A. Seltzer

A. SELTZER

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”.

For instance, it is mentioned in the tongue-in-cheek liner notes on 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.”

(August 2012)

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For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent Pebbles 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).

(July 2013)