Hi Jen! You had me shaking, no kidding. Just the fact that you're *open to the possibility* of writing a book made me swoon. I firmly believe that one day, even if it's not in our lifetimes, Happy will be discovered, not by the general public probably, but by music historians who will hail her as one of those artists who was deeply important, though not influential simply because they weren't known. Imagine if Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush had made the albums they made, but never got the recognition they did, and only had the bare bones of a cult fandom. Their music would still be important, though they wouldn't have gone on to influence the generation of artists that they did (I have more thoughts on this but that's for later). Some music historians will be *APPALLED* at how she was ignored in her time. That's what I think about Happy. A book (your book perhaps, if this actually happens) will be the first place these music historians will go to get information. Let me tell you something else I think will happen in the future. There will be Happy Rhodes scholors, at least a few, and there will be psychology classes based on her lyrics, at least a few. At least one. Her lyrics are so psychologically deep and rich that it has to happen. It may be 50 years from now, but it will happen. First things first though...we do have some time to work with for the article, let alone a possible book. I'll give you a bunch of resources and others that I can provide in the future. MUSIC: A large chunk of her first 10 albums can be found and downloaded at http://wretchawry.com/happy/samples I actually have her full catalog online but the songs not listed on that page are just not linked. At a point in the future, when you're ready, I can give you the URLs to the songs not linked so you can hear albums as a whole. You could certainly write an article with an incomplete knowledge of her catalog, but certainly not a book. The fan side of me says "Oh you must hear EVERYTHING!" though, even for an article, because every song counts. She's never made filler. Even her most minor songs have things to say. The ones up at wretchawry just happened to be my favorites at the time I put them up, not necessarily because I thought they were her very best or most important. I don't really think about such things when it comes to music. I like what I like. Of course, with Happy, out of 10 albums I only dislike a couple of songs, and even then I can find things to like within the song. The 8 Find Me tracks can be found at: http://rhodesongs.com/happy/findmemp3s/ That URL is not public. Happy is selling the mp3s and when I know that people have paid I send them there to download. Happy released a sampler CD to her fans in January 2005 to raise money. The CDs sold out fairly quickly, and I talked her into selling mp3s as downloads. There will definitely be 11 tracks on the released album, but I don't have and haven't heard the last 3 tracks. Happy did send me the lyrics to those tracks though. More in the next section. A side note: I don't, would never, work for Happy, but I offered to help distribute the hard-copy CDs. Happy sent me boxes of CDs. People sent Happy the money, she told me when she received the money, and I packaged up the CDs and sent them out. It was only natural that I continued to help her with the mp3s. Just in case you're wondering why I'm the one who send people the URL. LYRICS: Just to have resources in the same place, here's the URL of the lyrics to her regular albums and the 8 Find Me Sampler tracks are at: http://ecto.org/lyrics The albums there are sorted chronologically by album, and there's also an alphabetical list. Here are the lyrics to the final 3 tracks. These URLs are not public, I'm the only one who knows about them. I html'ized them so they could easily be made available at the time of the album's release. Of course, at the time I did this I thought the release was only a few months away. http://happyrhodes.org/findmelyrics/iamyourqueen.html http://happyrhodes.org/findmelyrics/treehouse.html http://happyrhodes.org/findmelyrics/littlebrother.html There's one extra song ("Shutdown") that didn't fit on the album. If finances allow (ha!) it might be on a CD single or something. I don't have the lyrics to that. Ok, now YOU know about the URLs too. Feel special? :) AUDIO INTERVIEWS: Right now there's only one online. It can be found on this page: http://wretchawry.com/happy/rarities/index.html Search for Helen Leicht. I gave you the page URL instead of a direct link because you might be interested in the page anyway. It's my Rarities page. I have several other audio interviews from the '90's and a few more rarities that are nearly ready to be put up on the page, but I'll let you know when they're there. I had them on cassette and I recently got the capability to dub from cassette to computer to make mp3s. I have all but 3 that I know about. One I have in my possesion but it needs severe editing; one I can probably get access to if I put the word out on ecto; the 3rd, I don't know of anybody who has a copy. There might be more that I'm not aware of or have forgotten about. PRINT INTERVIEWS: They're scarce. There are very few articles, interviews and reviews out there. I've been meaning to gather them up into one place. I know, uber-fan here and I haven't done that yet? I'm a lame uber-fan. It's on my list now. Here's the earliest one I can think of at the moment, from February 1992. It was a group intereview conducted by her mailing list, meaning that I took questions, snail mailed them to Happy, she wrote down the answers and sent them back. I transcribed them and posted it. An edited version appeared in a Kate Bush fanzine called Homeground. http://www.smoe.org/lists/ecto/1991-1994/February_92/Digest.161 There are a lot of things that are incomplete and/or need clarificaton (for instance, she left out some VERY important influences when she answered that question...she must have gotten distracted...how could she have forgotten Wendy Carlos?!). For a short while there was a fanzine run by a woman named Sharon Nichols. None of the fanzines are online (which I need to remedy) but there are interviews and lots of good tidbits in them. Happy/Aural Gratification also had her/their own newsletter for a while, and none of those are online either. I need to get my husband to hook up my scanner. These things were always in the "To Be Done" part of my brain. Here is Sharon's long-ago abandoned web site, with some articles (most of the ones that exist you'll find here) and other information: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/3450/terra.html I don't think any of those addresses for back issues work. I just need to get those issues scanned and online. I do have Sharon's current email address though, for any questions you might have for her in the future. There's a lot of info you will need to understand the progress here. 1) Happy's childhood - lots of hints and clues here and there, once you delve, but Happy's been very close about what really happened. All I know is that it was pretty bad. Here's two clues... The lyrics to "If I Ever See The Girl Again" http://www.ecto.org/lyrics/colossus/seethegirl.html The lyrics to "The Chariot" http://www.ecto.org/lyrics/mwabt/chariot.html - a print transcription of her saying what the song is about: http://www.smoe.org/lists/ecto/v11.n078 (search for "The Chariot story") - the actual song is on Happy's page, but here's an mp3 of a not-so-good performance, but at the end she tells the story transcribed above: http://www.wretchawry.com/happy/rarities/HappyRhodesLive_TinAngel1-29-05_1stShow_13_TheChariot.mp3 There's more, much more, for later delving. 2) Happy's start in music - there's a long story that's only hinted at in the bio on her page. I can help you with some and Happy can fill in the rest. It's a fascinating story. To me, anyway. 3) How I found Happy - circumstances are such that I am part of the story, but I have no ego, and don't want to interject myself into this more than absolutely necessary. However, certain things might not have happened had I not discovered Happy (such as the creation of ecto, which was born from a Kate Bush mailing list after I got a lot of people interested in Happy and Happy talk caused a flame war. I didn't create ecto, but it wouldn't have been created if I hadn't belonged to the Kate mailing list/newsgroup i.e. Love-Hounds/rec.music.gaffa). My story is in a blog on my personal page: http://www.myspace.com/equipoise 4) Happy's success in Philadelphia - Happy's song "Feed The Fire" from Warpaint became the most-requested song on WXPN. From that came a lot of things that you'll be running into, such as interviews, and her small but ardent following in Philly (her shows there always sell out). 5) Various items about her personal life - When you hear the name "Kevin Bartlett" perk up, because we might never have heard any Happy music without him. They were personal partners for 13 years when they broke up in 1998, I think. There's a lot of fuzziness concerning her breakup. That whole background is not something you'd need for an article, but would be important for a book. Happy is now married to a man named Bob Muller, who was her drummer for some shows, and who owned the studio where she recorded Find Me (he doesn't own it anymore). This may or may not be part of the article depending on if Happy allows it, but her day job is building studio equipment for a company Bob owned (my memory is hazy, I don't think he owns that company anymore either...I'm not sure what he does now). I gave this link in the other letter, but to have most of the best resources in the same place, here's the address of Happy's journals again: http://www.auntiesocialmusic.com/manyworlds/archive/index.htm (Correction on something I said, Happy's last journal entry was April 2005. The last archive entry was April 2004). 6) Her relationship with her fans - this is one very good indication of how she valued her fans in the past: Go to: http://wretchawry.com/happy/rarities/index.html and search for "The Left-Hand Demos" and start reading. She's been fairly distant to her fans in general recently (not updating her journal since 1995 for instance) but she's kept in touch with me and she does usually email back fans who write her. Why she's stepped back, both professionally and personally with her fans is one aspect fans, at least, are going to be extremely curious about. 7) Live work - I keep a web page about her shows at http://rhodeshows.com and have many many many videotapes of concerts. For non-fans, she can be uneven in concert, simply because she's a studio artist and the live sound doesn't really do justice to a lot of her music, but for fans, just about every moment in her presence is sublime. Just hearing That Voice come out of a real live human being standing in front of you is bedazzling. Plus she can be very very funny if she feels comfortable, which she usually does in Philly, where she's played more often than anywhere else. Of course, there are several videos on YouTube (live stuff, she's never made an actual video, and an interview) and we plan to put up more. Seeing more than what's already there and the ones we will be putting up isn't really necessary for an article. If a book happened you'd probably want dubs of whole concerts, though some of it is cringe-worthy. Another bridge to cross if we come to it. There's more but my brain is a blank. Tell me if you think I'm going overboard. Feel free to ask any questions at any time about any thing. If you lose interest and/or decide not to persue this for any reason, please tell me. I'll be disappointed but won't hold it against you or think any less of you, and knowing is easier than having hope for something that's not going to happen, be it the article or a possible book. I don't know a whole lot about Happy's childhood (only what's been made public) but I don't think she's ever had an interest in horses. It's not something that's ever come out, unless she mentioned something in passing and I'm not remembering it. She's an animal lover so I would imagine she loves the thought of horses, but whether she's ever ridden or been around them, she's never mentioned it to my recall. Except for the fact that she's not educated, you would bond over music and arts (and perhaps upstate NY), not horses. Happy probably wouldn't be suitable for your book proposal that you mentioned. She's always had a one-track mind about what she wanted to do. She's only ever been interested in making her own dream come true: to make music. It's funny, I somewhat fit the bill on the first part ("working toward making someone else's dream come true") but definitely not the second part ("shrugging off the role of muse and supporter to take center stage onessself") because Happy was and is my calling. If I were better at it, you know, the go-getter type, she'd be famous now, but there are myriad reasons why I haven't been able to do as much for her as I wish I'd done. That's not putting myself down (which I could do very easily) because I am very proud that several people have discovered Happy through me. If her music touches someone's life and heart because of something I did (played her on the radio, yapped about her on a mailing list, put up a web page) then that's my bliss, and my reason for being. Oy, that sounded weird didn't it? If you decide to write a book entitled "Weird fans of Obscure Artists" you do not have permission to quote anything I say about Happy. :) Sorry to hear about the break in. Damn! Thank you for your interest. What a wonderful thing! Vickie ----------------- Original Message ----------------- From: Jennifer Date: Oct 14, 2006 6:56 AM So... wow. Now I am getting excited. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have the unreleased tracks and lyrics. WOW. And you know-- I used to have a few of her cds, but my house was broken into and robbed and trashed when I still lived in Seattle a few years ago, and all of my music collection was stolen. Monsters!! I really need to get my hands on her whole collection to do this properly, and that will take me a little while. But it sounds like we have some time to work with. Any guidance and info that you are kind enough to provide will be wonderful!! Can you give me an idea of how many and what kinds of interviews and writings have been done about Happy? Or where to find such info? No one has yet written a book about her... is this true? Boy, I would LOVE to do something like that. I'm going to give that some serious thought. Hmmmmm. I have one book proposal under consideration at Seal Press right now, and actually Happy might be interested in that one, which is about creative women who have spent some portion of their lives working toward making someone else's dream come true-- like Happy before she was "discovered" maybe?-- and then at some point an awakening happens that causes each woman to realize that she must refocus and make her own dream come true. It's about shrugging off the role of muse and supporter to take center stage onesself. Wow. I'd love to write a book about Happy. I wonder if Seal Press would be into it? Hmmmm! Exciting! What do you knwo about her connection with horses? She might be interested to know that I am also from upstate NY, have a music and arts background, and have been passionately involved with horses too. This could be a friendship as well as a collaboration. Happy is amazing! Yay! Jen