Dear God Damn Diary’s Polkapalooza, for a limited time only.

But did B^2 know about Weird Al’s tragic loss? You know, I always thought Frankie was Al’s pop. I was certainly mistaken.

A couple days ago I noted that the Seattle Public Library has the magnificent survey of the psychedelic pop era known as Nuggets II. Obviously enough, it’s the second in a series which begins with Nuggets, which I’m happy to note is also available.

Nuggets focuses on obscure American rock bands; Nuggets II looks afield to the UK, Europe, and beyond, including Mexican and Asian groups. It’s really astonishing in the diversity of sources.

I first was exposed to this material through Steve Millen’s ongoing tape-compilation projects, The Enpsychedelipedia and the followup, best-of project, The Re-Enpsychedelipedia. I don’t recall how many volumes the series collectively ran to, but I’m gonna guess in the range of twenty ninety-minute tapes. A day after linking to the CDs, I got an email from a pal wondering if anyone had converted Steve’s Enpsychedelipedia to digital formats. I believe that there are one or two cassette-based complete copies of the project around, but it’s so much material I doubt that it’s been completely converted, and possibly hasn’t been attempted.

Steve had a collection of original vinyl from the era in addition to being a knowledgeable and passionate pursuer of roughly every vinyl reissue series available at the time. The project really picked up steam in the mid-to-late eighties, when there were several competitor series to Nuggets in circulation. The competitor compilations were a mixed bag: definitely of greater interest to connoisseurs of the obscure, these series tended to emphasize rawer songs and musicians, with recording quality being less of a consideration for inclusion than is the case on the relatively polished and well-budgeted Nuggets series.

Nuggets is a fantastic introduction to these sounds, make no mistake, and avoids falling into the anti-commercial trap that can so easily limit enthusiast-oriented compilations to material that did not succeed commercially at the time of release; thus, along with Tomorrow’s Digger anthem “My White Bicycle,” you get some pre-Monkees Davy Jones, pre-Eurostar Status Quo, the Troggs, and so forth.

Rhino conveniently provides tracklistings for both Nuggets and Nuggets II.

Nuggets was originally compiled by Patti Smith cohort Lenny Kaye in the early seventies; the original track notes may be seen at Little Steven’s web site, which has a number of interesting rock history goodies scattered about.

The most wide-ranging and best distributed of the non-Nuggets compilations is the 28-voume (!) Pebbles series. Apparently, twelve of these have been re-issued on CD, with differing track selections, and three 2-CD best-of sets are also available.

The final compilation source that I know Steve worked from to assemble his survey of this fertile field was also released by the same company that promulgated Pebbles.

Highs in the mid-Sixties focused on the many distinct regional rock scenes in the US. I can still remember the first time that Steve played Volume Seven for me, which features Pacific Northwest bands from the mid-sixties. He backed that up with an introduction to the original vinyl of The Sonics, which astonished me in its’ rawness.

Finally, Steve’s favorite band from this era is the formerly overlooked 13th Floor Elevators, a band that, he maintained, was infinitely superior to the no-count likes of “orchestral rockists” such as the Beatles and “instrumental fascists” like that “tightass white boy” Eric Clapton. Steve had strong, and frequently amusing, opinions.

The Elevators are legendary in Texas, partly because lead singer Roky Erickson is supposed to have gone nuts from using too much cough syrup. The truth of the matter is probably more complex; however you come down on the debate concerning the high-art aspirations of the most widely celebrated artists of the late sixties, it does seem clear that the Elevators were long unfairly neglected, something that may have changed somewhat since the early eighties.

So, is there a way to emulate the Enpsychedelipedia? Are there other knowledgeable eccentrics that still care about this material sufficiently to present guides, their own recompilations, and the like?

Happily, the answer is yes.

Turn Me On, Dead Man (despite an unfortunate all-graphic front page) offers webcasts via live365.com, and though their features highlight predictable artists that would have induced armwaving rants from Mr. Millen, there is an extensive catalog of garage and psychedelic compilation reissues.

Here’s another compilation database, which is also available for download from the compiler as an Access database.

Of course, a nod to Bomp! and the bomplist is called for. Bomp appears to have centralized many of the catalogs from other distributors that I recall from the eighties and appears to have a distribution relationship with Rhino, which in turn has a relationship with the big boys. Note that this is sheer observational speculation, I don’t keep up on label contracts and distribution relationships any more.

The bomplist, despite its’ name, is not specifically about Bomp product, but an active email discussion list that covers the same areas of inerest that the label’s catalog does. At times it’s been the best way I know of to find a particular garage-rock musician – while it’s not uncommon for artists to be kinda disengaged from the internet and computers and so forth, their fans and friends are often in the thick of things.

Hello, what’s this?

Friends, the public library is your true friend.

I think it may say something definitive about me that I’m far more excited about four CDs of forgotten one-hit wonders than four CDs documenting a single artist’s profound effect on the history of a genre.

Tonight, shall it be beer, or shall it be Bombay martinis? The future is unwritten.

User One informs us of Beatallica’s new album. You’ll need a BitTorrent client (I’ve not tried this ‘un) to access the torrent of either.

UPDATE: Now also seen on music.metafilter.com.

Those of you partial to Chuck Taylor hi-tops, neighborhoodies, and the occasional bowling shirt are strongly advised to drop in on Dear God Damn Diary today and avail yourself of some fine tune selections.

chordie provides a meta-base of multiple web sites that contain various iterations of lyrics and chop-chord style marked-up versions of songs, which is the particular format I prefer to learn from. the site makes clever and appropriate use of CSS to send printer data. Alas for Safari’s fixed 1/4″ margins.

The site offers membership, which appears to provide users the ability to build song collections and to save these collections to PDF for downloading.

Finally, the site also offers a beautiful feature, instant song transposition. Here’s the traditional song House of the Rising Sun – click the “Transpose” link under the chord lookup diagram, and look at the chords, both in place over the song lyrics, and in the lookup box.

The only feature I could think of that I’d like to see added is an instrument selection feature, so that I could set the chord lookup to display mando or banjo chords instead, or in addition.

As far as content, personally, I’d love to see the digitrad database added. The main website for digitrad is the Mudcat Cafe, but Rick Heit has long offered a ‘personal’ copy of the songs on his website. His offering is interesting because it provides the melodic information for the song in one of several formats.

Girl Trouble’s 20th anniversary show [P-I] will be at the Crocodile on Saturday ($7). But we’ve been invited to see the new Kaufman flick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Viv actually read the script months ago (in an early draft, mind you). She found it via Kate Winslet’s web site. I found it on the amusingly named Being Charlie Kaufman fan site.

The site also contains more writing by Kaufman.

The Bare Knuckle Boxers are my old Irish music rock band, in whch I played this electric mandolin. I also ran the old version of the website, which is worth rummaging through. Last night Greg (the other ex-mando slinger of BKB) and Karel (ex-guitarist) dropped in on the current version of the band at Mulleady’s in Magnolia. Mulleady’s was always a fun place to play and they sounded just fine.

The occasion was a CD release; the recording features the new lineup and while I have just finished ripping it to listen to it, I have not yet played it. As I was ripping the disc I dug into my archives to find material that the original lineup of the band recorded.

I hadn’t listened to the older stuff for a while; it sounds good! I’m looking forward to hearing the new stuff.

These three songs were recorded at Gravelvoice in May, 1999. The songs ‘All for Me Grog’ and ‘The Gallowglass’ were released on a split single (genuine vinyl!) by Seattle character Wally Hargrave of Estate Records. Haven’t run into him lately – wonder what’s doin’ at the Estate?

Tonight, my ears are all about Miles.

It’s a sweet pleasure.

bubblegum machine, via The Cartoonist.

Alas, I don’t have time (I’ve been, er, hip deep in Plumbing Problem Volume Two) to suck down all the good stuff until Monday. In addition to the week 68 material featured (The Germs’ “Lexicon Devil” being my highlight) I noticed stuff by the Sonics, The Kingsmen, Tommy James and the Shondells, as well as loads of the kind of radio crap that tormented me and twisted my soul in to the loathesome and festering pit of black hatred it is today.

Highly recommended.