Música Obscura

1. Real love
2. Everybody's Mad at Katherine
3. I can't wait
4. Justine
5. Mad Love
6. Cost of Love
7. Thin Red Line
8. Ways of the Heart
9. Mrs Peel
10. Here Comes That Wave




Mark Goldenberg - Guitar, Vocals
Peter Bernstein - Bass, Vocals
Steve Leonard - Keyboards, Vocals
Steve Beers - Drums

Mark Goldenberg and Steve Leonard met in junior high school in Lincolnwood, Illinois. The two stuck together and went to Chicago Music College. As a freshman, Leonard was teaching a course on electronic music composition to graduate students. Goldenberg was playing the Chicago folk scene for a while. After forming the Eddie Boy Band, and moving to the West Coast, the band broke up. Stranded in Los Angeles, Goldenberg started making demo tapes of his material. He landed a job as guitarist for Al Stewart's touring band. Stewart's opening act was Wendy Waldman, whose sidemen included Steve Beers and Peter Bernstein. They hit it off together and the three later backed Waldman on tour. They decided they wanted their own band, and so the Cretones were born. Read the included newspaper article for more details...

From Wikipedia:
The Cretones were a Los Angeles based new wave and power pop group in the early 1980s. Led by singer/guitarist & former Eddie Boy Band member Mark Goldenberg, who also wrote the bulk of The Cretones' material, the group had a strong sense of melody and a lyrical wit that placed them a cut above most of their new wave peers.

They had one single which charted on the Billboard Magazine Hot 100: "Real Love" in the spring of 1980, which was from their first album "Thin Red Line". The song "Empty Heart" from their second album Snap Snap was their only other song to receive significant airplay on album rock stations, but it did not chart as a single.

They are perhaps best known as the group which provided four of the songs on Linda Ronstadt's platinum selling 1980's new wave album, Mad Love. Ronstadt's effort served to highlight and introduce Mark Goldenberg's tuneful melodies.

After the band broke up, Mark Goldenberg went on to write the song "Automatic" for the Pointer Sisters which was a hit in 1984. He later toured with artists such as Peter Frampton and Chris Isaak, and had moderate success as a new-age instrumental artist in Japan. Since 1994 he has been lead guitarist for Jackson Browne and continues to write play and produce. Cretones members Steve Beers and Peter Bernstein helped produce and compose the score to the TV show 21 Jump Street. Steve Beers has been producing television ever since while Peter Bernstein has gone on write numerous film and tv scores.

This is a very rare and hard to find album never released on CD. Digitized at 24bit/96KHz.

Encoded at 320K from vinyl album. Includes album cover art, track listing, and newspaper article.

http://rapidshare.com/files/51112421/cretones_trl.rar

Password: music

Check out the Cretone's 2nd album Snap Snap

1. Hey Grandma
2. Mr. Blues
3. Fall on You
4. 8:05
5. Come in the Morning
6. Omaha
7. Naked, If I Want To
8. Someday
9. Ain't No Use
10. Sitting by the Window
11. Changes
12. Lazy Me
13. Indifference


The following review was borrowed from Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews

Yet another unjustly forgotten 60s group. This is a weird story all around. Skip Spence, a budding singer-songwriter, was recruited by the Jefferson Airplane to play drums (!) in their original lineup. He cut one record with them and quit in mid-1966, at which point he and the Airplane's manager hatched a scheme of forming a new band in the same mold. Like the Airplane, Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield, the new group was to be a harmonizing alliance of singer-songwriters with a fan following of rebellious teenage girls. And like those groups, Moby Grape was to go within just a few months from initial rehearsals to full-blown recording sessions.

The plan almost worked: Spence landed four talented songwriters, all from the West Coast and all with extensive gigging credentials. The group's first album was a careful blend of compositions by all five band members. Released within weeks of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, it was full of trendy pseudo-psychedelic two-minute pop songs. At this point, however, everything fell apart. The record company's efforts to hype the album's release (e.g., foolishly releasing five debut singles at once) were a total flop. The same week, three of the band members were busted for drug possession and (ahem) contributing to the delinquency of minors. The album's cover photo had to be modified when someone noticed that it showed a band member flashing a finger.

And so on. Things got worse and worse, with the group falling out with its manager, its performances deteriorating, and Spence consuming enough hallucinogenics to kill a stadium full of Deadheads. In early '68 Spence flipped out completely, running amok with a fire axe and landing in Bellevue for six months (!), which needless to say weakened the group's second album. The Grape cut a third album without him, and later a bizarre country-western fourth album with only three of the original band members, but the spark - and opportunity to cash in on the nation's Summer of Love cultural detour - was gone forever. Nonetheless, Spence cut a solo record in 1969; the other members released their own solo records throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s; and various combinations of the five founders have regrouped to cut no less than four reunion records, all of them hard to get except by mail order - I've listed them, but omitted most of the solo records.

Lineup: Peter Lewis (guitar, vocals); Jerry Miller (lead guitar, some vocals); Bob Mosley (bass, vocals); Skip Spence (guitar, vocals); Don Stevenson (drums). Spence died of multiple medical problems, April 1999.

For more information on Moby Grape, check out Wikipedia

Encoded at 320K from CD. Includes CD artwork.

Favorite songs: Omaha and Hey Grandma

Download Moby Grape

Password: music

1. Deliver Love
2. Chain Within a Chain
3. If She Knew What She Wants
4. Trained For Glory
5. Different Sands
6. Eligible For Parole
7. She's In Love Again
8. I Didn't Know Your Smile
9. You Are My Heartache
10. He Tore My World Apart
11. Take The Risk
12. All Through The Night
13. I know You're Not Alive


Songs 1-6 (side one on the album) are 24-track demos recorded with a revolving cast of musicians, many of whom Jules didn't know before the sessions. He used the recordings to not only get his fresh songs on tape quickly, (usually six tracks a night), but to find new players he could use for his solo albums. Songs 7-14 (side two on the album) are more like home demos recorded on eight-track.

From djangos:
Though he's never been able to record a hit of his own, singer/songwriter Jules Shear has recorded several albums of highly accessible, hit-worthy material, and as a testament to his abilities, he's penned hits for others, including "All Through the Night" for Cyndi Lauper and "If She Knew What She Wants" for the Bangles.

Born in Pittsburgh, Shear began writing songs as a teenager. He relocated to Los Angeles in the mid-'70s, joining his first band, a typically laid-back combo called the Funky Kings. The band released one album for Arista in 1976. While "Slow Dancing" from the album (written by Jack Tempchin) would later be hit for Johnny Rivers, the three Shear songs were clearly the highlights of the album. Shear left the following year to form his own group, Jules & the Polar Bears, who released two critically acclaimed, though commercially overlooked, albums for Columbia. When a third album was rejected by the label, Shear forged on as a solo artist.

Signing on to EMI-America, he released two solo albums, 1983's Watch Dog and 1985's Eternal Return; both received critical praise but few sales. Once again, he was dropped by his label and unable to secure another deal. Shear then formed the Reckless Sleepers with the Cars' Elliot Easton. In 1988, without Easton, the Reckless Sleepers released their sole album for IRS, Big Boss Sounds; it failed to make much impact, though "If We Never Meet Again" from the album was later covered by Roger McGuinn. In contrast to the Reckless Sleepers' hard rock tendencies, Shear teamed up with the Church's Marty Willson-Piper for an all-acoustic, Dylanesque album, The Third Party, in 1989. The album ultimately led to a spot on MTV, where he hosted the first 13 episodes of Unplugged -- he left when the show switched to the single-artist format. Shear followed with two critically acclaimed, more or less pop-oriented albums -- 1992's The Great Puzzle and 1994's Healing Bones -- two of his finest albums to date. In 1998, he released Between Us, an album of duets for Highstreet Records. Shear moved to Rounder Records subsidiary Zoe Records for his April 2000 release, Allow Me, and to Valley in 2004 for Sayin' Hello to the Folks. 2006 saw the release of Dreams Don't Count on the Mad Dragon label. ~ Chris Woodstra, All Music Guide

Demo-itis was released after The Eternal Return, and never been released on CD

Digitized at 24 bit, 96 kHz

Encoded at 320K from original pristine vinyl album. Includes album cover artwork.

Download Demo-itis (part 1) and Demo-itis (part 2)

NEW SINGLE PART FILE: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U9BPOJ68

Password: music

Side A:

Cool Air (3:38)

Side B:

The Rearrangement (3:28)





This was Russ Otis' first 45 record. It was made in 1976 on the now defunct Cool Duck Records. Both songs are written and produced by Russ. His sound always reminded me of Emitt Rhodes. Sadly, my friend Russ passes away on July 5, 2007.

Digitized at 24 bit, 96 kHz

Encoded at 320K from original vinyl 45. Includes artwork.

Download temporarily removed at the request of Russ Otis' family