“There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.”
Ain’t it the truth! Hey, Hi! It’s me, back from what seems like the hiatus that lasted an eternity.
Not that I’m complaining… no siree! I have been BUSY, my darlings … busier than a <fill in your corny but slightly amusing blank here.> Hellzapoppin’, dontcha know, and we’re careening sans seatbelts to what I expect to be a fiery finish to the apogee of the annus horribilis known as 2020.
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.”
Once again, Life has conspired to delay a column, this one being Part Two of the Sgt. Pepper/Beatles thread. It will be posted this coming Friday.
In the meantime, here are some related items from past columns, a little more back story for the uninitiated, and some amusing pictures that prove Sgt. Pepper has always been an obsession with some people…especially musicians.
Bob Dylan duly dumped about another thirty-seven (at last count) albums in our laps last year, while on much the other hand the vast majority of my aural Good Times! during oh-16 came courtesy of Micky, Peter, Michael and Davy. Nevertheless, there still remained room on the Pig Player for the following splendid, purely alphabetically-listed items as well …which you should all be playing too if you aren’t already:
Music’s a funny thing; sometimes a song will hide in the grooves of an album, unloved and unwanted, until someone uncovers the gem and makes it their own. A struggling songwriter may dream of the day that a megastar covers their work; in the right hands, a number one hit can make the writer a fortune in publishing.
This week Paul Revere of 1960s pop band Paul Revere & The Raiders passed away at the age of 76. He and his band were one of the second generation of pop stars who took the post-Elvis world by storm on the back of Beatlemania.
In recent weeks I’ve been contacted by various music artists through various social medias (funny how the telephone is no longer one of them) to pick my brain for the millionth time on how to sell their wares/songs/nubile posteriors up the music industry food chain in the guise of a record deal or publishing deal or both.
It’s always in the form of sickly whining and the fetid scent of desperation wafts across the social media chasm with every single key stroke. “Why won’t anyone notice me?”
Part 8 can be found here
As big an upheaval as the one between 1962 and 1965 had been for pop culture, radio, records, and almost everything else, the years between 1966 and 1970 would be much more intense and culturally explosive. Several unconnected events would lead to changes that had been unimaginable just months earlier. Most would center around the San Francisco Bay Area, but 2 of them would happen 341 miles south of The City by the Bay in a sleepy little town called Los Angeles and a tiny strip of county roads collectively known as Hollywood.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 