It's reassuring to know that in 2012, I'm still able to freak people out and ruin their lives with the sound (and in this case, sight) of Diamanda Galás. Twenty years ago, this was a ritualistic component of my weekly radio show on WPRB—these days, I just wait for my wife to walk into the room and then fire up this video clip.
"Saint of the Pit" was released in 1986 and is the second piece from her AIDS-themed "Masque of the Red Death" triptych. Further nightmare fuel here and here. Stunning and utterly distrurbing.
It seems like every other new release these days is a re-issue of some kind. At WFMU, re-issues compete at a rate that seems almost neck-and-neck with new releases by current bands, making the prospects of actually staying on top of things an essentially impossible task—a game left only to the truly lionhearted. And Brian Turner. There is both an upside and a downside to this, and like a lot of my radio pals at WFMU and elsewhere, I try not to wade too deeply into the waters of musical archaeology, at least when trying to assemble an engaging three hour freeform program. There's no denying that the glut of re-ups from quality labels like Soul Jazz, Norton, and Munster have opened a lot of people's ears to sounds they might never have heard otherwise, but reveling strictly in the legacies of bygone art scenes is a fast ticket to musical burnout, if not straight up Wavy-Gravy land.
"Hey man, is that late 2002 minimal techno?"
"Yeah, man!"
"Well then turn it up!"
Regardless of which direction your musical compass points, there are probably enough genre-specific re-issues out there to fill your hard drive several times over. As with new releases, some of them are great, others utterly forgettable, and still others (the majority, one might argue) have fleeting moments of brilliance but are more or less disposable. Nowhere is this phenomenon more immediately apparent that in the case of of 60s garage and psychedelic comps, where exalting utterly pedestrian Rolling Stones or 13th Floor Elevators-wannabes has been transformed into something of an art form. This wasn't always the case, however.
When I first started doing radio at WPRB in 1992, the station's record library was carved up via a ridiculously genre-fied filing system that grouped almost all left-of-center music made after 1980 together, with exceptions for select kingpins from past eras like Faust, Iggy, Wire, Velvet Underground, etc. Compilations were filed similarly, and I quickly discovered an auxiliary section of them that interested me just as much as titles like They Pelted Us with Rocks and Garbage (80s Cleveland noise), Wanna Buy a Bridge? (UK Post-Punk), or Dry Lungs (proto headache music) did. These were the 60s psych and garage comps, spearheaded by the wholly brilliant Back from the Grave series on Crypt Records.
The original eight volumes of Grave looked uniformly amazing to me, and were scrawled with exaggerated praises from DJs who'd long since fled the station's regular programming rotation. Feeling like I was on the cusp of something important, I decided to start at the very beginning and cued up the first song on Volume 1—a track called "We All Love Peanut Butter" by some apparent hoodlums calling themselves The One Way Street.
It wasn't the savage filth hinted at by the Grave series' attention-grabbing album artwork, but it was amateurish, funny, and sounded like it had been recorded in a bunker on a malfunctioning reel-to-reel deck—just like everything else I liked in 1992. Not surprisingly, I was hooked immediately.
That song was more than enough to fuel my jones for all eight volumes of Back from the Grave, most of which I eventually tracked down in the cutout bin at the local Record Hut. Back on the radio, my interest further blossomed at the behest of two other re-issues of older sounds, not on Crypt, but which seemed equally menacing in some way. The What a Way to Die collection from 1983, and the more acid-drenched Beyond the Calico Wall from 1990. Just as "We All Love Peanut Butter" became the flagbearer of the entire Grave series in my mind, these comps also vaulted certain songs to a kind of iconic status, and no selections from the countless 60s comps which have come and gone in the 20 years since have ever threatened their security at the top of the trash heap.
From What a Way to Die, it's "Leave Me Alone" by The Knaves—a song that deploys a musical middle finger with impressive deliberacy and panache. And from Beyond the Calico Wall, it's "Up in My Mind" by Spontaneous Generation, which I like to think of as a musical version of pork cracklings. (That is, it tosses your brain into a deep-fryer for a few hours, and then re-fries whatever particulate matter remains.) One can never be too certain, after all.
Here are all three songs, for your critical consideration. God bless these electric freaks.
In further deference to my new life of being woefully behind the cultural curve, I finally watched "Persepolis", the uber-acclaimed animated French film from 2007, based on the graphic novel of the same name. The story considers the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as seen through the troubled gaze of a young innocent named Marjane. Like many other middle class Iranians of the era, Marjane's parents rally against the US-backed Shah, but end up remorseful over the rise of the Khomeini-led fundamentalist government that eventually assumes control.
The perhaps questionable role of graphic novels and political animation serving as historical documents notwithstanding, Persepolis recounts an exceptionally complicated series of events with admirable skill. The characters, especially Marjane and her grandmother (voiced by legendary French actress Dannielle Darrieux), are profoundly engaging and often wickedly funny in spite of the film's grave subtext. To the top of your Netflix cue, stat!
I especially like how the CC elements appear to have been added later on (they seem dark and fresh, whereas the tower ink looks considerably more settled.) Either way: bravo!
In the spirit of radio and free culture, here are a pair of great radio-related songs from the Free Music Archive.
One is an instrumental and the other consists primarily of people screaming. Playing both at the same time yields pretty decent remix possibilities. Game on!
Great news for fans of Big Blood, one of the most prolific bands of present history, but one which still feels like the best-kept secret in the universe: Brand new album up for free download in the FMA! There's been plenty of prattling on about them before (from myself and others), so no need to rehash it all over again—But whatever you do, don't miss the drop-dead gorgeous video for their cover of The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary". (Below.) Ahhh, if only everything could be this good...
Here's the MP3 of "She Sells Sanctuary". Ian Astbury, consider yourself officially on notice.
Continued thanks to Big Blood for their willingness to freely sharing so much great music—naming a more refreshing and forward-thinking attitude towards art and commerce would be no easy task—and to Jason Sigal and WFMU's Free Music Archive for providing such an amazing repository of sounds.
I was thrilled to see Dangerous Minds recently post about the Punk chapter of the 1995 PBS documentary series, Rock & Roll, finally showing up on YouTube. (It hasn't been re-run in years, nor is it available on DVD. My homemade VHS copy bit the dust eons ago.) As DM pointed out, it's one of the few docs that really makes a point of completing the critical circuits between 70s punk and the reggae sounds of that same era.
However, the hour-long chapters dealing with proto-punk (The Wild Side) as well as early hip-hop/electro (The Perfect Beat) are also excellent, and now also online. The proto-punk edition focuses on the Velvet Underground (great interviews with Lou, Cale, and Moe Tucker), Iggy, the Doors, and Bowie, and the hip-hop chapter takes on Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and follows the narrative up through Run DMC, Beastie Boys, New Order, and The Orb.
Of course, it's easy to nitpick and complain about what the filmmakers foolishly left out or willfully ignored (ESG? The MC5?), but I still give this series very high marks for their overall presentation of the subject matter. In recent years, only that suberb Rough Trade documentary has surpassed this, I'd say.
Begin watching The Wild Sidehere. Begin watching The Perfect Beathere.
I have a soft spot—make that a bloody spot—for Bruce Duff's old band, the Jesters of Destiny. Sometimes cited as having been the first "alt-metal" band (talk about a dubious distinction), they had a knack for making complex artistic statements with totally weiner-flexing, guitar-god metal riffs. Take a listen to "Long, Long Gone (In No Man's Land)" and tell me honestly that you're not throwin' the goats by the three minute mark.
Bruce's voice is perfect for a punk-metal hybrid—he's got a wail that even Axl would be jealous of. I wholly endorse you seeking out Duff's many musical projects of the late 20th century, especially the Jesters of Destiny discography CD on Ektro Records, his seemingly brief (albeit critical) run in 45 Grave, and especially the recent collaborative album he made with Finland's Circle. If you can find it, there's also a great Jesters EP of all covers on which they do half-speed justice to CCR's "Fortunate Son" in a way that raises the little hairs on my neck with greater efficiency than the original. I have a picture of my friend Art holding that record in WPRB's old studios somewhere, but I can't find it right now.
Sadly, YouTube is pretty thin on Jesters video content, but I recently discovered two clips from another Bruce Duff project that I had been previously unaware of—NO Y-Z—and the results are, well... beguiling doesn't even begin to cover it.
After the jump: two of the weirdest videos you've seen in a while, plus a link to check out the super-rare NO Y-Z album, via the Mutant Sounds blog.
In 1987, I became totally obsessed with the band Redd Kross. A close friend had stolen his older brother's copy of their just-released Neurotica LP, and we played it over and over again under constant fear that our theft would be discovered—an offense that would surely result in us getting beaten up (again.) Fortunately, this friend's brother was sort of a pothead and rarely home, which enabled us to rock out in relative peace and security. Some months later, one of us acquired a Neurotica tour t-shirt, probably at a City Gardens gig, though I have no recollection of seeing them when I was that young. The t-shirt bore a psychedelic image of an androgynous, hippie-nymph hybrid, with the lyric Neurotica is Coming Down Fast emblazoned around it. That graphic made such a big impression on us that we actually took the t-shirt to a local copy shop, stuffed it into a Xerox machine, and ran off a few dozen copies of it. We tacked them up on telephone poles in Princeton and in the lobby of our Trenton high school, posted them inside our lockers, and in a spectacular act of weirdo teenage affection, taped one to the front door of a house in which girls we had crushes on would sometimes hang out. I'm not sure what message we really hoped to get across to them by doing this, but I guess when you're 15 or 16 years old, just letting 'em know you've been there is an important theme to communicate.
Ridiculous teenage melodrama aside, I was recently compelled to scan my last surviving copy of the Neurotica t-shirt flyer and post it here, as I have been unable to find the image or any reference to it online. Yes, that graphic on the left is sourced from a photocopy of a t-shirt made 23 years ago. (NOT scanned for such posterity is the reverse side of the photocopy, which features the scrawled phone number of a well-known NJ fanzine editor, and an incorrectly worked out long division problem. Remember, I was in early high school at the time.)
Redd Kross had already been around for almost ten years when I discovered Neurotica, but in a sense, they were really just hitting their full stride as a band. Their first couple of records offered a unique take on early hardcore, but with a trashy, pop culture lyrical obsession taken to an absurd degree. Considered alongside their fellow inhabitants of the left coast punk rock musical sphere, it might be fair to say that Redd Kross were more fun than Black Flag, and a lot smarter than the Descendents. Use the player below to hear "Notes and Chords Mean Nothing to Me" from the Born Innocent reissue.
By the time Neurotica came out, Redd Kross' music and appearance were utterly changed from their earlier incarnation. Recognizing the flash-in-the-pan nature of first wave hardcore, the band morphed from bratty, pubescent thrashers to technically-proficient prettyboys who rocked like the MC5. The title track from that wholly brilliant album remains one of my favorite songs ever, and whatever there was to be said about Jesus, Sigmund Freud, and salami sandwiches at the time, well... Redd Kross were clearly the ones who were going to say it. Listen to Neurotica's title track using the player below, and you'll get a pretty fair sense of what I thought the greatest band in the world ought to have sounded like.
The pressure to have rigidly codified taste in music when you're a teenager was always a struggle for me. However misguided, the sense that your interests are what define you is never more urgent than when you're young, and I frequently second guessed myself because I was simultaneously into metal, hip-hop, punk rock, Zeppelin, and Depeche Mode. However, my omnivorous musical diet still had a hard time getting wrapped up in Redd Kross' next album, 1990's Third Eye which is essentially a major label glam-pop record. 1990 was also the year I escaped high school with barely passing grades, and the cultural climate of the day had clearly identified that kind of music as anathema for myself and the kind of people I associated with. But there was a nagging sense of greatness lurking beneath the album's shimmering, zillion-dollar production, which I'm happy to report I eventually came to terms with. Song for song, Third Eye might even eclipse Neurotica in a totally biased comparison, but in the three year gap between them, stuffing t-shirts into office equipment as an act of dedication fell off my radar, and that's probably why Neurotica retains the edge on my personal rock meter. Whereas it is a crucial weirdo relic from the pre-grunge musical underground, Third Eye is an astounding triumph for a band that started out playing thrashy odes to Linda Blair. Listen to Third Eye's "Love is Not Love" using the player below.
Unlike almost everything else I really liked in 1987, my appreciation for Redd Kross has gotten stronger over the years. Hazy recollections of how the Neurotica tour shirt was acquired notwithstanding, I finally got to see them live only a couple of years ago, in Brooklyn, where they completely tore the house down. My longstanding admiration is rooted in a couple of critical details: They've never broken up, but they've also never released a bad record. (Probably because there's usually a 3-4 year lag between them—something more bands ought to consider before polluting their catalogs with floaters.) Furthermore, they've apparently reconciled their hardcore roots with the more sophisticated band they've become, as 90 second tantrums like the classic "Standing in Front of Poseur" don't sound out of place in the live set, even when buttressed by power ballads like "I Don't Know how to be your Friend" or alt-rock hits like "Jimmy's Fantasy" or "Annie's Gone". As a result of all this, they're one of very few bands who've been around for 25+ years who don't appear to be going through the motions for the sake of a paycheck, and that positions them in an enviable spot for a legacy act. Whatever their motivations, I continue to hang anxiously on their every release.
No slag intended... these are awesome! The badass "album covers" of yesteryear, now festooned upon 100% cotton upper body coverings! What splendid and thought-provoking conversation starters they must be... You think you're smooth? OK Barry White: What would YOUR opening line be to some geeky babe spotted in the local hipster-hut wearing a Pride & Prejudice or Catch 22 t-shirt? Hey sweet thing, wanna compare library cards? And high school students, think of the brownie points you might score by strolling into your Honors English seminar wrapped in a hard-worn Great Gatsby or Lord of the Flies number.
This may very well be the most critical forward leap in young adult fashion since the heyday of the iconic Rolling Stones "Sucking in the 70s" t-shirt. And if you're already fretting over what to get that oh-so-hard-to-shop-for Tea Partier/Ayn Rand devotee in your life this holiday season... Atlas Shrugged, yo!
