Battle of the Garage Bands: The Litter v The Misunderstood

Well, well, well. We have the first showdown in the books and it surprised me. Big time. This is why we have all these celebrity judges helping out. I flat out expected The Squires to make it deep into the brackets. Not even close. The Blues Magoos took their New York power and ran rough-shod over their New England Brethren.

So now we spin the winner of the Midwest region, Minnsesota's The Litter, against Southern California's hotly contested winner, The Misunderstood. The seven judges, who Donald Trump has described "as the most classy, opulent judges in the world", will now settle the score with these two bands and their powerful releases from 1967. Don't forget, both sides count in the consideration of the greatness of the record.

Original post on The Litter can be found here.

Original post on The Misunderstood can be found here

To put this into better context, here is a look at some of the competition that these cats bested as they claimed their regional victory.

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

And the winner of the Mid-West Region is...

The unanimous winner of the Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands competition is none other than The Litter with their January, 1967 release of Action Woman/Legal Matter. The Minnesota combo will now join the other regional winners in the waiting room as we move on to our next region, The Rocky Mountains.

As soon as we complete each region (we have 4 more to do), the 11 regional winners will then square off in a head to head battle in an effort to definitively set in stone the ultimate Mount Garagemore record ever released. Here are the winners for each region thus far.

Mid-West: The Litter with Action Woman/Legal Matter

Texas: The 13th Floor Elevators with You're Gonna Miss Me/Tried To Hide

New England: The Squires with Going All The Way and Go Ahead

The South: The Bad Roads with Too Bad/Blue Girl

Great Lakes: The Shadows of Knight with Bad Little Woman/Gospel Zone

The Mid-Atlantic: The Enfields with She Already Has Somebody/I'm For Things You Do

New York: The Blues Magoos with We Ain't Got Nothing Yet/Gotta Get Away

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

Mid-West Spotlight: The Gestures - Run, Run, Run/It Seems To Me

Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands rolls on. Today we welcome you to Mankato, Minnesota! 

Mankato is a small farming town about 90 minutes south of Minneapolis and about 90 minutes north of the Iowa border. Of the 24,000 residents living in Mankato in 1964, we're going to focus today on four of them: Gus Dewey, Tom Klugherz, Bruce Waterston and Dale Menten. Together the Mankato-four were known as The Gestures. They started off in high school playing surf music but quickly transitioned to vocal rock. In October of 1964 the band released their first single for the regional label Soma Records. That song, written by Menten, was the excellent Run, Run, Run. Believe it or not they had a real hit on their hands. The song went to number 44 nationally, number 1 in Minneapolis, number 1 in New York City and number 3 in Los Angeles. The small town band and the small local label couldn't keep up with production and the song began to fall from the charts as there literally weren't enough records to ship to the stores. At least Soma Records had the good idea to print a limited edition of the records in blue vinyl! How cool!

Now we get to flip that record over and dig on the brilliant It Seems To Me, also written by Dale Menten. It Seems To Me is a jazzy little number that really shows the maturity of Menten's songwriting. 

Sadly, after just two releases the band dispersed.

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

Mid-West Spotlight: The Cornerstones - You Rule Me

Day four of our Midwest spotlight takes us back to North Dakota. Grand Forks, right on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota to be precise. The band is The Cornerstones and their song, You Rule Me, was a major regional hit, making big waves over in Bismarck, North Dakota, and across the midwest.  The label, Metrobeat Records, was started by Trashmen member Tony Andreason and Mike Jann in 1966, with You Rule Me, the band's first of two singles on the label, getting its release sometime in early '67.

Those are the facts, while the song speaks for itself.  If its writer, lead singer Stephen Rood, had not been studying Joe Meek, and specifically The Honeycombs, prior to writing this, well, I'd be shocked. The production and vocal delivery scream Joe Meek, especially in the opening salvo. Once we get past the brilliance of that opener, we are guided through a series of tempo and rhythm changes - including a frenzied upbeat ska (polka?) section - that just make me wonder: 1. how this was ever conceived? 2. how a band could be convinced to get behind it? and 3. how the hell did they pull it off so brilliantly?  Listen to it in its full unadorned midwest greatness!

I'd appreciate any additional information out there. There's a highly regarded "Best of Metrobeat" featuring today's song put out by Sundazed in 1990 and I'm curious what its liner notes say about The Cornerstones.

See you on the Flipside!

Mid-West Spotlight: The Litter - Action Woman/Legal Matter

More Midwest mayhem today with our 2nd entry for the region's Battle of The Garage Bands competition. It's The Litter performing the garage classic, Action Woman.

Action Woman was released on Scotty Records in January 1967 (with a Flip-Side of The Who's Legal Matter) and after all these years, feels just as fresh today as it did the day it was released. The song is so epic that it led off the first Pebbles record even though their copy of Action Woman skipped!

The Minneapolis hipsters who comprised The Litter were Jim Kane on bass, Tom Murray on drums, Dan Rinaldi on guitar, Denny Waite on vocals and the very talented Bill Strandlof on lead guitar. That said, we need to talk a little about Warren Kendrick here. Kendrick was a local math teacher who formed his own label (Scotty) in 1965 in attempt to get on the rock-n-roll bandwagon after watching The Beatles light the world on fire on the Ed Sullivan Show. The math teacher began writing and producing and releasing numbers for the local Minneapolis kids to perform. Action Woman has Kendrick's signature all over the number. He wrote it, produced it and distributed it himself. Another of his band's, The Electras, released this number on the same label, just a month after The Litter. It's pretty damn awesome, but we'll go with The Litter's version as the definitive take on the song.

The fine, fine flip-side is Pete Townshend's Legal Matter. This is certainly one of the better covers of a song from the hard to cover The Who. Incidentally, Action Woman got re-released 8 months later on a different label, this time paired with The Small Faces' Whatcha Gonna Do About It. These guys knew their UK mod bands!

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

The Stillroven - Hey Joe

Rolling out a ton more of Hey Joe in the next couple of days so we are doubling, even tripling up on our daily posts. How cool is that?

The Stillroven hailed from the Minneapolis suburb of Robbinsdale, Minnesota where they all attended Robbinsdale High School. The teen band was Phil Berdahl, Rock Peterson, John Howarth, Dave Dean and Danny Kane. They released their version of Hey Joe on local label, Falcon Records in May of 1967. It was subsequently picked up for national distribution by Roulette Records a month later.

Minnesota Garage Spotlight: The Castaways - Liar, Liar

Minnesota Garage Spotlight - Bob Dylan and The Hawks - Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

More garage rock from Minnesota. From the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota, we have a garage monster named Robert Zimmerman. Here he is teamed up with a Band called The Hawks, many of whom were residents of Canada, not far from the north Minnesota town of Hibbing. One of the more obscure of his releases, we present to you today, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? released on December 8, 1965 on the local Hibbing label, Columbia Records.

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

Minnesota Garage Spotlight: The Deacons - Empty Heart

Minnesota garage mayhem continues into week two with a small band out of Johnson High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Deacons were, at the time of this recording, Earl Pritchard on vocals, Gary Starzecki on bass, Richard Weeks, Rick Youngberg on lead guitar and one other cat named, Chico. Don't know his last name. The high school mates had released two singles with a different singer named Jim Reiff in 1964 for Re-Car Records. Those singles fall in the Frat Rock/Party Rock category. They're fine, but don't hold up as well as our feature song, their third and last single, released in 1966 on local stalwart label, Soma Records.

The song was funded by one Dino Barilla, a bit of a lounge singer in Minnesota with some money connections. Fuh' get about it. Mr. Barilla needed a backup band and called on The Deacons for help. The Deacons cut Dino's song, the dreadfully bad Problems About Baby, with Dino crooning away at Kay Bank Studio in Minneapolis. Then they cut a cover of The Rolling Stones' Empty Heart with Earl Pritchard on vocals. And wow, what a difference. The two sides of this single share few similarities. Rick Youngberg lifts the four chord Empty Heart to incredible new heights. Their rendition starts out much like the Stones', albeit faster, but then the band adds a particularly killer Yardbirds' styles frenzied finish replete with wailing guitar and howling screams. I wish it didn't fade out. Fade outs are for sissies. 

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

Minnesota Garage Spotlight: The Trashmen - Surfin' Bird

We still have soooo much Minnesota garage rock we want to spin that we think we'll go ahead and take it through the weekend and maybe even into the early part of next week. But today is Friday and that means we need a good "party song". They don't get much better than this pre-Beatles raver from Minneapolis. 

The Trashmen were a surf band from Minneapolis who combined two songs from doo-wop group, The Rivingtons, to form one song anew. That Trashmen song would become known as Surfin' Bird. Surfin' Bird was released on the local Garrett Records label (this was only their second release for the short-lived label) and distributed by Minnesota label, Soma Records, in November of 1963. The earliest Garrett Pressings give songwriting credit to drummer and frenzied singer, Steve Wahrer (see the scan of my brutalized copy below), but a legal threat gave the Rivingtons back their due credit and royalties. 

Tony Andreason, Dal Winslow and Bob Reed accompanied Steve Wahrer in their frenetic beat down of this bizarre number. Unlike most songs we spin here, we can firmly say that this song was a certifiable hit. It reached #4 in the US just before Christmas of '63 and has remained a top of mind number all these years, even reaching the top 10 in the UK in both 2009 and 2010!

The timeless greatness of Surfin' Bird can't be denied. To point, as I digitized this one last night, my two kids got up from doing their homework to start dancing around the house and then asked me to play it again...but louder. You can readily hear the influence it had on off-beat bands like The Cramps and The B-52s. The vocals sound so much like those of Fred Schneider. 

I was stunned to find just the other day, the French picture sleeve copy on Columbia Records you see at the top of the post in mint condition in a record store in Denver, Colorado. How did that record get there? We'll never know. But now it has a good home. Happy Friday. 

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

Minnesota Garage Spotlight: The Gestures - Don't Mess Around and Candlelight

Don't Mess Around

Candlelight

Welcome to Mankato, Minnesota! Mankato is a small farming town about 90 minutes south of Minneapolis and about 90 minutes north of the Iowa border. Of the 24,000 residents living in Mankato in 1964, we're going to focus today on four of them: Gus Dewey, Tom Klugherz, Bruce Waterston and Dale Menten. Together the Mankato-four were known as The Gestures. They started off in high school playing surf music but quickly transitioned to vocal rock. In October of 1964 the band released their first single for the regional label Soma Records. That song, written by Menten, was the excellent Run, Run, Run. Believe it or not they had a real hit on their hands. The song went to number 44 nationally, number 1 in Minneapolis, number 1 in New York City and number 3 in Los Angeles. The small town band and the small local label couldn't keep up with production and the song began to fall from the charts faster than Soma could print more copies. (for a real treat, flip that record over and dig on the brilliant It Seems To Me, also written by Dale Menten) The band was brought back into the Minneapolis studios to record their follow-up. That single, released in February of 1965, is our hero single of the day: Don't Mess Around/Candlelight.

Don't Mess Around is an unexpected number. Written by singer and guitarist, Dale Menten, the 2:19 song shows signs of jazz and includes a surprising bluesy time change for the impressive lead guitar work. We're going to also include the Flip-Side for you, the nearly as good Dale Menten song, Candlelight. The single failed to catch on and only made it to number 33 in Minneapolis and failed to chart anywhere else.  

Sadly this would be the last time The Gestures would record. After just two releases the band dispersed. 

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