An Archival Edition of the Saturday Night Special from early 2020 (which is just a fancy way of saying a re-run) as we were just a little too busy getting ready for Day Drinking With Colin & the Bowlers at Woodlands Tavern this Sunday, 4-6 pm. Doors at three, admission free. Our favorite price.)
When Pencil Storm publisher Colin Gawel first assigned me to curate this Saturday night’s edition of TV Party Tonight! his suggestion was “5 Songs I Really Hate.” That was not a bad idea. I suppose it would be cheerily optimistic of me to claim there are more songs that I LOVE than songs I HATE but it’s sadly not true. For every Buffalo Springfield song I LOVED in the 1960’s there were countless Bobby Vinton, Bobby Goldsboro & Bobby Sherman songs I hated; for every Mott The Hoople or Aerosmith song I played incessantly in the 1970’s there were innumerable Styx, Journey & Kansas songs I could not escape on the Lee Abrams-dominated AOR radio conglomerate airwaves. And in this 21st century? Jeez, don’t even get me started. It’s very possible I haven’t heard a new song on the radio that I’ve REALLY enjoyed since The Strokes’ second album in 2003 and The White Stripes’ Icky Thump record in 2007. (That’s probably not really true, but it’s a good one-liner and DAMN CLOSE to being factually accurate.)
But I digress………
The TV Party Tonight! subject I settled on is a continuation of “Songs Mike Parks & I Loved In the 1960’s” that I started a coupla weeks ago in my Mike Gunslinger, updated for 2020 blog. I decided on this partly because no less a rock & roll personage than my fellow Pencil Storm contributor JCE wrote and told me that other than Paul Revere & the Raiders he was never that up on 60’s tunes, so I thought I’d offer up some more of my favorites. (JCE is the same age as my child bride Debbie, and they’re BOTH too young for 1960’s ravers.)
Today’s choices are a mix of the well-known – The Doors and The Yardbirds – and the lesser-renowned but dearly loved by Mike & me; The Standells, Lyme & Cybelle and Moby Grape.
THE STANDELLS / “SOMETIMES GOOD GUYS DON’T WEAR WHITE”
The record pictured here - Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds - was the first album I bought with my own money, back in 1965. (My previous albums were all either Christmas or birthday presents, I could only afford to buy singles, and I certainly couldn’t EVER have afforded this Japanese import version.) I earned said money from my after-school job at The Dairy Queen across the street from my house, where I made the princely sum of 50 cents an hour. The Yardbirds, therefor, accounted for at least six hours hawking ice cream cones on my part. It was worth every penny, and I still have this record today.
THE YARDBIRDS / “I’M A MAN”
MOBY GRAPE / “OMAHA”
I have no recollection whatsoever of how Mike and I came to be talking about this next song down in the basement dressing room of Ruby Tuesday’s back in 1990, during our stint with Willie Phoenix’s True Soul Rockers, but I do remember us working our love of this tune into a genuine lather. Fuzz guitars RULE!
(By the way, Lyme on this release was Warren Zevon of “Werewolves of London” fame. This was his first record.)
LYME & CYBELLE / “FOLLOW ME”
Winding up TV Party Tonight! for this week, The Doors with “The Unknown Soldier.” Here’s all I can relate to you about this song, and the times during which it was released; this record came out as a single in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and thusly was played on the radio once every couple of hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (at least in Columbus, Ohio, I read on Wikipedia it was banned by radio stations elsewhere, which might explain it peaking at only number 39 on the Billboad charts.) Can you conceive of a song like this being a hit on today’s airwaves? Can you imagine Ariana Grande or Drake or Taylor Swift or - for that matter - some “alternative artist” the likes of Mumford & Sons or Coldplay having the rock & roll BALLS to release a protest tune in 2020, let alone one this good? Their agents, managers, handlers & publicists would have a coronary, not to mention the folks at Entertainment Tonight or TMZ.
And I fully realize what a “Boomer” sentiment it is; but God, I miss the 60’s. Fuck you millennials, I take my rock & roll straight up.
THE DOORS / “THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER”
For those of you scoring at home, Ricki saw The Doors live at Veteran’s Memorial here in Columbus when he was 16 in 1968.
Real all about it here, from Growing Old With Rock & Roll…….Shows I Saw in the 60’s, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Doors.