tonight's late night listening pick: the girls at dawn...i started out on a quest for the modern day punk rock shangri-la's, inspired by the dum dum girls and listening to 6T's girl groups today... girls at dawn are three girls from brooklyn. here's a recent live video where it sounds a little washed out and feels amateurish in the shagg's sense but you can get an idea of what it would be like to see this group:
here's another cool video:
they appear to have a 7" on hozac and a 12" on captured tracks. The Girls At Dawn are: Erin (guitar & vocals), Ana (bass guitar & vocals), Sarah (percussion & vocals), Mysterion (keys)
Seeing Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound encouraged me to go to Goodwill and Positively 4th Street and hunt for used vinyl as a teenager. I really thought The Shangri-la's were tough, street-wise girls. I thought of them as punk. I was a big Sex Pistols fan at this time as well, but was troubled by their sexism, particularly on this record, Some Product, but I was also pretty obsessed with listening to this record over and over again. It was probably about 5 years before I would hear The Slits, so that gave me a lot of time to imagine what an all-female punk band would actually sound like and how they would present themselves. There really wasn't an example that I knew of. I also didn't hear or even hear of The X-Ray Spex until I was 18 or 19, which seems odd now, given that I was totally music obsessed and immersed in punk. I had heard X, of course, and I was a big Avengers fan, but both of those groups just had female lead-singers and that seemed a little limiting. All the Dangerhouse stuff was out of print, so even if you had heard of The Bags or The Controllers or The Eyes, there was really no way to actually get those records. So this idea of what it would be like if The Shangri-la's were playing their own instruments and writing their own songs really stuck with me. I remember hearing that The Shangri-la's had played with The Sonics locally and this somehow cemented their reputation in my mind for being really tough chicks. I took this image with me when I would walk around downtown at night. I didn't have go-go boots or long hair and I rarely wore make up, but I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a punk rock Shangri-la...a girl gang...towns full of girls in gangs...in groups...girl groups...teenage punk rock girl groups...ruling every town. Why hasn't this happened yet?
The early 80's documentary Girl Groups: Story of a Sound introduced me to The Exciters and many other 1960's girl groups, producers and songwriters. I had a copy of it on beta and would watch it often as a young teen. In the movie, Ronnie Spector talks about being inspired by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1956). Written by the young group themselves, this was their biggest hit, possibly because the singer's voice had not changed yet; Frankie Lymon was just 13 when they recorded the song. Sadly, he never managed to surpass it and and was dead by overdose at 25. He had one of the most distinctive sounding voices in the history of pop music:
In my view, it was Brenda Reid from the Exciters, not The Ronettes, who sounded the most like Frankie Lymon. The Exciters Tell Him (1962) is one of the greatest sounding pop songs of the Girl Groups era (1960-4) and owes a huge debt to Frankie Lymon. Singer Brenda Reid has an absolutely outstanding tone to her voice and the melodic phrasing on this Leiber/Stoller produced song is very similar to Why Do Fools Fall in Love:
It wasn't until I went to England in the early 90's and discovered Northern Soul that I got to hear classic Exciters songs such as Blowing Up My Mind (1969-RCA Victor) and He's Got the Power (1962-United) By the late 90's I managed to find The Exciters: Something To Shout About, an essential CD compilation of the tracks they recorded for Roulette, but it was missing the really great early stuff as well as the later foot-stompers--though it did have some of the later'70's psychedelic soul tracks. Luckily most of this is on on youtube for all to hear:
Trivia: The Exciters were formerly called "The Masterettes"
