Neita And The Drifters

 

Introducing Neita and The Drifters

Joe Sixpack, San Francisco Bay Area DJ, has nicely, as usual,  reviewed this album here :

An archetypal custom-label indie album by an informal country'n'oldies band out of Lawrence, Kansas, featuring a middle-aged gal named Neita Bahnmaier on piano, organ and vocals, along with several local lads, several of whom also sing lead on a track or two: Harvey Boyd on drums, David Cloud (lead guitar), Lynn McKenzie (bass), Leo McMullen (harmonica), Mickey Penny (lead guitar) and Bill Smith (rhythm guitar).

 Born [Neita M. Atchinson] in 1929, Mrs. Bahnmaier and her husband Joe lived on the outskirts of town, in rural Lecompton, although it isn't hard to imagine that the younger bandmembers were in some local rock bands, and possibly were enrolled at Kansas University... (I'm speculating: for the life of me, I couldn't find biographical info about most of these folks, other than Mr. McKenzie, who lived in Oskaloosa and passed away in 2003...) Anyway, this is an amateurish album that's easy to be charmed by, with some easy-to-play oldies such as "All Shook Up," "Johnny B. Goode," "Kansas City" (of course!) and also a decent amount of country stuff, tunes like "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Paper Roses" and "Snow Bird" (with Mrs. Bahnmaier singing lead.) My personal favorite is their unlikely cover of Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour," which could be dismissed as too whitebread and too rock'n'roll, but which I hear as an unexpectedly groovy, guitar-heavy power-pop confection... And in case anyone's keeping track, they also cover "Proud Mary," in this version, a duet between Neita and picker Mickey Penny. I'm not sure if these folks did much in the way of live public performances -- I did find some show listings a decade later, circa 1986-86 -- but this is a pretty cute little album.

Johnny B. Good