One Hit No More, No. 50: No One Home at the Edison Lighthouse

Totally wizard, man.

The Hit
I’m pretty confident I’d heard “Love Grows (“Where My Rosemary Goes)” one-to-several times or another on the various local oldies radio channels I listened to down the years, but I couldn’t have connected them to an act called Edison Lighthouse, not even if that was the only way to rescue my kids from a hostage situation. As it happens there’s a pretty good reason for that, something I’ll get into below.

“Love Grows” is a pretty, catchy song from straight outta the late-stage bubblegum pop era and it takes liberal advantage of the ear-worm arsenal: e.g., the white-funky guitar riff, the soft, bright horns that swell into simple verses of nonsense (“she ain’t got no money/her clothes are kinda funny/her hair is kinda wild and free”) that opens up into a sticky chorus, and a basic toe-tapping rhythm that just about anybody can’t lose. It’s like somebody was tasked with writing a hit, so they listened to what was working at the time and got to work.

That’s not too far off, really, even if it jumps ahead of the main story by about an album and a tour.

The Rest of the Story
As much as I regret it happening on the 50th post in this series (who shits on a milestone?), I will not regret phoning in this one. On the plus side, I get to kill two birds with one stone courtesy of that editorial decision, thus saving me from having to listen to The First Class’ “Beach Baby” ever again. I mean, what sane man wouldn’t take that trade?

Unlike most of the bands discussed below, Edison Lighthouse was an actual band - even if the last one for the main person of interest to the larger story.

Tony Burrows started his career in pop music with The Kestrels, a band he formed between the English version of high school and a stint in the Army. Two of his bandmates - Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - went on to become London’s answer to New York’s Brill Building songwriting machine, writing a string of hits for a generation of English artists, plus a couple for Eurovision contests and, with your friends at the Coca-Cola corporation, one of the most famous ad pitches in history. They’d also write several more hits with/for Burrows…but I’m getting ahead on him again.

One Hit No More, No. 32: Thunderclap Newman, Pete Townshend's Other Wild Vision

This will make sense by the end. Promise.

The Hit
If you weren’t fully sentient in 1969, or didn’t log enough time on a particular kind of “oldies/classic rock” radio programming, it’s likelier than not that you first heard Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” while watching something – e.g., Almost Famous, Kingpin, or an episode of My Name Is Earl. If I had to guess, I’d say you liked it. Some number of you probably asked the person next to you, “hey, who is that”?

The band was Thunderclap Newman. Yes, Thunderclap Newman.

It’s a pretty song, sounds a little like the Summer of Love, maybe with a bit of a hangover; the tinny (frankly pinched) quality in the vocals pairs with the twanging treble to create a bright sunny melody, so it sounds very late 60s West Coast. The bass and a spidery guitar sound creates a counter-melody that grounds that higher register, and there’s just a lot of fun orchestration going on. It’s just a nice song to listen to. Makes you feel like hugging strangers. Seriously.

The Rest of the Story
“I don’t quite know if that’s a fair description of it but I can tell you, for me, it was a bit sort of traumatic, except for having been a civil servant, and being used to dealing with the public.”

That’s what the actual Thunderclap Newman, aka, Andy Newman, had to say about backing into fame by way of a very famous fan-boy crush. The fan-boy in question: The Who’s Pete Townshend, who had seen Newman play a lunch-time show at Ealing Art School while he was studying graphic design. Newman wasn’t even scheduled to play, but, a mutual friend of Townshend and Newman’s named Rick Seaman suggested the latter to fill in. Unbeknownst to Newman (and for, like, literal years), Townshend left that lunch-time show he’d stumbled into the presence of overlooked genius. Newman had put out some recordings – importantly, recordings he made through multi-track recordings on single-track devices – and Townshend played one of them, Ice & Essence, something like into the ground. (This also files under “unbeknownst to Newman,” because he thought they sounded terrible.) He roped Newman into a couple projects over the years; Thunderclap Newman wound up being the last and largest of them. It’s worth pausing a second to talk about what Newman did at that lunch-time show (quote from Richard Barnes, Maximum R&B):

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.

April 2019 MAME Playlist: Mellow ATL, DIY England and Troubled Toronto

So simple, so good.

Welcome to the April 2019 MAME Playlist post, which, in a better world, will be the last whale I produce. (Here’s to hoping future plans come together). I posted a 50-song playlist for the month (there’s more where that came from; username snackyd), and all the songs on that playlist are linked to somewhere down below. I highlight three artists (chosen more or less at random) down below - Faye Webster, Martha (the band, not a person), and Shad – by sharing some stuff about who they are, where they come from and what they do. The rest of the playlist is mostly random. Mostly.

I posted some other write-ups on some other artists earlier this month, and some of the songs by those bands stuck to this month’s playlist. You can read about them in those posts, which I’ve linked to under the names of each band, and I’ll list/link to the songs by each that I held onto for this playlist. Those include: Weyes Blood (mellow, airy indie with gorgeous vocals, “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” “Andromeda,” and “Mirror Forever”); Orange Goblin (metal from the hard rock school mostly, “The Astral Project,” “Magic Carpet,” and “Aquatic Fanatic”); and The Who (you know them, but the story behind Lifehouse is a doozy, “Whiskey Man,” “Pictures of Lily,” “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” “Relay,” “5:15,” and “Slip Kid”).

All right, time to look at this month’s playlist’s featured artists…in which I accidentally go from oldest to youngest.

Faye Webster, [Eponymous]
I think it was last month when Discover Weekly pitched Faye Webster’s “Room Temperature” my way. It’s probably part of the promotional push for Webster’s upcoming album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, and, between that and the still-better, “Kingston,” I have high hopes for that new release. But it’s not out yet (think it said late May, like, May 26), so I’m stuck with her 2017 eponymous album. The one with the understatedly freaking awesome album cover (see above).

Webster comes from Atlanta, Georgia, and a creative family (something I see a lot when researching musicians). Musically, she grew up on old country, but branched out into Atlanta-area local hip hop – specifically, material put out by Awful Records. That branching out eventually lead her to membership in a “rap collective” called PSA, and you hear both influences in her sound. Her choice of instruments that makes her earliest influences stand out more: “No matter what music I end up making I will always use pedal steel... It's in my roots. I love pedal steel.”

The Who, Half-Assing, and the Perils of Full-Assing It: Yet Another Pivot

For my money, that's the one you're after...

It’s fitting to talk about the demise of one maniacally-ambitious project in a post that will end by talking about the demise of several other projects, if the latter were only too ambitious for one man attempting to maximize the internet in order to make the voices in his head calm down. I’ll close with that.

Reviving the Bins Project with a chapter on the band who bundled their greatest hits onto the first cassette I ever bought felt fitting, centering, even a little poetic. When my mom took me to…Kmart(?) and offered to buy a cassette for me (which I don’t even remember asking for), I don’t recall seeing anything else but The Who’s Greatest Hits, the one with a Union Jack jacket on the cover. I have zero recollection of how 11-year-old me came to decide that a cassette by The Who was the one I just had to have. I do, however, remember my oldest sister asking me to record a live radio broadcast of a concert of theirs that she went to see in Indianapolis – one after The Who’s infamous concert in Cincinnati where 11 people got trampled to death. (So called, “festival seating” caused that, by the way, and not the band, but they still got banned from Cincinnati, because that’s how America’s municipalities roll, I guess.)

I started the predecessor site to this one, A Project of Self Indulgence, as a review/farewell to my record collection, which I figured I’d stop listening to once I got lost in the infinite wilds of streaming services like Spotify. It became clearer and clearer, as I worked through my catalog, that I knew very little about the music. Worse, I knew far, far less (far, far, far less) about the artists who made it all. And I think that’s why I cracked up and deleted it.

I bring up all the above because that pattern started with how I consumed The Who. Greatest hits albums were all I ever listened to – whether the greatest hits album named above, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, or The Kids Are Alright, which, as it happens is a soundtrack to a documentary – so I’d never actually sat through an actual album by The Who, i.e., an original product put out for first-time consumption, and not something re-hashed. Well, Tommy excepted. I knew that album very well, even remember the look of the cover from lifting out of the stack of my sister’s records to play it just one more time.