The Crash-Course Project Index

Finding Your Feet, a comedy featuring Dolores Umbridge, apparently...

Welcome to this library of…posts about popular music. Unfortunately, I’ll have to start this with an explanation.

At the time I’m posting this little (for now) index, I’ve written a total of 57 posts for this site. 20 of those were devoted to the One Hit No More Project (and here’s the library for that one, which will grow just like this one), which leaves 37 posts about…other things. I changed both topics and formats between those posts, covering just one band/artist here, and building a post a round a playlist with multiple artists there. Call it a long process of finding my feet – which I think I have going into 2020 (also, I make regular claims to have found my feet, but they keep going missing all the same).

In order to lend both this library and posts I intend to write in the future some thematic coherence, I’ve decided to limit this index to posts in which I focused on one band/artist. (And, in accordance with future plans, I will create a separate index for those playlist posts.) About those posts…

While I cover a decent variety of bands/artists, the majority of them come from “indie ______” genres – e.g., “indie rock,” “indie hip hop,” and “indie pop,” with various sub-genres in between. Those will be the same kinds of artists I look into going forward too. At any rate, links to all the posts of this sort that I’ve written so far are linked to down below. As I write more posts going forward, I’ll add them to this post with semi-regularity to keep this library current.

Finally, you’ll see a bunch of different titles below, as well as a discontinued series or two. Going forward, I’ve decided to continue this under the “Crash Course” series, so the numbers will count up from there (and I dropped the hyphen in “Crash-Course”). That’s all, lots to read below - and listen to. Each post includes a short-ish history of the relevant band/artist, as well as links to a bunch of their music. God bless, Youtube, right?

The One Hit No More Project Library, Vol. 1 - 1958 to 1979

Welcome to the permanent standing, semi-regularly updated index for the One Hit No More Project. To give a little background on it, the project is dedicated to learning a little history about all the bands and artists made famous by one “hit” on the pop music charts – e.g., the Billboard Top 100. The idea is to see what else each of them did with the rest of their lives and/or careers.

For what it’s worth, surprises haven’t been hard to come by because, generally, it takes more than a little ego and eccentricity to become famous.

The first artist in the series had his hit in 1958, and the years and artists will move ever closer to the present the further down the list this goes. Each post includes a short-ish history of the band/artist – and I try to give visitors more than they can get out of a Wikipedia entry – as well as links to a lot of more of each band’s/artist’s music. Speaking of Wikipedia, I used their list of one-hit U.S. wonders for inspiration and as source material, skipping anyone who doesn’t cough up enough information.

I’ll update this index as I write the posts; hopefully the titles will get better as I improve. [Ed. - They did not, so where I didn't include the name of each artist's hit in the title, I added it in a parenthetical at the end.] UPDATE: In the process of rearranging the numbering/order on all these posts, but all the links below are live.

No. 1: The Short Flight of the The Crows, aka, "Gee" (1953)
 

No. 2: The Penguins Dancing with an Earth Angel (1954)

 

No. 3: The Chords (Literally) Go "Sh-Boom" (1954)

 

No. 4: "Be-Bop-a-Lula," aka, Gene Vincent's Happiest Moment (1955)

 

No. 1: Bobby Day, “Rockin’ Robin” & A Dabble in Doo Wop (1958)

No. 2: The Monotones Squeezed All They Could Out of “The Book of Love” (1958)

No. 3: Frankie Ford & His “Sea Cruise” to a Hall of Fame (1959)

No. 4: When Bruce Chanel (and Delbert McClinton) Shouted “Hey! Baby” (1961)

One Hit No More, No. 20: Syndicate of Sound, "Little Girl," and Unconscious Acts of Mild Suffocation

Classic promo photo, MFs.

The Hit
It took all of six seconds for me to recognize the riff on Syndicate of Sound’s 1966 single, “Little Girl.” The Divinyls, where I first heard it, played it rawer and flipped the object’s gender, but it’s a fairly simple string of notes and, in the Syndicate of Sound’s original take, it has a playful tingle to it that pairs nicely with lyrical phrasing that skips past even a hint of heartbreak. Don’t let that fool you, though, because it’s definitely a victory dance; in other words, the narrator does care. For what it’s worth, Syndicate of Sound heard and liked most of the covers they’ve heard of it:

“Yes, we have heard them all — even a live bootleg of The Knack doing ‘Little Girl.’ I like them all, especially when an artist puts their stamp on the song like the Divinyls.”

And, no, I can’t find that live bootleg…

The Rest of the Story
Syndicate of Sound formed in San Jose, circa 1964, when Don Baskin (vox/guitar) and Bob Gonzalez (bass) ditched Lenny Lee and the Nightmen and joined up with members of a band called The Pharaohs, John Sharkey (keys), Larry Ray (lead guitar) and John Duckworth (drums). Like a lot of bands of their day, they drew inspiration from the British invasion, but also, to "a fast-driving sound that was beginning in LA." Their big break came when they won (again) a local battle of the bands and a recording deal with Del-Fi Records. That didn’t take them any further than a single no one cared about called “Prepare for Love,” unfortunately, but the band kept plugging and playing until they came up with “Little Girl.” That said, by the recollection of Don Baskin (who, per the search algorithms, did a lot of the talking for the band before his very recent death):

“We couldn't get ‘Little Girl’ played anywhere. No one wanted it. Everyone turned down ‘Little Girl.’ So, we decided with our producer's label, Hush, which was a rhythm and blues label out of Richmond, California, the Oakland-Richmond area. Our producer's parents had owned that label. He decided, ‘let's put it out locally and see how it does,’ and we sold 5,000 copies in the first week.”

And, when Syndicate of Sound took off, they launched. Also, from here the story turns to tales of the best and worst in music business management. On the good side, their producer at Hush Records, Garrie (sp?) Thompson, understood that he didn’t have the resources to manage promotion of “Little Girl,” never mind what Syndicate of Sound became once it got loose in the world. To stick with that glorious, contemporary present, having a major single in their collective back pockets (#8 on the Billboard Hot 100, #5 on the Cashbox 100) punched Syndicate of Sound’s ticket to play with some of the biggest bands of the era. The honor roll:

One Hit No More, No. 19: The Capitols, "Cool Jerk," and Some Blunt Realities

The inevitable end-result of dance moves as a concept.

The Hit

A naked bass line gets “Cool Jerk” started, and the instruments come in one by one as if designed to get the next part of your body moving. It’s a good tune with a better groove – it comes from Motown - the perfect one-off summer single in some ways. Like, uh, more than one song from that era, The Capitols wrote their hit in 1966 hoping to grab the coat-tails of a popular dance of the day, “The Jerk” (which (probably) looked like so). Where does the “cool” come in? A Detroit-area spin on the move inspired the name, but everyone involved didn’t want to risk getting the single pinned under a censor’s stamp by naming it “Pimp Jerk.” Because I’ve got space to fill, enjoy some potential apocrypha on where the “pimp jerk” came from:

“The story goes that there were neighborhood pimps who were too cool to dance the jerk like everybody else at the clubs, so the joke was that they did a pimp jerk.”

The Rest of the Story

The only people the Internet forgets are the ones that too many people forgot before the Internet existed. To rephrase the issue, you can’t get interviewed in the Internet age if you died before the Internet. Unfortunately, two-thirds of The Capitols died before even dial-up: Richard Mitchell (back-up vocals/keyboards; born Richard McDougall) died of “unknown causes” back in ’84, and Samuel George (vox/drums) died in 1981 from getting stabbed in a “domestic dispute” The band’s third member, Don Storball (back up vocals/guitar; born Don Norman), is alive (at least the last time a Wikipedia editor checked in), well(?), and working for the Highland Park, MI police department. He seems the likeliest subject for an interview, too, given that he wrote not just “Cool Jerk,” but also the band’s first swing at fame three years earlier with “Dog and Cat” (which didn’t take because something about “juvenile lyrics,” about which...not inaccurate).

The band had actually broken up the time Storball wrote “Cool Jerk,” but they decided they had something after they worked it up. The American music market agreed, the single took off, and industry people rushed to cash in by recording not one, but two albums in ’66 alone: Dance the Cool Jerk and We Got a Thing That's in The Groove. I can fill in the “what happened next” with in a phrase, and one that’s worth isolating:

“...both [albums] featuring mostly covers of popular Motown and soul songs.”

One Hit No More, No. 18: The Music Machine's Short, Dramatic Spin with "Talk Talk"

Suits. Always the problem, amirite?

The Hit
1966’s “Talk Talk,” a hard-rock, garage-buzz tune, or, as Rolling Stone put it, “hog-snort guitar distortion, machine-gun drumming and growling paranoid despair, shaved and hardened with geometric precision.” Built around a good driving beat and lyrics of self-and-others loathing, it picked up the “proto-punk” label once punk became a thing.

For what it’s worth, that proved kind of a buzz-kill for me. Because I’ve heard both sounds so many times, it registers less as “punk” than it does mid-60s garage-bleeding-to-psychedelic – i.e., exactly what it is. I also know that the first “garage” tunes came even earlier, and even the band’s founder/Svengali, Sean Bonniwelll, seemed luke-warm on the punk association:

“Although Bonniwell did not regard himself as ‘the grandfather of punk,’ he recognized that others did.”

To knock the clutter off all the above, if you like mid-60s garage, you will like this song. And you will probably get the case for “proto-punk.” Insofar as that word has any meaning. Hold that thought.

The Rest of the Story
I’ve spent a week listening to The Music Machine, and I’ve only understood the whys and hows of their sound since last Saturday, and the “punk” thing doesn’t really come through in their sound. Fortunately, it took more diving than stretching to find a phrasing that makes the punk label work. This sums up the spirit of the project nicely:

“This wouldn't allow me to express myself in terms of arrangements and approaches, although some of the music, you can hear in the latter part of the third album for RCA, you can hear some of my radical influence in the arrangements, especially in the last album.”

Bonniwell strove to find new possibilities in rock and/or popular music (and was the mid-60s the peak blurring of those genres?), whether with the arrangements or on the production side (“The Raggamuffins purchased hardware for a homemade fuzz-tone switch. From the onset Bonniwell ensured the group resonated like no other by instructing his bandmates to lower their instruments from the standard E note to D-flat.”). He was also a relentless perfectionist, (by his own account) driving willing and talented musicians to keep hold of hard rock in a world turning toward softer sounds. (That’s right, Bonniwell thought The Beatles were soft (but also talented, but also soft).) He really wanted to create a new sound – and, to a very real extent he did. His beginnings, however, were in folk.

Crash Course, No. 16: Ween, Triumph, Breakdown, and a Tenuous Aftermath

Weird, sure, but so much more. Goddamn heroes.

“I can only speak for myself, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as Aaron and I are both alive on this planet, Ween is still together. We’ve never broken up. The idea of quitting is just laughable. This isn’t something you can quit. This is a life sentence.”
- Dean Ween, aka, Mickey Melchiondo

“The Caesar demo release was the straw that broke the camels back. Nobody asked Gener before releasing...Deaner broke the golden rule. the Boognish wept that day.”
- Gene Ween, aka, Aaron Freeman

Whatever meaningful conscious knowledge I’ve ever had of Ween started when I looked into FREEMAN, Aaron Freeman’s post-Ween, post-sobriety solo project for an earlier, now-deleted site, so that’s where I started. (And, for the record, “the Caesar demo” was a collection of unreleased demos recorded while they were working on Quebec, circa 2001-2003.) While I’d had Chocolate & Cheese and Paintin’ the Town Brown for a decade or so, I knew only the tiniest part of dick about Ween – which, also for the record, was inspired by a combination of the words “wuss” and “penis.” [Ed. – per new editorial policy, all sources for this post will be linked to at the end. Just…feels better that way.]

Ween’s 2012 break was both rough and a long-time coming, according to Freeman, and both he and Melchiondo processed it differently – the former as a matter of survival, the latter as a blow. Melchiondo kept going and in a similar vein: he revived his existing side project, Moistboyz, and keeps plugging away with the Dean Ween Group. The latter (and maybe the former) still played regularly at the same venue that hosted Ween’s earliest shows – John & Peter’s in their hometown, New Hope, PA (right on the Jersey border!) – as of 2018. Melchiondo does not appear to be sober, and he still plays with a lot of guys from the Ween days: e.g., Claude Colman, Jr. (drummer, third member of Ween), Dave Dreiwitz (bass) and Glenn McClellan (keys, both from Ween’s second iteration). He built his own studio and he still makes himself available to all kinds of media (including one interview with Noisey’s Guitar Moves series that I decided to drag out of the Sources because, on it, Melchiondo talked about Ween’s (and his) signature sound and/or hooks).

One Hit No More, No. 17: The Knickerbockers, "Lies," and Some Basic Honesty

My fantasy of the Red Velvet....

The Hit
1966’s “Lies,” which sounds a lot like The Beatles precisely because The Knickerbockers lifted the guitar, chord progressions and all, on one of their songs and dropped the word “Lies” after it. They are not remotely shy about copping to it either.

The Rest of the Story
The band’s core came together in the early-1960s around two brothers, Beau and John Charles (born Robert and John Carlos Cecchino), in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a town north and west of Manhattan. Buddy Randall (born William Crandall) added a third member and a saxophone to Beau’s guitar and John’s bass when he came over from another band, The Royal Teens (famous for “Short Shorts"). Their drummer, Jimmy Walker, found them performing at an outdoor Memorial Day event (for a fire department, maybe, or they just hijacked a parking lot), and he decided he’d make a good fit as their drummer. When the rest of the band auditioned him, his drumming impressed them less (or Beau Charles’ mom) than his singing voice (“Hire that guy,” she said, “he does sound good.”). Even though Walker came over from another band called The Castle Kings – who had done recordings with Ahmet Ertegun and (holy shit) Phil Spector that went nowhere – he wasn’t the polished product. In interviews, he recalls taking pointers from Randall and others on the art of drumming.

The Knickerbocker’s big break came when the newly-minted East-coast rep for Challenge/Four Star Records, Jerry Fuller, spotted them at the University Swing Palace in Albany, New York. While they’d started with early rock ‘n’ roll – e.g., Elvis, Sam Perkins, and so on – The Knickerbockers learned Meet The Beatles start to finish during that residency and developed that into a repertoire. They knew their way around their instruments well enough to learn just about any song, and they built their success around mimicking. According to Walker (the living member with the greatest ongoing media availability), Fuller bought in when they played a song he suggested, but wasn't even sure they knew (Johnny Mathis’ “Misty”) with musicians’ flair. Fuller signed the band, produced “Lies,” a song the band had written during that upstate residency, as well as a couple near-misses (e.g., “One Track Mind” instead of their preferred “Just One Girl”) and moved The Knickerbockers to Los Angeles. Their story picks up here.

With a hit single under their belts, The Knickerbockers picked up steady gigs at a venue called the Red Velvet, an off-the-radar spot where actors and musicians gathered after time on the set of Shindig, and they spent just shy of a year as regulars on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is. (A place called The Pancake House is involved as well, but mostly as another celebrity and semi-celebrity hang-out.) They also went on a couple of the Dick Clark package tours that typified the early(-ish) rock era, something they loved and hated in equal parts. But the meat of the stories about The Knickerbockers happened in LA, where they spent years mimicking popular bands, sometimes with members of those bands in the audience, much like they’d done with The Beatles. They impressed some of your harder to impress artists too:

Crash Course, No. 15: Battle of the Bands, Dad Rock Edition

In which, clouds, carpets and lazy dogs are "arena rock."

A couple weeks ago (now pushing three weeks), I challenged myself to choose the catalog of one band from my childhood to take with me to a desert island as the only music I would hear for the rest of my life. Here are the bands in play: Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Foreigner. Now, for a little framing.

First, why did I choose those bands? Mostly, they were what passed for cool in the American Midwest circa 1980. I’ve since discovered that they passed for cool just about everywhere: even back then and before I had a working understanding of what “big” meant, I grasped that Journey, at least, was massive. Musically, they shaped my earlier understanding of what “rock ‘n’ roll” sounded like and, to some extent, what rock stars looked like. With that, we reach a pivot.

Even though I called three of these bands my personal favorite at some point in my confused little life (for the record, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and, yes, Styx; Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” sunk a pretty deep hook too), whatever mystique stood between me and at least four of those bands evaporated as I got older and as those bands kept putting out new albums and videos. For instance, some latent instinct told me that 3/5’s of Styx looked anything but “cool” in the video for “Too Much Time on My Hands” (e.g., white pant-suit for James J. Y. Young, the purser’s uniform for drummer John Panozzo, and…just Dennis DeYoung), while Foreigner always came off as middle-aged men singing music suited for guys in their late teens, and REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin knows better than anyone that he doesn’t remotely fit the mold of a rock ‘n’ roll front-man. Between those details and a pile up of fresh inputs – e.g., the immediately mockable “Mr. Roboto,” REO Speedwagon’s pun-infused video for “One Lonely Night,” or even Foreigner’s band-breaking mega-hit, “I Want to Know What Love Is” – it became clearer with each passing year that these were popular bands, and on the cutting edge of absolutely nothing. Everyone involved had real talent, but what they put out stopped meaning anything to me by 1982. (Boston gets a pass in all this because, if I remember right, I had no sense of what they looked like – and for good reason as it turns out.)

Fast forward to today – or, more accurately, to a couple months ago – the fact that I didn’t know anything about all those bands started nagging at me. Defining as all these bands were to their era – i.e., disco, punk, funk, progressive rock, even late-early stage heavy metal all existed or matured at the same time - they occupied a fucking weird space of, for lack of a better word, normal. They were rock music for the straight world…and I still somehow worried that I missed something with one or two of them. So, after starting with a far larger sample (e.g., the first pass included Loverboy, Toto, and about a dozen others), I reduced the sample size to those five bands and started listening – and reading.

My light research into all five bands (seriously, it’s just Wikipedia entries and (massive hat-tip to @morrisonicpod for reminding me they existed!) the Behind the Music features on each) turned up all kinds of surprises. The biggest of those came from how often the same kind of storylines showed up in the different bands – for instance, how many of them started without their most famous and/or revered band members, the instability of their line-ups (and, sometimes, their styles), and how much ego and brand preservation drove that instability. That said, and obviously, no band’s story runs parallel to another’s: think of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram more than anything else, and with a big circle in the middle that reads “arena rock.”

I’ve already written about all five bands in separate posts, and links to those are below. I posted them according to how far or close each band got to coming with me to that desert island, from the last band I’d take to the first one. With that, here are the results and links to each of the earlier posts:

Foreigner, aka, Mick Jones’ Control Issues

Boston, The One-Man Act

Styx, I, Too, Blame Dennis DeYoung

Journey, aka, the Panic Attacks of Steve Perry

REO Speedwagon, Champaign, IL’s Party Boy(s)

One final note: further/continued listening and attempting to create a “Dad Rock Top 20” revealed that Styx belongs in last place. As it turns out, I’m partial to a couple Foreigner ballads, while even the stuff I used to like about Styx rubs me the wrong way.

Dad Rock Primary, No. 1: Yes, REO Speedwagon, The Champagne of Champaign, IL

Eh, close enough.

The Biggest Surprise: That the band that made this video/song spent a decade partying itself into rehab (with one tragic exception).
The Most Famous Line-Up: Too many to count, honestly, but here's the short list: Neal Doughty (piano/keys); Alan Gratzer (drums); Kevin Cronin (vox/rhythm guitar); Gary Richrath (lead guitar); Bruce Hall (bass/backing vocals).

What You Need to Know
It all started in the electrical engineering program at the University of Illinois, when Doughty met Gratzer and spent an afternoon jamming in their dorm basement. That happened in 1966; a decade-plus would pass before the REO Speedwagon managed a stable line-up. For example, Cronin - that's the lead singer you're picturing with them now, yes  - played on their second album, R.E.O. T.W.O., but left during production of the third over proverbial creative differences. He wouldn’t return for three albums and four years, and a guy named Greg X. Volz still had to pass on the job before he got it (he decided to stick with Jesus). (Alternately, most band members agreed an inevitable coming-to-senses made it happen on Behind the Music.) Cronin was actually the band’s second vocalist: a guy named Terry Luttrell (later in Starcastle) handled vocals on REO’s very different sounding debut album, while another singer, Michael Bryan Murphy, sang on the three very different albums in between Cronin’s first and second stints with the band (well, I've only heard the one, honestly). Members would come in and out of the line-up at just about every instrument until 1977, with one key exception - Richrath drove 100 miles from Peoria determined to join the band (“I’m going to be a part of that band whether they like it or not”). He came on board as lead guitarist in 1970 and, despite the churn, the band built a strong regional following by playing – and partying - like a rock band. With that reputation and a stable line-up, the band talked Epic Records into a live album, Live: You Get What You Play For (1977; I still haven’t listened to it). They moved to LA and went national, but the departure of one of the members they left in the Midwest (Gregg Philbin, who was replaced by Hall), foreshadowed a couple trends:

“Depending upon which band member is expressing an opinion, it was either because Philbin was disenchanted with the new corporate-structure REO where Cronin and Richrath got bigger slices of the pie instead of the equal credit they once shared as a ‘garage band,’ or he was asked to leave over his lifestyle issues affecting the music quality.”

Dad Rock Primary, No. 2: Journey, aka, The Panic Attacks of Steve Perry

Surely, someone told them....

The Biggest Surprise: Not that everything passed though Steve Perry, but the way it did.
The Most Famous Line-Up: Neal Schon (guitar); Ross Valory (bass); Steve Perry (vox); Gregg Rolie (replaced by Jonathan Cain and a different keyboard); Aynsley Dunbar (drums; replaced by Steve Smith in 1978)

What You Need to Know
“We’re gonna write about people’s lives, about what’s on their mind. ‘Just a small-town girl'…”
- Jonathan Cain

According to the Journey Behind the Music, a succession of tragedies propelled Steve Perry’s career in music, and he’d have a couple in Journey’s third act (against convention, it’s a four-act play). The first version of the band formed in San Francisco when former members of Santana – a ridiculously young Schon and Rolie – teamed up with former members of Frumious Bandersnatch – Valory and (very briefly) George Ticknor to form, first the Golden Gate Rhythm Section, then Journey. Three albums came out of (most of) that line-up – an eponymous debut in ’75, Look Into the Future in ’76, and Next in ’77. They played a jam-heavy sound back then and swapped singing duties, looking for the right mix. After laying three eggs, the band’s label more or less ordered the band to hire a lead singer, but that search also rescued Perry from mourning the death of someone from his previous band and his movie-perfect then-career of repairing chicken coops. Thrown together in a Denver hotel shortly after Perry came on, he and Schon wrote the first song for Journey’s first step to the main stage, 1978’s Infinity, “Patiently,” in just a few minutes. (“Wheel in the Sky” came from the same album.)

When Rolie took off after Departure (he was just tired of the life), Perry formed a writing partnership with his replacement, Cain, who came over from The Babys at Rolie’s suggestion. Those two repeated the trick from the Denver hotel room, only with a better (or more commercial) song: “Open Arms.” Despite critics’ and Schon’s cool reaction (and general antics around it), the single was massive, Escape was massive, and Journey was “Atari-designed-a-video-game-for-them” big. Because he seemed to be the nerve center for making it all happen, the rest of the band generally let Perry take over the band’s direction (to paraphrase Schon, “I took my hands off the wheel”) – an arrangement that could only last as long as he did. Fame started eating at him, and Perry retreated from the rest of the band. What started with traveling separately with then-girlfriend, Sherrie Swafford (yes, “Oh, Sherrie,” who still left him in the end) ended with him throwing Valory and Smith out of the band (a decision he seems to regret). After a crisis that involved his mother’s death, Perry wound up bolting (I believe) in the middle of the tour supporting Raised on Radio…and that was it…

…until Perry called up the rest of the band for a reunion in 1996. They recorded an album called Trial by Fire, and were all set to tour it…only to have a degenerative bone disease hit Perry while hiking in Hawaii preparing for the same tour. When he couldn’t go, the rest of the band decided to go without him. The feelings about all that remain incredibly complicated…the Behind the Music on that angel is pretty damn incredible.

My Favorite Anecdote
Pretty much all the stories around “Open Arms,” whether Schon visibly hating on it during recording, or him pissing off Perry by telling him “that song really kicked-ass” after it killed on its live debut. Also, this quote from Schon:

“When we were a jam band, it was mostly guys in the audience, and now our audience is 80% women. Y’know, they loved the ballads. That’s what I noticed the difference when I looked out there. It was very pleasing on the eyes.”

Why They Didn’t Make the Island
A couple Journey songs still actually get a response out of me – “Anyway You Want It,” (Departure, 1980) “Stone in Love,” (Escape, 1981) maybe something that sounds like “Lights”(Infinity, 1978) – and I think of all of those as the best version of Journey with Steve Perry (also, could be I'm just a Rolie stan). I’d never put any of those songs on a playlist, not because they’re awful, but because Journey has this knack for bubbling up in the zeitgeist now and then that has always felt misplaced to me. That said, I did have some fun knocking around their pre-Perry catalog, where I found a song I genuinely like (“Hustler”) and a song that answered the question, “why did the label want a singer?” (“She Makes Me (Feel Alright)”). So, bottom line, “peak-Journey” is played out for the rest of my lifetime, and the early stuff...well, it's missing something.

Other Featured Songs: I dedicated 1/3 of this playlist to giving people a taste of pre-Perry Journey, which got “It’s All Too Much” from Look Into the Future and (for me) the more mature, yet somehow not yet tied together, “Spaceman” and “People” from Next. With the Perry era material, I included hits from a couple yards off the beaten path – “Anytime” and “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” (because I learned the story behind it) – and then a handful from the band’s hey-day to show a little of what else they did: “Walks Like a Lady” (lounge meets honky-tonk?), “Escape” (actual rocker, one for Neil) and “Lay It Down” (a more melodic rocker). Finally, there’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” because a guy I chat with likes it and that makes me pull for it. One of the worst videos every made, btw, but what the hell?
Most Journey Song: "Open Arms,” both for its popularity and the way it demonstrated the hierarchy of the band. On a personal note, if you blurted out, "name a Journey song!" I'd answer with "Wheel in the Sky," because I was mesmerized by Neal Schon's afro in that video for a whole damn year.

Sources
Wikipedia

Behind the Music

Dad Rock Primary, No. 3: Styx, I, Too, Blame Dennis DeYoung

It was a bad idea.

The Biggest Surprise: Styx was more business than band. According to Tommy Shaw, they rarely hung out.
The Most Famous Line-Up: Dennis DeYoung (keyboards/vox), James J. Y. Young (lead guitar), Tommy Shaw (more guitar), Chuck Panozzo (bass), and John Panozzo (drums)

What You Need to Know
Between 1972 and 1974, Styx put out four albums – Styx, Styx II, The Serpent Is Rising, and Man of Miracles (full disclosure, I skipped the last two) – none of which found traction, but Styx II is the album to keep the eye on. As it happened, Styx had secret fans at WLS, a Chicago radio station with the power to make things happen, and, two years after Styx II came out, a DJ named Jeff Davis gave the album the first boost it over had by playing DeYoung’s ode to his wife/childhood sweetheart, “Lady,” at the same time every day. That singular decision revived interest in Styx (the band) and Styx II (the album), and that started them on the path to stardom. “Lady” also had the effect of convincing DeYoung that he had the magic touch. As he tellingly put it in Behind the Music:

“I always described Styx as a democracy, of which I was the president. But there was always the houses of Congress to deal with.”

With the band on the edge of fame, their label, A&M Records, made said “Congress” bigger by pushing for a more commercial sound and/or a new guitarist. Styx’s tour manager, Jim Vose, pointed them to Tommy Shaw, a songwriter in his own right, a choice that both added new dimensions to the band’s sound and sowed the seeds of its breakup. Styx didn’t get far on Equinox (1975, “Lorelei” and “Madame Suite Blue”), but the band (and Shaw) pulled all the elements together for Grand Illusion (1977, “Come Sail Away” and “Fooling Yourself (Angry Young Man),” by DeYoung and Shaw, respectively), while it looks like DeYoung threw Shaw the B-side of 1978’s Pieces of Eight with “Renegade” and “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights).” This started a record run of four straight multiple-platinum albums that carried through, significantly, to Paradise Theater (1981) and the crazy stack of hits the (again) concept album lined up (“Too Much Time on My Hands,” “Rockin’ the Paradise” and “The Best of Times”).

Dad Rock Primary, No. 4: Boston, A Prolific, Constipated One-Man Act

You see success, I see excess, so....

The Biggest Surprise: The story behind the “Mary Ann” on “More Than a Feeling,” or the fact that every person in that video is playing a lie....
The Most Famous Line-Up: Tom Scholz on everything (and all production), but also Brad Delp (vox/guitar), Barry Goudreau (guitar), and, later, Sib Hashian (drums), and Fran Sheehan (bass).

What You Need to Know
“I was just writing the kind of music I wanted to hear.”

Tom Scholz developed the material that became Boston’s first album in his basement, with him playing, recording, and crucially manipulating the production to get the sound he was after. He financed the whole thing through a day-job with Polaroid and, no matter how many record executives tried to flush Scholz out of the various basements he created, he never produced a Boston album anywhere outside the basement studios he built for himself wherever he settled down. And that’s the real point of interest in all this: Scholz has as many technical achievements as he has musical ones. When he couldn’t figure out how to get a sound out of the equipment he had, he made new equipment – all of them analog, notably, a point of pride he advertised on some Boston albums. And he really did some incredible stuff with this – specifically, the guitar sound, which, one person interviewed in that “Behind the Music” described as “crunchy guitar that sounded almost three-dimensional.” By my (untrained) ear, he did the same thing with Delp’s vocals – i.e., adding layers to them to make his voice sound like a chorus. When Scholz needed a physical band to record final demos or for the “showcase” he arranged to secure a recording contract to put out six albums in 10 years, he called in connections he made playing in bands during college (e.g., Freehold and Mother’s Milk). Scholz creative process/perfectionism made that rate of production laughably unrealistic - he never got over the b-side of Boston’s rushed (for him) second album, Don’t Look Back (1978) - and a major lawsuit inevitably followed when he insisted on taking his own damn time for a third album. That album, Third Stage, finally came out in 1986 and produced one monster hit (“Amanda”), but Boston’s history basically dries up there (and gets a little weird; see the final minutes of that “Behind the Music” linked to below).

Because Boston is based on Scholz’s singular vision, it’s probably worth taking a little time on Scholz’ influences. He grew up listening to and (I think) playing classic music. According to the “BtM” documentary, The Kinks were the first rock band he really liked – and he did branch out from there – but, if two things stand out about Boston musically, it’s the intricate structure of the songs and, most of all the production. The success of the band’s first, best-known album (1976, “Foreplay/Long Time,” “Peace of Mind,” and “More Than a Feeling*”) still feels like the creative peak. Full disclosure: I barely looked into either Third Stage, never mind 1994’s Walk On, and on the grounds that Boston’s time had passed.

My Favorite Anecdote
As Scholz bravely confessed, the inspiration for “Mary Ann” came from an older cousin Scholz had a crush on when he was 8 or 9 years old. Given the timing, I’m willing to give him a pass.

Why They Didn’t Make the Island
I struggle with Boston because too much of Scholz’ music sounds the same - something that could come from my own shitty ear just as much as repetition. I chose the one track I did from Third Stage – “We’re Ready” – precisely for its slight tonal differences with Boston’s earlier music, whether reining in the trebles or leaving a little more dead-air in the production. That gets at another fun detail: the song “Let Me Take You Home Tonight,” is a rare example of song that didn’t come from Scholz; that more roots-based tune came from Delp, and it’s enough to make you wonder what a different balance would have sounded like

Other Featured Songs: I also added "Don't Look Back" (LIVE!) but only as an act of hostility; that sounds so, so very Boston; the same goes for another successful single from the same album, "A Man I'll Never Be." It's the same gimmicks, the same vague uplift that defines some part of arena rock. That’s not the kind of thing one takes to a desert island, because until the end of your life? Seriously?
Most Boston Song: “More Than a Feeling,” and sorry for being boring.

Sources
Wikipedia

Behind the Music (actually a Japanese/reverential documentary on Boston).

The Dad Rock Primary, No. 5: Foreigner, aka, Mick Jones' Control Issues

He's not wrong....

[Ed. Links to all sources besides the songs are at the bottom of the post.]

The Biggest Surprise: The extent to which the band operated like Leninist Russia.
The Most Famous Line-Up: Jones (guitar) Lou Gramm (vocals), Al Greenwood (keys), Ed Gagliardi (bass), Dennis Elliott (drums), and Ian McDonald (not clear, but I think guitar with them).

What You Need to Know
Foreigner’s chose their name deliberately, or at least after rejecting “Trigger.” Because the original membership split evenly at the time between Yanks and Brits, at least half the band would be foreign no matter where they played, or that was the joke. In his defense, Jones did start the band: “stranded” in New York and with his current band imploded, he assembled a new band one man/instrument at a time with encouragement from a friend named Bud Prager. The search for a lead singer became the final, fateful piece. Auditioning 40-50 singers finally knocked loose a memory of Gramm, an American from upstate New York he saw perform earlier with a band called Black Sheep. Gramm was “cleaning a public safety building from seven at night till about 11:30” when Jones came calling, but they hired him almost as soon as he stepped out of the booth. Once they launched – which would take some time and something like Prager’s life savings – they could neither stop churning out hits – e.g., “It Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold As Ice” from their 1977 eponymous debut and the title track and “Hot Blooded” from 1978’s Double Vision - nor hold the band together. Most of the band’s musical direction came from Gramm and Jones (though McDonald insists he got his hands in there as well), but Jones seized ownership of creative control early by way of a succession of purges – e.g., Gagliardi before Double Vision, then teaming up with Gramm to oust founding members (Greenwood and McDonald) on the way to making the band a four-piece and recording 4 (a name with multiple, fairly dull connotations), the band’s biggest album, in 1981 (ft. “Juke Box Hero,” “Urgent,” and  “Waiting for a Girl Like You”).

Even Gramm eventually strained against the short leash Jones kept on the band. Feeling stifled (paraphrase, “I was tired of singing someone else’s songs”), he recorded a solo album (with the single, “Midnight Blue”), which, no shock, Jones resented for sounding too much like Foreigner. According to Behind the Music’s account, the lead single for 1984’s Agent Provocateur, “I Want to Know What Love Is,” caused the final break…but it takes a strained narrative to hold that together – specifically, that the “hard-rocking” Foreigner recoiled at the idea of attaching their name to a ballad. I’m trying to square that against the many ballads in Foreigner’s oeuvre going back to their debut fucking album with “Woman Oh Woman” and “Fool for You Anyway” (also, what was “Waiting for a Girl Like You” on 4?). After a couple decades, some profound health scares for both Jones and Gramm (and Gramm’s was/is rough, though not as rough as Gagliardi’s actual death), the band still plays, and Jones finally achieved his dream of absolute creative control.

My Favorite Anecdote:
Gramm on the controversial album cover for Head Games (third album, and the least successful from their hey-day; picture above):

“Part of that was because of the cover. The song Head Games was banned by a lot of radio stations after the cover of the album came out. Today, that would not have even been a problem. But in the Bible Belt, the cover of the cute little girl in the boys' bathroom erasing her number off the wall...They didn't see the humor in that. It wasn't supposed to even be sexy. She was sexy....she was cute… She was erasing her phone number off the wall of the boys' bathroom and that's all it was. A big deal was made out of that and it really hurt our sales."

Why They Didn’t Make the Island
With as little disrespect as possible, Foreigner always struck me as the cheesiest band of this bunch - yes, that’s with Styx in the mix. Too many of lyrics are laughable (or cringey AF; see “Love Has Taken Its Toll”), and listening to Gramm stretch bad writing to fit the music doesn’t help. The predictability of the guitar combined with rhythm structures that don’t have any bounce in them probably turn me off more than anything else.
Other Featured Songs: “You’re All I Am” (another ballad; nice one, too) and “Blue Morning, Blue Day,” another song I almost like. I like them best when they play off type. "Break It Up," more or may not have achieved that feat, but it got some props somewhere I read...
Most Foreigner Song: “Hot Blooded,” where they don’t fuck around and nail the hard-rock energy.

Sources
Wikipedia

Behind the Music

One Hit No More, No. 16: The Blues Magoos, "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet"; Call It Bluesedelic

Shit happened, man...

[Ed. Note – In order to avoid warping the narrative to get in links where I want them, all the sources for this post are listed and linked to at the end. Hope it works for you…and me.]

The Hit
A proto-psychedelic rock tune called “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” The Blues Magoos dropped into the Greenwich Village scene in 1966 – the very cusp of what counts as the psychedelic rock era (or enjoy this crappy live version). It opens with a shimmer of electric organ before clearing space for a grooving bass riff that holds the song together. It blew up worldwide – No. 5 on Billboard, and I read loose talk of No. 5 worldwide, but who knows? It’s a fun little tune that just about screams “mid-60s!”

That said, I’m excited about this band/post because, for the first time since I started this project, I finally found a band that might have gotten screwed into being a one hit wonder.

The (Original) Band
Emil “Peppy” Thielheim, aka, Peppy Castro (vox/guitar), Dennis LePore (lead guitar), Ralph Scala (organ/vox), Ron Gilbert (bass), Jon Finnegan (drums).

The Rest of the Story
The Blues Magoos started in Greenwich Village, playing wherever they could, trying to live on $8-10 a night, and crashing at home when they couldn’t earn enough playing shows. They started young too - right out of high school – which made home a live option. According to both Castro and Scala, a band that didn’t write its own songs would die in the Village, something that had the band writing songs at the same time they learned their instruments. All the members had their influences ("it was all Country-Western, Rhythm and Blues and Delta Blues"), but Scala notes that they wrote songs “as the commercial end.” And that will come up later…

From what I gather, “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” was one of The Blues Magoos’ first polished tunes, so they hit the ground running. With Greenwich Village crawling with industry people, all it took was a series of one introduction leads to another moments to land the band to a deal with Mercury Records. They recorded two albums in quick succession – Psychedelic Lollipop in 1966 and Electric Comic Book in 1967 – and that’s where all the stories take off.

One Hit No More, No. 15: The Gentrys, "Keep on Dancing," and One Brilliant Second Act

He wrote songs for the talent on top of this...

The Hit
“Keep on Dancing,” a garage-inspired tune with a “recorded-in-a-box” sound with a notable structure: “The second half of the song, after the false fade, beginning with Wall's drum fill, is the same as the first.” There’s more than one way to get to two minutes fifty…

Inspired by what they’d heard from the UK, The Gentrys wanted to record more songs with that sound. They recorded “Keep on Dancing” for a local label – Youngstown Records, I think – but, sadly, when MGM signed them to sell that hit and whatever came after it, they connected them to the wrong producer. At least that’s how guitarist/lead singer, Larry Strawberry, saw it and that name…a blessing, I tell you.

The Rest of the Story
The Gentrys formed as a group of friends at Memphis, Tennessee’s Treadwell High. To go through the rest of the members, they were: Pat Neal on bass guitar, Larry Butler on keyboards, the drummer Larry Wall (and later Rob Straube), Bobby Fisher on sax and keyboards, Jimmy Johnson on trumpet and, finally, Bruce Bowles and Jimmy Hart as back-up vocals…and hold onto the last name in that list.

They started the band as juniors and, to put some meat on what Strawberry called “our little rise to fame,” they went from playing dances and killing every Battle of the Bands they came across, to getting Youngstown to put out the single “Sometimes,” to steadily touring the mid-South (with chaperones! rock 'n' roll, MFs!), to doing a (possible dodgy) triple on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, to recording “Keep on Dancing,” to playing on shows like Hullabaloo Shindig! and Where the Action Is (i.e., shows featuring rockers for the teenyboppers). MGM called somewhere in there and, next thing you know they’re touring on Dick Clark caravan tours and playing with The Beach Boys (damn!) and Sonny and Cher (huh).

To skip to the end, after doing the math on what Dick Clark paid and seeing the solid support from family members and girlfriends get a little more complicated, the band’s members played out their careers on, as Strawberry named it, “the red-dirt circuit.” They made, like, 1.5 to four times per show doing that than what Dick Clark paid them, but they also lost the national exposure.

Crash Course, No. 14: Parquet Courts, Regular Dudes, Killing It Every Day

Not bad for inspiration....

Personal
Parquet Courts first piqued my interest with “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience” a lively punk number kissed with ska/dub rhythms. That grew into a fixation when the jaunty “Tenderness” rolled around (sorry about the "fan-cam" quality on that video). Both came from the band’s 2018 release Wide Awake!, which didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but does now.

A Little History
“The songs are told from a first-person perspective about experiences we’ve had, what someone feels like when fighting a square job from 9-5, and finding beauty and meaning in the world. It’s really important to all of us, and a lot of people can relate to that.”

I’m about to struggle to write much of interest about the (mostly) New-York-by-way-of Texas Parquet Courts. That has less to do with them not being thoughtful and/or intelligent, than it does with the reality that I’d need another month or so to learn their music well enough to properly comment on what they’re trying to tell the world. They definitely come from the “punk” tradition – a genre labeling almost as useful as “rock” at this point - their lyrics are political, they talk collective action, but, from what I gather, more from a “state of the world/existential” point of view than specific advocacy. They’re not given to grand declarations, at least not in interviews, so that aspect is contained entirely in their music, which’ll take more time to tease out than I’ve given myself for this, and I hate getting over my damn skis, so I’ll leave it there. In some fundamental way, they seem like any other four guys going to a job one day after the other, only they go to a much better job.

Parquet Courts is a four-piece, arranged like so:

“Led by two Texas transplants — Austin Brown, 27, and Andrew Savage, 26 — Parquet Courts’ is rounded out by bassist Sean Yeaton and Savage’s younger brother, Max.”

To fill in the blanks, Max Savage hits the drums (and looks distractingly like Andrew), while both Brown and Andrew Savage manage guitar and vocals and, near as I can tell, do all the songwriting. Based on what I’ve seen A. Savage “leads” the band – i.e., who does all the talking in this 2018 Face Culture interview (Part 1) – but don’t lead singers always do that(?), but I also didn’t catch too many instances of Brown taking a full musical lead outside of “Mardi Gras Beads” (the post-chorus guitar is fantastic; also, about the strike-through, it turns out Brown sings on several of my favorite tracks on Wide Awake!). Still, no one in the band looked or sounded sad or thwarted in any interview I’ve seen, and they’ve been at it as Parquet Courts since 2011, so, till further notice, they look like band who knows what works and feels comfortable doing it. Boring as hell, basically. (In other words, what’s my hook, dammit!)

One Hit No More, No. 14: Jonathan King, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and He Should Have

NOTE: King does not usually look like Mitch McConnell, but...

“I have been studying the music industry for the last three years and it is one big joke. Anyone can make it if they're clever and can fool a few people.”

Back in 1965, a Englishman named Jonathan King wanted to be a pop star very, very badly, so he wrote a song called, “Everyone's Gone to the Moon.” It’s not a great song, one of those popular music hold-outs in the early(ish) age of rock ‘n’ roll that borrowed from it while still sounding like something your local radio station would play after a Petula Clark hit. Whatever I think of that song, Jonathan King understood how pop stardom worked. Maybe not in the most traditional way – and, as it happened, not without prison time(!) – but King gave one hell of a lot more to popular culture than that one cheesy song…

…if nothing else, you can thank him for the “ooga chaka ooga ooga” in his remake of “Hooked on Feeling.” (Even if his version wasn’t the most popular; paging Blue Swede.)

Born to privilege in 1944, King became obsessed with pop stardom around the time he was working on his A levels. He was already performing with a band, The Bumbles, as well as writing and producing for them. That accounted for King’s first crack at fame, a single titled “Gotta Tell” (which I can't find). That flopped, but it only took his third/fourth attempt to write the hit that made him famous. "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" hit No. 4 on the UK charts behind The Beatles’ “Help!” at No. 1 and, to deepen the foreshadowing introduced above (e.g., “prison time(!)”), King played on Jimmy Savile’s Top of the Pops. Wait for it…

The decision to flag “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” as either King’s third or fourth attempt touches on a curious aspect of King’s career. King had persuaded Decca Records to release a 45 based on another song titled “Green Is the Grass”; when they’d asked him for a B-side, he delivered “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which immediately became the A-side. “Green Is the Grass” flopped in the end, but the way King released his next hit – e.g., without his name attached to it; he didn’t even perform it – established a template that he’d return to throughout his career. That single was titled “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous. King continued to release hits under his own name – e.g., “Lazy Bones,” Flirt,” and “Hooked on a Feeling” – but he’d also put out songs under names like The Weathermen (“It’s the Same Old Song” (yes, it's a (bad) cover)), Nemo (“The Sun Has Got His Hat On”), Sakkarin (“Sugar, Sugar”), and St. Cecelia (“Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)”). There was a certain logic to it all:

Crash Course, No. 13: Ezra Furman, You've Already Missed Too Much

Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus?

Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.

As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):

“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”

The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.

OK, on with the rest of it.

Personal

As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.