I’ve Just Gotta Say…

By Eduardo

that this is one of the greatest albums of all time.

Even if you’re not a fan of 60′s psychedelic pop, you won’t find it difficult to appreciate this underrated masterpiece. In my opinion, this ranks just below Pet Sounds in terms of songwriting and overall awesomeness.
Most people only remember the Zombies for “Time of the Season” (on this album) or their other minor hits, but they were masters at their craft. Odessey & Oracle, their final album, is chock full of timeless pop goodness. These guys were seriously one of the coolest bands of the psych era, and it’s too bad that they’ve been somewhat forgotten.

Okay, that’s it. I just wanted to give this album some long-deserved props. Go buy it; you’ll thank me later.

Final Few

By Eduardo

Here’s my mad dash to try and complete my list of Eduardo’s Most Influential Albums… I’ll try to keep it brief, but you know me.

The Greyboy Allstars
West Coast Boogaloo
1994

I’d heard of DJ Greyboy from fellow amigo Pepe, who had made me a great compilation of funky acid jazz during the long, cold winter of 1994. A year or so later, I was in the old Tower outlet store on K Street in Sacramento and stumbled across West Coast Boogaloo by a group called the Greyboy Allstars. Seeing as how it was only $4.00, I decided to see if these “Allstars” were as cool as the DJ Greyboy stuff I’d heard.

I was pleased to find that they were far better than DJ Greyboy. Not only were they a totally different group, but they played real instruments instead of being just one guy with two turntables and a microphone. These guys dished out solid, nasty, instrumental 70′s-style funk like nobody I’d ever heard before… It was raw. I was blown away by the sheer dopeness of this record, and was hooked instantly. I’d been listening to a lot of James Brown at the time, but had been yearning for some heavier, groovier stuff. West Coast Boogaloo was exactly what I needed, and the Greyboy Allstars had satisfied a growing hunger.
I spent a lot of time listening to that album while going to and from class at Sac State, and Jaimenacho and I played it fairly often at our pad near school.
I took the CD with me to Redding a short time later, and had Paco give it a listen. He agreed that it was quite dope, and we were on our way to becoming big fans.

Over the years, Paco and I went to see them live several times – and at least one of those shows would have to rank pretty highly on my “all time greatest concerts” list. The Allstars were twice as good live; even better than they sounded on CD. I saw them quite a few times over the years, and they never disappointed. The first time we saw them, though, it cracked me up to see four white guys and one black guy some out on stage. I’d always assumed that they were all black, because the funk was so good and genuine. Aside from the Average White Band, funk bands consisting mostly of pasty white guys were totally unheard of in the mid 90′s.

Very much like the Percussion All Stars, at first Paco and I knew nothing about the Greyboy Allstars due to the lack of much information on the album sleeve. They were on a tiny, unheard of label, so their stuff was impossible to find in most music stores. However, after we’d seen them a couple of times, we had a chance to talk with the guys themselves a bit – and found out more about their history and musical involvement with DJ Greyboy. A few years later, I even got to design a lot of stuff for the keyboardist, Robert Walter, after the Allstars broke up and pursued their solo projects.
Over the years, a lot of fun times, friendships, musical discoveries, and cool experiences came about – all because I picked up West Coast Boogaloo for $4.00 at the Tower Outlet. It’s provided hours upon hours of listening entertainment for many of us Amigos Locos, so I thought it deserved a mention here.

The Beach Boys
SMiLE
1967

This is one of the coolest, unique, and most beautiful albums ever made. Too bad it was never released.
The story behind SMiLE is what fascinated me the most, initially. I’d heard years ago from my uncle that the Beach Boys had made an album that was supposed to be a “sequel” of sorts to Pet Sounds, but it never came out. There were plenty of rumors as to why (it was never finished, it was too weird, label disputes, etc), but nobody seemed to know the real story. It had been chalked up as a “lost album”, and the Beach Boys just continued on – becoming progressively lamer with each following album.
What exactly SMiLE was, and what became of it, has been the subject of endless debate and discussion among pop music fans for decades. There have been books written about it, and eventually bootleg copies of the master tapes started floating around on Napster around ’99. It was around this time that I stumbled across some of these tracks, and downloaded them.
A lot of the stuff I had found was instrumental, with no vocals. It was very surreal and beautiful, with weird arrangements and a big-sounding ‘symphonic’ feel to it. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever put in my ears before, as if it were pop music from 100 years from now. I quickly became interested in how the Beach Boys had reached such a creative milestone – and more importantly, why the heck this stuff had never been released. I wanted to know the whole story of SMiLE.

I won’t go into the rest of the story here, but I’ve spent the past several years enjoying these tracks and learning the strange and fascinating story surrounding the SMiLE project.
I must say that my love for this weirdly unfinished album has definitely made me appreciate the huge influence on popular music that Brian Wilson has been. There are countless indie bands who have tried and failed to recreate the ‘sound’ of both SMiLE and Pet Sounds, and Brian Wilson himself is even planning on releasing a rehashed version of SMiLE in a few months. However, I don’t think it will ever again be possible to recapture the magic that (almost) produced one of the most amazing albums ever.

For a great article on the story of SMiLE, check out Stylus Magazine’s article, Smile: The Definitive Lost Album.

The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
1969

My first introduction to the Velvet Underground was “Pale Blue Eyes”, which I’d heard in my friend’s girlfriend’s car shortly after beginning college. I’d heard of them before, but there was something so special about that song that I wanted to hear more. I found that I really dug this album, which led to me gradually getting into their other stuff – particularly The Velvet Underground and Nico and Loaded, as well as post-breakup compilations VU and Another View.
When I first met Juanita, I was stoked to find that she was into VU as well. She and I spent that summer – and many thereafter – listening to Lou and the gang. Now that we’re married, we possess a sizable collection of assorted VU stuff. I still dig listening to them, and just about any of their albums is always a welcome spin on the stereo (with the possible exception of White Light, White Heat).

The Orb
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
1991

One afternoon in late ’91, Jaimenacho and I went over to the laughably lame Camelot Music in the Mt. Shasta Mall to see if there was anything new out that was worth picking up. I spotted this album by a group called The Orb in the ‘new releases’ section, and picked it up to look at. I knew nothing about what it sounded like, but it certainly looked pretty interesting. Judging by the cover, I figured it had to be at least reasonably cool – so I bought it.
On our way back to my house in the silver brother, we put it in Jaime’s stereo. The album kicked off with Little Fluffy Clouds, and we both agreed: “This is really weird, but pretty cool!”

I spent a lot of time listening to this album over the next couple of years, and Paco and some of the other Amigos ended up getting into it as well. Paco and I used to put it on sometimes while driving on long trips, which was cool. The whole album is like an epic journey through the solar system… it’d be perfect for a planetarium show.
It really grew on me, even though I liked it quite a bit from the beginning. Two years later, I was an enthusiastic Orb fan, collecting whatever releases of theirs I could find during our semi-monthly record hunting treks to San Francisco and Berkeley. We had few opportunities to go see them live, one particular time was when we opted to go camping instead.

Honorable Mentions
Here are a few that should be mentioned as well. These are just off the top of my head, so I’m certain that there are tons of great albums that I’m overlooking.

Right Wing Gunn Nut

By Eduardo

My appreciation for all things Gunn could not have developed in a more backwards way. Like many children of the 80′s, my first exposure to the theme song was via Spy Hunter in the arcades. I just thought that the music was cool, and had no idea that it was a real song – let alone the theme from an old TV show.
I later heard cover versions of the Peter Gunn Theme by groups like Art of Noise, Duane Eddy, and others. I wasn’t sure exactly who or what Peter Gunn was, but my dad told me that it was a really great TV show that had been on when he was around my age.

Years later, after I got into collecting vinyl, I really developed a taste for what could be described as ‘detective jazz’. Not to be confused with that other pseudo-genre of ‘spy jazz’, detective jazz was the smooth, laidback sound of the private eye… walking bass, steady ride cymbal, lurking horns, and usually a dope echoey flute solo if you were lucky. It conjured up images of a black-and-white 1950′s world of mobsters, private dicks, stool pigeons, and sultry women.
I had picked up a couple of records that had this kind of stuff on it, which piqued my interest – but the quality wasn’t very good. I wanted to hear more, and most of what I had found seemed derivative and uninspired. I knew that there had to be some better stuff out there, but what was it?
I decided to look into this more. After class one day, I stopped in at one of the computer labs at school and poked around on Usenet a bit.
After a little bit of searching in newsgroups and on the web, I found more than a few references to Henry Mancini’s The Music From Peter Gunn as being something like the “ultimate private eye jazz record”, and “essential” for anybody who dug that kind of stuff.
I had my answer. I began hunting for it locally, but had no luck. I think I even looked online, but nobody was willing to sell it for a decent price. It wasn’t available on CD, either, which only added to my desire to find this supposed gem.

My birthday was a few weeks after I had begun my search, and I spent that afternoon over at my girlfriend Juanita’s house. She said she had a gift for me, and went into the other room. She returned with a heavy, square box-shaped package and said “I hope you like it”.
I opened it up, and to my surprise found a hand-picked stack of wonderful records, precisely the kind that I would have bought if I’d found them on my own. There were some cool ‘percussion’ titles in there, some Xavier Cugat, latin jazz, all stuff she knew I loved. Juanita had delivered the perfect gift, and I was thrilled. As I excitedly went through the stack, one record in particular stood out.
There it was, at long last: Henry Mancini’s The Music From Peter Gunn.

I think it may have been at that exact moment when Juanita became my favorite person in the world.

The record was in fact every bit as cool as I had anticipated, and then some. The theme song that I’d become so familiar with was neat, but the rest of the album was even more fresh. It perfectly captured that world of mob goons and suave detectives, but managed to do it in a laid back, usually upbeat kind of way. It was indeed the ultimate “private eye jazz” record I had hoped it would be, and became permanently fixed in my car’s tape deck. Some of my best memories of my days in Sacramento are of the early summer afternoons when Juanita and I would drive around in the Ghia, listening to that album.

I still hadn’t seen the TV show, though. I wanted to see what the heck this music had been made to score, because it had to have been pretty darn cool. The back jacket of the LP sure seemed to substantiate that, but I had no way to find out what Peter Gunn had been like. Unfortunately, they never aired it on Nick at Nite or anything else – and I didn’t really feel like shelling out a bunch of dough for the episodes on VHS, so I assumed I was out of luck.
The album was finally reissued on CD, which was great, but my prospects for seeing the actual show looked slim.
It wasn’t until only a year or so ago that I learned that A&E had released a bunch of episodes on DVD. I picked those up, wondering if the show would turn out to be as good as the music I’d been enjoying for nearly ten years.
Surprisingly, the show was every bit as cool as the music. Pete Gunn was easily the hippest detective ever, with his snazzy suits, dry humor, and nightclub singer girlfriend. Better yet, the music was woven perfectly into the show in all the right ways. The camerawork was superb, and reminded me that television shows were once short segments of finely crafted cinema… a far cry from the utter crap we see nowadays.
Henry Mancini was the first guy to mix jazz and TV together, and RCA had the smarts to put out this record. It was wildly popular and influential for a while after it was released, for reasons I understand all too well. If you have any appreciation at all for stuff like this, I’d highly recommend picking it up yourself.

The 3 Minute Rule

By Paco

I have to send along my opinion, and subsequent agreement with Eduardo’s assestment of the Beastie Boys second and third albums, “Paul’s Boutique” and “Check Your Head”.

In the early nineties we rediscovered Paul’s Boutique just like many other people did. I can remember listening to “Hey Ladies” and a couple of other tracks from Paul’s Boutique back when the cd was new and thinking…

“These guys are even more lame than they were when “Fight For Your Right” came out…”

But it wasn’t until Eduardo persueded me to give the entire album a listen one day in my car that I finally appreciated how cool the album actually was.

I immediately went out and bought both cd’s and listened to both for quite some time, all the while wondering both to myself and out loud with Eduardo as to which cd was better. Which is a question that probably doesn’t have an answer.

Anyways, like I said before in a prior post… how could Eduardo and I forget the days of listening to the “The 3 Minute Rule” on the drive from Park Ridge to Sonoma State for more lectures about the Black Man’s Penis from good old Professor Averbuck?

Is Your Name Michael Diamond?

By Eduardo

It’s been said that Paul’s Boutique is the Pet Sounds of hip hop, and that sums it up much better than I could. What I can say is that this album was highly (and somewhat regrettably) influential on several of the Amigos and our friends throughout college. I won’t bore you with the stories of all the stupid stuff we did while under the influence of this record, but it usually involved eggs, alcohol, general mischief, or all three.

Paco and I have debated for years over whether or not Check Your Head is a better album, and we’ve more or less concluded that they are equally dope for different reasons. Personally, I think that Paul’s Boutique more perfectly encapsulates the B-Boys’ identity as fun-loving, delinquent idiots – and is just more fun to listen to. It’s their last totally non-serious record, which makes me respect it a little more. After Check Your Head, they often went too far over the line in trying to shed the image that gained them their original popularity.
Having said all that, Paul’s Boutique remains a favorite of mine to this day – and still sounds fresh every time.

Discussion in Percussion

By Eduardo

In December of 1994, my girlfriend Juanita and I stopped in at one of the many music stores we used to frequent near Sacramento. I think she was picking up some stuff she had ordered from them, and I was just looking around as she paid. I noticed a small bin of old vinyl LP’s near the door, which had a “FREE RECORD WITH PURCHASE” sign on it. I started thumbing through it, and the guy behind the counter told me to take whatever I wanted. Apparently, they were trying to get rid of the stuff.
One record in particular instantly caught my eye. It had a crazy, late fifties abstract design on it, with the word “STEREO” emblazened across the top in big bold letters. I pulled it out, quite pleased that I had found such a cool-looking LP in a box of unwanted music. I wasn’t really into vinyl, but I wanted to hear what this sounded like. If the music was half as cool as the cover looked, then I’d be happy.
At first glance, the cover didn’t reveal much about the style or genre, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was called Progressive Percussion, and was by some group called the Percussion All Stars.
‘This ought to be interesting’, I thought. I noticed that there were a couple of turntables with headphones nearby; listening stations for vinyl customers. I was in luck!

“Hey, can I listen to this?” I asked.
“Sure, go ahead.” said the guy.

Juanita was still finishing up her transaction, so I had at least a minute or two. I put the record on the turntable, flipped the switch, put the headphones on, and carefully set the stylus down onto the spinning black vinyl.
The wonderful, warm crackling sound of “old record noise” emanated from the headphones, and then…

BARRRUM… BARRRRUM… BARRRUM BARRRUM BABABADUMMM…

The sound of large tympani drums filled my ears, and a xylophone quickly stepped in to accompany. It quickly built to a mini-climax before bursting into the main song, an avalanche of horns, drums, guitars, xylophones and bongos. I was immediately struck by the energy of it all, and suddenly realized that the cover design made perfect sense. “The whole album must be like this”, I thought.
…But alas, it was time to go. Juanita stood waiting by the door. I put my new discovery back into its brightly colored sleeve, and left with it under my arm. I was excited, and wanted to hear the rest of it as soon as I could.

Back at Juanita’s pad, we put it on her turntable and gave the record a proper listen. I was quite pleased to find that the whole album was as good as that first track I’d heard, and was also surprised at how much I genuinely liked the music. It was jazz, but not the Coltrane/Monk/Miles Davis kind. No, this stuff was swingin’, and heavy on the drums and percussion (hence the name). All the while, though, it was cool – even the most rambunctious or melancholy tunes were eventually smoothed out to a perfect consistency of carefree, loungy bliss.
The lack of any identifying information about the group or recording on the sleeve gave it a certain mystique; all I had besides the music itself was the crazy abstract cover. The anonymity only added to the coolness of it all. I felt as if I’d unearthed a lost treasure, a wonderful relic from the forgotten age of fifties generica. I recorded the whole thing onto a high quality cassette tape, and put the vinyl in a better protective sleeve.

Yes, I had discovered Thrift Store Jazz.
Undoubtedly, most people had written this stuff off as “elevator music” years ago… but to me, it was a priceless find. It was something that you probably would have heard in a department store in 1959, or a record that Rob and Laura Petrie might play at a low volume after putting Ritchie to bed.
I wanted to hear more stuff like it, and soon learned that the only place to find the stuff was in dusty old thrift stores or garage sales. It may have been jazz, but it was the kind that connoisseurs and collectors would make fun of. I knew that I’d never find the Percussion All Stars filed neatly between Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins in an upscale record shop. Rather, I knew right off that I’d have better luck thumbing through the endless stacks of discarded Mantovani and Ray Conniff LP’s in musty old thrift stores.
I had no problem with this, and the added bonus of being able to take home five or ten albums for a dollar at most of these places was kind of a thrill. Since these records were practically free, I got to listen to a lot of different groups and performers. After a while, I knew what was good and what wasn’t. The All Stars were still my favorites, and nothing came close to sounding as cool to me – until I discovered the outstanding Command Records label, which put out many of my now-favorite LP releases.

It blew me away that so much good music was just sitting around, forgotten and rotting away in boxes. I developed somewhat of a desire to ‘rescue’ as much of this stuff from these places as I could – and thus began my unhealthy obsession for vinyl, which continued for many years.
Fortunately for me, all this happened before the whole annoying “lounge revival” movement of the late 90′s had gotten underway. Over the next several years, I found quite a few gems tucked away in the most unlikely places around Sacramento and Redding. My favorites usually had “Percussion” in the title, but I collected tons of other stuff as well. Although I got into a lot of other kinds of Thrift Store Jazz and collected hundreds of records, I’ve never found anything that has managed to top the All Stars in overall coolness value (to me, anyway).

Paco and I really got into Progressive Percussion while we both attended Sonoma State in ’95. We’d listen to it on our way to class, or while drinking beer at our pad – which often led to lengthy discussions on the impeccable skill of the guitarist or the drummer’s acute sense of timing and rhythm.
We had terrible weather there that semester, and I think it rained every single day. It wasn’t very pleasant, and after a while the relentless rain began to affect our moods. However, Paco and I found that it was impossible to be anything but cheery when the All Stars were on the stereo. That remains true to this day, and I can’t help but grin whenever I play it in my car.

We used to ponder over the back cover of the album, which showed pictures of the other releases on the same label (Modern Records). Interestingly enough, it indicated that there was in fact another Percussion All Stars album, called Dynamic Percussion. It had a similar cover, and we made an all out effort to try and find it. Back then, there was no GEMM or Amazon or eBay, so it was pretty much up to chance whether we’d ever find it or not. It took five years and several hundred thrift store visits before it ever turned up, but that’s another story for another time.

I can now look back and see how Progressive Percussion was, for me, an unlikely introduction into the fascinating world of jazz. I later got into other stuff, and have since developed a deeper appreciation for jazz in general… but the All Stars opened the door for me, and this album will always have a very special place in my heart.

The “P” All Stars

By Paco

I touched on it really briefly before about my first exposure to the Percussion All Stars, but I figured I should elaborate a bit since Eduardo told the story of discovering them.

Eduardo and I were driving from Redding down to Rohnert Park in order to check out places to live. It was the winter of 1994 and we were a few weeks away until classes were going to start. I decided to take a different route down there. I had only been to the area once or twice before, so we made a right turn off of I-5 at Williams, and decided to take highway 20 to try something different. We were probably listening to tunes like the Stone Roses, etc… but after we got about 1/2 way down the road, Eduardo made a suggestion…

“Hey, I got this cool record the other day… and I made a tape of it, do you want to hear it?”

“Sure… what is it?”

“It’s this old funky band called the Percussion All Stars, I think you’ll like it.”

“Ok, put it in…”

So Eduardo popped it into the tape deck. And the funky beats began. It sounded like nothing that I had heard before. Except maybe something that you would hear on the Muzak in Thrifty Drug store, but WAY more interesting. We grooved to the tape all the way to Rohnert Park, the rest of the drive flew by.

I was instantly hooked, just like Eduardo.

In fact that whole semester was spent with the constant sounds of the Percussion All Stars blaring through the stereo in our pheasant adorned apartment. Good stuff… I still love hearing the guitar player on that record.