All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 3: Time Keeps On Slipping...Into The Future

 

Volume Number Three, and adventurously the APNS series wanders out of the Seventies. But don't worry, friends and neighbours, it will be a smooth transition, because while we do enter the Eighties, these pearls are essentially of a piece with the preceding volumes. Mainly because artists and styles are pretty much a continuation of the hallmarks of the series: singers/songwriters, a bit of country rock, a touch of Southern rock. Nothing here is coming from the second part of the decade, and stylistically the artists here are somewhat still 'stuck in the Seventies'. In the best possible sense of course. So, no gated or cavernous drums, no huge keyboard swooshes or hair metal guitar a.k.a. the hallmarks of the Eighties. These things will come a bit later in the APNS series (a promise or a warning? - YOU decide!). So for now you can stay in the easy-going groove that the first two volumes have established. 

As for the artists, this volume is almost a hundred percent free of major label artists and, admittedly, anyone you have heard of. Which is part of the fun! Like me you discover artists you've never heard of before. All of them are American or Canadian and published these songs on private press (a.k.a. vanity labels) or local microlabels. The only artist here who sniffed major record label atmosphere is Joey Scarbury, whose song is actually the title song of the 1982 mix of coming of age and crime film "The River Rat", incidentally the first film produced by the Sundance Institute. The film is almost as unknown as the artists of APNS Vol. 3, though well worth searching for, or stumbling onto. It has the easy-going rhythms of an 80s "thriller" (yes, it's slow), but also some really impressive deep focus photography and a really good child performance from a really young Martha Plimpton. Plus Tommy Lee Jones and Brian Dennehy. 'Nuff said. But I digress. 

Blackhawk, opening proceedings with" Colorado Woman" were local southern rockers from - you guessed it - Colorado. Darryl Corley is a singer/songwriter from North Carolina. Dan Knight is a singer/songwriter from Ontario with a 1982 one-off album of improbable Christian psychedelic folk-pop songs. Michael Behnan, another Canuck, had two albums out in 1979 and 1980. Broken Bow was a country rock group from Wisconsin with a single album out in 1980. Dave Keir was a British folkie and acoustic picker who lived and taught music in Germany for a while and had a loyal cult following there. Jan Schim (below) was a folkie from Florida who recorded her single album in 1978, but finally issued it on her own label (the modestly titled "Jan Schim's Records" that obviously never issued anything else) in 1982. So she, like the fantastically named Doc Holiday or the less fantastically named Kurt Van Arsdel (who sounds a little like a Nazi villain in a Hollywood movie, am I right or am I right?) pressed their albums as private press releases in tiny numbers. 

So, there you have it. Another twenty pearls from truly unknown artists, and yet what a fine 70 minutes you'll spend with this. Fun (?) fact: This was the first APNS compilation I burned to CD because I really liked the flow of this one. Here's hoping you do, too. 

From The Record Shelf: Useful Music (No, really!)

If someone has browsed through the pages of this young blog for middle-aged readers, it seems obvious: Only old music for older folks here. But one goal of One Buck Records is to also from time to time present albums that have fallen through the cracks or have never gotten the attention they deserve. And yes, that includes albums that are less than forty years old. Case in point: Useful Music by the Josh Joplin Group. These were indeed my college years, so it's fitting that at the time I would listen to what in the olden days was called 'college rock'. It is in many ways is a good snapshot of what smart, well-written and played college rock sounded like in the early Aughts. Most of it was actually recorded and released in 1999, though this is the re-release from 2001 that added "Camera One" which dutifully became the album's lone sort-of hit. But Useful Music has held up remarkably well and even the markers of its time of production - the slight Hip Hop-like rythm of "Superstar", the reference to Sugar Ray in "Phil Ochs" - are now a charming time capsule. This album sounds like its time, while also subtly commenting on it. Take  "Phil Ochs", clearly one of the highlights of the set, a song that's not so much a eulogy for the beloved songwriter himself but rather the values he stood for, all the while skewering the rise of the artificial teen/boy group pop stars of the late 1990s: "And though the poster child tries/ he won't survive the scorn/ he is killed with compromise / in the tube where he was born / Phil, you are not gone / 50 fans can't be wrong / or can they?". 

The melancholy underpinning "Phil Och" also hints at what really makes this record. On one hand its fabulously catchy stuff - great music to listen and hum or sing to while doing something else - drivng, obviously, but also the laundry or what have you.  But then the record sneaks up on you with a well-placed observation or turn of phrase, or a tinge of melancholy during the mostly upbeat-sounding proceedings. Sometimes it's more than a tinge, as in the aforementioned "Camera One" that cuts through the beautiful L.A. lifestyle facade to reveal the story of a Hollywood suicide. And yet, you can easily not notice the often surprisingly weighty lyrics, because there are these fantastically catchy melodies propping up the songs, having you sing along to their choruses in no time. Useful music, indeed. 

Freak out in a...no, hold on, don"t freak out, it's just good ol' Davey Jones!

I would have thought that his untimely death in 2016 would've cemented David Bowie as one of the all-time greats, but it seems that opinions may still vary quite a bit. Some still see him only as the red-haired make-up wearing glam rock king of the Ziggy years, others remember him with shudders from his beach-blond Let's Dance period. Both are of course surrounded by other Bowie avatars - The Thin White Duke, the Ashes to Ashes harlequin etc. What is undeniable is that Bowie was more than just Ziggy, more than the Top of the Pops star. Bowie did vaudeville, British invasion r'n'b, folk and folk rock, hard rock, glam rock, Philly soul, art rock, mainstream pop, hard rock again, dance pop, art rock again, jungle & drum'n'bass, retro rock and finally a jazz-inspired record. That's an impressive list of musical exploration, whichever way you slice it. Sure, Bowie had times where he was chasing after the bus, rather than driving it. But I would say it's still fair to have him at at least 50% trendsetter, 50% trendhopper. His interest in whatever music caught his fancy at any given time could see him zig where people wanted him to zag, apart from an unfortunate period in the 80s. And hey, even from that time there are things to salvage (in later posts here at One Buck Records).   

I haven't seen Moonage Daydream, the archival documentary directed by Brett Morgen, though I've picked up the movie in the local library, just waiting to be watched whenever I find the time. But the soundtrack to the project caught my eye, mainly because besides a bevy of live music there was a bunch of music presented in alternative and remixed form, some of it featuring gentle mash ups of several compositions. A lot of the more exotic tracks however, were essentially snippets, sometimes only a couple of seconds long. From there was born the idea of a single long track, a sort of megamix that would reunite the most interesting moments of this project. A lot of the music here is from the mid- to late 70s, so if you enjoy Bowie's "Berlin period", then you will probably find lots to like in it. I know I did. It was a lot of fun to revisit these songs with a twist. I hope the same will be true for you. And you might thus not even notice that the song that gave the film its title is missing from the line up! So, there's no freaking out here, but maybe something else...bliss out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!

This Just In: More Sweet Magnolias

I called it, and my readership (well, one of them) agreed. The undisputed highlight of the second volume of All Pearls No Swine was "10 Days Over 23 Year" by the Sweet Magnolia Band. When I started to compile the APNS series more than three years ago (a Covid lockdown pastime...) there was literally nothing else from the band out there. But in the meantime, some folks have uploaded the rest of ths one-off onto You Tube, and so straight from the Tube right to One Buck Records comes the rest of the band's output, striking while the iron is warm-ish. 

I still don't have much more info on the group, other than they were from Little Rock, Arkansas (that's at least were their private press label is located). Oh, and what a label name: Lardbucket Records. That's fantastic! [Chandler voice:] Could it be any more Southern and redneck-y?! The album is pretty good, with quite a bit more country touches than I expected (Discogs has it as psychedelic rock; which I feel is a little exaggerated), and while "10 Days" sounded quite a bit like The Grateful Dead, throughout the album it's obvious how much the band was influenced by The Band. I also like that as their opening track they have their own theme, that's great. Overall, nothing here is quite as good as "10 Days" but for the country rock/Americana fans out there it's a nice little addition from the glory days of the genre. 

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 2 - Electric Boogaloo!

Okay, I lied in the subtitle here. Time for round two, though realistically there's not much electricity here, but a bunch of acoustic stuff, again from the obscure corners of the 1970s music scene (and, you know, Youtube). The line-up this time around includes some more known and recognizable names like Jonathan Edwards, Gallagher and Lyle or Manassas, and - if you're into deep cuts - maybe guys like Chris Darrow. Manassas' song is interesting, as it is the only true example of the 'cuban bluegrass' that Stephen Stills once described his band as. Except, you know, they never really played cuban bluegrass. They either played bluegrass, spearheaded by secong banana/right hand man extraordinaire Chris Hillman, or they played latin rock courtesy of Stills. This is the first of many stabs Stills had at "Thoroughfare Gap" (Manassas also cut a more traditional version) before finally releasing it on the album of the same name in 1978. And it is an interesting mix of the two, with Joe Lala going crazy on percussion while Hillman fires up the ol' mandolin. Maybe not a hundred percent succesful (which might've gotten it shelved for six years), but certainly intriguing! 

There are again a whole bunch of folks who either recorded on private press vanity labels or tiny independents, so information on a lot of these is shaky at best, and in some cases inexistant. There's a bunch of Canadians on here: Billy Mysner is a folkie with one self-released record to his name, while the Perth County Conspiracy (who supported Bob Burchill, from Vol. 1) was, seemingly, a mix between a hippie commune and a psychedelic folk-singer/songwriter collective from Stratford, Ontario. Also from Ontario hails Bob Carpenter, on whom I'll have a lot more to say and post, including his fight with the record company establishment that he unfortunately lost. Speaking of lost: Jim Sullivan, an obscure Californian songwriter, got lost in the New Mexico desert, never to be heard from again. After releasing an album called U.F.O. his more obsessive (and, uh, possibly altered by use of narcotics) fans - all five of them - swear he was abducted by aliens. 60,000,000 Buffalo (who will also be featured here later) was a contry/blues rock troupe led by Judy Roderick and Bill Ashford. Cayenne (also coming up!) was a local San Francisco country rock bar band. The Seabird Band was a local favorite in North Carolina. I don't know anything about the Sweet Magnolia Band other than that the song featured here is the best song The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty never recorded. Fantastic stuff. 

So, there you are. Hopefully a lovely hour and change of some sweet sweet Seventies music, better than any algorythm on Spotify could offer you. Oh, before I forget: For weirdos like me (and others out there, I C U, C!) who still burn stuff on CDs, all volumes of APNS will be timed to fit on a standard 80 minute recordable CD, if you desire to engage in such outdated fashions of using outdated technology. Then again, you are listening to thoroughly outdated music. Like we all should. Enjoy. 

Harvesting with Uncle Neil

Time to open the alternative album section here at One Buck Records, and what better way to do it than taking a good but flawed album and make it better (?!) or at least more coherent. And for that kind of exercise, who better to turn to than uncle Neil. Mr. Young, the most mercurial and unpredictable of musicians, whose work is - quite by design - one of the least coherent. From album to album, and sometimes from song to song within an album. Neil Young's principle for what to include or not in an album has always seemed relatively arbitrary. A performance is technically flawed, but he liked the spontaneity of it? Put it on the album! There's a bunch of live performances lying around that he likes? Put 'em on the album! There's a couple of old outtakes that sound nothing like the songs he's working on now? Put 'em on the album!

Harvest is Neil's most popular and succesful album, but it isn't a particularly great album. Part of it is uncle Neil's above-described M.O. The acoustic material is of one piece, but there's also a couple of electric performance, one live aoustic track dropped right in the middle, and the album's two huge missteps: the orchestral rock of "A Man Needs A Maid" and "There Is A World". The decision to let Jack Nitzsche add his orchestral bombast to these songs were, respectively, ill-advised and disastrous. "A Man Needs A Maid" is a sturdy enough song to survive the orchestration, despite it clearly being counter-productive to the song's sentiments of confusion and loneliness. But "There Is A World" is barely a song to begin with and completely buckles under the strain of Nitzsche's additions. Uncle Neil's decision to include these in that shape and form is dubious at best. Especially since the sessions for Harvest yielded a number of other songs, predominantly in the acoustic vein of the rest of the material, that could've and would've been a better fit than "There Is A World". 

So, time to harvest a better album. "World" is gone, while "Maid" stays, in a stripped-down acoustic live version. Harvest Time also reinstates the outtakes "Bad Fog Of Loneliness", "Journey Through The Past" and "Dance Dance Dance". The latter exists as a studio outtake, but I preferred a more spontanous sounding live acoustic take. And that's it. I sequenced "Old Man" in the midst of the songs similar in sound and sentiment, but otherwise kept the general structure of the album intact. 

"Out On The Weekend" is still one of my favorite album openers of all time, with maybe my favorite opening stanza: "Think I'll pack it in and buy a pick up/ take it down to L.A./Find a place to call my own and try to fix up/ Start a brand new day" which introduces the album's loose theme of wanderlust and new beginnings, while the very next lines "The woman I'm thinking of she loved me all up/ But I'm so down today" hints at the album's undercurrent of quiet world-weariness bubbling under the gentle acoustic surface. It sets the mood perfectly, for the original Harvest and for Harvest Time. A lot of the album might be overly familiar, but hopefully this gives you a fresh way to listen to Uncle Neil's classic. 

Time to go harvesting again...

The Best Album Rod Stewart (N)Ever Made

It was 1980 and Rod the Mod was miffed. The world at his feet, platinum records and platinum blondes galore, Blonde on Blonde so to speak...and yet. Where was the critical respect that was owed to him? Ever since his crossing the Atlantic and too many nights on the town, critics seemed to have it out for him. Was it his foolish behavior? Why couldn't he simply be foot loose and fancy free like in the younger days? Blondes have more fun is what they say, but Roderick wasn't having any. So he hatched a secret plan. Record a back to basics record incognito, and see what those damn critics - independent of their perception of him - would say. "I'll show 'em", he said to himself, assembled a crack crew of studio musicians and carefully chose a number of songs to cover. To futher tease the critics, he even included his own take on old Face colleague Ronnie Lane's "Ooh La La", originally sang by the band's other Ronnie. When tasked with finding a fitting pseudonym for his secret record, tentatively titled Watch That First Step (to imply it was a debut album by an unknown artist), Rod paused for a second, then said "I was thinking of some of the ol' lads recently, like Bruce and Stephen, so why wouldn't I be Bruce Stephens? Yeah, that sounds about right." Rod's team even hired a stand-in for the album cover so that the ruse would be complete. Now, he only had to get the record out and watch the critics' praise for this exciting newcomer roll in...

Or so it could seem, if you listen to Watch That First Step. The first thing you realize when you hear Bruce Stephens singing here is how uncanny the resemblance to Rod S. is, sometimes spookily so. If you play "The Heart Of Saturday Night" to a panel of people, even experts, and ask them what they'd think of this Rod Stewart outtake, I'm pretty sure most, if not all, would fall for it. But enough of Rod S., some words about Bruce S. His big claim of fame, as the sticker on the album notes, was being a member of Blue Cheer for two albums in 1969. He then founded another band, Pilot (not the famous one) who broke up after releasing an album and a single apiece. And then he gigged and hustled for the rest of the 1970s, at times recording a demo or two in search of  a record deal. That record deal, and record, finally came in 1981,and what a beauty it is. Stephens only has one (co-written) song on the album, but the covers are well-chosen and beautifully played. The best one is easily his version of Barbara Keith's "Detroit Or Buffalo". Keith's original is great, so is Neal Casal's cover, who revived the song for a (small) new audience to discover in the 1990s. But Stephens version tops both of them, for my money. Just fantastic stuff. 

Watch That First Step has never been issued on CD, so I had to source this from two different sources, and on some tracks you have some very minor vinyl crackles. The bonus track section collects most of Pilot's songs which were in the same vein as Step, as well as a couple of bits and bops (Blue Cheer's classic "Saturday Freedom" among them). With this package you pretty much have all the Bruce Stephens that you'd ever need. Rod S. might've had the hits and the fame in 1981, but Bruce S. had the better album, by far. Some (blue) cheers for that, please... 

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 1

 So, what is "All Pearls, No Swine"? 

For one thing, a phrase that popped in my head while I was compiling the first volume of what will (if all goes well and there are actually folks listening to this) a long running series on this blog. I'm not sure how exactly I started perusing the weirder and less visited corners of You Tube, chasing unknown diamonds in the rough that probably don't show up on music blogs every day, but it started a hunt for more unknown or semi-forgotten music, first only from the 1970s (the golden age of music, in my opinion, and I wasn't even born until it was almost over...), then spilling over in the 1980s and finally I made volumes on the following decades as well. My chase, especially throughout the 1970s and 1980s, led me to some fantastic artists, some truly weird one-offs, and a lot of stuff in the middle of these extremes. 

The 1970s and 1980s editions of the "All Pearls, No Swine" series will be a mix of music from private pressings, small local labels or the occasional underexposed act from an established label (or established artist on an underexposed label). Known names do pop up from time to time, albeit with songs that got  away: alternate versions, outtakes, the works. Speaking of pops: vinyl crackles and pops have been judiciously added for your authentic listening experience.

It's really simple. If you like the music on this first volume of APNS, you will probably like what I'm posting on this blog (and if you don't, there are other types of music coming). But this first volume will give you a good idea for my sweet spot mainly explored in this series: a healthy dose of country rock, a couple of singers-songwriters, a bit of folk, the occasional rock track, and from time to time some more exotic ingredients I appreciate, but only in small measures, like psych rock or prog rock. 

Music from artists featured here like Bob Burchill, Will Beeley, Jay Bolotin, Bluestone or George Law will come up in the following weeks. So will more pearls (and no swine...) 

Hope to see you then...

PS: Tell me what you think of these artists in the comments, will ya? It'll be merrier here without me just talking to myself and the unknown internet out there...

Welcome to One Buck Records!

This has been a long time coming. The original idea for a blog called One Buck Records probably goes back to something like a decade ago...whoops...all in good time and all that. The original conception was also somewhat different of what this blog will look like. Some day I might tell you about it. But what really counts is what this blog is about to be. The One Buck Records will obviously focus on music, good to great one preferably. This'll include a series of alternative albums ranging from giants like Bowie, The Byrds and The Beach Boys to fringe artists like Wayne Berry or Mason. There'll be compilations of hidden gems from the last fifty years or so, with an emphasis on the sweet, forgotten sounds of the 1970s. I will try to shed more spotlight on artists who are too little known. Or, you know, just pull an underappreciated record from my collection to hopefully make it slightly more known. 

So, this is it. It's been a long time coming. Let's hope it can last a long time.  

[Update]

This was, more or less the original text to welcome readers. As I write this, five months later, it's time to take stock and inform readers that labels have now been added to help you either browse by interest or look for something specific (especially considering my predilection for, uhm, ornery article titles). 

After this time there are also some series that will continue to grow

All Pearls, No Swine - The granddaddy of 'em all. Presents hidden gems from past decades. Up until now the 1970s (mainly) and the 1980s (occasionally). Will also include the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s at later points

From The Record Shelf - records from my collection that deserve wider exposure

One Album Wonders - great records that stand alone (literally, as their artists never made another)

as well as the usual mix of exclusive compilations, alternate albums and other assorted goodies that the One Buck Guy whips up for you.

Enjoy the ride.