UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR OCTOBER 2010: THE PILTDOWN MEN
I was down in Atlanta earlier this year on my first big-city record buying spree in way too long. There are records you see there that I have to order by mail, and others that just don’t get here at all; plus it is a real treat to see every single album in mint condition, even the ones that I only paid $1 for. One of the albums that caught my eye was The Piltdown Men by THE PILTDOWN MEN, an instrumental rock band from a full half-century ago. Hallmarks of their recordings are twin saxophones, booming kettle drums, and real nice guitar figures that range from Duane Eddy-style “twang” to early surf guitar a la Dick Dale. The recordings are still highly enjoyable, having a playful flavor without being juvenile at all.
As was common back then with instrumental bands, the musicians in
the Piltdown Men were anonymous. On sax was
Scott Gordon, while the guitar and sometimes bass were often handled by
Tommy Tedesco.
Tedesco has been described by
Guitar Player magazine as the most recorded guitarist in history and is part of a beyond-legendary group of session musicians that were behind many of the biggest hits of the
1960’s and
1970’s who became known as
the Wrecking Crew.
Denny Tedesco,
Tommy’s son created a 95-minute documentary called
The Wrecking Crew on these unsung heroes of rock and roll that has been shown at several film festivals and received a glowing tribute on National Public Radio, yet still criminally languishes without commercial distribution.
The Piltdown Men released a series of singles from
1960 to
1962, and many had titles with prehistoric themes: “
Brontosaurus Stomp”, “
Mac Donald’s Cave”, “
Bubbles in the Tar”, “
Goodnight, Mrs. Flintstone”, “
Big Lizzard”, etc. (These are their spellings on the record album, not mine). Over half of the songs are original compositions, but they also innovatively reworked old standards: “
Old MacDonald Had a Farm” became
“Mac Donald’s Cave”, and
The William Tell Overture – universally associated with
The Lone Ranger in that time period – was released as “
Piltdown Rides Again”. They also covered
Irving Berlin’s “
A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” and
Henry Mancini’s “
The Great Impostor”. One of their coolest is “
Tequila Bossa Nova”, a redo of the
1958 hit “
Tequila” by
the Champs with (you guessed it) “Tequila Bossa Nova” replacing “Tequila” as the occasional calls during the mostly instrumental song.
Their first single by
the Piltdown Men was
“Brontosaurus Stomp” b/w
“Mac Donald’s Cave”, and the band had the good fortune to release the song just as
America’s first prime-time animated television show,
The Flintstones was being launched, almost exactly 50 years ago today.
“Brontosaurus Stomp” made it to
#75 on the
U. S. charts, and
“Mac Donald’s Cave” did even better in
Britain, reaching
#14, despite having competition from a
Top 20 version of “
Ol’ Mac Donald” in a completely different style that was recorded by
Frank Sinatra, of all people. (Those fancy singers do love their nursery rhymes:
Barbra Streisand put “
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” on her debut album,
The Barbra Streisand Album. I picked that one up for a buck in mint condition not long ago, though that was local, not in
Atlanta). While they had no more chart action on this side of the
Atlantic,
“Bubbles in the Tar” and
“Goodnight, Mrs. Flintstone” were both
Top 20 hits in the U.K.
The Piltdown Men fast became one of my favorite band names, and how could it not? “
The Piltdown Man” is one of the most famous and most successful paleontological hoaxes in history. From its “discovery” in
1912 in an
English gravel pit, the skull fragments were accepted as genuine – though not unanimously in the scientific community – until ultimately proved conclusively in
1953 (more than 40 years later, and just 7 years before
the Piltdown Men were formed) as being a fraudulent amalgamation of a modern human skull and the jaw of an orangutan with chimpanzee teeth hammered into it.
Interestingly enough, the iconic dinosaur
Brontosaurus referenced in their biggest American hit “Brontosaurus Stomp” is also a mixed-up fossil, though in this case, it was unintentional. The largest dinosaur skeleton found up to that point in time (1879) became the first mounted sauropod (in 1905 at the Peabody Museum at Yale University) and was described as being Brontosaurus. Despite being nearly complete, the skeleton was missing the skull, so one was provided from another dinosaur called Camarasaurus (the actual head turned out to be more like that of Brontosaurus’ cousin, Diplodocus). However, subsequent scientific investigation very early in the 20th Century revealed that this skeleton (sans the wrong head) was actually an adult example of the Apatosaurus, which had been discovered and described two years earlier using a juvenile example; “Brontosaurus” was then demoted to a synonym. Still, every dinosaur book I looked through as a kid had the “thunder lizard” pictured and described along with Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and all the rest.
Besides the darling cover showing an r&r band of cave men and women plus dinosaurs, I spotted the name “
E. Cobb” in the songwriting credits and wondered if that could possibly be
Ed Cobb. And sure enough it was: As their producer and songwriter,
Ed Cobb greatly influenced the musical direction of what had up until then been a conventional rock band called
the Standells. The song that he wrote for the band called “
Dirty Water” made it to
#11 on the national charts and changed
the Standells into true
punk rock heroes: Not for nothing was this landmark
garage rock song placed on
Nuggets (the very first
garage rock/
psychedelic rock compilation album, released in
1972) as the second track, right after
“I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” by
the Electric Prunes. Ed Cobb also wrote several more of
the Standells’ most memorable songs, including the even fiercer “
Barracuda” plus “
Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” and “
Why Pick on Me”. As a celebration of
Boston and its
River Charles,
“Dirty Water” might seem like an odd choice for a
Los Angeles band like
the Standells; but
Ed Cobb was from
New England, so it was home to him.
Much to my amazement,
Ed Cobb turned out to be a member of a band from the
1950’s called
the Four Preps that could hardly be more different from
the Piltdown Men and
the Standells – come to think of it, those two later bands don’t have much in common either. (The other man behind
the Piltdown Men,
Lincoln Mayorga has had a long musical career, mostly behind the scenes, that began when he assisted his high school friends in that band; he became known as “the fifth
Prep”). While instrumental rock bands like
the Piltdown Men are extremely scarce these days – though a fine
surf/
psychedelic band called
the Mermen released a new album this year (their first since
2004) – the musical genre from which
the Four Preps arose was considered old-fashioned by the
mid-1960’s and is almost completely extinct today. These all-male, all-white singing groups often had names evocative of bourgeois college days – in addition to
the Four Preps, examples include
the Lettermen and
the Four Freshmen – and they sang in precise three- or four-part harmonies with a clean-cut look.
The Four Preps’ big hit was a long-time favorite of mine called “
26 Miles (Santa Catalina)”, a paean to
Santa Catalina Island off the coast of
California: “the island of romance, romance, romance, romance”.
And who was responsible for the distinctive growling vocals in
“Dirty Water” that prefigured the snarling, snotty singing in so many
1970’s and
1980’s punk rock bands? His name is
Dick Dodd, who handled lead vocalist duties on most of
the Standells’ records; and he had been one of the original
Mouseketeers (and no relation to “Head
Mouseketeer”
Jimmie Dodd). You just never know where someone’s life is going to go no matter how they start out, do you?
As a postscript, I have to confess that
the Piltdown Men actually do have a pretty decent write-up in
Wikipedia. Apparently when I looked them up after I got the album and realized what a great article I could do on them, I looked up “Piltdown Men” without the “The” and missed the entry. Still, I just couldn’t resist!
* * *
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 Oct 2010 – THE PILTDOWN MEN; Record Collecting II
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
