It was such fun to spend my late teens and early twenties in the company of superstars like the Monkees, David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman and Elvis. But I usually had just as much fun when I would be choose to interview or cover a potential new teenybopper star. I say potential because once producers caught on that introducing their young talented actors or singers in Tiger Beat sometimes helped turn them into instant stars, I received A LOT of requests to interview unknowns. The requests came from TV studio executives, public relations executives and record execs.

You know you are in the Land of the Giants when a hand is bigger than you and Stefan Angrim combined!

One I remember fondly was being invited out to the set of “Land of the Giants” to interview the teen actor Stefan Arngrim who starred as Barry Lockridge on the science fiction TV show “Land of the Giants,” which first aired on ABC TV in September 1968. Set in the then-future year of 1983, the series tells the tale of the crew and passengers of a sub-orbital transport spaceship called the Spindrift. In the pilot episode, the Spindrift is en route from Los Angeles to London via the ultra-fast route of a parabolic trajectory. Just beyond Earth’s boundary with space, the Spindrift encounters a strange space storm and is transported to a mysterious planet where everything is twelve times larger than its counterpart on Earth. The Spindrift crew calls the inhabitants “the giants”. Everything on their planet is built to their scale — buildings, cars, animals, etc. The Spindrift crashes on this planet and becomes inoperable.

The show had been on for a couple of months, but I had no clue what it was about when I went out to the set to interview Stefan. You can imagine my surprise when I arrived at 20th Century Fox Studios and went inside the first soundstage to meet Stefan. All around me were giant props, a matchstick bigger than a baseball bat, a “human” hand twice as tall as I was. This was cool! Stefan was a very nice boy, a young teen and yet he also exhibited a maturity that many child actors possessed. He could carry on an adult conversation and took an active part in my interview and my personally guided tour of the set.

During our interview Stefan told me about his new hobby photography. “I do character studies, and now I’m trying

Stefan, me and Land of the Giants matchstick and spark plug props.

my hand at fashion photography. I’m sort of trying out techniques and if someone is wearing something I love, I’ll shoot it. Like Angela Cartwright goes to school with me and when she comes in wearing something I like I’ll usually shoot that. I’ve always got a camera with me.”

He also told me all about playing in a band and when the band broke up he just continued writing songs.

I hadn’t thought about Stefan for many years, but as I Googled him to get his birth date, I found out he has had a very successful acting and music career!  You can read about his career at http://www.stefanarngrim.com/bio.htm

Kurt and me on the Disney studio set of his movie.

Another “B” list fave, or at least that’s how it began, was Kurt Russell. I had interviewed him once at his home, a “day in the life” story, for Tiger Beat. The publicist out at Walt Disney Studios kept calling me and asking me to please come out to the studio and do a story on the star of their new movie, a musical, “The One and Only Original Family Band.” I was usually agreeable about doing stories on the “B” list actors or singers because getting to know them at the birth of their careers always paid off if they really hit it big. I liked Kurt and his family and having worked at Disneyland during my high school years, I also thought it would be fun to see the Disney Film Studios.

Before we went onto the set, the publicist gave me a golf cart tour of the studios and the sound stages. An amazing thing I learned was that the studios were built during World War II. Walt Disney had enough money to build the studios from the success of his “Mickey Mouse Steamboat Willie” cartoons, but he had to get special permission from the War Department to build a studio of this size, as building materials were rationed and much of the labor force was serving in the armed services. The War Department agreed to let Disney build as long as the studio was designed in such a way that it could be turned into a hospital immediately if needed. So, as we walked through the studio the publicist showed me how the doors were all wide (enough to accommodate wheelchairs) and the doors did not have regular door knobs or locks, but instead had the big hospital pull handles and windows in the doors.

It was exciting to see the cartoonists at work at their big drawing tables. Disney was making motion pictures, but they were still doing the animated films that were so loved by the public.

Once the tour had ended, I met with Kurt and his mom and we would talk in between filming of his scenes. Kurt was always one of the most down to earth “celebrities” I had ever met. He told me all about how disappointed he was at the timing of this movie because it meant he couldn’t play for Thousand Oaks High School baseball team that season. Kurt loved baseball and eventually played for the Angel’s Class A Bend, Oregon Rainbows club as a switch hitting second baseman. He loved going to school on the studio lot, though, and told me, “On the set we only have to attend school four hours a day and I learn more than I do in a week at Thousand Oaks High.”

Of course, we all know just how far Kurt went in his acting career. I continued to cover him for a couple of years,

Me, Kurt’s mom Louise and cutie pie Kurt!

once joining him for horseback riding at his family’s home where they had several horses. I couldn’t help but laugh years later when my sons were 4 and 5 years old their favorite movie was Kurt’s “Big Trouble in Little China” and they would watch it over and over again. And I have probably watched “Overboard” at least a dozen times.

These are but two of the soon-to-be stars I would interview over the years. Are there others you’d like to read about?

Good times. . .Ann Moses reporting about “back in the day.”

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The B List? Not for Long!

It began as a dream in the minds of two teenage companions, Don Van Vliet and Frank Zappa, isolated in the barren town of Lancaster. After their high school years, Zappa moved to Cucamonga, and Van Vliet, quitting his job as the manager of a shoe store chain, soon joined him. They made plans to form a band called the Soots and concocted Van Vliet’s unusual alias, Captain Beefheart.

Eventually Zappa split for Los Angeles and invented the Mothers, but Beefheart, being a bit more reclusive, returned to Lancaster. There, in 1964, he assembled some “desert musicians,” the Magic Band, and began playing teen dances.

If you had been a teenager, then, in the audience for a Magic Band performance, it probably would have been quite a shock boogalooing to the grinding blues-rock of a group dressed in black leather with matching high-heel boots.

Beefheart’s early band was raw and fundamental, true inheritors of Robert Johnson’s dark and bold vision. The Magic Band’s first single on A&M, “Diddy Wah Diddy” (Bo Diddley transmogrified), and initial album, Mirror Man (recorded one night in L.A. in 1965) capture the abrasive intensity of this scabrous band that ultimately influenced a whole generation and new breed of musicians often called “punk” or “indie.”

Captain Beefheart’s pre-Trout Mask Replica creations were tampered with by recording company moguls. And yet, even today, Strictly Personal playfully conveys the artists’s unique vernacular (“Ah Feel Like Ahcid”), and Safe As Milk undeniably remains the most underrated album of the era. Disavowing the use of LSD and pot, Beefheart nevertheless was consumed by the psychedelic era. He did manage, however, to transcend the epoch’s cliches through his unique poetic voice–but not without losing a wide audience in the process. The age of “Ahcid” simply could not contend with an authentic genius.

Beefheart’s old pal Frank Zappa, having been in advertising and marketing, could objectify the times and, as rock’s equivalent to Marshall McLuhan, could manipulate his audience via cryptic messages, often satirical.

Zappa’s first opus with his Mothers of Invention was Freak Out!, which was ugly, berserk, and very intellectual. The album defined an LA sensibility, embracing while lampooning the approaching banalities of the times (multi-media events, happenings, grope sessions, concept albums) that, in 1966, had not yet entered the pop mainstream.

The Mothers of Invention embodied the anarchic ritual of “freaking out,” a terms that still best describes the ridiculous poses of LA’s finest psychos: Kim Fowley’s tongue-tied trips, the Seeds’ flower power sham, Davie Allan and the Arrows’ fuzzy soundtracks for a string of films about the Hell’s Angels.

Originally signed by MGM as just another California folk-rock group (as described in “Trouble Every Day”), the Mothers–thanks to Zappa’s flair for hype and organization–denied God in rock ‘n’ roll, forcing listeners to re-evaluate their preconceptions.

On “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” (12 grotesque minutes of percussive cacophony and terrible noises from Godzilla’s churning bowels), the band destroyed the barriers between rock ‘n’ roll and all other musical forms. On Freak Out!, Zappa’s music delineated a challenge alive with infinite possibilities.

That Zappa and the Mothers could make a leap from their traditional LA R&B and doo-wop backgrounds to “Help, I’m a Rock” is exactly what psychedelic awareness was all about.

I’ve found that if you want to gather and reflect on your post-modern musings it’s always helpful to relax with either Safe As Milk or Freak Out!—whichever comes to mind first.

Get your daily dose of Beefheart and Zappa at the ever-reliable POPKRAZY.

High school kids bathe in the stuff.

Demento’s fans have always plagued him with requests–petitions, phone calls, smoke signals, telegrammed threats, pushing their fave raves be it Rusty Warren’s “Knockers Up!” or Jim Backus’ “Delicious.” The market for this stuff are human beings trapped in a state of arrested development, and usually that means teenagers.

Demento has compiled many collections of this dumb music, and each one is an event that heralds a new level of tastelessness. His packaged nonsense consistently serves as a wunnerful wunnerful introduction to what seems like a lost world of noise, gibberish, and loud burps. The selection of material on his collections has usually been determined by how successful it was on Demento’s radio shows. (Napoleon XIV and R. Crumb always seem to be on them.)

For example, there’s Possum’s “The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati” (the answer record to “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago,” which in and of itself is sufficiently demented–but in the world of novelty records there is always that step beyond) combines belches, groans, and screams to create the perfect horror-snot performance. Not even grade-Z monster flicks were ever this appalling!

Then there’s Ben Gay and the Silly Savages’ “Ballad of Ben Gay,” which belongs to the usual poke-fun-at-gays ilk, a genre so jam-packed with contenders that its equivalent can only be found in Helen Keller jokes.

Dumb discs of the demented variety are constantly be rediscovered, and a record can become “demented” even though its original intent was quite serious. The frustration here is that you have to listen to Dr. Demento’s show in order to keep up. (He’s a great MC…kinda like what the Ghoul was for horror movies on TV.)

When bordom sets in, nothing but nothing beats a crazy record. Recorded dementia can cure zits, clear sinus passages, relieve back pain, and even stop constipation. Hey, give it a chance!

Lots and lots of novelty records can be found regularly at the forever crazy POPKRAZY

R.E.M.’s direct link to pop music’s past was their initial producer, Mitch Easter, a native Southerner who built his studio, Drive-In, at his parents’ home in Winstom-Salem, North Carolina. Easter produced great pop recordings by Chris Stamey and Oh-OK, and invented his own quirky pop group, Let’s Active, whose Afoot is loaded with a confusion of playful hooks and surprises.

On R.E.M.’s records, Easter steered away from the expeted, relying on offhand noises and seemingly off-the-wall disruptions to shape a unique sound: busy productions aflutter with the activity of a pop event. This style of production is the Beatles’ legacy, but it also owes a great deal to the music of another Southern eccentric rooted in ’60s pop, Alex Chilton of the Box Tops and Big Star.

Familiar with Chilton’s work, R.E.M. became the most successful practitioners of a Southern Anglo-pop style that has endured for over 40 years. Of gone-but-not-forgotten bands in this mold, some like the dB’s survive mostly in critical circles while others like the Scruffs fade into obscurity (except on EBay).

Labeled everything from hippie revivalists to new-wave progressives, R.E.M. has traditionally been regarded by leftist music critics with suspicion, especially having once called the Clash’s music “a newspaper.” In fact, R.E.M.’s sound could even be labeled as revisionist; their lyrics, pretentious.

But whatever R.E.M.’s songs are about, they remain important because they have renewed interest in the region that invented American music. Bluegrass and blues may seem incongruous with ’60s pop, but Southern boys listened to the Beatles, too!

As puzzling as it may seem on the surface, R.E.M.’s music is rooted in one place–Athens, Georgia, a comfortable haven removed from the hubbub of Atlanta. On R.E.M.’s “Time After Time (Annelise),” there is an allusion to climbing a water tower, and as any Southerner knows, the water tower serves as a marker in the small towns that dot the South. Since the town’s name is painted on the water tower’s face, it also provides the community with a sense of place. In Southern rural communities, young folks on a dare or just for kicks climb these towers, not to deface the town’s name but to paint their own personal riddles on the face of the tower–a message to be viewed by the entire community.

Climbing the water tower is the true motivation behind R.E.M.’s music.

The South, finally, can sing only of the South. As an established Southern pop band, R.E.M. reminds us of that heritage because it’s what they know best: the conflict between a dead South, ravaged by the Civil War, and a living region, breathing its last before it is effaced by the homogeneity and cultural proverty of America. Fully aware that the South is where America’s popular music truly began, R.E.M. have kept that legacy intact by introducing a myriad of old voices to a youthful audience.

It is no wonder then that when R.E.M., incognito, opened for the Cramps at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City on Halloween in 1983, the Athens band was billed under the only alias available to them: It Crawled from the South.

Find lots of Southern culture memorabilia at the great repository of memories:   POPKRAZY.

But it is this ambiguity which is partily responsible for R.E.M.’s success as a critics’ band. Back in 1983 in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, it was really the collective work of rock critics that enabled the band to place first and second place, respectively, for Album of the Year.

The band’s very name, the abbreviation for Rapid Eye Movement, denotes the ultimate dream state–the life between consciousness and unconsciousness–and this inbetweenness is at the heart of R.E.M.’s music. In fact, in the beginning, Michael Stipe’s mumbled words were a kind of literary device, a conscious attempt to obscure the meaning of the song while forcing the listener to assume responsibility for the meaning of the text.

Those lyrics–garbled catchphrases, broken thoughts, secret references to Athens, Georgia–are like brush strokes on the canvas of the music, impressionistic in intent, defying standard interpretations of rock lyrics. A tale or a poem may not unfold, but what does come through is an urgent message, a cryptic word hurled against the music.

The contrivance of R.E.M.’s ambiguity does possess a certain literariness, each of their early recorded works, like works of short fiction, begging to be decoded by the well-read, the elite, the academic. Music critics have traditionally admired this attribute and motivation in their rock artists (Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell) because it fulfills an ideal of equating rock with litearture as well as reflecting the critics own impulses as “serious writers.”

The import of R.E.M.’s music does not rest solely on literary aspirations. R.E.M.’s music can also be heard and understood as an attempt to convey the mysteries of Southern consciousness. The message is clear on the band’s very first great record, Murmur, on which the cover is nothing more than an eery image of kudzu in winter (an eeriness that all true southerners are familiar with).

In their early incarnation, R.E.M. exhibited a modern awareness of what Southern pop should be (their ’70s pop reference being Big Star from Memphis): the knowledge that meaning emerges through struggle, the idea which is at the very center of Faulkner’s fiction and the South’s history. In rock music, this translates into the sound of a million things happening at once, instruments and voices at odds with each other.

At the beginning, within two years. R.E.M. had released 30 songs spread over an EP and two albums. The exegesis of those songs can be difficult (and its part of the trick). But it is also no easy matter to define R.E.M.’s sound. Because of their ringing harmonies and folk-rock/psychedelic tendencies, R.E.M. was frequently compared to the Byrds, but their music owes a debt as well to Kaleidoscope, Los Angeles lovers of rural traditions (& David Lindley’s first group) as well as a host of ’60s short-lived pop bands like the Left Banke. Other musical influences abound: Jamaican dub, traditional country, Velvet Underground, and even funky soul. (There exists a tape of outtakes from Murmur which includes a cosmic rendition of the frat-party classic, Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up.”)

Early on, a pronounced Southern drawl pervaded every song, and at times, their close-harmony vocals recalled the Southern voices of country gospel singers from Appalachia. R.E.M.’s gift was their ability to re-echo those ancient voices and make them sound new–and ageless. Not unlike the Stanley Brothers or George Jones or any good creator of Southern music, R.E.M. reawakened the past with their music–and made that music seem eternal.

Their sense of the past in the present first came to the surface on “Pilgrimage” from Murmur. Whether or not this song is directly about the annual spring Southern pilgrimage tours of ante-bellum mansions and plantations is Mississippi is irrelevant. As the song develops, the pilgrimage assumes a greater significance–becoming about all returnings, the ever-present need to go home and the desire to rediscover the past.

Rediscover YOUR past daily at the great repository of memories known as POPKRAZY

One thing beach-nuts do agree on is that the sounds which inspire partying on the East Coast have absolutely nothing to do with California and surf music. In the East, a beach party means shuffling a little bit in the sand (a dance called, appropriately enough, the shag) and guzzling beer or sipping bourbon. In the Wild West of the ’60s, a beach bash implied some surfing, and required the sounds of the Ventures and the Beach Boys as well as many weird bands such as the Pyramids and the Trashmen.

Beach music of the East Coast bears the light of nostalgia and beams it through the AM radio waves–a longing for a past that was never a part of the scene to begin with.

Unlike the music on the West Coast, which was by white kids on an instrumental warpath, beach music has always been primarily music by blacks. What’s more, whereas the classic image and style of surf music suggested a homosexual subtext (with rockabilly’s similar subtext right on its tail: Roy Orbison’s “Domino” being the first example of rock music emulating the sound of the waves), the theme of East Coast beach music is heterosexual love and desire, often thwarted but always remembered.

Because beach music tolerates more than it excludes, it’s not really a definable genre like surf music. The beach music categorization includes rock ‘n’ roll from New Orleans (Ernie K-Doe, the Showmen), Philadelphia soul (O’Jays, Archie Bell and the Drells), Stax (Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MG’s), Motown (everybody), disco (Trammps, Tavares), ’50s R&B (Joe Turner, Five Royales), ’70′s smooth soul (The Floaters, Tymes)…and yes, even garage punk (the Gentrys, the Swingin’ Medallions).

It’s a mixed-up, shook-up celebration of a musical past, of passionate summers spent on the beach.

This phenomenon has been documented on zillions of excellent compilations (see above for a good example), but it was officially and best presented back in 1967 by Atlantic Records on two volumes called–you guessed it–BEACH BEAT (still, never reissued on CD).

Compiled in response to the demands of Carolina beach lovers seeking oldies amidst the dearth of psychedelia in the late ’60s, these two packages contain the quintessential beach performers and performances–classics by the Clovers, the Coasters and the Drifters; Willie Tee’s “Teasin’ You,” Lenny O’Henry’s “Across the Street,” and, courtesy of Chess, Bobby Moore’s amazing “Searching For My Love.”

Atlantic being one of the great R&B labels, these two collections was almost ready-made, and so, in a sense, was the beach music scene. Clearly, here was a programmed sensibility, not a phenomenon based upon stylistic substance but on a memory of a romantic lie: that music once had a meaning it now completely lacked.

The East Coast beach music sound is easy to package but impossible to pinpoint. It’s like you have to be in on IT to get IT.

Beach music has become an institutionalized form of party ritual restricted to the coastal resort cities and inland campus areas of the Carolinas and Virginia. The majority of the black groups branded with the “beach sound” were never intentionally creating music for this East Coast circuit. Instead, they were consumed by a locale desperately in need of an identity during a time when pop music seemed to be running riot with hippies and weird sounds.

It was an idea based on the belief that dancing to soul or doo-wop records would outlast the trendiness of the British Invasion and psychedelic rock. And, oh, how right they were, those determined reactionary shaggers on the beach!

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where boys and girls at the University know how to party for weeks on end. I have grown accustomed to the reactionary nature of beach music and its maddeningly nostalgic need to ignore the present until it becomes the past.

I used to read loyally each new issue of the slick mag, It Will Stand, dedicated to the preservation of beach music, its very name suggesting the notion that the South will rise again. I have listened faithfully to the old Rockin’ Ray’s “Hall of Fame” and “The Best of the Beach” radio shows on WBT in Charlotte. And shopping for beach music has never been easier thanks to the Internet.

But still, amidst the beach hubbub, I have always felt that the meaning of its presence eluded me, and then one day I discovered why.

In the early ’80s, I once had a long conversation with an A&R guy at Arista Records, Mitch Cohen. Cohen was then compiling an anthology of beach music for the label called The Beat of the Beach (great title). He had been asked by a higher-up at Arista to compile this collection because certain oldies were being consistently requested by distributors in the Carolina-Virginia area. Despite the invisibility of a discernible style, Cohen went for the job full throttle, talking with the editors at It Will Stand and oldies know-it-alls. Never did Cohen assume that he knew what a beach record was.

At the time, Cohen agreed with me that there was no discernible style to beach music, but he did say that he understood that you had to be “on the inside” to properly pick up on the cultural codes and signs that distinguish a “beach record” from your ordinary oldie. To know the shag beat may not involve a conscious effort but only an instinctual response to a manner of partying that has remained stable since the early ’60s.

So, Cohen, in programming the anthology, went for the feeling of the record. In other words, he tried to hear exactly what a shagger on the dance floor would hear in the air, not what a rock pundit thinks someone should hear.

And what a shagger hears is so subjective it can only be compared to the gooseflesh twinge of recalling a lost love that is suddenly regained at the intimate moment of remembering. That a seemingly reactionary musical consciousness can be so romantic is a shuddering thought.

But the idealism behind this love for an old record is also stirring: For through the all-encompassing, albeit nebulous, harmony of the beach music scene, if a record was once loved, then there’s the guarantee that it will endure.

You can find many of your beach needs daily at PopKrazy .

[WEIRD STUFF like this can always be found daily at POPKRAZY.

The discovery of self, getting to know the inner you, is the very stuff of our troubled and crazy times. The growing number of support groups, the proliferation of psychotherapists, and the overwhelming and seemingly all-powerful self-help sections at bookstores attest to this fact. “Feel the pain,” sez Zippy the Pinhead as he hands a friend a box of Milk Duds just before he heads spiraling into a nervous breakdown.

Pop music abounds in such eccentric edifices of the inner self. In fact, pop music is such a refuge for so many selves in search of self that pop and rock are probably nothing more than the babble generated by a series of cathartic experiences. Many of rock’s landmark albums are probing works, painfully introspective, almost dull in fact, until you hear them in the isolation of your empty room after a long night of dark fear and sweaty terror.

Here I will name but a few: Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” Dusty Springfield’s “Dusty in Memphis,” Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark,” Otis Redding’s “The Immortal,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love,” Big Star’s “Third/Sister Lover,” and the near-forgotten Alexander Spence’s “Oar.” (I mention with a cautionary note Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree” set, the most depressing collection of beautiful songs for suicidal late-nights ever assembled–beyond even Joy Division.) These are all great works that seem to listen intently to their own heartbeats.

Particularly since the heyday of the singer-songwriter in the early ’70s, rock culture (and rock criticism) has especially courted such deep self-absorption.

There exists the ultimate tribute to the ultimate pop masterpiece, Pet Sounds–Billboard going haywire over Brian Wilson’s beautiful self-indulgent extravaganza. I have nothing to add to what has been said over time about the great Pet Sounds, except to say that the work began in Brian’s room, which is where great pop music often begins–exploring the inner self ad nauseam in isolation.

So what are you waiting for? Come on and discover your inner child and all sorts of introspective stuff daily at PopKrazy

We were heading north of Nashville to find this barbq truck we’d heard about. (We found the thing, actually, and there is a great picture of the three of us–Joe, Charlie, and me–with the sauce dribbling down our swag T-shirts [on mine, it looked like Merle had blood dripping down his face]).

Anyway, after the food break, we decided to locate this guy Freeman Kitchens, who had been contacting Charlie for awhile to see if our repackaged oldies biz would release a Carter Family set for TV direct-response sales. Of course, the sound of ancient Carter Family recordings on TV would have put us out of business–not to mention the fact that there wasn’t any real footage. I mean, A.P. wandering the Virginia hills with a handheld camera behind him, wobbling as his depressed thoughts meandered, would have been great, but…..that’s the real problem with the media overload: all the good stuff was long before YouHooLookAtMeTube even existed.

And so, we find Mr. Freeman, who turns out to be a great host, and he’s surrounded by reel-to-reel & cassette tapes of the Carter Family with tons of memorabilia & stuff all over the place. He sure had focus, I’m telling ya. He was a really kind and thoughtful gentleman, and we stayed for an hour or so, but didn’t really promise him anything. Nevertheless, we came to believe in the Carter Family even more.

But not enough to put them on TV, mind you.

Freeman’s documentation was undoubtedly central to all of the scholarship that has gone on over the years in creating the CDs, books, etc. for one of America’s greatest wonders of musical outpourings.

Here he is in a much more organized environment than when we met him—as if he had come to rest in the heaven of his accumulated desires. Of course, you can see A.P. peeking over his shoulder.

God bless ya, Mr. Kitchens!!!
(Find Carter Family collectibles at the ever-reliable POPKRAZY.)