Some people around here might know Joe Maddalena for his current stint in The Mountain Movers, and then there's his other band, Crooked Hook, but long before any of that Joe was blazing a trail as an international indie pop superstar (believe me, I heard the rumors) with his 90's bedroom pop project, Names For Pebbles. Names For Pebbles at one point also included erstwhile 76% Uncertain drummer Bill Knapp, though I have no idea what Bill has been up to lately, or even where one could go to look up something like that.
Names For Pebbles derived from the supposedly miles and miles of tapes that Joe recorded by himself throughout the 90's, leading up to a handful of releases and compilation tracks as well as a scant few live performances. I managed to see Name For Pebbles once and get my hands on several recordings, as evidenced by the photo (taken at Brass City Records in 1997) and write-up from Brushback, seen below. Wow, what a hilarious, insightful fanzine that must've been. Too bad you missed it, right?
In the meantime, check out "All Day Reverie", which was released in Japan in '96 and is an important piece of CT twee-pop history, to be sure. Gee, this might even earn me my very own writing gig for Tweefort.com or CT Indie, who knows. Can't be any worse than the last guy, Mr. Heirloom Tomatoes or whomever the fuck he was.
Names For Pebbles -
(these files are now listen-only)
"Names For Pebbles Theme"
"Fairfax"
"Every Cloudy Rainbow"
5 comments:
Bill Knapp is in a little band called Singing Bridges now. http://www.myspace.com/singingbridgesband
awesome!Joey Maddelena is one of my favorite CT musicians. truly underated talent and unfortunately not a lot of releases. He will hate me for saying this- but even when I first met him in the late 80's at WXCI when he was a hot shit hip hop DJ!!!!he had genius oozing out of him. But as the shapeshifter he is - he then became one of the best bedroom twee pop musicians- which is why I needed him in Explodee(uber short lived). his psych garage bands rocked too- I can't even keep track of the bands names had - but I loved all of them.
Thanks for this!!!
Some day I'm going to post the Explodee/Nevertheless 7", so you can look "forward" to that...!
...thinking of Joe as a hip-hop DJ, that's funny. There's a picture on the Names For Pebbles myspace of Joe standing at the end of a driveway wearing some kind of sweater and bow tie type outfit, it's hilarious.
The mp3 files on this post are now listen-only (non-downloadable) files. For those of you who missed the boat, I will do my best to respond to any e-mailed requests for the original files.
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