POP-A-LOOZA: LOST IN THE GROOVES: The [Bay City] Rollers, ELEVATOR

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 a look back at the 1979 album Elevator by The Rollers (formerly The Bay City Rollers).

This piece was my third and final entry for Lost In The Grooves, a 2005 book edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay. Kim and David used my bits about Subterranean Jungle by The Ramones and Tell America by Fools Face, but weren't interested in my Rollers entry. They never saw the finished Rollers piece, which I completed (based on memory of the original thumbnail submission) for this blog in 2016. 

The Lost In The Grooves concept--a capricious guide to the music you missed--is engaging and durable. As music fans, we have no shortage of sounds we think deserve wider acclaim and a larger audience. I'm kicking around the idea of continuing the concept as a sporadic series on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), with each entry accompanied by an acknowledgement of Cooper and Smay. I would need a different series title--Lost In The Grooves belongs to Kim and David--but I'll come up with an appropriate name if I decide to pursue this.

In the mean time, here's a look at the end of the beginning, the final piece of my original Lost In The Grooves triumvirate. Elevator by The Rollers provides the subject for the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

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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: LOST IN THE GROOVES: Fools Face, TELL AMERICA

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 celebration of the album Tell America by Fools Face.

Both this piece and the recent post about The Ramones' Subterranean Jungle album were originally written for the 2005 book Lost In The Groove. While those were my only two pieces in the book, I did write a third entry, which the editors declined. We'll see that piece reprised next week.

Like The Skeletons, Fools Face were from Springfield, Missouri, a fact which enhanced my interest in those groups. My mother was born and raised in Southwest Missouri, and summer visits to the area were an essential part of my youth. The bus or plane from Syracuse brought us as far as Springfield, and my grandparents would pick us up there and bring us back to their home in Verona or (later on) Aurora. We occasionally made it back to Springfield's Battlefield Mall, where my cousin and I could see a movie (What's Up, Doc? was a favorite), and buy books or records. I never got to see any rock bands, mind you, but the idea of such utterly cool bands as The Skeletons and Fools Face coming out of that region always pleased me. I much, much later got to see The Skeletons a couple of times at shows in Syracuse; I regret I never had an opportunity to see Fools Face. But I have the records! And I still cherish them. 

Speaking of the Springfield sound, this paragraph from a previous blog post bears a repeat appearance here:

"Man, if you have a chance, check out the documentary The Center Of Nowhere: The Spirit And Sounds Of Springfield, Missouri. It's a fascinating account of Springfield's rich and essential music history, and while I regret that Missouri's phenomenal pop combo Fools Face didn't rate at least a passing mention, the film rightly focuses in large part on the late Lou Whitney, producer and bassist for The Skeletons. The Skeletons were one of the best live acts I ever saw, and I wish I'd had more opportunities to do so (and to see related bands The Symptoms and The Morells). Holy guacamole, these guys were good. I chatted very briefly with Whitney at a Syracuse club date in the '90s, and later did a telephone interview with him, as well. The interview was conducted for DISCoveries magazine, but circumstances moved it to publication in Goldmine instead. You can read that story and interview here."

I never lived in Missouri, and it's likely I'll never find myself back there again. But I have roots there. And I dig some of the music that came out of Springfield. Tell America, a fantastic album by a fantastic Springfield group called Fools Face, is the subject of 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: LOST IN THE GROOVES: The Ramones, SUBTERRANEAN JUNGLE

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 look back at an album from 1983, The Ramones' Subterranean Jungle.

This piece was originally written for the 2005 book Lost In The Grooves, edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay. There will be two more Lost In The Grooves pieces reprised in near-future Boppin' Pop-A-Loozas. I had previously contributed to Cooper and Smay's Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth in 2001, supplying an edited version of my history of bubblegum music, an appreciation of The Bay City Rollers, and collaborating with Gary Pig Gold on a debate about The Monkees. 

I've had work appear in other writers' books, including the history of power pop I wrote for John Borack's Shake Some Action and a reminiscence about John Lennon for Mr. Borack's Life Is What Happens. I had hoped to contribute to another pop book recently, but it was not to be.That's the way the Rickenbacker jangles sometimes.

Of course, what I really need to do is a book of my own. My long-planned book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is on hold, pending the development of some sort of path forward. It's not quite dead, but it is on life support at the moment; that said, I have not given up on GREM! just yet. There is, however, a different book project that looks more promising in the short term. I'll let you know when/if there's something to report on that promise.

In the mean time, we go back to Lost In The Grooves, and my celebration of an album deleted too quickly. The Ramones' Subterranean Jungle 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.

LOST IN THE GROOVES: ELEVATOR by THE (Bay City) ROLLERS

We've spoken of the 2005 book Lost In The Grooves, the self-described "capricious guide to the music you missed" which contained two entries written by me, covering Subterranean Jungle by The Ramones and Tell America by Fools Face.  I also submitted a short piece on Elevator, a 1979 album by The Rollers, the act formerly known as The Bay City Rollers. Lost In The Grooves editors Kim Cooper and David Smay took a pass on that one. I can't find my original manuscript so I wrote a new one for you:



THE ROLLERS
Elevator (Arista, 1979)

By 1979, The Bay City Rollers were clearly on the ropes. The hits had stopped, and the group's fan base of screaming young girls had chosen not to grow older with their formerly-cherished tartan-clad heartthrobs. A Saturday morning TV series had not kindled a new audience; on the contrary, it was a tacit surrender, an admission that The Bay City Rollers' S! A! T-U-R! D-A-Y! night had ended. As even the TV show faded to black, lead singer Les McKeown couldn't split fast enough.

But the remaining members of the group--Eric Faulkner, Stuart "Woody" Wood, and brothers Alan and Derek Longmuir--remained together, determined to become the solid, successful rock 'n' roll group they felt they could be. They recruited a new lead singer, Duncan Faure, previously of a South African group called Rabbitt, and attempted to distance themselves from uncool, unfashionable teen idolatry, ditching the tartan togs and shortening their name to just The Rollers. And so The Rollers sought fame fortune anew, with an album called Elevator.

Elevator was neither new wave rock 'n' roll nor FM rock fare, but it was a splendid work that could have been appreciated by fans of The Babys or The Records. Faure's vocals were identifiably influenced by John Lennon, lending a palpably Beatley sheen and edge to a confident collection of rockin' pop tunes. The Bay City Rollers had been an underrated pop group, capable of creating a few unforgettable power pop tracks amidst the prerequisite morass of balladry and goop expected of lads gracing the covers of teen magazines. But Elevator was the group's most consistent and listenable album to date. Sure, the drug references were winkingly and obnoxiously self-conscious--C'mon, an LP cover depicting a giant red pill in an elevator going up? Really?--but the songs and performances were first-rate. The single, "Turn On Your Radio," was catchy and engaging, and it combined with terrific album tracks like "Playing In A Rock And Roll Band," "I Was Eleven," and "Who'll Be My Keeper" to convey a compelling tale of the yin and yang of the good ol' rock 'n' roll road show. The title song rocked, and the aforementioned "Who'll Be My Keeper" was one of the best tracks of the year. Seriously!

And yeah, Elevator was stuck in the basement level from the get-go. There were some attempts to promote it; Trouser Press ran an article on this supposedly more mature edition of The Rollers, and the group appeared on The Mike Douglas Show hyping its new direction. But honestly, The Rollers could have released a record that cured cancer, fed the hungry, and reunited The Beatles, and none of it would have made any difference; in 1979, the public was done with The Rollers--with or without a "Bay City" prefix--and that was that.

This line-up of The Rollers released two more albums--an Arista contract-breaker called Voxx (one of the best odds-n-sods contract-breakers I ever did hear) and an album called Ricochet--that are well worth seeking out and enjoying; neither has ever been issued in the U.S. Later on, there was a terrible synth record called Breakout; in between Voxx and Ricochet, there was a cassette-only release called Burning Rubber, which I've neither seen nor heard (though the Rollers film for which it serves as soundtrack is on YouTube, I think). The Rollers' career ended in obscurity. Elevator, Voxx, and Ricochet deserved a better fate,

LOST IN THE GROOVES: TELL AMERICA by FOOLS FACE

I wrote here about my contributions to a 2005 book called Lost In The Grooves, a collection of short essays billed as a "capricious guide to the music you missed." We've already seen what I had to say about The Ramones' Subterranean Jungle album; this was my other entry in Lost In The Grooves:

FOOLS FACE
Tell America (Talk, 1981)

Based in Springfield, Missouri, Fools Face earned raves in the pages of Trouser Press and Creem, but remained criminally unnoticed by the general public. Even interested parties have had a hard time actually buying a damned Fools Face record. To this day, I own the only copies I've ever seen of the group's three elusive LPs, plus a bootleg CD-R of the final cassette-only release, The Red Tape.

Within the pop underground, however, Fools Face is renowned. For me, the moment of revelation came via the first track on the group's second album, Tell America. "American Guilt" is an acid-tongued critique of both gung-ho Reagan-era jingoism and mushy-headed neo-hippie naivete, lyrically as incendiary as a testimonial from The MC5, but with a perfect pop sheen. When the chorus soars with the lines, "When push comes to shove/All you need is love," the transcendent effect of the Beatles quote nails everything into place.

By turns confident and vulnerable, Fools Face was always literate, intelligent, musically accomplished, rooted in '60s songcraft but forged in the crucible of '70s punk and new wave. The individual tracks make the case: "Nothing To Say" is the best break-up song ever, encompassing casual heartache (or heartlessness?) and a matter-of-fact recognition of the need to just move on; "Land Of The Hunted" and "Stand Up" compress paranoia and determination into an irresistible 1-2 punch; "L5" even manages a compelling pop tune about space colonization.

Many fans prefer the group's third album, 1983's just-as-wonderful Public Places, though few will speak on behalf of Here To Observe, the merely okay 1979 debut. As a happy postscript, the original quintet returned for a splendid reunion CD in 2002, an album that lives up to the promise of Tell America and Public Places. Tell...someone!

POSTSCRIPT: That eponymous 2002 reunion disc was joined on the retail shelves by a vintage live performance, released under the title of Live At Last. Good luck finding any of it. 

While you may not be able to track down any Fools Face albums or CDs, you can still get a copy of Lost In The Grooves via Amazon. Watch this space for one more unpublished Lost In The Grooves piece in the near future. 

LOST IN THE GROOVES: The Ramones' SUBTERRANEAN JUNGLE

I've written several times here about the 2001 book Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth, edited by Scram magazine's Kim Cooper and David Smay. I was so, so happy to have been involved with that book, and I've been delighted to re-present my contributions here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do). They're all but a click away: my Bubblegum History, my Bay City Rollers piece, and my debate with Gary Pig Gold on whether or not The Monkees were ever really a bubblegum group. I've also posted my proposed Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth audio companion, and even my fake This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio playlist/appreciation of David Smay's fictional group, The Daisy Bang. When it comes to Scram, I'm a fan!

So when Kim and David asked me to contribute to their next book, I was all for it. That book was Lost In The Grooves in 2005, billed as "Scram's capricious guide to the music you missed." It was a collection of short essays about underrated, under-appreciated, or otherwise unjustly neglected albums. I think I proposed a bunch of potential albums I wanted to write about (including the [post-Bay City] Rollers' 1979 work Elevator), but was given the go-ahead for but a pair: Tell America by Fools Face, and Subterranean Jungle by The Ramones.

(I recall having to convince Kim about including a Ramones album in Lost In The Grooves. "The Ramones aren't underrated anymore, Carl," she said. "Maybe not," I replied, "but this album is!" She ceded the point, and I got to work....)

THE RAMONES
Subterranean Jungle (Sire, 1983)

The Ramones' seventh album, Subterranean Jungle is the most underrated work in their Carbona-huffin' canon. It is the only one of The Ramones' post-'70s works that fully embraces the trash-pop, bubblegum aesthetic that made the first four Ramones albums such enduring classics; yet it was the first original Ramones album to be deleted. And its follow-up, 1984's far-less-bouncy Too Tough To Die, wound up being hailed (falsely!) as The Ramones' return to greatness.

The Ramones wanted to be a bubblegum band, a faster and louder version of The Bay City Rollers and The Ohio Express. With '60s bubblegum vets Ritchie Cordell and Glen Kolotkin producing, Subterranean Jungle opens with a cover of The Music Explosion's "Little Bit O' Soul." (A fab cover of The 1910 Fruitgum Company's "Indian Giver" was also recorded, but appeared as a non-LP B-side.) A seemingly incongruous cover of The Chambers Brothers' psychedelic soul touchstone "Time Has Come Today" defies expectations and simply soars. And Dee Dee Ramone's misfit themes "Outsider" and "In The Park" (the latter song inspired--go figure!--by trips to the park to cop heroin) transcend their origins and emerge as triumphant, fist-pumpin', bubblicious delights.

It's not all bubbly. While Joey yearns for "Somebody Like Me" and "My-My Kind Of A Girl," Dee Dee's badass "Time Bomb" warns he's gonna kill his mom and dad, and Dee Dee and Johnny's "Psycho Therapy"--ultimately the album's best-known track--is an audio slasher flick, with a horror-film video banned by the weasels at MTV. Behind the scenes, Marky Ramone was fired from the band during the making of the album; the cover graphics show him clearly apart from the rest of The Ramones, looking out a subway window, a brudder-in-arms no more. This was the last great Ramones album, a bubblegum punk classic, and no one seems to appreciate it. Maybe that time has come today.

I still like Subterranean Jungle more than any other Ramones studio album released after 1978's Road To Ruin. (I specify studio album because 1979's It's Alive! is my all-time favorite live record.) I'll post my Lost In The Grooves essay on the great Fools Face album Tell America some time soon. And if the good folks at Scram ever decide to do another book, I think they know where to find me.

Oh, by the way: Lost In The Grooves is a cool little book, with or without me, and copies are still available over on the Amazon thing.  In the immortal words of Jack "King" Kirby: "Don't ask why--just BUY!"

Subterranean Jungle illustration by Tom Neely, from Lost In The Grooves