I didn't find any new releases worthy of obsession this month. Yes, there was Nuggets II, but the only songs I liked on it were the ones I already had. (I know; poor baby. It isn't easy being Dawn Eden.) Then there was the latest 45 by Detroit's Hentchmen, the reverb-reeking, fuzz-fueled, organ-oscillated instrumental "Creep of the Year" backed with the subterranean stomper "Teenage Letter" (D-wrecked-hit Records). However, before I could finish reviewing the record, I was detained for questioning by the Alliteration Police. They released me on the condition that I refrain from using the term "pure pop" in a sentence for an entire month. As a result, I am forced to write my first Fufkin column that is not a record review (drum roll, please):

The Ten Most Interesting Sixties Pop Personalities I Have Met

Please note that I used the word "met," not "known," so as to avoid any inference that I knew these men in the Biblical sense. They are indeed all men, not because I did not like the few female Sixties pop personalities I have met--including Petula Clark and Lesley Gore--but simply because they were not as interesting as the others. To make the list, a Sixties popster had to be interesting in the sense of being unusually nice; unusually troublesome; or unusually weird.

1. DEL SHANNON (Met: May 1989)--I consider myself extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to interview Del Shannon in person. He was everything that a fan could possibly want or hope him to be: kind, sensitive, intelligent, with a great memory and an easy laugh, willing to talk about anything. More than that, he had a good heart and was extraordinarily humble. Too humble, really; he had little concept of how deeply his songs were loved.

Keep in mind that Del (like Elvis, he deserves to be called by his first name) was, along with Roy Orbison, one of rock's first true singer-songwriters. He composed nearly all his own hits, as well as the Peter & Gordon classic "I Go to Pieces". For him to be topping oldies bills with ersatz Marvelettes and the like, which is how he made his living during the last 20 years of his life, must have have felt demeaning. Yet, he kept at it, delivering his trademark falsetto and playing lead guitar like a true rock and roller. George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and Mike Campbell recognized Del's sincerity and his unquenchable creative flame, and they all worked with him during his last years. That the demons of depression, which had dogged him since his youth, caught up to him before his Wilbury-related recordings could be released was a great tragedy, not only for Del's fans, but for whatever innocence was left in rock and roll. (Note: Del's final album, Rock On!, did eventually come out, on Petty's own Gone Gator label. While it's definitely worth hearing, I don't think Del would have approved of the slick production.)

2. MARK LINDSAY (June 1989/November 1998)--I hate to give Mark Lindsay the coveted No. 2 spot, as his legend is big enough already. Still, I would be hard pressed to find another living performer who is truly as larger-than-life as the former Raiders singer. Like Del, Mark met my expectations...and then some. Even at this late date, some 30 years since he last graced the pages of 16 magazine, he remains a walking pinup. Sure, if he takes off his prescription sunglasses, you can spot some lines, but the man unquestionably has an aura--not to mention an incredibly strong vitality--that easily fits the contours of a fan's mental image of him. Moreover, he knows it, not in an egotistical way, but in a manner that comes off as, for lack of a better word, gracious. Kind of like Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard" without the mania. Onstage and off, he knows what his fans want--a true STAR--and he plays the part so well that it's extremely hard to tell where the myth ends and the man begins.

3. JOHN CARTER (November 1997/May 1998/May 1999)--John Carter, as readers of my July column know, was a bonafide pop star in 1965 Britain, a member of the Ivy League who cowrote and sang on the UK Top 5 hits "Funny How Love Can Be" and "Tossing and Turning". He also cowrote an armful of other classic tunes, from Herman's Hermits' "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat," to the Music Explosion's "Little Bit of Soul," Sagittarius's "My World Fell Down," and songs by his own groups the Flowerpot Men and First Class.

John Carter falls into a small and very special category of Sixties pop musicians I have met--Sandy Salisbury of the Millennium and Rod Argent are in there too--who are most notable for their niceness. Niceness in itself doesn't sound that interesting, but it is when it is extreme, and when it comes from people who have survived all manner of music business chicanery.

Carter, Salisbury, and Argent all survived the Sixties apparently by drinking nothing stronger than milk. At least, that is what one would think upon hearing them speak. They have retained an unbelievably high ratio of their brain cells, more than most people in my family (and I don't think my family's that unusual). Also, refreshingly, the kind of stories they tell tend to be music-related, not the dime-a-dozen tales of wild sex that one hears from rockers of a more burned-out stripe.

So why does Carter merit position No. 3 on this Top Ten while Salisbury, Argent, et al are off the list? The easy answer is that I have spent more time with him and know him better than the others. The real answer is probably because it's more fun to pick his brain than it is anyone else's, and he lets me do so without complaint. What more could a fan ask?

4. ALAN PRICE (December 1995)--Alan Price is one of the biggest disappointments of my writing career. I sought him out for an interview because I was crazy about his music, believing he was unfairly neglected. Now, having met him, I still think he is unfairly neglected, but I am not nearly as crazy about his music. In fact, I can hardly listen to it. That is what happens when you build up an image of an artist only to find that the artist himself falls far short of it.

Actually, from certain standpoints, Alan Price was not a bad interview at all. Like Harry Nilsson (see No. 7 below), although he may not have given me the answers I wanted, he did answer most of my questions, and he gave me a lot of stories that he had never before shared with any reporter. Whenever an artist goes to that kind of trouble to reveal information, it suggests a kind of intimacy, as if the artist, at the very least, has a modicum of respect for the interviewer. Even so, while Price gave me some good quotes, he also gave me a whole lot of trouble during the interview, enough to literally drive me mad.

Price's antagonism was strongest when I brought up "The House of the Rising Sun," for reasons that require some explanation. When a song is in the public domain, anyone who records it can receive writer's royalties for their recording by crediting himself as the "arranger". Price's name appeared as the arranger of the Animals' version, so he received all the royalties for it. There exists, to this day, a controversy over whether Price was truly the sole arranger of the record, or whether, as Eric Burdon claims, he collaborated with the Animals' then-manager so that he alone would gain credit.

Naturally, as an interviewer, part of my job was to get Price's own take on this dispute, but he would have none of it. It wasn't just a question of his refusing to talk for legal reasons, which would have been understandable. He refused to talk and he refused to talk about why he refused to talk. Instead, he went on about the horrible "bloody-minded" journalists who made his life miserable with their misreporting. Mind you, he rejected every opportunity I gave him to correct such misreporting.

Price was so dour and insulting that I was driven to do something I have never done before, and hope to never do since. I excused myself, left the room, ran down the hall, got past the fire doors (it was a hotel), and screamed. Then I came back to resume the interview. I am happy to report that he was much less difficult after that.

5. PATRICK CAMPBELL-LYONS & ALEX SPYROPOULOS (both May 1994) (tie)--Nirvana (the British psychedelic group) was my biggest obsession for a while, so it is somewhat surprising that they don't interest me as much now as they formerly did. Perhaps it is because I can't stand to look at the cover of their All of Us album anymore. When I met and interviewed Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos, the duo who comprise Nirvana, Campbell-Lyons explained to me that the album's cover image, a photo representing the gods of war marching through a corpse-strewn battlefield, was actually a still from a film by Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl. Not only that, but the corpses were real: my relatives, probably.

I am afraid that is a rather roundabout and unappealing way of introducing Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos, who are actually two of the most delightful people I have met in the rock world. They are probably best-known to Americans as the men who sued Kurt Cobain and company over the group's name...and won. (The American Nirvana had to pay them a judgment.) In England, they are known as one of the first psychedelic acts, as well as one of the first rock groups to sign to Island Records.

I found both Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos to be warm and intelligent, but with a healthy dose of the psychedelic outlook on life. They have a definite bent for the surreal, and they were fortunate enough to know some of the true Pop Art personalities of the Sixties. Like Gered Mankowitz, who turned an ordinary publicity photo of Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos into the image of a pair of psychedelic heads, simply by putting tin foil over the lenses of the duo's sunglasses. And Salvador Dali, who splashed paint on the group while they played on French TV. Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos were happy to share those and other stories with this devoted fan. I am very sorry to have lost touch with them, and would love to know how they are doing now.

6. DAVE DAVIES (1999) & REG PRESLEY (July 2001)(tie)--Although each of these men is a creative songwriter and performer in his own way, a half-hour spent in each one's presence left me with very similar impressions. On the positive side, they are charming, remarkably well-preserved rockers who have reasonably good memories about their Sixties activities. Presley in particular has some great tales that haven't been reported, so far as I know, plus he is a human jukebox; at the drop of a hat, he will sing any song of his that you can name.

I feel guilty moving in for the kill now, because I am about to accuse Davies and Presley of a crime that I commit every day: talking incessantly about something that is of little interest to many (if not most) people. Still, if you ever plan to spend more than a few minutes with Davies or Presley, I feel it is my duty to warn you that you are in for a long talk about UFOs. That's right, UFOs. Big ones. Small ones. Fat ones. Skinny ones. What girls were to these rockers in the Sixties, UFOs are to them in the Zeroes.

I can't quite figure out why two major British Sixties performers should share the same extraterrestrial obsession. Could it have something to do with the fact that both them were managed by Larry Page? Now, there's a case for the X-Files. And, of course, we know where both artists' royalties disappeared: into the twilight zone.

7. HARRY NILSSON (January 1994)--Notice anything interesting about the date when I met Nilsson? He died in January 1994. I managed to interview him for the liner notes to RCA's two-CD Nilsson collection just eight days before he died.

Nilsson was very sick at the time of the interview, and he knew that he did not have long to live. He had serious heart problems, plus he had diabetic neuropathy, a condition that took away the feeling in his fingertips and made it difficult for him to walk. Not surprisingly, he was not a happy man and did not make for the most enjoyable interview. Still, even if he was somewhat abrasive, he was definitely interesting, answering most (if not all) of my questions and telling me stories that he had never told any other reporter. While some of those stories turned up in my liner notes to Personal Best, more of them appeared in a story I wrote for Goldmine, "One Last Touch of Nilsson," which is available on the excellent Nilsson Web pages: http://www.jadebox.com/nilsson/olton.html.

8. BRUTE FORCE (1990/July 2001)--To tell you the truth, I'm a little Brute Forced out right now, as I recently helped Irwin Chusid interview the off-the-wall performer and songwriter on Chusid's WFMU radio show. (You can hear it at http://archive.wfmu.org/archive/IC/ic010718.ram.) Just the same, I would be committing a grave omission if I left him off this list.

Brute Force started out as a Brill Building-era songwriter, writing tunes for the likes of the Chiffons (the classic "Nobody Knows What's Goin' on [in My Mind But Me]") and Del Shannon. Later on in the Sixties, after a stint in the Tokens, he made a gloriously bizarre album for Columbia, Confections of Love (produced by John Simon), and a 45 for Apple, "The King of Fuh". The latter went down in history as the rarest disc ever to appear on Apple. It was taken off the market when the BBC refused to play it due to its lyrics about the "mighty, mighty Fuh King".

As I mentioned, I am temporarily burned out on Brute Force and find it difficult to articulate why he is interesting, beyond the fact that here, once again, is a case of an artist whose personality perfectly matches his music. I would rather you follow the link to Irwin's radio show, in which Brute, a yoga instructor, began his interview by assuming a position of his own invention: the "doggie surrender pose".

9. ZOOT MONEY (December 1995)--When I came out to Southshields (near Newcastle) to see Alan Price and conduct my ill-fated interview with him (see No.4), Zoot Money was the lone bright spot of the excursion.

Although Price himself plays keyboard, he had Money in his band as an additional keyboard player. It was an ingenious move, as Money's famously buoyant stage presence provided a much-needed counterbalance to Price's sardonic personality.

I had a drink or two with Money after the show (this is probably why my memory is failing me on the details) and found that his personality contrasted just as brightly against Price's offstage as it did onstage. Although he didn't do anything as wacky as he did back when he was a regular at London's Flamingo (where he was famous for dropping his drawers onstage), he had a wonderful sense of humor, providing the gregarious good vibes that my disillusioned psyche badly needed after Price's battering. I only wish I had known enough about his career to quiz him about things like Dantalian's Chariot, the psychedelic band that he was in with Andy Somers (a.k.a. Andy Summers, later of the Police).

10. MEL TORME (Late 1990?)--One night when I had little money, I managed to snare a seat at the bar at New York's Michael's Pub, where I could hear, but not see, the guest of the evening: Mel Tormé (who does qualify as a Sixties performer, having recorded some of his finest work in that decade). I don't remember why I went there, as I have never owned any of Tormé's recordings, but, once he started singing, I was so glad I did. Even though he was, at 65, entering what would be the last decade of his life, he still had an astounding pure and innocent voice. He also had the most unbelievable vocal control that I will probably ever witness.

After the show, when Tormé was chatting with audience members, I felt moved to approach him. I gushed some words of praise and he shook my hand. That was it. But I will always remember that handshake. The word that came to mind immediately was "grace". That is as in "graceful," which he was, but also as in having some kind of inner beauty that is a reflection of the divine. I suppose we all have it inside us, to some degree, but, with Mel Tormé, as with a few other special people, it is right there on the surface. I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to experience it from him.

Now, if I can just get myself to buy some of his records...

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