THE SLOTHS
The Sloths were an American garage rock band formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1964. Although short-lived, the band had a profound presence on the Sunset Strip’s live scene; and their lone single, “Makin’ Love”, while not very commercially successful during its original release, has been heavily praised since its inclusion on the Back from the Grave series. The Sloths, after their re-discovery by music historians, are now considered the “great lost garage band”, and surviving band members have been conducting reunion tours since 2012. (More from Wikipedia)
AARP The Magazine had a neat article in their June/July 2016 issue recently about a virtually unknown garage rock band called the Sloths that were putting together an album 50 years after the 1965 release of their crude single “Makin’ Love”. The article was about as long as a companion piece in the same issue about the Rolling Stones. (I believe that this is the article where Mick Jagger expressed his wonderment about how it must feel for most people who live in a world where the Stones have always been there).
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While the other members of the Sloths moved on after the band broke up, Mike Rummans stuck with it. As reported in the AARP The Magazine article: “His musical résumé is a kind of pocket history of American pop. There he is on bass in the bubblegummy Yellow Payges [I just ordered an album, finally, by this band], the glam-tastic Hollywood Stars, the neo-rockabilly Kingbees. His Beatle bangs blossomed into a magnificent ’70s shag, then retreated as the ’80s arrived. Often, his bands flirted with success — the Stars were hyped as the West Coast’s New York Dolls, and the Kingbees charted two singles.”
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The AARP The Magazine article mentions Mike Stax a couple of times: “Unbeknownst to any Sloths, ‘Makin’ Love’ had become an object of fascination after it landed on an influential LP compilation [Back from the Grave, Volume 4] in the early 1980s. ‘The Sloths were something special,’ says Mike Stax, a San Diego musician and garage-rock superfan who publishes the rock zine Ugly Things. ‘“Makin’ Love” was the standout track on that album. So primal, so elemental. It had that caveman primitivism about it.’”
The same “unbeknownst” thing happened with Milan the Leather Boy. After I wrote up my Wikipedia article on him, I was contacted by his sister Dara Rodell Gould, who along with her husband Ricky Gould had been trying to interest people in Milan’s music for years. They had no idea that Milan had attained a cult status in the garage-rock community, or probably that there was even such a thing as the garage-rock community.
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After interviewing the bandmembers and writing them up for Ugly Things, a few years later the Sloths started making noises about “putting the band back together”, and Mike Stax gave them a shot by hiring them as the opening act for a concert by the Loons. As reported in AARP The Magazine: “They sounded rough, but kids turned out in droves to see a real-live 1965 band in the flesh. Tommy [McLaughlin] recalls the exuberant reaction at one early show in East L.A.: ‘We were like the Stones up there for them. I was like, We gotta do this.’”
In 2015, the Sloths put out their first album, Back from the Grave, named after the garage-rock compilation album, Back from the Grave, Volume 4 that brought the band back from obscurity.
(June 2017)
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