Evolution, a band from Reno, Nevada featuring two young women in white go-go boots and three men with ruffled shirts. The photo comes from Bob Dee and Associates who booked many groups around Reno, Lake Tahoe and California.
My friend Derek sent me this photo. Sure, they’re probably a show band covering soft pop, but the look is worth a few laughs. Maybe a couple of members were in cool groups a few years earlier who recorded some great unreleased music we haven’t heard yet. Maybe.
This is the US issue of the original 1971 version of “Trench Town Rock” by Bob Marley & the Wailers, issued by G & C Records C&G-5000.
Like the first Jamaican Tuff Gong issue, this US version clocks in at 3:29. The last thirty seconds contain the verse: “Don’t call no cop, we can trash things ourselves, got no snacks on the shelves, but let me tell you behave yourselves”. These thirty seconds do not appear on later Tuff Gong pressings, the UK Green Door 45, or the African Herbsman LP on Trojan, among other issues, which time at about 2:59.
I’d like to know exactly which Tuff Gong issues have the longer version, only the ones with red text & logo, or do any with a blue printed logo or handwritten labels.
Interestingly, this longer version has what sounds like an edit about 3:02 into the song, so possibly the ending was grafted from another take. The instrumental version on the B-side, titled “Grooving Kingston” on this release, or “Grooving Kgn. 12” on others, times at 2:59 on all releases I’ve heard.
This seems to be the only release on G & C Records.
As you may have heard, Bob Dorough passed away this week at the age of 94. He had a range of talents, including a unique singing voice, arranging, writing and playing piano.
My favorite of his works is “The Dream Keeper”, one of his three adaptions of songs by Langston Hughes, from the Jazz Canto LP on Pacific Jazz. The other two songs are “Daybreak in Alabama” and “Night and Morn”, plus the LP features his setting of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Dog”. None of these were mentioned in reports when he passed, or even on his Wikipedia page.
I wrote to Mr. Dorough in 2013 and this is what he told me about this album:
Billy Bean used to come to NYC, from his native Philadelphia, to blow in a jam session I held at my apt. – in the 50’s.
Then I lived in LA for 3 years. I had already composed and performed the three songs to Langston Hughes, with Ralph Pena on bass, at the Lenox Jazz School.
After Ralph knew I was in LA he spoke to Lawrence Lipton about the songs and Dr. L called me to ask me to record them for Jazz Canto. I said “It’s not ‘Jazz & Poetry’ – they’re ‘art songs’ in the jazz idiom.” “I want them on the album anyway,” he said. So I said, “OK, but let me do one at least that I would think of as ‘Jazz & Poetry.'”
“What would you do” he asked – without hesitation I said “Dog” by Ferlinghetti. He was astounded and said OK.
Bunker and Hardaway were just cats I’d met since moving to LA and also special pals of Pena’s.
The lineup on the album is:
Bob Dorough – piano
Ralph Pena – bass
Billy Bean – guitar
Bob Hardaway – tenor sax
Larry Bunker – drums and vibes
The Bacchantes were a studio creation of producer Carsten “Kit” Haaland. Kit Haaland ran the Bacchanalia label and production company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with enough of a presence to get a listing in the Billboard Buyer’s Guide for five years running from 1968-1972, once with Tom McBryde and DanTaylor listed as Vice Presidents.
Beginning in 1967, Haaland registered a number of songs with the Library of Congress copyright office, including such intriguing titles as “Sun Machine Goddess”, “Bad Dream”, “Focus Your Love Lamp Baby”, “Get Off Your Rock” and “I Want You, Big Man”. I’d like to see the lyrics for these as Haaland seems to have had some message he was trying to deliver.
This single also appears to be from 1967. “Child of the Morning Sun (Bacchanalia #9)” was one of the first songs Haaland copyrighted. The production is upbeat baroque-psychedelic with female vocals. “I’m Leaving You (Bacchanalia #3)” has complicated shifts in tempo and melody.
A second single has “I’m Leaving You (Bacchanalia #3)” done in a soul style with a different arrangement and vocalists. This exists on a white label with blue print, No. G-1219. The A-side has a vocal version credited to the Bacchantes, the flip is an instrumental track credited to Daddy Bacchus Basic.
As far as I can tell, these were the only releases on the Bacchanalia label.
If music was a dead-end for Haaland, he received much more attention for his next venture as an expert on UFO sightings. A 1975 profile in the Kingsport Times-News states “Dr. Kit Haaland is a physicist in the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, currently working on a study of how the nation might survive a hypothetical nuclear war. In his spare time, he directs a group of about 40 scientists who are establishing a tracking network for aerial phenomena [UFOs].”
I believe Carsten Haaland passed away in December 2010.
Josie Taylor was of the many women in the mid-’60s who had one or two fine solo singles then disappeared from the music scene and history books. A couple others that come to mind include Judy Hughes (“Fine, Fine, Fine” on Vault), and Marilyn Mattson who I covered ten years ago and still haven’t found any info about.
Josie Taylor’s single featured a rarely-performed Goffin – King song, “I’ll Love You For Awhile” given a dark, heavy-hitting arrangement by Leon Russell. Dusty Springfield originally did the song in a plainer arrangement on her LP Ooooooweeee!!!.
The flip is the instrumental “Tra La La” (written by Pell), that could be the Wrecking Crew doing a simple jam, but is very much worth a listen.
Snuff Garrett, produced both sides. It was released June, 1965 on Liberty Records F-55800.
This single by Arboreal was a mystery to me, the only names on the label are Glen, Greg Allen, and no label name or address. Even the deadwax only repeats the 45-ST-101 A/B on the labels. When I first wrote this post in late October, 2016, there was no info on the ‘net, nothing.
Obviously it’s not ’60s garage but sounds like mid-late 70s rock, without much punk influence. The opening of “Our Souls Would See Us Through” reminds me a little of Wire, but that’s as far as it goes. “16 Years Old” gives more attitude, but both songs have an original sound that can’t be pegged to any movement or sound from the time. The songs are in stereo.
As it turns out, Arboreal were two brothers, Greg Allen and Glen Allen, originally from Nutley, New Jersey but living in New York City when they went into a studio as early as 1968 and cut the songs on this single.
My friend Jason of Rip It Up R.I. and The Basement Walls did some excellent sleuthing and contacted Steve Simels of the Power Pop blog who had been in the Floor Models with Glen Robert Allen in the 1980s.. Glen wrote a long history of the band.
The entire post is worth a read, but the relevant paragraphs are:
Greg and I had a clunky but good sounding Telefunken tape recorder and, later, a Sony that had sound-on-sound,as it was called back then. We could overdub ourselves. Many Dada-esque tunes were recorded, and some attempts at “real” music as well.
But in ’68 I took up guitar, and we wrote and recorded more in earnest. By then our family had been in NYC for about a year. Greg and I decided to record in an actual studio.
An older classmate of mine, Jon Fausty, was working in a studio that specialized in Latin music. The first day in the studio the equipment went south, wouldn’t work. I was actually relieved, for although Greg and I had performed in public and had recorded at home, this was A STUDIO! Where RECORDS WERE MADE!
The next day the gear was in working order, and I had shaken off the nerves. After all, I did have long wavy hair, a cool turquoise ring, a Superman-logo’d tee shirt, tie-dyed jeans, and, most of all, my ’68 Gold-Top Les Paul Standard on which I had mastered the three essential chords.
I also loved the name we’d devised: Arboreal. We always had a thing for chimps, and we both probably would’ve proposed to Jane Goodall.
Greg was a metronomic drummer, a better time-keeper than me (‘though I keep good time!). But who knew at the time that left handed drummers set up their drums differently than righties? Not us — we’d only seen righties ever play.
Nontheless, with Greg keeping time and me on guitar, bass and vocals(!), we cut “Our Souls Would See Us Through,” which Greg wrote the lyric for, and “Sixteen Years Old,” which I wrote.
The chorus on “Sixteen…” was originally “Things are pretty shitty when you’re sixteen years old..” But for the sake of mass appeal and radio play, I cleverly changed “shitty” to “sickening”. A move of rare genius, though I missed the sheer beauty of the “pretty/shitty” rhyme scheme.
Greg, in true mystical metaphoric mode, came up with “we gazed into each other’s eyestreams, until we met each other’s dreams.” And to think — “eyestreams” was hardly ever used back then!
We printed 100 45’s, sent them out to several record companies, and waited for the offers to roll in. Some of the rejection letters came on very nice stationery. Some with encouraging comments and actual signatures!
As I recall, Pickwick, a budget label, made an offer, but we held out for the big fish. That fish is still swimming merrily out there somewhere….
I’d like to hear some of the Allen brothers other early tapes, they obviously had a very original approach to rock music.
I come across many singles out of the range of the ’60s garage I usually cover on this site. When something is very obscure, with little or no info on the ‘net, I post it to satisfy my own curiosity.
Such as this single by Gun Shy, Ohio rock that sounds mid-70s but actually dates to 1981. It’s a Musicol press out of Columbus, with lots of EQ notes in the dead wax.
The A-side is “Gun Shy”, straight-up rock with plenty of cowbell, and a professional sound. The flip “Rymes and Reasons” is a power ballad with a good solo. B. Whitlatch and J. Cremeans wrote both sides. No publishing info, but production was by L. Smith and W. Withrow.
Karl Thaler plays acoustic guitar and sings doom-laden lyrics on his original composition “The Storm”, and plays guitar and harmonica on the instrumental “Phoebe”.
I had no info other than what’s on the label, which includes the deadwax stamp “45 202 385” / “45 202 386”. A comment, below, informs me that this single was included with the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania’s literary magazine Esprit in 1969, when Karl Thaler was a student there. Any further info on about Mr. Thaler or the University of Scranton music scene this came from would be appreciated.
When I bought this copy of Kenneth Rexroth’s Fantasy LP “Jazz & Poetry at the Black Hawk”, I found inside the cover hand-written notes for the session for two of the poems recorded: “Nicholas Dog of Experience” and Rexroth’s translation of Francis Carco’s “The Shadow”.
Different handwriting lists the musicians on the session. Hank Uribe’s daughter tells me this is her father’s handwriting, but the rest of the notes belong to someone else. Musicians were: John Mosher, bass; Clair Willey, piano; Dickie Mills, trumpet; Brew Moore on tenor sax; and Hank Uribe on drums.
Even though Fantasy had an entire back cover to fill with notes, they didn’t bother to list the musicians, so I haven’t seen this information published anywhere else.
Kenneth Rexroth wrote an essay called “Jazz Poetry” for The Nation magazine in 1958 discussing how he was working with a quintet that included three musicians who would appear on the Black Hawk album: Brew Moore, Dickie Mills and Clair Willey; plus Frank Esposito on trombone, Ron Crotty on bass and Gus Gustafson on drums.
I’m also including a scan of a legal release to allow photos to be taken in the Black Hawk club in San Francisco. All this may be minor history, but I know someone else besides me will be interested in it.
The collaboration of beat poets with jazz musicians is a strange and funny genre, and Rexroth’s delivery is one of the oddest:
Rexroth passed away in 1982; Hank Uribe in February 2011. Brew Moore was probably the most famous musician on this session, which would have taken place just before he dropped out of the jazz scene until relocating to Europe. Fantasy released an LP under his leadership in 1956, featuring a band that included Dickie Mills. Moore died in 1973.
Update 2022: Hank Uribe’s daughter Ann wrote to me with the information that her father “was Johnny Mathis’s first drummer in high school. He played with Vince Guraldi, Smith Dobson, Dave Lario, Bud Dimmock, Red Norvo, and so many others.” She sent in the photo seen below.
Just a few days after I added Nick’s article on former Daily Flash guitarist Doug Hastings’ time with Dr. John’s band in 1969, I picked up this single on the Another label by Drits & Dravy, one of Mac Rebennack’s many early releases before he moved to Los Angeles and assumed the Dr. John persona. It features Mac and Ronnie Barron putting down a long stream of quick rhymes and puns, many of which I can’t make out through the echo.
I’ve seen this as being from 1960, but I think 1962 is probably more likely, given that Dr. John mentions having the Drits and Dravy act at the same time he was cutting an unreleased LP for AFO.
Besides Mac and Ronnie, either of whom could be playing organ, I’m not sure who was on this session. It could have included some of his regular band at the time, such as Paul Staehle (drums) and Charlie Maduell (sax).
Another collaboration between these two which sounds very different is Ronnie Barron’s single “It’s All in the Past” written by Dauenhauer-Rebennack b/w “The Hip Parade”by Rebennack-O’Neil, from about 1963.
