LOOKING BACK OVER THE DECADE . . . Ten years ago, in December 2009, I wrote the first of my 82 posts on Under Appreciated Rock Bands, i.e., rock bands (and artists) who did not have a write-up as yet in Wikipedia. It wasn’t much to look at, just four short paragraphs, but I got a lot wordier and more wide-ranging as the years went by. I had hoped to keep this up for at least 5 years, if not 10 years; as it happened, my last post was dated December 2017 – 8 years later, and 2 years ago. For two of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands – the Rip Chords (who had a major hit in the surf era with “Hey Little Cobra”) and the Iguanas (punk icon Iggy Pop’s first band, and the reason that he came to be called “Iggy”) – I managed to write my post literally the month before someone started a Wikipedia article on them. For another two – the Piltdown Men and Haymarket Square – it turns out that there was already a Wikipedia article on them; for the latter band, I just plain forgot to look! And one of the UARB’s, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters was not even a rock band – and I just found a Wikipedia article about them also, so I suppose I didn’t look closely enough when I started that post either. But I don’t care at this point: They are all Under Appreciated, from one end to the other, even for the handful who do have a Wikipedia article these days. I might yet write some more posts, but not until I secure my website in a safe place. No other bands or topics come immediately to mind though. I have already written 13 “stories” about various aspects of Bob Dylan’s musical life, and I don’t know what else I have left to add. As it turned out, a lot of my posts have revolved around artists on Bomp! Records and their affiliated labels, like Alive Records. When I was preparing the last of my posts, on The Iguana Chronicles (a long series of albums of unreleased material by the Stooges that was put together by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records) – which was named after the least likely UARB of them all, the Iguanas – I went through all of the Bomp! Records artists that I could locate before I finally found one without a Wikipedia article that wasn’t already a UARB: SS-20, whose first album came out in 1986 – 12 years after Bomp! Records was founded. 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’. * * * For most of this time, I was somehow able to put up long posts about rock music on a monthly basis while I was still working full-time. I remember thinking often over the years that I really should have waited until I retired to try to do something like this. Now that I actually have retired, I really don’t know how I put all of that information together, and I doubt that I could come up with many of those posts now. As an example, my detailed post on the Cream family tree (May 2014) was almost 7,800 words; the section on Eric Clapton alone totaled 3,500 words. I still haven’t counted up the words in all of the posts, but the grand total is probably on the order of a half million words. I am still working my way through the 10,000+ webpages in my website, tidying them up and getting all of the pages to more or less look the same. I am doing them all in alphabetical order, and I am now up to the R’s. I created the website in Google Sites – at https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockbands/home/ – which has changed a lot over the last six years and will eventually be replaced entirely with “New” Google Sites. I need to find a place for the website before that happens, but I am trying to get as much done as possible in “Classic” Google Sites, since I imagine that I will never find an easier platform to work with. This won’t be the end; a lot of the Wikipedia excerpts need work, and I never did put them in the “under appreciated” pages, even though many of them had Wikipedia entries even back when I first set up those pages. Some of the photos need to be replaced also, and some are missing, much to my surprise. I thought that I had been so careful about everything, but I guess I hadn’t. * * * Some years, my record collecting waxes; some years, it wanes. This has definitely been one of the big years, as I have been sharing on Facebook for much of the year. Besides the items on my internal want list and my usual instincts on other albums that I should check out, there is a host of bands and artists and albums that I have written about over the years where I had not actually heard the music. I decided this year that it was way past time that I made a big-time purchase at Maynard’s Music, “the” record store on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and I made off with a half shelf of great finds. I have made 11 (!) orders from my buddies at Bomp! mailorder in Burbank, California in 2019, though I already told them that they could put off delivering the last 2 until after the first of the year. While at my 50th High School Reunion, I kept a promise to look over my good friend Cynthia Jennings’s record collection. I took the records with me to my brother Tom’s house in Winston-Salem where I was staying, and I started going through them the day after – two big boxes full. I figured, maybe I would take home 20 or 30 albums like usual when I do a little record-shopping on a trip; but I kept finding albums that I did not have yet. She had a bunch of Chicago albums, but not the first two that I already had. Same with Joni Mitchell – no overlaps that I could remember. It kept going on and on like that. When I finally got to the end, I had found precisely one album that I wanted but already had – Beck, Bogert & Appice. Coincidentally, that happened to be the album that was on top of the haul from Maynard’s Music on my record racks back home. Naturally I took that one also. The albums are still at my brother’s house, though hopefully, I have arranged a caravan that will eventually bring them down here by the end of next year. * * * A few months ago, I was at The Book Bag, the great used-book store down here, and the owner asked me if I liked National Geographic, and I said sure. She then offered me to sell me numerous bound volumes for $20 – but only if we took all of them! She also had Time and Newsweek and Life and some U. S. News and World Report and even a couple of volumes from an old set of Encyclopædia Britannica. As I have mentioned before, I am not driving these days; and Shawanna’s husband Earl was steady carrying boxes out to his car on a dolly while I was shopping for books. A couple of times when he took a break, the owner ran back there and said, no, these also; and those over there. (At a later date, she had found another half dozen volumes and gave me those also!) The magazines are professionally bound, mostly in green, and look like they had come from a public library or university library somewhere. Although there are no library cards or anything like that, some of the individual issues are marked “Gulfport East High School”. The National Geographic volumes date back to the 1940’s and extend to the very end of the 1990’s, including those from the month of my birth (May 1951). I don’t think I have all of the volumes, but I haven’t put them into order yet, so I cannot say for sure. The magazine volumes cover most of two full bookcases, and I really didn’t know where I could fit them. Then it occurred to me to create a library in the front room off the over-sized living room; we had never really found a use for that room, other than to sit the china cabinets in there, but I had them moved to the side of the dining room off the kitchen (the only large window in the house is in that room). So far, I have three bookshelves in there, including all of the magazines; and I am planning to move the rest of the bookshelves into the library over the next month or so, probably including the paperbacks that are housed in open media cabinets in our bedroom these days. I have half a mahogany dining room table in the library already that I inherited from Charlie, along with eight chairs; they went through Katrina but came out in pretty decent shape after we had them refinished by a local company. The other half of the table was broken accidentally post-Katrina, so at our big yard sale, we sold that half plus the drop leaf to someone who was restoring an old boat. That half a table I have only ever used as a bar during parties; but I figured that it would work well as an old-fashioned library table like those you see in movies, with four or maybe even six chairs beside it. Post-Katrina, the bottom shelves of all of my bookshelves have always been used for a row of record albums; otherwise, I would have run out of room for them long ago. The upper shelves are no good for that, but the bottom shelves work out fine. There is one bookshelf left in my office that is also going to the library; pretty much everything else in that room is for the albums and CD’s. Hopefully, one more record rack from Hobby Lobby will cover the rest of the collection, including the 300 or so albums that went through Katrina that I have still not cleaned up. * * * For years, I have looked on Amazon.com periodically to see whether the serials and films in the Quatermass Series were available; I also wrote about them earlier this year. A year and a half ago or so, I noticed that they were finally all or almost all available there; and at length, I ordered the lot of them, though I still had to separately order Quatermass and the Pit (a/k/a Five Million Years to Earth). I picked up many other movies recently that I figured would be impossible to find any other way. Still a far cry from my movie collection pre-Katrina. My two most recent purchases were the British TV movie Max Headroom (1985) – the first videotape I have purchased in years – and the German action thriller Run Lola Run (1998), both as suggested by my frequent viewings of the Bourne Films (though I have still not managed to watch all five at one sitting). Matt Frewer played Max Headroom back in the day, and I am still delighted whenever I spot him in other films and TV shows in the years since. In The Bourne Legacy (the one Bourne Film that does not feature Matt Damon, even in the several flashbacks from the earlier films), I had thought that Matt Frewer played the scientist named Dr. Donald Foite who shoots up the laboratory and very nearly kills the female lead Dr. Marta Shearing (played by Rachel Weisz). But it turns out that I was wrong about that; Dr. Donald Foite is actually portrayed by Željko Ivanek. Run Lola Run has probably the best adaptation of the Groundhog Day motif that I have ever seen, as Lola goes over a variety of scenarios (filmed multi-media style) hoping to find one that will save her boyfriend. The film stars Franka Potente, who plays Jason Bourne’s girlfriend Marie Kreutz in the first two Bourne Films. One time when Peggy and I were visiting her son Mal, Run Lola Run was the only DVD that I noticed beside his TV. * * * So after finding films like that on Amazon.com for awhile, it occurred to me that I ought to be able to find some of the albums by the Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Under Appreciated Rock Artists that I thought I had no chance of ever locating. Sometimes the prices were simply too high, but I kept looking. I did pick up the only full album by past UARB the Lovemasters, Pusherman of Love – and what a treat it is! – but Bootsey X’s final solo album Women’s Love Rites was still priced at nearly $100 (as that album was not so long ago) and is currently not available at all. I just played that CD for a second time, cranked all the way up for a good part of the album. I think that I have now purchased all four of the albums by past UARB the Loons, one of three UARB’s that number Mike Stax among the bandmembers. While I still do not have the EP 5 x 4 by past UARB the Crawdaddys (which also included Mike Stax), I did pick up the 45 that features “There She Goes Again”. Even more surprisingly, I came across the other two albums by past UARB Crystal Mansion in some record store or other: their 1969 album Crystal Mansion and also their 1979 album Crystal Mansion that is also known as Tickets. (More recently, I did come across a copy of the Crawdaddys EP 5 x 4 on Bomp! mailorder, along with the original 7-inch Jesus Loves the Stooges – but I still don’t have a copy of the green-vinyl Kill City by Iggy Pop and James Williamson that also came out in 1977). Over the past few years, I have found the first two albums by Country Dick Montana’s best known band, the Beat Farmers, Tales of the New West and Van Go; under his real name Dan McLain, he was the drummer for the Crawdaddys. The Beat Farmers are known as one of the best country-punk bands, and it is easy to see why. Then I noticed on Amazon.com an even better album by another Country Dick Montana band, the Pleasure Barons, called Live in Las Vegas. The Pleasure Barons could be described I guess as a super-group, composed of Country Dick Montana, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, and psychobilly legend Mojo Nixon. Besides three Mojo Nixon classics – somewhat toned down from the original recordings and illustrating how well crafted Nixon’s music actually is – the other songs are mostly over-the-top covers of a wide variety of numbers, ranging from Mickey Gilley’s “Closing Time”, to R. B. Greaves’s “Take a Letter, Maria”, to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?”, to Joe South’s “Games People Play”, to Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses”, and finally to “The Definitive Tom Jones Medley”: “It’s Not Unusual”, “Delilah” and “What’s New Pussycat?”. That album is more fun than any record that I have bought in a long, long time. * * * Most of past UARA Phil Gammage’s music was only released in Europe, mainly France; he might be the most prolific of all of the UARB’s and UARA’s, with dozens of albums to his credit, either as a solo artist or in a band. I had already located a fair amount of music by Phil Gammage on the Bandcamp website, where my nephew John Lucas’s music can also be found. (John Lucas, a/k/a Lucas Kovasckitz is also on Amazon and Spotify and is now supporting his family strictly by sales and licenses of his music – Google used one of his guitar figures for a national ad not long ago; that’s what got the ball rolling). I immediately went for Motel Songs, a sampling of songs from Phil Gammage’s first five solo albums, and that only made me want to buy them all. I also picked up a recent album called Used Man for Sale, having a more mature sound and clearly showing that Phil Gammage is not just going through the motions but is just as committed to his music now as he was in his younger days. I have on my list to order Phil Gammage’s latest album, It’s All Real Good, which was released in September 2019. I also supposedly have a copy of the most recent of Phil Gammage’s albums at the time that I put up the post about him, Adventures in Bluesland. I cannot find a physical copy of the CD, so I guess I just got a digital copy, which I am playing now over the computer. Just not the same, having to play it that way; sorry, you digital fans out there! But it is a great record, and I am happy to be hearing it again. I ordered a copy of Phil Gammage’s Kneel to the Rising Sun from Amazon.com; although there was a fairly recent CD reissue, this album is available on Bandcamp only digitally. I also managed to find two LP’s on Amazon.com by Phil Gammage’s early band the Corvairs. Thus far, I have resisted ordering any more albums from Amazon.com by Certain General, which also features Gammage; even though November’s Heat is one of the best albums I have acquired in recent years. Speaking of “one of the best”, I managed to stumble upon a 12” single by the Lime Spiders I think in Fairhope, AL, called “Jessica”. I absolutely love that song and regularly pull the disk out of my stacks to replay it. Despite pretty active shopping on my part, that is the only record by this Australian band that I have ever found, after reading about them in the Village Voice more than 30 years ago. Finally found out why; as noted in Allmusic: “The bottom line is this: The Lime Spiders’ catalog is unavailable in the United States.” I checked the 12” single that I had, and sure enough, it was made in Australia. About as soon as I found that out, I ordered their retrospective collection on Amazon.com, Nine Miles High 1983-1990. Hoo boy, is that a great record. * * * 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!). I have previously posted the opening track, “Bill Haley in Mexico”, which I just have to hear again (sorry, Phil Gammage!). As almost everyone knows, Bill Haley and His Comets had the first big rock and roll hit with “Rock Around the Clock” (1954, though it did not become a hit until 1955). I am not sure what the chorus is talking about when it goes: “I wanted to know / I wanted to know / What happened to Bill Haley down in Mexico”. But I cannot recall a more insistent chorus with a better instrumental follow-up than this one. I am reminded of the first time that I played the American album by the Dutch band Shocking Blue, The Shocking Blue, which naturally includes their big hit “Venus”. I simply could not believe how good the opening song, “Long and Lonesome Road” was, and I actually got up from my chair and restarted the album. I also recently picked up Thomas Anderson’s The Moon in Transit, another amazing album. Only heard that one once so far. The name is similar to that of the first album of his that I got, the Marilyn Records album Moon Going Down. When I put up the “Flashback” on Thomas Anderson five years ago, I could not find any songs at all on YouTube; I had to settle for listing lyrics instead. There are lots of his songs on YouTube now. Also, Thomas Anderson is one of the few UARB’s and UARA’s that has a Wikipedia article currently. (Another time, I ordered two more albums by a Thomas Anderson, not knowing whether it was the right guy or not. One of them, Is This Love? turned out to be a different Thomas Anderson, and I assumed that was true of the other CD as well. However, I discovered last month that the other one, Heaven is another great record by the right Thomas Anderson, so that’s four albums of his that I have now!) * * * 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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Tenth Year Review
LOOKING BACK OVER THE DECADE . . . |