Page 44 - Flathead Beacon // 1.27.16

EVENTS 46 MOVIE REVIEWS 47 SIDE DISH 50 FACES & PLACES 51 PAWS & CLAWS 52 Arts&Entertainment
Preserving Montana’s Lost Sounds
D ave Martens began mining Montana’s rock and roll his- tory after hearing a rumor that the iconic garage rock song “Hippy Hippy Shake” had been writ- ten in 1959 by a Billings teenager named Chan Romero.
The hit 1959 tune was eventually covered by the Beatles, Davy Jones of the Monkees and the Georgia Satellites. Mar- tens, a musician with the Best Westerns living in Havre, wondered what other gems from Montana’s early rock and roll history he could unearth.
The fact that 1960s Montana even had a rock and roll history was enough to pique his interest, and in 2011 he set to work in earnest, employing his skills as a sonic sleuth and music bu in equal parts.
Martens has since dedicated untold hours to tracking down old recordings from musicians who have aged well into their mid-60s and beyond. He has scoured the state for old reel-to-reels, Montana-made 45s, cassettes, compact discs, and promotional posters. Transfer- ring the textured recording media onto one platform has been a learning process, he said, and he’s enlisted the help of doz- ens of Montana musicians along the way.
He has made, he estimates, “a million phone calls,” reaching out to rock and roll renegades who are consistently sur- prised by Martens’ interest in half-cen- tury-old rock and roll recordings, some of them released 25 years before Martens was born.
His mission is simple – to ensure that the music isn’t relegated to the dustbin of history – but with the recordings scattered across the state and region, from Kalispell
ave Martens archives Montana’s earliest rock and roll heritage BY TRISTAN SCOTT
The Vulcans. FROM LEFT: Dave Holmes, Clint Brown, Bruce Weldele, George Wallace and Ron Hauge
to Sidney, Washington to California, Mar- tens had his work cut out for him.
After more than a half-decade of painstaking work, the result is a com- pilation of Montana garage rock, called “Long Time Comin’ – Lost Sounds from the Treasure State.” Martens, a 32-year- old speech pathologist in Havre schools,
recently released the rst double album of early Montana rock and roll, available for purchase online and at a mounting list of record stores across Montana.
According to Martens, “Lost Sounds” is an organization “to preserve, archive, showcase and make accessible the music and associated history of Montana across
the decades.”
He intends to put out additional com-
pilations from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
One of the songs he included on “Lost Sounds” is a live recording of Missoula band The Vulcans playing at the Kalis- pell Teen Center in January 1966, a show brokered by Troy Evans, the actor who
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