Hunting for Trolls: The Quest for an Unfindable Band, Part One
After I read Rick Simmons’ excellent article, “8 Good, Bad, and Unforgettable Truths You Learn after Five Years of Interviewing Your Music Idols,” I got to thinking about my limited experiences in interviewing musicians over the past few years. “Limited” is actually too generous of a word. I can list three people that I had the pleasure of interviewing, and while they all went very well, I realized afterwards that it’s not as easy as it looks.
If you stop and think about it, interviewing an artist who made music that really rocked you to your soul can be daunting. If it’s somebody who’s already been interviewed numerous times, you run the risk of asking them the same questions they’ve heard hundreds of times before. If you’re lucky, they’ll politely answer them the same way they always do. If you catch them on a bad day, Lord knows how they’ll make you feel at the end of whatever you can salvage as an “interview.”
If it’s somebody who’s never been talked to before about their music or experiences, it’s even more of a crapshoot. They might be bemused or even flattered that you care and be more than happy to relive the past. They might see very little merit in their past and be hesitant — or even outright refuse — to go back to a time in their life that you see as important. You can’t really fault them if they feel that way, but man, it really makes you wonder if what you dug about them was really that valid or not.
Having said all that, please allow me to share with you the first (and almost last) time I tried to seriously write about music — specifically about a group that I became obsessed with for a while: the Trolls.
For starters, let me give you a little background. Back in the mid 1990s, a friend of a friend made me some mix tapes. I never met the guy in person (still don’t know what he looks or sounds like), but our mutual friend knew we had similar tastes in music, especially the 1960s. He had a good-sized music collection, and over the course of a few years, he was kind enough to periodically make a tape of stuff he happened to have lying around and drop it in the mail to me.
It was always the same experience, and I’m assuming a lot of you can relate. Some of the songs caught my attention, while others never really grabbed me. There was always at least one song that really caught my ear and would never let go. This is how I was introduced to the Trolls. Hidden in the middle of the first tape he sent was “Something Here Inside.” I can’t explain what made me so crazy that I had to hear the tune over and over. Maybe it was the harmony or the upbeat, almost sunshine-poppy words and tempo, or the crazy mixture that somehow comes together to make you fall in love with a song. Whatever it was, it worked. I was hooked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrBzFI8FAl0
I’m gonna pull over for a second and explain who the Trolls were, or what little I know. Back in the 1960s, there were probably dozens of garage bands around the country calling themselves the Trolls. The one I was taken with was located in Chicago. From 1966 through 1968, they released five singles (four on ABC, one on USA), then changed their name to Troll and released one album on Smash called Animated Music around 1968 or 1969. Then they disappeared.
Not much of a story, right? I would tell you more, but aside from listing the band members — Richard Clark, organ/vocals; Richard Gallagher, guitar/vocals; Max Jordan, Jr., bass/vocals; and Ken Cortese (also known as Ken Apples), drums — there’s nothing else to share. This is where I found myself in the mid 2000s. It was about 10 years after I first heard “Something Here Inside,” and the song was still stuck in my psyche. I had heard two other songs of theirs during the interim; one from another mix tape which contained “Laughing All the Way,” the flip side to the song I loved so much, and “Every Day and Every Night,” which was on a garage band comp I picked up along the way. Both were winners, and my obsession with the group continued to fester.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChwUvUxiWn0
I got the bright idea one day to search on the web and read up on the Trolls. Countless other garage bands with less output were well-documented elsewhere, so surely these guys have a webpage somewhere, right?
Wrong.
I couldn’t find anything about the Trolls except for references to other garage comps here and there that might have used a song of theirs. I didn’t get it. ABC was a major label, and their first single had actually cracked the Billboard Top 100 chart, so there had to be something out there about them, right?
Still wrong.
I stumbled across a terrific website dedicated to garage bands called — appropriately enough — 60sgaragebands.com. They had a bunch of interviews with members of groups that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me. Nothing was there about the Trolls, so I decided to contact the webmaster to see if he knew anything about them. As luck would have it, the guy that ran the website — Mike Dugo, a terrific gentleman — was a huge fan of the Trolls, and while he had a little luck digging up some information about the group, he had hit a wall as well. After some back and forth correspondence, Mike was generous enough to send me two CDs in the mail. One contained all 10 single sides they released as the Trolls, and the other was their album as Troll.
He gave me the opportunity to write an article about the music for his website. Looking back now, I’m not sure why he took the chance since he didn’t know me from Adam, but God bless him for doing it. I absorbed those two discs over a few days’ time. Honestly, there were a couple of clunkers in their discography — specifically, their last single for ABC — but most of their music was pure aural gold. I didn’t listen to anything else for a while because I really wanted to know the music and write an informed article about their sound and what the world was missing by not having heard these songs.
In preparing to write this article you’re reading right now, I went back to the website to try and read it again for the first time in years. After a paragraph or two, I ended up skimming the rest. It’s an embarrassing attempt to be a lightweight Lester Bangs, and while I did try to write about the music, the snarky atmosphere I created makes it impossible for me to read today. I’m surprised that the article is still up, but as I mentioned before, Mike is a generous soul.
For whatever reason, I felt empowered after having this piece of whatever published on his website, and I asked Mike if I could try and pick up where he left off in finding out more about the Trolls and their current whereabouts. He graciously agreed and sent me what info he had gathered. At the time, I assumed that perhaps he didn’t have the time or energy to go any further; in retrospect, it may be because there wasn’t much further he or anybody could go.
Mike had contacted two of the members with limited results. Max Jordan, Jr. — apparently the only member who still lived near Chicago — had become a Jehovah’s Witness and did not want to talk about his days as a rock ‘n’ roller at all. Richard Gallagher had relocated to Arizona and opened a leatherworks business (gun holsters, to be precise), and seemed too busy or disinterested in talking about his days as a Troll. Richard Clark was missing in action. Ken Cortese had died just a few years after the Trolls ceased to be a recording act. The good news for him was he was making a name for himself as a booking agent. The bad news is one of his clients was Jim Croce. They died in the same plane crash in September, 1973.
Armed with this paragraph of information, a surprisingly disarming amount of naiveté, and a strong desire to be the guy who would write the definitive Trolls story, I pressed forward to make new inroads into the world of music writing. What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty.
Check back tomorrow to find out if George ever landed his interview and uncovered the truth about the Trolls!
