Illustration from the cover of the ‘Smashing Time’ OST

Listen – Lynn Redgrave – While I’m Still Young – MP3

Greetings all.

This weeks ‘end of week’ post is coming a bit early on account of it’s a holiday and I’m taking the rest of the week off, on account of that’s how I roll on Thanksgiving.
The tune I bring you today is something I dug up onmy recent trip to the Berkshires.
I should start by informing you that the song you are about to hear is nothing less than a demented work of genius, and should be covered by a punk band (garage or otherwise) as soon as humanly possible.
The strangest thing of all is that ‘While I’m Still Young’ is basically a parody to start with, composed to be sung by Lynne Redgrave’s character ‘Yvonne’ in the 1967 film ‘Smashing Time’.
‘Smashing Time’ was always a touchstone of sorts back in the mod days, mainly because it was packed wall to wall with Carnaby Street type scenery, and that it provided an odd little snapshot of the short lived ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ fashion craze in the UK, AND (dig this) a cameo by no less a band than Tomorrow (Keith West, Twink, Steve Howe et al) as a band called the Snarks.
The main thrust of the film is Yvonne and Brenda (Rita Tushingham) heading into the big city in search of stardom, where the former, discovered as a “typical teen” is taken and injection-molded into attempted pop stardom by a cynical record industry.
Today’s selection’While I’m Still Young’ is the highlight of the soundtrack, with a bright, brassy 1967-centric vibe (as seen through the prism of middle aged showbiz types) and an absolutely insane lyric.

I can’t sing but I’m young
Can’t do a thing but I’m young
I’m a fool, but I’m cool
Don’t put me down
I don’t read but I’m young
I’m built for speed cause I’m young
I’m a fool, but I’m cool
I’m not a clown
Don’t give a fig if you don’t dig
That I’m around
I don’t walk but I’m young
I never talk cause I’m young
I won’t cry, if I die
While I’m still young

Yeah baby I’m so young
Yeah baby I’m still so young

The lyrics were written by English satirist/surrealist (and jazz singer) George Melly, and they’re really amazing. ‘While I’m Still Young’ reads like the long lost bridge between raw 1966 punk and snotty 1976 punk, all delivered through Lynne Redgrave’s shrill vocal, laid on top of a cool, sitar tinged arrangement.
I dig it a lot, and I hope you do too.
Have a great holiday and I’ll see you all next week.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for heavy bit of Latin funk.

Sandy Salisbury (bottom row, left side) with the Millennium

Listen – Puppet – Best Friend – MP3

Greetings all.

I had an interesting weekend. How’s about you?
The short version is, I started to feel sick (like kidney problem sick) on Friday, went to the hospital, had a brief (yet unpleasant) surgical procedure and was sprung by Saturday afternoon. All in all not the worst episode in recent memory, but honestly, who the fuck wants to spend a night in a hospital bed when you could be somewhere (anywhere) else?
Fortunately the ‘out by Saturday afternoon’ aspect of the deal was the crucial part, that and the fact that I’m not feeling too poorly overall, allowing me to return to my appointed rounds in a timely fashion.
The tune I bring you today is the first in a series of Millennium-related tracks that I amassed during the approach to the recent Curt Boettcher project. Though Boettecher is the name most closely associated with that group, the ranks of the Millennium included a surplus of songwriting and performing talent. Starting today, and going forward I’ll be featuring a number of interesting cuts by members of the band.
The inaugural post features a song that I chased for years by virtue of it having occupied a place in my childhood memory.
Back when I was a kid, there was a show called ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father’ (which itself was a remake of a 1963 Glenn Ford movie). It ran from 1969 to 1972, starred Bill Bixby (known to slightly younger viewers from the ‘Incredible Hulk’) and most importantly featured an incredibly catchy title song performed by none other than Harry Nilsson.
Flash forward 15 years or so to a much older me browsing through the crates at some record show or other and what do I turn up but a Nilsson LP called ‘Aerial Pandemonium Ballet’. An interesting artifact, ‘APB’ was in fact (and I did not know this at the time) something of an ur remix project, in which Nilsson took tracks from his first two LPs, 1967’s ‘Pandemonium Shadow Show’ and 1968’s ‘Aerial Ballet’ and engaged in often subtle bits of reworking/rerecording. He was essentially taking advantage of the fact that most of his 1971 audience – who came to him via his 1969 mega-hit ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ would have been unfamiliar with his largely overlooked early work, and presenting some of that work in a new setting.
Of course I knew none of this at the time, and it would have been aside the point except for the fact that one of the tracks on ‘APB’ sounded eerily familiar. The first time I heard ‘Daddy’s Song’ the archetypal light bulb went on over my head and I thought to myself, ‘This sounds an awful lot like the theme to ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father’, which it did. It was only years later that I discovered that the theme song in question ‘Best Friend’ was actually an amalgam of ‘Daddy’s Song’ and an unreleased (originally planned for inclusion on ‘Aerial Ballet’) song called ‘Girlfriend’.
Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I always wondered if there had been a commercial release of Nilsson’s ‘Courtship’ theme song.
There was not (unless you count a one-minute long version of it that surfaced on a ‘TV Theme’s’ comp years later).
However, back in the day, knowing a good song when they heard one, some enterprising souls put together a group – from what I can tell a one-off studio conglomeration – called Puppet, to record and release a (very faithful) cover of ‘Best Friend’. That group just happened to feature the lead vocals of none other than long-time Boettcher accomplice and Millennium member Sandy Salisbury.
Salisbury, who recorded a 45 (and an excellent unreleased LP) for Gary Usher’s Together records had worked with Curt Boettcher on a number of projects through the 60s. He had a wonderful voice and wrote songs like ‘Lonely Girl’ (recorded but originally unreleased for the Sagittarius sessions) and ‘5 A.M.’ from the Millennium’s ‘Begin’. I have no idea how Salisbury got involved in Puppet. The vast majority of his known credits were Boettcher-related, and as far as I can tell (at least by the label) Puppet was not one of those projects. It’s certainly not out of the question – considering his talent – that Salisbury (like Boettcher) did other similarly ‘anonymous’ work to make a buck.
Either way, it’s a groovy record, never straying too far from the original, which I assume was intentional since the assumption here is that Puppet were essentially trying to cash in on the popularity of the TV series. Naturally, as often happens with such projects, Puppet went absolutely nowhere, rendering their one 45 both obscure and rare*. I looked for this one for a long time, eventually stumbling on it in an unexpected place and grabbing it for a pittance.
I hope you dig the song, and I’ll be back later in the week.

Peace

Larry

*’Best Friend’ was included on the ‘Preparing for the Ballroom’ CD comp

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a deep soul ballad

Kak

Listen – Kak – Rain (45 edit) – MP3

Greetings all.

The end of yet another week is here and I’m just glad to get here in one piece.
In celebration of that fact, I bring you one of the awesomest, most brain bending-est, psychedelic sonic blasts ever committed to seven inches of vinyl.
The record in question is one that I chased for years, never finding one at a decent price until a few months back when I caught a copy as part of a big lot of 45s. In addition to the wondrous 45 we’ll all be hearing today, I also got a bunch of soul and 60s pop in the deal, some of which have already appeared in this space.
I first heard of Kak way back in the early days of CDs when I got two of their tracks (including today’s selection) on an import comp of 60s psyche. I bought that comp (three CDs at a relatively high price) to get one specific track, that being Love’s ‘Your Mind and We Belong Together’, which was not yet available on compact disc (anyone else here remember those days???).
Anyhoo, the comp – the title of which I can no longer remember since it was long ago lost after being loaned out and never returned – ended up turning me on to a couple of bands I later dug into deeply, namely Pearls Before Swine, and today’s artist, Kak.
Some time after acquiring those CDs, I blew a wad of cash on an import bootleg repressing of Kak’s sole Epic LP. I liked the record a lot, but was pole-axed when I discovered that the version of ‘Rain’ on the LP was a much tamer affair than the one I had grown to love on the CD comp. That this was in an era when the interwebs were in their infancy, I was at a loss as to why the versions didn’t match up, and it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that the version of the song that I loved so much had appeared only on a 45 release.
Thus began the search….
I was never able to grab a copy in the field, and seemingly every time it would pop up on E-Bay I would end up getting outbid.
As is always the case, I saved the search and bided my time. When the lot of 45s popped up (with no individual records graded) I knew I was taking a chance, but that’s part of the record game. Sometimes you have to leap before you look in the hopes that you will be rewarded when you land.
Fortunately for me, this was one of those times.
I won the auction, the box of records arrived at my door, and I opened it only to discover that the seller had packed everything in huge wads of shredded newsprint – which, since it’s one of the shittiest grades of paper imaginable – had (post-shredding) deteriorated even further, leaving my house coated in small scraps of paper, paper dust and god knows what else.
That said, the added labor of the clean up paid off in the end because the one 45 I actually wanted in the lot (the one by Kak) was in decent shape, and there was a nice stack of extras to make the value of the purchase all the better.
Now, at the beginning of the piece when I described the 45 edit of ‘Rain’ in glowing terms, I suspect (having listened to it yet again while I was writing this) that I was not quite effusive enough. ‘Rain’ is nothing less than two solid minutes of ass-kicking compressed into 45 form, guaranteed to set your hair on end, while you leap from your chair, air-guitar in hand, leaping about your house like a goofball.
It’s that good.
Where the LP version (which can be heard here) is a relaxed bit of San Francisco sunrise, the 45 edit of ‘Rain’ is a blistering and unrelenting mixture of late period garage powered, speed-freakery with just a pinch of soul added for flavor. The lead guitar by Dehner Patten is a fluid, wah-wah soaked wonder and the rhythm section is uncharacteristically powerful with over modulated drums and even at one point pushed even further by a round of handclaps, and just when it gets up to full speed, it’s over almost as soon as it started.
I listen to ‘Rain’ and the first thing that comes to mind is to question why not this wasn’t a hit, at least in the limited world of the FM underground. Perhaps it was too intense, whether for the Golden Gate Park hippies or the general AM radio audience. It’s entirely possible that ‘Rain’ may have made it’s only impact amongst the amphetamine sodden, leathered and chained motorcycle set where it provided the soundtrack for any number of nocturnal chain-whippings. Could it be that the band (or the label) witnessed the unholy explosions unleashed by the record, then changed their tune (literally) retreating into the version of the song that appeared on the LP?
The world may never know.
I hope you dig the song as much as I do, and I’ll be back on Monday.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a Jamaican funk 45!

Peter we hardly knew ye….

Listen -The Monkees – Teardrop City – MP3

Greetings all.

I hope all is well on your end and that you’re all ready to weather yet another week.
The tune I bring you today is yet another 45 that emerged from my giant, everlasting, pulsating record stash of a few summers ago, whence my father-in-law brought me down a heap of records, thousands strong, which even today is still giving up the goods (albeit at a much slower rate).
I still have a couple of crates of stuff from that haul down in the basement, and every once in a great while, when I’m moving the wash, emptying the humidifier or hunting the huge, mutant crickets that have moved into the cellar, I stop by those boxes, grab a handful of records and pick a couple of things that look like they merit further investigation.
These days, the amount of records that meet that criteria is getting smaller and smaller. The wife and I made a pretty thorough pass through the initial mountain of vinyl, so the pickings are relatively slim, however, there always seems to be something lurking down there, and today’s selection is one of them.
The Monkees have made a couple of appearances at Iron Leg over the years. I’m a fan, and there are still a couple of LPs by the group that I go back to on a regular basis. When I happened upon a copy of the ‘Tear Drop City’ 45, I thought the song title was familiar but could not recall anything of what it might sound like. As it turns out that was perfectly reasonable because I’d never actually heard the song.
I gave it a spin an really liked it, which sent me out onto the interwebs where I was surprised to discover that this was actually some of that late-period Monkee goodness, so late in fact that it is, how do they say, ‘Tork-less’.
That’s right, Peter Tork had left the band (no doubt to devote his time to beaded buckskin jackets and daisy chains) by the time the ‘Instant Replay’ LP was released in 1969. ‘Tear Drop City’, with its ‘Last Train to Clarksville’-ish guitar riff had actually been recorded the previous year by its authors, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart on their ‘I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight’ LP. The Monkees version is a much rougher take on the tune (though the 45 was arranged by Boyce and Hart) with heavier guitars and a more aggressive pace.
Following ‘Instant Replay’ there was one more Tork-less LP ‘The Monkees Present’ before Mike Nesmith got wise and tore himself loose, leaving Mickey and Davey to slog it out for one more LP as a duo, 1970s ‘Changes’.
I hope you dig the tune, and I’ll be back later in the week.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a new mix of funk and soul for the kids!

The Love Generation

Listen -The Love Generation – Not Be Found – MP3

Greetings all.

How’s by you?
The end of the week is nigh, and since it’s grey, gloomy, cold and windy outside, I figured I’d brighten things up a bit with a glittery little slice of sunshine pop.
It bears mentioning that had I been out digging in the field – sans portable – I would have been duty bound to pick up an album by a group calling themselves the Love Generation (assuming of course that some deluded flea marketeer wasn’t trying to get $25 bucks for it).
That said, when I finally did get the first album by said Love Generation, I was aware of them in name and reputation, and needed only to venture out into that great digital flea market known as the interwebs to secure my copy.
I hadn’t heard any of their music, and truth be told the group shot on the album cover screamed “corny”, but I had heard enough positive things about them that it wasn’t going to kill me to grab the record. Good thing too, since the album in question contained some excellent examples of the great, sunshiney harmony pop that I love so much.
When it comes to the subject of what the collector geeks of the world refer to as “sunshine pop” the range of quality is fairly wide, encompassing everything from visionary pop like the Millennium to one-off cartoon show soundtracks recorded by anonymous collections of studio professionals. How much an individual is willing to dig into the genre is guided both by a love for pure pop, and by a willingness to follow that love down all kinds of back alleys, some stranger than others.
Sometimes an obscure album yields nothing more than a bright cover and another worthless slab of vinyl to throw on the growing heap in your record room.
Other times – and I’m happy to report that this is one of them – you pick up a record, apply the needle to the wax and get a rush when what comes out of the speakers is in fact quite good.
The Love Generation were by and large the work of the brothers John and Tom Bahler. They, along with Mitch Gordon, Ann White, Marilyn Miller and Jim Wasson, took the sounds of groups like the Mamas and Papas, Spanky and Our Gang and the Association (among others) as a starting point and ran off into what can only be described as a groovy sunset wrapped around a licorice rainbow (sure, most people wouldn’t use those specific terms, but this is my blog…).
It’s important to give this music a serious listen, because a casual pass at a song like today’s selection ‘Not Be Found’ might impress the casual listener as light and disposable. The truth of the matter is, groups like the Love Generation, while wrapping themselves in the external trappings of the hip world, were in fact applying the pop vocabulary of the day to a much more conventional framework. They were using the same kinds of hooks as many more ‘serious’ rock bands, but delivered them in a decidedly non-rock fashion. This isn’t to say that they were square – because I can’t imagine anyone outside of the youth demographic enjoying this stuff – but rather that they were proudly un-hip. Where any number of rock bands that people might consider more ‘legitimate’ would have presented themselves with a rougher, cooler vibe (in both looks and sound), the Love Generation took some of the same energy and applied it to both songcraft and performance. Unfortunately for them – at least as history goes – is that their efforts landed them much closer to a commercial, even bubblegummy vibe that 40 years down the road endears them only to specialist collectors, rendering them disposable to pretty much everyone else. Had they come along a few years later they may very well cut a much wider commercial swath.
It should come as no surprise to you that I think this is unfair.
Say all you want about the ‘deeper’ bands of the day, but I’m here to remind you that even the brightest pop confections had their artistic moments.
The song I bring you today, ‘Not Be Found’ has a folk rock base, wrapped, again and again in layer upon layer of bright, lush harmonies. Like Curt Boettcher, the Bahler brothers knew the value and power in the human voice, making it the most prominent instrument on their records.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the Bahler brothers were involved in the early albums by the Partridge Family, as both writers and performers. Tom Bahler went on to write both ‘Julie Do Ya Love Me’ for Bobby Sherman, and ‘She’s Out Of My Life’ for Michael Jackson.
I hope you dig the tune and I’ll be back on Monday.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some dance floor grooves.

The Maestro – Enoch Light

Listen -Enoch Light & the Glittering Guitars – You Showed Me – MP3

Greetings all.

Welcome to another fantabulous autumnal week, in which my attempts to do psychic battle with the leaves in my yard result only in their repeatedly mocking me by falling to the ground.
In an attempt to soothe my shredded nerves I figured I’d get things started this week with something on the mellow side.
I have previously described my ongoing fascination with the sounds of Mr. Enoch Light.
Light spent the 30s, 40s and 50s as the leader of a popular big band, but it wasn’t until that last decade that he carved himself out a place as one of the true leaders of the ‘Now Sound’ with his work creating hi-fi masterworks engineered for full exploitation of the topography of the American bachelor pad.
Light, via his Command and Project 3 labels pioneered hi-tech stereo recording to 35mm sound and built a significant and widely varied catalog of albums. On the surface many of these records – especially the earlier ones – seemed aimed exclusively at hi-fi nuts who liked to sit between expensive loudspeakers listening to sounds bounce back and forth between the channels.
However, as Light and his army of crack session players (including keyboard whiz Dick Hyman, guitarist Tony Mottola and drummers like Bobby Rosengarten and Ed Shaugnessy) moved on into the swinging sixties, the material they covered on these records, under a variety of names, began to lean toward the hip side of the street.
And – wonder of wonders – the recordings of this material started to sound just as hip. The records by Enoch Light and the Light Brigade (or the Brass Menagerie, or as in this case the Glittering Guitars) and Hyman especially began to reflect less exploitation and more empathy with the material, so much so that if their interpretations sometimes sounded a little far out (listen to some Hyman’s visionary moog recordings of the 60s) they were more often that not very interesting.
The tune I bring you today hails from the compilation LP ‘Enoch Light Presents Patterns In Sound Vol. 6: The Now Scene’, which features selections from of number of the instrumental groups in the Command roster as well as the two best known vocal groups in Light’s stable, the Free Design and the Critters. The tune I bring you today is by Enoch Light and the Glittering Guitars, a cover of the Turtles classic ‘You Showed Me’.
The Light version features an ‘easy’ background, over which are layered a couple of very fuzzy, very sustained lead guitars (one by Vinnie Bell). Delivered at a familiar tempo, the juxtaposition of strings and fuzzed guitars sounds like the backing track for a mod boudoir scene in a period exploitation film.
It’s very groovy and I hope you dig it.
I’ll be back later in the week with something cool.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a funky 45

The Standells

Listen -The Standells – Little Sally Tease – MP3

Greetings all.

I hope all is well on your end as another week comes to a close.
The daylight savings time thing has come to an end, and this year (as opposed to all those in the past that I can still remember with any clarity) it doesn’t seem to be causing me any trouble. Usually I find my self dragging my ass around for at least a week as I pull myself into synch with the clock.
I’m putting this post up a little early since the fam and I are hitting the road for a couple of days of R&R.
The tune I bring you today has been a favorite since back in the garage revival days of yore. Back then, next to the Chocolate Watchband, the Standells loomed over the mid-60s like some kind of garage punk colossus, having created several anthemic tunes and having the added benefit of having recorded for a major label and having their moving image captured on film a number of times.
Though for most garage heads the go-to Standells numbers are ‘Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White’ and the Nuggets-y ‘Dirty Water’, my faves by the LA combo have always been lesser known killers like ‘Why Did You Hurt Me’ and today’s selection, their ramped up cover of Don and the Goodtimes PNW classic ‘Little Sally Tease’.
Originally waxed by D&the GTs, then later covered by the Kingsmen, ‘Little Sally Tease’ is one of those stompers that seems as if it were created in the lab of a mop-topped mad scientist attempting to formulate the perfect garage punk record, having exhumed and stitched together pounding drums, throbbing combo organ, fuzz guitar and snotty adolescent girl trouble lyrics of the first order.
The original version of the song is no small potatoes, but the Standells took it into the studio and beat it like a rented mule until every single drop of snot and bad attitude was placed on display like a hood ornament on their own high powered muscle car. Things get off to a strong start with heavy bass and witch doctor drums, but it isn’t until the chorus, shredded guitar solo and combo organ workout that things reach a truly explosive climax.
‘Little Sally Tease’ is a cut on the 1966 LP ‘Dirty Water’ which may pack more garage punk power than any full length in the history of the genre. Alongside the title cut, ‘..Good Guys’, ‘Medication’, ‘Little Sally Tease’ and ‘Why Did You Hurt Me’, you also get slamming covers of ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ and ‘Hey Joe’, as well as the cover photo of the Standells looking positively badass.
It’s just that heavy.
As your physician I recommend you get this on a CD (or patch the MP3 thingy into the car radio) and drive around with the stereo at full blast and the windows wide open. No sense in hiding the fact that you’re a fuzz addled freak from the rest of the neighborhood, is there? Hmmmm?
Dig it and I’ll see you all on Monday.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for the second half of the the 5th anniversary celebration.

Steff, the Remains and Buddy Greco ?!?

Listen – Steff – Where Did She Go – MP3

Greetings all.

I hope hat everyone has recovered from the Halloween festivities and is ready for a new week.
First off, it behooves me to direct you over to the mothership, i.e. Funky16Corners where the fifth anniversary of its foundation in the blog-o-mosphere is being celebrated this week with not one, but two new mixes of Beatles covers in the soul/funk/jazz bag. If it weren’t for the old F16C, Iron Leg would likely never have gotten out of the starting gate, so take a moment to stop by and soak up the good vibes, then come on back.
Done?
Good.
The tune I bring you today is yet another fantastic example of record-related serendipity.
I recently bid on and won a large lot of 45s (more than 200) , so that I might get my hands on one specific record that had eluded me for a long, long time. I paid no more for the lot than I would have if presented with a copy of said record, and figured that everything I got on top of that disc would be, in the argot of the streets, “gravy”.
And what a lot of gravy it was. In addition to the one psych 45 I picked up a grip of soul and funk 45s as well as a couple of very interesting pop/rock things.
One of those records – not coincidentally today’s selection – is one that was completely unknown to me. When I’m going through stacks of 45s in a situation like this, I make three distinct stacks:
Keepers
Unknown records that require further examination (like today’s record)
Garbage
I even make a second trip through the garbage just to make sure I’m not missing anything.
When I return to the ‘unknown’ stack, more often than not about 80% of the records end up in the garbage. Any record collector worth their salt will let you know that not everything that looks interesting is interesting, and conversely, sometimes the least interesting looking things turn out to be quite good.
Case in point: Steff.
When I saw the Steff 45 in the stack, my first instinct was to assume that it was a girl singer. However, the catalog number on the Epic 45 put it somewhere in the mid-60s, so I put it aside and continued digging.
When I finally dropped the needle on ‘Where Did She Go’ I was gobsmacked to hear a beat-cum-freakbeat guitar riff opening the song, followed by the accented voice of a male singer with a little bit of a growl in his voice. The verse was a little bit rougher than the melodic chorus, but I was digging the tune, a lot.
I set out upon the interwebs to see what I might dig up on Steff, and ultimately the answer was “not much”.
However, among the few tantalizing bits I was able to discover was the picture of Steff you see above (next to the Remains and Buddy Greco (?!?) from a trade magazine ad. ‘Where Did She Go’ was apparently released in late 1965 and even charted regionally in the American south.
Steff’s last name was Sulke, and as far as I can tell he hailed from Germany. He released at least two 45s on Epic, and another two (under his full name) on Dial, all of which – for some strange reason – charted in Louisville, Kentucky.
As I said before, ‘Where Did She Go’ straddles the beat era, edging right up into the beginnings of the freakbeat sound without diving into it whole hog. That said it’s a very groovy slice of pop and I hope you dig it as much as I do.

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for the 5th anniversary celebration!

Listen -Wizards From Kansas – She Rides With Witches – MP3

Greetings all.

It’s time to close out the Iron Leg Halloween thing, with yet another witch-related tune.
Last year I was on vacation in Maine with the family, and as if often (almost always) the case, I managed to crowbar a little digging into the trip. There was a store in downtown Portland that I had been in before, but our schedule, and the store’s oddball hours of operation conspired to keep me away. As luck would have (thanks to my lovely wife) we found a way to go to Portland on our way out of the area and I was able to make a quick stop.
Good thing too, because in addition to a couple of nice jazz/soul jazz records, I pulled a copy of the ‘Wizards From Kansas’ LP out of the ‘psych’ bin. The group’s name was familiar, it looked like my kind of thing, and since it was less than ten dollars I decided to give it a try and put it in the keeper stack. Much later that day, when we had settled in at our next stop, I logged on to the interwebs and started Google-ing my finds, when much to my surprise I discovered that the ‘Wizards from Kansas’ LP was actually worth a lot more than I paid for it.
The group was in fact from Kansas, and had recorded the LP in 1970. Though they hailed from the land of tornados, they sounded as if they’d come up in the ballrooms of San Fran, with touches of the Dead, late-period Moby Grape and even Kak in the mix.
The ‘Wizards from Kansas’ LP is a great slice of low-key, psyched out sounds that capture the ballroom sound right before it turned into something much heavier.
The tune I bring you today is ‘She Rides With Witches’, which aside from an era-appropriate, yet still clearly ill-advised drum solo, is a pretty groovy, somewhat spooky number. The band kicks back in after the drum solo with a jazzy rave up, with a very nice guitar solo. I’m not entirely sure that it makes up for the drum solo, but you take what you can get.
Apparently the Wizards From Kansas were another example of peaking too early, falling apart not long after their album was released, causing it to become a valuable obscurity. It has been reissued a couple of times, and there’s a comp out there featuring unreleased material.
I hope you dig it, and I’ll be back on Monday with something groovy.
Happy Halloween!

Peace

Larry

PS Head over to Funky16Corners for some more Halloween-osity…

Greetings all.
This is a relatively unprecedented mid-week post, bringing back last year’s Halloween tune. This is in my humble opinion the greatest slice of Halloween garage punk ever created, and it was a throwaway for a movie soundtrack. Ain’t that a bitch?
I hope you dig it and I’ll be back on Friday with something groovy (and new).
Peace
Larry

Originally posted 10/30/2008

Little Tibia & the Fibias

Listen – Little Tibia & the Fibias – The Mummy – MP3

Greetings all.

I wasn’t planning on posting again this week, but I got my hands on something cool and couldn’t let Halloween pass without posting it.

I’ve been a fan of Rankin & Bass’s ‘Mad Monster Party’ since I was a kid, when it was an annual event of sorts on Channel 5 in NYC.

Back in the day, when I was hanging out on the pageboy, fuzztone, granny glasses scene, I began to notice on part of that movie in particular (and if you scope out the picture above, you’ll know why).

Right there, in the middle of ‘Mad Monster Party’, was a smoking number by what I consider to be the greatest ‘fake’ band of all time, Little Tibia and the Fibias.

When I say “fake band” I refer only to the fact that the band was created especially for the movie (and the fact that the ‘band’ we’re referring to is in fact an animated/reanimated group of skeletal punks). There’s obviously a real band making the music. Unfortunately – aside from vague, unsourced rumors that Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers may have been involved – the identity of the real life performers has been buried in the sands of time.

That, my friends, is a goddamn shame, because as will be demonstrated when you extract the ones and zeros from the interwebs, ‘The Mummy’ is a wild ass-kicker of the first order.

You get the pounding drums, the combo organ, and a vocal that sounds like the singers were good and drunk.

And the words!

“Mad mummy dance!

He’s in a trance!

All wrapped up in himself tonight!

It’s the mummy!’

Oh, hell yes!

If this was a real 45, recorded by a “real” band, people would be kicking each other to death trying to get their hands on a copy. As it stands, the only place this was ever released was on the soundtrack to ‘Mad Monster Party’. ‘The Mummy’ is so good that I’ve often considered taking it and having a dub plate made to DJ with.

For now, just download, pop the song on the MP3 delivery system of your choice, and let it rip.

Happy Halloween.

Peace

Larry

Buy Mad Monster Party DVD at Amazon.com

Buy Mad Monster Party Soundtrack at Amazon.com

PS Head over to Funky16Corners

PSS Check out Paperback Rider too…