These are brief excerpts from some of the essays in the Lost in the Grooves anthology, with links to available reissues. If you dig what you see here, please buy the book!

The Action - Brain aka Rolled Gold

(Recorded 1967-68, released Parasol, 2002) The Action swiped songcraft from Curtis Mayfield and Holland/Dozier/Holland and assurance from entertaining fickle London mods, but sound here as if they’d been marinating in mescaline on the Strip.... As the songs flash past, the critic hears innocent wonder, loneliness in the middle of a gigantic youth culture and the rolling clang of cash registers. London label execs heard no such, and the Action died in an attar sweeter than the Zombies. (Ron Garmon)

Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier (Epic, 1980)

There

From the introduction to Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed, by Kim Cooper and David Smay

Reconsider, baby.

Scram is a magazine that for a dozen years has been tweaking the critical consensus with sly reappraisals of artists deemed insignificant, unimportant or just residing far outside the hipster ghetto. We’re the ones who shouted there was more to bubblegum than the obvious epithet. We raved about Radio Birdman when few north of Sydney cared, unearthed a great folk-rock disc tucked between Dion’s heroin and homegrown eras, and celebrated the earthy brilliance of Jackie DeShannon’s forgotten recording career.

Now we’ve called upon scores of Scram writers and folks who share our iconoclastic passions to bring you Lost in the Grooves, a collection of miniature love letters to albums (and a few singles and EPs) that at least one person considers iconic.

We see ourselves as part of a long tradition of buttonholers, evangelizers spreading the good word about our faves with an unshakeable faith that your physical and spiritual well-being depends on it. (See "Mimeos and Cut-Out Bins" for more on the early zine history, and the vintage reprints spread throughout the book.) Thing is, we're worried about you. You're listless, your skin is sallow, you're sprouting unsightly blemishes and developing a funk in your trunk--and we think this probably has something to do with the absence of the Potatomen in your record collection. You're teetering on the edge of an abyss, and the only thing that might possibly save you is John Cale's Paris 1919. We're sure of it. Perhaps you somehow missed Michael Mantler's Edward Gorey tribute. Or maybe you don't have any Swamp Dogg. It's almost unimaginable, but some people don't own any Swamp Dogg at all.

Dozens of factors have conspired to prevent you from finding your favorite record. You're an inadvertent victim of narrowly focused marketing strategies. History, geography, even the limits of your own taste have thwarted you. What you need is an enthusiastic record geek friend to lead you through the bins. You need somebody to pull you away from your beloved indie rock 45s, drag you grudgingly into the country section and thrust a David Allen Coe record into your mitts. What you have in your mitts right now is your own portable geek.

We want crate-diggers to read about Tony Joe White, Schoolly-D fans to hear about Pentangle, Mekons fans to check out Kylie Minogue. No, really, we insist. Because somewhere in the cut-out bin of a record store in Tulsa is your favorite record and you’ve never even heard of it. Or it's hiding in plain sight, overshadowed by that same musician’s acknowledged masterpieces. Maybe it's the one great record in an otherwise mediocre career. Or it’s in this very book, in an essay you’re going to skip. So many random events conspiring to prevent the two of you from finding each other.

At the same time, we want Lost in the Grooves to be a record guide, subject to dog-ears and Post-It noting. David spent years tracking down Hackamore Brick and Savage Rose after Greil Marcus wrote about them in Stranded, Breakfast Without Meat magazine’s intelligent adoration of Jimmy Webb made Kim re-think her aversion to that artist, and we were both bubblegumized by exposure to Lester Bangs.

This book exists to nudge the canon so lost records tumble out. We want to highlight sub-genres that produced great music but have fallen out of critical favor, assuming they were ever in it. One thing we didn't want was a record collector smackdown, vying for pack status with the obscurity of their treasures. Nor did we want to focus on works solely for their freakish novelty. So bad it’s good? Nah, just so good it’s gotta be heard. Not every record here is a masterpiece, but each is distinctive, original and fascinating.

But the standards for which records are unsung, forgotten or undervalued are incredibly slippery. There are plenty of records famous for being obscure, a counter-canon of influential cult classics. So now we don't really need to write about Gilded Palace of Sin or Radio City or One Nation Under A Groove. They have graduated beyond the scope of this book. Now they're a part of the canon.

We analyzed the small geographies between cult and canon, charting the ever-shifting border and reviewing case histories to get a feel for the terrain. Inevitably, our criteria for inclusion was both subjective--we asked the contributors to pitch their favorites, filtering the list for cohesion and breadth--and a snapshot of how we see the canon right now. It was impossible to ignore how often reputations rise or fall on completely extra-musical terms. Consider, for example, the unexpected impact of one car commercial.

Nick Drake’s star rose precipitously in 2000 when Volkswagen appropriated “Pink Moon.” Pink Moon sold a reported 74,000 copies that year (up from 6,000), as Drake’s doomed romanticism found a crop of receptive ears dwarfing his longtime cult. His winsome looks and tragic fate rendered Drake the perfect Shelleyan poster boy for the Belle & Sebastian generation, though many new fans made uncomfortable noises about coming to his music through the “dirty” scrim of commerce. But with the artist long dead and unable to approve such marketing plans, Drake retained his creative dignity, and his music still seems primally, perfectly pure.  

Others nurture a cult in the shadows of mainstream success. Scott Walker began as one of the Walker Brothers, British girlhood’s very own golden California fantasy. In 1967, Scott commenced a series of outré louche pop albums steeped in Brelian archetype and an ever-rising pool of sap. Late sixties Walkersong could be exquisitely heartfelt, or schlock city; hits came even as he veered into easy listening territory. But by his masterpiece Scott 4 (1969), the fans had tuned out. It remained for Julian Cope to restore his reputation with a 1981 compilation subtitled Godlike Genius. Scott returned with Climate of Hunter, an extension of the powerful electronic material he’d slotted into the Walker Brothers’ reunion disc Nite Flights, to little notice by critics then plotzing over Bowie’s similar experiments with Eno. Recently honored with a five-disc box set, Scott canonical status is assured.

With an eerie ability to ride the zeitgeist, the Beach Boys have kept their summer on life support for nearly forty years. Regular revivals remarket the Boys as good time music for successive generations. Meanwhile, a passionate cult clung tight to their private version of the sub-chart Beach Boys: the Beach Boys of Manson covers, Sunflower, that terrifying board tape of Murray Wilson haranguing his sons. Underground scholars like Domenic Priore compiled essential field guides as bootleggers continued assembling endless jigsaw puzzle of Smiles that might have been. Eventually Capitol recognized the market for such effluvia and issued a Pet Sounds Sessions box. Brian returned to the stage backed by a band of pop freaks who encouraged the master to replicate Pet Sounds and Smile live. Ironically, as their more arcane music finally finds an audience, the classic early kar kulture tracks are being neglected. But we think there’s room on any discriminating shelf for both “Chug-a-lug” and "Cabinessence."

Some get lost despite continued strong work. The aviaphobic Byrd, Gene Clark left the band as their touring commitments intensified, slipping off to forge a distinctive brand of mournful, harmony-drenched country-rock through collaborations with the Gosdin Brothers and Doug Dillard. While respected, these recordings sold sparingly. The eighties Paisley Revival scene was the creative boost Clark needed. Bands like the Bangles and Three O’Clock worshipped at his jangled boots, and pulled Clark back into the spotlight. In the last years of his life, he recorded duets with Carla Olsen, their So Rebellious A Lover selling better than any previous Clark release. As the Byrds’ career has been subject to box sets and expanded reissues, the strength of Clark’s early contribution is undeniable. But his very accessible and pretty solo material has failed to find any real posthumous life. While Gram and the Burritos loft up into the firmament, Gene Clark remains incomprehensibly earthbound.

Some celebrated artists still need reconsideration because their narrative doesn't scan neatly. Because Sly Stone remains inconveniently alive, the history of funk and rap has been grossly distorted. James Brown is a gigantor dust magnet accruing credit for every flicker in black music for the last four decades. While his rhythmic innovations brought a stinky new whipcrack funkiness to American music, James Brown did not invent funk. He's sui generis--nobody sounds like him except by pastiche. Neither did George Clinton invent funk. Funk starts on the thumb-callous of Larry Graham on "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"--and all things funky roll outward from that low, seismic tremor. But Sly crawled up a hole in his nostril thirty years ago, and George Clinton's a cuddlier interview for VH-1. Also, the Family Stone's epochal Woodstock performance date-stamps them as Hippie Rock in a way that muddles the clear line from There's a Riot Goin On through every Dr. Dre production.

The late nineties saw a flurry of interest in the DIY Elephant 6 collective. While the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control got more attention at the time, it’s the marching band psychedelia of Neutral Milk Hotel that’s proved the movement’s legacy. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea received warm notices on release, but no one could have predicted the record’s inexorable rise to the top of the postpunk indie canon. Although bandleader Jeff Mangum broke up the band after their 1998 tour, his weirdly beautiful love letter to Anne Frank went out and did its own promotion, passing from hand to hand in a truly underground, ever-expanding cult. When Magnet magazine listed the best releases of the last ten years, Aeroplane soared comfortably above the rest.

Deep catalogs that resist easy summary create their own problems. The book on Jonathan Richman says: proto-punk innovator with the Modern Lovers and faux-naïf kiddie songster thereafter. But that book's wrong. The kid songs were only a brief transitional period to stake out a new sound and songwriting territory that had a huge influence on the nineties indie lo-fi scene. We review Modern Lovers 88 in this book, but could have just as easily highlighted Rock 'N' Roll With The Modern Lovers or Rockin' and Romance or I, Jonathan, each stellar, distinct and scattered across his career. Curtis Mayfield's seventies work similarly suffers from his very consistency. It doesn't provide an easy hook for critics, and so the story stops after Superfly.

Box sets present key opportunities for revaluation: the Byrds, Zombies and Beach Boys all got significant boosts with their career summaries. But it doesn't always work. Even as we go to press, the Talking Heads’ box set seems to be actively souring their reputation simply because the packaging is so pretentious. How else to account for Robert Christgau all but anointing them as the best rock band in the world in 1982, then dismissing the whole of their work with a dyspeptic C? The Jefferson Airplane's box set couldn't pry them loose from their era to be heard as music, and that's an entirely different issue. Music at the core of specific scenes struggles to be heard for its merits, instead of as a lifestyle soundtrack. Goth is one obvious example, where Bauhaus drew from the same peculiar mix of dub, Krautrock, prog, punk and processed guitars as Joy Division and PiL, but can't shake its subcultural associations long enough to be heard by anyone inexpert in liquid eyeliner.

So many factors play into a band's rediscovery: the advocacy of a superstar fan (Kurt Cobain's penchant for Pastels t-shirts and Verlaines covers), an emergent scene with obvious forebears (the White Stripes and the longstanding garage rock underground), fads in sonic recycling (analog synthesizers coming back into vogue causing an outbreak of Moog farts and blurps everywhere). Rap's insatiable beat craving created a permanent market in yesterday's sounds that slopped over into every sample-happy sub-genre.

It's such a crapshoot, you need a tool to help even the odds. The subject's far too large to be covered comprehensively, so we designed this book as more than a record guide. It's a provocation, an outline, a dialogue, a shortcut, a rabbit hole. If you follow just a few of its paths, you'll find whole unexplored continents of music. We've set you on shore; here's a map into the interior.

There will always be that cool kid who lives to drop the names of some unheard band on their friends, maybe set the needle down on a scratchy vinyl disc, and enlighten the world to a long forgotten track that's the epitome of rock, punk, soul or whatever. Lost in the Grooves is the Bible for that kid who's out to save, or at least educate, the world. For the rest of us, though, Lost in the Grooves [Routledge] is just a good, fun read. In the introduction, called, Reconsider, Baby, we're introduced to a group of passionate zinesters that see Lost in the Grooves as “a collection of miniature love letters to albums.” And that's right-on. The voice of zines has always been one that's a little more personal and experiential than those high-fallutin', glossy, corporate publications. And face it, just like a rock and roll Stepford Wife, they look pretty--but without the rough edges, without the intensity and the feeling, they have no soul. Throughout the book, the Scram gang works hard to build amusing and solid cases to justify sometimes hard-to-believe albums, like Buckner and Garcia's 1982 release, Pac-Man Fever [CBS Records]. One of the best of more than 75 writer/critics includes editor, Kim Cooper, who always adds a personal touch--things like, “I was a teenage Velvets freak who overplayed their records until they sounded like dishwater sloshing around the room.” Among the 250-some entries, a lot of these writers, like Brian Doherty, will take you right into the song-it doesn't matter if you've heard it or not--because he gives it to you with full description, lyrics, and where and how to annunciate. It's amusing as all hell to read and really, just great writing. There are even a couple reviews [Pere Ubu and The Tubes] by the famous novelist, Rick Moody, who's been known to dabble in music from time to time. Lost in the Grooves hits on all kinds of music across all genres, and the thing is that even if, say, you don't listen to country, you're going to want to read the review for its entertainment value alone. It's easy to pick up and put down without having to follow any story line, and hey, if you're that kid who needs to be The Enlightened One: well, here you go. (J. Gordon, Nighttimes.com)

Lost-And Found: As countless new CDs continue to push existing music out of the racks and into the cutout bins, used stores and (gasp) even the trash, plenty of worthy albums get unjustly overlooked. In fact, pop-music history is littered with artists both famous and obscure whose work stands defiantly alone—too quirky, too unorthodox or just too demented to appeal to either a mainstream audience or even so-called fans. Lost in the Grooves: Scram’s Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed (Routledge), edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay, sets out to right those wrongs by spotlighting more than 100 musicians whose art—and in some cases, careers—simply don’t slot neatly into any one category. With pithy, smartly written essays by contributors to Scram magazine, a self-acclaimed quarterly “journal of unpopular culture,” Lost in the Grooves is structured alphabetically in an encyclopedic format. That makes finding the Dream Lake Ukulele Band’s self-titled 1976 album just as easy as locating Terence Trent D’Arby’s 1993 Symphony or Damn. The Beach Boys, John Cale, Glen Campbell, Marvin Gaye, the Hollies, Jefferson Airplane, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Prince and Dwight Yoakam all get nods here; and fans of lo-fi garage rock, French avant-garde, roots rock, psycho folk, proto-punk, ’80s soul and bubblegum pop will all find something to discover within these 304 pages. Readers won’t, however, find many recent releases. Rather, Scram’s writers seem particularly partial to vintage children’s music (Flo & Eddie’s The World of Strawberry Shortcake and The Alvin Show by Alvin and the Chipmunks) and novelty records (Rock Fantasy, a concept album from K-Tel that explores animals’ psychological character traits; Chevrolet Sings of Safe Driving and You, a circa-1965 musical set of rules for new drivers performed by an outfit called the First Team; and The Wozard of Iz: An Electronic Odyssey by Mort Garson & Jacques Wilson). Many featured titles are only available on vinyl; indeed, part of this collection’s charm is the way writers call these albums “records,” not CDs, and make references to Side One and Side Two. Still, it would have been helpful for editors Cooper (who also edits Scram) and Smay (co-author of Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears) to indicate which titles eventually did make it to disc—even if they’re currently out of print. Interspersed throughout the book are intriguing sidebars that excerpt original record reviews from the likes of Creem and Flash, and compile such lists as the “Top 10 Non-Goth Albums Goths Listen To” (topped by Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around) and the “6 Greatest Midget Rock & Roll Records” (with Bushwick Bill’s Little Big Man topping the list). The book’s contributors, although keen on putting any given album and its artist into some sort of context, have a tendency to knock well-known critics who panned these records upon their initial release or to go over the top with their effusive praise. That said, this book does what any good music journalism should do: It makes readers want to seek out—or maybe, at least in a few cases, rediscover— some of the records that people who love records truly care about. As contributor Brian Doherty writes in his assessment of Loudon Wainwright III’s 2001 album, Last Man on Earth: “Discovering it … makes you wonder what else everyone is missing.” (Michael Popke, Shepherd Express)

This could be considered both the anthology and encyclopedia of the not-so-popular music scene. Written in clever, whimsical, tongue in cheek style, the book is a wealth of trivia and facts about hundreds of albums and singles which never made the Top Ten or Hit Parade in the last forty-plus years, some by obscure artists and some non-hits by well-known artists. Because of the alphabetical arrangement of the numerous reviews the juxtaposition of the aritists, styles, and genre of the music is outrageously interesting in itself! For anyone who ever shoved nickles into a Juke Box, any music lover of any kind, and any pop-culture enthusiast, this book Rocks! Tom Neely's delightful cover design, illustrations, and caricatures of some of the artists will delight any reader. (Real Travel Adventures)

LOST IN THE GROOVES: SCRAM'S CAPRICIOUS GUIDE TO THE MUSIC YOU MISSED
a new anthology celebrating the greatest records you've never heard

about the contributors

Brooke Alberts is an inveterate folk-head who writes for the L.A. based Folkworks, plays whistle in as many Irish traditional sessions as possible, and loves hot whiskey and a great bowl of New England clam chowder.

Mike Appelstein is the former editor/publisher of Caught in Flux zine. Currently he is an occasional DJ and freelance writer, as well as webmaster of the pretty-much-official Young Marble Giants website. He lives in St. Louis, MO. Visit www.appelstein.com for details and contact info.

Jake Austen edits Roctober, the journal of popular music's dynamic obscurities, and (with wife Jacqueline) produces the children's dance show Chic-A-Go-Go. His work has appeared in The Cartoon Music Book, Playboy, The Spice Girls Comicbook and Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth. His books include A Friendly Game of Poker and a forthcoming idiosyncratic history of rock on television. Please visit www.roctober.com

Peter Bagge is an "alternative" cartoonist, best known for his comic book "Hate," although he has many other credits to his name. Please refer to www.peterbagge.com for further details.

The Bengala is a matrimonial art collective consisting of Benjamin Tischer and Gala Verdugo. They love music almost as much as each other. They also help put out K48 Magazine, which is way rad. Contact: bengala@verizon.net

Tosh Berman is the publisher and editor of Tam Tam Books. He is currently publishing the works of Boris Vian as well as Guy Debord and Serge Gainsbourg. For further information check out www.tamtambooks.com

Jon Bernhardt has been a DJ on WMBR-FM since 1983, and plays theremin for The Lothars and The Pee Wee Fist (CDs available at http://www.wobblymusic.com). He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Derrick Bostrom performed with the Meat Puppets from 1980 to 1986. Though he still maintains the band's archives his own music can be heard under the moniker "Today's Sounds."

Joe Boucher lives in Brooklyn with his two non-specific liberal arts degrees; his attempt to get a third did not go well. He loves and appreciates his family and friends. Employers sense in him a denial of their values. He could stand to drop a few pounds, too.

Carl Cafarelli's three all-time favorite bands are the Beatles, the Ramones and the Flashcubes. So there. Carl writes for Goldmine magazine and co-hosts (with Dana Bonn) This is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, "the best three hours of radio on the whole friggin' planet!," Sunday nights from 9 to midnight Eastern at wxxe.org. Weekly e-mail playlists are available from ccdatsme@aol.com

Kevin Carhart is a freelance writer based in the SF Bay Area. He is obsessed with music, comics and women. Come to http://carhart.com/~kevin for an unruly pile of comics, reviews, dreams, circles, lists, drawings, stories and creations.

Born and raised in East LA, documentary filmmaker Sean Carrillo was a member of the guerilla art group ASCO and co-founded Troy Caf

One of the great things about collecting rock and roll music is that there is always an undiscovered gem lacking from your collection just waiting for you to discover. This year (2005) celebrates the 30th year that I have been such a music junkie. LOST IN THE GROOVES is a book that celebrates albums that fell through the cracks in the "classics" description. Included are albums that: might have sold well initially but are now pretty much ignored ("McCartney II"), works by artists that were not taken seriously at the time (Herman's Hermits, etc), obscure artists of merit, and generally lost gems that demand reevaluation.

I had quite a few of the discs mentioned such as: "Muswell Hillbillies", "No Dice", "Klaatu", "L.A. (Light Album)", "McCartney II", "Subterranean Jungle", "Face Dances", "Pacific Ocean Blue", "Hillbilly Deluxe" - just to name a few. But, I found many more that I now need to hear! I only take issue with one entry: Pink Floyds' "The Final Cut". I bought it when it first came out and 20+ years later still say its crap!

I've already given LOST IN THE GROOVES several readings and, armed with a yellow highlighter, have made note of which albums I need to add to my collection. This is the perfect book for the advanced record collector/music fan! (Ronnie, Ear Candy)

... A month or two after I finished Kill Your Idols, I discovered another recent book, Lost in the Grooves (edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay), almost by accident. If upending the rock canon is a worthy goal, this book has the approach I like: positive, off center, championing the underdog even when he turns out to be Paul McCartney. The book is a series of capsule reviews of uncelebrated favorites, and although the pick with which I agree most, Spirit's Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, isn't all that obscure (it went gold, after all), more than half of the book is stuff I've never heard of at all. There's a bit of the anti-canon thing – Jim O'Rourke writes that he'd rather hear about Sparks's Propaganda than Pet Sounds, but, to balance that out, I can't help being amused by O'Rourke's comment that "Propaganda is the standard to which I hold myself and everything else." (Imaginary dialogue: "Well, Jeff, I guess A Ghost Is Born is shaping up pretty well. But it's no Propaganda.")... (Patrick Buzby, Jambands.com)

Scram magazine, housed in Los Angeles, California, pays homage to all the players too eccentric or obscure or off-beat to find a home in the Madison Avenue media machine. Scram is truly a resource for those musicians just outside the windows of top-forty-land, those songwriters and guitar slingers looking for an outlet for their own particular brand of art. Accordingly, Lost in the Grooves takes up where Scram leaves off -- a compilation of ruminations from 75 critics and music aficionados detailing their favorite slices of the scene: "Jandek is a flat-out weirdo. No one knows who he is, and the guy is either making up his own chords or just doesn’t care how his guitar is tuned. Jadek is like an alien trying to play music after hearing it described to him once. Blind Corpse is his masterpiece...His lyrics reveal a man suffering from a pain so oblique that the listener must simply allow him to revel in his misery. Jadek doesn’t need us for comfort..." (Hayden Childs -- Page 120) These little known stories about the sometimes shadowy figures of the music world are a hoot to discover; more than anything, this book is like picking an old Rolling Stone and reading for the pure enjoyment of the ride. However, Lost is important for another reason: as a diary of the hidden streets of the American Music scene, the pieces come together to give true historical perspective to the influences behind the echoes shedding light on the faces behind the old ghosts. Just as much as all the big-time dollar bands, these unknowns serve to bring shape and continuity to the history of our sound: "Forget the hilarious GTOs. Forget even the mighty Shaggs. Suckdog captures adolescent female adrenaline-fueled angst and aggression like no recording artist I’ve heard before or since. This is not a record for the squeamish..." (Russ Foster -- Page 228) Lost in the Grooves is not a book for fans mad about one band or one particular singer. Instead, this is a book for the serious music fan, for those serious students of the art form curious about who-influenced-who and what sound rose out of what region. Like turning on a radio station and listening to a feverish wounded-voiced DJ tell you the reason behind every record you never heard, there’s 20 new things to be learned on every page here. Recommended to all libraries in the public sector and at the college level as general reference text. Also will appeal to serious music fans of all generations - there’s some new stuff here for all tastes. & thanks to Routledge for perhaps forsaking pure commercial motive and releasing an invaluable teaching tool. (John Aiello, The Electric Review, March/April 2005)

Serious music dweebs may very well adopt Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed (Routledge) as their rare vinyl-collecting bible. The lisping indie obsessive who gets teary-eyed at Belle & Sebastian concerts ... the thrift-store-foraging Napoleon Dynamite who smells of dust and rotting cardboard ... Steve Buscemi's character in Ghost World ... the Kermit the Frog-voiced fellow who knows the whole discography of bands he doesn't even like ... they're all guaranteed to bust a blood vessel over this one. It's a guidebook written by geeks, for geeks, that makes rock 'n' roll seem almost not cool, grouping fans alongside other nerd cliques who fixate on comic books or Star Trek.

That said, the average music enthusiast will also find Grooves an informative and pleasurable read. The book, edited by Scram editor Kim Cooper and contributor David Smay (also the authors of Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears) contains a wealth of far-out performers who never got their due, forgotten albums by big-time artists, and impassioned defenses of maligned records even the Salvation Army can't get rid of. The emphasis here is on vinyl, including many records that never even made it to CD. Writers here include Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek, Angry Samoan Metal Mike Saunders, old-school rock critic Richard Meltzer, producer Jim O'Rourke, filmmaker Sean Carrillo, and a swap-meet-sized gang of freelance critics and music-zine whack-a-doos.

So what do they preach about? Kim Cooper tells the engaging story of the very obscure (and very short) musical career of Beverly Hills dental assistant and tripped-out songwriter Linda Perhacs, whose creative efforts didn't bloom until she fell in with the laid-back Los Angeles hippie crowd. One of her patients was film composer Leonard Rosenman, who in 1970 helped Perhacs record her only album, Parallelograms, which Cooper describes as "delicately layered love poems to the natural world and the charged erotics of youth."

Also forgotten in music history is the New Orleans piano-pummeling eccentric Esquerita, whom rockabilly singer Deke Dickerson hails as "the source for the bizarre/flamboyantly gay/mega-talented/hollerin'/screamin'/rhythm and blues archetype that Little Richard would take to the bank alone." Though signed to Capitol, Esquerita was too much for the general music-buying public of the time, and original copies of his 1958 self-titled debut are extremely difficult to find.

Epidemiologist and former radio DJ Max Hechter writes about blue-collar punks Cock Sparrer, a '70s act that almost hooked up with Malcolm McLaren, a deal that didn't work out reportedly because he failed to buy the band a round of drinks. McLaren, of course, went on to manage the Sex Pistols, while Cock Sparrer's catchy debut was released only in Spain after the band's label, Decca, went bankrupt.

Too obscure? David J. Schwartz focuses on a somewhat forgotten aspect of Johnny Cash's storied career. As a young ruffian, Cash wasn't afraid to piss people off. When country radio ignored the song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" from his 1964 album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, Cash took out a full-page ad in Billboard indicting the music industry for its desire to "wallow in meaninglessness."

Still, the unknowns rule the roost here -- for hardcore record collecting freaks looking for new, obscure obsessions, Lost in the Grooves hails little-known acts such as voodoo shrieker Exuma, Wichita rock quartet the Embarrassment, the Italian wannabe Hawaiian act Nino Rejna and His Hawaiian Guitars, French ex-beatnik popster Michel Polnareff, '60s singing duo Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, and the Yiddish-sung American standards of the Barry Sisters. The book also champions traditional rock-critic favorites such as the Brit-pop Housemartins, the always-adored Mekons, the hardworking Poster Children, New York post-punkers the Feelies, the deathless avant-garde crew Pere Ubu, the beloved duo Sparks, Elephant 6 deities Neutral Milk Hotel, and snappy Seattlite pop-punkers the Fastbacks.

Lost in the Grooves doesn't have much to say about jazz or metal, and the few hip-hop write-ups appear to be penned by folks who hardly qualify as fanatics. Otherwise, most musical genres are well covered, though the writing is occasionally subpar and skippable. But most writers succeed at promoting their favorite obscurities, leaving you to wonder, "Should I really seek out a copy of Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever or the Bee Gees' Mr. Natural?" The answer, of course, is yes. (Adam Bregman, East Bay Express, 1/5/05)