Rock and roll is a universal language that any musician can speak, but that cuts both ways. You certainly don't have to speak English to play it, though in the mid-1960's, it often seemed as though you had to BE English to be successful at it. However, in order to reach the big markets in the US and the UK, most bands sing in English and adopt a name of the English language as well.
Scorpions for example were fairly prominent in the early days of MTV and had several hit songs in that period. They are perhaps best known for their 1984 song "Rock You Like a Hurricane" that still gets a lot of play on oldies radio stations, but you might also remember "No One Like You" and the power ballad "Send Me an Angel". After Uriah Heep at the end of the previous year, they were only the second Western rock band to perform in the Soviet Union (in 1988).
Most people don't know that Scorpions is a German band, having been founded by guitarist Rudolf Schenker in 1965 and still together. They are among the most innovative hard rock bands of the 1970's – long before they had any American hits – and I was fortunate enough to gather a collection from this period in an album called Best of Scorpions that I was expecting to be drawn from their 1980's hits.
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One of their most high-profile moments was at the concert event The Wall – Live in Berlin, a July 1990 performance of the 1980 Pink Floyd album The Wall at the site of the Berlin Wall that had come down eight months previously. The concert was organized by Roger Waters, who had been the frontman for the band during their hitmaking period in the 1970's and early 1980's, though he left Pink Floyd in 1985 over creative differences and attempted to prevent the other bandmembers from continuing to use the name (they settled out of court in 1987).
Roger Waters had said during an interview in July 1989 that the only way he would perform The Wall live again was "if the Berlin Wall came down" – and four months later, it did. Attendance at the concert site itself was a record-breaking 450,000, and it was also broadcast live worldwide. Scorpions opened the concert with "In the Flesh" and also performed on three other songs. Guest artists included Cyndi Lauper, Marianne Faithfull, Thomas Dolby, Sinéad O'Connor, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, and Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band. Tim Curry, Albert Finney, Ute Lemper and Jerry Hall are actors who also performed, mostly during "the Trial" sequence toward the end. As the concert was performed, a gigantic wall (550 feet long and 82 feet high) that appeared to be made of large styrofoam blocks was completed; at the end of the trial, the judge declared: "Tear down the Wall!", and the wall was pushed over, row by row.
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Rudolf Schenker's younger brother Michael Schenker was a member of a British hard rock band called UFO during their most successful period in the mid-1970's. The band was named after the famed UFO Club (pronounced "you foe" or "oo foe") in London that had been the epicenter for British psychedelic and underground rock in the 1960's. Michael had periodically performed with his brother's band Scorpions and formed the Michael Schenker Group in 1979; this band also is active to this day.
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Of course, it can go the other way, too. The Beatles are well known for honing their craft in the clubs of Hamburg, Germany in the very early 1960's, as well as in their hometown of Liverpool. Still, there was some question back then as to whether they could be successful selling records in a non-English-speaking country, so the Fab Four were cajoled by their manager Brian Epstein and their producer George Martin into recording German-language versions of two of their biggest hits, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" in January 1964. "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" was later released on the band's American album, Something New about six months later.
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Speaking of Germans, I went into a long discussion of Neue Deutsche Welle ("German New Wave") in my article on one of the coolest UARB's of them all, Ja Ja Ja; and I never once mentioned the most successful of those bands: Nena. Their worldwide 1983 hit song "99 Luftballons" was in heavy rotation on MTV long before the English-language version, "99 Red Balloons" came along. (The only English words in the original song were "Captain Kirk"). I might have an excuse if that was all I knew about them, but actually, I had three of their albums and a cassette to boot – one was completely German language, and if anything, I like their German songs better than their English ones. One big favorite: "?" (yeah, that's the name of the song). I am often patting myself on the back about how good my current article is turning out, and then I make an inexcusable omission like that.
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One more German connection, and then I'll move on: About a year ago, I found another great German New Wave album from 1982 by Nervösen Deutschen ("Nervous Germans"), called Desolation Zone (or Nervous Germans). As with Ja Ja Ja, the cover was irresistible. The first song on Side 2 is "Germans Can't Rock'n'Roll" – and is that ever not at all true!
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At the time of the British Invasion that began in late 1963, it wasn't so hip to be American. However, with a few exceptions – such as Peter Noone, the lead vocalist of Herman's Hermits – even singers that had heavy British accents in their speaking voices didn't sound particularly British when they sang. Thus, many bands and recording artists in that period feigned Englishness in hopes of improving their changes of making the charts.
Sometimes though, they were just dressing in the fashions of the day. As an African-American group, the Chambers Brothers certainly weren't fooling anyone on the cover of their most successful album, The Time Has Come, though their white drummer Brian Keenan had lived in England and Ireland for a time. This album featured the band's 1965 psychedelic hit song "Time Has Come Today"; the extended version of this song runs for 11 minutes, and Keenan's distinctive drumming is one of the reasons it has remained so popular. The Chambers Brothers had started out as a gospel quartet in the 1950's and gradually edged into folk music during the early 1960's. They went electric at about the same time that Bob Dylan did – and at some of the same venues even, such as the Newport Folk Festival.
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One of the most successful faux-English bands of that period was the Sir Douglas Quintet; although they had a proper British name, the band was actually from San Antonio, Texas, and two of the bandmembers were Hispanic. When their debut album came out in 1966 under the misleading name, The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet, the band was photographed in silhouette so as to keep the ruse going. The album did include their first major hit (from 1965), "She's About a Mover". They had a later hit in 1968, "Mendocino"; though by then, their Texas roots were becoming clear.
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Frontman Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quintet would become one of the best known practitioners of Texas popular music of all types, including Mexican-American musical forms like Tejano. Ironically, Tejano was largely unknown to the larger American culture until the murder of "the Queen of Tejano" Selena in 1995 by the former president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar. In 1997, Warner Bros. released a theatrical film based on her life called Selena that launched the career of one of the most prominent Hispanic Americans of our time, Jennifer Lopez.
Doug Sahm was a founding member of Texas Tornados (named after one of his songs) that is a sort of Tejano "super group". The band included Freddy Fender, who is at least as well known as Sahm due to his hit songs "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" and "Before the Next Teardrop Falls". Rounding out the group were Augie Meyers, Sahm's bandmate in the Sir Douglas Quintet; and Flaco Jiménez, an accordion player whose father helped pioneer another type of Hispanic music, conjunto. Their 1990 self-titled debut album was released in both English and Spanish language versions.
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Meic Stevens is a national hero in Wales whom I just recently discovered through the above CD and one other. Following a nervous breakdown while he was just 25, Stevens retreated to his home village of Solva and began writing and recording songs in 1967 in the Welsh language in an attempt to create a body of pop music for the nation. He is often referred to as "the Welsh Dylan" and is also compared with Syd Barrett, the original frontman for Pink Floyd and the mastermind behind their debut album and one of the great albums of British rock, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. While he records an occasional song in English, mostly Meic Stevens sings in Welsh; though for me, this detracts hardly at all from the enjoyment of his music.
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On the other side of the Irish Sea, Enya has been one of the leading pop music performers from Ireland for many years. After appearing in her family's band Clannad for a short time, Enya began releasing personal songs with intricate musical structures in 1984. Mostly she sings in English, but Enya performs in 10 languages and occasionally drops in passages in what I take to be Gaelic on her albums.
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As I have mentioned many times before, I am a major fan of Dutch rock music from both the 1960's and 1970's. Some of the bands have non-English names, like Ekseption, Groep 1850 and Bintangs (which means "stars" in Arabic, I'm told) – the latter band being a future UARB – but most have English names (or just initials) and perform in English also, with some of the biggest being Golden Earring, Shocking Blue, Focus, Q65, and the Outsiders.
However, there was also an active contingent of bands in the Netherlands that did sing in Dutch and also Belgian rock bands who sang in Flemish (which is basically the same language as Dutch); and I have collected a few compilation albums of this music over the years, mostly in the Biet Het series.
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Shocking Blue frontman Robbie van Leeuwen has been quoted as saying that he doesn't know how to write songs in the Dutch language. Originally, vocalist Mariska Veres could not speak English and was singing phonetically; this was the reason for her occasional stumble over the lyrics, such as the opening line of their 1970 hit song "Venus": "God-ness on a mountaintop . . . ".
Also, while bandleader Kurt Cobain wrote most of their music, the first single by grunge pioneers Nirvana was a fairly obscure Shocking Blue song called "Love Buzz". Their version of this Robbie van Leeuwen song (they only used the first verse and chorus) is included on the band's little-known 1989 debut album, Bleach. Cobain often varied the spelling of his name over the years; on this album, he is credited as "Kurdt Kobain".
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We were in Europe for my first (and probably only) trip in April 1995; I can always pinpoint the time because the Oklahoma City Bombing took place while we were there. At that time, Celine Dion was being widely promoted for a concert appearance in Paris. I remembered wondering at the time what the big deal was; I knew that she spoke French and just assumed that she was from France. Actually, Celine Dion – who has one of the purest singing voices of her generation – is French Canadian; and this was her first concert in France, so it really was a big deal. A DVD and album of a concert by her that was recorded in October of that year, Live à Paris was released the following year.
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Over the course of my appraisal career, I have valued properties in 26 states and 2 Canadian provinces. As varied as it can be within the USA, Canada is a completely different place altogether to me. My Canadian appraisal jobs were two hotels, one in Vancouver, British Columbia and one in Edmonton, Alberta – sometime in the 1994-1995 period I would guess. We had previously been to the World's Fair in Vancouver (Expo '86) – following visits to the World's Fairs in Knoxville, TN in 1982 (1982 World's Fair) and in New Orleans in 1984 (1984 Louisiana World Exposition) – so I knew that area a little and was delighted to revisit the places that I had seen during my earlier stay. Vancouver is pretty cosmopolitan, but Edmonton was more foreign still; I felt a little out of my depth there in many ways, but I managed to get through the valuations okay. There was a woman there with the Pannell Kerr Forster office in Vancouver who helped show me the ropes; I visited her and her family one night for dinner, and I was amazed at how much her home looked like the one that I lived in for so many years on Wills Forest Street in Raleigh.
On that trip and occasionally at other times, I would get to see MuchMusic, the Canadian version of MTV (back when it was all about music videos of course). There was definitely some crossover with American and British rock, but for the most part, Canada had a completely different music scene. That surprised me; I had assumed I guess that the behemoth to the south had utterly consumed their local pop music culture at some point, but that clearly had not occurred. At a much younger age, I remember being equally surprised when I visited my cousins down in Florida, and the people on their version of Championship Wrestling were completely different from the ones that I used to see on TV in Winston-Salem.
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One thing that is decidedly different about Canada is that they have embraced their dual languages, officially declaring in 1969 that both French and English are the official languages in Canada, even though only the eastern portion of the nation is native French-speaking. At the Expo '86 in Vancouver, the announcements over the P.A. were all given in English and in French. Here in this country, we seem to be going the other way – for reasons that positively escape me – with periodic, jingoistic calls to declare English the official language of this country.
This flies in the face of the large Hispanic communities in nearly every state by now, not to mention the numerous Chinatowns and Japantowns. I traveled to New York City early enough to see numerous enclaves of former immigrant communities like Little Czechoslovakia and Little Spain; the latter was not far at all from where I lived in Greenwich Village, along and just below 14th Street. In about 1995, I made an appraisal of a hotel with an attached shopping center in Koreatown, a large section of Los Angeles that is set cheek by jowl with South Central L.A., where virtually all of the signage is in Korean.
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That brings me back to the original topic at hand: If Germans and Dutch could fluently speak the language of rock and roll, how much easier is it for Canadian rock musicians to blend in seemlessly with the larger rock world. Canadian rock stars are common, even if not everyone knows that they are Canadian: Neil Young is a long-time favorite of mine who is from Toronto, Ontario; the Guess Who, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, had numerous hits in the 1960's and 1970's and had a spinoff band as well called Bachman-Turner Overdrive, with lead singer Burton Cummings also having a lucrative solo career; Steppenwolf evolved from a Canadian rock band called the Sparrows (Mars Bonfire, a former Sparrow wrote their massive hit "Born to be Wild"); and the band that Janis Joplin headed for her final album, Pearl (after she left Big Brother and the Holding Company), the Full Tilt Boogie Band is from Stratford, Ontario. Even the seemingly quintessential American band called The Band was actually composed of Canadians with the exception of Levon Helm; they once released a single under the name the Canadian Squires.
Other Canadian rockers include Bryan Adams, k.d. lang, Rush, Loverboy, Klaatu, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and so many more. Anna McGarrigle wrote the title song on Linda Ronstadt's 1974 breakthrough album, Heart Like a Wheel that was later used as the name of a 1983 film about drag racer Shirley Muldowney; while Kate McGarrigle was married to Chapel Hill-born singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III whose union resulted in the birth of two more musicians, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright. I have a CD somewhere that features the whole family if I remember right.
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As was the case in this country, there was an active garage-rock and psychedelic-rock scene in the mid-1960's in Canada, and a few of their songs were released in the U. S. alongside their American counterparts. I recently picked up a reissue of the 1967 debut album, Somewhere Outside by the Ugly Ducklings from Toronto, Ontario; they are widely regarded as the greatest Canadian garage rock band. Their 1967 hit "Gaslight" hit #17 on the national Canadian charts and was #1 in Toronto; I know them better for their raw early songs like "She's Ain't No Use to Me", "Nothin'" and "Just in Case You Wonder".
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One fine day around 30 years ago, I came upon a copy of the 1980 comeback album by the Ugly Ducklings, Off the Wall. This was the first time that I had found a full album by one of the bands that was introduced to me by the Pebbles series. I wasn't sure that it was the same band until I checked my copy of the Pebbles, Volume 10 LP – one of the very first Pebbles albums that I acquired – and found a veiled reference to the album in the liner notes. By the way, the Michael Jackson album by that name – whose excellence, I fear, has been overwhelmed by the tsunami of Jackson's next album, Thriller – came out the previous August, but I wonder whether the Ugly Ducklings knew about that record. I really loved Off the Wall a lot, and I have always considered the album to be quite a find. Like many of the albums in my collection, I have never seen another copy in all of my subsequent trips to record stores.
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One horrible day about 8 years ago, all of my record albums and most of the rest of our possessions went through Hurricane Katrina. Sometime in the last year or two, Off the Wall was in a group of really beat-up albums that I was attempting to make playable; and after some preliminary cleaning, I realized that there was no chance with this disc. I believe that this album is in the worst condition of any that I have come across which weren't completely smashed. The label is still completely readable (it is amazing how much abuse record labels can take and remain more or less whole), but the album is wildly warped and is covered with bits of paper. I have the album (along with three others and more to come) mounted on my wall now in a display case.
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Another great Canadian band (from Montreal), the Haunted had a fairly big hit that has the title "1-2-5". Their recorded output was prolific enough that Greg Shaw released two Haunted albums in the Rough Diamonds series on Voxx Records; a CD has been released on Voxx more recently. The last single by the Haunted is a French-language version of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze", called "Vapeur Mauve" that is really something; the Voxx CD also includes their French version of "Talk Talk" by the Music Machine.
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Most of the Under-Appreciated Rock Bands that I write about released an album or two and never really enjoyed any major success, but that is not true of this month's band: LES SINNERS, who hail from the heart of French Canada in Montreal, Quebec. Likewise, most 1960's garage rock bands (under-appreciated or not) never released an album at all; only a tiny minority released more than a few 45's. However, Les Sinners – the French simply means "the sinners" – released 23 singles and 6 albums over the course of little more than a decade, featuring a rotating line-up; the band also broke up and reformed at least twice over this period.
Last year I was just about to exit that great record store in Atlanta, Criminal Records when I saw a short rack near the checkout stand; and I came upon a reissue of the first album by Les Sinners, Sinerisme. (Actually it is probably a bootleg, though the album has been properly reissued on vinyl by an Italian label in 1989, and in Canada in both 2008 and 2010). I like compilation albums as much as, if not more than the next guy; but being able to find an original album by a favorite band is a real treat.
Among American garage-rock fans, this is the only album that is at all well known. Checking my pre-Katrina database, I had apparently found a copy of Sinerisme at an earlier date, though I had completely forgotten that; it is way down the LP list – at #2532 – so I know that I never got deep enough in the stacks to actually play the album before the storm, and it has not yet shown up to be cleaned in the first half of my collection that I have gotten to thus far.
Sinerisme – which is a kind of nonsense word that translates "Sinnerism" (but with only one "n") – is evenly divided between songs in English and songs in French (with some songs having lyrics in both languages). I had previously heard "Nice Try" on the Pebbles, Volume 13 LP, and this song proves that Les Sinners can snarl with the best of them; the other English songs are similarly raw garage rock recordings for the most part. The album has out-of-the-ordinary vocals and musical passages, notably on the sort-of love song, "Cleopatra".
I later encountered one of the French-language songs from this album, "Sinnerisme" on the double-CD release, The Essential Pebbles Collection, Volume 1. While still strong stuff, the French songs are more melodic and a little closer to pop music; the mixture of the two languages and several musical styles makes for a delightful album.
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The original core of the band came together in 1965 and consisted of Francois Guy (rhythm guitar, vocals), Charles Prevost Linton (keyboards, vocals), and Louis Parizeau (drums and percussion). The bandmembers came from a Montreal neighborhood known as Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that had a mixed French/English population, so it was natural that they should record in both languages. For about two months the band went by the name of the Silver Spiders and then changed their name to Les Sinners. There were changes in the second guitarists over the next several months – Georges Marchand and Jay Boivin – before the line-up stabilized with the addition of Ricky Johnson on lead guitar.
Les Sinners performed for months in Montreal clubs and gathered R&B influences from the personnel changes and from the larger musical scene around them. Canadian country music star Roger Miron signed the band to his Rusticana record label in 1966, and they quickly released three French-language singles, including "Sinnerisme". The record album followed later that year with other tracks that they had laid down in the studio. Quirky song titles were definitely their forte: "Candid Colour Count Down", "Sour as a Sidewalk", and "La Troisieme Fuite de Mohamed 'Z' Ali'" ("The Third Escape of Mohamed 'Z' Ali'").
The latter song is apparently a tribute to Muhammad Ali, though this was just two years after boxer Cassius Clay joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changed his name as a result. With the notable exception of Howard Cosell, most in the sports world refused to acknowledge his new name for several years and continued to call him Clay.
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After Ernest Rock replaced Ricky Johnson on lead guitar, Les Sinners was signed to Jupiter Records, the Canadian subsidiary of London Records (which was the American label for the early Rolling Stones records). Their second album (which was produced by Pierre Noles) had practically the same name as the first – Sinnerismes ("Sinnerisms"), but with a second "n" this time – and saw the band essentially abandoning the English language for most of the rest of their career (though several of the song titles were still in English). Album highlights include a French-language version of the Beatles hit "Penny Lane", "Les Disc-Jockeys", and several weird psychedelic tracks like "L.S.D. Ha! Ha!".
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The next album by Les Sinners (though with the name shortened to just Sinners) for Jupiter, Vox Populi (Latin for "Voice of the People") came out in 1968 and is among the crush of "concept albums" that followed in the wake of the Beatles' 1967 masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. The album has acquired legendary status among fans of Quebec's musical scene. The album is entirely in French and is probably the first and certainly one of the best French Canadian concept albums ever released. A whole barrel of musical influences are present: the Beatles, the Monkees, the Byrds, the Who, Indian music, etc.
Remarkably, a CD reissue of the album in the early 1990's was reportedly in English. Another curiosity about this album is that Jupiter Records also released a third album that was purportedly a compilation album, called Chantent 24 Succes. Actually the 24 songs are composed of both of the Jupiter releases, Sinnerismes and Vox Populi, that were squeezed somehow onto a single vinyl disc. "Two-fer" albums were commonplace in the CD era, but this album came out in 1969.
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Les Sinners broke up sometime in 1968 but reformed two years later, with only drummer Louis Parizeau left over from the original band. In this edition, the other bandmembers were Alain Jodoin (vocals and bass guitar), Jean-Guy "Arthur" Cossette (lead guitar) and Daniel Valois (rhythm guitar, flute and vocals). The newly reformed Sinners were signed to the Trans-World label and released a new album in 1971. For the third time, the album name is practically the same, this time being Sinners; though the album cover is more sinister-looking. The album is mostly in French and has a different sound (as might be expected with a floutist on board); there is at least one English-language song this time out, called "Groovy". Two singles were released from the album in 1971; after being dropped by Trans-World, Les Sinners put out another six singles on three other record labels in 1972 and 1973.
Les Sinners came together a third time in 1975, with Louis Parizeau remaining from the original line-up plus Daniel Valois from the prior incarnation. New bandmembers were Serge Blouin (bass guitar), Claude Hetu (keyboards), Serge Locas (keyboards, synthesizers), and Dennis Violetti (lead guitar). The "Les" is back, but the last trappings of Les Sinners as a garage-rock band had fallen away in their three 1975 singles on Celebration Records, plus an album in the same year on Chelsea Records, called ?. Both English-language and French-language versions of ? were released.
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The last album by Les Sinners is scarcely mentioned at all on the various Internet sources that I researched about this band; it came out in 1976 on the CBS Records label (basically, Columbia Records outside of the USA) and is called Le Chemin de Croix De Jos Roy ("The Way of the Cross for Jos Roy"). The Way of the Cross can refer to the road where Jesus walked while carrying His Cross to Calvary – often described in the Latin as Via Crucis or Via Dolorosa – and it can also refer to the Stations of the Cross, a set of 14 or more artistic representations (the associated prayers have the same name) of events that occurred from His being condemned to death to His being laid in the tomb, and sometimes the Resurrection.
Thus, it is likely that Le Chemin de Croix de Jos Roy is a religious album of some sort, though there is little indication of this from the song titles (the entire album is in French again). The bandmembers in Les Sinners for this final album are mostly the same as those on ?, including Daniel Valois (rhythm guitar), Serge Blouin (bass guitar), Claude Hetu (keyboards), Serge Locas (keyboards, synthesizers), and Dennis Violetti (lead guitar), with the addition of Wally Rossi (rhythm guitar) and Richard Tate (drums, percussion). Longtime Les Sinners drummer Louis Parizeau produced the album, and another former bandmember, Alain Jodoin handled the arrangements.
I have no idea who or what "Jos Roy" might be. There is a poet in Quebec named Jos Roy (he even has a Facebook page), but he seems to be a contemporary artist, so I doubt he is the one.
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Typically the Internet sources that I investigated had only sketchy and somewhat contradictory information on the band. There is what appears to be a complete singles discography of Les Sinners at http://faintlyblowing.blogspot.com/2008/03/les-sinners-sinnerisme-1966.html . Overall, the most reliable information on Les Sinners came from a website called Badcat Records, at the link http://badcatrecords.com/BadCat/SINNERS.htm . In addition to write-ups on the band and their various albums, Badcat also has information on solo work by the bandmembers as well as links to related bands.
When I looked up one of these related bands, La Révolution Française, they seemed more like Les Sinners than the post-1968 line-ups of the actual band did. When Francois Guy left Les Sinners in 1968, the band evidently broke up. Guy then put together a new band consisting entirely of former members of Les Sinners: Jean-Guy Cossette (guitar), Georges Marchant (bass guitar) and Louis Parizeau (drums). Their debut single did well enough to justify an album in 1968 on CANUSA Records, called C. Cool. Louis Parizeau also produced the album.
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Two compilation CD's of music by Les Sinners that came out in 2001 borrowed previous album covers and used the name of this related band, La Révolution Française as the names of the CD's. La Révolution Française, Vol. 1 uses the cover of Sinnerismes; while La Révolution Française, Vol. 2 uses the cover of C. Cool by La Révolution Française (though with the photograph shown much more clearly). Additionally, a 2010 compilation CD came out on Merité Records that has the same name as Les Sinners' first album, Sinerisme. As if the trail of albums left behind by Les Sinners wasn't already confusing enough!
The following is another compilation CD that concentrates on the 1960's output by Les Sinners; I don't have any details on the album though.
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Flashback: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for April 2011 – BOHEMIAN VENDETTA
Bohemian Vendetta – a great name for a band – is one of those few 1960's garage rock bands who released an album. Theirs came out on the exploitive record label Mainstream Records; and reportedly, the band was forced to re-record their music in what turned out to be inferior arrangements for that album.
The best-known song by Bohemian Vendetta, "Enough" shows up on numerous garage-rock and psychedelic-rock compilation albums, including Ear-Piercing Punk (both the LP and the CD) and the original Pebbles, Volume 1 CD. There are several YouTube entries for this song, including this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1dIGlVZGI4 ; all are basically audio only, but one of them (not this one) shows a completely unrelated movie clip in the background (also apparently from the 1960's).
One of my recent acquisitions is a Voxx Records compilation CD put together by Greg Shaw of crazed psychedelic material called Beyond the Calico Wall. That album included another Bohemian Vendetta song, a brain-twister called "Paradox City"; it is also available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNiJ6HnMptI . Perhaps their best song of all, the more conventional "Riddles and Fairytales" can be heard at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllqc0-4BYc . Additional songs can also be heard on YouTube if these are to your liking.
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Photo Gallery: The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for April 2010 – THE BREAKAWAYS
This is the album that I was writing about by the Breakaways; it was mostly compiled from tapes that had literally been stashed away and forgotten in a garage:
This is a photograph of the two members of the group, Peter Case and Paul Collins back in the 1970's:
Here are the two members of the Breakaways in concert together in Phoenix in March 2012: