December 2009

The Hombres
Let It Out (Verve/Forecast FTS-3036)
1967

This is one of the great American garage albums that just don’t give a hoot.  A Memphis combo, the Hombres opted for the lighter side of garage-punk.  The Hombres’ album cover (which is their only album cover since no record label was brave enough to release another record by them) is an obvious reference to the Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird LP, released in ’64, which shows the infamous surf band from Minneapolis clustered around a garbage truck.

Ironically, the Hombres had originally intended to be a surf band.  In 1967, they traveled through Houston posing as a pop version of a West Coast surf group and somehow got tangled up with Texas producer Huey Meaux.  In ’65, Meaux had already transformed a band of San Antonio punksters into an ersatz British Invasion act, the Sir Douglas Quintet (featuring a very young Doug Sahm).  And so, with the Hombres, Meaux saw an opportunity for reshaping the rebellion of a garage band into a comedic sensibility.

HERE begins an ongoing series of song lists that will attempt to create, restore, retrieve, amplify, or defy the traditional rock 'n' roll canon.  Most of these creations don't really "exist" (whatever that means anymore in a free-floating universe of whathaveyou). 

In addition, the series will dig up lost (often demeaned) albums that have been denied their position in the established rock-crit canon.

Please keep in mind that I will NOT be sharing MP3s or any downloadable material.  Just like I had to do, you will have to seek this stuff out yourself. (It's not that I'm selfish--I fear the dreaded, albeit friendly, Web Sheriff.)

Below is a list of songs, all from The Beatles' Live at the BBC collection from 1994.  I swear to its repeated playability, which will be the primary criteria for creating or digging up a new contender for the canon.

Rock & Roll!!!! or The Beatles Sing the Oldies But Goldiest

1) I Got a Woman

2) Soldier of Love

3) Clarabella

4) Sweet Little Sixteen

5) I Just Don't Understand

6) The Hippy Hippy Shake

7) To Know Her Is To Love Her

8) Some Other Guy

9) I Got to Find My Baby

10) So How Come (No One Loves Me)

11) Crying, Waiting, Hoping

12) A Shot of Rhythm and Blues

13) Lonesome Tears in My Eyes

14) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)

Late in the pivotal year of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard, then a Marxist-Leninist filmmaker, came to America to make a revolutionary film about the '68 American revolution. With documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, Godard began shooting on locations in and around New York City on a project he called One A.M. ("One American Movie").

But One A.M. was never completed. Eventually, from some of the footage shot, the team of Leacock-Pennebaker put together another film called One P.M. ("One Parallel Movie").

One P.M. included the cast of Godard's One A.M.—Rip Torn, Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, The Jefferson Airplane, LeRoi Jones, among others. It also showed lots of scenes of Godard directing and Richard Leacock photographing One A.M (along with much footage of a couple of sound girls, some New York policemen,and Godard's wife, Anne Wiazemski.) One P.M. works as the record of the making of a movie, and it may be all that is left of a movie that was not finally made.

It's hard to say why One A.M. was abandoned. Some film scholars say that Godard failed to understand the nature of the movement in America.

The highlight of the film may be the footage of Jefferson Airplane performing "House at Pooneil Corners" live on the rooftop in Midtown Manhattan on December 7, 1968. Remember, this was shot over a year before the Beatles pulled the same stunt while rehearsing and recording their Let It Be film.

Once again, Godard was intuitively and radically ahead of his times.

[One P.M. is currently available in 10 short clips on YouTube.)