Pebbles Series 3

PEBBLES SERIES – History

As best I can recall, the above albums were the first two that I acquired in the Pebbles series that has filled my life with great, unknown 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock for more than 30 years. These LP’s, Pebbles, Volume 9 and Pebbles, Volume 10 were the last two albums in the first group of 10 that was released in 1979-1980, purportedly by BFD Records of Kookaburra, Australia. Actually, the series was masterminded by Greg Shaw, founder of Bomp! Records in North Hollywood.

Why he came up with the Australian connection is unknown to me, but I remember reading a review decades ago in the Village Voice of an album by the Lime Spiders, an Australian rock band that started out at least as a psychedelic-revival band. The article mentioned that interest in 1960’s American garage rock started in Australia; and looking back, I wonder whether that was for real, or whether the writer was just fooled by the supposed origin of the first Pebbles albums.

“BFD” was well known to me in North Carolina as an abbreviation for “big f--king deal”, and it might be a nationwide or worldwide bit of shorthand. Anyway, it turns out that there is no such place as Kookaburra, Australia; a kookaburra is a bird that lives in Australia. I should have known that Greg Shaw was pulling some kind of stunt: He also talked about Dacron, Ohio, and that isn’t a real city either (though Akron is) – Dacron is a type of artificial fibre.

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The first Pebbles album came out in 1978, in a modest release that was apparently distributed mostly among top record collectors. The label name was Mastercharge Records; most of you likely remember that as being the original name for what is now called Master Card, so I suspect that the release was financed by credit card advances. Greg Shaw had big plans for the series, and even this first edition was called “Volume 1” (though the one on BFD Records was not so marked). The album was subtitled “Original Artyfacts from the First Punk Era”, a takeoff on the subtitle of the legendary compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 that had come out six years earlier.

In 2008, on the 30th anniversary of the original Pebbles release, Bomp! Records put out a special reissue on clear vinyl complete with the pink xeroxed sheet with Greg Shaw’s liner notes that had been included with the 1978 album.

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In 1983, another long series of Pebbles LP’s came out on a brand-new label called AIP Records (standing for “Archive International Productions”) that was openly affiliated with Bomp! Records. As it happened, the very next disc, Pebbles, Volume 11 – with catalogue #AIP-10001 – would turn out to be my favorite album in the entire series. But even at that point, the idea that there were 10 volumes in the Pebbles series, and that these two (Pebbles, Volume 9 and Pebbles, Volume 10) were so good made me determined to get them all. Before it was over, I had purchased close to 100 LP’s and CD’s with the Pebbles name, and I still don’t have them all. In fact, some were mostly circulated in Great Britain under the name Best of Pebbles, and I only ever saw them one time – at the same Schoolkids Records store across from the North Carolina State University campus on Hillsborough Street where I first saw the original Pebbles LP’s. I sure wish I had bought at least one or two that day; not even Bomp! Records has a full set of those albums.

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On the back side of the Pebbles, Volume 9 and Pebbles, Volume 10 LP’s were cool liner notes that normally (not always) gave some information about the bands and the songs on the album. Greg Shaw wrote the liner notes for the original Pebbles release (they are available online now).

For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent CD’s on AIP normally have a copyright notice for BFD Productions – someone else was brought in to write the liner notes, since the ones that Greg Shaw did were said to be mostly geared to serious collectors. This gentleman’s name is Nigel Strange, and he is supposedly the editor of a magazine called Web of Sound. I haven’t been able to find out anything about this person on the Internet, and I suspect that he is yet another fiction, as is “A. Seltzer” (clearly a reference to Alka-Seltzer) who wrote the crazed liner notes for the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP. I loved reading the liner notes as I played the Pebbles albums (still do in fact).

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What really made an impression after awhile, however, is that more than a few of these bands were completely unknown even to the people who put the Pebbles albums together. Introducing “Train Kept A-Rollin’” by the Bold on Pebbles, Volume 10, the “Nigel Strange” liner notes say: “. . . I sure wish I knew more about them”. About the Wig/Wags, all they have is: “I used to think this was a Texas group, but since they aren’t included in the recently published Journey to Tyme [here they insert a plug and address for the book] I guess it’s not.” The liner notes for the Foggy Notions have a nice description of their great song “Need a Little Lovin’” but about the band they say simply: “A mystery group”.

The situation is much the same on Pebbles, Volume 9. For the second track by the LA-area band Byron & the Mortals: “. . . about whom nothing is known”. And: “The only thing I know about the Knaves is that lead singer Howard Berkman later turned up in some early 70’s Chicago bands.” The Banshees? “The group was Chicago-based, but that’s all I can tell you.” One more: “I know absolutely nothing about the Bugs.”

In order not to sound monotonous, the liner notes don’t always state outright that all I know about such-and-such group is that I found this here 45, but several of the liner notes are descriptive only. It wasn’t just these albums; most of the Pebbles liner notes were like this, particularly in the early years. Sentences like “Guess what? Another mystery band” and “Here finally is a group that I know something about” were commonplace on the back covers.

It didn’t always stay that way of course. We have yours truly to thank for getting the word out about the mysterious rock artist Milan, also known as Milan Radenkovich, also known as Rick Rodell, also known as the Leather Boy, also known as Milan (the Leather Boy); copies of Ugly Things #34 with my article about Milan are still available!

I found a retrospective album by one of the mystery bands introduced to me by the Pebbles series that also had songs by an associated band, though I can’t call it to mind; I thought that it was the Dovers, but they aren’t in my old LP database, so I guess not. I haven’t cleaned it up yet from the Katrina debacle, that much I know.

I knew basically nothing about the people behind Pebbles back then, but they were clearly experts in these matters. At this point in time, the records had been made just 12 or 15 years earlier, and I was amazed that all information about some of these rock bands could have simply vanished.

(July 2013)