MARTIN WINFREE’S RECORD CLEANING GUIDE  (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.) This article is not designed for people who can clean up their record albums by following the instructions given above. To paraphrase Truman Capote’s dismissive quote about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not cleaning, that’s dusting.” * * *  What I was faced with was a little more involved – the devastation from Hurricane Katrina that happened 10 years ago. A photograph showing the sodden album covers after I (and our housekeeper who helped us out) had pulled all of the discs out is given above. I have written of this before and won’t repeat everything I said, but I figured it was a lost cause: There were albums everywhere, strewn across the lawn of our home and in the bushes and in the former garage and crawl space and in the bayou and simply everywhere it seemed like (along with the house itself and the rest of our possessions); I didn’t even know where to begin. After a day or two, one of my neighbors said that she could see many of my record albums through the windows in part of the wreckage from the house. She had previously fished out some of our glasses and even several pieces of crystal that had somehow survived the storm and had that sitting out in her kitchen for us to take. I had my albums (around 2,600 at that point in time) on several nice wooden racks that I had found on the Internet. Record albums are very heavy, and almost all bookshelves are not really designed to hold them. I had the wooden racks set up along the two outer walls of a small room that my wife Peggy called her sewing room, which was between the breakfast room and the laundry room. We had only been married not quite two years, and I had sold my house in Ocean Springs and moved into hers in Gulf Hills about our year earlier. She had previously been renting her home to a top executive at the Beau Rivage Casino; when we fell in love, she was living in a “penthouse” in the Pelican Cay oceanfront condo building in Biloxi. During Hurricane Katrina, we stayed at Peggy’s niece’s home in Mobile; the winds were terrific, but otherwise, it didn’t seem so bad – it didn’t even rain that much. On television, the storm seemed to fill the entire Gulf of Mexico, but I was still hopeful. Driving back there the first day, the damage viewed from I-10 was beginning to get worrisome (parts of the Pascagoula River Bridges were damaged and closed off to traffic); but it wasn’t until we turned off onto Shore Drive (the main route through Gulf Hills) that I began to sense the true scope of the devastation: The road leading back to our section of the development was completely cut off by downed trees. * * *  A few days later, we were at the historic Gulf Hills Hotel, where we could use the bathroom and get the local newspaper (the Sun Herald published every single day through the catastrophe) and escape the heat a little. I was in the lobby and wandered up to the front desk and asked the woman there: “I don’t suppose you have a room available by any chance, do you?” When she said, “Yes, we do actually”, I just about collapsed on the floor. I knew that many people had ridden out the storm at the hotel, so I had no hope at all of finding anywhere to stay. As it turned out, Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel had just checked out that morning, so we got his room. I never get tired of telling that story! We had a hotel room but not much else, early on. There was no electricity (and thus no air conditioning except maybe in the lobby from backup generators), no telephones, no running water, no cable TV – even cell phones barely worked at all (that is assuming that you could somehow charge them up). The toilets were still usable; management had bailed out water from the swimming pool and filled up large plastic garbage cans along the hotel’s exterior corridors. What you would do is take the small trashcan from the room and fill that up, and then use the water to fill up the toilet tank after you flushed. When the water was finally turned on, that first cold shower in our room was one of the best I have ever had in my life. But we did have food, and that was a major plus. Friends of Peggy who operated a popular Ocean Springs restaurant, Bayview Gourmet were staying at the Gulf Hills Hotel also; and they brought over food from their freezers and used the hotel’s kitchen to cook up some fine meals for us – while most people after the storm were eating out of cans and subsisting on MRE’s. Eventually, one of the telephone companies (Sprint maybe) set up operations in the hotel’s meeting rooms; and they brought in big trucks with diesel generators on them in order to provide electricity for the entire hotel. That got us hot water and air conditioning. When we lucked out again and moved into a tiny garage apartment about a month after the storm (our housekeeper’s sister had stayed there while her house was under construction), we still had never had phones or cable TV in our hotel room; and as I recall, the bill from our stay was only a nominal charge. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Providence shone on us once again; and we ended up renting (and then buying) the home of one of the employees at Global Valuation Services who had moved back to Texas. * * *  Some items that we retrieved from the debris I was able to bring back to the hotel (we could at least lock up our room); but clearly, only a fraction of the record albums would have fit there. I arranged with my next door neighbors to stack up my albums in the carport under their house until I could figure out what to do. Once I took out what albums I could from the former sewing room – one wall was basically intact, while another burst open during the storm, so away they went – I returned to the site dozens of times and spent hours there and in the surrounding yards looking for my albums – most of the records that I could see were definitely mine, but there are a few that I gathered which were not. I had previously cleaned up and stacked my 45’s in two large pasteboard boxes which I ordered on line a couple of years previously; those sank to the yard basically unchanged (one even had its lid), but I still haven’t done anything with them. One night, I selected two of the albums and took them to the hotel room to see what I could do with them. One was practically the very first album that I picked up in the yard – a 12” single by Katrina and the Waves called “Do You Want Crying” (I never get tired of telling that story either). I washed the mud off the disks, and they didn’t look too bad; but the album covers were a lost cause: Even the handful that could potentially be cleaned up would no longer be usable for storing the albums in after they dried. * * * My other collections – videotapes, books, CD’s (most of the CD’s were actually at my Gulfport office, where there was no damage to speak of), and a few cassette tapes and DVD’s – also went through the storm; but I was mostly worried about the LP’s, since I had put the most energy into that collection. It doesn’t take much water to ruin a book or a tape, so those were hopeless. Gulfport had its main library a couple of blocks from the beach, and that turned out to be a really bad idea. Similarly, some of the County Courthouses in the three coastal counties where I often went to research property records and deeds were flooded; and cleaning up and recreating those records was a major undertaking as might be imagined. There were makeshift records rooms set up for both Hancock County and Jackson County for several years afterwards; although the records for Harrison County were in much better shape, and those records were available in the original locations after a fairly short period. The CSX Railroad tracks were often (though not always) the extent of the major flooding from the Gulf; the two (!) courthouses for Harrison County were both located north of the tracks and were not flooded as I remember. Anyway, I was able to retrieve some papers and old tax returns; but the smell was terrible, so I didn’t do too much of that. I did gather up the CD’s that I found also, but those were lighter, and most of them probably floated away in the storm. (I didn’t find a single DVD, but I didn’t have that many to start with at that time). * * * As it turned out, the corner of the house with the sewing room had floated off the foundation and came to rest in the yard relatively intact – those outer walls had collapsed somewhat, but sure enough, I could see row after row of albums through the windows. A lot of them didn’t even seem to have moved off the wooden racks. Prior to the storm (that is what we call it around here: the storm; everyone knows what you mean), I had run sheets of plastic from the back and across the top and then down the front. I was worried about rainwater basically, but actually, the plastic helped to keep a lot of the albums in place. Seeing that got me energized. I pried off the window frame and started reaching in and grabbing handfuls of albums. It was blazing hot that day, and the stench from the bayou mud was almost unbearable; but once I got going, I hardly noticed the privations. * * * Anyway, back to business. Both vinyl records and CD’s are pretty durable and can survive a lot of abuse from a storm. Just in case (God forbid) you are ever faced with a natural disaster or other catastrophe that scatters your record collection to the four winds or the seven seas, here is what you can do about it based upon my own experiences in cleaning up my albums from Hurricane Katrina. First of all, try to gather the albums up as they lie as quickly as you can and get them to a safe place. Heat is a big enemy of vinyl (probably not so much for CD’s), but just getting them to some sort of shelter out of the Sun is probably going to be enough. As it turned out, the bayou mud and the wet covers evidently provided a considerable amount of protection for my albums; but if they are dry, this is all the more important. There might be others buried in the debris, so if you can, hang around while it is moved to the curb and pull out what you can. However, be sure that you put the albums somewhere away from the machinery, or you might lose them anyway. Secondly, the album covers – even plastic sleeves – are not going to be any good, so don’t try to save them (other than some souvenirs). Also, as soon as possible, remove the vinyl disks themselves from the covers and sleeves. The bare disks will be vulnerable to damage, so take care with them as you are working through the album covers. But work quickly: If the wet covers are allowed to dry before you can get the disks out, you are much more likely to damage the albums as you remove them. This step is not really necessary for CD’s. Thirdly, for temporary storage, I used liquor store boxes; however, most liquor and wine boxes are not large enough to accommodate albums. You can take along an undamaged album to use as a template to see if you can use a particular box; if an album in its cover fits easily inside a box, then it is safe for the bare disks, but you definitely do not want them to be a tight fit inside a liquor box – they have been through enough without chancing additional damage unnecessarily. Some boxes might be wide enough but not tall enough, and you can use those boxes; but obviously, you don’t want to stack anything else on top of them. As temporary sleeves, I used small garbage bags; but again, you will need to get the size right on those. Some that I found were the right size, but for a lot of the albums, I wound up getting the large bags and then folding them around two albums. You can also stack albums with no sleeves between those that have them. The idea is to keep the albums separated. Once you have the boxes filled, the uncleaned albums can stay that way indefinitely. All record albums and 45’s – whether clean or dirty, in or not in covers and sleeves – should be stored vertically. * * * As to the actual cleaning, again, this is for albums that have been through a disaster like a storm or a fire – you won’t need to do all this for albums that have never left your shelves. For starters, get the idea out of your head that you have to handle the albums and CD’s only by the edges; you are never going to get them clean that way if they are really dirty. Also, metal is an enemy, so take off your rings and bracelets whenever working on the albums. Most nozzles are metal also, and you will need to watch yourself around them in order to avoid adding new scratches to the albums. Next, assemble your tools. Needless to say, any kind of metal brush is out of the question; but any type of fiber or plastic brush is okay – just make sure that there isn’t any metal anywhere exposed, like rivets or staples. A foam brush that is formed around a metal ring, say, is not a good idea; since the foam can wear away. After trying out several types of brushes, I settled on a basic shoe brush; it has held up during a lot of album cleanings without any substantial wear. I got the brush in a shoe polishing kit that I paid $5 or $10 for. For the initial cleaning, I used basic dishwasher liquid; I found the cheap brands easier to deal with, rather than the “ultra” type or name brands like Dawn, because I had to add so much water to use those detergents. Then I needed a place to put the albums after cleaning so that they could dry. I found a plastic dish rack with narrow slots that worked real well. There were little ribs between the dish dividers that allowed me to sit the albums more or less upright so that they would not touch each other or too much of the dish rack either. This is often easier said than done; if the albums are warped at all, you might have to spin them around in the rack or even move them to other slots in the rack in order to get them to sit right. The drainboard beneath allowed the water to drip off the albums into a drain. I usually had them on a bench in the tub, but a sink would work also. The rack needs to be on as flat a surface as possible so that the disks will stay in place and not flop into one another. Once the bulk of the water has drained off the disks, the rack can be placed anywhere to air dry; I would allow 24 hours or more between cleaning episodes (there will be several per disk). * * * To begin, take a short stack of dirty albums out of their box and put them in a pile near the sink (say, on the toilet lid). Before actually starting the cleaning, and if you can still read the labels, it is a good idea to write down a list of what the albums are, in order, in case the cleaning process damages the record label to the point that it is no longer readable. Once you know how many albums your rack will hold, then you can just count out that many every time. If you want to have several racks going at once, that is a possibility; just make sure you have a level place to put them all so that the water will go into a drain. Although a kitchen sink is physically better for cleaning a dirty record album, I didn’t use mine, since I didn’t know what sort of nastiness was on some of those disks. A tub isn’t a bad idea either, but I am not as flexible as I used to be, so I passed on that as well. Thus, I wound up at the bathroom lavatory; though it was a little messy, it worked out pretty good. For albums with caked on dirt and grime, or with paper and cardboard stuck to them, you could first try to knock off as much of that as possible and dispose of it in a trash can or something. Then wet the album on both sides; getting the label wet is unavoidable, and they can take a lot of abuse, but try not the hold the label directly under the stream of water. Some additional material should easily come off once the album is wet, such as dirt or pieces of album cover that might be stuck to it, so try to remove as much as you can before putting on the detergent. You can run your hand along the album grooves to loosen other pieces; if a little paper stays put, that’s all right at this point, but try to get all of the larger stuff off the album first. * * * Then run a thin stream of detergent around the entire album and use your hand to work the detergent into the disk. Once everything gets pretty soapy, you can probably get by with less, but the idea is to get a decent pile of suds on the album. Again, loosen what you can – in most cases, you should be able to get just about everything off the disk. A lot of my albums looked pretty good from the beginning, but I still did the detergent step to make sure that they were clean – at the very least, they had spent a lot of time soaking in bayou water. Take your brush and, using a circular motion, run it along the edge of the disk, avoiding the label area. Depending upon how dirty the album is, you might need to clean the album in three or four or five sections. Then flip the album over and do the same on the other side. In a few cases for really dirty albums, I did the detergent step twice. Rinse the album thoroughly on both sides, loosening any other material that remains at the time until the water runs clear. Let the water drip off, and then briefly examine the album to see if there is any dirt or paper that is still stuck to it. Then put the album in the rack and get started on the next one. After the albums have dried, look them over again – that will be easier now that they are dry. Again, if there are remaining dirty areas on them, then put them aside for re-cleaning – usually just cleaning the small areas that are still dirty is enough. If mud has gotten on them, some of the dirt is going to remain behind, though it really amounts to little more than a stain. What I would usually do is to run my hand along both sides of the albums – as long as they felt smooth to the touch, I could be assured that it really was a stain and not more mud that needed cleaning off. If I felt little ridges, then I would usually clean them again. * * *  At this point, the use of regular record cleaning fluid would complete the process. Several companies have that fluid available for sale, and you can just follow the directions for that. But basically, you spray on a goodly portion of fluid and work into the grooves with a brush. Wait briefly (it dries pretty quickly, since it is alcohol-based, but you do want to wait until the fluid soaks through everything. I usually used old undershirts to wipe off the fluid; if a lot of mud comes off, then I will often put the cleaning fluid on a second time. Then you can put the cleaned albums in the rack and let them dry for at least 24 to 36 hours before putting the albums into album covers again. The kind that I get is called Groovy Cleaner and comes from Bags Unlimited: https://www.bagsunlimited.com/ . There are kits and also larger bottles of cleaning fluid. Bags Unlimited I think started mainly to provide supplies for record albums, but they have expanded into every form of collectible out there it seems like; every time I go to their website, they have more kinds of stuff available. After you are finished, your albums will be back in circulation again, more or less. Many will play just as well as they did before, some will have a warp or even a puncture that will keep some of the album from being playable, and some records will be hopelessly scratched on one side. The warp can be so bad that only a couple of songs on one side and none at all on the other are actually playable. But it sure beats throwing them out. I still regret throwing out some albums that I had not even tried to clean up first. * * *  Speaking of stuff, Bags Unlimited also has blank album covers (including double-album covers), record sleeves (plastic as well as paper, both with and without plastic inside), and sleeves for covers also. Even if your record collection hasn’t gone through a disaster, they have a lot of supplies that can help keep your record collection in good condition. Cleaning the albums with their record fluid is a good idea from time to time, but if you don’t leave them lying around outside their covers, they are not going to get too dirty. Each disk should have its own sleeve; I use plain paper sleeves for the ones that went through Katrina, but a lot of people swear by the plastic. Also, plastic album cover sleeves are a good thing to get for a record collection, since the albums rubbing together can cause a lot of damage. You won’t need those for the blank album covers of course. Then after I have the disks back into sleeves and covers again, I look around on the Internet for the album covers and print them (as big as possible to fit onto a piece of paper). I then tape them onto the covers. When I first started doing this a decade or so ago, about the only place you could find album cover photos was Amazon.com listings and such as that. Some of the front covers that I found for my more obscure albums were tiny, and after blowing them up, they were practically illegible. Nowadays though, artist websites and other sites like Flickr and Discogs have both front and back covers and even shots of the record labels (though I haven’t tried to mess with those). You don’t have to use the boring back covers if you don’t want to; often I will use alternate album covers or even a cover from a different album by the same artist. Additionally, I will type out the basic info on the album – artist, album name, record label, catalogue # – and then cut out the strip of paper and tape it along the spine of the album. I typically put the artist and album name near the top of the album and then the record label and catalogue # in the lower part of the spine. What I am trying to do is to recreate the album cover to the extent possible. As a final step, I try to identify the albums where the record label is completely or mostly gone. Sometimes there is enough left to at least identify the record company, or part of the artist’s or album’s name. As I play back through the albums as I clean them up, I can usually pick up what album it is from recognizing the songs. In a collection as big as mine though, I still have a handful of records marked “[Unknown Album]”. © Copyright 2015 by Martin Winfree. All Rights Reserved. * * *  This month’s Under Appreciated Rock Band, CRYSTAL MANSION – often called the Crystal Mansion – is unusual in that several veteran musicians are involved; normally, the UARB’s are bands that are just starting out. Bandmembers include two men who have individual Wikipedia articles (both of which mention Crystal Mansion), David White – who had been a founding member of the estimable 1950’s band Danny and the Juniors – and Sal Rota – a bandmember in the Soul Survivors beginning in 1979. This band is best known for their 1967 hit “Expressway to Your Heart”, the first hit song by the Philadelphia soul songwriting and production team of Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Both men sang background vocals on Bernadette Peters’ first solo album. There are actually three incarnations of Crystal Mansion, each of which released a self-titled album over a 10-year period. * * *  David White (real name: David White Tricker) comes from a show biz family, performing as a child with his parents in an acrobatic trio called Barry and Brenda and Company. Singing first tenor, White started a doo-wop vocal group called the Juvenaires in 1955 with Danny Rapp (lead singer), Joe “Terry” Terranova (baritone) and Frank Maffei (second tenor). White made contact with another young singer, John Madara (real name: John Medora) who had a hit in 1957 with “Be My Girl” under the name Johnny Madara. The two wrote a song called “Do the Bop” for the Juvenaires and brought it to their vocal coach and record producer Artie Singer. He liked the song and arranged studio time in Philadelphia to record that song and also a ballad that White had written called “Sometimes (When I’m All Alone)”. At the studio, the Juvenaires were told that they would be singing back-up for John Madara; but as it turned out, his record company turned down the song “Do the Bop”. Artie Singer took the song to Dick Clark, who suggested that they change the name to “At the Hop”, since “bop” was considered old-fashioned by then. (Cyndi Lauper would later revive the term in a completely different context in her 1984 hit song “She Bop”). The band changed its name to Danny and the Juniors and. after performing as a last-minute substitute on American Bandstand, had a #1 hit for 7 weeks with “At the Hop” (beginning in January 1958, and breaking the record among vocal groups). In a classic example of so-called “payola”, Artie Singer (who also has a writing credit for “At the Hop”) had to sign over one-half of the publishing credits for the song to Dick Clark (Clark sold the rights to the song prior to the Congressional payola hearings in 1960). The flip side of the hit single “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors was the David White song “Sometimes (When I’m All Alone)”; according to Wikipedia (as taken from the article on David White): “‘Sometimes (When I’m All Alone)’ became a favorite of a lot of street corner groups just starting out who later became successful, including the Capris, the Chimes, the Cleftones, the Young Rascals, the Del Satins, the Dovells, the Elegants, the Impalas, the Earls, Randy and the Rainbows, the Tokens. the Vogues, and Vito and the Salutations among others.” David White wrote another classic song for Danny and the Juniors called “Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”, the band’s follow-up hit, reaching #19 on the charts. This song has since become a rock and roll standard and was featured in the films Grease and Christine. Danny and the Juniors also released many other songs that are less well known; in all, they have had 9 singles to make the Billboard Hot 100. * * *  “At the Hop” though has reached almost mythic status, far beyond even the major hit that Danny and the Juniors made of the song. One of the earliest of the rock and roll revival bands, Sha Na Na (with the name taken from among the innumerable nonsense syllables in the classic “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes) performed “At the Hop” at the original 1969 Woodstock festival not long after the group was founded earlier that year. Sha Na Na is perhaps the most unlikely rock band to appear at Woodstock; what’s more, their set immediately preceded that of Jimi Hendrix which included his legendary performance of “The Star Spangled Banner”. “At the Hop” also appears in the Woodstock film and the triple-LP Woodstock soundtrack album. Sha Na Na has had a long career, including a syndicated television show called Sha Na Na from 1977 to 1981 (roughly 10 years after their appearance at Woodstock). Wikipedia lists dozens of albums in the band’s discography. The gonzo antics of the best known member of the band, Jon “Bowzer” Bauman were probably the key to the band’s (and the show’s) success. Bowzer did not appear at Woodstock but was in Sha Na Na from 1970 to 1983. * * *  “At the Hop” was also featured in the nostalgic 1973 hit movie American Graffiti, an early film among the credits for both George Lucas (director) and Francis Ford Coppola (producer). Unlike the other rock and roll hits featured in the film (which were by the original artists and were found only in the soundtrack), three songs were performed in the film by another rock and roll revival band, Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids. “At the Hop”, “Louie Louie” and an original composition by the band called “She’s So Fine” were performed “live” by Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids (under the name of Herbie and the Heartbeats) in the dance party sequence in the film. “Louie Louie” did not appear on the double-LP soundtrack album, 41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti, though “At the Hop” and “She’s So Fine” did. Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids (now known as Flash Cadillac) are still around, having released five albums; three singles by the group made the Billboard Hot 100. * * *  David White left Danny and the Juniors and formed a production and songwriting team with John Madara called Madara and White Productions. One of their early hits was a #7 song that they wrote and produced in 1961 for Chubby Checker called “The Fly”. One of their finest and best known songs is the proto-feminist anthem by Lesley Gore called “You Don’t Own Me”, a #2 hit in December 1963 that was kept from the top of the charts only by the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. The song was written by David White and John Madara; Quincy Jones was the record producer, and Jones later produced a 2015 remake of “You Don’t Own Me” by Australian artist Grace featuring G-Eazy. David White and John Madara had a second #2 hit song in 1965 with “1-2-3” by Len Barry, who had been the lead singer of the Dovells, one of my favorite early rock and roll groups. * * *  In 1965, David White and John Madara formed a band called the Spokesmen with a popular Philadelphia disc jockey named Ray Gilmore. They had an “answer song” that year to the Barry McGuire protest song “Eve of Destruction” that was called “The Dawn of Correction” (“You missed all the good in your evaluation . . .”). I used to play those two singles back to back all the time back in the day. White and Madara produced the song, which was written by all three bandmembers. A cover version of the Beatles song “Michelle” by the Spokesmen was a minor hit in the Philadelphia area. David White, John Madara and Ray Gilmore also co-wrote a song called “Sadie (the Cleaning Lady)” that became a #1 hit in Australia in 1967 for Johnny Farnham. * * *  In 1963, David White and John Madara were approached by a Cleveland girl group called the Secrets, who had secured a recording contract after playing at a gig with the Starfires (also of Cleveland and later evolving into the Outsiders). They used their influence to release a single in October 1963 on Philips Records, “The Boy Next Door” b/w “Learnin’ To Forget” that became a #18 hit. The Secrets released three other unsuccessful singles on Philips Records that each featured a David White/John Madara penned song. The “A” side on one single that is shown in Discogs, “Here He Comes Now!” b/w “Oh Donnie (He Ain’t Got No Money)” was co-written by legendary “Philly soul” producer Leon Huff, who also worked with past UARA Mikki. * * *  The single by the Secrets mentioned above also features the Madara White Orchestra; this name (or variations) shows up on other early 1960’s singles, including the 1963 single “Gotta Dance” b/w “At the Shore” by Johnny Caswell, who later became the lead singer for Crystal Mansion. A version of “La Bamba” was released under the name the Madara White Orchestra, also in 1963. Additionally, David White and John Madara co-wrote both sides of a 1963 single for an active band called the Visions (also known as Bocky and the Visions), “Tommy’s Girl” b/w “Oh Boy, What a Girl”. * * *  Johnny Caswell is mentioned among the greats of Northern Soul, with his song “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” (written by Leon Huff) ranking #152 on the Northern Soul Top 500. His early sides are collected on the above album, The Best of Philly Soul, Vol. 4, with half of the 12 tracks being written or co-written by David White. * * *  David White and Sal Rota both performed background vocals on Bernadette Peters’ debut album, Bernadette Peters (1980); the front cover was one of the final “Vargas girls” paintings by Alberto Vargas. In 1992, MCA Records released a CD under the name Bernadette combining 8 tracks from this first album plus 5 from her second album Now Playing (1981) that has a different Vargas painting on the cover; the cover on Bernadette is the same Vargas painting from Bernadette Peters. * * *  The genesis of Crystal Mansion was in an R&B covers band called the Secrets from Mount Laurel, NJ that was active from 1962 to 1968 – they had the same name as the girl group called the Secrets that David White and John Madara had worked with in 1963, though there was apparently no other relation between the two groups. Early bandmembers in the Secrets included guitarist Ronnie Gentile and drummer Rickey Morley; lead vocalist Johnny Caswell and keyboardist Sal Rota were added by 1968. The band came up with a 45 for Capitol Records, “The Thought of Loving You” b/w “Hallelujah”; at that point, the band changed its name to Crystal Mansion. Several Internet sources speak glowingly of Crystal Mansion, particularly with respect to New Jersey music clubs where they often appeared. The success of the single, which reached #1 on the local Los Angeles charts, led to an album for the label in 1969 called Crystal Mansion. In his Allmusic review of Crystal Mansion’s 1971 album, The Crystal Mansion (though granting that album only two stars), Joe Viglione calls their 1968 single “The Thought of Loving You” “a little mini-pop masterpiece” and “a timeless pop song”. This song, “The Thought of Loving You” was released by Cher in 1968 (as a single only) and was later recorded by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, the Manhattan Transfer, Spiral Starecase, Lou Christie, Astrud Gilberto, and Wayne Newton. Unfortunately, the earlier Capitol album Crystal Mansion (1969) sold poorly – Allmusic describes it as “an album that turned out a disappointment for all involved” – and information on the Internet about this album is hard to come by. Billboard magazine placed the band’s 1969 album Crystal Mansion as the lead-off review in their “Merit Picks” section in the April 19, 1969 edition: “Capable of scoring on both AM and FM, the Crystal Mansion debut with their chart disk, ‘The Thought of Loving You’, and a melodic pop package of David White-Johnny Caswell tunes. Strong, individual vocals highlight ‘For the First Time’, ‘It Takes My Breath Away’ and ‘Somethin’ for You’ as this seven-man pop group bid for dual market honors with the same winning sound that struck pay dirt for groups like the Buckinghams.” * * *  After being dropped by Capitol Records, Crystal Mansion finally added a bass guitarist, Billy Crawford and released a single in 1970 for Colossus Records, the same label that released records in America by the Dutch band Shocking Blue, including their mega-hit “Venus”, also in 1970. The 45 was released under the name Crystal Mansion Featuring Johnny Caswell, with the “A” side being the James Taylor song “Carolina in My Mind” and an original song (by Johnny Caswell and Sal Rota) called “If I Live” on the flip. When Collectables Records reissued the 1971 album The Crystal Mansion on CD in 1994, “Carolina in My Mind” was included as a bonus track. * * *  “Carolina in My Mind” is one of James Taylor’s best known and most critically praised songs and is a frankly homesick remembrance of growing up in North Carolina (Chapel Hill specifically). He wrote the song while recording at the Beatles’ Apple Records studios in London. The song appeared on his 1968 debut album for Apple, James Taylor. Wikipedia says of this song: “Strongly tied to a sense of geographic place, ‘Carolina in My Mind’ has been called an unofficial state anthem for North Carolina. It is also an unofficial song of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, being played at athletic events and pep rallies and sung by the graduating class at every university commencement.” While attracting little attention initially, the song was covered frequently not long after its release. North Carolina country music recording artist George Hamilton IV had some success with his version of “Carolina in My Mind” in 1969. Probably the best known version of the song other than Taylor’s is that of Melanie, who included “Carolina in My Mind” on her classic 1970 album, Candles in the Rain. Other recordings of the song have been made by the Everly Brothers, Evie Sands, John Denver, and Dawn (later known as Tony Orlando and Dawn). Glen Campbell and Linda Ronstadt performed a duet of the song on his TV show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour; the song was ultimately released in the 2007 video Good Times Again. * * *  The next year, Crystal Mansion became one of the bands added to the roster of the Motown Records subsidiary Rare Earth Records that featured white acts. This album, The Crystal Mansion has virtually the same name as their 1969 album Crystal Mansion and is the one that I have. Bandmembers for this 1971 release are – in the order given on the back cover – Rick Morley (percussion), Sal Rota (organ, piano, vocal), Ronnie Gentile (guitar), Mario Sanchez (conga, vocal), Bill Crawford (bass), and Johnny Caswell (vocal, piano). Under his real name, former bandmember David White Tricker appears courtesy of Bell Records and co-wrote three of the songs. Tepid opinions of this album are fairly commonplace on the Internet; besides the two-star review by Allmusic already mentioned, Badcat Records also grants the record only two stars. Crystal Mansion is compared unfavorably to the namesake of the Motown label, Rare Earth; while Johnny Caswell certainly lacks the propulsive pipes of their drummer and lead singer Peter Rivera, Caswell and Crystal Mansion are after a completely different groove on their album. My own theory is that Crystal Mansion suffers from the same “problem” as last month’s UARB, the Human Zoo: The band has real variety in its material and doesn’t sound the same all through the record. The Allmusic article on the band, by Lars Lovén, starts off: “The Crystal Mansion’s relatively short story is that of a white R&B band moving towards groovy psychedelic rock in the ’70s.” Joe Viglione writing for Allmusic grudgingly acknowledges this about the final track: “‘Earth People’ is reminiscent of ‘Calling Occupants’, the hit for the Carpenters and Klaatu. It is the highlight of the album. Let’s call it Crystal Mansion’s ‘I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home’.” The reference of course is to the closing song on the Grand Funk Railroad breakthrough album, Closer to Home (1970), “I’m Your Captain”, although Crystal Mansion was able to craft their memorable song in barely one third the playing time of the Grand Funk track. Billboard magazine has an appreciative review of the album in their May 27, 1972 issue: “A fluid rhythmic feel permeates the texture of the Crystal Mansion album. Johnny Caswell has a strong, although not overpowering, voice that he uses to good effect. Their arrangements are uncomplicated and clean, their sound chiefly blue-eyed soul. Standout cuts include ‘Boogieman’, ‘Satisfied’ and ‘Earth People’.” The Crystal Mansion has R&B, funk, country, psych, progressive, and pop influences sprinkled among its 10 tracks. The stronger material is on the album’s second side, with “Earth People” preceded by a foreboding trio of introspective tracks, “Someone Oughta Turn Your Head Around”, “Boogieman” and “Let Me Get Straight Again” (with the first and last being penned by the band as a whole), followed by the calming “Peace for a Change”. But Side 1 also has several good cuts, such as the opening song “There Always Will be More” and the catchy “Satisfied”. * * *  Crystal Mansion had one more shot with a third self-titled album in 1979, Crystal Mansion (also called Tickets) that was released on 20th Century Fox Records, the same label that released Milan’s only LP in 1964, I Am What I Am. A notice in Billboard magazine calls the band “a new record act” and notes that some of the “top veteran local jazzmen” have been recruited to accompany them, among them “saxophonists Jim Horn, Bill Green, Bud Shank, Buddy Collette, Marshal Royal, and Tom Scott, bassist Richard Davis, trumpeter Jerry Hey, trombonist Bill Watrous, keyboard man Steve Porcaro, and percussionist Alan Estes”. Three-time Grammy winner and album producer Brooks Arthur (who was the engineer on the band’s other two albums) is quoted as saying of the band: “I feel so strongly about Crystal Mansion’s musicianship and ability, I felt only guest artists of that caliber could perform well enough with this band.” Allmusic’s Joe Viglione gives this 1979 release Crystal Mansion a somewhat higher rating of 2½ stars and says: “‘Lonely, Faraway, Missing You’ is a snappy opener, more appealing than Ambrosia, Player, and the Atlanta Rhythm Section, but falling short of the brilliant pop of Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds. However, that’s the market this band reached out to, not gritty enough to be Rare Earth and too hard to appeal to the fans of Debby Boone, who sings on the wonderful ‘Gather My Children’. The Crystal Mansion were a more than competent pop band that got lost in the rock & roll shuffle. ‘Place in Space’ is another stellar track – FM adult contemporary, if you will. The problem is that there wasn’t a format for solid adult pop music that didn’t make it to Top 40 prior to the invention of AAA [adult album alternative] radio.” * * * FLASHBACK: The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for August 2013 – Silverbird  I really delighted in being able to tell Silverbird’s story as the first Native American rock band to get a major recording contract. Here is a sample of Silverbird songs from the album that I have (shown above): “Would You” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuTQ_W5VExU , “Fight” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCMLSE_0yNk , and “At the Party” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5-cqT77L8Q . * * * PICTURE GALLERY: The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for August 2012 – Phil and the Frantics  Here are the three albums that have collected the Phil and the Frantics music over the years:    Here is a photo of the band in concert.  * * * STORY OF THE MONTH: Bob Dylan the Protest Singer (from May 2013)  This month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, HOLLIS BROWN is not a person, but the name of a band. It is taken from the name of a Bob Dylan song, “Ballad of Hollis Brown”. “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and I imagine that this is the album that most people think is his most overtly “protest” album. I beg to differ; Dylan’s breakthrough second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan includes four songs that are much closer to being protest songs than any of the songs on Times: “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, “Oxford Town”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bob Dylan is much less of a protest singer than he is generally perceived to be. I speak as someone who is as big a fan of the acoustic Dylan as of the electric Dylan, and I own dozens of songs from this time period that never made it onto any of Bob Dylan’s major-label albums – and there are hardly any protest songs among those recordings either. I dare say that I was one of the few Dylan fans who was disappointed when The Basement Tapes came out. I eagerly put on the supposed legitimate release of the classic double-LP bootleg album Great White Wonder, only to find that not a single one of the great early acoustic songs that made up most of that album were present; it was all electric songs that Bob Dylan recorded with The Band at the famous Big Pink house (and honestly, there weren’t all that many of them on Great White Wonder). To return to the topic at hand, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is much more typical of the kind of truly wonderful song that Dylan was doing in those days: social commentary, and not protest. The song is based on a true story of a South Dakota farmer named Hollis Brown; desperately poor and at the end of his rope, he kills his wife, his children and then himself. As taken from Wikipedia, critic David Horowitz writes of this too-little-known Dylan classic: “Technically speaking, ‘Hollis Brown’ is a tour de force. For a ballad is normally a form which puts one at a distance from its tale. This ballad, however, is told in the second person, present tense; so that not only is a bond forged immediately between the listener and the figure of the tale, but there is the ironic fact that the only ones who know of Hollis Brown’s plight, the only ones who care, are the hearers who are helpless to help, cut off from him, even as we in a mass society are cut off from each other.” * * * Generally speaking, politicians (and even “the Establishment”) are rarely in Bob Dylan’s sights. As an example, “Oxford Town” was written in direct response to an invitation from Broadside magazine for folk singers to write a song about the black student, James Meredith who enrolled at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962. That’s about as close to a pure protest song as anything Dylan ever wrote. However, I imagine that most people living outside the state of Mississippi have no idea that “Ole Miss” is located in the city of Oxford, and Dylan never mentions the student or the university. In a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel, Bob Dylan talked about “Oxford Town”: “It deals with the Meredith case, but then again it doesn’t. . . . I wrote that when it happened, and I could have written that yesterday. It’s still the same. ‘Why doesn’t somebody investigate soon’ – that’s a verse in the song.” About “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Bob Dylan’s most famous song along these lines, I can hardly improve on what Wikipedia has to say: “Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war and freedom. The refrain ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind’ has been described as ‘impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind.’” As to the other protest songs on Freewheelin’, Dylan’s angriest song by far, “Masters of War” is directed not at the politicians who get us into wars, but at the war-machine corporations who profit from them. Dylan states in the liner notes on the album: “I’ve never written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one. The song is a sort of striking out . . . a feeling of what can you do?”. More than any other song that I can think of, in later years Bob Dylan dramatically altered the arrangement of “Masters of War” in concert performances to the point that it is almost unrecognizable from the original version. In a 2001 interview published in USA Today, Bob Dylan linked this song to the famous farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961: “‘Masters of War’ . . . is supposed to be a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.” The most complex and imaginative of these songs, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is sometimes mistakenly linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis; but actually, Bob Dylan had already written the song before the crisis happened. In the liner notes on the album, Dylan famously spoke of this song: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” Author Ian MacDonald described “A Hard Rain” as one of the most idiosyncratic protest songs ever written. In the Studs Terkel interview mentioned above, Dylan uncharacteristically laid out what he meant by some of the lyrics in “Hard Rain”: “No, it’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen. . . . In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.” * * * On the following album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, the targets are even more diffuse. A careful listen to the title song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” makes it clear that Bob Dylan is not sending out some clarion call for protest and change, although the tone of the song makes it seem that way. The lyrics are an acknowledgement that the train has already left the station – that the world has irrevocably changed – along with a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet. “With God on Our Side” relates a litany of various wars, the Cold War and other historical events – such as the slaughter of Native Americans in the 19th Century and the Holocaust – in the context of the oft-believed notion that God or some other higher power is “with us”. Tellingly, nothing is said about the Vietnam War at all in the song originally, although a verse was added for live performances in the 1980’s. I had never heard that before, and I doubt you had either; here is the added verse: “In the nineteen-sixties came the Vietnam War / Can somebody tell me what we’re fightin’ for? / So many young men died / So many mothers cried / Now I ask the question / Was God on our side?” “Only a Pawn in Their Game” is about the murder (Wikipedia calls it an “assassination”, and that is not really an overstatement) of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in his own driveway. The conviction of the unrepentant Klansman Byron de la Beckwith for the murder took place in Mississippi in 1994; two other trials of this man 30 years earlier resulted in hung juries. I don’t know how much visibility this murder has in other parts of the country, but it is still pretty fresh in Mississippi. One reason is that Medgar’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams is a civil rights activist in her own right – she was on the local news just this month. This song is unquestionably a protest song, and Bob Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the same event where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. later gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. However, the song is really less about Evers and more about the murderer (and the other poor whites in Mississippi in those days). As Wikipedia says it: “The song suggests that Evers’ killer does not bear sole blame for his crime, as he was only a pawn of rich white elites who incensed poor whites against blacks so as to distract them from their position on ‘the caboose of the train’.” According to Joan Baez (speaking in the documentary No Direction Home), the genesis of “When the Ship Comes In” came from Bob Dylan’s own mistreatment at a hotel when a clerk refused to give him a room. The rousing music and vivid Biblical imagery gives the song’s theme – people rising up against oppressive forces that are mistreating them – an air of inevitability that is in the spirit of the title song on the album, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. The structure of the song was inspired – by way of the cultural tastes of Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo – by a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song “Pirate Jenny”; the song comes from their play, The Threepenny Opera. The song is closely associated with Weill’s wife, the Austrian singer Lotte Lenya, and her breakout role was in a 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera. The most famous song from that play is “Mack the Knife”, which was an unexpectedly huge hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. The lyrics in his version of the song even reference “Miss Lotte Lenya”. Lenya is best known to Americans for her role as the villainous Rosa Klebb in the 1963 James Bond movie, From Russia with Love. On one of my beloved Bob Dylan bootleg albums, I have a live performance of “When the Ship Comes In” – one Internet source says that it was in Carnegie Hall – that has this memorable introduction: “I wanna sing one song here recognizing that there are Goliath’s nowadays. And, er, people don’t realize just who the Goliath’s are, but in olden days Goliath was slayed and everybody looks back nowadays and sees how Goliath was slain. Nowadays there are crueler Goliath’s who do crueler, crueler things, but one day they’re gonna be slain too. And people 2,000 years from now can look back and say, remember when Goliath the second was slain.” * * * About his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which was released later in 1964, Bob Dylan told Nat Hentoff in New Yorker magazine: “There aren’t any finger pointing songs [here]. . . . Now a lot of people are doing finger pointing songs. You know, pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.” His song “My Back Pages” is most direct about this new direction in his music and is blatantly self-critical – particularly in the chorus line, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now”. The Byrds released a version of “My Back Pages” in early 1967, the seventh and last Bob Dylan song that the band covered and released as a single. However, this album is not devoid of his earlier musical styles either. Another Side also includes “Chimes of Freedom” that – like “When the Ship Comes In” – is rich with social commentary on the downtrodden and those who have been treated unfairly. However, to me, this is really the kind of song that Bob Dylan was singing throughout this period. About the changes in his songwriting on Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan told the Sheffield University Paper in May 1965: “The big difference is that the songs I was writing last year . . . they were what I call one-dimensional songs, but my new songs I’m trying to make more three-dimensional, you know, there’s more symbolism, they’re written on more than one level.” Later that year, speaking of “My Back Pages” specifically, Dylan told Margaret Steen in an interview for The Toronto Star: “I was in my New York phase then, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for fear they’d be misunderstood. Now I don’t care if they are.” * * * In like manner, I don’t view the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan as a radical break from the past, but rather a natural evolution of his music. For that matter, I feel the same way about Bob Dylan’s “going electric” on his next two albums, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited; and also his Christian period in the trilogy of albums from 1979-1981: Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. Bob Dylan is very much undervalued as an instrumentalist, in my judgment; his guitar playing – and his harmonica, and his work as a pianist – is so strong that I often don’t even notice whether a song is acoustic or electric. As an example, until I saw it pointed out in Wikipedia while I was researching this month’s post, I had not realized that one of my Top Ten favorite Bob Dylan songs – the last and longest track on Highway 61 Revisited, “Desolation Row” – was the only non-electric song on the album. As to his Christian period, I have already mentioned the Biblical imagery in “When the Ship Comes In”. The opening verse of the title track, “Highway 61 Revisited” on Highway 61 Revisited is a hip retelling of God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his long-awaited son Isaac. One of the songs on his very first album, Bob Dylan is a traditional folk song called “Gospel Plow”. So none of this is brand new either as I see it. In conclusion, I am not trying to say that Bob Dylan didn’t perform protest songs; clearly he did, in the broadest sense of the term at least. However, Dylan never vented his outrage in the way that you expected, and he never went after the easy targets. While I am certainly no expert, from what I know of Woody Guthrie – Bob Dylan’s direct inspiration and even his mentor to a limited extent – much the same could be said of his music as well. I welcome any comments that you might have on what I have written about Bob Dylan here. I suppose you could say that he has been my favorite rock artist for nearly 50 years, and I have strong feelings about his music that don’t seem to be echoed in many places. However, I was certainly gratified to find quotes from Bob Dylan himself that support much of what I am trying to say. * * * In any case, I got my “Martin Winfree’s Record Cleaning Guide” out there (a twin to “Martin Winfree’s Record Buying Guide” from a few years ago) that discussed how someone should go about restoring a record collection if it goes through something like Hurricane Katrina, as mine did. I had wanted to issue it on the 10th anniversary of Katrina, i.e., August 2015. So at this point in time, I think that I have written about all of the topics that I wanted to cover in these posts; and as far as I know, I have described all of the bands that have been in my unwritten list of Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists for more than a little while. That doesn’t mean that I have nothing more to say, or that there are no more UARB’s and UARA’s to talk about; but if I never got any further than this, I would be satisfied that I have created something of a legacy (if I may be so bold). My sister Alison Winfree Pickrell, who passed away around Labor Day, has published six novels, with at least two more already fully written that are yet to come out. I will never come close to matching that, but what I am leaving behind has been on my mind this year. (Year 6 Review) * * * I am now loading up the last of my monthly posts into the Google Sites website – https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockbands/ – including Martin Winfree’s Record Cleaning Guide that came out on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 2015). I always seem to be running 2½ years or so behind the posts that I am writing, but now that there are only quarterly articles after this one, I might actually get caught up this year. (Year 8 Review) |
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