AMAZON.COM (AMAZON)
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, VHSs, CDs, video and MP3 downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics — notably, Amazon Kindle e-book readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV and Fire Phone — and is a major provider of cloud computing services. Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its inhouse brand AmazonBasics. (More from Wikipedia)
There are actually a lot of websites out there that talk about Blair 1523: It might be surprising to some that a search of the band name in quotes brings up 18,100 hits on Google. The first page of Google hits has a YouTube video of “Fantasy of Folk”, the Bomp! Mailorder site where the “last copies” of the CD can still be purchased plus another listing on Amazon.com, the mention of the band in my Wikipedia article on the Outcasts, the Allmusic review and the Julian Cope blog mentioned above, a listing on last.fm that actually has some information and even a photo of Blair 1523, and more barren listings on mtv.com, Discogs, and Rate Your Music . Further Google pages bring up other barebones listings – the one on Ticketmaster that offers concert tickets and tour schedules for a band that broke up 20 years ago is particularly hilarious – and other places to buy the CD and rate the music and see the lyrics and download “free” MP3's (Napster lives!).
(September 2013)
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So who is she? Linda Pierre King is a native of Houston and moved to New York in the mid-1960’s. She became active in the folksinging circuit and spent a lot of her time at a beatnik coffee house called Beanie Baby’s Java Hut. Apparently the recordings featured on the Heart Beats CD were made in New York but had never been officially released before this.
Meanwhile, Norm Wooster was adrift in the Big Apple after seeing his musical career evaporate. The self-styled “king of barbershop” had numerous hit songs in the 1950’s and later became a talent scout for Play-Tone Records. After a bitter dispute in 1962 with Play-Tone chairman Sol Siler, the #1 hit “Lovin’ You Lots and Lots” was released in 1964 under the name Norm Wooster Singers, though Wooster did not perform on the record and had his songwriting credits excised. This song was also the opening track on the soundtrack album for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do! about a one-hit wonder rock band called (naturally) the Wonders.
Norm Wooster then immersed himself in the folk music world in New York and saw Linda Pierre King perform at the Beanie Baby club. He fell in love with her, and they were later married. Through her, Wooster eased his way back into the music scene and performed in a variety of styles from psychedelic rock to disco to country.
Linda Pierre King might also have helped moderate Norm Wooster's right-wing political beliefs; he had been friends with members of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whereas King was a follower of philosopher and author Ayn Rand. The HUAC connection had exacerbated the falling-out with Sol Siler, since HUAC was investigating actress Suzanne Pleshette, whom Siler was dating at the time. (See below).
(April 2012)
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Well, apparently I got fooled by some of the back story that was created for the 1996 Tom Hanks movie called That Thing You Do!, about a one-hit wonder rock band called the Wonders; I have never actually seen the film. There is no such person as Norm Wooster or Sol Siler, and Play-Tone Records was the fictitious record company that released the single by the Wonders. The supposed hit song by the Norm Wooster Singers, “Lovin’ You Lots and Lots” was actually written by Tom Hanks. Linda Pierre King evidently remained in the Houston area and never moved to New York City.
I ran across the biography in more than one location that appeared to be reliable, such as the post on last.fm that gave a biography called “Norm Wooster: The Myth and the Legend” (and several Amazon.com and YouTube items, though one YouTube video disclaimed the New York City connection). Birth dates, parents’ names, recordings, and name dropping peppered the entry; besides Linda Pierre King and Suzanne Pleshette (who was apparently not ever investigated by HUAC), the biography also mentions white soul singer Timi Yuro, Jerry Murad and the Harmonicats, Bob Dylan, and Kurt Cobain. Turns out that last.fm is a wiki like Wikipedia; the real story can be found in several entries on Wikipedia. It sure seemed legit to me at the time; I figured, how many people named Linda Pierre King could there be in the world who were folksingers?
Anyway, sorry about that, and I apologize for my part in propagating this nonsense. But that doesn’t make Linda Pierre King’s music any less wonderful.
(October 2014)
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Then after I have the disks back into sleeves and covers again, I look around on the Internet for the album covers and print them (as big as possible to fit onto a piece of paper). I then tape them onto the covers. When I first started doing this a decade or so ago, about the only place you could find album cover photos was Amazon.com listings and such as that. Some of the front covers that I found for my more obscure albums were tiny, and after blowing them up, they were practically illegible. Nowadays though, artist websites and other sites like Flickr and discogs have both front and back covers and even shots of the record labels (though I haven’t tried to mess with those). You don’t have to use the boring back covers if you don’t want to; often I will use alternate album covers or even a cover from a different album by the same artist.
(August 2015)
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Then there was a “Deluxe Edition” of Raw Power in 2010 – after the Stooges had reformed and began touring worldwide – on Columbia’s Legacy Recordings label that included a second CD of live recordings made at Richards in Atlanta in October 1973; a third CD entitled “Rarities, Outtakes & Alternatives from the Raw Power Era”; and a DVD featuring a documentary by Morgan Neville and additional live recordings made in November 2009 at Planeta Terra Festival in São Paulo, Brazil. Deluxe Editions tend to be pricey though, and many fans cannot afford to pay that much for music. The Raw Power Deluxe Edition is currently available on Amazon for $99.97 and up and was probably no cheaper when it originally came out.
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Another bandmember in the Tell-Tale Hearts, Ray Brandes is also an author. His book on the San Diego underground rock scene, Getting Nowhere Fast came out in December 2015. I had previously borrowed heavily from his history of past UARB the Crawdaddys that I found online a few years ago. The blurb in Amazon says: “1976-1986 was a period of time in which urban tribes staked out and ferociously defended their territories; a time when San Diego began to establish for itself an identity as more than just a Navy town with a great zoo. Getting Nowhere Fast, written by Ray Brandes of the Tell-Tale Hearts, looks at the origins of this period of ‘new’ music in San Diego, and provides an insider’s look at a handful of bands who never quite hit the big time, but who developed cult followings around the world. The histories of the Zeros, the Penetrators, the Unknowns, the Crawdaddys, the Tell-Tale Hearts, and several more groups are presented here for the first time in print.” Remarkably, three of the five bands on this list – the Unknowns, the Crawdaddys, and the Tell-Tale Hearts – are among the UARB’s.
(September 2017)
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For years, I have looked on Amazon.com periodically to see whether the serials and films in the Quatermass Series were available; I also wrote about them earlier this year. A year and a half ago or so, I noticed that they were finally all or almost all available there; and at length, I ordered the lot of them, though I still had to separately order Quatermass and the Pit (a/k/a Five Million Years to Earth). I picked up many other movies recently that I figured would be impossible to find any other way. Still a far cry from my movie collection pre-Katrina.
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So after finding films like that on Amazon.com for awhile, it occurred to me that I ought to be able to find some of the albums by the Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Under Appreciated Rock Artists that I thought I had no chance of ever locating. Sometimes the prices were simply too high, but I kept looking. I did pick up the only full album by past UARB the Lovemasters, Pusherman of Love – and what a treat it is! – but Bootsey X’s final solo album Women’s Love Rites was still priced at nearly $100 (as that album was not so long ago) and is currently not available at all. I just played that CD for a second time, cranked all the way up for a good part of the album.
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Over the past few years, I have found the first two albums by Country Dick Montana’s best known band, the Beat Farmers, Tales of the New West and Van Go; under his real name Dan McLain, he was the drummer for the Crawdaddys. The Beat Farmers are known as one of the best country-punk bands, and it is easy to see why. Then I noticed on Amazon.com an even better album by another Country Dick Montana band, the Pleasure Barons, called Live in Las Vegas.
The Pleasure Barons could be described I guess as a super-group, composed of Country Dick Montana, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, and psychobilly legend Mojo Nixon. Besides three Mojo Nixon classics – somewhat toned down from the original recordings and illustrating how well crafted Nixon’s music actually is – the other songs are mostly over-the-top covers of a wide variety of numbers, ranging from Mickey Gilley’s “Closing Time”, to R. B. Greaves’s “Take a Letter, Maria”, to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?”, to Joe South’s “Games People Play”, to Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses”, and finally to “The Definitive Tom Jones Medley”: “It’s Not Unusual”, “Delilah” and “What’s New Pussycat?”. That album is more fun than any record that I have bought in a long, long time.
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Most of past UARA Phil Gammage’s music was only released in Europe, mainly France; he might be the most prolific of all of the UARB’s and UARA’s, with dozens of albums to his credit, either as a solo artist or in a band. I had already located a fair amount of music by Phil Gammage on the Bandcamp website, where my nephew John Lucas’s music can also be found. (John Lucas, a/k/a Lucas Kovasckitz is also on Amazon and Spotify and is now supporting his family strictly by sales and licenses of his music – Google used one of his guitar figures for a national ad not long ago; that’s what got the ball rolling). I immediately went for Motel Songs, a sampling of songs from Phil Gammage’s first five solo albums, and that only made me want to buy them all. I also picked up a recent album called Used Man for Sale, having a more mature sound and clearly showing that Phil Gammage is not just going through the motions but is just as committed to his music now as he was in his younger days. I have on my list to order Phil Gammage’s latest album, It’s All Real Good, which was released in September 2019.
I also supposedly have a copy of the most recent of Phil Gammage’s albums at the time that I put up the post about him, Adventures in Bluesland. I cannot find a physical copy of the CD, so I guess I just got a digital copy, which I am playing now over the computer. Just not the same, having to play it that way; sorry, you digital fans out there! But it is a great record, and I am happy to be hearing it again.
I ordered a copy of Phil Gammage’s Kneel to the Rising Sun from Amazon.com; although there was a fairly recent CD reissue, this album is available on Bandcamp only digitally. I also managed to find two LP’s on Amazon.com by Phil Gammage’s early band the Corvairs. Thus far, I have resisted ordering any more albums from Amazon.com by Certain General, which also features Gammage; even though November’s Heat is one of the best albums I have acquired in recent years.
Speaking of “one of the best”, I managed to stumble upon a 12” single by the Lime Spiders I think in Fairhope, AL, called “Jessica”. I absolutely love that song and regularly pull the disk out of my stacks to replay it. Despite pretty active shopping on my part, that is the only record by this Australian band that I have ever found, after reading about them in the Village Voice more than 30 years ago. Finally found out why; as noted in Allmusic: “The bottom line is this: The Lime Spiders’ catalog is unavailable in the United States.” I checked the 12” single that I had, and sure enough, it was made in Australia. About as soon as I found that out, I ordered their retrospective collection on Amazon.com, Nine Miles High 1983-1990. Hoo boy, is that a great record.
(Year 10 Review)
