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.