POP-A-LOOZA: The Everlasting First: The Damned

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is another chapter in The Everlasting First, detailing how I became aware of a British punk rock group called The Damned.

It's no spoiler to say that The Damned were one of several groups I discovered in some way via the pages of a rock 'n' roll tabloid called Phonograph Record Magazine. I spoke at length about PRM right here, and PRM was also key to my subsequent embrace of the sounds of The New York Dolls, The Sex Pistols, Blondie, The Ramones, The Clash, Cheap Trick, and more. Phonograph Record Magazine was very important to me.

Like many stories, my introduction to The Damned also involves a girl. Wouldn't be a proper story if it didn't involve a girl, right? They aren't all love stories (nor even unrequited love stories); sometimes the story involves a friend or acquaintance who happens to be female. On this blog, these stories have touched upon musical experiences with The Monkees, The Go-Go's, The Kinks, Heart, The Runaways, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Bay City Rollers, and The Beatles. I betcha there are more such stories kickin' around here somewhere (and a Rush story that was so inconsequential that I never got around to telling it), but those are the ones my stupid boy-brain can conjure at this second. My lovely wife Brenda is introduced in my story of discovering The Jam, and she's at the heart of my reminiscences of The Ramones' Rocket To Russia album and seeing concerts by Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and The Peter Tork Project.

Today, it's all about the intersection of a rock 'n' roll tabloid, a teenaged girl, and a punk group from England. My discovery of The Damned provides the subject for the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl.

POP-A-LOOZA: My Illegal Records

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is "My Illegal Records," a look back at bootleg recordings I've owned.

As the post notes, my first bootleg album was a Beatles boot called The Deccagone Sessions. I wrote this about The Deccagone Sessions in a different post:

My first bootleg record, purchased in 1978. As a teenaged Beatles fan in the '70s, I was fascinated by the idea of unreleased Beatles tracks. Even though there were a handful of legit Beatles LPs I hadn't quite gotten 'round to scarfin' up yet--The Beatles Again, Magical Mystery Tour, A Hard Day's Night, and Yellow Submarine-- I wanted more, more than standard-variety Fab Four fare, more, MORE! I saw ads for this enticing, illicit more in The Buyer's Guide For Comics Fandom, and swooned at the prospect of all this secret bonus Beatles material. I passed up a chance to buy my first Beatleg at a Cleveland shopping mall record store over the '77/'78 Christmas break, then finally grabbed my copy of The Deccagone Sessions at Syracuse's Desert Shore Records a few months later. The Deccagone Sessions offered a hodgepodge collection of BBC performances and 1962 Decca Records demos, plus the horribly distorted live-at-The Cavern Club "Some Other Guy," the promo video version of "Revolution," and an uncredited snippet from the Get Back sessions. The radio cover of Buddy Holly's "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" was my immediate favorite (a skip in the track notwithstanding), with that definitive shooby-doo-wop rendition of "Revolution" a close second. All these decades later, that version of "Revolution" is still without official release.

References to the bootleg ads in The Buyer's Guide To Comics Fandom remind me that those ads played a role in the specific circumstances of my introduction to The Damned. The story involves a girl. Don't all stories involve a girl?

A girl. Not THE girl.

A Monkees bootleg called Monkeeshines served as my introduction to a number of TV-only Monkees tracks, and to "Christmas Is My Time Of Year," the 1976 holiday single by Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork. I eventually bought a legitimate reissue of that song on Rhino's The Best Of Cool Yule CD:

The biggest Christmas treat for me here was THE MONKEES!! Well, almost The Monkees. "Christmas Is My Time Of Year" was a 1976 three-fourths Monkees reunion single by Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz & Peter Tork, a cover of a '60s track by the studio group The Christmas Spirit (with members of The Turtles, The Byrds, plus some chick named Linda Ronstadt). I had the Davy/Micky/Petey track on a boot...er, RARE IMPORT Monkees LP called Monkeeshines, absolutely worshiped it, and was so grateful to secure a cleaner copy of the track on CD. The group's then-unreleased 1967 TV performance of "Riu Chiu" would ultimately become the definitive Monkees Christmas classic, but there'll always be a place in my holiday heart for "Christmas Is My Time Of Year."



There was also Monkeemania, a 1979 3-LP collection from Arista Records in Australia. It was presumably authorized, but it had, I dunno, a bootleg aura about it. I loved it anyway. The Kinks disputed Reprise Records' authority to release the 1973 archive-dive LP The Great Lost Kinks Album, but I don't think anyone really considers that a bootleg.



(Oh, and speaking of Christmas bootlegs, here's what I wrote about my presumably-unauthorized copy of The Beatles' Christmas Album:

One early '70s December evening, I was in the car with my family, riding through the village of North Syracuse, when this crazy, manic comedy record came on the radio. When I asked what it was, my sister said it was one of The Beatles' Christmas records. I was fascinated. But the damned things were elusive; they were originally produced from 1963 to 1969 solely for paid subscribers to The Beatles' fan club, and not available to the general public. To this day, their only official commercial release has been as a pricey limited edition collection of 45s in 2017. The Beatles' Christmas Album, the fan club LP that collected all of the original messages on one platter in 1970, has never been officially released, though bootlegs are quite common. I got my copy at a used record shop in Berkeley in 1989, and I added a decent CD boot...er, RARE IMPORT copy a few years ago. I used to wait for radio stations to play all of these at Christmas time, but few of 'em ever did. When we started This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl, we determined that we would play each and every one of them on our annual Christmas shows, without fail. I can't believe no one else does that.)

My most significant bootleg was a cassette of a 1978 live show by The Flashcubes. That tape was a cherished memento for years and years, and it was my only long-form document of the 'Cubes until the early '90s. The Flashcubes are in my all-time pop Trinity--The Beatles, The Ramones, The Flashcubes--but they only released two 45s during their original late-'70s run. I needed more than that. My live Flashcubes cassette sustained me until 'Cubes bassist Gary Frenay gave me copies of their demos, which in turn kept me going until the release of The Flashcubes' Bright Lights CD in 1997. I wrote the liner notes for Bright Lights, and it's one of my favorite pieces among the miles-high stack o' stuff I've done. It occurs to me that my well-worn, distorted live Flashcubes cassette is long overdue for a lengthy blog post of its own.



After writing "My Illegal Records," I realized that I had forgotten to mention my Dave Clark Five bootleg CDs. The ethics of bootlegs are shaky at best; unauthorized releases bring no revenue to artists or labels, though some fans justify purchasing bootlegs of favored acts because they've already bought everything else, and the boots contain material not otherwise available. That argument doesn't apply to pirates, which are illegal copies of legitimate releases. DC5 boots fall into an area in between; my three illicit documents of the Tottenham Sound--American Tour/Coast To Coast, Weekend In London/Having A Wild Weekend, and The Dave Clark 5 Play Good Old Rock & Roll/Dave Clark & Friends--are pirates of legit DC5 LPs from the '60s. But those are all long out of print, and Dave Clark has been unwilling to reissue them. I already own the four LPs contained on those first two CDs, and I don't think I've ever even seen copies of those last two albums. I'll buy 'em all again from ol' Dave if he ever sees fit to license them for officially-sanctioned shiny discs. Much of the material has been available for authorized digital-air download from iTunes, and I did buy a bunch of those (and frankly, I think those files sound better than some of the bootleg CD tracks). 


Anyway, those are the supplements to my bootleg story. "My Illegal Records" is the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.


TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1)will contain 165 essays about 165 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).

10 SONGS: 4/21/2020

10 Songs is a weekly list of ten songs that happen to be on my mind at the moment. Given my intention to usually write these on Mondays, the lists are often dominated by songs played on the previous night's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. The idea was inspired by Don Valentine of the essential blog I Don't Hear A Single.


This week's edition of 10 Songs draws exclusively from the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 1021.

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD: Flying On The Ground Is Wrong



During this week's show, I mentioned that "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" was the first Buffalo Springfield track I ever owned, courtesy of a 1970 budget sampler album called Do It Now, which I snatched from the fifty-cent bins at Mike's Sound Center in North Syracuse in 1977. Upon further review, I don't think this was quite my first Buffalo Springfield acquisition; I'm pretty sure I already owned my copy of the weird 2-LP sampler Heavy Metal, which contained a unique extended version of the group's "Bluebird." It's also likely that I picked up my copy of another sampler album, The Super Groups, during one or another of my spring '77 raids on the battered two-for-a-buck selections at Mike's Sound Center, and The Super Groups included Buffalo Springfield's "Mr. Soul" and the more familiar, shorter version of "Bluebird." So, "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" was, at best, the second Buffalo Springfield tune added to my library, and maybe the third. Sorry. You just can't trust DJs.



I've talked a little about those few visits to Mike's Sound Center in previous posts, especially in my reminiscence about snagging my cherished copy of The Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. there. I may yet re-visit the subject of that store in greater depth. In that spring of '77, I was a senior in high school. My interest in '60s music was voracious, fueled by...man, by anything I could get my hands on, any book I could read, any record I could hear, any vintage TV performance I could somehow manage to see. One evening, Syracuse University put on a presentation called Rock Of The '60s, a can't-miss chance to see clips of The Hollies, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Kinks, The Who, The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and more, culminating in a Dave Clark Five newsreel, The Beatles' "Revolution" video and their 1966 live TV performance in Japan. It was quite a program, and it also included Buffalo Springfield singing two songs on Hollywood Palace, "Mr. Soul" and "For What It's Worth." I'm sure I already had that Heavy Metal album and its nine-minute "Bluebird" by then, but that night at SU was when I became a Buffalo Springfield fan.

Buffalo Springfield guitarist Neil Young, formerly of The Mynah Birds

Oh, and I first read about Do It Now in either The Glass Teat or The Other Glass Teat, two collections of essays by Harlan Ellison. My copy of Do It Now is long, long gone, but I really oughtta write a full retrospective of that album for my Rescued From The Budget Bin! series. It was a hell of a set, odd and eclectic, with all the pristine sound one would expect from a Ronco Records product advertised on TV. And even if it didn't provide my first Buffalo Springfield track, it was pretty damned close.



THE DAMNED: Wait For The Blackout



The Damned famously began as a punk group, and they were the first British punk group to release an album, 1977's Damned Damned Damned, which beat Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols to retail by about ten months. I had an unusual introduction to The Damned, but I became a fan. And while I often tended to prefer punk groups when they were still punk groups, there's no question that "Wait For The Blackout" (from the group's 1980 psych-pop classic The Black Album) is my favorite among The Damned's catalog o' wonder.

THE DRIFTERS: Sweets For My Sweet



I have to presume that I knew The Drifters' original 1961 version of "Sweets For My Sweet" from somewhere, from oldies radio or whatever, when I was (in theory) growing up. It was a peripheral awareness, and not really a part of my ongoing pop consciousness. My go-to Drifters track was "On Broadway," and that's about it.



In the early '80s, I picked up a cut-out copy of a 1975 sampler LP called The Pye History Of British Pop Music : The British Invasion. I already owned a lot of its tracks, so looking back I've gotta presume I was drawn to it by The Foundations' "Build Me Up, Buttercup" and "Baby Now That I've Found You," and by the presence of a track by The Searchers, which was their cover of "Sweets For My Sweet."



I loved The Searchers, but my Searchers collection at that point fell well short of perfunctory. I had, I think, the Meet The Searchers and Take Me For What It's Worth LPs and a "Love Potion Number 9" 45, all on the Kapp Records label, and probably their then-recent Love's Melodies album on Sire. I picked up Love's Melodies in large part to finally possess a copy of someone performing "September Gurls;" my first Big Star purchase would have followed shortly thereafter. I did not own a Searchers best-of set. I hadn't heard their take on "Sweets For My Sweet" prior to buying this Pye sampler, but the track blew me away, especially with its falsetto backing vocals. Love at first spin, and I did buy Rhino Records' Searchers' Greatest Hits collection not long thereafter.

Within just a few years after that, I heard The Drifters' "Sweets For My Sweet" again, probably via an oldies show on Buffalo radio. And it just hit me, square, the way a pop song on the radio should. As much as I loved The Searchers' version, I now loved The Drifters' original even more. Nowadays, I go back and forth between which version is my favorite, generally opting for Drifters but cherishing The Searchers almost as much. Sweet.



THE FLIRTATIONS: Nothing But A Heartache



My sister had the Deram Records 45 of The Flirtations' 1969 soul-pop explosion "Nothing But A Heartache," and I had ample chance to listen to it over and over throughout the early '70s. The song rates a chapter in my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), and here's a little sample of what that says:

Like Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You," The Flirtations' "Nothing But A Heartache" is a noisy explosion of girl-group popcraft, trading the romantic, near-orgasmic bliss of Dusty's record for a lover's lament that is still no less magnetic, no less exuberant, even as the singer pines for an unattainable lover, a clueless cad who, apparently, doesn't want to be with her.

I say to hell with him.



"Nothing But A Heartache" was only a # 34 hit on the Hot 100, but it remains a surefire top-of-the-pops in my mind. There's a fantastic expanded CD version of The Flirtations' Sounds Like The Flirtations album, and while nothing else eclipses "Nothing But A Heartache," it's still puzzling that the group didn't have continued and greater success. And The Flirtations' holiday offering "Christmas Time Is Here Again" (not the Beatles song!) is an essential, underrated Yule tune. 



GEORGE HARRISON: What Is Life


Existential power pop! My favorite George Harrison track, whether solo or with that old group he was in. 



JUSTINE AND THE UNCLEAN: Vengeance



Driving and insidiously catchy. Sweet Cookie! The confident rhythm of this 2020 single by Justine and the Unclean brings to my mind both “Me Being Maximum” by Agony Aunts and "Get Your Own" by Alice Peacock, its “vengeance” lyric conjures The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” and it sounds like none of those. But it absolutely rocks, and I need to check out more of this combo’s material. I already know that related act Justine's Black Pearls do a mighty fine cover of The Searchers' "Needles And Pins" on their forthcoming album Cheap Vacation, and it all sounds custom-made for rock 'n' roll radio (and, of course, for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio). Sweeeet cookie!



GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS: Midnight Train To Georgia



Another song that will be featured in The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Here's an excerpt:

As listeners, as fans of pop music, it may be difficult to imagine the divine alchemy that transformed this unremarkable country tune into an all-time classic, a giant of pop soul. The percussive opening snaps and swings, establishing a groove that will pummel any impending impasse with extreme prejudice. The music sways, a luxurious flow of pure beauty, pristine wonder, a glimpse of Heaven shining on the Georgia clay. Gladys Knight sings, and my God, what kind of fool would even think of trying to deny her whatever she wants? The Pips support her with irresistible vocal fills and choreography that you can somehow, some way, see on your radio. It may be a miracle...

...But, even above all of these irresistible elements, "Midnight Train To Georgia" belongs to Gladys Knight. Her mastery of this song is complete and unquestioned, even as she sings of capitulation, of a woman surrendering her own dreams, retreating with her lover. As noted in a previous blog entry about the definitive rock 'n' roll jukebox: Lyrically, the tale verges on heartbreak: the girl is giving up everything else in her life, because the jerk she loves can't hack it in The Big Time, and she'd rather live in his world than live without him in hers. Knight's commanding delivery makes it sound like a celebration. Maybe it is.

Oddly enough, I initially did not like "Midnight Train To Georgia" at all. It was still a relatively current hit when I suddenly changed my mind about it, prompted by a TV appearance of Gladys Knight & the Pips singing (or maybe lip-syncing) the song. Something previously outta-whack inside me musta just clicked--I know it did!--and I've loved this record ever since.



NICK LOWE: So It Goes



A recurring point in my writings about pop music is my gratitude for people and things that went before, friends and periodicals and radio stations that turned me on to some specific sound or some particular purveyor of that sound. I consider myself lucky to have been the right age and in the right place at the right time to experience so much transcendent music. This pervasive thankfulness goes from the serendipity of having older siblings during the British Invasion to the happy coincidence of discovering a tabloid rock rag called Phonograph Record Magazine at the precise moment for those pages of newsprint to introduce me to punk rock. And it includes a lot of radio stations.

One such station was WOUR-FM in Utica, NY, whose signal was readily accessible in the Syracuse market. After years of devoted AM radio worship, I grew disenchanted with Top 40 around 1976, when I was 16. I certainly couldn’t give up on listening to the radio—let’s not get crazy—so I migrated to freer-form airwaves. WOUR looms largest in my legend for providing me with my first spin of The Sex Pistols in the summer of '77. But before that, amidst the wealth of introductions to songs and/or artists both new and old--Graham Parker's "Hotel Chambermaid," Greg Kihn's "For You," The J. Geils Band's "Musta Got Lost," Michael Nesmith's "Rio," Joan Baez's "Time Rag," The Kinks' "No More Looking Back," The Yardbirds' "Heart Full Of Soul," The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's "The Intro And The Outro," and so much more, WOUR played "So It Goes" by Nick Lowe.



"So It Goes" was the first single released by the upstart British label Stiff Records, a U.K.-only issue in August of 1976. WOUR jumped on that import single, and I heard it a lot, loving it more and more each time. It wasn't released in America until Lowe's debut LP Pure Pop For Now People (or Jesus Of Cool, as it was named in its native England) came out in 1978, in the spring semester of my freshman year in college. By then, it was a golden oldie to me, but still as current as the rest of my beloved new wave. And so it goes.

So it goes: Valerie Perrine in Slaughterhouse Five. Somebody will get it.

MONDELLO: Sherilyn



Mondello is John Moran's one-man band, which means John is The Smart One, The Talent, The Fool, Special, and The Bass Player. Onederful! This track from Mondello's 2019 album Hello, All You Happy People is a love song to actress Sherilyn Fenn. Well. Who could blame him?

If it wasn't written for her, we'll pretend it was.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: Who Loves The Sun


Who loves the sun? Who remembers the sun...?! I pray we'll all see it again soon.

"Who loves the sun?" is a Loaded question. THANK YOU! THANKS! We're here every day.

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:

Volume 1: download

Volume 2: CD or download

Volume 3: download

Volume 4: CD or download

Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio:  CD or download

Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 128 essays about 128 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).

THE EVERLASTING FIRST: The Damned

Continuing a look back at my first exposure to a number of rock 'n' roll acts and superheroes (or other denizens of print or periodical publication), some of which were passing fancies, and some of which I went on to kinda like. They say you never forget your first time; that may be true, but it's the subsequent visits--the second time, the fourth time, the twentieth time, the hundredth time--that define our relationships with the things we cherish. Ultimately, the first meeting is less important than what comes after that. But every love story still needs to begin with that first kiss.





This was originally posted as part of a longer piece covering both pop music and comic book characters. It's separated here for convenience.

Phonograph Record Magazine figures into my first exposure to British punks The Damned, but a larger role in that introduction was ultimately played by a green-eyed girl named Mary Ellen. We'll get to her in just a sec, but we'll start with PRM.  Phonograph Record Magazine's coverage of this exotic, scary, mysteriously intoxicating music called punk captivated me as a senior in high school, 1976-77. I didn't know what any of it sounded like, but I was aching to find out.

I was intrigued by so many of these bands that PRM name-checked so casually in its tabloid pages. The Ramones! Blondie! The Sex Pistols! Eddie and the Hot Rods! Chris Spedding and the Vibrators! It was a long, long list of acts I'd never heard of before, from The New York Dolls, The Dictators, and Milk 'n Cookies through Cheap Trick, Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and Yesterday and Today (later shortened to Y & T). I was desperate to learn more.

Even if you're my age or older, it may be difficult to remember just how different the world was just four decades ago. Today, if you encounter a reference to some new musical act, the great 'n' powerful internet can put that act's complete c.v. at your disposal instantly. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other cloud-borne resources that would have been the stuff of science fiction during the Bicentennial are now humdrum, banal fixtures of everyday living. Hell, a YouTube video was likely your introduction to this new act in the first place. The thrill of the hunt has long since been replaced by the smug, jaded smirk of entitlement.

Heh. I'm a curmudgeon at 58.

With that all said, I have to admit I enjoy the convenience of easily-accessible information. But there was something intangibly thrilling about the sheer mystique and wonder conjured in a young man's mind by the hype and glory of fevered ramblin' in the pages of mid-'70s rock rags like PRM. You couldn't hear the music; you could only imagine how amazing it must sound.

The Damned were among the many loud and angry punks mentioned in the pages of Phonograph Record Magazine. I don't recall the group necessarily getting a lot of ink in the few PRMs I was fortunate enough to grab, but I do remember Flo & Eddie discussing (and dismissing) one of The Damned's singles--either "New Rose" or "Neat Neat Neat"--in their Blind Date column. Flo & Eddie were not impressed with British punk on first exposure.




In the fall of '76, I met Mary Ellen at the ESSPA (Empire State School Press Association) Convention in Syracuse. I was there with a cadre of my fellow North Syracuse High School literary insurgents--Dan Bacich, Tim Schueler, and Sue Caldwell--representing our school literary magazine, The NorthCaster.  At the banquet and awards ceremony, we shared a table with a group representing a magazine from a Rochester area high school, and Mary Ellen was part of that group. I think their magazine was called Brown Bag, and I'm pretty sure they won top honors at ESSPA that year.

I have no photo of Mary Ellen. 

Our two groups hit it off pretty well, and it turned out that Mary Ellen was a big rock 'n' roll fan. She was especially fond of The Who; I'd remembered reading ads for some Who bootlegs (probably in The Buyer's Guide For Comics Fandom). I said I'd send her the information, and we exchanged addresses.

She wound up writing to me first, saying she was listening to Montrose and slipping into the terra incognita, a favorite phrase of hers. Starry-eyed teen that I was--I was kinda like Davy Jones on any random episode of The Monkees, except usually without reciprocation--I immediately began to imagine True Love. I was--what's the word?--an idiot. On a January bus ride from Cleveland to Syracuse, traveling back home solo after visiting my sister, I daydreamed about Mary Ellen, about singing Beatles songs together and maybe exchanging a playful kiss. 

But this was all just fancy on my part. I wrote her a long, presumably witty letter, devoid of any attempt at romantic content--I wasn't quite that much of an idiot--and she responded with delight. Further correspondence revealed that we would be switching neighborhoods in the fall; I would be starting college in Brockport, a mere 19 miles from Rochester, while she would be attending Syracuse University. She sent me her phone number at SU.

One fall evening in Brockport, I called Mary Ellen, and we spoke on the phone for about an hour. It was a breezy, banter-filled conversation. I remember mentioning The Raspberries (whom she didn't know all that well) and The Bay City Rollers (which horrified her, since she saw them as not far removed from the dreaded "D-I-S-C-O!"). We had both discovered punk. I don't know how The Damned came up in the conversation, but she asked me if I'd heard them yet; I hadn't, so she cranked up the stereo in her dorm room and played The Damned's LP track "Stab Yor Back" for me. So that was my true, lo-fi introduction to the music of The Damned.

We mentioned earlier how much easier it is nowadays to find out about something or anything. You wanna know what else has changed since 1977? The cost of long-distance phone calls. My 60-minute call to Mary Ellen cost a whompin', stompin' fifty dollars, which is an awful lot of money to spend for a few seconds of The Damned. My parents weren't real happy about paying that bill for me, so that was my Christmas present that year; they threw in a copy of the Alive II album by KISS, because they were really great parents.



But that phone call (and, I think, one subsequent shorter one) were my last positive communications with Mary Ellen. I tried to get in touch with her the next time we were both in Syracuse, but she'd figured out by now that I mighta possibly had hearts in my eyes, and she didn't need that at all. And honestly, I can't blame her. In any case, I was soon involved with Sharon, a girl I met in Brockport, and then also with Theresa (another girl I met in Brockport), and significant complications loomed on my immediate horizon.

Complications. My man Archie understands.

It was more than a year until I would be in the same room as a Damned song playing on a damned stereo near me. In the Spring of '78, a friend at school loaned me a compilation album called New Wave. New Wave included The Damned's debut single "New Rose," and I liked it a lot. It turned out that there would be a number of songs by The Damned that I like a lot, especially "Wait For The Blackout" on the group's 1980 LP The Black Album. I'll have to try listening to that over a $50 phone call some day.



TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

Our new compilation CD This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 4 is now available from Kool Kat Musik! 29 tracks of irresistible rockin' pop, starring Pop Co-Op, Ray Paul, Circe Link & Christian Nesmith, Vegas With Randolph Featuring Lannie Flowers, The Slapbacks, P. Hux, Irene Peña, Michael Oliver & the Sacred Band Featuring Dave Merritt, The Rubinoos, Stepford Knives, The Grip Weeds, Popdudes, Ronnie Dark, The Flashcubes,Chris von Sneidern, The Bottle Kids, 1.4.5., The Smithereens, Paul Collins' Beat, The Hit Squad, The Rulers, The Legal Matters, Maura & the Bright Lights, Lisa Mychols, and Mr. Encrypto & the Cyphers. You gotta have it, so order it here.