Great Lakes Spotlight: The Del Vetts - Last Time Around/Everytime

Day 4 of our Great Lakes-Region Battle of the Garage Bands takes us back to the Chicago area. And back to Dunwich, Man. Today we spin both sides of the Del Vetts debut single from August, 1966. 

We'll I'm sitting here sinking on deeper down.
My head is a' spinning around and 'round.
I can't seem to shake this feeling.
Oh, My body is a rockin' and a-reelin'.
Oh' it's such a funny feeling
that I know this is the last time around for me, Oh yeah, 

Oh, I'm sinking on sinking on deeper down.
My eyes are blood and I can't hear a sound.
Fight it! help me fight it.
Because I know this is the last time around for me. 

The Del Vetts were Jim Lauer on vocals and lead guitar, Bob Good on rhythm, Jack Burchall on bass and Roger Deatherage on drums.

Their debut single was a raging original composed by their friend, Dennis Dahlquist who penned a kick ass Yardbirds inspired song called The Last Time Around. Production is perfect as is Lauer's vocal delivery and Better Man Than I inspired guitar break. Jeff Beck would have been proud. Special shout out to the bass work of Jack Burchall whose work on this song truly inspired me to learn every note of what he did with his fast running fingers. This single was released just days after the Things To Come released I'm Not Talkin' and just two months before The Banshees set Project Blue upon the record buying public and The Shadows of Knight released Bad Little Woman/Gospel Zone. You see why I love this label?

While Last Time Around was a true regional hit, the follow-up, I Call My Baby STP, which came with a nice pic sleeve and an STP Oil sticker as part of a quasi-ad campaign, was a flop. (but the flip is respectable) It turns out that was the last time around for the Del Vetts who went from one bad name to another as they inexplicably changed their name to the lame-ass Pride and Joy, whose lone Dunwich release, Girl/If You're Ready, was highlighted a few years ago. Jim Lauer allegedly went the way of Roky Erickson and Syd Barrett. Play it loud and enjoy.

The Flip-Side is solid as solid gets and thus we include it here. Also penned by Dahlquist, the number is the rather peppy, Everytime. Another kick-ass guitar solo from Lauer. I love how you can hear someone cue them back into the verse after the guitar solo. Low-fi, baby.

Until next time, we'll see you On The Flip-Side!

Mid-Atlantic Spotlight: The Myddle Class - Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long / I Happen To Love You

The Myddle Class first came onto their local suburban New Jersey scene in 1964 as the King Bees but upgraded their name to avoid confusion with the King Bees releasing stuff on RCA Victor. Their first show under this new moniker was on December 11, 1965 in Summit, New Jersey. One of the opening acts for that show was a group playing its first live performance with its now core membership, The Velvet Underground. That's an auspicious start for our guys which consisted of Dave Palmer on vocals, Rick Philips on guitar, Danny Mansolino on Organ, Charles Larkey on bass and Michael Rosa on drums. Meanwhile, Al Aronowitz, New York Post columnist and band manager introduced the band to the songwriting team Jerry Goffin and Carole King who agree to write and produce for the Myddle Class. The bands first 45 was released on the short-lived Goffin-King label Tomorrow and features an excellent cover of Gates Of Eden as well as the brilliant folky original Free As The Wind.

Their next release on Tomorrow is our featured disc, released in June of '66. It opens on side A with the charging, barn-razing Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long. It's got screaming guitar work as well as some plain old screaming and gives the impression of the kind of raucous live performance for which they were known. The song is credited to the band, but it is well known that they copped it from The Blues Project's Wake Me, Shake Me while opening for them and even managed to get an earlier release than the original, itself taken from a traditional song. A later release on Buddha, while still crediting the band, gives arrangement credit to Al Kooper and The Blues Project. That's thoughtful.

The flip-side brings us to a Goffin-King song we flipsiders happen to really love, I Happen To Love You. The band was somewhat of a song tester for Goffin-King with some songs redirected to The Monkees, and one can easily imagine Micky Dolenz voice on this song. There are demos of Goin' Back and Pleasant Valley Sunday as well as others waiting for a well-deserved retrospective of The Myddle Class. The band only released one more single, also on Tomorrow. Charles Larkey married Carole King, Dave Palmer was an early vocalist for Steely Dan, and Rick Philips was senselessly murdered in 1969 by a jealous roommate.

You can also hear a version of I Happen To Love You by Them here.

See you on the Flip-Side!

Original Song Project: Jack Hayden, Olivia Is Here

So here's a song I wrote not too long ago for the child of a close friend of mine entitled Olivia Is Here. I had intended to put something together at the time of her birth, as I had done for his son, but this one didn't see daylight until she was a good five years old.  Which means she was able to give it a good listen for herself soon after it was recorded.  I'm playing a 1948 Gretsch Synchromatic in an open tuning.  Not much more to say other than that at the time I was listening to a lot of Merle Travis early instrumentals, so if you know that music you might detect that influence.

Original Song Project - Morgan Young -- Nothing Left To Lose

A quiet whimper offered for your use about a dirty little town of stray dogs, lust and hate. I hope you enjoy.

Photograph (C) Morgan Young, 2011

Original Song Project: Jeff Stovall - Middle Lila

Willets, California singer/songwriter and Original Song Project veteran, Jeff Stovall, kicked off his Kickstarter campaign today and we at Flip-side are dang excited.  Check out his campaign here and meanwhile you can listen to his song Middle Lila below. It's a demo of one of the songs that he will be featuring on his first record. We encourage you to get behind this incredible talent.

Until next time, see you on the flip-side!

Dunwich Records: The Del-Vetts - The Last Time Around and Everytime

Last Time Around

Everytime

Day 7 -- yes, 7! -- of our look at Dunwich Records, man!

We'll I'm sitting here sinking on deeper down.
My head is a' spinning around and 'round.
I can't seem to shake this feeling.
Oh, My body is a rockin' and a-reelin'.
Oh' it's such a funny feeling
that I know this is the last time around for me, Oh yeah, 

Oh, I'm sinking on sinking on deeper down.
My eyes are blood and I can't hear a sound.
Fight it! help me fight it.
Because I know this is the last time around for me. 

Oh Yeah! This is another Mount Garagemore record from Dunwich and one that I was very pleased to add to my personal collection. Today we look at The Del-Vetts. The Del Vetts were Jim Lauer on vocals and lead guitar, Bob Good on rhythm, Jack Burchall on bass and Roger Deatherage on drums.

Their debut single in June of 1966 was an original composed by their friend, Dennis Dahlquist who penned a kick ass Yardbirds inspired song called The Last Time Around. Production is perfect as is Lauer's vocal delivery and Better Man Than I inspired guitar break. Jeff Beck would have been proud. Special shout out to the bass work of Jack Burchall whose work on this song truly inspired me to learn every note of what he did with his fast running fingers. This single was released just days after the Things To Come released I'm Not Talkin' and just two months before The Banshees set Project Blue upon the record buying public and The Shadows of Knight released Bad Little Woman/Gospel Zone. You see why I love this label?

While Last Time Around was a solid regional hit, the follow-up, I Call My Baby STP, which came with a nice pic sleeve and an STP Oil sticker as part of a quasi-ad campaign, was a flop. (but the flip is respectable) It turns out that was the last time around for the Del-Vetts who went from one bad name to another as they inexplicably changed their name to the lame-ass Pride and Joy, whose lone Dunwich release, Girl/If You're Ready, was highlighted just days ago. Jim Lauer allegedly went the way of Roky Erickson and Syd Barrett. Play it loud and enjoy.

The Flip-Side is solid as solid gets and thus we include it here. Also penned by Dahlquist, the number is the rather peppy, Everytime. Another kick-ass guitar solo from Lauer. I love how you can hear someone cue them back into the verse after the guitar solo. Low-fi, baby.

Sit back and listen to all seven posts in tribute to Dunwich Records out of Chicago. I think you'll get it pretty quick. 

Original Song Project: Jack Hayden - Long Time Comin'

Here's a song about redemption I wrote while I was living up on the South Yuba River in the little town of Washington. Recorded last week on the same digital recorder used on the busker recordings. I hope you enjoy.

Original Song Project: Jeff Stovall - Revolution And Insomnia and Down Around

You might recall a previous installment of this project featuring a song by The Dirt Floor entitled San Joaquin.  The author of that song, Jeff Stovall, is our featured singer songwriter today. In between milking goats and pruning old ornery apple trees on his property in Willits, California, Jeff has been putting together some demos for a solo project. Today we have a couple of the demos written and performed by Jeff and presented here for your listening pleasure.  Us flipsiders are diggin' it!

Enjoy and, as always, feel free to comment.

Revolution and Insomnia

Down Around

You may listen to other OSP posts by clicking on the link at the Jump Station at right.  If you have some original material you think might be a good fit for Flip-side, just forward your recording to flip west or flip central and we'll get on back to you.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - The Jamestown Hop

This song has lyrics, but I've never been satisfied with the vocal performances I've put forth on them. It's now been gathering digital dust for a year and I don't think I'll ever return to trying to do more with it. So, here it is.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - This Song For Sale

As I mowed the lawn one day while listening to my iPod, I was struck by commonality of lyrical themes in much of the music to which I was listening. Particularly in the older country songs by Mel Tillis, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. That got me thinking about the world of professional song writers (to point, not performers, just the composers) and their inevitable approach to music not as a passion play, perhaps not even as an art, but most definitely as a commodity to be traded.

The spew of that thought is this song, This Song for Sale. It was one of those spontaneous compositions that took me less than 10 minutes to write. I didn't do much with it for over a year and finally rediscovered it myself. Upon rediscovering it in my dusty memory, I decided I actually liked it. A quick recording of the song and here I am sharing it with you.

I hope you like.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - Ride That Stingray!

Here is a song I wrote about a friend's tale of running away from home when he was a young lad. I've embellished with some of my own memories and a little reminiscing about the feel of 21 pounds of steel thunder between the legs and the smell of freedom that is the open road.

I, of course, am talking about the moment we all got our first Schwinn Stingray, cruised the neighborhood with the other ruffians and tried desperately to shake our Born To Be Mild reality.

I'm using a 1967 Gibson EB2D bass, a Gibson J200 acoustic, a Fender Tele and big steaming pile of false rockabilly bravado. Some photos for this post came from the blog, The Selvedge Yard.

I hope you enjoy.

Original Song Project: "Vague Memories", The Itinerants

Hello again flip-side. We are back. We are The Itinerants. Remember? You remember us maybe from the last song you published for us last year on your web page? That song was God's Crooked Smile, a song about a Godless killer who sinned and is now looking at a reckoning. We were real pleased with the words we got back from that song. Thanks.

Here is a new song that my brother, Jeremiah McCloskey, wrote and does the singing on. The song is called Vague Memories and is about our growing up in the hills in Omanik Maod, Georgia where we now have our Pentecostal church that we are real proud of. This song was recorded in the church and has the same music players as the last song. Jeremiah plays acoustic guitar and harmonica. I play some other stuff and Mrs. Kay plays bass. Our drummer didn't show up this day.

I hope your listeners might find their way to our church and join us for a song on a Sunday. One showed up not long after our last song was published. But he smoked so we had to ask him to leave. So if you show up this time, don't smoke. Or don't drink none neither.

With respect and God's love, Hollerin' Hank!

Original Song Project: Jack Hayden, Quarters and Dimes

I recorded this song about a year ago. It's in an open tuning. Hope you enjoy!

Original Song Project: "West Virginia Side", Jeff O'Connor

(c2010 Jeffrey O'Connor)

Several years ago I went on a canoe trip with five friends on the upper Potomac river. The first morning was particularly beautiful. It was springtime, unseasonably warm, and just as peaceful and tranquil as you can imagine. After paddling for a while, my friend in one of the other canoes said, "Hey, let's paddle over to the West Virginia side." It caught me off guard, because, until that moment, I hadn't even realized that the far bank WAS West Virginia...I had just assumed that the other side of the Potomac where we put in was Virginia. Even though I am an experienced canoeist, I was not involved in the trip planning outside of renting the canoes, and in the rush to get ready and get out of DC, I'm embarrassed to admit that I hadn't even looked at a map! So, of course, I looked like a total idiot, and we all had a good laugh at my expense as we headed over to the West Virginia side.

The next day it gently rained all morning and we kept paddling on anyway. I loved it. At one point though, the skies really opened up and it began to absolutely pour. However, right at that moment, we were lucky enough to come upon a small bridge, under which we could take cover. So, we parked there, under that old bridge, and waited out the cloudburst while enjoying our fine lunch of Clif bars and Budweiser in cans as the rain pounded onto the river just ten feet away.

That pretty much sums up what this song is about. It originally had lyrics, but I hated them, so into the river they went.

--Jeff

(c2010 Jeffrey O'Connor)

Original Song Project: "Hot Air", John Lawrence

{right click here to listen to John Lawrence's song}

Hot Air is a song with early Soundgarden and Led Zeppelin influences. I wanted to create something heavy and very guitar based. This was also an experiment in creating a full song with my Mac.

If you are interested in the recording part: I created the song using Apple’s Garage Band software. First, I set the beat using the built-in metronome and a Korg Nano Key keyboard ($50 Best Buy). The keyboard is recognized by Garage Band when you plug it in using a USB cable. I layed down the snare, then the kick drum. Using the keyboard, I lowered the sound of the drums by one octave, making them sound more authentic. I recorded the guitar by plugging straight into my Mac Book Pro using a ¼ inch to mini adapter (not the cleanest way but least expensive).

I practiced a bit, then layed down each of the two guitar tracks in one take each. This gives it more of a live feel, even if it’s sloppy in places.

I chose a grunge sound for the rhythm and a heavy blues sound for the lead. After guitars, I layed down the bass using the keyboard and the “muted electric bass” selection. Cymbals came last. I recorded them one at a time with the Korg. I went back and added a little reverb to the lead guitar and the snare drum to give the tune a little more atmosphere.

Hope you enjoy it.

John Lawrence

AKA Johnny Blue

Original Song Project: "God's Crooked Smile" The Itinerants

Hello - My name is Hollerin' Hank McCloskey and I would like to offer up a song to your listeners. We are The Itinerants, a two brother Pentacostal band out of Omanik Maod, Georgia. We are preachers in our rural church and we perform for our congregation while handling snakes.

The song we offer up is called God's Crooked Smile. It is about a godless killer with a split personality who is confronted with his horrendous crime and now looks to Jesus for redemption. Both myself and my brother, Jeremiah McCloskey, sing in this song -- each representing a different personality of our killer.

I hope your listeners will give us feedback and maybe join us on a Sunday at our Church. Thanks for your willingness to share our cautionary tale with your listeners. With respect and God's love, Hollerin' Hank.

[ed. note: I have changed some of the words and spellings from the original email, with permission from Mr. H. McCloskey.]

Original Song Project: The Dirt Floor - San Joaquin

The Dirt Floor is a five piece band out of Mendocino County (Willits, to be precise) playing our own special type of acoustic electric miscellanea.  We're bluegrass...folk-country...tight minor key gypsy instrumentals or loosely-played punkgrass, from the transcendental to the irreverent.  We've been playing and writing for some five years now and we do it all with guitars, banjos, mandolins, harmonicas, bass, drums and three singer-songwriters. I'm on banjo in the picture above. Join us for our slightly insane take on music and watch us freak out, if you want.

Here's a tune I wrote, San Joaquin.  The music for San Joaquin came together out of an intro in one key and a main riff in another key.  Either of the components could have been played in a different key to make them work together, but in the end they were joined by extending the intro and shifting minor and major chords to resolve in the key of the body of the song.  The first verse, spontaneous and improvisational, was left in and ended up setting the tone for the song, which is about getting older and trying to deal with holding on to the ones you love in a treacherous world.  In many cases it is treacherous because of one's own deeds.  Thanks for listening. - Jeff S.

The First Flip-Side Birthday!!!

Can it really be? Yep, it's true. One year ago today the brain trust at Flip-Side International posted it's very first Song of the Week. It was the song that drove us to create On The Flip-Side. A song so beautiful, delicate and rare that we couldn't help but climb to the virtual roof top and scream out loud: "you've got to hear this song!" That song was the 13th Floor Elevators' sublime recording of their own composition I Had To Tell You, from their second album, Easter Everywhere. As first postings tend to go, that song was largely overlooked. We're still so in love with that song (and always will be!), that we urge you to go back and listen to it again. Click here to revisit that very first post.

In this first year of On The Flip-Side we have had quite a bit of action. More than we had ever hoped for to be honest. For instance...

• We've never missed a week's submission of Song Of The Week. How cool are we! Thinking back on the 52 Song of the Week submissions we've done, we think we are most fond of this one from January 3, 2009. It's about the Irish band, The Undertones and their kick ass song of false bravado and lust. It's of course Teenage Kicks. Clicky here for a look/listen back to that SoTW posting.

• Speaking of cool, in the past year we've had ten postings of original recordings of Buskers performing on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Music that all too often escapes the ears of commuters and tourists bent on getting from point A to point B. We've had African drummers, traditional Phillipine folk music, bluegrass, rock-n-roll, jazz, country and blues. One of our favorites (it was hard to choose) was this recording from February, 2009 of the blue-grass inflected band, The Human Condition with their original song, Never Again. Clicky herey to hear them perform this wonderful song and stop to pause what you may be missing next time you rush past a busker in San Francisco (or anywhere else for that fact).

• And we've also had ten never before heard songs presented by four different unsigned artists as part of On The Flip-Side's Original Song Project. Songs that can't be heard anywhere else (unless you happen to live in the basement with one of these artists...and if you do, be very careful if they start fattening you up and taking measurements. It's not a good sign). We're smitten with all of the songs but we would like to draw your attention to two in particular. The first is the first song ever submitted. It's by the Street Preachers and the song is called Last Dance At Ipatiev. The second is by River Jack and it is a beautifully finger-picked number he calls Olivia Is Here.

• And we've also had specials, like our Seven Days of Summertime which featured a distinct take on the George Gershwin classic. You can revisit that here.

Lastly, we would like to complete the circle of our anniversary by giving you the option to hear another song from the artist and album that started the entire idea of us giving you the gift of music. So, without further pause, we present the 13th Floor Elevators performing their original number, (I've Got) Levitation. Enjoy and thank you for taking a look, a listen, and most of all for taking time to join the conversation and leave a comment.

See you on the flip-side.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - La Ranchera

Back in the saddle after far too long not playing. All work and no play makes flip-siders a dull bunch. Today's entry is something that is inspired by, but far removed from, The Zombies' I Remember When I Loved Her and The Who's The Good's Gone. I also should also throw a tip of the hat to the 13th Floor Elevators' Rollercoaster which I have been listening to a ton recently. Duane Eddy and Hugo Montenegro should get some props too. This little number is called La Ranchera. I hope you like.

Original Song Project: "Tres Piedras", Morgan Young

Here is a tune I have had kicking around my head since about 1994 when I was just a wee pup. I finally put it down on tape about 2 months ago. It's called Tres Piedras, which is a tiny town in northern New Mexico I used to frequent.