August's "Forgotten" Music: WHERE THE ACTION IS: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

I've been flensing the carcass of the most convenient Borders, and just bought this last night for slightly less than you can get it from an Amazon vendor, at least...there aren't Too many collections that range quite as widely over a pop landscape, even given how many of the just-out-of-the-garage bands, when they were, sound alike on disc two. Meanwhile, while it was unnecessary to offer all the recordings in mono (a common complaint about this package), as opposed to most which were recorded only in mono, and the sleeves for the discs are less than optimal for protection, this does give a sense of the "scene" in those years, as well as offering a decent selection of orphaned or otherwise rare items...so, if this music is of interest, here's an opportunity to find The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band cheek by jowl with the Bobby Fuller Four...and, happily, that's not the 1980s Knack, below. But, yes, that Kim Fowley. (Somehow, I thought Spirit was a San Francisco band...seems more fitting, somehow.) For that matter, it's a pretty rare album which features both Beefheart and the Magic Band and the Mamas and Papas...though the lack of The Mothers of Invention is another flaw (I can only imagine there was some intransigence on the part of the copyright holders)...


Track Listings
Disc: 1
1. Riot On Sunset Strip (The Standells)
2. You Movin' (The Byrds)
3. You I'll Be Following (Love)
4. Dr. Stone (The Leaves)
5. Go And Say Goodbye (Buffalo Springfield)
6. Zig Zag Wanderer (Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band)
7. Gentle As It May Seem (Iron Butterfly)
8. Candy Cane Madness (Lowell George & The Factory)
9. If You Want This Love (The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band)
10. Baby, My Heart (The Bobby Fuller Four)
11. All Night Long (The Palace Guard)
12. It's Gonna Rain (Sonny & Cher)
13. For My Own (The Guilloteens)
14. Take A Giant Step (The Rising Sons)
15. One Too Many Mornings (The Association)
16. Time Waits For No One (The Knack)
17. Take It As It Comes (The Doors)
18. Pulsating Dream (Kaleidoscope)
19. Tripmaker (The Seeds)
20. The People In Me (The Music Machine)
21. Saturday's Son (The Sons Of Adam)
22. Eventually (The Peanut Butter Conspiracy)
23. Swim (Penny Arkade)
24. The Third Eye (The Joint Effort)
25. Girl In Your Eye (Spirit)

Disc: 2
1. Jump, Jive & Harmonize (Thee Midniters)
2. Back Up (The Light)
3. To Die Alone (The Bush)
4. Get On This Plane (The Premiers)
5. Little Girl, Little Boy (The Odyssey)
6. Hideaway (The Electric Prunes)
7. Listen, Listen! (The Merry-Go-Round)
8. She Done Moved (The Spats)
9. Grim Reaper Of Love (The Turtles)
10. See If I Care (Ken & The Fourth Dimension)
11. He's Not There Anymore (The Chymes)
12. Back Seat '38 Dodge (Opus 1)
13. Eternal Prison (The Humane Society)
14. Revenge (The Others)
15. Come Alive (Things To Come)
16. Acid Head (The Velvet Illusions)
17. Guaranteed Love (Limey & The Yanks)
18. Love's The Thing (The Romancers, aka The Smoke Rings)
19. Underground Lady (Kim Fowley)
20. Pretty Little Thing (The Deepest Blue)
21. You're Wishin' I Was Someone Else (The Whatt Four)
22. Hippy Elevator Operator (The W.C. Fields Memorial Electric String Band)
23. That's For Sure (The Mustangs)
24. Tomorrow's Girl (Fapardokly)(Merrell & The Exiles)
25. Everything's There (The Hysterics)
26. Our Time Is Running Out (The Yellow Payges)

Disc: 3
1. Action, Action, Action (Keith Allison)
2. The Rebel Kind (Dino, Desi & Billy)
3. High On Love (The Knickerbockers)
4. Fan Tan (Jan & Dean)
5. Halloween Mary (P.F. Sloan)
6. Somebody Groovy (The Mamas & The Papas)
7. Daydreaming (Thorinshield)
8. Just Can't Wait (The Full Treatment)
9. Yellow Balloon (The Yellow Balloon)
10. The Times To Come (London Phogg)
11. No More Running Around (The Lamp Of Childhood)
12. Little Girl Lost-And-Found (The Garden Club)
13. Mothers And Fathers (The Moon)
14. My Girlfriend Is A Witch (October Country)
15. Montage Mirror (Roger Nichols Trio)
16. Flower Eyes (Pasternak Progress)
17. Come Down (The Common Cold)
18. Jill (Gary Lewis & The Playboys)
19. Daily Nightly (The Monkees)
20. Night Time Girl (Modern Folk Quintet)
21. Don't Say No (The Oracle)
22. Tin Angel (Will You Ever Come Down) (Hearts And Flowers)
23. Rainbow Woman (Lee Hazlewood)
24. Poor Old Organ Grinder (Pleasure featuring Billy Elder)
25. Baby, Please Don't Go (The Ballroom)

Disc: 4
1. Sit Down I Think I Love You (Stephen Stills & Richie Furay)
2. Splendor In The Grass (Jackie DeShannon with The Byrds)
3. November Night (Peter Fonda)
4. Roses And Rainbows (Danny Hutton)
5. Lemon Chimes (The Dillards)
6. Here's Today (The Rose Garden)
7. I Love How You Love Me (Nino Tempo & April Stevens)
8. Words (Demo) (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart)
9. (You Used To) Ride So High (The Motorcycle Abeline)(Warren Zevon & Bones Howe)
10. Life Is A Dream (Noel Harrison)
11. Los Angeles (Gene Clark)
12. Once Upon A Time (Tim Buckley)
13. Darlin' You Can Count On Me (The Everpresent Fullness)
14. I'll Search The Sky (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
15. Come To The Sunshine (Van Dyke Parks)
16. Heroes And Villains (Alternate Take) (The Beach Boys)
17. She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune (Jesse Lee Kincaid)
18. Sister Marie (Nilsson)
19. Last Night I Had A Dream (Single Version) (Randy Newman)
20. I Think I Love You (Del Shannon)
21. Change Is Now (The Byrds)
22. The Truth Is Not Real (Single Version) (Sagittarius)
23. Marshmallow Skies (Rick Nelson)
24. You Set The Scene (Love)
25. Inner-Manipulations (Barry McGuire)

Please see Scott Parker's blog for links to other music choices for this month...though a few need to be focused a bit (you'll have to dig into Bill Crider's busy blog for his entry, for example).

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

Bill Crider: Strangers When We Meet

Brian Arnold: The Boy Who Could Fly

Dan Stumpf: The Screaming Mimi and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; Repeat Performance

Ed Hulse: The Whispering Smith Films and George O'Brien

Eric Peterson: Still Crazy

Evan Lewis: Mattel Cap Guns

Geoff Bradley: A Film Evening with the Sherlock Holmes Society of London

George Kelley: The Summer Love Tour of A Prairie Home Companion; Green Lantern: Emerald Nights

Iba Dawson: Midnight Lace

James Reasoner: All Through the Night (1941)

Jerry House: The Great American Dream Machine

Juri Nummelin: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Patti Abbott: A Taste of Honey

Paul Bishop: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.--the European-market film versions

Randy Johnson: Curse of the Faceless Man

Ron Scheer: Valdez is Coming

Scott Cupp: Krrish

Steve Lewis: Friends of Mr. Sweeney; Whispering Smith (1948); Wagon Train: "The John Wilbot Story"

Walter Albert: Cockeyed Cavaliers

Yvette Banek: The Pirate

Related Matter:

Ed Gorman: The Lone Ranger collapse

Kate Laity: "Mandrake Anthrax"

Yvette Banek: Star Trek: The Next Generation

FFB: the critical legacy of the Futurians...

Frederik Pohl is credited with getting it all going, sort of. He was the young editor of Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, nineteen when he started in 1940. His magazines were published by the discount line, "Fictioneers," of the Popular Publications pulp house...so he was getting less per week than the lowest-paid secretaries at Popular, and was expected to write for his own magazines. One way he did so was in writing book reviews...and, unusually for the pulps, he took his best shot at applying technical literary criticism to the books under discussion. Slightly younger member of the NYC-based sf-fannish group the Futurians (which included Pohl) Damon Knight took that as his model, for his reviews in fanzines and then for reviews in professional sf magazines, and so did James Blish, who chose to write his criticism under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr. (after Ezra Pound's use of "William Atheling" for his own critical work...in its turn a reference to an historical figure among English royalty).


Donald Wollheim, one of the few members of the Futurians (slightly) older than Pohl (and the primary rival of Pohl's in the factionalism that developed in the Futurian Society) had published before Pohl, but became an editor afterward, and for an even less-well-bankrolled publisher...and his critical writing was somewhat less prominently published, as he focused on his editorial and publishing career. For that matter, Pohl never published a volume of critical writing, while Wollheim restricted himself to the survey The Universe Makers, a chatty review of broad themes published in 1971. Pohl has contributed to various anthologies of critical writing over the years, such as those edited by R. Bretnor, and had a column, "Pohlemic," devoted to criticism of literature among many other things as they occurred to him in the magazine Algol, later Starship, in the 1970s.


But Knight and Blish published books of their critical writing early on, Knight winning the first Hugo Award for nonfiction with the 1956 first edition of his In Search of Wonder, and Blish as Atheling, Jr. following up in 1964 with the first of what would eventually be three volumes of his collected critical writings, The Issue at Hand, both these volumes published by the small house devoted to sf criticism and historical writing, Advent: Publishers.

Advent is for the most part sustained these days by the NESFA Press, the New England SF Society imprint that grew out of the MIT-based fan group responsible for a wide range of Boston-area fannish activity, including the Boskone conventions, and the books in tribute to Boskone guests. Thus a relatively early NESFA Press publication, collecting the historical and critical essays of the third magazine editor to come out of the Futurians, Robert A. W. Lowndes, who published the contents of his The Three Faces of Science Fiction as editorials in his 1960s magazine Famous Science Fiction; despite some impressive reprints and new fiction in that Very low-budget magazine, Lowndes's essays were often the highlights of a given issue.


So...amidst a slow trickle, at first, of critical and historical works about sf beginning to appear in boards, beginning with Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's anthology of essays Of Worlds Beyond and J. O. Bailey's augmented PhD thesis Pilgrims in Time and Space in 1947, about half up through the early '70s had come from the ex-Futurians noted here...and these were among the most important books of my early reading...along with autobiographical and biographical works that these folks, and such fellow ex-Futurians as Judith Merril and Dave Kyle, would write and have published (most in the 1970s), along with those who were influenced heavily by the work of these folks (including Joanna Russ, to some extent Ursula K. Le Guin, Barry Malzberg, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss and particularly Algis Budrys, all of whom produced their own collections of critical writings that have been covered by others and/or myself in this series of FFB posts). As Budrys would note in the 1970s, Blish brought a better literary (and, as a student of music and Shaw's criticism, critical) education to the task, but Knight was even better at stating clearly and forcefully his technical and other sorts of assessment of a given work. All, however, are valuable, particularly when compared to such lesser work in the same vein as that offered by Sam Lundwall and Alexei Panshin, among many others who followed the pioneers...or Sam Moskowitz, who attempted to do important work contemporaneously with these folks, and sometimes did so well, but usually didn't.


For more, and probably more amusing and fully-realized, examples of today's choices of books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: more links

Youthquaking seems to be the not quite overwhelming accidental theme this week...given that I've just seen most of the inept Skidoo (which Chuck Esola, unfortunately absent this week due to even more unfortunate family matters, and best of luck to everyone, reviewed here), I can sympathize. As always, thanks to all the contributors and to you who are reading these...if you'd like to join in, please let me know in comments (and please don't be shy about leaving comments on the individual critiques/reports/citations!).

Allan Mott: Invasion of the Bee Girls

Bill Crider: The Young Rebels

Brian Arnold: 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee

Ed Gorman: The Many Loves of Dobie Gills

Evan Lewis: The Outlaw (1943)

George Kelley: The Pink Panther Classic Cartoon Collection

Iba Dawson: Conversations with Other Women

James Reasoner: "Yak's Last Ride"

Mike Tooney: Perry Mason: "The Case of the Bogus Books" (1962)

Patti Abbott: Traverse City Film Festival 2011

Randy Johnson: The Mummy (1932) and its Universal sequels

Ron Scheer: Crossfire Trail

Scott Cupp: Jack the Giant Killer (1962)

Stephen Gallagher: A Hero's Journey (2011)

Steve Lewis: Dramatic School; Night of the Quarter Moon

Tise Vahimagi: Prime Time Suspects: Theater of Crime (UK)

Walter Albert: The Smiling Ghost

Yvette Banek: Love Field

Related Matters:

Charlie Stella: The Rite, etc.

Michael Shonk: The Hour

Paul Bishop: Take the Money and Run (2011)

Yvette Banek: Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock!

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links (plus one more)

Patti Abbott is on the road, so I'm filling in this week. Look back to Pattinase next week for the next list of links.



Yvette Banek: The Robot Book by Robert Malone (with Seymour Chwast)

Paul Bishop: Bullet Hole by Keith Miles

Bill Crider: Happy New Year, Herbie and Other Stories by Evan Hunter

Scott Cupp: Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller

William F. Deeck: Murder Rehearsal by Roger East

Loren Eaton: The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

Barry Ergang (at Kevin Tipple's blog): The Last Best Hope by Ed McBain

Cullen Gallagher: the Guild series by Ed Gorman: Guild; Death Ground; Blood Game; "Guild and the Indian Woman"; Dark Trail

Barry Gardner: You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood; The Man with No Time by Timothy Hallinan

Jerry House: Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales by Norman Partridge

Dorte Jakobsen: The Last Place by Laura Lippman

Randy Johnson: Mordred by John Eric Holmes, from outline by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (an authorized sequel to the novel which introduced "Buck" Rogers)

George Kelley: One Night Stands and Long Weekends by Lawrence Block

Rob Kitchin: The Whispers of Nemesis by Anne Zouroudi

K. A. Laity: Tales from Moomin Valley by Tove Jansson

B. V. Lawson: The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert

Doug Levin: Dead Skip by Joe Gores

Evan Lewis: The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley

Todd Mason: The Best of Saki edited by Graham Greene; Theories of Everything: Cartoons by Roz Chast 1978-2006 (see below***)

Neer: Murder of a Martinet by ECR Lorac

John F. Norris: The Prisoner (aka Les Louves) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

Richard Pangburn: Nightcap by JCS Smith; The Gentlemen's Hour by Don Winslow

James Reasoner: Too Hot to Hold by Day Keene

Karyn Reeves: Fontamara by Ignazio Silone

Richard Robinson: The Game by Laurie R. King

Ron Scheer: Lin McLean by Owen Wister

Kerrie Smith: Murder in Advent by David Williams

Dan Stumpf: Lori by Robert Bloch

Jim Winter: Night Shift by Stephen King

Related matters:

Martin Edwards: Enid Schantz, RIP

Frederik Pohl: SF Publishing Through the Ages (with Fred)

***FFBs: The Best of Saki, selected and with an introduction by Graham Greene (Viking, 1961; Penguin, 1977); Theories of Everything: Cartoons by Roz Chast 1978-2006 (Bloomsbury, 2006)


If most people would have a quibble with Graham Greene's slender but rich slice of the collected short fiction of H. H. Munro, it would probably be the absence of "The Interlopers," that deft suspense story (and one that librarians and booksellers, those vanishing breeds, are often quizzed about); if I have another, it would be the similar absence of "Laura." Most of Munro's other most brilliant, usually at least wryly humorous horror and suspense stories are here, from the understandably inevitable "Sredni Vashtar" to the delightful "The Reticence of Lady Anne", and the first two stories I read by Saki/Munro, "The Open Window" and "Gabriel-Earnest"...and I much preferred the latter as a child and still do, though then in part because I wasn't quite sure of the meaning of "romance" in context. Greene selects at least a few stories from each of the Saki collections, leaning most heavily on the third and fourth of the five, and not skipping the purely satirical or nearly so, such as the story-within-the-story of "The Story-Teller"...Munro was very much of the Edwardian school of smartasses that also included such brilliant amphibians in both horror and comedies of manners as E. F. Benson, and was one of the painful losses of the literary world in World War I; Greene, not altogether unfamiliar with work in this mode himself, notes Munro's kinship to such survivors of traumatic childhood as Dickens and Kipling, and also his kinship in wit with Oscar Wilde (and certainly the title story of his last, posthumous collection, "The Toys of Peace," not collected here, is also notable for its somewhat despairing sentimentality, also in common with some of Wilde's late work). While omnibuses of the complete works have been available for some time, this selection makes a fine introduction...it's also notable that in Munro's short, war-ended career, his one science fiction novel (of two novels published) predicted a future war between Britain and Germany, When William Came.

Roz Chast is probably the best of the New Yorker cartoonists to arise in the latter half-century...clearly influenced by her predecessors in that magazine (David Remnick notes in his introduction that she was particularly drawn to the work of Peter Arno, George Price and, most of all, Charles Addams) and such others as Jules Feiffer and Gahan Wilson, she's a protean talent, and much given to deadpan and the kind of sideways yet intense scrutiny of daily lives that in its turn, I think, has helped inspire such folk as Lynda Barry and Peter Bagge; her early simple gag panels (such as her first New Yorker contributions in '78 reprinted here) soon gave way to often elaborate strips alternating with single-panels that featured her most familiar sorts of characters, who often look hunched and apprehensive at the best of times, and usually for good reason (I don't know how much the underground comix cross-riffed with her work, but she and no few of the artists there developed along similar paths). One of the finest things I've plucked while flensing the most convenient Borders carcass, this one, sadly, has been at least partially remaindered by its publisher...so look for inexpensive copies wherever dumped books are sold.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links, including some new links

An unusual number of films this week that I'd been considering reviewing as well, but hadn't gotten around to...and the odd coincidence that both Yvette and Ron, for rather different reasons, both cottoned to the same film independently on the same week. Thanks to all for contributing and reading, as always. If you'd like to join in, please let me know in comments...thanks again.


Bill Crider: Pulp
Brian Arnold: Really Rosie
Chuck Esola: Wolfguy
Eric Anderson: Otoshimono aka Ghost Train
Eric Peterson: Ed's Next Move
Evan Lewis: "Wholly Smoke"
"Mr. Gable": Attack of the Giant Leeches
George Kelley: Auction Kings
Iba Dawson: Night Train to Munich
James Reasoner: The Baron
Jerry House: Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
Kate Laity: The School for Scoundrels (1960)
Michael Shonk: Slacker, PI; The Bannen Way; Angel of Death
Patti Abbott: Friendly Persuasion
Randy Johnson: Black Sabbath (aka I Tre Volti Della Paura)
Ron Scheer: Yellowstone Kelly (see also: Yvette Banek)
Samuel Wilson: Flaming Star
Scott Cupp: Age of the Dragons [dead link]
Steve Lewis: The Last Musketeer
Tise Vahimagi: "Prime Time Suspects: Theater of Crime"
Todd Mason: Killshot (2008); Intelligence (2005-07)
Walter Albert: Just Off Broadway
Yvette Banek: Yellowstone Kelly (see also: Ron Scheer)

Related matter:Rupert Pupkin: Movie Art (Bill Crider and Brian Arnold need to see Jaws as a Peanuts strip.)