Behold the late Hamilton Camp, who died at age 70 in October 2005. Camp had two careers, and enjoyed a fair amount of success in both. Under his original name of Bob Camp, the British-born singer-songwriter was part of a successful folk duo with Bob Gibson in the early '60s, and placed a couple of songs with Simon and Garfunkel (who covered Gibson and Camp's signature song "You Can Tell the World" on their debut album) and Peter, Paul and Mary. West Coast psychedelicists Quicksilver Messenger Service also covered Camp's "Pride of Man" on their first album. Later, Camp went into acting, with a string of performances that covered over 40 years; my personal favorite was his one-shot guest performance on WKRP In Cincinnati as Del Murdoch, the fast-talking owner of a stereo store that gets robbed while Dr. Johnny Fever is doing a live remote.

In between, Hamilton Camp released a couple of solo albums on Warner Brothers during that odd period when Lenny Waronker was basically given free run of the place and the formerly staid adult contemporary label was releasing some of the most baroque examples of psychedelic chamber-pop known to man, like Harpers Bizarre's first three albums, the Association's peak period and David Axelrod's two albums under the Electric Prunes' name. Camp's 1967 solo debut Here's To You is in that oddball sunshine-pop mode, and the title track (a minor hit single in early '68) is filled with vibes, strings, and an oddly addictive scat-sung hook. It's just on the verge of pure corn, but there's something incredibly endearing about it. Believe it or not, this basically easy-listening single was produced by Felix Pappalardi, Cream's producer and the bassist for Mountain.

Although it's now all but forgotten for some reason -- I have heard this song on the radio exactly once, on a late-night broadcast from the late great KOMA-AM in Oklahoma City when I was driving across eastern New Mexico a few years ago -- "Master Jack" was an actual hit single, reaching #18 in June of '68. (Bizarre bit of chart trivia: as far as I know, there have only ever been three US chart hits by South Africans, not including Dave Matthews: this, Miriam Makeba's "Pata Pata" and Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass." All were hits in the space of about eight months. So how come there was no media buzz about the new "South African Invasion" like there was with the Dutch a couple years later?) It's hard to believe, since this song is so...well, weird. The very first time I heard it, I was working a temp job at Ralph's Records in Lubbock my senior year in high school when Ralph himself found a copy of the 45 in a forgotten pile and played it over the stereo system three times in a row. To this day, I tend to play this song multiple times whenever I put it on; it's addictive like that. What's particularly interesting to me about this song is that an entire generation of twee pop bands have unknowingly copped their entire sound from this single: one wispy female singer, a remarkably clean-sounding electric guitar playing a repetitive arpeggio riff, brushed drums and a bass part that's so subliminal you have to really strain your ears to hear it. (I guess the fourth Jack is just doing the little harmony vocal on the chorus.) But the oddity of the song is in the elliptical lyrics and the mournful way that Glenys Lynne sings them. I can't improve upon Wayne Jancik's description in his write-up in The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (Billboard Books, 1998): Lynne sings "as if she has experienced ontological reality, has been transformed forever, and is not very happy about the whole matter." All I can say is that if this was a hit, there was really no reason why Nico couldn't have made it bigger than she did.

When it comes to record collecting, I think I have the disease somewhat in check. I try not to keep stuff around that I'm not going to listen to, and I regularly weed out a pile of neglected titles to take down to the shop. Also, I always end up giving away those things I picked up cheap to sell on eBay someday. (I'd bet I've had ten different copies of the Bongos' Drums Along the Hudson on my shelf over the years.)

Nevertheless, I have my shortcomings. I do like to own songs that I truly love on 45. I frequently interrupt my wife's post-work cat-bonding with phone calls asking "Hey, could you go to the shelf and see if I have a Searchers' Greatest Hits?" Most significantly, there remain in the drawers and racks titles that I picked up because I was impressed by the first thirty seconds or so during a cursory scan at work.

I was asking some friends for recommendations about 60s pop stuff which hadn't been slotted into one of the collector genres (psych, fuzz, freakbeat, etc.) for some comps I was making. Stewart Mason fired back with a list of suggestions, including some I'd overlooked, and a few I'd never heard, some of which you will see here in the next few days. One of the tracks he recommended was "Dear Delilah" by Grapefruit. "Hey," I thought, "I have that." I wasn't sure why I had it though; most of the late 60s pop psych LPs you commonly find in used record stores (I'm thinking the Candymen on ABC, the Colours on Dot, stuff like that) seem to me to contain a maximum of two decent tracks surroundy by a bunch of novelty-esque filler.

I put Around Grapefruit on a couple of days ago while I was doing some light housekeeping to see if it was as good as I remembered the first 30 seconds of it being. My goodness, it's fabulous! The first track, the one featured here, would be on the A-list of any Rubble volume and immediately went onto my current car mix CD-R. The rest was strong as well, especially Stewart's pick, the heavily phased "Dear Delilah." The rest is typical British Pop of the era, not as "heavy" as the Koobas or the Open Mind, but not exactly wimpy either. In '69 they did an LP for RCA; I get the impression that it delves into the British Blooze sound.

What is the moral of the story? The sensible person might say "The moral is that you should occasionally take time to appreciate what you have instead of constantly acquiring more stuff." The record collector might respond with "Yeah, but if you just amass a bunch of stuff, you'll occasionally discover something great that you didn't even know you have." The sensible person might reply with "When was the last time you mowed your yard? You could use the exercise." And so on. One day at a time, Sweet Jesus.

The first time I heard this song, on WMBR's great '60s-obscurities show Lost and Found (weekdays 12-2 p.m. Eastern at www.wmbr.org, archives available online), I assumed that the Cedars were a British freakbeat band playing with the same kind of belly-dance rhythms as, say, the Hollies' "Stop Stop Stop," to which this song bears a passing resemblance. Discovering the song on volume three of the excellent freakbeat/UK psych anthology A Perfumed Garden (Past and Present Records 2002) confirmed that for me, but in doing further research just now for this write-up, I was surprised to learn that the Cedars came by their Middle Eastern rhythms naturally: the group was actually from Lebanon. (Cedars of Lebanon, geddit?) This is what I gleaned from a few minutes' Googling (corrections and amplifications welcome): thanks to the success of their self-financed 1966 single "Thanks A Lot," the Cedars were signed to Decca and traveled to London to record a few follow-ups. None of these singles ever troubled the UK charts and they broke up in 1968, but the Cedars were huge in Turkey, where apparently "For Your Information" is the local equivalent of "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone," the Ur-text of Turkish garage rock and a song that nearly everyone has covered at some point. Who knew? Incidentally, I also learned that that slightly distorted twangy sound's not an overmiked sitar, as I had originally assumed, but an electrified saz.

Every few months, it occurs to me to Google this 45, because I've owned it since I was in high school but I have no clue who on earth these guys are. Unfortunately, all that ever shows up is a few rare records sales lists. At one point, I did find out that guitarist Ronan Heenan and drummer Simon Ryan were later members of the short-lived Irish folk-punk band Lick the Tins, but that's about it. Anyway, "Don't Pass the Buck" has a vague ska pulse to it, but it's primarily just that sort of jittery, echo-laden post-punk that was so popular in the UK around this time. This is one of those records that's undeniably sort of second-rate, yet there's something kind of cool and charming about it that's kept me from getting rid of it when I've been weeding out my 45s. Love that uber-jangly dual guitar part about halfway through, for one thing.

-Srewart Mason

One of the greatest singles of all time. Made it onto nearly every rave-up party compilation tape I made during the 80’s. It’s the punk song that has it all. Everything one needs to get all revved up. Wonderful in-your-face trashy production, great instrument sounds, fabulously adenoidal nonchalant vocals courtesy of mastermind lead singer/leader Tito Larriva and the most brilliant and hilarious lyrics in the known universe. I’m totally serious. Plugz were probably the first Chicano punk band, part of the LA punk scene in the late 70’s and early 80’s, frequently opening for many of the punk heavies there. They’re mostly known for the flip of this self-released DIY single, a punk workout of “La Bamba”. A cool cover in its own right, but which has nothing on “Achin’”. They made two singles and two albums, the second featuring the cool title cut “Better Luck” (and for some reason an inferior alternate version of “Achin’”). Apparently they even backed up Dylan for four songs on Letterman in ’84, which is kind of wild to contemplate. Larriva went onto form the better known Cruzados after the Plugz demise. Over the years, I’ve lobbied hard and occasionally persuaded some of the bands I’ve been in to honor the song with a rousing rendition of it. Pull up a bottlecap, you juke box maniac.

-Andrew Chalfen

Scottish poet and humorist Ivor Cutler died on March 3, 2006, at the age of 83. The name probably doesn't mean anything to you, so you'll just have to trust me when I say that the world is an infinitely less odd place without him, and that's too bad.

Cutler was born in Glasgow, Scotland on January 15, 1923; he mined his destitute, Depression-era childhood for surreal comedy in his masterpiece, a series of dreamlike autobiographical sketches collectively called Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, Volume 2 (a 1978 album of these monologues has been reissued by Rev-Ola). He became a music teacher, a job he held even after he became first a popular radio comedian and then a recording artist and noted children's book author. He had a few flirtations with the pop mainstream, most notably in 1967 when he played Buster Bloodvessel in the Beatles' artsy flop Magical Mystery Tour, but from the mid-'70s onwards, his primary artistic outlets were in small-press poetry (he wrote several dozen books) and in the post-punk indie label scene, facilitated by the late British DJ John Peel, an enormous fan who broadcast over 20 live radio sessions of Cutler's poems and songs.

These performances ranged from gnomic poetry (the entirety of one of his most famous poems: "If your breasts are too big, you will fall over/Unless you wear a rucksack"), to rambling, bizarre stories accompanied by his own wheezing harmonium and cheerfully deranged songs set to boogie-woogie piano riffs with lyrics like "I'm happy, I'm happy/And I'll punch the man who says I'm not," all delivered in a completely deadpan voice with one of the thickest Scottish burrs on record. Listening to Ivor Cutler reveals a world where people with woolen eyes get annoyed if you try to replace them with real ones, restaurant menus feature Bicarbonate of Chicken and family stories include the time dad had intercourse with a polar bear on a Canadian vacation. And yet, he wasn't merely a charming goofball, because a persistent dark streak runs through his work: there are moments of genuine anguish in poems like "An Old Man," some of the autobiographical material makes Angela's Ashes read like P.G. Wodehouse, and even the goofy, child-like "I Believe In Bugs" ends with Cutler looking forward to being dead and buried, providing nourishment for various creepy-crawlers.

Try as I might, I can't feel bad that Cutler is gone: he'd been in ill health for years, was reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's, and said in one of his last published interviews a few years ago that since he had outlived all of his friends and family, he was basically just waiting to die. Sometimes it's best to let go. Still, he will be missed.

-Stewart Mason

Brooding big UK guitars from 1981, part three. By the time they had a US release, they were but a shadow of their former gloomy greatness, their name changed to C. S. Angels to avoid getting sued by a satellite communications company. So most folks who stumbled across them at that point never knew about the Comsat Angels earlier achievements. Guitarist/vocalist Stephen Fellows had one of those hauty bitter tenor voices that seemed to accompany so much of this kind of drama king music. He was great at moping with gritted teeth about psychic breakdown, failed relationships, and general English bleakness – the perfect vocal counterpoint to some often interesting and quite melodic songs and arrangements. The Comsats were especially good with very ingenious liquid bass lines; straight-forward, well-thought out effects-heavy guitar riffs, unusual drum parts, tasteful synths with incredibly low-cheese quotient, and knew how to use negative space to make the whole sound gel. Their first two albums were mostly too bleak and not hook-filled enough for my taste, excepting their excellent track “Independence Day” off the first album and “Eye Dance” off the second. They also had some catchy singles between the two, “Eye of the Lens” and “Do the Empty House”. , But they really hit their peak with the third album, “Fiction”. The gloom somehow lifted a little bit to reveal an excellent collection of colorful gem stones glinting in the dark ethers. It’s an amazingly pretty sounding and well-crafted example of the genre. I’m pretty sure the single “It’s History” (which does not appear on the album) was released right before the album. I’ll embarrass myself and say that this song gives me chills. Let’s all marvel at the economy and cleverness of its construction. The lyrics, of course, are total high school angst, and I can understand how some folks can’t get beyond all the vocal histrionics (somewhat related to the oft-cited conundrum of liking Johnny Marr and Smith’s music but wincing when Morrissey sings), but you need to grow and move beyond that, people!

- Andrew Chalfen