Phil and the Frantics

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UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2012:  PHIL AND THE FRANTICS 

My general stance in writing these posts about Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists has never been to say to my readers:  What you listen to is crap – here is what is good.  I have always enjoyed mainstream rock and still do.  What I am trying to do is to say instead:  Here is something else that is good.  Also, I have tried not to put down even artists that I don’t particularly care for; as someone who finds equal pleasure in the music of Carpenters and Ramones (just to give one example), my musical tastes are hardly average, so I am not about to pass judgment on someone else’s. 

That is not how everyone does it though, and a lot of people apparently like that sort of thing, since they are everywhere on the Internet.  The most prominent post on PHIL AND THE FRANTICS is a really snide piece by Mark Prindle from www.markprindle.com entitled “Frantically Ripping Off Everybody They Can”.  (One nice thing about there being a Wikipedia article is that it usually comes up at or near the top of a Google search rather than junk like this).  The article calls the band “Phil and the F--kups” (and that was just in the second paragraph) and names the front man Phil “Philthy Animal” Kelsey.  (“Philthy Animal” is a real person by the way; that is the nickname of Phil Taylor, the longtime drummer for the British hard rock band Motörhead that also features Lemmy).  Needless to say, the Prindle piece has almost no reliable information; it doesn’t even get the name of their hit song right. 

The title of the Mark Prindle piece refers to the fact that Phil and the Frantics is best known for a song called “I Must Run”, which was a local hit single in their native Arizona; the song is said to have been adapted rather openly from the flip side of the Zombies’ fourth single, “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move” (the follow-up to one of their biggest hits “Tell Her No”).  I was unfamiliar with the Zombies song but have played it recently, and I don’t really see the resemblance; if the song titles weren’t so similar, it might have slipped through the cracks altogether.  In any case, “I Must Run” is a superior recording to “I Must Move”, and I am not the only one who thinks so; my view is shared by that of Ugly Things magazine.  

For what it’s worth, the resemblance between “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison and “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons is much clearer to these ears than is the case with “I Must Run” by Phil and the Frantics and “I Must Move” by the Zombies. 

However, every source that I have examined mentions the adaptation, so I guess it is there.  For instance, it is mentioned in the tongue-in-cheek liner notes on the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP where I first encountered “I Must Run”.  The author of the liner notes is listed as “A. Seltzer”, and I think they are supposed to be satirically in the style of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, though I am not positive of that.  (Philip Seymour Hoffman played Bangs in the 2000 film Almost Famous).  About this song, “Seltzer” writes:  “And if you just moved to Dacron from some dumb place like Phoenix, Arizona, take heart cuz they’ve included YOUR favorite band, Phil & the Frantics with their famed plagiarism of the Zombies, ‘I Must Run’.  I’ll bet they did when the real songwriters came after ’em for taking credit for this song!  Real sleaze, but a shoo-in for punk posterity.” 

Anyway, the Mark Prindle article runs with that and also accuses the band of copying a Beatles song and a Byrds song and a lot of other not-funny stuff.  It also starts with a confession that while in college, the author bootlegged copies of the albums in Bomp! Records’ Pebbles Series. 

Plagiarizing music is not so straightforward to spot as, say, plagiarizing a term paper.  There were any number of bands aping the Beatles and the Byrds and the Zombies during the 1960’s; Bob Dylan for instance started out as a Woody Guthrie wannabe after all.  The practice of “bootlegging” music in particular is more of a gray area:  In this case, music is still being sold without paying royalties, but the product involves recordings that are not otherwise available for sale.  One thing that bootleggers don’t like though is when their records are bootlegged by others, as Mark Prindle admitted to doing at the start of his article on Phil and the Frantics.  

So to return to the topic at hand:  Phil Kelsey was born in Dallas into a musical family; his parents had connections to both jazz and gospel music.  His family moved to Phoenix, Arizona when he was in grade school.  By the 7th grade, he was already in his first band and played at school dances.  For his last two years in high school, he headed the Four Gents, a 1950’s-style rock combo. 

Phil and the Frantics came later and consisted of Phil Kelsey (saxophone and vocals), Bill Powell (guitar), Rick Rose (keyboards), John Lambert (bass), and Steve Forman (drums).  Forman left the band to join the Eclectic Mouse and was replaced by a new drummer, Joe Martinez. 

Phil Kelsey was a hustler, and his band was playing at the Arizona State Fair by 1963.  They even had their own nightclub called The Cave, where his band was the headliner.  The band attracted the attention of a local character named Jim Musil, Jr., who had a lot of friends in Los Angeles, including the now infamous Phil Spector.  Jim Musil, Sr. owned several night spots and leased one of them to Phil Kelsey, who reopened it as the Frantic Den in 1965; but problems with the Fire Marshal led to their relocation to the club downstairs called JD’s. 

Phil and the Frantics were a real hit in their new digs; Phil recalls:  “We were really surprised.  It was real mania, the kids were going crazy.  So they had us back again, with advertising this time, and we drew three times the crowd.” 

Meanwhile, future country superstar Waylon Jennings was holding court in the other nightclub upstairs; this was one of the nation’s first double-decker clubs.  (Jennings is also well known as being a member of Buddy Holly’s band on “the day the music died”).  Waylon Jennings wound up producing the band’s fourth and most successful single, “I Must Run” b/w “Pain”; he also played 12-string guitar on the recording.  (A later release of the 45 had a different flip side, “What’s Happening”).  In the wake of its success, Phil and the Frantics toured for a time with Peter and Gordon and others.  Shortly thereafter, John Lambert and Bill Powell left the band and joined the Beethoven Soul, which released an album on Dot Records.  Phil Kelsey put together a third line-up of the Frantics, but by then, their sound was out of step with the current scene. 

Phil Kelsey and Steve Dodge – who had been the lead guitarist for another popular local band, the Vibratos – drifted around Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas; they called themselves Phil Mark Five and, with the addition of Bobby Blood on trumpet, formed a band called the Babies (not the same band as the 1970’s British band the Babys).  They landed a record deal with ABC-Dunhill Records in 1969 and also toured with several major acts of that period, including Three Dog Night and Blues Image.  The band released three 45’s, though none went anywhere, and they later learned that the album would not come out after all. 

Afterward, Phil Kelsey operated more behind the scenes, becoming a session musician and songwriter.  He worked with Earth, Wind and Fire, Billy Preston, and Brenton Wood, among others. 

The first album featuring music by Phil and the Frantics came out in 1980 on the Bomp! Records label Voxx Records as Rough Diamonds, Volume 3 in their Rough Diamonds Series that consisted of entire albums by 1960’s garage rock bands that have more than one or two singles to their credit.  The first side is in an earlier style and is what I imagine music at a “sock hop” might sound like (I was a little too young to have ever actually gone to one), while Side 2 collects music from the same period as “I Must Run”.  Another of the songs on this album, “Till You Get What You Want” has been included on several garage rock compilation albums; I have a copy of the song on Acid Dreams Epitaph.  Nothing else is quite as good as “I Must Run”, but several of the other songs on the album are just as enjoyable.  Later albums collecting Phil and the Frantics music have come out on Bacchus Archives Records (Phil and the Frantics) and Light in the Attic Records (also called Phil and the Frantics); the latter label also recently released the album by past UARA Jim Sullivan).  

As a postscript, when I first started writing about Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists, I figured that it would be one 1960’s band or artist after another.  Actually Phil and the Frantics is only the second UARB/UARA this year from that decade, the other being Linda Pierre King. 

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Items:    Phil and the Frantics 

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FLASHBACK:  The Under-Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for August 2012 – Phil and the Frantics

Phil and the Frantics are best known for their evident plagiarism of a Zombies song for their minor hit “I Must Run”, though to these ears, it isn’t nearly so obvious as everyone else seems to think.  See what you think of this song on YouTube (audio only) as taken from the LP where I first heard the song, Pebbles, Volume 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLK9wV-NfzQ.  Here is another song called “What’s Happening”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDC-6wWl7bs.  One more, from the flip side of “I Must Run”, called “Pain”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm_nRU-lYWc. 

(August 2014)

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PICTURE GALLERY:  The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for August 2012 – Phil and the Frantics

This is their notorious, supposed ripoff of a Zombies B-side called “I Must Run”: 

Here are the three albums that have collected the Phil and the Frantics music over the years: 

Here is a photo of the band in concert.  

(August 2015)

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Here is a rundown of the past year’s (2011-2012) Under-Appreciated Rock Bands and Rock Artists: 

December 2011 – 1960’s pop-rock band THE MAGICIANS (retrospective album) 

January 2012 – 2000’s rock singer-songwriter RON FRANKLIN (3 albums) 

February 2012 – 1980’s punk/hip hop rock band JA JA JA (1 album) 

March 2012 – 1970’s disco band STRATAVARIOUS (1 album) 

April 2012 – 1960’s folk-rock singer-songwriter LINDA PIERRE KING (several songs on two compilation albums) 

May 2012 – 2000’s punk rock band TINA AND THE TOTAL BABES (1 album) 

June 2012 – 1980’s new wave rock band WILD BLUE (2 albums, though 1 might be unreleased) 

July 2012 – 1980’s punk rock band DEAD HIPPIE (1 album) 

August 2012 – 1960’s garage rock band PHIL AND THE FRANTICS (retrospective albums) 

September 2012 – 1980’s new wave rock band CODE BLUE (2 albums) 

October 2012 – 1980’s progressive rock band TRILLION (2 albums) 

November 2012 – 1990’s-2000’s rock singer-songwriter THOMAS ANDERSON (5 albums) 

(Year 3 Review)