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by Max Conroy:
Today’s generation probably has a rough time of it when it comes to collecting some older rock records. I’m 28 and most of the people my age whose parents didn’t listen to oldies stations in the car don’t have the same reference point that I do with some classic and oft overlooked oldies and classic rock. Groups like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Dave Clark Five, Manford Mann, the Turtles, Tokens, all that shit’s drifting further into obscurity. They’re part of the mortar-pocked no man’s land of 60’s pop acts that were popular then that haven’t been fortunate enough to have a significant cult following, like the Nuggets garage bands or a constant following like the Stones or the Dead. Some of these bands are truly great and don’t deserve the dustbin quite yet.
I was watching the Dead Boys Live at CBGBs DVD’s extras and Stiv Bators was asked what bands were his influences: uuuh, Iggy Pop, all of his bands, the early Stooges, ya know, the New York Dolls, I really like the New York Dolls, and Paul Revere & the Raiders, yeah Paul Revere & the Raiders, they’re for me. What? I can definitely see Iggy and the Dolls, but Paul Revere & the Raiders. I remembered that there was a bar where I went to college called Paul Revere’s and naturally they had a Paul Revere & the Raiders CD on the jukebox; their version of Stepping Stone was one that I’d play every time I went there. Stepping Stone rocked, but I assumed it was a fluke or something. I watched this interview a few years back and have had it in the back of my mind ever since to pick up one of their records and finally got around to it a month or so ago. I picked up their first album on Colombia Here They Come! from 1965 for $2. Frankly the record store didn’t have much else to offer, I was hung over and didn’t have attention span for proper digging and this record was in their new arrivals bin.
Half of the record is live and half is studio. It apparently took Colombia two years after signing them to release a full-length record; they released numerous singles that were regional hits in the Northwest. The Northwest was a shockingly good area for R & B influenced garage acts. It was home to the Wailers, the Sonics and the Kingsmen to name a few, and these bands were fiercely competitive, constantly playing against each other in battle of the bands competitions. So by the time this album was released, the band had been together for the better part of eight years, breaking up briefly after Revere was drafted, and had developed a powerful live act as the first side of this record testifies. Paul Revere was the keyboardist’s real name, he was usurped as the lead singer after Mark Lindsay joined the band, and was at the age where rock stars die, 27, when this record was released.
It’s about a three star album, certainly worth the $2. The live side swings with reckless abandon and the studio side has a protopunk/pop jangle to it, so it’s no wonder the latter-day Flamin’ Groovies chose to cover the track Sometimes. The Raiders’ version has a lot more character though.
Sometimes
You Can’t Sit Down
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*Cousin Geoff adds:
We get their records in quite a bit, but at the same time they sell fast too. We have the greatests hits album in the store, you can buy it here.
Posted By Guest Writer js:
Where I differ, I think, from Justin and from Geoff, and what always makes me feel vaguely ashamed when I’m talking about music with them, is that I’m not a real collector. I mean, I collect albums, and I am forever slowly expanding the number of songs and sides I have at my fingertips, but I really couldn’t care less about two things that are inherent to record collecting: value and rarity.
I’m not saying that I’m pure of commercial considerations or that I don’t want hard-to-find things, but both of those are sort of secondary. The blunt fact is that there is too much music out there for me to ever worry too much about stockpiling things for cash or for posterity, or even to lord over other music collectors.
This weekend, I picked up a handful of New Wave albums that I had never really thought about owning, and passed on something that I’d been looking for for a while, and basically subverted any inner record collecting instincts that I had.
I picked up Toni Basil’s first album (Devo plays half the backing tracks!), another copy of the Cars first album (mine has scratches and skips), ABC’s Lexicon of Love (their best by far), Blondie’s Plastic Letters (I only owned it digitally), B-52s Whammy (which I haven’t listened to yet), some Tony Orlando gig called The Flirts, and Squeeze’s The Squeeze is On which kind of sucks.
And I passed on The Wild Tchoupitoulas’s self-titled album.
The Wild Tchoupitoulas album shows why I’m not a collector. I had been curious about it for years, after getting a Souljazz New Orleans sampler that included a pretty nice second-line (which is what the Mardi Gras Indians, of which the Wild Tchoupitoulas are one “tribe,” are) tune. It was a full-on percussion stomp, with polyrhythms and call-and-response vocals and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Neville Brothers and the Meters collaborating with a bunch of faux-savages. So, ever since then, I’ve looked for the full album. I’ve seen it on eBay for $50 to $70 (though I always imagine that those are fake bids when I see an album spiral up like that). And yesterday I saw it at a local record shop.
It was a little warped, and a little scratched up, but was $22.50, and I’d likely never see that album again. My best bet would be to either stumble upon it when downloading music, or forget it existed. So I grabbed it up and did a couple of needle-drops at the listening station.
It… It just wasn’t very good. It was a bunch of smooth, relaxed grooves, but instead of The Meters who did Gris Gris with Dr. John, instead of the Struttin’ Meters, it was the “Witchita Lineman” smooth Meters. There was no depth to the production, and the vocals were all inept “Indians” with the Neville Brothers crooning like velure.
If I were a record collector, I would have bought it. But I just couldn’t.
Instead, I bought a bunch of New Wave detritus for $2 an album and loved it. I listened to most of them today, and they were fucking excellent. No one is ever going to want to buy that Flirts album off of me, although (as my girlfriend Amy informed me), “(Don’t Put Another Dime in That) Jukebox” was a radio hit. But it’s a damn fine album. I didn’t know that I was looking for it, but it fills a perfect niche between The Go-Gos and Adult., and I couldn’t be happier.
I admit it: I use soulseek to augment my music collection. It might come from being a music writer for so long in this internet age, where I can see everything as “promos” or “research” (I might have to write about that EPMD album someday, or at least tie it in to Rhymeslayer). Anyway, it’s pretty normal (if illegal) now.
But the odd part, the part that didn’t exist before the internet (really, before Napster, but it’s more explicit on slsk) is the public laying bare of your music taste.
