Approximately a decade or so ago I wrote a novel about my teen years in Amish Country. It should have made me famous but never reached the bookstores, because as I soon discovered publishers (seriously, can you believe it?) evidently expect you to come to them instead of them coming to you, which may be fine in the case of your average novelist, but yours truly? Be serious. The lazy sods!
Anyway, the novel culminates with the protagonist at a wild party in a decaying barn in the dying hours of the night, listening to the electric guitarist of an Amish band called Laut Dot Schof play a transcendently beautiful solo that goes on and on, for hours, until the light of dawn filters through the chinks in the wooden barn walls and the guitarist says, “Macht’s gut Sayn dich schpaydah” and the protagonist leaves the barn just in time to see what he’s refused to believe in and been searching for the entire novel, namely the mythical and elusive batdog—half-bat and half-Chihuahua—lift itself from the barn’s weather vane and zigzag off into the rising sun.
And I can hear you wondering: What is the connection between the above and Welsh power poppers The Pooh Sticks? Just this: the song I listened to over and over as I was writing that scene was “I’m in You” by The Pooh Sticks, because it includes one very long luminous and numinous guitar solo that goes on and on sending you into a trance, which was precisely the song I needed then, just as it’s the song you need now, although you don’t know it.
The Pooh Sticks are one of pop’s great lost bands. Formed in 1987 in Chelsea, Wales, The Pooh Sticks were lo-fi twee pranksters turned big guitar power pop pranksters, one of whose chief delights consisted of pilfering other bands’ musical property. Unabashed rock culture appropriators (on second thought, let’s make that thieves), The Pooh Sticks stole song titles (at least four song titles on The Great White Wonder are unabashed thefts), wholesale riffs, and lyrics without so much as a by your leave. (I love it when vocalist Huw Williams, who happens to be the son of Dire Straits’ drummer Terry Williams, opens “Let the Good Times Roll” by singing, “Hello, hooray/Let the show begin,” which probably caused poor Alice Cooper to scratch his head and say, “My that sounds familiar”). The Pooh Sticks dug through rock’s past the way one might the bins at a vintage clothing store, filching the stuff they liked without even bothering to hide their five-finger discounts beneath a bulky anorak.
They were labeled derivative, and in fact were derivative, but their genius resided precisely in their gleeful and satiric purloining of other peoples’ songs for whatever amused them. Like The Replacements entitling an album Let It Be, they had chutzpah, figured what’s yours is ours, and simply didn’t give a fuck. As stuffy poet T.S. Eliot once said, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.”
But their uniqueness wasn’t limited to their habit of poaching whatever wasn’t nailed down from other artists. There was also the question of their line-up, which consisted of Williams on vocals; Alison on bass; Stephanie on drums; Trudi Tangerine on Moog synthesizer, piano, synthesizer, and tambourine; and Paul on guitar. Seems straightforward enough, that is until one discovers that Alison, Stephanie, Trudi Tangerine, and Paul were all figments of Williams’ and producer/songwriter Steve Gregory’s imaginations. Or so claim most, although Martin C. Strong, the Homer of alt-and indie rock, seems to think they’re real enough. But if fictitious, who really played their instruments in the studio and at live shows? This remains a mystery, at least to this critic, who searched the Web in vain for a solution.
Two things are for certain; Williams really did sing vocals, and on The Great White Wonder he is joined by the flesh-and-blood vocalist and indie legend Amelia Fletcher, she of Heavenly, Talulah Gosh, etc. Heaping mystery upon mystery, The Pooh Sticks have even managed to befuddle discographers. I’ve heard The Great White Wonder described as their first, second, fourth, seventh, or even tenth LP, and so far as I’m concerned, any band capable of sowing such confusion and discord is on the right track.
The Pooh Sticks rose from the ashes of NME’s C86 movement, which emphasized jangly guitars and a twee variant of power pop, and their early LPs were certainly cuddly albeit more satiric than your average twee outfit, and included such irresistible tunes as “Teenage High” (which I’ve heard described as a rip-off of GG Allin’s “NYC Tonight,” although I don’t hear it); “I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well”; and their send-up of the fanatical pop music collector that is “On Tape” (“You want it, I got it/I’m talkin’ ’bout EVERYTHING/I’ve got The Monkees’ Head soundtrack/On tape!”). The band’s twee stuff is uniformly great and won them critical plaudits, but following a tour of the United States The Pooh Sticks renounced twee and reinvented themselves as a bona fide power pop band on The Great White Wonder, even turning themselves into an Archies-like cartoon band in the process.
Anyway, the band’s penchant for pilferage begins with the LP title itself, The Great White Wonder just happening to be the name of the immortal bootleg album of Bob Dylan/The Band demo recordings later released as The Basement Tapes. Opening cut “Young People” features Williams on vocals and is an infectious power pop tune featuring a melody that, if it doesn’t make you happy, is a sure sign it’s time to find a good embalmer, because you’re dead. It also includes some whacked-out bursts of guitar feedback and one happening guitar solo, and it wouldn’t be a Pooh Sticks’ song if it didn’t include some lyrical swipes, in this case from James Brown (“The night time is the right time/To be with the one you love”), Stephen Stills (“Love the one you’re with”), and Jonathan Richman (“Now is the time to have faith in what we can do”).
Oddly enough, follow-up “The Rhythm of Love” is not your average Pooh Sticks’ Frankenstein’s Monster of stolen parts but a bona fide cover of a 1965 song by The Strangeloves. The song opens with just Williams on vocals and an acoustic guitar playing the central riff of Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.” Amelia Fletcher provides great back-up vocals, and then some big crunchy guitars come in, and I’ll be damned if what they’re playing isn’t the familiar guitar opening to Neil Young’s “Powderfinger.”
“Sweet Baby James” is next. The Pooh Sticks may have looted the title from James Taylor, but Fletcher opens the song with lyrics taken from The Four Seasons’ great “Who Loves You.” A perky number, with that Four Seasons’ riff running throughout it, Williams can’t resist throwing in the lines, “But if you should ever fall apart again/I want you to know/Like Sweet Baby James/You’ve got a friend” while a tambourine rattles away. And after that it’s just Fletcher channeling The Four Seasons’ lines, “I love you pretty baby/Who’s going to help you through the night?”
As for “Pandora’s Box,” suffice it to say its title is from Procol Harum and it’s the only tune on the LP that doesn’t totally give me power pop wood. No melody is my verdict, but you’re free to make up your own mind. It does include vague references to both the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ “Jackie Blue” and Helen Reddy’s extraordinarily creepy “Angie Baby,” in which a crazy young girl (“It’s so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain”) causes a young peeper to be sucked into her radio, where she can imagine him as her dream lover. So far as I know there’s no such thing as a Twilight Zone compilation, but this one would make the perfect inclusion. Take heed, aspiring voyeurs, lest you wind up inside a radio, presumably one that plays “Jackie Blue” and “Angie Baby”!
“Desperado” shares a title with the Eagles’ song but that’s about it. It’s a rousing hard rocker with a guitar hell-bent on world domination, along with some repetitive piano plink that runs through the song. Williams plays the aspiring rock star as renegade (“This is the only life I know… Desperado,”) like he’s the Eagles or Jon Bon Jovi on his steel horse which needs both oiling and the occasional carrot, adding (“I know that one day I’ll be a star/And I know I’ll take to the life style the way a fish takes to water”). At around the 2:30 mark the song stops and a piano takes over, and Williams sings until one fantabulously cool guitar breaks out, like World War I without all the annoying trenches, at which juncture Williams and Fletcher return to take the song out. As for “Good Times” (or “Goodtimes,” I’ve given up trying to figure out which) The Pooh Sticks manage to lyrically put the titles of Katrina & The Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” back to back with the title of Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” which is sheer perversity so far as I’m concerned. And what makes it doubly perverse is that they use the exact same lyrics in the exact same order on “Tonight” off 1990’s Formula One Generation. Talk about gratuitous kleptomania; The Pooh Sticks are stealing stuff from themselves that they originally stole from somebody else!
“I’m in You” is not just the capstone of The Great White Wonder but of Western Civilization itself. From its title copped from Peter Frampton to its monstrous guitars and Williams’ greeting, “Hi there, dreamer,” this song rocks right from the get go. The tunes’ first six minutes (they go by in a flash!) consist of Williams’ (who is later joined by Fletcher singing, “I’m in you” over and over to a rhapsodic melody fueled by a giant chug-a-lugging guitar riff. Then they start repeating the line “Never learn not to love,” which just happens to be the title The Beach Boys gave to a song called “Cease to Exist” they more or less swiped from a promising young songwriter named Charles Manson.
And it’s oh so groovy when the guitar bursts in and takes over with a series of humongous power chords at the six-minute mark, moving linearly and in circles and snaking its way all over the place, hitting frequent ecstatic peaks from which you can see not only the roof of your house but all of the United States and in fact the whole world from Lithuania to Liechtenstein. And not just that but also the whole of Life, and suddenly its all clear, you know why you were born and are here and what it’s all about, namely the power and the glory of rock’n’roll. It’s a victory of the transcendent ascendant, whatever that means, and it goes on and on and on until you’re left dizzy and lost and don’t even want to be found, but just live forever like that careless voyeur in “Angie Baby” with the sinuous, mesmerizing confines of this guitar solo. Or at least that’s my take. Because I may be a cranky nihilist but I really could listen to this solo for hours, instead of the nine minutes it lasts before The Pooh Sticks close the tune with a “reenactment” of one of rock’s more iconic events, namely that moment in 1966 in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall when a fellow—since identified as Keith Butler—cried “Judas!” in protest against Dylan’s madly controversial electric set, to which Dylan replied coolly, “I don’t believe you.”
The title of LP closer “When Sunny Gets Blue” is stolen from Jan and Dean, or (less likely) the jazz standard of that title performed by everybody from Nat King Cole to Johnny Mathis. And while the Pooh Sticks’ lyrics are theirs, they certainly retain the title’s melancholy and lovely spirit. Williams, who is accompanied only by a piano, sings, “Sometimes she’s treading water/And sometimes she nearly drowns/Sometimes she rides with no hands/But I just don’t know what to do/When Sunny gets blue.” And what’s more, he sings the tune without the slightest trace of irony or camp.
It could be argued that, with their shameless swindling, The Pooh Sticks were engaged in a systematic program designed to demonstrate that rock was dead and all that was left to do was loot rock’s junkyard for kitschy scraps to be cobbled together into irony-laden “new” songs. But I don’t believe this for a moment. I suspect they were more like Robin Hood, robbing from the past to give to the present. And having a grand old time while they were at it.
It’s enigmatic that the Pooh Sticks, by embracing the derivative, found their way to a sound that was, if not original, certainly unique, and what’s more, enormously pleasurable. The Pooh Sticks were an anomaly, a campy inside joke that just happened to produce great music: high-spirited, inspirational, and perfect for a game of “Name That Rip-Off.” Which may seem easy, but really: Helen Reddy? Oh, and by the way? Any book publishers out there? Because I’ve got this unpublished novel about a batdog entitled The Sun Also Rises, which opens with the words, “A screaming came across the sky.” Neither the title nor the words are mine, but in a post-Pooh Sticks world, that doesn’t matter an iota.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
