Fact-checker wanted

I'm a big fan of The Underground Garage, Little Steven's weekly rock show. I tape it every Sunday night so I have something to listen to in the car the following week, since too much of what passes for radio around here will suck the intelligence right out of you. It's always a great show, excepting a few new bands he plays alongside classic Stones, Damned and Sonics tunes.

I'm drawn to the music first, but his between-set musings are entertaining as well. He frequently has a good anecdote about a particular song's recording session or history, stuff I'm a sucker for. (So much so that I rented Sympathy for the Devil last weekend and had to put up with Jean-Luc Godard's nonsense when all I really wanted to see was how much—or, it sadly turns out, how little—Brian Jones contributed to the track.)

Few things irk me more than a DJ sounding all high and mighty and tossing off a bunch of "facts" in a look-how-much-I-know manner, and then it turns out he's plain wrong. Like this stiff John Laurenti who hosts a weekly Beatles show on the local classic-rock station—that was another one I used to tape every week, but he and his idiocy drove me away—he's one of these superfans who thinks the Beatles did everything first, totally discounting the other geniuses of the day (the Kinks, the Who, Hendrix, etc.). So one time a few months ago he mouths off about the Stones not recording a long song until the Beatles cut "Hey Jude." Just sloppy. I was annoyed enough to email him, pointing out "Going Home," "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)," "Jig-Saw Puzzle" and others, and telling him (in so many words) that if you're going to be a loudmouth, at least be an accurate loudmouth. So that was pretty much the end of the show for me.

Which brings me to my man Little Steven. During last week's show he played a terribly inferior version of "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me" by Apostolic Intervention (it was written by the Small Faces and performed perfectly for their third album). A few songs later he played Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," one of my all-time favorites. So during the break he's telling us what we just heard, and it pains me to say he made two inexcusable errors—errors that frequently trip people up, but could be avoided with some Google research and common sense.

The first was in explaining that "Steve Marriott of the Faces" gave the song to Apostolic Intervention. For the last time, Marriott was in the Small Faces and was the only member of the Small Faces not to move on to the Faces in 1969. (True that the new group continued—against the band's wishes—to be called the Small Faces for their first album in the US, but in their home country and everywhere else in the world it was the Faces.) This is basic stuff if you're into sixties music.

I'm more flexible regarding his second mistake, since Donovan was enough of a flake to put it out there himself: "Hurdy Gurdy Man" does not feature three-quarters of a future Led Zeppelin (theoretically, all but Robert Plant), despite his Greatest Hits liner notes saying otherwise. He even admits as much in the notes to the later-released Best of Donovan. Think about it: it's a confirmed fact that Allan Holdsworth played guitar (because Hendrix and Page, Donovan's first and second choices, were unavailable) and Clem Clatini played drums on the song; does it really sound like there is more than one drum track on this song, or that there are two guitars beside Donovan's own? John Bonham was a relative unknown at the time anyway, and Page and John Paul Jones likely didn't even meet him until Plant brought him into the Yardbirds/Zeppelin fold later in '68 ("Hurdy Gurdy Man" was recorded in April of that year, Led Zeppelin in October).

So that leaves Jones, who indeed did perform (and nicely) on the track. But I guess "Featuring one-quarter of Led Zeppelin!" isn't quite as strong a selling point. By the way, I love the thought of Donovan sitting down to write his notes and thinking "Hey, what's a good story about 'Hurdy Gurdy Man'? I was so out of it, baby." Then he just starts making shit up, "I was the first singer of Led Zeppelin, why not?" Seriously, these are the best liner notes I've ever read. Regarding "Barabajagal," which he did record with the Jeff Beck Group, he writes "When the record escapes, no one knows who the hell it is… only one thing happened, fusion of a rare and curious kind. Angels and hipsters collide in love." Woot!

Little Steven, you are better than this. I can't blame Donovan too much because it's still painful to watch the "To Sing for You"/"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" sequence in Dont Look Back—let the man live his dreams, already. But realize that you might want to double-check his "facts."