Archive for April, 2009

Ashford & Simpson–The Real Thing

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

[Proclaimer: I wrote the booklet essay for the ““The Real Thing” live CD/DVD package.  I was there, too. Jumping up and down, screaming, going crazy with everyone else. Beyond that, though, I love Ashford & Simpson. No, make that I worship Ashford & Simpson. I get down on my hands and knees before them. The first time I saw them, at Radio City well over 20 years ago, it changed my life. And I’m not alone. Hardly. In fact, everyone who ever meets them wants to be near them at all times. Just to bask in their love and kindness. But I’m not biased. No. Not at all. How dare you think that? Don't even go there!]

It was long in the making and now it’s long in the promoting.

Ashford & Simpson’s “The Real Thing,” which came out in both CD and DVD format via Sony Music’s Burgundy label on January 27, was recorded live at Feinstein’s nightclub in New York in late 2007 after the legendary singing-songwriting-performing couple’s triumphant three-week stand there. It was their first release of new recordings since “Been Found” in 1996—not counting last year’s double-disc “The Warner Bros. Years: Hits, Remixes & Rarities,” which included new remixes of their hits, many of which have resurfaced live on “The Real Thing” along with versions of their classic Motown compositions like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You’re All I Need to Get By” and the title-inspiring “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”

But here we are at the end of April and the title is still being promoted. In fact, its promotion may be picking up in a textbook example of new marketing methodology.

“What I like about this project in particular is that it’s not wed to normal music marketing cycles,” says Jeff Rowland, “The Real Thing”’s executive producer/deal-maker, citing the unique nature of Ashford & Simpson’s music. “You can work on it and keep working on it because Ashford & Simpson’s music is timeless: Everybody knows it, so it isn’t wed to the normal cycles of hit radio airplay—and we could do anything we thought that was necessary, appropriate or possible to position to sell and continue to sell this record. We got into it knowing it wasn’t a ‘slam, bam, on to the next thing’ project.”

Rowland was himself perfectly positioned to handle all aspects of “The Real Thing,” from production to promotion. Having started out as a talent agent at ICM, he later worked at Metropolitan Talent and PolyGram Diversified Entertainment and was involved in entrepreneurial activities including artist management, independent record label operation, concert and event production and theatrical production.

He also was in charge of booking Feinstein’s, where Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson did an initial two-week stint in the fall of 2006.

“It was a great booking and we wanted to get them back,” continues Rowland. “Val had expressed interest in playing there again, but wanted to do something different and special and thought it would be great to make a record there. We met for lunch and they were such open and warm people—and the music was so good—that I decided to see if I could bring it about in an extracurricular way.”

In addition to his booking and production hats, Rowland’s Two Hands Entertainment company specializes in producing live entertainment and media deriving from it.

“When Val said she wanted a record deal, I found myself in the unique position to do something about it, and we thought we had a deal but a month before the taping the label dropped out and we thought all was lost,” says Rowland. “Then Val decided to fund the taping anyway just to have a record of it for herself. So I said, ‘If you do that, we’ll shoot in high definition and record it digitally and I’ll still go out afterwards and try to get a deal.’ They didn’t think it would happen and it took a year, but then I found Media Push.”

Media Push Entertainment  is a full-service marketing and distribution company focused on the development, acquisition, production and worldwide distribution rights for music and general entertainment content in a variety of forms including theatrical, digital cinema, DVD, TV, CD web, and wireless releases. As Tony Bennett’s manager/son Danny Bennett is a principal (the company’s name, incidentally, comes from the title of the 1974 album released by Bennett’s obscure band Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends), the company had a built-in relationship with Sony due to his father’s longtime label home at Columbia (Danny’s RPM Records label puts out Tony’s albums now via Columbia).

“The Real Thing,” then, is Media Push’s first release in a venture with Sony.

“We were fired up about it because they’d shot the program in HD and it was a great, quality product,” says Media Push president Steve Sterling. “We were also big fans of Ashford & Simpson, and figured that they’d never gotten all the credit they deserve–having written so many important songs that have touched so many hearts and minds. You might not know Nick and Val so well as artists, but you know their songs. So it’s one of the greatest untold stories in the entertainment business and they’re such wonderful people, so we’d been talking about doing something with them for quite a while and when they put the show together—that’s entirely hit-driven—we could finance the whole rights deal. So we said, ‘Let’s go for it!’”

As Sterling relates, Media Push is geared to serve as a “media rights marketing partner.”

“We can do things that people think only labels can do,” he explains. “You definitely need a big, powerful label pipeline to feed into, but at the end of the day it’s about marketing strategy and follow-through more than how big you are. So from that standpoint it’s a very exciting time: It’s a very level playing field right now in the music entertainment business, and all the traditional ways that artists used to be able to get projects put together have changed or disappeared so we see a real opportunity from an independent position to go to artists and managers and fund projects as media marketing partners. It’s very exciting because you have to think differently—but it’s good for everybody in the end.”

The key element of the marketing effort in support of “The Real Thing” was its rollout on New York metropolitan area PBS station WLIW21–the third most-watched public television station in the nation.

“We were releasing the CD simultaneous with the DVD, so the whole strategy relied on PBS pledge programming,” says Rowland. “Television sells, and PBS is a great utility in that if a pledge program is successful and people subscribe because of pledge programming, they’ll keep playing the program. It’s almost like MTV in the old days, only for an older demo.”

But well before the WLIW was set came an unforeseen development most extraordinary and auspicious.

“Throughout last summer as Nick and Val toured, they’d invariably get audience  participation on [their big 1985 pop hit] ‘Solid,’” says Rowland. “They were playing a show in California and Val handed the mic to a lady who changed the chorus on her own from ‘solid as a rock’ to ‘solid as Barack,’ which was a natural—though it had no relation with the rest of the song lyrically. But it caught on and then ‘Saturday Night Live’ picked up on it somehow and did a skit around the time of Obama’s half-hour primetime TV special just before the election. So we mentioned the phenomenon at a marketing meeting with Sony to position the record, and then suggested that Nick and Val record ‘Solid as Barack’ as a free ringtone to draw attention to it. But they were concerned that people might think they were making fun of Barack because of the ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit—and were also concerned that it didn’t make sense with the rest of the song. So Nick wrote new lyrics as a tribute to Barack and to reclaim it from the comedy sketch.”

They recorded the new version of “Solid” for the free ringtone and also made the full song available as a download coinciding with Obama’s inauguration—“which just happened be one week before the album release,” notes Rowland. “I wishI  could say it was a brilliant plan—it was!—but it was really a reactive plan. And it got an astounding amount of press: USA Today picked it up and Nick and Val performed on Larry King during inauguration week. Then they did Tavis Smiley’s show on PBS, and David Letterman. And after the inauguration the press transmogrified into the record and Ashford & Simpson and who they are. It was a great kick-starter.”

Then the PBS exposure kicked in.

“PBS was the perfect platform, so the next step was to get a PBS station involved,” says Rowland, lauding Ashford & Simpson’s wide-rangiing interview during WLIW’s initial pledge programming of “The Real Thing.”

“They did such a great job on WLIW that they’re editing it and rolling it out and distributing it to public TV stations across the country for pledge programming in May and June,” he adds, noting that “doing anything on public television is not as easy as you might think. It’s difficult figuring out which shows will be successful. But after they first aired it they were so happy with it that it ended up with six to eight prime time plays and it was very successful–so much so that they embraced it for national summer pledge distribution.”

Rowland says that while CD and DVD giveaways are the norm for PBS pledge drives, concert tickets have been found to be the most effective enticement for donations. So an exclusive Ashford & Simpson show has been scheduled for new WLIW members, thereby bringing “The Real Thing” around full circle.

“They’ll usually offer tickets to a pledge artist like Yanni or Sarah Brightman at Radio City or Madison Square Garden,” he says, “but these are advertised events for the general public. So we’re confounding the normal rules by having a special show at Feinstein’s only for people who become members of WLIW and not the general public. So they can’t get tickets directly from the venue or Ticketmaster.”

Ashford & Simpson are now set to return to Feinstein’s on June 7 and 8—a second night having been added after the first show for new WLIW members sold out immediately. “It’s at the place where we actually taped the CD/DVD show, so people who saw it on WLIW and were infused by the joy of the performance and how much fun the songs are now get the opportunity to go to the scene of the crime and relive it!” says Rowland. “And we’re now looking for different things in different markets this summer where we can similarly recreate the experience.”

An example may be Ashford & Simpson’s concert with The Temptations in Atlanta in August, for which the local PBS affiliate will be contacted, says Rowland.

“All told, this project has taken years now,” he concludes. “But it’s a good project: The show clearly delivers on every level—same with the CD and DVD.”

Incidentally, the DVD offers additional tracks including four new Ashford & Simpson originals written for a musical based on E. Lynn Harris’s compelling first novel “Invisible Life,” climaxing with the titletrack, “an anthem celebrating human diversity,” as New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in his review—and as I quoted him in my liner notes! Quoting now from myself: “God is watching you,” Val concluded in the song’s love- and life-affirming message. “He expects you to be real to yourself!”

The point is, A&S have some 20 new songs from the musical in the can, and having seen a run-through of the show for Broadway investors I can say they’re all great! [No! I’m not biased! We’ve gone over this before!] Perhaps “The Real Thing” will lead into a real new Ashford & Simpson album. The audience is certainly there–as is evident in the CD/DVD package–and so are the songs.

Posted in Music, Television | 1 Comment »

Bollywood-Hollywood

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Manhattan movie ticket prices being what they are, I waited for “Slumdog Millionaire” to come out on DVD. But I had a bad feeling about it, just like I always get whenever virtually everyone is raving about something–that and my friend Stephen Holden’s four-word review when I ran into him at a press screening for another film.

“It’s a fairy tale,” said the brilliant film/music critic for The New York Times, and he didn’t mean it as praise. Of course he was right: “Slumdog Millionaire” is a fairy tale—and despite its great cinematography, not a pretty one. And so is the notion that its many Oscars and other awards will open wide the door in America to Bollywood. A fairy tale.

This was clear from a Bollywood fairy tale of a different sort that I did see when it came out. Actually, I attended the New York premiere of “Chandni Chowk to China” on Jan. 8 at the AMC Empire Theater on 42nd Street. It was freezing, and there was a long wait to get in, mainly because its star Akshay Kumar hadn’t arrived and there was a big crowd of South Asians outside hoping to get a glimpse of him.

Kumar is Bollywood’s star-of-the-moment. A veteran action hero (he has heavy martial arts experience), he had come to “Chandni Chowk to China”—abbreviated in Bolly media as “CC2C”—off his star turn in the action/comedy/romance “entertainer” (a wonderfully succinct Bollywood term) “Singh is Kinng,” one of the biggest Bolly hits of 2008 (featuring, notably, a soundtrack contribution from Snoop Dogg). He, along with “CC2C”’s gorgeous female lead Deepika Padukone and director Nikhil Advani (he directed the huge 2003 romance hit “Kal Ho Naa Ho” that was set in New York), had starred that day at a press lunch for local South Asian media, also attended by Warner Bros. film executives.

“CC2C,” you see, is Warner Bros.’ first Bollywood co-production (the company also distributed the film in the U.S.), following similar Hollywood-Bollywood partnerships from Walt Disney Pictures (last year’s animated “Roadside Romeo”) and Sony Pictures Entertainment (the 2007 drama “Saawariya”). It also followed last year’s news of Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio’s billion-dollar joint venture with India’s Reliance ADA Group to produce as many as 35 movies over the next five years—which came two days after 20th Century Fox cut a multiple-film production deal with “Singh is Kinng” producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah.

Described as the first-ever Bollywood kung fu comedy, “CC2C” opened on over 125 screens in over 50 markets in the U.S. and Canada—making it the biggest release to date of any Bollywood film in North America. With elements of comedy, drama, romance and action, the film fit the masala mold of Bollywood cinema—“masala” being a mixture of spices: Kumar, playing a simple-minded cook in the Chandni Chowk marketplace of Delhi, journeys to China in the guise of a reincarnated war hero in order to defeat a vicious smuggler (played by Gordon Liu, star of the kung fu movie classic “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” and the “Kill Bill” films).

Unfortunately, “CC2C” was way too simple-minded itself to have much of a chance, not only in North America but worldwide and Bollywood, even. Despite plenty of hype, it was a box office and critical failure—as it should have been. Screenwriter Shridhar Raghavan cited numerous  influences, from Bollywood’s legendary “curry western” “Sholay” to kung fu classic “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” and more recent kung fu comedy fare from Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow. But “CC2C” was more silly than anything else, in character, plot and action. Nothing remotely to commend it as another “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” say, even with that arty Oscar-winner’s veteran martial arts stunt coordinator Huen Chiu-Ku as stunt choreographer, let alone Kumar’s legitimate martial arts credentials.

The “kung fu curry” of “CC2C” had another inherent problem for success in America in that it was subtitled rather than dubbed—foreign language being a traditional obstacle for mainstream American theatrical success. Director Advani recognized this at the press conference, and rightly noted that if it had been dubbed into English—like so many early kung fu movies—it would “lose the flavor” of the original language.

“You have to accept it for the kind of film it is,” he said. And that’s what American audiences will have to do with Bollywood. Far and away the bulk of Bollywood cinema is musicals—very long, three hour-plus musicals (including the interval, or intermission). And while they feature fabulous songs and singing and incredible dance productions, they differ from the great Hollywood musicals of Busby Berkeley or Fred Astaire or Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” in that they cover all genres—comedy, romance, melodrama, action, war, crime, suspense, even horror. So while it would be hard to imagine “The Wrestler” or “Milk” as a musical, it would be impossible to imagine a Bollywood remake—and Bollywood remakes American movies all the time—as anything but.

“Slumdog Millionaire,” then, barely qualifies as definably Bollywood, being that the only musical/dance number, the Oscar-winning “Jai Ho,” came during the end-title credits and had nothing to do with the rest of the movie (this sort of gratuitous film musical extravaganza is known in Bollywood as an “item number”). Contrast it with the last two Bollywood movies I’ve seen: “Fashion” and “The Last Lear.”

Partially based on a true story, last year’s “Fashion” was a highly acclaimed behind-the-scenes look at the backstabbing Mumbai fashion industry that earned luscious lead actress Priyanka Chopra and supporting actress Kangana Ranaut coveted Filmfare awards (Neha Bhasin and Shruti Pathak, notably, were also nominated for best female playback singers—a major awards category in that most Bollywood stars lipsynch their songs to tracks sung by equally renowned playback singers). Salim-Sulaiman (brothers Salim Merchant and Sulaiman Merchant) composed a hit-filled soundtrack, and the film also featured numerous stars in cameo appearances as themselves. But I found the story entirely predictable and nothing to warrant watching former Miss World Chopra for its entire 178-minute running time. (By the way, it only seems like every Bollywood actress is a former Miss World: Chopra and Sushmita Sen are, while Aishwarya Rai and Lara Dutta are Miss Universe holders.)

Clocking in at a relatively mere 130 minutes, “The Last Lear,” on the other hand, is truly great. Starring the extraordinary Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan (the star of “Sholay” who is idolized by the autograph-seeking young Jamal in “Slumdog Millionaire” and is the answer to the first “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” question), the absorbing film concerns a reclusive Shakespearean stage actor who is brought out of retirement by a young film director, thereby exploring the conflict between generations and the difference between cinema and theater. Like “Slumdog Millionaire,” then, it’s hardly a “Bollywood” film either, though it does star its greatest actor—along with fellow Bollywood stars Arjun Rampal and the always delightful and immensely talented actress Preity Zinta.

No songs, no dancing, but great acting and a great story. That’s how Bollywood can impact Hollywood—barring an innovative film like Baz Luhrmann’s acknowledged Bollywood-inspired “Moulin Rouge!” And it’s already starting to happen: Rai has tested the English film waters with “Bride & Prejudice” and “The Pink Panther 2,” and now Bachchan has signed on to costar with Johnny Depp in Mira Nair’s forthcoming “Shantaram” (Nair has directed the award-winning films “Salaam Bombay!,” “Monsoon Wedding,” and more recently, “The Namesake,” a deeply moving drama largely filmed in the U.S. and starring Irrfan Khan [the police inspector in “Slumdog Millionaire”] and “Harold & Kumar”’s Kal Penn).

“Slumdog Millionaire”’s biggest star, Bollywood veteran Anil Kapoor (the game show host) has been signed on to the eighth season of “24,” while young lead Dev Patel is on board for M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Predictably, Woody Allen has cast Freida Pinto, the young actress who played opposite Patel, in his next film, and it would seem only a matter of time before “Slumdog Millionaire”’s genius composer A.R. Rahman is asked to write for Hollywood—if he hasn’t been already.

Otherwise, filmgoers will have to accept Bollywood for what it is and on its own terms—which is total entertainment. A genre unto itself. Like opera, it’s an acquired taste, perhaps, but trust me: Though the masala more often than not may be a bit much, it’s still well worth the acquisition.

Posted in Cinema, Music | 5 Comments »

In Support of Phil Spector

Monday, April 20th, 2009

What you see is what you get, I guess, with Phil Spector.

If you find his physical appearance unappealing, if you find accounts of his past behavior abhorrent, you likely think he’s guilty. If you know him personally as a friend, you likely think he’s not guilty.

I know Phil Spector as a friend. A dear friend. A dear friend of unparalleled kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness and compassion.

I’ll share one special instance.

Phil happened to be in town when my dear friend Tim White, the editor of Billboard, died suddenly and unexpectedly. His empathy eased my pain considerably that night, and a few days later, after he returned to L.A., I received a handwritten note of condolence.

This is the Phil Spector I know. But he was always like that, writing notes, sending Internet jokes, staying in regular touch with his friends. I was privileged to be one of them.

And he had many friends—and many more who wanted to be. I can’t tell you how many times people asked me to introduce them to him, or wanted to know about him. If you weren’t lucky enough to know Phil, I can tell you that he was no celebrity in the sense of someone who seeks publicity or attention, but he was no recluse, either. He very much enjoyed being with and entertaining friends, and I attended countless dinner parties of as many as 20 people, many of whom he didn’t know, where he’d take us all out to a club to hear music, picking up the full tab of hundreds if not thousands of dollars while regaling us with his stories, observations and intelligence.

Indeed, he was ever the Rennaisance man at these gatherings, a rare man of the world always engaged in politics and other issues of the day, history (he loved talking about Abraham Lincoln and was an early and ardent backer of Obama) and the arts. His recollections of his music experiences, of course, kept his bedazzled guests enrapt and forever enriched.

But you didn’t have to be his friend to have been enriched by Phil Spector. In fact, I was given plenty from him many, many years before I met him.

The joy of music is hard to define, even for me who has made a career of trying to define it. But I can direct you to it easily: Go listen to “Be My Baby.” Or “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.” Or “He’s a Rebel.” Or “Then He Kissed Me.”

Or just go out and buy—if you don’t already have it–“Back to Mono (1958-1969),” the box set containing all his classic recordings. No greater joy in music can be found.

It is the joy of Phil Spector’s music that will keep giving to all of us who love music, those of us who support him and those of us who do not.

Posted in Music, Personal | 1 Comment »

Jesus Was a Capricorn

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

If I couldn’t see Jesus on Good Friday, Kris Kristofferson had to be the next best thing. And at the Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, no less!

The man even looks Christ-like—and certainly is the epitome of giving. He even came out at the end of Roddy Hart’s opening solo acoustic guitar set to join him on Hart’s closing “Home.”

Hart’s a young Scottish singer-songwriter, who’s opened some 20 shows for Kris in the U.K. and who was in town for the annual Scotland Week celebration. Likened to everyone from Dylan, Sprinsteen and Costello to Ryan Adams and Willie Nelson, he was still unknown to this audience–but Kris had him play a few songs while the room filled, and when he took over the stage’s sole microphone made a point of crediting Hart for gamely performing with the house lights on while people walked in and talked amongst themselves.

Kris’s kindness continued throughout the show. When he sang “Johnny Lobo” he gave props to the great Native American singer-songwriter/poet/activist John Trudell, the inspiring subject of the song. He gave a shout-out to singer-songwriter John Flynn at the end of the parable “To Beat the Devil” (“It belongs to you now,” he told Flynn, who wrote Kris’s longtime bandmate Billy Swan’s country hit “Rainbows and Butterflies,” after the show).

And he did all the hits, of course including my favorites “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” But this being Good Friday, the more sociopolitical songs were the most noteworthy, starting with his first song, “In the News.”

From his great 2006 album “This Old Road,” “In the News” compiles several bad-news headlines into an anti-war masterpiece. “Mortal thunder from the skies/Killing everything they say they’re fighting for,” he rails at “the billion-dollar bombing of a nation on its knees,” climaxing with “Don’t blame God/I swear to God he’s crying too.” The date’s significance was more directly commemorated with “They Killed Him,” his exclamatory tribute to fallen men of peace: “Sing about Mahatma Ghandi/Sing of Martin Luther King/Sing Of Jesus Christ Almighty/And the brothers Kennedy,” he commanded, tacking on the names of “Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, etc., etc.” who followed the others into martyrdom.

“Jesus Was a Capricorn” goes without saying. Kris’s classic 1972 album titletrack boldly depicted Jesus as a hippie, and rightly suggested the consequences of His return anytime soon (“Reckon they’d just nail him up if He come down again”) while also nailing the universal roots of prejudice and offering himself up as a current target: “‘Cos everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on/Who they can feel better than at anytime they please/Someone doin’ somethin dirty, decent folks can frown on/If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me.”

But the night’s—and the artist’s–biggest message came in the simple spiritualism of “Love is the Way.” The first verse:

Deep in the heart of the infinite darkness
A tiny blue marble is spinning through space
Born in the splendor of God’s holy vision
And sliding away like a tear down his face.

The lyrics go on to describe “the whole wide holy wonder” of nature’s beauty, and the human–the “strangest creation of many…a creature of laughter and freedom and dreams,” but one misguided by preachers of hate. The final couplet urges us to turn away from killing each other, “Because life is the question and life is the answer/And God is the reason and love is the way.”

It was the best I’d ever seen him—but I say that every time. And as the legendary Frances Preston, retired head of the music performing rights society BMI, said to me years ago at the Bottom Line, after Kris performed with his band, “You really have to see him every time. He sings the truth.”

That he does indeed. And he was still speaking truth and giving of himself after the show. Flynn mentioned that he was leaving to perform before wounded warriors at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, and Kris said he’d have joined him had his schedule permitted.

He also wanted to make sure I realized how talented Flynn is, making further note of Flynn’s social activism and especially his work in prisons. And then he stood out in the cold April rain for at least 10 minutes without a coat (his tour bus had broken down in Canada a few days earlier and he had to take a thousand-dollar cab ride to the next gig—and had left most of his clothes on the bus), siging autographs, posing for pictures, and graciously allowing multiple hugs from a pair of female fans who had been in love with him, they declared, for 35 years. They looked it. He didn’t.

“Write something good about John,” he told me before he left.

(Administrator’s note: I wrote the liner notes to the two-disc “The Essential Kris Kristofferson” that Columbia/Legacy put out in 2004. It remains among my proudest achievements.)

Posted in Music | 1 Comment »

Jack Shit and Mondo Vers

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Fuck me.

I get Jack Shit their first NYC gig and I can’t even get in.

My bad. Banjo Jim’s is such a tiny corner bar at 9th Street and Ave. (capacity is 74) that by the time I got down there, around 9:30, the guys were half into their first set and the joint was jammed. I tried to stand just inside the door but it was too tight for the girl working it. She did point the way for me to squeeze past the band (they were crammed into the corner just to the left of the door) and get to the back bar, but I’d had three big scotches at a small party right before, and being vegetarian, did not partake of the roast suckling pig. I felt steady enough and probably could have made that short walk without knocking over any mic stands and maybe taking out a guitarist, let alone toppling to the right and crashing into the crowd—but the odds weren’t that good.

Luckily it wasn’t too cold outside and I could hear OK leaning against the traffic light. If I had stayed on the steps I could see Pete on his drum stool through the window; I could still see Davey and Val in between the posters announcing upcoming Banjo Jim’s gigs taped on the window from where I stood against the lightpost.

That’s Pete Thomas, drums, Davey Faragher, bass, and Val McCallum, guitar. Jack Shit. The one and only Jack Shit. Jack Shit the Great.

Pete and Davey are Elvis Costello’s Imposters rhythm section, of course. Val has played in Jackson Browne’s band and for numerous other notables like Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Joan Osborne. (I must throw in that I got to meet his father, the 1960s teen idol David McCallum of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Illya Kuryakin fame at a Jack Shit gig in L.A., where they’re based. Great guy.) Together they do a tongue-in-cheek but terrific country shtick act. Great players, great songs.

Wasn’t the first time I couldn’t get in to see Pete, actually. Elvis did a record store promo gig years ago at the dearly departed Tower in the Village. I think I might have hung on to the window sill outside to catch a glimpse. Then many years ago I was supposed to be on the list when Elvis played Forest Hills, but I wasn’t. So I sat on the grass outside the stadium and heard the whole thing.

Some people came out for air in between sets, and I was able to fit myself behind a pillar near the bar. I’m glad I got to see them do “Ugly and Slouchy.”

“Ugly and slouchy, that’s the way I like ‘em/They’ll never be no fear of them wolves hangin’ around/Ugly and slouchy, that’s the way I like ‘em/They’ll never be no fear of her lovin’ someone else.”

I know the pre-rockabilly tune from the Maddox Brothers, who with sister Rose Maddox–the Maddox Brothers and Rose—were known as “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band” from the 1930s to the ‘50s. They were indeed that.

But Jack Shit’s “Ugly and Slouchy” was a take-off point for a medley of arguably some of the worst pop songs from the ‘60s/’70s—except that I actually like most of them. And first song, Hendrix’s “Fire” (sung by Davey in a slow country drawl) doesn’t really count. But “Green-eyed Lady,” by Sugarloaf, does. (I saw Sugarloaf vocalist/keyboardist Jerry Corbetta do it live once in the late ‘70s, when he was in Frankie Valli’s band. Nice guy.)

Then came Blood, Sweat & Tears “Spinning Wheel,” another horror. (BS&T lead singer David Clayton-Thomas married a lovely girl I went to high school with in Madison, Wisconsin.  Nice guy.) Then “Jesus is Just Alright,” a hit for the Byrds and then the Doobie Brothers—but I remember it as the follow-up to the big cover hit of the Beatles “Birthday” by Underground Sunshine, a rock band from Montello, Wisconsin. I liked it much better than “Birthday,” but I couldn’t understand it conceptually: It’s saying, what? That the fact that Jesus is just alright is under dispute?

Next came the undeniably god-awful “Hocus Pocus.” You know, that simply dreadful yodeling rock song by Dutch band Focus that went to No. 9 in 1973. Maybe the exact song that made me forever quit listening to “progressive rock” and go to country radio for good. But they followed it with “And When I Die,” another BS&T hit, but written by Laura Nyro.

I actually knew Laura Nyro. Not many did. She died April 8, 1997, at 49, same age, same disease as her mother. Ovarian cancer. I was with David Helfgott, the insane Australian classical pianist so brilliantly rendered by the Oscar-winning Geoffrey Rush in “Shine.” We were looking at pianos somewhere. He was really wonderful—exactly like Rush’s portrayal. I called my machine and got a message Billboard wanted me to write her obit. I knew she was very sick. And now I still cry when I hear her, when I think of her. If you don’t know her, do yourself a favor and get a copy of the two-disc anthology “Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro” (I made sure they found a copy of the single version of “Save the Country”) and “Gonna Take a Miracle,” the r&b cover album she did with LaBelle, that is maybe the most beautiful vocal recording ever.

And then it all came back to “Ugly and Slouchy” and my mind drifted way back…to The Vers.

Lots of bands will start with one song and throw in one or two or more in the middle or just transition one into another in a theme-driven medley. Elvis, for instance, likes to start with “Alison” and shift into Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown” or “The Tracks of My Tears.” But the one I always think of is The Vers at Headliners, “Holiday in the Sun” seguing into “Little Honda” and back into “Holiday in the Sun”—Sex Pistols into the Hondells. Sheer genius.

The Vers.

The absolute worst thing about what I do is seeing something you know is great and they don’t make it. Any number of bad things get in the way, or the good ones required to make it happen just don’t occur. The worst instances naturally go back to the beginning, back to Madison: I managed to make it out, but others didn’t, for whatever reason.

Most of the Madison area bands back in the mid-‘70s—when my career began—were basic bar bands doing mainly covers. Most of them I didn’t like, most of them I don’t remember. But there were three that stood out, that played original songs.

Spooner didn’t make it—as Spooner. It was as good a Tom Petty/New Wave-ish pop band as there was, thanks to a Farfisa keyboardist (if I remember right, they let him in the band because he had two Farfisas) and a great songwriter in lead guitarist/vocalist Doug Erikson. They had a couple albums (I was thanked on the first—my first album credit). Then somehow Doug became Duke: He and Spooner drummer Butch Vig, who would soon find fame as Nirvana’s producer, formed another Madison band, Firetown, which made it to Atlantic Records, very briefly, before disbanding. Then Duke and Butch found Shirley Manson and became Garbage.

Yipes! made it a little further than Spooner. They were real good. They were led by Pat McCurdy, another brilliant songwriter/performer, and they had a brief deal with RCA’s Millenium label, which was owned by producer Jimmy Ienner and is where I first met his brother, future Sony Music chief Donny Ienner. Then they broke up. But Pat’s been at it ever since. I checked his web site and am happy to see that his April schedule has only two nights off, the rest filled with gigs in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan (he worked 351 shows last year). Every Tuesday he’s at some place in Madison called the Regent Street Retreat (“$3 Leinie Bottles/$2 Coors Lights”). And he’s as funny as ever: A $10 subscription to the monthly Pat! Newsletter (“sent right to your door!”) includes the monthly schedule “as well as contests and words of wit and wisdom” and is a lifetime subscription, “which means you’ll keep getting it until either you or Pat dies.”

And then there was The Vers. Drummer Jim Stein, bassist Gabe Berrafato, keyboardist Charlie Calendar, guitarist Zoid Asteroid Machine, vocalist Mondo Vers, 1978-1983. They coulda been huge.

Visually there was nothing like them. Even the logo stood out. “THE…VERS” below a barcode sign. They evolved out of a band out of nearby Monroe, Wisconsin, named Yancy Derringer before Mondo (real name J.C. Hall, Jr., “Mondo” being short for “Mondale”) came aboard, that was quite popular in the area. I must have seen them at one time or other but don’t remember them at all. Hall, a prolific singer-songwriter from Oconomowoc (halfway between Madison and Milwaukee) joined during the third and final incarnation of Yancy Derringer, “on vocals and general crazyness,” according to a remarkable history of the band penned by Boyd Williamson (Zoid) for his z9design.com site (he’s also a graphic designer).

Yancy Derrringer had plied the bars, festivals, and college campuses around the Midwest, and built a substantial fan base from followers of band members’ previous band affiliations. They played some originals along with novel covers of Mott the Hoople, the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and did a Led Zeppelin medley. But Yancy Derringer 3, writes Williamson, “proved to be a free-for-all circus that had no real direction.” New songs came out of Hall “like bunnies in mixed-up-cages, and they were all very, very good.”

Hall’s songs thoroughly transformed the band into a New Wave-inspired unit. “This was a band who now appreciated the message, energy, efficiency, and humor of ‘punk,’ but unlike ‘real’ punks, they were musicians who could actually play!” continues Williamson. “And they were fronted now by the incomparable, larger-than-life J.C. Hall, Jr. on vocals, songwriting, energy, humor, and inspiration.”

They got the bandname in 1978 on the way back from a gig up in Medford, Wisconsin, passing through Colby on Highway 13. They spotted some three-feet high black letters on the side of an old garage spelling out “VERS,” which Hall took as a sign from above. No one, to this day, knows what it meant: “Bands before had shown that you could name a band anything, and this one was now proving that the name didn’t even have to be anything!”

Now Mondo Vers, the charismatic Hall stood six-feet, eight inches, often wearing a long olive drab trenchcoat dotted with as many as 200 various buttons and pins. He’d also don a baseball cap with devil horns or floppy Bullwinkle antlers, and “Groucho” glasses with a penis nose.

“He drew you in, made you laugh, and then made you cry, giving the best vocal performance of his life every time you saw him,” notes Williamson, self-described as “the cryptic, marooned 400 year-old alien guitarist [Zoid Asteroid Machine] from the planet Vulva, with orange hair and ‘Spocked’ eyebrows [who] wore red Superman briefs over black tights, spinning, jumping off of amps, stages, anything he could climb up on….”

I also remember how the impishly demonic Machine used to constantly make weird faces while soloing on various guitars. He once told me he was making “guitar noises”—something like what a guitar would say if it could speak. He really did fit the space alien part—so much so that I was blown away by the extraordinary level of his writing on the site. Maybe I never spoke with him at any length.

Charlie Calendar did this great shtick of bringing out a 50-pound MiniMoog synthesizer held together with duct tape and twirling it around in the air while playing it opposite Mondo. Gabe and Jimmy were the dynamite rhythm section and comparatively straight, even using their real names.

I would see them regularly at Headliners, the top rock club in Madison. The owner managed them and in 1980 they set the record for paid admissions, 1,200 plus.

One night they opened for Yipes! I was upstairs in the balcony with some of the Yipes! guys. They’d been signed to Millenium by now–and watched The Vers in disbelief. “I don’t know what it is about these guys,” one of them said. “But there’s something….”

Yes, there was something. They were great players, put on a great show, and had a great songwriter-frontman in Mondo Vers—whose charisma really knew no bounds. To this day I’ve never seen anything like it: Every show would bring out a group of maybe a dozen or so clearly moderate-to-severely retarded young fans (with chaperones). They would always go to the front of the stage and dance joyously at Mondo’s feet. Kinda like Howard Stern’s Wack Pack, I guess. They latched on to him on some entirely different psychic if not visceral level. Then again, in Mondo’s case, at least, he was as wack as anyone—no wonder they related to him as one of them.

I do urge anyone who reads this to check out Williamson’s incredibly insightful (and wonderfully illustrated) site, which covers the true tragedy of The Vers. For as I wrote in a cover story of the Madcity Music Sheet in the early 1980s–a story that was designed to give The Vers the big media push they needed but sadly turned into a veritable epitaph—Mondo had developed extreme throat problems.

“A few years of their relentless schedule, and Mondo’s inability to give anything less than 150 percent, eventually took a toll on his voice,” Williamson writes. “It got progressively worse and worse, until it got to be torture to try to listen to the big guy ripping his throat apart trying to hit the notes. Months of denials went by, before everyone finally got him to see a doctor about it. The same specialist who treated Elvis Presley, when the King was passing through Madison, gave the verdict: There were two polyps on Mondo’s vocal cords, like little hot dogs, split open and bleeding. He could have surgery, requiring three months to recover, or simply stop singing and talking entirely, and let it heal for the same amount of time. Logic dictated that he simply keep his mouth shut for three months…but Mondo was anything but logical. Being out of the band while they kept playing was extremely traumatic for him, and he had to tell everyone he saw, how he felt. He just couldn’t shut up.”

Mondo took a fordced hiatus while the other Vers went on with a temporary replacement. But no one could replace Mondo. Sadly, he couldn’t either: He essentially suffered a nervous breakdown, and when he did return to the group both he and they went into a freefall culminating in an inevitable explosion “in flames of fatigue, frustration and bitter disappointment.” And it would only get worse. Years after the breakup, Mondo was diagnosed as being severely bipolar manic-depressive. He and Zoid would perform as theXpairOmentals, a music duo using Zoid’s MIDI backing sequences. They did hundreds of gigs between 1995 and 2000, when their longtime collaboration “finally ended for good in the parking lot of a club after a gig on September 23, 2000, when Jimmy C. Hall, Jr., lost control, and attacked Boyd C. Williamson with a guitar stand, fracturing Zoid’s skull and breaking the middle finger of his left hand.”

Mondo was put on probation for two years for Substantial Battery, ordered to stay on medication and away from Zoid. He was unable to fulfill the latter requirement and was still begging Zoid to get back together again when a massive heart attack felled him for good on August 22, 2001. He was 51.

“Was he a genius, or insane?” wonders Williamson. “Without much debate, the answer is ‘yes.’ But with no argument from anyone, he was a truly great artist.” (His moving eulogy for his friend, a lesson in eloquence, is at http://z9design.com/vers/mondo.html.)

He goes on to explain why The Vers never made it, in what could easily be music business textbook terms—if a bit dated now:

“Record company executives do their work in plush offices on upper floors of expensive buildings in Los Angeles and New York. They are business professionals who market specialized pieces of plastic. Occasionally, they make decisions regarding what specific product they are going to spend a very large sum of money on to produce, manufacture, and sell, and these decisions are not made lightly. Apart from that, they spend a good part of their day trying to figure out ways to AVOID all the hoards of wanna-be’s who are trying to give them CD’s and tapes and enable them to become stars.

“Record execs don’t have the time to listen to a fraction of the stuff that arrives on their doorstep, in fact, they rather resent having to rent the dumpster that gets filled with all these hopes and dreams of unknown people every day, so they decide fairly early in their career that they’re going to be pretty darn callous about it; that it’s just not going to bother them, or they wouldn’t be able to do their job at all. It’s just that simple. And, in case you hadn’t guessed, they don’t travel one or two thousand miles to hear some band in a bar in the Midwest. They just don’t do that. You wouldn’t, either. And they didn’t in this case.”

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I don’t know if New York came to Yipes! or vice-versa, same with Firetown. But hell, The Vers were managed by the biggest rock club in one of the biggest college/music towns in the country. If Headliners couldn’t get anyone from New York to fly out and give The Vers a fair hearing, or even listen to a tape….

So where are they now? Gabe is a Home Depot sales manager in Beloit, Wis. Jimmy plays in a group called Boca Bande in Florida. Charlie’s in Florida, too, fronting a Cajun/zydeco trio, the Yard Dogs. Zoid’s in Reedsburg, Wis., playing solo as Zoid Asteroid Machine when not running his graphic design company.

And me? I’m helping Jack Shit carry out their equipment from Banjo Jim’s, happy to be useful for a change–and happy, too, to still be in New York. And happier yet that Jack Shit isn’t Mondo Vers.

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