Bookshelf OCD.

(P. 82-83) “…On July 2, 1979, we played on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Johnny Winter, AC/DC, and Nazareth to a crowd of forty-six thousand people in Toronto…I saw the other bands we were playing with and I thought, ‘This isn’t gonna work.’ I complained to Premier, our booking agency, about it, and they said, ‘We’ve been in the business a long time, we know what we’re doing’…

“About five or six songs into the set, the whole crowd stood up, and I thought it had started to rain. Dee Dee thought the same thing, but they were throwing stuff at us – sandwiches, bottles, everything. Then, all of a sudden, I broke two strings on my guitar in one strum. I thought it was a sign from God to get off the stage, because I’d rarely break a string, maybe once a year. So I just walked to the front of the stage, stopped playing, and gave the audience the finger – with both hands. I stood there like that, flipping them off, with both hands out, and walked off. The rest of the band kept playing for another ten or fifteen seconds until they’d realized I was walking off, and then they did too. I wasn’t gonna stand there and be booed and have stuff thrown at us without retaliating in some way. We had to come off looking good somehow, and there was no good way to get out of that.”

Bonus:
(p. 72): “We played with Cheap Trick one time, and the bass player sound-checked his instrument for an hour, so we never got a sound check. I have no idea what makes people do this stuff. This ain’t science.”

(p. 87): “We tried to bond with Spector. We watched the movie Magic at his house one night, and we’d go out to dinner with him. One night, Grandpa Al Lewis from The Munsters even came over. He’d be okay with us, but he was very abusive to everyone else around him.”

The resurfacing of David Marks has been one of the many happy developments in the Beach Boys saga. Marks joined the band when he was 13, replacing Al Jardine after the first single and appeared on the first four albums before an altercation with Beach Boy dad and manager Murry Wilson prompted his exit. Marks’s precocious guitar chops were crucial to the band’s early instrumental sound, a fact that gets overshadowed by their celebrated vocals and songwriting. You can read about Marks’s contributions in Jon Stebbins’s book The Lost Beach Boy (2007), which never strikes me as an overstatement of the case. It’s loaded with valid info any Beach Boy fan will appreciate.

Be forewarned, though, that the The Lost Beach Boy is a frustration fest recounting the following: David’s blustery departure from the group; Murry’s possible efforts to blacklist David Marks and the Marksmen from the airwaves; the undeserved commercial failure of his psychedelic group The Moon; the premature replacement of David by Eric Clapton in Delaney and Bonnie’s band; Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour wrecking David’s house; a falling out with buddy Warren Zevon, who thought Marks was having an affair with his wife; David getting off on the wrong foot with Phil Everly after meeting him; drug and alcohol abuse for several lifetimes; financial rollercoasters and more.

Cutting through all of this, though, is the clear sense that Marks takes full ownership of his disappointments and relishes every opportunity to continue associating with the extended Beach Boys family. This is also evident in Marks’s interviews and general demeanor elsewhere (I love this recent series of YouTube videos, for example, in which Marks gives an uber-simpatico clinic on Beach Boys guitar at Hawthorne High). The happiest result of my reading of The Lost Beach Boy, though, was the long stretch I spent with David Marks and the Marksmen’s Ultimate Collectors Edition on repeat in my car. (You’ll have to download it from Amazon – it’s currently not available for an affordable price any other way.) Give a listen to this muddy but eminently cool 1964 B-side and see why it might have that effect.

David Marks and the Marksmen – “Cruisin’” (1964)

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The songwriting/production team of Phil Coulter and Bill Martin pumped out a whole bunch of songs for the Bay City Rollers, many of which sounded like early ’60s fodder for American teen idols (“Summerlove Sensation,” “Remember (Sha La La La La)” “Shang a Lang” and the biggie, “Saturday Night”).  One of these that’s managed to get stuck in my head since the mid-seventies is “Give It to Me Now,” with its “shim-sham-sham-a-ram” chorus. The Rollers’ version, which appeared on their 1974 debut LP Rollin’, is a steamy, slowed down take of a 1973 UK hit (#38) by Irishman Tony Kenny, billed simply as “Kenny,” who was a squealing David Essex lookalike/Suzi Quatro soundalike. The B-side to Kenny’s single was, coincidentally, a song called “Rollin’,” which the Rollers never recorded. Producer Micky Most oversaw the Kenny records, all written by Coulter and Martin.

After “Give It to Me Now,” Kenny would wash his hands of the affair, but a new group formerly known as Chuff, with Rick Driscoll on lead vocals, would step in as the new “Kenny” and record a handful of additional charting hits. One of these was a UK #3 called “The Bump,” which the Bay City Rollers also recorded as a B-side for their 1974 hit “All of Me Loves All of You.”

Kenny – “Give It to Me Now” (1973)

Bay City Rollers – “Give It to Me Now” (1974)

Kenny – “The Bump” (1973)

Bay City Rollers – “The Bump” (1974)

For view master fans, the last few decades have been a dark age in which the collectable packaging of the 60s – 80s (far left) was done away with in favor of bubble packaging that suggested – if you could even find them in stores – the reels’ disposability (middle left and middle right). A recent visit to the downtown target in San Francisco, though, got me feeling optimistic; not only were regional interest View Masters in stock and packaged in a new, durable sleeve (far right), but they were on prominent display, right behind the cash registers.

Last September Bob Dylan lashed out at those who noticed similarities between his work and others’. Dylanologists will know that he’s been dogged by accusations of plagiarism at least as early as his Freewheelin’ days and they will accept and point out that the appropriation of idiom and folk tradition is what the pop culture process is all about. But Dylan’s full songwriting claim for his recent “Soon After Midnight,” in which he purloins the entire chord structure of the Bobby Fuller Four’s “New Shade of Blue” is kind of eyebrow-raising, and I’m surprised that only a few muffled “wussies” (Bob’s words) in comments sections of the online wilderness have taken notice of this. “New Shade of Blue” songwriters Bobby Fuller and Mary Stone have both passed on, but giving them a bit of songwriting credit where it’s due shouldn’t strike anyone as being an unnecessary gesture.

[P.S. Remember when Dylan gave Rod Stewart the business over “Forever Young”? Quoting myself: “In 1978 Stewart would get in trouble … when his ‘Forever Young’ irritated Bob Dylan, whose own ‘Forever Young’ was an obvious influence. So the two mammoths ended up splitting the royalties, which was no compensation for those of us who were irritated by the song in general.”]

The Bobby Fuller Four – “A New Shade of Blue” (1966) (excerpt)
Songwriting credits: Bobby Fuller and Mary Stone

Bob Dylan – “Soon After Midnight” (2012) (excerpt)
Songwriting credits: Bob Dylan

I wondered how Neil Young would have responded when I read these words by Dave Marsh many years ago in the 1980 edition of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (p. 404): “Young has mastered Dylan’s greatest trick, the art of self mythology… Neil Young has scripted his own myth boldly, in the song selection and liner notes to a succession of retrospective albums. The most important of these, the three-record anthology called Decade, represents nothing less than his claim to be considered the preeminent American rock performer of his generation.”

Thirty-two years later, Young has responded in this year’s Waging Heavy Peace (pp. 222-223): “A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don’t believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It’s my life, and I am a collector… The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years.”

I’ll share a personal quandary with you. When the notion of God as a father figure in space first found its way to me, I never once thought about this personage as someone with a white beard and robe. I thought of Him in the cosmic, clean-cut image of a specific record in my earthly father’s record collection – Pat Williams’s Think. This conception has proven to be a complex one for me over the years and I may yet attempt to unravel it. It makes me wonder whether one’s first distinct visual conception of God is a key factor in one’s future religious behavior.  Yes, kinda makes you think.

Pat Williams – “Think” (1968)

One of my favorite “borrowed tunes” is Shocking Blue’s “Venus” (1969), which was lifted from the Big 3’s 1963 version of “Oh Susannah,” which they called “The Banjo Song.” I like how Neil Young’s new version of “Oh Susannah” is directly inspired by “The Banjo Song.” I like the fact that many people who listen to it will think that Neil’s lifting from Shocking Blue. I also like how Neil once had a group called the Shocking Pinks and he will now be accused of lifting from Shocking Blue, who were actually lifting from the Big 3. I also like how I lifted my “Borrowed Tunes” heading from a Neil Young song he lifted from the Rolling Stones.

The Big 3 – “The Banjo Song” (1963)

Shocking Blue – “Venus” (1969)

Neil Young and Crazy Horse – “Oh Susannah” (2012)