Brooding big UK guitars from 1981, part two. Who in the world was Modern Eon? “Child’s Play” was a source of fascination for me when I first heard it on Philly’s WKDU. I would call the station requesting “I’ll Be the Driver” and the deejays would have no idea what I was talking about. It’s pretentious and overblown as all get-out, and to this day I’m afraid to play it for friends in fear that they’ll never take anything I say seriously ever again. The album from which it hails is dreadful. But the tune has so much I love about 1981. With production from Hugh Jones (could there be a bigger snare sound?), it’s got the latest in primitive synth technology, Cocteau Twins/Comsat Angels guitar flourishes, conforms to my theory of the 1981 proper approach to sax solo, has great hooks, and very dippy epic druggy magical lyrics sung by an unusual (some would say ridiculous) sounding vocalist who nevertheless seems completely invested in whatever the hell it is that he’s singing about. Kind of the UK equivalent to the Three O’Clock’s Michael Quercio.

Andrew Chalfen

There are elements of Start's sound (besides just their name) that suggest that this young Lawrence, KS. band members were fans of the Jam. Their lyrics are charming, almost painfully earnest slices of youthful introspection, the drumming is stiff-but-propulsive, and on "Where I Want To Be," guitarist Jay Francis demonstrates some tasty Weller rips. However, Start saw fit to fill in the sound with keyboards rather than slashing chords, and instead of the punkly call-to-arms of the neo-mod bands, Start substitute a naive sweetness. The results are more interesting than most similar genre exercises and a rather unique (especially for a US band) blip on the radar from the early college-radio era, .

Friends, I'm growing tired of pretending that I'm going to catch up someday. The next post will be the Song Of the Day for February 23, 2006. There will from now on be a Song of the Day almost every day, but I'm not going to scramble to catch up on missed days anymore. I can't seem to get to the computer and do this everyday, what with school and work and various other goofball projects.

I appreciate very much the efforts of Stewart Mason, Andrew Chalfen, Mark Griffey, Steve Mitchell, Michael Slawter, and anyone else who has gone to the trouble to send in a guest spot. Keep 'em coming.

Thanks very much,

Jon

As you can probably tell from the cover scans here, I've never been one of those guys who treat their records with the care an archaeologist gives to Etruscan pottery shards. As far as I'm concerned, records are here to be played, and since I don't ever plan on selling any of them, I never pay much attention to what they're worth. (Also, living in a house with three cats means that there's not much likelihood that the spines of any of my LPs is going to remain unclawed, so what's the point?) However, I always like to find out how much the Times' first album goes for on eBay -- it regularly sells for well over a hundred bucks -- because I paid 20 cents for this copy at a Best Buy in Albuquerque in October of 1995. They were having a deep clearance sale that included a lot of old LPs, which by this point consisted of over three dozen copies of the soundtrack to John Travolta's lame Saturday Night Fever sequel Stayin' Alive, the Giant Records issue of Shonen Knife's Pretty Little Baka Guy and this. The Shonen Knife record was pretty great, but this is absolutely one of the best value for money purchases I've ever made.

Ironically, although I was already a Television Personalities fan by this point, I didn't know about the Times when I bought this, and was surprised to learn when I opened the DIY silkscreen sleeve (the back, incidentally, is blank save for a piece of paper glued to one corner with the song titles typed onto it) that the album was on Dan Treacy's Whaam! label. In fact, as I later learned, the Times at this point were basically the Television Personalities with Ed Ball as singer-songwriter instead of Treacy. Although Ball has maintained a career for close to 30 years now, the honest truth is that I don't think he's ever been a patch on Treacy as a songwriter, although he's always capable of a few gems. (His 1996 solo single "The Mill Hill Self-Hate Club" is one such goodie, if you ever locate it.) An early version of "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" was released as a single under the name the Teenage Filmstars in 1980, during the period when Ball and Treacy didn't have stable names for their project(s), but I kind of prefer this version, which is a bit peppier and more lo-fi.

-Stewart Mason

There were some pretty cool comps of 60s modfreakbeatpsych coming out of Europe in the 90s like Digging For Gold, Incredible Sound Show Stories and so forth. While these provided many hoours of listening enjoyment, they were fairly straight updates of predecessors like Rubble and the European volumes of Pebbles. For something truly weird and different, there was a series devoted (mostly) to German beat and early psychedelia called Prae Kraut Pandaemonium (and its CD companion Elektrick Loosers). To say that these LPs present a rather deviant take on typical beat and psych templates is a gross understatement.

The liner notes of PKP Vol. 7 say little about the Loosers; only that another song called "Understand" appeared on vol. 3 (sorry, never found that one), and that this was a privately pressed German single. It is hooked by a guitar break that suggests falling down stairs.

Austria's Slaves released three singles in 1966. One of them, "Slaves Time" was compiled on the second Rhino Nuggets box. The one presented here appeared on Elektrick Loosers 3, and one of the international Pebbles comps. It is something of a high-water mark in beat dementia; while the band provides a very cool Pretty Things-style backdrop, some guy who lives in a dumpster mumbles about imagined slights, somehow managing to almost hook up with the band at the end of each verse. "Run away as fast as you can. Shut up. Shut up." Man, we love that.