V05-T04a "...It's smooth sailing..."

.....

.....Tito Larriva of the Plugz (see the previous post) played the character Ramon in David Byrne's movie "True Stories". Ramon claims to receive radio waves and refers to himself as Radiohead (and yes, that's where the band got their name). While the guitar-heavy "I'M A CADILLAC" naturally leads into "HOMBRE SECRETO", and that song's British mid-60's origins as a cover of "SECRET AGENT MAN" seem like the reasonable relations to this next track, I think that knowing about Larriva's contributions to both "Repo Man" and "True Stories" may have prompted my choice of this interstitial and the song that follows it.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 4a

• 00:18 [excerpt from "ODORONO"]
• performed (nominally) by The Wh♂
• original source: LP THE WHO SELL OUT Track Records 612 002[mono] or 613 002[stereo] (UK) 12/15/67
• and my source: CD THE WHO SELL OUT MCA MCAD-31332 (US) 10/88

.....The actual vocal used is obviously not one of the Who; it's a woman's voice over a string section singing, "It's smooth sailing with the highly successful sound of Wonderful Radio London", one of the more succinct and to the point Radio London jingles of the many on the album. Radio London had American financial backers who would supply them with custom jingles recorded by a professional service called Production Advertising Merchandising Service, better known by the acronym on its packaging, PAMS. The female vocalists on staff as of 1965 included Judy Parma, Camilla Duncan, Jean Oliver and Tinker Rautenberg, although I doubt that there are any surviving records specifying who was used on this particular recording. The station broadcast from a ship anchored off the coast of England to provide a commercial model to compete with the government owned BBC. It only existed from shortly before Christmas 1964 to mid August 1967, just two months before most of the recording was done for the Who's album. Actual Radio London jingles were edited onto the beginnings and endings of songs and faux ads recorded by the Who. Things like jingles, commercial sponsorship, programming to meet public demand and DJ's as well known as the records they played were all foreign concepts in UK radio prior to that. It was all as much an American import as Andy Warhol's ideas about pop art, something central to the Who's identity at the time.

.....From my notes in 1994:"The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album is widely touted as rock's first concept album. The concept at work there is that the album is supposed to simulate, in your living room, the experience of attending a concert by Billy Shears and various other performers. You can see what they're getting at on the first two tracks, "FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE" and again on the title track's reprise, but most of that album doesn't give that impression at all. And what's with the barking dogs in the trail off groove? Is that a 'concert experience'?

....."Let's not kid ourselves. The first side of LP THE WHO SELL OUT leaves absolutely no question as to what you're listening to: a radio station that plays nothing but the Who, even in its advertisements for Odorono deodorant, Medac pimple cream and Heinz Baked Beans. Unfortunately for the band they hadn't accounted for the fact that in American slang to 'sell out' means betraying your ideals for commercial reasons, while they meant to say that they had greater popular support than the 'safer' performers. They lost sales due to negative criticism of the title, but worse, they lost the recognition they deserved as innovators of the format."

.....The American sales actually weren't that badly impacted. They were experiencing a meteoric rise in the U.S. following what was their only top ten hit at the time, "I CAN SEE FOR MILES" and a literally explosive appearance on the Smothers Brothers' television show. It could be that American audiences correctly read the title as self-deprecating humor. In England, however, it became the band's lowest charting studio album, not counting soundtracks. In the U.S. it charted higher (at 48) than their previous album (at 67). Their first album didn't chart in the U.S. at all. Their next album, a shabby compilation deceptively packaged as a live album without the band's knowledge or consent, made it to 39, lending credence to my suspicion that an original album riding a hit should have made a greater impact. By comparison, most of their albums, including many of their compilations, were in the top ten in England since the beginning as they would be in the U.S. starting with 2LP TOMMY in 1969. As for what was the earliest concept album, that depends on how strictly you define a concept album. Operas predate rock operas, of course, and themed albums predate even the LP format, since the word album refers to bound sets of 78's. In the rock idiom, the first might be the Beach Boys LP PET SOUNDS, followed closely by the Kinks' LP FACE TO FACE in 1966. After that it was kind of a free for all, with the first high concept rock album probably being the Moody Blues' LP DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, released between Sgt. Pepper and Sell Out.

.....This interstitial introduces the next track, which was roughly contemporary to the Who album.

V05-T03 Hombre Secreto

.

.....I first saw the movie "Repo Man" in the theater and fell in love immediately. It's one more reason the human race has to thank Mike Nesmith. He's credited as an executive producer, which usually translates to financing a project rather than any hands-on participation, but though the punk music dominating the soundtrack and nihilism dominating the characters are both outside of his usual modus operandi his trademark dry humor is all over the dialogue.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 3

• 01:48 "HOMBRE SECRETO" (P.F. Sloan, Steve Barri; Spanish translation by Tito Larriva)
• performed by The Plugz
• original source: VALP MUSIC FROM THE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK "REPO MAN" San Andreas Records/MCA SAR 39019 (US) 1984
• and my source: the same

.....Sloan's co-writer, Steve Barri, was actually credited on the label as "S.B. Lipkin", his real name. I used his professional name because it's more widely recognized (and to be fair, Sloan's name is a pseudonym, too). Below are my notes from 1994.

....."What? No Japanese? Well, these compilations wouldn't be complete without a foreign language number in there somewhere. Of course, you may know this in English as the Johnny Rivers song 'SECRET AGENT MAN'. Being a long time fan of the TV show 'The Prisoner' (and its antecedent 'Secret Agent', with which Americans associate the song), those opening chords always catch my ear. I think there's a Lou Miami recording of this out there. In English, I mean.

....."The Plugz are a fine example of L.A. punk's dirtiest little secret-- i.e., that it isn't any more homegrown than the rest of the rock in L.A. Just like in the big commercial rock world, the best 'L.A.' punk bands weren't from Los Angeles; they were from San Francisco or Mexico. At first the only clubs to play in were in L.A. and the minute clubs opened elsewhere bands stopped making the haul to L.A. to perform. When the mass media types no longer saw punk bands in Los Angeles they assumed that there couldn't be anything going on in the 'lesser' towns and declared that punk was dead. Michael Nesmith, on the other hand, decided to look beyond the end of his nose and decided that it was not. He backed the production of 'Repo Man' (for which Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton will be forever grateful), whose soundtrack album was probably the first mass-marketed example of the fourth phase of punk (hardcore). The CD finally came out nearly ten years after the movie."

.....Shortly after the movie was released The Plugz renamed themselves the Cruzados and signed to Arista. They had previously released their own records. The new identity didn't last very long and the Cruzados also ended their existence with a movie, 1989's 'Road House'. They actually appeared on screen for that one, part of Tito Larriva's extensive list of film credits. The line-up for this particular track was:

• Tito Larriva- vocals
• Steven Hufsteter- lead guitar
• Chalo 'Charlie' Quintana- drums
• Tony Marsico- bass

.....None of the selections give individual producer credits, although the project was produced by Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks. I'm not sure if they had any direct involvement with the recording since there are two other Plugz tracks on the soundtrack with different personnel and were likely recorded earlier than "HOMBRE SECRETO". Actually, the whole album is killer, as is the movie, and both are heartily recommended in their entirety.

V05-T02 I'm A Cadillac

.....About five years ago I tried to research this band to update my notes but couldn't find much in the way of a discography besides Martin C. Strong's "The Great Alternative & Indie Discography" (Canongate, 1999). As of the next edition, The Batfish Boys were one of dozens (hundreds?) of entries excised from future editions for reasons of space. The band could not be reasonably expected to release more material; they had split when the 1990's began and the lead singer/songwriter went into technical work for other bands (reportedly including Sisters Of Mercy). To this day, Amazon does not carry CD format issues of their music. For these reasons, excising them from a print database seems inevitable however disappointing. If a book becomes too large, its own weight will split its spine. It comes down to a choice between expanding the entries of those artists who continue to produce and reprinting already published information about those who do not.

.....For the past few days I've been finding far more luck online than I did five years ago, digging up label and sleeve scans of the original pressings and learning a few things about the band's history. More about that later.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 3

• 03:58 "I'M A CADILLAC" (The Batfish Boys)
• performed by The Batfish Boys
• original source: B-side 7" Batfish Incorporated USS 108 (UK) 03/87
• and my source: LP LURVE-- SOME KINDA FLASHBACK Twilight Records/Fundamental Music TR013 (US/UK) 1987

.....My original notes on this track from 1994 were brief: "According to Trouser Press, this band burned out quickly after this, but this song snagged my attention with the Iggy Pop reference. After playing it on the radio a few times, I learned that it contained what would be one of my all-time favorite lyrics: 'I'm as sane as the next man and the next man is Howard Hughes!' A few years after leaving the station I found a sealed copy (import only!) for just a couple of dollars in a liquidation sale. Ah, vinyl."

.....Thinking about this later it occurred to me that the reason I first tried this song is that there's a Mott The Hoople song by the same title. Everything else in the paragraph above is still true, although there's a pretty complicated qualifier to the remark about the record being an import. The jacket was printed in the UK but the actual vinyl was pressed in the US by a small label in Covington, Georgia called Fundamental Music for an even smaller imprint in Atlanta called Twilight Records. Twilight carried two stateside Batfish Boys albums, the compilation LP LURVE in 1987 and the previous year their second album, LP HEAD, with radically different jacket art. All their early recordings (1985-1987) were released on their own label, Batfish Incorporated. Their later recordings (1988-1990) were on the label GWR Records and consisted of at least an album and two singles. But it's the earlier stuff I find more interesting. Batfish Incorporated issued works by a few other bands as well, but unsurprisingly the Batfish Boys made the bulk of its output. They put out three 7" singles (two of which were also released in 12" format with third tracks), an EP of exclusive material and two albums. The LP LURVE was apparently put together for the US market which had been less singles oriented than England since the mid 1970's. It collects all the non-album tracks from Batfish Inc. except for two. "PEACOCK MACHINERY" from the EP is missing and the A-side "JUSTINE" was more plausibly left out because it was already made available to the US on the LP HEAD. In their place was a track from the first album LP THE GODS HATE KANSAS called "LOOTENANT LUSH".

.....The Batfish Boys formed after the abrupt departure of the March Violets' vocalist Simon Denbigh, who renamed himself Simon Detroit (or Simon D.) and recruited the Skeletal Family's roadie turned drummer Martin Henderson, who became Martin Pink (and later simply Bomber). At first he used a guitarist and bassist who coincidentally(?) had the same last names as two of his March Violets bandmates. They were soon replaced by guitarist Johnny Burman and bassist Bob Priestly (who became Bob Diablo). These four recorded everything after the first single until the label switch to GWR. Most of that was with guitarist Murray Fenton (of Artery), but this song is the B-side of the last Batfish Incorporated single, "THE BOMB SONG", by which time guitarist Zero Rek replaced Fenton. That single was also the only one produced by the band with Vic Maile. Previously Denbigh would handle the production himself.

.....The nature of this series of compilations, being an unthemed cross-section of whatever the gravitational pull of my collection pulled into its orbit, almost guarantees that it will veer off into some outre territory with some regularity. Knowing that, I wanted to start from an accessible sound of guitar driven rock (like this), even if the particular selections aren't well known (like this). There'll be a few artists famous for being guitarists on Volume 5, although not necessarily for what I've selected.

V05-T01 Rock 'N' Roll Radio

.....I've just reread the notes for this track that I wrote in 1994 and, while I am going to reproduce them here, I've just got to say that the events that have transpired since writing them are considerably more notorious than is the case for most of these old notes. For one thing, three of the original four band members have passed away. The other thing you might have heard about. The album was produced by Phil Spector. The old notes follow the listing below.

Volume 5: DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL (YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN), track 1

• 03:51 "ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO" (The Ramones)
• performed by The Ramones
• original source: LP END OF THE CENTURY Sire/Warner Bros. SRK6077 (US) 01/80 [also an A-side in May]
• and my source: CD END OF THE CENTURY Sire/Warner Bros. 6077-2 (US) [no date; 1986?]
• currently available on CD END OF THE CENTURY Rhino R2 78155 (US) 08/20/02 [including both this version and a demo of the song as a bonus track]

.....Every self-important critic's nightmare come true. Imagine, those overgrown teenagers who wear non-designer jeans (with holes worn in the knees!) and told an interviewer that they were glad that they missed out on Woodstock (sacrilege!) because you'd have to be an idiot to sit in the mud a thousand feet from the speakers and get rained on just to pretend you were hearing the music. Imagine them exhuming that old "wall-of-sound" fossil who had most of his hits in mono (when everyone knows that quadrophonics is the wave of the future-- or will be once people wise up and grow a third and fourth ear to satisfy the needs of the technology). Who gave them permission to play fun music? Why can't they be more like Moon Martin or Christopher Cross? Now, those two have bright futures ahead of them...

.....Well, maybe not every critic was that out of it, but most were. It always astounds me, the number of people in the non-creative end of the business who thought Lester Bangs was crazy while they blathered like idiots about how Gordon Lightfoot was America's greatest popular composer (I'm not being sarcastic anymore-- I really read that one in Stereo Review) or voting Christopher Cross a Best New Artist Grammy (look it up), etc.

....."Do you remember Jerry Lee? John Lennon, T. Rex and Ol' Moulty?"

.....Well, do you remember Ol' Moulty? Not likely.

.....Victor Moulton was the drummer for The Barbarians, a Massachusetts-based garage band in the 1960's that got some national airplay (you'll likely find them on Nuggets-style compilations). The band was capable but would have been unremarkable except for Moulty. He had a hook.

.....Now, when I say 'hook', I'm not using a musical term for a catchy simple line of riffs that grabs people's attentions. I'm talking about a crude, metal prosthetic hand. I can't even guess at how uncomfortable it must be to play drums with a hook. That's the kind of dedication and spirit The Ramones associate with rock and roll. About a month after I put the tape together, Goldmine newspaper's 20th Anniversary issue came out and among the people they contacted to recall 1974 was Moulty. He runs a cleaning service now and plays nostalgia shows once in a while.

.....1974 was about the time Phil Spector dropped from sight. (For more on Spector's life, read "He's A Rebel".) Many assumed it was because his style was 'old-fashioned'. The real reason was that his deteriorating mental state (so common in perfectionists; see "Wilson, Brian") made it difficult to maintain associations with the high profile artists he insisted on working with. The Ramones soon learned this when he held them hostage at gunpoint. It was, however, an extremely cool record.

V05- Re-Introduction

.....Sorry for the delay. The last one and a half years were hijacked by three projects that were fun (for me anyway): the Halloween compilations, the hypothetical Cramps box and the list of about a hundred musical acts that should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by now. However, the original reason for writing this blog was to reproduce the liner notes to a series of compilation cassettes I put together in the mid-1990's. For the third cassette (Volumes 5 and 6) I found myself circulating them among folks who came in late. I had friends who had heard the first two and passed them to people I'd never met. That was fine with me (in fact it was flattering, if unexpected), but it made me feel a need to explain myself. I handed the cassettes out with no markings other than the series title (the name of this blog) and the name I gave to each side or 'Volume'. I had no idea how many copies each recipient ran off or loaned out. I did know what was on them, though, and some of it was pretty strange. I decided it would be a good idea to write an original introduction and since this blog has spent so much of the last year off-topic it actually works as an overdue manifesto for music fans who've stumbled across this blog in that time. I'm often surprised by the number and variety of international readers who've found me through non-English language search engines. I should apologize to them now for my love of puns and wordplay; it must cause Google's automated translation software to shoot out sparks occasionally.

.....The introduction below was written in late 1994, so the references to my collection are out of date. I lost track of U2 and R.E.M. after the late 90's, but I've picked up a lot more Dylan and Mitchell since then. Of course, none of that changes the overall line of thought. Here goes:

....."Because I also compile theme-based tapes, I have resisted the temptation to get too 'cute' about the playlists for So, What Kind Of Music Do You Listen To? . They are meant to be a random selection from an anarchic, kudzu-like collection, emphasizing those odds and ends that might not otherwise make it onto a single-artist or theme-based collection. For the most part this is still true, although the repeated excursions through clicketing piles of jewel boxes have served to remind me how much of my collection is taken up with genuinely popular pop music. Every album by Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, R.E.M., U2, Bob Dylan (up to '70), Joni Mitchell (up to '74), Cream (in fact, every Clapton project up to '75), The Monkees..., Elton John (up to '88), Pink Floyd, The Police, NoMeansNo, The Clash and the Who and probably others. That's a lot of music to skirt around and it starts to become conspicuous by its absence. A sampling really isn't representative without it, although avoiding it so prejudiciously has unintentionally given it greater definition. (There's an old joke that goes 'How do you make a statue of an elephant?'; 'It's easy, just start with a thirty-ton block of marble and chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant.')

....."Anyone who knows me well enough to have these notes probably already knows that I was a disc jockey at a college radio station. When I joined I had already developed a taste for seeking out the fringe of pop music and my access to the station's scratchy old vinyl allowed me to hear things I had only read about. (There's a dirty joke in there somewhere.) Being on air also encouraged me to listen to programming as critically as I would to individual songs, both on our own broadcasts and those of the big stations. What I learned is that if money can't buy happiness it can at least buy you bad taste by the truckload. The largest commercial stations played the shittiest, most derivative, lifeless, boring crap I had ever heard in my life, frequently, punctuated by what seemed like endless advertisements. Their means to avoid maintaining a coherent train of thought was to discourage anyone else from doing so and then getting lost in the crowd.

....."I decided to make a conscious effort to develop the skills to program artists and styles not commonly thought to go together. At the time I was doing this the direction of commercial stations was to be so tightly and strictly formatted that many of these artists would not be played on the same station as one another, and some would not be played at all. On a good night I succeeded and I had a lot of good nights. The purpose of this, the motivating force for me, was to let people in on a secret I had discovered: that we had been conned, that we had been lied to. Commercial radio had told us that all music fit into fewer than a half dozen distinct categories and that the one (note the singular) that you were allowed to listen to was dictated by the color of your skin or your annual salary. Why? Because that made it easier for the actuaries to set the advertising rates. Really.

....."I don't have any demographics to satisfy besides my own quirky need for the unfamiliar and novel in pop music. That's why these tapes sound the way they do. Even this one, despite the fact that it's 'radio ready'. That's a term coined to describe catchy songs that have much in common with songs that have become hits; they could very likely have become hits themselves if not for the fact that they were recorded by persons arbitrarily deemed unmarketable. Thus, they remain eternally 'ready' for airplay they'll never get. Some of these songs actually were charting singles, but many more could have been had they been heard. And of course there's a few that never would have made it past my personal hit parade anyway. Enjoy."