Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - 5:38 AM

Mourn not, for Rhino Handmade is alive and well; long live and love Rhino Handmade.

RH continues to offer up specialty items for special tastes -- and, as a fellow purchaser of the Jimmy Webb boxset (my favorite artist next to Captain Beefheart -- I bought the "I'm Going to Do What I Wanna Do" RH set as well), I feel duty-bound to defend the release of this, an aural document of the explosion of human fireworks that was Darby & Co.

Having seen them live myself, perhaps I'm a little biased; it *does* help one to forgive (and even enjoy) their "sloppiness" to know what kind of visual experience accompanied their sonic assault, which had no parallel, then or since. In fact, one could call their sloppiness somewhat calculated, as both Pat (Georg Ruthenberg) Smear and Don (Jimmy Giorsetti) Bolles were both excellent musicians. In fact, Pat would telegraph his fandom of Yes' Steve Howe by quoting a fragment of "Roundabout" in the intro to one of their songs. Don's drumming is also very noteworthy; remarkably propulsive and dextrous.

That leaves us with Darby (Jan Paul Beahm) Crash. Yes, he cannot "sing" -- but the same criticisms have been levelled against both Jimmy Webb and Captain Beefheart by those less enlightened, to be fair. What saves Darby from being considered another snarling brat from a broken home with a head full of insecurities (and enough drugs to cloud them over for a moment) is his lyrics. Though you'll *always* need a lyric sheet to appreciate them (God bless anyone who can actually make out what he's singing *without* one!), he's easily more profound and powerful as a poet than the other L.A.-area provocateur that preceded him ("Mr. Mojo Risin'").

In closing, RH doesn't have to cater to the tastes of any single listener or collector. However, RH understands that for every person who must have The Fugs' complete Reprise-era oeuvre and/or an exhaustive Stooges' "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions" volley, there is also someone who longs for an amusing/irritating Tiny Tim box and Sonny Bono's "Inner Views" CD. All are valid releases in the RH world -- and all shall find merit with someone, somewhere.

Perhaps the only thing that gets in the way of RH achieving a bona fide "Patron of the Arts" status is their failure, to date, to release a Christopher Milk anthology. I eagerly await its release with somewhat bated breath. In the meantime, I'll console myself with that Jagger-Richards truism: 'You can't always get what you want -- but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need".

N'est-ce pas?