Too much of a good thing
Is gonna be the end of me
[NOTE: The story of how I finally identified The Last’s “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” roughly 25 years after first hearing it on legendary Washington DJ Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show is an oft-told tale. Suffice it to say that the first 2 or 3 lines
post featured that song, and that a number of subsequent 2 or 3 lines
posts featured other songs that I first heard on the “Mystic Eyes” program. Here's the first installment of my three-part interview of Steven Lorber, the brains behind “Mystic Eyes.”]
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Q: Steven, I know you’re a big fan of 2 or 3 lines.
A: 2 or 3 lines first caught my attention because it was about music. But I found the personal elements of the blog more enchanting than the music history information, which for the most part I already knew. It was the way you put your own personal observations about what was going on in society in general and in your life in particular at the time the featured song was released. I liked the way you brought yourself into the picture.
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| Steven Lorber with his record collection |
Q: My original plan for 2 or 3 lines was to make it mostly about the music, but it’s turned out to be more about me.
A: And I would say keep going in that direction.
Q: I’m glad you feel that way, but I don’t need any encouragement to write about myself. But enough about me – let’s talk about you. I remember from hearing other interviews you've done that you lived in Pakistan when you were growing up. What took your family there?
A. My father was an engineer who was hired to help draw up plans for dams and other flood-control structures on the Indus River, which is the longest river in Pakistan. We ended up spending eight years there. It was kind of a bizarre way to grow up, going to an American school while living in a third-world country that was so behind the times. We had to boil the water that came out of the tap the whole time I lived there, and every six months I had to get a barrage of shots – shots for cholera and typhoid and hepatitis and so on.
Q: Did you ever come back to the U.S. during those eight years?
A: Yes, every two years we got to go back home for three months of home leave. I would use that time to load up on and hamburgers and milkshakes and records.
Q: Other than the records you brought back from the States, what were your sources of music when you were living in Pakistan?
A: We had American families constantly coming in and others leaving, so every year a new bunch of kids would come in and bring their records. My school had maybe 300 kids in grades one through 12, and everyone was friendly – if you were in 5th grade, you knew the people in 6th and 7th grade and you all hung out together. You found out who had the records, and you borrowed them or went to their house, and you listened to them ad nauseam. And we all had transistor radios, so we could listen to the BBC late at night and hear what was going on.
Q: What were some of the records you remember listening to back in Pakistan?
A: Everyone had Beach Boys and Beatles records, of course. Even my father was a Beatles fan – I remember he came back from one of his trips to the States with the A Hard Day’s Night album. Someone had the Seeds’ first album on GNP Crescendo Records, and the Seeds became really popular in my group of friends. Also the first Love album – not Forever Changes, but their first album – we listened to it a lot.
[NOTE: The Seeds’ eponymous debut album, which was released in 1966, included the group’s biggest hit, “Pushin’ Too Hard.” The British music magazine Uncut described the album as “[a] brilliantly simple, headlong surge of fuzz-drenched guitar, bubbling organ riffs and [Sky] Saxon’s raw, throat-tearing vocals.” AllMusic said that The Seeds “is probably the best album by any of the original American garage bands, without the usual time-filling cover versions and elongated jams.”]
Q: How old were you when you moved back to the States for good?
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| The Fillmore East |
A: I spent my last two years of high school in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, which was a suburb of New York City. The first thing I did when we moved to Fair Lawn was convince my parents to let me take the bus across the George Washington Bridge to hear Country Joe and the Fish, who were very big in Pakistan – very big. I ended up seeing a lot of great shows at the Fillmore East between ’69 and ’71, which was when I moved to Washington, DC, to go to college at Georgetown.
[NOTE: Rock promoter Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in March 1968. It closed in June 1971. The performers who played at the Fillmore East in the three-plus years it was open included the Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker, Derek and the Dominos, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, the Who, and Frank Zappa. Click here to read a classic 2 or 3 lines
post about a 1971 Black Sabbath show at the Fillmore East.]
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Here endeth part one of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber. In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll cover Steven’s years at WGTB, the late, lamented Georgetown University station.
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American boomers know the Troggs’ #1 hit single, “Wild Thing,” and most of them probably remember the group’s 1967 hit, “Love Is All Around.”
But the Troggs did so much more than those two hits. While I wouldn’t put the Troggs on the Mt. Rushmore of British Invasion groups instead of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, or Who, they were a great band that is underappreciated and underrated today.
Steven Lorber and his ex-pat friends listened to the Troggs in Pakistan in the sixties. He regularly featured the Troggs on his “Mystic Eyes” show on WHFS, and he continues to play their music on his WOWD “Rock Continuum” program today.
“Too much of a Good Thing” was released on the Troggs’ third studio album, Cellophane, in 1967.
Click here to listen to “Too much of a Good Thing.”
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