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
Our final day spinning records for the Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands finds us sitting along the massive Missouri River in the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The town is, for all intents and purposes, a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. The Royal Flairs would migrate to Chicago to seek their fame and fortune, but for our purposes, we are going to keep them on the Missouri River straddling Nebraska and Iowa.
These mid-west hep cats had a flair for the macabre. The band released their one and only single on Marina Records in 1966. The ever so brief A-Side is the band composed, Suicide. The number was written by singer and harmonica player Bob Everhart and guitarist Dave Krivolavek. On bass was Dave Brubek (not THAT Dave Brubek), Mel Mathews on lead guitar and Mike Donion on drums. Suicide tells the tale of, well, suicide. Our protagonist offs herself as she is distraught over a love gone bad situation. She didn't even stick around long enough to hear Mel Mathews' awesome guitar solo. Our narrator feels guilt and remorse and, like the Romeo he longs to be, decides maybe he should go as well.
The flip-side is an instrumental called One Pine Box (sticking with our not-so-living winning theme!) and comes replete with awkwardly timed hammering, digging and other appropriately inappropriate sounds pimping the glory of death. The number was written by Everhart, the gentleman seated in the middle in the picture below. The pic was lifted from Back From The Grave Vol 3 (the besterest comp ever?). The liner notes from that great record mention that Everhart was shot while defending a 300 pound Go-Go Dancer named Miss Temptation who was being sexually assaulted by a patron. Not sure if that is true, but there you go. Everhart apparently lived to tell the tale. Ironic, huh?
The second to last day of our Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands takes us to Kirkwood, Missouri. In that St. Louis suburb we find Mike King, Rick Tello, Alan Shelby and Phil Markley. These Show-Me-Staters were so extreme they called themselves The Xtreems. Along with extreme spelling. And extreme use of fuzz. And extreme use of the wah wah pedal. Extreme baby!
We have to spin this one since we are doing a Mid-West spotlight and Leonard Nimoy died this week. The connection being that the extreme Xtreems released this on Star Trek Records sometime between 1967 and 1969. All sorts of contradictory info out there. The band likely recorded this in 1967 in St. Louis.
The A-Side is a cover of The Who's 1966 release, Substitute. This is all over the place. It starts with a nice a cappella opening before entering into an ear piercing fuzz lead. Back to the cool a cappella thing. The band clearly picked up their version of Substitute from the US pressing as it has the substitute lyrics that the US market insisted on.
The flip-side is an original composition called Facts Of Life. The number was written by singer Mike King and bassist Gary Wood. Giving the number a writing credit of Wood-King. Ironically that was the High School era nickname of Jack Hayden, one of our Flip-Side contributors! And like Jack Hayden, this song is covered in fuzz and drenched in Wah Wah.
Mid-West Battle of the Garage Bands takes us to Hays, Kansas. You can't get more Mid-West than that! Today we spin the major label debut from The Blue Things.
The Blue Things were Mike Chipman, Richard Scott, Val Stoecklein, and Bobby Day. The band had released two singles on the Texas label Ruff Records when RCA came around. In came Dale Hawkins to produce a full length album cut down in Nashville. Speaking of Dale Hawkins...as usual we are going to flip the record over and spin La Do Da Da first. The Blue Things give the Dale Hawkins number a raucous, garage take. (We wrote about his original version back in September of 2014, you can hear it here.) Stoecklein's vocals are mixed deep in the record but the lead guitar work of Chapman is really something to behold.
The A-side of the single is the band composed I Must Be Doing Something Wrong. It's a little over produced in our opinion, but not too bad. Harmonies aplenty (including some female-like falsetto) and chimey guitar give this number a nice Byrds meets The Beau Brummels folk feel to it.
Mid-West garage band Battle of the Bands smack down stretches into it's second week. Back to the land of 1000 lakes we go.
The Electras hailed from the tiny town of Ely, Minnesota, nestled on the lakes near the friendly Canada/US border. The quintet of Gary Ormeza, Tim Elfving, Bill Bulinski, Earl Bulinski and Jerry Fink (I can not make these names up) traveled to Minneapolis where they met up with math teacher and budding music svengali, Warren Kendrick and his Scotty Records company. In 1966 the boys recorded two of Warren Kendrick's compositions at Dove Studios. That number is our feature here today, (Just A Little) Soul Searchin'. Within the year, Kendrick's other pet band, The Litter would also record this number, but here is the first recording.
I'm particularly fond of the back-up vocals and the strong keyboard work of Gary Ormeza as he and Bill Bulinski battle it out in the music break.
The flip-side is the very strong Warren Kendrick composed, This Week's Children.
