The guy Mar hooked up with when she was supposed to be working is hanging around our house. Right now.

Fergus and Geronimo, Unlearn

They don’t piledrive like The Dirtbombs or dance-off like The Fleshtones, but there are other ways to blend ‘60s soul and indie rock. Fergus & Geronimo do it with choppy sound collages, aura-like sounds accenting the vocals, and good old-fashioned enthusiasm. “Baby Don’t You Cry” is both fresh and familiar, simplistic and profound, thumpy and smooth, reckless and reserved.

The Summer 2011 issue of Nostalgia Digest includes an interview with Janet Waldo, known to separate generations as the squealy Emmy Lou on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet radio show, then as Judy Jetson, Penelope Pitstop and Josie (of The Pussycats) for Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons. The Waldo interview is a two-page teaser for a longer interview to be broadcast on Nostalgia Digest’s Chicago-based radio show Those Were the Days on Aug. 27, which will also air some of her radio shows. Waldo played the title role in Meet Corliss Archer, a series about a 15-year-old girl (“Heyyyyyy, Corrrrliissss!,” as her next-door neighbor boyfriend screams) which ran for 13 years—nearly as long as the unchanging age of its protagonist.

I’ve got to patient for two months now; Waldo doesn’t mention Josie & the Pussycats at all in the magazine excerpt.

Only a handful of Meet Corliss Archer episodes are extant today, despite the show’s long run. Another show highlighted in Nostalgia Digest, however, is ubiquitous on the Golden Age of Radio internet stations: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Well over 700 episodes exist from the show’s 1949-1962 existence. It was cancelled in 1954 but revived a year later, and lasted until the very end of the radio drama era. There were eight different Johnny Dollars in that time, including Dick Powell (who did the pilot), Edmond O’Brien (1950-52) and the longest-starring Bob Bailey (1955-1960).

Johnny Dollar comes up frequently on the Audio Noir, Antioch Radio Network and other nostalgia channels. I’d be pretty sick of it, except that because of the sheer mass of episodes available you don’t endure many repeats. Also, it’s one of the few adventure series on any medium to be set in Connecticut. (The few others include that TV show where Amy Brenneman was a judge.) Johnny Dollar is the Hartford-based insurance agent with “the action-packed expense account.” He’s actually hardly ever in Connecticut, always flying off to Texas or somewhere, where he seems to inspire more murders than he’s enlisted to solve.

I never learn much from Nostalgia Digest—the articles are too brief, more extensive info is easily available from books and internet, and it prefers the popular to the obscure—but I nonetheless find it irresistible. It’s very passionate about its vast topic: in the current issue, “Nostalgia” covers Astaire & Rodgers to Paul Whiteman to The Bickersons to I Love Lucy to drive-in movie theaters—some 60 years of pop-cult phenomena. I especially like how little effect new media has had on nostalgia publications like this and Classic Images magazine: still committed to print, and serving a diehard market of feverish collectors and casual nostalgia buffs. The very packaging enhances the nostalgia element.

The Blats came back the very next week, and did that some new pronoun-flouting song of theirs again. Having played it once with the sole lyric “I,” then again as “We,” this time it came out:

He

He He

He He He

He He He He

Which sounded like an explosion of giggles from singer Sonny Blitt, and led to similar mirth in the crowd.

But wait. There was more. A few songs later, Blitt improvised a second-long intro—“we wanted to be fair to the ladies” and blew into, you guessed it:
She

She She

She She She

She She She She

A weaker lyric than any of the previous ones, since only “She” and “chi-chi” really pun into anything comprehensible. But at this point, we knew Sonny was really just laughing at us, even if neither knew what the joke was. He ended the punk rave-up with a long drawn-out Sheeeeeeeeeeeeee, then segued immediately into a whole other song, which started with the word “It.” Sounded like a Southern rocker dropping his chaw. And he said it while looking directly at us.

We think we owe Sonny something for this little exercise. He’s shown us how we overanalyze other people who may just be having fun. On the other hand, how do we know he didn’t have something trenchant in mind all along? Then we maybe didn’t analyze enough.

In any case, we feel eyed, wee (as in small), HEaped scorn upon and even you-sed, even though Sonny never got to that particular pronoun. But do we feel like Sheeeee-it? Not exactly. We’ve really come to enjoy that little tune. Hope The Blats record it sometime.

Only gig of note tonite: The Somatics, The Logicals, The Rapy and Anal Why Sis at the only place which would have them all, the beloved Bullfinch. Boycott the other joints, even if the beer’s cheaper.

I am in a blue bagel funk.

Ezra Holbrook, Save Yourself

In some ways the second coming of Elliot Smith, in others a reliable everyday singer-songwriter, Ezra Holbrook sweet-talks his vocals in a matter-of-fact voice that draws you in. Tingeing the tunes with strings and keyboards (“Another Light Off in the Distance”) or stripping them down to squeaky guitar strums (“Architect-Archetype) underscore lyrical ironies like “back in my arms someday/That’s what other songs say.” A beautiful and bitter album, ending in the “Blackbird”-soft, gritty-underneath confessional “The Wrong, Wrong Eyes.” A 2 a.m. album if I ever heard one.

Mike Spoerndle, founder of Toad’s Place, died earlier this month.

It reminded me of a weird afternoon I spent with him once in the mid-1990s, ostensibly interviewing him for the New Haven Advocate. It was a seemingly random chat, not geared to any particular event the club was hosting, or to any big change in the place itself. I later realized that Spoerndle was asserting his dominance, trying to get back in the papers as the famous face of Toad’s Place because he was getting squeezed out of the day-to-day operations of the club. He was being deposed for good reason, by all accounts (including, occasionally, Spoerndle’s own). His drug problems weren’t just legendary during that period; they were public, reported in great detail in the local newspapers he was then trying to court.

Anyway, that particular afternoon I spent with him was set up through the encouragement of the Advocate’s publisher at the time, Gail Thompson. She and Spoerndle shared Cleveland, Ohio roots and had formed a fast friendship despite some otherwise major differences in taste and lifestyle. At her urging, I dutifully met Spoerndle for lunch and an hour-long tour of Toad’s, in search of a story. There wasn’t one, except for the one I didn’t feel like telling just then, about the end of a magical era in local club rock.

For someone barely hanging on to his empire, and his sanity, Mike Spoerndle had an awesome swagger, the balls of a dinosaur. I was (and am) an underground and indie-rock fiend, but all he would talk about was the very biggest bands who’d graced Toad’s, and how he’d convinced them not only to play his place but leave autographs or memorabilia behind. He told a long story about the lengths he’d gone to in order to get the exact type of grand piano Bob Dylan needed for his pre-tour warm-up show at Toad’s in January, 1990. According to Spoerndle, during that entire four-hour, five-set evening, Dylan approached the piano only once and played just one quick chord on it. This story, to me, explained Spoerndle’s overbearing attitude: he was playing in the big league of egos.

In the late 1980s, when I worked at New Haven City Hall, I remember Spoerndle calling to complain because Mayor Daniels had declared a snow emergency downtown—a blizzard was due, but so was a Toad’s Place dance party. Spoerndle was livid and unrestrained in his vehemence. I’d never experienced such chutzpah from a local businessman directed at the local government, let alone at the weather gods.

There are those in New Haven who will tell you that Toad’s Place was never the same after Spoerndle left. That’s unfair to Brian Phelps, who’s ably kept the club going all these years. It’s the music industry that changed, not Toad’s. In the 1970s, considered the golden age of live party bands at the club, it helped that the drinking age was only 18. In the ‘80s, when Toad’s truly lived up its motto “where the legends play,” it helped that many of the up-and-coming superstars who played there did so as opening acts on package tours arranged by promoters and record labels. The sheer volume of signed acts which visited the club improved the odds of many of them becoming hitmakers down the line. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when Toad’s scored appearances by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and The Rolling Stones (Spoerndle’s litany and legacy), it helped that there were no casinos in Connecticut yet, and almost no clubs and large and well-kept as Toad’s in the state.

So the club was at the right place (on the touring circuit between Boston and New York) at the right time (when touring was still mandatory for breaking a new album).

At the same time, Mike Spoerndle was the guy who made the canny decision to give up on his main career choice—chef and restaurateur, a field he’d prepped for by studying at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America—and turn his European eatery into a nightclub.

It was Spoerndle’s idea to set the Toad’s stage against one of the wide sides of the club rather than fitting it  to one of the narrow walls, as most clubs do. This strategic placement meant not only that sightlines were good from just about anywhere in the room, the openness had a pronounced psychological effect on bands, who would strut and posture and interact with the audience in ways they wouldn’t on more confined stages.

Then there were the T-shirts—those $5 fashion necessities that found their way into the wardrobes of countless rock stars, and earned Toad’s eternal renown when one was worn by a member of U2 in a popular poster during the band’s first flush of international success.

Somehow, during our conversation that afternoon, it had come up that I didn’t own a T-shirt. I guess Spoendle assumed that, because I was in his club several times a week, I had dozens of Toad’s shirts in my closet. I didn’t have any, I confessed—a local band CD or a third rum & coke always seemed a more pressing purchase.

“I’ll give you a shirt,” Spoerndle insisted. He must have repeated the offer a dozen times during our lunch at Yorkside (right next door to the club) and again as we ascended the stairs to his office. As I geekishly scoured the Toad’s filing cabinets for fun info (a Ramones rider; tech requirements for Todd Rundgren), Spoerndle pretended to sit at his desk and go to work. Almost immediately he spilled a giant glass of soda all over the desk.

At which point, he reached into a box under his desk, pulled out several pristine Toad’s Place T-shirts, and mopped up the spill with them.

I never got a Toad’s Place T-shirt from Mike Spoerndle. It seemed like he’d forgotten I was there. I wandered about the office, said muted goodbyes and slipped out sheepishly.

I ran into Mike Spoerndle a number of times in the following years, everywhere from the Branford Green to Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre. He was always effusive and energetic and open-hearted. In the space of very short conversations, he could confess, unsolicited, some very large sins and talk about what he was doing to overcome them. He developed the fervor of someone keen to rehabilitate himself.

That’s how I’ll remember him: as grand and multi-faceted a Connecticut character as the great P.T. Barnum—a showman, an ambassador, a philanthropist, a one-man maelstrom, a rocker.

Overpop is alive! The band had a car accident, one of those close calls where nobody died bur everybody had visions. Two members of the band, Bonney and C.G., spent weeks in the hospiltal and their girlfriends Rose and Pansy (of Flower Names) are showing off some nasty scars.

The terrors of the road trip inspired a concept album, which has become, appropriately, a live show. They tired it out last week in a classroom at the college on the hill, with projections and mic effects and everything. There’s not a lot of narrative, but there is a story, and a crash, and confessions, and a smashing set of brand new songs. Rose and Pansy sing back-up, which gives a whole new dimension to C.G’s songs: his lyrics always have sounded as if he was talking to someone in the room, and now he has a chorus to answer him.

The core concept of the set is that the crash was preordained, that the players had it coming to them. In real life, they do feel supernaturally altered by their communal experience. Joining forces and exorcising the demons musically seemed “more productive” than licking their wounds invidually in private.

“We crashed,” C.G. sez, “and we’re moving on.”

Rant Bloc is a spoken-word collective. Monday, they’re a band, with seven-piece jazz/rock backing, at the Bullfinch. Be forewarned: three of those musicians are percussionists… L’Etolie thinks he’s a star, because he’s headlining tomorrow at Hamilton’s Some stars do, in fact, do that, but sometimes the real headliners get to deciide where they go on the bill, and some choose to get back to the hotel before closing time. L’Etoile, the Star, goes on at 1 p.m…. The Flowers of Politics have back-to-back gigs at D’ollaries. Different opening acts each night, and we’ve even been told FoP will do different sets. That’s how things go in a city without a good-sized theater that allows rock band bookings…

Mar wasn’t at work and nobody knots what happened to her. The bagel place called around 6 a.m.

Ebsen and the Witch, Violet Cries

This takes me back to some of the doomladen female-fronted bands of my pre-emo youth: psycho but accessible, swirling but not smothering, making the most of high registers and low expectations. Slow-burn openings and stinging titles such as “Eumenides,” “Argyria” “Battlecry-Mimcry” and “Hexagons IV” add a mysticism and menace to the proceedings. Most of these elongated prog-electronic tunes sound like they mean to be accompanying an old arthouse film. That’s not a diss—if someone were to make that film, I’d watch it gladly. Spooky in how it lets light show through its darkness, Violet Cries doesn’t get weepy, just coolly gloomy.