Welcome to the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Limey) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

In this 29th episode we discuss not one of the first four classic albums by Liverpool legends Echo & The Bunnymen, but the troubled, eponymous fifth album. Tony actually witnessed the record’s long gestation in person while writing the band’s authorized 1987 biography Never Stop: The Echo & The Bunnymen Story, which makes Echo & The Bunnymen the first album to be featured on CROSSED CHANNELS that one of us was in the studio for. It is also perfect subject matter for Crossed Channels as it’s an album made by a British band in a British studio but with an American audience very much in mind.

Since he was present for its recording - both during the subsequently-abandoned sessions in Liverpool with producer Gil Norton, and then in London with eventual producer Laurie Latham - and given that he traveled with the band on their subsequent 1988 US tour for SPIN magazine, Tony has quite a bit of insider information to share during this episode. Some of it is explosive, and much of it will be new to Bunnymen fans, so this episode should be well worth the price of admission!

Released in July 1987, three years after the jaw-droppingly brilliant Ocean Rain,and nearly two years after the Latham-produced single “Bring On The Dancing Horses” signified a change in musical approach (and landed on the platinum Pretty In Pink soundtrack), Echo & The Bunnymen was the band’s most commercially successful release in the US, where the single “Lips Like Sugar” was a significant radio and dancefloor hit. In the UK, the album peaked at #4, just as Ocean Rain had done. But improved US sales aside, Echo & The Bunnymen was widely seen as a disaster.

Once considered the greatest band in the UK, Echo & The Bunnymen — whose drummer Pete de Freitas had returned to the fold after going AWOL in the USA the previous year and “totally insane” in the process — now seemed sadly adrift amid Laurie Latham’s generically “80s” pop production. Not even the presence of Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek on a remake of the beloved B-side “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” — the band subsequently covered The Doors’ “People Are Strange” for the soundtrack of the 1987 teen horror film The Lost Boys — could re-light their fire during the recording sessions.

Tony maintains that the group’s live shows, especially in the States, remained electric during this period. Certainly, the album’s first two singles, “The Game” and “Lips Like Sugar,” did sound stronger than their studio incarnations when the band performed them in the autumn of 1987 on BBC-TV’s marathon 24-hour concert “Rock Around the Clock” (see below). Still, it was clear from critical and long-term fans’ reactions that with Echo & The Bunnymen, Echo & The Bunnymen had somehow lost their aura of invincibility, and shortly after a Japanese tour in April 1988, front man Ian McCulloch left the group. (It would be 1997 before there was another Echo & Bunnymen album featuring McCulloch reunited with original guitarist Will Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson; sadly, Pete de Freitas died in 1989.)

How and why did things suddenly go so wrong for one of the most important and influential British bands of the 1980s? Tony clearly has plenty of thoughts on the matter. Dan has some opinions as well; though he was a relatively late convert to the magic and majesty of the Bunnymen,.having only just begun to investigate their back catalog when the release of Echo & The Bunnymen gave him serious misgivings about his newfound affection for their older material, he has since come back around to enthusiastically embrace the quartet’s first quartet of long players. On this episode, Dan asks: is this fifth album really as bad as he’d remembered? Or, he and Tony ponder, are there great songs lurking under the over-production?

As always, the first 10 or so minutes of this episode are free for all to hear. But to listen to this episode in its entirety, along with all of our previous complete CROSSED CHANNELS episodes, just sign up for a paid subscription to one of our Substacks — or, better yet, sign up for a paid subscription to both of them!

By doing so, you will not only get a new episode of CROSSED CHANNELS every month in your inbox, but also receive other exclusive posts from each of us, as well as full-time access to all the good stuff in our respective archives. Plus, your monthly paid subscription will allow us to afford our monthly post-recording repast over at one of our many fine (or at least decent enough) Asian eateries!

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Remember — CROSSED CHANNELS, unlike most podcasts, does not take ads; we value your intelligence too highly to subject you to that sort of thing. And if you are already a paid subscriber to one or both of our Substacks, THANK YOU. We appreciate it more than you can know!

(Theme music for this episode is Dan’s project The Corinthian Columns and its latest release “Hydrangea,” available on Bandcamp here.)

PS: In this episode, we refer to Echo & The Bunnymen being on tour in the US at time of recording. This was before McCulloch was in a car accident that caused the rescheduling of one show. We are relieved to hear it was not worse and wish him the speediest of full recoveries.

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I’ve been a fan of gay punk purveyors THE COCKS ever since 2021, when they burst out of Los Angeles (and their trousers) with Loads of Fun, their loud n’ lusty debut album.

Sure, I’d known COCKS frontman Zsa (also known as Jay Sosnicki) since the turn of the millennium, when we both worked at the late, lamented MusicBlitz website — but even without that personal connection, my perpetually-adolescent brain would have found hook-filled, smut-caked rockers like “Taking One for the Team,” “Cheeseburgers & Dick” and “Jerry Cantrell” (the latter being the only known musical tribute to a grunge icon’s package) utterly irresistible.

And now, five years later, THE COCKS are back with a new album — Endless Hummer, currently available on most streaming services — and a new, even more conceptual shtick. Recognizing that just being an ass-slamming rock n’ roll band with a seemingly endless supply of raunchy gay-themed glam-punk anthems isn’t enough to make anyone pay attention in this oversaturated day and age, THE COCKS have been steadily releasing hilariously creative videos to accompany new songs like “Brotein,” “Sugar on the Rim” and “Being a F*g (In a RNR Band)”.

Each clip comes off like a mini-episode from a long-lost TV sitcom in which the four COCKS — Zsa, guitarist Tchad Drats, bassist Jason “Halo” Halogen and drummer Mike McCormick — live together at a run-down pad in Reseda, bicker incessantly, occasionally blast off into outer space, and inspire the creation of their own action figures and play set.

That Zsa is the only member of THE COCKS who is actually gay never seems to be an issue or, er, bone of contention within the band — everyone’s open-minded and enthusiastically along for the ride, and that sense of dysfunctional-yet-supportive brotherhood is one of the things that makes THE COCKS so oddly endearing. As Zsa puts it with a laugh, “The straight guys have no problem whatsoever with singing songs about sucking dick.”

While THE COCKS stay true to their original short n’ sweet approach on the new album, keeping all of Endless Hummer’s songs under the three-minute mark, the record still finds them branching out a bit musically. They bust out some acoustic guitars and surf sounds alongside the rampant Ramones, Motörhead and Sunset Strip hair-metal influences, and the lads even indulge themselves in a majestic instrumental called “Bonehenge” — though they head off any risk of perceived pretentiousness by ending it after 30 seconds. In any case, the whole thing is a total blast from stem to stern; and while Endless Hummer makes a perfect party soundtrack for Pride Month, there’s no reason not to crank it all year long.

Zsa and I recently caught up by phone to talk about where THE COCKS have been, and where they’re going…

JTL: Did you already have the COCKS concept together when you started the band? Or did the band just kind of morph into it?

ZSA: We sort of morphed into it. The original guitar player and I, we did music for a short film that I did, and I’d written a song called “God Gives Notice,” because that was what the little short was about. But after we did that first song, we were like, “This is kind of fun. Let’s spend some time just coming up with a bunch of songs; if we like them, we’ll put a band together.”

And that’s what happened. The weird thing was that, once we pulled the group together, after about two or three rehearsals everybody was looking at each other like, “This is like, viable, right? This is the best band I’ve ever been in!” [laughs]

But you’re not just a great band — you’re also an amusing collection of characters.

Yeah — the whole “Monkees” component, that also came about organically, just because everybody in the band is super-duper crazy and damaged in their own way. Like Mike, our drummer, he really is that crazy, neurotic guy, our guitarist Tchad is kind of a kamikaze libertine, and our bassist Halo and I have this total love-hate relationship. Everyone really is those characters, and we’re all having a lot of fun just blowing it up, because it’s a way to have fun and extend the band beyond just the music. But also it’s a way of dealing with the problems that we have with each other by laughing at them.

Which is pretty genius, because then you’re using those problems creatively instead of letting them fester and compound.

And in the world we live in now, unfortunately, you can’t just make a record — you have to make “content”. And if we have to live in that world, then we may as well be super-creative and fun about it. So that’s where that “Monkees” component kind of spun out. We’ve got something that’s very unique, which I think has a wider appeal than some people think it would have, but there are some limiting things about it: Not everyone’s going to want to listen to songs about sucking dick, and we’re not young, we’re not cute. [laughs]

So it’s important for me to have this other component to get us out there in ways that the music and the live shows can’t do by themselves. And that’s kind of borne fruit; like, our YouTube channel is doing better and better, just because people respond to these goofy videos. In fact, I’m starting to have people hitting me up and saying, “Do you want to play this show?” based on our videos. So we’re making incremental progress, and earning one new fan at a time.

You and I have known each other for over 25 years now. For most of that time, I thought of you as a musician who just happened to be gay, but THE COCKS are your first band where you’re really amplifying that aspect of yourself. Was it freeing to be able to finally do that?

Actually, I never really thought about that before; but yeah, it was super-freeing in a way. In Monarch, the last band I was in, that was kind of a gothic country thing, and I wrote a song that was a pretty direct statement of male-to-male love, but it wasn’t as overt as this. And then, of course, I grew up in a world where if you’re a gay person in a rock band, you could maybe slip those things into the lyrics, but you could never be over-the-top about it. So when we set this thing up as something that was going to be overtly gay, that was incredibly freeing; but also I liked that we were putting out it there that we’re a band that only has one gay member, but all the straight guys have no problem whatsoever singing songs about sucking dick. [laughs]

At the first show we played, we were all expecting to get pelted with rocks and garbage, but the straight people really got into it. Because it's celebratory music and it's fun and it's funny; but the band also kicks ass, and that kind of gives permission to that uptight dude in the back of the room with his arms crossed to just fully get into the spirit of it. But yeah, it was incredibly freeing to be able to do this, and I guess that’s really kind of a reflection of the times we live in.

I know — I was thinking about how, back when we were teenagers, there would be all these schoolyard arguments over whether or not Rob Halford or Freddie Mercury were gay. I was pretty sure they were, but you still had to read between the lines sometimes to understand what they were singing about.

What’s that lyric from Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive”? — “Bound to deliver as you give and I collect/Squealing impassioned as the rod of steel injects!” I did an interview with Halford around the time you and I were working together. He had just come out, like, a couple years before, and he was like, “The way I was dressed on stage, the lyrics, how did people not know?” [laughs]

But yeah, it's awesome that we live in a world where people don't give a shit — I mean, certainly there are people who still give a shit, but it's just been normalized, which is great, and as it should be.

Musically, who are THE COCKS’ main influences?

Early on, it was the Ramones and Turbonegro, and absolutely Motörhead. When we first started this thing, we were like, “Let’s just be loud and fast and dumb!” Two-minute songs, that was the absolute template — anything over two minutes, we would laugh and call it prog-rock. [laughs]

With this new album, we kept the soul of the music while expanding upon the idea of it. I was super-duper into listening to a lot of Zappa and Beach Boys, and there were a couple of opportunities there to like do those little homages, like “California Boys” and “Endless Hummer” — Halo, who is like my prime collaborator, talked me into that one, because that was originally just an acoustic number called “Who’s Gonna Suck My Dick?” The guys really wanted to do it, and I was like, “No, I hate it, it’s too on the nose, it’s not clever.”

But Jason and I had been talking about doing like a Beach Boys-style song, so he was like, “Why don’t we make this a surf tune?” He laid down the track, and it was literally one of those things where, in one night, we just laid down the vocal and just started making harmonies. We were like, “Yeah that’s it — now this is worth doing!”

Same thing with “California Boys” — I mean, there’s absolutely some Baby Snakes in that. The goal for this album was like, “All right, we’re a California band, and we’re specifically in LA band. So what’s the record we would want to hear that, 30 years from now, we could say stands up with The Doors and The Mothers and all the best LA music that we love?”

I’ve seen a lot of YouTube comments where people are like, “Turbonegro already did this.” How do you respond to that?

I love Turbonegro, but I think people say that mainly because of my sailor hat. Because as much as I love them, and I feel like they’re an influence, it’s more of like an attitude influence; I don’t think we sound like them in any way, shape, or form. That said, I’ll go to my grave saying Scandinavian Leather is one of the best albums of its era.

You’ll get no argument from me on that one. So, what’s up next for THE COCKS?

More videos, more fun. The goal we’re working on with the team we’ve pulled together is to do something very different with every video. We’re currently working on for the song “Why Can I Remember (What You Won’t Forget)” — we’re going for a guerilla-style handheld iPhone thing, kind of like that Aerosmith video for “Let The Music Do The Talking”. And then in the fall, we’re going to do a big, full-on Hollywood musical production for “Sex in Prison”. Kind of our Jailhouse Cock, you know what I mean? [laughs]

We’re also going to do a string of West Coast shows in late fall, and we’re hoping to keep that going into the spring. Our publicist keeps telling us there’s tons of rock clubs in the south, and he really thinks we can do a lot for ourselves there, presuming we don’t get killed. [laughs] And I’m hoping, like, maybe by this time next year, we can put out a live album. I would love to do one that stands up with like Budokan, Kiss Alive and Unleashed in the East as a sort of perfectly-constructed ersatz live album that’s recorded in the studio, but seems to be a live experience, and really captures the essence of what you’re about live…

Sounds like you guys are gonna be hitting it hard, so to speak.

Yeah, well — time is ticking, and I’ve been working on focusing on what’s really important to me. I’m embracing 100% that I’m not gonna stop doing this thing with THE COCKS, but I have completely made my peace with the fact that it may never pay the bills. And that’s okay, because I just have so much goddamn fun doing it — and that has to be enough, because that may be all I get.

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When it comes to baseball’s late, great Dock Ellis, I like to think I’m fairly well-versed in his life, career and antics, both on and off the field.

After all, the irrepressible right-hander is a recurring character in all three of the books I’ve written about baseball in the 1970s — Big Hair and Plastic Grass, Stars and Strikes and The Captain & Me — and I even appeared as an interview subject in 2014’s Dock doc No No: A Dockumentary.

There’s no need for anyone to forward me another link to James Blagden’s animated 2009 short Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, which features audio from an interview conducted by my pal about the lysergically-assisted no-hitter Dock threw against the San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970; I’ve seen it so many times over the years that I’ve practically got it memorized. Ditto for any articles about the time Dock attempted to bean the entire Cincinnati Reds lineup, or the time he successfully beaned Reggie Jackson, or the time Dock and Vida Blue became the only pair of Black American pitchers to start a MLB All-Star Game against each other, or the time MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered Dock to stop wearing curlers in his hair during pre-game warmups. These stories are all practically part of my DNA by now, just as much as any story behind, say, the making of a particular Beatles or Kinks album.

I’ve done a lot of research on Dock Ellis over the last 20 years or so, both because he was an oddly omnipresent figure in 1970s baseball — I somehow even managed to witness one of his last major league starts in person, during which he got completely shelled by the Philadelphia Phillies at Shea Stadium while pitching for the New York Mets, and I almost caught the long foul ball that Greg “The Bull” Luzinski crushed off of him — and because he truly embodied the sport in that tumultuous decade.

Dock’s anti-authoritarian attitude, his unapologetically proud Blackness, his shit-stirring press interviews, his mischievous humor, his “Super Fly” fashion sense, his substance abuse (and the inner demons it unleashed) and his intensity as a competitor all added up to 1970s baseball in a nutshell — which, given that one of his well-deserved nicknames was “Nut,” also seems rather appropriate.

In other words, there’s not a whole lot you could show or tell me at this point about one of my all-time favorite ballplayers that would genuinely surprise me. But my buddy Joe Viaene managed to do just that the other day when he sent me a message saying, “I’m sure you were aware of this new discovery of mine.”

Attached to Joe’s message was a the album cover of Mr Soul of Jamaica, a 1974 compilation of tracks recorded for Jamaica’s Treasure Isle label by Alton Ellis, a.k.a. “The Godfather of Rocksteady”.

This was followed by a photo of a first-edition copy of Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, the 1976 book by future U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall that was written with Dock’s input.

And no, I hadn’t been aware of the similarities between them. In fact, it took my brain a good minute to process exactly what I was seeing. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “here’s an album cover using the same typeface (ITC Pioneer, according to my designer/DJ/musician pal Marco Scarsone) as the one used on Dock’s book cover, and with a similar color palette besides. That’s kinda odd…”

And then, suddenly, my synapses kicked into gear. (Hey, it was late Sunday afternoon, and I wasn’t planning on using my brain for the rest of the weekend.) Alton Ellis… Dock Ellis. What the hell? There was no way that this could have been a coincidence, and suddenly I had to know more…

The Alton Ellis album cover, as it turns out, was designed by Moo Young Butler and Associates Ltd, a company helmed by the award-winning Jamaican designer/photographer/creative director Howard Moo Young. A Kingston-born graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts (where he later served as a lecturer), Moo Young is credited with designing dozens of album covers for Jamaican artists, though his album designs generally tended to be based around vivid color photographs — like his cover for Junior Byles’ 1972 album Beat Down Babylon, which featured a hand-drawn typeface not dissimilar to the ITC Pioneer used on the Alton Ellis record.

The Alton Ellis cover looks kind of cheap and slapdash by comparison to the rest of Moo Young’s work, which makes me think that Treasure Isle owner Duke Reid didn’t give him much of a budget for it. Given that possibility, and Moo Young’s experience and connections in New York City, I figured it was entirely possible that a) he’d also done some freelance design work for NYC publishers Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., b) they’d hired him to do the cover of Dock’s book, c) the Ellis-Ellis connection had reminded Moo Young of the cover he’d done two years earlier for Treasure Isle, and d) he’d chosen to squeeze a little extra money out of that earlier design by repurposing it for the book.

None of this, however, appears to have actually been the case…

I’ll admit that I don’t actually own a first edition of Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball. Though it would be a cool artifact to have in my collection, the updated 1989 edition is the better, more honest and more important version of the book. In December 1975, while he was in the midst of working on the book with Hall, Dock was traded from the Pittsburgh Pirates — the team he’d been pitching for since first coming to the majors in 1968 — to the New York Yankees as a last-minute throw-in to the deal that sent hot Pirates infield prospect Willie Randolph and veteran hurler Ken Brett to the Bronx in exchange for Yankees starting pitcher Doc Medich. While Dock generally wasn’t shy about speaking his mind, both he and Hall knew full well that revealing his drug use would put him in deep shit with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a man so hung up on the sanctity of the team’s pinstriped image that he wouldn’t even allow his players to sport beards or shoulder-length hair during the regular season.

Therefore, out of a need to keep the peace, Dock’s LSD no-hitter was downgraded to vodka-fueled for the book’s first edition. The 1989 update was where Dock fully came clean about it, as well as about how his struggles with booze and drugs had brought his playing career to a premature end, and how his belated sobriety had saved his life.

(The Yankees got the far better part of that deal with the Pirates, by the way: Medich, who had averaged 262.2 innings per season over the three previous seasons, proved less reliable in Pittsburgh and wound up being relegated to the Pirates bullpen in August ‘76, while Ellis — who surprised everyone by winning 17 games — and All-Star second baseman Randolph helped put the Yanks in the World Series for the first time since 1964. And you can read all about that in Stars and Strikes.)

Since I don’t have a first-edition copy of Dock’s book, I put out an APB on Facebook to see if any of my friends owned one with an intact dust jacket that might include any information on who did the design work. My friends John Ford and Charlie Vascellaro immediately sent me pics of their copies (Thanks, guys!), which revealed the credit “Jacket design by Cheryl Asherman” on the back cover, and not a mention of Howard Moo Young in sight.

Asherman apparently did a herculean amount of jacket design work in the 1970s and 80s, with her many credits including autobiographies of such luminaries as Gold Meir, Groucho Marx and Whitey Ford; but as with Moo Young and the Alton Ellis album, none of the many Asherman covers that I’ve found at all resemble that of the Dock Ellis book. So even setting aside the obvious Ellis-Ellis connection, it seems highly implausible that Asherman would have come up with her book design without seeing Moo Young’s album design first.

The big question for me, though, is how would she have seen it? Treasure Isle was not a label with a wide distribution reach outside of Jamaica, and to date Mr Soul of Jamaica still hasn’t been released or reissued in the United States. And while reggae music had found a receptive audience in the US by the mid-1970s, American audiences were mostly buying albums by marquee Jamaican artists like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Toots & The Maytals. Alton Ellis wasn’t an artist you’d have easily run across in American record stores at the time, and his name would have been primarily known on these shores only to transplanted Jamaicans and the most hardcore of American reggae fans. Was Asherman, or someone she knew, among the latter?

Or was Dock himself a reggae fan, and did he — amused that he shared a last name with a rocksteady legend — suggest the album cover as a possible template for the dust jacket of his book?

On the one hand, this seems less likely than the possibility that Asherman or someone close to her was an Alton Ellis fan. Though most readers tend to assume that book authors are heavily involved in the design of their covers, this is rarely the case at major publishing houses. As I can attest from personal experience, you’re lucky if your publisher’s designers will even take your suggestions after they’ve finished their initial cover mock-up…

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have put it at all past Dock to push his way into the Coward, McCann & Geoghegan art department to show them an album cover that he dug, and demand they come up with something similar for his book. And while I don’t know that he ever made it to Jamaica, I certainly wouldn’t have put it past Dock to dig himself some reggae. He certainly had broad musical tastes, listening to everything from Philly Soul to Black Sabbath and Iron Butterfly, and I could definitely see him (a self-described “get-high”) getting into the sun-splashed island vibe — especially if someone introduced it to him with a little dynamite weed on the side…

According to those who knew him, one of Dock’s most endearing and inspiring qualities was his unquenchable curiosity, so the idea of him exploring reggae artists beyond the obvious stars isn’t that far-fetched. After all, he initially connected with his co-author Hall not because he thought Hall was cool or particularly knowledgeable about baseball, but because Hall was a poet by trade — Dock was fascinated by the idea that someone could actually make a living writing poetry, and simply wanted to know more about that. Dock often wore a Star of David around his neck, not because he was Jewish but because he felt a personal kinship with the Jews as a result of his deep friendship with longtime agent Tom Reich. And, as I mention in this brief outtake from No No: A Dockumentary, he once took an ill-advised ride into the jungles of the Dominican Republic, just because he heard he might get to see some actual zombies there…

Stay curious, folks. And have a fantastic weekend.

Interviewing Tony Iommi in the sunlit lobby of a medium-posh Beverly Hills hotel is a little like reading a collection of M.R. James’ antiquarian ghost stories by the pool — not exactly the ideal setting for it, but you can still think of much worse ways to be spending your time.

In any case, that’s exactly where I find myself — and exactly what I find myself doing — on this early spring afternoon in 2001. In fact, I’m not only interviewing Black Sabbath’s legendary guitarist today, but also the band’s equally legendary rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Bill Ward for a Guitar World cover story. (Frontman Ozzy Osbourne is nowhere to be found; words will apparently have to be wrangled from him at a later date.)

And just as I would rather chat with Iommi — the “Hand of Doom” himself, the man whose earth-shuddering chords and brain-searing lead bends laid the groundwork for all heavy metal guitarists to come — and his bandmates beside a roaring fire in some creepy, cobwebbed castle, I’d much rather conduct these interviews over the course of a long, wine-sodden evening or two, rather than trying to cram everything I want to ask about the band, their recorded legacy and their plans for the immediate future (which currently include a headlining run on Ozzfest 2001, and making a new Sabbath album with Rick Rubin) into a round-robin of 30-minute individual interviews followed by another 30 minutes of the three old friends cracking unprintable in-jokes with each other. But again, I can think of much worse ways to spend my time; after all, this is three-quarters of BLACK FUCKING SABBATH that I’m talking to…

Though none of us know it yet, much will change in Sabbathville over the next few months. Sabbath’s recording sessions with Rick Rubin will be suddenly cut short in order to give Ozzy a chance to finish up his solo album Down To Earth, which will in turn result in my interviewing “The Prince of Fucking Darkness” for the first time — not about Black Sabbath, but about his new record and his post-Sabbath solo career. (A new, Rubin-produced Sabbath album called 13 won’t actually emerge until 2013, whereupon I will spend an absolutely hilarious hour interviewing Geezer and a sadly drugged-up Ozzy in the equally dissonant setting of a sun-drenched hillside overlooking the Malibu beachfront.)

The Guitar World cover story (assigned to me by , one of my all-time favorite editors to work with) goes ahead regardless, and I am incredibly proud of the final results. Still, as always happens with these kind of features, most of the great quotes and stories I coaxed out of Tony, Geezer and Bill that day ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor.

Happily, I recently unearthed all those interviews from one of my external hard drives — and 25 years on, I’ve decided to share their entire contents (much of which have never been printed before) with my paid Jagged Time Lapse subscribers, starting today with that day’s Iommi interview. The others will follow over the next few weeks, along with a newly-discovered Iommi Q&A I did in 2004, where we dove deep into selected Sabbath tracks.

If you’re not already a paid subscriber and would like to read these interviews — along with all my other interviews with notable musicians that I’ve previously shared here at JTL — a mere five bucks a month or $50 a year will get you full access to them, along with full access to the completed chapters of my musical memoir-in-progress and the complete episodes of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast that I do each month with my friend and fellow author/journalist . A paid JTL subscription will literally help keep the lights on over here, and you’ll get lotsa good exclusive “content” in return. So in the immortal words of Ozzy Osbourne, “C’MON PEOPLE — LET’S GOOOOOOO!!!”

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Before we jump into the interview, I should probably mention how nervous I was to speak with Tony Iommi that day. Not only was he one of my all-time favorite guitarists, but my longstanding impression was that he was always kind of the “Christopher Lee” of the band — dark, elegant and quietly intimidating. He was also supposedly quite handy in a scrap, and legend had it that he was the band’s “enforcer,” someone more than willing and able to settle a dispute (be it with a bandmate or outside antagonist) via a single punch.

But while the esteemed Mr. Iommi was indeed just as dark, elegant and quietly intimidating in person, he was also charming, forthcoming and quite good-natured. He also showed me his box of prosthetic fingertips — homemade solutions which enabled him to continue playing guitar in the wake of a 1965 industrial accident — a morbid little treat which I was not at all expecting him to share…

According to legend, you were the one who came up with the idea of making music that would be the polar opposite of the flower-power music that was coming out in the late 1960s.

TONY IOMMI: Well, I just wanted to create something that was startling, something that would really take you back. Something where you’d go, “Wow, what’s this?!?” and get tingles up your spine. That’s what it done to us when we played it, and I liked the idea of coming up with something a bit more powerful than, like, “Monday, Monday” or stuff like that. Which I liked [laughs], but I wanted to do something different.

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Back in the early 1990s, when the CD boom was motivating record labels of all sizes to unleash all manner of reissues and compilations, I got my very first taste of “Cool Aid,” courtesy of Rhino Records’ Soul Hits of the ’70s: Didn’t It Blow Your Mind! Vol. 5.

Rhino’s modus operandi with this multi-volume soul series (and many of their other various-artists compilations in those days) was to pepper the well-worn classics with a few tasty hits that had since slipped through the cracks of the collective pop cultural memory. Most of the 1971 soul hits on Vol. 5 were already very familiar to me (“Want Ads” by The Honey Cone, “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, “Treat Her Like a Lady” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, etc.), but “Cool Aid” — the debut single by Paul Humphrey and His Cool Aid Chemists, which had peaked at #14 on the US R&B Singles charts but only reached #29 on the Billboard Hot 100 — wasn’t the sort of thing you ever heard on your garden-variety “soul oldies” station. And from its opening drum break, I was completely hooked…

True to its title, “Cool Aid” was the kind of funky instrumental that could make anything you were doing while it played seem exponentially cooler. Sure, there was a slight novelty aspect to it, what with the obviously fake crowd noises and the bursts of a plastic siren that sounded straight outta the Cracker Jack box; but the track’s confident groove, simmering organ and freaky wah-wah guitar were unquestionably hip, and the whole thing sounded like the gritty-groovy theme from some early low-budget Blaxploitation flick. I put “Cool Aid” on countless driving mixes over the next decade, and regularly marveled at its intrinsic ability to make my late-eighties Cutlass Ciera handle like a turn-of-the-seventies Eldorado.

I had never heard of Paul Humphrey before, but it turned out that I had indeed previously heard him — that’s him thumping the tubs on Joe Cocker’s cover of Dave Mason’s “Feeling Alright,” The Four Tops’ “Ain’t No Woman (Like The One I’ve Got),” Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” and a good portion of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On LP. A true drummer’s drummer, the well-traveled (and oft-sampled) Humphrey had an incredible six-decade career as a session and touring musician before his death in 2014. He’d be legendary in my book just for his appearance on the Barney Miller theme — but who else can say that they played with Wes Montgomery, Quincy Jones, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Marc Bolan, David Byrne and Lawrence Welk, to name just a few other luminaries from his extensive sessionography? (Yes, it’s true; Humphrey was the featured drummer on The Lawrence Welk Show from 1976 to 1982!)

But for a while there in the seventies, Humphrey also led and recorded his own bands, and “Cool Aid” and its parent album Paul Humphrey and the Cool-Aid Chemists were his first waxings as a bandleader. For his Cool-Aid Chemists, Humphrey unsurprisingly chose some top-notch sessioneers: guitarist David T. Walker and keyboardist Clarence McDonald had both previously recorded with Merry Clayton, The Friends of Distinction and The Mamas & The Papas, and bassist Bill Upchurch — who has often been erroneously credited in The Cool-Aid Chemists as Phil Upchurch, but was definitely a different person — had previously toured with The Temptations and The Supremes. The chemistry they had together was unquestionably cool.

In the late nineties, when I started seriously collecting old soul 45s, it was not uncommon to run across cheap copies of “Cool Aid” in Southern California singles bins — probably because it had been released by Lizard Records, an independent record label founded by Steppenwolf producer Gabriel Mekler, whose offices were located just across the street from West Hollywood’s legendary Whisky a Go Go.

Back then, I would buy a copy of “Cool Aid” (with the equally funky “Detroit” on the flip) whenever I saw one priced at just a couple bucks. It was always fun to play the track for a friend in my living room and then send them home with a copy of their own, or to press a copy into the hand of a fellow digger as we were exiting the record store, telling them “You need this.” I never had anyone give their gift copy back to me.

Less easy to was “Funky L.A.,” Humphrey’s follow-up single, which only made it to #45 R&B and didn’t make the Hot 100 at all — probably due to its streetwise lyrics (written by soul singer and Lizard label mate Nolan F. Porter) about how easy it is in Los Angeles for a lonely guy to “go on the town and find a prostitute”. Then again, the single also spoke of the considerable meditation and even levitation opportunities on offer in the City of Angels for the more cosmically-oriented. Clearly, The Cool-Aid Chemists weren’t judging!

Much as I dig “Funky L.A.,” Humphrey’s commercial fortunes might have been better served if Lizard had put “Baby Rice,” the single’s B-side, out as the focus track. “Baby Rice” has a similar mid-tempo groove to “Cool Aid,” but Walker’s searing fuzz guitar would have beat Dennis Coffey’s hit instrumental “Scorpio” to the speaker-shredding punch by a couple of months…

For years, the only Cool-Aid Chemists tracks I knew of were the ones contained on those two 1971 45s. I finally heard the rest of the Paul Humphrey and the Cool-Aid Chemists LP around 2007, when some kind soul collector had digitized his vinyl copy and uploaded it to his music blog. Though the recording was a bit on the scratchy side, I could hear enough of it clearly to know that I needed a copy of my own.

Unfortunately, scoring one — at least at a price that wasn’t shockingly high — proved extremely difficult. And aside from a Japanese-only CD release in 2005, the album had completely eluded the reissue boom of the nineties and early oughts; I’m pretty sure it’s not even available on any streaming services. So it was with a veritable whoop of joy last week that I hit the “Buy Now” button when a VG+ graded copy popped up on Discogs at a very reasonable 15 bucks. And since it arrived in the mail earlier this week, I have already gotten more than my money’s worth out of it…

Sure, one could argue that the singles’ A- and B-sides (all of which are included here) are the highlights of the Paul Humphrey and the Cool-Aid Chemists, but the cover of Buddy Miles’ “Them Changes” is also pretty hot, and the band’s sweetly laid-back renditions of Gary McFarland’s “Sack Full of Dreams” and George Harrison’s “Something” wouldn’t have sounded out of place amid the tufted red leather banquettes of an early-seventies Crenshaw Boulevard cocktail lounge. Which I definitely mean as a compliment.

Of the album’s two Motown covers, Humphrey’s slow-cooking arrangement of “Ain’t That Peculiar” is a lot more interesting than his straightforward take on Stevie Wonder’s “Music Talk,” the latter of which chiefly seems designed to point out how blatantly Bobbie Gentry ripped off the melody from Stevie’s 1965 B-Side for her 1967 smash “Ode to Billie Joe”. Still, you can’t fault the playing; on every track, Humphrey, Walker, McDonald and Upchurch instantly find the pocket and groove seamlessly together from there. Even Walker’s more way-out fretboard excursions sit comfortably in the mix alongside his compadres, never upstaging them or drowning them out.

But my favorite Paul Humphrey and the Cool-Aid Chemists track at the moment is one which, frustratingly enough, doesn’t even seem to be available on YouTube: A supremely soulful instrumental cover of “Dreams” by The Allman Brothers Band. The aforementioned Buddy Miles had already covered the song on his Them Changes album at this point, so it’s entirely possible that Humphrey and Co. were simply covering a cover. That said, while Miles took a typically brash approach to one of my favorite ABB tracks, the Cool-Aid Chemists arrangement is much more subtle, slow-building, and even reverent; it sounds like an approving nod from these Californian and Midwestern cats, acknowledging that those Georgia boys had some soul to spare…

Have I mentioned that I love this massively underrated album? If you dig the jazzy, funky sounds of the early 1970s, Paul Humphrey and the Cool-Aid Chemists is well worth a grab. I’m taking finally getting one of my own as the cue to further explore Humphrey’s discography as a bandleader, which I’m thus far completely unfamiliar with. He’s got a couple of 1970s albums with the enormously enticing titles of Supermellow and America, Wake Up, so I figure I’ll start with those…

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It’s April 1979, and my sister and I are spending our spring break in New York City visiting our father, who has recently returned to his (and my) hometown after living for over a decade in the comparative cultural desert of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We’re having such a fantastic time visiting local museums, landmarks, delicatessens and record stores that I don’t even really mind when our planned visit to Shea Stadium gets rained out. Hell, even riding the subway is an enormously entertaining adventure for us.

One afternoon, we exit the train and come face to face with an enormous ad for Cher’s new Take Me Home album, which features the singularly-named singer posed in some kind of “Sexy Valkyrie” ensemble. Under the words “Take Me Home,” some smart-ass has scrawled “Looking like THAT?!?” in black magic marker. My sister and I laugh hysterically over this, and will continue to do so for decades to come…

As tickled as I am by this tart dose of NYC waggery, I have to admit that I’m actually quite enamored with “Take Me Home,” her new album’s hit title track. I’m currently at the peak of my original disco infatuation — it’ll be another few months before sheer glut of dance-oriented hits and Saturday Night Fever-inspired fashions will make me consider that the “Disco Sucks” crowd may actually have a point — and “Take Me Home” definitely delivers the late-seventies disco goods.

Mildly funky, smooth yet propulsive, and so cinematically (or at least telegenically) arranged that I can almost envision the variety show choreography that will go with it, “Take Me Home” is also infused with the classic essence of Cher (Cheressence?) — i.e., she totally commits to the song without ever taking herself too seriously. Besides, it’s been six years (nearly half my life at this point) since Cher has had a Top 10 hit in the US, and there’s something really comforting about having her back on the radio…

Long before I ever really cared about music, I cared about television — and after Hee-Haw and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was the first primetime TV show featuring musical performances that I was ever obsessed with. My sister and I had no idea that Sonny and Cher were a pop duo enjoying an early-seventies comeback after their long run of sixties hits had dried up, but it didn’t matter; their chemistry, energy and willingness to be extremely silly struck enough of a chord in our six- and four-year-old selves to keep us riveted to the screen. The show’s musical numbers were just incidental fun, as far as I was concerned — and yet I retain a vivid memory of the stir it caused at the swingin’ bachelor pad shared by my dad and his friend Ted when Cher sang “Half-Breed” on the show…

My parents were the first couple I knew who got divorced; Sonny and Cher were the second. This made oddly perfect sense, as I already kind of saw them as my parents’ cathode-ray counterparts. Sonny, like my dad, had a brilliantly analytical mind yet often led with a goofy sense of humor; Cher, like my mom, had long, dark, center-parted hair, a quick way with a wisecrack and an almost palpable need to figure out who she was outside of her marriage.

And just as we never “took sides” with our folks (who, much to their immense credit, never asked us to), my sister and I remained loyal to both Sonny and Cher after their split, watching both The Sonny Comedy Revue and Cher’s self-titled solo variety show with equal degrees of commitment; they were, after all, part of our “family”. We were predictably overjoyed when they reunited in 1976 for The Sonny and Cher Show, though even we had to ultimately acknowledge that it never really re-captured the spark of their original TV pairing. Cher’s personal life — including her brief marriage to Gregg Allman and her ensuing pregnancy — was making more headlines than the show at this point, which didn’t ameliorate the awkward “divorced but back together onstage because the audience demanded it” vibe between her and Sonny at all.

(Side note: One of the more surreal lunchroom conversations I remember from elementary school revolved around the question of who the father of Cher’s unborn child actually was. I didn’t know the Allman Brothers from Lynyrd Skynyrd, but I was sure I’d read in the Sunday papers that it was Gregg Allman. For some reason, however, my friend Peter was absolutely convinced that it was Neil Diamond.)

Despite being two years younger than me, my sister developed an interest in records long before I did. The first album she ever owned was Sonny & Cher’s The Two Of Us, a 2-LP repackaging of their albums Look At Us (from 1965) and In Case You’re In Love (from 1967) released by ATCO in 1972 to cash in on the success of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. (By this point, both Cher and the duo were recording for Kapp/MCA.)

We wore Side One of that album raw, but I don’t recall ever hearing the other three sides; the first side’s 19-minute trip from “I Got You Babe” — still one of the sweetest, most heart-melting pop-duet paeans to love and loyalty ever waxed — to the soul-crushing breakup pleas of “Baby Don’t Go” seemed to uncomfortably mirror my parents’ story, and always left me too depressed to want to listen to the rest of the record…

Much as I dug “Take Me Home” at the time of its release, I didn’t buy it; my record budget was severely limited in those days, and at that point I was far more interested in adding Chic and The Commodores to my collection than I was in stocking it with figures from my childhood. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I really developed a greater appreciation for Sonny and Cher, both together and individually.

The penny dropped first with Sonny, once I learned that he’d been credited with co-writing “Needles and Pins” and had also penned songs for Sam Cooke, Larry Williams and Don & Dewey; getting introduced to Mott The Hoople’s searing cover of Sonny’s “Laugh At Me” didn’t hurt, either. But Sonny was out of the spotlight and thus easier to reconsider and reclaim; at the time, Cher was still seen as a walking, talking, Bob Mackie-draped punchline — thanks in part to Black Rose, her 1980 hard rock collaboration with then-boyfriend Les Dudek’s band of the same name, and the absurd, quasi-New Wave cover image of her flop 1982 album I Paralyze — which didn’t exactly make an image-obsessed teen like myself want to have anything to do with her.

What changed it all for me, Cher-wise, was her acting. After surprising critics with her solid supporting performance in Robert Altman’s 1982 film Come Back to the the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Cher appeared in four more good-to-great flicks over the next five years: 1983’s Silkwood, 1985’s Mask, and 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck, the latter of which remains one of my favorite films of the era. In every one of these films, Cher more than held her own playing self-possessed and self-reliant characters — tough, cool, thoughtful women who, much like herself, had made some bad decisions in the past but were determined to get it right going forward. (I must admit that I’ve never seen her other 1987 film, the legal thriller Suspect, though in fairness I don’t think too many other people have, either.) How could you not root for characters like that, or the person so effortlessly portraying them?

And if I didn’t particularly dig the records Cher made during her enormously successful late-eighties return to the music biz, I still gave her credit for leaning hard into the absurdity of it all. If she wanted to belt out a Diane Warren-penned rock anthem while straddling a battleship cannon and being lustily howled at by a horde of horny sailors, then god bless her — the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time” was certainly funnier and way more over-the-top than anything Madonna was doing at the time.

But when word got out that she was opening her 1989 concerts with a cover of Gregg Allman’s “I’m No Angel,” that’s what put me on Team Cher for life. Turning a recent hit by her notorious ex-husband into an unrepentant commentary on her own past? That’s strictly Badass Territory, right there…

Of course, by then I was already doggedly digging through her sixties and seventies back-catalog, exulting when I finally tracked down clean 45s of what Robert Christgau memorably termed her “Swarthy Trilogy” — “Half-Breed,” “Dark Lady” and “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” — and marveling at such new-to-me gems as 3614 Jackson Highway, her woefully under-appreciated 1969 album with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, on which she gave the likes of Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and Dr. John the full Cher treatment…

Throw in the fact that Cher was a tremendous sartorial influence on Jeff and Steven McDonald of Redd Kross — she gets name-checked multiple times in our book Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, including the explanation of how some record-store riffing on the I Paralyze cover inspired the title of their Third Eye album — has scored Number One singles in seven consecutive decades (along with selling over 100 million records), has long been a staunch LGBTQ+ ally, and has never been remotely shy about calling out the festering piece of shit currently occupying the White House and his bootlicking enablers, and it all adds up to my kind of pop culture icon. In light of all that, I can even forgive her for popularizing the use of aggressively Auto-Tune’d vocals with “Believe”.

The woman alternately known as Cherilyn Sarkisian, Cheryl LaPiere, Bonnie Jo Mason, Cher Bono and Cher Allman turned 80 last week, and her continued existence is just as worthy of celebration as that of such late-May-born heroes as Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Paul Weller. Happy (belated) Birthday, Cher — long may you walk on gilded splinters.

What’s your favorite Cher jam? Feel free to leave a title or link in the comments!

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I’m pretty wiped out from this past week, and thus am simply too fried to finish the piece I was hoping to upload today. So I thought I’d resurrect this particularly amusing blast from the past, which was originally published in March 2023, back before most of my current loyal subscribers had climbed aboard the good ship JTL. See you next week with some fresh material!

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the release of T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” single, which is easily one of my favorite rock n’ roll songs by anyone ever.

As with so many other great Marc Bolan bashes — “Ride a White Swan,” “Hot Love,” “Children of the Revolution,” etc. — I’d read about “20th Century Boy” years before I actually ever heard it; US radio basically considered T. Rex a one-hit wonder (give or take the occasional FM spin of “Jeepster”), and the band’s non-album UK singles (of which there were many) were all but unobtainable on these shores in the days before the Internet. In fact, I probably hear The Replacements’ 1984 cover of “20th Century Boy” a good two or three years before I finally discover the mighty original via an import collection called Solid Gold, which somehow turns up in a thrift store on Chicago’s North Clark Street.

Once I meet the real deal, though, it’s love at first listen. The brash boogie strut, the heady air of celebration, the winking braggadocio of the lyrics (“I move like a cat/Charge like a ram/Sting like a bee/Babe, I wanna be your man”), and most of all that beautifully crunching guitar riff — it’s everything I want from a T. Rex single, or from a rock song in general.

And, like most of the T. Rex catalog, it’s pretty easy to play. So over the subsequent years, whether in band rehearsal or in casual jams with friends, “20th Century Boy” becomes one of those songs that I always pull out of my back pocket whenever we’re stuck for inspiration, even if I don’t have the requisite feather boa to go with it…

I pull it out again in February 2013, when I’m on assignment for Guitar Aficionado magazine at the Rock n’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas. I’m posing as a “regular camper” while gathering color and soaking in the experience for my eventual feature article, which means that I have to come up with some ideas for songs that my hastily-assembled “band” can play together when we perform at the Battle of the Bands a few nights later at the MGM Grand’s Rouge Lounge. And “20th Century Boy” certainly fits the bill.

I’ll admit that there was a time when the notion of going to a fantasy camp of any sort would have been a massive turn-off. It seemed to me like the very definition of clichéd middle-age male wish fulfillment… until a 2010 trip to Cubs fantasy camp (a year-end bonus from the company I worked for at the time) roundly disabused me of such cynicism. I met some incredible people during that experience, and learned some pretty profound things about baseball and my own self in the process; so when Tom Beaujour, my editor at GA, offers to “embed” me at RNRFC, I readily take him up on it. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the star guest of this particular camp session is Roger Daltrey, especially considering that a high school viewing of The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright was pretty much what made me want to pick up a guitar in the first place.

The other special guests for this camp session are Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins of Jane’s Addiction, and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield and Poco; but like Daltrey (and Who second guitarist Simon Townshend, who tags along with him), these guys just show up for a brief jam and/or Q&A session. The “counselors” — the folks we really spend quality time with — include Kip Winger (of Winger fame), Ozzy Osbourne/Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo, Alice Cooper’s muscleman guitarist Kane Roberts, Heart guitarist Howard Leese, Dio/Black Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice, and keyboard player Teddy Andreadis, who has worked with everyone from Carole King to Guns N’ Roses.

Teddy is my band’s counselor/leader, and he proves to be a lovely chap — but he’s also very serious about whipping us into shape for the Battle of the Bands. “Teddy’s bands always win,” I overhear someone saying during our lunch break, and I can see why. I’m probably the weakest musical link in our band, which includes Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm stand-in Rolly Devore on drums, retired Oracle co-founder Edward Oates on guitar, and a Tourette’s Syndrome-afflicted professional Rod Stewart impersonator named Danny Dzialo. (Danny’s Tourette’s outbursts only happen when he’s speaking; it’s all smooth-sailing when he’s singing, though, and he really does sound like Rod.) But Teddy has a way of getting us all to play to our individual strengths while molding us together as a musical unit… and while deftly deflecting Danny’s repeated requests to sing nearly every song in the Rod/Faces catalog.

By the time Day Three and our chance to jam with Roger Daltrey rolls around, we’re already a well-oiled musical machine. Every camp band picks a specific Who song to play with Roger and Simon, and we’ve chosen “Baba O’ Riley” — so it’s serious goosebump/teenage The Kids Are Alright flashback time as I hear Roger belting out the words “Out here in the fields/I fought for my meals” like ROGER FREAKIN’ DALTREY while I’m cycling those mighty I-V-IV power chords.

It’s an incredible experience, but it’s also an insanely stressful one. Not only am I worried that I’ll fluff the iconic lead break that comes in just before the “Teenage wasteland” part (I thankfully don’t), but I’m also trying to sidle into position next to Roger so that the camp photographers can get a pic of us together onstage for the magazine — and that fucking Danny dude keeps blocking me from getting anywhere near him.

(The above pic is finally taken after we’ve already finished playing and are packing up our gear to make way for the next band; I literally run over to Roger, say “Hey Roger, look at the photographer!” and strike an F chord. Not exactly real rock action, but it works well enough for the mag’s purposes.)

As with baseball fantasy camp, you learn a lot about teamwork at Rock n’ Roll Fantasy Camp. On any other week in my life, I would rather saw my hands off than play Bob Seger’s hoary “Old Time Rock and Roll” or Stevie Ray Vaughn’s bar-band blooze “The House is Rocking’” in front of a live audience; but during this camp session, I come to the oddly mature realization that how well my bandmates and I play together is much more important than my own musical likes and dislikes. And anyway, Teddy now has enough confidence in my singing and playing abilities that he’s asked me to lead the band on two songs during our Battle of the Bands set — Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” and of course “20th Century Boy” — which will nicely redress the artistic balance.

During our performance at the Rouge Lounge on the final night of camp, we go straight out of “Cinnamon Girl” into the T. Rex number; and as we boogie confidently towards that song’s close, I remember something Teddy told me in rehearsal: “Dan, it’s your song — you decide how we end it.” I lock eyes with Rolly behind the kit, and leap rapturously into the air for a Pete Townshend-style final chord flourish. Unfortunately, I come down on something slippery — probably ice or liquid from someone’s spilled drink — my right knee wobbles out from under me, and I finish the song writhing painfully on the floor in a squealing-feedback face plant.

As if the agony and embarrassment of the moment aren’t enough, I am now confronted with the completely surreal vision of Kip Winger — the guy I used to see singing “Daddy says she’s too young/But she’s old enough for me” on MTV during my senior year of college — crouching attentively over me like some sort of battlefield medic. “Which knee is it?” he asks, trying to help me to my feet. When it becomes clear that I can’t stand up of my own volition, he and one of the camp’s roadies pull a barstool onto the stage, prop me on top of it, and position my microphone stand in front of me. “You’re gonna finish this set,” Kip intones meaningfully, slapping me on the back like he’s my high school baseball coach leaving me on the mound to close the game.

I spend the rest of our show perched upon said stool, chunking out chords while alternately cursing and laughing at my absurd predicament. Every time I gingerly reach down with my left foot in order to kick my boost pedal on or off, I’m desperately wishing that the footswitch is actually a do-over button. No dice, though.

And just as I never dreamed I’d ever jam with Roger Daltrey, I likewise never imagined that Kip Winger and Kane Roberts would one day lift me off of a stage and into a waiting wheelchair. I unfortunately spend the entire “end of camp” jam sequestered in a service hallway behind the lounge getting examined by paramedics, who finally determine that I don’t appear to have broken anything. (I later learn that our band won the Battle of the Bands, but I’m unfortunately too busy icing my massively swollen knee up in my hotel room bathtub to celebrate with my bandmates.)

So yeah, go figure — I’m the guy who survives baseball fantasy camp without sustaining anything worse than a few ugly bruises, but leaves Rock n’ Roll Fantasy Camp in a wheelchair. Still, I kinda figure Marc Bolan would’ve wanted it that way.

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I was digging through the bins last week at a small record store in New York City, when the guy behind the counter and I unexpectedly bonded over our shared love of power pop. (The shop — Downtown Music Gallery — actually specializes in avant-jazz and Canterbury-era prog, but I’ll happily take a knowledgeable convo about guitar-driven pop wherever I can find one.)

The conversation began with our shared love of Midwestern ’70s and early ’80s stuff like Cheap Trick, Off Broadway and The Kind (the latter of whom actually played our high school gym during my sophomore year), but soon moved on to the L.A. pop scene of the 1990s. “Oh man, I love the Wondermints!” gushed my new friend — I think his name was John — and those words verily warmed my heart. Because back in 1994, when I saw my first Wondermints gig, I knew that they had something really special, and hoped like hell that the rest of the world would someday catch on…

The band — initially formed around the core of vocalist/keyboardist Darian Sahanaja and vocalist/guitarist Nick Walusko, then expanded to include singing drummer Mike D’Amico with numerous other talented L.A. musicians dropping in and out for gigs and recording sessions — would go on to become best-known for landing a song on 1997’s Austin Powers: Man of Mystery soundtrack and joining Brian Wilson’s touring ensemble in 1998, an arrangement which led to Brian Wilson Presents Smile, an incredible 2004 re-recording of Wilson’s long-shelved Beach Boys concept album from 1967.

All of which was incredibly impressive, of course — but the Wondermints’ own albums are ultimately far more meaningful to me. And while I’m forever glad that their long-running gig with Brian helped make the world at large aware of the musical brilliance of Darian, Nick and Mike (while also supplying them with a well-deserved paycheck), it still makes me a little sad that the touring and recording commitments with Brian inevitably shifted their focus away from making new Wondermints music.

Only four official Wondermints albums were ever released: 1995’s self-titled debut (which has recently been reissued on vinyl in a special 30th Anniversary edition, and can be purchased directly from their Tomorrow Labs label), the 1996 covers album Wonderful World of Wondermints, 1998’s Bali, and 2002’s Mind If We Make Love To You. All are filled to the brim with fantastically melodic flights of pop fancy, and all deserved — and continue to deserve — a much wider audience. (There’s also a UK-only “odds n’ sods” 2009 comp called Kaleidoscopin’, which is well worth tracking down.) But they always remained something of a cult act, and then Nick’s unexpected passing in 2019 essentially brought the Wondermints saga to an end.

The music thankfully lives on, though, and according to Darian there may be more Wondermints vinyl reissues on the way. In Part One of our interview, he and I spoke about how his and Nick’s early songwriting and recording partnership eventually led to the recordings that would be featured on the Wondermints album.

And here in Part Two, we get into the band’s “retro-futurist” outlook, the recording of the band’s three other LPs, and the thought process that went into the new Wondermints reissue. We also discuss the band’s legendary 1998 Spaceland gig to celebrate the release of Bali, a night which not only included onstage appearances by Brian Wilson and Evie Sands, but also featured a mini-set by Nancy Sinatra, who sang “Some Velvet Morning” with duo-duet help from David Ponak and myself as the “Hazlenuts,” which will forever remain one of the highlights of my life…

JTL: You mentioned you and Nick going to Sci-Fi conventions and being into psychotronic films and stuff like that, and one of the things I always loved about you guys was that it wasn’t just about the music. There were all kinds of other aesthetics and influences in what you were doing — 1960s TV shows, psychotronic films, Nick’s fascination with outer space exploration, your love of Mid-Century imagery like the classic Pan-Am Airways logo… there was so much else that was part of the package.

Darian Sahanaja: Again, I just don’t know how to quantify or qualify that, because it’s just what we liked, you know? It’s also fascinating to me that in the past 10-15 years, Mid-Century Modern has exploded. I mean, the furniture has gotten so expensive, and new homes are all designed that way; and so of course, I have to kind of roll my eyes a little when people are like, “Hey, you’re into that Mid-Century Modern thing that’s hip now, right?” [laughs] And I want to pull out a copy of our Wonderful World of Wondermints album — there’s all this Mid-Century Modern stuff in there — and be like, “Yeah, this is from 30 years ago!” [laughs]

At that time, I remember Nick referring to what you were doing as “retro-futurism”.

That’s true! And I have to say, that was the first time I’d ever heard that term. Of course, I’ve since seen it written up in articles galore, but I want to say the first I’d ever heard of it was when Nick said it; I don’t know if I’d ever heard it anywhere before that. But it is true — at the time, it was sort of what we envisioned this fantastical future to be. We loved Disneyland 1967, you know? We loved all the Sci-Fi films and the aesthetics, like the bubbles and the streamlined architecture…

Satellites…

Yeah, there was the whole Joe Meek thing, too… but I guess it was a promise of what tomorrow could bring, with technology and science, just in a fantastical way.

Speaking of Wonderful World of Wondermints — that came out on Toys Factory, which was the same label that put first album out.

Yeah, Mr. Eshima, after he put out the first album — and here’s my Chris Carter impersonation of him again — he says, “Wondermints second album — covers album!” And we’re like, “Uhhh… not really what we had in mind, but okay!”

He was offering us money to record a covers record, and we didn’t understand it at the time because we had new songs that were ready to go. But now having visited Japan as often as I have, and it becoming one of my favorite countries in the world, it all makes sense; having met people there and understanding how they process music and history, it makes sense. It seems like the Japanese really, really love that analysis of influences; they love seeing how an artist’s sound becomes what it is, based on what they were influenced by.

And sure enough, we put that [covers] record out… and next thing I know, we’re getting letters from fans in Japan, and one of them sent us a VHS tape. And the footage on the tape starts off with a street in Tokyo — you’re just seeing the street, traffic, pedestrians — and then it pans around and you see a storefront. It zooms in closer and closer, and on the door is this little sign that says, “Wondermints Meeting No. 1!” I’m like, “What?!?” [laughs] And then they open the door, and there are all these young kids sitting around, and there’s a DJ playing Bacharach and cool movie soundtracks, all this stuff that we love.

And that’s when it fell together, like, “Oh, they’re really, really into diving into the culture and learning!” Really into discovering. So yeah, these kids are sitting around talking about music or this cult ’60s culture stuff; it was a gateway for them, like, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? What’s this? The Carrie Nations? That’s cool!”

Is there any chance that like that you’re gonna put Wonderful World of Wondermints, or even Bali, out on vinyl at some point?

I mean, the hope is to is to reissue all of them. I don’t know how long vinyl is going to be popular enough to do it. It seems like it keeps going; every time I think, “Okay, it’s run its course,” there’s more pressing plants being opened up, and all these new artists are releasing stuff on vinyl. And so, I mean, as long as it lasts…

We put this new reissue out on vinyl ourselves. We had gotten offers from labels; we were entertaining the idea of doing it five years ago for the [album’s] 25th anniversary, and Nick and I discussed it. And even at that time, we were like, “Oh God, it’s time. We should really start to reissue our catalog.” I remember Nick and I talking about it — “Yeah, let’s talk to one of these labels. Maybe they’ll put it out on vinyl, and maybe we’ll do a few shows to promote it.”

So yeah, that was all floating around — and then Nick passed away, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. But over past five years, it just kept floating up again, and people kept asking. And so I finally sat down with Mike and Susan, Nick’s wife, and we thought, “Well, should we do this? Can we do this?”

And I thought of the challenges of doing it. I’m such a control freak when it comes to the artwork and the quality of it all, so I just kept thinking about how, if we were to go with a label, one of the challenges would be that I’d have to constantly be working with their art department, for example. And I could already see myself thinking, “Boy, I want to tweak this one thing,” something that might take me five minutes, but which would take them a whole day. And I just kept thinking about how frustrated I could be with that kind of process.

So that was a big sticking point. And then just the whole thing of how the industry’s changed and models are completely different now, and it’s not like it used to be… We thought, well, if we have the funds, if we can do this and put it out ourselves, then we might actually make money [laughs] — as opposed to a label putting it out with the promise of us “getting a cut of the percentage of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” In the end, you keep getting these statements sent to you with a number that’s just like zero, because their claim is always, “Oh, we spent X amount of money on advertising and promotion and this and that.” You never make anything, you know?

So we just decided, if we can pull it off, we’ll do it — and if we make a profit, then that’ll go towards future reissues. We pressed up 1000 copies of this album, and I want to say that, as of maybe today or yesterday, we’ve broken even. Which is amazing, considering we didn’t cut any corners with this. I mean, the only corner we cut with this is that we didn’t do 180 gram vinyl — which, you know, is a little bit of an…

Overrated selling point?

Yeah, exactly. But we used top quality printing, and we did card stock for the inner sleeves; we didn’t spare much in the expense department. It did cost us quite a bit more, but it was all worth it. Because now the overall sort of message I’m getting, which is wonderful, are people saying, “Oh my god, this is classy! This is a real class job! It sounds great! You hold it in your hands, and it just feels like a piece of art.” It’s a substantial thing.

I knew it the second that our buddies Jim Laspesa and Ronnie Barnett — both of whom worked at record stores for years, Ronnie more recently — came to the house just as I got a bunch of the newly pressed record delivered. I was asking them, “What do you think we could sell these for?” I was kind of going over the numbers and this and that and thinking forty bucks was maybe pushing it…

This was back in the summer, and just between summer and now inflation has really influenced our opinions. [laughs] But Ronnie was saying, “Forty bucks? I don’t know, guys, I don’t know.” And then I pull it out, and Ronnie’s holding it his hands and goes, “Oh, this is really good. Yeah, you could charge forty bucks for this!” It was like, “Wow, all right!” [laughs] It was so immediate, you know — he felt it, looked at it and just knew that we didn’t go down the street and print it up at the freaking Joe Schmo record pressing plant.

I mean, that was the thing – I was gonna buy the record anyway, just because I loved those songs and wanted to have them on vinyl. And yeah, forty bucks is a little more than I would usually pay for a new record. But at the same time it’s like, “Well, it’s really two LPs,” thanks to the extra tracks, and the whole package is even better than I’d hoped. I also love all the alternate photos from the cover session, and it’s just a wonderful piece overall. So, well done, Sir!

Awww, thanks. Again, I’m hoping it does sort of establish a precedent for more reissues. We’ve pretty much broken even on this, so the rest of anything we make beyond this would be going towards future reissues, and we kind of like the idea of releasing them as anniversaries. What that means, though is that… we tend to favor our original music more than the covers. I love the covers record, but that would probably be the lowest priority of releases.

And also probably give you the most headaches, at least in terms of licensing.

Yeah, exactly. They were able to do a lot of that easily in Japan, but I really don’t know; we’d have to look into that. But probably the thing that makes most sense, as far as the promoting and marketing goes, is that our last album — Mind If We Make Love to You — was put out in 2002. So technically, 2027 would be the 25th anniversary of that. And then 1998 was when we brought out Bali, so 2028 would be the 30th anniversary of Bali. So they might be released out of chronological order. [laughs]

But I guess one thing that I’m really happy about is that when it comes to a favorite Wondermints album amongst fans, we’ve got a nice, even split. I would say a third of them really love this, our first album; and then another third is into Bali, and then a whole other third is into Mind If We. So that’s a nice feeling.

I would say Bali is my favorite.

Yeah, I think I remember you being in the Bali camp, for sure. I mean, it was definitely the most fun record to make. The first album, as you know, was kind of piecemeal, and it was a compilation of stuff that we’ve done over previous years. And Mind If We was done also kind of piecemeal, because we were already working with Brian, and I remember it was always a question of whether we could even be an active band because we were just so busy; but we managed to fit in a recording session here and there, in between touring with Brian.

Whereas Bali, I think of that as us being mad scientists — we just locked ourselves in the studio and basically ate, breathed, and shit music. [laughs] It was such an intense and fun time. And it was all done in a concentrated amount of time, and just really pushing the envelope. At the same time, Bali was the first album we recorded fully digital. As I explained earlier, even in our analog four-track days, we loved the idea of being able to stack tracks and flying them back and forth. And technology, by the mid to late ’90s, had gotten to the point where, again, it really sort of pushed our creative limits. Nick and I had all these great ideas of what we could do, sonically.

That was right around that time that we got the “Austin Powers” song placement in the movie — and as a result, we got a really amazing publishing deal from EMI. So we’re given this big lump sum of money, and the first thing we did was buy a Pro Tools system, which was not the thing for an indie band to do back then; they were expensive, but we just thought, “This is the future. Let’s figure it out.”

We always sort of embraced that kind of challenge. And I remember Nick and I driving up to San Francisco because this guy was going to sell us this Pro Tools system; we didn’t trust all that valuable gear to be sent in the mail, so we drove up and picked it up ourselves, and put it together.

So, yeah, that was the first album we did fully digitally on a computer. Aside from it being really fun and just us cracking each other up in the studio, like, “Whoa! Check out this sound!” [laughs] It was like, “How far can we push things now?” The flip side of that was, it was at a time when things were changing in that area of recording. I remember we had to be incredibly discreet about saying that our new album was recorded on a computer; I just remember feeling that if I mentioned that we’re recording it on a computer, people would immediately be turned off — that they would go into it thinking, “Oh, this can’t be good, because it’s going to sound ‘computerized’ or ‘robotic,’” whatever that meant, if you said you recorded it on a computer.

But Nick and I never saw technology as sort of dictating what we did. We always saw it the other way around, like, “These are tools we can use to do whatever we want!” So, yeah, that’s what I think of when I think of Bali — just this really fun, experimental exploration of sound.

I think of it as one of the great lost albums of the 1990s. I don’t believe it’s on streaming anywhere…

None of our music is.

And if I recall correctly, as with the first album, it got kind of a staggered release — it came out in Japan first, and then came out on a different label in the US a year or two later. And like a lot of great stuff that got released in the late ’90s, it’s just kind of forgotten now. So I would love to have it back.

None of our music is streaming. It’s not available streaming anywhere. So that was a whole other thing that we need to address. We could just, like, put them all out now [on the streaming platforms], but we feel like that might undermine the new releases, because we’re remastering them. I mean, I suppose we could put them out as is and then replace those, but I don’t want a whole bunch of different versions floating out there.

Again, the CDs — We put all our albums out during the CD era, so the sound of the first album on CD and Bali, to me, are very compressed. Especially Bali; I am kind of looking forward to remastering it so that it breathes a little more, and it’s friendlier to warm analog. Again, that was recorded on Pro Tools. It’s our first full full digital record, and so might be a little too harsh for my ears right now. [laughs]

So yes, that would be cool. But you’re right — I don’t know if it was a mistake, but it probably was that we haven’t had our stuff available all these years. But what’s nice is also that, by our stuff not having been out all this time, when it does come out it becomes more of a talking point. It’s more of an event when people are discovering it again.

But Bali, yeah, that was such a fun record. And that’s around the time, 1996-97, which was a really fun time to have been playing live, too. We were playing with so many cool bands, like the show we did with Redd Kross and Shonen Knife. [February 8, 1997 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, as part of that year’s Poptopia! festival.] I feel like that’s when that sort of movement of bands that was happening in LA was really hitting their stride at that point — The Negro Problem, The Sugarplastic, Baby Lemonade, all those bands — and Bali was right in the middle of all that stuff. And I also think it was for the American record release of that record that we were playing at Spaceland, and that’s when Brian and Melinda and Nancy Sinatra came to the show, and when you came up and you sang! I think it was for the Bali record.

Was it? It would have been around that time, for sure…

Yeah, you know what? I’m going to definitely say it was, because Bali came out in ’98, and that show was in late ’98. Because that’s when we had gotten the sort of… it was suggested that Brian was going to do some shows to promote his then-latest record, and that he was considering us to be in his backing band. And so that’s why they came down to Spaceland, and to sort of check us out. Brian had seen us, but I think Melinda really wanted to scope us out.

I remember one show at the Roxy in like ’95 or ’96, where Brian came to see you and you closed your set with “Darlin’” in tribute to him.

Yeah, Brian came to a few of our shows. And there were also a couple radio shows that he did where he was going to be interviewed, but he’s such a nervous interviewer that he just wants to get to music — you know. “I’ll talk, and then I’ll do some songs.” And if he wanted to do songs, he would ask that we be there to back him up.

Yeah, I was at one of those radio tapings with you guys. But okay, that all makes sense — it was around the time of Bali was when you guys went on the Brian trip.

Yeah, it was late ’98 that there was the proposal that Brian might go do some shows to promote his new record, and we just happened to be playing a show to promote the Bali record release. It may have come out earlier in the year in Japan or something like that, and then we were going to put it out here. And that just happened to be right around the time that the Brian talk was happening, and that’s when they came down, and Rodney [Bingenheimer] brings down Nancy… Wow, that was a fun night.

It really was. And the fact that I got to sing “Some Velvet Morning” with Nancy Sinatra is completely down to you — and that’s one of the greatest moments of my life, so I’m forever thankful to you guys for that.

What a trip. What a trip! And also, Evie Sands played with us that night. Lisa Jenio and I had just met her a few months earlier; I don’t know if you know that story. Obviously, Lisa and I were huge girl group records fans, and some of our favorites were Evie Sands records. But we had no idea what she looked like, or if she was still making music…

I remember, I was down by the beach one day, I opened the LA Weekly or whatever, and there was an ad for Evie Sands at Genghis Cohen. And I thought, “Could it be the Evie Sands?” And I remember going to a pay phone and calling Lisa and saying, “Hey, you know there’s an Evie Sands playing tonight at Genghis Cohen. You think it could be her?”

So, we bought tickets, we ate dinner, and come show time we’re sitting in — I don’t know if you remember Genghis Cohen, but they had like these little church pews. So we’re sitting there in this dark, little, tiny room, and finally this little, tiny lady comes out with her acoustic guitar, and both of us go, “Oh no… it’s like some singer-songwriter folk person!” [laughs] And we’re ready to leave, but then she strums her first notes and starts to sing, and it was unmistakably her voice. We were like, “YESSSS!!!” And then she did “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can’t Let Go,” “Angel of the Morning,” all the songs, and it was so great.

And after the show, we hung out — we actually saved her from some crazy fan who was basically monopolizing all of her time. But we became really good friends, and a few months later she came to that record release show, and we invited her up to sing “I Can’t Let Go”. So that show went great, because not only were Brian Wilson and Nancy Sinatra there, but we had Evie there, too.

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Marijuana has been on my mind a lot lately, even though I haven’t actually smoked the stuff in years.

A couple of weekends back, as my girlfriend and I were celebrating my birthday in Manhattan by merrily traipsing East Side/West Side/All around the town, I was repeatedly reminded of how absolutely rife my home borough’s streets have been with the pungent smell of weed over the last few years. The skunky odor was so omnipresent during our walks (and so often additionally infused with the tempting tang of freshly-spilled urine) that it made me genuinely nostalgic for the “pavement-baked garbage” potpourri of my 1980s summers in the city.

I was also visited this past week by one of my oldest, dearest friends, and we spent much of our day together flashing back on some of the memorable misadventures we shared during high school and college — a few of which involved me having to look after him following the ingestion of pot that was either laced with something nasty or simply way stronger than expected. Of course, the Midwestern dirt weed we puffed back in the ’80s was considerably weaker than my current local dispensary’s mellowest strain, which is partly why I never touch the stuff anymore.

There was a time, however, when we (and many of our friends) were downright evangelical about marijuana, and fully convinced that pretty much everything went better with a couple of hits off a joint or a bong. And reflecting on those heady, hazy days made me think of one of my all-time favorite evangelical marijuana anthems, The Everly Brothers’ 1967 single “Mary Jane”.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was producing a couple of Slade compilations for Shout! Factory, folks at the label encouraged me to pitch them some ideas for Various Artists collections. While nothing ever came of it, the one I really wanted to produce was a collection of psychedelic (or at least psych-tinged pop) tracks recorded in the late 1960s by artists who generally presented as anything but “turned on” — things like “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, “Watch the Flowers Grow” by The Four Seasons, “I Hear Voices” by Billy Joel’s late-’60s band The Hassles, and “Naturally Stoned” by The Avant-Garde, which was written and sung by future TV game show host and fascist bootlicker Chuck Woolery. (My suggested title for the comp was something like Love Beads: A Candy-Colored Trip on the Psychedelic Bandwagon.)

There are many more similarly Nehru-jacketed nuggets out there, but my all-time favorite is probably “Mary Jane”. Written by Everlys’ bassist Terry Slater — who also wrote or co-wrote a number of other songs for the duo during the mid/late 1960s, including “Talking to the Flowers,” the mildly stoney B-side of “Mary Jane” — the song is right up there with Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” as far as “OMG people you should TOTALLY smoke weed!” anthems go.

Released a little less than two months after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the song opens with a woozy calliope-style intro straight outta “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” before shifting into a fuzztone-powered 4/4 groove, over which Don and Phil extoll the virtues of “Mary Jane” with lyrics that (like the titular heroine) barely qualify as double-entendre:

Clouds so sweet, cloud my mind girl
And I don't know what way I'll go girl
But I don't care no more
I've got my Mary Jane
And I'm secure once more
I've got my Mary Jane

I love how they sing “care” as “keeeer” — it’s like they’re so friggin’ high, they can’t even bother to keep their Appalachian drawls under control. Betcha they’re not afeared to drop none o’ thet-there LSD, neither!

The second verse kicks the pot party up another notch with some rattling bongos — Maynard G. Krebs must have arrived late to the studio with his hand drums and fresh-rolled jazz cigarettes. After another chorus in which the brothers continue to insist that they no longer “keeeer,” disembodied voices begin dreamily intoning “Maaaary Jaaane” over some peppy horns, and Don (or is it Phil?) lets loose with the wordless moan of a man unexpectedly lost in the shifting dead-end streets of his own mind. Has he taken the tea… or has the tea taken him?!?

Suddenly, the singer snaps back to some semblance of reality, grandly philosophizing that he’s “Found the key to tomorrow/To a shelter from the past” — at least, that’s what I think he’s saying. Two different internet lyrics sites have it as “Through a chauffeur from the past,” which would be one hell of a convoluted drug metaphor, even if it does kind of make sense that a chauffeur would have a key. (But c’mon, what self-respecting chauffeur would let you drive the car?)

“I found it! I found it! I found it!” he continues to exult, and the woozy calliope waltz kicks back in as if to further emphasize just what “It” is. Then it’s back to a repeat of the first verse, another chorus refrain, and a harpsichord-led outro. (Not sure if that’s courtesy of Don Randi or Mike Melvoin, but they’re both on the recording — along with such additional session heavyweights as Glen Campbell, James Burton and Hal Blaine.) The boys have it all done and (hopefully not angel) dusted in a fraction under three minutes, but they will clearly never be the same after what Mary Jane has done to them…

Almost as mind-blowing as “Mary Jane” is the fact that Warner Bros. actually thought such a thinly-veiled ode to the Devil’s Lettuce had a real hope of climbing the pop charts in the summer of 1967. The Everlys were coming off their biggest hit US hit in three years at the time — the Slater-co-penned “Bowling Green,” which reached #40, their highest charter since “Gone, Gone, Gone” reached #31 in 1964 — and their commercial comeback might have been additionally bolstered with the release of another more straightforward track from The Everly Brothers Sing. (My pick would have been Don’s gorgeously bereft “It’s All Over,” but nobody asked me at the time, since Warners wasn’t in the habit of running potential singles by year-old toddlers.)

But despite getting an oblivious rave from Billboard magazine (see above), “Mary Jane” whiffed completely, effectively dooming Don and Phil to commercial purgatory for the next 17 years; they wouldn’t break the US Hot 100 again until 1984, when their Paul McCartney-penned reunion single “On the Wings of a Nightingale” hit #50.

The Everlys followed The Everly Brothers Sing with one of the best albums of their entire career — 1968’s country-rockin’ Roots — and their Warners era-capping live album The Everly Brothers Show provided ample audio proof that the boys still had the goods. (For more on Don and Phil’s wonderful late-’60s output, take a gander at what has to say about it over at Listening Sessions.) But the sun was rapidly setting on their partnership…

As great a record as it is — and for all its ridiculousness, I truly think it’s a fantastic piece of psych-pop wax — “Mary Jane” didn’t stand a chance. Radio wasn’t going to play it, older Everly fans were not going to embrace their heroes’ druggy new direction, and the kids who dug finding nudge-nudge-wink-wink dope references in their pop songs simply weren’t gonna buy them from a couple of relative geezers. And the American record-buying public in general? Well, they just didn’t “keeeer” no more about one of the greatest singing duos their country had ever produced. And that’s far more tragic than any drug-induced freakout.

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There were so many amazing pop bands in L.A. back in the mid-’90s… but if I could set the Jagged Time Lapse time machine to go back and witness any of them in their prime once more, it would most likely be to catch a Wondermints gig.

From the very first time I saw the ‘Mints — and I’m pretty sure it was a spring or summer 1994 gig at the old Jack’s Sugar Shack on Pico Boulevard — I was completely won over not only by their musical chops, their playful sense of humor and their encyclopedic grasp of classic pop, but also by the brilliant songs of keyboardist/vocalist Darian Sahanaja and guitarist/vocalist Nick Walusko.

The other musicians in the band — drummer Mike D’Amico, multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory, and bassist Brian Kassan (replaced later by Jim Mills) — were all excellent as well, but there was something especially enchanting about the way that Darian and Nick’s songs seemed to create (or at least come from) their own little parallel universes.

Sure, you could pick out bits of, say, The Beach Boys, Paul Revere & The Raiders or Elvis Costello here and there, but none of the originals in their setlist were straight-up imitations of any artist in particular; instead, songs like “Proto-Pretty,” “Time” and “Global Village Idiot” fused a head-spinning array of influences, inside jokes and pop culture references into something extremely personal and deliciously melodic. And if they felt like paying a more obvious homage to their heroes on any particular night, they’d simply whip out something like The Beach Boys’ “Darlin’,” The Monkees’ “Porpoise Song” or Patrick Williams’ theme from The Streets of San Francisco, and blow you away with how well they nailed it.

Their all-covers sets, performed as The After-Dinner Mints, were riots of pure joy as well, with various guest stars popping up to perform and all manner of planned and unplanned shenanigans going down. My most vivid memory of my 30th birthday party at L.A.’s late, lamented Spaceland — which The After-Dinner Mints played, and which I got roaringly drunk during — is of practically coughing up a lung with laughter when Nick whipped out a walkie-talkie to do an improv comedy bit in the middle of covering Geoff Goddard’s “Sky Men”. Maybe you had to be there… but I’m forever grateful that I was.

Sweet memories like that one came flooding back late last year, when the band’s self-titled debut album — a collection of 12 songs plucked from their “Blue,” “Purple” and “Green” cassette-only self-releases, which was originally put out in 1995 by Japanese label Toy’s Factory — was reissued on vinyl for the first time on their own Tomorrowlabs Records imprint. Released in a limited-edition numbered run of 1000 copies (and currently still available directly from the band), this gorgeous-sounding 30th Anniversary version of Wondermints includes five earlier demos of songs from the original album, and is pressed up on clear vinyl and housed in a lavish gatefold cover featuring numerous outtakes from the original cover photo session. If you loved the band back in the day, or you simply love great pop music, I highly encourage you to grab yerself a copy before they’re all gone.

The Wondermints went on to make three more wonderful albums, and become much better known as an integral part of Brian Wilson’s touring band. (Nick sadly and unexpectedly passed away on the eve of Brian’s 2019 tour.) Darian has also toured with The Zombies and done a ton of scoring for TV and film, including my old pal Morgan Neville’s Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels documentaries. But for all of their considerable accomplishments — and while 1998’s Bali remains my personal favorite of the band’s four albums — Wondermints occupies a special place in my heart, in part because it really captures the “retro-futurist pop on a shoestring budget” aesthetic that Nick and Darian were mining when I first encountered them back in 1994.

Darian says he generally hates doing interviews, but he graciously agreed to do one for Jagged Time Lapse last November in honor of the album’s re-release. We had a blast catching up, strolling down L.A. pop memory lane and discussing the early days of his and Nick’s musical partnership, their musical roots, their lo-fi recording process, and how it all led to the release of Wondermints. Unfortunately, life and technical gremlins got in the way, and I was only recently (and happily) able to rescue our recorded conversation from the limbo into which the fates had seemingly hurled it.

Enjoy Part One of our interview follows here — and Part Two will run in a week or so. If you’d like to be notified via email when Part Two goes live, please subscribe to Jagged Time Lapse at the link below!

JTL: Listening to this album again, I found myself wondering, “Okay, well, when did I first meet you guys? When did you first lay one of those tapes on me?” The closest I can come is maybe spring or summer of 1994, and Eric [Reidelberger, my dear friend and co-founder of our mid-’90s mod-psych band The Fancy Trolls] and I going to seeing you guys at the original Jack Sugar Shack. We’d been going to see Baby Lemonade, both with and without Arthur Lee, and I’m pretty sure it was Mike Randle from Baby Lemonade who told us, “You gotta see The Wondermints!”

Darian Sahanaja: Yeah, yeah, wow… It’s so funny, because I feel like I’ve known you all my life, but I was actually trying to think, “When did I meet Dan?” I think the earliest memories were, for me, at Spaceland. You definitely came to an After-Dinner Mints show there, and you brought Eric.

Right! Totally!

I just remember we’d start a song, like, “Play On” by the Raspberries, and I could hear you going, “YEAAAHHH!!!” [laughs] I picture you guys sitting in a booth on my right, and just like giving thumbs up to every cover we took on. But before that… I was trying to put my finger on when I would have first met you, and it makes sense that it would have been through the Baby Lemonade guys. Jack’s Sugar Shack, wow…

And I remember a small party at the apartment where Rusty and Mike lived together… I think that was the first time where we really talked to you and Nick and realized that we were all kind of on the same page with our mental illness. [laughs]

Yeah. [laughs] So that was ’94?

Yeah — it wouldn’t have been earlier than that, because Eric and I didn’t really get tight with Mike and them until ’94. It was well before this album came out — though it’s amazing for me to look back and see how much happened in those years between 1994 and 1996, what with you releasing this album and the Wonderful World of Wondermints covers album…

So you must have gotten the second tape — “The Purple Tape” — which had “Proto-Pretty” right?

Yeah. And it had some cover songs hidden on the second side.

Because I think “The Green Tape,”which was the — listen to me, referring to my own stuff! [laughs] — “The Green Tape” was the last one, the one that had “Time” and “Global Village Idiot”. Basically, the last five songs on the album are “The Green Tape”.

So yeah, it was before that LP came out. Because the LP only came about because a record exec in Japan got the tapes. Chris Carter was managing us at the time — Chris Carter of Dramarama and now Breakfast with The Beatles fame — and I remember Chris calling up and saying, “There’s a guy, Mr. Eshima from Japan, who wants to put your music out in Japan. And he’s offering this amount.” And it was like the most money we’d ever seen dangled in front of us. [laughs]

And we thought, “Well, surely he wants us to re-record the songs.” But apparently — and I have to do my imitation of Chris Carter imitating Mr. Eshima — apparently he said, “I listened to Wondermints 246 times. They are THE BEST!!!” [laughs]

So he just wanted the songs as-is…

Yeah, and we were like, “Wow. Okay!” So then it was just a matter of having to choose 12 songs. And we definitely wanted to keep the latest ones intact, because they most represented where we were at the time, and we were happy with the way they sounded. The ones before those — I mean, to us they were kind of glorified four-track demos. But Nick and I really put our all into making demos, as you know. And so it was just a matter of choosing which seven [songs] of the first two tapes to put on the record. And along with the five newest songs, that became our first record.

You listed recording dates for all the tracks on the album, and it kind of blew my mind to see that “Tracy Hide,” “She Opens Heaven’s Door,” “Libbyland” and “Shine” were all from 1991. I had no idea that you guys were a going concern that far back.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Nick and I, we met in ’83 and just had really no desire to be in a band or “get signed”. [laughs] In fact, we had a bunch of friends of ours at the time that were quote-unquote signed, and it just seemed like it sucked! They were always in some limbo, where they couldn’t do anything else, and it just felt like they were trapped in some situation. And none of that was appealing to us.

We were just into recording. We were into records — “Why does that record sound so great? What is it about that guitar sound or that keyboard sound, or that production?” And, you know, Nick and I, to a certain degree, were like “scientists of sound”; we dug in and thought, “Well, we can incorporate that into our own music.”

And Nick was super prolific; he was always writing. I, on the other hand, I’d write a song here and there, usually for other people. But during the late ’80s, we were being invited to sing or arrange or produce other people’s records. And I had my little Tascam four-track Portastudio… I think most people think of them as a tool for making demos, but we always just got a kick out of really pushing the limits on them and seeing what we could do — bouncing tracks, doing the whole sort of “Fill it up, bounce it out and bounce it back, add more tracks then bounce that out” thing.

And you know, if you fill up four tracks of an analog tape, and then you bounce it out to another analog tape, you introduce hiss and all this noise, and it just becomes really noisy. But at one point I discovered, or I read somewhere, that Hi Fi VHS tape has like the quietest audio track. [laughs] And so I thought, “Hey, let’s try that.” So we bounced out to the Hi Fi track of a VHS tape. And sure enough, it was super quiet. So we’d fill up four tracks on the Portastudio, bounce it out to the VHS tape, bounce that back, add more. And we’d do that and do that and do that until we were happy.

People got kind of spoiled with 16, 24, 48 and now unlimited tracks, but it was cool at that time to kind of approach songs in the way that our heroes did. Brian Wilson would have three tracks to work with, you know? It really forced you to make decisions without the option of fixing it in the mix later. It was just like, “Okay, we’re going to cut this bass as we’re bouncing. So this is it — you gotta get it right!” [laughs] You’ve gotta get the sound and balance and mix right….

So yeah, we did a lot of that in the late ’80s. And Nick would borrow my four-track, take it home and come back with a song and it would blow me away. It would inspire me, and then I would do a song and play it for him. And he would be like, “Dude, kick my ass!” [laughs] You know, we were just trying to kick each other’s ass. And after a while, we had a collection of songs. I remember playing it for our buddy, Andy Gratton —

Oh, I remember Andy!

Yeah, crazy Andy, rest his soul. But he was always a really, really good barometer for us, because he had such great taste in music — and as a non-musician, was probably the most musical person I ever knew. We sat down and played them all for Andy one night, and he was just mesmerized. And at the very end he just looked at us and said, “You know, each one of these songs, they’re like little wonder mints!” And Nick and I looked at each other, and were like, “Wow, what a great word, and what a great way to describe the sound and feel of all these songs!”

Because, you know, maybe we weren’t so aware of it at the time, but both Nick and I had very similar leanings in sensibilities and production and arrangement, and so the songs were very sympathetic. And we thought, “Oh, let’s just put them all together on a cassette and give them out to our friends.” And that’s what we did, and that’s how it kind of started, and we just did it just to share. But then eventually it turned into a “Wow, these are great — when are you guys playing?” kind of thing.

So then it was like, go out and find a rhythm section?

Well, yeah. I remember David Ponak had a band called Brief Candles at the time, named after a fantastic song on the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle album. But he’d known of us through our friend Eileen Lucero; they both worked at Warner Brothers at the time, so he heard our tapes because we had given Eileen a tape. She was one of our best friends, and she was going around playing it for people, including her workmates. David was one of them, and next thing I know, David’s wanting us to open for Brief Candles at a show. Nick and I are like, “Well, we don’t really have a band.” And he says, “Well, can’t you do something as a duo?”

We thought, “Oh, I don’t know — I guess we can. You’re on guitar, I’m on keyboard, and we’ll have like a little drum machine, and we’ll do that.” So we did. And Nick and I had a good enough time at that show, and people wanted us to play again and again and again. And after the show, the guitarist from Brief Candles approaches us and says, “Oh my god, your music is so great! I like playing guitar in this band, but I’d really like to just play bass. And I love your music, and if you guys ever need a bass player to do shows, then let me know.”

That guitarist was Brian Kassan, and he ended up playing bass for us. We did a few shows as a trio, and the next step was to start looking for a drummer. We put an ad out, I think it was in the Recycler or Music Connection — I’m going to say the Recycler — but we put an ad out that said, “Neo-pop outfit looking for drummer. No double kicks!” [laughs]

No roto-toms!

Yeah! [laughs] We auditioned a few people, but then this one guy comes out — he’d just came out west from New York — and he was good. It was really obvious how good he was, right from the start. We had a good feeling about him, and we did one of those “All right, we’ll let you know, we’ll think about it and we’ll maybe get back to you” kind of things — knowing that we would most definitely get back to him, but not letting him on at the time.

So we’re about to tear down, and he goes, “Hey guys, listening to your stuff, it reminded me of this song I really love. I don’t know if you guys remember it, but it was called ‘Magic’ by Pilot.” Nick and I looked at each other and said, “He’s in!” [laughs] And then we proceeded to play it! That was the moment Mike joined. “Do you know ‘Magic’ by Pilot?” Jesus! [laughs]

So that would have been, what, 1992?

I think ’92 was when we got Mike. But before that, it was all just Nick and I, and then when Brian came on… so, the first tape, “The Blue Tape,” is essentially just Nick’s songs and my songs; we just threw them together.

And recorded them with drum machines?

We did, yeah — either Nick played bass or we had some friends play bass. But aside from that, it was just Nick and I. By the second tape [a.k.a. “The Purple Tape”], that’s when we had Brian Kassan, and he played bass on most of those, or all of those; I can’t remember. And then then we got Mike on drums, and that’s when we did the third tape. Wow… I didn’t think I was gonna do, like, this history, but it’s good. It helps me remember the timeline of things.

You talk about how you and Nick were fascinated by sound, and were always interested in exploring what made this or that record sound so great, or what made this guitar or keyboard sound so great, etc. But back in the ’80s — well before we all had access to YouTube or even the internet — just tracking down records could be insanely difficult, much less tracking down information about how they were made. How did you guys go about that?

Wow, that is a great question. I don’t know if anybody’s asked that. I often think about that myself, because, as you know, I’ve become good friends with the current and young band The Lemon Twigs. And whenever we hang out with them, I’m always marveling at their knowledge and interest in so many different styles of music that all sort of, somehow, intuitively make sense in their world. And every single time that I think, “Wow, how did they do that?” I then stop and go, “Wait a minute. Nick and I were the same way in the ’80s!” [laughs] We were young, and we totally found these records and we found out how they were made…

I really don’t know how we did that, because you’re right — it was before the internet. It must have been just this hunger and desire to… well, the ’80s was not my favorite decade for music, for one thing. So it made you go out and really search; you had to dig deep. And if that meant going to, you know, swap meets, or we’d go to sci-fi conventions…

Like, we went to see a panel discussion of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space with people that were involved with the film. We were into all that kind of stuff, and that just sort of branched off into just a certain type of psychotronic thinking — just a little bit out of the box, I guess, And I imagine it could apply to music, too. I remember really going on a heavy Joe Meek trip, and, obviously, Brian Wilson and everything he influenced. I mean, how do you really qualify that or quantify that? It’s just what your taste is, right?

I always knew I loved the 4 Seasons, but I never really got into the man behind that sound — Bob Crewe — until later on, and then I got into all his productions and tried to find every record he produced; and, well, you go on and on and on. But that’s, I imagine, what happens now to young kids, except they’ve got an extra 40 more years to dig into than we did. [laughs]

I would also assume there was a lot of experimenting with sounds on the four-track Portastudio — like, “Can we get the bass to sound like the bass on Pet Sounds? What do we have to do to get that sound?”

Yeah! And, wow — again, this is great, because you’re making me think! [laughs] Because I remember Nick only had one electric guitar. It was his Strat, and now I’m remembering trying to not make it sound the same each time, like, “What could we do so it sounds like a different kind of guitar?” Because you just didn’t have access to, you know, Gibsons and actual 12-string Rics and things like that at the time. So if that meant we wanted to get a 12-string sound, we’d double track it at an octave up to get that jangly thing. And if we didn’t have a baritone guitar, we would record it pitched up, so that when the track is pitched back down, it’s lower than the range of the guitar and has that sort of Duane Eddy thing…

So, yeah! [laughs] I love this; I love having to think back on, like, “God, how did we do that stuff?” But we were just so passionate. We were young, and we had all the energy in the world. And, I mean, I had shitty jobs; at the time, I think I was working in the stock room at the May Co. shoe department. [laughs] I couldn’t wait to get home and work on songs, and work on songs with Nick.

So the music you were making was kind of an escape from the day-to-day drudgery, but it was also an escape from the insanely over-produced sounds of ’80s pop.

Yeah, which just did not appeal to me one bit. But, you know, I look back… like, I was not a fan of disco when it came out, and now I look back and I can appreciate it more — mainly because, you know, they’re actual, real players.

There’s a drummer actually playing that beat for eight minutes straight…

Yes, and it just feels like musicians playing together in a room. I can appreciate that. But my least favorite Abba album when it came out was Voulez-Vous, because it just sounded to me like Saturday Night Fever Revisited. It was only in the past 10 or 15 years that I went back and checked it out again, and now it’s like one of my favorite albums. But I think I just did that mental protest thing at the time, like, [grumbles] “This sounds too much like…” And what disco was to me at the time, was more of a lifestyle; so that record just reminded me of, you know, the guys in school who would come with their open shirts and their medallions and all that, and an attitude. So that’s why I had a bad association with that stuff. But now I have an appreciation for it.

There’s this prevalent notion now that the anti-disco sentiment of the late ’70s was exclusively based in racism and homophobia, but it was really way more nuanced than that.

Oh, yeah!

Because I certainly didn’t know any gay people, at least that I was aware of, when I was in my anti-disco phase, and I certainly didn’t know what kind of music gay people liked or didn’t like. Most of the kids I knew in junior high who were into disco were white kids with feathered hair — and they were usually the jocks, or the girls who dug the jocks.

Yeah, it was — at least in my school!

And I actually really liked disco at first, and I love it again now. But when I started seeing the JC Penney ads with “disco fashions,” and Dance Fever with Deney Terrio popped up on TV, it just felt like, “This stuff is past its sell-by date!”

That’s so fascinating. Yeah, that’s only come on my radar, this whole thing about equating being anti-disco to anti- all of that. That’s all new to me, actually, and I was actually surprised when I saw that, because I was like, “That’s not what I didn’t like about it!”

That’s not why I didn’t like disco. It was more exactly what you described — and I’ll go beyond that. It was just too formulaic, you know? And I guess because I’m a musician or whatever, I just thought the four-on-the-floor [beats], and the [sings stereotypically bouncy disco bass line], I just thought, “Really? Again and again and again, over and over and over?” It was just boring to me. It was too easy of an approach to music. It wasn’t challenging to my “musical sensibilities”.

I wasn’t even playing music yet at that point, but I was a music fan, and lyrics were very important to me. I remember being like, “Does every fucking song have to be about dancing?” I’m convinced to this day that the main reason Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away” was such a huge hit in the spring of 1979 was because it had “Dance” in the title. You put any other verb in there, and that song doesn’t get the same airplay.

Interesting, interesting… and you know, I don’t even think of that as a dance tune. I think of it as a great record, and a great song. Just off topic, when I hear “Dance the Night Away,” I don’t know why, but it just sounds to me like a Bobby Fuller Four song. It has a Bobby Fuller Four vibe to me, the whole production of it. Well, like, “Let Her Dance”.

Yeah, change out the coke bottle for the cowbell, and it’s pretty much the same thing.

[laughs] But, yeah, I mean, more to the point, I know that it wasn’t that I didn’t like disco music, because I freaking loved everything from “The Hustle” to “Rock the Boat,” “Dancing Queen,” and then even the Bee Gees — those Main Course songs are fantastic! “Jive Talkin’,” “Night on Broadway,” I love those!

Me too.

So clearly, my aversion was more towards the point when it became formulaic. I always point to the success of that film and soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever — it just became really, really boring to me after that. But that combined with, you know, dudes in school going, “Hey dude, you’re not cool because you’re not like this,” that just really bummed me out. And maybe it’s a good thing, because that pushed me into getting into the more new wave and sort of punkish acts of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

I remember when we first started hanging out, you were telling me about going to hardcore shows. And I was just like, “Oh, wow. This guy’s into all that shit, too?” It kind of took me by surprise.

Which was weird, because at the time — late ’70s, early ’80s — I was actually heavily sort of immersed in my jazz musicianship. Because at the combined junior and senior high school that I attended, which was Eagle Rock, which was the only six-year school in LA at the time, we had a really great jazz program. So, I got into that. And I could play drums — I was playing drums in the marching band — and I could play piano, but there was already a drummer and already a pianist in the jazz band. So the band director said, “Well, if you’re good at that and good at that, how about this?” And he pointed this instrument that I had no idea what it was, and it was the vibraphone.

So I thought, “Wow, this is really cool. I’ve got the chops for drums and rhythm, but I also have the knowledge of the keyboard. This is really great for me.” And it ended up becoming my instrument. And I really got into that in high school. So I was doing all that, getting really deep into bebop and big band swing, and all the different players and composers. So, yeah, I guess I just had no time for anything that was super commercial at that time. And unfortunately, disco kind of fell into that category.

And I think I’m bringing all this up to say that it was that sort of formulaic attitude or aesthetic that really bothered me, and that went even more so in the ’80s popular, commercial, Top 40 sound. And that was worse because it was a lot of programmed drums with gated reverbs, and the guitar sounds were all these very digital sounding atmospheres. It just wasn’t my bag, and I know Nick wasn’t that into that, either. We were way more into a Beatles ethic and approach. So we would have to dig deep to find bands; we loved a lot of bands in the ’80s, but they just weren’t popular.

I remember seeing you guys do a Split Enz cover, which is a perfect example of an ’80s band that was kind of on the commercial bubble and doing cool stuff, but didn’t really break through in the US in any meaningful way.

I mean, one of Nick’s favorites was XTC. So yeah, bands like that, and of course the whole sort of Paisley Underground thing that was happening in LA; the Bangles went on to break it big from that, but none of the other bands did. But just anything that had a ’60s aesthetic as their foundation was always cool with us.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview, in which Darian talks about the Wondermints’ retro-futurist aesthetic, the making of the band’s subsequent albums, and which one will most likely be reissued next!

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Welcome to the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Limey) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

For this, our 28th episode, we decided to change things up a bit. Instead of discussing one particular artist or album, we’re each bringing three music-related topics to the table without informing the other in advance, and going wherever those topics take us. We’re calling this new format the CROSSED CHANNELS “Pick n’ Mix” — it’s kind of like a spirited bar conversation, only without the alcohol (since we didn’t want to get too sloppy while recording it).

So join us and try to hang on as the conversation careens from the merits (or otherwise) of Rickenbacker guitars, to the The Rolling Stones’ most vital period, to what makes for a good live show when you’re in your 60s, and more. Tony even finally reveals the correct answer to this multiple choice question/poll that he posted on April 23…

Also different this time out is the fact that we’re making this episode available to all listeners, and not just paid subscribers to Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith like we usually do. While we would obviously love it if you became a paid subscriber to either of our Substacks (if you’re not already), we wanted to give everyone a full dose of CROSSED CHANNELS action, in hopes of tempting some new subscribers. Our other entirely free episode — “Oasis: What’s The Story” from April 2024 — can be found here, while all our paid-only episodes can be found here. They are many, they are varied (The Jam, Replacements, Kate Bush, Otis Redding, Blondie and Parliament are just some of our previous 27 subjects), they all home in on a specific album or period, and — dare we say it — we think they are all a cut above.

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In addition, we’re putting a different sonic spin on this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS by studding it with snippets of tracks from our current musical outfits — Dan’s solo project The Corinthian Columns and Tony’s band The Dear Boys. The two Corinthian Columns tracks heard during this episode are the ’70s cop show tribute “Blue Diamond Fire,” which was this podcast’s original theme music…

…and the new jangle-psych single “Hydrangea”.

While the recent Dear Boys single heard throughout the show is “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are”.

And finally, since we also talk in this episode about legendary recording sessions we would have loved to be flies on the wall for, we were wondering: which would be the one recording session you wish you could have attended? Feel free to leave your answer in the comments section, which — like the rest of this episode — is open to all. Thanks for listening!

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I returned home on Sunday evening flying high from an absolutely wonderful birthday weekend in New York City, then awoke on Monday morning to the deeply sad news that singer-songwriter, artist, music-for-healing therapist and all-around cosmic cat Orville Stoeber had passed away.

I first crossed cyber paths with Orville in early 2015, when I was penning a weekly column for the Fox Sports website at the behest of friend and editor (better known as Rob Neyer). Titled “Bloop Hits,” the column examined the stories behind various baseball-related songs. It was at Rob’s suggestion that I dug into the musical aspects of the 1973 baseball film Bang the Drum Slowly — specifically, the scene in which players of the fictional New York Mammoths baseball team sing “Please Excuse My Tears” on a TV show. It was one of Rob’s favorite baseball film moments, and to the best of our combined knowledge no one had written much about it before.

I gladly took the assignment, and I’m forever grateful for Rob’s suggestion. For not only did it force me to rewatch a favorite baseball film of my youth (but one which I’d generally avoided in my adulthood because it always made me blubber like a baby), but it also led to a decade-plus online friendship with Orville, the man who wrote “Please Excuse My Tears” (a.k.a. “Look Before You Weep”) and appeared strumming an acoustic guitar in that very “Singing Mammoths” segment Rob loved so much.

When our mutual friend James Fender introduced me to Orville via Facebook messenger (thanks again, James!), Orville seemed willing to tell me the story of his connection with the film, but also fairly wary; as with so many other talented, sensitive people, his brushes with the music and film businesses had left him with still-tender scars and reopened pre-existing wounds, and I could tell he wasn’t entirely stoked about revisiting the person he’d been in the early 1970s. He agreed to do the interview, but only if I emailed him the questions, and his written responses — while honest and enlightening — were gruffly succinct.

Given how brittle and prickly he’d seemed during our initial interactions, I worried that my Bloop Hits piece would somehow hit a wrong nerve with Orville — but he loved the published version so much that he immediately dropped his guard with me, as if he were a catcher flinging away his protective mask after the final out of a victorious game. I was living in L.A. at the time, and he invited me on a couple of occasions to join him and his son in Venice for drinks and baseball chat; sadly, I was never able to take him up on it, in part because I was getting ready to move to Chicago and thus dealing with a bunch of move-related stresses and time crunches.

Still, we kept in semi-regular touch thereafter via FB and the occasional email, and our exchanges — and his FB posts, which were some of my favorite things about being on that social media platform — allowed me full access to his playful spirit, his kind heart, his wry sense of humor, his thought-provoking and eye-popping art (which often mixed elements and symbols from numerous religions) and of course his wonderful music. Along the way, he also occasionally sent me some terse but loving messages of encouragement for my writing and music-making (along with a bit of good-natured shit for my Cubs fandom) all of which I deeply appreciated.

“I’m basically a songwriter, always looking for the next word and melody so I can finally quit,” he told me during our interview. “It’s not a great way to make a living or have a life.” And yet, he never stopped writing songs and making music, in part because doing it brought so much joy to others, and because he clearly connected with some sense of universal purpose while doing so. There’s a lot of great Orville Stoeber music out there, but my personal faves are Songs, his 1971 debut LP, and his gorgeous 2021 album Story Moon, which showed him still going strong 50 years down the road. Just start at either end of his discography, and see where it takes you…

So groove on, Brother O; may your beautiful soul soar ever higher. I’ll never forget you, your music or your friendship — and in your honor, I am re-running that Bang the Drum Slowly piece from Bloop Hits today…

While there’s no box score or stats sheet I can dig up to prove it, I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever cried in a movie theater was during a mid-’70s screening of Bang the Drum Slowly.

Nearly 42 years after its initial release, John D. Hancock’s 1973 film is still a beautiful bummer, and remains worthy of inclusion on any list of great baseball flicks. Adapted from Mark Harris’ 1956 novel of the same name, about a country bumpkin ballplayer dying from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Bang the Drum Slowly neatly sidesteps the cheap sentimentality and saccharine clichés that have marred so many films about the National Pastime.

The emotional power of this low-key drama derives from its portrayal of players as real people; the film shows us the sheer boredom of life on the road, the grind of the long season and the tension it creates between teammates, and the soul-crushing frustration of do-it-yourself contract negotiation during the pre-Free Agency era. Throw in a veteran catcher (played by Robert De Niro) whose skills are being steadily eroded by a terminal illness that he desperately wants to keep hidden from his teammates, and, well, I think I have some dust in my eye…

Which is not to say that the film is unremittingly bleak, by any stretch. There are a number of memorably humorous scenes throughout Bang the Drum Slowly, including the ones where New York Mammoths coach Joe Jaros (played by Phil Foster, better known to those suckled on ’70s sitcoms as Frank De Fazio, proprietor of Laverne & Shirley’s Pizza Bowl) and ace pitcher Henry Wiggen (played by Michael Moriarty) engage suckers in a card game called “tegwar” — which stands for “The Exciting Game Without Any Rules” — and there are several hilariously snappy exchanges between Wiggen and the Mammoths’ irascible manager Dutch Schnell, played by Vincent Gardenia.

Best of all is the “Singing Mammoths” segment, wherein six of the team’s players perform a song-and-dance number on a TV show. The performance includes some silly soft-shoe maneuvers courtesy of DeNiro’s character Bruce Pearson, whose teammates — unbeknown to him — are well aware that he’s dying, and have decided to include him in the fun despite his apparent lack of singing or dancing talent.

The song they sing, “Please Excuse My Tears” (often referred to as “Look Before You Weep”) was written by Orville Stoeber, an immensely talented singer, songwriter and composer, whose lovely 1971 album Songs is one of the era’s hidden musical gems. Stoeber actually appears in the scene, finger-picking on an acoustic guitar and doing his best not to crack up while watching his “teammates” stumble through their rudimentary choreography. Like the film itself, the story of how Stoeber came to be involved in Bang the Drum Slowly is redolent of a far less glitzy period of Hollywood history than our current one.

“I had worked with John Hancock on two of his previous films, scoring the Oscar-winning short Sticky My Fingers… Fleet My Fleet and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, a low-budget horror film,” says Stoeber, who these days is based in Venice, CA, and is still active as a songwriter, artist and teacher.

“In 1972, I was living on 100^th Street on the west side of Manhattan, crashing among various hippies and dope dealers — you could still afford to live in brownstone apartments then. I had recently been signed to a three-record deal with Uni/MCA; [my first album was] an artistic hit but otherwise a failure, and who cares about artistic hits? Anyway, I borrowed a friend’s Volkswagen, and drove to Nebraska looking for my first wife, who had left after the record debacle; after giving up on any possibility of reconciliation with my wife, and being thrown out of my father’s house in Missouri, I made my way to my sister Cathy’s in Chicago…

“So, I’m sitting in my sister’s house, drinking all my brother-in-law’s beer, when somehow Hancock tracks me down and says he needs a song for a movie about some guy who is dying. I picked up my guitar, walked into my sister’s living room and wrote ‘Please Excuse My Tears’ in five minutes. John called again; he asked if I could fly into New York and come to Yankee Stadium where they were filming and sing the song, which he had not heard.”

Shortly thereafter, Stoeber found himself enjoying the surreal experience of playing his newly-written song to Hancock and members of Bang the Drum Slowly’s cast and crew at The House That Ruth Built. “How do you end up in Yankee Stadium when you were piss-drunk in your sister’s garage the week before?” he says with a laugh.

Hancock thought the song, which Stoeber says “caught the tragic tone from my heart being broken by my first wife,” would be perfect for the “Singing Mammoths” sequence. In Harris’ book, the team’s singing group is a vocal quartet with a flair for barbershop classics like “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine,” but the director wanted something closer to the musical numbers that professional athletes often performed on the TV variety shows of the late 1960s and early 1970s, like Tom Seaver’s Lettermen-assisted 1969 appearance on NBC’s Kraft Music Hall.

“It was done in classic wing-it style,” says Stoerber of the scene, which was filmed at Shea Stadium, on the set of the Mets’ postgame show Kiner’s Korner. “I taught the song to the actors, they put me in make-up, and we filmed the scene. I would not let them cut my hair, so it is fairly long in the sequence.”

Stoeber says Hancock initially wanted him to play Piney Woods, the Mammoths’ guitar-slinging catching prospect who bums everyone out during a rain delay with his mournful rendition of “Streets of Laredo,” but that he was “too fucked up” to handle the role. (It was eventually given to actor Tom Ligon.)

But Stoeber did provide the poignant musical bed to the film’s most heartbreaking moment: the slow-motion sequence in which Pearson loses track of an easy pop-up during the Mammoths’ pennant-winning game. Nowadays, such a sequence would likely be set to a bombastic power ballad or obtrusively weepy Sarah McLachlan-type song; but here, Stoeber’s spare picking and wordless vocals delicately underscore the tragedy of the moment instead of hitting you over the head with it. “It is nice to work and have someone believe that you can accomplish something creative for them,” says Stoeber.

On a lighter note, Stoeber says that working with De Niro definitely left an impression upon him, though perhaps not in the way one might expect. While the actor’s next two roles, in 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s The Godfather Part II, would turn him into a huge star, Bang the Drum Slowly’s Bruce Pearson was by far the biggest role he’d played up to that point, so Stoeber was completely unaware of being in the presence of greatness when the two men crossed paths on the set. “Being the method actor that he is, De Niro never dropped out of character,” Stoeber recalls. “I thought he was just some cracker they got to play the dumb-ass catcher.”

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Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers! I’ve got something special for you today…

Back when the world was younger and the Blur-Oasis feud was just a glint in Liam Gallagher’s beady eyes, Doug Edmunds and I were introduced by a mutual friend and immediately bonded over our shared love of Rickenbacker guitars, polka-dot shirts, soaring pop melodies and all things mod.

At the time, Doug was playing drums and sharing vocal and songwriting duties in Gladhands, a tremendously talented Chapel Hill-by-way-of-Omaha power pop trio — who, despite my own ardent championing of them in various publications at the time, remain one of the great undersung bands of the 1990s. (Sadly, none of their three records for the Big Deal label are currently available on streaming services; but if you ever see From Here to Obscurity, La Di Da or Wow & Flutter in the used CD spins, snap ’em up and you won’t be sorry!)

Despite living on opposite ends of the country, Doug and I often unexpectedly ran into each other — most memorably (for me at least) one year at SXSW, right as the mushrooms I’d inadvisably consumed were just really starting to kick in. But even when I was at my most, er, distracted, he always felt to me like a kindred spirit and long-lost brother, a feeling which was confirmed once I moved to North Carolina in 2018 and we began hanging out on a regular basis.

By then, Doug’s band The Stars Explode was winding down, and he was beginning to write material for what would become Life’s Wild Ride, an EP released in 2022 under the solo moniker DB Edmunds. The full-length Everybody Knows By Now followed in 2024; and like Life’s Wild Ride, it contained some of the best music he’s ever made — the always-trustworthy Big Takeover described the album as “a perfect blend of craft and heart,” which pretty much nails it.

Everybody Knows By Now was mixed by the legendary producer Mitch Easter (R.E.M., Let’s Active, Game Theory, Velvet Crush, the Baseball Project and oh so much more), who also contributed some additional percussion and acoustic guitar to the album during the mixing process. Their collaboration on that record set the stage for DB Edmunds’ fantastic new Chasing Yesterdays EP.

Produced and mixed by Easter at The Fidelitorium in Kernersville, NC, Chasing Yesterdays — which drops today and can be purchased on vinyl and digital formats via the DB Edmunds Bandcamp page — features two politically-charged new songs (“Ignorance Is Bliss” and “Everything Left to Lose”), a ripping cover of The Jam’s “Running On The Spot,” and “Chasing Yesterday ’25,” a cinematic reworking of one of Everybody Knows By Now’s standout tracks.

Taken at a slower pace than the original version, “Chasing Yesterday ’25” also features some gorgeous lead guitar work by Easter, some enchanting marimba playing by Doug, and luscious layers of acoustic guitars strummed by the both of them. This beautiful new version of the song really amplifies the melancholy in its melody and message — a reflection on how so much of modern humanity has become fixated upon trying to relive past glories, both real and imagined, at the cost of the future. That message is further bolstered by Stephen Jablonsky’s stunning black and white video for the song, which makes its world premiere today at Jagged Time Lapse.

While I presided over numerous video launches in the past at various websites where I’ve worked, I’ve never done one on Substack. But when Doug suggested that we premiere “Chasing Yesterday ’25” here, I thought it was a fantastic idea — after all, I’m a fan of his music and he’s a fan of my writing (as well as a loyal subscriber to Jagged Time Lapse), so why not joins forces? Especially since a large percentage of my readers are quite likely to dig what DB Edmunds is laying down…

And so, without further ado, Jagged Time Lapse proudly presents the video world premiere of DB Edmunds’ “Chasing Yesterday ’25,” directed by Stephen Jablonsky. Turn it up — and let me know what you think of it in the comments!

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If everything goes according to plan, I will be exiting my fifties this coming Saturday, celebrating the occasion much like I rang in my entrance — with a visit to a museum, and a gathering with some of my favorite people at a favorite watering hole.

It doesn’t seem as if much time has actually passed since that last big milestone birthday, at least until I take a step back and consider how different my life is now, as well as how drastically (and depressingly) both the country and the journalism/publishing landscape I inhabit have changed since May 2016.

And then, of course, there are all the friends and loved ones I’ve lost since then — a significant uptick from the previous decade, as goes with the territory — the medical scares that were generally more intense than the ones I’d previously weathered, and the various dietary modifications that have been implemented whether out of caution, necessity and/or changes in outlook. I feel like exactly the same person I was when I turned 50, but I know in my soul that the last ten years have irrevocably changed me in ways both subtle and profound.

But for all the trials and turbulence of my fifties, I can’t say that I wasted them. I wrote or contributed to more books over the past ten years than I did during my forties — including Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, and the forthcoming Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Electro-Harmonix Story with of JHS Pedals fame — I’ve continued to write features and profiles that I’m proud of for the likes of Rolling Stone, Revolver, FLOOD and The Forward, and I’ve managed to establish a loyal readership and supportive subscriber base with this here Substack. (If you’re reading this, THANK YOU!!!)

In that time, I’ve lived in three vastly different settings — major Midwestern metropolis, Southern college town, East Coast mountain hamlet — rebuilt my heart and life after a shattering divorce, and fallen in love again. I’ve made some great new friends and kept most of the old ones (the fascists and bootlickers showed themselves out), traveled to places I’d only dreamed of seeing in person, and enjoyed countless experiences which further reinforced my long-held belief that love, kindness, joy and creativity are the things that truly make this life worthwhile. And on the creativity tip, I started writing music again in my fifties, after a layoff (and creative block) of nearly two decades.

I had played in bands from my late teens to my mid-thirties, three of which (Lava Sutra, The Fancy Trolls and The Jupiter Affect) actively tried to get noticed by the music industry. As with so many of our compadres of the “alternative rock era,” these bands only managed a few independent releases that few people knew about outside of our scenes; and while I would not trade those recordings or experiences for anything, a combination of personal and professional pressures convinced me around the turn of the millennium that I would be better off putting all my eggs in the writing basket, as opposed to the rocking one.

While I continued to play guitar on a regular basis, I soon found that writing songs — something which I’d regularly done to greater or lesser effect since I was 18 — felt newly impossible. My trusty Tascam Porta-2 that my father had generously given me as a college graduation present had finally bitten the dust, leaving me without my favorite songwriting tool, and I was deeply unenthusiastic about entering the brave new world of digital recording. But I think the songs really stopped coming because I felt like I no longer had a purpose for them, and because years of trying to “make it” in the music biz had made me completely neurotic about songwriting.

After a while, everything I’d written or tried to write had been almost instantaneously scrutinized by my inner quality-control department: Does this song sound like too much of a departure for the band? Does it sound too much like a retread of some other songs in our set? Does this riff or chorus sound too much like something else on the radio? Does it not sound enough like something else on the radio? Etc., etc…

It’s been said before, but one of the great things about being in your fifties is that you start to not give a fuck about things that you unnecessarily gave a previous fuck about. Oh, I’m too old to be “relevant”? Oh, I’m not rockstar skinny like I was in my twenties? Oh, there’s no audience for the kind of music I want to make? Whatever, dude — turn up the fucking amps and let’s rock!

After an aborted attempt to get a new music project going in Chicago with some old bandmates — the will, chops and good vibes were all there, but getting everyone on the same practice schedule page proved far more difficult than it had been in our twenties — I decided to finally dive in to the world of GarageBand. The learning curve was initially pretty steep for someone who had only ever done home recording on cassette tape; but after a bit of messing about, I managed to come up with this little 70s cop-show groove in the first weeks of 2020…

I decided to dub my home recording project The Corinthian Columns — a nod to my archaeology/architecture-obsessed youth, plus I’ve always loved how the word “Corinthian” rolls off the tongue — and I’ve been intermittently writing new music and revamping some older songs on GarageBand ever since. (Here’s a YouTube playlist of my favorite CC tracks, if you’re interested.)

Music came easier than words at first, as it was tough for my brain to click out of prose mode and back into the lyrical realm. But after reminding myself that I didn’t need to try to compete with Bob Dylan, Robyn Hitchcock or any of my other favorite songwriters, my brain relaxed its inhibitions and started to let the lyrics flow. I still love making instrumental tracks inspired by my continuing fascination with 1970s library music, but I’ve become a lot more comfortable with writing “song” songs again.

At the beginning of this year, I decided that I would try to write and record one new Corinthian Columns track a month — both as a commitment to keeping my creative light shining amid the darkness of what promised to be an extremely turbulent year, and as a way to draw attention to (and maybe even raise some funds for) some worthwhile charitable organizations. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t solve the world’s problems, but at least I can be the pebble that sends positive ripples across the pond…

While I haven’t completely kept up the hoped-for pace, I have managed to finish my third Corinthian Columns track of 2026, a song called “Hydrangea”. A jangly psych-pop ode to love, flowers, springtime and renewal, it feels most appropriate for April — and a well-timed spiritual shove back against the human awfulness I’ve witnessed (both on the news and in person) over the last few days. All proceeds from Bandcamp sales of this song will go to benefit Ziggy’s Refuge Farm Sanctuary in North Carolina, which has been doing incredible work on behalf of abused and abandoned farm animals since 2016. It’s the last new song of my fifties, and I hope you dig it…

On a technical note: While several musician pals have tried to get me to upgrade to other recording programs like Logic, I’m still happily working in GarageBand; the technical side of things has become so second-nature by now that the ideas and riffs can just flow without me having to stop to consult a YouTube tutorial. Also, if you noticed a significant improvement in the guitar and bass tones on this track, I’d have to say that they owe much to EarthQuaker Devices’ new ZEQD-Pre, a tube-driven pre-amp that adds some serious analog oomph to digital recording; it makes my JHS Supreme fuzz pedal sound so mighty that I’m tempted to record a whole set of early Jesus and Mary Chain covers…

I should also note here that while I did write for the EarthQuaker Devices blog from 2023 to 2025, this is in no way a paid-for plug; I’m a fan of their effects pedals in general, but the ZEQD-Pre has been such a game-changer for me that my trusty studio assistant Hugo is guarding it with his life as we speak…

Finally, I’d like to dedicate “Hydrangea” to the memory of my dear old pal Phil Rosenthal; I just learned of his untimely passing as I was finishing up this post.

I first met Phil in 1994, back when he was fronting the L.A. power pop band Twenty Cent Crush; he was an unfailingly shining and hilarious presence on the local pop scene, and a tremendously talented dude to boot. (Among his many accomplishments, he wrote the theme for the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World.)

Phil was always incredibly generous with his praise for The Fancy Trolls (our first real gig was opening for Twenty Cent Crush at some now-forgotten Melrose-area coffee house) and for my songs. For years after the Trolls broke up, Phil would come up to me at one L.A. club or another (and now that I think of it, even at his wedding) and ask, “Are you still writing songs?” I would always give him a shrug and an annoyed eye-roll, like, “C’mon, man — I’m done with all that shit.” “You’re a great songwriter, man,” he’d insist. “You’ve gotta keep at it!”

Well, my brother, you got your wish. Thank you for your friendship, and for your constant encouragement; I always appreciated it, even when it made me grouchy to be reminded of part of myself that I’d temporarily lost. May your sweet soul rest in eminently tuneful peace. This one goes out to you…

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We all love our rock n’ roll fairy tales, don’t we?

This was the thought that occurred to me while dipping into The Rolling Stones: The Biography, Bob Spitz’ new 704-page opus that purports to be the definitive look at the band’s history. And maybe it is; I’m still only at the point in the story where they decide to employ Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton as their co-managers.

It’s an enjoyable read, in any case, and while I can’t say the book has told me much thus far about the Stones that I didn’t already know, there’s still something comforting about reliving the oft-told story one more time. It’s kind of the adult music-nerd version of crawling into bed in your favorite childhood footie pajamas and asking, “Daddy, can you please tell me again about the time Brian and Mick and Keith kept warm in their squalid Edith Grove flat by playing the blues?”

Still, there’s a big part of me that would far prefer to read a deep, detailed dive into a particular album or period from the band’s career, one that’s less concerned with hitting all the chronological plot beats and more interested in unearthing obscure nuggets of information that further add to our understanding of the band members as human beings, and offer more insight into the music they made together.

Or, failing that, a book which takes the well-worn story and looks at it through a new and different lens, a la Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which beautifully humanizes both men while examining how the dynamics of their friendship — and, truly, their deep love for each other — profoundly impacted the music they made together (as well as the music that they made apart). Of all the Beatles books I’ve read over the past 40-some years, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is perhaps the most myth-shattering, if only in that it’s impossible for anyone to cop the age-old pose of being strictly a “John person” or “Paul person” after reading it. I’d love to see someone do something similar with Mick and Keith; there’s surely plenty of interesting perspective to be mined from the intertwined tension between Mick’s polymorphously perverse London School of Economic grad and Keith’s swashbuckling (but sexually far more conservative) art school student…

I have long felt a similar sense of frustration about most music documentaries. It’s hard to truly do justice to the full arc of a band or artist’s career in only two hours (or even four, if you’re Martin Scorsese), even if you aren’t tarting the film up with big-name interview “gets” who add little to the story but need to be there in order to excite those who are funding the project. Walking the line between making something with hardcore fan appeal and making something that will attract and entertain viewers who are largely unfamiliar with the documentary’s subject is likewise a profoundly difficult task. Fr’instance, I thought Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 Stooges doc Gimme Danger was a solid example of taking the second tack — my ex-wife, who knew next to nothing about the band, was completely entranced by it — but most of the hardcore Stooges fans I knew disliked it for not going deep enough.

Which is part of why I loved Bernard MacMahon’s 2025 doc Becoming Led Zeppelin so much: Rather than trying to cram the band’s entire story into a couple of hours that would inevitably have to hit all the best-known parts of the saga, MacMahon focused entirely on the band’s early days. Is it a perfect film? Not at all. But it’s an incredibly enjoyable one for viewers of any level of Led Zep fandom (even my mom loved it!), and it’s wonderful to see and hear the band’s three surviving members talk about their early accomplishments with deep affection and the perspective of half a century.

Besides, as I previously wrote:

…by limiting the chronological scope of the documentary, MacMahon was able to really drill down into the short but incredibly vibrant period it covers, rather than just hitting the obvious notes on a career-spanning overview. I’d love to see more music documentaries taking a similarly specific tack.

Shortly after watching Becoming Led Zeppelin, I stumbled across a podcast interview with Richard Morton Jack, the author of a new book called Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly. Though I’m not aware of it having any actual connection with Becoming Led Zeppelin, the interview quickly made it clear that Jack’s book was mining similar territory — following the Led Zeppelin saga from Jimmy Page’s initial 1957 brush with rock n’ roll on up to the release of 1969’s Led Zeppelin II. But instead of telling the story through vintage film footage and 21st century interviews, Jack recounts it in a day-by-day narrative, one which is illustrated by a wealth of contemporary news clippings (going all the way back to a June 1960 item from the South London Advertiser that mentions Page’s band Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps), gig posters, reviews, interviews, press releases, promotional photos, record store ads, etc.

Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly sounded like a real labor of love, as well as something I could get enjoyably lost in while waiting for the spring thaw and trying to keep from becoming too catatonically depressed by the bubbling bullshit fricassee that is the United States circa 2026. Unfortunately, as it’s a 350-page hardcover coffee table book from a UK publisher (Lansdowne), it was difficult to find a copy that wouldn’t also set me back a ton for shipping to the US, and which would show out on my doorstep without me also being charged a tariff by the deliverer. I was eventually able to find one via Presto Music in Royal Leamington Spa; along with a fair shipping price (and no tariffs!), I got a kick out of buying a book from a store in the town where I lived and went to school back in 1974.

Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly was a pricey purchase, to be sure — but man, was it absolutely worth it. I’ve been going through it slowly, usually 8-10 pages at a time over my morning coffee, perusing every clipping and soaking up every detail.

Jack is scrupulous about keeping to the chronological timeline, which means that in the pre-Zep period you’ll see things like the above two-page spread from August 1967, in which Jimmy Page is playing the Santa Monica Civic with The Yardbirds and the still-struggling Robert Plant has just left one incarnation of the Band of Joy and is drumming up some free publicity from the local papers by staging a pro-marijuana demonstration outside of the Wednesbury courthouse, much to his mum’s apparent displeasure. Delicious juxtapositions such as this really underline what an “odd couple” Page and Plant truly were, and how unlikely their eventual partnership seems at this point, nearly a year before their first meeting.

Already a veteran of the stage and studio — not to mention the Led Zep member with the artistic/commercial vision and the industry connections on both sides of the Atlantic — Page is understandably the focal point of most of the press coverage included here, even after the first Led Zeppelin album becomes a hit. Well into the spring of 1969, he does most of the band’s interviews himself, and he’s remarkably patient with journalists even when they’re asking him for the hundredth time if Led Zeppelin is “the new Cream” (people were really hung up on Cream in those days) or ask him if he’s ever seen the Loch Ness monster. (“It’s real,” Page enthuses.)

A February 1969 interview with Cavalier magazine seems to be the first press interview that Page and Plant ever do together, and it’s fun to read the sparks flying between them when Plant the young upstart puts down Frank Sinatra as an example of a singer who just goes through the motions — “He sort of drawls and all this bit” — and Page the seasoned pro immediately comes to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ defense. “I think it’s a bad example,” he scolds the singer. “If you talked about Buddy Greco or one of those, I’d agree. But not Sinatra. Those early recordings he did are incredible.”

It’s incredibly fascinating to watch the story unfold in real time in Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly, just as it’s hilarious to note the many ways that the press and various advertisements manage to misspell the band’s and its members’ names. And while Becoming Led Zeppelin talks about how the band became a phenomenon in the States while still doing crummy pub gigs in the UK, Jack’s book provides the details; in February 1969, they’re earning $7500 a night for a two-date stand supporting Vanilla Fudge at Chicagos Kinetic Playground, and then a month later they’re back home promoting their debut album by playing grubby pub gigs and college “pajama dances” for a meager 125 pounds a night.

It’s also interesting to see how reviewers of both their live shows and their debut album grapple with describing music that is now — some 57 years later — firmly embedded in the pop cultural vernacular. Despite the band’s insistence over the years that the press were unduly hostile to them, the reviews of the time are actually largely positive, though a couple of insecure male writers are clearly disturbed by Plant’s androgynous vocals and pansexual appeal, and a handful of others do already have their knives out for this much-hyped “supergroup”. Especially notable in the latter category is John Mendelssohn, whose notorious trashing of Led Zeppelin in the March 15, 1969 edition of Rolling Stone — a review which was largely responsible for the band’s dimview of the magazine, and of the music press in general — is actually preceded nearly three weeks earlier by an arguably even harsher review of the record in UCLA’s Daily Bruin. “If there’s one thing we don’t need,” that review concludes, “it’s another lazy, self-indulgent contemporary blues group from England.”

While the band may indeed have been a trifle self-indulgent — who wasn’t in 1969? — they were far from lazy, playing over a 150 gigs that year alone. Part of the fun of Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly is seeing who they shared stages with during their initial year and a half of existence, including acts ranging from the now-legendary (The Who, Alice Cooper, Spirit and Jethro Tull) to the now-forgotten likes of The Raven and Closed Cell Sponge. And then there are those ships that passed in the night, like the jaw-dropping double-bill of the Velvet Underground and the Allman Brothers that hit the Boston Tea Party in May 1969 the night after Led Zeppelin left town…

In all, Led Zeppelin: The Only Way To Fly makes for a fabulous time-trip — not just back to the formative days of what would become one of rock’s biggest and most influential bands, but to an era of underground newspapers and hippie ballrooms, a time when old people in America would still literally spit at younger folks for having long hair, and live performances could go well over their allotted time slot if the band and audience “were really feeling it, man.” I would love to see more music history books take such a similarly immersive approach.

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Of all the great British guitarists I can name, I can’t think of anyone who’s had as significant an impact upon his fellow countrymen (while also remaining almost entirely unknown in the US) as Hank Marvin.

As the lead guitarist for The Shadows (a mostly instrumental quartet who first achieved fame as Cliff Richard’s backing band before also branching out on their own), Marvin played on a combined 69 UK chart hits from the late 1950s to the late 2000s, none of which made the US Top 100. There were many reasons for this territorial disparity, but lack of talent or quality clearly wasn’t one of them; the band’s singles were always impeccably produced (legendary EMI A&R man/producer Norrie Paramor helmed all their records through the late ‘60s), and featured Marvin’s equally impeccable lead guitar work, which was so fluid, tasteful and precise you couldn’t imagine him ever hitting a bum note.

A veritable British institution, The Shadows finally called it a day in 1990, whereupon Marvin — who had made occasional solo records as far back as 1968 — took his trademark spectacles and fiesta red Fender Stratocaster and embarked upon a successful solo career of his own. When I interviewed Hank for Guitar Player magazine in the spring of 1997, he was in the midst of his third post- Shadows solo tour of the UK, where he was promoting a delightful Buddy Holly tribute album called Hank Plays Holly. (As mentioned in Part One of our interview, the bespectacled, Stratocaster-playing Holly had been a major formative influence.)

But as with so much of his discography, Hank Plays Holly hadn’t been released in the US, so my assignment for GP was to pen a feature hooked around his Shadows hits — which had recently been released on CD in the US for the first time via Scamp Records’ fantastic Shadows Are Go! compilation — and Ark 21’s Twang! A Tribute to Hank Marvin & The Shadows, which featured the likes of Brian May, Ritchie Blackmore, Mark Knopfler and other estimable axe-wielders taking a crack at the Shadows catalog.

As with Part One of our interview, much of what’s contained Part Two has never seen the light of day before, as the Guitar Player piece was really just a short “front of the book” profile with a few choice quotes. Snd as with most of the other interviews in the Jagged Time Lapse archives, I’m making Part Two of my Hank Marvin interview available exclusively to my paid subscribers, whose support I am eternally grateful for. The music journalism landscape (as with so much else) has changed remarkably for the worse over the past few decades, so having loyal readers who are willing to throw a few bucks in the hat in exchange for my exclusive content is a real blessing. I thank you all from the bottom of my music-fueled, garlic-infused heart…

The second half of our interview starts off in pretty gear-heavy territory — this was an interview for Guitar Player, after all — but we soon get onto other subjects, like The Shadows’ lack of success in the US, Hank’s opinion of The Ventures, his favorite Shadows hits, why he connected with Buddy Holly more than Elvis Presley, and the time he had to learn how to play Slash’s Guns N’ Roses solos (which is something I would have truly loved being a fly on the wall for). And while I half-expected a man of Marvin’s immense talent, stature and accomplishments to have a bit of a superior attitude, he turned out to be absolutely lovely…

Do you still use VOX AC30s?

No, I’ve gone through different things over the years, Dan. I used the Voxes right through the ’60s and through the ’70s; and then, in the early ’80s, I decided to go with Mesa Boogie because we had a lot of reliability problems with Voxes. A few friends of mine said, why don’t you go for a Mesa Boogie? And I tried one, and with a bit of fiddling I thought it sounded pretty good. It was a good amplifier; never any trouble.

But then I read about Matchless back in 1990, and so I tried the Matchless DC30 and the Clubman 35, and I bought a whole bunch of DC30s and a Clubman 35. I’ve got some at home in Australia and some here in the UK, and I’ve been using those. And I think they’re great because they’re very similar in character to a Vox, but I think better; to me, they’ve got a wider frequency response. And I can only speak from my own experience, but I found that they are generally very reliable.

I’ve really enjoyed using them; they sound exactly what I want to sound like. Sometimes when I’m recording I’ll use the Clubman 35, but onstage I use the DC30 because it has two channels — one my clean sound, and then I’m running an overdrive into the other channel.

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The springtimes of my youth never failed to inject me with a rush of almost unbearable giddiness.

Initially, such giddiness arrived via the tantalizing prospect of the last day of school, and the promise of the summer vacation — which almost always involved visiting beloved family members in other states — to follow. In fourth grade, I was so keyed up for the end of the school year that I actually finished all of my class assignments nearly a month early, leaving me ample time to sit at my desk drawing images of great white sharks and WWII bombers, reading a thick UFO magazine that I’d obtained from a friend in exchange for two unopened packs of Bubble Yum, and daydreaming about my upcoming summer travels to Tuscaloosa, Los Angeles and San Diego. Those were undoubtedly the happiest weeks of my entire elementary school career.

As I got a little older, springtime meant the beginning of baseball season, which was even more exciting to me than the prospect of three months without school. There was a surreal aspect to the first month or so of the season that I always found incredibly intoxicating; not only could any team still seem like possible contenders at this point, but early-season batting heroics made for some eye-popping statistical anomalies and projections.

For example, during the first three weeks of the 1976 MLB season — when I was first falling in love with baseball and just figuring out how to formulate player stats on my Texas Instruments pocket calculator — I determined that Detroit Tigers DH Willie Horton was on pace to hit 69 homers and drive in 231 runs for the season while putting up a .373 batting average. Of course, Willie would finish the year with a far more prosaic batch of Triple Crown stats (.262/14/56), but I’ll never forget what might have been…

Once adolescence hit, springtime always seemed to coincide with one massive crush on one massively cute girl or another, crushes which were more often than not just as unrealistic — but nonetheless just as exciting — as Willie Horton’s early-season stats in ‘76. Requited or otherwise, these crushes were inevitably soundtracked by a favorite song or album, a tradition which was echoed three springs ago when I fell madly in love with someone to the tune of Willie Nile’s “Vagabond Moon”. (Thankfully, she fully reciprocated.)

But sometimes my springtime crush has been purely musical, like the spring of 1992 when my then-girlfriend opened my ears to jangly “C86”-style British indie pop, a genre I’d been too busy fixating on 1960s garage and psych compilations to even notice during the mid-’80s. I remember spending that April and May trying to buy up and absorb everything I could find by the Pastels, the Shop Assistants, the Wedding Present, the Dentists, the Jasmine Minks, Biff Bang Pow, etc., as well as similarly-inclined bands from either chronological side of them. Coming off the great grunge reckoning of late ‘91 and early ‘92, I found Byrds-y arpeggios and fainting-couch reveries a refreshing and much-needed palate cleanser from all the Gen-X angst, hyper-masculine grunting and refried Black Sabbath riffs I’d been recently subjected to. Plus, it was much better music to stroll through a freshly-flowering park to.

Indeed, there’s something about the best jangly guitar pop that sounds particularly swoon-inducing at this time of year. Maybe it’s because the surging waves of brightly-colored 6- and 12-strings feel as welcome and restorative after a dark and miserable winter as a newly-warmed breeze; maybe it’s because hazy harmonies and wistful mid-tempo melodies pair particularly nicely with April showers. In any case, that’s probably why it’s taken me until this spring to really fall in love with an album that was released last November: Balloon Balloon Balloon by Chicago’s Sharp Pins.

And fall in love, I absolutely have. I first heard of Sharp Pins (basically the one-man home-recording project of a young gentleman named Kai Slater, though he performs live backed by other musicians) late last year, chiefly via videos passed along by various friends who share a similar love for the mod aesthetic and 1960s-influenced pop in general. I liked what I saw and heard well enough, but I was not at all in the right headspace to fully enjoy it; without going into gory detail, this past November through early March were pretty rough on a personal level, and I was mostly turning to 1970s library music and favorite classic soul and jazz records for comfort and sanity.

But about a month back, with the winter ice finally beginning to thaw and its attendant darkness finally beginning to lift, I took another look at the charmingly low-budget video for “Popafangout” — the leadoff track from Balloon Balloon Balloon — and decided it was high time to grab a copy of the album. It has been a semi-constant occupant of my turntable ever since.

With its compact songs (21 tracks in 44 minutes), ramshackle production, twee energy and impressive hook-to-track ratio, Sharp Pins have racked up a number of comparisons to Guided by Voices, the Elephant 6 collective and ‘80s/‘90s K Records acts like Beat Happening and Heavenly. The latter certainly makes sense by association, since Balloon Balloon Balloon was actually released on K Records, and Slater’s “get it all down on the four-track ASAP” attitude unquestionably flashes me back to the glory days of The Olivia Tremor Control and The Apples in Stereo.

But as far as Guided by Voices go, I’ve been hearing far less Robert Pollard and considerably more late’70s/early ‘80s indie mod influence — stuff like the Television Personalities circa …And Don’t The Kids Just Love It, The Times circa Pop Goes Art! and Anthony Meynell and Squire circa Hits From 3000 Years Ago — in the clanging guitars, plaintive lyrics and fey “indoor boy” vocals of Balloon Balloon Balloon. 1965 Roger Daltrey would be completely appalled, but 1967 Pete Townshend would surely understand…

(In fact, I just discovered while writing this piece that Sharp Pins have a digital-only 2024 album called Mods Mayday 23, which features covers of ten songs originally recorded by Squire, Beggar, The Mods and Secret Affair for Mods Mayday ‘79, an album which is essentially the Rosetta Stone of the late-’70s UK mod revival. So yeah, I’m gonna stand by my original TVPs>GVB assessment.)

As with those records, the ’60s UK musical influences run rampant here, but you also probably wouldn’t mistake tracks like “Popafangout,” “I Don’t Have The Heart” or “Crown Of Thorns” for actual vintage tracks from the original freakbeat and popsike eras; they’re all just a little bit too personal (and a little bit too warped, wrinkled and frayed at the edges) to be strict genre pastiches, which is totally fine by me. And despite its obvious debt to the aforementioned indie mod bands, the record’s occasionally jarring lo-fi psychedelic elements — presumably the work of credited co-mixer Capt. Tripps Ballsington — keep Balloon Balloon Balloon from sounding like a straight-up homage to early ‘80s British labels like Whaam! or Artpop!

After all, Slater is a Midwestern kid born nearly a quarter-century after the release of …And Don’t The Kids Just Love It, an album in which Dan Treacy filtered his fascination with British pop culture of the 1960s through the DIY lens of 1970s British punk; so it only makes sense that Balloon Balloon Balloon’s deployment of the same musical and aesthetic touchstones — combined with Slater’s own 21st century existence and reference points — would result in something even blurrier and more distorted, like an image that’s been Xeroxed and re-Xeroxed so many times that it starts to lose some of its original elements and take on new ones.

It all totally works, though. Even when “Fall In Love Again,” the Merseybeat rocker that opens Side Two of the album, blatantly borrows from The Everly Brothers with the couplet “You don’t realize what you do to me/And I never realized what a kiss could be,” it feels to me more like reinterpretation than Rutles-ization. And maybe that’s because the “Fall In Love Again” actually packs the same heart-pumping, sigh-inducing pop power as “I Should Have Known Better,” a song which Lennon and McCartney also borrowed the second Everlys line from, and which coincidentally soundtracked a major crush of mine in the spring of 1980.

Sharp Pins have two other earlier albums of original material, and the prolific Slater has made several other records with the likes of Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe, but I have yet to explore any of them beyond the aforementioned Mods Mayday 23. (Which is highly recommended to anyone who digs Mods Mayday ‘79 — or anyone who, like me, spent far too many hours trawling the used bins for that original live album, only to be profoundly dismayed by its dismal recording quality.)

I’ll get to them all eventually, of course, but for now I’d rather just savor every note of Balloon Balloon Balloon like I’m savoring every sweet moment of this current spring. I can just about guarantee that if any of the aforementioned reference points (C86, Merseybeat, mod revival, Elephant 6, etc.) made your heart flutter, you’re gonna love this record, too. Even my difficult-to-please cat Tiny Angus can’t resist the album’s charms — check him out as he “makes muffins” to the tune of “Popafangout”!

I suspect Slater has several more great records in him. But even if he eventually comes back to earth like Willie Horton did in 1976, I will always be grateful for the rush of joy that Balloon Balloon Balloon brought me fifty springs later.

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For British guitarists of a certain age, Hank Marvin is unquestionably the man.

As the lead guitarist of Cliff Richard and the Shadows — and The Shadows as a self-contained entity — Marvin played on a combined 69 UK chart hits from the late 1950s to the late 2000s. But arguably the most important part of his legacy is the fact that he was the first British guitarist to wield a Fender Stratocaster, a fiesta-red development which (along with such artfully-plucked early Shadows smashes as 1960’s “Apache,” 1961’s “F.B.I.” and 1962’s “Wonderful Land”) set young guitarists a-pickin’ and a-dreamin’ across the UK and beyond.

Marvin’s ardent early acolytes included such notable names as George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Pete Townshend, Peter Green, David Gilmour, Peter Frampton, Neil Young, Tony Iommi, Brian May and Mark Knopfler; in other words, rock music as we know it might have been vastly different without Hank’s formative influence.

And yet, despite their massive success in the British commonwealth, The Shadows remained total “men of mystery” in the US. Over on this side of the pond, we had The Ventures to fulfill our beat instrumental needs; and while The Shadows did release several stateside singles and albums on Atlantic and Epic, none of them caught on with American record buyers. My first encounter with Hank and The Shadows didn’t occur until my junior year of high school, when I saw some Dezo Hoffman photos of them in Tony Stewart’s 1982 book Cool Cats: 25 Years of Rock ‘N’ Roll Style and wondered, “Who?”

In late 1996, Miles Copeland’s Ark 21 label attempted to answer that question by releasing Twang! A Tribute to Hank Marvin & The Shadows, a 12-track album featuring rearrangements of classic Shadows tracks by the aforementioned gents Blackmore, May, Iommi, Green, Young and Knopfler, along with Steven Stevens, Keith Urban, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and my dear old pal Andy Summers. (Hank also contributed a track of his own, a reworking of The Shadows’ 1965 hit “The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt” performed with his own touring band.)

Whether or not that tribute album made any real dent in the American consciousness, its release — along with Scamp Records’ wonderful 1996 compilation Shadows Are Go!, which I believe may have been the first collection of Shadows hits to be released in the US — led to me interviewing Hank for Guitar Player magazine in the spring of 1997. I recently ran across the tape of our conversation (most of which has never seen print before) in my poorly-organized cassette box, and am now making it available for paid Jagged Time Lapse subscribers to read. (You can find links to all my other “paid only” interviews with musical greats over here.)

Hank was a bit worn out when I reached him by phone, as he was currently in the midst of a massive UK tour. But he sounded just as affable as his photos had always made him look, and he was more than happy to talk at length about guitars, his playing technique and The Shadows’ long history, including their mysterious inability to crack the US market. I really enjoyed revisiting this interview for the first time in nearly 30 years, and hope you’ll dig reading it for the first time! Part Two will run next week…

You’ve been a major influence on just about anyone who’s anyone, at least as far as British guitarists go. But who were your first guitar influences?

The first guy I really heard on guitar — but not so much lead guitar work — was Big Bill Broonzy. I went to see him at Newcastle City Hall [in February 1957], and it was a real joy to hear him sing his work songs and hear him do all that finger picking stuff. It was great!

Then, when I started getting interested in rock and roll — probably 1957 — the sounds that really excited me back then were the guitarists who were working with people like Elvis, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Holly himself. Cliff Gallup I thought was great; all his solos on the early Gene Vincent records, his guitar work, I used to try to copy that and work out what he was doing and play it, because we used to sing all those songs. And then all the early Elvis records with Scotty Moore.

Then James Burton came on the scene in ’58 with Ricky Nelson, when Ricky started get a few hits in Britain. And a funny thing, Dan, was what impressed me a lot about James Burton’s style was that he used to bend a lot of notes, unlike the other guys. I mean, Cliff Gallup used to bend a bit, but you could hear that the strings were heavy. Now with James, I was totally astounded. And it’s funny, looking back on it now, but we’d never heard of light-gauge strings. All electric guitars in England came with these incredibly heavy strings, with like a 24 wound third or 26 round third.

And they were flat wounds, right?

No, they were actually round; you could get flat ones, but they all sounded dead, very dull sounding. But the first thought that came to my mind when I heard James Burton was that we’d heard all these stories about the US — you know, people ate plenty of steak and drank milk and orange juice, and because of that all you guys had these enormously powerful fingers and you were doing this amazing bending. [laughs] And it wasn’t until October ‘61 that Cliff and The Shadows were touring in Australia, New Zealand, in the Far East, and I bumped into some musicians in Sydney who had actually met James Burton. The guitarist told me that James used this trick of having a banjo string on the first string, then putting the first string on the second, the second on the third, and so forth. And of course, we couldn’t believe this trick! [laughs]

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Welcome to the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — a.k.a. the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Limey) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

This episode (our 27th!) focuses on an album from an artist we’ve wanted to discuss for ages: the legendary funk maestro George Clinton. The main reason we haven’t covered the good Dr. Funkenstein on the podcast before now is that the sheer breadth and brilliance of his six-decade discography made it difficult to decide how to approach it.

Do we zero in on his 1960s soul and R&B recordings with The Parliaments, including their Top 20 single, 1967’s “(I Wanna) Testify”? Should we focus on an early Funkadelic album like 1971’s mind-blowing Maggot Brain, or widen the scope to examine Funkadelic’s acid-fried early days in Detroit, during which they shared stages (and drugs) with the likes of The MC5, Stooges and Alice Cooper?

(For a tantalizing glimpse of the band during this particularly tripped-out chapter of Clinton’s career, dig this clip from their 1969 appearance on Say Brother, a public affairs TV show broadcast on Boston’s WGBH.)

Or should we look at other important Funkadelic records, like 1975’s shaggy Let’s Take It to the Stage or 1978’s more streamlined One Nation Under a Groove? Or what about Up for the Down Stroke, the 1974 album that saw Clinton reviving the Parliament brand, Parliament’s tongue-twisting 1977 smash Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, or Clinton’s hugely influential 1982 album Computer Games? Do we try to round up and try to make sense out of all the Parliament-Funkadelic offshoots or related projects like Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Brides of Funkenstein, Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns, Parlet and/or Zapp?

You can see our dilemma, right? But ultimately, we decided to hitch a ride on Mothership Connection, Parliament’s 1975 commercial breakthrough. The record not only gave Clinton his first million-selling LP — and his first million-selling single with “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” — but also introduced the first characters and storylines of the interplanetary Afrofuturist sagas that would dominate P-Funk’s albums and live shows over the rest of the decade.

And speaking of live shows, Mothership Connection marked the point where P-Funk’s eye-popping concert presentations began to rival not only those of fellow funk-soul brothers Earth, Wind and Fire, but also those of hard-rocking Casablanca labelmates KISS. Dig, if you will, this clip from their Halloween 1976 show at the Summit in Houston, Texas, which includes the landing of the actual Mothership…

In this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, Dan and Tony discuss why Mothership Connection was the album that finally brought George Clinton mainstream US success after over a decade of funking on the margins. But we also talk about why the album failed to catch on overseas, and why it would take a few more years before Clinton actually landed on the UK charts.

And in addition to getting into the years and musical milestones leading up to the Mothership’s initial landing, we also touch upon Clinton and P-Funk’s widespread influence. For one example, here’s Tony’s Rock Academy students performing Mothership Connection’s “Unfunky UFO” during their April 2023 George Clinton Universe show at Wall Street Music Hall in Kingston, New York.

To hear this episode in its entirety, along with all of our previous complete CROSSED CHANNELS episodes, just sign up for a paid subscription to one of our Substacks — or, better yet, sign up for both of them!

By doing so, you will not only get CROSSED CHANNELS every month, but other exclusive posts from each of us, and full-time access to all the good stuff in our respective archives. Plus, your monthly paid subscription will allow us to afford our monthly post-recording repast over at one of our many fine (or at least passable) Asian eateries!

And remember, CROSSED CHANNELS, unlike most podcasts, does not take ads: we value your intelligence too highly to subject you to that sort of thing.

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When my impossibly handsome cat Oscar passed away this past November, I started going through all the pics I’d taken of him during the 11 years or so we spent together. (He spent the last three years of his life in the loving care of my ex-wife, who made sure to update me regularly on his shenanigans.) In doing so, I discovered that I had taken dozens of photos of Oscar enjoying various albums with me — usually from his perch atop my turntable, where he could really dig the vibrations as the record spun.

I’ve decided to use these pics as the basis for “Oscar’s Picks,” a semi-regular series of posts which will be a nice way to keep his handsome memory alive, as well a prompt to write about some of my favorite records. I previously wrote about him digging deep into Side Three of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti; this time, we’re flashing back on the most perfect album side that Tom Jones ever waxed…

I’m not sure when it was that I first became aware of Tom Jones. Oh, I definitely recall hearing the hip-thrusting “Whoa-ah who-ah whoa”s of “She’s A Lady” while driving to or from Baskin-Robbins in Ann Arbor in 1971 — for some reason, ice cream runs were about the only times my folks had the car radio tuned to the local AM pop stations — but I know I didn’t put them together with Tom Jones the man, the myth, the Pontypridd Powerpack until much, much later.

I remember seeing ads for Tom’s Vegas gigs in the L.A. Times circa 1979 — often featuring him sporting a large crucifix over a semi-bare chest, and gazing meaningfully into the camera like he was fixin’ to fuck the lens — but having no real idea of what he sounded like, or even what exactly it was that he did.

“Who is Tom Jones?” I asked my Mom one Sunday morning while leafing through the paper. “Ewww!” was her succinct reply. Now I was mildly intrigued…

At some point, I guess I kind of twigged that he was a lounge singer — the Vegas residencies and all — but I can’t recall actually putting his name and voice together until the summer of 1984, when my friend Jason and I discovered Parrot Records’ 1967 compilation The Greatest Hits from England, which included Tom’s breakthrough 1965 hit “It’s Not Unusual”.

While we were initially more stoked about find Them’s “Gloria,” Los Bravos’ “Black Is Black,” The Nashville Teens’ “Tobacco Road” and Unit 4+2’s “Concrete and Clay” (a song I’d been searching after for years) on that record, something about the swinging horns and swaggering vocals of “It’s Not Unusual” got under our skin — and we dug the song even more once we somehow learned that Jimmy Page had played the guitar solo.

But what really turned on the ToJo tap for us was a short MTV News interview I saw with him in late 1988, right as “Kiss” — his collaborative Prince cover with Art of Noise — was climbing the charts. By way of establishing that Tom had been making hits for nearly a quarter-century at this point, the MTV interviewer asked him about opening for The Rolling Stones back in 1965. “The kids in the audience didn’t know what to think,” Tom chuckled in his soft Welsh brogue, “Because they had never seen anyone quite so MASCULINE before!”

I just about spit up my 36-ouncer of Colt 45, or whatever I was using to chase my afternoon bong hits. This guy was clearly on his own trip, and I loved it. I immediately resolved to start tracking down his 1960s and ’70s albums, just as I’d begun doing with Herb Alpert. Entry to a whole ToJo-tastic world must surely await me in my neighborhood thrift shops, I figured…

Unfortunately, I quickly realized that his albums weren’t that great. Much of his ’70s output seemed to be mainstream country, which I wasn’t into at all, and his ’60s records suffered from the curse of the all-around entertainer. As I would later discover with Lou Rawls, another singer possessed of an incredible voice and little in the way of artistic vision, Tom’s albums seemed designed primarily to showcase his versatility; along with his latest hit (often penned by Les Reed and Tom’s manager Gordon Mills), there would be showtunes, treacly ballads, items from the Great American songbook, some Reed-Mills throwaways, and a smattering of classic soul and R&B covers. He sang his ass off on everything, of course, but the lack of quality control or a defined focus made for a frustrating listening experience. (His 1966 album A-Tom-ic Jones is a perfect example, containing the incredible “Dr. Love” but little else of lasting value.)

And then I discovered his 1970 album Tom, staring out at me from the shelf of some dingy thrift shop on Chicago’s Halsted Street. It was the day after my band Lava Sutra had played our first-ever gig (opening for The Dangtrippers and God’s Acre at Lounge Ax in January 1990), and I’d spent the afternoon digging for records in a celebratory haze. My search hadn’t turned up much of interest… until now.

Tom’s name wasn’t even on the cover, because he’d become such a pop culture icon by the time of the album’s release — his variety show This Is Tom Jones was in the midst of its two-year run on ABC — that only his face was apparently required. His hypnotic gaze (which followed me around the shop until I gave in) commanded “Take me home”… and, after flipping the album over to look at the track selection, I did just that.

Because while this one was stocked as usual with Broadway numbers (“If I Ruled the World” from Pickwick and “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha), Tom’s latest hit ballad (“Without Love”) and ballads by other hit artists (The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” The Bee Gees’ “Let There Be Love”) and a bombastic country belter called “Can’t Stop Loving You” which isn’t to be confused with the far superior Ray Charles song of a similar name that Tom had previously covered, someone at Decca had the brilliant idea to push all of those songs on to Side Two. Side One, on the other hand, was reserved for hot rock-’em sock-’em ToJo action from start to finish.

To this day, I’ve always wished that Tom had done an album made up entirely of soul covers, and Side One demonstrates why. It’s bookended with rip-roaring versions of Stax/Volt classics — Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and Sam & Dave’s “I Thank You,” both of them cut at breakneck speed with the help of a killer band led by British session guitar legend Big Jim Sullivan, and both of which are positively soaked with Welsh chest sweat by the time they’re done.

Big Jim also comes through with some serious chicken-pickin’ on a cover of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” a rendition which features a hilarious ToJo intro rap aimed at “Some of y’all who never been down south too much” — like, to the Vale of Glamorgan? — and a performance that’s as cartoonishly volcanic as Tony Joe’s is laconic. Even after over 35 years of familiarity with this version, my jaw still drops to the floor at the moment where ToJo berates Annie’s brother for stealing watermelons out of his truck patch.

Roots rock evidently being squarely in his wheelhouse, Tom then takes a solid swing at Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” a rendition which is only let down slightly by its variety show production number vibes and the fact that John Fogerty’s line about “I cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis” is witlessly transformed here into “I’ve seen a lot of places like Memphis”. What’s the matter, Tom? Don’t hunky Welshmen do dishes?

Up next is “Sugar, Sugar,” a massive 1969 hit for bubblegum studio group The Archies — but Tom takes the song back to Soulville with an arrangement modeled on Wilson Pickett’s recent hit cover. Of course, ToJo being ToJo, he can’t resist getting overly insistent when it gets to the “Pour a little sugar on me, baby” refrain…

The real wild card on Side One is the cover of Shocking Blue’s recent worldwide hit “Venus,” a song which has neither soul or country roots, but which Tom manages to take a lusty, gator-sized chomp out of nonetheless. The TV show horn section suits this one to a “T” (or perhaps a “V”), lighting up the sky over the song’s churning and burning rhythm section as Tom melts with priapic perspiration in the presence of the titular goddess; you can practically see the full-on ToJo gyrations happening in conjunction with the killer drum break at 0:49. But the best part of all comes during the instrumental break at 1:42, where our lad gets so worked up that he starts wailing like a muezzin in a minaret — or whatever the Welsh version of that would be.

I snapped the photo at the top of this post about four years ago, when I was still living in North Carolina. I’d just scored a rare (at least in these parts) German copy of Tom for a buck at a local bookstore, and I was in the process of A/B-ing it against the US copy I’d found in Chicago all those years ago when Oscar jumped up on the turntable. Clearly, this was a once-in-a-lifetime “handsome-off” — with Oscar matching his tuxedo’d elegance against ToJo’s South Wales smolder — so I just had to take a pic.

The German pressing, unsurprisingly, sounded much better than my old US one, so I kept it and passed my first copy of Tom on to someone else who was in need of accepting ToJo into their life. Equally unsurprising was the fact that, while Oscar had enthusiastically hopped up onto the turntable for Side One, he didn’t come back after I shooed him off to flip the album.

I’ve come around to enjoying Side Two on its own ballad-heavy terms, but it admittedly doesn’t pack anywhere near the nonstop Wendell-waving wallop of the album’s first half. Maybe Oscar just wasn’t digging it, or maybe he figured he’d already totally smoked Tom in the handsome-off and saw no need for a rematch. In any case, Oscar, I thank you for being such a wonderful (and wonderfully handsome) companion for so many years…

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