"I Hear A Voice, Deep Down Inside - There Are Other Girls, Other Waves To Ride" Dept.

Jan & Dean should have fronted a pop group, not been a duo. Duos are tricky to get right. Simon & Garfunkel, Sam & Dave, the Everly Brothers [girls' group - Ed.], The Righteous Brothers, Sonny & Cher, James & Bobby Purify ... I'm struggling here. Anyway, here's why they should have fronted a group - the emphasis in a duo is singing. You don't get a singer teaming up with a bass player (although you did get Cher teaming up with a doofus). You're both up there to sing. And neither Jan nor Dean could sing a whole lot better than any random spirited Ben Frank's-type teen. Or they should have had a TV show, like the Monkees - they shot a couple of pilots.

But they did good for a couple of college kids making music on the side. Surf City, co-written with Brian Wilson [FX: harp glissando, heavenly choir, birdsong - Ed.] was the first surf song to reach #1, and they had a bunch of other chart hits before Jan Berry trashed his Corvette. Dean's loyalty and support through the long years of recovery shows how strong friendship can be. 

My favorite J&D album (and they were never an album act) is this here Original Soundtrack Recording of '64's Ride The Wild Surf, some kind of classic of the genre. I mean, gee whiz, check out that cover! Babes in bikinis, surfboards and striped shirts, and also too - for those what care, such as I - some boner-inducing typography - I just wanna lick that italic! The package is perfect, and so is the music. Yes, there's filler - a union requirement for surf-adjacent albums back then - but it's fun filler. And the tunes are killer, from the swooningly beautiful (Waimea Bay, and the elegiac A Surfer's Dream) through upbeat frug-alongs to the genuinely laff-out-loud (The Submarine Races).

Jan Berry gets credit for the sumptuous production (with massive assist, I should imagine, from Hal Blaine, Bones Howe, and Chuck Britz), and Brian Wison [FX: harp glissando, heavenly choir, birdsong - Ed.] gets principal credit for four songs. So yeah.

The lyrics to Tell 'Em I'm Surfin' (by the godlike P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri) are not only super-smart and deceptively finely crafted, but encapsulate the whole California Guy's Dream. And there's a sweet twist - for all his teen jock strut n' brag, he's talking to his Mom. He even asks her to pack his lunch - aww!! Read and enjoy. It's poetry, people!

Hey Mom if any of the guys from the baseball team try to call me on the phone, to ask me to play in an important game, just say their captain ain't at home.

Tell 'em I'm surfin' (don't care 'bout hittin' home runs now, all I have is fun fun fun now) - I'm tradin' in my bat n' ball, say I'll see 'em in the fall, I'm goin' surfin'.

And if that pretty little girl from across the street who's been botherin' me for days to go swimming in her pool, well her pool's real cool, but it hasn't got ten foot waves.

Tell her I'm surfin (she's a mighty mighty cute girl now, but I'm gonna be shootin' the curl now). If she wants some company I'll be out at Windandsea, I'm goin' surfin'.

Last year I had a summer job, and all day long I had to run around, but now I can afford a new surf board, and all summer long I'm gonna bum around.

So just pack me a lunch and I'll be on my way - oh yeah, there's one more thing to do; if the mail man comes with a letter for me, just forward it to Malibu,

Where I'll be surfin' (just drop it in my '34 Ford now, I'll read it while I'm waxin' my board now) Tell him I'm surfin'. I won't be home for days, I'll be ridin' the waves, I'm goin' surfin'.

EDIT: Lupine Assassin sends a link for The T.A.M.I. Show, hosted by Jan & Dean. See comments!

This post made fungible thru' th' Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association.

Larry's Boy Done Good! - Nobby Explains The Phenomenon That Was Duffy Power

These looks, that name - what could possibly go wrong?

Ray Howard [posits Nobby - Ed.] may well have considered himself one of the lucky ones when he was re-christened Duffy Power by manager Larry Parnes. At least he didn't end up as Elmer Twitch, the name that Joe Brown refused.

I was vaguely aware of Duffy Power, but only as one of the Larry Parnes' Silly Names of the early sixties. It was only when I read Colin Harper's biography of Bert Jansch that I discovered there was a lot more to him than that.

"Long regarded by critics and cognoscenti as one of the most compelling British singers and songwriters of his generation, and as a recording artist whose career – perpetually blighted with bad luck – never remotely equalled his talents. In a nutshell, his time at the coalface of rock’n’roll, pop, folk, blues and progressive rock – and in truth no single genre is wide enough to pigeonhole the man’s music – spanned the late fifties to the mid-seventies, after which time he seemed to fade entirely from view." (quoted from Colin Harper's website)

After being discovered by Larry Parnes and suffering the obligatory name change, he never achieved the success of Marty Wilde, Georgie Fame, Billy Fury or others in the stable, possibly because he turned down the song "Livin' Doll" and left to go it alone. He was a vocalist of some note and as such Lennon and McCartney apparently wrote "I Saw Her Standing There" especially for him, when they were toying with the idea of just being songwriters. He became only the second person ever to cover one of their songs on 20th Feb 1963 (The Beatles recorded their version on 11th Feb) backed by the Graham Bond Quartet, including John McLaughlin (guitar), Jack Bruce (bass) and Ginger Baker (drums).When word came back that John & Paul found it "too jazzy", it was re-recorded and toned down, a month later.

As well as a pop singer, he became enamoured by the blues and worked as a duo with Alexis Korner for a year in 1964/5 playing the folk clubs and fronting Blues Incorporated on the 1965 lp "Sky High". Later that decade he recorded some demos with a world-class pool of collaborators (McLaughlin, Bruce, Baker, Danny Thompson, Terry Cox, Phil Seamen and others). This was eventually released by Transatlantic in 1972 as "Innovations" to critical acclaim. "The resemblance to Billie Holiday is the most striking thing about Duffy Power," according to Gramophone." At his finest he communicates the same sense of emotional involvement, the same distraught lyricism." He then formed a group "Duffy's Nucleus" with Thompson, Cox and Mclaughlin but it came to nothing bar some BBC sessions so Thompson and Cox moved off to form the rhythm section of Pentangle.

He did various session work in the late 1960's through to the 1980's, including harmonica on the soundtrack to The Italian Job, and harmonica on Bert Jansch's Birthday Blues album, but worked for the DHSS for many years. He was dogged by mental health [mental illness - Ed.] throughout his life, which coupled with drugs, hindered him from making a breakthrough into the mainstream. There was a brief comeback thanks to Paul Jones and others in the 1990's which resulted in him recording several radio sessions and contributing to the Bert Jansch tribute album "People on the Highway". 

In 2011 he released a new cd "Tigers", which is the subject of my download and the first thing that I had heard by him. I find the combination of his voice and minimalist guitar/harmonica totally mesmerising. It's an almost entirely acoustic record of just him, his bluesy voice, guitar and harmonica. Laid back folk blues, I should cocoa. The standout track for me is his cover of the reggae song "Johnny Too Bad", but his own composition, "Tigers" comes a close second, and the rest a close third. Success still evaded him however and he remains just a footnote in the story of the UK music scene. He died, aged 72, in 2014.

The Machines Are Taking Over Our Music! Dept. - Tonto's Expanding Head Band

"Whaddya mean we, white man?"

Robert Margouleff had one of the first Moogs (after Micky Dolenz), to which Malcolm Cecil added a massive bank of other technology, creating the world's largest sound synthesizer, the acronymic TONTO. The wiki page tells the story, and it's well worth your time.

The first thing you may notice about the Tonto albums is how organic they sound. Squelchy burps, jungle bleeps and whistles, flutters and feathery whooshes. This is warm, surprisingly human music, not the chilly interstellar soundscapes of (say) Tangerine Dream. Earth music.

Bob [left] and Cecil - that hair!

It's also unpretentious and entertaining. Relatively short tracks, using melody and harmony, rhythm and structure; no "challenging" avant garde noodlings, no "covering the classics" to impress the academics. No space-age treatments of Beatle sing-alongs to grab the novelty market. They're all original compositions, many recorded on the fly, capturing the fugitive sounds as they happened. The albums (from '71 and '74) are also entirely electronic; the sounds aren't sound effects but the substance of the music. Sales didn't reflect the impact it made. Stevie Wonder, for one, was on the phone to M&C before the record finished spinning - it changed his music and gave his career exactly the boost it needed.

Gatefold art by psych pioneer Isaac Abrams

My ten cents: I bought the first album on release, and I was more puzzled by it than blown away. Psychedelia had mostly run its course by '71, and there was an element of pastiche in the name. It didn't sit happily with the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, or Krautrock. But those were problems created by my point of view, not the music. Better and more original than I thought at the time, it seems today a unique treasure, a brilliant bubble of sound. And a lot of fun.

Oh - ear goggles advisory.

Operation Eggs Over Easy - The CIA's Shocking Role In The Birth Of Pub Rock

CIA chief Richard "Uncle Dick" Helms testifies before closed congressional hearing, 1972

Having been pivotal in the late 'sixties Youth Movement through the manufacture and supply of Hoffmann-grade LSD, the CIA soon turned its beady eye to the UK.

Operation Eggs Over Easy was to follow the Black Ops tradition of MK Ultra and Operation Paperclip. Berkeley coffee-house intellectuals Jack O'Hara and Austin de Lone were recruited and flown to London to infiltrate the "underground scene" by posing as a country rock act, reporting back through CIA agents embedded in the American Embassy, which paid for the band to tour universities in the UK (seen as hotspots of radical politics). The Agency also provided a base for the band - a house in London's leafy Kentish Town, wired for audio and video surveillance. "There were like wires and cameras on the fucking walls, all over the house," laughs Graham Parker today. "We were too stoned to give a fuck. I remember Nick [Lowe - Ed.] making faces and fart noises for the cameras. Happy times!"

Operation Eggs Over Easy's stroke of strategic brilliance lay in establishing a network of public houses as music venues; chat flowed as freely as beer at the gigs, giving the CIA a unique source of street-level data, soon winging its way back to Langley via the band's "cultural sponsors" the American Embassy.

The year-long operation complete, the band headed back to the USA, where it showed its street cred by supporting headliners such as The Eagles and Yes on stadium tours. They recorded a couple of pleasant, laid-back country-rock albums as tax write-offs (both mysteriously "vanishing" after zero promotion) which sound little like the bands that sprang from the lively London pub scene the CIA created.

CIA Chief "Uncle Dick" Helms [at left, left - Ed.]  feels up war criminal Henry Kissinger at London Embassy reception for band. "You like that, bubeleh?"

CIA's Alma Street "safe house" in London's leafy Kentish Town, where band entertain political subversives such as Nick Lowe (the CIA's role in failed US launch of Brinsley Schwartz is currently being researched) and Barry Richardson out of Bees Make Honey.

Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation meeting at Tally Ho public house in London's leafy Kentish Town, where Eggs Over Easy are house band. Jack O'Hara center left.

Band practice at Walter Annenburg (then US Ambassador) town house in London's leafy Belgravia. Note costly medieval tapestries, "hippie" toupées.

Both O'Hara and de Lone were contacted during research for this piece; both declined to comment.

Country Rock "Rained Eels On Orphans' Picnic" - Claim

It's been too long since we FoamFeatured™ this swell genre on th' IoF©. You don't care, because you're here for the Hair Metal, so you can click right out of this one.

Borderline were out of Woodstock, NY. I was at Woodstock with my pal Joel, only we missed the festival because it was the early 'nineties, so we went back to Long Eddy and had a Philly Steakwich, which I'm still digesting.

Ben Keith - him - played with them on their two albums from '73, '74. There's a bunch of swell music happening here, with contributions from Billy Mundi [YAY! - Ed.], Amos Garrett, Vassar Clements, and - surprisingly - David Sanborn and Randy Brecker. So why ain't you heard of these guys? Well, the first album crawled out of Pennsylvania on the poverty Avalanche label, with the obligatory shit cover, and the second didn't get released until Japanese Country Rock fans discovered it in 2001. So that's why.

For fans of this-type music such as I, this is damn near as good as it gets. Songs you can sing? Check. Swell playing? Check. A litle waltz-time wistfulness? Check. Clear harmonies and pedal steel? Check and checkmate. Sometimes this is all you need.

This piece funded in part by Myron and Irwin Veeblefetzer's Eggplant Planet™, Stinkhole,  ND.