Blood, Sweat & Tears – "Go Down Gamblin'" (1971)

I've been called a natural lover

By that lady over there

Honey, I'm just a natural gambler

But I try to do my share

[NOTE: Due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2 or 3 lines has issued an emergency executive order that temporarily suspends its series of posts featuring records that I heard on Steven Lorber’s legendary “Mystic Eyes” radio program.]

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I’ve had a lot of time to think deep thoughts over the last couple of weeks.

Here are a few of the questions I’ve been pondering:

1.  Will the American birth rate go up nine months from now, or will it go down?  I’m guessing married women will give birth to more babies, but the birth rate for unmarried women may go down.  But I could be wrong.

2.  Will the average American gain weight or lose weight over the weeks (months?) that we self-quarantine?  No one’s ever lost money betting that Americans will get fatter, and that’s where I’m putting my money.

3.  Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, we are going to be up to our necks in Monday-morning quarterbacking about how we responded to it.  Some will say President Trump moved too slowly, while others will say he and the government overreacted.  Some will say that Governor Cuomo’s actions and words were admirable, while others will say that he screwed the pooch and was responsible for the disaster that is New York City.  And so on and so forth, world without end, amen.  Let’s say the over/under for the number of commentaries on the pandemic that rely on 20/20 hindsight is a million gazillion and one – do you take the over or the under?  (I’m taking the over.)

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Heaven help you if you’re a sports bettor – there are almost no sports to bet on these days.

Offshore betting sites are offering opportunities to bet on the weather – expected maximum temperature or the amount of rainfall in Houston on Saturday? – or who will win American Idol.  

(That's a pretty good price!)

That’s not quite as satisfying to your hardcore sports bettors as being able to bet on who will win the Masters or Wimbledon or the next Yankees-Red Sox matchup, but I suppose it’s better than nothing

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Today’s featured song was written by David Clayton-Thomas, who succeeded Al Kooper as the frontman of Blood, Sweat & Tears.

Clayton-Thomas’s lyrics are as phony as a three-dollar bill, and his lead vocals – he growls, he yells, he sings falsetto, he interjects “Lord, Lord!” when he can’t think of anything else to do – are waaaaay over the top.

David Clayton-Thomas

Despite that, the record is a stick of dynamite.  The members of BS&T's brass and rhythm sections are technically very accomplished, and they really cut loose on this recording.  The horns are used very effectively to fill in the gaps in the first two verses and choruses when Clayton-Thomas isn't singing.  

But all that is merely a warmup for the eight-bar bridge that begins at 3:08 and leads into the final chorus.  It’s barely 15 seconds long, but it may be the most powerful 15 seconds of horn playing I've ever heard on a rock record.

Click here to listen to “Go Down Gamblin’.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Toms – "I Did the Wrong Thing" (1979)

I did the wrong thing to the right girl

I’d do anything to turn back time

(That makes two of us, bud.)

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I have a mild case of omphalophobia – I freak out when someone tries to touch my belly button.  

EWWWWW!

Those who suffer from more severe omphalophobia feel anxious even when they see someone else touching his or her own belly button.  Some can’t even look at a belly button.

I’m not that crazy.  I just want you to keep your cotton-pickin’ finger out of my belly button.  (Anything else is fair game.)

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According to Dr. Julie Segre, the first scientist to create a topographical map of the various and sundry bacteria and fungi that live on the human body, most of our skin is comparable to an arid desert – not much lives there.

“But as you walk through this desert you encounter an oasis, which is the inside of your nose,” she said. “You encounter a stream, which is a moist crease. [These] areas are like habitats rich in diversity.”

(I’m visualizing that “moist crease” right now, and feeling just a bit queasy.)

The human underarm is akin to a lush rain forest – plenty of diverse microbes can be found there.  

And so is the humble belly button.

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A few years ago, a group of researchers at North Carolina State University with nothing better to do swabbed the belly buttons of 60 adults, and found a total of 2368 different species of bacteria hiding in their subjects’ umbilical nooks and crannies.

Here are just a few:

An astonishing 1458 of those microbial species – over 60% – were new to science, according to the Belly Button Biodiversity project’s write-up of its findings..

One person’s belly button harbored bacteria that had previously been found only in soil from Japan – a place the man had never visited.  Another subject had a type that typically lives in the polar ice caps.

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The Belly Button Biodiversity’s scientists aren’t worried by any of that.  They say that the vast majority of those bacteria live in harmony with their human hosts.  So they believe most people don’t need to worry about keeping their belly button clean.

But Dr. Claire Cronin begs to differ.  She points out that surgeons who do laparoscopic procedures often use the belly button as the port of entry, and worries about people with untidy umbilicuses: 

There is a surprising lack of awareness on the public's part as to what can accumulate in a belly button. . . . I like to think of it as a cache of a lifetime of little treasures. . . . Most patients have not received adequate instruction on proper umbilical hygiene. It has not received the same level of attention that the area behind the ears has. . . . There is a technique to cleaning the belly button.  It involves soap and water and gentle probing. . . . Alcohol should not be used, in order to not disturb the delicate pH balance of the area. 

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New Jersey native Tommy Marolda was one of the zillions of American kids who were glued to their TV sets in February 1964 when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show.  He taught himself to play the guitar, and pretty soon was playing at local clubs with a cover band.

Tommy Marolda today

But Marolda eventually developed stage fright, and decided to focus on writing songs and producing records in the recording studio he built in the basement of his home.

In 1979, he recorded and a one-man album as the Toms – which made sense, since it featured Tom on vocals, Tom on guitar, Tom on bass, and Tom on drums.  “I Did the Wrong Thing” is from that album, which features several other very good power-pop tracks:

Marolda eventually moved to California to work for Paramount Pictures, writing original music for movies (like Stayin’Alive and Days of Thunder), television shows (Bones, America’s Next Top Model), and TV commercials.  He now lives in Nevada, and recently released Toms album number seven.

Click here to visit Tommy’s website. 

Click here to listen to today’s featured song – which is another winner I first heard on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980.

And click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Avengers – "The American in Me" (1978)

Ask not what you can do for your country

What's your country been doing to you?

[NOTE: This is an updated version of the June 2, 2010 2 or 3 lines post about “The American in Me.”]

Most of you are no doubt familiar with the line from John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural speech:  "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country."

The lines from today’s featured song that are quoted above turn that quote on its head.

Kennedy's assassination was obviously the inspiration for the first two lines of this song, which pull no punches:

It's the American in me that makes me

Watch the blood

Running out of the bullet hole

In his head

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This post is the last in my series of posts about songs I heard on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” program 30 years ago.  

The Avengers

That's because “The American In Me” is the ne plus ultra song of that era – trying to top it would be like Chuck Berry trying to top his opening act, Jerry Lee Lewis after Lewis ended his act by setting his piano on fire.  

Some of the other “Mystic Eyes” songs I've written about are somewhat frivolous.  But there’s nothing light-hearted or tongue-in-cheek here.  The Avengers were not f*cking around.  

There’s another reason to make this the final “Mystic Eyes” post.  I stopped listening to (and recording) that program when I moved to San Francisco in November 1980.  In San Francisco, I started listening to (and recording) a Pacifica radio program that featured hardcore punk bands.  (I plan to do a series of posts on the very obscure music played on the Pacifica program some day.) 

One of the hosts of the Pacifica program was Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys and arguably American hardcore punk’s biggest name.  (According to his Wikipedia entry, Jello Biafra – whose real name was Eric Boucher – attended UC-Santa Cruz, where he “studied acting and the history of Paraguay.”)

Many of the bands featured on that program played at the Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino restaurant and nightclub on North Beach that became the center of San Francisco's hardcore scene – sort of a West Coast equivalent of CBGB.  Among the regulars at “The Fab Mab” was the Avengers.

So this song bridges my “Mystic Eyes” era and my San Francisco sojourn.  

Before we get back to the Avengers, click here to watch a video of the Dead Kennedys' biggest hit, “Holiday in Cambodia” – accompanied by footage from the movie Apocalypse Now.

(Two sticks of dynamite in one post?  That’s the way we roll at 2 or 3 lines.)

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The Avengers were formed in 1977.  On the strength of a 3-song EP and their Mabuhay Gardens appearances, they were chosen to open for the Sex Pistols’ final show at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom.  Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols then produced the band's eponymous (there’s that word again!) EP, which included “The American In Me.”

A couple of the band's original members (including singer Penelope Houston) re-formed the band after the release of a compilation CD in 1999.  In 2006, they performed “The American In Me” with Pearl Jam at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.  

Click here to read a 2005 interview with Penelope Houston that discusses the history of the band.

"The American In Me" is a startling song – a real kick in the *ss for anyone who lived through the Kennedy assassination.  It is anti-government from a leftist conspiracy-theory sort of viewpoint (another of its lines is “Kennedy was murdered by the FBI!”), as opposed to being anti-government from a right-wing Tea Party perspective.

Punk/rock music should be anti-government, of course . . . also anti-parent and anti-teacher.   

Without further ado, click here to listen to the Avengers doing “The American In Me.”

If you want to buy this song from Amazon, just click on the link below:

Undertones – "Hypnotised" (1978)

I fell into a trance

Just watching you dance

Watch this video and you’ll fall into a trance, too:

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Did you ever wonder why “hypnotized” is spelled “hypnotised” in the UK?

“Hypnotize” and most other English “-ize” words are of Greek origin.  The “-ize” spelling is closer to the original Greek than the Frenchified “-ise” spelling that’s generally used by the Brits.

I say “Fooey!” to Frenchified words.  (French fries are a different story, of course.)

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The Undertones formed in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1974.  (I’m not sure if the band’s members are Catholic or Protestant.  St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal for Irish Catholics, of course – not so much for Irish Protestants.)  They released four albums before breaking up in 1983.  

The Undertones

The group reformed in 1999, and are still together today.  In fact, they are scheduled to do a show in Washington, DC, next month.  I’ll be there, unless the tour gets canceled thanks to the damned coronavirus.  (Which it undoubtedly will.)

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My notes indicate that I first heard “Hypnotised” on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show on April 26, 1980 – only days after the Undertones’ album of the same name was released.  (My man Steven didn’t let the grass grow under his feet when it came to good music!)

The photo used on the front cover of the Hypnotised album was taken at a seafood restaurant in New York City, one of the eight American cities where the Undertones opened for the Clash during their first American tour in 1979:

The most distinctive thing about today’s featured song is lead singer Feargal Sharkey’s very interesting voice.  Unfortunately, Sharkey didn’t rejoin his mates when the Undertones got back together in 1999.

Click here to listen to “Hypnotised.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Tina Peel – "Fifi Goes Pop" (1978)

I used to blow-dry Fifi

But Fifi got split ends

Put her in the microwave

Blew up my doggy friend!

“Fifi Goes Pop” is a cautionary tale about a pet owner in a big hurry who puts his poodle in a microwave after bathing her to dry her fur.

That turned out not to be such a good idea:

Fifi goes pop

At setting number two

Cooked from the inside out

In a Fifi barbecue

It sucked to be Fifi, huh?

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In 1976, the 24-year-old Rudi Protrudi – that can’t be his real name, can it? – was living in an efficiency apartment in Harrisburg, PA, where he listened to New York Dolls and Ramones records and fantasized about moving to Greenwich Village and becoming a punk-rock star.

Rudi Protrudi

A few months later, he drove to New York City to see the Dictators perform at CBGB.  The opening act that night was the Dead Boys, a brand-new punk band from Cleveland.

Rudi had never heard of them, but was blown away by their performance.  In 2002, he wrote about what happened when he met them after that show:

They didn't have a bassist, so I offered my services.  [Dead Boys frontman] Stiv Bators invited me to audition the next week.  I hitched a ride to NYC and passed the audition.  They invited me to play with them that night.  We prepared for the show in Joey Ramone's apartment, as they informed me that the show was a benefit for Punk magazine.  We were playing on the same bill as David Johansen, Blondie, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Suicide!  Our set was a screaming success and the Dead Boys made it official.  I was in the band.  Debbie Harry came up close and whispered congratulations. . . . I returned to Harrisburg, packed my belongings and waited for further instructions. 

Two weeks later, Dead Boys guitarist Jimmy Zero called Rudi and told him they’d decided to invite a different bass player to join the band.

It sucked to be Rudi Protrudi, huh?

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But Rudi’s story – unlike Fifi’s – has a happy ending.  

Rudi and his girlfriend – who performed under the moniker “Deb O’Nair” – formed Tina Peel.  (The bands other members included “Jim Nastix” and “Rick O’Shea.”)  Their first gig was at the Washington Punk Art Festival in Washington, DC, where Kim Kane (founder of the Slickee Boys) and the late Skip Groff (a local music producer and the owner of the legendary Yesterday and Today Records store) heard them.

“I loved [Tina Peel] right away because they were cool and had a sixties style that I grew up with,” Kane later said. “I freaked and ran around to find Skip Groff, to see if we could pool our money and put something out by them.  I remember the band being shocked when I asked them to do it.”

Rudi, Deb, and their drummer eventually moved to the East Village and started auditioning for New York City gigs.  Kane and Groff teamed up to release a Tina Peel EP, which got enough radio airplay to get them hired to play at CBGB, the Mudd Club, and other happenin’ venues.

The "Fifi Goes Pop" 45 sleeve

After releasing “Fifi Goes Pop,” the group got a regular gig at the popular Upper West Side “rock disco,” Hurrah.  Deb got a job with music promoter Ian Copeland (the brother of the Police’s drummer, Stewart Copeland), and he arranged for them to open for touring new-wave and power-pop bands like XTC, the Stranglers, and Split Enz.  

Eventually Rudi and Deb formed the Fuzztones, which opened for Tina Peel at Hurrah one night.  To their surprise, the audience liked them as the Fuzztones better than they liked them as Tina Peel, so they decided to perform as the Fuzztones going forward.

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Steven Lorber played “Fifi Goes Pop” on the very first “Mystic Eyes” show I ever recorded.  That was on March 15, 1980 – forty years ago today. 

Click here to listen to “Fifi Goes Pop.”

Chords – "Something's Missing" (1980)

 I got a feeling 

Something is missing

Raise your hand if you haven’t ever had the feeling that something is missing.

Anyone?  (Bueller?  Bueller?  Bueller?)

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I heard “Something’s Missing” by the Chords on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show on May 10, 1980.  (I’m a little OCD when it comes to music.)

I’m confident that’s the only time I ever heard the song on the radio.  Steven might have played it on another “Mystic Eyes” show – but if he did, I wasn’t taping his show that night.

If I was a glass-half-full kind of guy, I’d be marveling at my good luck in stumbling across “Something’s Missing.”  

But I’m more of a glass-half-empty kind of guy, which makes me wonder how many great songs like this one I missed over the years.

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The Chords formed in London in 1978.  Their fans included famed BBC DJ John Peel and Paul Weller of The Jam.

The Chords

The band’s first five singles all charted, but none were big hits.  Its only album, So Far Away, peaked at #30 on the British album charts.

The Chords followed up So Far Away with two singles in 1981, but neither one charted.  So the group decided to call it a day in September 1981.

I recently tracked down the group’s primary songwriter and lead guitarist, Chris Pope, and talked to him about the Chords in general and “Something’s Missing” in particular.

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2 or 3 lines:  “Something's Missing” is a great record.  On the one hand, it’s clever and has a tight structure – it was clearly written by a skilled songwriter.  On the other hand, it’s loud and fast and the band seems to be on the verge of losing control – but never does.

Chris:  It's probably the one and only song in terms of production and playing that captured the Chords perfectly.  There is a thin line between taking a song to the limit and going over the edge and crashing.  I think we managed to stay on the right side of the line on that tune.

2 or 3 lines: What inspired the lyrics to “Something’s Missing”?

Chris: It’s about how I felt about the original punk bands.  They had become a bit too popular – too “big.”  You felt a bit detached from them when you saw them play in a big concert hall as opposed to seeing them close up in a club.  And some of the leaders of those bands had gotten a bit “gobby.”

 2 or 3 lines:  The key change as you go into the instrumental break at the midpoint of the song is very interesting.

Chris: Always loved a key change in a song! 

2 or 3 lines:  What kind of music did you like when you were young?  

Chris:  I grew up listening to my dad’s Beatles and Stones records.  I’ve always liked guitar-oriented pop music from the sixties and seventies – I went from the Who and the Kinks, to glam rockers like T. Rex and Slade to punk groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

2 or 3 lines: I understand you ended up with the Chords as a result of a classified ad in the New Musical Express magazine.

Chris:  I answered an ad in the January 1978 NME – I think the headline was “New wave band with aspirations.”  That’s how I met Billy Hassett and Martin Mason.  

[Note: Original Chords members Hassett – a singer/guitarist – and bassist Mason were cousins.]

2 or 3 lines:  I guess you passed the audition.

Chris: I remember playing “I Can’t Explain” – badly! – in Billy’s bedroom, and “giving it large” about stuff I hadn’t a clue about.  It must have worked. 

2 or 3 lines:  The Chords have been described as a “mod revival” group.  Do you think that’s an accurate description?  

Chris:  To me, the Chords were a power pop band – sort of an amalgamation of mid-sixties English pop combined with seventies punk.  We were obviously influenced by the Who, Small Faces, and Tamla Motown.

[NOTE: Tamla Motown was what Motown records were labelled outside of the U.S.]

British mods (circa 1980)

2 or 3 lines:  My knowledge of British “mods” is limited to what I learned from the Who’s Quadrophenia movie.

Chris: A lot of kids at the time were into Quadrophenia both for the fashion and the music.  I saw the Who half a dozen times and must have played the Quadrophenia album a million times by 1978.  But as far as mod fashion goes, I look rubbish in anything other than t-shirt and jeans.

2 or 3 lines:  One of my favorites from that era is “Hypnotised,” by the Undertones – who were from Northern Ireland.  I understand that the Chords toured with the Undertones back in the day. 

Chris: Our first ever tour was with the Undertones in May 1979.  They were brilliant on that tour, which was put together to promote their debut album.

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Chris bounced around after the Chords broke up.  Several years ago, he formed a new band called the Chords UK, which has released two albums: Take on Life (2016) and Nowhere Land (2018). 

Chris Pope (2017)

Click here to visit Chris Pope’s website, where you can buy those albums as well as Chris’s solo releases.

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Click here to listen to “Something’s Missing.”  It is, I dare say, a stick of dynamite.

Click on the link below to buy a live recording of the song from Amazon:

Bob Segarini – "Gotta Have Pop" (1978)

I loved the Beatles up to Sergeant Pepper

Then they ruined pop for what could be forever 

Bob Segarini’s 1978 album, Gotta Have Pop, includes the song “Love Story,” an unabashed tribute to the Beatles, who Segarini believes “changed the universe/with every verse and chorus.”

But in the title track of that album – a three-minute pop song that is an unapologetic paean to the classic three-minute pop songs that dominated AM radio when Segarini was a teenager – he says that the Beatles “ruined pop” by releasing Sgt. Pepper.

In 2016, Segarini explained why he said that:

The lyric is still as valid today as it was when I wrote it . . . and to set the record straight . . . I loved the Beatles, but Sgt. Pepper caused every artist at the time to put the emphasis on the overall sound/theme of their albums and all but ignore AM radio’s beloved three-minute singles. It was a mistake to think that the genre was square or unhip, and, to this day, it still pisses me off.  

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Here are the lyrics to the first verse of “Gotta Have Pop”:

I remember when I was a boy

I could recall every phrase and line

Of every song I ever heard

But now all the words seem to run together

And none of them seem to make too much sense

It’s a synthesized mess

I couldn’t agree more.  As the sixties became the seventies and eighties,  I found it more and more difficult to decipher the lyrics of the songs I listened.

You want to know what’s ironic?  It’s ironic that I couldn’t figure out the lines of “Gotta Have Pop” posted at the beginning of this verse without help.

Physician, heal thyself!

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Bob Segarini was born in 1945 in Stockton, California.

In 1966, he formed a group called Family Tree, which released an album titled Miss Butters in 1968:

Miss Butters (which was inspired by Segarini’s kindergarten teacher) is a concept album that tells the story of a lonely spinster schoolteacher.  AllMusic reviewer Mark Deming said that the album’s songs (all of which were written by Segarini, except for one that was co-written with Harry Nilsson) were “intelligent” and “beautifully crafted”: 

Segarini’s songs evoke their time and place with a more potent and less self-conscious tone, and the tale of the sad life and times of an elderly school teacher [is] poignant and effective without schmaltz.  Suggesting a middle ground between the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society and the best sides of the Left Banke, Miss Butters is a lovely, overlooked triumph of sixties chamber pop.

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In 1969, Segarini formed Roxy (not to be confused with Roxy Music).  After the group released one album, its producer – Gary Usher, who produced albums for the Byrds, wrote songs for the Beach Boys, and was the genius behind the legendary sunshine pop group, Sagittarius – rejiggered the band, which changed its name to the Wackers and released three albums.  (The first was titled Wackering Heights.)

Segarini co-wrote two songs for the soundtrack of the 1971 movie, Vanishing Point – a low-budget rebel-without-a-cause cult classic that I love beyond all reason.  

In 1974, Segarini and a couple of his Wackers bandmates formed the Dudes, which released one album and had almost completed a second when their record company gave them the boot.

Between 1978 and 1981, Segarini released four solo albums, which didn’t make a dent in the U.S. market.  (A couple of them did chart in Canada.)

Bob Segarini in 2015

He then became a DJ in Toronto, where he still lives.

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If you’ve never heard of Bob Segarini or Family Tree, Roxy, the Wackers, or the Dudes, don’t feel bad – you’re not alone.  

“Gotta Have Pop” is the only Segarini song I’ve ever heard.  And if I hadn’t been listening to Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980, I would never have heard it.

God only knows how that record – which was released in the UK and Canada, but not in the U.S. – ended up in Lorber’s hands. 

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“Gotta Have Pop” is a pop record that celebrates good pop records.  It’s a winner.

Segarini wrote the song for the Dudes.  It was going to be the title track of their second album – but that album was never completed.

Click here to listen to the Dudes’ version of “Gotta Have Pop,” which was recorded in 1974.

Click here to listen to the version of the song from Segarini’s 1978 solo album of the same name, which is the version I heard on “Mystic Eyes.”