ABSOLUTE GREY

Snagged from Scorgies.com

If continents can drift 20 centimeters farther from each other over 20 years, imagine how a volatile rock band can scatter in that time. The drummer to San Francisco. The bassist to Maine. The guitarist to Seattle. The lead singer to Ithaca. Twenty years ago, those four pieces were Absolute Grey, one of the best, most happening bands that Rochester has had to offer to the music world.

It was beyond music, even.  “It was multimedia in its earliest, roughest form. That’s how pretentious we were back then,” recalls bassist Mitch Rasor of a show at the Pyramid Arts Center.

“We had a big crowd, and on all of the walls and the ceiling we were showing these films we had made, and our friends who were filmmakers had made, to go along with the music. It was complete immersion, it was everywhere, and I was standing in the middle of it all, almost forgetting I was playing.”


Twenty years later, folks who weren’t at Scorgie’s – the center of the local rock universe, but now a shut-down, silent club on Andrews Street – probably don’t know what the fuss was all about. “There was a buzz going on about this particular band,” says Dave Anderson. “There seemed to be something exciting about them….”


Absolute Grey had the goods. And the fact that the band still has fans to this day – such as R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who’s quoted on a sticker on the Greenhouse reissue jewel box claiming    “I still have the original LPs” – is Exhibit No. 2 that Absolute Grey is more than a passing moment.

They loved ‘em in Germany, where a two-CD retrospective was released 10 years ago. They adored ‘em in England, where a review of Greenhouse that is to appear in today’s London Sunday Times reads, “Squint a little and Greenhouse is stupendous….” The Scorgie’s tracks secure “Greenhouse its own little space on the lost classics shelf.”   This of a band that released only four albums in its brief lifetime, the last two on a label in Greece. We’re talking Greece the country, not Greece the Rochester suburb.

So what happened?

Rasor and Matt Kitchen, the guitarist, were students at Pittsford Sutherland High School. They went off to college. End of band, it seems.   “Beth and I tried to convince them that it was obvious we had something going on,” says Pat Thomas, the drummer; Beth was Beth Brown, the band’s incandescent lead singer, a torch shining through her band mates’ darkness. “And one more year might have been all we needed to bring it up to the next level.”  As it turned out, it’s been 20 years to bring it up to the next level.

Perhaps the band’s premature end was also inevitable. After graduating from Sutherland, Brown was working as a clerk at Record Archive when Greenhouse was released. She was 23 and Thomas, who had moved here from Corning, was 24. But Kitchen was only 16, and Rasor 15. Yet they were already perfect rock stars. “I was too radical,” Rasor says of being kicked out of art class. As sophomores, he and Kitchen took charge of the school yearbook and used Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the story of a man who awakens to find he’s been turned into a cockroach, as the theme. “It was all gray, with pictures of, like, the chess club over decomposing leaves,” Rasor says. “The total opposite of what a yearbook is supposed to be. The seniors were furious.”


The members of Absolute Grey saved their fury for the band: “We fought like cats and dogs.” Brown and Rasor both use that phrase. “We were so pretentious, we’d fight over poetry,” Rasor says. “We took ourselves so seriously. We were so spoiled. It’s like I wrote in the liner notes to the CD that was released in Germany: ‘Somehow we managed to overcome all the advantages we were handed in life to start this great band.’”

Anderson agrees with Rasor on that point. “The guitarist and bass player were from Pittsford, and I think Beth was, too,” he says. “They had an air of arrogance about them, I must say. Matt had a very condescending tone, especially for a young kid, I thought. He was very serious; he was very intellectual about everything. “He was the main songwriter. They were very moody, atmospheric tunes. It was kind of a downer trip, overall. But in a good way. The name says it all. Absolute Grey.”

They could see nothing but gray. Anderson recalls being in the attic studio during Greenhouse. Brown was in the basement, recording some vocals; something about the acoustics, or her needing to be alone. And he could hear her crying as she was singing her part.

“You know how they say the light in the south of France is best for painting?” Rasor says of the fuel of collaboration. “Well, being in a band… it’s the best. Being able to take ideas and turn them into songs the next day is a great, especiall in high school, when you’re filled with all of this teen angst.” Absolute Grey plunged into the Scorgie’s scene, dominated by local bands such as Personal Effects. Paul Dodd, that band’s drummer, ran Earring Records, a small label that had already released music by the Wilderness Family, the Essentials and the first Colorblind James Experience album. He agreed to release Greenhouse as well. “I remember Pat,” Dodd recalls. “He was a real hustler.”

Hustler, as in aggressive. Among the many talents of Absolute Grey was professional focus. “There was no money attached, no contract. It was just a name. A co-op. A commune. A collective,” recalls Peggi Dodd of Earring’s relaxed business ethos; she was Peggi Fournier then, a keyboardist in Personal Effects. And she was a teacher at Sutherland. Rasor and Brown had been among her Spanish students. They even recruited her to play keyboards on two Greenhouse songs. “I’d come see the band,” she says, recalling the music as “somewhat dark.”

Conceived in an attic, Greenhouse was born in the basement of Scorgie’s in the winter of ‘84. “There was a huge blizzard, and I was so worried that people wouldn’t come because the weather was so’horrible,” Brown says of the record-release show. “But the place was packed, everybody was partying, and I was so gratified.”


Less than a year later, Rasor was a student at Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio when he heard that the college radio station – which didn’t even know that the guitarist from Absolute Grey was on campus – had selected Greenhouse as its indie album of the year, over the likes of R.E.M.’s Murmur. But that was really the beginning of the end.


“I think I can speak for Matt,” Rasor says. “We both knew we wanted more of an academic career, an arts career. Absolute Grey was about to go somewhere, but it was not quite the train we wanted to be on for all that time. I’m a little more comfortable in a library than onstage.”

Absolute Grey proved to be a springboard for Rasor and Thomas in music. Rasor has found a way to combine his interests in architecture, landscaping, graphic design, writing and music – he’s working on his 23rd album, some of which are solo efforts – with a company called MRLD, just north of Portland, Maine.

Thomas lived in Denmark for a year, then used his Absolute Grey connections for a move to California, where many of the survivors of the ’80s psychedelic-rock revival lived. He now runs a San Francisco label, DBK Works, that re-issues classic records on vinyl. And new works as well, including his own solo records and, obviously, Greenhouse.  Kitchen spiraled off into a different orbit, setting down his guitar in favor of a fiddle and a civil-service job, a wife and a daughter in Seattle. The other three members of the band describe him as ambivalent about Absolute Grey,  Brown? The band’s star, with her blend of folk-rock and wailing-punk vocals, has taken the oddest – most frustrating, even – road of them all. “I’m disappointed and angry,” Thomas says, “that she never went on to do anything without us.”

Brown moved to Boston, enrolled in art school, drifted to Ithaca and started a sign-painting business, then moved to the Berk-shires and opened an art gallery. By then, she had a daughter – Indiana – with a German immigrant named Knut Schmitt. Now she’s back in Ithaca. She and Schmitt went their separate ways years ago. Yet in a strange twist, she’s not only caring for their daughter but also the 54-year-old Schmitt, who now is battling early-onset Parkinson’s disease.

Indeed, recently Brown has been writing songs. She will be on the new Absolute Grey release. But her focus is on recording her own music, probably with Anderson’s Saxon Recording, and will return to Rochester this year to find some like-minded musicians to help.

It took 20 years for Brown to take the next step after Absolute Grey. “I didn’t want to do music for a while,” she says; the guitar was packed away. “You know how 2-year-olds are. They mess with stuff.”

Now Indiana is 8. The guitar is out again. Brown, who always collaborated, has discovered she can write songs on her own. “This is going to be a powerful record,” she says. “I can’t wait to do it.”

“You really need to leave that guitar out on the stand. So you can just pick it up. Anytime.”

Essential Listening


Greenhouse

The other albums sound interesting, too, but are all O.P.

Absolute Grey Wiki
Allmusic Absolute Grey

THE AVENGERS

Snagged w/out permission from Alibi.com - article by Marisa DeMarco

Penelope Houston, frontwoman of the punk ’77 band The Avengers, says in the early days, there were plenty of women on the scene. "A lot of the bands around Los Angeles and San Francisco had female performers, female musicians and singers. I wasn't the only one around." Still, she says, she would like The Avengers to be compared to other punk rock bands without any reference to gender—period. Houston can't escape an awareness of her sex, but it's not without payoff. "Women starting bands and performing because of The Avengers is always really gratifying to me."

Punk ’77 is a term that houses bands from around the year punk first blew up. That was back when no one had much of an idea of what they were doing, before a template took over. But there were only a few years before punk became subject to its own laws. "There are some sounds and behaviors that got codified," Houston says. "You see that in 1980 when hardcore came along."

The first few years, there weren't any regulations, and the bands from that period were vastly unlike each other. Nuns, Crime, The Mutants, The Dils—all very diverse San Francisco bands, different looks, different sounds. "When hardcore came along, it just turned into a homogenous thing. The rules started being made and they're still being followed to this day."

But don't idealize the early days of punk too much. "We didn't have the radio. There were very few clubs for punk. We never actually played off the West Coast back in the day. It wasn't possible. We didn't take it for granted that we would be able to go anywhere or get played anywhere or have a record made." Punk bands had to create their own clubs and sleep on each others’ floors after playing those limited venues. Actually, not much has changed there. The Avengers will still be couch-surfing for at least half of their 2007 tour.
The Avengers’ music has endured for 30 years, though the band was only around for two. The original group formed in June 1977 and played until June 1979. The band's last show was with the Sex Pistols at Winterland, having headlined dates with X, The Go-Go's and the Dead Kennedys. In those two years, The Avengers released one three-song EP on Dangerhouse Records. After the band split up, White Noise Records put out another four-song record. A full-length self-titled LP, a collection of previous recordings, came out in 1983.

An assemblage of live and studio material, Died for Your Sins, was released in 1999. Another official release, American in Me, hit the streets in 2004 and a revitalized Avengers (Houston and original guitarist Greg Ingraham atop a new rhythm section) performed a couple shows to support it. "Then suddenly we were getting invited to Europe and London," she says. "It's snowballed. The interest in having us play live just continued." The Avengers are playing all the classic material on this tour, and Houston says she hasn't felt comfortable writing any new Avengers songs. "Singing these songs is cathartic. It feels good to me now. We're in a political situation where being righteous is the right thing to do," says Houston, who raked politics and religion over the coals in her youth.

After the band's breakup in 1979, Houston performed as a folk artist, because the idea of singing in a really quiet situation was frightening and exciting, she says. "Back then, I sometimes felt like I was just screaming and screaming and screaming and people were hearing only every fifth word or something." Before The Avengers ended its run, Houston remembers telling people they were a folk band. "What I meant by that was folk as music belonging to the people, music made by everyday people. That was one of the defining things about punk—it brought rock music back to the users. It brought it down to this level where everyone could participate."

Essential Listening

Avengers -the album pictured at right, contains the cream of their crop, and more.  All the essential tracks are here. You can get it direct from Penelope Houston's website.

Died For Your Sins has some alt takes and live material, and some worthwhile rarities. Also available at Penelope's website.









Essential Reading:

Punk '77: An Inside Look at the San Francisco Rock n' Roll Scene, 1977
Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day


Penelope Houston's Website
Avengers Wiki
Avengers Allmusic

LED ZEPPELIN

Now this is one I didn't want to write.

Generally I try to find out if someone else has already said what I want to say.  But with Led Zep it ain't possible.  Do a search and what you get is either unbelievably fawning and worshipful, or some ignorant little netsnipe (I just made that word up) trashing them, generally while demonstrating total ignorance, in both the areas of music, and of literacy

That's because Led Zep was THE biggest band of their era.  They absolutely dominated rock music in the 70's, and their shadow loomed over it for another two decades (actually it still looms over it, though it has diminished some).  Which is of course, part of the problem.  If you grew up like I did, having to hear them blasting out of FM rock radio every 15 minutes, constantly bombarded by their music, their image, and stoner dudes babbling about "Zeppelin" (when they weren't babbling about Ozzy.  Or Rush if they were a little more sophisticated), hating them was very easy to do.

But, separated by time and exposure (or lack, should I say), you start to hear things.  Twice in my life I've declared that I loathed them and divested myself of any recordings I had around.  And twice I've acquired most of those same recordings again.  And I've read books about them.

I still hate many things about them.  I hate Robert Plant's screechy singing (he's fine when he brings it down to a normal register).  I hate the ludicrous Tolkein-rip lyrics, intoned as if they were profound.  I hate "Fool In The Rain" and "D'yer Maker."  And I could go my whole life without ever hearing "Stairway To Heaven" again, and be happy.  I hate their bloated, ponderous live recordings.  I hate the "Song Remains The Same" movie, which is boring even if you are stoned.  I hate pretty much any of their attempts at blues.  I hate the way they helped push rock music into an album-oriented format, killing much of its spirit.

But, I admit - I love the Bert Jansch-ian guitar.  I love the production - still the best sounding hard rock records ever - with complete definition but no loss of power.  I love the Middle-Eastern and Celtic flourishes.  I love the bold - maybe I should call it shameless, experimenting ("Black Dog"!).  Most of all I love the sound of "Rock and Roll," and "Four Sticks," and especially "When The Levee Breaks."

Seen in perspective, they were horrible, awful, embarrassing, stupid, a big joke.  But at their best, they could be something wonderful, too.

Official Site
Led Zeppelin Wiki
Led Zeppelin Allmusic

Essential Listening

Led Zeppelin (Box Set) - definitive except it's missing "Four Sticks"
Led Zeppelin aka Led Zeppelin IV aka Zoso - their best single album

Essential Reading

Led Zeppelin: 1968-1980 - Keith Shadwick
Hammer Of The Gods - Stephen Davis

THE CRAMPS

In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n’roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n’roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of   southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups.  As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.
— J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology
from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits

It would be almost impossible to have never heard of The CRAMPS. Their career has been the stuff of legend.  Dangerously bizarre but most of all cool, The CRAMPS represent everything that is truly reprehensible about rock’n’roll.  Founding members Lux Interior (the psycho-sexual Elvis/Werewolf hybrid from hell) and guitar-slinging soul-mate Poison Ivy (the ultimate bad girl vixen) are the architects of a wicked sound that distills a cross of swamp water, moonshine and nitro down to a dangerous and unstable musical substance. Their cultural impact has spawned a legion of devil cults and dance-floor catfights, and created in its wake a cavalcade of cave-stomping imitators. As punk rock pioneers in the late seventies, they cut their teeth on the stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and recorded their first record at Sam Phillips legendary Sun Studios, funded mainly by Ivy’s income as a dominatrix in NYC. They coined the now popular term “psychobilly” on their 1976 gig posters. Their hair-raising live performances are still a total, no-holds-barred rock’n’roll assault. After a quarter century of mayhem, they’re too far gone to even consider any other course. (from the Cramps website)

Cemeteries, rock `n` roll, old mansions, horror movies, a splash of surrealism-add atmospheric clothing (preferably black) and some tongue-in-cheek humor, and the list does a pretty fair job of delineating the wacko-Gothic world of the Cramps.

This is the band, after all, that signed its current contract with Enigma Records at Bela Lugosi`s gravesite in Los Angeles. The band that foreshadowed today`s concerns about nutrition and diet with a 1981 song that cautioned listeners not to eat stuff off the sidewalk, no matter how good it looks. The band that once played a free concert for patients at a California mental hospital after being told by someone: ``You guys ought to play at a nut house. That`s where you belong.``

Formed some 13 years ago after Lux and Ivy migrated from California to New York-and added drummer Nick Knox and second guitarist Bryan Gregory (later replaced by Kid Congo Powers)-the Cramps forged their sound in the Big Apple`s punk/New Wave scene of the late `70s.

But while their early efforts displayed a good deal of punk`s urgency, their primary stylistic stomping ground became an alternate-universe version of rockabilly known as psychobilly-a crazed, take-it-to-the-max form where standard rockabilly vocal hiccups became desperate gulps and gasps, and rockabilly`s sprightly rhythms became stark, dark exercises in the weird and the warped. (Tom Popson - Chicago Tribune)

Conjuring a fiendish witches' brew of primal rockabilly, grease-stained '60s garage rock, vintage monster movies, perverse and glistening sex, and the detritus and effluvia of 50 years of American pop culture, the Cramps are a truly American creation much in the manner of the Cadillac, the White Castle hamburger, the Fender Stratocaster, and Jayne Mansfield. Often imitated, but never with the same psychic resonance as the original, the Cramps celebrate all that is dirty and gaudy with a perverse joy that draws in listeners with its fleshy decadence, not unlike an enchanted gingerbread house on the Las Vegas strip. The entire psychobilly scene would be unthinkable without them, and their prescient celebration of the echoey menace of first-generation rock & roll had a primal (if little acknowledged) influence on the rockabilly revival and the later roots rock movement. (Allmusic)

The Cramps Official Site
The Cramps Wiki
The Cramps Allmusic
Crypt of The Cramps
Mike's Cramps Webpage

Essential Listening


Songs the Lord Taught Us
Gravest Hits
A Date With Elvis
Stay Sick!

Essential Reading


The Wild World of The Cramps

...

THE FLUID

Written by Dr. Octagom from his blog Last Days Of Man On Earth.  The full article also contains a detailed discography and is well worth a read.

My favorite band of the original Sub Pop grunge explosion did not even come from Seattle. They came from Denver. And they really weren’t grunge either. The Fluid were for all intensive purposes, a garage punk band but they were really ahead of their time. When Punch N’ Judy came out in 1986, I think the term “garage” was really used for neo-60′s bands like The Chesterfield Kings. Punk was kind of a dirty word at this time. And punk is what the Fluid were all about. Pure unadulterated Punk Rock-n-Roll. The most obvious influence being Kill City era Iggy Pop. Just look at the cover of Freak Magnet. Whaddya think these dudes were going for?

Any music fan with some years behind them knows that there are bands that take you to a certain time and place every time you hear them. Some bands are so closely tied with a certain moment in your life that you cannot ever listen to them without the baggage (good or bad) of the past again. You revisit them years later and you are amazed at how quickly the sounds can transport you. When I hear The Fluid, I am instantly delivered back to 1989. I’m living in a shit-hole in Tulsa, smoking pot all the time. I’m eating a steady diet of Ramen Noodles and the smell of cat piss and incense fill the air. My favorite music is The God Bullies, Nirvana, Helios Creed, The Melvins, The U-Men and The Fluid.

I am stricken today at how totally “on the nod” a lot of this music sounds. Singer John Robinson was not much of a screamer. He liked to mumble his lyrics as if it was taking all he had just to stand upright and deliver them. Freak Magnet was one of my favorite late night, cigarette albums back in 1989. The music is just so debauched and detatched sounding. My favorite album by The Fluid however, is their first Sub Pop release Roadmouth which I bought back in 1989 on tye dye vinyl cuz I’m a pretentious asshole. The Jack Endino production really brings out the band. Even John belts out a few on this one. The band itself, who were made up of ex-Denver scenesters including former members of the proto-grunge outfit The Frantix, really lay it on thick. It and the follow-up EP, Glue, really had “it” whatever “it” was. One more album, Purple Metal Flake Music was released a few years later but by then the moment had passed. It’s a good album but y’know how zeitgeists are.

Essential Listening

Glue/Roadmouth 

The Fluid wiki
The Fluid Allmusic
Interview with lead singer John Robinson

LOTS MORE AT FLUID VIDEO ARCHIVE

JOHNNY LEGEND

By Jonny Whiteside, for Rockabilly Hall Of Fame - reprinted without permission)

Singer - actor - wrestling promoter - horror archivist - porn producer Johnny Legend exists in a bizarre cultural vortex whose undertows perpetually whirl him into an episodic cycle of shenanigans that just get curiouser and curiouser. The wild-eyed, weird-bearded, longhaired dynamo, internationally known as the Rockabilly Rasputin, is a manic force, one you can find at just about every unsavory corner of the Hollywood underground. Always vibrating with eerie vigor and scheming up his latest hustle, Legend is possessed with an unrivaled fascination for the offbeat, thrust upon him from earliest childhood: He grew up in San Fernando, where he befriended neighbor Tor Johnson, the hulking, chrome-domed grappler of Plan 9 From Outer Space infamy, but the relationship suffered somewhat, Legend says, "after he let me play with his coffin and I accidentally left it out in the rain." Monster culture was a natural for Legend: "I was at Forry Ackerman's house and got to meet Ed Wood. I had my copy of the first Famous Monsters, and had Wood autograph it. He wrote this strange message: 'Whenever better monsters are made, I'll try. Ed Wood Jr.'"
            Legend formed his first band, the Seeds of Time, in 1966. Conducting their own personal riot on the Sunset Strip, they played every joint in town, the same circuit worked by the Seeds, Love and the Doors. "We were kind of a progressive folk-rock band. I got shows at UCLA fraternities, and we started auditioning at places like the Sea Hag, all the Sunset Strip clubs, London Fog, Pandora’s Box. I had an Outer Limits monster costume that I got at an auction, the Giant Garbage Eater from the Henry Silva episode. We'd put somebody in that, hit the Strip and hand out fliers. This was pre-drug, it was really more a Mod thing, then the Seeds had a couple of hits and [Seeds singer] Sky Saxon started coming up and saying, 'Hey, I love you like a brother, but I'm probably gonna haveta sue your ass, so we changed the name to Shadow Legend in '67. That was a harder-edged band, doing more a Yardbirds hard rock, all original songs, playing the Hullabaloo, the Galaxy next to the Whisky. You'd do three sets a night for a week - one night the entire audience was Martha Raye and Neil Young."
            In the early '70s, Legend "snuck into the film business," working PR campaigns and writing trailers for American International, and composing soundtracks for semi-hard-core stuff like Sexual Sensory Perception: Sex of the Future - he also appeared in the Z-grade exploitation flick Pot, Parents and Police ("a family film done on a skin-flick budget, which I co-starred in as a crazed hippie who gets stoned on mescaline and falls down the stairs") - and running with the lowlifes who pioneered pre-Deep Throat XXX.
            Circa '73, Legend emerged at the forefront of Los Angeles’ rockabilly revival with a new group, Blue Midnight: "What we did wasn't Ruben & the Jets or Flash Cadillac or Sha Na Na - I formed the band for Gene Vincent, and then he died, so I figured what the hell? We didn't do fashion crap or mimic the songs, we just did them in our own versions."
            Legend then quickly formed an outfit with volatile German rockabilly fanatic Ronnie Weiser and veteran singer Ray "Caterpillar" Campi. Momentum built slowly; without a major record deal, club dates were almost impossible to nail down at the time. Billy Zoom, later of X, joined up on guitar, and, as the Rollin' Rock Rebels, they embarked on a bizarre endeavor that, Legend says, "only about 10 people were interested in."
            The notorious promoter-DJ Art Laboe brought them to the stage at Chino State prison ("Humble Harve was an inmate at the time," Legend says, referring to the KRLA boss jock and spouse killer), and with the assistance of sax honker Chuck Higgins, Blue Midnight began to mix with some of the Johnny Otis R&B stable. But bookings remained a problem; once Higgins had the group substitute for him at a Bell Gardens dive: "This was the scariest place I'd ever seen - a bunch of ex-cons, and within 10 minutes someone had smashed a guy's head through the jukebox; he was bleeding on the turntable." Zoom quietly packed up and left; Legend managed to keep his skull intact with an improvised honky-tonk set.

            In the early '80s, Legend, along with several other Rollin' Rock Records players, became K-Tel International recording artists, touring Europe with supercharged 1950s renegades Jackie Lee "Jack the Cat" Waukeen Cochran and Tony "Wild Man" Conn. These were wild, drunken blitzkriegs, with Wild Man and the Cat still raging over career implosions suffered two decades earlier; Legend acted as chaperon and devil's advocate. Legend usually appeared in full Confederate-general uniform, caterwauling "The South Will Rise Again" (from Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs) along with such demented originals as "Soakin' the Bone" and "Mexican Love," the latter a favorite of the late Dennis Wilson, one of a small army of celebrity affiliations Legend seems to magnetically attract.
            From Russ Meyer ultravixen Kitten Natividad to the late film noir bruiser Lawrence Tierney, Legend has commingled with just about everyone. The melding of horror movies, rock & roll and lucha libre is hardly novel at this late date, but for Legend, it all converged with a frightening inevitability. He was responsible for the recording of Classy Freddie Blassie's immortal "Pencil Neck Geek" and later the movie My Breakfast With Blassie, and enjoyed associations with such wrestling aficionados as Andy Kaufman and the Aztec Mummy; Legend the horror actor has suffered gruesome ends in movies such as Bride of Re-Animator and Children of the Corn III.
            Legend's frantic pace is constant; curating an endless series of underworld sideshows, he pinballs on a hit-and-run, shock-and-thrill spree of film festivals, club dates, horror conventions, wrestling shows, acting jobs. He's always there, lurking in the shadows, rattling off staccato accounts of his bizarre feats, usually climaxing with a statement along the lines of "They finally pulled the plug and everyone went berserk and we had to beat a hasty escape." Legend never exaggerates - he doesn't need to.

Johnny Legend at Rockabilly Hall Of Fame
Johnny Legend wiki

Best of Johnny Legend at CD Universe

THE LYRES

The Lyres are, for all intents and purposes, Jeff Connolly - keyboardist, record freak (he earned the moniker "Mono Man" for his refusal to allow stereo recordings into his collection), and all-around madman.  The band has gone through literally dozens of line-ups, with members being booted or exiting due to Conolly's legendarily difficult personality (Conolly once gave his definition of a group as "a group of people who do exactly what I tell them to do.")

Of the dozens of bands that emerged in the 1980s garage rock revival, Lyres were one of the few that seemed to realize that the point wasn't about how much paisley clothing you could wear or finding the right vintage effects pedals (i.e. wallowing in nostalgia for an era you were too young to have actually witnessed -- the musical equivalent of living in an episode of Happy Days), but about playing cool stripped-down rock & roll. Jeff "Monoman" Conolly understood that the Sonics and the Ramones were traveling in the same direction, but merely using a different path to get there, and, as a result, Lyres' recordings have an energy and passion that's stood the test of time far better than most of their contemporaries. While Conolly's Vox Continental organ keeps his 1960s obsessions up-front throughout, the rest of the band is capable of generating a hard-driving groove, and the performances capture what was exciting and soulful about 1960s punk without drowning in a sea of "retro." (Allmusic)

The Lyres originated from the ashes of DMZ - essentially the same concept, with perhaps a slightly more new wave/punk approach.  DMZ even managed a debut album on Sire(!), produced by Flo and Eddie (!!) though garage fans have dismissed it as too slick.

After DMZ shattered, Conolly founded Lyres with fellow ex-DMZ'ers - who soon enough fell by the wayside.  The band made a name for itself with their second album, On Fyre, which sold surprisingly well, even in the US, while establishing them a solid European following.  The follow-up, Lyres Lyres, was even better.

After that, the constantly-re-aligning band seemed to lose its inspiration, closing the 80's off with the intermittently successful A Promise Is A Promise, then largely disappearing, poking its head up once or twice in the 90's with a full-length album or another single or EP, as well as a stream of live albums from various sources.  The inspiration of their early days showed only in flashes.

The Lyres were inactive for most of the early 2000's, but of late have been touring again, mostly in Europe.  Conolly remains Conolly.

Lyres wiki
DMZ wiki
The Lyres Allmusic
DMZ allmusic
Right Now! The Lyres
Amusing Interview with Jeff Conolly

On Fyre
Lyres Lyres
DMZ: Live at the Rat