From: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org (seven-seas-digest) To: seven-seas-digest@smoe.org Subject: seven-seas-digest V4 #466 Reply-To: seven-seas@smoe.org Sender: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Precedence: bulk seven-seas-digest Wednesday, October 5 2005 Volume 04 : Number 466 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 07:55:00 +1300 From: "Kristin Smith" Subject: seven-seas Kelley Stoltz article (1/3) This is absolutely wonderful!! http://www.sfbg.com/40/01/noise_echo.html Echo of the past A superfan looks back at a life shaped by Echo and the Bunnymen. By Kelley Stoltz BACK IN APRIL of this year, after my band finished a tour of the UK and Europe, I stayed on in London with a friend to see the sights and, most important, to make a two-day pilgrimage to my musical mecca, some three hours north by train, Liverpool b the hallowed hometown of my favorite group, Echo and the Bunnymen. I had been a fan since 1983's Porcupine (Sire), which was one in a pile of good records my cooler, older stepbrother had loaned me to instill some taste and to replace the crap I had blindly ordered from Columbia House. It was some "vibe" about the LP sleeve that actually caught me first: four trench-coated dudes walking together along a frozen mountainside in some mysterious netherworld of snow and ice b it reminded me of walks my friends and I would take along the iced-over banks of the lakes and through the barren trees of Michigan winters, walks that were full of a great spiritual meaning even if we didn't know quite yet what that meant. Just young kids, really, with a bottle of wine or, more likely, a couple cans of Busch Light and nowhere really to go, but still looking for a meaning in the shadows on the wall or in the changing autumn leaves, and conjuring whatever romantic visions one has at that age. Attack of the clone The opening strains of sitar on "The Cutter" start off Porcupine, and I'd never heard anything like it b it was long before I was exposed to the Yardbirds, the Velvets, Shankar, and George Harrison, etc. Half pop, half Indian raga-rock, Porcupine gave way to the moonlit nights and orchestral water dreams of 1984's Ocean Rain (Sire). By then, a year later, I was a suburban teen clone of the Bunnymen's lead singer, Ian McCulloch, cigarette smoke wafting into my Aqua Net-sprayed hair. I perfected his heavy Scouse accent and spent hours interviewing myself in character on the living room couch until the sound of Mom's car in the driveway as she returned from work prompted a hurried end to my fantasy. Yes, the Bunnymen were my band, the first group I cared about, wanted to be, and hoped no one else apart from a select few would ever hear. ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://www.villiersterrace.com * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * ====================================================================== ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 07:57:41 +1300 From: "Kristin Smith" Subject: seven-seas Kelley Stoltz article (2/3) [2 of 3] Of course, others had been on this "new music" from the start, like the owner of the local "imports only" record store, who made frequent forays to England to stock up on 12-inches and 45's by the cool English groups and resold them to me and a few other guys back in Detroit at insane prices. I would happily fork over two weeks' allowance and the entire earnings from mowing the neighbors' lawn for a picture-sleeve single I'd never seen. I collected them all. "Rescue" 12-inch b $40. Sure. "The Puppet" 45 b $25. OK. A cassette bootleg at $15 (kept in those days in a secret drawer behind the counter). Gotta have it. "A Promise" 12-inch b $30. Can I pay half now and half later? The Bunnymen were at the top of their game then, and those prices didn't seem so exorbitant. Nowadays I could have the whole lot on eBay in a day and for a fourth of the price. How do I know? Because 22 years later ... I still have the Bunnymen bug, and every time I'm looking for records, I see what there is of theirs in the bins or on auction online. Instant karma But now there are other bills to pay and far more bands to check out and different stuff to buy and collect. I had been tempted to buy a few Bunnymen things over the years, but really I had it all b and wouldn't I be better off saving up for a mono mix of the "White Album," or paying the phone bill? b but when I saw a huge promo poster for the first Echo single, from 1979, on eBay early this spring, I convulsed like I was 16 again: In all my years, I'd never seen that. And so it was. Buying an $80 Echo poster on eBay proved to be some kind of karmic debt repaid: The poster led me to befriend the seller, Dave "Yorkie" Palmer, who was a childhood friend of the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. In fact, it was at his mother's house that the Bunnymen and the Teardrops had rehearsed for their first two years. He had had that poster all that time and had since gone on to have a fair music career of his own in the band Space. After I explained that I would be coming to have a look around Liverpool in a month, after my tour, Yorkie offered his services as my personal tour guide to all the old haunts of the late-'70s Liverpool post-punk scene's inner circle. That scene revolved around the seminal Eric's Club, on Matthew Street, which opened in 1976. Just opposite the by-then-defunct Cavern Club, Eric's featured the first northern performances of the Sex Pistols and the Damned and later would host the first shows by the Bunnymen and the Teardrops, in 1978, as well as regular performances by Joy Division, the Fall, XTC, the Cure, OMD, the Buzzcocks b a who's who of the period. Yorkie walked me by where Eric's used to be, and then to the site of the old Probe Records, the still-hipper-than-thou music shop of Liverpool, around the corner from the spot where the La's rehearsed, and finally, the next day, to his mother's basement, where the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes rehearsed their first songs. ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://www.villiersterrace.com * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * ====================================================================== ------------------------------ End of seven-seas-digest V4 #466 ********************************