To answer the question of what came first, pub rock or the Eggs, we offer up a delicious serving of Eggs Over Easy.
Such was the name of the American band in the early ’70s who inadvertently started pub rock when they came to England to record an album that never got released, but managed to play Monday nights at a nearby pub, kickstarting a back to basics movement that fostered groups like Brinsley Schwarz, Ducks Deluxe, and Dr. Feelgood and laid the foundation for punk rock still to come a few years later.
Eggs were a couple of New Yorkers, Jack O’Hara and Austin de Lone. One played guitar, one played keyboards; both sang. They didn’t have a drummer until they went to London to record their first album produced by Chas Chandler, the old bassist for the Animals who had famously discovered the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Another ex-Animal, John Steel was recruited to play drums, and they not only recorded an album whose release got forever stuck in red tape, they hung around long enough for a weekly gig at the local bar, the Tally Ho, where rock and roll was such a novelty in pubs that they attracted a number of other musicians, including Nick Lowe, Loudon Wainwright III, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello.
As Lowe remembers it, “There were hippies there, skinheads, Rastafarians. I remember, most especially, a Sikh bus driver with a turban on and his bus driver uniform dancing away. It was an unbelievable scene with people hanging off the ceilings. There was this fantastic feeling that you were in on something extraordinary.”
Generally lost to the ages, Eggs Over Easy will have another chance to sizzle when Yep Roc releases a triple LP retrospective on June 24, Good ’N’ Cheap: The Eggs Over Easy Story.
It includes the band’s entire catalog, restored and remastered, from the first album they finally released back in the US in 1972, Good ’N’ Cheap, produced by Link Wray, their second album—the unfortunately named Fear of Frying that hardly anybody heard in 1980, an errant single, and some of those previously unheard tracks from London.
The package includes from the first album “Henry Morgan,” a kind of laid back groove with a gently unspooling guitar solo that somehow manages to meld The Band to the rhythm track of the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway to Your Heart.”
Both O’Hara and de Lone are still with us, and in fact will reunite for a special show at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall June 6 for the first of what are supposed to be a number of reunion dates. I’ll have a plate of that, please.
