 NextUNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR JANUARY 2011: HACIENDAThirty-some years ago, I picked up a two-record set with a neo-psychedelic cover called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. (I always just called it “Nuggets”, but Wikipedia uses the whole title). If the dates strike you odd – thinking, wait a minute, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t come out until the summer of 1967 – well, that is true; but psychedelia had been around a long time before that mainstream hit. (Likewise, by the time the Bee Gees, John Travolta and the Saturday Night Fever crowd showed up, the disco craze was on the wane). Besides being one of the greatest compilation albums of all time – Rolling Stone puts it at #196 on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, period – this was a record on a mission: By naming “the first psychedelic era” just three or four years after it had ended, Nuggets helped ensure that there would be a second (and a third) psychedelic era. Even before I played it the first time, I knew I would love Nuggets , because I was already familiar with a lot of these bands. In fact, I picked up the debut albums by Blues Magoos and the Electric Prunes in the same shipment from Columbia Record Club back when; and it wasn’t long before I also had the first album by the Shadows of Knight, with their killer cover of Van Morrison’s “Gloria”. The Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” was another favorite, though it was awhile before I got an album. Lenny Kaye, who would later be the guitarist for Patti Smith Group, helped put the album together and wrote the liner notes that are almost as well known as the album itself. Patti Smith has been more or less a recluse all of her professional life – the whole time I was in NY, her only performance was a poetry reading that I passed on – but she has been getting a little more prominence lately, I am delighted to see: She interviewed Johnny Depp in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine and has an acclaimed memoir out now called Just Kids, about her life with her late roommate, the brilliant and notorious photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In an introductory note, Lenny Kaye expressed something that I felt as well while I was reading it: that there was this wonderful music floating around among the British Invasion bands and the girl groups and the Motown sound, and it was gone before we even knew what we were hearing; and wouldn’t it be great to hear all of these songs again in one place. Kaye called the music “punk rock” – the first high-profile use of that term – but these days, it is called garage rock and psychedelic rock. It is no exaggeration to say that this album told my soul what kind of music I really love. Reading between the lines, many of the songs on Nuggets were apparently chosen by what had hit the Top 100 at some point during that time period; that would explain the presence of the strangest of the songs, the closing track “It’s-a-Happening” by the Magic Mushrooms, which remarkably made it to something like #94 for a week. Even more intriguing to me were the songs that hadn’t hit the charts at all. One immediate fave was “A Public Execution” by a Texas band called Mouse and the Traps (the song was officially issued under the name Mouse), doing something that I didn’t think would ever happen: someone else creating music along the lines of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 61 Revisited. There about midway through the fourth side of Nuggets was a song that I didn’t think quite fit in: “Farmer John” by the Premiers. It was earlier than any of the other tracks, dating from 1964, and it sounded like it was recorded live at somebody’s picnic. The lyrics were simple – “Farmer John . . . I’m in love with your daughter . . . whoa-oh-oooh” – as was the beat and the slow, loping groove; but it just kept growing on me. Eventually Neil Young recorded a cover of the song in the same style on his excellent 1990 album Ragged Glory. The songwriter is Richard Berry – he is not related to Chuck Berry but has some seminal songs to his credit nonetheless; “Louie Louie” heads the list, but “Have Love, Will Travel” is almost as good. (See below). Only last year did I discover that the Premiers were a Chicano band; there was a show on PBS that explained how this band and so many other Latin bands had been chased off the charts by the British Invasion. They are hardly the only ones; Question Mark and the Mysterians are a dynamite Latino garage rock band with a big hit to their credit, “96 Tears”. Their bandleader had his name legally changed to ? (though it was usually spelled out) decades before Prince did something similar – at least ?’s was a pronounceable symbol. Thee Midniters is yet a third one familiar to those in the know; generally bands who use “thee” are Latino bands. Sadly the Latin presence in American rock and roll is not at all recognized. Most people only know about Ritchie Valens, who had a couple of hit songs back in the 1950’s, “Donna” (or“Oh Donna”) and “La Bamba” (also the title of a 1987 biopic film about him, La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Phillips). Along with the better known Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, Valens died in the 1957 plane crash in Iowa that was immortalized in Don McLean’s haunting “American Pie” as “the day the music died”. Totally unremarked upon in all this time, as far as I know, is that Ritchie Valens’ real last name is Valenzuela, the same as the legendary pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Fernando Valenzuela. In 1981, Valenzuela caught the imagination of the whole country when he won his first 8 games as a starting pitcher in his rookie season for the Dodgers, including 5 shutouts. If the season hadn’t been cut short by the baseball strike that year, there is no telling how dominant he might have been; but to this day, he is still the only player in Major League Baseball history to have been awarded the Rookie of the Year award, the Cy Young Award, the Silver Slugger Award, and a World Series championship, all in the same season. While “Fernandomania” was a distant memory to most people by the time La Bamba came out, Fernando Valenzuela had one of his best seasons the previous year (1986) and nearly won the Cy Young Award again. Which brings me at long last to this month’s band: San Antonio’s HACIENDA, a Spanish word for a residential estate or plantation. As is often true of Latino bands, Hacienda is a family affair that was formed by Abraham Villaneuva (piano/vocals) and his cousin Dante Schwebel (guitar/vocals) and later added Abraham’s brothers, Jaime Villaneuva (drums/vocals) and Rene Villaneuva (bass/vocals). Hacienda has two albums on Alive Records to their credit, Loud is the Night (2008) and Big Red and Barbacoa (2010). The first album includes a lovely cover of one of Sonny and Cher’s earliest hits, “Baby Don’t Go” – “Baby Don’t Go” was actually released before the duo’s signature hit “I Got You Babe” just after they stopped recording under the name Caesar and Cleo. I am not sure exactly what the title of the second album means, but “Big Red” and “Barbacoa” are the names of two instrumentals that would have closed each side if the album was released as an LP. Like their first album, the new record includes one cover among their self-penned songs, an Everly Brothers song that I was not familiar with called “You’re My Girl”. Both albums are excellent, but the second is more self-assured and seamless in its sound. I was introduced to the band when Suzy Shaw, who manages Bomp! Records’ online Bomp! mailorder business (among other duties) included three recent releases in one of my usual orders of decades-old music. Besides the second Hacienda album, she also included a delightful psychedelic stew of an album by Mondo Drag called New Rituals; and Brian Olive’s debut solo album, Brian Olive. Olive (ex-Soledad Brothers) is one of those amazing men – like Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Nikki Sudden – to whom songwriting is as natural as breathing; he is working on a second album already. Although I very much enjoyed the albums that I had ordered, I found myself playing these new artists again and again. Anyway, it surely worked, for I have a nice stack of new CD’s and LP’s released by the Bomp labels that I have since ordered. Hacienda caught the attention of Dan Auerbach of the acclaimed blues-rock band the Black Keys, who produced both of their albums. One of Bomp! Records’ recent coups was releasing the first album by this band in 2002 called The Big Come-Up; the new Black Keys album, Brothers is one of the standout albums of 2010, landing a Grammy nomination and a #2 ranking on the 2010 Albums of the Year by Rolling Stone, and even making Time Magazine’s list of Best of 2010 in Music. How to describe Hacienda’s music has been a problem for me though. Because of their 1960’s sensibility and love of harmony vocals, they are often compared with familiar bands from that era – even their website says: “Think the Beach Boys meet the Everly Brothers”. That’s a cute headline but isn’t really helpful in terms of a description: If I were writing about the Everly Brothers, I certainly wouldn’t say, “They are a lot like the Beach Boys” – or Gram Parsons, or The Band, or any of the other artists that I have heard mentioned. As I have thought it over though, I realize that Hacienda sounds more like the Premiers than anyone else I can think of, so maybe it is a special Chicano sound that they have. I had originally brought up the latter band as a device to start talking about Chicano rock bands – and as a way to write a tribute to one of my very, very favorite albums. In any case, “Farmer John” is not to be missed, so I have included a link to a YouTube video of the original 45 of this great song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKVLAiyDIzw. (I am not positive that this is the one that was on Nuggets, but it probably is, though the odd introduction about “Has anybody seen Kosher Pickled Herring?” is omitted). Also, not surprisingly I suppose, Hacienda is the first of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands to have a Facebook site, and here that is: https://www.facebook.com/haciendamusic . * * * I’m not sure where I got the idea that “Farmer John” was written by Richard Berry, but I was mistaken about that; the song was actually written by Don “Sugarcane” Harris and Dewey Terry, who originally recorded the song in the mid-1950’s under the name Don and Dewey. Sorry about that. I’m still glad that I had something to say about Richard Berry though; he wrote some great songs, and not just “Louie Louie”. (January 2014) |
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