Dave Dudley: Lonelyville

By Don Jacobson

I never really thought of ’60s country music icon Dave Dudley as a sensitive kind of guy. Most of his songs were rollicking odes to gear jammin’ truckers and, as the decade progressed, turned awfully heavy on the pro-war flag-waving. I just assumed it was pretty hard to get in touch with your feelings when you’re popping “little white pills” and constantly rhapsodizing about Ol’ Glory.
So imagine my surprise when I found Lonelyville in the bargain bin. Dave Dudley’s 1966 LP veers right off the turnpike from his usual formula of truck stops and hippie-bashing and gives us 12 songs of mostly crying-in-your-beer laments about, as the title suggests, loneliness. It’s the achy-breaky Dave that I never knew even existed, so it’s really cool to find this – but how well does it work?

Posted on January 20, 2010

Badfinger: Ass

By Don Jacobson
What a bittersweet thing is the 1973 Badfinger album Ass. As a Bin Dive entry, it is eminently qualified because it completely flew under the public’s radar (it was released simultaneously with their first Warner Brothers album Badfinger, which flopped, too). It also fits the bill because it is an unjustly overlooked artistic success – it featured the penultimate popsters branching out into early ’70s-style hard-boogie psych-rock and showed what could have been from a band that was right on the edge of a bitterly hard fall.

Posted on April 9, 2009

Bin Dive’s Five Favorite Cover Songs

By Scott Buckner

Cover songs are the ugly step-sister necessity of bar and wedding bands everywhere, yet they also seem to attract the already-famous who are happy to use covers to suck money from the music fan trough without actually putting forth much effort. This has been a staple of American music since the 78rpm vinyl disc was invented, allowing musicians and singers to copy, refresh, or completely remake some dusty zero into a current-day hero.
The 1960s was especially littered with the corpses of gone-nowhere originals like The Olympics’ “Good Lovin'” or The Top Notes’ “Twist and Shout” being turned into monster chart-toppers by bands like The Young Rascals, The Isley Brothers and The Beatles. Or if you were Carl Perkins, you were waking up pretty much every other weekend to find out someone was scabbing your rockabilly songs like “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Summertime Blues” into records that would eclipse your own.

Posted on March 2, 2009

The Cowsills: We Can Fly

By Don Jacobson

Nothing quite says bubblegum pop like The Cowsills. And that’s an accurate impression of the band of late ’60s teenyboppers . . . if you stop at their first album, the eponymous 1967 Cowsills, with its still-sickeningly sweet “The Rain, The Park And Other Things.” That song forever branded them – probably rightly at time – as the safest rock ‘n’ roll band in the land. I mean, my God, their mom was right there in the band, adding the fifth voice in their five-part harmonies and constantly casting quick looks offstage to Bud, the despotic, Navy man dad, who made damn sure they all knew their lines and got to the shows on time.
Yes, the sunshine is so intense on that first Cowsills album it probably spawned a whole solar-powered pop counter-revolution of sweater vests and sensible shoes at a time when things everywhere else were getting real hairy.

Posted on January 19, 2009

The Seeds: A Web of Sound

By Don Jacobson

The L.A. group The Seeds have an incredibly apt name because from their humble, barely visible germ sprung some mighty, mighty oaks. Like The Doors (very woody) and Alice Cooper (kinda tinny). There is a direct connection from The Seeds’ organ/synth-heavy Flower Power psychedelia – chiefly authored by unsung ’60s keyboard genius Daryl Hooper – to Ray Manzarek and all the rooms of the Morrison Hotel. And the proto-punk screechings and snotty ramblings of Seeds singer Sky Saxon. . . well, I think it’s safe to say that raw ’60s garage rock reached some of kind climax with him and it was up to Alice and Iggy to take that stash and run with it, later handing it off to the kids at CBGBs.

Posted on November 10, 2008

Rockpile: Seconds of Pleasure

By Don Jacobson

When it was reissued by Columbia/Legacy in 2004, a new generation of music critics rightly came to realize that Rockpile’s one-and-only album Seconds of Pleasure (1980) was, to quote Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds from the album, “nothing but fine, fine, fine.” Even so, it’s good every now and then to remind people of that fact, especially with Lowe taking to the road in October to support his new release, At My Age.

Posted on September 8, 2008

The Return of Roger Miller

By Don Jacobson

Wow. I didn’t realize how lucky I was when I found a very good vinyl copy of this album at the Reckless Records on Milwaukee Avenue a couple months ago. I bought it just because I’ve always been a big fan of Roger Miller, since I was nine years old, really, when his mid-60s smashes “Dang Me” and “King of the Road” succeeded somehow in pushing the British Invasion off my radar for about five seconds. But now that I check it out, I see that The Return of Roger Miller (1965, Smash Records) has NEVER been released as a CD. Amazing. This was his “King of the Road” album! What gives? It turns out the big songs off it have only been issued on CD in “greatest hits” form.

Posted on June 9, 2008

Chad Everett: All Strung Out

By Don Jacobson

This album has been lumped into the Movie Stars Making Godawful Vanity Projects bin, along with the likes of William Shatner rapping Dylan and Jayne Mansfield reading Shakespearian sonnets. And for the most part, that’s probably where it belongs. But even though it’s most assuredly crap, Chad Everett’s All Strung Out has a couple of worthy moments when the hunky TV doctor starts singing about his love for God in a few original gospel tunes that roll out in a kind of whitebread, early ’70s version of Ike Turner on a Jesus bender.

Posted on March 30, 2008

Wings: Back to the Egg

By Don Jacobson

Back to the Egg was Wings’ swan song and, to me, always a criminally underrated record. But because it followed a true stinker, 1978’s soft-boiled London Town, the then-all-powerful handful of music critics of the day were predisposed to hate it, and to use it as an example of how the icons of ’60s rock were going corporate in an era when punk was redefining tastes.
And to be sure, there are a few fine examples of Paul McCartney’s soon-to-come descent into Michael Jackson-esque wankery here (such as “Baby’s Request” and the syrupy “Arrow Through Me“). But for my money, Back to the Egg is Macca’s final burst of unbridled rock energy, a fascinating coda to the part of his songwriting oeuvre that produced some of the late-period Beatles’ hardest-edged songs, like “Helter Skelter,” “Birthday” and “Back In the USSR.”

Posted on January 29, 2008

Pat Boone: Moody River

By Don Jacobson

Pat Boone’s pop career didn’t really end because it was killed by the Beatles, as the conventional wisdom has it. It was already heading down the tubes as early as 1960 after his TV variety show, The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, was canceled by ABC. Apparently, even the McGuire Sisters and the Kingston Trio weren’t enough to keep those white shoes shining into America’s living rooms every week. After five number-one hits in the late ’50s (mostly boring, sanitized versions of black-written rock ‘n’ roll classics), it looked like Boone’s inexplicable, inexcusable run as an American Idol was finally coming to an end.
Then came 1961’s “Moody River” on Dot Records, quickly followed by an LP of the same name. Boone’s cover of a rockabilly-inflected country song by Dot labelmate Chase Webster (real name Gary D. Bruce) was his last number-one hit and, in my opinion, the only one that really deserves it.

Posted on December 12, 2007

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