Just so everyone has an idea of where we are. There are 21 people in the exchange.

Jeff Mangum donated a beautifully decorated acoustic guitar to an AIDS care organization and they're auctioning it off on eBay: [link]

I remember that there were 4 discs, but the handwriting on two of them was very, very similar. Also, I think I lost the liner notes to one of those two - at least, I couldn't find any when I went to ship them off. And, no, I don't remember whose.

Thanks for the link, Ginger. I couldn't figure out how to finesse that.

Here's the review itself for the click-averse.

***************

Times of London

January 28, 2005

For the ones that got away - Bob Stanley

IMAGINE the scene: a rock magazine is compiling the World’s Greatest Punk Records to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Slaughter and the Dogs’ first gig. The editor looks through his well-thumbed list — Anarchy in the UK? Check. Clash? White Riot will do. Somebody suggests Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited has a bit of a punky attitude.

The editor looks fidgety, beads of sweat appear on his brow. “And the Beatles?” he asks. “How are we going to fit them in?” This is not how pop writing was meant to be. What we deserve is the grand tradition of informed enthusiasm and unwarranted bile which stretches from Nik Cohn and Lester Bangs, through punk sage Jon Savage and sly brainbox Simon Reynolds. What we get is a cover-stars-by-rote version of pop history —people who rate Nirvana as slackers with one good idea and a pretty face are royally bored by twice-yearly definitive histories.

A giddy new book called Lost in the Grooves, on the other hand, is exemplary pop writing. “It’s always a treat to find something new that really blows your mind. I think that’s what every music freak is looking for,” explains editrix Kim Cooper. Lost in the Grooves is a collection that has grown out of her and co-editor David Smay’s Scram magazine, dedicated to digging deeper than the familiar Elvis/Beatles/Pistols/Nirvana saga. At the same time, the editors are no obscurants, placing albums by Paul McCartney, Prince, Pentangle, Lou Reed, OMD, the Kinks, the Bee Gees and the Beach Boys alongside the Dream Lake Ukelele Band’s one shot at fame. They just don’t pick the albums you read about on every other list.

Paul McCartney’s 1980 album McCartney II, for instance, came after a foolish drugs bust in Japan that effectively meant the end of Wings. He discovered synths and went all DIY and electronic. The juddering insanity of Temporary Secretary made it a hot Hoxton item 20 years on, Summer’s Day Song is warm honey, while Darkroom imagines Cabaret Voltaire re-jigged by Jonathan King. As for the bubbling Tomorrow’s World-ish instrumental Front Parlour, I’m proud to say I once played it at an electronica night and three people asked what it was.

Nobody has time to listen to everything, and this is where Lost in the Grooves becomes invaluable as a trigger. I’ve pored over the works of the Bee Gees and Beach Boys to the detriment of my soul and my social life but had still never heard either Mr Natural (the one before Jive Talking) or LA Light Album (the one with Lady Lynda), both LITG inclusions: they were officially uncool and I’d been conned. Now I’ve heard them both and I’d say the former’s Throw a Penny is a match for How Deep is Your Love, a natural-born guilty pleasure. Lost in the Grooves is written with such zip, enthusiasm and love of music that you can’t help but get sucked in.

For Cooper “it’s all about lauding the brilliant underdog and discovering unfamiliar glories. Part of the reason I love John Cale’s Paris 1919 so much is that I can still listen to it with fresh ears, where I overplayed my Velvet Underground albums to saturation point.”

Cooper and Smay first came to prominence with the groundbreaking book Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth four years ago. It revived the spirit and endless inquisitiveness of late Sixties/early Seventies fanzines such as Teenage Wasteland Gazette and the late Greg Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp with contributions from the originals (Shaw, cartoonist Peter Bagge) and the latterday pop-culture mavens.

The book was greeted with relief — essays penned with a mixture of gravitas and glee normally reserved for undiscovered Springsteen outtakes were on subjects such as the Monkees, the Sweet and the Archies. Roots and authenticity, touchstones of the musically bankrupt, counted for nought. Cooper describes the Archies as “masters at evoking (continued...)

( continues...) the nervous excitement of adolescent sexuality . . . Sugar Sugar has one of the sexiest moments this side of Tim Buckley when vocalist Ron Dante explodes ‘like the summer sunshine, pour your sweetness over me’.”

The end result of this hoo-ha was the Bubblegum Achievement Awards in New York, the genre’s spiritual home. Such luminaries as Ron Dante, Toni Wine (fellow Archie and author of Groovy Kind of Love) and Mark Volman of the Turtles were awarded Gummies. Presented by Cooper, the Gummies are “beautiful custom trophies of a golden woman holding aloft a real pink bubblegum ball. This music has brought so much pleasure to people, it was really cool to give some of that back to the people who made it.”

Smay and Cooper describe Lost in the Grooves as “a capricious guide” that may not have a sequel. Neither says they want to declare war on the world of Q and other classic rock publications. “I don’t get angry,” says Smay, “I just shake my head that people choose Thriller over Off the Wall, or misunderstand Mick Taylor’s contribution to the Stones, or missed the Everly Brothers’ mid-Sixties career.”

Cooper tries “not to worry too much about what the canon holds. It seems to me that the canon is becoming less and less meaningful.” Her work means that the odds on the Archies making the cover of Q some time soon are still slim, but just a little less slim.

Hec, thanks for name-checking the Everlys.

Though all I have of theirs from that era is a 2-CD compilation from the Warner Brothers years.

Though all I have of theirs from that era is a 2-CD compilation from the Warner Brothers years.

Well, that's a lot more than most people have. The Everlys were still in their early 20s in the mid-sixties. They couldn't get their songs on the radio anywhere after the British Invasion, but groups like Chad and Jeremy or Peter and Gordon would cover those same mid-sixties songs and have hits. One of their mid sixties songs, "A Man With Money" became something of a mod classic covered by several groups, including The Who.

I have the Everly Brothers box set and it has more great, unheard music than almost any other box set I have on a single band or musician. Most boxes taper off in quality on the last disc, but the Everlys did fantastic work even into the early seventies where they explored a lot of great country rock.

They actually did fairly well in the UK during the mid-60s. XM's '60s channel does a weekly "here and there" show of the Top 10 this week in 196whatever, alternating between "here" (the US) and "there" (the UK). Apparently "Gone, Gone, Gone" was a big UK hit.

I found the pretty version (with an excellent Wings photo!): [link]

Ah, now Wings. I saw them on an old Flip Wilson rerun last weekend, performing (I kid you not!) "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

I can't say I liked it, but it was far better than it had any right to be.