- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- The release of The Great Lost Album! in 1990 shows the enduring appeal of the Trashmen and also the large number of tracks that the Trashmen laid down.
The Trashmen – The Great Lost Album! (1990): One of my favorite bands that truly does not deserve the one-hit-wonder label is the Minneapolis band the Trashmen. Their song “Surfin’ Bird” is one of my very favorite 1960’s songs to this day – and believe me when I tell you that that is saying something! The story is that they were at a gig when drummer Steve Wahrer stopped playing and improvised a growling, spitfire performance of a doo-wop song called “The Bird’s the Word” that he had previously heard being performed by a group called the Sorensen Brothers. He then coupled that with a similar performance of another doo-wop song “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” by the Rivingtons – not knowing that “The Bird’s the Word” is also originally by that band.
A local DJ Bill Diehl who was in the audience encouraged them to record the song, and the Trashmen later won a Battle of the Bands competition. The Trashmen were signed by Garrett Records and reached #4 on the charts with the wyld record “Surfin’ Bird”. On one of the over-priced but essential Born Bad CD’s – also known as Songs the Cramps Taught Us – “Surfin’ Bird” is preceded by the original recordings by the Rivingtons of “Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow” and “The Bird’s the Word”; both songs are follow-up singles to their biggest hit “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow”. It is in that setting that “Surfin’ Bird” can best be appreciated: Their song could hardly be more different from these other much slower performances, yet in their own way, this surf rock band is also honoring the doo-wop tradition that formed much of the basis for the surf sound in the first place. “Surfin’ Bird” came out in 1963, the year before I got my newspaper route and started buying records in earnest. Thus, I have never gotten a copy of the hit 45 – or the Trashmen’s first album Surfin’ Bird either – but I did purchase a copy of the Trashmen’s second single “Bird Dance Beat” at the time (it reached #30 on the singles charts); the flip side is a car song, “A-Bone” (the only thing surf bands love as much as surfing is cars). It is amazing enough to think of there being a surf rock band from Minnesota – which is about as far as it is possible to be from an ocean and still be in the United States – never mind one that is so uniformly excellent. The release of The Great Lost Album! in 1990 shows the enduring appeal of the Trashmen and also the large number of tracks that the Trashmen laid down during their relatively brief lifetime – the combo broke up by late 1967 or early 1968. I have another album called Bird Dance Beat on the Garrett Records label that sure looks like it could be their second album, where the first two tracks are from their follow-up single to “Surfin’ Bird”, “Bird Dance Beat” and “A-Bone”. The Great Lost Album! and Bird Dance Beat have no songs in common. There is even a 4-CD box set that I recently acquired called Bird Call / The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen that came out in 1998, also on Sundazed Records; there are 80 tracks in this collection, all recorded between 1961 and 1967. The songs on The Great Lost Album! were mostly recorded in 1964, with the last four songs recorded in 1966; and all are previously unreleased. The instrumentals are probably the best part of The Great Lost Album!, including the great Stan Jones song “Ghost Riders in the Sky” that opens the album, plus “Greensleeves”, “Hava Nagila”, “Stick Shift”, “Bad News”, and “Bird Diddley Beat”. Familiar covers include Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’ ”, the Beach Boys song “Be True to Your School”, and Buddy Holly’s “Heartbeat”. Several of these songs I did not previously know, and they are among my favorites on the album, such as “True True Lovin’ ”, “Wild Cat Loose in Town”, “Mind Your Own Business” (written by guitarist Tony Andreason of the Trashmen), and “Talk About Love”. Two other songs are included on The Great Lost Album! CD that are not on the LP, another Little Richard song “Lucille” and the Booker T and the MG’s classic instrumental “Green Onions”.