SUNDAZED RECORDS
Sundazed Music, Inc. is an American independent record label based in Coxsackie, in the Catskills of New York. It specializes in obscure and rare recordings from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. In 2000, Sundazed had a staff of 15 and two mixing studios, including a vintage audio equipment collection. (More from Wikipedia)
Minnesota is not often mentioned in the garage rock world either, but Minneapolis produced one of the finest examples from the genre, the Trashmen, whose legendary 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird” transmogrified two hit songs by a doo-wop group called the Rivingtons, “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” and “The Bird’s the Word” and showed America just what surf rock music was capable of producing. They continued to produce several minor hit singles – I bought “Bird Dance Beat” myself when it came out – and made enough music that a box set was released of Trashmen recordings (by Rhino Records if memory serves – actually it was Sundazed Records). All this by a band that hailed from a state that is as far from an ocean as it is possible to be and still be in the United States.
(September 2010)
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The Stillroven came from a Minneapolis suburb called Robbinsdale and reappeared seemingly out of nowhere when the 1960’s reissue label Sundazed Records released a retrospective album from the band, Cast Thy Burden upon the Stillroven in 1996.
Reportedly the band has a full unreleased album from 1968 that Sundazed has also promised to reissue at some point.
(September 2010)
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They say that the Trashmen only released the one album Surfin’ Bird, although I have a copy of a second album Bird Dance Beat that sure looks it could have been a follow-up album (though my copy was obviously much newer than the mid-1960’s), along with The Great Lost Trashmen Album. Sundazed Records even put out a 4-CD box set in 1998 called Bird Call!: The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen.
(May 2012)
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The Stillroven were an unknown garage rock band from Minneapolis, even to most record collectors, when Sundazed Records put together a compilation CD in 1996 called Cast Thy Burden upon the Stillroven. I missed the fact that Sundazed had put out a second Stillroven CD in 2003, Too Many Spaces, though Allmusic disputes that it is actually an unreleased album.
Sundazed is definitely amped about this band: In the liner notes for Cast Thy Burden upon the Stillroven, they rave that the Stillroven’s version of “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” buries the Monkees’ hit recording of “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”. Now, on their website, Sundazed insists that “their pedal-to-the-metal, frenetic version of ‘Hey Joe’ [is] still THE definitive version as far as we’re concerned”. That’s a pretty strong statement considering that “Hey Joe” was one of the most recorded songs of the 1960’s. Better-known covers include those by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Deep Purple (on their debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, they even claimed to be the songwriter!), Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, the Music Machine, and the Leaves.
(September 2012)
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(September 2013)
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After hanging in there for several more albums (Sundazed Records has reissued four of them), Vanilla Fudge broke up in early 1970.
(April 2014)
