We Are the Peter Green Appreciation Society

The Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 7.31.2020

8 min readJul 31, 2020

Hello friends, and welcome to another Dr Frank Weakly Reader, that thing I do where I attempt to index my own internet for future findability since, as we all know, though few care: it ain’t gonna index itself.

Scroll down to OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC for the Peter Green stuff and a link to my little essay about “Oh Well” and the struggle to come to terms with Fleetwood Mac.

And now, on to the weak that was…

FRONT BURNER

— The Mr T Experience… and the Women Who Love Them re-issue on Sounds Rad is still on the front burner. I mean, obviously. As mentioned last week, there have been some production delays at the pressing plant. August 14 is still the official release date, for digital and CD. Not sure when the delivery date for vinyl will be, but of course I’ll let you know when I know.

— Hello Dr. Frank…: they know me so well.

— The CDs, they exist: I know because Sounds Rad posted a pic.

— …and finally, Mtx forever: still a thing.

THIS. IS. MTX.

— MTX from the Rough Trade years: a photo from around 1989 I’d say.

— Milk Milk Lemonade Still Not Getting Any Younger — 28 Years and Counting: some old notes and a retrospective essay I wrote last year, posted on Medium. It is what it was.

(One reason for re-posting, as explained in the Medium post, is I had great difficulty finding the original post on minds.com when I tried to look for it. Internet, an index would be nice. That — the lack of an index — is the reason I do this here weakly reader thing, in fact, but it only works if I am scrupulous about cross-referencing every link and sometimes I drop the ball. And by ball I mean: eternal vigilance.)

LK 23, a.k.a. the “Song Long Sucker” seven inch: Seems that a guy on the FB Lookout Records fan page has a complete collection of the LK discography and is posting them one by one. This is, by number, the 23rd Lookout Records release, and the first MTX record on the label. 1989

And for more about this record and it’s weird artwork misfire, I wrote about it here: “if it’s broke — don’t fix it!”

— The bitterness is working for them: via Andrew McQuillan by way of Newspapers.com, here’s the Vancouver Sun’s review of Love Is Dead, from Jan. 11, 1996. Four stars. Throwing you back for Thursday.

— Odin: the Mr T Experience — “When I Lost You,” live in Forlì, Italy on the Euro-tour with the Groovie Ghoulies ca. November, 1997.

“Minor secrets” write-up is here. And here’s the Songs for Odin playlist.

— Now, there’s something you don’t hear everyday: a cover of “Now We Are 21,” that is, on bandcamp, from TJ Cabot and thee Artificial Rejects.

THE MANY MOODS OF DR FRANK

— A subtle change that says so much, from our man Klode. (At left.) Original here.

— Dr Frank — The Way It Sounds Like, cassette only live album — 2nd “pressing” still and now available.

— Age four was great, and ever since — decline: don’t know where this was from but Sounds Rad posted it and I must have said it. Basically accurate, though I didn’t think so at the time. You never know how good you had it till you don’t have it anymore. (As some have pointed out, “There’s Something Wrong with Me” places this turning point at six or seven, or it would if that song was about me rather than its narrator which is not necessarily quite the case. Fiction is so confusing.)

— Finally, a test: Was having trouble embedding YouTube videos, so I posted this just to see if it was working, and if the song is obsolete yet:

Answers: yes and no.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC

— We Are the Peter Green Appreciation Society: he died this week and I posted the customary photo on the social medias. (At left.) I’m a relative late-comer to the Peter Green Appreciation Society, and, like most converts, I’m above-average fervent and possibly over-reverent. He was quite an extraordinary man, as a musician and as a person.

As a personal tribute, I can do no better than point to the story of my relationship with “Oh Well,” a rather personal essay which you may read here.

Snip:

It took quite some time to come to terms with liking Fleetwood Mac. And it involved quite a bit of denial and a slow peel of layer upon layer of prejudice.
The Fleetwood Mac that was popular when I first became aware of them (and boy were they ever) was the Rumours Fleetwood Mac, loved by Normal People everywhere, and their parents. I was not normal. I was edgy. Off-beat. (At least, I was in my head.) At war with normalcy, wanting to flee from normalcy as far and as quickly as I could. Fleetwood Mac was, to me, the ultimate in anodyne, insipid, pantywaist normality, not just in the music per se, but in the associated lifestyle that it was (as it seemed to me) the soundtrack and emblem of Boomer parents in their hot tubs, soft-focus beach scenes, crystals, passing around a joint and discussing charter schools after the kids were safely in bed, sensitive men with ponytails, women in filmy scarves talking about enneagrams and vegetarianism and “earth shoes”; i.e., the California lifestyle that surrounded me.

I’ll just add that trying to learn to imitate his guitar playing is a great but frustrating experience because it is so deceptively simple, fluid, and natural, but impossible to reproduce once you get down to it. It’s the tone, of course (it’s always the tone.) And the economy that somehow seems to hint at an underlying, deep emotion. But also: zillions of rock guitarists have played similar blues-derived stuff, obviously, but he, like no other among them perhaps, played the clicks and ambient bits, exploiting the string rumble and scrapes in the background and using them as subtle texture to the otherwise straightforward blues licks that most tried very hard to isolate. It’s “there” even when you can’t quite hear it. It is, to me, quite a moving sound, and very impressive once you’ve noticed it. Moreover his voice, as a writer and singer, radiated an unusual sincerity.

Here’s Kimberley Rew of the Soft Boys, etc., tweeting:

I was introduced to the music of Peter Green at school, and that was my life for the next fifty three years- trying to copy him, but of course never getting anywhere as deep as he could get, with words, tunes and guitar ideas, never complicated but delivered with deep soul…how he reached that far down I’m not sure even he knew.

Like a lot of great art, it seems to come from some other place, somewhere “beyond,” corny as that may sound. It’s very unfortunate in this case above most others that drugs eclipsed the art so completely and so early as there certainly would have been so much more. It’s a common enough story, though, of course, and as always we’re left to appreciate and celebrate what there is. Anyhow, RIP Peter Green is what I’m saying here.

This essay was compiled into the first “All My Vinyl” aggregation here on Medium, but as with the Milk Milk Lemonade look-back, I neglected to cross-reference the link to the original post on minds.com and since that site is not indexed or archived there’s no way to find it. So I reposted, as I suppose I should with all such items as I find them. Cleaning up the carnage after the social media internet monster has ravaged its “content” is a never-ending, absolutely thankless job but I do my best anyway.

Anyway, I posted it anew and the new iteration may be found here.

Oh well:

PICTURE BOOK

— Roman calendar:

I am fond of St. Christopher not only because his medal has protected me through my travels throughout almost my entire life (and here I am, living proof in my capacity as a person who is not dead); but also because of the tradition that he had a dog head.

(More on cynocephalic saints here.)

— Plus: Saint Anne from the Faras Cathedral; Saint Pantaleon; SS Nazarius and Celsus, illuminated; Saint Martha and the Tarasque, illuminated; SS Abdon and Sennen, illuminated; the death of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, engraving by de Mallery….

— Behold: the trials of Dr. Hedgeh; “Everything good dies here, even the stars” — scene from I Walked with a Zombie; Ladies’ Intimates; a dark angel; John Lennon, 1789, and couple of swinging young people — and: the Klode alternate (about which see also below); the mysterious and alluring Miss Shirley Jones; Horrible! Worst-looking ghost I’ve ever seen!

— and: