I uploaded a dozen recordings to my youtube channel since my last Ghosts in The Machine update; linked them below and I’m jotting down a few thoughts on them here just to close the loop.

Various - Bubblegum Motherfucker CD series

I put up the first two volumes of this series, and will maybe continue with a few more in the future. I only dabble in bubblegum pop! But I can’t help but admire the focused and sustained zeal that fueled the creation of this 47(!!) volume behemoth, all allegedly compiled and released by a single fanatic. That obsessive, “John,” can be found in the comments of the Bubblegum Reviews blog [CLICK HERE] from Emily Bartlett Hines, who made an earnest attempt to review every track in the series (and in the process authored some of my favorite music writing). Atlas-like efforts all around.

Various - Punish or Be Damned #1 and #2 cassettes

These comp tapes were issued by the Tape Appeal label, featuring synth- and keyboard- forward punk tracks from the 70s to present. Within that thematic criteria we find all kinds of beloved classics (eg tracks from the NORMAL, SCREAMERS, that first keys-driven MISFITS 7”) as well as present day obscurities. Minimal synth/wave rogues, artpunks, industrial miscreants, postpunk misanthropes and other assorted critters are all here to party. If this at all seems appealing, I think you’ll find a new favorite sound or two in here. My big takeaway was SEWN LEATHER’s “Boots are for kikkkin” from volume 2. Somebody tell me more about this damn act, I can’t find a single goddamn thing about them!! Their/his manic auctioneer calls over a super distorted drum loop and 1 note guitar barely qualifies for this comp (are there keys on this?), and heck, barely even qualifies as MUSIC, and I could not love it more.

Various - Buffalo Bop - “Monster Bop” “Tough Dolls” “Rockabilly Choo Choo”

I’ve already talked about the Buffalo Bop label [CLICK HERE]. I added a few additional volumes, covering some of the topical preoccupations of the rockabilly genre that are of greater interest to me; that is, movie monsters, tough women, and trains.

Jesus and Mary Chain - Send Me Away: Early Demos LP

Beatnik Filmstars - Laid Back and English LP

Send Me Away is a bootleg collection of JAMC’s drum-machine/portastudio demos from 1983-4, and, to me, the batch of songs stands up on its own as a full-length listenable work, rather than a sketchbook of drafts or throwaways. Your level of agreement with me I imagine depends on your predilection for the Shit-Fi Stoned Out Brill Building Pop Jams Meet Eardum Piercing Screech aesthetics characterizing this period of the band. We get both the gentler and audience-antagonizing natures of the Reid brothers represented well through the expressiveness of saturated, high noise-floor cassette processing. I enjoy it as something that sounds utterly human, a counterweight to the artificial perfection in everything we now consume.

In Bristol a few years later, remnants of the mod-tinged C86ers THE GROOVE FARM in 1990 reconfigured into the more impulsive, anything-goes BEATNIK FILMSTARS. From afar, their noisy, hit and run approach to indiepop seemed to find kinship with BOYRACER, draw comparisons to their hyperproductive messthetic American indie rock cousins like SEBADOH and GBV, and hook the welcome ears of losers like me. Just about all of their wide-ranging discography can be found streaming on this platform and others, but oddly not Laid Back and English, their second LP, which I have put up for all to enjoy.

Various artists - Black Rock n’ Roll (Savage Kick vols 1-2 on CD)

Various artists - Shakin Fit CD

Various artists - Boogaloo Pow Wow 2xLP

The apex of the 60s Soul DJ night is probably behind us, as well as the fervor over crate digging for bonzer 45s, issuing bootleg LPs collecting those gems and other knock-on activities and industries. These three bootleg comps are additional personal favorites from the 90s-00s re-heat of 50s-60s R&B. Black Rock n’ Roll repackages tracks from the first two Savage Kick series LPs, and mines the rawer, bluesier side of R&B (think BUNKER HILL and SCREAMIN JOE NEAL, both of whom are compiled here); Shakin Fit feels more dancefloor to me and was a project of WFMU DJ Todd A. The Boogaloo Pow Wow 2xLP takes an entirely different approach, attempting to document that intersection of the R&B, Latin Soul, and Afro-Cuban sounds that freely intermixed in the clubs and dancehalls of New York’s ethnic enclaves.

Bill Moss and the Celestials - Doing My Job for Jesus LP

The June Brides - There Are Eight Million Stories LP

Wankys/Exithippies - Split LP

A couple random-not-random LPs. The BILL MOSS and the CELESTIALS record was a thrift store find that wormed its way into my life. I suppose that’s the whole point of the gospel endeavor: it’s an infectious vector for the Good News. While “Doing My Job for Jesus” isn’t one of the most notable recordings of the genre (or even one of the most notable for Bill Moss), I love listening to it. Some may be relieved that despite my enjoyment of black gospel, my lifelong spiritual positioning, something akin to agnostic ignorance or secular non-commitment, remains unshaken.

The JUNE BRIDES LP on the other hand is a classic of the indiepop genre, and is strangely somewhat gate-kept by the scene’s insiders. It has never seen reissue, though individual tracks have found their way onto comps. Given the enduring and widespread appeal of the jangly, strummy sounds and moods transmitted so well here, it was weird to not find this one already on the platform, so I stepped into the breach with the upload.

The UK’s WANKYS are a self-identified tribute act for obscure Japanese punx THE SWANKYS (talk about niche), while Japan’s EXITHIPPIES (who I’ve touched on before, CLICK HERE) reconcile their devotions to abusive noise, crust punk, and acid EDM in a confusing and provocative way. “You’re weird, I’m weird,” they said, “let’s corelease an LP with some really stupid cover art.” And so they did.

Sexy - Por Vida LP (2004)

I feel like this fantastic record is the apotheosis of…something. Early aughts Oakland, CA warehouse melodic punk bardsman-ry? The fellows in SEXY were hard to pin down in the best way. Yes, they seemed to approach life in that nihilistic, yet romantically drunken manner; yes, they fluidly moved through the punkest of crowds and played hard and loud; yet, their otherwise crashy songs, to me, hit with a scholarly attention to detail and pop craftsmanship. They were like an American SQUEEZE in crust patches. They were also just hard to catch generally. I could never figure out when/where/if they were playing—the band name was impossible to search for—and they were just as likely to jump on any local show or house party to play for 15 minutes using the prior band’s instruments. In fact, the first time I saw them, they had done just that with my band. I feel like people that get to know this record, without fail, develop a deep connection to it, and that strong but narrow appreciation led to two represses, once on CD by the punx/hippies at Plan-It-X, and then years later by Thrillhouse records. A better remembrance from someone closer to the situation can be found here (with a nice download link with all inserts/lyrics/covers): https://remoteoutposts.blogspot.com/2015/06/sexy-por-vida-lp-2004.html

New Bad Things - Freewheel! LP (1992)

It was a defining low in my professional life: I was a trainee in the clinical pain service for the surgical unit of a large research hospital. I had the pleasure of trying to figure out the anesthesia and post procedure pain control issues for floors full of “interesting” patients with decade-long addictions to Oxycontin getting literal bone-breaking hip and knee replacements. I was bankrupting the inpatient pharmacy and local CVS of the wildest shit (methadone, liquid Dilaudid and the like), and, speaking of shit, trying to induce poops for weeks-long impacted bowels. I was doing 5am morning rounds and 7pm tuck in rounds, my hospital pager popping off from minor and major emergencies throughout the day, 7 days a week. Meanwhile my boss was a complete asshole. He handed me his full prescription and order pads, every page (illegally) pre-signed, and menacingly informed me “You’re in charge of the clinic, I’m going to go golf, if you make a mistake I will kill you.” In the infrequent days he was actually there, in the pauses in his boasting about his material wealth (like I give a single fuck about cars and boats), I got a bumper share of his verbal (and in one case, physical - certainly enough for a lawsuit in these times) abuse. I was alternating between stress drinking extra-large diet cokes from the hospital cafe, probably as close as I ever was to slashing someone’s tires or accidentally-not-accidentally hip checking a superior walking by, and sinking into an automaton-like numbness, humming the NEW BAD THINGS’ perfect “Krankenhaus” to myself as a sole comfort, counting the days until the whole thing was over, wondering if the DEA was going to haul me off to jail.

In a recent blog post, Patrick Fleming wrote (Click here) about the secular ideal of music materializing from a rotating collective of people orbiting a living room or basement. Being in more of the “sitting in the basement by myself” camp of creative process, I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with that, but in terms of vibe and feel, the NEW BAD THINGS’ “Freewheel!” (1992) is where my mind goes first in relation to this type of group-effort setting. Listening to their banger “the I Suck,” I imagine a room full of overeducated, eccentric characters sitting around a dilapidated Portland house (not unlike the setting of Portland coinhabitants HAZEL’s “Dayglo” video) reading newspapers or chapbook poetry, playing chess, blowing kazoos, or yelling manifestos into a tape machine.

It has to be this kind of Anything Goes environment that can successfully evoke the wide range mapped by the ragged bubblegum of “Josh Has a Crush on a Femme from Reed” on one end, the somber “Goethe’s Letter to Vic Chesnutt” on the other, and incidental noise experiments in between. It seemed in the early/mid 90s, this band was the toast of the indie fanzines I was reading, and counted John Peel among their admirers (along with melodramatic Britpoppers HEFNER, who later beautifully rendered a version of “Goethe’s Letter….”).

I can’t say for certain that a village really birthed and raised “Freewheel!,” and something needs to be said about the artifice of spontaneity. Often, I think what sounds like a perfectly messy, thrown together recording, was precisely, premeditatively engineered to sound that way. More times than not, I suspect individuals still had to frustratingly sit by themselves in basements to do some heavy artistic planning and lifting.

That old supervisor of mine couldn’t do any lifting at all after ironically suffering a golf-related back injury, which then led to his own chronic pain problems. My eventual complaints to the university ombudsman I think joined a chorus of others’ and he was demoted. A few years later, he passed away, I speculate due to issues secondary to the back injury. No tears over here.

BLITZ - “Fatigue” (1983)

HOME FRONT - Watch It Die LP (2025)

I was aware of BLITZ as a band celebrated on the spiked leather jackets of charged UK82- worshipping punx, and on t-shirts under the suspenders of the modern skinheads I’d occasionally see at shows in the 90s and beyond. Oi! and the streetpunk style not really being my thing, I never gave the band a shot, until I somehow landed a copy of the synthpunk mix tape Punish or Be Damned Vol 2 which contained the track “Fatigue” from BLITZ’ fabulous 1983 New Age single. In marrying electric keys to their raucous sound, the tune excitingly caught the band part way through their provocative transformation to what was apparently derided as “Oi Division.” Their 2nd LP Second Empire Justice completed the metamorphosis to angular, spirited post-punk, to great effect to my ears, but of course their core fans were revolted (and their label was bankrupted) by this effort, and these tensions dissolved the band.

This is the fertile musical soil from which Edmonton, Alberta’s HOME FRONT seemed to germinate and spawn, where shouted, street level poetics and gang chants can counterintuitively mix with shiny 80s Synth Britannia, moody guitar textures and posi-core leaping and finger pointing. Yet beyond an effective exercise in genre bending and style mixing, HOME FRONT’s new LP Watch It Die is to me a beautiful, evocative collection of music. The album’s opener “Watch It Die” and closer, “Empire” feel to me like brute force, spiritual companions to (a personal all-timer) BILLY BRAGG’s “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward” in pulling to the fore the sublime out of our collective anticipation of dramatic, violent change. The songs in-between articulate personal struggles, painting one’s conflicts with the world with both broad and fine tipped brushes, yet without nihilism or cynicism. Both Speak and Spell era DEPECHE MODE and YOUTH OF TODAY’s Break Down the Walls welcomed their contemporary moments in their respective sounds, attitudes and themes, with an inclusiveness to their audiences that is awfully needed today, and you’ll hear all of this in HOME FRONT’s blistering aesthetic.

ECCA VANDAL - “Molly” (2025)

On the other side of the world comes a total earworm from eclectic solo artist and Melbourne, Australia resident ECCA VANDAL. In her narcotics tribute “Molly,” I hear a very pleasing digestion of abrasive 90s radio altrock (ELASTICA, HOLE, NIRVANA, VINES) which is altogether confusing as I don’t particularly like those bands! I’m also unsure how to feel about ECCA VANDAL supporting LIMP BIZKIT on a global tour; and I’m rarely one to comment on costuming or dance moves, but I find this video for “Molly” really great in both regards. Learning a lot about myself with this one! A thing I do often opine on is the gloriously raspy rock n’ roll throat, and ECCA VANDAL has got a great one, evoking the memory of hall-of-famer Kim Shattuck of THE MUFFS. I also obviously love guitars, and this track has a nice Guitar Center walls’ worth of them. “Molly” is packaged together with two other superb, loud rockers “Cruising to Self Soothe” and “Bleed But Never Die,” all with the artist’s strength in putting the listener inside what feels like her poetry of impulsions and reflexive, defiant thoughts. I could not be a more receptive audience for her roars and clapbacks. Talk your shit lady, tell me more, tell me everything!

THE LOVELIES - “Love Lack” (1995)

I was a big fan of the LOVELIES’ Love Lack 7” from 1995, released on Nancy Ostrander’s Cher Doll label out of Seattle. The band, broadcasting from the South of England, seemed to kind of re-write the trajectory of THE WEDDING PRESENT to take a different pre-Bizarro turn to a figuratively smaller, more ramshackle style, with remarkably Gedge-alike vocals and everything. And then I was left to wonder what happened as I never saw anything about the band again! Some rooting around youtube found me a cool music video for “Love Lack” and this article that gives some more historical context on the group :

https://oursoundscene.org/2024/09/20/the-lovelies/

MINOR THREAT - “Filler” (1981)

Writing about THE FIX recently sent me down the rabbit hole of revisiting early US hardcore. The MINOR THREAT discography cd was the first of this stuff to enter my sphere as a disgruntled preteen and there’s something still so exceptional about this material. To hear that ripping first charge of “Filler” and Ian’s accusatory “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUUUU” is to instantly appreciate the conversion of generations of young men–for better or worse–into maniacal, circle-pitting puritans. I’ve heard plenty of les pauls played straight into Marshall half stacks on stages and in records, and somehow none of them sound anywhere near the same area code as Lyle Preslar’s signature chainsaw on these first MT tracks. Another stray observation - I always assumed drummer Jeff Nelson was playing a straight ahead, alternating single and double kick stroke beat, but in now close evaluation, it sounds like it may be a fast D-beat in some of these songs?!

WILLIAM ALEXANDER - “You Can Take it” (2016)

I met Will ages ago during his brief tenure as touring guitar muscle for SPENCEYDUDE, never imagining I’d be trading his bubblegum Ramones-y power chordage there for the transfixing, vibey textures of his solo work years later.

I think my life can be charted by cycles of forcing myself out there to actively interact with humanity and then retreating into prolonged solitude. One current regret from the great Drop Out of the Middle-Aughts and Twenty-teens, is missing out on following THE POISON CONTROL CENTER of Ames, Iowa, more closely.

Catching these artists at the Athens Popfest in 2004 was one of those revelatory moments that music fanatics crave and are constantly chasing: a band you’ve never heard of, from an unexpected place, simply exploding. This configuration of otherwise unassuming young men and woman, were a bucking bronco throwing off a bounty of hooks, melody, and KINKS-ian and Maximum R&B ideas with a level of abandon and physicality I have rarely seen outside of hardcore punk. One minute, delicate intertwining harmonies; the next, anthemic guitar histrionics; the next, band members’ bodies getting hoisted over shoulders and thrown across the stage. You just wanted to drape these sweaty people with American flags at the end, for completely delivering on the promise of rock and roll.

I bought everything on their merch table, and in currently evaluating those several home-made CDRs (each complete with one-off Sharpie art) and their extensive official discography covering the next 10 or so years, to say that the PCC were prodigious songwriters seems to be putting it mildly. It’s a little tough to put numbers to it, but among the dozen digital releases on their bandcamp page and likely innumerable comps, one-offs, CDRs and demos, we’re well into the triple digits for track output, with all well-formed pop songs. One is reminded of their Midwest elders GUIDED BY VOICES, in the long-throw, multi-year journey of tirelessly, habitually firing new, brilliant love missives into the sky every damn day with the admirable, but desperate conviction that maybe somebody might find or care about them.

If I could highlight two releases that have really caught my ear: 2011’s full length Stranger Ballet has so much going on compositionally and lyrically, hits so many resonant emotional/narrative notes, is so carefully crafted, draws in so many sounds, and goes by so fast I can’t help but keep running it back. From what I can tell, this was their final (and perhaps definitive) statement. As the band tells it, the record was pounded into shape in the crucible of a 200-show US tour (holy shit) that included support for PAVEMENT and other like-minded, indie rock leading lights.

At the other end is 1999’s “a nice old-fashioned romance with love lyrics and everything” CDR. This piece catches the team as precocious teenagers casually composing a 25-track rock musical. Despite being self-described as unfinished, it is entirely listenable, and its broad eclecticism sketches out the wide berth of sounds, styles and themes that would be trafficked over the band’s career.

A few random notes:

I really miss this t-shirt. A vengeful cat had so soaked it in piss that it was rendered completely unwearable.

I remember members Patrick (guitar, vox) and Devin (guitar) telling me they were such devoted, longtime AISLERS SET fans that they braved a multihour drive through a Midwest blizzard and endured a near-death car rollover just to hit one of that band’s rare tour dates. These guys had just melted faces and swung their guitars around at each other like baseball bats. Clearly this was the band for me! Devin was also suddenly the most popular person at the fest when it was discovered he was a manager at a Krispy Kreme location.

Buffalo Bop

Early Simon and Garfunkel 1957-1962 (1993)

Various Artists (vol 152): Choo Choo Bop (2001)

Anybody with a passing interest in generally post-war Americana reissues, in the realms of folk, country, blues, rockabilly, and R&B has probably encountered the formidable Bear Family catalog. This fanatical German umbrella of labels is truly something to behold. The exhaustive 40 (!!) volume CD series of Hank Snow’s complete recordings and 16 CD box set of local Washington DC R&B 1940-1960, were typical, rather than exceptional, examples of their product. In the era when physical media was king, this catalog drained checking and pension accounts worldwide and was a not-insignificant contributor to Eurozone GDP.

The Buffalo Bop/Deejay branch of Bear Family compiled rockabilly, country, early rock and doowop sides into thematic CD/LP volumes. I’d love to know how these obsessives sourced their bottomless supply of tracks as they seemed to eventually stop at a healthy 178 volumes (and likely not from lack of material). Choo Choo Bop is interestingly one of at least 3 volumes of songs fully devoted to the subject of trains, which is neat as one typically associates rock n’ roll with other wheeled transportation modalities (cars, motorcycles, and for the hardcore punx - skateboards). We get obvious derivatives of “Mystery Train” and “Folsom Prison Blues” (and JOHNNY CASH himself makes a few appearances here with some early Sun sides), but there’s plenty more exciting evidence on how the sounds, procedures, and contemplative nature of train ridership inspired the pens of hundreds of rock and country unknowns.

The Early Simon and Garfunkel comp is notable as Buffalo Bop’s first release. Included are a little over 2 dozen cuts penned and performed by the duo as teens under pseudonyms, working in/out of Manhattan’s Brill Building teen pop sound machine. Here we get Paul Simon as "Jerry Landis" and Art Garfunkel as "Tommy Graph" (it was reasoned their real names were “too ethnic” for mainstream America) keeping it light/fun with their best Everly impersonations. The xenophobic dimensions of this would be laughable if they were not also grimly poignant in light of today’s social climate.

Various - It Was I Who Rode In To That Shore (2012) Hawaiian Music of the 1920s-1970s

I seem to remember this compilation being reviewed in a fanzine or two, and thus suspect (maybe?) this was not just an online project, collected by Michael Klausman, former buyer for NYC’s Other Music. In his words:

“This mix is the result of having casually been collecting Hawaiian albums in the mainland United States for the last few years, as many used record shops still have a bin devoted to Hawaiian records. These sections are usually shunted aside to the dimmer corners of these stores and look rather forlorn, filled as they are with the vestigial remains of countless half-forgotten vacations. While I’d long been familiar with 1920’s and ’30’s pioneers such as Sol Hoopii, Jules Ah See, and Kalama’s Quartet, it was in these bins that I discovered the heroes of Hawaii’s Second Cultural Renaissance of the late 1960’s and ’70’s.

Apart from a couple of earlier cuts, this is my somewhat idiosyncratic take on that time period, when artists often sang in their native language and addressed local concerns, and mainland settlers drank from the wellspring of rediscovered folkways. For the most part I’ve chosen to focus on the more languid aspects of this music, and have attempted to steer away from the tourist zones for the weirder and more alien climates of these beautiful islands.“

Contemporary popular Hawaiian island music has come to mean something totally different than the sounds represented here, much of which was marketed in 20th century Mainland bins as exotic kitsch, flattening the complex culture and past and present struggles of the Hawaiian islands and its residents. Yet regardless of your understanding of the region’s history, one cannot deny the sheer soul and vibe transmitting from these selections, along with the inviting sounds of the regional signature slack key and lap steel guitar mastery.

THE FIX - Spot Demo Cassette (1981)

There’s a fun clip from a documentary on UK hardcore punk and grindcore, where I think a member of THE STUPIDS laments on how bands that sounded totally ferocious on grainy 2nd or 3rd generation cassette dubs suddenly sounded limp on an official clean vinyl release. There’s a bigger treatise to be written on compression, harmonic distortion and psychoacoustics as applied to extreme music. In today’s music tech marketplace there’s an abundance of tape and analog distortion simulation plugins, and there’s even a corner of pricey boutique guitar pedal land that intentionally replicates the reedy preamp of a Tascam four track as a desirable effect. The shitty equipment limitations of the past are the aspirational sounds of today!

If all you knew of Lansing, MI’s THE FIX were the sounds off their 1981 Vengeance 7” (a record that continues to set and exceed collector price benchmarks), I don’t know that you’d GOAT them the way USHC oldheads do. “No Idols” off the Process of Elimination comp 7” and the Jan’s Rooms EP were more unhinged and powerful statements (esp the former) to these ears. But to me none of these recordings touch this bootlegged cassette of pre-Jan’s Rooms demos that was passed around after THE FIX spent a few nights with SST engineer/guru SPOT.

From a 2009 MRR Interview with FIX singer Steve Miller:

We knew Spot because Black Flag came through Lansing and stayed at our house. So, we talked to him, and he was cool enough. Yeah, at that time we had to negotiate something. I don’t remember doing it. One of us had negotiated. He said, “Listen, we are going to be in L.A. in July (this was said in March) and are you going to be there?” He said, yeah, and my guy from the Fix asked if we could do a session. It was a cheap rate. I can’t remember what it was, but it was nothing. We ended up in L.A., doing it at Music Lab on Hyperion Ave. (in Hollywood). They were doing some pretty big sessions during the day, but he had this place at night. We said, “We’ll come in whenever.” I think we came in there at midnight. We scammed a place to stay with some girls in a nice area, so we’d stay there all day then go in and record two nights. We did it all live since we were so well rehearsed by then. There were no mistakes. I might have done a couple guitar tracks. Spot was so dead-on. He knew everything that needed to be done. We were blown away by it. You listen to it now and obviously there are all kinds of problems, but back then, we just wanted a big blast of noise. If we could have deconstructed it anymore, we probably would have!

This digital rip of the tape is grainy, stretched in moments and despite these and other undesirable audio artifacts, it SLAYS with the same freight train-like, throaty power of the best of Dez-era Flag. Material to this discussion: subsequent attempts to remaster and re-release this material have resulted in significant power LOSS! Do an A/B with the official releases and see what I mean.

Hi all - back with some fresh youtube uploads:

Exit Hippies - self titled 7” (2003)

Sendai, Japan’s EXIT HIPPIES are bearers of the type of full-commitment and jarring eclecticism exhibited by many of their countrymen. They are dyed-in-wool, noise-not-music crust punks, descending from the ear-splitting, hostile sounds and ideas of their studded-jacket tribal elders like CONFUSE and GLOOM, yet they also seem to love the aesthetics of acid house and rave music (!?). I think one can understand the group as a continuing manifestation of that notorious 1992 Brit Awards show, where dance-pop cynics the KLF, instead of performing one of their hits on stage as scheduled, instead brought out grindcore crusters EXTREME NOISE TERROR to play the “hit” and fired machine guns (loaded with blanks) into the audience. Indeed, the first track of this 7” samples the KLF’s “Justified Ancients of Mu Mu” chant. The balance of the record (all 4 minutes of it) then consists of chaotic shit-fi outbursts good for serious teeth-gnashing and punching holes in drywall. In later recordings, EXIT HIPPIES continued to baffle consumers with sound collages, straight-up electronic dance music and other explorations.

Blue Mitchell - Collision in Black LP (1969)

In the file sharing boom years ago, I somehow (in piecemeal fashion and in small batches) acquired vinyl rips of nearly the entire Blue Note discography. Mind you, I am not a hardcore fan or collector, and have not even listened to most of it! Then came the streaming era which made that whole misadventure essentially worthless. The jazz adherents of the world seem to have uploaded nearly everything to youtube. However I do notice a deficit here and there, and maybe I’ll do the systematic survey at some point, but I did want to hear this particular record and it was strangely not on any major platform. The serious fanatics probably thumb their nose at this release - it’s one of the last of the catalog, and it hybridized Mitchell’s bebop horn styles with accessible soul and funk grooves authored by collaborator Monk Higgins. I see some purist critics ascribing a collapse in general Blue Note integrity to this record, which is being a little dramatic, guys. “Collision in Black” I don’t think was ever reissued to CD and was even left off of the Blue Mitchell “Complete Blue Note Sessions” box set. To the extent there is a Mod Jazz genre, this is it in my mind. It’s a compelling listen - chilled, catchy and sophisticated in vibe without rolling down to sleepy elevator music. Some listeners out there surfing the algorithm must agree, as this upload got a bunch of views really quickly. By the way, I’m taking requests - let me know in the comments if there’s a Blue Note release you’d like to see that’s not up yet.

Various Artists - Banjo Pickin’ Girl LP (1978)

Some of these tracks are up on youtube individually and comped elsewhere, but I really like this Rounder Records collection as a whole, which chronicles several female folk and country performers that managed to navigate the treachery of the 1920s and 1930s well enough to find their way onto wax. Scans of the 16 page booklet that came with the album can be found here:

https://www.45cat.com/vinyl/album/1029

Despite being music nearly a century old at this point these sides sound incredibly alive and fresh to me, hiss, crackle and all.

I am uploading records to YouTube with the following general characteristics

• They are awesome and I want the convenience of listening to them outside of the home

• They are not already up on there or on any other streaming platform

• They are long out of print and/or unlikely to be reissued

I aspire to the discipline of more frequent/periodic lighter posting (still punctuated with infrequent, more in-depth material). Maybe “Record of the Day” (or even Record of the EveryOtherDay or ThreeTimesAWeek) is setting expectations too high, but something like that is the goal. I’ll be adding to my YouTube channel on a rolling basis, before I get my thoughts together on the sounds on Substack, so subscribe there if you want the fresh tuneage (CLICK HERE FOR MY CHANNEL)

I imagine I’ll run into some copyright or IP issues but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I am not monetized here nor there, and am the smallest fry on the planet so I don’t think anybody will care but I’m also not trying to be a jerk and if requested (esp by artists) I will take stuff down.

All right, enough preamble, let’s go!

Slim and the Supreme Angels - Why Was I Born LP (Nashboro 1977)

I along with many other punks and degenerates got interested in Black Gospel sounds due to the activities of the frequently brilliant, but also often frustratingly line-overstepping OBLIVIANS. Their “Play 9 Songs with Mr. Quintron” release of raw and reverent gospel covers was an example of their heights; this was interestingly also such a change in tone that it led to internal band dissension and the group’s breakup. I don’t count myself as a spiritual person in the least, but I can get down with the transcendence of musical experience, and the visceral feelings of soul stirrage, need for redemption, and desperation in trying to find one’s way in the world coming off this LP from SLIM AND THE SUPREME ANGELS are universal and strongly resonant. The history of the group spans the 1950s to present day, and the literature on the genre overall is formidably vast and unfamiliar to me; as a very uninvolved tourist I am completely unqualified to opine on any of it! I keep coming back to this record though, and wonder why it has not captured more ears. Give it a shot and see if it grabs you in the same way.

Various Artists - Groovy Sounds Unlimited and Mr. Fine Wine Present VITAL ORGANS LP (1999)

The late 90s-early 00s saw a flood of bootleg compilations of 60s funk material - the UK DJ Keb Darge-defined “Deep Funk,” aka the filler and discards from his ilk’s US crate digging safaris for Northern Soul 45 gems. It’s funny to me that at some point that scene decided, oh wait, this shit is amazing, and that aligned nicely with the much larger digging/sampling endeavors already well underway in the US and elsewhere to juice the market for long-lost 45s.

Though the narrow conceit of this compilation is instrumental soul and funk with the organ as a foreground instrument only, I think Vital Organs is my #1 overall personal favorite of the funk reissue and bootleg comps. It’s killer from start to finish, no skips, expertly mixed/mastered, and some of these songs are just absolutely filthy with stink-face groove and deep in-the-pocket play (going so deep in the bag there must be fries at the bottom). As I understand it, this particular mix was compiled by Matt Weingarten (Mr. Fine Wine), massive collector and WFMU DJ.

Gridlink - Amber Gray Demos (2007?)

The grindcore brilliance of DISCORDANCE AXIS is appreciated by many, and fans could not have been more excited for throatist Jon Chang’s next project, GRIDLINK, with NOISEAR’s octopus drummer Bryan Fajardo and steel string attack man Takafumi Matsubara from Japanese deathgrinders MORTALIZED. These demos got leaked well in advance of their 2008 debut Amber Gray, and I was transfixed on these tracks. The intensity and atonality were mixed with melodic thrash elements for a killer sound and feel. The official release was amazing, but I also feel that something humanizing was weirdly lost when they took out stuff like the click track starts, and I also think that the demos can be appreciated as a separate entity, with a naturalistic production quality that actually ties back to the Scott Burns-produced death and grind classics of the 80s/90s.

I’m lacking all context on these scans from an old hard drive, of what appears to be an OPERATION IVY tour diary. I’ve deduced it’s from a spring 1988 tour and saw vague reference online to a tour journal written by David Hayes. I am certain at least one of you punk rockers can give us the 411. The file names are all suffixed with “ebay” so maybe this was auctioned and sold at some point. Among the details of interest to me:

• OPIV apparently played a big show with the reunited ZERO BOYS and SLOPPY SECONDS, minutes from my childhood home (but as a goofy grade schooler, zero chance I would have known about it).

• Playing with GWAR one night and then FUGAZI two nights later (and roasting them for being SO EMO, in 1988)

• The hazards and daily grind of (and humor needed to survive) a punk tour are bleeding off the pages - white power dudes, filthy spaces, fisticuffs, cops, strange bills and people, infrequent relief and warmth.

Here’s a second limp attempt at becoming an extremely minor league content creator. I was really fond of INCITE! fanzine, and talk about it for a few minutes. Already noticed an error: Dean of Arts and Humanities, not Dean of Arts and Sciences (facepalm).

Tim Alborn archived every issue with commentary HERE

London Review of Books blog post on INCITE over HERE

As threatened, I go way out of my lane and take a phone video talking about comics

We’re about 2 years into this substack, unbelievably. As AI and automation rapidly assimilate and infect every region of creative pursuit, I think it’s the really marginal, idiosyncratic, and nuanced idioms and endeavors that will be the final holdouts. Streaming platforms can conjure up a Borg armada’s worth of imaginary artists and soundalike tracks to pollute playlists and deprive working musicians of their fractional penny royalties; yet economic issues aside one could argue that recorded music always did have an element of artificiality. Try as you might to simulate the excitement of seeing an artist perform right in front of you (and one can contemplate if that is the actual point anymore, as the aesthetics of audio recording seem to have gotten so dominant and entrenched in consumers’ perceptions and expectations, that many live artists are now preoccupied with replicating the recorded studio sound in a live setting, instead of the other way around) and the limitations of recorded and played-back media are exposed. How does one simulate the thrill of happening upon the BLAST ROCKS!! bashing away in the alley behind the Berkeley Kinko’s?

In another year there will probably be more than enough material in this Stack to train a chatbot in my voice, but I struggle to think of what useful purpose that could serve. Most of what I write about is way, way below-deck musical happenings that have all but been wiped from the wider internet. By the time you came up with all of the prompts to have the bot describe some fabricated, detailed memory of an invented band and associated yarns, you will have basically written the article yourself, for zero reward! For my part, my writing style is also entirely imitative (which is being generous, these people are way cooler than me) of a few 90s fanzines: Jeff Smith’s FEMINIST BASEBALL, Jay Hinman’s SUPERDOPE (and recent DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE), Tim Alborn’s INCITE!, and Leslie Gaffney’s POPWATCH stand out. I was a kid devouring these magazines, and it’s hard to overstate how much these people shaped my tastes, pursuits, and perhaps outlook on life. Stay tuned for my upcoming video series, “Video on Print,” where, instead of writing about audio, I video-review a bunch of paper matter. I keep falsely promising more wacky content, but this feels like it’s actually happening.

It feels like I breached some ethical code by writing about my own recordings in recent posts, and I was, comically, very hesitant to do it. I’m not sure who I am afraid of disappointing. In these instances it helps to consider that nobody cares and nothing matters! Far more consequential norms (and many would say, our humanity) are being disgustingly transgressed by the worst, most powerful people every damn day it seems. And it was a fruitful exercise, in that I came to realize: I would have loved to be written about at the time, and maybe a carefully articulated review in some fanzine is all I ever wanted? I think about the creation of music as an effort in connection–-an audience-seeking behavior-–and to be received and understood by a conscientious listener might be all that anyone really wants.

Professional rock critics and others that regularly review records get rightfully slagged. However, I get the tendency to become unnecessarily mean-spirited, nihilistic, overly self-important and curmudgeonly on the one hand–-and disingenuously complimentary on the other–-when put in that position. I obviously love and appreciate music but the task of having to assiduously evaluate dozens of records one would otherwise be indifferent about just seems kind of horrible. I tried to run a college radio show one summer and I basically did not like music at all for several months afterward. I think great music writing does have the potential to be of great value, approaching the gratification of the musical art itself. I mean, I love the TIGHT BROS FROM WAY BACK WHEN’s first LP, but it was also a hoot reading Julian Cope raving about it for 3000 words (THAT GUY GETS IT!!). I like, and think we need, articulate people writing interesting things about interesting art.

Here are the top 5 posts thus far, in order by number of views:

I joined the Boston-based pop group JUMPROPE in 1999 as a fill-in for departing guitarist Noelle Boc, and stuck around for about a year. My first experience in a real band! I had played a single house party in Ithaca prior to that with a thrown-together version of the CLARENDON HILLS from before I even recorded the first tape (incidentally also on that bill, local punk heroes IFARM and New Jersey’s LIFETIME), but that was the extent of me playing rock music, in front of an audience. I don't remember how I found out about the JUMPROPE vacancy. It was probably associated with the unhealthy amount of time I was spending in a chat site associated with their label, Twee Kitten (operating out of Walnut Creek, CA). Reaching out to see if I could tag along was about as nerve racking and pulse-pounding as professing your feelings to a secret crush; and this said to me, intuitively, that it was the right thing to do. Successfully hustling to get a job and an apartment in what was to me a strange new city, had emboldened me to make new connections and put myself in awkward situations. I thought nothing of, say, jumping on a Greyhound to Buffalo or Toronto to wander around and grab lunch with internet strangers I had only ever traded fanzines with. I had always aspired to be in a gigging rock group, and in weeks, I was up on stage, badly messing up backing vocals for the FREE DESIGN's "Kites are Fun." I am grateful to the band for allowing me in and tolerating my inadequacies. Everyone was several years older than me and far more skilled as musicians. Noelle’s brother Ad (guitar) and Tom (drums) had knocked around the 80s-90s Boston underground doing (to my ears) really cool HUSKER DU adjacent power pop as MIRANDA WARNING, while Cindy (bass, vocals) was classically trained and a prolific songwriter. I gained an appreciation of Bossa Nova and obscure jazz chords, and developed incrementally increased comfort playing on a stage and in a studio. I'm on some of the songs on this comp "Holiday in Brazil" that came out in 2001, shortly after I had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, on the Mushroom Pillow label out of Spain. “Interstellar Secrets From the Cellar” was my favorite of the group’s songs, it was a blast to play and I think captures their overall vibe (my mind had framed it as HEAVENLY playing BRASIL ‘66) well, and speaking of which, I am really fond of the vibes solo part on the recording.

A very nerdy aside: my live guitar setup for this band was unnecessarily complicated and a makeshift pain in the ass, but for clean stuff I don’t think I ever got a better sound. I had a 90s Epiphone semihollow f-hole guitar, that I played through the neck pickup, into a tremolo pedal, then the preamp of a tiny GK 250ML combo amp, then into a monster 1970s Traynor YBA-1 Bassmaster head and a tweed Carvin 4x10 cabinet. I won the Traynor in an online raffle. It had been heavily modded, with the side effect of the volume knobs having no middle ground between silence and deafening overdrive, and the tone controls basically doing nothing. The GK didn’t sound great on its own, but feeding the Traynor, it became like an effective volume knob and brightener/enhancer, and when everything was dialed in I felt like Megawatt Kenny Burrell - loud, clean, yet mellow and expressive, in a way that was really different from the canonical Fender Twin type sounds that were really popular. Years later I would have restored the original Traynor circuit, or wired up some other more elegant solution, but that’s where I was in my journey with musical electronics. Here’s some footage from what I think was my last show with the band:

While I spent most of my leisure time in activities with this twee associated act, I was still chasing down ignorant garage punk, grindcore and a bunch of other disparate niche music. Two things I enjoyed immensely at the time:

Massachusetts emo-core intensivists HASSAN I SABBAH

And Japan’s TEENGENERATE. Their tune “Dressed in Black” is my write-in ballot for best punk rock song of all time.

Blanche Devereaux - KALX Live 2002

There were many well-distributed musical crosscurrents that by 2000 had well prepared the indie rocker's ears to receive a wide breadth of lo-to-no-fi amateurish listening material. For me that was Shrimper stuff like JOHN DARNIELLE's boombox folk, DANIEL JOHNSTON, THE GORIES, and the most primitive sounds coming out of Olympia, WA and their GRRL- and pop-progeny nationwide. In 2002 The C.Hills were on a random weekday line up at the Stork Club when we first met with Oakland's BLANCHE DEVEREAUX, and after they finished their opening salvo (the gloriously junky and anthemic "We're Gonna Rock Til We Fucking Die"), I remember the look of mutual recognition with Pepito--we both just KNEW this was it. We rushed to their merch table, instantly purchased and donned two of their shirts (blue Sharpie art on thrifted T's, which absolutely did not survive a single wash) and then stood pressed to the stage like fucking dorks. Were there even 10 people in the room, bands included?

There's a mistaken framework many music fans have that assumes all performers can, and should want to, scale up to larger and larger venues and stages. I do not begrudge anybody their careers or leaps in fortune. However, that system of goals and incentives is hard to square with my experiences as part of an audience - where the most memorable, magical stuff seemed to happen in some tiny place with transient musicians no one would hear from again - and as band member - where the few times I played some gigantic capacity venue, it felt really alien and was never enjoyable. Did BD play Slim’s or the Great American Music Hall? My guess is no, but if they did I’m sure it was good grist for the (probably farcical) memory mill. I caught them several times at house parties, a library, and tiny bars, and you really had to be there, face-close to the band, with them asking you directly if everything is sounding ok.

BD in one sense sounded like people that had picked up instruments for the first time, weeks ago (which might have actually been true?). But they also had ears trained enough to ply the most rudimentary instrument ability and equipment into catchy words, hooks and fun. They wrapped this all in a totally agreeable guiding philosophy (FUN AND DUMB) and just had this singular, Fonzi-like, chilled-out, unearned confidence about themselves and what they were doing that was enviable. It really straddled that line where one wonders whether this was all a put-on, and to complicate matters further, under cover all three band members were savants in other ways. Amy Blaustein (guitar, vocals) had other writing and artistic pursuits and for example, showed up later on guitar for HUNX AND HIS PUNX. Joe Haener (tambourine, vocals) was an excellent drummer and in tons of other notable groups, like BATTLESHIP, the GRIS GRIS, and in the touring unit of the DODOS (one of those tiny details we all love - Meric Long might have been in the studio and name checked in the “Dead Air” interlude). Dana Wilcox (drums) was a Tetris champion. And I don’t mean that she was just skilled at Tetris and BD wrote a song about beating some guy on the internet (“Jake Wade”); she is the first woman to achieve a maxout (the max score of 999,999 on the NES), is decorated in international competition and is featured in the Tetris documentary “Ecstasy of Order.”

I don’t know that BD ever released anything official, but I treasure this KALX live recording of them, and revisit it often. There are choruses and song parts in BD material that are nefariously both simple and totally memorable. I love the vocal interplay that seemed to find root in doo-wop, commercial jingles and playground rhymes and games. With everything so stripped down, some of these songs feel like a manual on how to construct a rock song, with encouraging footnotes in the margin that read “with taste, some good ideas and basic tools, you can do this too!” I think these recordings capture the simple and timeless joy and gusto of plugging in and making a synchronized racket with your friends. The song “Jesus Christ” in particular really left a lasting impression with me. Live, Joe was unmic’ed, and his howling still really cut through. According to the band, it’s based on a TV commercial from the Mormon church that all of us were blitzed with during afternoon cartoon time in the ‘80s. ELBERTRON covered this song, and it may be a main highlight for that band too.

The Anchors - The Many Moods of Cartoon Elephants CDR (2000)

I saw these San Diegans touring with CASIOTONE FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE, and really enjoyed their ebullient American strum and jangle, that got me thinking of BIG STAR, VU and Dylan. I imagine principal songwriter Anthony Lukens both enjoyed these basics but also the literary sentimentality of Tigermilk and the indulgence of a nasty, swaggering rock song like their Stonesy “That Sounds Alright.” The recording glues these elements with a Billy Childish-like engineering ethos of trebly rough edges and megaphone vocals that really hits the sweet spot for me. I listened to the shit out of this for weeks! As I’m reading now, Lukens moved on to form the DONKEYS (of greater renown and longevity).

RYLI is remarkably 3 for 3 on these song drops and I strongly encourage everyone to savor these successes. Home team fans can get unappreciative, inured and/or cynical in the face of consistent winning. I urge you to consider that the RYLI story is just getting started - they have only existed for a little over 1 year! - with a superlative 7” single out in the world, and this preview to a 10-song LP that’s approaching like a rising, glittering tsunami now within eye- and earshot from SF’s Ocean Beach.

I would also like the international Indiepop Consortium to opine on, at minimum, whether RYLI is America’s best currently-operating band. In backing up some old stuff, I rediscovered the bootleg “One Too Twee” comp, an 80-song, 3-CD survey of the rough pop exemplars in the decades from “Anorak City” forward. Nobody would blink if a RYLI track snuck in there, and honestly, I would rather be listening to the sparkly, sentimental pound of “Medicine Speed” than the bulk of that comp. Plop them into Bristol or Glasgow in the late 80s, Northern California or a New England liberal arts college in the early 90s, and various pretentious Sads would be losing their goddamn minds. The organ! The hooks! The lush production!

My TENS of readers will rightfully note my bias, as the world’s premier accidental archivist of musical ephemera related to Yea-ming Chen. Exhibit A:

Exhibit B: The world forgets that the Bay’s beloved export MATES of STATE covered DREAMDATE. I remember bro!!

Several of the totems of this scene were wildly short-lived; GO SAILOR and TIGER TRAP were each only around for about a year. Who knows what could have transpired had we all appreciated them as much as we do now, in the moment? Call to action:

I was looking for some files to back up from a spindle of CDRs and an ancient platter hard drive, and found a lot of unrelated fun stuff. Come splash around with me in the nostalgia puddle!

THE JACK LONDON SQUARES demo CDR (2005):

The JLS was around for maybe a year? This was me (drums), Aaron Burnham (guitar) and Ryan Miyashiro (bass). Hellen Jo did the growly vocals on the first song. Maybe the concept was too all over-the-place for any durability. We mixed Aaron’s power pop numbers, with “funny” novelty garage rock stuff (like constantly name checking each other - moderately silly now in a surfacey way, but also really funny, in a meta way, that I, in the moment, thought we were being really funny), and then sprinkled in sloppy attempts at blast beat parts and DRI style fast punk. I personally was floored on having seen Osaka, Japan’s THE FUTURES, and how they had seamlessly incorporated weird psychedelia and hard rock elements into their thrashcore, and also always loved the tension on the first LEMONHEADS record “Hate Your Friends” where they seemed to be wrestling with juvenile hardcore leanings while also wanting to write earnest, sensitive songs. We opened a memorable show for the HI FIVES and GROOVIE GHOULIES. We did a BRENT’S TV cover (“She’s Coming Over”), a DREAMDATE cover (a slow, gazey version of “The One I Need”), and a MR. T EXPERIENCE cover (“Dumb Little Band”). I tacked on a very shitty live recording of those first two covers onto the back end of the demo. The DREAMDATE cover gives me the chills, the original song is great, and Aaron and Ryan are super capable musicians and harmonizers, conjuring up that slow-burn, desperate inclusiveness that cause anthems like HICKEY’s “El Farolito” to make your chest explode. Aaron and Ryan moved on to start 60s garage meisters the MOTHBALLS with Carlos and JJ. I started THUNDERSHEVITZ with Hellen. Then I hopped into the vacated drummer’s seat in DREAMDATE.

THE CLARENDON HILLS - 2003-4 Demos, All Day All Night All Right CD (2002)

There’s a certain appeal in the application of quantification to the endeavor of life. The popular zeitgeist of hustle and self improvement is deafening with the repetition of many such ideas: 10,000 hours of practice, getting 1% better each day, compounded interest, fall down 7 times get up 8 (a bonus, fall-less getup because hell yeah MOTIVATION). From when I started dabbling in coming up with songs as a teenager, I’d had a persistent notion that I’d keep at it until I had come up with 100 songs, and then by virtue of probability some of them would be good. Of course a lot goes into a final, subjective judgement of good, and for numerous reasons, I just generally hate listening to things I played on. It’s cringe-city. I’m just too familiar with: what I was plagiarizing or aspiring to, how seriously I took myself versus my incompetence, and then the disparity between the results and expectations. On the other hand, I can pinpoint moments from the practice room, during shows, or other specific flashes in the existence of bands where I was ecstatic and couldn’t have felt better, really about anything going on in my life. On the OTHER-other hand, there were moments where I could not have been more upset or frustrated. Beneath the most mediocre local band are some high amplitude emotions!

By the time the CLARENDON HILLS (me - guitar, Pepitopea - bass, Chris Lebron - drums) were done I think I was more than half of the way to that century mark. A lot of these songs were just not even worth showing to my bandmates or spending any more time on, and some made it to 4-track tapes but never played live. I had forgotten all about these three:

The distance of several years has softened me up a little (internal voice: “hey, these are ok, I wonder why we never tried them”). These demos span 2003-2004ish, and the last C. HILLS show was late 2004. Friends might find them amusing. I can hear exactly what was in heavy rotation from my car’s CDR folder at the time from these drafts. I remember my vocal ability changing in weird unpredictable ways and my range narrowing considerably, whereas a year prior I was really comfortable singing the twee-er songs. I thought maybe I had damaged my throat somehow, but it turns out I had undiagnosed Graves’ disease that required treatment shortly later.

A satisfying song is one thing. But in hindsight, I think about it as only one element that allows the rest of the journey to unfold. Punk bands are typically young people connecting to a bigger world, figuring out things about themselves, and learning how to exist and work with others. More than a particular aesthetic, fashion, subgenre, product or whatever, these are the bigger, more important things in my view.

As requested by pals, I also uploaded the CLARENDON HILLS album:

I haven’t listened to this in ages. It impresses me that this sounds as decent as it does, considering we tracked and mixed it entirely in a bedroom using a standalone Roland VS-840 digital recorder (a portable all-in-one 8-track machine that could only really access 2 tracks plus a stereo pair at one time, had no real-time onboard effects or outboard busses, and stored data on ZIP disks that could barely hold enough for a 3 minute song). I had to hack into the firmware using sketchy messageboard directions to get it to back up data! All that is to say, that the workflow was really clunky, overwrought and roundabout, but we made it work.

We had two previously aborted attempts at recording our first record - first a setup at 924 Gilman with sound engineer and great friend Joe Steal, and then a session in a garage near SF’s Haight that Will Thrash connected Pepito with. There may be audio floating around from these but to put it plainly - the results were not good (mostly owing to our own performance inadequacies and inexperience, I think). In contrast there are recordings we had heard, from BLACK FORK and SHARP KNIFE (you know, the utensilcore bands) that had come out of those makeshift studios that were fabulous.

It really strikes me how preoccupied i was, lyrically, with doomed relationships, holy cow, and you wouldn’t be wrong for thinking this guy singing was an overserious bummer (me to my younger self: lighten up broham). Pepito and Chris netted out my somewhat self defeating nature and moved the whole ongoing concern forward with humor, industriousness, community building, and a thrillseeking sensibility. We were enjoyably roasting ourselves and others constantly, and on the occasions we now get to reconnect, the major memories are tangential to the playing of music (unless you count onstage violence as music). Remember when Mike Park beat you two and Ollie in 1-on-3 basketball at the Gilman hoop? WEARING BROWN LEATHER DRESS SHOES?

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DREAMDATE - KALX Live

I was a big, big HAWAIIAN GETAWAY fan (click here to read more on that), and naturally loved the next band for Yea-ming Chen (guitar) and Anna Hillburg (bass) with Emily Grayson (drums), DREAMDATE. We had neighboring practice spaces in an East Oakland complex, and I dug the impromptu interruptions to hang out. Emily moved to Seattle, and I think they had a series of semi-reliable fill-in drummer replacements, before pulling me into the picture, sacrificing the inspiration potential and marketability of an all-girl trio. I’m a little hazy on how long I was in the band, but there was a tour of the West Coast with SPENCEYDUDE near the end of my tenure, and this recording captures the band right after. As happens when you play every night for weeks, the performances got exceptionally tight, and I think it’s perceptible here - despite the recording limitations you can hear the harmonies really hitting, and the guitars and drums are all locked in. Simultaneously, the confinement of being around the same 4 or 5 people 24 hours a day also eventually makes everyone cranky and volatile, as everyone’s smallest foibles get magnified exponentially, and I can hear a little of that too. I’m really happy to have been there for the development of the CUB cover (“Go Fish”) which is great on this recording, that band having been a huge influence on us all. As mentioned by DJ Kendra K at the end, the band also trial-ran a RONETTES cover (“Here I Sit”), that didn’t totally click. The DREAMDATE lineup then stabilized with (the well-loved and missed) Joe Haener taking up the sticks

I requested Ron (@Mattelica on IG and youtube) to master and digitize the ART SIMMONS - Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings LP I wrote about a while back (click here for the post). It came back splendid. I never really think about cleaning records, but he remarked that the record got noticeably more alive with each play, and there was probably a lot of chud in the grooves from 66 years of age getting sheared off. It's up now on Youtube, and available NOWHERE ELSE. Enjoy!

REGAL LILY's "Twinkling Ash" was encountered as part of the closing credits for the brilliant Delicious in Dungeon anime - it is unmistakably a celebration of hyperspecific times and styles - 4/4 jangly chorded guitar pop, a full digestion of creation/sarah/c86 themes and song elements that would fit very comfortably on a 90s CMJ radio chart, yet all meticulously calculated, executed, and then unfortunately polished to such a slickness as to lose all sense of abandon.

REGAL LILY is like a twee Steely Dan? Of course, I am fascinated by the tune and can't stop listening to it. If I were in the control room during these sessions I think I'd be secretly sidechaining a fuzz pedal on the mains mix for my own private stash. The first 43 seconds are like hall of fame indiepop song construction. I'm reminded of A) the SKYFLAKES (who I wrote at length about earlier here) and then B) Sydney-via-Sarah OGs EVEN AS WE SPEAK's Feral Pop Frenzy from 1993 which similarly startled with its precisely quantized studio sounds and feel. "Falling Down the Stairs" was the big song from that one.

Revisiting sophomore-ic Houston sock hop punks JUNIOR VARSITY led me also to remember this scorching LP from their local garagey pals (with the provocative and nonsensical moniker) the JEWWS.

Its like everyone heartily signed on with the cheap thrills, trashy sonics, and throwback teenagerisms of South San Francisco's SUPERCHARGER but had their own way to push it forward. For the JEWWS, this meant their outbursts about UFOs, girls and cars were laid over a foundation of sped up JOHNNY THUNDERS/CHUCK BERRY riffs. But checking out old live footage, I'm struck at their similarity to Albuquerque's awesome combo, The DRAGS, in sound and presentation, and then they busted out a cover of the DRAGS’ “Tastes Like Poison,” sealing that connection.

I sense this was a byproduct of the popular southwestern state coalition to mandate garage punk trios with old junky 60s guitars slung way low, tiny drumkits, and shoulder length hair on bassists.

I could be fairly accused of being a partisan for musician Yea-Ming Chen, having already devoted a disproportionate amount of newsletter space to fawning over her unsung first band, Hawaiian Getaway (here) and then her contemporary project The Rumours (here).  But listen, if you’re in the arena and your franchise player is splashing three pointers from halfcourt, what are you going to do, sit there politely with your arms crossed?  No, you’re going to scream yourself hoarse, spill beer and hug strangers.

The front office executives at Dandy Boy Records engineered the All-Star starting 4 of this latest project RYLI, originally for their CLEANERS FROM VENUS covers comp, which has YMC teamed with fellow local SF Bay Area lights Rob Good, Luke Robbins and Ian McBrayer, and the A-side of their forthcoming single of original material just dropped yesterday. It is well worth cheering about.

No one would kill you over filing “I Think I Need You Around” under capital “I” Indiepop, but besides the debt to the moptop/anorak/sundress/jangle scenes, there’s a depth here to my ears that draws from the same well as classic American crafters like Roy Orbison and the Everly’s, as well as a lively studio burnish that classes the sounds outside of my usual comfort zone of paste-up tapes, distortion and high noise floors.  I’m also all about the subtle production accents adding a lot, and let me tell you, if you can appreciate a hint of vocal harmony, organ, tambourine, and/or percussion shakers, you’re going to be playing this all night, ad nauseum, delightfully picking apart all the finer ingredients.

I’m reminded of the experience of throwing on the WEDDING PRESENT’s “Mini” Ep after pulling it out of the cutout bin at HMV - the band was at that point unheard to me, and as I was already seeped in lofi stuff, I was blown away by the polish and fullness of that recording.  I just did a side by side with personal favorite, the Weddoes’ “Convertible” and this RYLI tune might compare more favorably, gun to my head? I know, sacrilege!  One sometimes has the disconcerting (and comedically narcissistic) feeling of an artist having created something hyperspecifically to appeal to exactly you. We’ll see what the RYLI 2nd track “When I Fall” brings - prominent handclaps?  A blastbeat part?  

I don’t get out that much but I was seriously bummed at having missed this group live, but more than just a studio project, RYLI appears to be a functional, touring live unit, so if the US survives this election evening, go see ‘em!

RYLI on Bandcamp

RYLI on IG

I’ve been slowly making my way through the discography of David Berman, the poet and troubled creative principal for SILVER JEWS and PURPLE MOUNTAINS. Berman’s suicide weeks after the release of the PURPLE MOUNTAINS s/t full length in 2019 adds more than a little gravitas to all of his artistic work; yet barring the facts and circumstances of his spiraling life, the resulting world weariness, hopelessness and frustration Berman could not avoid, could also not be more in the fore in a song like “All My Happiness is Gone.”  I love this tune as a singular piece of downer pop craft, a work that is instrumentally upbeat and hook-filled, yet also oozing with negative emotions.

Another subliminal, psychoacoustic reason why this tune probably seeped into my cortices: it dawned on me one day that you can sing the entire chorus of MODERN ENGLISH’s “Melt with You,” measure for measure, over the chorus of this song (try it, I did it out loud for a friend in the car and it was a real WTH kind of moment).  Imitation?  Flattery?  Plagiarism?  Coincidence?  How you react to this obscure observation says EVERYTHING about your worldview.  GO, I’M LISTENING, NO PRESSURE.

Queuing up the first CHROME CRANKS LP sent me down a little youtube rabbit hole searching for trash rock ephemera, and I exited at this cool archival live footage of Denton, TX’s FIREWORKS, on tour in SoCal in 1994.  Note that this nearly abandoned YT channel belongs to McKinley Richard, of Los Angeles maestros JACKKNIFE.  

The Dallas Observer had a fine profile on the FIREWORKS from around the time of the release of their 2nd LP Lit Up (click here), so I don’t have to go retreading all of that material here.  Lit Up came and (I think unfairly) disappeared without much hoo-hah, ballyhoo or hullaballoo, even among the fans of this very niche corner of the 90s garage punk scene, that of the nearly avant-garde, screechy, primitive, blues-informed realm of Tav Falco, PUSSY GALORE, GORIES, the GIBSON BROTHERS, CHEATER SLICKS, and other travelers.  FIREWORKS’ debut LP, Set the World on Fire, on Crypt crystallized a distorted, destructive (and reconstructed) vision of rockabilly played through 3 feedbacking guitars, no bass, and Janet Walker’s stand-up, minimalist drum pounding.  Some hard living ensued after that release, including stints of major substance abuse and imprisonment for lead man Darin Lin Wood, before Lit Up pared the group to 2 guitars and plunged the artists more deeply into territory only roughly charted by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and those storied, early blown-out JESUS AND MARY CHAIN live sets that induced audience riots.  

The opening track “50 Ton Highballin’ Ghost” has been such a kick for me and a beautiful demonstration of a certain piece rock n’ roll wisdom:  with the right attitude and imagination, you can slay giants with two notes and two drums.  The blues instrumental “Raw Deal” is like George Thorogood with the complexity of leads played set several levels lower and with the mixer gain set far too high - pure sugar for my ears.  The record concludes with an expansive, almost soothing cover of SUICIDE’s “Be Bop Kid” - noisy to be sure, but with atmospherics, bird sounds and echo.  That last number I think set the band up for a transition into Darin/Janet’s project CAT FUR, which had promised to pull in electronics and pursue an altogether different path.  I see a 1998 comp track for CAT FUR on discogs but am at a loss for what these folks were up to in the decades after.  Darin and Janet joined the GORIES’ Mick Collins in the great pre-DIRTBOMBS combo BLACKTOP; Wood also filled in on guitar for Jeffrey Evans’ ‘68 COMEBACK.  I’m a little hazy on the sequence of events here, but this was all 90s stuff.  Guitarist James Arthur led THE NECESSARY EVILS and played in the REATARDS among several other projects.               

I’ve been sitting on a longer term thesis that goes something like:  people that make really extreme music tend to be pretty laid back and well adjusted, whereas some of the most problematic people I’ve met through music, make the more conventional styled stuff, and this has been generally true from my own anecdotal experience.  However, in considering the examples above, maybe this line of thinking is wrong or inadequate and there is no general correlation; maybe mental wellbeing and the considerable personal toll of trying to survive as an uncompromising artist in our economic reality are just the start to the additional layers of complexity needed to complete the picture.  I admit I don’t like the conventional wisdom that one must suffer in order to make worthwhile creative work, and I prefer the aspirational ethos behind Double Nickels on the Dime.  That is, my unrealistic wish is that people travel safely and conscientiously in their everyday lives (ie drive 55), and go crazy instead in their artistic endeavors.

I’m working on a bigger journalistic piece on the deep connection between young Asian Americans of the 1980s and 1990s and UK synthpop. One thing that will probably fall by the wayside is what may have been a big record specifically only for my Azn friend circle in that timeframe, and that is OMD’s 1991 LP Sugar Tax.  Though platinum in the UK, this album did not chart in the US, and in broader OMD fandom it’s probably considered a lesser pop commercial grab by Andy McCluskey, after the departure of cofounder Paul Humphreys from the group.  Nonetheless I can’t help but feel a certain kind of way about the leading track “Sailing on the Seven Seas”; the spooky nautical theme works as a perfect metaphor to the dreamy imbalance of first love, and I’ve always admired McCluskey’s vocals, and how he can draw in an emotive R&B style but still sound restrained and in service to the song. 

The Clarendon Hills tried to cover the 2nd single “Pandora’s Box” with guitars; I’m not sure it worked but it was fun to try.  The mix for the radio/video/single release for “Pandora’s Box” seemed to indulge in McCluskey’s pet fascination with Barry White’s productions (which then found full manifestation in "Dream of Me (Based on Love's Theme)" on the next LP, Liberator), but the album version, which I prefer, is more straight ahead.  What do I know about silent film actress Louise Brooks?  Absolutely zip, and I didn’t know that this song was about her until years later!  

This tribute seemed a little too on the nose to me, even at the time, but I went with it and don’t think anybody out of the 3 to 5 elbertron listeners noticed or took issue.  

For someone that has never lived there, Stockton, CA has been in and out of my life a lot - from the long drives for my job where I stepped into a car in the East Bay amidst a brisk 60 degree dewy morning chill, only to find myself in punishing 108 degree Stockton heat an hour later; to great friends that grew up there; to the city’s prominence in academic studies of Asian and Latin American history and struggle, Stockton having played host to both huge waves of migration from the Gold Rush onwards–with the economic opportunity presented by the shiny rocks, agriculture, railroad and port–and waves of institutional discrimination and racially charged violence; to its surprising mix of high- and low- cultural exports:  Chris Isaak, PAVEMENT, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston.

MONSTER TREASURE are from Stockton, and when they entered my cognizance via live footage captured by some IG follows and then algorithmic suggestion, seeing offhand mention of the Asparagus Capital drew me in and I’m glad for the prompt for further investigation.  Their II LP from 2017 is a beautifully crushing rock recording.     

Sometimes I want to go far out there in terms of listening adventure and end up at exotic Musique Concrete or a Kazakh dombra playlist, but I also can’t deny decades of acculturation with electric guitars or escape my penchant to occasionally sit for hours playing the same chords with every fuzz pedal I own trying to approach the heavy, velcro-ripping sublime.  In that way, II is comfortingly familiar, and further, the sounds transport me to a few other specific geographic areas of historical (dis)interest:

CHICAGO 1990s - as a teenage fan, getting my ears blown out at the Cabaret Metro and other like-sized rooms to the alternative radio-charting buzz champs like VERUCA SALT, WEEZER, and THAT DOG., and I clearly remember being hearing impaired overnight after seeing SUPERCHUNK (MT’s “The Fall” could easily pass for an On the Mouth or foolish outtake).  Chicago was very proud of VERUCA SALT, as they were a local product, gracing covers of Illinois Entertainer with the other cause celebre’s (nostalgia point - see also Gish-era SMASHING PUMPKINS, MATERIAL ISSUE, LIZ PHAIR).  At the same time, in local circles the Brad Wood snare sound on American Thighs was divisive!  We had apparently so little going on that this is the dumb shit we made up to complain about.  In this afternoon’s evaluation of “Seether,” the snare cuts through the mix, has a nice amount of shell clang (just this side of the Metallica black album, which I don’t mind that much, but also don’t care much about overall) and is good.

The drums on MONSTER TREASURE’s II are excellent.  Some reverb on there, powering through the mix amidst a dense storm of guitars and added-in feedback and other amplified chaos fading in and out of the stereo field.  In fact all of the sounds are just enviably superb.  Listen, I don’t know if it’s 30 years of advancing technology, taste, technique or what, but the sounds on this relative to many of the major label releases of the alt-rock golden age (and their attendant piles of financial debt/heartache in budget)--it’s like someone just removed a heavy blanket from the speakers.  All credit as well to engineer Ben Hirschfield. This is the best overdriven bass tone I’ve heard in recent memory, in addition to the feast of distorted guitar chordage for the fuzztone sommeliers out there.

This comparison will drive some nuts, but there was a point when a faction of American crust punks decided to follow their Swedish and Japanese counterparts into the realm of melodicism and big budget sound, and some of the resulting global products, denigrated as Stadium Crust,  like TRAGEDY’s Vengeance and DISFEAR’s Misanthropic Generation seem like companion listening to me.  No comment on MONSTER TREASURE’s hygiene or opinions on nuclear annihilation, but I hear in these recordings related craftsmanship, despite completely unrelated sub-scene contexts.  One can imagine the common challenge of trying to find space and dynamics for everything when every instrument source is 100% loud and peaking at all times.  Take away the throaty shouts, and replace them with vocal melody and harmony, and I think these bands are closer musically than one might surmise at first blush.  Here’s another thing:  could MONSTER TREASURE serviceably cover DISCHARGE?  I think they could!  Could AT THE GATES’/DISFEAR’s Tomas Lindberg manage the dreamy harmonies of MT’s “Buttercream” or “Candy Sun?”  I would love to see either happen.  Not that this argues a particular point, but this was fun to think about.   

I mentioned sublimity a few paragraphs up. “Candy Sun” is IT. While II has already become a great start-to-finish friend, the heart swells for MT’s artistic success with this song. In one of my first listens I actually said out loud, “fuck yeah, they’re doing it.” If you’ll allow me a sports simile here, it’s like watching the clip of Tracy McGrady scoring 13 points in 30 seconds, except instead of an unreal individual basketball feat that carried his team to victory, MT build a slow moving fortress of thick gazey sound, with enough space inside to take us all home.

BOSTON - later 1990s - I fell into seeing BOY WONDER several times, and for those unfamiliar this was a post-DROP NINETEENS band for vocalist/guitarist Paula Kelley, and while their hooky, twin Marshall halfstack attack advanced my hearing loss, their few recordings didn’t seem to satisfyingly cash the check.  In chatting with the band, they commented their record wasn’t super reflective of what they could do on a stage, but they preferred having someone hear the record and then have expectations exceeded live, rather than not being able to live up to a recording. This all seemed a little sad to me.  It was during this period that I also caught the MUFFS on tour with Lisa Marr’s post-CUB (how have I not mentioned CUB in a post yet?) combo BUCK at the Middle East.  I think I wrote in my fanzine at the time that eyeballs were rolling into the backs of skulls, the rocking was so hard.  The BUCK guitarist Pepper Berry sold me on the sound of a single coil G&L tele playing Ramones-y chords through a jcm 4x12 - that flavor of stringy buzz has stuck in my mind ever since, with echoes to MT’s guitar painting on II.

MT apply their noisy, yet melodic sonic bombast to lust and breakup songs and escapism and confectionary metaphors, and frankly I think I have some strange form of aural diabetes from repeated doses.  You eat too many Doritos because billions in research dollars were directed at formulating something you would overindulge in with high probability.  The scientists over at MT have evidently hooked me.

Monster Treasure on bandcamp

Monster Treasure on IG

Wow, the Fastbacks have released a new record!  While I let that one marinate in my ears a bit, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of their older tracks–songs that are all time favorites of mine and made indelible marks on the way I think about music.

“Impatience” (1992)

My high school buddy Joe Kim put this on a tape in 1993 which was a wild coincidence; I recalled reading a glowing live show review of the Fastbacks in the Boston Phoenix earlier that summer (the writer remarked how Kurt played guitar better airborne than anybody - I think the argument could be made he is just straight up better at guitar than anybody), and was bummed at the time that I couldn’t find their records in any of the Cambridge, MA record stores that I pretty much spent all my free time flipping through.  I never asked him how or why he came to own their The Question is No CD, but when I heard this song it was like the world opened up.  

I love their …and His Orchestra (1987) and Very, Very Powerful Motor (1990) LPs, and it helps to acknowledge that the FBX had, by 1992, already been a band for more than 13 years, plugging away and perfecting their craft of hook filled, poppy punk in relative obscurity.  They seem to have been 100% of SEATTLE, being solid community pillars through the first waves of local punk and hardcore of the late 70s-80s and sustaining well into into the grunge days and 2000s; they knew and probably pal’d around with everybody (eg bringing several infamous persons or soon-to-bes into their bureau of a dozen drummers, including a teenage Duff McKagan, Dan Peters, Jason Finn, etc), although it seems they sounded like no one else in town.  Paying attention to interviews with all of the other great not-particularly-grungey or grunge-adjacent Seattle musicians, all of them mention the Fastbacks with reverence.  Somewhat related, I can recommend Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music as one of the more entertaining and interesting regional scene histories, along with the documentary Hype! (lots of great moments, like Art Chantry destroying priceless flyers in a paper cutter, Dead Moon live footage, Kurt and Conrad Uno working with Flop at Egg studio),  and the follow up, Hype: 20 years later.  Duff Mckagen’s autobiography is also pretty great for the Fartz/10 Minute Warning fan (and I suppose the GnR ones too).  I’m not even that particularly interested in capital-G “Grunge,” but for whatever reason I am drawn to all of the smaller corners and musical satellite scenes of the pacific NW.   

Back to the FBX, there seems to have been a sonic leap for their recording activities moving into 1991, as heard on the tracks that make up the first half of The Question is No.  It sounds like the final pieces of production and engineering know-how were finally in place to round out the edges and make everything really pound.  The liner notes say they had to ditch the studio and fire up a basement 8-track to print these tunes. As someone that has torn their hair out trying to mix a loud rock recording or two, what’s going on in these tracks is not a higher fidelity (actually the opposite on that particular variable, to these ears), but a sonic signature that makes the whole thing sound more alive.  Nate Johnson’s (my preferred of the FBX drum lineage) kit work never sounded so dynamic, the intertwining guitar parts and Kurt’s high gain tone never so articulate yet meaty, and Kim and Lulu’s vocal toughness and vulnerability never so present.  In my own imagination (and subjective perception), Kurt took a similar tack with all of his subsequent productions with other bands. Just seeing his name in the credits or reading about his involvement was enough to get a record into my collection, as he had a way of working that seemed to bring out the best in many like-minded groups.  Here’s a few examples:

Anyway back to this batch of songs (essentially the The Answer is You 2x7”, Run No More/Really single, and “What’s It Like” from the Seattle Syndrome comp) - here’s the question I’m wrestling with at the moment:  did the Fastbacks paint the Sistine Chapel of pop-punk here, years before the genre’s surge in popularity and practice?

Arguments in favor: 

• Skill and execution:  I’ll often listen to and appreciate a thing more when I can imagine doing it - I think the defining character of some of the best punk is that it begs you to try it.  I can’t picture a reality of approximating the role of a Fastback, as everyone is so good at what they do.  I can’t shred like Kurt, I can’t play drums like Nate, I can’t sing like Kim or Lulu.  Compositionally, I can’t write a song like Impatience. Despite being insanely catchy and anthemic, it is highly sophisticated in melody and sound.  I’m not even certain how to reproduce the palm mute parts during the verses - if you listen closely, it’s not really even regular palm muting, more like loose hand-gated chording?  Never mind the divebombs and harmonics in the song turns.  There is nary a 1-4-5 progression to be found here.  As a dabbler in audio engineering, I can’t replicate a sound like this (and I tried!).  There’s conventional musician wisdom that in the studio, you should have some reference material around to calibrate your ears, and Impatience was one of my go-to’s.  There’s a bus compression on the mix, or maybe just on the drums, that has really stuck with me as an ideal punchtastic rock drum sound - gated and eq’d just right. 

• Imagination/Affect:  the lyrical voice of Fastbacks songs have an unmistakable confessional, heart-on-sleeve quality, yet I don’t think this band ever authored a conventional love song (though they have covered several - among them cuts from the Ramones, Buzzcocks, and Raspberries).  In my reading of Impatience, it is an emotionally charged, heart to heart talk with a neighborhood cat (see if you agree).  There is something really beautiful about devoting so much of one’s efforts and artistic reserves to this kind of endeavor.  I cranked this song in the car the other day, and maybe it just caught me in an emotionally labile moment, but I experienced a crazy rush, akin to being thrilled to near tears.  I can’t be the only one with this song in their Mt Rushmore, yet it doesn’t even chart in their own Spotify list!  This brings me to:

• Recognition: undecided here.  There’s an insiders-only character to FBX fandom, and within there is plenty of strong fanaticism - this band is the proverbial reward for deep digging by conscientious parties.  Intrepid listeners from the indiepop underground found them on the mid 80s K Records cassette comp Let’s Sea or their In the Winter 7” with the Flatmates’ Subway Organization label; late 80s black jeans and flannel indie rockers heard them on the Sub Pop 200 comp.  Ben Weasel for a period was singing their praises in his 90s MRR columns (an odd thing coming from a guy that hard-lined a philosophy that musicians must not be too skilled), which maybe turned a few studded belts and spiky jackets their way.  San Francisco had their backs, as they played every Noise Pop fest from inception (1993) until 2002, at which point the band went on hiatus.  In the late 90s, they tried the stadium rock thing, opening for Pearl Jam globally on tour for a few months, but I don’t know that that moved many units.  The Fastbacks are a band many people are aware of, but peculiarly, I don’t think these songs get defined as all-timers for many (or any?).  

“In the Winter” (live - 1989)  “In the Summer” (1990)

I was so profoundly affected by the Fastbacks’ music there in ‘93 that I had it in my mind to write them a fan letter (something I’ve only done a handful of times in my life).  I was shocked to receive in response, an outrageously generous package from Kim that included the “Live in America” 2x7”  Therein is a great live version of half of their dyad of seasonal themes, “In the Winter.”  “In the Summer” is somehow beyond the “everyday miracle” category of a pop song - it’s goddamn perfect.  Kurt’s guitar virtuosity is given plenty of leash here with the leads, and again so many hooks and compositional tools are employed to fill the audience to burst point over excitement for the hot months.  The term Power Pop has increasingly come to mean something really specific for musicologists and collectors, but to me “In the Summer” is the exemplar and what it should mean.  I was quite pleased with myself when I could finally play guitar along with In The Summer from start to finish; it might be for me, pathetically, a top 3 guitar player accomplishment, number 1 being surviving as a sheet music-illiterate, complete novice orchestra guitar player for a university theater production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” (a truly weird experience). 

I couldn’t find the right version of In the Winter, but here’s a sweet cover of Mott the Hoople’s “Roll Away the Stone” from the same record.

“Book of Revelation” (1998)

I wish I could get the story on how this cover of a Mr T. Experience standout happened. Or maybe the better question is how did Kim Warnick end up doing backup vocals on the MTX original?  The song has uncharacteristically complex guitar lead parts for MTX material, almost Kurt Bloch-like, so it makes all the sense in the world that it would be good grist for the FBX.  The song asks many cosmological questions, and it has inspired me to ask a few of my own: are all bands that are appealing to me, appealing to each other?  Do most bands of a certain stature that I like, all know each other?  Could I have possibly pulled some extradimensional threads in willing these relationships into existence?  One wonders!  Well we are all blessed that this happened.