Pellmell.org is the official/unofficial website of the U.S. band Pell Mell that existed from 1981 to 1998 or so. Most of the members of Pell Mell have continued on to other projects, so the goal of this site is to keep track of any news related to Pell Mell and its associated members’ projects.
Back in February of 2001 I started pellmell.org as a way to capture and collect the information that existed on the Internet (and some that didn’t) about the great instrumental rock band. Over the years there has been some activity that was worth noting– soundtracks that featured a Pell Mell song and side-projects of the band.
I have had input and support of most of the members of the band, whose lineup changed a couple of times over its existence– mostly from Bob Beerman, the drummer of Pell Mell who has a new project called Grimspex with Gary Waleik from Big Dipper.
The website is now using WordPress as its content manager and the news surrounding the band will be threaded like a blog and I’ll take the discography and work on a WordPress plugin for that. I think that ultimately this will make the content easier to work with, and will afford me the ability to extend creator accounts for the guys so they can create content as well (hint, hint).
Nothing Lies Still Long.
Mike
my band insect Surfers is planning to record ‘Par Avion’ for our upcoming cd… do you know how i can contact Bill Owens and/or Bob Beerman?
My first experience with P.M., sort of: Around 1982 I was at UC Davis, and saw Beerman at a soundcheck for a show I wasn’t able to attend. He played a very simple rhythm, Bump, Pop, Bump, Pop, Bump, Pop, Bump, …. I was transfixed. Something about what he was doing felt like it reached deep into the earth. (I was not high.) Later, ’83-85, I saw them once or twice at small clubs in San Francisco. Wow. Such great, quirky funky rock. Seems like I still remember a high-hat sizzle-choke rhythm that started one of the songs. (I’m not a drummer, but I have never heard anyone play like Beerman back then, or like the band as a whole.)
I didn’t think Pell Mell had any recordings, and I heard from a friend that they’d broken up. Around 2007, I went looking for recordings. All I found was Interstate, which was nice, but was from some band that was supposedly based in Portland, not San Francisco. That music was nice, but not what I remembered or what I wanted. A weird coincidence–two guitar-based instrumental bands a few years apart from different cities–but as hard as I looked, I found no evidence that the Interstate band was the one I was searching for.
It was only this week that I found the 2018 Perfect Sound Forever interview (http://www.furious.com/perfect/pellmell.html), and realized that there was only one (American) Pell Mell, and that there are other recordings, with different stylistic variations, which I can get on discogs. Then found this site. Very happy about this.