Iron Leg: 2012 The Year In Vintage Pop

Why, yes dear! I’d love some fuzz!

Playlist

Woolies – Who Do You Love (Dunhill)
Beauregard and the Tuffs – Ramblin’ Rose (Decca)
Brenda Lee – Is It True (Decca)
Evie Sands – I Can’t Let Go (BlueCat)
The Knack – Time Waits For No One (Capitol)
Monkees – Star Collector (Colgems)
Nat Stuckey – Listen To the Band (RCA)
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart – Smilin’ (Aquarian)
Royal Guardsmen – Leaving Me (Laurie)
WC Fields Memorial Electric String Band – Hippy Elevator Operator (HBR)
Morning Glories – Love-In (WB)
Liberace – Suite Judy Blue Eyes (WB)
Mike Stoller and the Stoller System – Silver Sea Horse (Amy)
Nobody’s Children – I Can’t Let Go (Bullet)
Kitchen Cinq – Codine (LHI)
Spotlights – Batman and Robin (Smash)
Wayne Logiudice – Come On (Let’s Get Some Action On) (Philips)
What-Knots – I Ain’t Dead Yet (Dial)
Bougalieu – Let’s Do Wrong (Roulette)
Connie Francis – Fallin’ (MGM)
The Gosdin Brothers – The Sounds of Goodbye (Bakersfield Intl)

Listen/Download -Iron Leg 2012: The Year In Vintage Pop – 99MB/256kbps

Greetings all.

What you see before you is the annual gathering of the ‘Best of’ Iron Leg for the year 2012.

Every year about this time I go back and comb the year’s posts looking for what I consider to be the finest tracks.

As the track listing above indicates, this has been an exceptional year, both for my record collection and for your MP3 delivery/storage device.

There are hot garage punk tracks, psychedelia, power pop, sunshine pop and all kinds of other goodies for you to soak yourselves in as the new year approaches.

As always, I hope you dig it, and that you join me in 2013 for more of the same.

Until then, stay cool, and I’ll see you when I see you.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners

Iron Leg Radio Show Episode #20

Beep beep beep beep…..

Playlist

Opener – Action Scene – Hawkshaw/Mansfield (KPM)
Spirit – I Got a Line On You (Ode)
Spirit – Taurus (Ode)
Spirit – Girl In Your Eye (Ode)
Spirit- Straight Arrow (Ode)
Spirit – Topanga Windows (Ode)
44th St Portable Flower Factory – Let’s Get Together (Scholastic)
44th St Portable Flower Factory – The Letter (Scholastic)
Esko Affair – Morning Dull Fire (Mercury)
Roy Buchanan – Down By the River (Atlantic)
Spirit – Clear LP Promo

Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Tich – Shame (Fontana)
Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Tich- You Make It Move (Fontana)
Bang Girl Group Revue – Drink In Hand (Psychedelphonic)
Bang Girl Group Revue – Love’s Gone Bad (Psychedelphonic)
Dino Desi and Billy – I’m a Fool (Reprise)
The Finnz – East Side Story (Finnz)
Heather Black – Bill The Black Militant (Double Bayou)
Kitchen Cinq – Determination (LHI)
Terry Knight and the Pack – Got Love (Lucky Eleven)
Gary Lewis and the Playboys – Heart Full of Soul (Liberty)
Gary Lewis and the Playboys – The Flake (Kelloggs Corn Flakes Ad)

The Critters – Mr Dieingly Sad (Kapp)
East Coast Left – My Child (Kapp)
Epic Splendor – It Could Be Wonderful (Hot Biscuit)
Giant Crab – Help Yourself (Uni)
Giant Crab – It’s Getting Harder (Uni)
Hourglass – Power Of Love (Liberty)
Music Machine – Some Other Drum (Original Sound)
Tom Northcott – Blackberry Way (Uni)
Peter Fonda – November Nights (Chisa)
The 10:15 – Joe’s Acclamation ()
Semicolons? – Beachcomber (Cameo/Parkway)
Poco – Hurry Up (Epic)
The Rockets – Hole In My Pocket (White Whale)
Neil Young – Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere LP Promo

Listen/Download -Iron Leg Radio Show Episode 20 – 184MB/256kbps

Greetings all.

I hope all is well in your part of the world.

It’s time once again for the Iron Leg Radio Show, episode 20!

This time around we start the show with a tribute to the late, great Ed Cassidy of Spirit, move on into some top shelf freakbeat and garage and finish up with a solid set of pop.

I hope you dig it all, and that you come back next week for the annual Year In Vintage Pop mix.

Until then…

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners

Manfred Mann – 5-4-3-2-1

Uh, huh, it was the Manfreds…

Listen/Download – Manfred Mann – 5-4-3-2-1

Greetings all.

Welcome to yet another week in the annals of all manner of pop.

The tune I bring you today should be – assuming that you have a taste for UK R&Beat – a familiar one, but the disc it appears on might not.

Manfred Mann is one of those bands that I have certainly known about all my life (via the big hits) , but it was only during the mod/garage days of the 80s that I discovered and developed a serious taste for their music.

So much so, in fact that I would gladly go on record as stating that aside from Scott Walker – who exists in a class by himself – Paul Jones is my favorite vocalist of the British Invasion.

Manfred Mann were ostensibly part of the blues-based British vibe, but one need only scratch the surface a little bit to discover how important jazz was to their sound.

Thanks in large part to Manfred Mann’s (the man, not the band) keyboards and Mike Vickers work on guitar, flute and sax, the Manfreds laid down some of the deepest, most exciting sounds of the early to mid 60s.

Today’s selection was commissioned by the producers of Ready Steady Go as the theme for their 1964 season and the song made it into the UK Top Ten of the UK charts.

The song was released as a single in the UK on the HMV label in January of 1964.

This of course brings up the question of, where did the 45 you see before you come from?

Fans of soul jazz/mod jazz will already be knee deep in the Prestige Records 45 discography, a wellspring of Hammond organ sides and all manner of harder edged soul jazz. How Manfred Mann – who had all of their early US 45s released on the Ascot label – got this one 45 issued on Prestige is a complete mystery to me.

If you take a look at a Prestige 45 discography, there is one interesting clue, that being that the next single released in the catalog was a record by a duo named Brett and Terry with the tunes ‘Beatle Hop’ b/w ‘Beatle Fever’.

Aside from that, all the releases before and after these two 45s – this being perhaps a very short lived attempt to cash in on the longhair/teenage market – are regular Prestige label bread and butter, i.e. jazz and blues.

The record itself is a banger of the first order.

‘5-4-3-2-1’ has been a fave of mine since I first heard it roughly 30 years ago. It sees the band in top form, moving forward like a buffalo stampede led by Jones’s harp and Mann’s electric piano.

The flip side, ‘Without You’ is a bluesy grinder with some remarkable flute work.

Oddly, the writing credit on the 45 is messed up, with Mike Hugg listed as ‘Hugo’ between Jones and Mann.

It’s a great disc, and if anyone has any deeper info on the Prestige connection, please drop me a line in the comments.

I hope you dig it, and I’ll see you next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

The Sneekers – Sneaker Talk

The Sneekers

Listen/Download – The Sneekers – Sneaker Talk

Greetings all.

Welcome back to another week here at Iron Leg.

The 2012 Pledge Drive was a big success. I know that some of you that hit both Iron Leg and Funky16Corners dropped some cash into the virtual tip cup, so I send you my thanks.

The tune I bring you today is, despite its major-label-osity, almost a complete mystery.

I don’t remember when I picked up the Sneekers, ‘Soul Sneaker’ b/w ‘Sneaker Talk’ but I think it must be obvious why I did.

How, I ask you, could any digger/fan of music flip by a 45 like this and not put it in the keeper stack?

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the Sneekers 45 was released in 1965, but aside from that, little else in the way of hard facts have turned up.

The band – I’m assuming that the folks on the sleeve are in fact The Sneekers – have an oddly retro look for 1965, with the bow ties, suits and short haircuts.

While ‘Soul Sneaker’ is decidedly non-soulful, ‘Sneaker Talk’ has a kind of wild, beat-era rave-up feel to it. The guitarist is especially good on both sides of the record. While the lyrics are the kind of inane, dance-craze boilerplate that Brill Building/Tin Pan Alley cigar-chompers seemed to be rolling up and tossing out the window on an hourly basis (could they perhaps been a commercial tie-in done on spec?), the group is musically quite good.

While I wouldn’t describe the sound as garage-y, it is definitely butting up against the border of those kinds of sounds (imagine ‘Sneaker Talk’ with some fuzz guitar or organ).

Interestingly, the Ugly Things comp database lists a few other tracks by a group called the Sneekers, based in the UK, two of which were included on collections of Jimmy Page’s session work. I have no idea if this is the same band, or if Page played on these tracks, but the R&Beat sound certainly screams UK to me.

If any of you good folks have anything to add/confirm, please do so in the comments.

See you next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Manfred Mann – Watch Your Step

Uh huh, It was the Manfreds….

Listen/Download – Manfred Mann – Watch Your Step

Greetings all.

I hope everything is swinging light in your corner of the world.

The tune I bring you this week is something I was shocked to find in what one might term a ‘local’ dig.

I’ve been a Manfred Mann fan for a long time, since my man Mr Luther hit me up with an early ‘Best Of’ that pretty much blew my mind back in the garage/mod days.

Sure I was hip to all of the hits, but as soon as I heard stuff like ‘5-4-3-2-1’, ‘The One In the Middle’ and ‘Cock-a-Hoop’ I was all “Where has this groovy stuff been all my life?” b/w “Where can I get me some?”.

Naturally, I don’t think I ever need to hear ‘The Mighty Quinn’ again, under any circumstances, even if I should host a cocktail party and Mike Hugg and Bob Dylan both showed up, however, that early exposure to the Manfred’s made me a devotee, particularly where it comes to the voice of one Paul Jones.

Jones has since that day been one of my very favorite singers of the R&Beat era, and the Manfreds one of the great, underrated (not unpopular) bands of their time.

You can’t really expect a world exposed to ‘Pretty Flamingo’ to know that Manfred Mann had serious R&B and jazz chops (which never really got a lot of play over here), but you can’t sit by and leave the situation unremedied either, especially if you have yourself a blog, which I do, so here we go.

The aforementioned find was a UK OG of the Manfreds 1965 ‘Mann Made’ album which was a very solid display of their range (and on odd thing to turn up in a cardboard box in Asbury Park, NJ).

In addition to very groovy, very jazzy instros like ‘Abominable Snowmann’ and ‘Bare Hugg’, you get solid R&Beat like their ‘You Don’t Love Me’ re-write ‘LSD’, and today’s selection, their storming cover of Bobby Parker’s mighty ‘Watch Your Step’.

The OG is a big, big, BIG favorite of mine, but Jones and company acquit themselves very nicely indeed. You get that soulful, bluesy flavor of Jones’s voice running riot over a tasty backing, including some swinging organ by the Mann himself.

It is very solid indeed, and ought to warm things up until I return next week.

Until then.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Iron Leg – Live Sets from Spindletop b/w 2011 Pledge Drive

Listen/Download – Iron Leg Live @ Spindletop Set 1 / 99MB Mixed MP3

Kingsmen – Little Latin Lupe Lu (Wand)
British Walkers – Diddley Daddy (Try)
Ron-Dels – Lose Your Money (Smash)
Sir Douglas Quintet – The Tracker (Tribe)
McCoys – Fever (Bang)
Rationals – Feelin’ Lost (Cameo)
Question Mark and the Mysterians – 8 Teen (Cameo)
Kinks – Come On Now (Reprise)
Guess Who – Shakin’ All Over (Scepter)
Dave Berry – Don’t Give Me No Lip Child (London)
Don and the Goodtimes – Little Sally Tease (Dunhill)
Gants – Road Runner (Liberty)
Barbarians – Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl (Laurie)
Davy Jones and the King Bees – Liza Jane (Decca)
British Walkers – Shake (C/P)
Pretty Things – Don’t Bring Me Down (Fontana)
Easybeats – Made My Now I Gotta Lie In It (UA)
Underdogs – Love’s Gone Bad (VIP)
Spats – She Done Moved (ABC)
Sonny & Cher – It’s Gonna Rain (Atlantic)
Unchained Mynds – Goin’ Back to Miami (Buddah)
Ian and the Zodiacs – Whay Can’t It Be Me (Philips)
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart – Out and About (A&M)

Listen/Download – Iron Leg Live @ Spindletop Set 2 / 106MB Mixed MP3

Sonics – The Witch (Etiquette)
Small Faces – All Or Nothing (RCA)
Changin’ Times – How Is the Air Up There (Philips)
Dillons – Simple Way of Living (Impression)
London Knights – Go To Him (Mike)
Nashville Teens – Find My Way Home (London)
Mindbenders – Getting Harder All the Time (Fontana)
Jacques Dutronc – Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi (Vogue)
Cast Of Thousands – Girl What You Want To Do (Tower)
Q65 – It Came To Me (Philips)
Animals – Don’t Bring Me Down (MGM)
Mouse and the Traps – Beg Borrow and Steal (Fraternity)
Cryin Shames – Ben Franklin’s Almanac (Destination)
Caretakers – East Side Story (Rip’Off)
Bit-A-Sweet – Out of Sight Out of Mind (MGM)
The Herd – Understand Me (Fontana)
Love – Seven and Seven Is (Elektra)
Los Bravos – Going Nowhere (Press)
Uncalled Four – Do Like Me (Laurie)
Troggs- I Can’t Control Myself (Atco)
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – Hideaway (Fontana)
Unrelated Segments – Where You Gonna Go (Liberty)
13th Floor Elevators – You’re Gonna Miss Me (International Artists)

Listen/Download – Iron Leg Live @ Spindletop Set 3 / 71MB Mixed MP3

Thoughts – All Night Stand (Planet)
Shanes – Chris Craft #9 (Capitol)
Creation – Making Time (Planet)
Thors Hammer – Show Me You Like Me (Columbia)
Equals – My Life Ain’t Easy (President)
Syn – Grounded (Deram)
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – He’s a Raver (Star Club)
Strangeloves – In the Nighttime (Bang)
Guilloteens – Hey You (HBR)
Kit and the Outlaws – Don’t Tread On Me (Black Knight)
Cherry Slush – Don’t Walk Away (USA)
Spencer Davis Group – Somebody Help Me (Fontana)
Beverley – Where the Good Times Are (Deram)
Kak – Rain (Epic)
Question Mark and the Mysterians – Can’t Get Enough Of You Baby (Cameo/Parkway)
Standells – Why Did You Hurt Me (Tower)

Click Here To Donate!

Greetings all.

As promised last week, today marks the beginning of the Funky16Corners Blogcasting Nerve Center and Record Vault 2011 Pledge Drive, wherein we come to you, hands outstretched (but filled with music) asking for contributions to aide the upkeep of the server space (where all of this wonderfulness resides).

This has been going on over at the main blog for the last six years, and I had something special lined up for Iron Leg this time around, so I figured I’d close the loop as it were.

That something special is a couple hours of very groovy music (garage, UK beat, freakbeat etc) recorded live, as spun (also live) by yours truly at Spindletop @ Botanica in NYC on 5/23.

I generally get inside of a funk and soul bag when I do Spindletop, but this time out our host Perry Lane allowed me to run the freak flag up the pole with a return to my own fuzz drenched roots.

I’ve recounted my mid-80s garage/mod years in this space many times, and the 45s in this mix are a selection of my favorites that I started collecting back in the day (and continue to dig for to this very day).

I should note that there are a couple of moments where one of the turntables seems to be having speed difficulties, but they are few and far between, and the music is hot.

So, give it all a listen, and if you’re a fan of what I do here, or over at Funky16Corners (or both), click on the Paypal button (above or below) and drop a few bucks in the till.

If you head over to Funky16Corners, you’ll find over seven hours of new mixes of Northern Soul, rock steady, deep soul and funk assembled by myself and some of the finest selectors I know.

Click Here To Donate!

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Iron Leg Radio Is On The Air!

Beep beep beep beep…..

Playlist

Opening Theme – Alan Hawkshaw/Keith Mansfield – Action Scene (KPM)

Baker Knight & the Knightmares – Hallucinations (Reprise)
Apparitions – She’s So Satisfying (Caped Crusader)
Andre Brasseur – Pow Pow (Palette)
101 Strings – Spinning Wheel (Alshire)
World of Oz – Peters Birthday (Deram)
Turtles – She’s My Girl (White Whale)
Radio London – Pussycat

Standells – Little Sally Tease (Tower)
Tino & the Revelons – I’m Coming Home (Dearborn)
Thee Muffins – Surprise Surprise
The Lime – Love a Go Go (Westwood)
Strangeloves – In the Night Time (Bang)
Sonics – Lost Love (Picadilly)
Sonny and Cher – It’s Gonna Rain (Atlantic)
Boyce and Hart – Coke Spot

Softmachine – Love Makes Sweet Music
Soft Machine – A Certain Kind (probe)
13th Floor Elevators – Livin On (45 Edit) (IA)
Blue Things – Orange Rooftop of Your Mind (RCA)
Buffalo Springfield – Expecting To Fly (Atco)
Yes – Everydays (Atlantic)
Upbeat radio Spot

Millennium – Prelude / To Claudia On Thursday (Columbia)
Neon Philharmonic – Brilliant Colors (WB)
Mark Eric – California Home (Revue)
Love Generation – The Love In Me (Imperial)
Lee Mallory – Take My Hand (Valiant)
Hondells – Just One More Chance (Columbia)
Neon Philharmonic Radio Spot

Insomniacs – My Favorite Story (Umbrella)
Mod Fun – I Am With You (New)
Lord John – Westminiature Abbey (Bomp)
Smithereens – Just Got Me A Girl (Dirt)
Biff Bang Pow – There Must Be a Better Place (Creation)
Game Theory – 24 (Alias)
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Rattlesnakes (Capitol)
Ravi Shankar Anti-Drug PSA

Montanas – That’s When Happiness Began (Pye)
Lovin’ Spoonful – Six O’Clock (Kama Sutra)
Animals – I’m Gonna Change the World (MGM)
Motifs – If I Gave You Love (Selsom)
Biff Rose – What’s Gnawing At Me (Tetragrammaton)
Billy J Kramer – 1941 (Epic)

Listen/Download -Iron Leg Radio Show Episode 1 – 266MB/256kbps

Greetings all, and welcome to something very special.

As mentioned in today’s post over at Funky16Corners, my experience creating the Funky16Corners Radio Show – which airs on Viva Radio and is then archived for download over at the blog – had me thinking about expanding the whole radio show bag.

Initially I considered doing a second Funky16Corners show, but eventually my thinking came around to the idea of doing something similar with the vibe here at Iron Leg, i.e. 60s pop (and sometimes beyond) of all varieties, with the garage punk, and the sunshine pop, and the psychedelic and whatever else happens to fall into that particular bag.

I’ve been doing Iron Leg, with both individual tracks and mixes for four years now, and I figured it was time for something new and (hopefully) interesting.

The Iron Leg Radio Show (you can tell I sweated over that name, huh?) will be posted on a monthly (for now) basis, and is likely to run in the vicinity of 90 minutes, though this first show breaks the two-hour mark.

You’ll be getting all of the groovy stuff you’ve come to expect here at Iron Leg, but the bouillabaisse is going to be stewed together in what will hopefully be new and interesting ways, with both music and information together, which in the words of Abraham Simpson, is the “style of the time”.

Right now, the Iron Leg blog will be home base for the radio show until I find somewhere else to host it as well, which is fine by me with the MP3s as good at my link as someone else’s.

That of course may never happen, since the internet and podcasts (and MP3 playback devices) have really replaced radio. My ipod (and I’m sure a lot of other people use theirs the same way) is a de facto radio, delivering everything my radio used to do, more efficiently and with much more personal entertainment value than the old wireless set, wherever, whenever, and for however long I want it to.

This is not to say that the old formats of radio are, or should be extinct. In fact podcasting has freed these formats from illogical (at least in what’s left of a free-thinking, adult-level world) constraints having to do with advertising, time limits, freedom of speech issues etc.

It bears mentioning that radio-style programming via podcasting is in many ways (all positive) returning broadcasts to an expansiveness, whether with musical choice or conversation (much of what I listen to in the car, on the ipod, are spoken word podcasts on a variety of topics) that they once had, even if only on the fringes.

We’re in a boom period now where (as it was with blogging) everyone and their crazy uncle has a podcast of some kind, but these things tend to shake out in the end, with the truly fringy stuff finding its small audience, more popular stuff finding a bigger audience, and those things with no audience at all eventually disappearing as their creators become bored or move on to something else (thus the vast floating islands of abandoned web sites and blogs out there in the wilds of the interwebs).

Where the iron Leg Radio Show ends up on that spectrum remains to be seen. If a healthy percentage of the existing audience for this blog, and those from Funky16Corners whose tastes cross over like mine do take a listen and dig what they hear, that’ll be enough for me.

It’s fun creating these shows and I hope that comes through in the podcasts.

I hope you dig it, and I’d like to hear what you think, so drop me a line if you have the time to give it a listen.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you all next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Pretty Things – Don’t Bring Me Down

Oy! What you lookin’ at??

Listen/Download -Pretty Things – Don’t Bring Me Down

Greetings all.

The 45 I bring you this week is one of my all-time favorite finds.

Back in the day (way back in the day) I took a little trip to a local antique mall on account of I’d heard there were records to be pawed over.

At first, aside from a very expensive copy of the Rajput and the Sipoy Mutiny LP (way too rich for my blood) there didn’t seem to be much there, until that is I stumbled upon a table full of 45s.

Even when I got into that mess, it didn’t seem too promising.

Then, while flipping through a stack of sevens I happened upon the familiar, blue Fontana label.

My first assumption was that I had happened upon yet another copy of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s ‘Je T’aime…’, so imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw that what I was holding was a Pretty Things 45!

It was shocking because outside of the rarefied air of record shows it was the first (and last) time I ever encountered one of their records in the wild.

During those heady, mid-80s garage/mod days the Pretties loomed large, first and foremost because of their bad-assery, which was compounded by the fact that they had the cache of obscurity here in the states (practically unheard of aside from their much later Swan Song LPs junking up flea market stalls).

Amongst the British R&Beat scene, the Pretty Things were a very big deal, scoring in the UK, on the Continent and pretty much everywhere else aside from the US of A, where in 1964 they were way too long-haired, mean and freaky for the time.

Mickie Most could stuff the Animals into matching suits and they’d pass on American TV, but I can’t imagine Ed Sullivan taking a shine to Phil May and Dick Taylor with their ratty thrift store sweaters and vomit-flecked boots, not to mention their unspeakably long hair and general bad attitude.

Though the Pretty Things would later add a touch of pop and jangle to their barbed wire, in the early days they were among the most faithful devotees of the US electric blues sound, presaging US-style garage punk with their snarl.

Written by Johnnie Dee (lead singer of a group called the Bulldogs, I’m not sure if this is the same Johnnie Dee who recorded for Sonet) and released in 1964 (it was the group’s follow-up to ‘Rosalyn’) ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ was a UK Top 10 hit. It’s rawer than most of similar contemporary efforts from that side of the pond, with wailing guitar and harmonica and of course Phil May’s snotty vocals.

The opening guitar line, moving into the tambourine hits is one of the great openings of the Beat era.

I hope you dig it, and I’ll be back next week.

Peace

Larry

 

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Graham Bond – Love Is the Law b/w The Naz

Bond. Graham Bond

Listen – Graham Bond- Love Is the Law – MP3

Listen – Graham Bond- The Naz – MP3

Greetings all.

I’m back from the road with a bellyful of lobster and a stack of new (old) vinyl.
The digging aspect of our journey was especially fruitful for the coffers of Iron Leg, with the acquisition of a fair amount of pop, rock and psych stuff, including a couple of want list items that will surely be featured in this space as soon as I get it all digi-ma-tized.
The tune I bring you today is something I picked up years ago because of the label.
Pulsar records was a California based imprint that was a home away from home for a number of New Orleans expatriates like Mac Rebennack (aka Dr John) and Jesse Hill.
When I saw a Graham Bond* 45 on Pulsar, my first instinct was that it might contain within its grooves a helping of Hammond Heat. Bond was one of the first wave of UK R&Beat organ masters with the Graham Bond Organisation (which included a young pair by the names of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker) recorded some true heat, including one of my all time faves, the scorching ‘Harmonica’.
Bond’s early work is truly deserving of a wider audience, lacking in his own time likely due to his own anti-rockstar persona – Bond was a portly Oliver Hardy lookalike – and today to a lack of proper representation on the reissue market.
After tearing it up with R&B and the blues, Bond immersed himself in the occult (a devotee of Aleister Crowley) and moved to the US, where he met (and later married) singer Diane Stewart (also an occultist and the composer of today’s selection) and recorded two LPs for Pulsar.
The tune I bring you today , ‘Love Is the Law’ takes its title from one of the main precepts of Crowley’s cosmology, which he called Thelema.
The tune itself is a vaguely psych-y number with a typically wailing vocal by Bond. The music itself is atypical for those familiar with Bond’s earlier work. Though Bond does work the Hammond here, the most prominent sound is that of the Mellotron (which I’ve seen a reference which claims Bond was the first rock musician to use one), and the overall vibe is a lot more hippy and trippy. I’ve read that Bond played all of the instruments on this album, aside from the drums which were played by session master Hal Blaine.
The flip side of the single, and instrumental entitled ‘The Naz’ (one would assume that Crowley was borrowing from the mighty Lord Buckley) is a touch jazzier, with Bond doubling on organ and saxophone**.
After his time in the US Bond’s drug and psychological problems worsened. His life ended in 1974, an apparent suicide under the wheels of a train.
I hope you dig the tune(s) and I’ll be back later in the week with some proto-garage.

Peace

Larry

*I don’t know why, but the Pulsar 45s have his name spelled with an “e” at the end…

**Like the great Charles Earland, Bond was initially a sax man before moving on to the Hammond

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some soul.

Iron Leg Digital Trip #23 – Turned On Vacation

Playlist

Baker Knight & the Knightmares – Hallucinations
Manfred Mann – 5-4-3-2-1
Rattles – Come On and Sing
Del Shannon – Little Town Flirt
Dave Berry – Don’t Gimme No Lip Child
Herman’s Hermits – No Milk Today
Turtles – Outside Chance
Jacques Dutronc – Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi
Yardbirds – Over Under Sideways Down
Peter Lee Stirling – 8:35 On the Dot
Thane Russal – Drop Everything and Run
Changin’ Tymes – How Is the Air Up There
Choir – I’m Going Home

This mix can be heard in the Iron Leg Digital Trip Podcast Archive

Greetings all.
The week of the vacationing is upon us (or at least ‘me’), so in the spirit of all things space-holding, like the jelly that keeps a donut from caving in, I have quite literally slapped a mix together so that we all might have something to groove to until I get back in the saddle.
This is not to say that anyone depends on what they find here to keep their ears filled, but that the presentation of an additional option to do so, especially with groovy sounds, is why the Iron Leg exists, so mix I shall.
That said, I must begin with a caveat, that being that there are a couple or three tunes herein which I do not posess on original vinyl sources, but since they make my ears tingle, and ought to do the same for you all, I figured it couldn’t hurt (and it won’t). It helps that the whole stew is glued together with a series of vintage commercials.
The first of those (and the first song in the mix) is the brain bendingly cool ‘Hallucinations’ by Baker Knight and the Knightmares. Aside from the obvious sonic power of the song, it’s cool when you find out that Baker Knight had a long and varied career, making rockabilly, pop (including writing hits for Dean Martin) and this awesome slice of Californ-a-delica.
Next up is the song that is not only one of the finest things the Manfreds ever laid down, but waqs also for a time the theme song to ‘Ready Steady Go’. I remember quite well how my mind was blown when I first realized how much R&Beat was there underneath stuff like ‘The Mighty Quinn’ and ‘Pretty Flamingo’. Not to mention what an amazing singer Paul Jones was…
The version of Kraut-punkers The Rattles ‘Come On and Sing’ that I include here is from a soundtrack to a German TV movie. It sounds like a weird mix, but I’ll have to depend on those more versed in Rattle-iana to fall by with the facts on this one.
Things take a brief detour into my all-time favorite slice of proto Merseybeat, Del Shannon’s ‘Little Town Flirt’, before running head on into the nasty flip side to ‘The Crying Game’, Dave Berry’s ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, long rumored to feature a certain Mr. Page on lead guitar.
Say what you want about Peter Noone’s leaping, buck-toothed, innocent appeal to a whole generation of twelve year old girls, but Herman’s Hermits weren’t all ‘Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’. They – like many of their peers – had access to the golden pen of Graham Gouldman, and used this access to create true brilliance like ‘No Milk Today’, still one of my favorite UK 60s tunes.
Over here in the US, probably down the street from Baker Knight, were the Turtles, who started out working the Bob Dylan cover-go-round and morphed into one of the truly great pop bands of their era. Back in the day when I hammered the drums with the Phantom Five we often whipped out ‘Outside Chance’ as a combination Chesterfield Kings/Turtles tribute.
I felt the mix wasn’t redolent enough of garlic butter, so I brought back the previously posted, and always brutal, Franco-garage of Jacques Dutronc’s ‘Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi’. I think you’ll agree that it is a song worth hearing again.
Despite the fact that it is currently being used to sell a Seth Rogen movie, the Yardbirds ‘Over Under Sideways Down’ will always be one of the greatest, fuzzed out bits of freaky, beaty, proto-psychy, wanna be a sitar-y goodness to ever come down the pike. That opening guitar riff still makes my hair stand on end, nearly forty years since I first heard it.
I know almost nothing about Peter Lee Stirling, other than that he seems to have released a number of poppy 45s before ending up fronting Alan Hawkshaw’s supergroup Rumplestiltskin. ‘8:35 On the Dot’ is a fine bit of late 60s UK pop.
Coming from th every same comp is a song that I’ve been chasing on vinyl for years (unsuccessfully), ‘Drop Everything and Run’ by Thane Russal and Three. Russal recorded a bunch of much harder-edged Mod stuff before this, but there’s a certain pop naivete in the grooves of this number that I find appealing in an underappreciated mid-period Rolling Stones-y way.
I’ve already gone into depth describing the blood-curdling, 1965-ish, awesome-osity of the Changing Tymes’ ‘How Is the Air Up There’, which is record of unique power and fuzz.
The last cut here is one that has appeared in this space before, in a post dedicated to spanking the Choir for the unabashed thievery herein (with apologies to the Nashville Teens). That said, ‘I’m Going Home’, yet another record I first heard via the Chesterfield Kings (aka Rochester’s Newest Hitmakers) is still a killer.
I hope you dig the mix, and with any luck I will return to you in a week, stuffed to the gills with lobsters and fresh New England air.

Peace
Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a jazzy/funky edition of Funky16Corners Radio.

PSS Check out Paperback Rider too…