In late 1966, just after they quit touring to devote themselves full time to making music, the Beatles began work on a new album. That album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, would not only go down in history as one of the most important albums in rock, but it also marks the most famous instance of a band adopting a pseudonym or alter ego under which to create music. In the Beatles' case, taking on the Sgt. Pepper moniker provided the band with a concept for their album and allowed them new freedom to experiment, but countless other artists, like Green Day posing as the Foxboro Hot Tubs or Paul McCartney disguising himself as the Fireman, have donned similar masks for a variety of reasons.

By the early-to-mid 1980s, British new wave band XTC had reached a lull in their career. Like the Beatles, they had made the transition from touring to strictly recording, but in their case it was due to singer and resident genius Andy Partridge's intense-and-growing stage fright. And even though they were coming off a string of consistently brilliant albums, the music, too, was beginning to change and the band was searching for a new direction. It was in this environment that the Dukes of Stratosphear were born.

Coming seemingly out of nowhere, in the thick of 1985, the Dukes of Stratosphear's 25 O'Clock EP was quite the anachronism. At a time when synthesizers, Duran Duran and hair metal ruled the day, this mini album was a kaleidoscopic burst of swirling psychedelic goodness. Over the course of six songs covering a mere 30 minutes, the Dukes worked just about every imaginable device of late 60s pop – sound effects, cryptic mumbling, backwards tape loops, sitars, fuzzed-out guitars – into a stew of day-glo, mod and trippy-hippie sunshine. It begins with the ominous sound of a ticking clock as the first song, "25 O'Clock," slowly builds in distorted-guitar intensity, and then positively thrashes as the singer declares, "At 25 O'Clock/that's when you're going to be MINE." One listen and you'll realize it's an impeccable homage to possibly one of the greatest songs of the original psychedelic era, the Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night," and the EP only gets better from there. Other highlights, on an album full of peaks, include "Bike Ride to the Moon" (think an even zanier Syd Barrett teaming up with the band Tomorrow when they were recording "My White Bicycle"), "What in the World??" (a song that absolutely begs comparison to Zager & Evans' "In the Year 2525") and "The Mole from the Ministry" (easily a lost B-side to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever"). Throughout the entire effort, the music is hook-filled, rollicking, unapologetically British and radiates with such glee, it's pretty much impossible to not succumb to its spell.

Of course, when this first came out, XTC denied any involvement. It was only over time that they not only relented, finally admitting they were indeed the Dukes, but even went on to record Psonic Psunspots, a full album of even more rainbow-flavored '60s originals.

The Dukes of Stratosphear were, are, and probably always will be the crème de la crème of '60s psychedelic bands who never actually existed in that decade. It's virtually impossible to separate their music from the music of the decade they formed to pay tribute to, except in the sense that the songs they created are such perfect pastiches of sounds so familiar, so over-the-top and flawless in execution, maybe they only could have been composed long after the passing of the bands whose altars the Dukes so obviously worshipped at. Yes, the Dukes were that good. Nobody since, and I mean nobody, has nailed the Carnaby Street-meets-Flower Power spirit quite like them, while still creating fresh, original music. Call it a tribute, call it a parody, but when Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, and Dave Gregory slipped on the personas of Sir John Johns, the Red Curtain and Lord Cornelius Plum, their paisley shirts, striped trousers and Beatle boots fit so perfectly, it may as well have been the Summer of Love all over again.

While it probably felt like simply a fun side project to indulge themselves in at the time, hindsight shows that the spirit of the Dukes carried on with XTC throughout the remainder of their career. Just after releasing 25 O'Clock, XTC went on to create Skylarking, a serious album of '60s-influenced pastoral pop that some fans consider the pinnacle of their career. And even the albums after that were tinged with psychedelia. One glance at the Yellow Submarine-inspired art on the cover of Oranges and Lemons, or a listen to its swirling opener, the Middle Eastern-flavored "Garden of Earthly Delights," would leave little doubt of that. The Dukes, it seems, came along at just the right time to help XTC transition from its quirky new wave past to a more mature neo-psychedelic future.

If eccentric British pop with all the trappings of the psychedelic era is your cup of tea, I’m happy to announce that all of the Dukes' releases were later compiled onto one album entitled Chips from the Chocolate Fireball. And even better, that particular album, along with several other releases by XTC proper, is available here ... at your library.

The road along the history of pop, yellow-bricked and sparkling as it can be, is also littered with has-beens, the forgotten, and promising young artists who should have made it big, but never did. Chance and choice can play big roles in how things turn out for anyone, but sometimes the very forces that should be working for us turn against us instead. And the relationship between the art world and the business world has often been a contentious one. Such are the elements at work in the story of Emitt Rhodes, whose sad tale is one of the many cautionary signs posted along the pop expressway.

Emitt broke into the music business very early in life. In 1964, at all of 14, he was drumming for a band called the Emerals (yes, without the "d"), who later changed their name to the Palace Guard and had a minor hit in the Los Angeles area with the song "Falling Sugar." By 1966, however, Emitt had taught himself to play guitar and left to form his own band, the Merry-Go-Round. The Merry-Go-Round was even more successful, scoring bigger hits in the songs "Live" and "You're a Very Lovely Woman." This was all very heady stuff for someone barely old enough to drive. After a couple of years at it, though, and feeling weighed down by his band, Emitt decided to break out on his own at the still-relatively-tender age of 19.

The self-titled album that Emitt put out a year later was incredible. To begin with, now a true solo artist in every sense of the word, he wrote and sang all of his own songs, played all the instruments on the album, and recorded everything in a studio he assembled in his parents' garage. For 1970, that was an amazing feat. But Emitt was no mere novelty act; he had the chops to back up his vision. Every review you ever read of Emitt Rhodes will mention Paul McCartney, and this one will be no different. The similarity between the two men's voices is inescapable, and Emitt's sense of musicality, at least on this album, was as dead-on as Sir Paul's. His ability to pound out memorable melodies - the kind you only need to hear once and they'll stick with you the whole day through - was uncanny. Emitt also gravitated to similar sentimental themes and emotions as the man who was so obviously his musical hero. The album reached number 29 on the Billboard charts, not bad for a relative unknown, and, at the time, there were people who even believed Emitt was putting out better material than the freshly-minted ex-Beatle himself.

The problem, though, was that Emitt signed a recording contract, and not just any recording contract. His contract required him to release an album every six months for the next three years. To a starry-eyed 20 year old climbing up the ladder of success, this may have sounded good in theory, but in reality it was disastrous. On his own, with no band mates or song-writing partners to back him up, turning out product at that rate proved an impossible task. It also left almost no time to tour and support albums when he could get them out. Emitt quickly fell behind schedule, and his record company turned on him. Soon, not only was he not being promoted, he was being sued for breach of contract for more money than he'd ever made. Under the feverish pace of his schedule and the stress of his legal situation, the quality of his subsequent albums suffered, and within a couple of years his ship was sunk. By age 24, Emitt, burned out, scarred and broken by his ordeals in the music industry, called it a day as a recording artist.

Fast forward forty years, however, and you'll find that despite the tragic tale, Emitt Rhodes has a cult following. "Lullabye," one of the songs from his self-titled album, was used in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, and just last year Italian director Cosimo Messeri made a documentary about Emitt entitled The One Man Beatles. Bits and pieces of his genius have crept into the daylight over the years, and even here at the library, if you dig, you can get some exposure to the man's music.

For starters, "Falling Sugar" and "Live" can both be heard on the Nuggets compilation, an anthology of 60's garage I've mentioned before and cannot recommend enough. Emitt's solo albums, like the albums of so many worthy unknowns, have suffered spotty availability over the years, but we also have an album called The American Dream. This is a compilation of songs he recorded with the Merry-Go-Round and a few songs he did on his own just before embarking on his fateful solo career. And while I don't feel this album does him justice, it does have some stellar moments. If you're looking for instant gratification, some singles off the album if you will, the very Zombies-like "You're a Very Lovely Woman" will do in a pinch, and "Saturday Night," sounding like a lost-lost cousin of "No Reply" or some other world-weary track on Beatles for Sale, is just amazing. The rest of the songs on this album are, to me, growers, but the range of music on display - calypso, country, straight-up rock, baroque - certainly demonstrate Emitt's versatility and give a good snapshot of a man on the verge of something great ... which he went on to create just after this music was recorded.

The next time you're listening to the radio, remember that for every artist you're hearing, there were countless talented others who, through fate or circumstance, never broke through. If McCartney and the Beatles are your cups of tea, seek out Emitt Rhodes' first, self-titled album and I promise you'll be awed. In the meantime, drop by the library for an introduction to this worthy, long-lost artist who should have been.

There's a famous truism about the Velvet Underground that states only about 1,000 people heard them when they existed, but every one of those people went on to form a band of their own. I've seen variations on the number of people, but the message is the same: the Velvet Underground didn't make much of a splash in their own time, but the seeds they planted lived on, and they ultimately became one of the most influential bands of the rock era.

Falling in line with that nugget of wisdom, almost every piece I've ever read on the Mirrors touts the fact that weirdness sprang up wherever the Velvet Underground touched down, and Mirrors' founder Jamie Klimek claims to have seen Mr. Lou Reed and company every one of the 14 times times they played Cleveland. Still, while it would be hard to refute the connection, the fact remains that the Velvet Underground played dozens of towns across the country, but in very few did a durable scene actually pop up in their wake. Cleveland, however, was an exception.

Cleveland, in the early-to-mid 70's, was a universe unto itself. The biggest names to eventually crawl out of its grip were Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, and, from Akron just to the south, Devo. At that time, though, those bands, or any bands they evolved from, were operating in near-to-total isolation. Cleveland wasn't a cultural center, its ideas weren't being beamed across the country like those in L.A. or New York, and this was long before the Internet or YouTube. Anything these groups accomplished was pretty much for its own sake.

And the scene was plenty weird. Like the industrial landscape around it, the sound of Cleveland's underground was raw and heavy. Some bands, like the Electric Eels, sported an early industrial sound that was as intensely iconoclastic as anything you can imagine, not unlike like a precursor to New York’s No-Wave movement, which came much later. Yet, along with this harshness, Cleveland's music had a strong element of experimentalism and bohemianism, too, displaying what Pere Ubu’s Dave Thomas called "Avant Garage." Several of these bands fed off of each other, sharing songs, members, and the satisfaction that they were creating something new out of the old, even if there wasn’t an audience around to appreciate it. The sounds they created later became part of the punk and new wave lexicon.

But I digress. The Mirrors, who were one of the first out of the starting gate of this scene, actually had a bit of veneer, and some of the music they played was indeed heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground. Just a quick listen to the first song on Hands in My Pockets will tell you that. That primitive beat, frenzied sound, and mad, mad use of feedback are all smudged with Lou Reed's fingerprints, so much so that you almost expect the man to step out from behind a curtain and break into "Sister Ray." But the Mirrors were much more than a VU clone. "Shirley," a song that later turned up as the A-side of the Mirrors' lone 45, starts off in a Velvets' mode, but later breaks into a trippy, cosmic ending that would do Syd Barrett proud. In fact, trippy fringes of the 60's weave in and around this music, as the Mirrors try to take these forms, at the time not that old, to their next logical stage. The garage stomp of the Troggs, psychedelic freakouts a la early Pink Floyd, and the pulse of the Doors are laced throughout, mixing nicely with the newer, more anarchic sounds, and creating something reminiscent yet strange. The Mirrors remind me a lot of Simply Saucer, a band operating out of Ontario at roughly the same time, even though it's doubtful the two bands knew of each other. Maybe it was something in Lake Erie's water.

Later songs on Hands in My Pockets are more revealing of the Styrenes, the band the Mirrors morphed into, than of the Mirrors themselves. Some of the songs, like "Everything Near Me," not only turned up in the Styrene’s repertoire, but the trippy, muscular tones of the Mirrors' early work had all but disappeared, replaced by something more quirky and jazz-influenced. However, it was still just as avant and weird.

Cleveland's proto-punk scene is often forgotten and buried beneath the much larger happenings of CBGB in New York and The Roxy in London, but it was no less essential - spanning 60's garage and psychedelic with 70's new wave - and was without a doubt just as colorful. What set Cleveland apart from the myriad of other places the Velvets planted seeds will probably be a mystery for the ages, but it's certainly a mystery worth investigating.

Check out the Mirrors, Pere Ubu, or another of Cleveland's early flowerings here at the library today.

During the 1980s, streaking across the musical horizons ripped open by punk rock, there was an underground surge of sounds influenced by the sixties. Long-dormant genres of psychedelic, folk and jangle once again filled the air and had new life breathed into them. In some places, like L.A. with its Paisley Underground, well-defined scenes sprang up. Most everywhere else, however, these retro-inspired bands operated in relative isolation. And lurking in the shadows and alleyways of it all was a creature much more subversive and wild than the rest, a new strain of garage rock. Boston had the Lyres, Portland had the Miracle Workers, Pittsburgh had the Cynics ... and all of these bands shared a common ethos. Worshipping at the altars of the early Kinks, the Sonics, the Standells, "Louie, Louie," so-easy-anyone-could-do-it simplicity and screaming volume, these bands were sixties-sounding, but reborn with a punk heart. Three chords, fuzz guitars, Farfisa organs, plenty of snarl and a penchant for mixing long-lost nuggets from the golden age of garage with attitude-laced originals were the order of the day.

Coming in at the tail end of this movement was one of Norfolk's own, the M-80's.

I was first introduced to the M-80's when a friend loaned me one of their 45's, "You've Been Told" backed with "What I'm After." It was the B-side that got me. Placing it on my turntable, the next couple of minutes found me in jaw-dropping awe of this band. The vocals were gritty and passionate, the singer moving seamlessly between a croon and a growl and a shout, and the guitar smoldered. The song itself was a slow, sinister crawl, ripe with tension, and threatened to explode at any moment. That explosion came at the end, in a burst of harmonica, bringing everything to its logical conclusion. The sense of control the band displayed throughout, while still oozing all the righteous abandon you'd expect from garage, was incredible. And the warm crackling of the needle-on-groove only added to its authenticity. This was what rock n' roll, what living, was all about. It was perfect. And like everything in Lenny Kaye's Nuggets pantheon, if the M-80's had never created anything else, "What I'm After" would stand forever as a monument for the ages.

The M-80's all-too-brief existence straddled a certain moment in time, during the late eighties and early nineties, just before the college rock scene and all its rich diversity got blown away by the enormity of grunge. And more than just a one-song wonder, the band went on to become legendary around these parts. While those years in Norfolk, with a thriving local scene and a steady diet of shows played at now-defunct venues like the King's Head and Friar Tuck's, are fondly remembered in general, the intensity of the M-80's live shows in particular, and their commitment to playing no holds-barred rock n' roll, have become the stuff of lore. People still talk about them to this day.

For the rest of us, for those who never had an opportunity to see them live, all we have are the recordings. And the music does live on. The library, in fact, has a self-titled collection of songs by the M-80's. Of course one should know this isn't exactly music for the tea-totaling crowd. The screamin' and shoutin' that lead off the first couple of songs are sure to scare off the faint of heart, and that's probably how the band wanted it. If you can hang in there, though, the rewards are plenty. The choice of covers alone - the Pretty Things' "Rosalyn," Q65's "I Got Nightmares," the Blues Magoos' "Gotta Get Away" - will tell you volumes about what to expect. A killer cover of the Dave Clark Five's "Any Way You Want It," with singer Eddie Pierce sounding eerily like David Johansen, also graces this collection, and will have you believing you've discovered a forgotten gem by the New York Dolls. And even with all the ruckus going on, there are quiet moments, too. The final track, "Spiderwebs (Song for Anna)," is as introspective a tune as you'll ever find, and is downright country-ish a la the Sticky Fingers- and Exile-era Stones.

Sadly, "What I’m After" isn’t on this disc, and while it might be sacrilegious to say, I’m not sure anything else they recorded can quite touch the pinnacle they reached with that song. But that's a personal opinion, and it certainly isn't a swipe at anything else this band achieved. If garage rock is up your alley, you're a rock 'n roll traditionalist who likes your music in a pure, unadulterated state, or you just want a taste of the old Norfolk scene, give these guys a listen. You'll be glad you did.

Somewhere in the library’s collection, amongst a scattered handful of local bands, hidden behind Minor Threat and Joni Mitchell, or, as the band itself once put it, somewhere between Mocksville and Harmony, are the Mockers. And in real life, just as in the library’s collection, the Mockers exist almost entirely under the radar.

To start with, the notion of an honest-to-goodness, ridiculously talented local band performing original songs in the power pop (or pure pop, or guitar pop, or whatever you want to call it) tradition seems too good to be true. Like the elusive dream of ever getting a professional sports team in Hampton Roads, it just ain’t gonna happen, right? Great music doesn’t happen here, or so the myth goes. And when you consider that one of the band’s songwriters lives in New York City, their strongest following is in Spain, and only on the rarest of occasions do they perform in Tidewater (a certain house party in Pungo circa 2001 comes to mind), calling them local might seem a stretch. But Seth Gordon, one of the two primary songwriters and quite possibly the prime mover of the band, lives and operates out of Ghent, so why not?

Although they’re relative unknowns, the Mockers, who took their name from a line in the movie A Hard Day’s Night, are no strangers to, well, at least near success. Their first album made a Billboard Critic’s Choice list back in 1995, they’ve racked up glowing praise in such high-profile places as Popmatters, enjoyed airplay on Little Steven’s Underground Garage, and even had a song featured on Love Monkey, an ill-fated series on CBS that only lasted for a few episodes back in 2006. And recent years have found their ranks joined by Robbie Rist (as guitarist/producer), who played Cousin Oliver on the Brady Bunch. So yes, they’ve flirted with fame and made a few dents in the mass consciousness, but the Mockers are still a long way from being a household name.

That said, the lack of a complete breakthrough Stateside hasn’t stopped them. Their first album took off in Spain, a haven for more traditional forms of rock’n’roll and pure pop, and they continue to cultivate a following in that sun-drenched nation to this day.

As for their sound, music is such a subjective thing, but the Mockers’ neighborhood is an easy one to describe. Probably the touchstone for all power pop bands, the Mockers’ hooks, melodies, use of bright, ringing guitars, and conciseness/economy of sound are all going to remind you of the Beatles. Harmonies are on loan from one Mr. Brian Wilson. Their second album, Living in the Holland Tunnel, was produced by the legendary Mitch Easter (of REM and Let’s Active fame), and that should tell you something, too. Comparisons to Matthew Sweet or the Rembrandts wouldn’t be wrong, and yet the Mockers’ songs are all their own. The music is expertly crafted, gives a nod to its influences without sounding derivative, and Seth has quite the knack (musical pun intended) for wordplay and the sardonic in his lyrics:

The saddest part is that you think you've been anointed/
Because you've got a few friends that seize upon your every word

You walk around and make believe that you're King Arthur/
When it seems to me that you're more like Richard the Third

Their third album, The Lonesome Death of Electric Campfire, shows the band expanding its boundaries with an infusion of Ramones-like, amped-up intensity, but it doesn’t sacrifice the melodic qualities of their previous work. The song "Willoughby Station," for one, with its horns and driving guitar, is one of the crunchiest pieces of baroque pop these ears have ever heard.

And yet, despite the quality, here these albums sit, not exactly begging to be heard (because the Mockers wouldn’t embrace that sort of desperation), but certainly worthy of an audience. If you’re curious, I’d recommend starting with the more intricate, lush-sounding Holland Tunnel, which may say something about me: I’ve always been a sucker for the craftsmanship of pop over the spontaneity of rock. Either way, though, you can’t lose. The Mockers’ first album is long out of print and their next one is still in the works, but the two the library owns are both fantastic and worth well more than a spin.