Frank Rote is from a small Slovenian community in upstate New York. He currently lives in Alta Loma. He plays both button and piano accordion. He is in charge of many of the activities at the Slovene Hall in Fontana and is the leader of the Fontana Button Box Accordion Club, a local button accordion band. He also has his own Polka band, The Frank Rote Orchestra.

Fred Mlakar is also of Slovenian heritage and came from a Slovenian community in northern Minnesota prior to moving to Southern California. He also plays both button and piano accordion. He is the son of Joe Mlakar who is also a well-known button accordion player. Fred’s band is called The Fred Mlakar Orchestra.

Jon Miller is originally from Michigan and now lives in Anaheim. He plays many instruments, from banjo to bagpipes and is “on call” with several local Polka bands, as a banjo, guitar, and bass player.

James Koci is Fred’s nephew and the grandson of Joe Mlakar. He plays guitar and bass guitar and is in a rock and roll band. Of course, given his heritage, he also plays Polka music, usually accompanying on his bass guitar.

Troy Sampson is Skip’s son, and played rock and roll and blues until one day SKip convinced him to come out to the Slovene Hall in Fontana for one of their Polka music jam sessions. They didn’t have a drummer and Skip knew he could fill in and he has been ever since.

Strawberry Hill (Hoyer Trio)

Patricia’s Waltz (Hoyer Trio)

Castle Rock (Ray Champa)

Sailing Sailing (Ausenik Quintet)

Glacier Polka (Joe Mlakar)

Just Because (arr. Frank Yankovic)

Pomona College student band the Dirty Boys performed a live set on the Basement with Justyna. Strings galore!

Rye Shuffle

My 2 Cents

You Don’t Love Love

Heavy Hands

Run

Another New World (Josh Ritter)

Green Rocky Road (traditional)

Musicians Louis Gallardo, Max Kelly, and Keith Shacklett brought a Fender Rhodes and a great set when appearing on All that Jazz with Larry the Fox, which you can hear Saturdays from 5-7pm. The Fender Rhodes was enormously popular in the 70′s and 80′s in the genres of funk, rock and jazz and is built very similarly to a piano with a small twist: instead of hammers hitting the strings, they hit tines (similar to tuning forks) which are amplified by pick-ups. Check out their set below!

Lady Bird (Tadd Dameron)

All Blues (Miles Davis)

Autumn Leaves (Joseph Kosma)

Oh Green -Canto de Ossanha (Baden Powell de Aquino)

Blackbird (The Beatles)

Nardis (Miles Davis)

Spain (Chick Corea)

Check out the trailer here!

Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions From Mars by Winona

Finnish band “Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions From Mars” has something to say. What exactly it is, I don’t know. I can barely understand the lead singer, Ray Katz, over the grungy guitars, Drano-laced vocals, and chunky chords. In a post-Stooges universe, “Electric Blue,” as I’ll henceforth refer to them, is made up of a little bit of Big Black, a pinch from The Flesh Eaters, and a very weird fascination with the Beatles.

Give me a moment to digress. Alternative Finnish rockers are very near and dear to my heart (well one alternative Finnish rocker). On a balmy night during my wild high school days, I made my way down to Whiskey A Go Go club in Hollywood for an all-ages night of Finnish fun. As usual, in the hi-octane crowd situation I was amazingly crushed, so I sought refuge in the very back of the venue and watched a Finnish band called The Rasmus sweat and sometimes shred on-stage. It was cool, but I was far away and with a friend and wearing colors that were much too bright, and generally felt terribly out of place. After the show I lingered for a while, letting the crowd clear, when I noticed the band standing to my right, ordering a few beers. They saw me and smiled, somehow they had slipped away from the crowd unnoticed. They said they liked my shirt or something, and proceeded to introduce themselves in very, very limited English. They were the kind of band that used more eyeliner than was really appropriate, but hell, they were the nicest group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. We spent about 15 more minutes chatting or trying to and they gave me a free shirt, told me to come to Finland, and went on their way.

First impression? Finnish bands are really freaking nice.

So I noticed Electric Blue’s album, featuring a Great White Shark on the cover, and lay it down on the turntable to one track described as “Ya ya!” in the review.

“Right Feel” by Electric Blue 

And here’s a photo to set your peepers on:

The first 10 seconds of this song start like a weird They Might be Giants track (the guitar riff and playful vibe n all).  But then Katz’s vocals come in, all screech and lighter fluid and what have you, and take this somewhere else. It’s fun, it’s kind of exotic, it’s weird as hell. The repetitive guitar and steady beat make the outlandish vocals sound even more defiant against such a controlled backdrop. It’s a short and sweet song that oscillates between “fuck you” and “let’s dance,” and that sounds really great in the context that this is a band that worships the Beatles (their title “Revolutionion” a conscious play on the Beatles “Revolution”) and makes music that sounds like gristle. They’re definitely not the Rasmus, but maybe the next best thing.

Richard Hell by Joseph 

I’m not very punk rock. Right now I’m wearing khaki pants and grass-stained Asics sneakers. My hair is neat if unshowered. I smell like stale air and sitting sweat. Richard Hell is punk rock. He wore torn shirts. He spiked his hair. He dropped out of high school to write poetry in New York City. Shit, Richard Hell did Sid Vicious before Sid Vicious did Sid Vicious. Of course, the aesthetic doesn’t make the movement, as much as some people seem to think, but Richard Hell also literally started punk rock. He was in the first iteration of Television. He played at CBGB in the ‘70s. To quote LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, he “was there.” He was right there at that time in that place with all those people.

I didn’t start listening to punk until college and I’m still very unknowledgeable about the genre and its history. In high school, I primarily bumped Andrew Bird and the Decemberists. The record Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids literally couldn’t have existed in my reality then. If someone had played me this record, a black hole would have sucked up my hometown with the quiet whoosh of a thousand suburbanites’ repressed screams.

I’m still not punk rock and chances are I’ll never be. I’m a cautious person. I keep diligent To Do lists. That being said, it’s Friday. It’s 6:26 PM and I’m still at work writing this. I’m tired and I have a headache. My eyes are dry because I drank too much coffee today. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna throw this song on and crash into the weekend.

Busboy by Winona

Like Joseph’s post, I’m writing about a band on which I really cannot find much information. However, this hardly matters, for they are the everyman band! If the everyman takes into account only the select group of musicians that adhere to the specific and niche-worthy brand of pop, or maybe it’s punk, that cherishes sass and low production value above all else.

LISTEN TO BUSBOY HERE!

Enter The Brentwoods “from south city.” Off of their record label Radio X comes their self titled EP featuring the song I’m going to focus on, called Busboy. In the same vein as KSPC buddies Slutever and Geoff Geiss comes the opening line, defiant and snotty, but still damn cute with its pronouncement of, “Busboy, busboy standing there! I want to run my fingers through your greasy hair.” I had trouble picking apart the tone of the song…. was it mocking? Appreciative? Romantic? Whatever. It didn’t matter because it was pretty obvious The Brentwoods didn’t want it to matter. They just happened to write a funny and strangely touching song about a busboy that made me want to dance and, more specifically, shimmy. Plus I’m a total sucker any time a song includes “oh oh ohs” and the like, so I was hooked by the minute mark.

It also totally helped that this is the scene I had in my mind the entire time I was listening to this song:

Anyways, there’s not too much to say for this song except that it’s really, really fun. It sounds like The Brentwoods are having a good time, and I definitely appreciate the advent of a sound that still makes you dance, want to maul a busboy, and sing along all at the same time. Get outta here, it’s Friday, go order a malt.

Pianosaurus by Joseph

There isn’t a whole lot of information about Pianosaurus on the internet. Most sites can tell you that the band formed in the ‘80s in New York. They self-released two live albums that are difficult to track down before releasing their studio debut Groovy Neighborhood on Rounder Records in ’87. Their song “Back to School” was featuring in Francis Ford Coppola’s short film Life Without Zoe. Then Alex Garvin, lead vocalist and guitarist, disappeared with the tapes for their second album Back to School and the album was never released.  And most importantly, all these sites also tell you that the band exclusively played toy instruments. As it says in the liner notes: “All sounds produced on real toys.”

Peep that Fraggle Rock drum kit. Those tiny guitars and toy pianos (a Pianosaurus is plastic toy piano in the shape of a dinosaur). Garvin handled the guitar work, as mentioned earlier. Bianca Miller played toy piano and organ and Stephen Dansiger pounded away on children’s drum kits featuring the faces of the Smurfs, the Muppet Babies and boy band Menudo.

“Sun Will Follow” is the third song on the album. The song represents the band’s aesthetic well. There’s a definite cute factor heard in the plink of the piano and the pitter-patter of the drums. At the same time, the schtick seems sincere. There’s no ironic self-awareness to the music. Pianosaurus play sunny rock ‘n’ roll and they play it on toy instruments. As ridiculous as that sentence reads, the fact is that while the toy instruments make the music charming, the band also makes plain good music. They transcend pure gimmickry.

In fact, many of the articles I read make this point, addressing those who toss the band off as a novelty with no substance. However, I never read any of these hypothetical naysayers. The people writing about Pianosaurus are the people who love them. One of the things I’ve realized writing this blog is that there is an astounding amount of music that most people will never hear and that music history and criticism, even the branch that focuses on underground and obscure music, will leave behind. This realization is obvious but seeing shelves upon shelves of obscure records put out by labels that don’t exist anymore and people who now do other things drives the point home.

That being said, for every band I’ve written about a select few fans exist. Like I said at the top, there isn’t much information about Pianosaurus on the web and there has been even less information about other bands featured on this blog, but there are a couple blog posts and articles about the band and they’re all dedicated to preserving them in some way. Pianosaurus didn’t gain much success while they were around and they probably never will but they’re still alive, even if it’s only on someone’s abandoned blogspot, and in a way that’s more intimate and meaningful than any of the glam and hype of a mainstream media profile.

Some people seem to know what they want to do right from the start – a strange concept for a Liberal Arts college student who has spent the last two years lithely dodging that very question at various family gatherings and holiday parties. Mark Kramer and Ann Magnuson are two such people. The duo recorded music together as Bongwater, a name that nails the group’s melding of ‘60s pysch-rock with surreal and absurd humor,  from 1985 to 1992, after which the pair split up professionally and personally, Magnuson suing Kramer and Kramer counter-suing Magnuson. In the time, between the band’s formation and the double-lawsuit, Bongwater released four albums and each album is surprisingly lush with strange and specific ideas.

I pulled down their second full length Too Much Sleep, which Kramer’s label Shimmy Disc released in 1989. The album features a combination of covers and originals supplemented with interludes of found recordings and Magnuson’s multi-tracked spoken word pieces. The title track, the song that I’m focusing on, combines the aforementioned ‘60s rock influence with Galaxie 500-esque shimmering guitars and melodies (Kramer produced every Galaxie 500 album). Magnuson’s vocals are backed by the French horn meanderings of Coby Batty.

Too Much Sleep 2

Magnuson takes a devastating idea, a wasted life, and imbues it with humor, “you think it’s humorous the way we fade away / but one day you’ll feel it too and this is what you’ll say / I slept too much.” And for those of you like me (aka a lover of sleep) who, despite the punch line, still find those lines fairly depressing, the rest of the chorus unfolds  “…way too much, I’ve had too much sleep, I’ve slept way too much, I really overslept, I could’ve been awake…” Bongwater delivers the laughs.

The average person sleeps away about a third of his/her/their life. That’s valuable time that could have been used for other things like learning guitar or writing a poem or water skiing. This song raises an important question. Are you getting the most out of your life that you possibly can? Or are you sleeping away, so to speak, the precious amount of time you get to be alive? Obviously, I am not advising that you stop sleeping entirely. Science says that’s impossible and it will probably make you unhappy. But maybe ask yourself the above questions.  And most importantly ask yourself: AM I WATER SKIING ENOUGH?

The Mad Scene by Winona 

You know that feeling when the plane takes off and for four months you leave most of what you know/love, in favor of an incredible experience and exotic educational endeavor? I don’t know that feeling, but I soon will when I leave at the end of this month to study abroad in Madrid. I’m excited, I’ve shopped for my velcro wallet and booked my ticket. I’ve planned on eating at a few churro carts when I first arrive, and my Spanish is pretty damn good. I have most things set up, and today I may have found the perfect song for that moment when you’re in the plane and trying to feel nostalgic or something and listening to Belle and Sebastian etc. Enter a song by New Zealand band The Mad Scene called ‘The Greatest Time.’

CLICK FOR SONG

Yeah, it starts with Joy Division-y drums and not so Joy-Divisiony horns of sorts, but then the electric guitar comes in all fuzzed out, and the plane is rising in the sky or something, and he starts singing. “He” being Hamish Kilgour, drummer of The Clean, a band of supreme Flying Nun fame. Every so often the guitar picks up and he stops singing, giving the song that feeling of soaring that I may be mistakenly or not associating with a plane ride. The plucky bass interrupts his voice, conspicuously dating this song right back to its 1995 release date. It could be the song that prepares the viewer for a Melissa Joan Hart kiss or maybe a more unknown alternative to some of the similar fuzzy and ethereal 90s music that came out around the same time.

Towards the end we have a psychedelic solo that spins and maintains the heavy snare, swirling and what have you until the song unceremoniously finishes and maybe you realize that you need to get up to use the bathroom but you’re in the middle seat, so you hold it and play the song again. This time you realize that maybe the horns are a little bit sillier than you thought, but dear old Hamish sure does a good job of covering up that New Zealand accent of his.

“Does it feel alright” he asks between that prevalent bass feature, which you now realize is pretty dumb, but still makes you feel just as good.

”

“America’s Greatest Lost Band” by Winona

Growing up in Los Angeles with parents who really, really liked oldies radio, I was exposed to lots of KRTH 101.1. For those of you unfamiliar with this staple of my childhood/minor bane of my existence, KRTH is exactly the type of sugary, over-the-top kind of DJing that most Dads would like. And mine surely did. Here’s an example, featuring one of their staple DJs “Shotgun” Tom Kelly:

See? Yeah.

So for all of KRTH’s technical missteps, they did play a lot of really good music. Sure, 85% of programming would be the same song off of the Beatles’ White Album, or maybe the occasional Motown track. But every so often they’d play something unique that would segue into either an impassioned lecture from one of my parents or  a hunt on my own to find the artist and maybe some more music by them.

For all the Stones, Dylan, and McCartney I heard, I never once heard of The Remains. So when I came across a distinctly Brit-pop looking album in the KSPC library it seemed very out of place to say the least. Curiosity got the better of me so I put it on, and this is what I heard.

!

My curiosity was piqued. This group sounded really good. They had a few more “punky” covers of songs (ie Hang on Sloopy, Like a Rolling Stone, etc.), but the one original track on the album (the song I linked, “Why do I cry”) was by far their best. They sounded like a hybrid between every mega band of the time, you know, the kinds that are painfully cited over and over again by people like me in relatively incompetent blog posts.

But hey! They were catchy, the guitar was awesome, and the jangly beat is something I could imagine being played over and over again on one of those oldie stations. I mean, sure, they weren’t worn and familiar sounding to me yet, but if clout in today’s radio world is measured by how quickly a band becomes disdainful through over-saturation, I could see these fellas coming out right on top. So why weren’t they big?

Turns out The Remains have a bit of a sob story, beginning with their brief taste of fame opening for THE BEATLES during their last tour. It almost sounds like it was meant to be, right? Too bad these guys couldn’t keep it together though… they broke up the summer after their opening gig on that tour and never really got off the ground again. They recorded a few cringe-worthy songs since, but have since faded into relative obscurity.

I’ll let rock journalist Mark Kemp say it, “The Remains most certainly are America’s greatest lost band.”

“Land of the Loops” by Joseph

This week’s record caught my eye because it features cute album art. It’s as simple as that. Take a look.

In my head, the commercial opens with a medium long shot of a couple twenty-something men sitting in the back of a moving pick up truck. They are clearly bros, wearing fitted baseball caps and tanks. Several shots of trees flying by intercut with close ups of the bros laughing or looking pensive and nostalgiac. Cut to the bros hopping out of the bed of the truck with a wicker basket full of Miller Lite (this is the only time the viewer sees Miller Lite). Cut to the bros hiking in the woods. One of the bros pretends to kiss a banana slug. The other bros laugh. Cut to side shot of the bros walking across a log in single file. Cut to the bros running across an open field. This is all shot on a shaky handheld camera, by the way. Lots of sweeping shots. Lots of lens flare. The bros tumble to the ground. A few bros are lying on their backs with their eyes closed, expressing bliss on their faces. The other bros are up on their elbows. A couple close ups of bros looking down and then up shyly, a little past the camera as if at the other bros. A slow sweeping shot toward the setting sun. White out. Miller Lite.

Stung In the Heart

by Winona

In this recurring dream of mine I’m in a field of gold. I’m alone, the wind is blowing, summer wheat smell invades my senses. I’m relaxed but expectant, when, from a distance he arises like a scarecrow, gaunt and measured, from a far-off part of the field. He bats his eyelashes and lets his metaphorical hair down. We begin doing yoga as the sun sets behind us. Before we fall into a deep, smooth sleep he whispers softly in my ear, “You’re my desert rose.”

ie:
This desert rose
Each of her veils, a secret promise
This desert flower

Anyways in case you couldn’t tell, I never have that dream but I do really, really, really enjoy Sting, or, referring to the good ol’ name he was born with, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE (sorry to out you on such a public forum Sting but the name was just too good).

So, imagine my surprise when amongst the music that I’m not cool enough to listen to I find something, rather, someone, who really understands me. And as if it could get any better, it’s on an album that features covers of songs by Kurt Weill, a leader in the avant garde music scene in Berlin of the Twenties. I had to listen to this, and you will too:

Having little to no knowledge of Weill’s body of work, I soon learned that he was well worthy of covering and honoring, and he absolutely is revered and respected on this album with performances and covers of his songs from such superstars as Lou Reed, Tom Waits and John Zorn. Weill wrote and collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on such masterpieces as The Threepenny Opera and The Seven Deadly Sins. He scored the Broadway musicals One Touch of Venus and Lost in the Stars. Langston Hughes was even quoted as saying “Weill was a truly universal artist, who could with equal justice be claimed by Germany as German, France as a Frenchman, by America as an American, and by me as a Negro.” So this guy truly was a force to be reckoned with, a force worthy of the combination of the tooty tuba and operatic gravel of Sting’s voice that had to come together to create this fantastic ode to a fantastic man.

This song is part legend and part reality. Relatively lost in the haze of youtube videos and vinyl compilations (well, at least here at the KSPC library) I doubt it will ever get airplay, or should even be played on the air at an independent college radio station. But maybe by bringing it to light I’ll get that moment I’ve always hoped for, the moment I’ve always dreamed of when Sting one day looks me in the eye and says, “Hey kid, you done good.”

 Princess Tinymeat

By Joseph

This week’s Spin Doctors pick was not found by me.* It was found by DJ Natty, host of the wonderful KSPC program Squaremont (RIP). We were looking for Rancid records in the vinyl library when Natty pulled down a record by a band called Princess Tinymeat. Obviously, this record attracted us for the reason any of the records I write about for these posts do, it is glaringly ridiculous and baffling.

What does it mean? Who is Princess Tinymeat? Personally, I think of the Venture Brothers’ character Princess Tinyfeet, but not all people have the same level of intimacy with Adult Swim’s programming that I do, especially not PT themselves considering the album came out several decades before the show (or Adult Swim for that matter) was created. So what’re we dealing with here? Transsexual royalty with feelings of inadequacy? A small steak with a tiara? A third obvious misinterpretation? I still don’t know, but the music’s good.

The record, Herstory, is a 1987 compilation of PT’s various singles and EPs. Formed by experimental musician Daniel Figgis, at the time recording under the name Haa-Lacka Bintii (of fucking course), the band seemingly didn’t release much music. This compilation covers most if not all of their released songs. For the same reason I was drawn to Princess Tinymeat in the first place, the last track on the record, “Devilcock!,” immediately attracted me.

“Devilcock!” is a throbbing (heyo) cut that, to my relatively uneducated ear, falls somewhere between industrial, goth, and post-punk. The drums pound and crack. The bass bobs. Distorted washes of guitar dart in and out. Bintii’s voice is surprisingly high. I always expect the vocalist of any goth-sounding band to sound like Ian Curtis but Bintii does his own creepy and deranged thing on this song. Since these posts are first and foremost about the music, I’ll get out of the way now and let you listen for yourself.

*Actually, I initially saw this record when I was reorganizing the P section of the vinyl library a couple weeks ago. Princess Tinymeat is a great enough band name that it stuck with me even though at the time I was in a re-alphabetizing fervor and could be stopped by nothing short of a bomb threat. Even then I probably would’ve hung around a little longer to get a few more 7 inches filed and to see whether the dude even “had the balls.” It should also be mentioned that the Princess Tinymeat LP was misfiled so clearly I did a good job.