TRILLION
Frank Barbalace of Wild Blue is also a member of a well-regarded progressive-rock band (also from Chicago) called Trillion. I won’t say anything more about that for now, because they will likely be a future UARB before the end of the year.
Anyway, Frank Barbalace is ambitiously advertising on his website a two-CD collection of most of his recorded works – Wild Blue, Trillion and other material, including some that he did with who I gather is his wife Rebecca Barbalace in a band called Ondavon – for a $50 tab.
(June 2012)
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Even in the context of the late 1960’s, King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King seemed to come out of nowhere. In the Court of the Crimson King featured powerful music and dense lyrics, particularly on the title song, “In the Court of the Crimson King” and “21st Century Schizoid Man”, interspersed with quieter songs like “I Talk to the Wind” and an extended free-form jazzy interlude on “Moonchild”. I have already discussed this album at length on an earlier post about another UARB, Trillion.
(March 2013)
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This is a photo of Frank Barbalace, who played guitar in another UARB, Trillion:
(June 2015)
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We have been bombarded with important anniversaries this year. Though I purposely did not research all of these anniversaries and undoubtedly missed plenty of them for this post (I have been adding them as I think about new ones, however), I know about several others: A long-time favorite food that I still enjoy, Sun Maid Raisins was started in 1912; I lived for nearly 7 years in Jackson County, MS, which was founded in 1812; and the first book of fairy tales and folk stories that were assembled by the Brothers Grimm was published in 1812. The “unsinkable” ship Titanic went down in 1912. The first Whitman’s Sampler – the standard by which all mixed chocolate boxes should be judged IMHO (though not since their acquisition by Russell Stover in 1993 – and yes, I do think that Godiva is over-rated) – came out in 1912. The time-traveling sequences in one of my favorite romance movies, Somewhere in Time (starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) were set in 1912. As I noted in the UARB post on Trillion, one of the best known albums by Rush is called 2112; this album placed second on a readers’ poll by Rolling Stone on “Your Favorite Prog Rock Albums of All Time”. My alma mater, North Carolina State University celebrated its 125th anniversary this year.
The post on Trillion in particular was long because this band is/was chock-full of extremely talented musicians that included Patrick Leonard, one of the major forces behind Madonna’s incredible musical career – and that was just the beginning. In my mind, this band is second only to Wendy Waldman as the most unexpected absence from having a Wikipedia article (the sole criterion I have for marking Under-Appreciated status). The only reason that it wasn’t even longer is that I had already discussed guitarist Frank Barbalace as a member of previous UARB Wild Blue.
For Trillion, I decided to mark the myriad connections to musicians and bands that do have Wikipedia articles by the use of the symbol “(W)”. By the way, I did not use duplicates – there was only one (W) in all cases. Wikipedians are mostly young and hip, so Wikipedia articles are heavily skewed toward video games and rock musicians, as opposed to what you find in, say, Encyclopædia Britannica.
People who don’t use Wikipedia regularly probably don’t realize that, in addition to articles on the band, there are also individual Wikipedia articles on all or most of the members of second- and third-tier rock bands like Toto and Survivor, as well as articles on many of their albums and individual songs. For major rock bands like Led Zeppelin, there are Wikipedia articles on virtually every song that they have ever released. The Trillion post gives the reader a hint of the breadth of coverage that Wikipedia has in the world of rock music within its 4,000,000-plus articles. In any case, I finally counted up the (W) symbols in the Trillion post this morning, and there are 53 of them – and 3 of those are articles on bandmembers in Trillion itself. As I mentioned in the post, there would have been dozens more if I had also marked albums and songs having Wikipedia articles with a (W).
(Year 3 Review)
