Office Naps Late Summer 2016 Psychedelic Pop mix

Well well well.   A new Office Naps psychedelic pop mix.  Do wonders ever cease?   This is the sixth of these, and the first in six years, and it skews subtly towards the ’70s and a darker Vietnam-era energy while summoning all of the chiming, soaring, weird Aquarian vibes of previous psych-pop mixes.

Office Naps Late Summer 2016 Psychedelic Pop mix

Sun, The Dream (The Journeys of the Sun Sailors 7″ 45 EP, Pyrasound)
Honey LTD.
, Silk ‘n Honey (7″ 45, LHI)
Estelle Levitt
, I Like the Way It Feels (7″ 45, Music Factory)
Orange Box
, Time Has Gone to Sleep (7″ 45, Overlord)
Mozark Music Makers
, Theme of the Corillions (7″ 45, The Corillions)
Jupiters’ Children
, This Is All I Ask (7″ 45, Triple O)
Pyramid
, Shadows (7″ 45, Solomon)
National Bank of Sound
, Me and My Friends (7″ 45, Sea-West)
Plain Jane
, Not the Same (Plain Jane, Hobbit)
The Pyramids
, I Don’t Wanna Cry (7″ 45, Archer)
Harlen Michael
, Day Sleeper (7″ 45, Era)
Neil Norman
, With You My Love (7″ 45, GNP Crescendo)
The Apocalypse
, God is My Home (7″ 45, Apocalypse)
Stone
, Le Nenuphar (7″ 45, Polydor, France)
Charley D. and Milo
, Om Sweet Om (Charley D. and Milo, Epic)
Jan & Lorraine
, Snow Roses (Gypsy People, ABC)
Puff
, I Sure Need You (Puff, MGM)
Piero Umiliani
, Pellegrinaggio Al Totem (Polinesia, Omicron, Italy)
John Paynter and Peter Aston (dirs.)
, Musique Concrete  (excerpt) (Sound and Silence: Classroom Projects in Creative Music, Cambridge University Press, U.K.)
Persona
, Água (Som, no label, Brazil)
Stu Phillips
, Ranee Express (Follow Me, Uni)
Hollins and Starr
, Krishna Day (Sidewalks Talking, Ovation)
Commune
, Violets in Your Basket (7″ 45, Flippin’)
Electric Frogs
, Mona (7″ 45, Storec, Germany)
Calcium
, Elle Regarde Et Elle Rit (7″ 45, Pathé , Canada)
Deuces Wild
, Hey Little One (7″ 45, Deuce)
Dennis Harte
, Summer’s Over (7″ 45, Roundtable)

Posted in Exotica/Space-Age, Garage Bands, Miscellaneous Flotsam, Mixes, Psychedelic/Pop | 2 Comments

The Cool Blue Flame, my new Thursday evening radio show on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio stream

Hi everybody, I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new two hour radio show on WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio every Thursday night starting at 10 eastern/ 9 central.

http://wfmu.org/playlists/UE

The show is the Cool Blue Flame.  WFMU is the greatest radio station on the planet.  Hope you’ll join me.

 

 

Posted in Personal natter | Leave a comment

The Bluesville Jukebox


 
Hi everybody.  I’ve posted a new page of one hundred thematically- and musically-related 45s over at the Exotica Project.  It’s titled the Bluesville Jukebox:

http://exoticaproject.com/4

The collection is shaped around late ‘50s and ‘60s jukebox jazz sides as well as the smaller numbers of hip R&B and rock ‘n’ roll instrumentals. The new soul sound of the late ‘50s and ‘60s is echoed in many of the records, as are strains of Brazilian bossa nova, Latin rhythms and unusual time signatures.

There’s also frequent overlap with what came in the U.K. to be classified as “mod jazz,” though the Bluesville Jukebox pushes the stylistic boundaries of that aesthetic.  The compilation of this collection is neither arbitrary nor without historical basis, but ultimately the Bluesville Jukebox is ultimately an emphatically personal exercise, the collection’s representative 45s are imbued with nothing more precise than some fundamentally ineffable sense of ‘60s cool and consciousness.  Hope you dig it.

Posted in Miscellaneous Flotsam | 3 Comments

My Annual Halloween Radio Blowout 9-11pm * TONIGHT * WEDNESDAY * 10/21

I’m pushing my favorite evening of my radio show a bit early this year, as I’ll be raising money for the station come next Wednesday.

Anyway, two hours of lost ’50s/’60s Halloween sounds. Gothic R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, haunted country and instro flameouts, witchdoctor exotica and mad suspense pieces.

No stupid monster novelties with silly voices, just deep haunted house moods, b-movie atmospherics and hella 45s.

Lost Frequences
9-11pm CST TONIGHT (WEDNESDAY)
KRTS 93.5FM
stream at http://marfapublicradio.org/


Image courtesy of scar stuff courtesy of Standard Comics

Posted in Personal natter | 5 Comments

Nowhere Town: 100 Lost Places and Spaces

Hi everybody, long time.

So I’ve posted a third collection of 100 thematically related 45s over at the Exotica Project.

The new page is named Nowhere Town, and it’s comprised of lonesome and atmospheric country, rockabilly and teen pop 45s from the ‘50s and ‘60s, along with a set of period guitar instrumentals with Western-ish motifs.

My hope is that, taken together, the records will conjure some vision – even if cinematic and entirely fanciful – of the lost places and open spaces of Space Age America, its bygone small town life and poignant characters and the wildlife and boundless landscapes of its deserts and plains.

Please have a look at Nowhere Town, and thanks!

Posted in Country, Instrumentals/Surf, Nowhere Town, Rock 'n' roll, Updates | 6 Comments

Lotus Land: The curious legacy of jazz exotica

This is an essay I wrote back in January for Melbourne, Australia’s mighty PBS 106.7fm.  Many thanks to Richie1250 for having me aboard, and for keeping the torch ablaze for progressive radio.

Martin Denny, Forbidden Island

1958's Forbidden Island, one of Martin Denny's definitive albums of cocktail jazz exotica from his classic (late '50s through mid-'60s) period.

Exotica was a colorful programmatic music that conjured impressions of Polynesia, of the East, of Africa, of various fabricated paradises, Shangri-Las and faraway latitudes. Popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it sprang largely from the imaginations of Hawaiian tourist bar musicians and Hollywood composers. Exotica’s repertoire was of jungle interludes, languid tropical reveries and exotic arrangements of familiar standards, its instrumentation an atmospheric mélange of flutes, Afro-Latin percussion, vibraphones, bird calls and bogus incantations.

Exotica encapsulated a moment in Western, and specifically American, culture when an increasingly suburban middle class had both the leisure time and the means to avail themselves of the newly-introduced stereo system (and the realistic, album-length sonic environments it facilitated).  There was no mistaking the subtext of exotica’s beautiful, lurid album covers and song titles like “Forbidden Island,” “Taboo,” “River of Dreams” and “Return to Paradise.” Exotica meant escape, if momentarily, from the Atomic Age ideals of a well-ordered society, structured workaday life and prescribed social and sexual mores.

Les Baxter, Ritual of the Savage

Baxter's Ritual of the Savage, recorded in the early '50s, is perhaps the seminal exotica album, and remains a highpoint.

Recordings by Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and Yma Sumac, along with dozens of albums by other artists in cocktail combo and easy-listening settings, are today cited as exotica’s foundation.

Exotica was nothing if not catholic during the music industry’s mid-century boom, however, finding expression in an array of genres, including Latin music, girl-group pop, rhythm & blues, surf music and early rock ‘n’ roll.

It was postwar jazz, however, where exotica found perhaps its most fascinating and richly fruitful host. Jazz, that most authentic of American art forms; jazz, that increasingly rigorous, increasingly elite 20th-century music. Not only did bop deliver tropical idylls to discerning listeners in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but it indulged many of the same musical tropes and took many of the same thematic liberties as its easy-listening counterparts.

Down in Jungle Town

Sheet music for "Down in Jungle Town," a 1908 Tin Pan Alley ditty by Theodore Morse that evinces an earlier vogue for the exotic. Image courtesy of Vintage Ephemera.

But first a brief tangent.

While it only became a bona fide phenomenon in the decades after World War Two, exotica on record extends far back to the 78rpm era, to the early recorded works of Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel, to impressionistic Hawaiiana, to “oriental” orchestras and to assorted dubious Tin Pan Alley jungle novelties.  Similarly, one can trace a thread of exotica back in prewar jazz, too. All but the best few sides were a trifle forced, however.  For every Duke Ellington “Echoes of the Jungle” or Mills Blues Rhythm Band “Congo Caravan” there were many more tacky jungle music cash-ins and dire “Streets of Cairo” leitmotifs.

It wouldn’t be until the mid-‘40s that jazz, in its sleek new bebop guise, finally found a convincing language for channeling its exotic impulses. Though it would always mirror popular tastes to some degree, it’s worth noting a few additional factors why jazz became a natural outlet for exotica in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Crucially, there was the new freedom of bebop’s radical harmonic language.  Early examples abound of boppers working in unusual modes with exotic themes, from Oscar Pettiford’s “Oscalypso” (1950), Howard McGhee’s “Night Mist,” (1947) Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia” (1946) and Tadd Dameron’s “Jahbero” (1948) to lost 78rpm gems like Sax Mallard’s “The Mojo” (1947) and Eddie Wiggins’s “Orientale” (1946).

Eddie Wiggins's "Orientale"

An unusual 1946 jazz exotica side from saxophonist Eddie Wiggins. Image courtesy of the indispensable Red Saunders Research Foundation.

The success of mambo-jazz crossover experiments was also a critical factor. Ambitious early cubop recordings by Machito, Dizzy Gillespie and Chico O’Farrill helped to establish “exotic” Afro-Latin percussion and rhythms as a fixture in bop.

Simultaneously, recorded jazz itself was itself maturing and expanding from a three-minute-per-side phenomenon, gracefully taking advantage of the long-playing album format in a host of extended jazz compositions and adventurous suites.

For the first time, jazz’s forays into exotica sounded properly otherworldly and mysterious. While jazz exotica never constituted a concerted, self-conscious movement, dozens of jazz musicians would record unambiguously exotic sessions during bop’s recorded apogee of the ‘50s and ‘60s. 1  Geographical concepts often got blurry, but a few essential themes coalesced.

 

Paul Horn, Impressions of Cleopatra

Flautist and saxophonist Paul Horn's Impressions of Cleopatra, from 1963.

The Middle East and Asia proved especially popular choices as concepts, from Walt Dickerson’s Jazz Impressions of Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Horn’s Jazz Impressions of Cleopatra, Eddie Bonnemere’s Jazz Orient-ed, Paul Gonsalves’s Cleopatra Feelin’ Jazzy, Cal Tjader’s Breeze from the East and Several Shades of Jade, Phil Woods’s Greek Cooking, Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Impressions of Japan and Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite to obscure albums like Lloyd Miller’s Oriental Jazz and Joe Maneri’s Music of Cleopatra on the Nile.

 

There were works that were inspired by or incorporated African and Afro-Caribbean music, including Buddy Collette’s Tanganyika, Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro, A.K. Salim’s Afro Soul/Drum Orgy, Randy Weston’s Uhuru Afrika, Randy (Bap Beep Boo-Bee Bap Beep-M-Boo Bee Bap) and Music from the New African Nations, Guy Warren and the Red Saunders Orchestra’s Africa Speaks America Answers, Shorty Rogers’s Shorty Rogers Meets Tarzan, Harold Vick’s Caribbean Suite and Shelly Manne’s Daktari.

Buddy Collette, Tanganyika

Superb music, superb album cover. Multi-instrumentalist Buddy Collette's Tanganyika, from 1956.

And there were odd outliers like Buddy Collette’s Polynesia and pre-Columbian suites by Dizzy Gillespie (The New Continent) and Art Farmer (Aztec Suite), along with albums oriented around a generalized exoticism: Sun Ra’s The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra and Fate in a Pleasant Mood, Duke Ellington’s Afro-Bossa and Roy Harte & Milt Holland’s Perfect Percussion.

From dark, swirling jazz thrillers to sonorous tone poems, individual album tracks by boppers expanded the boundaries of jazz exotica even further. James Moody’s “Zanzibar,” the New York Jazz Quartet’s “Jungle Noon,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Africana,” Cannonball Adderley and Milt Jackson’s “Blues Oriental,” Sonny Rollins’s “Jungoso,” Andrew Hill’s “Chiconga,” Dave Pike’s “South Sea” and Art Farmer’s “Mau Mau” are among the best of a list that includes dozens and dozens of recordings.

Gerald Wilson, Algerian Fantasy

Very obscure mid-'50s jazz exotica from brilliant West Coast bandleader Gerald Wilson.

It’s interesting that jazz, while rightly perceived as an authentic art form, very often trafficked in the same constructions and tropes as Les Baxter or Martin Denny.  If African, Eastern and Afro-Caribbean themes were popular, they comprised a relatively vague set of parameters. Tracks like Gene Shaw’s “Karachi,” Gerald Wilson’s “Algerian Fantasy” and Philly Joe Jones’s “Land of the Blue Veils” were moody, terrific compositions, full of unusual contrasts and bewitching moods, but the relationship with the distant lands they summoned was dim.

 

While most jazz exotica made few, if any, concessions to incorporating indigenous music, it’s worth singling out four jazz musicians – Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Yusef Lateef, Herbie Mann and Art Blakey – who did go further in adapting non-Western modes and instruments with some degree of consistency, if not authenticity, in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

 

Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Jazz Sahara

Ahmed Abdul-Malik's Jazz Sahara, from 1958.

Yusef Lateef, Jazz Mood

Yusef Lateef's 1957 album Jazz Mood commenced a fascinating series of jazz exotica studies.

A bassist with Sudanese roots, Ahmed Abdul-Malik was an in-demand sideman who largely focused on music of the Near and Middle East on his own late ‘50s and early ‘60s efforts. Proficient on the oud, albums like Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Jazz Sahara, East Meets West and Sounds of Africa introduced jazz players into a pseudo-Eastern context.

 

Detroit-born Yusef Lateef primarily played saxophone and flute, but took a voracious, life-long interest in ethnic wind, reed and percussion instruments, featuring many of them to striking effect in his compositions – see in particular Lateef’s albums Eastern Sounds, The Centaur And The Phoenix, Jazz And The Sounds Of Nature, Jazz ‘Round The World and Prayer To The East.

Flautist Herbie Mann was similarly omnivorous in his musical predilections, and, in addition to a number of Latin jazz and Brazilian dates, would record several Afro-Eastern works: African Suite, Family of Mann, The Common Ground and Impressions of the Middle East.

 

Finally, powerhouse drummer Art Blakey, leader of the venerable Jazz Messengers, recorded a handful of albums with large percussion ensembles (Drum Suite, Orgy in Rhythm, vols. 1 and 2, Holiday for Skins, vols. 1 and 2, The African Beat) that reflected his own interests in the polyrhythms of Africa and the African diaspora.

 

While often superb, all of these artists’ recordings were clearly based in Western musical theory and structure, and ultimately fall somewhere too along the continuum of jazz exotica.

Herbie Mann, African Suite

Though credited to vibraphonist Johnny Rae, 1958's African Suite is just as much a Herbie Mann effort.

Exotica as a style hung in the air in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But why was it so particularly attractive to jazz musicians?

The colorful sounds, contrasts and motifs, the unusual rhythms and the emphasis on otherworldly atmospheres that characterized exotica were also natural vehicles for jazz’s practitioners’ restless creativity. In the guise of exoticism, the need to justify a strange tone poem or jazz fantasia was obviated. As a sort of musical shorthand, exotica provided the latitude for musicians to take chances, to exorcise creative impulses, to expend wild musical energies, to instantly transform a room’s ambience.  Also: conjuring the exotic Other just sounded so great.

Art Blakey, Drum Suite

Art Blakey's Drum Suite, from 1956

In the mid-’60s, modal and avant-garde jazz albums began making use of the imagery of faraway lands.  2 Such places were invoked largely with reference to the Pan-African interests of black consciousness rather than as loci of exotic escapism and leisurely pleasure, however. Various sitar jazz experiments came sometimes close to the spirit of exotica, too.  3 But these were more closely aligned with the younger, psychedelic counter-culture’s nascent interest in Eastern mysticism.

Notwithstanding such dalliances, jazz, itself contending with something of an identity crisis, its popularity in permanent decline, had, past the ’60s, largely ceased to be a vessel for exotica, at least in the previously established sense of the term. More to the point, all that had been previously thought of as popular music, including exotica and the broad reaches of easy-listening, had been irrevocably displaced by rock music by the mid-’60s. Messieurs Denny and Baxter would continue to have their exotic moments, but theirs was music that was, incontrovertibly, no longer hip cultural currency.

Clark Terry, Swahili

When the forces that originally engendered it evolved or were displaced, jazz-borne exotica – itself a curious tangent of an ephemeral manifestation of mid-century culture and music – dissipated along with them. Not surprisingly, no one particularly noticed its absence at the time. The modest, post-modern revival of space-age pop and tiki culture that began in the 1980s resurrected many of exotica’s central figures, but its more obscure representations continued to remain neglected.

Clark Terry, Swahili

Stunning 1955 jazz exotica from trumpet player Clark Terry.

Just below the surface of the postwar jazz discography exists this fascinating body of exotica. Musically, the best moments of jazz exotica are like the best moments of exotica proper, bypassing their sometimes unfortunate cultural misperceptions, and transcending a legacy as mere kitsch.

Fully realized jazz exotica tracks from Yusef Lateef’s “Iqbal” and Lloyd Miller’s “Gol-E Gandom“ to Chico Hamilton’s “Blue Sands” and Clark Terry’s “Swahili” are dark, otherworldly, unironically beautiful recordings.

  1. Many European jazz musicians were simultaneously following similar pathways into exoticism in this time – a vast topic for another essay.
  2. Pharaoh Sanders’s Tauhid, Bob Reid’s Africa is Calling Me, the East New York Ensemble de Music’s At the Helm, Toudie Heath’s Kawaida, the Black Unity Trio’s Al-Fatihah, etc.
  3. Alice Coltrane’s Journey In Satchidananda, Pat Martino’s Baiyina, Bill Plummer’s Cosmic Brotherhood, Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga, Emil Richards’s Journey To Bliss, etc.
Posted in Exotica/Space-Age, Jazz Obscura | 12 Comments

The Plum Beach Incident / Dave Yarnell

It was terrific to speak recently to Dave Yarnell, guitarist and singer with the Plum Beach Incident, whose sterling “Pretty Thing” I first featured back in 2010 in a post surveying ‘60s jangle pop.  A warm, friendly gentlemen whose continued passion for music was obvious, Dave filled me in on some of his ‘60s band history, and the story of the Plum Beach Incident.

Early life and Dantes

The son of an educator, Yarnell was born in Sacramento, CA, relocating with his family early in life to his family’s home state of Ohio, where he grew up.  Inspired by West Coast surf music and the rock ‘n’ roll of pre-British-Invasion groups like the Beach Boys, the Kingsmen, and Ventures, the self-taught Yarnell began playing guitar in the sixth or seventh grade.

The early version of the Dantes.  Playing at Ohio State University, circa 1964.
Early version of the Dantes. Playing at Ohio State University, circa 1964.

In high school Yarnell and his classmate Richard Wakefield formed an early edition of the Dantes.   (Yarnell referenced local group the Electras – the future Fifth Order – as an inspiration, noting their musical equipment and use of bar chords in particular.)

An early songlist for the Dantes
An early songlist for the Dantes, circa 1964

Halfway through high school in 1965, Yarnell moved with his family to Falls Church, Virginia, a town just outside the D.C. beltway. The Dantes would go on to eventually enjoy some success – a few of their 45s charted in Ohio – but, by that point, Yarnell was no longer with the group.

Ye Bay Rums

Yarnell was serious about music.   “I had a natural ear for harmony” – and he’d sometimes be seen carrying an inverted history book to strengthen the chording muscles in his hands.  He wasted no time in founding a new group, Ye Bay Rums, as a junior at George Mason High School.

Ye Bay Rums included Tim Woolsey (drums), George Cotner (Hammond organ and vocals), Tom Turrisi (bass) and Yarnell (guitar and vocals).  The group played local events, dances (“Great money for kids in high school”) and the occasional opening slot for touring artists like the Ohio Express and Wilson Pickett.  The group’s repertoire featuring period covers (Beatles, Sam & Dave, Young Rascals, Wilson Pickett) along with the occasional band original like Yarnell’s “Picture with the Eyes that Move” and Cotner’s “Love Came on” and “Let Me Make it Up.”  Yarnell also played cornet in his high school’s band and would, along with Cotner (a fellow horn player) be seen grabbing his horn onstage for covers of “Land of 1000 Dances” and “Midnight Hour” and other period soul and R&B.

Ye Bay Rums made some demo records for Lionel Hampton’s Glad Hamp Records, but, while there was commercial interest, nothing was actually released.  By 1967 Yarnell had graduated high school and began attending Corcoran School of Art in D.C..  Ye Bay Rums would disband in 1968.

Plum Beach Incident

The Plum Beach Incident was started around 1968 by Art Morales, a colorful local musician who modeled himself on guitarist Eric Clapton, then with Cream.

Plum Beach Incident
The Plum Beach Incident. (front, l-r): Arturo Morales, Sharon Theet, Johnny Smith, Karen Theet, Keith Edwards; (rear): Steve Croson.  Note: Yarnell is not pictured.

Yarnell’s involvement began upon answering an audition ad posted by Morales at a local music store in 1968.  The group – which would largely coalesce through Morales – would come to include Johnny Smith (keyboards), Steve Croson (bass), both previously of the Organic Cavemen – a popular Northern Virginia band, Keith Edwards (drums – the “hippie-est,” according to Yarnell), and the telegenic singers (and sisters) Sharon and Karen Theet.    Everybody in the group sang.  The group was listening to and performing a lot of West Coast psychedelic rock at the time. (Yarnell also cited the Bee Gees’ “Words,” the Doors’ “Love me Two Times” and covers of Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, with the Theet sisters assuming lead vocal duties.

The Plum Beach Incident playing the Knights of Columbus hall in 1968
The Plum Beach Incident playing the Knights of Columbus hall in 1968. (l-r): Steve Croson, Sharon Theet, Karen Theet, Dave Yarnell, Johnny Smith, Arturo Morales, Keith Edwards.

The Plum Beach Incident played live around northern Virginia, Washington D.C. and Maryland, attaining enough local celebrity to land opening slots for nationally-known artists like Vanilla Fudge as they came through the area. The group also shared stages with local groups of the day like the Fallen Angels, the English Setters, and later, the Cherry People.

Envelope direct from Orpheum Records.  Postmark August 1968.
Envelope direct from Orpheum Records to Arturo Morales. Postmark August 1968.

The Plum Beach Incident, Pretty Thing

The group’s management team helped facilitate the recording session that led to “Pretty Thing” along with its flipside “Summer Love.”  The session took place over the course of a few days in New York City in August 1968.  The lyrics were handed to the Plum Beach Incident, the arrangement and interpretation were entirely the group’s own.   In addition to the 45, a few other songs were also recorded in that time to acetate, including an original, “You Need a Friend.”

Plum Beach Incident, 1968
Plum Beach Incident, 1968. (l-r): Steve Croson, Sharon Theet, Arturo Morales.

Despite its potential – “Summer Love” was discussed for placement in a Clairol advertisement at one point – the 45 was not a commercial success.   It probably didn’t help that its release was delayed in deference to Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ version of “Pretty Thing,” or that Orpheum Records, along with its sister label Pop-Side, was winding down its operations by the late ‘60s.

The group lasted less than two years, the pressures of the draft, drug busts, lifestyle changes, pregnancies and family life eventually finally catching up with them.

After the Plum Beach Incident

Of the group, it was bassist Steve Croson – he passed away in 2010 – who enjoyed the most success in the music world – playing and singing on a number of Nashville country sessions, touring for years with various country music artists and, in recent years, founding the Roy Orbison tribute show “In Dreams.”

Yarnell enlisted for a stint in the Air Force as an AF Illustrator after being drafted in 1969, and would afterwards return to finish his studies in fine art.  He started a family along the way, worked as a graphic artist and, later, as a licensed boat captain between D.C. and the Florida Keys.  Dave still plays music, and currently can be heard playing around northern Virginia as Capt. Dave and the Neptunes.

Many thanks to Dave Yarnell for the archival photos, and for this interview.

Posted in Garage Bands, Psychedelic/Pop, Updates | 5 Comments

Another view from the outer fringes

I always feel a little bit leery of posts like these because there’s nothing in the way of, say, regional or sociocultural provenance or shared stylistic cues drawing the selections together, nothing guiding them into cohesive genres or concepts with tidy boundaries.  These are fitted together mostly because they fit together somehow in my mind.

So this is actually a continuation of a post from a million years ago.   Beginning in the ’50s, and continuing into the ’80s, a spate of unusual, unhinged, otherwise untrammeled examples of musical individualism found their realization on the 45rpm record, that most democratic and affordable of the post-War recorded formats.  An overall concept that’s nothing particularly new in the Office Naps universe.

But the Beat Generation – its electrifying, groundbreaking forms and beatnik clichés alike – looms in some way behind each of these selections, even if it’s only inadvertent, and somehow the fact that these three 45s, which would have been unorthodox no matter their year of release, evoke the spirit of an entirely earlier decade seemed worth more exploration.  So here we go.

Tamara’s New Generation, Traffic (IRC 6943B)1. Tamara’s New Generation, Traffic (IRC 6943B)
Tantalizingly few credits to work with here.

Recorded in mid-1967, “Traffic” was released on the Chicago-based IRC Records.  IRC was operated to a large degree as a custom label – meaning that, for a fee, it would press a set quantity of a record for any artist or small recording studio.  IRC’s small LP run favored European folk music while its 45 discography, which extended from the early ‘60s until the mid-‘70s, included a relatively unfiltered cross-section of period sounds, including teen pop, sound effects novelties, gospel, personality records and, perhaps most notably, some mid-‘60s garage band singles by the Little Boy Blues, Placy Anatra & Jimmy Watson, Danny’s Reasons and the Phantoms.

And this selection?  Tamara’s deadpan spoken word meditation on the modern condition in “Traffic” – not to mention those charmingly artless flute accents – are the very image of youthful Greenwich Village existentialism of a decade earlier.   As with a lot of custom label output, obscure ysteries would often see release, but little else among IRC’s schedule would sound like “Traffic.”  Little else anywhere sounded like “Traffic,” though the Miriam 45 bears some passing resemblance.    (“Just Flowers,” the nominally more orthodox flipside, is a more psychedelic number that seems straight from some jam at the Golden Gate Park Be-In, again with flute and a bit of Tamara’s spoken word vocals).

The Night People, Erebian-Borialis (Del-Nita DN-1002B)2.  The Night People, Erebian-Borialis (Del-Nita DN-1002B)
The Night People were a mid-‘60s Cleveland-area group.

While the Night People might read like your standard local mid-‘60s garage band on paper, it’s clear with this 1967 45 – the first of the group’s two releases – that something slightly different was going on.  To begin with, the a-side of this 45, a crudely psychedelic rave-up entitled “We Got It,” featured a prominent theremin, an instrument otherwise nearly unheard of in the context of local ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll.

This selection, “Erebian-Borialis,” is the yet-more-anomalous b-side.

Loosely-structured and freewheeling, it’s in the spirit of other early psychedelia, but the instrumentation and intimate production values of “Erebian-Borialis” are both quite unusual.   (The title itself seems to be a meaningless invention.)  Like “Traffic,” this side is simultaneously of its time and out of time; “Erebian-Borialis” succeeds in being utterly psychedelic, while little but a fuzzed-out electric guitar separates it from the flute-and-bongo coffeehouse aesthetic of a decade earlier.

“Erebian-Borialis” featured the group’s guitarist Terry Paul, drummer Greg Paul (likely on the bongo), bassist Joe Rose – and his brother Frank Rose on the recorder.   (Vocalist Bob Holcepl is not heard here.)

The Night People’s second 45, while also excellent, is much more in the vein of straightahead period garage band records.

The New Bangs, Go-Go Kitty (Prism 45-PR-1935)3. The New Bangs, Go-Go Kitty (Prism 45-PR-1935)
According to Buckeye Beat, the New Bangs were a studio-only project composed of members from two Dayton, Ohio combos.

The first of these, the Dawks, were a working group that included Terry Lawson (vocals), Jim Henson (lead guitar), Mike Clark (rhythm guitar), Lou Gore (drums) and Larry Henry (bass).  They recorded several times for the Prism Records label, their discography notably including “Good Thing,” a ringing gem that appeared on WONE: The Dayton Scene, a battle-of-the-bands compilation, in 1966.

And the second combo was the Bangs, an otherwise undocumented girl group.

This side was released in early 1966.  Even by the standards of b-sides – where the weirder, anything-goes material tended to live – “Go-Go Kitty” is a strange artifact, a shambling teenage head trip that transcends novelty by its sheer uncompromising, uncommercial wigginess.    It makes sense that this might have been a studio lark.  It’s certainly nothing like “Get Back in Your Tree,” its pop a-side.

The group released a second 45 (“The First Time b/w “She’s Gone”), also on the Prism label, but these sides again bore no resemblance to the madness of this selection.

Thanks goes to Buckeye Beat for much of the information.

Posted in Garage Bands, Psychedelic/Pop | 6 Comments