Author Archives: Michael H. Little

On 1976’s The Roaring Silence Manfred Mann’s Earth Band leaves Earth behind in a progressive rock-et ship powered by pure synthesizer shlock. You can call the results abominable—I do—but they’re also entertaining in an over-the-top pop prog way.

The Manfred Mann Earth Band directed their low-rent, high-energy version of progressive rock at the kids in the cheap seats, and I’m betting the kids loved it. The Earth Band weren’t as technically proficient as Yes, as rigidly neoclassical (although they have their mortifying moments) as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or as austere and melodically sophisticated as Pink Floyd. The closest comparison is to The Alan Parsons Project. The music on The Roaring Silence isn’t half as smart, subtle, and sophisticated as it thinks it is, but that’s part of its sick charm. This is art rock for people with no appreciation for good art. It’s dumb. Very dumb. So dumb I sometimes find myself rooting for it.

By the time the Manfred Mann Earth Band got around to recording The Roaring Silence they’d gone through numerous other phases, including one during which they seemed to think they were the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Mann and Company’s cosmo-futurist jazz leanings linger on here, united, alas, with depressing and sometimes inadvertently hilarious results, to the classical past in the form of the music of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Philip Hayes, whoever the hell he is. (They’d had the same intentions on 1973’s Solar Fire, so it’s not as if they were on to something completely novel and horrific.)

So yeah. If an unholy fusion of space jazz and classical music filtered through the pop (and populist) sensibility of the British Invasion veteran who gave us “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and some cool Dylan and Springsteen covers is your idea of a good time, The Roaring Silence could be your cup of progressive shlock. If not you’re in for some very real pain and suffering, bookended by the Earth Band’s pair of Springsteen covers, “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night,” although you’ll only get the second if you buy the 1998 re-issue of the album.

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Remembering Robert Palmer in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

I first heard Robert Palmer’s Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley the morning after my beloved alma mater, Shippensburg University, held its annual “Spring Fling” in a field in the middle of nowhere. Every year people would spend the day getting wonderfully wasted, and every year a tiny minority would disappear into the woods abutting the field for “a brief nap,” only to wake up the next morning marooned, like Robert Crusoe with a killer hangover.

I pulled this stunt one year—and figured I’d spend the remainder of my life out there all by my lonesome, living on squirrel meat and wearing bark clothing—when lo and behold another guy staggered out of the woods. And not only did he have a car, he had Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley playing on 8-track. I fell in love with it immediately, despite having a head that felt like one of those cartoon anarchist bombs that look like a bowling ball with a sizzling wick coming out of it.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a million miles of difference between Palmer’s mid-1970s work and the swill—by which I mean the likes of “Addicted to Love,” “Simply Irresistible,” and “Can We Still Be Friends,” the Todd Rundgren tune that never fails to make me vomit from the ears—that constitutes his chief legacy to pop culture. And don’t even get me started on his stint with a few Duran Duraners in The Power Station. But the early Palmer, ah—that’s a different story. He had impeccable taste in studio musicians, could write a good song, and most importantly, he knew a great cover when he heard one.

Palmer’s solo career followed a stint with Vinegar Joe, the feckless English R&B band that released three forgettable (and I’m talking so forgettable I never even knew they existed) LPs for Island Records. Palmer obviously had friends in high places, or made a pact with the Devil, because Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, his 1974 debut, is chock-a-block with big talents.

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Celebrating Jim Stafford on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

The list of famous country novelty songs is a long one. There have been hundreds–probably thousands–of them. Just off the top of my head: Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” Loretta Lynn’s “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” Mark Chesnutt’s “Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” and my dad’s all-time favorite (he sang it all the time), Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” Any half-decent country fan could reel off dozens more.

But when it comes to country novelty tune artists, Jim Stafford could just be the king. I grew up listening to “Spiders & Snakes,” “Wildwood Weed,” and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It,” and while I’d never kissed a girl or smoked a joint in my life, I loved the obvious spirit of fun behind all of ‘em.

Stafford has released only three albums, and since 1990 he’s dedicated his energy to operating and performing at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri (no vanity there, and by the way: should you find yourself in Branson, be sure to stop by Dolly Partons’ Stampede!). Don’t know if he’s plain lazy or doesn’t need the money, but Stafford hasn’t released an LP since 1993. (He has done some acting; he played the role of Buford in 1984’s immortal Bloodsucker from Outer Space.)

Jim Stafford spawned four Top 40 hits, and if there’s one word to describe the LP it’s versatility. You get some swamp rock, a faux-lounge number, a couple of good ole’ country numbers, a blues parody, a rockabilly pastiche, and a couple of songs that pack what can only be described as a hard rock punch. And that “variety” also extends to Stafford’s knack for creating personae; he’s a shapeshifter who is, by turn, a sly hayseed, an aging rockabilly fan, a very confused courter, a Louisiana oracle, and so on.

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Celebrating Wayne Coyne in advance of his 63rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The Flaming Lips’ 1999 LP The Soft Bulletin is brilliant. A masterpiece released just as the sun was going down on the Twentieth Century. But for my money—which unfortunately happens to be in worthless depression era German Reichsmarks—the Oklahoma band released its finest work between 1986 and 1995, before they went and got themselves domesticated.

The Soft Bulletin is a warm and fuzzy album for warm and fuzzy people looking for an uplifting musical experience. Earlier Flaming Lips albums featured songs like “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever),” Unconsciously Screamin,'” Jesus Shootin’ Heroin,” and “Evil Will Prevail.”

If The Soft Bulletin is a hug-your-neighbor ecstasy trip, LPs like 1989’s Telepathic Surgery and 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head are LSD trips—you might find instant enlightenment or, conversely, locked in a Porta-John at your local music festival, because demons are pursuing you and you need somewhere to hide.

I attended a few Soft Bulletin-era shows, and they were joyous affairs—Grateful Dead concerts minus the home tapers. The concertgoers around me had the glassy-eyed look of true converts. The only song that’s ever left me glassy-eyed is Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van,” which ought to qualify as a world religion. Your Flaming Lips idolater is a fanatic, and fanatics can be very dangerous people.

Which is why I prefer albums like 1989’s Telepathic Surgery. It doesn’t hurt that the LP’s title sounds like the name of a Blue Öyster Cult song. But what really wins me over are song titles like “Hare-Krishna Stomp Wagon,” “Hell’s Angel’ Cracker Factory,” and “Redneck School of Technology.” And the songs are as strange as the titles. A fair number of Flaming Lips fans would hide in a Porta-John to escape them.

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Let me give you a piece of life advice, pardner. Be real careful when you tell people you’re a Commodores fan. Because before you know it people will slap the “Lionel Richie Fan” label on you, and that’s bad, real bad. Worse, they’ll assume you’re talking about the Commodores of “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” and that’s fatal. Forget about that job promotion. Forget about your friends. They’re gone. Forget about your kids getting into that elite pre-school. They’re headed straight for drug addiction and rehab, and they’re only four. And forget about your significant other. Gone too. A person can only bear so much shame.

No, if you want to come out of the Commodores closet without going down the commode you have to be mighty specific, and tell everyone you know—in writing preferably—that you’re exclusively a fan of the funky R&B side of the Commodores that brought us such immortal tunes as “Machine Gun,” “Brick House,” and “I Feel Sanctified.” You can even throw in their homage to Marvin Gaye, “Nightshift.” It’s not funk but it passes muster. In short, “Slippery When Wet,” yes, “Just to Be Close to You” no, no, no, no, no. You don’t want your preschooler pawning your shit for narcotics, do you?

There’s a relatively clear line of demarcation between Commodores good and evil—it was the early Commodores that had the funk in them, although they were still good for the occasional dance classic later on—”Brick House” didn’t come along until 1978, when the band had pretty much gone over to the dark side of easy-listening treacle. But if you want to be sure you’re getting the right stuff you should sit your ears down and listen to their 1974 debut Machine Gun, It’s all funk and R&B all the time, and there isn’t a single sappy song on it. Even “There’s a Song in Your Heart”—an unpromising title if ever I’ve heard one—is funky brother.

The title track alone should give pause to anyone looking to dismiss the Commodores out of hand—it’s one of the premier funk-disco instrumentals of the era, a clavinet-powered dance track that boogies up a storm. The title says it all—Milan Williams’s rapid fire clavinet will fill your reservations about the Commodores with bullet holes. It’s a slick and sleek machine, this one, pure Motown swinging, and it includes a colossally super-funky segment so supernaturally cool the Beastie Boys stole it for “Hey Ladies.”

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Remembering Clarence Clemons, born on this day in 1942. —Ed.

Well here it is—the most operatic, overblown, bombastic, and yes wonderful slab of vinyl that has ever caused my ears to cry hallelujah. On 1975’s Born to Run a cocksure Bruce Springsteen went right over the top, blew a fuse, and tried to pack as much of the majestic mystery of the New Jersey night as he could onto one LP. It was a desperate gamble but it paid off in spades, and we’re all the richer for it.

On such Phil Spector-worthy epics as “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets,” and especially “Jungleland” Springsteen risked all trying to say all, and the results are indeed awesome. To a small town kid like me, Born to Run captured the wild and inchoate delirium of coming of age—of wanting to go out and explode like a skyrocket in the warm summer night. Is the whole contraption at the risk of overheating? Sure. But listening to this album never fails to return me to that innocent kid desperate for experience, and for that alone I will always love it.

To more jaded ears Born to Run may have sounded hokey, but therein lies the genius of Bruce Springsteen; on Born to Run he’s as shameless a romantic of the American Night as Jack Kerouac, and he captures the wild and heedless excitement of being young and mad with an unquenchable thirst for everything. On Born to Run Springsteen says yes to the night and to all it represents. “Roll down the window/And let the wind blow back your hair,” he sings in “Thunder Road,” “Well the night’s busting open/These two lanes will take us anywhere.” On Born to Run Springsteen sings of the possibilities, and of risking it all to run the backstreets, and I’m not certain if anyone has ever come even close to doing a finer job of doing so.

Springsteen does nothing by half-measures here; he howls, barks, and emotes like a mother—just listen to his wildcat yowl on “Backstreets” and all of the dead-end passion he pours into the immortal title track. In a gushing overflow of pure street poetry he tells us there’s no place left to hide, calls himself a tramp, and delivers the greatest “Hup dat!” in the history of rock’n’roll. This isn’t music—it’s a fever dream at the end of the night, and as pure a howl of sheer animal hunger as you’re ever likely to hear.

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Celebrating Jimmy Page on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

So if this Hobbit Trilogy of a ditty ain’t the greatest epic in the history of rock’n’roll, what is? It contains multitudes! Encompasses whole mythopoeic civilizations of stargazing shrub worshippers! And oh, it’s got three sections each of which is a wheel, which means it ain’t a stairway, it’s a tricycle! And if you hop aboard said tricycle it’ll ride you straight to heaven, which will save you from having to take the stairs!

“Stairway to Heaven” is both an architectural folly and the fullest and most baroque realization of the rock’n’roll dream–if Chuck Berry’s songs are street-ready hot rods, “Stairway”’s the fucking Sistine Chapel set down on the chassis of an Oldsmobile 442.

Written in part at the band’s Welsh hideaway Bron-Yr-Aur in 1970 following Led Zeppelin’s fifth American tour and in part at recording sessions at Headley Grange, Hampshire, “Stairway to Heaven” is–to employ yet another metaphor–a majestic and ever-widening river, one fed in turns by the tributaries of Renaissance music, English folk, heavy metal, and progressive rock.

“Stairway to Heaven” was famously never released as a single, but two U.S. promotional discs were issued in very small numbers, so collectors start your engines. Of course FM radio played the shit out of it anyway–I’m talking to the tune of an estimated 2,874,000 times by 1991, which if you were to listen to all 2,874,000 radio plays back to back would take you 44 YEARS! So start listening!

No wonder so many people hate the fucking song. If familiarity breeds contempt, for some folks “Stairway to Heaven” breeds homicidal ideation. You never hear drunks shouting “Play ‘Stairway to Heaven’!” at live shows, probably cuz they’re afraid the band will take ‘em up on it.

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Remembering David Bowie, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Having emerged more or less psychically shattered from his disastrous sojourn in Los Angeles—where he is said to have subsisted on a diet of cocaine, peppers, and milk—David Bowie took the extraordinary step of relocating himself to West Berlin, that Cold War capital of duplicity, intrigue, and espionage, to escape a galloping case of paranoia. And it was there, having absorbed both the motorik sounds of Krautrock and the ambient explorations of Brian Eno, he produced 1977’s “Heroes,” the only one of his much-touted “Berlin Trilogy” to be wholly recorded in that city.

“Heroes”—which was recorded at Hansa Studio by the Wall a short 500 yards from that deadly monument to the Cold War the Berlin Wall—is art rock at its best, and I’m not just talking about its largely ambient and instrumental B-Side. Bowie didn’t just soak up the sounds of West Berlin, he soaked up its feel, and by so doing bequeathed us an LP that is by turns defiant, taut with menace, and eerily calm.

“Heroes” is Bowie the human synthesizer at the top of his game; if any rocker understood T.S. Eliot’s adage that good poets borrow while great poets steal it was the Thin White Duke. But everything he stole he made his own, and this is especially true of the various sonic experiments on “Heroes.”

His ambient exercises, for example, are far more dynamic than those of Eno’s, and I say hooray for that. As for the LPs more traditional cuts, they’re extraordinary. The title track, for example, may be the pinnacle of Bowie’s long and justly celebrated career. Bowie’s vocals, riding atop a mesmerizing but sinuous drone, become increasingly impassioned as the song builds and builds, and the results are utterly enthralling.

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The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a purveyor of American myths. Dark myths—of long dead trains, ghosts on the highway, bad voodoo, murder and fire spirits and hellhounds on your trail. His was a vision of a haunted America where every day is judgment day, an America stained by blood and tormented by sins for which there is no forgiveness, and he translated that vision into a totally unique and new musical form—a raw punk blues infused with the imagery of our continent’s violent past. This alone set him apart from an LA punk scene set in a chaotic, dystopian present, one with no past and no future. Pierce’s vision was, ironically, closer to that of the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead than to the Germs’ (GI). A taste for the past makes for strange bedfellows.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s fixation on the American deathtrip was odd indeed when one considers he was the one-time President of the Blondie Fan Club. He would bring a Bible on stage and preach fire and brimstone like a clay-eating, itinerant Pentecostal minister. In his mind he dreamed fugitive visions of evil going-ons in a rural South that was as foreign to him as it was to that other prophet of a bad moon rising, John Fogerty. It makes no sense to romanticize the guy. He was just a kid with a vivid imagination who liked Blondie. He wasn’t one of his characters, although he shared their taste for self-destruction. He wasn’t a myth. He didn’t die in the back seat of a 1952 Cadillac like Hank Williams. He was living with his mom. There’s something commonplace and domestic and touching about that.

The Gun Club’s debut album, 1981’s Fire of Love, is a revelation. Its primitive rhythms, raw sound and dark poetry spell out a vision of a savage, timeless America, one you won’t find on any roadmap. “Sex Beat” and “She’s Like Heroin to Me” are the standouts, carnal and dangerous. “Sex Beat” is a primal blast of feral punk blues that hits you straight where you live. A simple guitar riff and jungle drums propel Pierce’s shot-to-the-solar plexus vocals—when he sings “so you can move, move!” then follows it up with that “Sex beat… go!” it’s as exciting as hearing some long gone wild man in a Southern juke joint of the imagination. “She’s Like Heroin to Me” is all propulsion and slide guitar; it’s surprisingly melodic and is about a woman as seductive and addictive as a strong narcotic—she may be the only woman in the world that comes with a needle and a spoon. And Pierce, as always, is a live wire—the man’s frantic vocals shoot off sparks.

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Remembering Sandy Denny in advance of her birth date tomorrow. —Ed.

If folk music scares me–and it does–English folk music really scares me; I’m still trying to recover from the traumatic consequences of inadvertently viewing a YouTube video of Pentangle performing the pro-virginity dirge “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.”

That said, I’ve always made an exception for Fairport Convention in general, and their LP 1969’s Unhalfbricking in particular. Unhalfbricking was the work of a band moving away from American influences towards the Ye Olde English-style minstrelsy, and the music they performed during said transition is some of their best.

Fairport Convention’s take on folk rock is decidedly English–as English as eel pie. And how couldn’t it be–listening to Sandy Denny, who remains arguably the best English folk singer in the history of recorded music, is like walking the Cornish cliffs of Tintagel on a lovely May morn. But–and the caveat is critical–you never get the awful sense you’ve wandered into the bucolic pagan setting of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, where you’ll be shoved into a wicker totem and burned alive, a sacrifice to a bountiful harvest, as the happy villagers sing “Sumer Is Icumen In.” (A tune I’m sure Pentangle performed all the time.)

While “lovely” best describes the songs on Unhalfbricking, you get plenty of variety: a trio of exceptional Dylan covers; one instant classic; a pair of slower numbers that creep up on you, and one Cajun-flavored rock’n’roller that sticks out, if you’ll bear the obscure allusion, like Beau Brummell at a stevedores’ convention. Oh, and there’s one simply incredible song that somehow manages to bridge the gap between the English traditional folk form and the Velvet Underground.

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I’ll tell you what this fool believes—there has never been a song that wouldn’t sound better with Michael McDonald singing on it. The Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen”? Needs Michael McDonald on backing vocals. The Ramones first album? It would really kick ass with Michael McDonald back there singing up a soulful blue-eyed storm. Sonic Youth? Nothing without Michael McDonald. Ditto Lydia Lunch, the New York Dolls, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, the Urinals, Public Enemy, and GG Allin.

Ziggy Stardust may be the greatest album ever recorded but it would be an even greater greatest album ever recorded if Michael McDonald was in the mix. I’m sure you agree. Because the McGodfather’s R&B patented rumble—the guy sings like a four-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake that mumbles—will always turn anything it touches into gold. Gold records, that is. What have we done to deserve him? Nothing, so far as I can tell. He’s a form of grace. He’s Michael McDonald. I sure wish he sang on “Holiday in Cambodia.” That would fucking rock.

Of course, why settle for the Yacht Rock Soul King’s singing back-up when he can be right up front and personal? Sure, McDonald enriched songs by Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, Bonnie Raitt, Stephen Bishop, Wang Chung and others, but he’ll be best remembered for resurrecting those long gone hippies the Doobie Brothers, which let’s face it was a miracle of almost biblical proportions. Come 1975 the Doobs needed a temporary replacement for singer Tom Johnston, and McDonald not only stepped in, he stepped up, lending his trademark resonant mumble to a handful of instant classics. He singlehandedly turned a band on their way down into a first-class Yacht Rock hit machine.

Come 1982 McDonald went the solo route, and while he has recorded some fine songs over the years—including duets with the likes of Patti LaBelle and James Ingram—few equal the power and the glory of such Doobified classics as “Takin’ It to the Streets,” “Minute by Minute” or, let us all fall to our knees and give thanks, the halo-crowned “What a Fool Believes,” one of the few songs I can think of that deserves its own Nativity scene.

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The Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” That’s the way I feel about the English band The Police, and their every bit as pretentious as Bono frontman Sting. If I were to find myself with my head through the shattered windshield of my demolished automobile and one of The Police’s reggae-influenced new wave songs were to come on the car radio I would say, “Oh, come on God! “Roxanne?” Am I really that terrible a person?”

When Sting decided to Garfunkel trio mates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers at the peak of the band’s success in 1986, I might have heaved a sigh of relief. But a little warning bell in my head told me that Sting’s departure from The Police because he felt artistically constrained by the band’s pop rock style of music boded ill. I couldn’t escape the suspicion that the King of Pain was out to prove to the world that he was more than just the guy who gave us “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” No, he was a musical artiste set on making grand artistic statements, and he didn’t care who got hurt.

Which is just what he did with his 1986 debut album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. You can tell he’s aiming high because the LP is jam-packed with songs about big societal issues and has a slick jazz veneer. Because, you know, jazz is a more sophisticated musical form than rock, and indulging your jazz itch automatically makes you a classier person.

The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, never one to suffer fools gladly, had this to say about Sting’s debut: “Displacing the Police’s sere dynamics we have bathtubs full of demijazz, drenching this self-aggrandizing and no doubt hitbound project in a whole new dimension of phony class.” That about sums it up. When it comes to rock, jazz is often the last refuge of a scoundrel. It may even be the first.

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Remembering Cliff Williams, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

A very brief history lesson. First Attila was the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then Sir Lord Baltimore took over as the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then along came AC/DC to produce an electrical surge that brought down the hard rock power grid, settling the debate forever. Their ascendancy caused many a band to give up the ghost. Some sold their gear and returned to England to resume their careers as bricklayers. Others picked up dulcimers and went full folkie. I saw Deep Purple at a Greenwich Village folk club and their lute and bodhrán take on “Smoke on the Water”inspired some discerning fan with a flare gun to burn the place to the ground.

AC/DC played a primal, zero frills, straight ahead hard rock that led morons (like the younger me) to conclude their music was for dummies. Frank Zappa (my then idol) played cerebral brain music. AC/DC just punched you in the solar plexus. Theirs was gut music, like Iggy and the Stooges or a souped-up, oversexed early Black Sabbath.

And on 1980’s Back in Black—the band’s seventh studio LP—AC/DC forged its metal into a tool of sledgehammer simplicity. It was former Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson’s first LP with the band, Bon Scott having died from alcohol poisoning the previous February. The band recorded the LP in the Bahamas, where a diehard fan in the form of a crab scuttled across the studio floor. With his cheerleading the band recorded ten tracks that stripped hard rock to its essentials. Three chords, no poofter organ solos, just barf in your face music for the lads at the local.

You get a little dark stuff in the form of “Hell’s Bells,” are invited to have a drink with the lads, and get a lecture on how rock and roll isn’t poisoning the aural environment. But what you mostly get is not so subtle sexual innuendo that reveals Ted Nugent to be a loincloth feminist. This is 12-year-old stuff, but to be fair to the band, there’s nothing on Back in Black as pubescent as Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.”

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Remembering Terry Kirkman, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic as a cheap plastic peace symbol.

But hey–as that great philosopher Huey Lewis pointed out it’s hip to be square, and all of your REAL swinging girls and boys know The Association are the Nazz. So what if they flunked the Acid Test and would have been more at home at Tricia Nixon’s wedding than a Human Be-In? The Association rose above it all, producing a rapturous dream pop that Tricky Dick himself might have tapped a toe to.

And you can hear The Association in all their vocal glory on the 2018’s Anthology: Just the Right Sound. Its 51 songs are a definite case of overkill–and I’ve docked it a half-grade accordingly–but it’s worth the purchase price (and more!) if you want to hear not only the songs that melted your heart but such berserker numbers as “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies,” to say nothing of a couple of cuts off 1972’s justifiably neglected Waterbeds in Trinidad!

Just about everybody knows their big ones. “Windy” is a sunshine pop classic about a girl with stormy eyes; its opening guitar riff and superlush vocals are for the ages, and I die a little every time I hear that flute. And then there’s the motorvatin’ “Along Came Mary,” with its handclaps and badass (by Association standards) vocals. And who could forget the moon-eyed “Cherish,” which makes the perfect mate for the lovely “Never My Love,” both of which say I’m going to love you forever by means of those perfectly pureed vocals that were The Association’s bread and butter.

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With Pentecostal fervor—that’s the way prodigies Larry and Lorrie Collins of The Collins Kids played their rockabilly. Precocious doesn’t begin to describe Larry, the little maniac who was storming about stage like a pint-sized dervish while tearing off lightning-fast runs on his Mosrite double-necked guitar—when he was 10. And Lorrie—who was two years older than Larry—was steaming up rooms with sultry vocals that won her comparisons to the wicked Wanda Jackson. They were a mite older (two years or so) when they hit their peak in the late fifties, but they were still definitely kids—which didn’t stop them from cutting some of the hottest rockabilly tracks you’ll ever hear.

After Larry and Lorrie wowed them at amateur shows—first separately, and then as a team—in Tulsa, Oklahoma, their mom convinced their dad to sell the dairy farm, load up the family’s ‘47 Hudson and move west to Los Angeles, which was hardly Rockabilly, USA but where they managed to score a recording contract with Columbia Records. They also became regulars on the L.A.-based TV program Town Hall Party, and if you check out the available YouTube videos you’ll understand why—decked out in full C&W regalia The Collins Kids cook up an electrical storm.

Larry was a born showman, dancing around and mugging it up for the crowd like a cross between Chuck Berry and Angus Young while playing flashy runs on what was only the second double-neck guitar ever made. Meanwhile, Lorrie belted ‘em out, somehow managing to look virginal while upping the temperature in the room considerably. (No wonder she was Rickie Nelson’s first girlfriend.) They were just kids, but theirs was no kiddie novelty act—they served ‘em up red hot, just like Gene V. and Jerry Lee.

Larry, a childhood churchgoer like his sister, would later say, “We just had a natural Pentecostal beat that followed us in our music. It was rockabilly when we started doing it together. We had no one to learn from. We were just doing what we felt. It the song didn’t have a beat and something we could move around to, we didn’t do it.” In short, they found their inspiration to play the Devil’s music in God’s house, and both God and the Devil got a kick out of their handiwork.

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