Bobby
Boy’s Old Curiosity Shop
By Bob Davis
Hi! I’m Bob Davis, the new, yet
old addition to DaBelly.com. There’s a birthday card that shows a
rather puzzled fellow on the outside, and he’s saying, "I’m trying
to get a feeling for how old you are." (then, on the inside) "Like,
were you really sad when all the dinosaurs disappeared?" Well, even
woolly mammoths are a bit before my time, but I was really sad when
the Pacific Electric Red Cars disappeared from Monrovia. My musical
memories go back to the big band era, and the first records in my
collection feature the musical mayhem of Spike Jones. On the other
hand, when I worked for the Edison Co. Telecomm Dept., I went into
one of our communication rooms and found three of our younger
technicians waiting for another crew to set up a test. They were
talking about a hip-hop group, and couldn’t quite come up with the
name. I chimed in and said, "Oh, you mean the Wu Tang Clan!" There
were some startled looks, implying "Where did this old guy learn
about the Clan??"
I’m now retired from SCE, and
when people ask what I do, I reply, "Among other things, amateur
streetcar mechanic and honorary roadie for Adam Marsland’s Chaos
Band Featuring Evie Sands." As a long time member of Orange Empire
Railway Museum in Perris, and a card carrying railway enthusiast,
I’m often riding or photographing trains old and new. Recently I’ve
been joining the efforts of IWILLRIDE.org in bringing electric
railway service back to Monrovia and nearby towns.
To backtrack a bit: I’m a native
of the San Gabriel Valley and remember when the location of the
Monrovia Home Depot was an airport. There were orange groves along
Huntington Dr. (which was US Route 66 in those days) and the site of
the Target store in East Pasadena was a cow pasture.
***
We were going to open the Shop
with an upcoming show by the above-mentioned Chaos Band. They
were scheduled to be at the Buccaneer in Sierra Madre on Feb. 6, but
I was advised that the "Buc" has been ordered to discontinue live
music. We'll be checking into this issue, but here's what
would have happened had the show gone as planned. The playlist
would have included some of Adam's new songs.......
Highlights of the show for your
reporter are songs by Evie Sands. She usually does "I Can’t Let Go,"
which she originally recorded in the '60s and which she updated in
2006 with the Chaos Band. Adam usually introduces it with a comment
about how with any other band it would be a cover, but Evie is the
original! Another song that’s special for me is "Don’t Look Back
(Don’t Look Down)."
One night the band was playing at
Molly Malone’s on Fairfax in Los Angeles north of Wilshire. Adam
spotted me before the show and said, "Bob, I’m glad you’re here.
Evie’s going to do one of your favorite songs tonight." Partway
through the show, Adam asks "Is there a '70s soul singer in the
house?" (spotlight shines on Evie) "Why, it’s Ms. Evie Sands! Tell
me Evie, do you have a song for Bob?" and Evie says "I sure do!" and
segues into "Don’t Look Back."
At a previous Buccaneer night, my
wife and I invited friends from Monrovia to join us, and they were
quite impressed when the band dedicated "Don’t Look Back" to me. For
a long-time record collector and music fan to be recognized by an
internationally known artist (Evie is considered an icon by the
English "Northern Soul" fans) is a wonderful experience.
If you can’t get to a Chaos Band
show, their songs are available on CDs:
"Long Promised Road," which
features the music of Dennis and Carl Wilson (Brian’s brothers, in
case anyone doesn’t know), along with some of Adam’s songs, such as
"The Big Bear" (which get a bit "close to home" for residents of the
northern part of Monrovia), and for Evie fans, the only recorded
version of "Don’t Look Back" and the 21st Century "I Can’t Let Go."
Adam’s double disc set "GO WEST"
is available through Amazon and other outlets; it’s a real showcase
of the versatility of the band and has a wonderful variety of
original songs. For some of Evie’s recordings of the '70s, "Any Way
That You Want Me" and "Estate of Mind," have been reissued on CD by
Rev-Ola in England and are available through the usual channels.
"Women in Prison," her 1997 CD for Train Wreck Records, is
officially out of print but is available through Amazon. All three
are for sale at Chaos Band gigs, plus you get to meet Evie, who one
writer calls "The Inimitable Empress of Soul/Pop." As far as this
writer is concerned, if there were more justice in the world, Evie
Sands would have at least one Grammy on her mantel.
Sunday (Jan 24) was the next to
last day for NFL action on TV. The Jets got shot down (or
kicked out) by the Colts, and New Orleans had the mojo (and maybe a
John the Conqueror Root) and scuttled the Vikings' ship. Since
NFL games have about 15 minutes of real action, that leaves a lot of
time to promote upcoming events.
For the classic rock fans, the
main attraction was the clips of The Who at concerts back in the
last century. Unfortunately, today's Who, who will
be playing halftime at the Super Bowl, is only half of the original.
One of their top songs was "My Generation," which had the line
"....hope I die before I get old". Drummer Keith
Moon fulfilled this thought by checking out at age 31, but the
others lasted until they were old enough for senior specials
(bassist John Entwistle passed in 2002). If they perform this
song, irony will abound.
My other reaction to "My
Generation" comes from 28 years with Southern Calif. Edison; one
could say that the morning generating unit status report is "...talkin'
about My Generation".
Probably my favorite Who song is
"Pinball Wizard." Back in the 1940s and '50s I was quite the
devotee of electro-mechanical entertainment of this sort. When
my wife Pat and I visited England in 1993, one of our day-trips from
London was the seacoast resort town of Brighton. Main reason
was to ride Volk's Electric Railway along the seashore: it's less
than two miles long, it's rather slow, but like many things in
England it's OLD, having opened in 1883. This was quite an
accomplishment for that era-- Thomas Edison had opened the
first central generating station only a few years earlier.
Getting back to the Who, I
remembered the line "....from Soho down to Brighton, I must have
played them all...." so after riding the electric railway, I found
what we Yanks would call a "penny arcade" and had Pat get a photo of
me playing a very American-looking pinball machine. One final
thought: good thing the New England Patriots aren't in the Big
Game-- their namesakes dealt with a "British Invasion" more than 200
years ago.
Bob Davis
Bobby Boy's Old Curiosity Shop
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