broadcast | issues | snock | storage | gloss
Clamtones BC
Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones
Tracklist and sound samples
Reviews
CD 1.
1. Lazy Bones
2. Polar Cave Blues
3. Porky
4. Dial A Prayer
5. Sweet Lucy
6. Mavis
7. Honolulu
8. Leroy
9. Penile Malfunction
10. Paraplegic Waltz
11. Stolen Guitar
12. Fooey Fooey
13. Toilet
14. Alley Cat
CD 2
1. Poor Otto
2. Rotten Lettuce
3. Slurf Song
4. Robbin Banks
5. Da Blues
6. Jack Knife/Red Newt
7. Driving Wheel
8. Griselda
9. Rosebud
10. What Made My Hamburger Disappear
11. You're Gonna Look Like A Monkey
12. Release Me
13. Portland Water
Double helping of 70's songwriter with Holy Modal Rounder connections.
7 out of 10.
?When Robert Christgau, (Dean of American Rock Critics ©), brought out his list of his favourite albums of the seventies there was a weird anomaly. Nestling amidst the Clash, Television and Neil Young there was, at number 10, an album called "Have Moicy" by Michael Hurley, the Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Fredericks & the Clamtones. Connoisseurs have long recognised the special qualities and uniqueness (" a cute, fatalistic musical head comik about the pleasures, sorrows, and mundane irritations of bohemian life " Christgau) of this album. Two of the participants (Michael Hurley and Peter Stampfel) have continued to make music and plow that furrow of leftfield cultdom. The third member of this unholy trinity, Frederick, has failed to achieve even the status of cultdom. Due in part to his untimely death in 1997 and the lack of any recordings (apart from the album, "Spiders in the Moonlight", 1977, currently unavailable) he has often been seen as a footnote to the main Rounders/Hurley story.This is unfair as despite his fairly relaxed attitude to various intoxicants he maintained a strong band of musicians who played throughout the North West of America in the seventies and eighties. Over the past two years his widow has been selectively releasing archived material, in the main live recordings, that demonstrate his talent and bonhomie.
This, the most recent release, is a two CD set of a Canadian radio broadcast from 1976 and is the best of the released material so far, both in terms of sound quality and song selection. Leading a six piece band and with Jill Gross on additional vocals, the music falls into that mid seventies loose limbed country groove as exemplified by the likes of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Dan Hicks and Doug Sahm with several of the tracks stretching over six or seven minutes. The song selection includes several from the Have Moicy album, some Hurley tunes and Frederick's own compositions. The band (guitar, bass, sax and other wind instruments, mandolin, fiddle, piano and drums) weave in and out, sometimes in an endearingly haphazard way (although the piano, by Richard Tyler, is generally spot on). But once they lock into a tune (Robbin' Banks, Jackknife, for example) you can sense the enjoyment they get from making this music. At times they are mildly reminiscent of mid seventies Grateful Dead Trucking type boogies. There is a great segue between the Slurf Song and Robbin' Banks, two of the aforementioned Have Moicy tunes.
Frederick's vocals are warm, easy and relaxed, drawling at times with an attractive habit of half spoken asides and on occasion achieving a kind of spaced out croon. There is humour here of a pre PC type on several songs, "Paraplegic Waltz" for example, but Frederick could write affecting songs too. On "Honolulu" in particular the band are very sympathetic to his words with violin and sax prominent as he sings of becoming a migrating bird fleeing cold climes to an island paradise. Another highlight is "What Made My Hamburger Disappear" where the Zen-like question of the hamburger is never answered but the band coil around the song like an anaconda. The album ends with a great rendition of "Portland Waters", a song by Hurley pertaining to this bands' normal stomping ground.
There are some minor quibbles over the sound, the guitar seems clipped some of the time but for a recording of this vintage overall it is better than expected. However, for any old hippies out there or folk interested in the likes of Hicks or mellow grooved songs that, as Christgau said, describe that bohemian moment in the seventies, I can recommend this album. Well packaged for an independent release, with great liner notes, buy this and wait for the anticipated release of "Spiders", Frederick's sole official release.
RELIVE THE MOMENT
Jeffrey Frederick, Clamtones B.C. (Frederick Productions, 2005)
Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones are the best hippie jam band you've probably never heard of. The real deal. Original 1970s hippies, not any Phish or Blues Traveler or Donna the Buffalo-style late-coming wannabes. This generous two-disc set captures them in all their glory in a live radio show from British Columbia in 1976, churning out more than two dozen of Frederick's twisted ditties. The Clamtones were the West Coast branch of the Holy Modal Rounders extended family. Sometime in the '70s, original Rounders Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber took up residence on the East and West coasts, respectively. When the quintet of Dave Reisch, Teddy Deane, Robin Remailly, Richard Tyler and Willy North backed singers Frederick and Jill Gross, they were the Clamtones, and when they backed Weber, they were theRounders, Holy or Unholy or some such permutation. The band travelled up and down the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada with both frontmen, sometimes splitting gigs, sometimes doing the whole show with just one or the other, depending on the state of drug-induced bliss the leaders were in.
Frederick passed on a few years back, but his wife Kathryn and the remaining Clams, some still hanging around Portland,Oregon, are making sure that Jeff's legacy is carried on into the 21st century with releases like this one.
Many of these songs are woodshedding versions or works in progress that would later appear on Frederick's legendary Spiders in the Moonlight album, or on the seminal Have Moicy, long recognized by mainstream and underground critics alike as one of the classics of the '70s. You can hear studio versions of several of them on Rounder Records' retrospective I Make a Wish For a Potato. But there's something about the energy of a live performance that brings out the best in a band like the Clamtones, and that's abundantly evident here. The recording is remarkably high quality for one made in a bar 30 years ago, too. Frederick wrote most of the 28 songs on B.C., although some are by that other genius of off-kilter folk, Michael Hurley. Most of the songs are similar in type, wry parables and philosophical musings on mundane and banal everyday occurrences, or quirky and profane songs about equally quirky and profane characters. Like "Porky," about a guy who complains about a mooching neighbor, who retaliates by burning down Porky's house. Or the modern take on Jack and Jill in "Sweet Lucy." Or the woozy country of "Penile Malfunction," or the giddy playfulness of "Paraplegic Waltz": "Put your prosthesis in mine, let our limbs entwine, as we do the Paraplegic Waltz." The characters here resemble those in Steinbeck's Cannery Row, drinking, fighting and carrying on like the guy who cuts off his girlfriend's ear in "Jackknife," and the fellow who falls down and hits the back of his head on the bathtub because he sat on the toilet playing the guitar too long and his legs fell asleep, in "Toilet." In others, they adopt alley cats or mourn for dogs bitten by rattlesnakes, or get on buses and ask questions about the meaning of life in "What Made My Hamburger Disappear." The music spans the range of honkytonk and folk and rock, with elements of blues, jazz and Dixieland. Frederick's comically inflected baritone floats over the groove laid down by his own guitar, Remailly's fiddle and mandolin and Richard Tyler's piano, and Teddy Deane plays saxophones and flute, often in extended jams with the others. Remailly, Gross and bassist Reisch all provide harmony and sometimes lead vocals, but it's pretty much Frederick's show. And a wonderfully entertaining one it is. If you weren't lucky enough to catch these folks live back in the day, here's your chance; if you did, you can relive the moment with Clamtones B.C.
Gary Whitehouse, Green Man Review
"The best barroom rocker and crooner, ever"
Some real vintage Jeffrey, right here. White Label
sour mash. Two CDs, includes many of his songs that later became his recorded and standard gig repertoire along with a bunch of rarities as well that dropped out of the rep after a while for reasons known only to the man himself. It's a live recording of a radio broadcast in Vancouver, prior to
"Spiders In The Moonlight." They musta had some long-assed live radio shows in Vancouver, I guess, in them days, to get two whole CDs out of one. Also comes with excellent and entertaining liner notes by Teddy Dean that give you the full picture of those days from one who was on the bus, and the
cover features artwork by Jeffrey his own damn self.
It's still early on in the Rounder/Clamtones days, and you can hear the Rounders still finding their way with Jeffrey's music, which they'd soon find their way into all the way, but on this recording we find ourselves back in '76 and you have to set your head back, and just listen to the fermentation that would soon explode upon the world in all its antic fullness. There's good playing by all but there's a tentativeness to it, still. Dave Reisch is the one most fully locked in with Jeffrey, and he's all the way locked in and would stay that way for the rest of Jeffrey's life. Roger and Richard are closing in on it; Teddy and Robin are still tentative but both also deliver some devastation
for all that when the stars collide. Jill Gross of course is totally with Jeff, tethering him to the planet, as Teddy says in his notes.
Jeffrey himself is captured in fine form, still a young man, only 26, overflowing with great songs, energy and humor, and with his guitar and vocal style already fully developed, as it was while he was still in Vermont, before he headed west.
That kind of overflow of great songwriting, and great, original singing and trademark guitar style, already developed at that age, is near miraculous, really, especially if one remembers the times, which were overflowing with great music, true, but also with drugs of any and all description, and alcohol by the barrel, particularly in this tribe's circles.
These two CDs prove Jeffrey Frederick was simply unique: the best barroom rocker and crooner - ever.
Gary Sisco