The May edition of GQ magazine has a feature called unsung heroes where musicians, singers, and writers nominate their favorite secret musical genius. The South American writer John Jeremiah Sullivan nominated one of my unsung heroes-The Silos. Their eponymous record, The Silos (1990) on RCA still sounds as vital today as it did when I picked it up in college sometime in the early 90s. Perhaps, because, as Sullivan states:
“…the Silos are emblematic of all those bands who do something relatively narrow, do it with consummate taste, and refuse to stop doing it. And if one were high and leaning against the door by a bathroom at a half-empty club in Louisville, listening to Salas-Humara sing “A Few Hundred Thank Yous”---, one might call that heroic.”The album did not sell well and they were dropped from RCA. The Silos were one of the bands that helped discover alt-country in the late 80s and early 90s, as Sullivan says:
“I’d challenge you to listen to the one with the bird on the cover (The Silos) and not conclude that Wilco, when they made Being There, had in many ways succeeded in reaching, years later, the place where The Silos started.”I think that either my roommate Anders or I used to have the albums Cuba and About Her Steps, but I no longer have them so I think Ask The Dust, a sort of greatest hits collection, is going to be my next purchase.
The feature also has a nomination of Jonathan Richman by Chris Heath, whose “Roadrunner” with the Moderns Lovers is a punk/new wave classic. Richman has plenty of other great whimsical tunes as well; somehow I lost my greatest hits CD-time to replace it.
I was intrigued by Dave Egger's choice: The June Brides. I’ve never heard of them, a band from the UK. He makes them sound completely vital:
“…I found a compilation with everything they’d ever done, which was about forty-one songs, all of them jangly, ragged, literate, very sad=about how silly we all sound when we talk, how it is to feel that our homes are not our homes-but all the while, with help from trumpets and a viola, to sound less sad. I still think singer Phil Wilson wrote some of the best songs we have, and that the June Brides approach which always sounded live-as if recorded, drunkenly, in a living room lined with books-is the only real way to make music.”
I'll add one of my own: Gerald Collier, is another of my unsung heroes, former lead singer of the under-rated Seattle -based The Best Kissers In The World, and now a solo artist, who writes clever, catchy songs that stay in your mind for days, although he hasn't recorded in three years.
Click here for a link to the GQ page which has samples of the songs by the musicians nominated.
Do you have any unsung hereos?
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