Poppacool

I know I lean heavily on the Peacock label, but honestly — why shouldn’t this greatness be shared? Peacock may have been based in Texas, yet its reach stretched far beyond state lines. Take The Chariot Gospel Singers, for example. They hailed from Ohio, and a quick search reveals they were formed by Henry Bossard, a former member of the legendary Swan Silvertones — a...

Saturday obscurity at its finest. And yes, I’m cheating a little. Back in 2012 I posted the Dick Wagner & The Frost 45 “Bad Girl” on Date — complete with the elusive picture sleeve. Today’s mail‑order treasure? A “Bossmen” single pairing “Hey Congratulations” with (surprise!) “Bad Girl.”

I dropped the needle and immediately thought, Wow, this so...

The weekend — no, let’s give it its proper title, the glorious Three‑Day Weekend — is creeping up, so allow me to seduce your senses with some sweet, swooning, soul‑soaked goodness. — the kind of record that the buying public completely ignored at the time, proving once again that history has terrible taste. What was once a bargain‑bin wallflower has now become a har...

Crackly Ria and The Revellons crash‑landed onto my Thursday Girl Soundz like they’d been smuggled in by a time‑traveling jukebox. They started with that Shangri‑Las swagger, but then—bam!—my brain did a cartwheel and suddenly I’m hearing David Johansen from the New York Dolls yelling from the corner of the room. Wild how your mind just grabs two unrelated records and...

We lost Sonny Curtis last September, and his passing drifted by like a quiet chord change — subtle, almost unnoticed, but leaving the air different once it was gone. His songs traveled farther than most people realize, landing in the hands of artists as wildly different as the Everly Brothers, Bobby Vee and the Clash, Hüsker Dü and the Dead Kennedy's. And of course, before al...