There was probably a time when one release would not have meant as much to me as it does today. I worked in the record business for so many years I became jaded, the major labels releasing numerous albums each month and the independents trying to squeeze the few that they had through the stampede. I never really cared about the really big ones— it is a part of me I have had since I was very young, this aversion to the stars— and have learned only within the past ten to fifteen years to really appreciate the significance of the lesser-knowns. I get tired of all the pissing and moaning about how the “new” music biz has watered down the quality of music and allowed the less talented to record massive amounts of lesser works. As if they were lesser.
I was twenty-three, fresh out of the Army and full of frustration and cynicism. I had spent the last one year, nine months, two days, four hours and thirty-five minutes in what I considered a military prison. Before I was drafted, I was a radical, a hippie, an idealist. Staunchly anti-war, I isolated myself from old friends and family. I smoked dope, joined The Resistance and demonstrated on and off the University of Oregon campus. When I got out of the Army and returned to Eugene, I learned that I hated everyone who displayed bumper stickers or posters which heralded “America— Love It Or Leave It” or “My Country, Right or Wrong” as if they were the Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments. Those who upheld vocal groups like Up With People as true American music became my enemy.
This is not my favorite column to write. In my youth, death was death, something which happened to everyone else. As a young man, I looked upon it as simply draining the talent pool because by then I was consumed with music— immersed in it to the point that life beyond it was a blur. In middle-age, it began becoming personal— friends and favorites taking the dive either stunningly quick or in dire circumstances.
They were Jesse Dee & Jacquie B when I first heard them— two waifs supposedly in the outbacks of the Yukon surviving by hunting and survival skills, living off the land, playing bars for beer. They ate raw meat, sometimes frozen if there was no way to thaw it (there evidently isn’t, on the whole), but skirted moose and squirrel out of respect.
Please allow me to start this column with an aside. Each year, I compile a list of albums I consider the best. Last year, I picked Lost Leaders‘ self-titled album because it had that indescribable something which made me come back to it again and again. I mean, I love this album!!!
But before I begin passing out (No, wait! There is more!) awards and kudos to those who made a huge difference in my attitude and my life, let me point you all to a problem we in America (including the hat— that be Canada) should embrace— the media. Not that the media itself is the problem, but (as pointed out by Roxanne Tellier‘s DBAWIS column of just two days ago) how we have allowed politics to destroy it.
I present to you music I have loved over the years and have written about but only a few have found. This is about music by artists who deserve more than they have gotten and are consigned to live in the shadow of what they should have been. In many ways, I wish they could have recorded back in the seventies when the music business was a real center of the public’s attention because had they, some would be stars of today.
After ending this last year cranking out two long columns about musicians we lost, I feel the need to counterbalance. While I know that death is a part of life (indeed, life = death according to the laws of nature), it was not all that much fun to dig through the past year searching for musicians recently passed. It was, in fact, a bit of a downer. Reliving the news that I knew was not half as bad as discovering the news I had missed. All too many musicians I admire tripped off this mortal coil without so much as a thank you, Frank, it’s been fun, and I was more than a little unsettled with each discovery. But the past is the past, whether we like it or not, and it was not all bad.
Back in 2007, Pop Culture Press magazine asked me to conduct interviews for their Summer of Love Issue which featured the forty years which had passed since. I interviewed Bob Segarini (The Family Tree), Peter Albin (Big Brother), Tracy Nelson (Mother Earth), Dehner Patten (KAK). I also interviewed Gary Duncan, legendary guitarist for Quicksilver Messenger Service). It was a dream come true. Quicksilver had been my favorite of the San Francisco bands, the epitome of what I thought psychedelia was all about. Gary was very gracious and forthcoming when we talked and the result was one of my personal favorite experiences in all of my writing. So pour a cup of coffee or pop a cold one. If you’re not among the biggest Quicksilver fans there are, you are about to learn more about Gary Duncan than you thought you would ever know.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 