Rockabilly Interlude/Cramps

.....I haven't posted (except for the previous note) in about three weeks for several reasons. I've been trying to establish a backlog of material on the Christmas blog (350th anniversaries don't come along every day), the current incarnation of the Doom Patrol comic book will likely be cancelled in a few months, impacting my first blog, and finally I've been uilizing my often neglected Livejournal account to write a detailed annotated Cramps discography for the purposes of a renovated compilation. Longtime readers of this blog may be aware that it is all just an enormous set of liner notes for a set of mix tapes compiled in the 1990's. That set of tapes was both an answer to the often-asked question that makes up the title and a way for me to reconnect with the odd bits and pieces in my collection that didn't seem to have any place among the single artist/act compilations I more commonly made for myself at the time.

.....One cassette I put together then which I continued to routinely listen to was a 90-minute Cramps selection which I called "Highlights For Lowlifes", but which only covered their career up to 1991. They released new material slowly but regularly, about an album every three years, but still toured in between. I posted about them recently here and since then have been in touch with a personal friend who wanted to dig up whatever I might have available. That sounded to me like a good reason to renovate the compilation. The Livejournal entries are essentially my scratch pad for the project. I'll note every recorded I've ever learned about there, select the best and /or most representative tracks and plot workable cassette and CD configurations, which I may post here between the end of Volume 4 and the start of Volume 5, not unlike taking time out for Halloween last fall, but with more advance planning.

.....If you want to follow my notes, perhaps learning what holes there may be in your own collection, Google my screen name, pblfsda, and the name livejournal. It should be the top of the list, or thereabouts.

.....I hope to complete Volume four in March.

Update on Volume One

.....Last year I got an e-mail about one of my posts asking for an mp3. Generally I don't embed these because: (a) I don't own publishing rights to any of this music; (b) my computer has limited capacities that I have to use economically; and (c) it's really just a blog, not a full blown website, and the purpose is to organize all of these loose notes I have piling up and loose memories that dim with age and put them into a more manageable and maneuverable form. I admittedly invite millions of strangers to watch, even comment and contribute, but ultimately it can never be anything more than a personal endeavor.

.....That being said, I am not averse to connecting interested parties with hard to find music. In a sense, this blog has always done that by the mere fact of its existence. It doesn't help anyone for there to be millions of uploaded songs online available to be heard if no one knows they exist or knows what their names are to search. As I've said before, there are quite a few songs I blog about that were rare or underexposed back in the mid-90's when I made most of these compilations, but which have become more common since then, often making it to CD for the first time as bonus tracks on remastered albums or incentives in a boxed set. Some just haven't. So when a commenter requested a copy of the punk version of the Mr. Rogers' theme song by P.B.S. (originally on a Troubled Youth 7") I thought I should contact the band (we had friends in common a lo-o-ong time ago) and ask if they had any objections to posting it. Google searches got pretty frustrating pretty quick. I don't normally track down people often enough to make it worth subscribing to sites that do so routinely and I found far more people than I expected to with the same names (complicated by the fact that both the band name and the song title are famous for many more reasons than the record). Then I started developing technical problems, which, when fixed, required me to work through backlogged plans for my comic blog, and if you've been reading for any length of time, you know the rest.

.....Well, it seems the question has been resolved for me. Better than a fourth generation mp3, the band (or a former member) has posted the actual original 1980's video on You-tube. You can find it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ad8PkYZzqU

...and you can find the band's page at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/pbsoww

.....So, if anyone has been attempting to patch together their own compilations following the play order, this shouldn't be quite the obstacle it once was. I should also give the band proper credit.

• Mike Bourque: Vocals, Guitars
• John Saylor: Vocals, Bass
• Peter-oww-Oldrid: Drums
• Produced [actually, "Prduced"] by Hirsh Gardner
• Engineered by Bruce Macomber
• Recorded at Sound Design Studios

.....There are also photo credits and thanks to friends and family members not relevant to most readers. One curious detail I hadn't noticed earlier is that both sides (TR-001-A and TR-001-B) have the same mastering number (23445) both on the labels and in the trail-off grooves. Hunh. Oh, well, small labels have all kinds of quirks much stranger than that. We'll see what I can remember (and how accurately) in the new year.

V04-T09 September Song

.....I've used a large number of covers over the course of this compilation series, but this one has nearly half a century between the original and the recording here.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 04:18 "SEPTEMBER SONG" (lyrics: Maxwell Anderson, music: Kurt Weill)
• performed by Lou Reed
• original source: VALP LOST IN THE STARS A&M SP9 5104 (US) 1985
• and my source: VACD LOST IN THE STARS A&M CD5104 (US) 1985(?)

.....If Americans know Kurt Weill at all it's probably for the song "MACK THE KNIFE" from the musical "Threepenny Opera", written in Europe with Bertolt Brecht. When the Nazis began rising to power Weill's productions became targets of their vandalism and he immigrated to the United States in 1935. Soon after, he met Maxwell Anderson. In Anderson, he not only found a new friend in an unfamiliar country, but potentially a prolific collaborator. They each bought a house in an artists' enclave in upstate New York and began working, but Weill was increasingly being offered lucrative work on Hollywood soundtracks he would have been foolish to pass up. He spent the last third of his relatively short life (1900-1950) in America and his only two collaborations with Anderson form bookends to that period. The first musical was "Knickerbocker Holiday"(1938), the source of the song "SEPTEMBER SONG". The second musical was a musical adaption of Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" that they called "Lost In The Stars"(1949), the source of this album's title track.

.....Producer Hal Willner made something of a cottage industry out of tribute albums, beginning in the early eighties and continuing into the past decade. Following this one and SGT PEPPER KNEW MY FATHER, a non-Willner production using post-punk British musicians in 1987 to recreate the Beatles' album track by track for its twentieth anniversary, there was a flurry of artist tributes on small labels like Communion on which current alt-rock acts acknowledged their (sometimes obvious) debts to then-under-exposed acts like Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett and the Velvet Underground. After the flurry came the deluge. I have actually lost count of the number of reggae-only tribute albums there are to Pink Floyd (I think it was four when I stopped paying attention). Willner's were almost always superior. He had an uncanny knack for matching just the right performer to the material, usually a performer you never would have thought to consider yourself but who, in retrospect, seems perfect. For instance, on the 1989 Disney tribute STAY AWAKE he paired Sinead O'Connor with "SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME" and Tom Waits with the Seven Dwarves' "HEIGH-HO", both adapted from "Snow White". At the time Lou Reed recorded this he had been working professionally for 20 years (almost 30 if you count the singles he made as a teenager) and almost never recorded covers. (Just after this was an ill-advised remake of "SOUL MAN", but that's rarely heard outside the soundtrack album of the same name.) Whatever possessed Willner to enlist Reed to interpret musical theater was something that can't be adequately described by trite phrases like "thinking outside of the box". It requires not only an intimate familiarity with the material to be covered but also with the panoply of artists available from which to choose (and then persuade to participate).

.....Say, I mentioned a tribute to Disney earlier. There's a whole different kind of tribute coming up next.

V04-T08 Love Is All Around

.....At the time I put this tape together I was sorely tempted to pair this song with the completely different song by the same title by the Troggs. I'm not sure why I didn't; it may have been because I had just used one original hit from the 1960's and four sides into a compilation series that emphasizes the obscure it would seem unusual to have two so close together. You'll see that not everything I chose to use was rare or unusual. Avoiding the popular or commercially successful music in my collection wouldn't be genuinely representative of what I was listening to any more than using it exclusively.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 01:46 "LOVE IS ALL AROUND" (Sonny Curtis)
• performed by Hüsker Dü
• original source: B-side 7" SST 051 (US) August 1985
• and my source: CDEP EIGHT MILES HIGH/MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL SST CD270 (US) 1990

.....My original notes from 1994 still look relevant:

"Anybody who doesn't recognize this as the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, hold out your hands to be slapped. Bonus points, however, to any who know that the connection between the fictional Mary Richards and the late Hüsker Dü is that they were both based in Minneapolis. Extra bonus points and a big wet kiss to anyone who recognized the style, which is pretty obscured here, of the song's author, Sonny Curtis. Yes, it's the same Sonny who wrote 'I FOUGHT THE LAW', better known from records by The Bobby Fuller Four and The Clash.

"Poor Minneapolis; so much talent, so little focus or cohesion. What is the Minneapolis sound? Hüsker Dü? Prince? Garrison Keillor? Is there some common unifying bond or trait amongst those three that I'm missing? I doubt it.

"Anyway, this track has made the rounds. This and another Hüsker Dü single were compiled onto a four-song 10" EP which in turn was reissued as a CD. All four songs are also found on an indispensable Various Artists CD called SEVEN-INCH WONDERS OF THE WORLD."

.....Now back in 2011, I've added a link to a fan-generated Hüsker Dü Database that provides descriptions of the various formats and configurations in which this recording has been made available. The reference to a Minneapolis sound came from a tendency in the late 1980's to promote upcoming bands by associating them with established bands who've come up through the same club circuit. In some cases the comparisons were valid; scenes would develop with a large number of musicians in one area forming and reforming bands by exchanging members and playing a handful of venues to, by and large, the same audiences. Inevitably they would share the same references and musical vocabulary. Today, with new groups promoting themselves nationally (and internationally) online, I'm not sure the concept of regional sounds has any relevance anymore.

.....Tomorrow, another love song, but with an international touch.

V04-T07 I Want Candy

.....Sandwiched between two covers I placed the original version of a song better known as a cover.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 7

• 02:36 "I WANT CANDY" (Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, Richard Gottehrer, Bert Berns)
• performed by The Strangeloves
• original source: A-side 7" BANG!Records B-501(US) 1965
• and my source: the same

.....I don't know if my copy is a first pressing but I don't think it would matter if it was. Unfortunately from a collector's standpoint it is a deleted sleeveless stock copy in rough condition and bought for chump change out of a bargain box somewhere. Still plays though. The reason that a first pressing would be a better conversation piece is that this is a little bit of rock history-- the first(?) official release from BANG! Records.

.....Atlantic Records was formed by Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun in the 1940's to indulge their love of American jazz and blues. By the 1960's they had diversified somewhat, as most successful labels will. In the course of their expansion they had enlisted a number of talented producers. In 1964 two of them, Bert Berns and Jerry Wexler, convinced them to launch a competing label as committed to purely commercial, hit-making producer's projects as Atlantic had been committed to capturing artists authentically. They called it "BANG!", named for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui and Gerald. Initially they recorded content for other labels, producing finished recordings instead of demos and shopping them around to other small labels in need of a chart hit. One such song was "LOVE LOVE(THAT'S ALL I WANT FROM YOU)" on the Swan label by three producers masquerading as a group called The Strangeloves. Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer could play instruments, but generally left the heavy lifting to session men. One day they laid down the instrumental backing for a cover of "BO DIDDLEY" that turned out so well, Berns suggested they make it the basis for a new song instead of squandering it on a B-side. The result was "I WANT CANDY".

.....Seeing that this single was catalog number B-501 with matrix numbers W-1003 and W-1004 (A and B, respectively), it occurred to me that the previous single would have been B-500 with matrices W-1001 and W-1002. Not only could I not find any release like that for any of the artists I knew to be on their roster, I found out that W-1001 is in the trail-off groove of a Neil Diamond album they released two years later.

.....When the single became a hit, Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer took four of the musicians from the session on the road with them to play concerts. They were Jack Raczka (guitar), John Shine (bass, vocals), Richie Lauro (sax, vocals) and Tom Kobus (drums). The line-ups were perpetually changing later, but this would have been representative of the studio band on the single. The three 'real' Strangeloves continued writing and producing with and without the pseudonym. In fact, Gottehrer was producing the Go-Go's when they recorded that B-side I used a few posts ago. The song's been pretty durable, too, covered by the Count Bishops (in the 70's) and perhaps most famously by Bow Wow Wow in 1982, changing the 'girl' in the song to a 'guy'.

.....Next up, a cover more appropriate than it immediately appears.