Roy Loney and the Phantom Movers – "Act of Love" (1980)

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If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know the oft-told origin story of my wildly popular little blog.  

It all started with the “Mystic Eyes” radio show on WHFS-FM, which I regularly listened to in 1980 when I was a young lawyer living in Washington, DC. 

I heard great records on “Mystic Eyes” that I never heard anywhere else, which inspired me to start taping the show whenever I found myself at home with nothing better to do on a Saturday night – which was pretty much every Saturday night.  

One of the songs on those tapes became my personal white whale.  I thought it was the best record of all time, but I didn’t know its title or the name of the group that recorded it.  

Many years later – with the help of the internet – I finally figured out that the song was “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here,” by The Last.  I featured it in the very first 2 or 3 lines post I ever wrote.

If you missed that post – which originally appeared just over ten years ago – you can click here to read it.

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I decided several months ago that I would celebrate the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines by interviewing Steven Lorber, the legendary Washington DJ who was the brains behind the “Mystic Eyes” program, and featuring some of the best records he played on that show.

This summer, I listened to every one of my “Mystic Eyes” cassette tapes, and created a spreadsheet with the title of each song on those tapes, the name of the group who recorded it, the year the record was released, and other information.  (The identity of a few of the songs on those tapes remains a mystery, but I haven’t given up trying to identify them.  Dum spiro spero!)

Steven Lorber

For the next several months, 2 or 3 lines is going to feature only music from my “Mystic Eyes” tapes.  Trust me, those tapes contain more than enough great material to keep me going for the foreseeable future.

By the way, I plan to focus on records that were relatively new when I was taping “Mystic Eyes” in the spring and summer of 1980.  Steven Lorber didn’t only play new records on his show – he played a lot of great sixties music as well.  But I’m going to stick mostly to records that were released in 1979 and 1980.  

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I stopped recording “Mystic Eyes” because I moved from Washington to San Francisco in the fall of 1980.

San Francisco was a wide-open place back then.  At one end of my daily bus commute was the so-called “Polk Gulch,” where gay bars stood cheek to jowl.  (No one knew about AIDS in 1980 – the first cases of what soon became an epidemic were reported in 1981.)

Carol Doda

At the other end of my bus route were the legendary topless joints of North Beach – including the infamous Condor Club, the home of Carol Doda, who was the first topless dancer to have silicone breast injections.

The lyrics of today’s featured song pay tribute to the shameless barkers who stood outside those topless bars and tried to persuade passers-by to come inside:  “Admission’s free! . . . No need to be shy there, champ!”  

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Roy Loney and the Phantom Movers released “Act of Love” on their Phantom Tracks album in 1980:

Loney was a Bay Area native who had co-founded the Flamin’ Groovies – another group whose music I heard first on “Mystic Eyes.” Several years after leaving the Groovies, he formed the Phantom Movers, which performed regularly in San Francisco rock clubs when I lived there. 

I bought the Phantom Tracks album in San Francisco, but I first heard “Act of Love” on the “Mystic Eyes” show before I moved west.

Click here to listen to “Act of Love.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: