Jack Logan & Bob Kimbell - Little Private Angel

Artist: Jack Logan & Bob Kimbell Title: Little Private Angel Catalog#: Parasol-CD-040 Price: $7.50	Tracks on this CD:
	Four Men In a Car
	Frozen Rope
	Nerves Of Steel
	Little Private Angel
	Fire On the Boat
	Just One Kiss
	Look To the Future
	Rained Like Hell
	220 Volts
	All About Money
	Not the Only One
	Marchin' With the Saints
	Dialing Your Number
	Frozen In the Snow

Old buddies Jack Logan and Bob Kimbell have finally united for a full-on full-length collaboration. Jack received widespread critical accolades for his two Medium Cool/Restless CDs, "Bulk" and "Mood Elevator". You may recognize the following quotes: "…the most substantial rock ‘n’ roll of this decade…" from Billboard’s Timothy White, "…boozy, sloppy, and beautiful…" from Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, and "Logan’s rockabilly-blues/lounge-pop hybrid bustles with melodic invention...from letter-perfect 60s style country to indelicate distorted rock…" written in Request.

Bob has released three full-length CDs as leader of the Parasol band Weird Summer, hailed by internationally diverse publications Magnet, Bucketfull of Brains, Puncture, and Pop Culture Press. Magnet said, "What a voice…that is the first and lasting impression left by Bob Kimbell…" Puncture compared Bob’s songs to Alex Chilton’s, and Pop Culture Press, called Weird Summer’s output "…nearly perfect melodic, romantic, melancholy pop".

Their voices beautifully blend on these fourteen tracks. Highlights include "Frozen Rope", a haunting track about hitting a line drive in baseball (how’s that for everyday charm?), and "Rained Like Hell", a song that originally appeared on Weird Summer’s third CD, In Search Of.

Jack…
…on his collaboration with Bob.

I got to know Bob Kimbell sometime in the early eighties in Champaign, Illinois. While I can't remember our first meeting, I do remember the first time I saw him. It was at some punk-rock-pop new-wave show someone was putting on in some armory-like building at the University of Illinois. Bob and a woman walked in wearing huge, army-green trench coats. Anyway, we were both playing in new-wave-punk-rock-pop groups at that time and since the audience for this genre was composed almost entirely of other bands of this genre, our paths inevitably crossed.

I could be wrong, but I believe our first attempt to write songs produced the song "Little Private Angel". We continued to write together sporadically over the next ten or fifteen years.

This January, we finally decided to get together and make a record. We assembled some old recordings, but recorded the majority of it in the Georgia homes of Kelly Keneipp and myself. The result was a record where we had a lot of fun and did whatever the hell we wanted. I can't wait to do it again.

MTV News Online
June 16, 1998
Jack Logan & Bob Kimbell's Primitive Cool

After parting ways with his label following two critically-acclaimed releases, Jack Logan has returned to the simpler pleasures with a stripped-down new album, "Little Private Angel," with an old friend and accomplice, Bob Kimbell.

"Angel," which arrives in stores on June 30, charts Logan and Kimbell's friendship back to its inception in the early '80s, when the two were struggling musicians of the Urbana, Illinois, music scene -- Logan with his first band, the Anglers, Kimbell with his long-time group, Weird Summer.

"I can't remember exactly when we met," Logan said, "but once we got together, we very much had a mutual appreciation thing going on, even though our approaches were different." "I had this little four-track," Kimbell added, "and we got together and did some writing at that time, and we have just continued to do that over the course of the last 15 years."

Even though the two eventually headed in separate directions, Logan and Kimbell managed to stay in contact while working in their own groups, and continued to meet every so often to collaborate on material. Kimbell even co-wrote a song, "Tex," on Logan's double-album debut, 1994's "Bulk." "It seems like we always get together once a year somehow," Logan said, "and when we do, we always try to put something down on tape. Over the years we've got quite a little catalog of songs built up."

After Logan split with Restless Records, Kimbell suggested that the two revisit some of their past songs, and the duo subsequently spent a week earlier this year cutting most of the basic tracks for "Angel" in Logan's kitchen in Winder, Georgia. Aside from creating the cover for "Angels," Logan, who holds an art degree from Illinois State, also recently illustrated the "Not Dogs ... Too Simple (A Tale of Two Kitties)" album, which features the Reverend Horton Heat, Drivin n' Cryin's Kevin Kinney, the B-52's Cindy Wilson and Moe Tucker narrating a children's tale for adults.

Kimbell and Logan will kick off a tour in support of "Little Private Angel" in July.

Creative Loafing-Atlanta
July 1998
When It All Comes Down

Jack Logan -- closer to home
BY DAVID PEISNER

It's a hot Sunday afternoon in Winder and the main street is mostly deserted. The bank clock on the corner alternately displays the time, 3:58 p.m., and the temperature, a scorching 98 degrees. In front of the Winder-Barrow YMCA, a couple tries to figure out how to fit an empty baby's stroller into the already-packed trunk of their car. Across the street from them, a teenager scrapes something off the sidewalk. By most accounts, nothing much is happening in this small Georgia town on this unseasonably hot June day. Jack Logan, though, could probably write a few dozen songs about it.

Since even before the release of his first album back in 1994, a 42-song behemoth of a debut, appropriately titled Bulk, he's been writing about exactly these sorts of everyday things with a keen eye for the bizarre underbelly of the everyday. In snapshots of seemingly normal life, Logan manages to hint at the neuroses, frustrations and unfulfilled dreams that lie just beneath the surface. He zooms in on the cracks in the hard exterior of the everyday and discovers the meat of life hiding there.

Just off the main drag is Logan's unassuming white house. Inside, trying to stay out of the blistering heat, slurping on ice-pops and working out songs for their upcoming tour are Logan and Bob Kimbell, an old friend with whom Logan collaborated on their low-key new album, Little Private Angel. Just sittin' around passing away a lazy Sunday, they couldn't look more normal -- Logan in a faded Dashboard Saviors T-shirt and jean shorts, Kimbell in a yellow T-shirt and corduroy shorts.

But the record they've made together is anything but normal. It might not sound too startling at first to hear Logan croon, "When I get to the checkout section, with beans and a loaf of bread/ reach down in my pockets/ reach back up and scratch my head," on Little Private Angel's folksy title track, but swish those lines around your brain a bit, dwell on them for a few minutes and see what sort of truths start nosing their way to the surface.

"I just like telling little stories," Logan says. "I slow everything down. Like "Dialing Your Number" (from Little Private Angel). Nothing happens. A guy walks down to the phone and pushes the buttons and that's the end of the story. I don't know why I do that. Maybe if I make the songs last longer something will happen eventually. I guess it comes from '60s and '70s films that really annoyed you, where you go through all this shit and then you come to the end and it just stops arbitrarily. I still like to do that because it makes it more effective as a metaphor. "Dialing Your Number," it's not just about some guy in a phone booth. "Once you get over your adolescence you realize that life doesn't have this nice resolution," he continues. "You work for a certain thing, you get it, you lose it horribly, and it just keeps going on and on."

"The credits never roll," Kimbell adds, laughing. "You just have to stop somewhere," Logan says, finishing off his ice pop, "and move on." They could easily be talking about Logan's recent experience with Restless Records, the label that put out his last two albums and put the third in the can. Or about his struggles to balance his infamous day-job in Doraville with his musical career.

Little Private Angel comes at a crossroads in Logan's life. Though his first two releases were met with widespread enthusiasm, Logan still kept his job at Doraville Electric Motor Service, repairing swimming pool motors. For for one reason or another, it had become part of Logan's well-defined persona. Every interview and review seemed to mention it. ("Every other musician in the world has a job -- some stupid job," Logan laughs "For some reason, I just fit that 'everyman' thing.") But Logan's burgeoning music career demanded a steady time commitment, and about six months ago the time came to make a choice. The shop moved from its original location to a Buckhead locale, and Logan decided he didn't want to move with it. "I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. I'd rather flounder around trying this. I wanted to try it for real and not treat it as a hobby."

The timing was not great. His relations with Restless were about to take a turn due South. Despite the consistent critical acclaim that Logan's first two releases got -- articles in Rolling Stone and the New York Times which mentioned him in the same breath as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor -- it became clear, as he was hard at work on the follow-up to 1996's Mood Elevator, that Logan was sitting on Restless' back burner.

"You just kind of got the vibe after a while that they just didn't want to put it out. They were busy with other things and trying to stall me. I could've waited it out and tried to modify the record to please them, but at that point I didn't know what they wanted and I wasn't really that interested.

"They got bought out by Regency Pictures and it just became a place that would never have put out Bulk or even, probably Mood Elevator," Logan says. "It was obvious [there was] a whole different direction they wanted to go. Their whole deal is they're trying to become the next Interscope or whatever. I think the head of Restless ...wanted to be a player. More power to him but Lord knows, I don't think we're gonna make it with the 14-year-olds of America."

Logan would finish the album for Restless but when he realized they didn't want to put it out, he asked for and got his walking papers. Unfortunately, the label still owns the rights to the finished album, though Logan can buy the album from them if he finds someone interested in putting it out (he's talked to one label about it already).

Perhaps it was inevitable -- a middle-aged mechanic can only expect to see eye-to-eye with the music industry machine for so long. Though Logan says, "It made me learn things I didn't want to learn," his experience is an old story for many musicians, and has a familiar twist. Fate steps in and seems to move you backwards. In the process, things often change for the better.

Logan and Kimbell had met back in the early '80s, while both were living in Champagne, IL, chasing dreams of rock stardom. After meeting at a benefit concert, the two traded tapes and soon found themselves writing and recording together -- just stuff they were knocking off, with little ambition to do anything other than pass the time. In 1988, Kimbell showed up in Winder, where Logan had moved to work in the much-ballyhooed motor shop. Though Kimbell stayed only a year, he estimates that they wrote well over 100 songs. And they stayed in touch.

After the dissolution of Logan's contract with Restless, Kimbell found his way back down to Georgia. There, in Logan's kitchen, they began laying down the songs that would become Little Private Angel.

Despite the music industry bullshit, all the Rolling Stone reviews, all the days working at the motor shop, all the days looking out onto the quiet streets of Winder -- Logan's strange little songs were still there waiting, those weird, quirky nuggets that seem to say so much without saying much at all. What's most striking about the record (especially to those familiar with the loose Replacements/Stones vibe of Logan's debut, Bulk, and its follow-up, Mood Elevator), are its simple pop arrangements. The raucous fury of classic Logan material like "Cartoons," "Unscathed," and "When It All Comes Down," is gone, replaced by sweet melodies, clean guitar lines and smooth harmonies.

Logan credits Kimbell with softening him up a bit.

"Bob's influence on it is really apparent. His influences are slightly different than mine..."

"I'm more of a pop-oriented guy," Kimbell offers. "In a nutshell, Logan's Stones and I'm Beatles. That's where we come from. I bring the sweet, dreamy, wide-eyed pop stuff. I'm a sucker -- I believe all that stuff ..."

Little Private Angel, adds Kimball, is something he and Logan had always thought about doing. "We've always written together and recorded stuff on boombox, four-track and eight-track. All of a sudden the time seemed right."

And when it was finished, someone was still interested. Little Private Angel comes out on Parasol, a small, Illinois-based independent label whose highest profile releases to date include the first solo album from Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, and the CD single of "Your Woman" by the English band White Town, (which was eventually picked up by EMI and briefly turned into a hit). It's a label with considerably less international clout than Restless. Regardless, Logan and Kimbell are optimistic about the album's prospects.

"Initially our goal was just to record a good record," Kimbell says. "At this point we're hoping that some of the people who liked Jack's stuff before and gave it a lot of notice will fall in line. And since we're putting it out on Parasol, a smaller label, and we don't have the huge debts you incur on a bigger label, we have a chance to make a little money at it."

They finish off their ice-pops. The couple and the teenager on the main street are long gone. It's still 98 degrees in Winder, Ga., and Logan's probably got another song in his head.

Boston Phoenix
July 16-23

With his love of beer, his knack for crafting impeccable pop hooks, and his working-class cred, Jack Logan could be GBV frontman Robert Pollard's Southern doppelgänger. Like Pollard, Logan's written more songs than he'll ever possibly record (well over 1000), and most of those that have seen the light of day are short, witty, and unforgettably catchy. But his tunes are grounded in a melancholy realism inspired by his day job as a swimming-pool-motor repairman.

For the past 15 years, Logan has been making music with singer/songwriter Bob Kimbell; it's taken them until now to release their first collaborative CD, Little Private Angel. Kimbell's high, nasal wail sounds like a cross between Neil Young and Alex Chilton; Logan's voice is rawer and huskier, like Paul Westerberg with a drawl. When they sing together they create fluttering harmonies as their voices search for the right notes. Their songs about fixing cars, baseball, rain, and infidelity evoke classic tunesmiths like Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles. But Logan and Kimbell are at their best when they're sincerely goofy -- when "Little Private Angel" morphs into "Leader of the Pack," or when they turn the Ali-Foreman fight into a poignant metaphor for friendship in "Nerves of Steel."

-- Joshua Westlund

hicago Reader
July 17-23

Jack Logan had recorded some 600 songs with his drinking buddies in a suburban Atlanta garage before R.EastM.'s Peter Buck recommended him to the Minneapolis label Medium Cool, which released nearly 80 of his tunes on a pair of albums in 1994 and 1996. Logan and his songwriting partner Kelly Keneipp added pop hooks, country twang, and bluesy immediacy to rough-hewn rock of surprising emotional depth, but by the second album, Mood Elevator (the slower, less satisfying of the two), what kept me interested was mostly Logan's unself-conscious honesty. On his new album, Little Private Angel (Parasol), he gets a musical shot in the arm from Champaign jangle-pop icon Bob Kimbell, longtime leader of Weird Summer. Kimbell wrote all the tunes here, and while his own material is so light it sometimes threatens to dissolve like cotton candy, here it's given proper heft by Logan's mournful lyrics and somber croon. Likewise Logan on his own can get awfully lugubrious, but Kimbell's breathy, Alex Chilton-like backing vocals let a little light in. Logan usually plays with Keneipp in their band Liquor Cabinet, but for this show he'll be backed only by Kimbell on guitar and bass and Kevin Lane on guitar. Saturday, 10:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 North Southport; 773-525-2508.

--PETER MARGASAK

WASHINGTON POST
Friday, July 24, 1998; Page N13

JACK LOGAN AND BOB KIMBELL "Little Private Angel" Parasol
VARIOUS ARTISTS "Not Dogs . . . Too Simple (A Tale of Two Kitties)" Casino Music
By Geoffrey Himes

When Jack Logan gets off work at Doraville Electric Motor Service in Doraville, Ga., the 39-year-old repairman doesn't go bowling or watch television; instead he gets together with his friends to write and record rock 'n' roll songs. And when old buddies visit from out of town, they revisit old times at these jam/demo sessions. Logan's been doing this for 20 years, and he has two solo albums and more than a thousand songs to show for it. Even if the songs weren't that good, it would be an inspiring tale of rock as a folk art, but the songs are good -- maybe not as good as Steve Earle or Paul Westerberg but better than 90 percent of what you hear on MTV on any given day.

Now Logan has joined his old pal Bob Kimbell for the duo album, "Little Private Angel." They met in the early '80s when Logan was in the Anglers and Kimbell in Weird Summer, both new-wave bands in Champaign, Ill. They've gotten together for songwriting sessions at least once a year ever since, and "Little Private Angel" collects 14 of their best tunes onto a single disc. The tracks have the casual, lo-fi sound of home-made demos, and the arrangements range from alt-country to garage-punk. But Kimbell's melodies are consistently catchy and Logan's lyrics conjure up tantalizing pictures of sandlot baseball games, burning boats and electric-motor repair without explaining too much. And the two harmonize as if they were a reunion of the Jayhawks' Mark Olson and Gary Louris.

Another side of Logan is revealed in "Not Dogs . . . Too Simple (A Tale of Two Kitties)," a children's audio book with a 32-page, whimsically illustrated storybook by Logan. Narrated by Ali Cat (former Blockhead Ian Dury), it's the story of sheltered indoor cat Luis (Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker) and streetwise outdoor cat Shenanigans (Kevn Kinney), who pull a Prince/Pauper routine and find the meow mix is not always crunchier on the other side. The songs, with words by Mark Harper, are performed with a mostly Atlantan alt-rock cast that includes Cindy Wilson, Murray Attaway and Jim Heath (Rev. Horton Heat). Sly and funny, it's aimed at the 10-year-old in all of us, though it may actually help to be 10.