The Joopiteers was one of the bands that escaped the clutches of “Sat” Satin, though they had to move out of town and lay low a while before they made their break. They also had to swap the psychedelic style on which they’d been weaned for a new harmony-pop angle. Label interest in them was immediate, and we’re talking national. For various reasons (their schooling, mostly), the band stuck around town and made their first album at Olympus Studios. They played several times a month at student centers throughout the county, and singlehandedly birthed an upbeat sunny-sky teen-pop scene that the music landscape wouldn’t otherwise have had. Lead singer Joop (who seems to be some cryptic relation to “Sat” Satin) wielded a gold-painted guitar specially made for him by Volk of the music dump. His onstage partner and erstwhile girlfriend Joopette the Eaglet played tambourine and genuflected during his guitar solos.

Joop is now married to Junie, keyboardist and songwriter for the Peacock Queens. The couple has been living quietly in the Hill neighborhood for decades now, coming out of retirement only for benefits and such. They just announced that they’ll be doing a series of fundraisers for the Zing Kids nursery school. One of the projects is a kids-music record, the first new recordings for Joop or Junie in several years. You can hear some of the songs live, over the wails of tots, Saturday morning at the school bake sale and open house. Gosh, when we were a kid all we got to do on Saturday mornings was watch TV cartoons.

Hidden Harbor and Short-Wave Mystery at The Bullfinch; not as doom-and-gloom as you’d suppose… Idol rock with Desert Giant and Viking Symbol (who wear those hats—fun!) at Hamilton’s… Jam band Whale Tattoo plays their 49-minute version of their four minute radio hit at D’ollaire’s, with Outlaw’s Silver opening…

Ate all the cookies myself.

This stuff is so light and fresh and airy, it has no right being so accessible in the wintertime. I’ve been grooving (that’s the word, in the Young Rascals sense) to Eytan & The Embassy’s album The Perfect Break-Up non-stop for a couple of days now. It’s got that classic Raspberries or late-ELO feel, where songs are translated in a perfect pop lingo using phrases and notes coined by masters such as The Beatles (heavy on the Lennon), The Turtles (for the harmonies), Northwestern R&B/garage bands, Bolan & Bowie, and many unsung one-hit-wonders of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Musically, this is comforting and familiar, yet fresh. Lyrically, it’s human and honest and confessional, yet fresh. The fact that bandleader Eytan Oren appears shockingly young, and that these ambassadors of London, Detroit, Memphis and L.A. sounds base their embassy in Brooklyn, gives the whole project an otherworldly, out-of-time feel. Yet here they are, in the here and now, giving contemporary teens a forebear of what kept their poor punk-starved parents going in the late-middle 20^th century. “The Good Life” features guest bleatings and bashings by Locksley, one of my all-time fave pop/punk/British invasion blenders. I’m a power-pop purist; this is a hard artform for the post-modern set to crack. Locksley’s done it, and so now has Eytan & The Embassy.

Things get even brighter with the brand new Eytan & The Embassy single, released Tuesday on iTunes. “Everything Changes” doesn’t exactly change everything—it’s the same heady brew of power-pop, white soul, Motown horns and ‘70s AM radio rock—but this time the studio production seems to keep up with all the melodic voices in Eytan’s head. It overwhelms with confidence and energy. It’s also a song of optimism and self-awareness, which is nice to hear during these cold-season just-broke-all-my-New-Year’s-resolutions doldrums.

Eytan & The Embassy play tomorrow, Thursday Feb. 2, at the Outer Space in Hamden. As impressed as I am by the extravagant pop production, I imagine this would be a special band to see live. Eytan takes pride in his soulful voice, and I expect one of the balladdy tunes such as “Juliet,” where he croons “Come on, I am on your side,” could be intoxicating in a small club as a surefire rave-up like “Queen Bee.”

Eytan & The Embassy play Feb. 2 at the Outer Space in Hamden—a single release party of sorts—with Super Bad, Matt Maynes of Johnny Mainstream and Patrick McHenry.

The Amazon alert I received yesterday is titled “Sax Rohmer’s New Book.”

Rohmer died in 1959. The book in question is The Mystery of Fu Manchu, which will be reissued in a couple of weeks by Titan Books as a ten-dollar paperback, or via Kindle for $6.39.

The Mystery of Fu Manchu is already available on Kindle for a buck and a half, within the 615-page Fu Manchu Omnibus 1, which also includes the other two volumes of the initial Fu-Manchu trilogy: The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu and The Hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Under its American title, The Insidious Fu Manchu, there are several Kindle editions available for free.

The Titan edition’s distinction will be “a special feature by Leslie S. Klinger.” Klinger’s cool. He’s a trusted authority on both Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, and edited the new annotated edition of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics (a 560-page hardcover).

Context is everything with Fu-Manchu, and Klinger can provide it. The novels are unconscionably racist, appealing to a readership to which “inscrutable” was a better adjective than “mysterious” when describing an “oriental” villain with evil powers and world-conquering intentions. Yet these books are cornerstones of 20^th century adventure fiction. Offensive, undoubtedly, but from an era which boasted no end of things which offend modern sensibilities. Up to you whether you need a new $6 preface to tell you that.

Hip Dip
Talk Balk
Freak Critique
Net Nut
Lame Aim
Steep Leap
The Moose is Loose
Sheer Non-Cents
Cute Catch
Nutty Note
The Sandy Clause
Goof Spoof
The Champ of Camp
Super Duper Star
Care Despair
The Paws That Refreshes
Conversation Frustration
Cake Mistake
Weekend Pest
The Moose is Loose (again!)
Can Goodies
Boat Banter
Race Case
Wheel Wail
Tip Top
Escape Caper
Substitute Suitor
..plus an unusually high percentage of titles that neither pun nor rhyme, and which I shall not bother with here.

“Goof Spoof,” by the way, is a gag in which Big Moose (also the object of ridicule in both “The Moose is Loose” strips) is mowing the lawn and told by Archie that “to take care of crab grass… you have to get rid of it as soon as it comes up!” So Moose is shown in the middle of the night, scissors in hand, shining a flashlight on the lawn and waiting for the first hint of grass. Which has, I’d argue, nothing that merits the designation of either “goof” or “spoof.”

If everyone who claims to have heard “Sat” Satin play when he was part of the local scene were telling the truth, he would’ve been selling out stadiums—and this town doesn’t have any of those. Some say he came up at a time when bands were gracious and community-driven, and that his unusual act benefitting from that purity. Others say he was a crazed, driven monster who broke up every band which wouldn’t let him have his way.
Satin still circles the scene, plucking gullible guitarists and ego-driven drummers out of bands which are sickened to lose them. Sat promises the sun, moon and stars. He knows producers, agents, label owners. (Or at least he used to.) He’s the last of the old school wheeler-dealers, and he still gets a lot of good people stuck in his orbit.
Latest “Sat” Satin New Talent Showcase—at which the participants pay (rather than get paid) to play—is Saturday. Or, as its herald would have it, Satin-Day, at D’ollaire’s, where the maestro still has some old connections. The smaller clubs are done with Sat’s nonsense—some bartenders won’t even serve him. That’s notoriety, we guess, a precious resource for networking. But we’re sitting Sat’s latest stunt out.

The Secret of Pirates’ Hill, a live punk rock opera by a secret ensemble who once had Pirates in their name until they weren’t allowed to anymore, at The Bullfinch, with “narrative folksinger” Trapped at Sea (who’s also at several senior centers this week)… Hooded Hawk (some kind of penis metaphor, we’re told) with Airport Mystery at Hamilton’s… More darkness at D’ollaires with Demon’s Den, Blackwing Puzzle, Game Plan for Disaster and Tic-Tac-Terror… Several teen bands got on a benefit bill for their dads’ forest-animal Lodge #72: Voodoo Plot, Firebird Rocket, Sky Blue Flame, Witchmaster’s Key and the little league outfit Danger on the Diamond. Will they have made anything once they pay for the clean-up afterwards?…

Fell asleep. Nearly burned house down. Smoke all over the walls.

Jamuel Saxon, Pre-Madonna.
Jamuel Saxon, featuring composer/frontman Keith Milgaten plus live bandmates and a projectionist, has the amiability and impatience that are too often missing from electro-pop. The band’s songs don’t spin aimlessly in their tracks. They amble off in fresh directions, layering and extending themselves. The opening track, “Jonathan Taylor Thomas Jefferson” continues the presidential nameplay of the band’s own monicker and is a fitting intro for the fun and frolic to follow. “Time is Money” (with rapper Scarub, who also appears on “Fake Yr Death”) is a straight-out pop single, quirky yet earnest. “Planetarium” gets more dark and tribal. Honestly, by then you’re hooked. I don’t dance, but I listen, and this is listenable dance music.

It’s Mark Lindsay season! The latest issue of ‘60s garage fanzine Ugly Things has a lengthy interview with the old vocalist for Paul Revere and the Raiders. (For those who don’t know, Paul Revere was the real name of the band’s entrepreneurial founder and drummer.) Now the generally less nostalgic rock mag The Big Takeover runs a separate chat with Lindsay in its 69th issue, one which also touts interviews with members of Iggy Pop’s Stooges and the recently reunited 60s baroque pop pioneers The Left Banke.
There’s some overlap but no overkill. It’s hard to tire of Mark Lindsay’s exploits, and I wish he’d write a book already. He was an attractive front man, but no mindless pop star, helping guide the group from the lucrative realm of sleazy frat parties to a losing duel with The Kingsmen over who’d turn “Louie Louie” into a hit (ditto Monkees and “Stepping Stone”), from dressing up in Revolutionary War costumes for a daily teen-dance show to a string of major hit records, from disguising the band as “Pink Puzz” to sucker radio programmers when the Raiders were considered unhip to surving time spent in the house of co-producer Terry Melcher, site of Manson family murders. Lindsay made the most of Paul Revere’s ride, becoming a skilled songwriter and producer and fashioning a solo career that helped him when the band’s fortunes waned. He’s been the member most keen to revisit the grottiest chapters of the Raiders’ storied past, doing a Cavestomp set in the ‘90s backed by Chesterfield Kings and reuniting in ’97 with key Raiders Drake, Smitty and Fang even when Paul Revere didn’t want to join in. The impetus for the interviews is a new Raiders greatest-hits collection, but Lindsay’s more vital than that. He’s still raiding and stepping and hungering and kicking.