Thursday 5/23/24
Maybe you have. It's called "Action Woman." But I'd say chances are low and I just wanted to say some words on behalf of the Litter. They were a garage band formed in Minneapolis in 1966. Garage music--and to be very specific--garage music from that year, is some of my favorite music in the world. If I had to pick a list of a half dozen different genres, that would be one of them.
What else? British rhythm and blues--stuff like the Yardbirds at the Crawdaddy and the Beatles covering "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" and the Animals doing "Talkin' About You" and the Who's aborted would-be debut album, Introducing the Who. Also what I call pure song--Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and the Grateful Dead at Golden Hall Community Concourse on 8/5/70 and that stuff like that cover of "Ain't Got Time to Stop and Tarry" that I've posted on here before. But as I said, some of my favorite music is garage music. The Count Five's lone LP, for instance.
The Litter had an album in 1967 called Distortions. This was what I was listening to in the car, driving to school, in the 1990s. I never thought it was weird. I didn't know anyone else who listened to what I did. My parents didn't listen to it. I didn't get introduced by anyone to it. As I remarked the other day, I've always just done things for myself.
And I dug the Litter! They had a song called "Codine" about drinking cough syrup. Their sound was pretty big--sort of hefty--for a garage band. They were on that cusp with the whole 1967 thing. Not a lot was written about them, you didn't have the internet. You really had to be into music to turn up the goodies like this. But that was the thing about really being into music--it wasn't hard to turn up those goodies because you were that into finding stuff.
I had also said that some of the only writing right now worth reading comes from music-related YouTube comments. Because the music means something to people. You can always tells when something does. Look at all of these shitty writers we talk about on here. You know that writing doesn't mean anything to them. Just like when we read the lying comments about how great, I don't know, someone like Diane Williams is, who is poor at writing to a Motorollah degree, you know how false they are. How "un-meant." It's just (perpetually would-be) literary types saying something they don't mean, as per usual.
But look at this comment here under the video: "This song was the only thing that kept me sane during the last couple years of my marriage."
That's awesome! And weird! Listen to the lyrics and that'll perhaps give you some insight into this guy and his marriage. Imagine that, though: You're listening to the Litter to keep yourself from going crazy in your dying marriage. See? That's real. And we know it's real. I'm going to share a truth about writing in the middle of this post about music: He who writes realest writes best. Now, a lot goes into that. It's not a "just tell the truth" thing.
Echo and the Bunnymen covered this song. It remains a mystery to me (could have been the Pebbles comp in the late 1970s) how they knew about it. That was the 1980s, before CDs. But as we were saying, music people who love discovering great music will find a way to find it. Or they used to, at least.
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