Engine

It's kind of uncanny how much I agree with you here. My experience was similar: I heard about the band from a friend and, at his urging, I drove into the city where there was a record store that would carry it, bought the tape, and immediately fell in love with Summer Babe. That song will be burned into a special part of my brain as long as I live.

Gavin B.

This one's for you, Engine... and don't forget: NO BIG HAIR!

Gavin B.

Song of the Day




To Sure With Love- Lou Miami and the Kozmetix Lou Miami was Boston singer who acheived some noteriety as a performer on the East Coast post punk scene in the late Seventies.

He was quite popular in the rough and tumble Boston club scene and the uptown Manhattan no-wave scene. Lou opened gigs for Arto Lindsay's DNA, the Bush Tetras, the Contortions, Lydia Lunch and 8 Eyed Spy and Mission of Burma in New York and Boston into the early Eighties. It's strange how YouTube has resurrected these hoplessly obscure bands that you were once obsessed with 25 years ago. Your past will stalk you to your grave on YouTube.

Lou's bondage and disipline version of To Sir with Love became a humorous high camp fetish classic among Boston punk rockers. In Lou's ironic version "Sir" teaches him so good lessons about right and wrong down at the lumberyard. Push the HQ button on the YouTube player when the video begins to roll, or the quality will be terrible.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day



Mona- Quicksilver Messenger Service My father used to book Quicksilver's gigs in St. Louis and Chicago in the late Sixties. A couple of weeks after this open air gig in the Bay Area in the fall of 1969, in the video below, they flew to St. Louis and played an open air free gig at the World's Fair Pavillion in Forest Park in St. Louis that my father organized.

I vividly remember Forest Park Pavillion QMS gig even though I was a kid. Lots of people blowing bubbles, balloons, face painting, and Crazy Marvin the head of the Boneshakers Motor Cycle Club who was friends with my dad. My mom carried my younger brother around on a papoose on her back like the Lakota princess she was. I saw my first black dude in a big giant afro that day (power to the people!). I couldn't tell you what I ate for breakfast this morning but I have total recall of the big afro dude I saw in 1969 as a kid.

Quicksilver had a reputation for their love of LSD, guns, music and horses and it was all about in that order. The band existed in a constant state of chaos and paranoia. They were the first Frisco band to move to Marin County so they could avoid any more drug busts. They spent a lot of time firing their vintage guns and riding their horses. The major labels were interested in Quicksilver as early as 1965 but they were about the last San Francisico band to put out an album. Quicksilver really didn't have much of a work ethic and did everything in the moment.

Quicksilver was signed in 1966 by Capitol Records and they spent two years blissed out in the studio before coming up with an embarssingly thin 6 song debut album that was really quite good but should have taken two weeks to record. Commerical success was never a priority for Quicksilver. They allegedly drove Capitol Records crazy who dropped them after their second album even though that album, Happy Trails became a psychedelic classic and made it to 27 on the charts and big improvement on their self titled debut which peaked at 68 on the charts.

Quicksilver had all kinds of problems with the law including drug busts and one member who went AWOL to Canada when he was drafted. The band actually hung together in various forms until 1975 which was amazing given the dysfuntional behavior of the band members and thier stubborn refusal to embark upon anything resembling a career path throughout their 10 year existence. (click on HQ button once YouTube player starts for vastly improved sound and video quality).

music_phantom13

Wow this thread is amazing. I just finished reading through it, and you have some great stuff in here. And out of curiosity, what exactly is it that you do? You obviously have led a very interesting life, and had some great stories to tell about some of these people. Also, you can nonchalantly talk about a job recording blues and jazz for the Smithsonian archives. I'd give just about anything for a job working in music.

Gavin B.

I've probably had 101 jobs in my life, none of which would be considered jobs in the conventional sense of the word job. I have an undergraduate degree history and and MEd in psychology but never worked in either field. Most of my work comes from doing short term research (6 month- 1 year) projects funded by various private foundations promoting the arts.

The Smithsonian job was an entry level job but because so many of the great musical historians like Mike Seeger, Harry Smith, Sam Charters, and Barry Lee Pearson worked at the Smithsonian it was a great opportunity for me. Moses Asch ran the Smithsonian Folkways label from 1948 until 1986 and during that period over 2100 field recordings sessions were released on the label and probably another 3000 or so are in the archives at the Smithsonian on tape. I had just completed a tour of duty in the Peace Corp and saw the position announced in a routine government service posting. It was still during the era when the American goverment spent some money perserving it's own cultural folkways. All of that ended during the Reagan era along with my gig at the Smithsonian.

For the past five years I've been writting full time and doing a weekly radio show at a local college radio station here in St. Louis.

I'll soon be doing a internet radio show for Perspectives.com, the internet's largest forum and since the show has a global reach, anyone on Music Banter will be able to hear my show. I'll supply details as soon as I get them in about a week or so.

Making a lot of money has never been a big career priority for me which frees me to follow my own path. Bob Dylan once said freedom is waking up in the morning and doing pretty much what you want to do all day long. No amount of money can purchase that kind of freedom.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Photo of "Monoman" Jeff Connelly at a Lyres' 1980 performance at the Rat in Boston.

Don't Give It Up Now- The Lyres I was taken aback the first time I went to YouTube and there wasn't a single song by my old Boston homeboys, the Lyres. The Lyres were led by Farfisa organ king and tamborine master Jeff Connelly aka Monoman. Monoman earned his nickname for his obsessive collecting of old singles by garage bands and the Lyres played the same kind of ? and the Mysterians, Misunderstood, Seeds, Stooges, and Barry and the Remains variety of garage rock.

The Lyre's were technically a proto-garage band who were part of the Boston punk scene in the late Seventies and early Eighties but Monoman's faithful renderings of his songs sound so authentic, many folks think the Lyres' music is from the Sixties era when they first hear it. It's ashamed how great Boston bands like Mission of Burma, the Pixies and the Lyres got passed over by the music industry and were only appreciated long after they had gone their seperate ways. The Lyres deserved a whole lot more. They were a wicked good live band.

I decided to produce this homemade video of the Lyres song Don't Give It Up Now, so they had at least one song posted on YouTube. For the video content, I mostly used old photographs, gig flyers and scans of old album covers by the Lyres.

music_phantom13

How very, very true. I've always just wanted to work with music in some way, hopefully I'll get there on day.

Thanks for the Lyres song, I've never heard of them before but that was great. They sound much more, um, musically gifted than, say, the Stooges. I thoroughly enjoyed that and intend to try to find some of their stuff after I get off work today.

Gavin B.

Drugs, Music, Madness and Government Propaganda Films

Anyone who grew up and attended a public school in the United State be it in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties or Nineties has probably been forced to sit through government made propaganda films about the negative effects of various controlled substances. The most notorious and laughable of these films was Reefer Madness (1937) in which the government was already trying to connect marijuana, with madness, jazz music, violence and sex:




Then in 1966 from the FBI X-Files, came the classic, campy, anti LSD film I Murdered A Hot Dog (my name for the film). What high school kid could not sit through this Ed Wood type of cinematic tale and not laugh:




Then in 1998, the Nancy Reagan founded Partnership for a Drug Free America decided to scare the hell out young people and hired an unknown actress named Rachel Lee Cook to flip her wig on this public service announcement This Your Brain on Drugs (Temper Tantrum Remix):



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Here's an alternative perspective that rarely gets aired:

Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia Interview by Tom Snyder

At least Kesey is honest concede that nothing is free and acknowledges his frequent use of LSD use my have had certain unintended effects on him. Jerry Garcia, the man sitting next to him may have died because of his cocaine use but it's more likely that Garcia's love of sugar got him into the health crisis that aggravated his diabetes and ultimately killed him. . Despite the hazards of their drug use, neither Kesey nor Garcia would have been quite the same artists without the use of drugs and neither man had any regrets about that aspect of their life.

beszpilman

I do find the third film sexy, it does that for me at least ;D