If I can just get my mind together, the first “real” concert I ever attended as a wee young Canucklehead was The Jimi Hendrix Experience at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, May 3, 1969.
I’d already been a fervent fan for a couple of years, having spent most of my Grade 8 art class making swirly sketches of Jimi in charcoal. Plus the Are You Experienced album was right up there – almost – with Monkees Headquarters on my 1967 Most-Played List.
On an even damper than usual Spring afternoon in 1969, three guitar-and-drum-beating sisters from tiny Fremont, New Hampshire entered an even tinier recording studio and emerged, just a few hours later, with a dozen original rock ‘n’ roll songs on some quarter-inch tape. These twelve songs were then pressed onto one thousand vinyl records, nine hundred copies of which immediately vanished forever off the face of the Earth. Within a year however, no less an authority than Frank Zappa declared that this album, prophetically entitled Philosophy Of The World, was “better than the Beatles,” and a decade after that the similarly inclined visionaries in NRBQ re-pressed Philosophy briefly on their own Red Rooster label.
Can it really be true that Rolling Stone publisher/magnate Jann S. Wenner has personally conducted a decades-long campaign to bar The Monkees from induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Peter Tork certainly thought so.
“He doesn’t care what the rules are and just operates how he sees fit,” Peter told the New York Post in 2007. “It is an abuse of power. I don’t know whether The Monkees belong in the Hall of Fame, but it’s pretty clear that we’re not in there because of a personal whim.”
First, there was Elvis. Amen! Then there was Ricky Nelson and Johnny Hallyday. Perhaps even Conrad Birdie.
Of course P. J. Proby could often sing “movie Presley” – and much later surely do “Vegas Elvis” – better than the true specimen, Terry Stafford hit U.S. Number 3 with an o.k. “Suspicion” mind during the very height of Britishmania (personally, I much prefer the 1970 Viv Stanshall / Keith Moon interpretation), and who can even forget Ral “This Is Elvis (sorta)” Donner and possibly even the Dick Clark-approved Ronnie McDowell? There was a real cool guy here in T.O. called Subway Elvis too, but he was always getting thrown in jail.
Lindsey Buckingham got kicked out of Fleetwood Mac (again), The Monkees made their first-ever Christmas album (!), and I am still waiting for that big Turtles Battle of the Bands Commemorative Special Anniversary Collectors Edition. In the meantime though, I remained happily pigging along beneath headphones to (in strictly Alphabetical order)…
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The other day I did something I haven’t done in a while. A long, long while. After taking a break to gulp down my standard late-afternoon frothy chocolate shake, a friend decided to drive us spur-of-the-moment clear cross-town to… a record store. Yes, a record store. Remember those?
Ten so long years ago, a random gathering of some of the best musicians from Canada’s greatest musical berg threw themselves onstage as part of the annual Locke Street Festival. Spearheaded by veteran Hammerhead Tom Wilson, said ad-hoc combo was busy rocking and rolling things all the way up that street as the sun slid down when suddenly, a most familiar figure was spotted nearby.
The lead singer of the one, the only, Teenage Head.
Bullseye Records of Canada
