 UNDER APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR SEPTEMBER 2017: THE TELL-TALE HEARTS  Continuing the overview of Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges from earlier in the year, here is a band that (until the present century) left behind just three studio albums, with a total of only 23 songs. By comparison, the Beatles’ Abbey Road album alone has 17 songs. For those who are fans, that can be extremely frustrating – and I know that all too well as someone who writes about Under Appreciated Rock Bands who often (though not always) don’t have a recorded output that is even that large. Iggy Pop started his prolific solo career quickly enough, but Iggy’s solo albums are as different from his work with the Stooges as Elvis Presley’s music after he got out of the Army is from his early rockabilly sides at Sun Records and RCA. * * *  If all you ever buy are major-label record albums or CD’s, then you’re stuck. You have the choice of those three Stooges albums – The Stooges, Fun House, and Raw Power – and that’s it. And those albums are not always in print, and used copies are a tough find as well. As an example, for the third album, Raw Power, there was a 1989 CD release on Columbia Records – 16 years after the original vinyl edition in 1973. (The other two Stooges albums came out on Elektra Records). Several more editions of Raw Power have been released more recently, however – most famously, an alternate mix of Raw Power supervised by Iggy Pop in 1996 came out in April 1997, in response to the frequent complaints about David Bowie’s mix that was used in the original 1973 release. Iggy felt pressured to participate; he figured that if he blew them off, the record company would put out a remixed album anyway, and who knows what it would sound like. Then there was a “Deluxe Edition” in 2010 – after the Stooges had reformed and began touring worldwide – on Columbia’s Legacy Recordings label that included a second CD of live recordings made at Richards in Atlanta in October 1973; a third CD entitled “Rarities, Outtakes & Alternatives from the Raw Power Era”; and a DVD featuring a documentary by Morgan Neville and additional live recordings made in November 2009 at Planeta Terra Festival in São Paulo, Brazil. Deluxe Editions tend to be pricey though, and many fans cannot afford to pay that much for music. The Raw Power Deluxe Edition is currently available on Amazon for $99.97 and up and was probably no cheaper when it originally came out. I have purchased recent vinyl pressings of the other two Stooges albums, but not Raw Power; and my copy of that record has not yet surfaced among the hundreds of albums that I have cleaned up from Hurricane Katrina. There was, however, a limited vinyl edition of Raw Power that came out on Record Store Day 2012 that featured one disc with the original release of Raw Power using David Bowie’s 1973 mix, and another with Iggy Pop’s 1996 remix of Raw Power, along with a 16-page commemorative booklet. I’m keeping my eyes open. * * *  Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind. There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way. They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released. “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether. That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago. Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry. In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like: “Licensed for promotional use only. Sale is prohibited.” That memorable time – I always thought it was late 1969, but based on the dates I see in Wikipedia and elsewhere, it must have been in 1970 – I went by the Record Bar in Raleigh near the North Carolina State University campus, and there were several tables full of bootleg records that had been set up in the middle of the store. I picked up four that day: two by Bob Dylan, Great White Wonder and John Birch Society Blues; one by the Beatles, Kum Back; and one by the Rolling Stones, The Greatest Group on Earth. The music I got that day was a revelation and has informed my record collecting habits ever since. * * *  The Rolling Stones album, on the Lurch Records label, was released in other editions besides the one that I have. My copy of The Greatest Group on Earth has plain red lettering in one corner of an otherwise blank record cover (or maybe no lettering at all; the cover is gone now of course), but other versions have a big red star and “Greatest Group on Earth” in big block letters. The same recordings in the same order have also been issued under the name Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be (on Lurch Records, and on Hobo Records, or with no label name at all). “The Rolling Stones” does not appear anywhere on the label or the cover on any of these discs. Occasionally, the labels on bootleg records are misleading; for instance, some editions of Great White Wonder on Rocolian Records show the artist as “Dupre and His Miracle Sound” and have completely different song names. More often, the record labels are completely blank or just have “Side 1” or “A” or something like that. The Greatest Group on Earth is typical of bootleg records that I have seen for a host of bands and artists over the years, in that it consists of a live concert with middling recording quality that was taped surreptitiously by someone in attendance. My guess is that 90% or more of bootleg records are like this. Listings in the Discogs items about this album say that the songs were taken from the second show performed by the Rolling Stones at the Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California on November 9, 1969. * * *  The concert was made not long after the release of one of my favorite Rolling Stones albums, Beggars Banquet, and includes two songs from that album, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man”, plus several more from their most recent album at that time, Let it Bleed: “Gimme Shelter”, “Love In Vain”, “Midnight Rambler”, “Live with Me”, and “Honky Tonk Women” – a country version of this song was included on Let it Bleed under the name of “Country Honk”, while “Honky Tonk Women” itself was released five months earlier as a single only. The Greatest Group on Earth was the only concert album that I had of the Stones for several years (in fact, I did not own very many albums back then, period) – just one live album by the Rolling Stones had been officially released previously, Got Live If You Want It! (1966) – so I played this record a lot. The Rolling Stones’ bootleg album, The Greatest Group on Earth is mostly familiar material as might be expected in a live concert. However, until I got this album, I did not know or at least remember the song “I’m Free” (a different song from the well-known track, “I’m Free” from the Who’s album Tommy); it had been the b-side for the Stones’ second #1 song, “Get off of My Cloud”. The album also includes two Chuck Berry songs, “Carol” and “Little Queenie”. “Carol” was released as a single in January 1964, charting only in France, and was also on their first album, The Rolling Stones. While “Little Queenie” was never recorded by the Stones on a single or a studio album as far as I have been able to tell, “Carol” as well as “Little Queenie” are included on their second live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert (1970). According to Wikipedia: “It [Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!] was reported to have been issued in response to the well known bootleg Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be” (the alternate name of The Greatest Group on Earth). * * *  My bootleg album by the Beatles, Kum Back turned out to be a remarkable piece of vinyl: an early mix of their final album, Let it Be as recorded on acetate in August 1969 that was put together by Glyn Johns and with apparently minimal involvement by George Martin, who had produced virtually all of the other Beatles records. (An acetate disk is a low-quality type of phonograph record that is normally intended only for temporary use; it wears out quickly if played repeatedly). The title Kum Back I figure is sort of a takeoff on two 1969 Beatles singles, “Come Together” and “Get Back”; also, Get Back was the original working title for the Let it Be project, meant to be “a return to the Beatles’ earlier, less complicated approach to music” (as expressed in Wikipedia). As an illustration of this, the photograph for the planned cover for Get Back was taken in the same location as the one on the Beatles’ first British album, Please Please Me, and the cover had a similar design. Kum Back was essentially recorded live, though evidently in a studio setting; and Get Back was planned for release in this same manner, as a back-to-roots move. As it turned out, the album Let it Be as it was ultimately released on May 8, 1970 (more than a year after most if not all of the actual recordings by members of the Beatles had been made) was greatly different from this earlier intention as Get Back, with superstar producer Phil Spector remixing all of the songs – adding orchestra and choir sections to some songs; and editing, splicing and overdubs on others. By the time Let it Be was released, the Beatles had already officially broken up. Richie Unterberger notes in his Allmusic review that Let it Be is “[t]he only Beatles album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews, [and] there are few other rock records as controversial as Let it Be”. I didn’t like it much myself, particularly since I had previously heard Kum Back, which (though raw and rough in places) is better in almost every respect than the official album. * * *  One thing about Kum Back that I didn’t particularly like was the seemingly endless performance of “Teddy Boy”; unlike most of the songs on the album that became part of the Beatles’ Let it Be album, “Teddy Boy” was instead released as a song on Paul McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney – this album actually came out in April 1970, the month before Let it Be. (McCartney is not the first solo album by a Beatle though; Wonderwall Music, a soundtrack album of Indian classical music for a film called Wonderwall, was released in November 1968 by George Harrison). At nearly 6 minutes in length and almost 2 minutes longer than any of the other songs on Kum Back (according to the Wikipedia article), “Teddy Boy” seems even longer; while there are two verses, the song mostly consists of the chorus line – “He said, Mommy don’t worry, now Teddy boy’s here / Taking good care of you” – repeated multiple times with very minor wording changes. * * *  Ultimately, a revised edition of Let it Be came out in 2003, due to the hostility by many to Phil Spector’s production efforts on the original album. It was called Let it Be . . . Naked and purportedly stripped the additions and corrections made by Spector to the original Beatles recordings. As with the Iggy Pop remix of the Stooges album Raw Power, however, successfully redoing an album that has been heard for many years by basically everyone having any interest at all in the music is easier said than done. Mark Deming notes in Allmusic: “In 1997, when Columbia made plans to issue a new edition of Raw Power, they brought in [Iggy] Pop to remix the original tapes and (at least in theory) give us the ‘real’ version we’d been denied all these years. Then the world heard Pop’s painfully harsh and distorted version of Raw Power, and suddenly [David] Bowie’s tamer but more dynamic mix didn’t sound so bad, after all.” * * *  As to the Beatles’ attitudes toward the Let it Be . . . Naked reissue, Wikipedia notes: “[Paul] McCartney in particular was always dissatisfied with the ‘Wall of Sound’ production style of the Phil Spector mixes of three tracks, especially for his song ‘The Long and Winding Road’, which he believed was ruined by the process. George Harrison gave his approval for the Naked project before he died. McCartney’s attitude contrasted with [John] Lennon’s from over two decades earlier. In his December 1970 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Lennon had defended Spector’s work, saying, ‘He was given the s--ttiest load of badly recorded s--t – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it. . . . When I heard it, I didn’t puke.’ Harrison and Ringo Starr also remained complimentary about Spector’s contribution, with Starr saying: ‘I like what Phil did. . . . There’s no point bringing him in if you’re not going to like the way he does it – because that’s [Wall of Sound] what he does.’” So how did Let it Be . . . Naked go down 33 years after the original release of Let it Be? The same sort of muted comments that greeted the 1996 remix of Raw Power were in evidence here as well; Wikipedia lists some of them: Allmusic notes that Let it Be . . . Naked “is overall slightly stronger [than Let it Be] . . . a sleeker, slicker album”; Pitchfork notes that Let it Be . . . Naked is “not essential [. . .] though immaculately presented”; and Salon commented that Let it Be . . . Naked “stripped the original album of both John [Lennon]’s sense of humor and Phil Spector’s wacky, and at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, grandiosity.” For myself, some tacky items stood out when I scanned the changes made in Let it Be . . . Naked that are listed in Wikipedia; they seem to go beyond adjusting whatever Phil Spector had added to the recordings. For “Dig a Pony”, Wikipedia states: “[The] error in second verse (the ‘because’ in [John] Lennon’s vocal track) [was] digitally corrected.” Similarly, in “Two of Us”, a “minor error in Lennon’s acoustic guitar performance [was] digitally corrected.” One of the live tracks, “I’ve Got a Feeling” is actually composed of “[a] composite edit of two takes from the rooftop concert”. After reading this, I have an image in my mind of a high school art student touching up an old master. * * *  A tape of this early acetate of Let it Be made its way to America and was played on several US radio stations; it was later pressed into the bootleg album called Kum Back – as with The Greatest Group on Earth by the Rolling Stones, there are multiple editions of the album, though the title Kum Back is used consistently throughout as far as I know. While live concerts are almost always performed after the studio album comes out, Kum Back was made available many months before either the rooftop concert film called Let it Be was broadcast or Let it Be the album was released (they came out a few days apart in May 1970). As to the tracks on Kum Back that did not show up on Let it Be, besides “Teddy Boy”, a performance for just under a minute of a blues song by Jimmy McCracklin called “The Walk” (also known as “Can He Walk”) also does not appear on Let it Be. The biggest surprise though is that one of the strongest songs made by the Beatles in their twilight years, “Don’t Let Me Down” – previously released in April 1969 as the b-side of the “Get Back” single – was also not included on Let it Be, though it was among the songs in the 2003 reissue, Let it Be . . . Naked. With the inclusion of “Don’t Let Me Down”, two short tracks, “Dig It” and “Maggie Mae” (not the same song as the Rod Stewart classic, “Maggie May”) were left off Let it Be . . . Naked. Together, these two songs run just 1:30; honestly, you’d think there would be enough room on the CD for them, too (neither appears on Kum Back either, though “Don’t Let Me Down” does). From Wikipedia: “Written by [John] Lennon as an anguished love song to Yoko Ono, [‘Don’t Let Me Down’] was interpreted by Paul McCartney as a ‘genuine plea’, with Lennon saying to Ono, ‘I’m really stepping out of line on this one. I’m really just letting my vulnerability be seen, so you must not let me down.’ . . . Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called it ‘one of the Beatles’ most powerful love songs’.” * * *  Anthology 3 includes numerous Beatles tracks from the Let it Be sessions that (as I remember) are likely the corresponding songs on Kum Back; in all, 12 of the 23 songs on the second CD are identified in Wikipedia as “Savile Row Sessions”, with recording dates ranging from January 22 through January 29, 1969. Among these songs are “Teddy Boy”, but with a much shorter running time of 3:18. Other performances on Anthology 3 from the Savile Row Sessions that have no connection to the Let it Be album are two of the Abbey Road songs, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Oh! Darling”; a song called “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues” that had been recorded by Buddy Holly in 1957 and was part of the Beatles’ live repertoire until 1962; and a medley of three rock and roll classics – “Rip It Up”, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Blue Suede Shoes”. * * *  Bob Dylan’s bootleg albums fall into a different category entirely from all of the rest, if you ask me. While latter-day Bob Dylan concerts often show up on bootleg records, dozens if not hundreds of songs that had never been released on any of his studio albums or singles can be found on the myriad bootleg albums that have been issued over the years, as taken from a wealth of demo recordings, live performances of early songs (where less than 20 people appear to be in the audience in some cases), and many other sources. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Bob Dylan is the most bootlegged artist of all time, and that certainly doesn’t surprise me. For his part, Dylan hates bootleg records but eventually responded in his own way to get his unreleased recordings out there to his fans. Great White Wonder is probably the most famous bootleg album of all time and one of the earliest as well, being released in July 1969. It is a double album with a total of 25 cuts – electric songs and acoustic songs, quiet songs and fast songs, guitar songs and piano songs, solo performances and others with a full rock band, a dramatic recitation of a poem called “Black Cross” (or “Hezekiah Jones”), an interview with Pete Seeger, and a strange story called “East Orange, New Jersey” where Dylan complains about playing in a chess club there and relates a dream he had where they paid him in chess pieces rather than money. The music is fantastic, without question, but the album has a real personality as well. It is a simply amazing album that is unlike any that I know of that have been released by Bob Dylan or anyone else. A few of the songs on Great White Wonder I knew already; alternate takes of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (which both appear on Bob Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan) are included, and “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” I knew as a single, “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann, released in early 1968. Another song on the album, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” was also a single for Manfred Mann (“If You Gotta Go, Go Now”) and was a hit in England, though I am not sure I had heard it before. But that’s it. Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me. To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them. * * *  What attracted the most attention on Great White Wonder were seven songs recorded by Bob Dylan with the Band, probably at a house called Big Pink that is referenced in the name of the debut album released by the Band, Music from Big Pink (1968). They are clustered mostly on Side 4 and also include the last two songs on Side 2; in order (as listed on the Great White Wonder labels), they are “Mighty Quinn”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Richard!”, “Too Much of Nothing”, “Nothing Was Delivered”, and “Tears of Rage”. All great songs, no question; but this was barely a quarter of the music, and many people seem to think that the earlier acoustical songs that I loved equally well didn’t matter. I have never felt that way myself; Great White Wonder is great from one end to the other to these ears. * * *  As I mentioned earlier, bootleg records were generally tolerated, but there was definitely considerable resistance to them. I would read in the press from time to time and hear from other sources that “legitimate” releases of the songs on Great White Wonder were coming, and we should just be patient and wait. Needless to say, I wasn’t having it; in all, I have purchased 23 Bob Dylan bootleg albums (many being double album sets, like Great White Wonder), and I will likely purchase more if I get a chance. It has been a while since I have seen any in a record store, however, now that I think of it. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait too long – about 6 years. With great fanfare, a two-album set called The Basement Tapes came out in mid-1975. While it was exciting to see another two-album set of unknown Bob Dylan music, the albums ultimately left me feeling underwhelmed. * * *  When I started playing the albums, early on I didn’t recognize any of the music. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if The Basement Tapes is what you were supposed to buy instead of Great White Wonder, it sure wasn’t filling the bill. At the end of Side 2, I finally heard one of the songs from GWW, “Tears of Rage”; and then “Too Much of Nothing” to start Side 3, but no more again until Side 4. In a way, The Basement Tapes was structured like Great White Wonder, except that other “basement-tape” songs were provided in the parts of the discs where the early Bob Dylan songs were slotted on GWW. What I noticed right away, first and foremost, is that none of Bob Dylan’s early folk music and acoustical songs were included on The Basement Tapes. While Great White Wonder included a variety of songs, that is the kind of music that I was encountering on most of the other Dylan bootleg albums that I had been gathering. While there is a lot to love on The Basement Tapes, and I cannot argue with the 5-star rating on Allmusic and other sources, I gather that I am not the only one who was somewhat disappointed. By the time The Basement Tapes came out, the Band had gained considerable stature in the music world and were no longer just “the band” backing Bob Dylan (they were actually called the Hawks in the basement-tape days). Still, I certainly hadn’t expected that fully one third of the songs (8 out of 24) on The Basement Tapes would be songs by the Band alone, with no involvement from Bob Dylan. Finally, I dare say that anyone buying The Basement Tapes would have expected, at a minimum, to hear those seven basement-tape songs from Great White Wonder; but the album came up short in that regard also. Only five of them are on The Basement Tapes, amazingly; “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” and “I Shall Be Released” are omitted from the 1975 album. To be sure, they both had previously been included in the 1971 Bob Dylan retrospective album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II. * * *  One might think that my other Bob Dylan bootleg acquisition that day long ago, John Birch Society Blues would have been completely overshadowed by Great White Wonder, but that isn’t true at all – it is a blockbuster album as well. Like many bootleg records, John Birch Society Blues has had several editions over the years, and with some variation in the songs provided on the album. The first cut, “Mixed Up Confusion” was my introduction to Bob Dylan’s very first 45, as I have written about previously. With Dylan backed by an electric band, the song dates from November 1962 and was released on December 14, 1962 – 6 months before Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, and fully 2½ years before the electric Dylan hit with full force on “Like a Rolling Stone” – but it was almost immediately pulled from the market and is now a great rarity. The flip side of this single, and the only song that I recognized on John Birch Society Blues was “Corrina, Corrina”; an alternative take of the song was included on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but I had heard the song previously before I heard it there, by somebody somewhere. Wikipedia lists so many recorded versions of “Corrina, Corrina” that I have no idea which one it was; probably it was the Ray Peterson recording of “Corrina, Corrina” in 1960 that made it to #9 on Billboard Hot 100. Two of my favorite topical songs by Bob Dylan, “Who Killed Davey Moore” (a live performance) and “Percy’s Song” are included on John Birch Society Blues. Davey Moore was a boxer who lost a fight in March 1963 and died a few days later. One by one, beginning with the line “not me”, Dylan sings a verse on behalf of the referee, the crowd, the manager, the gambling man, the boxing writer, and finally, his opponent in the match (Sugar Ramos), “the man whose fists, laid him low in a cloud of mist” – demonstrating that they each shared some culpability in what happened but could ultimately not be blamed directly for the death. Dylan shows some of his trademark humor when talking of the gambling man and how he wasn’t liable: “Anyway I put money on him to win”. The final verse ends with a quote from Davey Moore’s widow about her husband’s death, “it was God’s will”. “Percy’s Song” – identified on John Birch Society Blues as “Turn to the Rain and the Wind” – has the singer learning that a good friend had been involved in an auto accident and had been convicted of “manslaughter in the highest of degrees”, resulting in a 99-year sentence. Interspersed with a recurring refrain, “Turn, turn, turn again / Turn, turn to the rain and the wind”, the singer tries to get to the bottom of what happened and argues to no avail with the judge that the sentence is too harsh, closing with “But he ain’t no criminal / And his crime it is none / What happened to him / Could happen to anyone”. * * *  Some of the very early pressings of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that are now extremely rare included four sterling Bob Dylan songs that were later left off the album: “Rocks and Gravels”, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, “Gambling Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand” and “Talkin’John Birch Paranoid Blues”. Two of these four songs, under the names “Ride Willie Ride” and “John Birch Society Blues” are included on John Birch Society Blues. The latter song is an hilarious but quite harsh take on the anti-communist group called the John Birch Society that has nice things to say about Adolf Hitler and neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. One verse goes: “Well, I investigated all the books in the library / Ninety percent of them have gotta be thrown away / I investigated all the people that I knowed / Ninety-eight percent of them have gotta go / The other two percent are fellow Birchers / Just like me.” “Ride Willie Ride” is an entertaining if outlandish tale of the adventures of a superman gambler who is eventually shot dead while holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights – the “dead man’s hand” made famous when Wild Bill Hickok was killed while holding those cards. * * *  I will have more to say about Bob Dylan bootleg albums in a future post(s), but I will mention in passing that Dylan has released a staggering amount of his older music in a variety of formats, including but not exclusively in The Bootleg Series. When Dylan agreed to start doing this, he secured an agreement from the record company that was non-negotiable: The recording quality has to be good no matter what. The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 was released in 1991 and includes a live version of “Who Killed Davey Moore”. I had to play it several times to be sure but finally concluded that it is the same live performance included on John Birch Society Blues, even though the difference in the sound of the two recordings is dramatic. Even so, I am happy to have both of them; I was never dissatisfied with the quality of “Who Killed Davey Moore” as it appears on John Birch Society Blues. A new volume in this series, The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981 about Dylan’s Christian albums, was released in November 2017. * * *  The Iguana Chronicles is not really a series of bootleg albums; as related by Greg Shaw, James Williamson brought a box full of tapes of music by the Stooges for him to do whatever he wanted with, in exchange for his agreeing to release his new album with Iggy Pop, Kill City on Bomp! Records, when major-label record companies would not. The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, past UARB the Iguanas (I doubt that I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being in the UARB roster). As given in Discogs, there are 20 records listed in The Iguana Chronicles (all dating from the 1990’s up to 2000), starting with Kill City – though the original LP releases are not shown, with Kill City being the first LP released (in 1977) on Bomp! Records; previously they had pressed only 45’s. As Shaw put it in the liner notes for the label’s retrospective double-CD Destination: Bomp! (1994): “To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.” Iggy Pop had moved on and had previously released two solo albums in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life; but Kill City was the music that Iggy had created right after the third Stooges album came out, Raw Power. As it happened, James Williamson stayed until the end; besides being in the 21st-Century tour with the Stooges, he was in the line-up when the band created its last album, Ready to Die (2013). * * *  According to Greg Shaw, James Williamson was instrumental in saving the Stooges’ musical history; besides the treasure trove given to Shaw as part of the Kill City release deal, he had saved the tapes that became Metallic K.O. (1976), from live performances by the Stooges at Michigan Palace in Detroit on October 6, 1973 and February 9, 1974 – the album originally purported to be entirely from the 1974 show, which was purportedly the Stooges’ last live performance until reforming in 2003, but later releases of Metallic K.O. cleared up the confusion on the dates. The same thing said about Metallic K.O. in Wikipedia – “Considering [James] Williamson’s involvement, and the endorsement of Iggy, it was considered a ‘semi-official’ bootleg, when released on the Skydog label in 1976” – would apply to the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as well. According to Wikipedia: “The album proved popular, due to its release in the first era of punk rock and the Stooges’ growing legend as proto-punks. Metallic K.O. outsold the Stooges’ major label official releases, selling over 100,000 copies in America as an import in its first year alone.” I will get into further details about The Iguana Chronicles in a later post; this one is probably long enough already! * * *  So far, I have included two Under Appreciated Rock Bands with Mike Stax in the line-up: the Crawdaddys a few years back, and the Loons in my last post. THE TELL-TALE HEARTS, named after one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories, is the third and came along between the Crawdaddys and the Loons. The main reason that there are Under Appreciated Rock Bands in the first place, in the way that I define the term (i.e., they do not have an article in Wikipedia), is the idea of Notability; quoting from the Wikipedia article on this topic: “In general, notability is an attempt to assess whether the topic has gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time as evidenced by significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic.” For rock bands, having two albums released on a major record label automatically makes a band “notable”; beyond that though, whether someone is notable is up for interpretation – Wikipedia articles are deleted frequently for that reason alone. In almost every case, the UARB’s and UARA’s that I write about are also “notable”, whether or not Wikipedia would agree, in that they have numerous fans throughout the country and around the world. Again, nearly always, there are comparatively recent reissues of the album(s) by the UARB’s; these aren’t forgotten records that no one else knows about. * * *  Mike Stax also does not have an article in Wikipedia, though there is a short article on the fanzine Ugly Things that he founded in 1983 (the Tell-Tale Hearts were also formed that year). To my mind, there can be little doubt of his “notability”. An article in the San Diego Union Tribune on May 23, 2013 about an upcoming concert over three days celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ugly Things quotes another San Diego musician and rock critic Bart Mendoza (who is in the Shambles): “To me, Ugly Things is the top music magazine in the world. It’s even better than (top English music publication) Mojo, because it has more pages and covers more ground with more depth. Mike’s coverage of music is the template everybody has to match, not only for content but for research. No one else does such comprehensive articles.” Mike Stax’s exhaustively researched article over four issues in Ugly Things on the Misunderstood led to the publication of a book on the band called Like, Misunderstood that was co-written with the band’s lead singer Rick Brown; as quoted in the Union Tribune article, Stax says: “They came pretty close to making it in London, they got a deal with Fontana Records, had a single out and had media (coverage). Then, the [U.S. military] draft claimed the lead singer, and they were finished overnight, just as they were on the verge of success. They would have been the first psychedelic band, with an album out before [Jimi] Hendrix and Pink Floyd. They were cheated. Their music was world-class.” More recently, and representing 15 years of research, Mike Stax published another acclaimed book called Swim Through the Darkness: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali, about a pop and folk musician named Craig Smith who worked with Andy Williams, Glen Campbell and the Monkees and later descended into mental illness and became a “psychedelic messiah” called Maitreya Kali, who released two albums in the early 1970’s. * * *  Another bandmember in the Tell-Tale Hearts, Ray Brandes is also an author. His book on the San Diego underground rock scene, Getting Nowhere Fast came out in December 2015. I had previously borrowed heavily from his history of past UARB the Crawdaddys that I found online a few years ago. The blurb in Amazon says: “1976-1986 was a period of time in which urban tribes staked out and ferociously defended their territories; a time when San Diego began to establish for itself an identity as more than just a Navy town with a great zoo. Getting Nowhere Fast, written by Ray Brandes of the Tell-Tale Hearts, looks at the origins of this period of ‘new’ music in San Diego, and provides an insider’s look at a handful of bands who never quite hit the big time, but who developed cult followings around the world. The histories of the Zeros, the Penetrators, the Unknowns, the Crawdaddys, the Tell-Tale Hearts, and several more groups are presented here for the first time in print.” Remarkably, three of the five bands on this list – the Unknowns, the Crawdaddys, and the Tell-Tale Hearts – are among the UARB’s. * * *  Although Mike Stax moved to California from England specifically to join the Crawdaddys, their musical vision could be rather doctrinaire and was often at odds with the strains of music that he was trying to bring into the band’s recordings. On his 21st birthday, as I related previously, Mike Stax quit the Crawdaddys on the spot after having his birthday present, a valuable garage rock record, thrown at him from across the room by another bandmember who hated garage rock. While commiserating about the state of the San Diego music scene with several friends who had been in a short-lived though well regarded band called the Mystery Machine, the Tell-Tale Hearts were born in the summer of 1983. The liner notes for the album that I have, High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces) state: “There was never any intention to start a movement, influence local musical tastes or convert the masses – we were simply five young men who came together at the right time and place.” The Tell-Tale Hearts had a winning combination of strong musicianship – I particularly love the organ – and a raw sound that proved popular with local audiences. A tongue-in-cheek sidebar on the liner notes by drummer David Klowden says: “I don’t know why the band did as well as it did – couldn’t have been the music . . . Must have been the trousers. Yes, I think it was the trousers that endeared us to those handfuls of sweaty, alienated teenagers displaced from reality during the feverish height of Reaganism. There was even a band member (Mike [Stax]) who actually called pants ‘trousers’.” * * *  The Mystery Machine was formed in 1982 by veterans of several other like-minded bands like the Hedgehogs, the Crawdaddys, and Manual Scan. Bandmembers included Ray Brandes (vocals), Carl Rusk (acoustic and electric guitar), Mark Zadarnowski (bass guitar), Bill Calhoun (keyboards, saxophone), and David Klowden (drums). The band stayed together only about one month, but that was long enough to create one of my long-time favorites called “She’s Not Mine” that was included on three different Bomp! Records/Voxx Records compilation albums: Battle of the Garages, Part 2, The Roots of Power Pop, and Destination: Bomp!. Mike Stax joined with Ray Brandes, Bill Calhoun and David Klowden of the Mystery Machine in creating the Tell-Tale Hearts, along with Eric Bacher who had been in a band called Freddie and the Soup Bowls. Their first gig was in September 1983 at a yard party; Gravedigger V made their debut at the same event, though they were known as the Shamen at that time. The Tell-Tale Hearts seemed to hit San Diego at just the right time and quickly became a fixture in several local clubs, serving as the house band for Studio 517 for a time. * * *  The Tell-Tale Hearts caught the attention of Greg Shaw, and he arranged studio time for them at Bomp! Records/Voxx Records, resulting in their first album, The Tell-Tale Hearts (1984). The liner notes continue: “We battled tooth and nail against technology to try to capture the raw bite of our live show. Recorded mostly with minimal overdubs, the results were generally satisfactory, until Greg decided to do a remix while we were away on tour. The result was an album where the music was robbed of all its muscle and vitality – something we’ve never let Greg forget since.” Due to their dissatisfaction with the way the album sounded, the Tell-Tale Hearts recorded 6 songs in early 1985 at a San Diego studio for an EP sarcastically called The “Now” Sound of the Tell-Tale Hearts that also came out on Voxx Records. The liner notes for High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces) relate the time in 1985 that the Tell-Tale Hearts opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers (right after their first album, The Red Hot Chili Peppers came out) and the Cramps, one of their idols. “When the Cramps finally took the stage around midnight, we were absolutely blown away. The level of talent and professionalism was beyond belief – higher than we could have ever aspired to – yet they managed to lose none of their raw, powerful edges. . . . We were further treated to a backstage meeting with the group later that night, who said that we ‘looked and sounded just like the Shadows of Knight’. They truly must have understood how much that meant to us. A nicer, more down-to-earth group of people would be hard to find.” * * *  In April 1986, Eric Bacher left the Tell-Tale Hearts and was replaced by another ex-Crawdaddy, Peter Miesner. After 3½ years, the band was having difficulty keeping it going: “Musically, the band had stuck in a rut for some time. The new songs that were being written did not sound like ‘Tell-Tale Hearts songs’, and we each had difficulty adjusting to and accommodating the changes that were taking place as our individual tastes expanded. . . . And Mike [Stax] put it best to a San Diego Union reporter: ‘We had painted ourselves into a corner musically.’” Still, the band reported about their final recording session in their original incarnation in December 1986, culminating in the single “Promise” b/w “Too Many Lovers” on an Australian label, Kavern 7 Records: “Incredibly, considering the conflict within the group, ‘Promise’ turned out to be one of the [Tell-Tale] Hearts’ finest moments, highlighted by Peter [Miesner]’s amazing guitar leads and controlled feedback, and Bill [Calhoun]’s wailing harp.” The band called it quits on Valentine’s Day 1987. * * *  The retrospective album that I own by the Tell-Tale Hearts, High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces) came out in 1994 on Voxx Records, collecting 6 songs from The Tell-Tale Hearts (after being remixed to recapture their original sound); 5 from The “Now” Sound of the Tell-Tale Hearts; the 1986 single mentioned above, “Promise” b/w “Too Many Lovers”; 5 demos dating from early 1984; and 3 live performances. Nine of the songs are previously unreleased. Among the demos is a particularly welcome version of “Crackin’ Up”; “Crackin’ Up” by the Wig is listed on the cover of both the Pebbles, Volume 1 LP and the Pebbles, Volume 1 CD but is not actually included on the album. There are some great covers on the Tell-Tale Hearts CD that run the gamut of the whole Sixties scene, among them “Just in Case You’re Wondering” (originally by the Ugly Ducklings), “Me Needing You” (the Pretty Things – the band who inspired the name of Mike Stax’s magazine, Ugly Things), “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” (the Shadows of Knight), “Satisfy You” (the Seeds), the great lead-off track, “My World Is Upside Down” (the Shames), and “Cry” (the Malibus). The band’s original songs are steeped in the same Sixties brew; my favorites include “(You’re a) Dirty Liar”, “Crawling Back to Me”, “It’s Just a Matter of Time”, “One Girl”, and “Promise”. As usual though with the UARB’s, all of their music sounds great to me. When playing L.A. clubs, the bands there often looked down on San Diego bands like the Tell-Tale Hearts; the album name comes from a dismissive comment in 1984 by Gwynne Kahn of the Pandoras: “The Tell-Tale Hearts? Oh, they’re just a bunch of ugly boys with big noses and pizza faces!” Stephen Cook with Allmusic gives the album 4½ stars and writes: “Taking Brit blues invaders like Them, the Animals, and the Yardbirds as a template, not to mention plenty of ’60s garage inspiration, San Diego’s Tell-Tale Hearts forged a fairly original beat homage between 1983-1986. A bit too gritty and blues-based to really fit in with L.A.’s contemporary Byrds and pop-psychedelia revival (the Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, Plasticland), the Hearts only cut one album, an EP, and a smattering of singles and live tracks. . . . Compiled by bassist Mike Stax and featuring the snider-than-Van Morrison vocals of Ray Brandes, the 21-track collection includes studio highlights like ‘(You’re a) Dirty Liar’ and ‘Me Needing You’, as well as some super lo-fi demo covers and a live rendition of the Seeds’ ‘Satisfy You’.” Another retrospective album called The Tell-Tale Hearts, having 16 tracks came out in 1995 on Tapir Records (based in Belize). * * *  After the Tell-Tale Hearts broke up, their former bandmembers and those from another popular local band, Manual Scan joined forces in creating the Shambles, a power pop band that formed in 1990 and is still active. Kevin Donaker-Ring and Bart Mendoza, both of Manual Scan, started playing with first Ray Brandes and later David Klowden of the Tell-Tale Hearts, plus Mark Z, formerly of the Crawdaddys. Another ex-Heart, keyboard wiz Bill Calhoun was added at a later date. The Shambles have had a revolving membership over the years; from what I can tell, none of the bandmembers from the Tell-Tale Hearts are currently with the Shambles. * * *  In 1989, the Tell-Tale Hearts reformed with another line-up for a one-off single “Circus Mind” b/w “Flying” on Nevermore Records (in a limited release of 800 copies), with personnel Bill Calhoun (lead vocals, harp), Mike Stax (bass), Ron Swart (organ), Jon McKinney (rhythm guitar), Carl Rusk (lead guitar on “Circus Mind”), Paul Carsola (drums on “Circus Mind”), and Craig Packham (drums on “Flying”). A tribute by Phil May of the Pretty Things that I found online says of “Circus Mind”: “The Tell-Tale Hearts’ recording of ‘Circus Mind’ picks up on echoes of early electric Dylan (as in Bob), which I’ve always thought ran through our version. . . . They’ve turned what was just a vignette in the Pretties’ version into a whole song that drives the distance.” The Tell-Tale Hearts also toured in 1994 to promote High Tide (Big Noses & Pizza Faces). Further reunions took place in 2004 and 2007. An article written by Bart Mendoza of the Shambles for sdnews.com for the 2007 reunion says of the band: “Mixing Vox keyboard-driven rhythm and blues with fuzzed-out rock, the group’s live shows were incendiary, championing an authentic ’60s sound and taking their cues from such legendary acts as the Pretty Things and [the Dutch band] the Outsiders. While the group has been overlooked locally in recent years, their impact worldwide, particularly in Europe and Japan, continues undiminished. The band is cited regularly as an influence on today’s rockers. Numerous acts have covered the Tell-Tale Hearts’ music, including Spain’s Agentes Secretos, Australia’s Shutdown ’66, England’s Diaboliks, and Japan’s Young Pennsylvanians.” In the mid-1990’s, Mike Stax and Eric Bacher of the Tell-Tale Hearts formed the core of and did most of the early songwriting for the Loons, who was the UARB last time. * * * Story of the Month: Repo Man (from March 2017)  Repo Man (1984) – not at all the same movie as the rather odious Repo Men – would be my current candidate for the “greatest movie ever made” (as I have been telling Peggy for the past year) that I never get tired of watching. The story is a wicked mixture of science fiction, action movie, and sight gags, with a wild array of mostly unknown character actors, and Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez as the stars. The soundtrack, Repo Man: Music from the Original Motion Picture collects a variety of punk rock classics plus others made especially for the film. The opening theme music “Repo Man Theme” (a gut-busting, guitar-driven instrumental that is the best music of all, though it is not on the album) and the title song, “Repo Man” (performed over the ending credits, which crawl downward rather than upward) are by Iggy Pop, while the score is performed by L.A. punk stalwarts the Plugz. I have watched Repo Man a few times with subtitles; that has helped me follow the stream-of-consciousness lyrics in the Iggy Pop song and pick up on some of the other fine points of the movie. For instance, Dr. J. Frank Parnell is mumbling “Oh My Darling, Clementine” to himself in the opening scene, where he warns the doomed motorcycle cop when he asked about the trunk: “Oh . . . you don’t want to look in there”. * * * The Honor Roll of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists follows, in date order, including a link to the original Facebook posts and the theme of the article.
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