Gary Pig Gold on THE PHILOSOPHY Of FIFTY YEARS

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.

GARY PIG GOLD – FOR PETE’S SAKE

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.”

Roxanne Tellier: MonkeeMania! Part Deux

Critics called them “The Pre-Fab Four,” but a generation of little girls understood. Those of us coming into puberty, who had been just a little too young to have had fantasies about The Beatles, now had our very own super group. The Monkees were cute! They were funny! And really – could this quartet be more non-threatening? The worse that could happen would be that Davy might not get the girl … but he always did.

My best friends and I would loll around for hours, listening to their latest record, buying every copy of 16 Magazine and TIGER beat with a picture of one of the boys on the cover, and of course, watching the show every Sunday night. We’d squeal on the phone about their rumoured escapades, and dream of some day meeting a real live Monkee.

Roxanne Tellier: MonkeeMania!

Ramping up to the 50^th anniversary of The Beatles February 9, 1964  appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, it’s easy to forget that one of the other acts on that same show, on that same evening, featured a slight, young “Artful Dodger” – one David Jones, aged 19, belting out a song from the hit Broadway play Oliver! During that performance Jones sang “I’d Do Anything” with the entire cast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpLngN6CPE

Segarini: A Monkee, a Montrose, a McQuarrie, and Other Fallen Friends

I felt bad about Whitney Houston. I feel bad about most of my fellow travelers who die from misadventure or self-abuse. I can relate to the fearlessness of youth, the temptations afforded by the entertainment business and more money than brains, and the unforeseen (and oddly unexpected) results some of our most revered icons suffer at the hands of bad decisions and yes-men surroundings.

I appreciate the irony of men of religion and ‘family values’ falling victim to temptations of the flesh, anti-drug celebrities dying because of the very thing they rail against in public, and the folly of those not yet in touch with their own mortality…but it pisses me off when we lose people we care about because of disease, dangerous drivers or delusional fans, lack of resources, or God’s blunder of whisking us off this ball of mud just as we get old enough to start figuring shit out…and that goes for the famous, the not so famous, and the rest of us.