Dec 14

Pebbles, Volume 2 LP

PEBBLES, VOLUME 2 (LP)

 
Pebbles, Volume 2  is a compilation album featuring American underground psychedelic and garage rock musical artists from the 1960s.  It is the second installment of the Pebbles series and was released on BFD Records in 1979.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
On the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP is a song by a band called the Satans – yes, it’s true – and the song is called “Makin’ Deals”, so the name carried over into their music as well.  The song is quite remarkable in anticipating the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” by several years; one of the lyrics is even:  “Can you guess my name?”  They only released the one single (no big surprise there).  The parents of the bandmembers in the legendary Iowa garage-rock band GONN were not keen on their original name the Pagans; I can only imagine what this band’s parents must have thought. 
 
(July 2012)
 
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Phil and the Frantics is best known for a song called “I Must Run”, which was a local hit single in their native Arizona; the song is said to have been adapted rather openly from the flip side of the Zombies’ fourth single, “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move”. 
 
For instance, it is mentioned in the tongue-in-cheek liner notes on the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP where I first encountered “I Must Run”.  The author of the liner notes is listed as “A. Seltzer”, and I think they are supposed to be satirically in the style of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, though I am not positive of that.  (Philip Seymour Hoffman played Bangs in the 2000 film Almost Famous).  About this song, “Seltzer” writes:  “And if you just moved to Dacron from some dumb place like Phoenix, Arizona, take heart cuz they've included YOUR favorite band, Phil & the Frantics with their famed plagiarism of the Zombies, ‘I Must Run’.  I’ll bet they did when the real songwriters came after ’em for taking credit for this song!  Real sleaze, but a shoo-in for punk posterity.” 
 
(August 2012)
 
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For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent Pebbles CD’s on AIP normally have a copyright notice for BFD Productions – someone else was brought in to write the liner notes, since the ones that Greg Shaw did were said to be mostly geared to serious collectors.  This gentleman’s name is Nigel Strange, and he is supposedly the editor of a magazine called Web of Sound.  I haven’t been able to find out anything about this person on the Internet, and I suspect that he is yet another fiction, as is “A. Seltzer” (clearly a reference to Alka-Seltzer) who wrote the crazed liner notes for the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP.  I loved reading the liner notes as I played the Pebbles albums (still do in fact). 

 

(July 2013)

 

 
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Phil and the Frantics are best known for their evident plagiarism of a Zombies song for their minor hit “I Must Run”, though to these ears, it isn’t nearly as obvious as everyone else seems to think.  See what you think of this song on YouTube (audio only) as taken from the LP where I first heard the song, Pebbles, Volume 2:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLK9wV-NfzQ .  

 

 (August 2014)

 
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The five songs by the Choir on the EP called The Choir, however, did not include their September 1966 release “It’s Cold Outside”, which was picked up by Roulette Records in May 1967, hitting #1 on all three Top 40 radio stations in Cleveland and peaking at #68 on the Billboard charts.  “It’s Cold Outside” is one of my very favorite 1960’s garage rock songs, and this song has fans across the country and around the world.  “It’s Cold Outside” gained more attention when it was included on the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP and later in the first Nuggets Box Set. 
 
(December 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021