Midnight confessions

I learned a lot about the Grass Roots from yesterday's obit for Rob Grill, the singer. (One thing I learned is the name of the Grass Roots' singer.) I think I thought they were Canadian before.

This was "wow":

The Grass Roots began life as a phantom. In the mid-1960s, two Los Angeles songwriters, Steve Barri and P. F. Sloan, were asked by their label, Dunhill Records, for songs that would capitalize on the growing appetite for folk-rock.

They wrote “Where Were You When I Needed You” and, as the Grass Roots, recorded a demo. When the song had some success on the radio, they cast about for an existing band to become the Grass Roots.

They enlisted a San Francisco group named the Bedouins, who recorded the first Grass Roots album, also titled “Where Were You When I Needed You.”

In 1967, after the Bedouins decamped, Mr. Barri and Mr. Sloan recruited the 13th Floor, a Los Angeles band comprising Creed Bratton, Rick Coonce, Warren Entner and Kenny Fukomoto. (Mr. Bratton, the lead guitarist, later worked as an actor; he is known for playing the eccentric quality assurance director — also named Creed Bratton — on the American sitcom “The Office.”)

Is that common knowledge? That Creed from The Office was in the Grass Roots? (And for the Asian-Americanists: Who was Kenny Fukomoto?)

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Several years ago—let's say 10—I was walking along one of the streets in the East 60s, an ordinary day, and suddenly from the basement (?) of a high school on the block came a live-rehearsal brass-band rendition of "Midnight Confessions." It put a spring in my step!

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Do you remember the Blake Babies' cover of "Temptation Eyes"? Do you remember the Blake Babies? Did their name have to do with William Blake? (How terrible/great/funny!)



(I've never seen this video before.)

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Paper late

Scranton native Mollie has cheerfully blogged about the fact that The Office is set in her hometown...

I just learned, on the straight-faced Dunder Mifflin site, that the company has a branch in Buffalo.