to a concert of his once but eventually lost interest and left at halftime; the same thing happened another time when we saw folksinger Burl Ives.
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Speaking of Frank Zappa, he is a musical genius who will be discussed at greater length some other time. But one of Zappa’s most successful ventures from the standpoint of record sales is the song “Valley Girl” that he put together with his daughter Moon Zappa. Behind a rock beat with Dad singing a chorus that said in part “Okay, fine, fer sure, fer sure / She’s a Valley Girl, and there is no cure”, Moon delivered a whiny, stream-of-consciousness monologue in “valleyspeak” featuring teenage slang of the time. Several phrases from the song entered into popular culture, like “grody to the max” and “gag me with a spoon”.
Moon Zappa had a follow-up song called “My Mother is a Space Cadet” where she was accompanied by her brother Dweezil Zappa on guitar. I can only remember hearing the song once or maybe twice, and there didn’t seem to be a lot to it; but the song kept replaying in my head for what seemed like decades.
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Then there are the celebrities (mostly movie and TV stars) who decide that the country just has to hear them sing. While I have never been able to bring myself to purchase a record by one of the Star Trek duo – William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy – I actually own one by Telly Savalas, Telly. This album includes a spoken-word version of the Bread song “If” (written by David Gates), which got to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the UK charts in 1975. The album is not as bad as it could be, and Telly Savalas actually released at least two more albums and topped the Billboard country charts with his version of Don Williams’ “Some Broken Hearts Never Mend”.
If anything, the practice of virtually any celebrity deciding to lay down some musical tracks has been accelerating in recent years; sometimes the results aren’t bad at all actually. On their 2009 Varshons album – made up entirely of covers of mostly unfamiliar songs – the Lemonheads are accompanied by model Kate Moss on one track, Arling & Cameron’s “Dirty Robot”; while actress and model Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and model/singer Bebe Buell) contributed vocals to their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”.
I got Varshons myself, because it includes a cover of one of my TOP TEN favorite songs of all time (maybe my VERY FAVORITE even): “Green Fuz”, a minimalist song by a Texas garage rock band called Randy Alvey & Green Fuz. The Cramps previously included “Green Fuz” as the opening track on their album Psychedelic Jungle. Any version of “Green Fuz” is welcome in my record collection; but (despite truly terrible sound quality) the original is simply untoppable, with 15-year-old Randy Alvey’s growling lyrics backed by a fine band that includes drums that are unlike any that I have ever heard before. To this day, when the original “Green Fuz” comes up on an album I’m playing, it is as if the world stops spinning: My mouth goes slack, my muscles freeze up, and my mind focuses entirely on this incredible recording.
The Cramps were careful to match the timing of their recording of “Green Fuz” to that of the original song (2:06) – though they made only a half-hearted attempt at the drum solo toward the middle of the song – but the Lemonheads took a more leisurely approach to the song.
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Even in the context of the late 1960’s, King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King seemed to come out of nowhere, even after other bizarro albums had already come along (both of which are excellent by the way): the 1968 debut Gris-Gris by Dr. John the Night Tripper (the stage name of premier New Orleans pianist Mac Rebennack, and later shortened to Dr. John), which features voodoo rhythms and chants; and, in the same year, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, which spawned the hit single “Fire”. In the Court of the Crimson King featured powerful music and dense lyrics, particularly on the title song, “In the Court of the Crimson King” and “21st Century Schizoid Man”, interspersed with quieter songs like “I Talk to the Wind” and an extended free-form jazzy interlude on “Moonchild”. I have already discussed this album at length on an earlier post about another UARB, Trillion.
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I have always been fascinated about where this music came from, and while I certainly don’t have all of the answers, I heard about a predecessor psychedelic rock band called Giles, Giles and Fripp not too long ago. This band includes the only constant member in the ever-changing line-up of King Crimson over the years, guitarist Robert Fripp. The other bandmembers were two English brothers, drummer Michael Giles and bass guitarist Peter Giles; the two had advertised for a singing keyboard player, but they hired Fripp anyway. The band released one album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp in 1968, along with a couple of singles; all sold poorly (Robert Fripp claimed that they only sold 500 copies of the original album, though that figure is disputed).
The band later added Ian McDonald – who played saxophone, clarinet and flute – and vocalist Judy Dyble, the original lead singer of the legendary British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. After Peter Giles left the band, Michael Giles, Ian McDonald and Robert Fripp formed the original line-up of King Crimson with vocalist Greg Lake and lyricist Peter Sinfield. Peter Giles later returned as a bass guitarist on the band’s second album in 1970, In the Wake of Poseidon; though both of the Giles brothers left the fold by the time of King Crimson’s third album, Lizard.
In 1971, two ex-members of King Crimson – Ian McDonald and Michael Giles – along with Peter Giles released an album under the name McDonald and Giles; I actually saw a copy of the album cover last year in a local junque store called Garage Sale. Even though the disc itself was missing, I bought the cover anyway (that’s how much of a collector I am!). The entire album is actually available on YouTube, so maybe I don’t need the disc anymore?
I recently picked up a retrospective album of Giles, Giles and Fripp, a 2001 CD called The Brondesbury Tapes (1968). This album shows a lot of experimentation as well as the folk-rock side of what would later become King Crimson, including two fully-formed renditions of “I Talk to the Wind”, one of which features Judy Dyble on vocals.
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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).
Most of the songs are apparently originals – or at least I’ve never heard them before – with the exception of a fine cover by the Brain of Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)”, featuring Mike Blakesley on trombone (!). Blakesley also performed on the 1971 McDonald and Giles album.
The two brothers first played with Johnny King & the Raiders and with Dave Anthony & the Rebels in 1960 and 1961. Though neither band ever made any recordings, Al Kirtley of the Rebels played piano on “Hypocrite”, the first track on the Giles, Giles and Fripp CD, The Brondesbury Tapes (1968).
The Giles Brothers later connected with the Dowland brothers in a band called the Dowland Brothers & the Soundtracks. I suppose there have been other rock bands that featured two pairs of brothers in the line-up, but one doesn’t come to mind right away. (Well, there is Sparks, originally known as Halfnelson, founded by the Mael brothers, Ron Mael and Russell Mael, and including the Mankey brothers, Earle Mankey and Jim Mankey, on their first two albums). The sound of these earliest recordings (from 1962) sound a lot like another set of brothers, the Everly Brothers. Several of these songs were produced by the legendary Joe Meek, one of the most innovative figures in early British rock music; his best known recording is the instrumental “Telstar” by the Tornados (released in December 1962), the first rock song (and only the second record, period) by a British artist to reach the top of the American charts.
After a few gigs with the Sands Combo and the Interns in 1963 (not the same as the Welsh band called the Interns that was active from 1964 to 1967), the Giles Brothers played the longest (“758 gigs played”) with a band called Trendsetters, Ltd., from 1964 to 1967. They released four singles on Parlophone Records (the Beatles’ label in the UK). After guitarist/vocalist Bruce Turner left the band in 1967 to join the Troggs, the band continued to record under the names the Trend and the Brain.
Subsequently, the Giles Brothers reunited when Michael Giles released his 2002 solo album Progress with his brother Peter Giles on bass. Along with fellow King Crimson alumnus, Ian McDonald plus Jakko Jakszyk (who had previously played with Level 42, Tom Robinson, Robert Fripp and Dave Stewart, among others), the Giles Brothers formed a band in 2002 called 21st Century Schizoid Band, which was named after the King Crimson song, “21st Century Schizoid Man” (the opening track on In the Court of the Crimson King). Though not exactly a tribute band – since they were the original musicians on much of the music – 21st Century Schizoid Band mainly played music from the first four King Crimson albums. They disbanded within a few years.
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for March 2011 – INDEX
Index is reportedly one of the most legendary psychedelic rock rarities out there, though you couldn’t prove that by me. They released two albums actually, and the reissue of the one that I have I got at a reduced price because the corners of the LP were bent or something. (Actually it looked fine to me when I got it).
YouTube has several Index songs in its database: Their version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” can be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybyi8XBgjY8 (as taken from the original album, not the reissue that I own). Their original song, “Shock Wave” is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d4xRwhrbDM . Here is another, this time from their second album that I don’t own, “Paradise Beach”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=738VNGV8sYQ .
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Photo Gallery: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for March 2010 – BANG
Here is Bang’s first album, Bang, the one I looked so hard for:
This second album, Mother / Bow to the King actually had what looked like two front covers; I always assumed that these were each going to be separate “concept albums”, but instead, they put the two half-albums into a single disc.
This was their final album, Music; all three are quite good, though the first is still my favorite.
This record, Death of a Country was to be their first album actually, though it remained unreleased until 2004:
The band has since released two more albums, Return to Zero (2001) and The Maze (2004). This is the front cover of an ambitious offering of all four of their 1970’s albums in a single four-CD box set called Bullets.
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As I feared, some of my early Notes seem to have disappeared from my Facebook page. I’m going to have to get some sort of website set up so that they are more available and won’t be lost. I had already printed out the first 18 months’ worth, but I took the time last weekend to print out the rest of them so that I at least have a hard copy of all of them. I was amazed at how much paper it took: I must have half a ream of copy now in these posts – this one is my 40th!
