MetaFilter posts tagged with outsidermusic

Oh oh, Sherry!

dobbs — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:31:15 -0800

The Pirate of Love is an album of love songs to Sherry by outsider musician / truck driver Daniel C. The self-released album somehow found its way to Iceland, where it's had some influence on the music scene and caused an animation student to make an animated documentary about the film. A truck dispatcher in Memphis was given the CD by one of his drivers, Daniel Ciocan. The man googled it, found the documentary, and put the driver and the filmmaker in touch. Each of them is now working on a sequel. Daniel and Sherry are now married.

Wenn ich siebzig bin

acb — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:39:23 -0800

Over the past 13 years, Berlin resident Klaus Beyer has translated the Beatles' entire oeuvre into German, recording the translated songs in his home studio and releasing them on CDs with titles like Gummi Seele, Kloster strasse and Das Gelbe Underwasserboot, even recreating the cover artwork of the originals. Beyer, 59, who became a Beatles fan after seeing them on German television in the late 1960s, commenced the project in the 1980s, originally for the benefit of his non-English-speaking mother, and continued it as a somewhat idiosyncratic labour of love, armed with only his school English and a dictionary. He finished the project recently with the recording of Das Weisse Album, though aims to tackle John Lennon's solo work next.

The-what-would-have-been-if-what-is-hadn't-happened.

slumberfiend — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:30:51 -0800

Still hyped by his local press as a "neglected rock-and-roll genius" Ralph F. Gean is an old rockabilly guy who almost "made it" back in the early 1960s… but didn’t… and then sort of did after all. Along the way he became a Mormon, got into trouble with the Feds, and lived on the streets; all the while making weird music that nobody paid any attention to. Rediscovered in the ‘90s by the likes of Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Boyd Rice (Non), Eric Allen (Apples In Stereo) and others, Ralph briefly made something of a forty-years-too-late comeback, and released a double-disc retrospective which garnered him enough attention to get him profiled and interviewed a few years ago on Canada's "Collective Voice Radio Programme," and then later onto Al Gore’s Current TV, crooning a tune about how Barack Obama will ruin the country. Now in his late sixties, Ralph is still playing live solo shows around Denver, Colorado, and occasionally guest-deejays with college kids on Boulder radio station 11.90, with surreally amusing results.

The Song-Poem Archived Music Series

Knappster — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:51:15 -0800

The American Song-Poem Music Archives dropped its song-poem mp3s in 2004, but Lee Rosevere "managed to collect all the tunes from the site and squirreled them away." Today he presents the first volume of the Song-Poem Archived Music series at WFMU's Beware of the Blog. (previously)

A New Creation Resurrected from Obscurity

jonp72 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:46:46 -0800

The New Creation was born in 1970 when Chris Towers, an unknown guitarist from Vancouver, decided to form a Christian rock group with his mother Lorna as lead singer and their neighbor Janet Tiessen on drums. Scared by reports of the hippie excesses of the Manson/Altamont era, Lorna Towers wrote doom-laden, apocalyptic lyrics for the New Creation's aptly titled album, Troubled. The band was unpolished, yet somehow captured a unique lo-fi sound comparable to a hybrid of the Velvet Underground and the Shaggs. The group might be totally forgotten today, if an aging hippie record dealer named Ty Scammel hadn't rescued a copy from a $1 bargain bin, leading to the album's rediscovery by collectors of Christian rock and outsider music. Companion Records released a reissue CD that proved popular enough that the band not only re-formed, but released A Unique Disaster, a sequel CD inspired by the Book of Revelations and the Left Behind series. Now that an impossibly rare original copy of the New Creation's Troubled has appeared on EBay, rediscover the band once again with a great article from the Canadian blog, Alienated in Vancouver. Sound clips can be found here, and a fan video of the Status Quo Song can be found on YouTube.

You can never please/any-boh-oh-dy/in, this, world!

not_on_display — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:22:53 -0800

In 1968, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire -- Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin -- started a band, under the encouragement, support, and management of their father, Austin. Dot recalls that the girls would rise late, practice for two hours, then work on their home-schooling. Then they did their calisthenics, rigidly prescribed by their father, and rehearsed two more hours in the evenings when Austin was home. Over the next 8 years, Austin would rent out the Fremont Town Hall many Saturday nights for a dance; the sisters, known collectively as "The Shaggs," would play their music, while their mother, Annie, would collect tickets and sell sodas (with help from more of the Wiggin siblings). In 1975, Austin Wiggins died; the sisters, without their father to spur them on, laid down their instruments and got on with the rest of their lives. And that would have been the last that anyone had heard the Wiggin Sisters' music. Except that, a year after the girls had started taking lessons, proud father that he was, Austin (a factory worker in nearby Exeter) paid for time in a recording studio for his daughters, and then paid more money to press the resulting album of songs. "Going into the recording studio was all my father's idea," Dot says. "We didn't feel like we were ready yet; we didn't feel that we knew that much about music. We were just getting started. He gave us a lot of support. He backed us up all the way." Still, that recording was almost just another Wiggin family story, as the guy whom Austin paid to press the album took off with his money and most of the records. The master tapes, stored in a chest in the attic, also eventually went missing. The few albums that remained somehow found their ways into the right hands, and in 1980 Rounder Records re-released The Shaggs' now-classic LP "Philosophy of the World". In the 9/27/1999 issue of the New Yorker, Susan Orleans wrote an article, "Meet the Shaggs." The article, and the Wiggins' story, caught the eye of Artisan Entertainment. A biopic seemed to be on the horizon, but that eventually morphed into an award-winning musical. "It was a good article, but if she’d only kept to the truth," Dot muses in the seacoastnh.com article. "A lot of it was right and quite a lot of it was wrong." Nobody can deny their own first reaction to The Shaggs' music: either you've found bliss, or a headache. It's a mixture of naive innocence, simplicity, chaos, confusion, and beauty. Lester Bangs, deeming the album "one of the landmarks of rock'n'roll history," describes the Shaggs' sound, "sorta like 14 pocket combs being run through a moose's dorsal, but very gently." Frank Zappa thought that the Shaggs were "better than the Beatles." If "outsider music" had a Mt. Rushmore, the Wiggin sisters would be standing there, 7 stories high, pawn-shop guitars in hand, smiling, ready to light up your world. You can listen to four of their songs on their MySpace page. There are also plenty of examples of their music (but sadly, no footage of them) on YouTube: - My Pal Foot Foot [previously on MeFi, a different version] - I Love - You're Something Special To Me two three four - Philosophy of the World - It's Halloween (Possibly one of the best Halloween songs ever.) - Gimme dat ding - I'm So Happy When You're Near (video features pandas!)

Jan Terri, where are thee?

Lillitatiana — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:26:30 -0800

Jan Terri, an enigmatic outsider musician from Chicago, became a dubious celebrity in her own right after releasing a number of self-produced songs and accompanying videos on VHS in the 1990s. Among her "hits" were Losing You, Baby Blues, Get Down Goblin and the must-see Rock-'n'-Roll Santa (which has been covered by Yo La Tengo). Her music videos were so earnest and popular for their camp value that Marilyn Manson eventually enlisted her to sing at a birthday party of his and the Daily Show invited her on. However, she hasn't really been heard from since. Has Jan Terri given up her dream?

Night at the Asylum

otio — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:20:44 -0800

Secretly Canadian to reissue psychedelic rocker Bobb Trimble's ultra-rare lps on cd. Considered some of the best psychedelic music produced in the 80s, these self-released records are prized by collectors and routinely fetch hundreds on ebay. Pirates have tried to cash in with unauthorized reissues but now it's Bobb's turn. Download this hour-long radio special devoted to the music (playlist) to get a taste.

Kinda like blogs!

ashbury — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:59:19 -0800

We've heard of outsider music, but along with this is the strange world of song-poems. ...ordinary people" respond to come-on ads on the back pages of magazines, mailing in their heartfelt but often bizarre poems to "music industry" companies that, for a fee, turn those poems into real recordings. More inside...

Outsider Music

jonmc — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 11:53:51 -0800

Outsider Music. From a mailing list, here's a concise description of what is really more an idea than a genre, per se. The Hip Surgery Music Guide has some info on the essential artrists of the phenomenon. If you wanted to stretch the definitions of the form you could include, some better-known artists as well. Unspoiled genius in the rough or merely crude freakshow appeal? The answer I believe is somewhere is somewhere in between. But in an age where most music is either a copy of what is currently popular or a revival of what used to be popular, Outsider Music is a place to go for a "Wow! What was that?" musical experience.