From: Marc Marshall
To: Kipp, Thomas J
Subject: Davie Allan
Hi Tom! Did I forward this to you already? My new musical friend at Noblis I told you about, Frank Lawrence, turned me on to Davie Allan recently.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjhno4sn2TA
Thanks Marc!
What a fabulous summary of both the 1967 HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS movie and Davie Allan’s greatest fuzztone guitar masterpiece, “Cycle-Delic”! Also a wonderful glimpse at Jack Nicholson’s biker movie roots….
By the by, if you’re looking for the definitive Davie Allan & The Arrows collection, the buck$ should stop here—
I picked up this exemplary Sundazed 2cd set several years ago, after wondering for over twenty what all the fuss/fuzz was about! By the by, DA can certainly hang wit’ Link Wray and Dick Dale….
“This treasure trove of Allan’s decades-unavailable recordings for Mike Curb (his high school choir-mate turned producer and record-biz mini-mogul) marks the first time most of the collection’s 40 rare tracks have been anthologized for CD.”
“Blues Theme” (#37 in 1966) is another certified biker classic—
Wonder what Frank Sinatra thought of daughter Nancy’s role in all this Roger Corman-induced mayhem?!
Kinda funny that the same Mike Curb responsible for dumping The Velvets & The Mothers of Invention from Verve/MGM ca. 1970 (as its anti-drug crusading 25-year-old label head, and subsequent hero to The Nixon Administration!), and then foisting The Osmonds (along with his own, far more heinously Wonder Breaded troupe, The Mike Curb Congregation) upon the world, was also responsible for promulgating all this fuzzed-out hippie/biker music via his ol’ high school pal Davie Allan! LOL
By the by, Mike Curb’s Wikipedia entry is one of the most amazing I have ever encountered! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Curb
He was Jerry Brown’s California lieutenant governor! Ronald Reagan’s protégé and co-chairman of his 1980 Presidential campaign! Collaborator with Harvey Milk in the defeat of 1978’s California Proposition 6! Leading conservative advocate for gay rights! Nashville and NASCAR mogul! University philanthropist with a star in The Hollywood Walk of Fame! The man who also launched the careers of Linda Ronstadt AND The Electric Flag! And claims credit for 374 BILLBOARD #1 records (274 singles, 100 albums—in Pop, Country, and Contemporary Christian)!
Clive Davis, eat yer heart out!
More exhaustively/exhaustingly, here’s his official website-housed bio—http://www.mikecurb.com/about/bio.cfm
And finally, this delightfully droll Amazon customer commentary re: The Mike Curb Congregation, but first, to get y’all in the mood, their greatest hit (“Burning Bridges”, #34 in 1971), from the Clint Eastwood/Telly Savalas war flick, KELLY’S HEROES—
4.0 out of 5 stars Utterly, beautifully, dreadfully fun, just awful!, February 21, 2012
By Son of Flintstone (Brigham Young’s Empire, Osmonia)
This review is from: The Mike Curb Congregation: Greatest Hits
If you grew up in the ’70s, maybe you had this experience. Most of us kids then did: our parents were aghast that we wanted, bugged, pushed, begged them to buy us Evil rock records. Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Beatles,…and we got force-fed this kind of "rock." Square OLD people just knew if you listened to that guitar stuff you’d turn into a pinko-commie draft-dodging liberal hippie, so we got prompted to detox off the rock drug until we could appreciate…Wayne Newton, Frank, Dean, and our parents’ idea of "good" music (which we detested). At the time, this was tripe, unspeakable, JUST NOT COOL AND NO ONE AT SCHOOL CAN KNOW I HAVE THIS! In hindsight, it’s fun bubblegum now that we’re big enough and old enough to beat up our kids with this stuff, along the lines of The Brady Kids, Doodletown Pipers, late New Christy Minstrels, The New Seekers, those "group" albums where the boys are dressed, coiffed, puffed and primped to be just as effeminate as the cutesy unapproachable girls. Yes, if anyone suspected you actually might like this stuff, you’d get stomped into the playground dirt when the teachers weren’t looking, if you were a guy (same for Barry Manilow fandom at the time, too!).
(P.S. There’s a priceless scene in the movie, DETROIT ROCK CITY, when the cigarette-lipped mother of one of the boys goes nuclear about a KISS album. Everything you see there is just as it was in 1976.)
Yes, "Burning Bridges" actually cooked, but no one could admit it. If you’re over-the-hill, this is fun stuff and it may even be torture for your rebellious little monsters. Lock the doors, roll up your windows, and let them hear your good music. Best thing about the new technology: you can put that detestable "It’s a Small, Small World" on auto-replay again and again and again. (You might even check out Slim Whitman’s yodeling version of it, too! And, as a sidebar: in addition to the MCC backing Hank Williams, Jr. and Sammy Davis, Jr., you might look around for that Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme MGM Lp with their crooning backup.)
After reading all that, I’m VERY tempted to make what sounds like an ESSENTIAL cd purchase fer The Sludge Collection! LOL
– Tom
P.S. Despite tossing The Velvets and their “sordid” ilk off his label like they were lighted sticks of dynamite, Mike Curb in no way impeded their eventual inclusion in his gloriously-leveling, 23-artist, cut-rate “Golden Archive Series” of 1970, which forms perhaps the most dizzyingly-eclectic batch of single artist LP compilations from the pre-Rhino music biz dark ages!
http://www.bsnpubs.com/mgm/mgmgas.html
http://www.discogs.com/label/Golden+Archive+Series+%282%29
In fact, the late Ellen Willis famously included MGM’s VU entry as her “Desert Island Album” in Greil Marcus’ immortal rockcrit anthology, STRANDED!
And thanks to a stray copy somehow making its way into the Northern Montana College Library’s collection, this was how I first heard Frank Zappa, ca. 1977-78—
But the six entries below provide an even more acute sense of Mike Curb’s “big tent”/“wide umbrella”, aka “Let’s toss li’l drabs of everything in our corporate coffers against the wall and pray that something sticks”! Also dig the pseudo-Warholian repetitions enshrined nearly throughout, as well as all those swatches o’ green, orange, and purple!
Now let’s see, that’d be (from top left) Big Band Swing, Teen Idol/Bubblegum, Rockabilly/Country, African Jazz, Hispanic Rock and Roll, and Jazz Piano, in addition to the grubby, allegedly drug-addled, “Freak” Rock above—
– Tom Kipp
