We Don’t Know
Jody Rosen has written a long and worthwhile story about masters archives, jumping off from a fire that burned about 120,000 masters of the Universal Music Group in 2006.
He does a great job explaining why the masters of albums by Elton John and Nirvana and Muddy Waters and John Coltrane, among many others, are valuable even when you can stream their music online.
But then he gets grittier, and talks about Don Bennett, whose masters burned in the UMG fire, and whose career is almost impossible to survey. He was a vocalist in the Chocolate Watchband, which I’d heard of, but he also had a solo career, which has almost completely disappeared.
The point? Lots of music that is disregarded at first turns out to be valuable later.
So, here is the Chocolate Watchband. And a plea for Rosen to digitize the album he bought and get it out there!
And their name inspired the immortal Strawberry Alarm Clock. CWB had some good songs, notably “Let’s Talk About Girls” which was on the original Nuggets compilation, and what I consider the definitive version of the Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”: