Jim Messina & His Jesters - The Dragsters (1964 LP)

Jim Messina & His Jesters - The Dragsters (1964 LP) Lp (1964) To MP3 192 Kbit/s Included: LP Front Cover & Info Jim Messina & His Jesters Biography by Bruce Eder allmusic.com Early in his career -- right at the outset, in fact -- 18-year-old Jim Messina was a devotee of surf music, enamored of the music of Dick Dale, the Champs et al. The Jesters was among his early professional efforts, a surf band that included, along with Messina, Bill Beckman and Ron House on guitars, Jim Sholstedt on bass, Dave Archuleta on saxophone, and Larry Cundieff on drums. They won a lot of local band competitions in California, where the competition in the field was still fierce in 1965 and 1966, and were good enough to get to record an entire LP for Audio Fidelity. It was re-released on the Thimble label in the mid-1970's, to capitalize on Messina's success as one half of Loggins & Messina. Jim Messina Biography by Kim Summers & Bruce Eder allmusic.com As a singer, writer, guitarist, producer and engineer, Jim Messina made major contributions to music in the 1960's and 1970's, as a key contributor to the Buffalo Springfield at the tail-end of their history, a co-founder of the country-rock band Poco, and as one half of Loggins & Messina. Born in Texas in 1947, Jim Messina's life was divided between his mother's home in Texas and his father's home in California. His father was a semi-professional guitarist and greatly influenced his son's musical career. Messina began playing the guitar at the age of five. As time progressed, he became interested in the guitar parts on Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson records, and later acquired an interest in surf music, a natural outgrowth of living in California. He was heavily influenced by the hits of such outfits as Dick Dale and the Deltones and the Champs. During his late teens, he organized a group of his own called Jim Messina & The Jesters, their sound heavily indebted to that of the Champs, and their were good enough to win a string of local band competitions. They managed to grab the last vestiges of the surf music craze and got an album out entitled The Dragsters in 1966, on the Audio Fidelity label. The release of an album was an impressive achievement for a teenager, but not much came of that record at the time, the surf music boom having pretty much ended by the time of its release. Messina stepped back from performing, and decided to learn more about music from the technological end, working with a local deejay he had met and learning how to produce and engineer sound recordings. He got a job at Sunset Sound, a major Los Angeles studio, and became the second engineer -- among the acts whose records he worked on were the Doors, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, and Lee Michaels. But the project that caused a major detour in his life, back into performing, had to be among the least promising that he'd been assigned -- the final album by the Buffalo Springfield. Since the early 1970's, with the fame achieved by co-founders Stephen Stills and Neil Young, the Springfield have been treated as legends, but in late 1968 they were perceived as one of the more hard-luck bands on the Los Angeles music scene -- from a promising beginning with a lead-off hit, they'd squandered opportunities (or had opportunities squandered for them) across three tumultuous years, owing to personnel difficulties, management problems, and a general inability to run with the chances they were given (such as playing the Monterey Pop Festival when they were decidedly below full-strength, with co-founder Neil Young absent from the lineup; doing one major television appearance with a roadie substituting for an absent bassist; and a first album filled with great songs that mostly lay there flat because their managers insisted on producing it themselves, rather than bring in an experienced hand). With Messina's help, their final album, Last Time Around, was nothing like that -- it sang, all the way through, and it was livelier and fresher than any record by an otherwise disintegrating group had a right to sound. And part of the reason was that Messina ended up playing on the record as well as producing. Tracklist: 01. The Breeze And I 02. Raunchy 03. No Name Dragster 04. Strange Man 05. High Voltage 06. Yang Bu 07. Thing 08. Jester 09. Suspense Run 10. Cossack 11. Masatlan Rally 12. Honky Tonk 13. Chihuahua 14. Tamale Wagon

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 Iron_Horse (2010-05-22)

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