Peaked Too Soon - Bands That Were Ahead of Their Time

Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and add free on Amazon music, included with Prime. Ever hear of Jeremy Bentham? He was an Englishman, a political philosopher who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, and he was, by all measures, a radical. He was against slavery when it was still very much a thing for the British Empire. He promoted animal welfare. He believed that everyone, over a certain age, man and women, should be able to vote. He was against the death penalty. He wanted homosexuality decriminalized, something that didn't happen until 1967, and he advocated for no fault divorce. These are all now the foundations of liberal democracy. These concepts were not just years, but quite literally centuries ahead of his time. And none of these changes came into effect until many, many, many, many years after he died. So Jeremy Bentham was far, far ahead of his time. Avalov lace was another one. She is widely recognized as the first ever computer programmer. Now computers didn't exist when she lived in the early 19th century. Heck, there wasn't even electricity yet, but her notes laid the groundwork for the world of mechanical and electrical thinking machines. And then of course there was Leonid Ordevinchi. In the 15th and 16th centuries, he designed concepts for the first parachute, the helicopter and the tank. He explored human anatomy, astronomy, art, cartography, botany, even paleontology. This was centuries before anyone knew that dinosaurs existed. These people, along with inventor Nikola Tesla, author Jules Verne, and Terry Pratchett, an author who predicted the rise of fake news and disinformation on the internet eventually got their due, but only after they died. Their stories got me thinking, what musicians were so far ahead of their time that they never got credit for their accomplishments? Or how are musicians who still aren't getting the recognition they deserve for pushing the envelope in the world of rock? That's just wrong. It's time to fix that. This program is about musicians who should have been famous for altering the course of music, but got no respect at the time. They just peaked too early. This is the ongoing history of new music podcasts with Alan Cross. Again I'm Alan Cross and this program is all about giving credit where credit is due, specifically to musicians who were so far ahead of their time that the public and the industry just didn't get it. And as a result they were ignored or shunned, unrewarded or otherwise omitted from music history. Most of these names might be new to you, but that's not your fault. The music world just dropped the ball on these people and that's wrong. They just happened to offer something when we weren't quite ready for it. In other words, they peaked too soon. And let me show you what I mean. If you're at all familiar with the early rock scene in France and I'm talking about the late 1950s and into the 1960s, you may know that this music was referred to as ye ye. Francis Hardy was a well-known ye ye singer. She was known primarily for singing sentimental and melancholic ballads. Over 50 years she released over 30 studio albums and once competed in the Eurovision Song contest and she's considered a national treasure in France and has friends worldwide because she also sang in English and German and Italian. Hardy remains one of the best-selling singers in French history. She was also an actor. She was involved in the world of fashion and photography and she even became a professional astrologer. But wait, back to music. She has also been called Lagrange. Lagrange didn't become a thing until at the earliest the late 1980s. But if we examine France's Hardy's music and travel back to 1964, we have songs like this. You remove the string section, concentrate on the low tune distorted guitar and the raw drums and you'll see what I mean. Yeah, 1964. "France, while Hardy, whom the people of France called the Grandmother of Grunge, she died on June 11th, 2024. I wonder what she thought of the American Grunge scene of the 1990s?" We'll come back to another sadly ignored female Grunge pioneer in a little bit. It's an easy one because almost everyone acknowledges that the velvet underground was probably the first alternative rock band. They were formed in New York City in 1964 by Lou Reed, John Kale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker. German singer Nico was later grafted onto the lineup for one album by Andy Warhol, their manager and producer. And there have been many, many books written about them, but I can offer these highlights. First of all, their name. They was taken from a trashy paperback novel written about the BDSM lifestyle that somebody found it in literally in the gutter someplace. They had a female drummer, something that was unheard of in the middle 1960s. They were part of Andy Warhol's freaky New York crowd and he encouraged them to continue to improvise and experiment, regardless of what everyone else was doing. That was all fine, but in the nine years the band was together, the velvet underground had pretty much zero commercial success. They sold very few records. Their gigs were sparsely attended and even in the era of underground FM radio almost no one played their records. No one sounded like the velvet underground. When their debut album arrived in 1965, rock and roll was largely about cars and girls and various escapists and fun topics. Not the velvet underground. They were from the gritty streets of New York City where there was crime, weird sex, strange people and drugs, lots and lots of drugs. They sang about that world, which to the music world at large was considered too extreme at the time, but they did have their fans. Their debut album, the Velvet Underground and Nico sold maybe 30,000 copies between 1965 and 1970. That's the claim anyway. It peaks at number 199 on the Billboard Top 200 album charts. But the right people bought this record. In 1982, producer Brian Eno famously said that everyone who bought one of those 30,000 records started a band. Here is a list of just some of the few who claimed to have been awakened by the Velvet Underground and then incorporated some of whatever they were doing into their music. David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Doors, Patty Smith, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, U2, Joy Division, The Pixies, The Sex Pistols, Talking Hens, The Cure, Craftwork, REM, Simple Minds, The Strokes and The Psychedelic First, whose name is derived from a Velvet Underground song. To illustrate how different they were from the mainstream, let's go back to the spring of 1965. These were the big hits from March of that year, just as the Velvet Underground and Nico hit the stores. We had the Beatles and eight days a week, a nice pop song, The Supremes and Stop in the Name of Love, My Girl from the Temptations, Roger Miller and King of the Road, and this Diamond Ring by Gary Lewis in the Playboys. Compare all that lightweight pop to this song about Lou Reed banging smack into his veins. A song that still very intense by today's standards. Now imagine hearing that back in 1965 when the Beach Boys were the biggest thing around. The Velvet Underground was at least ten years ahead of their time, maybe more. We wouldn't hear stuff like this until maybe the punk revolution of the 1970s. And today the Velvet Underground is considered to be one of the most influential bands of all time, yet when they were around, nobody cared. The next accidental visionary is a guy from Boston who was a hardcore Velvet Underground fan. He was also someone who at a time when every male rocker and every male rock fan wore their hair long, but this guy, nope, he wanted to wear his hair short. He was vehemently anti-hippy and he reveled in being different. Jonathan Richmond was inspired to get into music because, like I said, of the Velvet Underground. He formed a band called The Modern Lovers, which featured future rock stars Jerry Harrison, who would later become part of the Talking Heads, and David Robinson, the future drummer of the cars. His stripped down songs help set the groundwork for punk rock. In fact, we classify his music as proto-punk, the stuff that had to happen first before punk rock could be born. The song I like to point to is this one. It was recorded in 1972, and it is every bit of modern powerpop as anything by the strokes or slone, the new pornographers, the Danny Warhol's, Jimmy Eat World, and even the Go-Ghosts, and the knack and blondie and the Romantics. Have a listen. It's an ode to the state of Massachusetts. Also, it's an ode to a muscle car, and it's an ode to listening to AM radio late at night. This is Jonathan Richmond and The Modern Lovers with World Runner. It was years before his influence was acknowledged. And if you remember the movie, there's something about Mary. Jonathan is the guy with a guitar who shows up in strain places during the film. Here's another group of women who should have been much, much bigger than they were, despite the support they got from David Bowie. They were called Fanny, four women who formed a band in Los Angeles in 1972. Now at that time, the idea of an all-female rock band was unheard of. You just didn't do this. I mean, everybody knew that women couldn't rock, right? Oh, sure, they could sing and maybe shake a tambourine, well, in pretty, but a rock group featuring nothing but girls? That's crazy. But here's the thing. Fanny was good, very good. Like I said, Bowie thought they were brilliant. And although commercial success escaped them through four albums before they broke up in 1975, they were tremendously influential on other young women. That includes those who would go on to form the runaways, heart, the go-goes, and the bangles. Take a listen. This is from 1972. It was released around the same time that Jonathan Richmond song that we heard came out. The album is entitled Fanny Hill. The song is Blind Alley, which by the way was recorded in the Beatles' Apple Studios on Bond Street in London. That's the all-woman group called Fanny, showing everyone that women could rock in 1972. Today, Fanny's reputation continues to filter through the music world. And if you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend a 2021 documentary called Fanny, The Right to Rock, very good. If you want to hear more stories of musicians and bands who were way ahead of their time, stick around. Plenty more coming up. This is a program about musicians who peaked too soon. Given the music world, stuff that it wasn't quite ready for yet, and they've gone down in history as being too far ahead of their time. The next band I want to talk about is Big Star. They were from Memphis, and they were headed up by singer Alex Chilton. They became active in 1971 and hung on until 1975. And in the process, they essentially invented the genre that we now call Powerpop. And from the cars and blondes to Sloan and Blink-1 and II, we're influenced by Big Star. Now to be fair, Big Star took a lot of cues from the Beatles and the Who and the Beach Boys. But their genius was to combine very melodic hooks with very catchy melodies and big guitars. And while the music tended to sound happy, that often covered up lyrics that were on the depressed and melancholy side. There were other Powerpop bands in the '70s who had hits. There was Bad Finger and Todd Rungren. We had the raspberries, cheap trick, the knack, but Big Star was there before all of them. But the world wasn't ready for what Big Star was selling. And after three albums, all commercial disappointments, they broke up. But in the years that followed, especially in the 1990s, they were rediscovered by new generation of alt-raug musicians and fans. A cult following built, and in 1993, the group reunited and stayed together until singer Alex Chilton died of a heart attack. Let me illustrate what I'm talking about. A song like this would not sound out of place today. But it was recorded in 1971 and released in April 1972. This is Big Star with 13. Cult favorites, Big Star, who should have been much bigger than they were. But acceptance of modern Powerpop was still a few years into the future when they were around. This brings me to death, a group that lived in obscurity for decades before being discovered. And what makes them interesting is that they were punk before there was punk, before it was a thing. And there were three black brothers from Detroit. There was Bobby, Julian, and David Hackney. They formed death in 1971. And they were originally a funk band under the name Rockfire Funk Express. But after seeing gigs by Alice Cooper and the Hu, they decided that they needed to rock things up a bit. And they were very good. In 1975, Columbia Records expressed interest in the band and paid for the recording of seven songs. And while the music was good, the label did not like the band's name and demanded that they find something else. When death refused, Columbia bailed, saying that a group with that name would have zero commercial success. Two years later, the band was done. They moved to Vermont and switched to singing and recording gospel songs under the name "The Fourth Movement." And death was almost completely forgotten. Meanwhile though, a seven inch single for a song called "Politicians in My Eyes" became a collector's item, exchanging hands for up to $1,000. That music inevitably ended up being digitized and began trading hands as MP3s through the early 21st century. In one day, Julian Hackney, the son of Bobby, heard his college roommate playing one of those MP3s. "That's my dad," he said. One thing led to another, and those old master tapes from 1975 made their way to a label called "Drag City Records," who released those seven songs commissioned by Columbia on an album entitled "For All the World to See." When people heard this, the reaction was, "Wow, this is punk! Three black guys from Detroit making punk rock before the music even had a name." The band was enticed to reunite and even perform at one of Joey Ramones Memorial birthday parties. Today, death is belatedly, well, very belatedly, created with help and create the modern punk rock sound. In 1974 and 1975, and for decades afterwards, no one knew anything about death. Today, though, they're considered visionaries. Here is that once super collectible seven-inch single. There's punk and hardcore and more in this song, and again, this is 1975. Death and politicians in my eyes, now recognized as an important example of proto-punk music, even though it was completely unknown for decades. Whereas death now? Well, David Hackney died of lung cancer in 1982. The other two brothers are still in Vermont and still playing with various groups, and there have been a few reunions along the way. Let's return to the concept of grunge and where it all came from. In 1983, a woman named Tina Bell, along with Tommy Martin, formed a group called BamBam in Seattle. They found a bass player, a guy named Scott Ledgerwood, and the drummer was a 21-year-old guy named Matt Cameron. And yes, the same Matt Cameron who would later play with Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. He would soon leave the band, but it's interesting that he was part of BamBam at the very beginning of the whole grunge thing. In fact, before the grunge thing began. It's important to point out that the group also employed a young kid as a rote for a while, and that kid's name was Kurt Cobain. BamBam, led by Tina, was unmistakably grungy in their sound. They had a decent local following, but for some reason, few outside Seattle took them seriously. Tina had an especially rough time. She was a barely five-foot-block woman, fronting a heavy rock band, and the amount of racial abuse she endured was sickening. CZ Records, a tiny label that was instrumental in putting out indie records by early grunge bands, including Soundgarden, was interested in BamBam, but they made the decision to continue on their own. They did manage to release one record, an EP entitled Villains Also Wear White. They continued for a few more years before the group fell apart after some lineup changes, but still they managed to open gigs for Pearl Jam. Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. But nothing was happening for them in Seattle, so Tina and the group made the decision to move to London, thinking that their sound would get a friendlier reception. It did not. In fact, because they didn't fill out the proper paperwork, BamBam was immediately deported back to the States. Tina left BamBam in 1990 and was not replaced. They continued as an instrumental band. Tina quit music entirely. By the 2010, she'd fallen on hard times, often finding it hard to find a decent place to live. She volunteered at a local church, but still struggled with depression, which she sought to treat with alcohol. She ended up dying of cirrhosis of the liver in an empty Las Vegas apartment in 2012. Her body wasn't found for a couple of weeks. It wasn't until the late 2010s that Tina and BamBam started getting the credit they deserved in creating the whole grunge aesthetic in Seattle. If Francois Hardy could be called the grandmother of grunge, it's no stretch at all to call Tina Bell the godmother of grunge. Some even refer to her as the queen of grunge. Here's a sample of what I'm talking about. It's from 1984. A few years before grunge was, well, grunge. It's the tunnel track to the EP "Villains Also Wear White." Seattle's BamBam, featuring singer Tina Bell, grunge before it was grunge. A few years too early. In retrospect, though, we understand that Tina was just slightly ahead of her time. She peaked too soon. We're going to continue in this vein with two more grungey bands, including one fronted by an extremely familiar name. Let's give more credit where credit is due to musicians who should have been bigger than they were because they did some good stuff. The problem, though, was that they were a little too far ahead of the rest of the world. That was the case with Mudhoney. They arrived on the Seattle scene in 1988 with a dark, sludgy, tuned-down guitar sound before almost anyone else in the region was into that sort of thing. There's more, too. One of the co-founders, guitarist Mark Arm, was previously in a band called "Mr. Ep in the Calculations." They were formed while Mark was attending Bellevue Christian High School. Mr. Ep was actually their math teacher, and the whole thing was treated as a joke. It took three years before the members actually learned how to play any kind of musical instruments. They started playing gigs and did whatever they could to promote themselves. In 1981, Mark wrote a letter to "Despert Times," a local alternative weekly that was more of a fan-zene than anything else. Mr. Things Up, the zene invited readers to nominate the worst and most overrated bands in Seattle. Mark took up the mission and wrote this. "I hate Mr. Ep in the Calculations. Pure grunge, pure noise. Everyone I know loves them. I don't know why." This is the first known appearance of the word grunge in print as a description for a certain style of music from the American Pacific Northwest. Now Mark didn't invent the word. It had been in use in American slang for years to denote something repulsive. But Mark, apparently, as far as we know, was the first to apply it to rock. Mr. Ep in the Calculations broke up after a final show in February 1984. Within weeks, Mark and his buddy Steve Turner formed Green River, another sludgy band, who released a few records. And they died in 1987, some survivors, including Mark and Steve, formed Mudhoney. And their name came from a soft-core porn film directed by Russ Meyer. They eventually came to the attention of Bruce Pavitt, one of the partners in a tiny, struggling, local record label called Subpop. He liked them enough to release a single. This was Mudhoney's first single. If this isn't grunge, I don't know what is. Mudhoney, and touch me, I'm sick from 1988. In another universe, that song is the song that kicked off the whole grunge thing in the Seattle area, and the world at large. It did have local impact, but for the rest of the planet, not so much. Subpop was perpetually broke, so it didn't have the money or cloud to promote their releases. More importantly, music at large wasn't really ready for this sound and attitude. Things were still all about hair metal in 1988. Pop music was still dominant, and any kind of alt rock was still very much in the margins. Besides, Seattle was way off the beaten track in those days, and no one paid attention what was happening there. But within about two and a half years, grunge took root, thanks to groups like Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam and Allison Chains. Imagine how Mudhoney must have felt to see a sound they'd play in here blow up without them. I want to end with David Bowie. For the entire decade of the 1970s, he was a million miles ahead of everyone, with his shifting personas, his new images, and his musical explorations. He went from folk to glam, to blue-eyed soul, to electronic, to early industrial music, to Technopop. Bowie saw round corners and predicted the future of rock unlike anyone we've ever seen. The 80s started strong with the Let's Dance album, but after that Bowie kind of ran out of steam. It was like tonight from 1984, and never let me down from 1987, where disappointments on a number of levels. So Bowie decided to switch gears again. In 1988, he saw the way the wind was blowing. Heavy and hard rock was going to move away from hair metal and into something more primal over the next few years. Bowie was into this music at the time and wanted to pursue this sound. Instead of chasing what audiences wanted, he was once again to make music that he liked. The result was a band called Tin Machine, a band formed with guitarist Reeves Gabraels and Tony and Hunt Sales, sons of comedian Super Sales. It was the first time that Bowie had been in a band since sometime in the early 1960s. Tin Machine was experimental and very hard, pre-dating a lot of the music that we would hear with Grunge and Punk and Hardcore in the 1990s. And at first, Tin Machine did well. Their debut album got good reviews and had respectable sales. But they soon ran out of steam. Fans and critics felt that Bowie had stopped being Bowie. There was a second album and a live record, and then the band broke up in 1992. Tin Machine is, frankly, not remembered fondly by many Bowie fans, if at all. But I propose that this isn't a fair assessment. Bowie had correctly ascertained that music was going to get heavier and angrier. Tin Machine's problem is that they were doing that two or three years before the world was ready for it. I think Tin Machine requires a re-evaluation. If they had arrived in, let's say 1992 or 1993, I maintain that things would have been very, very different. If you don't know the band, here's a sample. This is a single from their self-titled debut album. It's called "Under the God." After Tin Machine broke up in 1992, David Bowie went back to being, well, David Bowie. He had some decent success, but nothing like what we saw in the '70s and early '80s. He did, however, predict pretty much everything that would happen with music with the rise of the internet. Here's what he said in 1999, just as the internet was starting to go mainstream. I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. It's just a tool, isn't it? No, it's not. No, it's an alien life form. What do you think, I mean, when you think about it, is their life on Mars? Yes, it's just landed here. But it's a simply a different delivery system there. You're arguing about something more profound. Oh, yeah. I'm talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment, where they interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. Hang on, David. He was also one of the very first artists to have a website. And there's more. He predicted that song catalogs could be used to raise money through sales to third parties, something that's practically happening every week these days. In that case, he was about 25 years ahead of his time. And just like with his internet predictions, he made tens of millions of dollars by using his songs as collateral. What's even more remarkable was his timing. He leased his catalog for a period of 10 years just before the internet nearly destroyed the recorded music industry. And while everyone else was losing money because of music piracy and dropping CD sales, Roy laughed all the way to the bank with a payday of $55 million. And at the end of 10 years, he got all his songs back and began to make money via streaming. And by the time he died in 2016, he owned everything. He might have been wrong with tin machine, but he got the internet right. People always ask me which bands do you think should have been bigger? And that's a question I've tried to answer with this show. That timing and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even with the right songs, are something that we've seen throughout the entire history of rock. There are many, many more such artists, of course, and perhaps we'll revisit this topic sometime in the future. If you want more ongoing history, there are hundreds and hundreds of podcasts, which you can show just like this one. They're all free and can be downloaded everywhere. There's also my other podcast, a true crime thing called Uncharted, crime and mayhem in the music industry. Hope you can check that out. I'm on all the social media networks. My website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. And if you have any questions, comments, complaints or criticisms, use [email protected] and I will get back to you. Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. Talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross. Hello there. Thursdays on global. I'm Madeline Matlock. She's the lawyer with a legendary name. Don't underestimate this Matlock. This one is a shark. You know it, baby. The one you can trust. Even if she has to bend the rule. Things aren't always as black and white as they seem. To crack a case. This is how I get things done. Any winning actress Kathy Bates is. Matlock. All new Thursdays at 90s turn on global. 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