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| Decided to roll with what might have been... |
The Hit
I’d never heard Frijid Pink’s “House of the Rising Sun” until last week and…it’s fine, a sound spin on what I learned was their particular mash-up of influences. I’ll cover that story below, but think hard rock meets the sounds of Detroit.
I also learned that Frijid Pink recorded that cover as filler for their debut album - i.e., they had some empty space to fill on the LP, so they producer asked them if they had anything else. They’d been working up their take on “House of the Rising Sun” for their live shows, and for exactly the same reason. They knew it, though, and recorded the album version on the first take. Even if it doesn’t top the most popular version* (I assume), it’s a nice serving of fuzzed-up acid-rock typical of the burned-out come-down from the 1960s. And the theme is timeless, obviously…I just struggle to accept someone getting famous on the back of a cover, but accept that’s more personal bias than a judgment of artistry.
(* I’m confident this list isn’t even half-thorough, but it looks like Georgia Bell Turner recorded the first version in 1937 (on bad tech, from the sounds of it), Bob Dylan revived it for his debut, and then The Animals played the version that I think most people know.)
It hit big, rising as high as No. 7 on the Billboard, where it stayed for 13 weeks; it made loud noises in Europe (11 weeks at No. 1 in Germany) and Canada. It gave a gold record to a rock band from Detroit for the first time, thereby (arguably) putting Detroit rock on the map, you’re welcome, KISS. The accidents continued from there, not all of them happy…
The Rest of the Story
It starts with two kids who picked up music early and on their own, drummer Rick Stevers and bassist Tom Harris. By the time they reached high school, circa 1967, they had an actual touring band made up of kids they own and managed by Stevers’ parents, Clyde and Clara. They played as the Detroit Vibrations and mainly as a cover act, if one with ambition: they kept tabs on every song that came out and prided themselves on being the first band to perform it on the Detroit party/lounge/whatever circuit. They rode that into something like a residency at The Chatterbox, their hometown hot-spot in Allen Park, Michigan, by winning one battle of the bands after another.
The major bend in their story arc begins when two local musicians - Gary Ray Thompson, guitar, and Tom Beaudry, aka, Kelly Green - found Clyde Stevers after a Detroit Vibrations show to tell him they could take the band places. When they signed on, all agreed they should rename the act. Clara Stevers got the ball rolling with “frosted pink,” a name inspired the pink color that her son and then-guitarist Dan Yehlely* painted in their hair before a show. (*The draft came for Yehlely, who was killed in an ambush two weeks into his tour.) As the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends retrospective has it, the boys rejected that name is too girly, but they felt better about “frigid pink,” a name that came to Judy Harris while staring at a Frigidaire refrigerator. They embraced it once Clyde Stevers suggested spelling the first part “frijid” “because it was both different and looked German.” Yes, the band-parents named them…
The shift made sense on a deeper level: with Thompson and Green on board, Frijid Pink decided to start playing mostly original music. More than that, they started playing venues, teen and otherwise, all over the Detroit and the Upper Midwest; Stevers’ and Harris’ roots in R&B covers opened space for them to step in as a back-up band for bands Motown like The Four Tops, The Parliaments, The Contours and The Falcons. They became regulars on the Detroit scene, even put together an album’s worth of material at a place in Detroit called Pioneer Studios. They recorded their “House of the Rising Sun” on that and it eventually landed on the desk of the President of London Records, Walt McGuire. And that changed everything…
It yanked them out of a growing Detroit music scene, for one:
“Because their bookings were done by Willard Alexander out of Chicago, they were seldom included in the package shows in Michigan on which bands like SRC, Frost, MC5, the Bob Seger System, the Amboy Dukes, and the Stooges would all play the same venues, booked by local promoters like Brass Ring or Mike Quatro.”
They’d shared bills with all those artists, but, once they got away from their Detroit base, the locals felt forgotten and turned on them. On the other hand, in a 40th Anniversary retrospective posted in Review Magazine, Stevers claimed the band made “Paul Revere & the Raiders, Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield” money in their best years - and it wasn't such an odd choice. He elaborates in the same article:
“The local fan base thought they were stuck up. Stevers felt he was between a rock and a hard place. ‘The locals did not know how hard it was for us because we weren’t hanging out and partying with them. They didn’t know that instead of playing for 200 fans in a club. We were out playing for the President of the United States, the Montreal Forum and other places with big crowds.’”
Away from the stage, the insidious side of success wormed its way in. First, their follow-up album, Defrosted, didn’t get the traction their eponymous debut did. Next, Stevers’ (and maybe Harris) floated and recorded a song titled, “Music for the People,” a gospel-infused anthem that took a sharp turn…in some direction from what Frijid Pink had done to that point (also, hold that thought). Quietly appalled at the turn, Thompson and Green slipped away ahead of a show in St. Louis, hitched a bus to Detroit, then a flight to New York, where they confronted Walt McGuire, informed him that they were Frijid Pink, and demanded a new bassist and drummer. The coup didn’t come off in the end, but it did finish the unraveling.
A couple things followed from that. First, Frijid Pink released one album without Thompson and Green and…1) it is different, and 2) it tracks closer to “Music for the People.” For what it’s worth, Julien Cope gushes over the resulting album, Earth Omen, calling it, “a magnificent opus, fully heavy progressive rock of the highest caliber... In short, one of the most polished rock albums of 1972-73, and definitely one of the most overlooked.” It also seems like Green and Thompson provided the material/edge that made Frijid Pink…y’know, Frijid Pink. The reason why comes up when you compare what the band sounded like on various songs from their debut album - e.g., “Tell Me Why,” “Crying Shame,” and “Drivin’ Blues” (also, here’s a link to that full album) - against the sound on the remastered versions on 2011’s Frijid Pink Frijid Pink Frijid Pink. Listen to those and you see how they shared a bill with MC5 and The Stooges...
If you boil the question down to what worked for Frijid Pink as a band - e.g., “House of the Rising Sun” - arguing against Thompson’s and Green’s feels like taking the wrong side. The band has made multiple attempts at getting back together - up to and including a bunch of random dudes (as in no original members) who recorded an album titled Inner Heat as Frijid Pink in 2001, only to have the name and contract yanked out from under them after one show without playing the hit. Stevers managed to get Green/Beaudry on board for another attempt in 2005, but that fizzled…and I think this is the one when Clyde Stevers pulled the plug. Stevers finally pulled together a working line-up, this was around 2006, and they’ve been doing something like recording stuff for the internet since then, including and up to Frijid Pink Frijid Pink Frijid Pink (and thank god I never have to type that again), plus the Taste of Pink EP in 2017, which includes some new material, plus a remastered version of “House of the Rising Sun.” For what it's worth, I don't think that'll improve your opinion of anything...
About the Sampler
Between what Spotify had to offer and the fault-lines in the Frijid Pink catalog - e.g., the split between Defrosted and Earth Omen - most of the sampler comes from those two albums. While Defrosted struggled commercially, it did have the band’s second biggest hit, “Sing a Song for Freedom,” which, reportedly, killed at their live shows (and that's a live performance). The selection from that album with rounds out with songs in a similar vein, including “Bye Bye Blues,” which sounds like what it is (if with a couple heavy bridges), “I’ll Never Be Lonely,” (think Procol Harum), “Black Lace” (a nice acid-rock bender), plus a couple nods to what was to come with “Shorty Kline” and, to a greater extent, “Sloony,” a showy instrumental.
Earth Omen, the post-Thompson/Green album, really was its own thing, calmer, less guitar-driven, and generally matching Julian Cope’s description - e.g., “New Horizon,” “Sailor” (bit of a call-back, honesty), and “Earth Omen” (very woke, fwiw). Going the other way, I included a couple songs from Frijid Pink, etc. to get an echo of their original sound. That refers mostly to the washed-out “Cryin’ Shame” and “Feelin’ Down,” and maybe even to “Life Unlived.” The one song I held onto somewhat deliberately was “God Gave Me You,” as nice a proto rock-ballad as I’ve heard.
That went on a little longer than I wanted, but, whether it’s the growing availability of better sources as the subjects get closer to the present, or the overall relatability of Frijid Pink’s story - e.g., a music scene catches in the zeitgeist and the major labels swoop in and fuck it up - but it all sounded familiar enough
I’d never heard Frijid Pink’s “House of the Rising Sun” until last week and…it’s fine, a sound spin on what I learned was their particular mash-up of influences. I’ll cover that story below, but think hard rock meets the sounds of Detroit.
I also learned that Frijid Pink recorded that cover as filler for their debut album - i.e., they had some empty space to fill on the LP, so they producer asked them if they had anything else. They’d been working up their take on “House of the Rising Sun” for their live shows, and for exactly the same reason. They knew it, though, and recorded the album version on the first take. Even if it doesn’t top the most popular version* (I assume), it’s a nice serving of fuzzed-up acid-rock typical of the burned-out come-down from the 1960s. And the theme is timeless, obviously…I just struggle to accept someone getting famous on the back of a cover, but accept that’s more personal bias than a judgment of artistry.
(* I’m confident this list isn’t even half-thorough, but it looks like Georgia Bell Turner recorded the first version in 1937 (on bad tech, from the sounds of it), Bob Dylan revived it for his debut, and then The Animals played the version that I think most people know.)
It hit big, rising as high as No. 7 on the Billboard, where it stayed for 13 weeks; it made loud noises in Europe (11 weeks at No. 1 in Germany) and Canada. It gave a gold record to a rock band from Detroit for the first time, thereby (arguably) putting Detroit rock on the map, you’re welcome, KISS. The accidents continued from there, not all of them happy…
The Rest of the Story
It starts with two kids who picked up music early and on their own, drummer Rick Stevers and bassist Tom Harris. By the time they reached high school, circa 1967, they had an actual touring band made up of kids they own and managed by Stevers’ parents, Clyde and Clara. They played as the Detroit Vibrations and mainly as a cover act, if one with ambition: they kept tabs on every song that came out and prided themselves on being the first band to perform it on the Detroit party/lounge/whatever circuit. They rode that into something like a residency at The Chatterbox, their hometown hot-spot in Allen Park, Michigan, by winning one battle of the bands after another.
The major bend in their story arc begins when two local musicians - Gary Ray Thompson, guitar, and Tom Beaudry, aka, Kelly Green - found Clyde Stevers after a Detroit Vibrations show to tell him they could take the band places. When they signed on, all agreed they should rename the act. Clara Stevers got the ball rolling with “frosted pink,” a name inspired the pink color that her son and then-guitarist Dan Yehlely* painted in their hair before a show. (*The draft came for Yehlely, who was killed in an ambush two weeks into his tour.) As the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends retrospective has it, the boys rejected that name is too girly, but they felt better about “frigid pink,” a name that came to Judy Harris while staring at a Frigidaire refrigerator. They embraced it once Clyde Stevers suggested spelling the first part “frijid” “because it was both different and looked German.” Yes, the band-parents named them…
The shift made sense on a deeper level: with Thompson and Green on board, Frijid Pink decided to start playing mostly original music. More than that, they started playing venues, teen and otherwise, all over the Detroit and the Upper Midwest; Stevers’ and Harris’ roots in R&B covers opened space for them to step in as a back-up band for bands Motown like The Four Tops, The Parliaments, The Contours and The Falcons. They became regulars on the Detroit scene, even put together an album’s worth of material at a place in Detroit called Pioneer Studios. They recorded their “House of the Rising Sun” on that and it eventually landed on the desk of the President of London Records, Walt McGuire. And that changed everything…
It yanked them out of a growing Detroit music scene, for one:
“Because their bookings were done by Willard Alexander out of Chicago, they were seldom included in the package shows in Michigan on which bands like SRC, Frost, MC5, the Bob Seger System, the Amboy Dukes, and the Stooges would all play the same venues, booked by local promoters like Brass Ring or Mike Quatro.”
They’d shared bills with all those artists, but, once they got away from their Detroit base, the locals felt forgotten and turned on them. On the other hand, in a 40th Anniversary retrospective posted in Review Magazine, Stevers claimed the band made “Paul Revere & the Raiders, Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield” money in their best years - and it wasn't such an odd choice. He elaborates in the same article:
“The local fan base thought they were stuck up. Stevers felt he was between a rock and a hard place. ‘The locals did not know how hard it was for us because we weren’t hanging out and partying with them. They didn’t know that instead of playing for 200 fans in a club. We were out playing for the President of the United States, the Montreal Forum and other places with big crowds.’”
Away from the stage, the insidious side of success wormed its way in. First, their follow-up album, Defrosted, didn’t get the traction their eponymous debut did. Next, Stevers’ (and maybe Harris) floated and recorded a song titled, “Music for the People,” a gospel-infused anthem that took a sharp turn…in some direction from what Frijid Pink had done to that point (also, hold that thought). Quietly appalled at the turn, Thompson and Green slipped away ahead of a show in St. Louis, hitched a bus to Detroit, then a flight to New York, where they confronted Walt McGuire, informed him that they were Frijid Pink, and demanded a new bassist and drummer. The coup didn’t come off in the end, but it did finish the unraveling.
A couple things followed from that. First, Frijid Pink released one album without Thompson and Green and…1) it is different, and 2) it tracks closer to “Music for the People.” For what it’s worth, Julien Cope gushes over the resulting album, Earth Omen, calling it, “a magnificent opus, fully heavy progressive rock of the highest caliber... In short, one of the most polished rock albums of 1972-73, and definitely one of the most overlooked.” It also seems like Green and Thompson provided the material/edge that made Frijid Pink…y’know, Frijid Pink. The reason why comes up when you compare what the band sounded like on various songs from their debut album - e.g., “Tell Me Why,” “Crying Shame,” and “Drivin’ Blues” (also, here’s a link to that full album) - against the sound on the remastered versions on 2011’s Frijid Pink Frijid Pink Frijid Pink. Listen to those and you see how they shared a bill with MC5 and The Stooges...
If you boil the question down to what worked for Frijid Pink as a band - e.g., “House of the Rising Sun” - arguing against Thompson’s and Green’s feels like taking the wrong side. The band has made multiple attempts at getting back together - up to and including a bunch of random dudes (as in no original members) who recorded an album titled Inner Heat as Frijid Pink in 2001, only to have the name and contract yanked out from under them after one show without playing the hit. Stevers managed to get Green/Beaudry on board for another attempt in 2005, but that fizzled…and I think this is the one when Clyde Stevers pulled the plug. Stevers finally pulled together a working line-up, this was around 2006, and they’ve been doing something like recording stuff for the internet since then, including and up to Frijid Pink Frijid Pink Frijid Pink (and thank god I never have to type that again), plus the Taste of Pink EP in 2017, which includes some new material, plus a remastered version of “House of the Rising Sun.” For what it's worth, I don't think that'll improve your opinion of anything...
About the Sampler
Between what Spotify had to offer and the fault-lines in the Frijid Pink catalog - e.g., the split between Defrosted and Earth Omen - most of the sampler comes from those two albums. While Defrosted struggled commercially, it did have the band’s second biggest hit, “Sing a Song for Freedom,” which, reportedly, killed at their live shows (and that's a live performance). The selection from that album with rounds out with songs in a similar vein, including “Bye Bye Blues,” which sounds like what it is (if with a couple heavy bridges), “I’ll Never Be Lonely,” (think Procol Harum), “Black Lace” (a nice acid-rock bender), plus a couple nods to what was to come with “Shorty Kline” and, to a greater extent, “Sloony,” a showy instrumental.
Earth Omen, the post-Thompson/Green album, really was its own thing, calmer, less guitar-driven, and generally matching Julian Cope’s description - e.g., “New Horizon,” “Sailor” (bit of a call-back, honesty), and “Earth Omen” (very woke, fwiw). Going the other way, I included a couple songs from Frijid Pink, etc. to get an echo of their original sound. That refers mostly to the washed-out “Cryin’ Shame” and “Feelin’ Down,” and maybe even to “Life Unlived.” The one song I held onto somewhat deliberately was “God Gave Me You,” as nice a proto rock-ballad as I’ve heard.
That went on a little longer than I wanted, but, whether it’s the growing availability of better sources as the subjects get closer to the present, or the overall relatability of Frijid Pink’s story - e.g., a music scene catches in the zeitgeist and the major labels swoop in and fuck it up - but it all sounded familiar enough
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