FACEBOOK – 2015-2020 Named for main protagonist Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars saga, the Skywalkers is a Dutch duo that had a limited release on vinyl which I was fortunate to order. One of the bandmembers, Jacco Gardner released his first solo album, Cabinet of Curiosities the month after my post. The band’s farewell single, “Rosa” b/w “Creature of the Night” was released in April 2013. However, their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/FreakbeatIsBack?fref=ts is still active.
(January 2015/2) * * * A full-length album is planned in the Spring of 2015. Brian Olive also has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BrianOliveMusic .
(February 2015)
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In the summer of 1968, Haymarket Square was approached by the Museum of Contemporary Art to provide the music for a work of art on display at that time called The Original Baron & Bailey Light Circus, which had been put together by two college professors. The Facebook and Google+ pages for the museum recently showed some drawings for the exhibit. For the most part though, the exhibit seems to be remembered mainly as the source of the Magic Lantern album. (June 2015) * * * Using several of these sound tricks can be enough to completely change a song. I am up to mid-2013 in loading up my Facebook posts into my website, and one song that I wrote about then is a long-time favorite called “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers, which started out as an African-American gospel group. The song was originally recorded in 1966 but had a completely different sound; it was next released on the band’s album The Time Has Come in November 1967 and became a hit single in 1968. Wikipedia notes that it is “one of the landmark rock songs of the psychedelic era” and continues: “Various effects were employed in its recording and production, including the alternate striking of two cow bells producing a ‘tick-tock’ sound, warped throughout most of the song by reverb, echo and changes in tempo.”
(July 2015)
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(First of all, it was Facebook who changed up the format of the Notes; I don’t like this much at all. But it’s their show, so what can I do.) (August 2015) * * * Amanda Brix had been in an all-female band called the Lame Flames that was active in the Los Angeles area in the 1980’s. They are described variously on the Internet as a rap trio and a heavy metal act (with Amanda Brix called a “sex goddess”). Though the band has a Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/The-Lame-Flames-137156196321030/ – they apparently did not release any records, and I am not sure that there are any YouTube videos out there either. There are oodles of photos and posters on the Facebook site and elsewhere on the Internet though. (December 2015) * * *
Besides my usual commitments at work and at home, I am still busily sorting out my past UARB/UARA posts into my website on Google Sites, which can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockbands/ . I am up to nearly 2,000 web pages now, and I am getting into the meat of the writing: I am now working on my “what might have been” post in June 2013 about “the day the music died” that includes info on various rock and roll pioneers. That was the first time that I exceeded the 65,536-character limit that Facebook has on their posts. That has happened several times since, including twice this year alone. I have made a couple of additions throughout the website in the past year: I now have introductory sections from Wikipedia (except naturally for the Under Appreciated pages) at the beginning of each web page. I also figured that I didn’t have quite enough colors yet, so I have marked place-names with violet (though I have not tried to set up any web pages on those). (Year 6 Review) * * * As I mark 7 years of Under Appreciation, the sheer volume of what I have written staggers me. I have printed out hard copies of all of my Facebook posts – I just don’t trust “the Cloud” to always be there – and the pages measure more than 4 inches thick. I have set up web pages on what I have written about over the years through the May 2014 post, and they surely number over 5,000 web pages now. Eventually I guess I will set up a proper website, with all of the bells and whistles; but for now, Google Sites does everything I need it to do. The maximum size of 100MB was worrisome at first, but I later found that I could start as many sites as I want (five so far), and they talk to each other pretty well. The only annoyance is that I keep having to load up the photographs when I bring in a new Facebook post. (Year 7 Review) * * * The above headline took my breath away when I first noticed it a few months ago on NBCNews.com: “This Oscar Winner Has the Most Supportive Wife Ever”. The wife in question is Holly Ramos, one of my Facebook friends as a result of this series of Under Appreciated Rock Band posts; and she was the bandleader in the UARB with the shortest name (Fur) coming at the end of the longest post (June 2013). Holly Ramos had tipped off her Facebook friends that her husband Tom Cross was up for an Oscar for Film Editing, and I had my eyes open during the 2015 Oscar ceremonies. It might be my imagination, but I think I remember a flash of a few seconds toward that part of the crowd when I saw Holly reacting to the announcement of the winner. In his acceptance speech, Tom Cross thanked, among others, his wife Holly Ramos and their two children. * * * When I first started loading up individual webpages in my website on the bands and albums and songs that I had written about in my Facebook posts, I began to wonder if I would ever finish that massive undertaking – ultimately, it amounted to more than 10,000 webpages. I was keeping an eye on the gap between the current Facebook post and the one that I just finished putting into the website, and it seemed to be holding steady at about 2½ years. In other words, setting up the web pages was taking about as long as I spent to write up the post in the first place. At length, I got to the more recent posts that were made on a quarterly rather than a monthly basis; and I finally started to narrow that gap. I got encouraged and pressed hard to wrap that up. I now have everything sorted out and indexed and laid out on the website, as of sometime in the middle of last year. (Year 9 Review) * * * I suppose I could come up with even more posts about record collecting (five so far), women in rock (five also), rock and religion (five as well), and songwriting (six of those); but I would have a hard time getting motivated about any of that. I guess that I could put together another group of capsule reviews like I did about the albums on the CD rack that I took off the hands of a flea market dealer ages ago; those were a lot of fun. We’ll see. I already consider these posts to represent a pretty decent legacy that will hopefully outlive me. Early in my Facebook experience, I noticed the ‘Notes’ section; and that seemed to be a good place for my UARB posts, rather than just putting them on the Feed. Currently, ‘Notes’ is pretty far down the list of the more than 20 sections of Facebook to ‘Explore’. * * * But the best find of all, without question, is locating a copy of past UARA Thomas Anderson’s second album, Blues for the Flying Dutchman (1992). I had previously noted that the Village Voice said of him: “Thomas Anderson is clearly the greatest unknown songwriter on the planet.” This album knocks it out of the park and shows that their writer wasn’t just whistling “Dixie” with that remark. That, er, memorable time that I was drunk Facebooking for most of a night and woke up on the floor under my desk at 3:30 a.m. that I have written about previously? Early in my latest round of neurological problems that I still have no answers for? I had been playing Blues for the Flying Dutchman nonstop and full blast for most of that time (poor Peggy!). |