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Seventh Year Review

I Really Used to Do This Every Month?
 
Retirement is sniffing around me, waiting for me to take the bait, and I am starting to glimpse my working life in the rearview mirror. Writing about rock and roll is something I should have been doing afterwards, not over these long years when I am still slogging away for paychecks. Year after next (and I am certain that I will still be working then), I will mark 45 years as an appraiser and 20 years living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast – I remember when the dozen years that I spent in school seemed like a long time.
 
In my field of real estate appraisal, there are two kinds: those who appraise houses, and those who appraise everything else. There’s more money in the less glamorous part, at least these days, but I am still happy to have taken the other path. I have valued just about everything now – apartments, factories, regional shopping malls, high-rise office buildings in Manhattan, a resort with a forest of towers in Waikiki Beach (twice) that took a full day just to walk through, and everything in-between, in 26 States and 2 Canadian Provinces at last count. I have been on dots of land barely as big as a living room, and sweeps of woods that I could scarce take in from a satellite photograph.
 
One called “Mike’s Island” comes to mind, a wooded riverfront 2½ Sections large and the next county over that later became a Naval proving ground, whose boundaries were delimited by creeks and streams, many that could be easily stepped across, where a steel bridge once carrying truck traffic now looked questionable even to support my meager frame. Sometimes there are a half dozen of us rolling through a forest down roads that are in much better shape than they have any business being; and sometimes it is just me on foot, wondering exactly where I am, with too-fresh memories of The Blair Witch Project as the sun is going down – a Sheriff’s Deputy was there to rescue me one time.
 
I have looked at buildings older than me that would easily stand another 100 years, except that no one has known what to do with them for more than a decade. Some were barely recognizable anymore as buildings, where I was afraid even to cross the threshold. Many were new structures of course – a fully automated textile plant as large as a Walmart SuperCenter in an unassuming North Carolina location, with barely two dozen cars out front and as many people working the office as the factory, where literal bales of cotton arrive at one end and, through the wonders of German engineering, spools of yarn go out the other that haven’t been touched by human hands. A brand new convention hotel in California, where I was struggling to view it as new, I had seen so many just like it that were decades old. A huge, fully refrigerated pizza distribution facility here in Gulfport, doubled in size and fully renovated just months previously, now shrugged off in a corporate merger and daubed with mysterious black grit that was being shipped out in pasteboard boxes to some unknown purpose.
 
One memorable chunk of real estate in New Bern, North Carolina lives in my memory – a fast-crumbling massive mansion built by the man who made Sloan’s Liniment (and later used as the New Bern Country Club facility) at one end, too expensive to save by half with an estimated half-million 1980’s dollars needed just to fix the roof; and at the other end a near-grotesque modern residence for the head of one of the state’s largest banks, with a living area well into five figures that had hardly been occupied at all, having a dock for a yacht larger than some ferry boats I had been on. Between them was the “guest house” for the Sloan mansion that was occupied by one of the owners’ children (another of their brood invented the Inertia Nut Cracker that you might remember from TV commercials years ago), a house likely as large as my own, where this part of the property had become so overgrown that no one even knew it was there when the property was purchased some years earlier. I remember saying to my boss as we left after the inspection that I felt like I should have paid an admission charge.
 
How could I ever have worked as anything else after that first major project where I helped out? The company that I joined was valuing a key part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore along the Outer Banks that was then being assembled, more than 750 acres of land wrapped around a Coast Guard Station that included Cape Lookout itself, where waves crashed along both sides of a point of land that reached out into the Atlantic. The beach was littered with full-sized conch shells like the beaches of my youth had cockle shells; I took three home with me, though there were dozens within touching distance at the spot where I found them.
 
The property was improved with the largest A-frame house I have ever seen, along with a few modest fishing cabins and even a little store, decorated with antique bottles that the proprietress had found along the shoreline over the years. The area was renowned as having the best fishing in the State, and fishermen would take over the oldest car they had on small boats (the one we took would hold two cars in a pinch) and then drive up and down the beach to favored fishing spots. If the car broke down, they left it behind, so this expanse of land with scarcely any roads at all had dozens and dozens of old cars as far as the eye could see, many almost completely buried in the sand.
 
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I started out doing a general-interest monthly music post for my own enjoyment as much as anything else; it is a niche that I have seen few others attempt to fill. I needed an outlet for my writing, and I had noticed that my knowledge of rock music was becoming more difficult to retrieve, so I figured that I had better get it on paper before it all disappeared. As I started writing about various topics and artists over the years, the effort tickled my memory banks and called up interesting tidbits and connections that I used to enrich what I was learning and writing about.
 
Although I have typically written about several better known rockers as well in my posts, my “hook” is to write about an Under Appreciated Rock Band. What most people mean by that is their opinion that a band or musician should be a lot more popular than they are among the general public and/or rock critics. I have a lot of those feelings myself, but for these purposes, I took a more rarefied definition: Since I began this by writing Wikipedia articles, these Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Under Appreciated Rock Artists in my posts do not have a Wikipedia article yet. I still write in the dispassionate style of an encyclopedia, though I also put in the kind of colorful language that Wikipedia discourages.
 
The English Wikipedia now has well over 5 million articles – there are also Wikipedias in nearly 300 other languages, with 10 of those having more than a million articles – and includes something on just about any musician or rock band that you can name. You can give it a try yourself – think of the most obscure band or rock artist that you know about, and chances are that they are in Wikipedia. As an indication of what is there, their category on “Rock music groups from North Carolina”, my home state, includes 19 alternative rock groups, 29 indie rock groups, 6 hardcore punk groups, 28 heavy metal musical groups, and 32 others (a total of 114). I don’t know the great majority of them myself, and only a handful could be considered at all well known among rock music fans, such as the dB’s, Nantucket, the Connells (they are from Raleigh, and I believe it was their drummer who lived in the same apartment building where our appraisal office was located for many years), Let’s Active, Corrosion of Conformity, Arrogance, and Fetchin Bones.
 
Others have Wikipedia articles but aren’t on the “Rock music groups from North Carolina” list. I wrote about Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts earlier this year for instance – I have read about them being called one of the early punk rock bands in North Carolina, believe it or not – and another fave is Squirrel Nut Zippers. These two bands are both listed in the “Musical groups from Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina” category, but not the general North Carolina category.
 
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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.
 
I have also noticed a lot of deaths, particularly it seems in the past year; Leon Russell passed away the day after I set up a modest web page on him, as just one example. Clearly these musicians mean a lot to people, and not just the most famous among them. As I write this, Leonard Cohen’s death was more than two weeks ago, yet his photograph still shows up on the “In the News” block on the Wikipedia main page. Cohen’s death notice is in the middle of the list, while Donald Trump’s election the following day is at the bottom.
 
Just this month I learned of the untimely death of writer and musician Billy Miller, and also the co-founder (with wife Miriam Linna, a former drummer with the alt-rockabilly band the Cramps) of the excellent reissue label Norton Records, who was responsible for introducing Hasil Adkins to a wider audience through such albums as Out to Hunch, Poultry in Motion and The Wild Man. I learned of a past UARA named the Lonesome Drifter through their albums.
 
Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.