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”).