For Sale 

I like this one a lot, so much that I haven’t really decided if I want to sell it.  The Six O’Clock News were formed by Rockabilly hall-of-famer and Detroit native James Wayne Boyer.  He originally formed the band Jimmy Boyer and The Newports, who were a top local band in Detroit and Windsor in the early to mid 60s.  Around ‘68 or ‘69, he formed the Six O’Clock News, who recorded only one 45, Train Ride Down Jasper Way / Working On The Road, in 1969 on Novi based label Adell.  After the Six O’Clock News broke up following their brief time together, Boyer went on to play in a few more local bands before touring nationally with a Nashville based group called the Billy Swan Band. 

The A side to this promo copy, Train Ride, is a great song.  Jimmy’s rough and gruff voice give emotion to a hard working railroad love song, backed by a Dennis Coffee-esque funkabilly band.  It’s a fairly rare 45, but it’s unlike many small label Michigan garagers that we come across, the song writing is actually good (and original).  If CCR put this out, it could have been a national smash hit.  As it was with a relatively unheard-of Detroit band in 1969, they produced about 1,000 or so promo copies, sent them out to as many radio stations as they could, and probably received little if any airplay. The records then sat for years, with a few surfacing here and there.  This one came out of a collection we bought recently that was the remnants of a local radio station’s backstock, hundreds of discarded 45s, deemed not popular enough to be worth a damn, forgotten for almost 40 years, until they landed with us to revive them again. NOW FOR SALE

Listen to Train Ride Down Jasper Way:

Note: The B Side on this, the pop-pysch Working On The Road, was featured on the comp “Voyages Into Pop-Psych Vol. II”, and also on the internet radio station/website Technicolor Web of Sound.