The Holloway Echoes

Carry On Echoing

(Western Star)

Sporting drape coats and beetle-crushers, with high spirits their commonality, credentialed Teds bound onstage.

The contrast between eminently dispatched, grand musicality and japes that, on occasion, prompt blushing, mark proceedings. Lead-off cut "All Asses Must Be Shown" is a ribald tale, fondling the Camping entry in the Carry On laugh-escapade movie bunch. Felicitous blonde Babs is touched upon as banjo strikes up rousing merriment, and group singalong wreathes all in smiles. 

Jolly tone having been set, tagalong cuts span stately (and frequently back-slappingly waggish) passages. Pop sunniness, Skiffle,  and music hall cavortings are numbered amongst. Evidence abounds that while jesters every inch, these spiffily attired gentlemen (including Pat Winn and Alan Wilson) know their instruments up the avenue and home again.

Recommended: "All Asses Must Be Shown," "Brylcreem," "The Law Must Take It's Course," "Charlie's World," "This is a Melody of Guitars and Bells," "50s Fred (The Monoped Ted)," "Gripper," "Watch My Records Play," "The Third Earl of Harrow," "Take Me Back," "Cox's Creepers," "Last Orders," "Be Right Yet Left"

Videos: "All Asses Must Be Shown"   "Brylcreem"   "This is a Melody of Guitars and Bells"   "50s Fred (the Monoped Ted)"  "Gripper"

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Juno Records

Proper Music

Rough Trade

rarewaves

Sonic Rendezvous

Nekromantix

Three Decades of Darkle

(Cleopatra)

What distinguishes Cleopatra's steaming-from-oven reissue of their 2019 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD compendium will be instantly apparent to anyone with an eyeball in the center of their brain (to quote Lux): On offer is a two green-vinyl version, in addition to more orthodox formats. (This 30-year anniversary concert was filmed at California's Observatory Theater.) Kim thrashes his coffin-doghouse, as is his infamous wont, while allies Franciso Mesa (foamingly rabid guitar) and Brain mogul Rene D La Muerte (bashing skins beyond recognition) toil at his elbow. Soil-turning morbidness, plus humor dug only by those of bent disposition, ricochets to Saturn's haunted handies, Skelton Knaggs' Universal shooting stages, and climes in which grim ghouls ply deviltries.

Recommended: "Struck by a Wrecking Ball," "Night Nurse," "Demons Are a Girl's Best Friend," "Nekrostatic Extacy," "Gargoyles Over Copenhagen," "Subcultural Girl," "Brought Back to Life," "Horny in a Hearse," "Haunted Cathouse," "Who Killed the Cheerleader"

Video: trailer   "Struck by a Wrecking Ball"   "Demons Are a Girl's Best Friend"   "Gargoyles Over Copenhagen"   "Subcultural Girl"   "Horny in a Hearse" (official video)

Cleopatra

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Magic Sands

Limón y Agua

(Hi-Tide Recordings)

Many travel agents, posters of exotic destinations adorning office walls, could doubtlessly convey you to Kona, Hawai'i's Magic Sands, reputedly the world's most dangerous beach. (Riptides, shorebreak,  and all.) But know that the present Los Angelino combo, sharing that and-still they-come tourist-spot's name, can do so faster and cheaper. Hawai'i's ancient charms roll forth in wonderment, as strings are plucked and strummed with a dignity that is all the more intriguing for its mum knowingness. Percussions of island, exotica, and Latin characters induce pleasing physical inclinations. August ambience is further embellished by piano-key judiciousness. 

Sun disappears far across blue vastness, as ti leaf-wrapped pigs roast beneath earth in kālua enterprise. Mesmeric airs waft through evening air, and hula voluptuousness undulates.

Hi-Tide has specified a June 26 release date. Orange and green vinyl versions in gatefold jackets, with collectable obi strips, will be marketed in 200-unit limited edition.

What travel agent could offer all that?

Recommended: "Hawai'i Kai," "Vaquero," "Night in the Medina," "Mahina," "Back Door," "Hawai'i Kai," "Limón y Agua," "Baja Norte"

Videos: "Hawai'i Kai"    "Vaquero"   "Payout"   "Mahina" 

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Hi-Tide Recordings

Bandcamp

Plaid Room

Love Vinyl

Strictly Discs

Record Store Day

Sonic Rendezvous

Back in the Day, 2010

Wild Boogie Combo

Music for Females   bootleg 

(Chickens Records)

Hervé "Jake Calypso" Loison was one of the two pseudonymous, ex-Hot Chickens members who mongered proudly feral, give'em-the-sock thunderations in nights not distant. (Somewhere in regions uncharted, Hasil and Lux paused quaffing Frankenstein 'shine, and waved salutes.) Mr. Calypso and dirty business partner Theirry "Terry Reilles" Sellier  (under aliases Billy Cock and Willy Ass) accomplished two fine deeds: 1) ramping up enthusiasms in the creepered contingent, and 2) provoking staid neighbors to pound fruitlessly on shared apartment walls.

Reputedly of bootleg nature.

Recommended: "She's Mine," "Bip Bop Boom," "High School Confidential," "Roll Roll Train," "Bonie Maronie," "Baby Won't Come Out Tonight," "Rave On," "Woodpecker Rock," "Chicken Walk," "Tore Up"

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Great Invaders

Why were wrecking devotees jammed shoulder-to-shoulder at 2025's Tokyo Big Rumble? Given featured agitators Great Invaders - a threesome that gleefully detonates at Link Wray sound levels - the superfluousness of that question spurts crimson.

Video: "I Love Psychobilly"

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Komando Batikano

1980s Spanish teens Guti, Txopo, and Jabuxta grabbed hold of Punk's prospect for eruptive escape from/challenge to hardships social, economic, and political. Site Euskal Musika relates the trio joined musician-collective Assembly of Madmen and the Generación Bunker rehearsal space contingent. The three waxed 10-track demo Maketa in 1988. Present information defies acquisition.

Video: "Hambre Miseria Y Muertos" (1987 TV performance)

Euskal Musika

Ray Campi: Slappin' that doghouse, wavin' that scarf

Look over lists of golden era, million-selling rockers who've gone to their rewards, and names like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, and Little Richard will turn up. 

Thoroughly sincere Rockabillies, sweating and bopping on subterranean levels of regard, have always outnumbered the storied icons of 706 Union. But their toils are significant, also.

Here is the story of one.

Ray Campi's name doesn't adorn Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame billboards. But he nevertheless enjoyed select renown amongst internationally located rebels; for us, the "big bass-slappin' man" was of especial rank in American popular culture.

One heard in this veteran foot soldier's recent work the same snapped-tight dynamism and rollaround, good-time flow that he unleashed in bygone salad days. 

Older lovers of primordial, country-sparked bop will recall Ray's 1957 romp, "Caterpillar." And their more youthful fellows were fortunate to have Ronny Weiser's indispensible 1970s/1980s Rollin' Rock label to facilitate their own howdy-hi to Campi, and, in some cases, to the musical vein, itself. 

"Rockin' At the Ritz," "Hollywood Cats," "Quit Your Triflin'," "Rockabilly Man," "Pan American Boogie," "Tore Up," - these are only a few of the titles he committed to vinyl and thereby etched into Rockabilly revival immortality. 

His roots stretch back into a pre-Rock'n'Roll era in which loose-limbed and rambling young Country pickers first fortified bouncing rural melodies with a pronounced beat. The hillbilly bop they fathered in countless, liquored-up honky tonks resounds healthily in Ray's contemporary efforts. 

As a young man of spirit, he scaled to the mountain's top in the hardest way. Ray mastered his wild-side-of-life craft before 1950s Texas honky tonk crowds. Blurry late nights beyond enumeration were spent surveying the world through the lens of raucous, boozy revelry and suds-up brawls.

But the fame and riches that came to a chosen few eluded him. And life called.

Like many who had, from bill-paying necessity, turned to punch-clock existences - their one-time imaginings of the big time having swirled away like smoke from a dobro picker's Pall Mall - Ray abandoned stages for blackboards, taking up the unspectacular life of the high school teacher.

And on that unremarkable downbeat the story might have faded, were it not for Ronny Weiser.

Born and raised in Italy, Ronny fell in long-distance love with the 1950s American culture he found on movie house silver screens and precious 45s.

He became a Californian in 1965. But to his dismay, Fats Domino and Buddy Holly had been pushed from popularity by the Beatles. 

By the late 1970s, Ronny had launched his independent Rollin' Rock Records label. And the hot sounds he had as a youthful immigrant hoped to find in his new land, Country bop steeled by hard-driving beats, romped again. 

Over years, numerous LPs were cut in Ronny's Van Nuys garage. A mail-order business thrived. Originals like Charlie Feathers, Johnny Carroll, and Mac Curtis released Rollin' Rock tracks. 

But before those wonders transpired, Ronny discovered school teacher Ray lived near. And just like that, Campi was back.

He and other pioneers were were joined on the roster by new generation rockers including Billy Zoom, Jimmie Lee Maslon, Rip Masters, Ronnie Mack, Colin Winski, Steve Clark, and Jerry Sikorski. (These last three, with an additional guitarist, would eventually back Campi as members of the Rockabilly Rebels.)

Ray onstage lived his songs. He full-throated them with more enthusiasm and ingratiating humor than many of the Rock'n'Roll Hall's manufactured transient sensations. (But his habit of waving a cowboy scarf over fans swarming stage fronts holds significance not known to the present author.)

Since reemerging at Rollin' Rock, he recorded disc after good-time disc. Audiences around the world whose only previous exposure to him had been got from scratchy, hotly-sought vinyl, were driven wild by his on-fire performances.

Ray wasn't a star (save for among creepered believers). But with his genuinely affable rollicking and 'all the world's a honky tonk' Rockabilly, he offered a precious portrayal of Americana fast slipping otherwise into oblivion. 

Over decades, Ray imparted lessons in regular-folks' jumpin' and kickin' to the "real gone, crazy beat" that can be appreciated in scores of subsequent wax laid down by acolytes. As long as Mr. Campi's schooled bopcats are trodding studios and stages, something that helps make our world special endures and will always be accessible to us. Money in the bank, as goes the phrase.

And he will forever scale his Texas-starred double bass, mug in histrionic delirium, and wave that handerchief whenever needles drop on his platter legacy.

Which is cool. Because everybody digs a happy ending.

Videos: "Rockabilly Rebel" (live in England 1979)   "Rockabilly Man" (official 1981 video - pink-shirted Rollin' Rock founder Ronny Weiser cuts rug amid dancers.)   "Rockin' and Rollin' Towards Tennessee" (Rollin' Rock 1975)   "Rockin' At the Ritz" (74 year-old Ray, live at 2008 French Blue Monday festival)