After twenty five years I decided to see if I could still play one of the old signature tunes from the DD & the Highway Kings’ first album.
“Roadkill” was the choice, an instrumental played at every gig. Originally, recorded on a 4-track tape machine, all the analog equipment I used to do it is long gone.
Back in ’84 or ’85 I started a set in front of a group of hardcore punks with “Roadkill.”
This was a serious mistake.
You have to understand many hardcore punk kids had adopted a set of odd moral standards stringently adhered to. Beating up girls, for instance, was OK. But doing anything perceived to be mean to animals was verboten.
“Roadkill” starts out with a maniacal laugh and shout of its title.
You can imagine how this went over. The punks stood there with backs turned and arms folded for the rest of the set. And that was the last time DD ever played for a crowd of them.
Most people think Pasadena is very upscale, a place where it’s hard to find bum wine.
Not true!
In at least one spot, made up of two small markets at the intersection of North Wilson and Villa, Thunderbird and Night Train Express are in stock.
These beverages served and serve a purpose. They’re for when you’ve really hit the skids. And because they are fortified with about 18 percent alcohol by volume, they’re bona fide painkillers.
Yes, it’s been a very bad year here in Pasadena and it looks to only get worse.
Well before Bill Cosby’s enshrinement as a TV star in the Huxtable family, DD thought he was hilarious.
If you were a smartypants kid living in Pennsylvania within easy travel of Philadelphia in the mid-Sixties, Cosby was the homegrown comic for you.
The most played Cosby vinyl in the Smith household, between my brother and I, was “Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow Right!” — a live recording of him doing his thing at the Bitter End in NYC.
But there was one Bill Cosby record that was off style.
“Bill Cosby Sings Hooray for the Salvation Army Band!” was an album of Cosby singing — or yelling and chanting if you prefer — old favorites, many with his own lyrics tacked on, while backed by a funk band.
Viewed with a fishy eye by some regular fans, it was at first perceived to be a joke album by a jokester putting one over on the same fans.
It wasn’t.
DD was introduced to it by fellow Pine Grove Area School District student Dave Berger. Berger showed up in class one day reciting the lyrics to the title track. Even without music, they were a laugh riot if you were in our state of mind.
As we were easily entertained, Berger’s description of Bill Cosby singing about “stealing tires” and getting ready to “have a little sin” set to an unusual interpretation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” sounded top shelf — not a piece of eye-rolling junk to try your patience.
After that, it was about a week before I had convinced my grandfather to drive me to Pomeroy’s in Pottsville to secure a copy.
In the Eighties in Bethlehem I always wanted to perform “Hooray for the Salvation Army Band” but the Highway Kings would have never went for it.
The song was recorded using Roger Linn’s Adrenalinn III magic box. The Adrenalinn III is a guitar amp emulator and drummer coupled to beat-synchronized multi-effects. What that means is you can play a guitar through its digital selection of vintage pieces of equipment, like amplifiers chosen for their rock and roll history and tone. Through the software and processing power in the Adrenalinn III’s chips, your playing is lashed to the beat of any song you would like to record or perform.
The Adrenalinn has been around for years, upgraded intermittently but very effectively by its designers. It is the embodiment of sophisticated music machine fun and it’s hard to imagine making a recording or writing a new tune without employing it.
So the Adrenalinn III was the perfect tool for “Hooray for the Salvation Army Band” as it provides settings and sound ideal for something loosely based on “Purple Haze” — the original’s basic drum track, plus the old Marshall amplifier and octave fuzztone used by Jimi Hendrix.
Everything on the track (with the exception of the “Bringing In the Sheaves” punchline) was sent through the Adrenalinn III.
If you have Cosby’s original album — it is back in print — you know the tune was interpreted as garage-style funk rock. DD has altered it slightly, toward a more psychedelic hard rock flavor.
No, you’re not seeing double. This is an old post migrated from DD’s old Blogger-administered site. In advance of Blogger’s shutdown of FTP publishing.
“Needle and Spoon” first appeared on Savoy Brown’s Raw Sienna album from 1970. Penned by Chris Youlden, the band’s gruff but soulful blues shouter, it has always been one of my favorite blues rock tunes.
I’ve kept the fast shuffling beat, added a bit more thumping acoustic guitar, plus a short fuzz solo tossed in behind a vocal imprecation. For just that old-timey feel.
No one in this edition of Savoy Brown was a heroin user so rack it up to bumping into other rock ‘n’ rollers in 1970 Blighty who were. There was no shortage.
For extra fun, consider the single to have a virtual B-side, “Internal Revenue Boogie,” here.
Jolly good!
Gear: Roger Linn Design Adrenalinn III, lotsa guitars — at least three.
The meat of DD’s rock music library consists primarily of the latter from the title.
Of course, you didn’t know this was the essence of your taste when you were a kid going to record storea through the Seventies and Eighties. You bought something on spec, took it home and invested time in getting to like it. And if it wasn’t horrendous and too far outside your taste, it found a home, even as the artist was summarily dropped from his or her label.
And if you’d told me then that my mother would eventually throw out all these old records in a revenge fit brought on by dementia, and that fifteen years later guys my age with the same taste in records (but who’s moms weren’t nuts) would commence to ripping their collections of nobodies and also-rans to a global network, where I could listen to them again one more time, I would have given you the stink eye.
But that’s how it worked out.
And today’s offerings fall into this category, my favorite genre of well past expiry hard rock.
They were all momentary pieces of lawn furniture in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, made by journeymen and women, often musos who thought they were going on to much greater things, as thought, too. But who — (insert flopping noise) — didn’t.
Take Karen Lawrence and 1994.
That’s the cover of Please Stand By — and it’s a great one. Just the cover, though. It was their second stab at it, after a tremendous debut, which had gone mostly ignored because it’s cover looked like this. (Scroll down.)
Record label and managements squandered Lawrence’s striking visual appeal — her hair, legs, ass and 1,000 buck lavender skin-tight leather duds for a cover that said “meh!” with great vigor, looking like the top of your stereo amp with a tiny polaroid of the band on it.
By the time the second record arrived, the pic was great, but the magic was gone. No more full-bore screaming hard rock and mystical eastern Led Zep steals. Instead, an embarrasingly un-wild cover of “Wild in the Streets,” something the listener can tell wasn’t 1994’s or Lawrence’s idea.
In DD’s old bedroom, you could hear the air whistling out of the punctured tire.
Please Stand By… is still a far cry from awful. The title cut is fair hard rock and pop. But the band doesn’t work up a lather until the album’s last two songs — “Nerves of Steel,” which digs up the ground using some slide with a blues stomp, and “Keep Ravin’ Up,” with the best lyric on the entire record: “You’re a real man, I can tell it by your shoe size.”
With Trigger, one could tell the label’s (Casablanca) art department wasn’t up to doing them any favors, either. It’s 1979 and the boys were wearing what looks like pink lipstick and rouge.
As you can guess, that went well. And it’s unfortunate, because Trigger sounded a lot like Slade. The band featured two singers — one for the ravers, who sounded like Noddy Holder, and one for the singles, who sounded a bit like Jackson Browne. There’s not a dud song on the LP and if one ignores the predictably stupid lyrics on “We’re Gonna Make It” and “Rockin’ Cross the USA,” the band delivered all the yobbishness one had come to love from Slade.
Now, instead of the lipstick and rouge, if Casablanca had delivered a group picture with mutton chops, some worn denim, and the name Trigger tattoo’d on their fists …
Anyway, Trigger furnished the goods live. DD stumbled upon them by accident at the Jersey shore in ’79 with his old Albright College girlfriend, a nineteen year-old med tech major whose small size belied a capacity for strong drink. She had recommended we stop before withdrawal made her bellicose. Playing in the basement of an old resort before an audience of about fifty, Trigger delivered their entire album with speed and great elan. At least half the crowd cheered.
Who’s that? Looks like Pat Benatar!
Another record company promotional idea gone wrong — posing Laurie Beechman like Pat Benatar on the cover of Laurie and the Sighs in 1980. After Benatar already had “Heartbreaker” and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” all over FM radio.
What were they thinking? That some fans’ hands would slip and they’d grab it by mistake on the way to the checkout counter?
Laurie and the Sighs didn’t sound much like Pat Benatar. First, and most obviously, there’s nothing like “Heartbreaker” here, no Michael Chapman steering the singer into covering Sweet’s “No You Don’t” or Johnny Cougar’s “I Need a Lover.”
On the other hand, the Sighs rocked a lot harder than Benatar’s backing band, and their relatively tuneless delivery in comparison with the songs and playing on Benatar’s first two albums, worked better in the context of what this LP achieved.
It’s a thirty minute pounding, a wall of Laurie’s blaring voice and Marshall stack guitar. At its center, Laurie and the Sighs is a heavy metal record way before women who were in metal bands all had to look something like Doro Pesch.
In fact, Laurie looked a lot like my old girlfriend, the one who liked inexpensive spirits. Maybe that’s why I bought it.
But DD still enjoys her record a lot, as the last two songs on this LP kill, their themes still resonant, even after the passage of decades.
“Stop Telling Me No!” Laurie yells. Plus, she’s “Burning Up!” in front of an “indecisive” wussy who needs “shaking up!” “Hot, hot, hot!” Shriek and roll! Watch out! She’ll strike your cock with a hammer!
It’s a well-known fact that access to all the amateur homespun talent on YouTube has made the world a richer place. How, for instance, could one live without all the slideshow copyright-infringing home videos uploaded by ‘fans’ sampling from their record collections? Or all the duplicates of Cherie Currie of the Runaways singing “Cherry Bomb” in her underwear and nylons for the Japanese in 1977?
It would be difficult to top the latter in its actualized potential for sheer adult embarrassment.
But DD has found lots of music-oriented stuff even more teeth-grinding and capable of getting the cold sweat out on the back of your neck.
Home videos of guys trying out their new store-bought mini-amplifiers. Static videos of the camera looking at a guitar amp with an occasional hand entering the stage to twist a knob.
This is a select group, only done for and by guys.
DD couldn’t find any female contributors. And, like last week’s ‘battle bands’ collection, it’s a challenge to endure more than 30 seconds. Persevere! With the exception of the last one, they’re all guaranteed horrendous!
The first one DD calls simply: “The Cough Syrup Addict.” Turn on the lights, buddy! It’s in “Cloverfield” approved Shakey-Cam and the very definition of ‘excruciating’ from beginning to end, including the Hendrix and Guns ‘n’ Roses stuff. As unendurable as possible, watched over twelve thousand times.
This next one is tricky. The beginning makes you think the player actually might have done the good-sounding fragment. Patience! The real thing is about to begin — a bit of bedroom ‘Stairway to Heaven’, then born to be mild AC/DC and Ozzy. Seventy thousand watches. How long do you think it took his friends and family to rack that up?
Oops! So tone deaf, he can’t tell when the guitar is out of tune! 30,000 hits! Oh, f— me, not more Ozzy and AC/DC!
Another punishing version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ “Awesome!” comments someone. Yeah, 71,000 instances of masochism is pretty awesome.
This next one is cheating. It’s the company’s sales rep in the firm’s pro video. Hang around, look at the annoying hairstyle. He’ll eventually get around to the patience-smashing bedroom shredding, knowing it’ll send a legion of guys like those above, to the store. And then to YouTube.
A computer nerd gives us a bird’s eye view of his very clean desk and a standard dose of bad thrash metal. Then, without even a hint of a sense of humor, some ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Freebird.’
“OK, so I’m doing another demo of this Orange Crush amp because my other one didn’t do it justice,” says ShortScaleGearDemos. After the harsh, crystalline tone along with the bursts of tuneless feedback and chaos, DD trembles at the thought of such a ‘bad’ video. Right about now, the CEO of the maker is wondering how to get this off YouTube. Only eight thousand views, though, so damage is limited.
The one worth your patience, a video of someone playing the guitar and singing in such a way to make you jump up and shout for the glory of rock ‘n’ roll and a good song. It’s a girl! Canada’s Kathleen Edwards, singing “Cheapest Key,” onstage in Europe.
A paltry five hundred and change views. Your YouTube global market, in action.
Today’s venereal wart-like curiosity: A ridiculous article at Playboy on the US military’s ‘Battle Bands.’
“These days, martial music also means Marshall stacks,” writes a Playboy hagiographer. “That’s right, soldiers rock — officially.”
Hmmm, not by the evidence presented, lil’ pardner.
What listeners and viewers do witness: The same kind of stuff bar bands have peddled in every ‘burgh and hamlet in the US for the last thirty years. It’s milder by loads, since one should presumably not hear swearing or see women take off their tops when in video repping a service arm to the public. Or throw cups of beer and bottles of whiskey in a power drunk fit.
Caveat emptor: Most people won’t be able to stand more than thirty seconds of the linked videos.
Ready for the Motel 6 ballroom on Friday night. Good mix on the horns, though.
The Greenwood Hill HH&L Bingo Hall Show Band in action.
If you’re going to sing a pomp metal song entitled “Locked & Loaded,” shouldn’t it sound like you’re about to, er, take the warpath and kill someone?
However, the undisputed King of Born to Be Mild rock is Mike Huckabee. So, perhaps, the ‘Battle Bands’ are in good company. And, indisputably, there is no evil in playing rock ‘n’ roll for the baby-stroller crowd.
Sold out at CD Baby, but promised to be ‘back in stock soon,’ the Anthony Aquarius Mystery’s debut record, Nocturnal Visit — now discovered fresh at the ago of four, is a certified hoot, easily eclipsing the Albert Schroeder Experience’s debut from a couple years ago.
A mix of Velvet Jones lover man guitar and vocal soul, it has the bona fide Sixties sound. Although it might have been tricky getting the radio to play “She’s All Sheep” — my personal favorite, and “Love Bathed Experience.”
“Anthony Aquarius has had an amazing career and journey of life,” reads the blurb. “He has played from coast to coast, recorded in Switzerland, played the ‘Chiterlin Circuit.’ ”
A somewhat baffling but charming video set to an Anthony Aquarius original is here.
Traditionally, semi-famous to obscure Jimi Hendrix impersonators/tribute artists have been almost exclusively white guys. Empirically, this is because virtually the sole audience for this type of thing — and it’s almost always primarily a live experience — is white people who live in places where there aren’t many, if any, black people.
Please don’t throw shoes at the presumed tartoor. I grew up in southeastern Pennsyltucky and having seen a lot of this, that’s just the way it was.
So it’s truly a novelty’s novelty when the Los Angeles Times profiles someone completely different, here, a person who breaks the stranglehold on the genre, Anthony Aquarius of Silver Lake. Aquarius tries to look as much like Hendrix as possible and plays for many people on the sidewalk in Hollywood, a number of them not even white or from rural Republican America. As a busking version of Jimi he’s not bad, particularly broadcast through the modern marvel of a small digital battery-powered rock and roll travel amp.
“I’ve probably played ‘Hey Joe’ more times than Hendrix played it,” he tells the newspaper, which would seem beyond dispute.
Wouldn’t you buy a CD of four white guys doing a tribute to the Jimi Hendrix Experience for $1.25? If you like hard rock like me, you wouldn’t hesitate one moment. White guys doing Jimi Hendrix tributes are a necessary part of the lawn furniture in the great backyard of heavy rock. And I know if you’re taking this seriously, and I am sure that you are, you also probably have a copy of a Randy Hansen vinyl record, or one by Frank Marino, as proof. However, even Mahogany Rush isn’t as keen a name as The Albert Schroeder Experience, or the Stoney Curtis Band, which I bought last year.
Randy Hansen, who also made records simply redoing Hendrix material, is found here.
But the guy who was thought to have traded most famously on the Hendrix impersonation was Frank Marino of Mahogany Rush. This was an article of faith in the early rock press, which spread it. Of this, Marino commented:
“The most often heard story is that I took an overdose and woke up from a coma in the hospital and somehow became the spirit of Hendrix, or that I met this spirit and it entered me, endowing me with this amazing ability to play a guitar and magically know everything about it … They never ask me the truth and when I told them, they wouldn’t listen. The short truth about it is that I learned how to play guitar while recuperating from my trip. The guitar became a soothing help for me because of my great fear of letting my mind wander back into the trip if I wasn’t occupied and besides it was the only thing in the hospital relaxation room. I never even thought about the guitar before since I played the drums quite well anyway. I had this trip while Hendrix was still alive and began to play his music because it matched perfectly to what I was going through at the time.”
Marino’s first three albums — Maxoom, Child of the Novelty and Strange Universe — traded heavily on the psychedelic trippiness of Hendrix. In the early Seventies. And without the catchiness in the tunes.
That may sound like a dig, but if you’ve read the blog since its inception you know DD really likes stuff like that. Sometimes, tunes just get in the way of the enjoyment.
Another obvious imitator is Stoney Curtis and his Acid Blues Experience. Don’t throw a rod here, either. I like the one Stoney Curtis CD in my possession.
And there was also the Sterling Cooke Force, an act from Tamaqua, PA, near DD’s birthplace. They seemed to be more appreciated in Europe, for a year or two.
“Hey, that sounds like Hendrix, only not as good,” insist Philistines.
If you’re Googling this at some future date and you think that I’ve overlooked your favorite Hendrix impersonator or that you yourself are a cruelly unappreciated Hendrix impersonator, I beg forgiveness. I didn’t mean to do it. My abilities are not such that I can keep and maintain an international registry on the matter.
Yes, yes — Robin Trower. Trower charted big time in the US with Bridge of Sighs in 1974. An excellent album, it doesn’t really match anything in the Hendrix catalog, delivering its own unique flavor of billowing and lugubrious, heavily electric blues rock.
Reader beware: The Los Angeles Times web edition hosts the interview with Anthony Aquarius. Initially, DD read it in the hard copy. The Times website will hang some browsers, even on high speed connections. In some ways, the newspaper site almost qualifies as malicious. One is certain editors don’t view it this way. However, the Times is such an intentional bandwidth hog in its desperate attempt to keep visitors on-site and squeeze money from the web, its designers do many things they shouldn’t.
