Crime are legend. A group whose rep cannot be fucked with. One of the all-time cult rock fetish totems. They’re that band you find via smoke signals, by following the clues. The one that, when you finally get to them, obliterates all else.

What The Sonics are to ‘60s American punk, Crime are to its ‘70s (pre-hardcore) iteration. The real deal; the undiluted, full strength dose; the wildest of the wild; the key that gets you entry to all locked rooms.

Unlike most subsequent US punk, image is all important with Crime, and, as locked via their most widely disseminated photos, just the sheer sight of them still hits harder than the actual music of many of their lesser peers. Gaunt, bone-thin motherfuckers, uniform greaser quiffs and flat-tops, dead blank expressions on the verge of a post-photo sneer; this isn’t just BEFORE Malcolm Maclaren ruined everything, it’s an alternate blueprint from a whole different universe. Style never goes out of fashion, and all that.

But the coup de grace, the element of absolute perverse genius, arrived a year or so into their sporadic recording & performance career, when the band took the decision to adopt full, neatly pressed police uniforms, complete with ties, badges of office and accompanying Ray-Bans. A simple move, but aesthetically devastating. As provocateurs, these cats knew exactly what they were doing.

Whether spectators were aroused by an instinctive, lizard brain hatred of the cops, by an unease at the sacred uniform being co-opted by sneering punkers under the banner of CRIME or merely by the cognitive dissonance that results from a confusion between cops and robbers, the band knew perfectly well that when they come out swinging dressed like that, no one is comfortable. Plus, it just looked fucking cool. I mean, watch live footage online and it looks like they actually got those uniforms *tailored*, y’know? Sharp.

And then of course, there’s the music, which at its best is just… incredible. Like Chuck Berry rock n’ roll tied to a chair and tortured with electric shocks and razorblades, rockabilly hip thrusts blurring into the lumbering spectre of grinding proto-Black Flag/Flipper noise aggro. Masking amateur imprecision with feedback and swagger until things got within waving distance of The Electric Eels’ avant-obnoxiousness, Crime spat out an unholy mess of brilliance.

Slicing out the influence of the ‘60s as if it were a tumour (a pretty radical gesture when you’re first on the scene in mid-‘70s San Francisco), what remains zeroes straight in on everything that the more subterranean rock n’ roll of the ‘50s achieved when it appeared, amped up for a nastier, even more divisive decade to come: frightening, incomprehensible, and exhilarating.

One of the most jaw-dropping and unnerving music vids I’ve ever found on Youtube is the Target Video footage of Crime playing a performance in the recreation yard at San Quentin prison - the same correctional facility where Crime’s sartorial precursor Johnny Cash was knockin’ em dead a decade or so previously.

Now, who in the hell thought that a militantly aggressive punk rock band named Crime would be the perfect fit for a morale-raising prison gig, I have no idea. And who the hell subsequently let them walk in WEARING POLICE UNIFORMS, I can’t even imagine. But nonetheless, that is what seems to be happening when the video begins, and, though no violence actually broke out to my knowledge, “uneasy” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the situation that resulted.

One of the great things about Crime I think is the way they knowingly took on the whole ‘bad boy’ cliché of rock n’ roll, but, rather than using it for nostalgia or escapism, they proceeded to push it right back in their audience’s faces as if it were the realest, most tangible thing in the world (a trait they shared with the early years of The Cramps to some extent, but I digress) - and that is exactly what you see in the San Quentin video.

Standing there in the uniforms of San Fran’s finest, the band face down a small army of motionless convicts, some sitting, grinning, holding up photocopied Crime promo posters as the camera pans across them, others standing, arms-crossed and surly. Exhibiting a complete disregard for decorum or good sense, the band launch straight into Piss On Your Dog – originally titled ‘Prisoner Dog’, until their fans started shouting the misheard lyric back at them - the heaviest and most threatening song in their repertoire. Refusing to dial down the kind of aggro-laden performance they might have presented to a crowd of college kid rock fans even a fraction, Frankie Fixx and Johnny Strike stalk the stage like dogs on a leash, giving it all of their best “come on you fuckers” body language, as the amp stacks roar with evil distortion and guards stationed on a raised gantry clutch loaded rifles to their chest as if they expect things to kick off at any moment. Then to top it all off, right in the middle of the no man’s land between the band and the prisoners, a lone woman dances enthusiastically, apparently oblivious to the brooding tensions being exercised in this otherwise all-male environment. What a scene. Love what they’re doing or hate it, it’s hard to deny that this is a band with balls of steel.

Like most people who weren’t knocking about in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, I first became aware of Crime via the cover of ‘Hotwire My Heart’ on Sonic Youth’s ‘Sister’. That was ol’ Thurston Moore hard at work of course – scanning and regurgitating anything hip like an art school photocopier. But as with so many other things, I’m still grateful to him for pointing the way, even if the vague attribution of the song to “Johnny Strike/Crime” didn’t initially mean a lot to me amid the Philip K Dick goofing mirror-message blather of ‘Sister’s sleeve notes.

And like many people (in the UK, at least), I first caught up with the original Hotwire My Heart (A-side of Crime’s first single) shortly after the millennium, buffed up and compressed for maximum impact on Rough Trade Shops’ epochal ‘Rock and Roll 01’ compilation. To say it sounded like the best thing on there is no small boast amid such a monolithic track-listing, and the song’s brain-melting, beyond-punk totality proceeded to launch a hundred over-excited mixtapes of the “fucking eat this!” variety.

Guitars flailing like loose electrical cables, vocals that sound like one of them just hit Gene Vincent in the ass and gave him brain damage, drumming so dismembered and lost in the mix it’s difficult to tell if the player is some kind of improv genius or merely incompetent (I suspect the latter), it’s a recording like no other; unhinged, accidental, psychotic and just impossible to unpack or compute on first listen.

Both then and now, the late Frankie Fixx’s lead guitar playing on these early Crime cuts is a total inspiration, and it’s at its very best on ‘Hotwire..’, ploughing straight in, needle in the red, with only the vaguest idea of what he’s doing, but with a total confidence and bravery that allows no quarter, riffing and screeching cack-handedly as if DARING some damn hippie to stand up and tell him he “can’t play”, slurring notes and letting feedback ring, revelling in the mess, like some moonshine-ripped rockabilly plucked from a one mic rural studio, now suddenly tooled up for the era of full scale noise. Just amazing.

A few years after that white light moment came sneaky downloads of Crime’s first two singles, plus the San Francisco’s Still Doomed compilation LP on Swami Records, a legit copy of which has sat conspicuously on my birthday/xmas present list for years. Frustration on the second single’s A is another work of genius, Baby You’re So Repulsive is as blunt & brutal a punk rager as the name suggests, and even the second 45’s lengthy b-side ‘Murder by Guitar’ has a certain kind of ballsy idiot charm to it, even if it is just an indulgent fuck up of a track really. And as to the comp LP, well that offered more of the same in greater quantities really, though I confess, the relentless aggression and relative tunelessness of Crime’s lesser known demo material wore my weedy senses down to the wire pretty quick, even as ‘Rock n Roll Enemy’ and ‘San Francisco’s Doomed’ took a seat aside the single cuts as firm faves. (Format note: a friend of mine has a vinyl copy of ‘..Still Doomed’ that sounded absolutely ferocious compared to the mp3s when he threw in on the turntable; I coveted it muchly.)

Much water under the bridge since then of course, and this latest collection on Superior Viaduct arrives at a time when the merits of relentless aggression and tunelessness seem a whole lot more appealing to yours truly, meaning that promises of a wealth of *previously unheard* Crime studio recordings (alongside all the material from the singles) had me jumping in anticipation.

So, now I’ve got it, how does hold up? Well, as is usually the case with these ‘complete recordings’ comps of obscure punk and garage bands, the LP played front to back is a bit of a mixed bag, but this more or less chronologically-ordered recap of Crime’s trips to the studio does at least succeed in presenting a slightly weirder and more interesting musical story than yet another “hmm, turns out everything else they did was pretty dull” styled addition to the KBD/Nuggets completest archives.

Obviously it’s great to hear ‘..Repulsive’ and ‘Frustration’ sounding better than ever, and if the somehow-previously-unreleased ’77 recordings of ‘Terminal Boredom’ and ‘Dillinger’s Brain’ perhaps aren’t QUITE as inspired, they still could’ve made for a respectably fucked up KBD-era single, the former song a surprisingly straight up punker that reminds me a little of The Zeros, whilst the latter delves into the band’s weird gutter-pulp crime obsessions with all the subtlety you’d expect (which is to say, none at all). Even ‘Murder by Guitar’ sounds quite nice as heard in higher fidelity here, with its repetition, idiot noise, and winningly dumb declaration that “I’m gonna drive this guitar straight through your heart!” just about winning me over.

Sadly, the newly exhumed studio version of ‘Piss On Your Dog’ turns out to be a bit of a bust, sounding hesitant and muddled, with weak drumming resulting in a flubbed riff that completely misses the fearsome menace of the extant demo and live versions, and the LP’s B-side opens with another bummer, in the shape of the long and uneventful drag of ‘TV Blues’, an ambitious attempt at a slower, more art-damaged kind of song-writing that regrettably never really gets off the ground, sounding, strangely, like a really rough demo of one of those dreary/dreamy late-era Sonic Youth songs that were putting us all to sleep through the ‘00s.

Thankfully after that we’re back in business with ‘If Looks Could Kill’ and ‘Lost Soul’ from ’79, which both fucking rip it, the former perhaps the clearest example of Crime’s re-tooled rockabilly mode ever captured on tape, whilst the latter builds around a metallic, Lou Reed-ish “strutting down the street” riff to brilliantly cool effect, even if the lyrics, in true Crime tradition, sound like they were written about twenty seconds after they started recording (an issue which starts to become problematic at this point in their career, when gradually increasing fidelity means we can finally hear what they’re going on about).

Those tunes catch us on the cusp of the point at which Crime like many mid ‘70s punk bands who staggered into the cold glare of the ‘80s, started to go a bit weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Signposting these changes pretty clearly, ‘79’s ‘Rockin’ Weird’ was produced by none other than Huey Lewis (yes, that one, etc), and the trad boogie piano slapped high atop the somewhat cleaner mix is a bit of a shock to say the least, even if some totally vicious riffing beneath succeeds in salvaging the band’s bad-ass cred to a certain extent.

It’s an odd cut for sure - perhaps an errant example of what might have happened if Crime had reined in their excesses for new waver-era public consumption? Thankfully, the band never really ventured much further in that direction, but it seems that by the dawn of the ‘80s they were heading into stranger waters altogether, as demonstrated on the swan song of their original recording career, the much maligned 1980 single ‘Gangster Funk’ b/w ‘Maserati’.

For years, those song titles have had inquisitive punks running a mile (myself included), and indeed their worst fears would only have been confirmed by actually listening to the damn thing, as it finds Crime apparently pushing toward what I can only describe as some kind of beyond-kitsch, retro-futurist groove-rock, fearlessly embracing such horrors as gated drums, phased fretless bass and random, panning synth swooshes alongside their by now rather contrived curled lip vocal sneer. Imagine the kind of music a neo-rockabilly band might make in some ill-advised ‘80s proto-cyberpunk movie club scene, mixed up with a bit of cut price “we are the future” methodology left over from Neil Young’s ‘Trans’, and you’ll get the idea.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say these songs are “good” (though 'Maserati' comes close), but it’s a testament to Crime’s basic talent for rock n’ roll that they could indulge in such nonsense and at least escape embarrassment, emerging with something reasonably listenable, their trademark strutting aggression left largely intact. It might have been interesting to see where they went next with all this, but, for better or worse, we can assume that a mixture of label poverty, bad living and audience disinterest put the nix on Crime’s planned future-rock utopia at this point, leaving that final single an intriguing oddity, an appropriately uneasy question mark at the end of one of the most relentlessly vicious and original recording careers in US punk history.

Just as ‘San Francisco’s Still Doomed’s ragged skree didn’t really succeed in presenting the whole picture of Crime’s work, ‘Murder By Guitar’s more clinical / chronological approach proves equally unsatisfactory [just two of the essential songs not included: Samurai, Rock n Roll Enemy]. But for providing the other half of the jigsaw, it is essential listening all the same. If you are at all interested in this band (and if you’ve heard ‘Hotwire My Heart’ and you’re not, then fucking hell, you’re in the wrong business), just do the decent thing and get them both. Then play them simultaneously in some kind of audio battle royale. Go on, do it. I’ll be ready in the corridor with a nice cup of tea when you stagger out clutching your bulging forehead. In conclusion: CRIME! YEAH! New songs by CRIME? YEAH!! CRIME! What are you waiting for, buy it already.

Buy from Superior Viaduct in the US, or try Norman in the UK.

Labels: album reviews, Crime, punk rock, reissues

How To Be a Rock Band, with Mick Farren & The Deviants, Hyde Park 1969.

Y’know, casual misogyny aside (oh Mick, you freakin’ dimwit), this is pretty much what I want to see/hear on any given occasion, right?

It’s like that 1970 footage of the MC5, forcibly boiled down to the level of blithering, sub-human caveman dementia. Utter fucking ruination of civilised ideals, channeled through a bunch of Ladbroke Grove drop-outs, a primitive fuzzbox and amp stacks that probably weigh more than their entire home & possessions.

For most of it, they seem to have forgotten what language is, never mind ‘notes’.

So beautiful it makes me weep.

Look out for the Paul Bartel-meets-Ming The Merciless, ‘I’m the critic from the Evening Standard’ guy towards the end of the first video, appearing unmoved.

If you like this, well… god help you, but maybe you’d enjoy my biker rock comp.

Labels: 1960s, fuzz is all, punk rock, The Deviants, UG enthroned, videos

Love Minus Zeros.

I’m not much for love songs at the moment (I’m more into the monster songs, to use Jad Fair’s dichotomy), but as a reluctant recognition-nod to valentine’s day, here’s one I really like.

As I understand it, this is from the last set of recording that the first incarnation of The Zeros did, in 1980ish. It’s track eleven on the Bomp! compilation of their stuff, and sequenced as it is behind ten grade A punk/power-pop blasters, it’s more subtle charms may take a few (hundred, in my case) listens to sink in.

The other songs The Zeros recorded for this session (“Getting Nowhere Fast”, “They Say That Everything’s Alright”) speak in plain terms of disillusionment with the low-reward grind of life in a rock band, prefiguring their subsequent decision to pack it in. But in “Girl On The Block”, Javier Escovedo puts a more positive spin on his return to ‘normal’ life, giving us a sweet picture of bored-yet-blissful existence with the hometown girl he’d probably have been knocking around with if he’d never started a punk band and headed for Hollywood. Like a grizzled cowboy returning to his homestead after unknown adventures in the movies, Javier is abandoning the fantasies(?) of swastika-clad blondes and mascara-smeared man-eaters who inhabit his earlier songs, returning instead to where his heart truly lies.

It’s mature and sensitive and shit – you can tell from the way they’ve got an overdubbed acoustic mixed in there somewhere.

In the hands of an older, sleazier rocker, a song like this could easily take on a pretty entitled and ugly tone, but Javier as ever is right on the money – teary-eyed and full of respect-bordering-on-awe for the sense of belonging he finds at home with his gal; “she takes me but she don’t need no one at all / when I go I know that she won’t fall”.

Like all Zeros songs, “Girl On The Block” has a chugging mid-tempo swing that is just to die for, and a boilerplate sense of pop-melody that is just unfuckable-with in it’s simple, utilitarian perfection. Listen to that star-gazing chord progression as he sings “ain’t no beer left / so I guess I’m going out” – a vision of aimless, prospectless life transformed into paradise by the presence of the kind of unconditional warmth and companionship so distant from the neon-punk ideal he dropped out of school and left home to pursue a few years earlier.

Earlier Zeros songs were driven by a sort of breathless fantasy of urban decadence, but that’s all gone now – what’s left is some straight dope on how to live a good life in imperfect conditions, and it’s pretty f-ing beautiful.

Labels: punk rock, song reviews, The Zeros, Valentine's Day

Crime and Punishment.

This is a video of the legendary San Francisco punk band Crime, playing a show in an exercise yard in San Quentin prison. The Target Video tidemark says 1984, but I think it’s actually 1978.

As usual, Crime perform in police uniforms, and make a brooding, audience-baiting racket, rich in implied violence.

A solid wall of convicted felons stares back, some of them grimly holding up xeroxed “CRIME” posters for the camera. A very small number of guards look on apprehensively from the sidelines, hands on their weapons, presumably wondering who in the hell thought it would be a good idea to let this band play in a prison.

At the front of the stage, a lone woman dances to the music, seemingly oblivious to the seething male aggro all around her.

Crime are doing a song called “Piss on your Dog”.

Frankly, the whole scene looks pretty uncomfortable.

I’ve not heard any stories about the time Crime started a prison riot, so I’ll assume everybody got out in one piece.

Some lo-fi audio of more of their set is hear-able here.

Labels: Crime, punk rock, videos

I Like Overnight Lows.

Overnight Lows are a three-piece band out of Jackson, Mississippi, rocking that ever-popular husband/wife/drummer configuration. Their album “City of Rotten Eyes” came out on Goner Records earlier this year, and it totally destroys.

That’s about all you need to know really, and this music makes me feel like being BRUTALLY CONCISE (some hope), but it’s the least I can do to at least try to use words to sell you on a record I’ve listened to all the way through about, say, five days out of every seven for the past couple of months.

Comparable in both form and execution to the spirit of that first Thermals album, crossbred with an accidental nod or three to the “world’s fastest strumming average” ideal of Reis & Froburg’s Hot Snakes, Overnight Lows play punk rock stripped of all fat, devoid of bullshit – twelve loud, memorable, breakneck-paced songs about being angry and hating stuff. Five of them make the two minute mark. Not a clunker in the bunch, and not a slow bit or room to catch a breath either. Best walking to work music ever.

Drummer Paul Artiques plays about as is humanly possible without lapsing into hardcore/metal double kick drum territory – hi-hat going like a metronome and heavy on the ride cymbal. He is a great drummer! Marsh and Daphne Nabors correspondingly lay into things with a crazed ferocity, rather akin to the spirit of a guy on super-charged two-stroke motorbike, randomly hurling dynamite and trying to overtake a train. Recording quality is pretty good, but with everything in the room mixed WAY UP, rough edges in the playing swallowed by the feedback… and by the next verse, which has probably finished before you’ve even clocked what the hell is going on.

Like most great punk rock, each song here begins as a monomaniacal tirade about some aspect of singer’s life that s/he feels is simply intolerable and, well, just sort of continues as one really. “You’re well read / big words stuck in your tiny head / you’re well read / can’t understand what you said”, shrieks Marsh Nabors at some scholarly antagonist in ‘So Well Read’. Wait dude, what's so bad about reading books? Nothing, obviously, but if you read books and you're a JERK, well - fair game. “When I kiss your lips / all I taste is lies / I know what I’ve gotta do, and that’s sad”, responds Daphne in ‘Static Scars’. After a few dozen listens, both singers’ lyrics stand out as genuinely excellent – direct, imaginative and dryly funny, however random and unprovoked the fury with which they’re spat out may seem.

It’s funny, I could spend all day listening to contemporary albums by bands of musclebound guys effortlessly playing ‘punk rock’ music of similar volume and velocity to this, but none of it would hit me like the Overnight Lows record. What we’ve got here I think is he sound of people who WEREN’T born to play music like this, straining themselves to the nth degree to keep up the pace and take the damage, sounding like they could fall apart any second – which is fantastic, and exhilarating, and yeah – punk rock.

Seeing as how they’ve got character and intelligence and no visible tattoos, the bastards’ll probably file them under ‘indie’. C’est la vie.

Oh yeah, also not to be confused with the other band of the same name, who seem to have monopolised web searches for ‘Overnight Lows’, and are pretty hopeless.

For the avoidance of doubt, I’m talking about these Overnight Lows;

http://www.myspace.com/theovernightlows

Labels: I like, Overnight Lows, punk rock

UK Punk Catch-Up # 1:
Damned, Damned, Damned…?

Ok, so for no reason whatsoever I’ve been catching up on a lot of ’77-era UK punk recently. Obviously there’s an absolute ton of more recent/relevant music that I’d promised myself I’d get around to writing up for the blog, but the hell with it, I’m grabbing bits of writing time as & when I can at the moment, and today I feel like talking about The Damned.

Traditionally of course, I’ve always been a solid American partisan when it comes to the tedious transatlantic punk debate. I’ve never thought the ‘Pistols and The Clash were worth a damn (their sole beneficial effect being to create an identifiable market/aesthetic that allowed thousands of much better bands to thrive), and beyond that what do I care what a bunch of spit-drenched oiks from, I dunno, Guildford or somewhere have to say on the matter when I’ve got the whole wonderful axis of Ramones/Velvets/Stooges/Dolls/PSG/Huskers/Flag/Threat/Minutemen/Replacements/Teenage Jesus/Zeros/Crime-etc-etc-etc to explore forever?

Obviously there ARE plenty of fun and/or interesting British bands from that era that I’ve always been into, but if I start running of those down here this will be a very long and dull post, and would The Damned stand for that? Hell NO! Point is, a lot of the big names in UK punk are still pretty much unknown to me, and, given my current preference for everything loud, fast and stupid, 2010 is proving a good opportunity to rectify that. Now let’s get on with it….

As a cultural presence, The Damned have always really bugged me.

For some reason they always seemed to be turning up on TV. Whenever it was time for the BBC to dig up the ol’ anglocentric history of punk thing for another go round, there they were clowning around on the Old Grey Whistle Test, making a mess, acting like louts and playing straight into the hands of all the musos who wanted to write off punk as a gimmicky bunch of crap. And then they’d always drag out Captain Sensible for a ‘quirky’ interview segment where he’d talk a bunch of arse about how they single-handedly destroyed the evil hegemony of two hour drum solos that we’re told ALL OTHER MUSIC consisted of in 1975 (I swear every time they do one of these documentaries, the drum solos get longer).

I remember hearing “Smash It Up” on the radio as a teenager, and even at age 16 thinking “what a stupid song – I bet these guys’ fans are a bunch of morons”. I guess I must have heard “New Rose” a bunch of times, but it never really grabbed me the way a big, rousing punk tune should – always sounded pretty weird and crappy and amelodic – b-team stuff by a buncha chancers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or so I thought. None of the clear intent or fun or sense of purpose or blazing kick-assitude of The Ramones or Dead Kennedys or The MC5 here – just a tinny, raucous mess. Whatever.

As I’m finally starting to appreciate though, this is something like the best tinny, raucous mess ever; a tinny, raucous mess for the ages! The Damned’s songs do business like frantic series of exclamation points and punctuation outbursts, the musical equivalent of “!!!$&”£$>!#:@!!!!” in a cartoon speech bubble, the sound of a bunch of overgrown schoolboys hurtling forward trying to express something desperately important but without a clue in hell how to do it – a hilarious, confounding, stupid, hyperkinetic mess, beating it’s head against the wall and laughing.

Listening to “New Rose” with fresh ears, what a startling and mysterious thing it is. Perhaps the only record I’ve ever heard that manages to be unnervingly scary and brooding whilst also powering full steam ahead in cheerful 4/4 idiot rock mode. The way that that weird, top-heavy riff sorta keeps *almost* turning into a straight up Heartbreakers boogie, but keeps pulling back in the last few notes as the singing starts, perpetually frustrating itself and sabotaging the motorik-punk pleasure principle (that’s probably why I never liked it much back in the day). “I GOT A FEELING INSIDE OF ME / IT’S DARK AND STRANGE LIKE THE STORMY SEA!” Good grief, I know the singer’s a bit of a goth and everything, but what were these guys ON? It’s like The Damned tried to record a big, up-tempo love song that everyone would love as their first single… and when they listened back, it had all gone horribly wrong, turned into pimply hormonal carnage, haunted by the ghosts of Black Sabbath.

The whole existence of The Damned seems like a horrible, glorious mistake. I mean, they look like a bunch of random, poorly conceived characters that Hanna Barbara might have thrown together for a failed ‘punk’ update of Scooby Doo. They make ugly, ham-fisted, beserk music that tries to be enjoyable, high energy rock n’ roll and KINDA succeeds, but basically ends up sounding like an explosion in a confused 17 year old boy’s head. They’re quite famous, but nobody’s ever gonna write a poncey book about how they were influenced by situationism. The Damned never were and never will be cool. How can you not love ‘em?

“Damned Damned Damned” is an absolute riot from start to finish – Brian James’ guitar-playing seems to lunge around in a constant temper tantrum as he tries to throw in ‘chops’ to assert his musician-who-can-play status at every opportunity, wrestling all the while with an amp set up like a giant, farting trash compactor, stumbling into moments of beautiful brutality than inadvertently invent Greg Ginn three or four years early. Rat Scabies’ drumming sounds like a constant, rolling headache that almost buries the rest of the band, and I still don’t know WHERE Dave Vanian is coming from most of the time.

He’s a very strange frontman. I’m not sure where he got the idea from that he’d like to be the singer in a band, but he doesn’t seem to like being the centre of attention much. He mumbles through “Born To Kill” sounding like he’d rather just have a bit of a snooze whilst the rest of the group go off like human fireworks behind him, and somehow he gets away with it. He could be singing about buying shoes on half these songs, or going to the cinema, or stalking virgins through the streets at midnight – I have no idea, but whatever he’s on about it all fades into irrelevance by the time the rest of the band burst in for a yelped, incoherent chorus. The whole album is wild anyhow, and I’m ashamed that I’d not bothered listening to it until now.

The other song on there I really like is “See Her Tonight” – you know the one; “SHE’S SO COOL!!! I’M GONNA SEE HER TONIGHT!!!” – a song so breathlessly enthusiastic it almost loses it’s grip on musical syntax altogether and just explodes into a monkey-like shriek of excitement. Listening to it, I imagine the male protagonist as some supremely dorky teenage amalgam of all the members of The Damned, bouncing off the walls of his bedroom in anticipation. ‘HER’ I imagine being a slightly older, more sophisticated girl, like an arts graduate or a photographer or something, who maybe led him on a bit cos he seemed like a goofy kid who’d be fun to have around, but now deeply regrets it as she sits there trying to have a smoke and listen to Public Image as he literally hops around in front of her wearing a dirty raincoat, army boots, crazy new wave sunglasses and, like, Bermuda shorts or something, blathering on relentlessly, overjoyed by the fact that he’s ACTUALLY HAVING A (one-sided) CONVERSATION with this SMART, COOL LADY!

What a great song – it makes me laugh out loud whilst walking down the street. What a great band – it sounds like they had no idea what they were doing but they just fucking DID IT, and it doesn’t get much more punk rock than that.

Labels: punk rock, The Damned

Things of Interest:
The Hitmen

So here's a new discovery to help cme liven up this Dennis Hopper-less Saturday Night - The Hitmen!

They were kinda like an Australian Undertones!

What, you mean you don't feel like listening to an Australian Undertones right now? Fine, please yourself.

It seems The Hitmen made a TON of videos between about '79 and '83. All of them are pretty much the same, but that's ok, because all of them are pretty great.

Enter Youtube:





That said, I'm not sure "Bwana Devil" was really a good idea from anyone's point of view. I still kinda love it though - fits perfectly into that whole weird sub-sub-genre of early '80s Australian bands who seemed to be into some kinda inexplicable tiki bar/jungle adventure/caveman shtick (see just about anything by Screaming Tribesmen, Hoodoo Gurus, Lime Spiders etc).



I was just reflecting on the fact that The Hitmen's song "Pay Up Or Shut Up" would be pretty awesome if it didn't owe such a huge debt to Radio Birdman's trademark sound, when Wikipedia informed me that The Hitmen's singer Johnny Kannis actually functioned as a kinda odd backing singer/hypeman for the Birdman in his spare time, as can be witnessed in this absolutely blinding video of the band from '77;



So, er, there ya go.

Man, Denis Tek [who you see playing that nifty white guitar in the above vid] rules.

One day when Youtube's been obliterated, we'll weep blood for all these good times.

Labels: Australia, punk rock, Radio Birdman, The Hitmen, things of interest, videos

Things of Interest # 4:
Ice & The Iced.

Ice & The Iced came from Podenone, Italy, late '70s. Maybe they were the first punk rockers in town, maybe not. It makes a better story if we assume they were though.

Ice has HAD ENOUGH. His dad treats him like a criminal, and wants to see him working all day. His teachers are fat, and sexually repressive, and don't care about the life he's bringin' on.

So what's a boy to do? Tell the world all about it in one of the best fuckin' songs ever, that's what.

Seriously, I can't express how wonderful this is. To anybody who ever made any "this track really defined what punk was all about blah blah" type claim re: some storied London/New York band; Ice & The Iced will blow you to smithereens.

As Joe Stumble of Last Days of Man On Earth where I first heard this last week puts it: "You think you could write a better song than We’ve Had Enough? You can’t. Kids all over the world are learning this song right now. Somebody needs to send me the tabs. It’s gonna be the next generation’s “Satisfaction”. Get on the train now or you are gonna miss it."

Labels: Ice And The Iced, Italy, punk rock, things of interest

I Like The Spits.

The Spits aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Anecdotal evidence would tend to suggest they’ve been around for years, and they have a tangled discography fulla live EPs, split singles and the like to keep the wouldbe Spits fanatic busy for, ooh, hours. But for whatever reason, The Spits had flown beneath my radar until this January, when their ‘Vol. 4 / School’s Out!’ album effectively BECAME my radar.

Eight or nine weeks later, I’m still listening to it every single day – no kidding. Thankfully that doesn’t require much of an effort, because it’s only fifteen minutes long. Such conciseness of purpose immediately puts The Spits on my Christmas card list. Music aside though, I still don’t really know where The Spits are coming from, whether they’re polite book-smarts guys playing dumb or just a gang of big, angry lummoxes from the middle o’ nowhere, so the card might remain unsent pending an address. But whoever they are, they SPEAK RAMONES, and that means we’re talkin’.

The Spits have a human drummer who sounds like a drum machine and they have big, distorted Jerry Only type bass. They have toxic, monotone fuzz guitar and a vocalist who sounds like a surly drunk from a Lenny Bruce sketch. They have cheap wavo/Devo keyboards and Liquid Sky sci-fi/horror shenanigans to liven things up too, but that’s all gravy. I appreciate that they are probably working to whims of a relatively small audience who consider this sort of thing The Most Perfect Music Ever, but if that audience ever get together to start a formal organisation, I’m gonna try and run for treasurer or entertainments secretary, so the hell with ya if you think different.

During the brief run-time of ‘Vol. 4’, The Spits make their platform abundantly clear. The Spits like: parties, beer, aliens, petty crime. The Spits dislike: teachers, the police, girls who dump them, living in a van. And like The Ramones and The Misfits before them, they have a beautiful and persuasive sense of melody with which to sell us on these emotionally sound but sometimes ethically impractical proposals, for at least as long as those robot-drums keep thrumming away. Truly a band who speak for the heart & soul of the common man. Hallelujah!

So make sure to listen to “Tonight” and “Life Of Crime” on their myspace each day, and I hope that soon you’ll be onside as we join The Spits in pursuit of an all round better life for everyone.

http://www.myspace.com/thespits
http://www.thespits.com/index.html

Their live shows certainly look like... an experience:

Labels: I like, punk rock, The Spits

Brendan Mullen, The Masque and LA Punk ‘77

A few weeks ago, I happened to pop into that shop on Charing Cross Road that sells fancy art books for knock-down prices, and was delighted to find a copy of Live at the Masque: Nightmare on Punk Alley, a huge hardback tome showcasing photographs and ephemera from the heyday of seminal LA punk club The Masque circa ’77-’79 that’s been on my xmas list since I learned of it, for about one third of the RRP.

Thus, it can now claim the honour of being the one fancy hardback photograph book that I own. And well worth owning it is too. For all of its legendary baggage, LA punk has kept a surprisingly low profile within popular culture, and as such practically every page of the book is dynamite from both an informational and aesthetic point of view, an absolute motherlode for anyone who shares an interest in the history of punk, rock n’ roll and American youth culture.

It wasn’t until this week however that I learned that Brendan Mullen, founder and manager of The Masque who edited and provided the text for the book, died of a heart attack earlier this month at the age of sixty.

I’d been vaguely meaning to do a blogpost based on the book, with some scanned pictures and mp3s etc, but in tribute to Mullen I thought I’d move that intention way up my priority list for a combined deathblog/photos/music tribute post.


By all accounts Mullen was far, far more than just a club manager – he was an instigator of, participant in and spokesperson for the punk scene, and The Masque stands out as the definitive early example of a DIY “by the fans, for the fans” music venue/rehearsal room/community space of the kind that’s become such a vital part of the American music scene in recent years (far less so in the UK sadly, but thems the breaks), and Mullen, rather than some impresario looking to turn a quick buck, was a late-twenties punk fan himself at the time – just one with the drive and know-how to find a space and make it happen.

Subsequently, he has authored two books on LA punk, We Got The Neutron Bomb (about the scene in general) and Lexicon Devil (about The Germs), both of which are sure to be great reads, if the smart and charismatic prose he contributed to the photo book is any indication.


One of the things I’ve found most remarkable about reading/looking at “Live at the Masque” is the drastically different picture of the time/place it paints to my other major source of LA punk documentation, Penelope Spheeris’ film “The Decline of Western Civilisation” (which you can watch in a series of handy chunks on Youtube, beginning here).

Whilst “Decline..” (which opens with an interview with Mullen) is an amazing and exhilarating documentary, capturing a cultural milieu that might otherwise have come and gone leaving little in the way of visual evidence, I’ve always been irked by the feeling that Spheeris was chasing controversy when putting it together, deliberately choosing the most violent concert footage, interviewing the most troubled/fucked up fans and musicians etc…. not to mention ending the film with an absolutely torturous sequence on the aptly named Fear, whose ugly, audience-baiting jibes and homophobic/sexist bullying closes proceedings on a colossal downer – enough to put the casual viewer off investigating punk rock for life. In short, I get the impression that Spheeris came up with her apocalyptic concept first and set about assembling footage to justify it.

“Live At The Masque” manages to tell a completely different story, presenting evidence of a far more positive and cohesive underground community. The self-made mythology of ‘70s punk may centre on tales of drugs, squalor, nihilism and bodily abuse, but the kids in the crowd (and in the bands) here just look happy and friendly and excitable, each trying to outdo each other with their kick-ass NY/London influenced sartorial style. Flyers, newsletters and notes pinned to the doors are funny and self-deprecating to a fault, full of scene in-jokes, breathless announcements of which bands “might be playing, if they can get it together”, and hand-written summaries of local and international ‘punk news’. Even the graffiti that covers every surface is largely pretty good natured.


The negative vibes chronicled by Spheeris are hard to find anywhere in these photos, and even the self-destructive ‘no future’ ethos that goes hand-in-hand with early punk is undermined by the presence on the scene of cats like Greg Shaw, Kristine McKenna, John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Mullen himself, all providing the kids with serviceable models for how to grow up punk without fading away or selling out. Photos of some of the lesser known bands on the scene reveal a healthy compliment of women and non-whites taking a creative role in proceedings, and, in short, it’s difficult to flick through the book without feeling a pang of regret that you weren’t there to take part in such an awesome explosion of teenage creativity and self-definition.

In fairness, “Decline..” was filmed a couple of years after the heyday of The Masque, when the action seemed to have shifted to bigger, more barn-like venues with cynical managers and security guards, and when the native suburban hardcore pioneered by Black Flag and The Circlejerks was in the ascendant, as opposed to the more urban, relatively arty Pistols/Heartbreakers influenced combos that characterized the Masque scene. But still, the discrepancy between the book and the film is startling. As usual with these things, I guess the truth probably lies somewhere between the two.



Obviously the more artistically striking bands associated with The Masque – Screamers, Germs, X, Flesh Eaters, Dickies, The Dils and the much-underrated Bags – are the stuff of legend, and both The Weirdos, Plugz and my favourite ever Californian punks The Zeros (who played a coupla times) have achieved cult immortality by infusing their racket with a razor-sharp pop sensibility. Late period scene upstarts like The Go Gos and Holly & The Italians may have gone on to varying degree of Hollywood New Wave fame, and the book also has great pictures of awesome out-of-town headliners like Crime, The Cramps, Dead Boys, Avengers etc., but much of the fun of flicking through “Live At The Masque” comes from checking out the legions of less distinguished and/or completely forgotten groups.

The Skulls, Controllers, Flyboys, Backstage Pass, The Eyes, Simpletones, The LA Shakers, Deadbeats, Alleycats, Mutants, Schizos, F-Word, The Nuns…? Oh, if only these photos came with in-built sound.




So without further ado, here’s some choice mp3s, some from the “Live at the Masque ‘77” benefit LP, some from elsewhere, presented in tribute to Brenden Mullen, who saw these people and this culture sprouting up from nowhere around him, and did what it took to put the pieces together.

The Weirdos – Life of Crime
The Zeros – Cosmetic Couple

The Bags – Violent Girl (live)
The Germs – Let’s Pretend (live)

X- Los Angeles
Screamers - In a Better World

Labels: books, deathblog, Germs, LA, photos, punk, punk rock, Screamers, The Bags, The Zeros, Weirdos, X

Thinkpiece: Stupid is the New Smart

(Disclaimer: As ever with these sort of torturous state-of-the-nation rambles, I pretty much thought this one up as I went along and am not presenting what follows as any sort of coherent manifesto. Critiques and mockery welcomed in the comments, and I reserve the right to violently disagree with myself by about, ooh, this time next month maybe? – Enjoy.)

There are so many great, fun new stupid, noisy, great bands popping out of the woodwork at the moment, I’ve been a bit lost for words trying to get my head around ‘em all.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the nature of myspace, last.fm (not that I use last.fm), hype machine and quick downloads of singles/mp3s have changed the way I approach new music, and presumably the way everyone else does too. Yeah, I know all of those things have been around for a while, but... uh, I dunno, maybe it’s taken a while for their wider ramifications to filter down to the heart of our listening process?

The last year or two has seen a lot of people (myself included) trying to formulate a rationale/explanation for the “lo-fi/DIY boom” or whatever you want to call it – y’know, the one that’s seen an ever increasing number of scrappy, home-recorded bands of variable quality finding themselves pushed into the public eye, with results both pleasing and deeply silly in equal measure.

And naturally, we aforementioned commentators have been quick to call bullshit on all these oft-times lazy, arrogant, unimaginative, borderline unlistenable groups, deriding the whole business as a cynical hype perpetrated, presumably, by soulless, unsavoury, self-regarding characters of some ill-defined description. Meaning, perhaps: people from the generation below us…? Scary thought, huh?

Anyway, as far as the established model of music appreciation goes, bullshit calls = fair enough. I mean, if that guy from Wavves lived across the street from me and gave me a tape of his stuff, I’d probably think he was a pretty cool kid to be blaring out such a ridiculously silly Muppet Babies do The Dead C type racket in his spare time, and I’d wish him well. But at the same time, anyone who would consider him a World Class Prospect on the indie-rock circuit, able to stand alongside all those clever, consummate, committed bands that top all the end of year polls and charm festival crowds across the globe, would clearly be some kind of abject fool or simpleton. Not because his music is worthless or doesn’t have its place in the world, but, y’know… it ain’t exactly The E Street Band is it? Multiply by the fact that he also seems like a bit of a dick, and finish this paragraph with yr own comment re: his 15 minutes sliding down the drain.

But clearly this disjuncture between ‘Local’ and ‘Global’ approaches to appreciating music requires some thought. I guess the two levels have always been there, but it’s the world-shrinking power of the internet that’s caused this strange rupture in the relationship between the two that people are still trying to get their heads around.

And, pondering this, it suddenly occurred to me that this here “lo-fi-whatever boom” is not so much a trend or movement or hype that can be analysed via the codified music industry pattern we grew up with - it’s more the result of a basic sea-change in the way we’re experiencing music.

Put it this way: I’ve always loved trashy, slapdash, noisy, weird, amateurish, geeky, fun-loving, indifferently talented punk-ass bands. In fact, I probably enjoy them a hell of a lot more than most of the ‘World Class Prospects’ out there, and it’s always been comforting to know that pretty much any populated area in the western world will have a few of these kinda bands, just kicking around and having some laughs for the benefit of whoever’s around, without ever having to worry about becoming World Class or, god forbid, ‘proper’.

What’s changed is that now THE WHOLE WORLD can hear these bands, where previously the mechanics of record distribution & critical approval would have kept them below the radar. And we can all listen to them on the same day that somebody first brings a mic and a 4-track/laptop to one their practices too. And, apparently, a lot of us are enjoying the opportunity to do just that. And, in essence, that’s PRETTY AWESOME, right?

If we can get past the tiresome critical notion that ‘innovation’ is somehow prime currency in music (as if it were a research project or something… but sorry, that’s another rant entirely), then can’t this be seen as the original spirit of the Desperate Bicycles and Television Personalities (and Dead Moon and The Gories, and Jim Shephard and Maureen Tucker?), writ large across America in permanent marker?

So a few shitty bands might accidentally create a hype snowball, and end up touring the world without a clue what they’re doing, as everyone yells “huh?? I thought these guys were supposed to be the future, they can barely even play, and they just sound like a shit version of [insert cultish ‘80s band here] anyway! I paid £10 for this! What a bunch of crap!” Yeah, well… what of it?

Personally, I’ll go on record as saying I’m happy to grab the opportunity to share in whatever racket a bunch of hip teenagers in Galeburg, Illinois are banging out this week in preference to having to make do with whatever Matador or Secretly Canadian deem to be a real strong release. And if a few people get burned as the indie establishment tries to engage with the garagebound masses…. well, so it goes.

Not that I’m suggesting that the hype perpetrated by limited edition 7” labels, by the bands themselves, and by certain shadowy conglomerates of guys who I assume probably wear baseball caps indoors and speak ominously of “jams”, is necessarily benign or well-intentioned. Indeed it often has a rather toxic feel to it that I would wish to avoid if possible. And neither am I advocating blanket acceptance of any old rubbish – many of the names more frequently thrown around in the ‘noisy & badly recorded’ sphere do nothing for me, and indeed can easily seem almost offensively useless to the untrained ear. But the negatives, I feel, are more than outweighed by the positives.

Namely, to return to my initial point, by the vast amount of music that’s streaming my way every day that’s fun, that’s energetic, that’s positive, that makes me want to jump around and praise the heavens. More of it than I can really find the time to compose any worthwhile thought about to post for you here. And it’s not like a lot of these bands require much thought from me anyway…. they’re just doing what they do and it’s good fun and it makes me grin. Hence: posting quandary.

So I’m going to do about it is: three or four brief posts, each of them throwing out the names of five new bands in this general vein who get the thumbs up from me. Some of them you might have heard about, some of them not so much, it depends where you do your reading/listening I suppose. But all of them in their own weird way embody what I love about rock n’ roll.

Just don’t expect ‘em all to be the new Guided By Voices, for that kind of genius comes but once in a lifetime. Just imagine you’ve had a few beers and you’re watching ‘em play at a barbeque or in a garage or something and all will be well in the world for a few minutes. And if it turns out any of them actually are the new Guided By Voices, well.. BONUS!

Nodzzz we’ve already done of course, and Dum Dum Girls, and I’ve written tons about The Vivian Girls, not to mention Hotpants Romance, Cheap Time (damn, those guys are great) and Thee Oh Sees. They’re all still my faves – probably my tips for the brightest sparks of 4-track sunlight out there - but they’re increasingly looking like the surface of a very groovy, everlasting iceberg, so….. man the boats, people!

Labels: punk rock, rambling

Deathblog: Lux Interior 1948 - 2009

"For Immediate Release: February 4, 2009

Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, passed away this morning due to an existing heart condition at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California at 4:30 AM PST today. Lux has been an inspiration and influence to millions of artists and fans around the world. He and wife Poison Ivy’s contributions with The Cramps have had an immeasurable impact on modern music.

The Cramps emerged from the original New York punk scene of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, with a singular sound and iconography. Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.

The family requests that you respect their privacy during this difficult time."


WHY DO AWESOME PEOPLE KEEP DYING...?!?

It's such a drag I can't hardly stand it no more.

I never got to see The Cramps play.

*lurches off, snivelling, crashing into furniture, etc*

Howls speak louder than words. If for some reason you've never heard these, do yourself a favour:

The Cramps - Teenage Werewolf (outtake with false start/argument)

The Cramps - Garbageman

The Cramps - Sunglasses After Dark (demo)

The Cramps - Human Fly (live at CBGBs 1978)

The Cramps - Fever


Rock n' Roll in action:

Labels: deathblog, horror, punk rock, The Cramps

Deathblog: Ron Asheton 1948 - 2009

So I was determined to get that Top 30 out of the way before posting anything else, but during the meanwhilst, as it is apt to do, stuff happened.

In particular, it’s been a bad festive season for guitarists.

Ron Asheton. Need I say more? In the field of memorable and iconic christian name / surname combinations, ‘Ron Asheton’ is hardly up there with, say, ‘Mars Bonfire’ or ‘Templeton Parsley’, but nonetheless, for everyone out there who was lucky enough to be exposed to (and more than likely “transformed into the misshapen wreck you see before you today” by) the first two Stooges records at a formative age, it’s a name that’ll ring out as if I’d typed it in twenty foot high stone-wrought block capitals surrounded by exploding fireworks.

Ron Fucking Asheton. I learned of his death about the same time I was finishing off my #5 - #1 post.

Trying to think of much else to say is pretty futile. I’m sure there are already thousands of people around the internet saying stuff like “No Ron Asheton, no punk rock”, and so forth. And on one level that’s obviously a utterly witless thing to say – punk rock is as punk rock does; you could apply that to literally hundreds of people; witness Lester Bangs bit where he traced the ‘spirit of punk rock’ back person by person to St. Francis of Assisi or something. But at the same time, you can see exactly where they’re coming from – there’s a SINGULARITY, and monolithic year zero power to Asheton’s playing on those records, that defies any attempt at description, and if a daft generalisation gets the feeling across in a moment of several-steps-removed mourning, why not?

I knew the first time I heard ‘No Fun’, on a mixtape, walking ‘round some anonymous country road somewhere aged 16 or 17, that there was no possible way to express what this music did to me; I felt exactly the same way the last time I heard it, for the millionth time, probably in the background at some gig, waiting for a band to come on. Some great music you end up taking for granted after you’ve heard it X number of times; it becomes part of the canon, part of the background. That never happens to The Stooges. An A barre chord, a D barre chord – out of that he makes something that makes you feel like the only sane reaction is to explode into some kinda hummingbird-esque frenzy, followed by plunging your hands into your chest cavity and tearing yourself inside out. Talk about the ‘spirit of punk rock’.

And ‘TV Eye’ and ‘1970’ from a year later, are, like, ten times gnarlier. So gnarly it’s taken me till my mid-20s to even process ‘Funhouse’ to a satisfactory degree, despite regular and ecstatic plays. The second side of ‘Funhouse’ is ALWAYS too much; a vicious, damaged, intoxicating, unrepeatable living thing, like rock n’ roll’s nearest equivalent to those latter day Coltrane albums... if Coltrane had been a knuckleheaded, drug-hoovering, white suburban delinquent I suppose.

Of course, Iggy’s lyrics and implied physical presence are a vital part of making this music what it is too, but this isn’t really the place/time to talk about that. And, no matter how many interviews he gives talking about how he was the brains of the operation, the pecking order on those albums has always seemed the other way around to me, and who needs brains? It sounds more as if Iggy is being whipped up to career-best levels of performance and creativity by the pre-existent force of The Stooges music. Especially on ‘Funhouse’, where his whole being seems to become one more instrument, gasping for life in a purely exhilarating fashion between the lava-storm of Asheton’s guitar and Mackay’s sax.

And that’s that. Rather than say more words, I was tempted to suggest that everyone who owns a guitar and amplifier should pay tribute by, an a predetermined juncture, throwing open the windows and blasting the ‘No Fun’ riff as loud as is electrically possible, like some musical equivalent of the ‘mad as hell’ scene in 'Network'.

Thankfully though, some other people have come up with some fine words where I failed, to save the local police the embarrassment of having to drag me away for breach of the peace.

As is so often the case, Chris Summerlin is right fucking on in every respect, and I hope he doesn’t mind me stealing the picture he used for this post. I wouldn’t go quite so far as he does in condemnation of Iggy (I’ve got some love for the old bastard yet), but all his points are sound, and he runs down all the pertinent info you need to know.

This guy has some good stuff to say about his time roadying for Asheton and J. Mascis prior to the Stooges reunion too.

And man, do I ever now feel an idiot for not getting it together to ever witness said reunion. I mean, I know the album they did was a fucking disaster, but those shows they played must have ruled like nothing else. What else was I doing that was so important every time they played in London? They were even the saving grace headlining some utterly loathsome corporate festival on Clapham Common over the summer. To think – if somebody whispered to my teenage self that at some point in future IGGY & THE FUCKING STOOGES would play within walking distance of my house, and I DIDN’T GO... well I think I’d better watch my back lest some unlikely time travel paradox allows my teenage self to be lurking in a shadowy doorway with a sack full of doorknobs.

Someone else I’m cursing myself for not going to see when I had the opportunity is Davey Graham, who died before Christmas. I’d love to take the time to say some stuff about him, just as I’d love to proof-read this post properly and fill it with Mp3s and other nice things, but I’m posting from work and probably won’t get another chance to write/post for a little while, as I’m taking an uncharacteristic plane flight to Italy tomorrow morning to visit a friend.

I’m sure though that, having spent so much time mastering the ways of the guitar, carving new styles out of thin air and seamlessly blending music from all over the world, Davey would be pretty pissed off to find himself playing second fiddle in the obituary stakes to a guy who just liked to turn it up to 10 and play riffs that sometimes don’t move beyond one fret. Oh well – maybe I’ll write him a proper, if belated, Deathblog upon my return.

Labels: Davey Graham, deathblog, Iggy Pop, punk rock, Ron Asheton, The Stooges

I was out late the other night…

The next two posts are going to take the form of a kinda combined gig review / album retrospective sort of thing, written in tedious ‘what I did on my holidays’ style unedited blather, if that’s ok with you guys?

Part One:

PARTYLINE / WET DOG / KASMS
Catch, London, April 2008

So I was out A BIT late a couple of Saturdays ago, though nothing to shout about really, taking up residence in an awkward spot just behind one of ‘speaker on a pole’ PA system jobs just to the side of the stage in a hot, packed, dark room, listening to mangled, poorly mixed guitar and drum treble-heavy blare and watching weird, exciting looking humans cavort and shriek, and drinking overpriced alcohol way too fast, and…. actually quite enjoying the experience for once.

Now, I’m increasingly making it gospel these days that if you find yourself idly throwing the word ‘hipster’ into conversation with any frequency, you probably ARE one (must I link to that spot-on Cat & Girl comic again? - I fear I must), so with that in mind, I’m doing my best to eradicate the word from my vocabulary altogether, save perhaps for it’s original, noble use in describing Cab Calloway-esque pre-Beatnik jazz scenesters. But to grit my teeth and give it one more outing, let it be said that, in the parlance of our times, the first thing that’s noticeable on this particular evening about Catch, a new-ish venue just off Old Street, is that it’s pushing an almost supernaturally high hipster count. Don’t worry if you were there - I’m sure YOU weren’t one of them. I mean, these are OTHER people we’re talking about, right? Not nice, normal people like you or I. But… y’know what I mean.

So the downstairs bit is the kind of bar that’s too loud and crowded and awkwardly arranged to possibly be a fun place to be under any circumstance I should imagine, but is perpetually packed out anyway, cos…. well, I don’t fucking know, maybe it’s ‘the place to be’ or something for a certain set, and it often seems that trendy East Londoners seem to choose their hangouts of choice in deliberate opposition to the relative pleasantness of the environment. But anyway, I’m not here to review bars, so ON WITH IT. The band-watching bit is up a spiral staircase, and it’s a long, dark, narrow room - a poor place for presenting any kind of live music in most respects, but it puts me in mind of innumerable shitty, marginal gig venues of yore, and is thus almost appealing in a ‘look ma – I’m in an underground music hellhole’ kind of way, though the weird comfort factor would doubtless fade if we’d arrive a bit later and got stuck in the back, with a choice of fixing our eyes on some guy’s greasy hair, a distant light-fitting or a drunk tripping over the merch table, as some vague roar happens about a mile away. But we’re early enough (at bloody nine forty-five or something) to get a bolthole at the front, so no worries there.

We arrive just in time to see the two girl / two boy Kasms setting up, and a better band to fit the surroundings would be hard to imagine. Before they get going, my friend and I decide they look like the kind of band that would turn up in a Jaime Hernandez story in Love & Rockets. The two guys switch between guitar and drums, stomping around enthusiastically and making a GREAT ol’ riff-noise of the dissonant, clanking Death Valley ’69 variety, the bassist I can’t really see or hear from where I’m standing (sorry), and the singer…. oh, my lord, the singer.

She’s a skinny girl, though she looks like rockets would bounce off her no problem. Her shoes are incongruously dressy. Her dress is…uh.. pretty tight. She seems, like, half in the real-everyday-people world, like somebody you might randomly meet at work and get a crush on, but with one foot in mad, psychosexual rock star world, dragging herself further across the threshold for all she’s worth, like the night-haunted wraith that just ate Karen O for breakfast or something. Her performance is total Nick Cave in the Birthday Party dementia – utterly premeditated theatricality, but no less hair-raising for that. It’s kinda thrilling. Sixty seconds into any given song and she’s writhing on the ground, legs in the air, twisting the mic cable into ungodly knots as the feedback howls, and if the song has the tenacity to break two and a half minutes, she’ll be charging headfirst into the waists of audience members, grabbing drinks from unsuspecting hands, kicking her heels into the floor, snarling like a dying dragon. And in the breaks between songs, she’s staring at her feet half the time, quiet as a mouse.

She’s dynamite. ‘Gosh’, we mutter to each other as the set concludes and the DJ strikes up some L7, and ‘heavens above’, and ‘wow’, and ‘she’s quite something’ and ‘…’ and ‘wow’ again. Such lusty testimonials are probably not quite what you’ve come to expect from Stereo Sanctity, but it must be said: if a straw poll of we three sensitive fellas is anything to go by, the lady-fancying contingent in tonight’s audience will not be remembering this band for their chord progressions.

Are we hopeless suckers? You be the judge:



The only merch they have on sale is a jar of homemade mood rings. Ladies and gentlemen: Kasms.

After all that, Wet Dog can’t help but be just a little disappointing. I’ve been busy telling everyone how great they are for the best part of a year since I last saw ‘em: really cracking band, doing righteous stuff in a distinctly Raincoats-esque vein, but tonight it’s not quite happening. The guitarist seems to have gained an odd new axe that looks like a Fender neck nailed to a piece of debris from a building site, but they also seem to have gained a new set of material that’s more abstract than the stuff I remember hearing previously, relying on painstaking stoppy/starty dynamics and wobbly high-end riffs, dashed through breathlessly with no room for rockin’ out, vocals sadly reduced to a few repetitive, wordless group yelps. It’s still pretty good stuff all things considered – I still really love each musician’s brilliantly perfecto unschooled musical style, the drummer particularly, but… somehow it’s not as fun as it should be? – tonight, at least.

Here’s some of a set they played at The Spitz last August, so again, see what you reckon:



Partyline, on the other hand, are almost by definition more fun than the sum of their parts. It seems that perpetually awesome frontwoman Alison Wolfe abandoned any plans for a respectable post-riot grrl type musicianly career when she ditched the rest of Bratmobile (great, great underrated band – check out their ‘Ladies, Women and Girls’ on Lookout for some of the best feminist punk rock fun the ‘90s had to offer) in order to form this appropriately named good times troupe in 2003, but I mean that in the best possible way.

Alison’s particular approach to vocalisin’ – basically a series of stream of consciousness personal/political rants delivered machine gun style over whatever music happens to be passing – anchors the origins of both bands firmly to the same source, but the other Bratmobilers’ dedication to crafting tight, hooky surf-punk is long gone, replaced with some gloriously immature flailing hardcore racket from Angela Melkthesian (guitar) and Some Random Dude (drums). It’s like at a certain point they all ceased to give a fuck whether or not Sleater Kinney gave them props, got caned on some unholy combination of sugar, coffee and over the counter stimulants and learned to play along to the first Minor Threat demo, rejoicing in the thought of how awesome the world would have been if h/c kids hadn’t turned out to be such a bunch of macho grumps, then wrote a bunch of songs telling everyone they don’t like to fuck off, and took it to the people.

Partyline are a total blast on stage – the girls can scarcely go a minute without cracking each other up with absurdist banter, and there’s joggin’, jumpin’, feedback and mid-song catastrophes aplenty. Each song comprises a ninety second spoken digression attempting to explain the lyrics, followed by about seventy seconds of incomprehensible high energy thrashing, and it seems like they only manage to make their way through, like, six songs before calling it a night, but that’s all TOTALLY GREAT, y’know. Alison scarcely seems to notice when the rest of the band slope off to get some drinks, and sits in the corner of the stage as she carries on telling us all about what party she’s registered to vote for and how she’s getting on living in New York and stuff, until someone thinks to unplug the mic and she wanders off to find her buddies. Man, what a fun band, what a great gig – I’m really glad I got myself together and made it out for it.

This footage of them playing in Australia in 2006 is gloriously representative:

Labels: Kasms, live reviews, Partyline, punk rock, Wet Dog

Guitar Romantics: The Exploding Hearts

Ok, so they’re a pretty ubiquitous presence in certain strands of US punk culture. Ok, so I’ve had their sole LP ‘Guitar Romantic’ stuffed into my Mp3 player for a good while now, and have been aware of their work for far longer.

But I’d be lying if I tried to claim I haven’t been listening to The Exploding Hearts just about every damn day on the journey to or from work for the past month or so.

Every day it’s the same: struggle toward or away from the front door, rub my tired eyes, and contemplate sticking on some of the less familiar records I’ve stuck on the portable music box in order to give them more of a listen. And everyday, it’s another quick blast of “Sleeping Aides...” or “Modern Kicks” that wins out. Just a couple of tunes, I tell myself, just to get me going, then I’ll put something else on. Then I’ll proceed to listen to the whole album twice through over the course of the day. I think I could probably recite all of the lyrics by now, and whistle the solos. If I could whistle, which I can’t, thank christ. But I could probably do my best to imitate the bits of lingering feedback and ‘phew - we just finished the song’ noise at the end of each track instead. (Despite being as tight a band as you could hope to encounter whilst their songs were actually in progress, these guys sure knew the value of ploughing toward a clattering, collapsible, ad-libbed rock n’ roll ending, and I bless them for it daily.)

Anyway. ‘Guitar Romantic’. First issued by Dirtnap records in January 2003. I swear to god, it’s fucking perfect. It sounds EXACTLY like a record called “Guitar Romantic” by a band called “The Exploding Hearts” should sound. I guess the last song goes on maybe about a minute too long, but aside from that, I love every single thing about it.

The Exploding Hearts may have relied on a simple formula, one that SOMEONE was bound to make their own at some point, but man, what a formula it is, and never before or since has a band launched into it with the energy and guts and 100% hit rate that these guys did.

So, for the uninitiated, what are the ingredients we’re looking at here?

Well:

1. Classic, perfectly formed power-pop songs, tunes that could stand up to – and indeed beat the hell out of – just about anything on those Rhino Poptopia comps, topped with howled, heartfelt lyrics about girl trouble, and drugs, and schoolyard riots, and other such travails of being a punk kid, but, well, mostly girl trouble to be honest, and why not? Every one’s a winner.

Now, If there’s one problem with ‘power-pop’ as a genre, it’s that it’s often played by embittered old dudes going through the motions, but not so here, as we add;

2. Gallons of snotty, hormonal punk rock energy, coming straight from that exact same place as The Undertones, Circlejerks, Ramones, the first few Replacements records and early Green Day, where the puerile crashes headfirst into the sublime, where mad desperation hitches a ride on top of stoned suburban ennui, where every sound this band makes simultaneously cries out “FUCK YOU!” and “I LOVE YOU!” and *nothing* in-between.

3. A wild, musically accomplished band with energy levels through the roof who could, and did, absolutely play their asses off in pursuit of melodic rocking perfection.

4. A truly ridiculous ‘everything in the red’ production aesthetic, executed in the same spirit as Iggy’s remix of ‘Raw Power’. The first time I played ‘Guitar Romantic’ through my earphones, I thought there was something wrong with it – vocals all distorted and guitars clipping all over the place. Then I realised that it was simply more AWESOME than my poor equipment was accustomed to. Like, finally, someone made an album where the guitars are mixed at right level! Adam Cox’s humbucker powerchords get full spectrum dominance whilst Terry Six’s freaking *beautiful* overdriven Rickenbacker leads cleave in over the top even louder, like sickly candy from pop heaven. The vocals are cranked and compressed to shit in order to remain comprehensible over the racket, and sound all the better for it. And, miraculously, the rhythm section still comes through loud and clear too, sounding like they’re just thumping away harder than ever to stay on-message above all the distortion. THIS, I put it to you musicians and audiophile dudes, is the way a great rock n’ roll record should sound in the 21st century.

And that’s that I guess. I may be getting more reactionary in my musical tastes as I get older, but fuck it. Life as expressed through sound doesn’t get much better than this. To have been involved in the making of this music – even just making the tea (or handing out the airplane glue) – would I think justify a deeper sense of achievement than any foolhardy artistic ambitions the likes of you or I may strive day and night to fulfil.

There’s now another Exploding Hearts CD on the market too, thanks again to the folks at Dirtnap (also home to other fine power/pop/punk/garage outfits such as The Riff Randells and The Carbonas, so why not give ‘em a look), and I went out and bought it from Rough Trade the other week to help make up for my wanton freeloading of ‘Guitar Romantic’. Called ‘Shattered’, it collects the rest of the band’s recordings in a pleasantly no nonsense fashion, comprising eight non-LP songs taken from singles, session outtakes etc., and a few alternate (and on the whole less satisfactory) mixes of the album material.

Perhaps inevitably, the stuff on ‘Shattered’ isn’t quite so good as the motherlode of ‘Guitar Romantic’. The tunes occasionally veer a bit too far toward a polite power-pop-by-numbers blueprint, and lack the raucous feeling and overloaded production, but by anyone else’s standards it’s still absolutely top stuff, featuring some of the band’s best pure punk moments in the form of ‘(Making) Teenage Faces’ (“Someone shot the principal / straight through his head / school is out forever / and we’re glad that he’s dead!”), and a supremely snotty take on F.U.2’s uber-generic punk classic ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ (“it’s better than kissin’!”), whilst the self-explanatory ‘Walking Out On Love’ is a two minute blast of straight to tape perfection and ‘We Don’t Have To Worry Anymore’ is one of the group’s best compositions.

Those unfamiliar with The Exploding Hearts may have picked up on the fact that I’ve used the past tense pretty definitively a few times when discussing them in this post. That’s because on July 20th 2003, between some place and some other place on the way to a show, their tour van crashed. Pretty badly. The details don’t really matter, the point is: three quarters of the band – Adam Cox (guitar/vocals), Jeremy Gage (drums) and Matt Fitzgerald (bass) - never regained consciousness.

Pretty devastating and upsetting stuff, even five years later on the other side of the world.

But, crass though it may be to draw a conclusion like this from such an obvious tragedy, it must be said: for the world at large, a better legacy for a rock n’ roll band is hard to imagine. As one of rock’s greatest survivors ironically reminds us from time to time, rust never sleeps, and, barely out of high school, these guys had the look, the sound, the energy DOWN. About seventeen original songs immortalised on tape, every one a lightning bolt of emotion, confusion, noise and triumph, then a handful of now-legendary live shows, followed by a sudden, fiery demise. Beat that, punks.

You might be *slightly* cheered to know that surviving band member Terry Six has stayed true to the power-pop cause, and now fronts the thoroughly ‘70s-tastic Nice Boys. (And I kinda dig ‘em actually - they’ve got real great stuff going down on a pure retro bubblegum tip, but it’s all a bit too determinedly UN-PUNK for me to really love, y’know..?)

Anyway, It’s no wonder the 'Hearts have gained a hefty cult following in the states, with bands like The Busy Signals and Sleeping Aides & Razorblades taking their names from their songs (the latter have since renamed themselves The Nica-Teens – fairly sensibly, I’d venture to suggest) and certain sections of the internet are nigh-on overflowing with tribute videos, cover versions and the like. But, in the UK at least, The Exploding Hearts still none too well known, so hopefully I’m not just wasting time going over old ground with this post.

When trying to decide which two tunes from ‘Guitar Romantic’ to post for you, I might as well have pinned the song titles to the wall and thrown darts at them, such is the overall quality of the songs therein. In fact I might do that anyway, it sounds fun, but, if pushed, I think these are my two faves.

Download and play loud.

I’m A Pretender

Throwaway Style

And, thanks to the wonders of Youtube, you can also spend some quality time with one of the best rock n’ roll bands of the 21st century thus far, thanks to these two videos from one of their last shows, at the Bottom Of The Hill club in San Francisco. Fantastic stuff. I believe I achieved some sort of state of oneness with the universe somewhere between ‘I’m A Pretender’ and ‘Boulevard Trash’ in the first video.

Put ‘em on full-screen and play loud.

Part one (Modern Kicks / I’m A Pretender / Boulevard Trash):



Part Two (Busy Signals / Sleeping Aides & Razorblades):

Labels: power pop, punk rock, The Exploding Hearts, videos