Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Rock From The Mid-West- The Cuca Records Story Volume 2 -The Zakons "Wasted" !












Oh this, is the best volume so far because it features the Zakons two wonderful instrumentals "Wasted!" and "Trackin' ", The Orbits doing "Orbit Rock", and a terrific rockabilly tune from Bob Mattice & The Phaetons doing "What's All This". Which features a neato-keen-poke-fun commentary on a lot of the popular songs of the day, and naturally makes fun of each and every one of them, saying "What's All This?". It's dated and well, songs like that have a short shelf life, and now mostly point out exactly when the song was recorded. It's clever, and worth hearing. Again,nothing really revolutionary about this music, other than, it's rare,obscure rockers from Wisconsin. The Zakons really could have challenged Link Wray in a duel guitar fight, but I think ol Link would have whipped them, and shown them a thing or two.But they do some nice Rumble like chords. I don't know whatever happened to The Zakons, and maybe with more research they ended up in another band. We'll see, but these guys are so hard to find in these bands. I was kind of hoping some of them are still around, so we could get them to write about their lives and leave more on this site too. That's what this is all about. So write me,leave a comment! Link in the comments as usual. Maybe Collector Records will re-issue more things like this in the future with an updated band information booklet. We can only hope Cees Klop from White Label /Collector Records comes to our musical rescue!

Rock From The Mid-West-The Cuca Records Story Volume 1- I'm Movin' On!


Yeah, I'm still here.I'm just busy,and doing other things besides blogging,and well, this is all self produced,and I don't get anything for it. It's also a matter of finding more interesting music, and finding a clean copy on vinyl,and the whole nine yards of making it into a digital copy,blah,blah blah, and then posting it here. When you're doing 5 other things, it's natural to just post things slowly. And you should savor the flavor of each album I post anyways. It's not quantity it's quality my dear.
This album is courtesy of the fabulous Collector Records out of Holland and they did 3 volumes of this (that I found so far) and this is volume 1.It features mostly all rockabilly and instrumentals from the mid to late 1950's. Don't let the sad cover fool you, the inside features some nice primitive early rock instrumentals from The Rock-A-Fellers,Willie Tremain's Thunderbirds, and The Montereys. One track that stands out is "I'm Moving On" By Dick Hiorns with Jimmy Sun & The Radiants, it just chugs along like a rockabilly rocking train, and leaves me wanting more. Unfortunatly, a lot of these bands were only able to make a single or two, and then sadly, move on to either another band or give it up entirely, as the life of a musician is always precarious. Maybe they move on literally, get married, go to college or just work a straight normal job, but they left their marks here on this little record. I will be posting all 3 volumes so, please give them a listen. It's not musical history altering here, just damn good rock and roll from Wisconsin. Link in comments, cheese is welcome.