Being that Mod was a peculiarly British phenomenon, those
self-identifying Mod bands tended to be British. However, in the wake of the
British Invasion that stirred a rabid-Anglophile streak across America, there
were Mod—or at least Moddish— bands Stateside too. Perhaps some of these bands
really thought of themselves as Mods. Perhaps some of them have only been
identified with the scene after the fact. I have a hunch that artists such as
The Sonics, The Knickerbockers, We the People (can a band adopt a more
American name than that?), and certainly Gene Vincent didn’t think of
themselves as Mods any more than Joe Tex or Curtis Knight did, but I’ll be
damned if hearing all these U.S. soulsters and poppers bunched together on Looking Stateside: 80 US R&B Mod, Soul
and Garage Nuggets doesn’t make me want to slip on my winkle-pickers and do
the Block.
The name of the game here is obscurity, which pretty much
has to be the case at this late stage in sixties-pop compilation history (and
this one follows three others in RPM Records’ Looking… Mod-box series). However, there are familiar artists and
songs. Versions of essential Mod anthems such as “Leaving Here”, “Shame, Shame,
Shame”, and “Harlem Shuffle” are here, as are a quite a number of “original”
songs that borrow liberally from familiar items such as “Get Ready”, “Do You
Love Me”, “Satisfaction”, “Sugar Shack” (in an answer song by Georgia Lynn that
slaughters Jimmy Gilmer’s original), “Night Train” (via a visceral instrumental
penned by eighties TV jackass Morton Downey Jr., of all people), and once
again, “Leaving Here”. There’s also Mickey Lee Jones’s original version of “Hey
Sah-Lo Ney” (cut definitively by ace Mod combo the Action but not necessarily better), an outrageously
powerful number called “He’s Mine” by The Swans, The Wailers’ eardrum-pulverizing
“Out of Our Tree”, and a version of “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day” that
predates The Monkees’ by a few months (but hardly betters it).
As a whole, Looking Stateside
is a pretty damn consistent dance party in a clamshell box, though there may be a
few too many instrumentals and it would have been an even more engaging
listen if the soul and pop numbers had been mingled instead of segregated on
their own discs. Still, it’s fab that bin dives can still turn up enough
killer obscure records to basically fill three discs such as these.
