Deserving of wider attention.....

Posted by: u5227470736789524 on 31 October 2004

One of the joys of music for me has always been discovering an artist, wondering why they never really "made it", following their long career and follwoing the branches that lead off from that original discovery.

These two men fit that scenerio.

I first heard a Michael Stanley LP in 1972. Since then Michael, in various solo/group outings, has released 20+ albums of great midwestern rock and roll. The "biggest" he ever became was to be opener for many touring bands (Foreigner, Bad Company, Springsteen) and to have a cult-like follwoing in the midwest US. When the Michael Stanly Band broke up in the mid 80's, they played a weeks-worth of sold out shows at a 3,000 capacity Ohio outdoor venue. Since that break-up, Michael has been a dj on a Cleveland Ohio rock station and continues to release albums every few years. In a late 90's live release, he sings/plays a song by a writer he had come across, Bill Deasy .....

Bill is also located in the midwest US, and at the time I learned of him, was fronting a band The Gathering Field. He has since parted ways with that band and is continuing solo and with his own band. He is simply one of the finest singer/songwriters I have come across in nearly 50 years of music loving life.

So, suggest others (any genre) who may have had similar recording/career experiences, never having hit it "big", but making your life so much the richer through their efforts.

And take the time to check out www.michaelstanley.com and www.billdeasy.com both of which have some samples and tons of info and links to great music.

Good listenin'

Jeff A

[This message was edited by Jeff Anderson on Sun 31 October 2004 at 15:48.]
Posted on: 31 October 2004 by bhazen
Nick Heyward; pretty much unknown in the US, he acheived brief notoriety as front man for 80's lightweight dance-popsters Haircut 100. Not my cuppa.
However, in the 90's he released three of the most excellent, Beatlesque pop albums imaginable: From Monday to Sunday, Tangled, and The Apple Bed. Unfortunately, these are mostly out-of-print or at least rather tough to track down. FMtS is a sunny-day pop feast, very McCartney-esque, that hasn't a bad tune; the other two are the albums Oasis wish they could've made during the same era.

Martin Newell; almost as difficult to obtain, unfortunately. The Greatest Living Englishman is one of the great indie-pop albums of the 90's, very Beatle-esque (see a trend in my taste here?), but with great segue sound effects (provided by producer Andy Partridge of XTC) and a Ray Davies eye for small-town English life. The follow-up, The Off White Album, is cut from the same cloth; as English (to these Yank ears, anyway) as a village pub, an Aston Martin, or a trout stream in Hampshire.

Speaking of: although actually somewhat better known than Nick or Martin, I should say that I think artists like XTC, Crowded House, Michael Penn, Aimee Mann, Jon Brion, Cotton Mather, the Honeydogs, etc. should be at least as popular as Britney Spears; we live in Philistine times.

Cheers,
Bruce (defiant Anglophile)

[This message was edited by bhazen on Sun 31 October 2004 at 18:33.]
Posted on: 31 October 2004 by u5227470736789524
Small world, Nick.

The only time I saw MSB live was in the mid-70's just prior to my moving to the NW. Intimate little civic theatre in Akron Ohio, probably seated 750, they opened for Blue Oyster Cult.

For me, Michael has always been what I wished Springseen had been. That is probably heresy amongst the masses, but I could so much better relate to Michaels songs of girls and cars and hangin' out on the North Coast (ie. the southern coast of Lake Erie). Warm humid nights, nothin' to do but just hang and listen to music and watch the cruisein' and the chicks. And you are right, that is sooooo American. Michael had a near fatal heart attack in the early nineties, and with the advent of the web, his music is still in demand and he has released compilations of the vinyl albums and several excellent "solo" albums, Coming Up For Air, Eighteen Down and the most recent The Ground. Pretty much the same ol' rock and roll but with some nice modern embellishments. Even had the courage on Eighteen Down to cover Eleanor Rigby.

In following some of these paths this weekend on the internet, I found an interview with Bill Deasy in a Dutch site, Real Roots Cafe. Around the time of the interview, Deasy was opening a tour for Randell Bramlett (played with Allmans, Sea Level, Winwood etc) who is based in the Athens Georgia area along with Widespread Panic, Drive-by Truckers and many others. Bramlett played keyboards on the Jackmormons last studio release "Conscious Contact", produced by Dave Schools.

So, I guess I have come full circle Smile

Jeff A