Album Notes by Stephen Peeples
For The 12" Vinyl Single:
BAD CASE OF LOVING YOU

In the second half of 1978, nocturnal rocker Moon Martin rose from regional subterranean obscurity to one of the international rock underground's best known victims of romance. Sure in the past few years he'd been a member of Southwind , played on a bunch of L.A. sessions for big-time artists including Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons and Del Shannon and ~ after Jack Nitzshe got wise to him ~ had some of his tunes covered by Mink De Ville, Michele Phillips and Lisa Burns. But Moon had a lot more to give rock roll than a few tunes in exchange for sporadically-delivered mailbox money.

So armed with a stack of seething originals (Moon once characterized them as "decadent Chuck Berry" in style) and his "there's not enough rock & roll on the radio today!" battlecry, Moon and his producer Craig Leon (with albums by Blondie, The Ramones and Climax Blues Band under his belt) let rock & roll lethargy have it wih a double-shot right between the eyes last summer when they cut and unleashed Shots From A Cold Nightmare, Moon's first solo outing.

America's rock scribes, many of whom are waging a similar battle in print against boring radio, responded to the call, because with Shots Moon has presented ten workable solutions to the problem rather than just bitching about it. Moreover, the critics realized Moon had done it without taking the whole campaign so seriously that he forgot rock's basic rule ~ to have fun or forget it.

"Hot Nite In Dallas" was the first Shots tune heard on the airwaves, and the people in Texas and Oklahoma (Moon was raised on a wide spot in the road on the Texahoma border) had no trouble that summer of '78 identfying with the songs "sheets a-stickin' to my skin" phrase. Right behind "Hot Nite" in airplay and requests were "Bad Case of Loving You" and "Cadillac Walk", Moon's theme onstage and on record.

During Moon's first tour late last summer, Houston got the spirit as stations there ran contests to see which of their listeners could send in the cheekiest photo, giving another lease on llfe to the Great American Tradition of dropping one's drawers in public ~ mooning ~ to shock the squares. Austin, that hotbed of far-flung styles of American music and known for audiences which can be excruciatingly unsympathetic toward no-talent artists clogging the stages of their clubs, called Moon and his band back for three encores at their first gig there. Austin's reaction proved the encores Moon got in Dallas, Houston and Oklahoma City were anything but home-town-boy-makes-good schmoozings.

The Eastern half of the continent fell next as New York City, Philadelphia and Toronto (where the El Mocambo was left in shambles) succumbed to the Moonshine. By the time the march to Boston ended, Shots was beating out albums by local competitors Boston and even the Stones' Some Girls LP on the city's AOR biggie, WBCN-FM, solely on its hot phones. That led to 'BCN's decision to carry Moon's Paradise Theater gig live on the air for all the Boston Moonmaniacs who couldn't be shoehorned into the club.

By that time, Shots had been heard across the Big Water, and the folks over there were waiting anxiously for the slight, bespectacled rocker to show his, er, face on their stages. So Capitol's international guys here and their cohorts in England and Europe wasted no time putting together the debut "Moon's Over Europe Tour '78", as it came to be called, last November.

Moon and his young band had 'em calling for "mehr!" in Germany after SRO headlining gigs in Munich (three encores at The Sugar Shack), Hamburg (even more encores at the Logo, with The Cars and Genya Ravan and premier German female rocker Inga Rumph in attendance) and Berlin (where the band played everything they knew at The Kant Kino and it still wasn't enough, so Moon wrote a song backstage in four minutes to deliver as the fourth encore so he and his guys could get out of there alive).

While in Munich, Moon taped songs for two top German rock television shows ~ "Rock Pop" and "Scene '78" ~ and did scores of interviews with the country's rock press, winding up on the cover of Sounds and the target of major feature spreads in Musik Express, Joker and other top German music publications. And in Amsterdam, they hollered "bis!" after Moon taped a couple of songs from Shots for the "Rock Planet" TV show and afterward met with the fired-up Dutch music community for interviews.

By the time Moon got back to London, the frenetic pace had rendered Moon's pipes ragged and he had to bow out of a scheduled showcase gig there, but as video tape (shot live on stage at The Roxy in Hollywood just before the Texas Tour) was screened, Moon and the EMI people co-hosted the British press at a special reception.
Hours later the tour was over, and a tired but nonetheless excited bunch of rock & rollers retreated to their MASH unit in L.A. for some well-earned R & R.

The homecoming Moon and his band received at The Whisky on Sunset at the end of December was enthusiastic, to put it mildly. Even L.A.'s pickiest rock journalists were won over. The whole scene was reminiscent of the reception Tom Petty and his band enjoyed a couple of years ago when they returned from Europe as the stars they weren't when they'd boarded the plane to London.

Meanwhile, Moon's fight against lightweight rock and boring radio had gained inertia overseas in his absence ~ they were still yelling "more Moon!", only louder. Robert Palmer surfaced as an unabashed Moonmaniac, saying publicly that Moon was his favorite artist, and backing it up by playing Moon tunes including "Bad Case" in his encores during his recent tour. It became clear that the only way to satisfy the clamoring European multitudes was to go back and moon them all over again.

Capitol's international chiefs came out of another pow-wow with the plans for the encore "Moon's Over Europe Tour '79", staged between the end of January and the end of February with concerts, TV appearances and a few hundred more interviews in London, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Paris, Lyon and Cologne to spread Moon's growing fame even wider.

All that was happening at the same time "Bad Case of Loving You" was simultaneously released worldwide, backed fully on the American front by Capitol (the double-A-sided clear-vinyl 12" single enclosed being part of the campaign) and by EMI in England (which released Shots at the beginning of January and created for promotional use and accordion-jacketed package containing 5 7" discs in different colors of vinyl, each single including 2 tunes from Shots), with heavy promotion for the album and tour by the Capitol label chiefs on each stop of the tour.

With Moon's razor-sharp Shots, his steaming live sets and all that worldwide energy behind him, Moon's international illumination factor justifiably rose a few thousand candlepower when he made his second Cadillac walk back to America. With those first victories behind him, Moon's war against limp rock & roll draws more Moonmaniac divisions everyday.

Stephen Peeples