Music

The grateful dead

by Chris Wright

Lazy Smoke, White Lightning, Litter, the Rising Storm, the Flat Earth Society. If you've never heard of these bands, you're not alone. Most of them have been defunct for over 30 years. Some of the band members are dead. But this hasn't stopped Erik Lindgren, founder of Arf! Arf! Records, from trying to resurrect them.

Over the past 10 years, Lindgren has reissued more than 50 CDs by obscure '60s bands -- music he calls "garage, punk, weirdo stuff." The project hasn't made Lindgren rich ("Some reissues do really well," he says, "and break even"), but it has made him awfully popular among aging rockers.

Lindgren himself knows a thing or two about musical longevity; his own band, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, has been around for two decades. But at 46, he's a mere pup compared to the rockers whose work he reissues. "Walk through any mall and look at guys in their 50s," he says, "and that's what these guys look like."

Not surprisingly, long-forgotten groups like the Rising Storm are "elated," Lindgren says, to discover there's still an interest in their work. Last year, inspired by an Arf! Arf! reissue, the Rising Storm dusted off their guitars, pulled on their tattered jeans, and started playing again. "It's exciting for these people to relive their youth," Lindgren says. "It's kind of neat to see this magic happen."

Next month, Arf! Arf! will reissue the work of its most illustrious group yet -- at least from Lindgren's perspective. "We're about to release a two-CD set by a band called the Legends," he says. "The exciting thing about this is that I used to go and see the Legends. They were huge in Pennsylvania. Bigger than the Beatles." Did they ever make it out of Pennsylvania? "They almost made it," Lindgren says. "But `almost' is a word that's used with a lot of bands."

As Lindgren sees it, his mission is to give bands like the Legends one more crack at the big time -- one more chance to make it out of Pennsylvania -- though he knows in his heart that this will never happen. "I do this because I'm a fanatical archivist and collector," Lindgren says. "And because no one else is going to do it if I don't."

The Legends' CD is due out in January 2001. The price is $18. For more information, visit www.arfarfrecords.com.