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!

The Beau Gentry - Just In Case

The Beau Gentry, formed in Indiatlantic, Florida in '64, made their way up north in the summer of '66 to tour the midwest and soon were amassing a following in the Wisconsin and Illinois area. So much so that they settle in the area for the next while and eventually made today's recording, Just In Case, on a small label out of Janesville Wisconsin in, I believe, early 1967.

Just in Case - the flip-side of the single - was written by non-bandmember R. Bryant and has an odd time signature, somewhat reminiscent of the Yardbirds' Little Games. What is it? 3/4? In any case to me it's like an inverted waltz. Add to this some brilliant CSN-like harmonies, a charging, free-form rhythm section and a time-signature change for the bridge and you know you're in some uncharted territory. The Beau Gentry was Rick Jaeger, Doug Kilmer, Lance Massey and Russ DaShiell (l-r pictured above).

Doug Kilmer and Russ Dashiell soon hit it big when they joined Norman Greenbaum for the recording of Spirit In The Sky and subsequent touring, while Rick Jaeger went on to record and tour with Dave Mason. Not bad! The Beau Gentry also show up in a Dunwich retrospective and it is no surprise they were subject to the gravitational pull of that formidable scene.

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. 

Song of the Week: The Swamp Rats - Louie Louie

 

Moving from The Sonics' last single, released in '65, we'll conclude our Louie Louie love fest with the first single by The Swamp Rats, out of Pittsburgh, PA, doing Louie Louie. It's this '66 release on the St. Clair label that reveals some of the most distinctly 'punk' inclinations yet set to wax. Instruments played and recorded at extreme volumes, a dissonant lead, cavalier vocals, a palpable indifference to product and, above all, aggression.  So, a lesser known tune, with its trademark melody and rhythm lifted directly from a cuban song, gets introduced to a Pacific Northwest audience and interpreted with a fresh rock-and-roll sensibility then turned into a massive popular hit, and yet again into an anti-pop monster, ultimately finds its way to a loose-knit changeable group of kids in Pennsylvania ready to take it a step further.  It's the core trajectory of State-side rock-n-roll in a nutshell.  

One can guess whether The Swamp Rats heard the Richard Berry or The Wailers version, but its certain they heard The Kingsmen's and The Sonics' Louie Louie. By 1966 The Kingsmen's Louie Louie had entered the national popular consciousness, and rightly so.  And we know The Swamp Rats were listening to The Sonics by the fact that they soon thereafter covered, in blistering fashion, the Sonics' rocker Psycho, and that they chose to cover the Sonics' version of Louie Louie with its unusual major key structure, this time in the key of B.

Sit back and enjoy!  And be sure to listen as the song trails out.

Song of the Week: The 13th Floor Elevators - I Had To Tell You

The other night I finished watching a documentary entitled Your Gonna Miss Me. It's a doc about Roky Erickson, the troubled front-man from the legendary 60's garage band, the 13th Floor Elevators whom are perhaps best known for their 1966 single, You're Gonna Miss Me.

It's certainly more about Roky than it is about the Elevators, but there is a lot of juicy stuff about the band nonetheless. As is so often the case, one comes away wondering "what could have been"? What could have been if they had better production, better management, better decisions in terms of drug use? But more than that cast of woulda, shoulda, coulda usual suspects, you wonder what could have been if Roky had better legal counsel, a better mother (the home film footage of mom's self-made Beast King movie is very, very odd), a better father, and of course, a better sense of what is real and what is not real. What could have been? As with Syd Barrett, one gets the sense that Roky was a brilliant musical mind that heard things that others didn't. But you also get the sense, as with Barett, that things were terribly wrong inside the head. Add an alleged 300 drops of LSD, and suddenly the cracks in the House of Usher become unfixable fissures.

Needless to say, I turned to their records not long after watching the doc. More and more these days I turn to their second album, Easter Everywhere. While it is not as "cool" as Psychedelic Sounds of..., EE has better production values and represents some of the bands' best songwriting.

The standout from the album, in my opinion, is the sublime "I Had To Tell You." I can't get enough of it. It's filled with warbly out of tune guitar, funky Rick Danko-like (of The Band) harmonies, a twittering straight tuned harmonica that hits the highest registers, and some of the best lyrics you can get outside of Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry.

The line from the song that always tugs at my ears is a quixotic line that plays up the contradiction between control and chaos. A line that raises hope in the same instance that it dashes it. A vulnerable Erickson pleades, "If you fear I'll lose my spirit, like a drunkards wasted wine, don't you even think about it, I'm feeling fine."

It never fails to get me. Just click on the post title to listen to it. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Morgan