Pop Geek Heaven

THE KOOBAS “Koobas” Although I am a fan of most pop music, my favorite niche is mid-’60s British psych-pop: Beatles, Zombies, Donovan, Small Faces, The Pretty Things, The Creation and so on. I know most of these bands’ albums so well that I rarely listen to them, so it’s especially great to discover similar bands […]

IVOR CUTLER TRIO “Ludo”   Ivor Cutler is best known to pop fans as Buster Bloodvessel from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour television film. Few may know, however, that he also had an extensive career as a recording artist (in fact, he was quite the renaissance man, also achieving success als as a writer of […]

THE RUMOUR “Max” The Rumour is, of course, best known as Graham Parker’s backing band. The members were virtually a “who’s who” of pub-rock: Brinsley Schwartz (guitar) and Bob Andrews (keys) from the band Brinsley Schwartz, Martin Belmont (guitar) from Ducks Deluxe, and Andrew Bodnar (bass) and Steve Goulding (drums) from Bontemps Roulez (that’s French […]

THE RUGBYS “Hot Cargo”   The music that is most heavily imprinted upon my psychology is the music that served as the soundtrack to my puberty. In This Is Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that this almost universal phenomenon is grounded in the influence of hormones (and music) on brain development, although […]

SILVER JET “Pull Me Up…” I have a friend who is a fellow guitar player and he was in the process of putting together a covers band to, you know, make some money when I suggested to him that he focus exclusively on ’90s music. This was in 2014. He was curious why. I told […]

  WIL MALONE “Wil Malone” When I was in high school and beginning my record-collecting career as a Beatles obsessive, my older brother would often stop by my bedroom door and look bemused while I played my Beatles bootlegs, the sound quality of which was often quite poor (and the performances were often sloppy and […]

  GORDON ALEXANDER “Gordon’s Buster” When I was in elementary school, my sister received as a birthday present a copy of Tiny Tim’s debut album, God Bless Tiny Tim. She must have been thirteen or so and was entirely flummoxed. She could not fathom why anyone would think she would want such a curiosity. Being […]

  TIM FINN “Big Canoe”   One of the ways I can identify a most cherished album is when my friends complain that I play it too much. I remember being on a trip to Boston and seeing Tim Finn’s Big Canoe in a used record shop and, having loved his previous record, Escapade, I […]

  THE QUICK  Mondo Deco One of the perks of being in the classic rock generation is that you can often impress younger people with the shows you’ve seen. Kids in their twenties typically respond with choruses of “wow” when I tell them that I saw Led Zeppelin live or that I saw Stevie Wonder […]

“ONE MAN BANDS – The Story Behind…” by MIKE BARON There have always been guys who did it all themselves, sometime in a studio, sometimes in their garage.  However the computer age, and greatly improved and compact recording equipment, have made it much easier for the lone genius to record his own album playing every […]