Wow, five years – now that’s something to celebrate.
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But first a retrospective of the past year. Most satisfying no doubt was being able to write about the courageous Russian punk/protest band with the provocative name, Pussy Riot. How many Western bands and rock artists can say that they have been to jail for their art? Joan Baez maybe, but I think it was actually a husband of hers. I cannot remember its coming up even in the Civil Rights era.
Anyway, Pussy Riot had the goods on Vladimir Putin years before anyone in the West had figured out his true colors.
My proudest achievement is my tribute to legendary underground rock musician Mick Farren, which appeared in March 2014. I garnered a lot of praise that my friend Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records forwarded to me – from past UARA and fellow bandmember in the Deviants, Andy Colquhoun (who posted a link on the band’s Facebook page), from Mike Stax of Ugly Things Magazine (who published my article on Milan year before last), and from Suzy Shaw herself.
I had my first “two-fer” this year, with the Richmond Sluts and Big Midnight, two related garage rock bands of recent vintage.
Mostly I had long series in the past 12 months: 3 of my 5 pieces in the Women in Rock series and all 5 in my Rock and Religion series. I will no doubt have much more to say on both topics, but not right away. In the latter, I examined Bob Dylan’s Christian period; and the religiously oriented events in the life of the Beatles, before and after the break-up, beginning with John Lennon’s notorious pronouncement that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus.
For the first in the Rock and Religion series, the UARA Mikki is African American, at last. Stratavarious probably is also, but there is no doubt with Mikki. For the most recent, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters does not fit the title “rock band” in the slightest, but I put ’em in anyway.
My website, https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockbands/home continues to grow. I now have about one-half of the posts fully indexed and distributed onto their individual web pages – from December 2009 through June 2012. I recently posted the 2011 index, showing about 1,200 web pages. I ran out of room on the Google Sites URL above, so I started a second website – https://sites.google.com/site/underappreciatedrockartists/home – and they link together very nicely. I am about 64% through with the second website, so a third one is coming. This was not my original plan; I have tried setting up a website elsewhere or moving to another section of Google Sites that has 10 times the available space, but nothing has worked out so far. But I learned a long time ago that finding a workaround is crucial to using computers, if not to life itself.
What I was thinking about for next year is to revisit the UARB’s and UARA’s on their fifth-anniversary month and expand on what I had written earlier. I think that I will wait a year on that at least: too much else to do with the website and all, not to mention my full-time job as a real estate appraiser.
The 12 (13) UARB’s and UARA’s from the past year are these:
December 2013 – LES HELL ON HEELS, 1990’s-2000’s punk rock band
January 2014 – BOYSKOUT, 2000’s punk rock band
February 2014 – LIQUID FAERIES, 1980’s alternative/world music rock band
March 2014 – THE SONS OF FRED, 1960’s British R&B band
April 2014 – HOMER, 1970’s progressive rock band
May 2014 – THE SOUL AGENTS, 1960’s British R&B band
June 2014 – THE RICHMOND SLUTS and BIG MIDNIGHT, 2000’s garage revival rock bands
July 2014 – MIKKI, 1970’s R&B/soul singer/songwriter
August 2014 – THE HOLY GHOST RECEPTION COMMITTEE #9, 1960’s psychedelic rock band
September 2014 – NICK FREUND, 1960’s psychedelic rock artist
October 2014 – MÖTOCHRIST, 1990’s-2000’s punk rock band
November 2014 – WENDY BAGWELL AND THE SUNLITERS, 1960’s-1990’s gospel/comedy group
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I play the albums by the UARA’s and UARB’s frequently and am always struck by how great they sound. With few if any exceptions, they aren’t just another hard rock band or garage rock band or folk/rock artist – they have a distinct sound that I simply love. For many – such as Beast (whose first album is playing now), the Not Quite, the Ugly, the Unknowns, Chimera, and Thomas Anderson, to name a few – they don’t sound like anyone else that I am familiar with.
Job One in the UARB and UARA posts is that their music must be good. Period. It doesn’t hurt to have some historical significance also – for instance, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters had the first million-selling gospel single, and Silverbird is the first Native American rock band to be signed to a major record label – but simply put, if I don’t like their music, I am not going to cite someone as an Under Appreciated Rock Band or Under Appreciated Rock Artist. (That doesn’t mean that I like everyone that I say something about, however.)
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I have tried to work out my approach to rock and roll writing, and this is what I have come up with.
Keep it Interesting – Decades ago, when I first started doing this, it came to me that posts about rock should crackle.
Keep it Positive – Most rock critics tend to put down other rock artists and bands while they write about the ones that they like; I try not to do that.
Keep it Informative – I am not trying to show off here or to talk over someone’s head. I am not afraid to call somebody an ex-Beatle for instance.
Keep it Engaging – I try to show the same enthusiasm for something that I found out long ago and not go, ho hum, everybody knows that.
Keep it Clean – I will use offensive language when needed, but without the words fully spelled out, and I keep nudity to a minimum.
Keep it Sweeping – Many if not most people like a lot of kinds of music, so the writing and the UARA’s and UARB’s come from pretty much the full spectrum.
Keep it Personal – I will connect up what I am writing about to my personal life when I can – but not too much; this is the Internet after all.
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I also keep these pieces personally informative; in short, I learn a lot myself from putting these Facebook Notes together. While most of the kernels of what I write about are lodged in my brain somewhere, I coax the details from simple Google searches, with my primary sources being Wikipedia and Allmusic. For the UARB’s and UARA’s, I sometimes find myself mounting searches for hours. I often put in extended quotes that I find on-line, particularly for matters that I don’t know too much about. That is perfectly fine with Wikipedia, but not so much with other Internet source material.
I certainly don’t know as much going into a monthly post as I probably let on, and despite its thousands, my record collection is not comprehensive. For instance, my post awhile back about the origins of Cream and the many bands that arose in the wake of their break-up germinated from some writings by the music columnist Ricky Flake in our local paper, the Sun Herald. At the time, I had precisely one album by Cream, Disraeli Gears (I still don’t have Goodbye) and only the first Mountain album, Climbing!.
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I go back a long way with Under Appreciation. When watching TV as a kid, I of course paid a lot of attention to the stars, but I would also notice the character actors that showed up in small parts in a lot of the shows. One of my favorites back when was Dabbs Greer; he just seemed to show up all the time on TV, and eventually I picked up his name from the credits in one of those shows. Scanning his write-up in Wikipedia, he was in an episode of The Twilight Zone and several of the Perry Mason shows; but it was mostly Saturday morning shows where I remember seeing him.
Imagine my surprise decades later when Dabbs Greer appeared in some of the first scenes in The Green Mile; he played the Tom Hanks character in later life who was relating the story to a friend at the nursing home where he was living.
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Probably the most memorable events of my schoolboy days were seeing the early spaceflights. Regular school went by the boards; the teachers brought in their portable TV sets, and we would all crowd around to watch, beginning with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight in 1961 and John Glenn’s trip in orbit the following year.
I was amazed to find that the intervening sub-orbital flight by Gus Grissom was almost completely forgotten; I just couldn’t understand it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and was reminded that all didn’t go smoothly with that mission; though the whole flight was barely 15 minutes long, the capsule started filling up with water upon splashdown, and Grissom very nearly drowned when water started getting into his space suit also.
Besides this second American flight into space, Gus Grissom was also on one of the Gemini spacecraft and thus the first American to go into space twice. Gus Grissom was among the three astronauts that were killed in the cabin fire during a test for the planned launch of Apollo 1 in January 1967, twice illustrating that being an astronaut is one of the most dangerous professions today. Virgin Galactic had a disastrous launch just last October, killing the pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring the co-pilot Peter Siebold.
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All of this started I suppose when I began noticing that I was over-writing a lot of my appraisal reports, so I tried to find a more satisfying outlet for my writing. I joined Wikipedia in August 2006 and almost immediately started my first article there, on a 1960’s psychedelic rock band called the Head Shop. Milan had been involved in their album as a producer and a musician, and I started trying to get to the bottom of who Milan was. After meeting his sister Dara Gould on line, I not only had enough for Wikipedia, but it eventually shaped up into the article that got published in Ugly Things.
Over the next several years, I wrote up numerous articles for Wikipedia, mostly on other 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock bands and nearly all of the albums in the Pebbles series. In all, I started over 100 articles and made contributions to Wikipedia that number more than 2,500. Most of these rock bands are quite obscure to most people, but some are not: The Outsiders had a major hit with “Time Won’t Let Me” that still gets a lot of radio play. The same is true of Stone Poneys, Linda Ronstadt’s first rock band who scored with “Different Drum”. Both of these bands had only a few sentences – what is called a “stub” on Wikipedia – so I fleshed out their stories and also wrote up an article on all of their albums.
With Milan though, I ran into one of the Wikipedia rules: notability. I fought hard for several months against other Wikipedians who threatened to delete the article that I had put so much into. I had thought that a musician was automatically “notable” if they had an album released on a major record label, but actually the rule was two albums. Eventually I was able to get over the hurdle by demonstrating that Milan had recorded more than 30 songs.
But the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. By now I had developed into something of a music historian; and as far as I am concerned, every great musician’s story deserves to be told, notable or not notable.
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It was Dara Gould who got me to sign up for Facebook, sometime in late 2009. Not really knowing what to do with Facebook now that I was on it, I made a modest announcement on November 10, 2009:
Coming soon: UNDER-APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH. An article in Discover Magazine once said that the “beloved, unwieldy” Wikipedia included “scads of articles on virtually unknown rock bands”. I had to laugh out loud since I have done my part to add to those scads! Still, many great bands don’t yet have a Wikipedia article, or even an entry on “Allmusic”: http://www.allmusic.com. So I will try to remedy that.
My first post (on December 1, 2009 – they have been showing up very late in the month recently) was on Beast, a 1960’s “hippie-flavored” rock band that was introduced to me through a friend of a friend back while I was still in high school. On my third post, about the 1960’s garage rock band Cyrus Erie, I expanded the post to talk about the band more in context – in this case, as part of the 1960’s Cleveland music scene. Thus, in most cases I not only had to come up with a band that had no Wikipedia article yet (or only a “stub” at least), I wanted to find some aspect of music that I could talk about at the same time that hopefully had some sort of a connection to the UARB or the UARA.
I was not sure how long I would be able to keep this up; but every month, these articles seem to expand to fill up a sizable post and then some. With the Mick Farren tribute, I exceeded the Facebook limit of 65,536 characters for an entry under Notes, for the second time.
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One problem that I am almost certainly not going to have is running out of UARB’s and UARA’s. This past year was the most “current” list yet, with fully one-third releasing their first album during the past two decades. I haven’t counted up how many possible UARB/UARA candidates I still have in my record collection, but if I already owned another 60, it wouldn’t surprise me.