Dirty Sheets

The Crumbs - s/t (Lookout, 1997)

2012-02-10T12:45:00.001-08:00

Earlier this year, Lookout Records (According to former boss Larry Livermore, the name was never intended to be written with an exclamation point) made the decision to cease operations. Though I'd paid scant attention to the imprint's later releases, it was still somewhat shocking to hear the news of Lookout's demise. Like Amphetamine Reptile, Junk, Pelado and others before it, so smothered another flame from what time has proven to be a productive '90s for likeminded labels. The first album I owned from Lookout was Screeching Weasel's Wiggle. A friend had picked up the disc for me as a belated birthday gift. The bratty vocals, cultural references and thoughtful lyrics laced their Chuck Taylors as tightly as the Ramones' most beloved pairs. Twenty years on (Where in the hell did the time go?), Wiggle remains one of the best punk rock platters of any era. In 1996, the same bud passed along a dubbed tape with The Mr. T Experience's Love Is Dead on side "B." (The Humpers' Positively Sick On 4th Street covered the front half!) Whereas the Weasel mostly fed on a 1-2-3-4 diet of Bowery-like blasts, MTX balanced their "Gabba Gabba Hey!" intake with the smoother hooks of power pop. I've got fond memories of Love Is Dead powering the cassette deck as my friend and I drove around aimlessly on Independence Day in search of a free cookout. We ended up at Kempsville Inn with a pitcher of Miller Lite (100% drank by yours truly), three plastic darts and an otherwise empty room. I'd dug The Queers' Killed By Death-compiled cuts like "At The Mall" and "I'm Useless" for a great while, but I only recently became a convert of their 'Mones-meets-Beach Boys proper catalog. With statements such as "Ursula Finally Has Tits" and "I Can't Stop Farting," 1993's Love Songs For The Retarded is a spirited celebration of eternal juvenile behavior. All of the aforementioned LPs are prime staples in the now-gone Lookout catalog. However, my favorite leather-jacketed lads from the label hail (Yeah, they're still making music!) from the decidedly non-rock outpost of Miami, F-L-A.

My first nibble on The Crumbs was on the shared space of a Stiff Pole Records 7-inch single with fellow Sunshine State roustabouts Pink Lincolns and Gotohells. "What Do They Know?" flew its Ramones flag high with a punchy patchwork stitched by snottiness and uptempo beats, but the threads of Aussie punk popes The Saints and '50s greaser rock also pledged allegiance. The Chris Bailey-esque snarl and the familiar Lower East Side trademarks shine their stripes even brighter on The Crumbs' self-titled effort. Around the time of the album's release, an Arizona trader sent me a tape containing a broadcast from the nearby college radio station. Finest moment from the mix? "Get On With My Kicks." Framed by some serious rock 'n' roll riffin', it's the tale of a reckless woman who's constantly on a first-name basis with trouble. She's got no qualms about dropping everything and hitting the road with a Clyde to her Bonnie in search of illicit substances. Indeed, the willing tag-along is "all shook up even more than Elvis allowed." "No Time" shares a title with a Saints song from (I'm) Stranded. Even with different lyrics, the feeling of being trapped by a Timex is most relative ("Are you stuck inside the classroom?/The teacher always putting you down/The bell never rings and the minutes go by too slow"). "Long Distance Luv" tracks a lonely heart beating strongly for a displaced crush made possible by the USPS ("I've only seen her once/She lives a thousand miles away/But every time I get a letter/In this world I wanna stay"). Descriptions of a modern "Shakespeare": "He got no money and he got no home/He got no place to go/He got no license, no degree/Got no PHD." Tasting toast with diet pills and raiding liquor cabinets satiate the cool kids who exhibit "All Style." "It's Gonna Take All The Time I Got" sets its broken Swatch on drunk o'clock ("Here comes a girl from another land/She said she saw me playing in a rock 'n' roll band/Turns out she's the daughter of this clingy place/Drinking without paying 'til I fell on my face").

So long, Lookout Records. I'll still keep my eyes on you.

-Gunther 8544

The Jellybricks- Soapopera (Rite-Off, 1999)

2012-01-28T16:47:00.000-08:00

Planet Music (OK, it's been called fye for years, but I prefer to reference the place by its former name) in Virginia Beach produced some interesting finds in the 2-for-$3.00 bin last Sunday (1/22/2012). I'd seen Lava Love's Whole Lava Love in discounted piles for nearly a decade without taking it to the register. What an idiot move! The female-fronted jangle-pop rings as clear as any prior Mitch Easter production. Now that LL's other album is on my list, it'll probably never turn up at Planet again. Flop were spotlighted in the Northwest-themed "Hype" documentary, but I'm having trouble recalling their scene. (Side note: My friend Holly bought the film on VHS for a buck at said store in 2002) World Of Today is stuffed with the sort of crunchy guitar-pop favored by famed knob-tuner Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks/Young Fresh Fellows). Led by vocalist/guitarist Don Fleming (formerly of Norfolk's own Citizen 23!), Gumball spat out several discs agreeable to fans of peer groups Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Super Tasty was the one I bit on BACK IN THE DAY (TM), but Revolution On Ice blows a bubble that's just as big. The prime artifact from the Planet visit, however, comes in the form of a wonderfully squishy slab based out of Harrisburg, PA.

Possessing the winning wordplay of early Elvis Costello, the sensitivity of Material Issue, the down-at-the-pub punch of The Figgs and the radio-friendliness of Matthew Sweet, The Jellybricks' Soapopera might've only cost me $1.50, but it's true value is akin to a moon rock in NASA's display case. A manly man like Victor Newman would never have to seek female companionship at a laundromat, but a dollar-changer like the dude in the title track should Bounce at such an opportunity ("She got me through my color separation/Was this my chance to ask her out, or just idle conversation?"). Once hook-ups by the machines become painful routines, "Fingernails" might claw in the direction of that factory reconditioned washer/dryer combo at East Coast Appliance ("Mouth to mouth in sight/Nothing else seems right/Thirsting for this pain/Unwashable blood stain"). Clogged with lint from the dryer trap, "Speechless" requires a service call to restore sweet sentiments ("I love you when you're miles away/I'm speechless in your presence/I'll think about you twice a day, and smile through my sentence"). How many cups of Gain would it take to coat the loads of cynicism in "Martyrs"? ("You can beat yourself 'til you're black and blue/Maybe Elton John will sing for you") "Bone-crunching, blistering, bad-acid bowling for premature pregnant teenagers with no soul" crams the Kenmore by explicitly defining a "Prerequisite Rocker."

According to the message on the CD's back cover, "the music found here is an appropriate accompaniment for dancing, staring at the walls, light snacking and many other activities." It's time to place a clean pillow over my face, dream about that one woman with a fresh scent and play Soapopera at a volume exceeding a washer pumped by the blood of yearning hearts.

-Gunther 8544

Buzzcocks - Trade Test Transmissions (Castle Communications, 1993)

2011-10-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Luckily, I have seen these Mighty Men from Manchester twice on stages away from the Tidewater area.

The first fix was at a now-defunct dive called Twister's in Richmond, VA. Touring with the Lunachicks and Down By Law as part of a package deal for Go-Kart Records in 1999, the Buzzcocks were actively promoting their fairly recent (and Miami Dolphins-hued) Modern album. Dismissing the 'Chicks as "punk rock for girls in gas station shirts" and DBL as "sounds for skater shits," my fair-weather friend jOhn A. and I turned our heads and spent the duration of the support acts' set time chatting with a cool couple from Carolina (North division). Most exchanges were of the "I wish the Buzzcocks would hurry up and play already!" variety. After the genie's grant, Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle -- two of UK punk's songwriting masterminds -- were joined on Twister's platform by Tony Barber (bass) and Phillip Barker (drums). Hearing '70s gems like "Ever Fallen In Love?" and "Autonomy" (their most metallic track?) in the flesh more than made up for the eternal wait outside and obvious questions from panhandlers. Cuts from Modern such as "Soul On A Rock" and "Speed Of Life" added just as much wind to the Twister's cyclone. Post-gig, jOhn, the Carolina duo and I complimented the 'Cocks on the execution of old and new favorites. In return, we were given access to the band's spacious tour bus. I mostly conversed with the driver and someone from the Buzzcocks' camp, but jOhn got a 30-minute audience with Shelley. My friend fired away with the burning questions, and Pete seemed genuinely taken with jOhn's humorous satire via his Skin Alley zine. The dude was beaming all throughout the two-hour ride back to Virginia Beach!

In 2003, the 'Cocks made a stop at the legendary Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC (the only show I've caught outside Virginia's borders, save for a boss blues band in B-More whose name escapes me). New tunes like "Jerk," "Friends" and "Sick City Sometimes" made the self-titled effort another winner, but the totality of the CC experience lacked the magic that'd been pulled from Twister's hat four years prior. Still, I held Shelley's Sprite bottle while he was signing something, drank three quick PBRs, ate tasty pizza from the kick-ass parlor next door and heard Donnie Iris' "Ah! Leah!" for the first time in nearly 20 years. Not bad for an "off" night, huh?

Here's the final bit from my review of the Buzzcocks' s/t disc that appeared on the long-gone Empty Wagon site: "It's amazing that Shelley and Diggle were once at a dilapidated shopping center on Newtown and Baker Road in Virginia Beach." That club in the blighted part of town was called Outer Limits and had played host to other top tourers like drivin n' cryin' and The Posies. Like a lugnut, I declined jOhn's invitation to witness Shelley and Diggle perform numbers from their well-received 1993 comeback wax (Trade Test Transmissions) at OL. Maybe I was too busy hanging out with the Touch Tone crew at Summer's Past or some other watering hole in hopes of being the rebound for a lonely lady, but missing the Buzzcocks in VB was akin to air-balling a free throw from three feet.

In contrast, owning Trade Test Transmissions is like jamming all of Vince Carter's dunks in that famed All-Star contest in a single attempt. Gripping a well-worn subject on the hardwood, "Palm Of Your Hand" manages to keep its dribble inbounds with cheeky cleverness ("Executive attention, yes, the kind that relieves/You've got the instruments of pleasure at the end of your sleeves"). Like a baller braggin' 'bout his PPG prowess, "Do It" scores twos and threes "like the river fills the sea," but the star calls a 20-second timeout with emotional pondering ("My only consolation/Is that someday you'll care/Perverse sophistication/You won't get far if you're going nowhere"). "Isolation" is blessed with a killer hook (shot) and Reggie Miller's touch when left alone at the perimeter ("There's an empty space where nothing grows/There is no life for the rose/Only a shadow in my heart"). Were it not for the lockout that's threatening to deep-six the entire 2011-12 NBA season, LeBron and Kobe could use the title cut's opening tip ("Turn the television on/You've been reading too long") in a promo piece and leave the teachings of sincerity and sarcasm to bonafide instructors. Perhaps only Bill Walton amongst hoopsters past and present would be able to pass the classic-rock reference of "Innocent" while trapped in the paint ("Even though you're not my mom/I've got to get my washing done"). "Last To Know" rewards with something greater than the Larry O'Brien trophy in June ("I came into your room while you were sleeping/And tip-toed to the bottom of your bed/I held my breath so I could hear you breathing/Love's such a sweet thing").

The first time Bob Mould saw the Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley shouted the chord changes of various songs to him. Talk about an assist that's greater than any of Magic Johnson's spectacular dishes!

-Gunther 8544

The Ergs- Dorkrockcorkrod (Whoa Oh Records, 2003)

2011-10-19T05:23:00.000-07:00

To the best of my recollection, the most “contemporary” album I’ve ever reviewed for Dirty Sheets was Guitar Romantic by the Exploding Hearts. And that came out nine years ago. What’s my beef with modern music? I don’t know. If it’s an unwritten rule that the records we write about here should be ones we truly and deeply love, then it kind of makes sense that I’ve mostly stuck with older records. It takes time to really get to know an album. A relationship between man and music must be properly cultivated. Notoriously prone to rash judgments about music, I have been known to pan albums that I later loved. And I have been known to praise albums that I never listened to again. But if I’m reviewing it here, it might as well be written in stone. So then: in the year 2011, it seems safe to finally write about my favorite band of the 2000s, The Ergs.

South Amboy, New Jersey’s Ergs, in their eight-year career, put out two albums, several EPs, and over ten thousand singles. And while I’ll maintain that The Ergs did not hit their absolute peak until they recorded their final LP Upstairs/Downstairs, there’s one album I always reach for when I’m craving “classic Ergs”: 2003’s Dorkrockcorkrod. As a style of music, “pop-punk” is not exactly most people’s favorite. But if every pop-punk band sounded like The Ergs, it would be a different story. While the typical pop-punk band of their day was like a second-rate Screeching Weasel or a third-rate Ramones, The Ergs were more akin to The Descendents with jazz inflections, hardcore tendencies, comedic undercurrents, an air of geek chic, and a whiff of Jersey. Neither wimpy nor formulaic nor lyrically clichéd, the music of The Ergs proved that pop-punk could rock. And Dorkrockcorkrod is in my mind one of the landmark recordings in the history of the genre.

Individually, the members of The Ergs are among my favorite musicians of recent memory. Joe Keller (now killing it with the Night Birds) is still one of my two favorite bass players in punk rock. Mike Yannich, in my mind, is one of the most gifted pop songwriters of his generation. He’s also one hell of a drummer. And Jeff Schroeck is a truly brilliant guitarist. Yet somehow, with all that incredible talent, The Ergs managed to be even more than the sum of their parts! They were a true group- a dynamic and cohesive power trio who combined their complementary superpowers to create a singular force of awesomeness. Dorkrockcorkrod achieves a sound that all pop-punk groups should aspire to: powerful and aggressive, with guitars and drums pushed so high in the mix that you could close your eyes and swear the band was right there in the room with you. Credit must go to producer Chris “Gobo” Pierce for knowing how a punk rock record was supposed to sound. Equal credit must go to the band for its formidable chops and undeniable chemistry. With nods not just to The Descendents but also The Minutemen, Replacements, Black Flag, Husker Du, Green Day, Elvis Costello, and The Zombies, this is an album far removed from the banality of cookie cutter pop-punk. Rife with obscure pop culture references, smart-guy witticisms, rollercoaster tempo shifts, and Ginsu-sharp hooks, it’s an album that delights even after a hundred spins. I should know!

While The Ergs were far from creatively undemocratic (Schroeck and Keller both contributed songs to Dorkrockcorkrod), Yannich was no doubt the band’s “star”. When you think of The Ergs, you probably think of Mikey Erg and his “brokenhearted love songs”. On Dorkrockcorkrod he keeps ‘em coming, even as he pokes fun at himself for doing so. “Pray for Rain”, perhaps the greatest Ergs song ever, opens with these lines:

I'm so in love with you/
So I thought I'd try something new/
And write a silly song about just what your smile can do/
But it's just not working out/
And now I'm having my doubts/
It seems that broken hearted love songs are what I'm all about

Funny stuff for sure, but in typical Mikey Erg fashion it absolutely tears your heart out. In the same manner, songs like “Saturday Night Crap-O-Rama”, “Everything Falls Apart (And More)”, and “Most Violent Rap Group” channel one young man’s excruciating heartache into music that’s emotionally charged yet incredibly fun listen to. “Pray for Rain”, for all the anguish it unleashes, is an utterly triumphant number, and one of the all-time great tracks to air-drum to while you’re operating a motor vehicle. You just can’t help pumping your fist and shouting along to that chorus: “And I!/Could write you the perfect song!” You don’t want to wish relationship woes on anyone, but if there’s a silver lining to Mikey Erg’s bad luck in love circa the early 2000s, it would be brilliant songs like this one. And the album is full of them! In the liner notes, my old friend Lew Houston perfectly sums up the thematic scope of Dorkrockcorkrod: “This is an album about girls, and showers, and new beginnings, and globes, and vampires. That leaves 12 songs about girls. A concept of sorts. Not a very complex one, but one nonetheless.”

The songs on Dorkrockcorkrod that are not about girls are no less essential to the flow and feel of this pop-punk classic. Joe Keller’s “Extra Medium” is like a “Turn on the News” for the Internet generation (“Please don’t turn on the TV/Or open the paper/’Cause the chances of tragedy/Are now part of the weather”). Jeff Schroeck takes the mic for his contributions “Fish Bulb” and “I Feel Better Tonight”, switching things up with his blunt vocal delivery and provocatively vague lyrics. And leave it to the Ergs to go ultra-obscure in cover song selection, having a go at “Vampire Party” by the Paul Roessler/Mike Watt collaboration Crimony. As a whole, it’s hard to find fault with Dorkrockcorkrod – every detour into hardcore thrash or experimental jazz doubling back to snappy power pop (“Rod Argent”) or hard-charging melodic punk (“180 Degree Emotional Ollie”). The general vibe is fast and fun, but it’s the variety that carries the day. It’s as if your favorite early ‘80s “post-hardcore” group stepped out of the pages of Our Band Could Be Your Life, hopped a time machine to 2002, and decided to show the pop-punk scene what it had been missing. The Ergs would go on to make much more great music, and individually they’ve carried on in terrific bands like Black Wine and the aforementioned Night Birds. But Dorkrockcorkrod was something special, and will likely forever remain my favorite thing that any of these three men have ever played on. Has it really been eight years? Damn!

-Josh Rutledge

Jeff Dahl- Ultra Under (Triple X, 1991)

2011-10-09T13:45:00.001-07:00

Thirty-nine cents! It's tough finding a goddamn Snickers bar for less than that amount of lint-covered coins, but spotting arguably Dahl's best album on tape in Camelot Music's cheapo bins inside Virginia Beach's Lynnhaven Mall circa 1995 surely satisfied (albeit temporarily) my ears' hunger for fresh sounds. Judging by the thick nest of frizz on the cover (Mark Bolan with a perm from Hell's hairdresser?), the sleeveless Stooges tee, a dedication to Stiv Bators and song titles like "Junkies Deserve To Die" and "Mick & Keith Killed Brian," I was readily eager for Ultra Under to acquaint itself with the deck of my Magnavox boombox. After the fourth or fifth complete rotation of Dahl's promising platter, I made the following mental declaration: "Man, this dude's like Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders rolled into one human being!" Indeed, Dahl's shoveling The Stooges' "Dirt" was so spot-on, my New Jersey-based friend (who'd acquire Ultra Under on CD within a week after wearing out the dubbed copy) thought it was Mr. Iguana himself. Said bud also gave high marks to the take of The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb," for it served as a template for Dahl's oft-girly vocalisms. Remember The Sweet's version of "Reflections"? Same shit, different era. It was the opening whine ("Touchy, Touchy Baby") that initially impressed us the most, however. Personally, I dig lots of '80s hair bands (as recipients of my grit comps would confirm), but this wild child sipped its glam formula with punk rather than metal. Because Dahl spat out lines in the same way a toddler extracts Cheerios ("So many questions got you on the spot/You don't bother to answer/Just give it up/Plain as day, but she can't see/Just shrug your shoulders/Ah, c'est la vie"), we sang along to Ultra Under in my amigo's rental car during his return to Tidewater.

Mr. New Jersey is no longer a friend of mine (100% his fault, but whatever...), but Jeff Dahl can still be counted upon whenever a rock 'n' roll jolt is necessary to power bleak days and nights. Recounting the true story of a horrible night amidst the '70s punk scene in Los Angeles, "Elks Lodge Riot" puts you in the middle of the chaos ("Flying vultures overhead/Tracking my every move/Sirens running thru the streets/Sets such a dangerous mood"). An absolutely stinging guitar riff from Chemical People's Jaime Pina (shades of Cheetah Chrome) heightens the tension. Dunno what kind of household Dahl grew up in, but "God Don't Care" is an answer-back redolent of many an artist a la Jim Carroll and Patti Smith ("Take it any way you want/It ain't blasphemy/If you sell your soul, baby, you ain't free/Put all you've got in the collection plate/Yeah, you can buy salvation if it ain't too late"). "Somebody" and "Pretty Blonde Hair" (another Pina lead!) are apt tributes to Stiv, as both throw flames with the white-hot intensity of the cookers on We Have Come For Your Children (the BETTER of the two Dead Boys albums!). Sparse piano and voice could be the stuff of your mom's favorite Jeff Dahl composition ("Just Amazin'"), though the tale of succumbing to addiction keeps it out of the recital realm. Elton's preferred instrument is also utilized on "Chemical Eyeballs," which blinks with a mid-tempo groove reminiscent of primo Bowie and Mott The Hoople.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts. All 39 pennies' worth.

-Gunther 8544

The Ugly Beats - Motor! (Get Hip, 2010)

2011-07-22T04:08:00.001-07:00

Austin, TX? I've never visited the city, but that doesn't mean I can't make assumptions about the place. For the friends I may or may not have from the Lone Star State, please take any generalizations with a sip of Shiner Bock and a forkful of juicy steak. If my perceptions on the quirky college town were 100% truthful, I'd be on the next Amtrak departing from the Bad Newz terminal. Off the train, here's what I noticed during my imagined trip. Barbecue beef brisket is consumed for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Every person you meet is in a band of some merit. The ratio of record stores to Walgreens locations is 15:1. All street signs are adorned with "Keep Austin Weird" bumper stickers. Every person you meet has taken a ride in one of Billy Gibbons' classic cars. There's a taping of "Austin City Limits" around the clock. Every person you meet has experienced one of Daniel Johnston's freakouts in the flesh. Police officers here are much friendlier than in other parts of the state. Every person you meet claims to have attended every SXSW Festival and whines about it being cooler when there was less hype. More than twenty must-see shows happen nightly. Girls wearing long dresses and multiple bracelets exclaim, "I bet you're wondering how someone can be a vegan in a state where beef is what's for dinner!" Every person you meet has a story about eating dinner at Roky Erickson's house and taking bong hits with him afterwards.

Dreams and glass pipes extinguished, The Ugly Beats REALLY are a prime cut of contemporary garage rock 'n' roll from the same butcher's rack as earlier Get Hip beef slabs like The Cynics, Sons Of Hercules, Stump Wizards, Steel Miners on down. A suit holding a snifter might accuse the menu that's the liner notes of being self-serving, but those who lament the closing of The Grate Steak in Nawfuck wish they could still cook their own meat. With dry rubs from the early Beatles, Byrds and a host of seasonings found on the Nuggets box set, TUB are a well-done hunk of heifer that's grilled to my satisfaction. "Through You" and "Bee Line" sear like the Lyres' Mono Mann at his most manic, courtesy of the uptempo, organ-driven beats and howling vocals. "Don't Go" tenderizes a la the Fab Four's "Love Me Do" with the same plea for affection, but the sweet intones of a female accompanist hasten the USDA stamp of approval. "All Comes Back" simmers in the jangle that Peter Buck borrowed from Roger McGuinn, while the voice liberally blends in the unique style of another REM member. "You'll Forget" is a regional take on an old Neil Diamond B-side recipe, and the heavier approach raises the temperature just a tad. "Funny Girl" brings Babs to mind in a titular sense, but her Noo Yawk ass ain't anywhere near the kitchen. Someone should check to see if Linda Ronstadt is back there. She's one hot pepper, and if there's one thing that Texas loves...

Oh, all taxi cabs in Austin are Cadillac Eldorado convertibles with "Hook 'em, Horns!" hood ornaments.

-Gunther 8544

The Star Spangles- Bazooka!!! (Capitol, 2003)

2011-07-14T20:42:00.001-07:00

More than baseball, hot dogs and apple pie combined, procrastination is America's favorite pastime. Which is the reason why this review wasn't submitted to Dirty Sheets in time for a themed piece on Independence Day. On July 4, 2011, my lovable laughing stocks from Crab Town were defeathered by the Texas Rangers sans Cordell Walker, a Ball Park frank was replaced by a Chicken BLT with sweet potato fries at Ruby Tuesday and the usual sweet treat was benched in favor of several pieces of Ferrero Rocher candy. The digital vinyl spun on my Facecrack wall didn't necessarily uphold the Stars 'N' Stripes tradition, either. Kate Smith, Lee Greenwood and Bruce Springsteen? Those old standbys might've been on your flag-draped granpappy's phonograph, but I chose to blow out the candles on Old Glory's birthday cake with some lesser-heard gems that smear the same shades of red, white and blue frosting. If Lady Liberty holding her flaming torch symbolizes freedom, then her NYC homeboys The Dictators are emblematic of the freedom to rock 'n' roll. Name a band from China or Cuba. I sure as hell can't. Their version of "America The Beautiful" (from the Every Day Is Saturday odds 'n' ends collection) expresses its loyalty with brash vocals, loud guitars and skipped stanzas. At a shade under three minutes, it's also a tribute to the short attention spans of our nation's citizens. Salute! Formed on a military base in Europe, America proffered an overseas take on "California rock" thousands of miles away from The Golden State. Still, "Sandman" is "Top Gun" before Tom Cruise. Prominent mentions of aircraft ("All the planes have been grounded") and alcohol ("We ain't had no time to drink that beer") would be welcome in any at-ease watering hole from Oceana to Oceanside. American Heartbreak paid lip service to Finnish transplants Hanoi Rocks with a cool reading of "Rebel On The Run." Could you imagine Michael Monroe and the boys moving to North Korea instead of Los Angeles and releasing album after album of top-shelf glam rock? It's a good example of the "Great American Melting Pot" that's versed in the "Schoolhouse Rock" bit. Lastly, I selected another Noo Yawk group who might be one of the few to have graced the stages of Chicho's in Virginia Beach (on 9/10/01 -- think about that date for a minute) and the Ed Sullivan Theater.

I don't know what David Letterman does with all the CDs he gets from musical guests on his talk show, but I'd like to think The Star Spangles' Bazooka!!! was the soundtrack to more than one backstage soiree with several fresh-faced CBS interns. The juxtaposition of Johnny Thunders-like sleaze with Paul Westerberg's corn-fed sensibilities suggests that the Indiana-raised host kindly asked his tryster for permission to drop the Worldwide Pants. Faulty wiring is the thread to many a relationship. Via a measure to curb arson-laced arguments, "Which Of The Two Of Us Is Gonna Burn This House Down?" (Ain't that a mouthful, Dave?) is up to code with the Dalmatians and their handlers ("Because the best thing to do for fire prevention week/Is if me and you just not speak"). Moving to a different breed of dog, track 8's opening lines flame like Michael Bolton driving a jacked NYC ladder truck in reverse ("If we can't be lovers/We can't be friends"). Later lyrics are sure to strangle the poodle with a hose ("Maybe I'll call you if I need a meal/Maybe I'll ball you if I need a cheap steal"). Fueled by a Steve Jones-style guitar octane, "I Don't Wanna Be Crazy Anymore" pays at the pumps and confesses on a cat-clawed couch ("I'm public enemy in my hometown/Parents tell their kids not to say my name out loud"). Prescribed medications in effect, "The Party" favors a less toxic approach to having a good time ("Fill the beer can with Coca-Cola/Makes you feel like a rock 'n' roller"). In the right frame of mind to meet a possible better half, perhaps the appreciative "Angela" will be the one you get to know away from the stage ("She's got my posters up on the wall/She used a box of tacks to make sure it just don't fall/And when I stare into that space/I will always see her face").

Stay tuned for my Labor Day story. It should be ready by Halloween. Or Thanksgiving. Or Christmas.

-Gunther 8544

The Subhumans- Incorrect Thoughts (Friends Records, 1980)

2011-07-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

When I think of all-time-great first wave punk bands that nobody ever talks about, the original Subhumans are among the first that come to mind. While the majority of punk rock fans are far more familiar with the later, vastly inferior U.K. Subhumans, it was the Canadian Subhumans that made some of the finest and most ferocious punk rock to come out of North America in the late 1970s. Respect!

Often compared to Vancouver’s other classic early punk group, D.O.A., The Subhumans were similar for good reason. Singer Brian “Wimpy-Roy” Goble and original drummer Ken “Dimwit” Montgomery were in The Skulls with D.O.A. singer Joey Shithead. The Skulls then splintered into two bands. D.O.A. and The Subhumans frequently played shows together and shared passionately strong opinions on socio-political matters. If both bands sounded kind of the same, that was strictly a blessing to the punk world. What could be better than a great political-minded punk band from Vancouver? How about two great political-minded punk bands from Vancouver? And as in-your-face as Shithead and company were in espousing their world views in song, the boldly anarchistic Subhumans took it to another level entirely! Incorrect Thoughts, the band’s 1980 debut album, relentlessly attacks on musical and lyrical fronts from the first raging strains of “Big Picture” to the final note of that tender love ballad “Let’s Go Down to Hollywood (& Shoot People)”. This is angry, explosive music that goes for the kill and never lets up. If you took the righteous indignation of The Clash, multiplied it by 100, and set it aflame on a runaway train, you’d get the seething ferocity of “The Scheme” or “Death to the Sickoids” (the band’s debut single from ‘78, ragingly reprised here). In essence, this is hardcore punk before the term really existed. Yet because it’s some of earliest hardcore known to man, it’s got just as much in common with ‘77 punk rock as it does with ‘82 hardcore. Basically it’s rock n’ roll played louder, faster, and way more angrily than it ever had been played before, and in these blazing tunes you can hear an affinity for everyone from the Avengers to The Ramones.

Like D.O.A., the Subhumans were propelled by one of the hottest & tightest rhythm sections of their time. And although Montgomery (older brother of Chuck Biscuits) did leave the band in 1979, replacement drummer Jim Imagawa was no downgrade. Imagawa and bassist Gerry “Useless” Hannah set a breakneck pace on Incorrect Thoughts, while Mike “Normal” Graham unleashes a righteous blend of melodic leads and heavy, scorching guitar. On lead vocals, Goble atones for a lack of a traditionally good singing voice with passion, conviction, and the sheer force to move mountains. The man sounds flat-out pissed, and he’s got a lot to say! While the term “anarchist punk” would be sullied in the ensuing years by several generations of really awful bands, what you hear on Incorrect Thoughts is some of the best music ever. It’s aggressive and hard-hitting, no doubt, but at the same time you’re pumping your fist, singing along, and itching to get out there and wage war against the powers that be! Whether he’s railing against new wave rock (“The Scheme”), bully jocks (“Greaser Boy”), poser punks (“Dead at Birth”), brainless sheep (“Model of Stupidity”), the mass media (“Death to the Sickoids”), or the forces that oppress (“Big Picture”), he’s at 11+ on an anger scale of 1 to 10. And the band behind him is bringing it hard! It may strike some of us as odd that the new wave bands we music geeks now romanticize are the object of derision in “The Scheme” (Goble did most definitely not get The Knack!). But there’s just no denying that it’s one of the greatest punk rock songs of the early ‘80s.

“Big Picture” opens the album with a proverbial bang. Hot on its heels are the classic anthems “We‘re Alive” and “Firing Squad”. At that point a lesser band might have shot its wad. But The Subhumans are just getting started, and the action doesn’t really hit its peak until midway through the album. The all-time classic “Death to the Sickoids”, the furious call-to-arms “New Order”, the satirical & metal-tinged “Slave to My Dick”, and the melodic sing-along “Greaser Boy” are four of the best songs the band ever did. They spearhead the album’s inspired back half, which seems to be gaining momentum even as closing track “Let’s Go Down to Hollywood (& Shoot People)” eases off the gas pedal a tad. What a rush! If you need a musical recording to get you fired up, or if you’re in a foul mood and crave some good old angry punk rock, this is the album you want! If punk rock music is about saying “Fuck you!” via song, then this is one of the punkest records ever made.

If you were actually there to see The Subhumans circa 1980-81, what an experience that must have been! Those were wild times, with many shows literally culminating in riots. The band gigged throughout Western Canada and the U.S. West Coast, playing with kindred spirits the Dead Kennedys as well as Husker Du, Black Flag, Bad Brains, X, and Minor Threat. Even after Hannah and Graham left the band in 1981, reinforcements were brought in and a second album was recorded for release on SST Records. By the time it came out, however, Goble had left to play bass for D.O.A. and the Subhumans were no more. Hannah would gain notoriety in 1983 for his role in the bombings of an environmentally unfriendly hydroelectric substation on Vancouver Island and a missile manufacturing plant near Toronto. He served five years in prison. Dormant since 1982, The Subhumans reformed in 1995 with Hannah and Goble on board for a Canadian tour. And in 2005, the band reformed for the long haul with Graham back on guitar and SNFU’s Jon Card taking over on drums. They put out a new LP in 2006 and last year re-recorded Incorrect Thoughts in its entirety due to a contractual inability to re-release the original album. I have not heard the new version, Same Thoughts, Different Day. But come on: if you’re gonna get Incorrect Thoughts, accept no imitations. Find the original album! A classic of hardcore punk and one of the best punk LPs of the early ‘80s, period, it’s worth tracking down. And if you don’t feel bad about screwing the band out of royalties, the CD Presents reissue adds two bonus tracks and comes with quite the nice booklet. Talk about a moral dilemma!

-Josh Rutledge

Parasites- Punch Lines (Shredder, 1993)

2011-06-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

For a man of 40, I’ve had a relatively small number of “favorite bands” in my lifetime. When I was 10, my favorite band was AC/DC. At 15, I was rockin’ with Dokken. At 21, I was all about Nirvana. The lengthiest favorite band reign of my lifetime belongs to the Dimestore Haloes, who were “my” group from 1998 until they disbanded at some undetermined point in the early to mid 2000s. The title has remained vacant ever since. In between, there were others like Judas Priest (my seventh grade year) and Bad Religion (the year after college). And I’ll never forget those years – circa ’96-’97 – when the Parasites were my #1.

Along with Screeching Weasel, The Queers, the Beatnik Termites, Green Day, and the Mr. T. Experience, the Parasites were the cream of the crop of ‘90s pop-punk. Originally formed in New Jersey in 1985, the Parasites became more or less a one-man show when Dave “Nikki Parasite” MacKenzie relocated to Berkeley, California in the early ‘90s. Working with a revolving door of supporting players, MacKenzie recorded two albums for the indie imprint Shredder: Punch Lines and Pair. The latter was primarily comprised of songs that had originally appeared on the band’s 1990 debut Pair of Sides. For years, I insisted that the punkier Pair was by far the superior album. Although I liked Punch Lines, I contended that it was “overproduced” and sounded “like an Elton John record”. It’s easy for me to understand why I felt that way then. I was a young man – 25, 26 years of age. I was a dyed in the wool “punk rocker” with a closet full of Clash t-shirts and a bedroom floor littered with Maximum Rocknroll back issues. Punch Lines, for all of its merits, did not deliver the buzzsaw guitars and stripped-to-the-bones simplicity I craved in pop-punk music. But as the years passed and I came to value musical substance over musical style, I completely fell in love with Punch Lines. It’s not even close – Punch Lines is the best Parasites album, and to boot one of the ten greatest pop-punk albums of all-time.

Perhaps because MacKenzie played everything but drums on the album, Punch Lines has the feel of a solo record. Although the obvious influences (Descendents, Buzzcocks) contribute to the general musical approach, the album is the distinctive work of a truly unique artist. True enough: MacKenzie has always been a genre traditionalist, and no one is better at crafting simple, catchy pop-punk songs. But no other pop-punk album has ever sounded quite like Punch Lines, which derives its character from MacKenzie’s plaintive vocals and brilliantly heartrending lyrics. If Punch Lines really is a concept album, the concept is not hard to grasp: love’s a bitch! The man once told me that he wrote songs because it was a lot cheaper than paying a therapist to listen to his problems. And judging by the lyrical tone of Punch Lines, he must have suffered through some serious relationship woes prior to writing these songs. I had suffered through some serious relationship woes of my own around the time I bought the album, so it’s easy to see why Punch Lines connected with me. The record affirmed my views on love – and probably influenced them going forward.

While typical pop-punk music of the day addressed the ups and downs of teenage romance, Parasites songs spoke of far more complicated adult love. Punch Lines recounts the less pleasant aspects of grown-up relationships: the inevitable dysfunction and subsequent betrayals, the torture of loving someone who doesn’t love you back, the neurotic over-analysis of what went wrong, the dark cloud of obsession looming over new love, the agony of loss and the hole it creates in your heart, the bitter realization that what started out so promising could have ended in heartbreak and despair, and through it all, the optimism to believe that no matter how many times love fucks you over, it’s going to finally work out next time. By turns pitch dark (“Dead Roses”), hopeful (“When I’m Here With You”), cathartic (“Letdown”), stalkerish (“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”), bitter (“I Don’t Believe You”), and bizarrely upbeat (“Crazy”), the relationship theme plays out with all the poignancy, humor, and high drama of a cinematic love story. If they ever make a Broadway musical out of Punch Lines, I’m first in line for tickets.

Perhaps a fair criticism of Punch Lines would be that its best tracks outshine the rest. The funny, self deprecating “Young and Stupid” is just about the greatest pop-punk tune there’s ever been. And album opener “Crazy” is simply an extraordinary song – a touching tale of two very imperfect individuals who nonetheless make a perfect match (“I met you in emergency/You rolled right by on your way back from shock therapy/I knew that you were meant for me/I loved the way you moved/Even though you moved involuntarily”). Also meriting classic status in the annals of pop-punk is the peppy and impossibly catchy “When I’m Here With You”. But while the rest of the album may suffer slightly by comparison, it's still really freaking good. The likes of “Someday”, “The Next Time”, and “Nothing At All” are solid tunes on their own and crucial components of the album as a whole. And “Letdown”, for all of its dragging instrumental bloat, is the epic closer the album needs. While not quite a “happy” ending, the song brings closure to the artist’s suffering. A page is turned, and our protagonist lives to love another day.

The optimist in me was sometimes tempted to re-program the CD so that it would end happily with “Crazy”. But deep down I knew it was pointless. Punch Lines is supposed to be a bummer – the kind of record you listen to when you’re going through some major shit and need company for your misery. You listen to this guy spill his guts about how much his love life sucks, and it makes you feel better. The album sure got me through some rough times. Today at a considerably happier point in my life, I hope to never again require its consolation. But Punch Lines will always be a favorite of mine. The 25-year-old me may have been mostly full of shit, but he had fine taste in music.

-Josh Rutledge

The Adicts - Songs Of Praise (Dewd, 1982/Cleopatra, 1993)

2011-05-28T15:13:00.001-07:00

Along with the Toy Dolls and Peter And The Test Tube Babies, The Adicts were part of a movement within a movement I've seen classified as "fun Oi!". While street-punk pioneers such as Sham 69, Cock Sparrer and The Business occasionally had their humorous turns, the eternal cut-ups were far more interested in going to the pub with Harry rather than using his influence to unite the kids. Donned in droog costumes straight from the wardrobe of "A Clockwork Orange" and fronted by a "Monkey" man in joker paint, The Adicts were the class clowns of '82 UK punk. Stage props like confetti, beach balls, toy instruments and bubbles enhanced their yearbook superlative. Who else would discuss a fruitless search for food ("Chinese Takeaway"), "lament" over a lost love ("My Baby Got Run Over By A Steamroller") and express a genuine appreciation for classical music ("Ode To Joy") in the midst of serious sloganeering from other outfits? Familiar inflections from vocalist Keith "Monkey" Warren are perhaps The Adicts' most amusing aspect. Josh swears up and down that it's Robert Smith from The Cure masquerading as a punk rocker. Sounds legit to me. Maybe Smith listened to The Dickies as much as David Bowie in his early days. Plus, we all know the man's no stranger to applying makeup.

OK, cancel some of what I said above. Songs Of Praise has been in my stash for over fifteen years, and this is the first time I've really studied the lyrics. Behind the cloud of cosmetics is a band who really gives a damn. Didn't mean to imply otherwise. Onward...

"I Don't Wanna Die For England" makes a terse, anti-war statement of not wanting to "hear the bugle call." "Sensitive" adds more heft to the Robert Smith theory ("If I say something wrong/You might start to cry/I don't wanna get you down/Don't wanna make you cry"). "Viva La Revolution" has the empowering lines ("Long live the people/Long live the scheme/Long live our hopes/Long live the dream") and endless title chants to join Jimmy Pursey and his "Borstal Breakout." Individuality is ironically endorsed in "Just Like Me." In lieu of my retraction, there are plenty of party favors. A former friend of mine once termed Pete "Dee" Davison's stringing on "Peculiar Music" as "Egyptian guitar." Well, the reissue of Songs Of Praise is on Cleopatra...Pete's bro, "Kid Dee," adds a lead vocal to his drumsticks on "Mary Whitehouse" and spouts about "pornography on the BBC." "Get Adicted" is a rousing recruiting pitch and a band theme song all in one. The last dance is saved for "Tango" ("We drank champagne/We danced again/We had laughter/And then after...").

I once saw Ozzy Osbourne wearing an Adicts T-shirt in a magazine. What would be the ratio from London oddsmakers that he's actually heard the band? 666:1, most likely.

-Gunther 8544

The Outfield - Bangin' (Columbia, 1987)

2011-05-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

Comparing these English popsters' first two full-length slabs to Baltimore Oriole outfielders, Play Deep is to Adam Jones as Bangin' is to Nick Markakis. It's a push, really. Both residents of 2110 Eutaw Street have been putting up big numbers during the O's' current five-game winning streak. Likewise, the albums' lineup cards are inked with cut after cut of undeniable catchiness. Historians might argue that Play Deep enjoyed more success between the lines of radio airplay and fielded a Hall of Fame pop gem ("Your Love") with a hook more irresistible than an Earl Weaver opportunity to swear at an ump. Bangin' sent one single to the plate ("Since You've Been Gone"), but the other nine potential All-Stars weren't even given the chance to aim for the fences. If only there'd been a better manager...

Two of the reasons why Dirty Sheets exists: During Josh's days as skipper for the still-missed Now Wave Magazine, we exchanged numerous e-mails concerning music, sports and food -- a practice still continued on the walls of Facecrack and in other dugouts. One of the inquiries posed to Lord Rutledge: "What do you think of The Outfield?" His response: "They're great wimpy pop!" The banter hadn't been intended as a litmus test for a future DS teammate, but I now smile at the scouting report on what constituted "good" and "bad" music. My "Thrift Scores" piece in Holly Womack's Fresh Rag 'zine circa 2002 also served as Triple-A training for DS. In the review of The Outfield's debut disc, I wrote: "You might think I regard Play Deep as one of the finest one-through-nine-inning collections of WRV T-shirt rock in the record books. You'd be correct in your analysis there, southpaw." Stealing another base from FR: "A swing to the warning track demonstrates (The Outfield) have an MLB-level of craftsmanship akin to first-stringers The Police and Big Country." Go ahead and add Journey's double-play duo of "Stone In Love" and "Anytime" to the squad. Send aging "stars" "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Open Arms" to the showers.

Nine years later, Bangin' is worthy of an examination by the Veterans Committee. "Since You've Been Gone" smears the dirt of denial ("An' I know you're coming back") on the cleats of intense loneliness. If this had been struck by The Police, they would've slammed a four-bagger. "Moving Targets" has Johnny Marr-like jangle behind the plate in spots, even though it lacks Morrissey-style lyrical pitches from the mound. "Playground" swings its lumber with monkey-bar guitars and see-saw drums a la Play Deep's "All My Love" and "Say It Isn't So." Joe DiMaggio would've respected the "This isn't meant to be a backseat love affair" line in the near-power pop "Better Than Nothing," but I'm not so sure about Phil Rizzuto and Meat Loaf.

Calling Bangin' "a bat out of hell" would be a misnomer. All the same, the grip feels pretty good.

-Gunther 8544

Rick Springfield- Working Class Dog (RCA, 1981)

2011-05-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

The mainstream “pop-rock” genre of music has never gotten much respect from the critical establishment. If you record a catchy little pop song on shitty equipment and sell five hundred copies to your cult following, the critics will call you an “artist”. If you record a catchy little pop song on top-of-the-line equipment and sell five million copies to soccer moms and 12-year-old girls, the critics will call you a hack. Well fuck that! Great music is great music! It’s really freaking hard to write a simple three minute pop song! Anyone who can do it brilliantly and consistently gets mad respect in my book. If you think Rick Springfield was just some pretty boy soap star who made records because he could, you’re in need of some serious learnin’! Gather ‘round, ye uninformed, and dig what I’ve got to tell you! Rick Springfield was an artist, and Working Class Dog is the greatest pop-rock album of all-time. Believe it!

True enough: at the time of its release, Working Class Dog seemed an unlikely candidate for enduring artistic significance. Springfield, who’d scored a top 20 hit as a teen idol pop star with 1972’s “Speak to the Sky”, had transitioned to acting after a suspected payola scandal involving his label Capitol had caused many radio stations to boycott his music. He starred as “himself” on the Saturday morning cartoon Mission: Magic! and later played Dr. Noah Drake on the hit soap General Hospital. But Working Class Dog was no opportunistic cash-in. Springfield, in fact, had already finished the album before he took the soap role. That his new-found stardom opened a few doors is hard to dispute. But even harder to dispute is that the music was more than worthy. From the jump, Working Class Dog comes off like an album that was made for the radio. And if you don’t think that’s a compliment, you know nothing about power pop music. Imbuing crunchy, high energy guitar rock with ringing melodies and razor-sharp hooks, opening track “Love Is Alright Tonite” just sounds like a hit. And it was – reaching the U.S. top 20 in late ’81. It was preceded there by two top tens off the same album – the Sammy Hagar penned “I’ve Done Everything For You” (#8) and the #1 smash “Jessie’s Girl”. The latter may be the greatest radio rock song ever recorded, and today it remains a staple of “classic” rock formats. In this current era in which commercial success is equated with well-honed mediocrity and soulless pandering to market demographics, the brilliance of Springfield’s artistry may be lost on most. But it’s not lost on me. Never one to underestimate the importance of a pleasing melody and a stick-in-your-head chorus, I consider the man an all-time great in his field.

It seems unnecessary to elaborate on “Jessie’s Girl”. Anyone with taste will concur that it’s the Mona Lisa of pop-rock songs and the Citizen Kane of top 40 hits. I saw Springfield debut it on the TV program Solid Gold, and it was truly a life-changing experience. The chorus knocked my socks off, and the guitar bridge was epic! I had my mom take me to the record store the next day, and home I went with the “Jessie’s Girl” 45 (Had this series of events never transpired, surely I’d now be a gaming enthusiast or antique collector instead of a music blogger). When a full LP arrived a few weeks later, it was no letdown. Co-produced by industry titan Keith Olsen (Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead) and featuring the work of seasoned session players like Robben Ford (George Harrison, Joni Mitchell) and Neil Giraldo (Pat Benatar), Working Class Dog was a polished product in all the best ways. But it was the songs that stood out the most. Springfield wasn’t trying to change the world or revolutionize music, but he sure knew what mattered to people. Who couldn’t relate to songs about broken hearts, unrequited love, and the escape from mundane frustrations afforded by a hot date on Friday night? Not unlike ‘70s acts such as The Babys or even the great Cheap Trick, Springfield achieved a blissful marriage between high-powered arena rock and carefully crafted, melody-driven pop. Fun, energetic, and expertly targeted towards the lovelorn adolescent in all of us, his songs embody the spirit of the early ‘80s in a purely good way. And although Springfield’s romantic frustrations were not as convincing as those of a less photogenic contemporary like Joe Jackson, you just couldn’t hold his good looks against him. So what if he’d banged six chicks since lunchtime? When he got up on stage and sang “Jessie’s Girl”, we didn’t doubt for a second that he felt our pain! He was one of us – singing about the girls he couldn’t have and doing it better than it had ever been done. And the girls, they loved him even more than we fellas did.

Working Class Dog is by no means 100 percent filler-free (few albums of the time were!). But its best tracks are sheer perfection, and even its cheesy moments are not without a certain charm. Lesser known songs such as “Hole in My Heart” and the reggae inflected “Everybody’s Girl” probably could have been hits, while the main departure from the three-minute pop formula, album closer “Inside Silvia”, is oddly trippy yet quite beautiful. Springfield’s songwriting acumen, while surely the vital cog, is just one part of the awesomeness. The man’s vocal chops deserve equal billing, and they especially shine on his impassioned interpretation of Hagar’s “I’ve Done Everything For You”. The world may have first perceived of Rick Springfield as an actor who could sing, but three songs into Working Class Dog, you realized it was the other way around. If you somehow still pegged him for a flash-in-the-pan, another thirteen Top 40 hits over the next seven years would ultimately prove you way wrong.

Perhaps what I love best about Working Class Dog is that it both typifies and transcends its era. When you put the album on, it’s like you’re traveling back in time. It just feels like the early ‘80s, in all the best ways. It transports you to a more innocent age – when young couples didn’t “hook up” but actually went on dates, The Greatest American Hero was killing the Nielsen ratings, and “gaming” meant you went to the mall arcade and fed quarters into the Donkey Kong machine. But whereas most popular recordings from the same period succeed as nostalgia pieces, Working Class Dog just plain succeeds. Like anything well-constructed, its superb songs and indelible melodies have held up over the long haul. The likes of “I’ve Done Everything for You” and “Love Is Alright Tonite” sound as alive and infectious now as they did the day the album was released. Compared to “classic” power pop acts like 20/20, the Plimsouls, and the like, Rick Springfield surely polished and “mainstreamed” the three-minute pop medium for a mass audience. But that’s not always a bad thing. Some music is just meant to be massive. Can you imagine “Jessie’s Girl” as an obscure “cult” hit that only hipsters bought? The mere thought throws me into a near depression. A great pop song that doesn’t get radio airplay is like the proverbial tree falling with no one around to hear it. For a number of years in the early ‘80s, Rick Springfield gave the masses great pop songs. And the masses loved it. Dude gets my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame vote!

-Josh Rutledge

The Registrators- Sixteen Wires from the New Provocate (Mangrove, 1999; Rip Off Records, 2000)

2011-05-06T10:48:00.001-07:00

To those of us who lived through it, the latter part of the 1990s clearly rates as one of the all-time classic eras of punk music. Only first wave (’77-’79) and early/pre hardcore (’80-’82) were better. There were SO many great bands going circa ’95-’99, many of whom (Teengenerate, Prostitutes, The Fuses) we’ve previously chronicled on these very pages. While I’d be hard-pressed to name one greatest punk band of the period, Japan’s mighty Registrators have to be in the conversation. How many other punk bands of that era delivered two certifiably classic full-length albums? How many other bands of that era managed to push the envelope of how punk music could sound while still retaining the energy and catchiness of the genre’s original definers? Throw in at least a full album’s worth of good-to-spectacular singles, and you’ve got yourself a recorded output for the ages! Depending on your sub-genre of choice, you could make a case for anyone from The Rip Offs to The Queers to Turbonegro as the supreme punk band of the mid-to-late ’90s. But if your top five doesn’t include The Registrators, I vehemently protest!

The mid-to-late ’90s was the golden era of garage punk LPs. Even amongst a slew of truly legendary titles, the Registrators’ 1996 debut Terminal Boredom stood out as an instant classic of the genre. Had the band chosen to make another album or two just like it, no one would have complained. But like a bunch of evil geniuses toiling away in the lab in pursuit of universal domination, The Registrators had something far more unprecedented in mind for their second LP. They were poised to take punk rock into the future. And initially, I was one of the skeptics. The new wave/post-punk thing was at the time becoming trendy, and I would have preferred more of the early Damned on amphetamines primitive trash-bashing action of Terminal Boredom. I simply didn’t “get it” at first. But I got it soon enough. Given my somewhat notorious appreciation for the “melodic” side of early punk, it was probably a surprise I didn’t immediately flip for the Buzzcockian mutatations of Sixteen Wires. To the band’s credit, the “modernization” of its sound was achieved not through the use of electronic instrumentation, but rather through sheer musical inventiveness and the advantageous use of advancing recording technology. While more melody-driven and far “odder” than Terminal Boredom, Sixteen Wires in no way abandoned the band’s trademark hyper speed pogo punk motif. It simply took it to the next level. And in direct contrast to the cold, dark sounds that were passing for “new wave” in the late ’90s, Sixteen Wires is just wild, crazy fun!

From the moment it kicks into action, Sixteen Wires sounds like the work of a band that’s been wearing the grooves out of the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP 24/7. You’ll swear that a young Shelley and Diggle are playing the leads and singing the harmonies! But easy as it may be to detect, this influence is just one element of many that make this record so extraordinary and distinctive. Perhaps if the ‘cocks had attempted to replicate the aggro-synth stylings of Ultravox and The Screamers with guitars, gotten hepped up on caffeine, and time traveled to 1999, they may have made a record like Sixteen Wires. Or maybe they wouldn’t have. The beauty of Sixteen Wires is that, really, no band but The Registrators could have made the album. It’s uniquely them - highlighted by Hiroshi’s crazed, wonderfully mangled English vocals, Ren’s out-of-this-world bass playing, and a generally off-kilter take on the punk rock sound that only a Japanese group could have fashioned. Somehow the band mashes together classic punk, lo-fi garage, and futuristic art-rock to create something totally fresh and legitimately “new”. The songs, while inflected with “experimental” tweaks of various sorts, are instantly likable and almost dangerously infectious. Side 1 scorchers like “School’s Lust” and “Panic Action” are as explosively catchy as anything off of Terminal Boredom, and even when the band really pushes the “weird” quotient, the results are massively enjoyable. Songs like “Pink Lipstick” and “Kiss Me Kiss Me” suggest what might happen if an army of aliens got ahold of some '70s punk recordings and started their own Martian new wave band. At times it sounds like The Registrators of old (the blazing “T.V. Hell” and “Automatic Exit” are re-records of A-sides from ’97), and at times it’s completely the opposite. The near-epic “Louder Faster” sounds like a long-lost masterpiece of English post-punk from 1980, while the magnum opus title track brings to mind the experimental side of the Buzzcocks’ A Different Kind of Tension.

It’s interesting to note that The Registrators kind of lost the plot after Sixteen Wires, their scant pre-breakup output ranging from pedestrian power pop to almost unlistenable indie rock. Much like another defining punk band of a particular era, The Clash, they had probably reached such heights of greatness that there was nowhere left to go but off the cliff. But isn’t that the sort of problem almost every band in the world wishes it had? The last time I spoke on the telephone with resident DS pundit Shawn Abnoxious, he told me The Registrators were going to save rock n’ roll. This must have been 1997, ’98 – a couple years before anyone knew what was coming in Sixteen Wires. I can only surmise that Shawn saw the future, that perhaps he’d even traveled there with The Registrators and sat in their luxury sky box. I’m reminded of the plot of that classic American film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the very foundation of civilization surviving is predicated upon the existence of a rock band. I can truly imagine a future world in which Sixteen Wires is hailed as society’s salvation and all the little cyborg children fall at Hiroshi’s feet. Even in our more primitive early 2000s, we encountered scores of bands that attempted (mostly in vain) to emulate the modern punk sound of Sixteen Wires. If it were simply as easy as utilizing phaser guitar, choppy rhythms, discordant instrumentation, and bizarre vocal effects, this album could have been re-made a dozen times over and perhaps even improved upon. But as we well all know, that wasn’t it at all. Great music results from neither style nor techniques. It results from talent and inspiration, and The Registrators had both in abundance. Sixteen Wires is far more than merely a groundbreaking achievement. It’s simply a great album on every level. It’s fun to listen to and contains a large number of truly classic songs. Here’s a top secret known only by the reptilian hybrid men who live under ground and clandestinely control all the world’s governments: The Registrators did save rock n’ roll. Eventually, we will all be informed.

-Josh Rutledge

The Demons - self titled (Mercury Records, 1977)

2011-04-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been a fan of the three dollar record. You know what I mean: some forgotten long player from the '70s or early '80s, played to death in its day, stored in the attic for decades, then eventually carted off to the record store and exchanged for a miniscule amount of currency. It’s then marked for three bucks and placed in the bins with thousands of other records, where it will likely languish until the end of time. If you know what you’re looking for, you can get a good deal on a record like that. Hell, for three bucks, it’s worth the dough even if there’s only one great song! It’s just like buying a single – except the larger surface area allows it to double as a weapon. Such titles as Romeo Void’s Benefactor and JoBoxers' Like Gangbusters, which I ostensibly bought for one track, would have been overpriced at retail value. But at three dollars a pop, I did not hesitate.

…Which brings us to The Demons’ self-titled debut album. It’s the ultimate three dollar record. Like almost any other band even remotely attached to the mid-to-late ‘70s New York City punk scene, The Demons got signed to a major. Singer/guitarist Eliot Kidd was probably best known for having a few quotes in Please Kill Me. He was a pal of Johnny Thunders and Walter Lure (who at one point was a member of The Demons). Having gigged a lot with the likes of The Dictators, The Demons drew the attention of Mercury Records and were given the opportunity to record with Craig Leon. Leon, as an assistant to the legendary producer Richard Gottehrer, had worked with the Ramones, Blondie, Suicide, and Richard Hell. And while The Demons may have not been top tier a la the aforementioned bands, their one and only album is a really cool artifact of early New York punk.

The Demons are probably best known for the song “She’s So Tuff”, which was covered a decade ago by Tina and the Total Babes. Tina Lucchesi knows how to pick ‘em! “She’s So Tuff” was hands down one of the greatest power pop songs of the late ‘70s, and it alone justifies the purchase of the Demons’ album. If Kidd had been able to write a few more songs like “She’s So Tuff”, then perhaps The Demons would not be such an obscure band in our present memory. The closest the group came to another A-level track was album closer “I Hate You”, which is disturbingly funny and really fucking catchy in a Heartbreakers meets Real Kids sort of way. I can totally imagine Tina Lucchesi covering this one as well - so stay tuned, rock n’ rollers! The rest of the album, while not devoid of filler, delivers some really cool tracks. Opening cut “It’ll Be Alright” is a terrific mid-tempo rocker that kinda brings to mind Johnny Thunders fronting The Paul Collins Beat. Given Kidd’s connection to Thunders and Lure, it’s hardly surprising that “Bad Dreamin’” comes off like an LAMF outtake. “Ten Past One” is a very credible ballad in the fashion of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. And well-done covers of “She’s a Rebel” and “I Fought the Law” further affirm Kidd’s affinity for that particular era of rock n’ roll.

Probably not a “punk” band per se, The Demons imbued their throwback rock n’ roll with enough sleaze and sloppiness to nonetheless fit the bill. The now-deceased Kidd is somewhat notorious for being in Sid Vicious’s hotel room the night Nancy Spungen died. But as a musician, he was more than worthy. You can’t really say The Demons were an influence on the glam-punk that resurged in the ‘90s (after all, who had actually heard them besides Tina Lucchesi?). But if you’re a fan of anyone from The Joneses to the Trash Brats to the Dimestore Haloes, you will most definitely recognize The Demons as some of the earliest practitioners of their style. Like a second string New York Dolls with power pop tendencies, Kidd and his mates were a fun band that must have been a good time live. They left behind just this one album, and one truly classic song in “She’s So Tuff”. In this age of Internet commerce, it’s not always easy to get a great deal on an old LP. But if there’s a shop in your proximity that deals in large quantities of used vinyl, The Demons are worth seeking out…even if you have to pay more than three dollars.

-Josh Rutledge

OFF! - First Four EPs (VICE, 2010)

2011-04-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

On October 15, 2010, vocalist Keith Morris (Black Flag/Circle Jerks), guitarist Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), bassist Steven McDonald (Redd Kross) and drummer Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt) were featured on "Last Call with Carson Daly." Banding together as OFF!, the fearless foursome performed their entire first EP (simply titled 1st EP) in front of NBC's TV cameras at Club Lingerie in their home base of Los Angeles. Running through the set at a clip equivalent to a star high-school miler's four laps, KM and friends ticked a moment in time worthy of being shot by Al Flipside or Penelope Spheeris for a viewing audience arguably more in need of a punk-rock boot to the head than the Pablo Cruise passengers from thirty years ago. Morris' Johnny Rotten-raised-in-SoCal sneer hasn't lessened one iota since his classic turns on Black Flag's Nervous Breakdown EP (1978) and the Circle Jerks' Group Sex (1980)/Wild In The Streets (1982) twin killers. Prior to the "Last Call..." live footage, here was Morris' take on the current state of the music he had a major role in shaping: "We're older guys. We don't really listen to a lot of the new punk rock bands. I mean, you can go the Warped Tour and you can see all of these emo, screamo boy bands. If you're a 13-year-old girl, that's cute and swell and wonderful. But if you're like older guys like us, that's not happening."

For "older guys" like KM -- who's still screaming at the age of 55 -- OFF! (yet another band named after an insecticide) are a breath of polluted air for those who sucked on intoxicants from Black Flag's vast spray can BACK IN THE DAY™. Thirty-two years after Morris' initial spasms, The First Four EPs collection recalls the nascent days of BF in more than one instance. Tense 'n' terse compositions lasting around a minute each in length. Lyrics dripping with several coats of anger and intensity. Raymond Pettibon's distinctive artwork that's as important to the band's vision as any instrumentalist. The most crucial likeness? KM's ageless voice box. From Pettibon in the First Four EP's liner notes: "Keith could've been born with a microphone in his hand, though he spits righteous spiel without for the privileged backstage or on the street. Cole Porter would have loved him for his enunciation and interpretation if he could have gotten past the shock and rush of Dimitri's, Steve's and Mario's accompaniment."

Thankfully, the "shock and rush" of Morris' supporting cast pace all 16 OFF!-erings in a running time faster than your track-star brother's 5K result from the Eastern Regionals. "Scared and soaked in sweat/How worse can this get?" shouts KM on "Panic Attack," and the pronounced fear is much worse than your bro's asthmatic teammate who left the necessary inhaler in his red-headed girlfriend's glove box. Spray-painting the band's moniker on a wall amongst spartan surroundings, "Darkness" doesn't turn off the Todd Stadium lights on its brutal truth shining in your face ("You're the problem/We're the solution"). Bet you and your Cocks High School buds would suck a schlong in order to skate a reconstituted Mount Trashmore ramp to the strains of "Upside Down" being played live. 'Til that happens, watch the vid with jealous rage and decipher this, dudes: "You wonder why I'm always shouting/You wonder why I've gotta yell/You ask me why I don't hang out/'Cause you turned this into a livin' hell." Had you and your brother taken the suggested Advanced Placement art class instead of slacking in a study hall, perhaps there would've been two scholarships to Virginia Commonwealth University at term's end. But alas, the aimlessness turned black paint into "Black Thoughts" ("I crash into a wall/No feelings at all/How far will I go/Before I hit the bottom"). While you were doing your best Tony Alva impersonations and pestering homeless veterans on the boardwalk, here's what was missed from Dr. Morris' "I Don't Belong" lecture: "Hit on Miss Liberty/Under the cherry tree/Drunk on hypocrisy/I'm standing in the shadows/And I'm pissing in the punch bowl." Next day's plans included smoking wacky weed and blasting Dave Matthews Bland bootlegs in your white Rastafarian friend's Jeep, thus the glimpses of "Poison City" went uncaptured ("No pictures/No flowers/Crumbling towers/Glamorize the fallen rubble/Stirring up all this trouble"). Since DMB kills eardrums and engines dead, you weren't able to hear Dr. Morris' heartfelt eulogy for his friend "Jeffrey Lee Pierce." Here's some final thoughts: "A river runs through his esophagus/To a swamp buried in his chest/So carry off, Jeffrey Lee/And we'll burn that Christmas tree."

Carson Daly: You're OFF! my shitlist.

-Gunther 8544

Adolescents- self titled (Frontier Records, 1981)

2011-04-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve put forth some questionable opinions in my day. I said the Dallas Cowboys should have drafted Tony Mandarich over Troy Aikman. I said reality TV was going to be a short-lived fad. I said Rudy Giuliani would coast to presidential election in 2008. I said Gary Cole deserved an Oscar nomination for Office Space (okay, I still believe that one). The point is that I’m prone to a lot of knee-jerk declarations that don’t pan out too well in the long run. It’s a defect in my brain chemistry. I was the guy who panned the debut albums of both The Daggers and the High Tension Wires. I was the guy who said The Office could never succeed as an American TV program. I was the guy who wanted the Eagles to trade Michael Vick for a 6th round draft pick last summer. But if I give myself time to really think something over, I usually get it right. The world at large may still disagree at first, but in time I’m always proven correct. I told you Donna was hotter than Jackie. I told you Hardee’s didn’t suck anymore. I told you Abe Vigoda was never going to die. I didn’t just blurt these things out. I meditated upon them at length. I did research. I pondered meticulously. Then I spoke up. Similarly, my choice for the third-greatest punk LP ever made was not hastily determined. I have been considering the point for a good 15, 16 years. I have listened to thousands of records. I have drawn detailed charts. I have consulted the Mayan prophecies. It’s all led me to the same conclusion: If the first two Ramones records are by default the top two punk albums of all-time, then #3 has got to be the 1981 debut by The Adolescents. Take it to the bank.

What I love about the Adolescents was that they occupied a very cool niche in punk history. They weren’t ’77 punk, and they weren’t hardcore punk. They were something perfectly in between. They had the catchy three-chord simplicity of early punk, but also a snotty attitude and ramped-up aggression that foreshadowed the arrival of hardcore. It wouldn’t be quite correct to say this band invented snotty teenage punk, but they’ve got to be considered one of the defining bands of the style. Formed in 1980 by 17-year-olds Steve Soto and Tony Cadena and featuring 16-year-old Frank Agnew on guitar, The Adolescents really were adolescents. The quick departure of original members John O’Donovan (guitar) and Peter Pan (drums) paved the way for the addition of a couple of scene veterans in ex Social Distortion players Rikk Agnew (Frank’s brother) and Casey Royer. The combination of Rikk Agnew’s skilled songwriting and Cadena’s attitude-laden, authentically teenage vocals proved hard to beat, and in short order the group powered out the classic single “Amoeba”. With its snarling vocals, ripping melodic guitar leads, and rousing sing-along chorus, it created a blueprint not just for The Adolescents but for Orange County punk as a whole. As synonymous with its time and place as “God Save the Queen” and “Blitzkrieg Bop” were to theirs, this song alone would have made legends of The Adolescents. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Adolescents (aka The Blue Album) is one of those rare debut LPs that plays like a best-of collection. In addition to “Amoeba”, songs like “Creatures”, “No Way”, “Wrecking Crew”, “Who Is Who”, and the near-epic “Kids of the Black Hole” are all bona fide classics that are still being copied today by up-and-coming punk groups who could only dream of being half this good. The group plays with the youthful abandon and slamming raw energy that are essential to this style of music, but one should not overlook the incredible skill that went into making the record. The guitar playing of the Agnew brothers- a hallmark of both The Adolescents in particular and the O.C. punk sound in general - mirrors the stylings of Johnny Thunders but kicks it up a notch. And the songwriting, largely credited to the elder Agnew, packs these hard-charging tunes with honest-to-goodness hooks! Cadena on vocals sounds so ferociously indignant that it’s almost shocking to see old video footage where he looks like a little kid (the way he sang, I always pictured a cross between Lemmy and Henry Rollins!). When people talk about all-time great vocal performances on punk rock albums, maybe they bring up Jake Burns on Inflammable Material or Jello Biafra on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables or John Lydon on Never Mind the Bollocks. Rarely is Tony Cadena’s name brought up, but it damn well ought to be. From the first line of “I Hate Children” through the final raging strain of “Creatures”, he raises the standard for what “snotty” vocals are supposed to sound like.

While most adolescent punk rock is considered utterly disposable or at best charmingly juvenile, Adolescents is a remarkably enduring and transcendent recording. I was already in my mid-to-late 20s when I first heard it – long past the point where I held a “teenage” point of view. Even now, at the age of 40 and very much an average Joe, I find these songs exceptionally relevant to the human experience. If tunes like “No Way”, “L.A. Girl”, and “Creatures” articulate how fake and fickle society truly is, there’s no denying that’s truer than ever today. “I Hate Children” is still really fucking funny. And “Kids of the Black Hole”, in its candid critique of teenage hedonism run amok, comes off eerily prophetic in the context of our current culture. Most importantly, this remains some of the hottest and fiercest punk music ever committed to record. I would imagine that if you are a teenage punk struggling to find acceptance in the high school hierarchy and the world at large, cuts like “Who Is Who” and “Wrecking Crew” would become personal anthems the instant you heard them. And the great thing is that these are songs you’ll never need to “outgrow”. I listen to this album at the gym when I’m pulling heavy weight off the floor and at home when I’m cleaning the bathroom. It’s not just a classic punk LP but also one of the greatest albums of the past 30 years, period. And although there have been numerous reboots of The Adolescents franchise with varying lineups, they’ve never been able to quite recapture the magic of that first album. Then again, neither has anyone else.

-Josh Rutledge

Judas Priest- Defenders of the Faith (Columbia, 1984)

2011-04-01T11:15:00.001-07:00

Anyone with the fine taste to like Judas Priest in the first place can tell you that British Steel and Screaming for Vengeance are classic albums (and that Point of Entry in between was, yeah, kind of sub-par). Priest in the early ‘80s was the balls, and the band’s exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is one of the great tragedies of our time. Perhaps points had to be deducted for JP’s lackluster output in the latter part of the ‘80s. The majority of Priest fans would generously label Turbo and Ram It Down as “disappointments”, but where does that leave 1984’s Defenders of the Faith? Is it the last album of Priest’s good era or the first album of its bad era? Not only would I argue for the former, but also I would maintain that Defenders of the Faith is one of the top five Judas Priest albums ever.

I bought Defenders of the Faith the day it came it out. It was probably the first album in my life that I purchased on its release day. I think that as a 12-year-old Priest fan, I was initially a little let down by Defenders of the Faith because it lacked a true “classic” song a la “Breaking the Law” or “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”. There was no “crossover” smash hit single on the album – which seemed odd given the emerging marketability of heavy metal music circa early 1984. But it was precisely that non-commercial quality that ultimately made Defenders a great album. As the title suggests, the record wasn’t made for the masses. It wasn’t catered to the 14-year-old girls who bought Def Leppard’s Pyromania. It was made for true fans of metal. And although Priest was only a couple of years off from selling out in the very worst way, on this album the band didn’t care jack shit about cashing in or getting on MTV. They just put the pedal to the metal and rocked. And even if there’s not one all-time classic track to be found, from start to finish Defenders is as consistently good as any album in the Priest catalog.

There’s no denying Judas Priest’s highly influential and very worthy 1970s output. Still, when I think of Judas Priest, I think of early ‘80s Priest. I think of leather and motorcycles and sold-out arenas and Rob Halford wailing away on vocals and K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton engaging in dual guitar wanking of the most epic variety. Defenders of the Faith typifies that prime era of Priest. It’s the third of the three classic albums the band released in its true heyday, and of the three it’s no doubt the hardest. The songs, while tuneful and loaded with hooks, kick ass and shake the walls. Not even the dreaded tinny ‘80s production can tame the Priest metal machine. The group hadn’t captured this level of power and aggression on record in years – and would not capture it again until 1990’s speed metal surprise Painkiller. And Halford – arguably the greatest metal singer of all-time – is in career-best form. The utter ferociousness that caused “Freewheel Burning” to tank as a single makes it a big favorite amongst hardcore fans. It flat-out rips, the band coming out of the gates with a vengeance (no pun intended). It’s merely the first half of a 1-2 punch, with “Jawbreaker” coming on strong right behind it. And although tunes like the minor hit “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” slow the pace a little, it’s the power numbers that prevail. “Rock Hard Ride Free” and “Heavy Duty” (a throwback to classic J.P. arena sing-alongs like “United” and “Take on the World”) are veritable anthems that deserve a place on any good Priest best-of collection.

If there seems to be an inherent cheesiness to Defenders of the Faith (the cover art, some of the lyrics), it’s strictly an awesome, proto Spinal Tap kind of cheesiness. This was 1984, after all. Heavy metal music was supposed to be evil. And like Turbonegro, whom they clearly inspired, Priest wasn’t funny purely by accident. I doubt that one could read the lyrics to “Love Bites” or the homoerotic sex bondage anthem “Eat Me Alive” and not think the band was trying to be humorous (one person who did not get the joke: Tipper Gore). And even if “The Sentinel” is closer lyrically to a bad imitation of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” or countless Iron Maiden songs than it is to a proper parody, the band gets a pass because musically it freakin’ rocks! You could say the same about the album as a whole. Defenders is everything you wanted from a metal record in the early ‘80s. It’s accessible to the mainstream, but not overtly commercial. It’s loud, aggressive, and unapologetically cheesy. And of course it has the over-the-top operatic vocals and speed of light guitar shredding that every metalhead craves! Add in that the songs are tremendous, and you’ve got yourself a genre masterpiece. As metal music was rapidly growing in popularity, Priest would soon stumble in an effort to fit in. The use of synthesizers on Turbo was just plain pathetic, and Ram It Down was a totally phoned-in effort. But Priest’s decline is no way foreshadowed on Defenders of the Faith. A slump may have been looming, but they hit this one out of the park.

-Josh Rutledge

The Pursuit Of Happiness - Love Junk (Chrysalis, 1988)

2011-03-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

Soon, the supercomputer known as Watson will assist professionals in the fields of finance, healthcare and telecommunications. This past February, however, the question-and-answering machine developed by IBM (I Beat Mortals) was in no mood to be helpful. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter -- two of the greatest contestants in the history of game shows -- competed against Watson in a "Jeopardy!" exhibition match that benefited their respective charities. Though the humans' intellectual prowess on past programs had made the pair legends (not to mention millionaires!), their efforts against the computer were at the level of a clueless "Wheel Of Fortune" wheel spinner choosing an already-turned-by-Vanna White letter. With the ability to tap the buzzer in 10 milliseconds, Watson out-clicked Jennings and Rutter in 24 out of 30 Double Jeopardy questions to win the $1 million top prize. The machine's final total was a whopping $77,147, which almost doubled the combined tally of the flesh-and-blood duo. Paraphrasing a bit from "The Simpsons" ("I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords!"), Jennings accepted his second-place check ($300,000) with a chuckle. Watson wasn't completely omniscient, though. In the category of U.S. Cities, the Final Jeopardy answer read: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle." The computer's response of "What is Toronto?" drew gasps from the IBM researchers and others in the audience. "What is Chicago?" was, of course, the question on Alex Trebek's card. As a native of Canada, the "Jeopardy!" host would've been somewhat justified to call Watson a "dumbass" at that particular moment.

The Pursuit Of Happiness weren't an airport based in a large American city, but Toronto was the launching point of the group in 1985. Piloted by Moe Berg (guitar/vocals) -- who bore a strong resemblance to The Kid Who Had A Report Due On Space from the encyclopedia adverts -- TPOH also featured Dave Gilby (drums), Johnny Sinclair (bass) and sisters Tamara and Natasha Amabile (backing vocals) in the cabin. 1986 saw the release of the band's debut single, "I'm An Adult Now," as well as a grainy video of the song filmed on the streets of TPOH's hometown. Still an unsigned act in early 1988, the group put forth another independent 45, "Killed By Love," that failed to generate the attention of the previous wax. Before inking a deal with Chrysalis Records, the Amabile sisters parted ways with TPOH and were substituted by Kris Abbott and Leslie Stanwyck. Todd Rundgren was tapped for production of Love Junk -- the band's first LP. Would the pairing be a match made in Utopia?

TR's knob-tuning on the record more than meets Moe Berg's once-stated ambition of "crossing AC/DC with ABBA." The fellas strike their tools with the force of 21 Australian lightning bolts, while Abbott and "Not Costello" Stanwyck touch all harmonious bases of said Swedish supergroup's better half. If such a hybrid scares you, there's plenty of gold for fans of Andy Partridge, Dave Faulkner, Pat DiNizio and David Lowery to pan. Re-recorded for Love Junk and again released as a single, "I'm An Adult Now" would climb to #6 on the Billboard Alternative songs chart. No matter the take, Berg's cynical look at the expected behaviors of 18-and-overs makes it a classic in the annals of modern rock. (Oxymoron, anyone?) Sample snapshots: "I can't even look at young girls anymore/People will think I'm some kind of pervert/Adult sex is either boring or dirty/Young people can get away with murder" and "I'd sure look like a fool, dead in a ditch somewhere/With a mind full of chemicals, like some cheese-eating high school boy." "Killed By Love" was also redone for the album, and the heavier mix lifts the lines. You might want to call Cupid's Crane Service to excavate its final words from six feet under, though ("My passion was your weapon/It put a blindfold on my eyes/The last sound I heard was laughter as you buried me alive"). Yo, Moe: Is that the guitar riff from INXS' "The One Thing" in your band's "Hard To Laugh"? If so, nice appropriation, man! Double kudos for the lyric, "Everyone asks you why you're so serious/'Cause your woman's got a body that would make most women delirious." Give me a Robin Scherbatsky in a Canucks sweater who'll be faithful for a week. After that, she can cheat with Ted, Barney, Rick Moranis, Dave Stieb, the Farriss brothers and you to her black heart's content. One word of caution when "Looking For Girls" like Robin and otherwise: BEWARE! ("She might be a Catholic/She might be a nurse/She might give me a child or gonorrhea or something worse/She might be a painter or a Communist, with my luck/But that's the kind of girl you really want to fuck"). "Man's Best Friend" is not an ode to a four-legged companion, but it removes the fleas from a situation that's dogged many ("Well I guess it's no secret to any of us/How I feel about you/But to live it out vicariously through him/Is the best I can do"). The Stones-like groove of "Beautiful White" balances a sweet story that's told with somewhat of a smirk ("She's got a big grey overcoat/She just dumps on a chair/But she paid a lot for those trousers/She'll handle 'em with more care").

To quote Watson's creators: "Let's build a smarter planet." One listen to Love Junk is a good start. Even if you're a "cheese-eating high school boy."

-Gunther 8544

Stiletto Boys- Rockets and Bombs (High Society International, 1999)

2011-03-23T08:51:00.001-07:00

Of all the late ‘90s bands fashioned in the style of first wave punk rock, the Stiletto Boys were one of the top two or three. Crossing the racing tempos and vocal stylings of The Dickies with the old school pop-punk ethos of The Boys and the face-smashing aggression of the Dead Boys and Radio Birdman, this Lancaster, Pennsylvania outfit was brought back from the dead after its 8-Track 7” was released to great acclaim by Zodiac Records in 1997. A new 7”, Attitude Adjuster, made its way into the world in 1998, and for the next couple of years the Stiletto Boys were a machine. They played out three or four times a month and recorded like crazy. In short order they cranked out two great LPs and then kind of fell off the face of the earth. A long overdue third album has actually been in the works for a few years now, and if it ever sees the light of day, it will surely be great. While we wait, we still have the back catalog to enjoy. Debut album Rockets and Bombs in particular belongs to that rare class of ‘90s punk records that could have come out 20 years prior and held their own against the best LPs of the day.

As the Stiletto Boys were continually gravitating towards a power pop focused modus operandi, second album Buzzbomb Sounds (aka A Company of Wolves) was without doubt more “evolved” than its predecessor. A lot of people like it better. If Rockets and Bombs was their own Boys self-titled, then Buzzbomb Sounds was their Alternative Chartbusters. But the punk purist in me prefers the visceral thrills of Rockets and Bombs, with its bright hooks and breakneck tempos. It’s classic Stiletto Boys all the way, propelled by Casey Wolfe’s ridiculously good drumming, brother Sean’s vocal synthesis of Stiv Bators and Leonard Graves Phillips, and Eric Benner’s rocket launcher guitar sound. The material is a nice mix of oldies-but-goodies (“8-Track” and “Don’t Stop” – which will never be surpassed as the greatest Stiletto Boys song of all-time!) and newer tunes like the hyper and impossibly catchy “Killing Me”. Whether you prefer scorching rock n’ roll adrenaline (“Triple Two Stroke”, “It’s About Time”) or beautiful pop melodies (“Don’t Cry for Me”), the album is all-killer, no-filler. It’s weird to say that I “forgot” how many great Stiletto Boys songs there were. But as I listen to this disc, I find myself really taken aback by the wealth of songwriting talent they had (and no doubt still have). Remember “Sirens”? Remember “Second To None”? That shit was mint! The real bonus here is that the CD issue tacks on the 8-Track and Attitude Adjuster EPs in their entirety plus another unreleased EP, for a total of a whopping 23 tracks. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, son! In effect the disc functions as a “best-of” for the ‘90s Stiletto Boys, whereas Buzzbomb Sounds better represents the band in its Year 2000 vintage. You can’t go wrong either way.

The Stiletto Boys’ quantitative lack of output may have been a blessing in disguise. Had they kept on putting out albums, it’s possible their fans may have grown bored of their consistent brilliance. It would have been like, “Another perfect Stiletto Boys album? Ho-hum.” But now it’s been a decade, and it’s high time for a comeback. Especially with the band now citing influences outside their previous realm (Mott the Hoople, Nick Lowe, The Who, The Vapors), the work-in-progress Liberator is intriguing to consider. In the meantime, as you continue to digitalize your highly treasured ‘90s punk rock music collection, make certain that Rockets and Bombs sits atop your need-to-download list!

-Josh Rutledge

Dramarama- Cinema Verite (New Rose/Question Mark, 1985)

2011-03-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

For such a small state, New Jersey has managed to produce a disproportionately large number of great recording artists. All but a few states in the union would be envious to claim the Feelies, Smithereens, Shirelles, Misfits, Four Seasons, Adrenalin O.D., Gaslight Anthem, Ricky Nelson, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen as their own. So if Dramarama easily rates as one of Jersey’s ten greatest bands ever, that’s no small feat. Originally based out of the town of Wayne (home to, among others, boxing trainer great Lou Duva, infamous “reality TV” star Danielle Staub, and a fellow named George Washington), Dramarama eventually relocated to L.A. and took the world by storm. Okay, so they didn’t quite take the world by storm. But they should have, and at the very least they scored the all-time most requested song on legendary L.A alternative rock station KROQ, the blistering anthem “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)”. And while it was hardly a chart dominator, the band’s debut album was probably as good as any rock album released in 1985. In a truly epic year for below-ground guitar rock albums (Husker Du’s New Day Rising and Flip Your Whig, the Replacements’ Tim, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction, The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder, the Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun, to name a few), Cinema Verite rated up there with all of the above.

Rooted in the Bowie/Lou Reed/Ian Hunter strain of glam rock, informed by early ‘80s new wave, and infused with the simple hooks of classic punk and power pop, Dramarama’s sound was unlike any other band’s. John Easdale was one of the finest songwriters of his day or any other, and he was backed by a hard-rocking quintet that would have made Mott the Hoople or the ‘70s Stones proud. Part Brit-pop revivalists, part Jersey bar blasters, and part Hollywood club scene rock stars, Dramarama had the radio-ready hits and buzzworthy live act that ought to have propelled them to international fame. No matter that they didn’t – the songs hold up regardless. The Rhino best-of comp 18 Big Ones is pure gold all the way through and belongs in the collection of anyone who’s got taste. But the albums are great as well, and none are greater than Cinema Verite.

“Anything Anything (“I’ll Give You)” qualifies as a “classic” by even the most stringent application of the term. In its account of impetuous young love’s de-evolution into an acrimonious and ill-fated marriage, perhaps it qualifies as the most realistic love song ever written. Beyond that, it’s a killer rock n’ roll tune, propelled by Easdale’s impassioned vocal delivery and the fine guitar work of Peter Wood and Mr. E Boy, who go off like a new wave Thunders and Sylvain. Completely different, but equally great, is the melancholy pop tune “Scenario”, which somehow sounds uniquely Dramarama-ish even though it blatantly rips off the Psychedelic Furs. Hands down, it’s my fave Dramarama song (“Sister’s in the everglades/Mother swallows razor blades/Father makes the flags for all the Labor Day parades” - Where did he come up with this stuff?). It seems unforgivable that “Questions?” was left off the Rhino comp. It’s classic Easdale – the song’s narrator confronting an ex-girlfriend’s new man (“Does she make you buy her jewelry?/Does she speak to you in tongues?/Does she tell you about her brother/Who's got liquid in his lungs?”), his anguish conveyed not just through words but also a despairing vocal tone. The cliché about broken hearts is that they sometimes give us classic songs, and no doubt this classic song was inspired by real-life heartbreak. And if I call the guitar work “Clapton-esque”, do I mean it as a compliment? Yes! Elsewhere the band takes on jangle pop (“Transformation”), ballads (the marvelous “Emerald City”), glam rock standards (the Velvets’ “Femme Fatale” and the Bowie obscurity “Candidate”), and straight-up punk rock (“All I Want”), coming up aces all the while. Whether you think of Easdale as a poor man’s Paul Westerberg, a modern-day Ian Hunter, or a masculine David Bowie, no doubt it’s his growling voice and brilliant lyrics that really bring Cinema Verite to life. The men backing him are fantastic as well, and bassist Chris Carter’s no-frills production effectively marries Dramarama’s bar band roots to its pop art sensibilities.

Dramarama would record four more studio albums before calling it quits in 1994 (only to be famously reunited on a VH1 TV show a decade later). It is this writer’s humble opinion that all five pre-breakup LPs are must-owns. The Rhino comp, as good as it is, will not suffice even for the most casual fan. When you’re talking about a songwriting talent as prodigious and inimitable as John Easdale, an 18-song sampling only scratches the surface. You gotta go catalog with Dramarama. Stuck in Wonderamaland, if only for its outstanding cover of Mott the Hoople’s “I Wish I Was Your Mother” (a rendition so poignant it made my cry the first five times I heard it), earns serious consideration as the very first Dramarama album you should buy. But Cinema Verite edges it out. If you're a fan of good music, you really need to own it.

-Josh Rutledge

Air Supply - Lost in Love (Arista, 1980)

2011-01-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

If one considers the cumulative abundant manliness of AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, Radio Birdman, The Saints, the Fun Things, and the Victims and then considers the finite amount of testosterone available to any one continent’s gene pool, then clearly Air Supply was a band that could not be avoided. The irony is that Air Supply – long mocked for their monumentally sappy ballads and frequently derided as something even worse than a couple of Aussie Michael Boltons – probably got more pussy than all of the aforementioned bands put together. And while it might not be cool to dig Air Supply, you have to give the duo its props. If it’s only fair to judge a band within the context of its particular genre, then Air Supply is close to soft rock royalty. At worst, they were true craftsmen and worthy successors to such AM gold progenitors as Bread and England Dan & John Ford Coley. And truth be told, I love me some AM gold! Surely it’s going too far to call Lost in Love a “great” album. But I’ve got no problem admitting that it is a classic of its genre. Three decades on, I bet it’s melted more panties than the first three Twilight movies combined.

For all intents and purposes, Air Supply was (and still is!) two guys: Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock. The former was the pretty boy blonde Bjorn Borg looking guitarist/songwriter while the latter had the unfortunate white man afro and sang lead. Lost in Love, their fifth album, was their first to receive any airplay outside of Australia. But when Air Supply finally hit it, they hit it BIG. Lost in Love scored three top five U.S. singles and went double platinum. Music industry legend Clive Davis heard the Aussie single “Lost in Love” in 1979, signed Air Supply to Arista Records, and quickly had the band re-record the tune for an American release. Added to what was already a fine set of new songs, it made for a true powerhouse soft rock album. #2 hit “All Out of Love”, for all its epic cheesiness, boasts a melody of such perfection that it brought drill sergeants to tears and literally moved mountains (albeit two very small ones along the northwestern coast of New Zealand). Even better are the breezy, mellowed-out groove of “Lost in Love” (like some forbidden coupling of Cat Stevens and Christopher Cross) and a rare quality “happy” love song in “Every Woman in the World” (penned by professional songwriting tandem Bugatti and Musker). It was the latter that turned a nine-year-old me on to Air Supply when the group performed it on the TV program Solid Gold sometime in the fall of 1980. I loved the song the instant I heard it and would soon after request, for Christmas, a cassette copy of Lost in Love. I played the hell out of that thing! Having already owned AC/DC’s Back in Black, and soon to discover the power pop splendor of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl”, I would come to think of Australia as this magical, mystical place inhabited primarily by incredibly talented musicians. Little did I know then how right I truly was.

Do ladies love sensitive men? Perhaps. Do ladies love sensitive men with hit songs on the charts and big money in the bank? Definitely. Air Supply came out of nowhere to become the biggest band of 1980, and that was only the beginning. They would score five more top five hits and two more platinum albums by the end of 1983, achieving a level of world domination somewhat equivalent to today’s Bieber fever – except in their case the females they bedazzled were well past puberty and clearly capable of expressing their appreciation in the best way possible. This is only speculation, but based on the demographics and sheer size of the Air Supply fan base, Russell and Russell circa the early ‘80s must have been availed to a volume and quality of pussy that would have made even Bon Scott envious (by now rolling over in his grave for sure, wishing he’d imbibed less and written more songs like “Overdose”). Such is the jealousy amongst the world’s male populace that Internet rumors still abound about Russell and Russell being gay and married to each other (easily dispelled with a small amount of fact-checking, losers!). Laugh them off as wusses all you want, brother. But be aware that not only did they “get some”, but they got more than you’ll ever dream of. I’ll put it this way – if these two dudes weren’t indulging in a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of ripened female flesh from the first night of the One That You Love tour right on through to the plane ride back to Melbourne at the conclusion of the last gig in support of the Making Love compilation, then what was the point of writing all those sappy songs? Liking Air Supply will not get you laid. But being Air Supply surely did, and one cannot underestimate the artistry required to concoct such supremely seductive tuneage.

Like their country mate Mel Gibson, who peaked with the first two Mad Max films and only half redeemed himself with Braveheart and the Lethal Weapon franchise, Air Supply would rest on its laurels for decades. They’d never again attain the artistic and commercial heights of their heyday, and they didn’t really need to. A greatest hits compilation may suffice for most, but for me Lost in Love is Air Supply’s Mad Max. It holds up so well not because it’s flawless, but rather because it’s not. It’s a perfect 1980 time capsule, capturing in song everything that was good and bad about that strange time in our world’s history. The ‘70s were over, but the ‘80s had yet to begin in earnest. Men still wore shirts that exposed chest hair and gaudy necklaces. You could still call a midget a midget, and Chlamydia was not an “S.T.D.” but rather a “V.D.” The funny term “sex symbol” still existed, and was applied to the likes of Cathy Lee Crosby, Loni Anderson, Lee Majors, and Erik Estrada. There was no Internet or even MTV (that would come a year later). You were a high roller if you had HBO and/or owned an Atari 2600. If you wanted to follow popular music, you actually listened to the radio and bought 45s of the songs you liked. There weren’t chat rooms or Facebook or even email. “Social networking” meant going to some sleazy singles bar and striking up conversations of astrological significance. Most likely you just stayed in and watched The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, then put on the big headphones, listened to some fine music on the stereo, and contemplated the imagined glories of boning Suzanne Somers. And this being 1980, Lost in Love was definitely one of the titles you played. It had all the hits, plus some notorious misses (the failed attempt at recreating Bee Gees magic, “Just Another Woman”, the unbearably cheesy wanna-be anthem “American Hearts”, the unfortunate rocker “I Can’t Get Excited”). On top of the classic cuts, deep tracks like “Having You Near Me” and “My Best Friend” were first class proto adult contemporary rock all the way, establishing a formula that the likes of Chicago would later milk for all it was worth.

We often say “They don’t make music like that anymore” in reference to the classic artists of yesteryear. But sometimes that phrase can pertain to music that wasn’t even particularly respected to begin with. Truth be told, nobody does make music like Air Supply’s Lost in Love anymore. That gloriously wimpy, super-sentimental, silky-soft style of rock is a relic of the past just like “V.D.” and recreational racquetball. I for one wish “V.D.” were still in vogue. The Air Supply guys probably knew a thing or two about V.D. They also knew a thing or two about how to craft a great tune. “Every Woman in the World” is still one of my favorite songs of all-time. I’d call it a guilty pleasure, but I ain’t guilty.

-Josh Rutledge

The Connells - Boylan Heights (TVT, 1987)

2011-01-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

It wasn't an easy decision to choose which Connells album would be discussed on these pages. Along with R.E.M. and The Smiths -- two undeniable influences of these Raleigh, NC pop gods -- Mike Connell (guitar/vocals), David Connell (bass), Doug MacMillan (vocals), George Huntley (guitar/vocals) and Pelle Wimberley (drums) logged many hours on turntables and tape decks during my junior and senior years of high school. I remember Darker Days (1986) helped me cope with an otherwise uneventful bus ride one cold morning. "Seven" pressed its luck with a case of vocal hiccups, jangly guitar heroics, steady basslines and skilled stickwork. This and the other eight tracks on the disc were almost like a permission slip for the Hatful Of Hollow T-shirt I'd worn in regular rotation. Fun And Games (1989) was a tour my brother Mike and I caught at The Boathouse in Norfolk, VA. After taking several wrong turns in the Bondo-covered 1977 Chevy Malibu, we finally made it inside in time to hear catchy cuts like "Something To Say," "Upside Down," "Hey Wow" and "Sat Nite (USA)." There were at least 25-30 of our Salem High School classmates at the gig, which made us refer to The Connells as an unofficial local band for years afterward. Mike and I also saw the fellas in support of their follow-up effort -- the crunch-pop classic One Simple Word (1990). "Stone Cold Yesterday," "Speak To Me" and "Take A Bow" hit the hardest, but gentle caresses from "What Do You Want?" and "Waiting My Turn" were welcome stopgaps. The band's playful side was best shown on "Too Gone," via a lyrical lift from '80s R & B star Shannon's "Let The Music Play." Ring (1993) called repeatedly with perhaps The Connells' most direct pop songs to date. "Slackjawed" was showcased on Conan O'Brien's gabfest. " '74-'75" garnered massive airplay in Europe. "New Boy" headed an EP that also featured an interesting take of Jethro Tull's "Living In The Past." "Burden" had such a killer Byrds-y hook, Tom Petty would've reached for his cash drawer. Unfortunately, Mix Master Mike and I weren't able to witness the Carolina gents at one of their peak moments. But thanks to a big brother who'd kept his left ear glued to a Sony boombox, our appreciation for The Connells began in modest circumstances.

Moving from Portsmouth to Virginia Beach during the summer of 1987 forever changed the way I listened to music. Because of independent stores like The Music Man and cutting-edge DJs such as FM-99's Carol Taylor, I was presented with more audio options than the default dross emanating from 97-Star and Z-104. Instead of Bon Jovi and other tarts for teens, I recorded songs from the likes of The Alarm, BoDeans, Midnight Oil, The Insiders, Rainmakers and many more onto my ever-growing collection of mixed tapes. One of my favorite moments from the homemade stash of C-60s happened to be the first shot from Boylan Heights. In spite of a line that read, "I delight in my despair," "Scotty's Lament" captured vivid images of angels and windmills that betrayed any self-loathing. With infectious choruses and clanging guitars, it brought to mind another Southern pop act from my tapes who would later strike "green" in a major record deal. Often considered The Connells' answer to R.E.M.'s Murmur, Boylan Heights shares a kindred spirit in legendary producer Mitch Easter. Once again, he's at the helm of a disc that's by turns dark, uplifting and folksy. The blaring trumpets and 1776-style snaring of "Over There" are an inspiring call to arms when the "boys hit distant soil," but the instruments become tuneless when facing anti-war rhetoric ("Lead the sheep in their sleep to slaughter"). So much for using it as a recruiting pitch, huh? Staying on the battlefield, "Choose A Side" finds a "soldier" not willing to discuss his painful experiences ("When they've torn you every way/ Put your past away/When they said to choose a side/It made you want to hide"). Whether the hurt is caused by wounds from shrapnel or a woman named Sherry, you're left with a bitter smile all the same. "Try" makes an attempt to revive a relationship that was once strong, even though the finality is like the Dead End sign on We No Longer Court ("But if you should feel confined/Then take the step and you could leave it all"). A stab at reconciliation highlights "Home Today," but the Morrissey/Marr bounce is popped with a pocket knife ("I like your face, but I can't anymore"). A final meeting on "I Suppose" fails to take place ("All the way down to the park/And I never saw you there"). This is also branded by marks from The Smiths. Perhaps Miss No Show prefers The Cure.

Should the key lineup of The Connells decide to perform at my 25-year reunion at Salem High School in 2015, I'll be the portly man in the crowd wearing a Bayside Marlins sweatshirt. Hope Timbaland doesn't beat me up.

-Gunther 8544

D Generation - No Lunch (Sony, 1996)

2011-01-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

One part post New York Dolls sleaze rock and one part Dead Boys-ish urban punk n’ roll, D Generation was doomed from the get-go. Formed in 1991, a.k.a. The Year Glam Died, the New York City band had everything on its side except timing. As other glam-influenced groups were cutting their hair and hopping on the alterna-grunge gravy train or simply disappearing from the face of the Earth altogether, D Gen went all-in. Against great odds the band scored a major label deal – its hit-worthy hooks and blow-‘em-away live show enough to overcome The Industry’s sudden shunning of all things glam. The band would part ways with EMI/Capitol after one woefully misproduced and commercially failed LP and subsequently land at Columbia Records. Mass adulation and significant unit-shifting were not in the cards this time, either. But at the very least, the group got the opportunity to work with a strong, sympathetic producer – one Ric Ocasek. The D Gen/Ocasek collaboration, seemingly an odd coupling, yielded one of the greatest punk rock n’ roll records this world has ever known.

No Lunch may have been five years ahead of its time, or twenty years behind it. Like some unholy bastard spawn of Young, Loud and Snotty, Appetite for Destruction, and Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the album combines gritty hard rock, snarling old style punk, and a flair for melody that you could have called “commercial” in any time period besides the late '90s. It’s pointless to lament that none of these songs were hits – this after all being the year of 311, Sublime, and Bush. Suffice it to say that tracks like “Capital Offender”, “She Stands There”, and “Waiting for the Next Big Parade” could have been huge, and probably would have been in 1979 or even 2003. Featuring four songs re-recorded from the band’s first album plus eight new ones, No Lunch perfectly integrates D Gen’s scorching pedal-to-the-metal attack with the nuanced, melodic songwriting of singer Jesse Malin and guitarist Richard Bacchus. The self-titled LP featured incredible material (e.g. “Guitar Mafia”, “Wasted Years”), but it fell flat thanks to a production style more suited to a Stryper album. As No Lunch would prove, it was all an easy fix.

It was no surprise that someone with Ocasek’s industry savvy was going to mine the pop gold that was, say, “Capital Offender”. But where he really excelled as No Lunch’s producer was in letting D Gen cut loose and just be themselves. No Lunch is a hard-rocking punk n’ roll record first and foremost. Ocasek’s production accentuates the commercial hooks but doesn’t try to scrub clean the band’s raw edge. This is the closest D Gen would ever come to sounding “live” on record. Guitars and drums are pumped sky high in the mix, and there’s a reckless, destroy-all-comers energy in the playing that just wasn’t there on the first album. From the opening notes of “Scorch” to the final strains of the killer Reagan Youth cover “Degenerated”, the guys just tear it up. Bacchus and Danny Sage kick up a dual guitar firestorm like a couple of Cheetah Chromes, and Malin plays the proper rock star on vocals - his nasally tone unlikely to ever win him any voice competitions but his attitude cranked to 11. Red-hot tracks like “Frankie”, “No Way Out”, and “Too Lose” absolutely shred, providing the perfect yin to the yang of the album’s standout melody-driven numbers. On a lesser album, perfect pop songs like “She Stands There” and “Capital Offender” would make everything else sound like filler. But No Lunch kills from wire to wire. It’s the album that D Generation’s debut could have been. Funny how tunes re-recorded from the first album – “No Way Out”, “Frankie”, “Degenerated” – sound like much better songs on No Lunch. The “Degenerated” cover is particularly inspired, and rocks so ferociously that it seems the band may come bursting through your wall at any moment with guns a blazing. It closes the album with a proverbial bang – No Lunch is like a thrilling movie that saves its very best scene for the end.

D Generation would go on to do another fine album for Columbia, 1999’s sadly unheralded Through the Darkness. The band broke up that same year. Malin finally achieved fame in the early 2000s after re-inventing himself as a “singer/songwriter” and indulging his inner Neil Young. And while it was nice to see this talented individual finally “make it”, he was always at his best when he was fronting a full-blown rock n’ roll band. 15 years later, No Lunch sounds as good as ever and remains the best thing Malin has ever put his name on. Like other terrific groups of the same ilk (Hanoi Rocks, Dogs D’Amour), D Generation was probably too hard rock for the punks and too punk for the hard rockers. The alternative rock hit-makers of the mid-‘90s sure as hell didn’t know what to do with this band. They weren’t grunge. They weren’t ska. They weren’t “post-modern”. They didn’t cross over to AOR formats like Social Distortion or seize the Hot Topic demographic like The Offspring. While it’s a shame they only got to do three albums on a major, the fact that it was that many was slightly miraculous! D Generation’s imitators – warmed over plagiarists like the Black Halos and Jesse and the 8th Street Kidz – only made the band’s demise seem all the more unfortunate. And when the likes of the White Stripes, Strokes, and Vines were living large in the heyday of “garage” revivalism, it was hard not to wish that D Gen would get back together and blow all those bands off the stage. If the silver lining of so many failed mid-’90s major label "alternative" acts is that you can still find a lot of really great albums for cheap in cut-out bins, then put No Lunch at the very top of your to-find list.

-Josh Rutledge

Bobby Fuller Four - I Fought the Law: The Best of the Bobby Fuller Four (Rhino, 2001)

2011-01-05T06:31:00.001-08:00

Bobby Fuller is best known for his mysterious death and his defining rendition of “I Fought the Law”, yet perhaps he ought to be most remembered as one of the few true American rock n’ rollers of the early 1960s. I Fought the Law: The Best of the Bobby Fuller Four is far from a comprehensive summation of the truly excellent music left behind by the man and his band. But at a lean 12 tracks, it’s got most of the essential tunes from a group that combined the best aspects of traditional rockabilly and the British Invasion.

American rock n’ roll didn’t completely die in 1959, but it would find itself on life support for a good five years. Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens were dead. The previous year, Elvis Presley had gone off to the Army and Jerry Lee Lewis had found that marrying one’s 13-year-old cousin was a perfect way to destroy a career. Embroiled in serious trouble with the law, Chuck Berry would have zero Top 40 hits between 1960 and ’63. Little Richard had found God and quit rock n’ roll. Clean-cut teen idols would be the new face of popular music, and American bands would not really start rocking again until they began imitating the new English bands who themselves were imitating the old American ones. But there were exceptions. The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, and Del Shannon – to name a few – held to the traditions of early rock n’ roll and found chart success in the early ‘60s. And Bobby Fuller, who took the world by storm in 1965, had been releasing rockin’, Buddy Holly influenced records since 1961.

The Fanatics, after re-locating from El Paso to Los Angeles in 1964, signed to Bob Keane’s Mustang Records (subsidiary of the legendary label Del-Fi). Keane quickly changed the band’s name to the Bobby Fuller Four to take advantage of the singer/guitarist’s talent and charisma. By this time, the British Invasion was in full swing and new bands were popping up all over the place doing their own take on the Fab Four’s throwback rock n’ roll. Fuller and his band, who’d already been playing that kind of music for years, fit right in with the ‘beat craze. The Fuller-penned “Let Her Dance” was a regional smash and hit the national charts in 1965. Another minor hit followed in “Never To Be Forgotten”, but it was the next BFF single that would make history. The Fuller Four had previously covered “I Fought the Law”, a 1959 tune by Sonny Curtis and the Crickets. The group re-cut the track for Mustang and scored a top ten hit in January of ’66. Another single - a cover of Buddy Holly’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You”- went Top 40. But it would be Fuller’s last hit. On July 18th, 1966, Fuller was found dead in the front seat of his mother’s car, his body severely beaten and a gas-soaked rag stuffed into his mouth. He was just 23. The LAPD bizarrely ruled his death a “suicide”, and for decades theories have abounded given alleged connections between organized crime, a lady friend of Fuller’s, and a “business associate” of Keane’s.

If Fuller is ultimately remembered as a Buddy Holly imitator, he at least ought to be remembered as one of the greatest of such imitators. He was a talented songwriter in his own right. And his voice, although styled much like Holly’s, was wonderful. If you’re wondering what kind of music Holly would have made had he survived into the ‘60s, I Fought the Law gives you 12 really good examples. Moreover, the collection demonstrates that Fuller was a genuinely unique artist, as adept at pure pop and pretty ballads as he was at old style rockabilly and proto garage rock. For legal/contractual reasons, the disc is forced to omit classic tracks like “Never To Be Forgotten” and high energy rockers like “Saturday Night”. And while that’s a damn shame, it’s a testament to Fuller’s unheralded greatness that 12 songs are simply not enough. Of course “I Fought the Law” alone justifies the price of admission. But “Let Her Dance”, with its plaintive melody and homespun harmonies, is a bona fide rock n’ roll classic. British Invasion fans will go nuts for the Beatle-esque gem “Another Sad and Lonely Night” and the bouncy “Take My Word” (which could almost pass for a Herman’s Hermits B-side!). Some of the LP cuts are pure gold as well, like the poppy “She’s My Girl”. And “Julie” may be the second-best song ever penned by Chip “Wild Thing” Taylor. Even with so many essential songs missing, this is a fine starter kit for any aspiring Fuller Four fan. Turntable owners would be well advised to seek out some older, vinyl LP best-ofs, and you wouldn’t be crazy to spring for the Never To Be Forgotten box set, which compiles the entirety of Fuller’s Mustang recordings and a rare live LP. Basically, go out and pick up anything you can find with Fuller’s name on it. If you consider him a one-hit-wonder, you need some serious schooling.

-Josh Rutledge

Golden Earring - The Continuing Story Of Radar Love (MCA, 1989)

2010-12-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

Though Golden Earring have amassed over three dozen hit singles in their native Netherlands, they are generally known for two classic-rock staples which charted nine years apart in America. 1973's "Radar Love" (#13 Billboard) might be the ultimate driving-to-see LovieHoneyBabyBunchesOfOats (a pet name for my ex-girlfriend) tune ever grooved to a long player. With thick bass lines, tasty guitar licks and powerful percussion (Blue Oyster Cult and the Alice Cooper Band trading "blows" in an Amsterdam rock club?), the illegal-to-own-in-Virginia detector helped spot the hidden police cruisers along the side streets of Lynnhaven Parkway during the song's many airings on 106.9 The Fox circa 1998-2003. My radar lover and '87 Chrysler New Yorker from those peak years are forever gone to a junkyard full of broken hearts and cracked engines, but new voices in my head will drive my heel and shift gears en route to potential lovelies in Timonium, MD, Windy City, IL and Ghent, VA. Their names aren't Brenda Lee, but I hope they come on strong. Reaching #10 on Billboard in 1982, "Twilight Zone" was a perfect fit for the days when video first killed the radio star. The choppy beats and instrumental midsection were rooted in rock, but the thump was suitable for dance floors at meat markets like Rogue's Gallery in Va. Beach. GE's answer to the Stones' "Miss You"? Maybe, baby. The video was acclaimed for being one of the first with a cinematic storyline, as band members filled the roles of a secret agent and his pursuers. Who can forget the scene of a playing card being sliced in two? Not me, Jack. If Red Rider's "Lunatic Fringe" owns 3 AM, then "Twilight Zone" rules the post-Lovie ride back home an hour later. Many folks in Tidewater have confused these two songs with one another. I blame then-FM99 WNOR DJ Liz Gillette for the mix-up. To my connection in Maryland: Please don't get tired of taking chances. Call me at 2 AM, unless all circuits are dead. If you tear a card in half, make sure it's not the Two of Hearts. Such severance would be the bullet that hits the bone between my chest.

Barry Hay (vocals/guitar/flute/saxophone), George Kooymans (guitar/vocals), Rinus Gerritsen (bass/keyboards) and Cesar Zuiderwijk (drums) have been the core of Golden Earring since 1970. As teenagers, Kooymans and Gerritsen founded the band in 1961 (!) -- when the group was called Golden Earrings and influenced by the pop stylings of the era. In 1968, the "S" was dropped, Hay took over as lead vocalist and the shift was made to a heavier rock sound. Bookended by the two U.S. hits, The Continuing Story Of Radar Love unfolds ten other chapters in GE's fascinating history. How come "Quiet Eyes" (1986) wasn't the band's third Top 20 single in the States? The black-and-white video features fuzzy televisions, spinning clocks, an appealing ticket-taker with eyeglasses and an ample bosom, clever "Soul Train" scramble board-style word alterations and a gang chorus dedicated to the tossin' 'n' turnin' one ("Quiet eyes, silent tears/Silent as the night you deserted me"). Unlike the clip's pajama-clad insomniac whose restless night seems like it's lasting seven years, those who would later purchase Pink Floyd's comeback effort totally missed the wake-up call of this mid-paced gem. Another momentary lapse of reason is why "She Flies On Strange Wings" (1971) isn't universally regarded as a riff-rock masterpiece. Kooyman's guitar wizardry brings to mind the meatier moments of BOC's catalog, while quieter tones emanate like a Waters/Gilmour dreamy soundscape. If the cover band you're in starts playing a different tune, send 'em on the hot rails to hell and seek GE's approval to glide on "...Strange Wings." Worthy of the glam-with-attitude poses struck by The Sweet and Slade, "Candy's Going Bad" (1973) has strong parental objections to a daughter's enjoyment of the wild nightlife ("Daddy said, 'I'll break your bones'/If you come home dressed in peacock clothes/Mother said,'Quit the show'/She didn't want the neighbors to know"). Alas, Candy finds a pimp named Ted and turns tricks for pearls. Keeping it sleazy, Alice Cooper would've given GE the heads of eighteen boa constrictors and bubble shafts in exchange for the weighty strap of "Leather" (1978). Free of the WTF experimentation AC was mired in at the time, the cut is a flatline rocker offering a no-holds-barred look into the S & M subculture ("Sharper than a razor/She hurts me with a laser beam/Burnin' leather keeps her tougher/She stole my dignity"). 1974's "Kill Me (Ce Soir)" is another tale The Coop wishes he had told on his own wax. It might be "too much risk for a golden disc," but musicians will forever take a shot -- even if it means getting shot ("Vick played the part/With all his heart/He wasn't prepared for the shock/When howling lead/Bit into his head/A new martyr for the book of rock").

If your book of rock doesn't mention Golden Earring, the story isn't worth continuing.

-Gunther 8544

The Cavedogs - Joyrides For Shut-Ins (Enigma, 1990)

2010-11-30T05:51:00.001-08:00

Often overlooked in a Boston scene that produced such notables as the Pixies, Lemonheads and Throwing Muses, The Cavedogs concocted a plot of playful revenge via the title track from the Tayter Country EP. Brian Stevens (bass/vocals) and Todd Spahr (guitar/vocals) took notice of a Tayters (a brand of regional potato chips) truck that drove by their 9-to-5 each morning. The pair regarded typical Boston show goers as "cold and cliquish," so they began calling the folded-armed masses "Tayters." Mark Rivers (drums/vocals) assisted in the putdowns of jaded scenesters. Spahr's lyrics were in attack mode ("The volume drones to a hundred black/We'll play 'The End' and then give it back/To the comfy light of tradition/'Cause when the shroud is removed from you/The cutting edge becomes petting zoo"), but the catchy '60s pop-meets-'90s modern rock approach gained enough white-flag wavers to make "Tayter Country" the band's first local hit. The irony wasn't lost on The Cavedogs, but they couldn't resist a parting shot (paraphrasing): "Besides, the only words they could understand were, '...with a machine gun'". Lightheartedness also came in the form of a comedy troupe who regularly performed before AND during the band's sets, as well as the trio's penchant for offbeat covers like "What's New, Pussycat?" and "I Melt With You" done 'Doggy-style.

Don't be fooled by the jesting, though. All three members possess a knack for sharp songwriting, a gift for harmonies and an emphasis on powerful arrangements. Todd Spahr's "Tayter Country" is wisely reprised on Joyrides For Shut-Ins, and its Who-cum-Smithereens stance leads off the album like a four-bagger over the Green Monster. Another at-bat, "La La La," finds Spahr pulling a fastball in the direction of himself and his teammates ("We're just three white rich kids bitching 'bout the world/We think we've got problems, but we ain't got problems"). Think Paul Westerberg playing pepper with Paul Weller at Target Field. Main Spahr-ing partner Brian Stevens (AKA "The Lennon Guy") throws his strongest jab on "Leave Me Alone" ("Pointed speech just flows right through my head/Leaving me with wounds from what you said/There is one thing I can plainly see/A hundred faces making fun of me"). If Julian Lennon had traded blows with Ken Stringfellow, perhaps they would've turned in a classic Hagler/Hearns-esque round like this one. Collaborative efforts between Spahr and Stevens yield a couple of ripe fruits. "Proud Land" is a Beatles/XTC juice mix flavored with equal amounts of sweetness and cynicism ("On any nameless street/The clothes are on the line/The dogwood's blooming/And the paper's right on time"). "Taking Up Space" fills the basket with insomnia brought upon by worriment ("Sally doesn't sleep a lot at night/Sometimes she wishes she could/But the preparation must begin with the light/To look is to be good"). An A-1 drum roll is found at the core of this tasty apple. Speaking of which, add Mark Rivers' name to the list of folks whose talents aren't strictly confined behind a snare and cymbals. Though Rivers propels The Cavedogs' backbeat with the ferocity of Keith Moon/Bun E. Carlos, he has bandleader ambitions a la Grant Hart/Dave Grohl. The betrayal in "Bed Of Nails" ("Could you stand to watch me crawl?/Would you move to help me?/Turn your back or break my fall/Save my name or sell me") and finality of "What In The World?" ("And so you're back to your guns, but now they're pointed at you/And your shot in the dark hit what you listened to/What was critically done was not so easily said/And with your feet in the mud, they moved on") prove that Rivers is worthy of holding the baton.

Even if you're not a recluse, take a joyride in a Tayters truck today.

-Gunther 8544

American Heartbreak- Postcards from Hell (Coldfront Records, 2000)

2010-11-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

I have often lamented that I was born ten years too late, and didn’t have the chance to be a teenager when they still played good music on the radio. It would have been so awesome to have gone to high school in the late ‘70s – when youth culture meant rock concerts in hockey arenas and vinyl records on the turntable and posters of KISS and Cheap Trick on your bedroom wall. It seems almost unfathomable now, but there was a time when having a hit single was a positive accomplishment, when appealing to a mass audience meant that you wrote great songs with melodies and hooks, when rock music was actually fun to listen to. Perhaps my high school years co-incided with the tail end of that era (Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses were rock royalty at the time). But by my college days, the party was over – as the angst, self-loathing, and heavy seriousness of grunge became the new model for youth rock. Things only got worse as the decade continued – the rise of “nu metal” meaning that FM rock was becoming not only even more of a major downer, but also intentionally devoid of melody. Catchy choruses were out. Harmonies were out. Screaming anguish and “edgy” sounds were in. It was around this time that American Heartbreak delivered one of the greatest pop-rock albums this world has ever known. Needless to say, it was not well-received by the public.

I would describe Postcards from Hell as an album packed with potential hit singles – if it had been released in 1978. Formed by Billy Rowe (late of the outstanding glam metal band Jetboy) and Michael Butler (formerly of thrash legends Exodus), American Heartbreak began its quest to save music from awfulness back in 1996. Rowe and Butler, deciding it would be fun to play the “good catchy rock n’ roll” style they grew up on, set out to emulate old favorites both obscure (Starz, Angel) and iconic (Aerosmith, AC/DC). It may have not seemed like a novel concept. But in the era of Korn and Rage Against the Machine, the idea of American Heartbreak was truly heaven sent. Lance Boone was recruited to sing, and the band was off and running. An EP called What You Deserve arrived in early 1997, and a couple years later AH really hit its stride with the great “Please Kill Me” single on the punk label Pelado. Finally in 2000 came a proper album. To say Postcards from Hell did not disappoint would be like saying the 2010 Giants had a pretty good baseball season.

The album plays like a greatest hits compilation from some long-lost ‘70s rock group who might have filled an opening slot on a mythical KISS/Cheap Trick concert tour, but with a clean modern production redolent of, say, early Goo Goo Dolls or Foo Fighters. There are no ballads, no synthesizers, and no experimentations with musical style. From start to finish it’s just high-powered, super-melodic rock fueled by Ginsu-sharp hooks and a massive wall of guitars. Just when you think you’ve heard “the hit”, immediately comes another song just as good. You hear tracks like “Superstar”, “Too Beautiful”, “Brain Vacation”, and “Idiots On Parade” and have to gather that if these songs weren’t massive hit singles, then surely the world must have gone insane. You’d be right – just look at the units being shifted at the time by Creed and Limp Bizkit. Sometime, at some point during the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, good taste at the mass level simply died. This was the beauty of a record like Postcards from Hell. The most anti-commercial thing to do in the year 2000 was to make the greatest commercial rock album in the history of time. It wasn’t about money or fame. It was about craft. Rowe and his band mates carefully and meticulously constructed an album’s worth of completely perfect pop songs – each one containing a chorus catchier than the clap, melodies made for the radio, and glossy, glorious guitar hooks out the wazoo. Boone, singing for the first time in a “big” band, proved to be a natural rock singer - hitting all the notes while bringing bona fide rock star swagger.

It was tempting to hear Postcards from Hell and fantasize about a rock n’ roll revolution – that somehow this album and these songs would get out there and people would suddenly like good music again, that through the healing power of song American Heartbreak would bring joy to the despondent masses and obliterate all the raging nu metalists as swiftly and decisively as Nirvana had wiped away a generation of hair metal bands. It was tempting to imagine American Heartbreak in heavy rotation on MTV (Yes, they used to play music videos on that network), children dancing in the streets to “Dead at Seventeen”, the group playing “I Wish You Were (D.E.A.D.)” on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and fans lining up blocks at a time for tickets to the AH/Tsar Super Hit Parade Worldwide Domination Tour. But here we are ten years later. Postcards from Hell is long out of print, and they still don’t play good music on rock radio. American Heartbreak’s debut album did not change the very face of the world. But it damn well should have. I tend to be less prone to hyperbole in my old age, but I’ll conservatively call Postcards from Hell a classic of its genre.

-Josh Rutledge

Stiv Bators- Disconnected (Bomp! Records, 1980)

2010-11-17T05:48:00.000-08:00

Of all the first wave punk stars, Stiv Bators may have been the most successful in transitioning to new styles of music. God bless Joe Strummer and his artistic integrity, but did the guy ever make a solo album that you’d actually want to listen to? Mick Jones owes the world an apology for Big Audio Dynamite II. Johnny Rotten went the dreaded “avant garde” route post Sex Pistols. And Joey Ramone managed such an enduring and listenable musical legacy precisely because he never stopped being Joey Ramone. But Stiv Bators, in a relatively short period of time, built upon the greatness of his punk output with a varied and uniformly excellent body of musical works. For a couple of singles he reinvented himself as a punk rock Eric Carmen, issuing two of the greatest power pop sides in the history of the genre. Later with the outstanding Lords of the New Church, he’d write the book on how to fuse the glam and goth rock genres. Even Bators’s weird conspiracy theory heavy concept super-group project The Wanderers came through with a fine, sadly overlooked LP. And for the best of all worlds, one only needs to turn to Stiv’s one-and-only proper solo album – a somewhat forgotten classic of its period.

After the Dead Boys disbanded in 1979, Bators set out to forge a new path for himself as a recording artist. Seeking mainstream respectability and at least partially hoping to distance himself from his reputation as a vile punk howler, the Ohio native found inspiration from Cleveland greats The Choir and their later incarnation, The Raspberries. Bators wanted to emulate those bands’ power pop stylings and infuse them with the guts and hard edge of punk rock. It was a brilliant idea - and Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records took notice. Bators’s debut single, a cover of The Choir’s “It’s Cold Outside”, was released on Bomp! in May 1979. His second, “Not That Way Anymore”, followed in January 1980. Disconnected arrived later in the year and added plenty of new elements to the solo Stiv motif.

Working with a first-rate backing band (Frank Secich from Blue Ash on bass, George Cabaniss from Akron punk greats Hammer Damage on guitar, and David Quinton-Steinberg from Canadian pop/punk stalwarts The Mods on drums) and a soon-to-be-legendary producer (Thom Wilson, who’d later record such genre standards as TSOL’s Dance with Me, Social Distortion’s Mommy’s Little Monster, and the Adolescents’ blue album), Bators had everything going for him. It’s no surprise, then, that Disconnected is everything it should be: a step beyond punk rock that shows growth but retains the Essence of Stiv. The should-have-been-a-hit “Evil Boy” is a carryover from Bators’s power pop phase but plays on his bad boy punk image. “Make Up Your Mind” is in the same vein but without the irony- it’s Stiv’s true teen heartthrob moment. “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” , a highly dramatic Electric Prunes cover, is one of several tracks that draw from the ‘60s garage rock sounds Bators so loved as a teen. “A Million Miles Away” and “The Last Year” (originally the B-side to “It’s Cold Outside”) aren’t just great pop tunes with memorable choruses. They’re beautifully performed slices of melancholia that show off Bators’s thoughtful, tender side. There are moments when the old Stiv rears his lovely head (the cheerfully perverted “Ready Anytime”), but Disconnected is generally kind of dark and introspective – in a lot of ways foreshadowing the dense gloom of the Lords of the New Church. Although he was never going to be confused for a technically “good” singer, Bators had great heart and sang with real feeling. On Disconnected’s moodier, more downbeat songs, he conveys heartache and despair without affectation. Elsewhere he’s just good old Stiv- rough around the edges, and surely up to no good, yet such a charismatic stylist that you just have to love him.

I can honestly recommend all of Stiv Bators’s post Dead Boys recordings, and perhaps the most mandatory purchase is Bomp!’s wonderful L.A. Confidential compilation (if only for those brilliant early singles). But as a whole, Disconnected is the best thing the man did in the 1980s. It’s a pleasing updating on garage rock and the classic sounds of the ‘60s, done up in Stiv’s unique style. It’s punky enough to appeal to fans of the Dead Boys, but with a gloomy undercurrent for those who’d rather listen to the Lords of the New Church. It seems strange to say this about a guy who’s an absolute legend in the punk world, but I think sometimes people forget how freaking talented Stiv Bators was. Consider Disconnected Exhibit A.

-Josh Rutledge

Dimestore Haloes- Thrill City Crime Control (V.M.L. Records, 1997)

2010-11-10T12:16:00.001-08:00

I won’t argue that Thrill City Crime Control is the greatest Dimestore Haloes album, or even that it’s the best place to start if you’re a Haloes newbie. I certainly won’t contend that it was the best or second-best punk album of its year (for the record, The Donnas and The Infections). But if Dirty Sheets is about albums that mean something to us, that have had special places in our lives, I was bound to write about TCCC sooner or later.

No one, a hundred or even twenty years from now, is going to mistake 1996 for 1977. But to those of us who were too absorbed in cartoons and Star Wars figures to even know that popular music existed in ’77, to those of us who were, as the Haloes put it, born too late, the mid-‘90s rebirth of classic punk rock was pretty fucking cool. Unlike the mass media appointed phony “punk revival” of two years prior, the old school punk renaissance circa ’96 was totally legit and totally grass roots. I was hooked in 1995 after buying a Spent Idols 7” I saw reviewed in Maximum Rocknroll. I was immediately intrigued when I first read about a band called the Dimestore Haloes in a zine put out by the lead singer of the Spent Idols. When, a year later, a local band called The Prostitutes had their first 7” released on a label based the whole way out in Costa Mesa, California, I knew something cool was starting to happen. And what did you know: that label, Pelado Records, soon put out a split single featuring…the Dimestore Haloes! It was all coming together. While I still dig the garage punk and Ramones-core that were all the rage in the mid-‘90s, there was something special about the likes of the Haloes, Prostitutes, Spent Idols, Bladder Bladder Bladder, and U.S. Bombs – groups that were flat-out ignoring the past two decades of musical “progress” and just playing punk music as if the calendar had never turned past 1977. It was an exciting time to be into underground punk – especially as nu metal and boy bands were leading commercial music right over the cliff.

If ’95-’96 was the ground zero point for the ’77 punk revival, then ’97 was the year it really hit its stride. The Prostitutes, U.S. Bombs, and Humpers all put out terrific albums. Pelado seemed to release a new 7” every week. And the Haloes, who had shown great promise on their first two singles, delivered a debut LP that did not disappoint. With clear nods to The Clash, Johnny Thunders, and the Rolling Stones, the Boston foursome came out swinging on up-tempo numbers “Cheap Red Wine God” and “Twentysomething Bad”, quickly introducing the world to their unique brand of sloppy punk n’roll. Singer/guitarist Chaz Matthews came on with classically snarling punk vocals but a lyrical bent in the tradition of Beat literature. Rarely has a band charged out of the gates with a mission statement as memorable and enthralling as “Cheap Red Wine God”’s opening verse:

I got a pale wasted white Keith Richards complexion
You don’t get this pretty through clean living, son
I got a guitar and a girl who’ve seen better days
The only exercise I ever get is the shakes
But I bob like life in a silent movie
I grease my hair, slip into something that moves me
If death is the inevitable end of this film
Then I’ll look so flash while I’m rotting within

Makes you want to listen to the rest of the album, doesn’t it?! Even if one of those lines was ripped verbatim from one Paul Westerberg, it’s still some freaking ferocious poetry! And from “Twentysomething Bad”, how about this brilliantly-succinct analysis of American culture circa 1996:

TV never taught me anything
Except how to change the channel or the clothes I’m wearing
High school never taught me anything
Except now the in-crowd carries guns
America eats its young

Bullseye! If there was one thing about the early Haloes that always made an impression, it was that lyrical boldness. In an age in which Joe Strummer’s line about “turning rebellion into money” had been fully fulfilled in the form of a corporate “alternative” music scene and youth apathy had risen to a cultural ideal, songs like “Twentysomething Bad”, “Hate My Generation”, and “Adrenaline” couldn’t have been any more socially relevant. And although Thrill City Crime Control as a whole isn’t really a “political” record, clearly here was a band that had at least something to say. While many punk n’ roll bands of the time were far more likely to wax poetic on beer, pussy, and how much they “rawked”, the Haloes recalled a time when punk music brought ideas to the table.

If the punkiest songs on the album (“Sickness”, “Hate My Generation”, “Twentysomething Bad”, “Heartbreak Gin”) all suggest what LAMF might have sounded like if Johnny Thunders had traded in his heroin for pep pills and gone into the studio with a severe head cold, that’s not exactly a bad thing. Moreoever, TCCC is not without its pleasant surprises – a lovingly rendered cover of “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, the soulful Stonesy ballad “Wingtip Blues”, and the deliberately-paced “Adrenaline” with its hints at the refined pop prowess of the Haloes’ later work. Listening to the best of the Haloes’ recordings, like 2005’s Ghosts of Saturday Night or the criminally underrated EP Long Ride to Nowhere, you hear the full realization of what the band was already shooting for on TCCC. Those irresistable lead guitar hooks, that punked-up take on ‘50s rock n’ roll, those anthemic choruses…It’s all there, just in a rawer form. Some of the band’s later incarnations may have been more “technically” proficient; but Matthews on guitar and vocals, Lorne Behrman on guitar, Marcus Arvan on bass, and the late Jimmy Reject on drums will always constitute the “classic” Haloes lineup in my mind. There was just something incredibly cool about getting this album and digging the band look (like a time machine collision between Ziggy Stardust and James Dean), the provocative lyrics, and the retro-sharp pink-and-black color scheme of the artwork. I’m not saying they were as good, but these guys were for me what The Clash and Sex Pistols had been for my older punk rock friends. From the instant I first played Thrill City to the moment they broke up, they were my band.

The heyday of old style punk revivalism would last a couple more years at least (Remember the Dead End Cruisers? Libertine? The Chemo Kids?). There may have been even better albums yet to come, and there were always new bands to love. But Thrill City Crime Control was always the one album that best epitomized the music scene that made my late 20s tolerable.

-Josh Rutledge

AC/DC - Let There Be Rock (Atlantic, 1977)

2010-11-03T12:49:00.000-07:00

Any album that begins with a song about oral sex and ends with a tune about banging a plus-sized woman is bound to be great. The only question is the degree of greatness. And if AC/DC is the second-greatest rock n’ roll band of all-time and Let There Be Rock is their best album, we’re talking a very high degree.

Let There Be Rock may not be the most popular or obvious choice for greatest AC/DC album, but it’s been my #1 for years. Yeah, sure: Back in Black is an incredible record. But with all due respect to Brian Johnson (a hall of fame singer in his own right), Bon Scott era AC/DC is where it’s at! All six Bon-era studio albums are gold standard classics in my book, so picking just one out of the lot becomes a matter of personal preference. I go with Let There Be Rock - probably the band’s bluesiest LP, yet also one of its heaviest. AC/DC, in its heyday, was like Chuck Berry on amphetamines; and that vibe is more pronounced on Let There Be Rock than it is on any of the band’s other albums. And for those of you who are guitarists – try and tell me this album doesn’t have some of the greatest rock n’ roll guitar playing you’ve heard in your life! Praise God! Praise Angus!

In contrast to commercially streamlined, Mutt Lange-produced albums like Highway to Hell and Back in Black, the earlier Vanda & Young produced AC/DC albums are rawer, looser affairs retaining a “bar band” feel. Let There Be Rock typifies that feel. It’s a rock n’ roll record, and it sounds like it. It’s all energy and power and sexed-up swagger, well-produced but not over-polished. It plays to the band’s strengths: Scott’s amazing raspy vocals, Angus Young’s wildfire guitar leads, and a rock-solid rhythm section that never got enough credit. While the likes of Cream and Led Zeppelin imitated the blues, AC/DC truly had the blues in their hearts and their souls. If you want to hear the true spirit of rhythm and blues seamlessly integrated into hard rock music, head straight to Let There Be Rock. I don’t know if it was something in the water, or in the air, or in its unique cultural heritage, but 1970s Australia produced some of the hottest and most authentic rock n’ roll the world’s ever known. And at the head of the class was AC/DC. Let There Be Rock, the band’s last album with an all-Aussie lineup, doesn’t re-invent rock n’ roll. But it damn well perfects it.

Working mostly a raunchy mid-tempo groove, Let There Be Rock kicks off with a monster guitar riff on “Go Down” and never looks back. The late, great Scott never sounded better – his delivery depraved and libidinous, yet soulful to the core and utterly lovable. The songs are simply constructed, yet perfect in every way. The Young brothers are on fire – Malcolm banging out riffs that shake your bones; Angus soloing with such fury that it seems your stereo speakers may shred. But Scott’s clearly the star of the show, wailing away with a blend of confidence and dynamism that only Iggy and Jagger have ever been able to match. He lends muscle to underrated rockers like “Dog Eat Dog” and “Bad Boy Boogie” but still comes across with convincing tenderness on the bluesy love song “Overdose”. And he totally kills it on the album’s two classic songs – the epic title track and the barnburner finale “Whole Lotta Rosie”. And although five of the album’s eight tracks clock in at longer than five minutes, the songs don’t seem long. “Let There Be Rock” and “Whole Lotta Rosie” are musical equivalents to The Godfather – so delightful and action-packed that you’re left wanting more in spite of their length.

The ultimate value of any rock n’ roll record cannot be quantified or even adequately conveyed by the written word. There’s no real way to analyze the greatness of Let There Be Rock. All I know is that whenever I put it on, my day becomes more awesome. I find myself immediately launching into air guitar outbursts of the craziest order. I sing along at the top of my lungs. Routine activities like walking to a shelf to put away books become opportunities to dance and jump around. What’s that? Unemployment is only getting worse, America is trillions of dollars in debt, a terror attack is imminent, Iran’s got the bomb, and if the world doesn’t end in 2012, there will at least be another Great Depression? So what! The music’s loud, and I love it!

-Josh Rutledge

Boris the Sprinkler - 8 Testicled Pogo Machine (Bulge Records, 1994)

2010-10-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

Fusing class of ’77 three-chord pogo with elements of standup comedy, geek pride, fast-talking disc jockey spiel, Meatmen-style joke thrash, fervent Green Bay Packers fandom, and ‘90s pop-punk, Boris the Sprinkler were beloved in their day but never as critically respected as they should have been. At best, Boris is remembered as a “vehicle” for the great fanzine columnist “Rev.” Norb Rozek. At worst, the group gets written off as a lightweight novelty act good for a few laughs but ultimately lacking any recorded output of enduring value. I would strongly argue that both takes on the Boris legacy are off base. Perhaps you haven’t put on 8 Testicled Pogo Machine and given it a listen in say, 15 years. But if you did, you’d be pleasantly surprised by how much the thing rocks. I told you Boris ruled in 1995, and I’m still telling you Boris rules in 2010!

Ignore for a moment the outrageous live shows that were something in between performance art and improv night at the comedy club. Ignore for a moment the irreverence, absurdity, and outright wackiness of Rev. Norb’s lyrics. Ignore for a moment the antler helmet, the assorted spoken word intros, and the covering of the Circle Jerks’ Group Sex in its entirety. What do you have left with Boris the Sprinkler? Some of the best poppy punk rock of its time – chock full of hooks and bristling with Energizer bunny vivacity. One just needs to take a look at the bands Boris covered – Undertones, Rezillos, Generation X – to understand where Green Bay’s finest was coming from. And like all good “modern” punk bands, Boris came at the melodic side of ’77 punk from its own angle. In this case, we’re talking the angle at which the band members were repeatedly dropped on their heads as small children. But behind all of the glorious stupidity and goofball frivolity and demented d.j. vocals were honest-to-goodness killer tunes.

Album opener “Drugs and Masturbation”, based on song title alone, is testament to the genius of its creators. But it’s not just a great idea – it’s one of the true CLASSIC punk tracks of the mid-‘90s. Imagine if the Dickies had taken on Tesco Vee as lead singer, gotten hopped up on SweetTarts and Wisconsin cheese, and found themselves locked in a room for hours on end with the first Devo album spinning non-stop. It’s zany for sure, but catchy as all get-out and supremely pogo-licious – buoyed by a sing-along chorus that would do Sham 69 proud. And once you’ve paid homage to the two pastimes that sustained the typical punk kid in 1995, where do you go from there? You move on to the refined, more “adult” punk rocker rites of passage, like pursuing underage girls (“One-Three”), obsessing over comic books (“Hey Professor Flutesnoot”), and rejecting the only female who’ll have you (“Get Out of My Life”). Throw in numerous references to fast food joints, super heroes, TV characters, and classic punk bands, and you’ve got yourself a party! But while the hilarity factor and bad taste quotient are admirably pushed to the brink, this is far from a comedy album. It kicks serious ass, and many of these tunes (e.g. “Gimme Gimme Grape Juice”, “She’s Got a Lighter”) are among the most iconic of all Boris numbers.

One could argue that the signature Boris sound is best exhibited on the group’s second album Saucer to Saturn, but there’s something highly enjoyable about how all-over-the-place 8 Testicled Pogo Machine is. Styles as disparate as power pop (“The Way It Is”), Johnny Thunders-on-amphetamines punk n’ roll (“West of the East”), warp-speed hardcore (“Drunk”), and straight-up pop-punk (“Girls Like U”) are mixed without rhyme or reason – not to mention the full-on weirdness of seeming throwaways like “Anarchy Bob at the Mayo Clinic” and “Hail Potsylvania”. Say what you want about this disc, but you sure as hell can’t call it “formulaic”. And even if you’re sure to program out a few of the, uh, odder tracks, there’s still enough Grade-A material here to match the best efforts of other cherished mid-‘90s pop-punk acts such as Parasites, The Vindictives, and Sloppy Seconds. If I could pull out just one album to remind me why pop-punk circa ’95-’96 was king, I’d probably reach for The Queers’ Don’t Back Down. But my second selection, without a doubt, would be 8 Testicled Pogo Machine. It rules as much in the era of Aaron Rodgers as it did in the heyday of Brett Favre.

-Josh Rutledge

Candy- Whatever Happened to Fun...(Mercury, 1985)

2010-09-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

Whatever Happened to Fun… is hands down one of the 25 greatest pop albums ever issued – right up there with the best of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Big Star, Badfinger, and whoever else is considered definitively “pop”. Yet it never makes anyone’s power pop best-of list – probably because even if you are one of the 12 people who’ve actually heard the record, you might not be sure that “power pop” is quite the right category for this late, great band. Well, it is, actually, but still somehow Candy seems out of place in power pop discussions – their image pure Sunset Strip hair metal and their Raspberries fixation at least five years out of date in the heart of the Reagan Era. If you were a self-respecting headbanger in 1985 and somehow found a copy of Whatever Happened to Fun… in your possession, you would surely have laughed it off as wussy AM radio fluff unsuitable for even your little sister. If you were a power pop fan in 1985, you probably had one look at the LP cover, took Candy for a second-rate W.A.S.P., and moved up the record rack in hopes that Paul Collins had just come out with a new solo album. Is it any wonder that Whatever Happened to Fun… tanked so severely that today there exists almost zero evidence that the album was ever released? I generally try to shy away from writing about records that are nearly impossible to obtain, but I have to make an exception for Candy. Whatever Happened to Fun… really is that good. And I can say with complete confidence that should you go to the farthest extremes (i.e. selling an internal organ, hitchhiking across the continent, breaking open your kid’s piggy bank, or prostituting yourself to a toe fetishist) to acquire it, you will not be disappointed.

Historians sometimes remember Candy as a “hair band”. But with Wally Bryson credited as musical director and Raspberries’ hit-maker Jimmy “Teeth” Ienner producing, Whatever Happened to Fun… was hardly going to be confused for the new Motley Crue record. Candy, for all their revivalist power pop and glam leanings, somehow fashioned a sound that was not-at-all stuck in the ‘70s. In fact, Whatever Happened to Fun… sounds so very 1985 that I feel like I’m 14 again every time I hear it. There’s something about this record that encapsulates how it felt to be young in the early-to-mid-‘80s. It’s got the innocent, bittersweet tenor of an ‘80s teen movie – oozing an adolescent melodrama that’s endearing and even a little inspiring. It’s hard to hear “Weekend Boy” or “Kids in the City” and not imagine the sort of youth who was supposed to buy the record – a wide-eyed teen, misunderstood at school, misunderstood at home, his hair big, his dreams even bigger, in love with some girl he could never have, riding in a car with his friends on a Friday night, the top down, the stereo cranked up loud, and life’s possibilities seemingly endless. “First Time” may not have played over the closing credits of some long-lost John Cusack teen comedy, but it sure as hell could have. It also could have been the prom theme at any American high school in the spring of ’86 had Candy’s promotion been better. Singer Kyle Vincent, who would go on in later years to become Barry Manilow’s favorite recording artist, briefly serve as lead singer of the Bay City Rollers, and be labeled by Goldmine as the “crown prince of soft pop”, wasn’t exactly Bret Michaels. His plaintive touch on vocals gives Whatever Happened to Fun… its heart and soul, while Gilby Clarke (later of Guns N’ Roses fame) imbues the band’s bubblegum hooks with just enough guitar punch to merit Candy its borderline association with L.A. metal. The melodies, penned by future Electric Angel Jonathan Daniel, are nothing short of magnificent.

It’s kind of a cliché to say that an album sounds like a greatest hits compilation, but sometimes the cliché is true. Whatever Happened to Fun… was Candy’s first and only album. And if the band had to be short-lived, at least it managed to pack a career’s worth of should-have-been hits into its sole issue. Silly filler (“Turn It Up Loud”) and over-reaching stabs at epics (“Last Radio Show”) aside, it’s pretty much wall to wall smashes here. Melodies and harmonies prevail, and the massive hooks never stop. And if the world, in 1985, didn’t quite know what to make of the band’s Sweet meets Bay City Rollers meets Rick Springfield on the Sunset Strip aesthetic, clearly some people were listening. You just can’t deny Candy’s influence on the bubblegum glam sub-scene of late ‘90s punk rock, when bands like American Heartbreak and the Beat Angels (produced by Gilby Clarke!) ruled the school. Today, the very question “Whatever happened to fun?” seems far more appropriate than it did in 1985. Given the prevailing themes of angst, self-loathing, family dysfunction, and rage that have dominated “serious” rock since that dreaded year 1991, the “problems” chronicled in yesteryear’s adolescent anthems may now seem laughable. Yet even in this age when the taste envelope is constantly pushed and teenage sex is as casual and emotionally insignificant as buying a pack of gum, falling in love and coming of age are still themes that resonate with a massive audience. It’s why Taylor Swift has sold a gazillion records, and it’s why Candy’s music has held up so well. And even if the trials and tribulations of the likes of John Bender, Lane Meyer, and Stefen Djordjevic seem a little hokey today, we still watch their movies and love every minute. If the musical tastes of John Hughes had been a little more mass appealing and a lot less rich kid faux alternative, Candy surely could have had a song in one of his movies. Fuck Simple Minds! “American Kix” would have been a great closing song for The Breakfast Club.

-Josh Rutledge

The Godfathers - More Songs About Love And Hate (Epic, 1989)

2010-09-27T05:42:00.000-07:00

Nobody would ever mistake my knowledge of movies with Rex Reed's. I might pretend to know a thing or three about obscure musical artists, but many films that are cherished by numerous friends have never been part of my Blockbuster Nights. For some odd reason, there is a multitude of "G"-string movies missing from the "Seen It!" checklist. It is beyond senseless that "Ghostbusters" has gone unwatched. I like Bill Murray. "What About Bob?" is one of my all-time favorites. Seeing "Bob" take "baby steps" to track down "DR. LEO MARVIN?!?!?" is always the right prescription for laughter. I like Sigourney Weaver. She made shaved-headed chicks sexy with the "Alien" role, and her type-A character in "Working Girl" was the stuff of many dreams. If I had been Tess (Melanie Griffith), I would've served SW more than just coffee! I like Ray Parker Jr. His way with the ladies in the video for "A Woman Needs Love (Just Like You Do)" turned Billy Dee Williams and Colt 45 into Steve Urkel and Nestle's Quik. "Gone With The Wind"? Frankly, Ted Turner, I don't give a damn! Recently, I was asked by one Mr. Eric Thornton to name my favorite scene in "Grease." "The one where John Travolta does his thing," I replied. What's with all the love for "The Goonies" lately? Last week, there was a free screening of the film in the parking lot of Chesapeake Square Mall. Also, the Target inside said shopping center had a themed T-shirt next to a preferred Yoo-hoo rag. I'm sure the young lads' search for treasure is a fine tale, but I can't get past the Cyndi Lauper connection. The only positive thing I have to say about the woman is that she made shopping for clothes at thrift stores acceptable. Somewhere in the world, there exists a man in the twilight of his life who has never heard The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Well, push my wheelchair alongside Wilbur's, for I have yet to give "The Godfather" a private viewing. Ridiculous, huh? Once again, I've enjoyed the work of several of the movie's stars. Al Pacino is a man whose photograph might be included next to the definition of "actor" in the latest Webster's. Turtlenecks and all, Diane Keaton has brought a free-spirited attitude to many fine performances over the years. Robert Duvall was excellent in "Tender Mercies" and "Crazy Heart." I haven't necessarily refused the offer to watch what's considered the best picture in history, but at least I got into the band named for the epic some twenty years ago. You can't take that cannoli away from me.

Brothers Peter (vocals) and Chris (bass) Coyne had their directorial debut as keynote members of the Sid Presley Experience. With an overdose of pub-meets-punk panache from the '70s glory days, "Jealousy" was recorded for a Peel Session in 1984. Cross the cool of vintage Eddie And The Hot Rods, the bite of The Damned's classic lineup and the bark of Roxy-era Slaughter And The Dogs. The result? One of the decade's finest unknown tracks. Two years later, the Coynes formed The Godfathers amidst the fog of their London home. Released on Link Records, Hit By Hit struck with unobstructed views of greed ("I Want Everything" begs like Ian McCulloch wanting change for a Bugs Bunny lithograph), poverty ("This Damn Nation" scrapes by with an absolutely sick guitar effect from Kris Dollimore) and depression ("Lonely Man" has a bouncy beat belying its frowning face). 1988 saw a move to Epic and the greatest success for The Godfathers in America. Peaking at #38 on Billboard, Birth, School, Work, Death benefited from extensive airplay on college radio and the presence of videos on specialty shows a la MTV's "120 Minutes." The band's lyrical edge remained as sharp as a Ginsu. Check out this slice from the title track ("I cut myself, but I don't bleed/'Cause I don't get what I need"). Here's a boast from "'Cause I Said So" ("Every day's a thrill when you're living with me/Don't read Baudelaire's poetry/And I don't need no P.H.D./'Cause I'm ten times smarter than you'll ever be"). After those lines, 'Fathers, I'm kissing your rings!

It's been said that the third "Godfather" movie pales in comparison with the two masterpieces. Fortunately for the Coyne boys, More Songs About Love And Hate is their strongest slab in a well-muscled catalog. "Walking Talking Johnny Cash Blues" speed-freaks its way back to the days of Dr. Feelgood and the Count Bishops blowing thru pub-rock pitchers on the set of "Old Grey Whistle Test." Dressed to the nines in black like his hero, our man has 50,000 questions for a lady named Marie. With her behavioral pattern in "She Gives Me Love," however, perhaps it's best not to interrogate ("She never takes my money/But she always steals my time/ She's the kind of girl that if you gave her the world/She'd say it wasn't worth a dime"). Echoes of The Beatles' sunny voices on "Halfway Paralysed" do little to alter Marie's cheerless disposition ("You serve to bring me down/And follow me around/It's such a crying shame/To see you play your game"). "I'm Lost And Then I'm Found" dumps the ashes from Rolling Stones ashtrays onto contemplative curb sides ("Everybody's giving me the third degree/Don't know when I'm up or down/Cigarettes and women be the death of me/Better that than this old town"). Several years on, "Johnny" and Marie come up with a coping mechanism that's the main image from the
Kink-y "Life Has Passed Us By" portrait ("Gin's a mother's ruin/Dulls the pain away/Helps the conversation/ We're best friends today").

To borrow one of the 50,000 questions: Did The Godfathers ever tour with The Brandos? OK, I'll steal another: Has anyone ever given Al Pacino a copy of More Songs About Love And Hate? If so, it's probably filed next to his prized Germs vinyl.

-Gunther 8544

The Fuses- I Wanna Burn (American Punk Records, 1998)

2010-09-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

The two greatest punk rock records of the past 15 years: Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic and The Fuses’ I Wanna Burn. Whatever is at #3 is not even close. But the race for #1 is a dead heat.

Everyone knows and loves the Exploding Hearts, but rare is the individual with knowledge of The Fuses’ greatness. Formed out of the ashes of the highly underrated pop-punk quartet Webster, The Fuses came tearing out of Baltimore in 1997 – the last year their hometown Orioles would win the AL East. And just like closer Randy Myers, The Fuses brought the heat. Brendan Bartow (guitar), Kevin Trowel (guitar), and Lee Ashlin (drums) recruited ex-Thumb Mark Minnig (later replaced by Pete Ross), and The Fuses were born. Webster, unlike typical pop-punk bands of its day, had a harder-edged, Descendents-influenced sound. So it wasn’t at all a stretch for three quarters of the band to evolve into something more straight-up punk rock. Yet “straight-up” punk rock seems a woefully inadequate summation of The Fuses! If you threw The Clash’s self-titled LP, Wire’s Pink Flag, and The Adolescents’ blue album into a blender, tossed in a teaspoon of ‘90s melodic punk, and served it with a heaping side portion of pre-millennial anxiety, you’d get The Fuses. Debut EP “New Bomb” arrived in late ’97 and was so immediately mind-blowing that I can still tell you where I was when I first heard it (standing in front of the counter at the Angry, Young, and Poor record shop in Lancaster, PA, my mouth hanging wide open). I waited with ridiculous, childlike anticipation for a full-length –which arrived a few months later. I was not disappointed.

When you think late ‘90s punk revival, you think of groups slavishly imitating both the sound and the image of their 1977 heroes. I’m not going to say there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I made my name celebrating that. It’s just that while The Fuses were doing something similar to those other bands, they were also doing something very, very different. For while The Fuses did combine the warp-speed melodies of early ‘80s California hardcore, the outside-the-box strangeness of first generation art-punk, and the wildfire urgency of The Clash, Dils, et al, they did so without coming off as copyists or even revivalists. With the exception of the blatant “Blank Generation” homage of “I Think They’ve Got My Number”, the songs on I Wanna Burn are remarkably non-derivative. Influences are hinted at but never made obvious, and all in all The Fuses fashioned a highly original take on classic punk rock – a true updating of the ’77 sound for the ’97 world. It was an odd time for our planet – technology was rapidly advancing, people thought the world was about to end, fat-free cheese had just gone mainstream, and Jerry Springer was the biggest thing on television. Everyday life was bizarre if not ominous, and along came The Fuses to tap into the tenor of the times. Here was a band that carried the icy, sci-fi ish overtones of Gang of Four or Mission of Burma yet delivered them with a staccato adrenaline rush that would have made the Ramones or even Lemmy proud. This was the future, this was the past, this was the present – punk music as visceral and aggressive as it was moody and angular.

But really, who cares about originality? A band can have all the originality in the world, but if the music’s not good, the creativity is pointless. Would you really rather listen to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music than jam to The Riverdales? So if we’re going to hail I Wanna Burn, it’s gotta be because it’s a great record, and not because of its novelty and social context 12 years ago. So let it be said: I Wanna Burn is an incredible record, chock full of catchy, perfectly-constructed punk songs played at a delirious pace with fire, force, and feeling. It hits with the power and determination of Bo Jackson barreling over Brian Bosworth on Monday Night Football while offering up hooks bigger than Geico’s advertising budget. Ashlin’s drumming is relentless and tight, setting a lightning pace for the Trowel/Bartow guitars, which crash into each other like raygun fire in a space war. Trowel and Bartow emote dread, discomfort, and frantic desperation on lead vocals, bringing it like their lives depended on it. Debut single “New Bomb” is wisely included, joined by equally inspired tunes like “Jesus on the Beach”, “Dead Air Beat”, and the scintillating title track. A vinyl reissue in 1999 tacked on an absolutely ferocious cover of Joy Division's “Warsaw”, punked-up to the max.

The good year 1997 was sadly a last hurrah for Baltimore’s Orioles. The team missed the World Series by two games, but a roster filled with aging stars (Jimmy Key, Cal Ripken) and notorious juicers (Brady Anderson, Rafael Palmeiro) was not built to last. The O’s haven’t been to the post-season since. Baltimore’s Fuses, however, were just getting started in ’97. The group would indulge its love for classic post-punk and art-punk, evolving rapidly and challenging its fans to keep up. A second LP, Are Lies, came out in 2000, followed by a third album Eastern Cities, released five years ago by Shit Sandwich Records. Did Our Lies prove to be a worthy follow-up to the greatness of I Wanna Burn? Did The Fuses sustain their early excellence for the long term? Is there more than one title in this band’s catalog that you absolutely have to own? Stay tuned to this blog, and you may get the answer!

-Josh Rutledge

Alice in Chains- Dirt (Sony, 1992)

2010-08-26T07:11:00.001-07:00

It’s so very tempting to blame Alice in Chains for directly influencing countless “nu metal” bands who sucked in the late ‘90s and 2000s, continue to suck now, and shall forever suck in the future. Not only did AiC have a major role in taking down an entire generation of fun-spirited metal bands, but also the group’s bleak sound became the blueprint for the dark, self-loathing face of metal in the 21st Century. You have to hate AiC, right? Wish you could go back in time and prevent them from ever existing? Uh, no. For while nearly every single band that’s imitated Alice in Chains can be rightfully described as unlistenable, the genuine article still sparkles. Dirt, AiC’s second LP, sounds as good today as it did 18 years ago, and still rates as one of my all-time fave heavy metal albums. Is it gloomy? Bleak? Dark? Depressing? Yes on all counts. And I love it!

Jerry Cantrell, Layne Staley, and their bandmates created such a masterpiece of misery that it could not be successfully copied. Modern takes on the AiC sound come off as tuneless exercises in manufactured angst. Dirt, on the other hand, was not contrived but rather born out of the very real throes of heroin addiction and death obsession. It’s a thundering, screeching beast of an album – far from pleasant but in its own way an immensely enjoyable listen. Rooted in the brooding heaviness of Black Sabbath but reflective of an edgy, angst-ridden age in American life, Dirt proved to be just as much of a culture-changer as the previous year’s Nevermind. And while any perceived connection between Nirvana and AiC was purely a media fabrication, it cannot be denied that both bands were deserving of acclaim. Had the “grunge” fad never existed, had Alice in Chains been from Idaho or Canada or Celebration, Florida instead of Seattle, Dirt would still have been one of the most powerful and memorable hard rock albums of its time. All these years later, the thing still flat-out rips!

While Alice in Chains would eventually cultivate a tempered, mellowed-out groove best exemplified by the Jar of Flies EP, the band was at its best when it stuck to heavy rock. As introspective, haunting, and sophisticated as it often is, Dirt is pure fire and fury – one of the hardest and heaviest mainstream rock albums to come out of any era. Cantrell’s battering riffs, so steeped in the classic rock/hard rock tradition, are as memorable as they are muscular. Staley, who would eventually succumb to the drug addiction he laments here, is an anguished, convincingly desparate vocalist. He channels all his demons, all his inexhaustible angst, all his fear and pain and utter hoplessness, into something genuine and powerful and truly remarkable. He gives a performance for the ages, lending chilling conviction to already dark lyrics. And beneath the thundering, sludgy guitars and pounding drum beats are genuine melodies. The likes of Staind and Godsmack and countless other douchey modern rock bands managed to imitate the style, but none of them had even a fraction of the talent that made Alice in Chains special. And how many of the wannabes had the songs to go toe-to-toe with their heroes? From the pitch-black blitzkrieg of “Them Bones” to the epic slow burn of “The Rooster” (BEST WAR SONG EVER!) to the seam-busting hysteria of “God Smack”, Dirt is loaded with the A-grade material to match its conceptual aspirations. It’s not even possible to dislike the MTV hit “Would?” – a song good enough to be forgiven for its association with Cameron Crowe’s lame attempt at a “grunge” movie, Singles.

Alice in Chains would manage to produce just one more LP between the release of Dirt and Staley’s death in 2002. The group eventually carried on with a replacement vocalist, and released an album last year. But come on – without Layne Staley, it’s not really Alice in Chains. Cantrell and Staley, each considerable talents on their own, were really best as a tandem. Musically, at least, they played off of each other’s strengths and far exceeded what either could have done alone. One might think that it would be difficult to listen to Dirt knowing that Staley was destined to die at the hands of the very demons he confronts in these songs. But in some strange way, I find this a life-affirming record. Staley’s life may have been ill-fated and far too short, but he at least left behind music that comforted and inspired others. We are all, to some degree, terminal in this life, and Dirt begins with that exact sentiment: “I believe them bones are me,” sings Staley. “Some say we’re born into a grave. I feel so alone; gonna end up a big old pile of them bones.” Morbid as they may be, Cantrell’s lyrics remind us that no one lives forever. Dirt, which rages against the dying of the light, isn’t really an album about death. It’s an album about life. Smart, soulful, and rocking to the core, it represented the beginning and the end of “new” metal.

-Josh Rutledge

Badlands - Voodoo Highway (Atlantic, 1991)

2010-08-24T08:48:00.001-07:00

May 17, 2005: A Southern gentleman named Bo Bice delivers what many consider to be the finest moment in the history of "American Idol." Backed only by stunned silence from the audience and judges, the confident contestant induces goose bumps with an a cappella version of Badlands' "In A Dream." After a hearty round of applause mixed with some tears, the judges' comments continue the bravos. Veteran record producer Clive Davis expresses great interest in working with Bice on future projects. Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul admire his bold move of choosing to sing without a backing band. Even resident curmudgeon Simon Cowell admits, "You may have just put 34 musicians out of work." Though Carrie Underwood ultimately takes home the '05 "AI" crown, Bice is to be commended for giving belated exposure to a great band who would've scoffed at such a pop-tart competition.

It's been said that Ozzy Osbourne has an ear for gifted guitarists. Count Jake E. Lee among the Prince Of Darkness' collection of axe-shredders. His best moments with the Devourer Of Doves can be heard on the Bark At The Moon album. Via telegram from Osbourne's wife/muscle/interpreter Sharon, Lee was given the pink slip while polishing one of his prized muscle cars. Tony Iommi's taste in vocalists is equally exemplary. Presented with a once-in-a-
lifetime opportunity to perform alongside Black Sabbath's legendary fret-burner, New Jersey-based Ray Gillen replaced Glenn Hughes on the tour for the band's 1986 Seventh Star full-length. He worked with Sabbath the following year on their next album, The Eternal Idol, but dissolution in the camp forced Gillen to jump ship for an early lineup of Blue Murder. Joined by drummer Eric Singer (another Sabbath alumnus) and bassist Greg Chaisson, Lee and Gillen formed Badlands and released their self-titled debut in 1989. Powered by the strength of videos for "Dreams In The Dark" and "Winter's Call," the album reached a peak position of #57 on the U.S. Billboard chart. Constant touring and rave reviews helped push the disc to over 400,000 in total sales. For all of the Sab/Oz connections, Badlands didn't pull too many rabbits from those hats. Rather, they poured their bowls of Trix cereal from the magic boxes of vintage Led Zep and Deep Purple. Gillen/Lee were as fine of a next-gen model of Plant/Page and Gillan/Blackmore as one could cite. Had Whitesnake spent more time on their recordings instead of dollars on skanks, perhaps I would've reviewed Slip Of The Tongue instead of Voodoo Highway. Shortly after the death of KISS drummer Eric Carr, Singer left the band to fill that void. Former Racer X vocalist Jeff Martin took over Badlands' abandoned stool and began working with the three charter members on their follow-up platter.

As much as I dig the first Badlands album, the Robert Christgau in me could accuse it of being too much of a one-dimensional effort. Those phony reservations can't be made for the meandering trip down Voodoo Highway, however, as the interstate signs are painted in various hues of the rock 'n' roll spectrum. The cut I'm groovin' on right now, "3 Day Funk," thumps like the 'eaviest Edgar Winter/Jimmy Page juke 'n' jive imaginable. Jeff Martin's the busiest cat here, as he contributes congas, timbales, maracas, blow drum and blues harp with his usual stick-smashing. "Headbangers Ball"-cum-"Soul Train"? Word! "Shine On" points its flashlight in the faces of contempos like Alice In Chains and The Black Crowes. Would the suggested collaboration between Jerry Cantrell and Chris Robinson work with the involvement of the actual principals? Nah, the stage'd collapse from twenty tons of ego. "Show Me The Way" shares a title with Peter "Fucking" Frampton's slice of classic crock, but it's NOT a cover of the poodle-coifed talk box's claptrap. If Paul Rodgers and JP were to reconstruct and recontextualize The Firm with the hiring of credible backup players, perhaps the radioactive emissions would slay the Peter Monster once and for all. "Fire And Rain" IS a take on James Taylor's elements of singer/songwriting. Let's suppose your Scully's-lovin' grit band circa 1993 were to feature this in a way that displays yer chops while retaining the spirit of the original. For the effort, I'd clap at a noise level exceeding that of an LPGA gallery. Then I would swear like Eldrick "Fucking" Woods on the 18th for your Faster Pussycat-like treatment of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain." C'mon, fellas! Y'all don't wanna be among the 34 musicians put outta business, right? Lee's swampier-than-the-Dismal geetar on "Whiskey Dust" strings like CCR's "Green River" taking a riverboat to meet the sick-as-a-dawg slide from a Uriah Heep tune I can't seem to recall. As for "In A Dream"? Save for sparse accompaniments of dobro guitar and acoustic bass, Gillen croons the number in a similarly naked way as the aforementioned "AI" participant would 14 years later.

Bo Bice: If your nickname were "Jangles," I'd buy every damn one of your records.

-Gunther 8544

Blue Magic- Greatest Hits (Atlantic, 1990)

2010-08-12T06:59:00.001-07:00

Hot Tub Time Machine not only provided a breakout film role for my evil twin Rob Corddry but also executed wardrobe and set design worthy of an Academy Award nomination. Having (barely) survived the horrors of life in the mid-to-late 1980s, I can attest to the stunning visual accuracy of this fine motion picture. Watching in my 21st Century living room, I felt like I really was back in 1987. And let me tell you: I sure as hell don’t ever want to return to that time! If I did have a time machine, I’d be far more inclined to ride all the way back to 1974, and like Corddry’s lovable asshole Lou, I’d probably stick around a few years. How cool would it be to see the Ramones live in their infancy, drink a Billy Beer, see good cartoons on Saturday mornings, drive a brand new ’75 Firebird through the Gino’s drive-thru to pick up a Sirloiner, chat up ladies sporting hot pants and monster ‘fros, witness the rise of punk in 1977 London, converse with truckers over C.B. radio, grow out my chest hair, and be there in person to see Tug McGraw strike out Willie Wilson to clinch the 1980 World Series? The first thing I’d do upon arriving in the past? Purchase a ticket for the Stanley Cup Finals and watch the most violent sports team of all-time, the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers, win their first championship. Shortly thereafter, in the same city, I’d catch Blue Magic in concert.

While not as revered or famed as fellow Philadelphians The Delfonics & Stylistics or the Philly-produced O’ Jays, Blue Magic had a chart run to rival them all. Between 1973 and 1976, the group had nine singles reach the R & B Top 40. “Sideshow” went all the way to #1 and crossed over to the pop Top Ten as well. Backed by THE house band of Philly soul, MFSB, and produced by the legendary Norman Harris, Blue Magic really could not miss. Its self-titled debut album just might be the single best LP of the Philly soul era. Greatest Hits, a definitive document of Blue Magic in its heyday, takes the majority of its tracks from that classic first long player. You supply the hot tub, and the music is the time machine - taking you back to the day when majestic harmonies, lush strings, slick dance moves, and pimp outfits ruled the music scene in the City of Brotherly Love. Is it any wonder why I wish I could go back?!

Less like Gamble and Huff’s larger-than-life O’ Jays productions and more like the Creed/Bell easy listening slow jams, Blue Magic’s hits epitomized the soft side of Philly soul. Only in this era did there ever exist music that was equally suitable for backseat makeout sessions and corporate elevator ambience – a perfect description of Blue Magic’s versatility. You and yours, still in your hot tub, can get it on to the dulcet tones of Greatest Hits. And then you can play the very same disc for your grandparents when they come over later to watch Glenn Beck on your 50-inch flat screen. These songs exhibit all the hallmarks of smooth soul: heaven-sent harmonies; impossibly high-pitched lead vocals; gorgeous orchestral arrangements; sweet, sublime melodies; and heartbreakingly rendered lyrics about breaking up, making up, and loving all the while.

Listening to this collection, it’s still hard to believe that most of these songs came from the same album! From the first track through the last, it’s pure gold. Ted “Wizard” Mills shines on the lead, showing off the pipes that made him one of the greatest vocalists of ‘70s R & B. And the songs, written by a top-notch team including Mills, Harris, MSFB guitarist Bobby Eli, and Gwen Woolfolk (among others), are sheer perfection. “Sideshow” is a classic in anyone’s book, but “Stop to Start” and “Spell” are every bit as good. “Three Ring Circus” (off the band’s second album Magic of the Blue) is basically a re-write of “Sideshow” that surprisingly manages to equal the original. And although Blue Magic’s “thing” was tender ballads like the exquisite “Chasing Rainbows” (off 1975’s 13 Blue Magic Lane), the group occasionally got funky. “Look Me Up” has the group sounding like the East Coast’s answer to Spinners, and “Welcome to the Club” is proto-disco at its finest.

Perhaps, if I chose to stay in the ‘70s, I’d eventually have to live through the ‘80s and ‘90s again. That would suck, but I’d make sure to use my knowledge of the future to advance the good of mankind. I’d track down Sylvester Stallone and convince him that two Rocky sequels were enough (We have to allow Rocky III to exist, for without it there would have been no Mr. T.). I’d warn everyone about New Coke. And at 1974 prices, I could easily buy a copy of Blue Magic’s debut LP for everyone who’s reading this. But the pimp canes I buy? I'm keeping them for myself.

-Josh Rutledge

The Dirtys - You Should Be Sinnin' (Crypt, 1997)

2010-08-09T06:23:00.001-07:00

When I hear this album, I instantly want to do what one of their songs is entitled: "Drink, Fight… And Fuck"! Oh yeah, and do all the drugs! Too bad it’s migraine drugs these days...

Why do I turn to albums that aren’t current? 'Cause no one makes balls-out rock albums like this anymore. Hailing from Port Huron, MI, this short-lived four-piece on Crypt Records had THE reputation of living the way they played. Booze, drugs, women and rock! The life I always wanted to live! This album was it. Their tours breathed it. I envied it. To the point of where one summer, I met one of these fine gentlemen at a backyard BBQ and got down on my knees and begged like a schoolgirl to ask him to reunite The Dirtys. Although I wasn't (vocalist/guitarist) Larry Terbush, I would've done my best to emulate the man. I don’t know if that impressed or scared him, but I never got a call back. Bummer!

What you get here is 15 tracks of pure fucking rock-n-roll! In your face, booze down your throat, coke up your nose… Whatever, this band is it! Raw, lo-fi, fast and dirty! Thirty minutes after this slab of pure sleaze rock is over, the adrenaline is going, and you're ready to throw it back on and rock the fuck out again!

Produced by the multi-talented Mick Collins (The Gories, The Dirtbombs), he adds that perfect “Nasty Detroit” sound that gets to the grit of this album and contributes his riffs to “Rock It Out Tonight”. Makes you wonder what The Dirtys really could have done with Mr. Collins at the helm full time.

“Midnite Till Noon” gets you started in all its blazin’ glory (“She don't want me no more/She says I’m not what she’s looking for/She’s got me drinking all the time/When I don’t even have a dime”). Loud guitars ripping through screeching vocals of pure unadulterated rock!

“I’m On Fire” gives you something like a modern day Chuck Berry, with guitar licks, swagger and its ringing of “Christine, Justine, Emily…" Wonder if these guys, though, ever had to do time for taking minors across state lines? Naw, those girls probably kept their mouths shut!

“I Ain’t Cheatin’”, an Eddie "Guitar" Burns number, is the only cover song on the album. An old, traditional blues tune, but it fits perfectly with their attitude (“She works hard every day/Stumbles in at night/But I don’t take your money, 'cause that ain’t right/I ain’t cheatin'’’).

The longest cut on the album, "Alive", can also be considered ironic (“Only I survived/Everybody died/But I’m alive”). Only months after this album's release, Larry was found dead from a drug overdose. And thus brings us to the end of, in my opinion (which always matters!), one of the best rock-n-roll bands that never got a chance to really give us a taste of what they really could do. The rest of the band members went on to do other projects, but nothing can withstand the full-on rock glory that is The Dirtys. As I put on their album to finish this up, I think about them and do as they say: "Gonna Rock It Out Tonight"!

-Angie Granado-Wehrle

Holly and the Italians - The Right to Be Italian (Virgin/Epic, 1981)

2010-07-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Sometime in early 1998, I suddenly decided I was going to start collecting power pop albums from the 1979-81 skinny tie era. Pop-punk, my genre of choice, was starting to get stale. Power pop was making a comeback. I felt compelled to go back to the source. And for a year or two, I took a really good run at this quest. I visited record stores specializing in old, unwanted vinyl. I went to record collector expos. I posted my wish lists in my zines in hopes that readers could hook me up. I ended up acquiring dozens of LPs - some “classic” (Paul Collins Beat, 20/20), some cultural remnants of my boyhood (Vapors, The Knack), some ultra-obscure (The Cichlids, The Now), and some that were for power pop completists only (The Proof, Pearl Harbour and the Explosions). Never one to collect things just for the sake of collecting them, I actually listened to all those records. Was I wasting my time? I think not. Granted, I doubt I’ll ever again in my life feel the need to sit through Yachts’ Without Radar or Bram Tchaikovsky’s Strange Man, Changed Man. But I enjoyed them well enough. And at three bucks a pop, it’s not like those records set me back a fortune. Better yet, some of the titles I bought ended up becoming records I loved – all-time favorites of mine, in fact. Near the top of that list is the debut album by Holly and the Italians.

Listening to The Right to Be Italian, I find myself marveling that it was actually put out by a major label in 1981. The majority of commercial power pop in 1981 was really just new wave pretending to be power pop. With The Right to Be Italian, it’s the other way around. It was punky power pop marketed to the new wave crowd, and as such it was not characterized by thin early ‘80s production, contrived quirkiness, or an over-reliance on synthesizers. In the lexicon of today, you’d probably call it “pop-punk” – and I mean that in the nicest way. While nearly every other big name record producer of the day was a corporate hack entrusted by his bosses to cut the balls off a band’s music, Richard Gottehrer knew how to make great rock n’ roll records. He’d already done ace work on the debut albums by Blondie and The Go-Go’s, and as the architect of ‘60s classics “I Want Candy” and “My Boyfriend’s Back”, he was clearly no faddist. Gottehrer’s old school approach, a perfect fit for Holly and the Italians, gives The Right to Be Italian a timeless feel. It’s just a great, loud rock n’ roll album with crunchy guitars, hard-hitting drums, and a clean, crisp sound. It could have been released in 1965 or 2001 and sounded just as fresh and fun as it did in ’81. Perhaps it could have benefited from a higher “rockers to ballads” ratio. But all in all, the LP is bona fide awesomeness.

Singer/guitarist Holly Beth Vincent’s shtick doesn’t seem so revolutionary today – combining the girly appeal of the ‘60s teen queen with the snotty pop-punk ‘tude of The Ramones. But in the early ‘80s, there weren’t a whole lot of precedents for that type of thing. Along with Nikki and the Corvettes and the aforementioned Go-Go’s, Holly and the Italians form a holy trinity of seminal bands in the girl-fronted power pop (g.f.p.p.) genre. While not as consistent as Nikki and the Corvettes’ debut, or as well-known as the Go-Go’s’ first, The Right to Be Italian is in the same class as both. And if there’s one truly ultimate g.f.p.p. single, it’s “Tell That Girl To Shut Up”, The Right To Be Italian’s best tune. Whether you pay one, ten, twenty, or forty bucks for the album, this track alone justifies the purchase. With its punchy guitars, bristling bad-girl swagger, and unforgettable sing-along chorus, it hooks you from the first note and holds up to a thousand spins. Bands like The Donnas, Bobbyteens, Eyeliners, Riff Randells, Holograms, and Baby Shakes, so successful in the ’90s and 2000s, were all spiritually descended from this number. Nearly as good is album opener “I Wanna Go Home”, an anthemic rocker that rates as my all-time favorite song about America not sung by Neil Diamond. Dirty Sheets’ fearless CEO likens “Youth Coup” to a female-fronted Dictators, and I cannot disagree. “Do You Say Love” channels post-adolescent heartbreak so powerfully that it ought to have played over the closing credits of a top-tier early ‘80s teen movie. And the ballads – even if there are too many of them – are pretty freaking excellent.

Even with its big-name producer and big-name musicians (David Letterman sidekick Paul Schaffer and his bandmate Anton Fig were session players on the record), The Right to Be Italian features only one true star – Holly Beth Vincent. She was the total package, combining a flair for perfect pop songwriting with a great voice and a cool kind of sex appeal. She should have become a force in pop music – but for whatever reason she did not. She would go on to make more serious, “mature” records – which were perfectly fine but lacked the youthful energy and buzzsaw catchiness of The Right to Be Italian. We can say it’s a shame that there was no true “sequel” to The Right to Be Italian, but if there had been one it probably would have been a disappointment. Although in no way dated, this is an album that evokes the feel of the early 1980s – youthful optimism, an innocent type of rebellion, heart-on-sleeve teenage romanticism. It was a lighting-in-a-bottle moment in music, and Vincent would have been a fool to try and re-create it in later years without her original band. When you start naming the truly classic power pop LPs, the Plimsouls, Beat, and 20/20 may come to mind first. But The Right to Be Italian is right on the heels of them all – not just one of the greatest specimens of the genre but also one of the most enduring mainstream rock albums of the entire early ‘80s. Pay any price- it’s worth it.

-Josh Rutledge

Rhino Bucket - The Hardest Town (Acetate, 2009)

2010-07-16T11:05:00.001-07:00

Do any of my Virginian friends remember when Food Lion sold record albums? The year was 1983, the store was the location on Tyre Neck Road in Portsmouth and the child ready to make a purchase was a curly-haired ignoramus of 11 years. I had saved nearly 1200 pennies' worth of allowance in order to trade Abe Lincoln's facial representation for a more colorful portrait. Would the tall 'n' bearded one be swapped with a baby smoking cigarettes on Van Halen's 1984 cover pose? Would our 16th prez be replaced in the history books by a hot rod adorning the face plate of ZZ Top's Eliminator? Would the light on the Gettysburg Address be dimmed by Angus Young's electrical test on AC/DC's Flick Of The Switch visual? I'd love to lie and claim one of the aforementioned LPs as the first slab of vinyl bought with my own money. Pulling honesty out of Abraham's top hat, however, I walked out of Food Lion that day clutching Culture Club's Colour By Numbers under my arm. An embarrassing first choice for the milk crate? Maybe, but at least it wasn't a goddamn Wham! album. That offense would've necessitated an ear bite from Mike Tyson's chompers.

Air-drumming into another generation, my 11-year-old nephew Nolan hasn't experienced any hangovers from listening to tween po(o)p such as The Jonas Brothers (did they really play a free show outside MacArthur Center before becoming famous?) and Justin Bieber (John Mayer is JB all growed up). Thanks to the influences of his uncle (takes a bow!) and soundtrack selections from various PlayStation 3 video games, the not-so-small dude rocks out to Aerosmith, KISS, Ramones, Motorhead, Twisted Sister, etc. The band Nolan favors the most? AC/DC. Though my neph digs their entire output from High Voltage to Black Ice, he prefers the early works with Bon Scott on the mic. Favorite album? Highway To Hell. Favorite song? "Beating Around The Bush". Awesome picks, Noles! No wonder you're a straight-A(C/DC) student! Gradually, I'll introduce him to artists who've used Acca Dacca as a blueprint (Rose Tattoo, The Four Horsemen, Jackal, Airbourne, etc.), but the latest effort from 20-year worshippers at the Church of Bon in Van Nuys, CA needed an immediate reading of its scriptures.

Rhino Bucket's 1990 self-titled debut on Reprise Records rang the bells for those who'd tried to prevent Bon Scott's final ride on Hell's Highway a decade earlier. Georg Dolivo (vocals/guitar), Greg Fields (lead guitar), Reeve Downes (bass) and Liam Jason (drums) did their damnedest in siphoning gasoline from the golden throat's Cadillac. Tunes like "One Night Stand," "Train Ride" and "Ride The Rhino" were unapologetic in their toasts to the whiskey-coated voice and signature groove that'd filled AC/DC's pre-Back In Black shot glasses. 1993 saw the departure of Liam Jason (who'd later have gender-reassignment surgery and briefly rejoin the band as a woman -- now THAT'S AC/DC!!!) and the arrival of one-time Acca Dacca snare-smasher Simon Wright. After an extended hiatus from 1996-2001, RB returned with Brian Forsythe from Kix taking over the duties on lead guitar. Appearances on several movie soundtracks (including "The Wrestler") and a slot on the Rocklahoma festival helped the band regain a foothold in an L.A. rock scene that'd changed considerably since the heyday of Riki Rachtman and "Headbangers Ball."

RB's 2001 core lineup returns to The Hardest Town with the unchanged ambition of recording a proper follow-up to Highway To Hell. Make no mistake, Brian Johnson has done an incredible job fronting AC/DC over the past 30 years and been a part of some great moments in the band's history. I must admit, though, to spinning THT way more often than the otherwise-fine Black Ice. Had Bon Scott lived to drink another fifth, RB's latest would've been on the shelves as a Wal-Mart exclusive. When Georg intones, "I'm looking for money/I'm living in dirt/Something for nothing/'Cause that's all it's worth" on the title cut, an emphatic door greeter, a shifty manager and a sly smiley face grant the problem child permission to five-finger Acca Dacca's Backtracks collection. With the economic problems and other riff raff, these three Wally World workers realize it ain't no fun waiting 'round to be a millionaire. Rosie behind the register isn't a squealer, so the touch of her lips turns out to be love at first feel. However, you suspect Jack from automotive is doing the bad boy boogie with your not-so-little lover ("Every time you come over/There's a weird vibe/I see you looking at my woman and I wonder/What happened last night"). It takes big balls to fool around with another man's lady, so why doesn't your "Dog Don't Bite" Jack's live wire? Being a jilted rock 'n' roll singer who was shot down in flames by a woman can make one forget his identity as a love hungry man. Simply go down the aisle stocked with Krylon and take your cans to the biggest Wal-Mart in Sin City. Once your tagging is finished ("I got a mind/It's on the wall/Big block letters/Ten feet tall"), Rosie's cute 'n' cuddly friend in gardening will "Know My Name." Feeling the down payment blues on a deposit for a place to house you and the horticultural honey, Jack gives your squeeze a ride on his Vespa. Damn, kicked in the teeth again? Here's the message you want passed from "Street To Street": "I'm a bad motherfuckin' man, if you take what's mine/If you mess with my woman and child, it's your suicide." What's next to the moon is a star called loneliness. If that's a light heading to heaven, then hell ain't a bad place to be. Because "You're Gone" ("All I ever wanted was for you to be mine"), a permanent "Gone shootin'." sign hangs on the front door.

Back to Wal-Mart for a bullet to bite on...

-Gunther 8544

The Main Ingredient- Everybody Plays the Fool: The Best of The Main Ingredient (RCA, 2005)

2010-06-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Next to cheesesteaks with Whiz and women with large rear ends, early ‘70s soul music is probably the best thing ever. It had all the right stuff: lush strings, soaring harmonies, bigger than life production, and silky lead vocals always delivered by the smoothest ladies man you ever saw in your life. Those were the days, man! Circa 1971-74, the American soul scene was killing it! Philadelphia had The Delfonics. Chicago had the Chi-Lites. Detroit had The Spinners. New Jersey had The Moments. And New York had the mighty Main Ingredient!

Like all the great bands of the smooth soul era, The Main Ingredient had roots in traditional vocal R & B but developed a new sound through collaboration with a highly skilled producer. Donald McPherson, Luther Simmons, and Tony Silvester formed the group in Harlem in 1964, calling itself The Poets. The trio recorded some singles as The Poets and later The Insiders, and eventually changed its name for good to The Main Ingredient. Under the direction of producer Bert De Coteaux (arranger of B.B. King’s classic “The Thrill Is Gone”), The Main Ingredient was one of the earliest bands to push soul music in an orchestral direction. De Coteaux’s gorgeous arrangements and lead singer McPherson’s smooth voice proved to be a match made in music heaven. Early hits like “You’ve Been My Inspiration” and “Spinning Around (I Must Be Falling In Love)” are some of the most beautiful recordings not just of the early ‘70s, but of all-time! Tragically, McPherson took ill with leukemia in 1971 and died that year. Cuba Gooding, Sr. replaced him on lead vocals, bringing a swagger that would transform the Main Ingredient’s sound from quiet storm to more classic ‘70s soul. Buoyed by Gooding’s big pipes and suave persona, the new Main Ingredient hit the ground running with the famed 1972 single “Everybody Plays the Fool”, which hit #3 on the pop charts and sold over a million copies. The group would hit the top ten again in 1974 with a great cover of Blue Magic’s “Just Don’t Want To Be Lonely”. Not surprisingly, the Everybody Plays the Fool collection opens with both mega hits – two of the greatest recordings from a golden era of American soul. But there was so much more to The Main Ingredient than that, and this comp does a wonderful job of representing the many facets of a truly remarkable band.

Everybody Plays the Fool is comprised entirely of tracks from The Main Ingredient’s glory period, which began with 1970’s debut Tasteful Soul and ended with Gooding departing the band in 1977 for a solo deal with Motown (he returned to the group in 1979). Included are the aforementioned sweet soul gems “Spinning Around” and “You’ve Been My Inspiration” plus a few more choice tracks from the early years. McPherson sparkles on beautiful covers of Curtis Mayfield’s “I’m So Proud” and Bread’s “Make it with You” and belts it with conviction on the funky, stirring Afro power anthem “Black Seeds Keep On Growing”. The Gooding era tracks, although occasionally bordering on disco (“Happiness is Just Around the Bend), are aces too. Alicia Keys liked “Let Me Prove My Love To You” so much that she sampled it on her huge hit “You Don’t Know My Name”. “Girl Blue”, “I Am Yours”, and “Superwoman”- all Stevie Wonder covers from 1973’s superb Afrodisiac LP – are remarkable testaments to the trio’s singing talents and powers of interpretation. As upbeat and catchy as “Don’t Want To Be Lonely” and “Everybody Plays the Fool” are, this was a band that excelled most at being the epitome of smooth. Slow jams like “Spinning Around” and “Let Me Prove My Love To You”, while not the trio’s best-known songs, are the definitive Main Ingredient numbers. Call it mellow, call it easy listening, call it whatever you want. The music created in the early 1970s by The Main Ingredient has stood the proverbial test of time. Need some tunes to enhance your next romantic dinner? Check. Need to mellow out on a lazy Sunday morning? Check. Need to calm yourself while waiting in the dentist’s lobby? Check.

We all have our rock n’ roll fantasies, I suppose. When I was 10, I wanted to be Angus Young. When I was 25, I would have loved to have walked in Joe Strummer’s shoes. Today, though, if I could be any musician, I’d want to be a soul singer in the 1970s. I’d want to wear sharp suits and pimp hats and sport a big ‘fro and go on Soul Train and melt the fine sisters’ hearts with my smooth ways and velvet voice. Specifically, I’d probably want to be Cuba Gooding, Sr. The guy was flat-out cool. His son Cuba Gooding, Jr. would go on to exceed his fame – but Senior is still the badder dude if for no other reason than he didn’t appear in perhaps the worst movie of all-time, What Dreams May Come. And if I had my choice between working with Tom Cruise (what the hell happened to his career?) in the ‘90s or rubbing elbows with Don Cornelius in the ‘70s, it would be an easy call. There was just something magical about the period in music that was The Main Ingredient’s heyday. Some of it was about style, but substance was no less important. It was the era of the producer and the era of the singer – you weren’t any less of an “artist” if you were performing a song someone else wrote. You could put out an album comprised almost entirely of Stevie Wonder covers, and nobody called it a cop-out, because it wasn’t about who wrote the songs. It was about amazing vocals, incredible production, and beautiful recordings. Today The Main Ingredient are not quite as celebrated as a lot of their contemporaries. But one listen to Everybody Plays the Fool will make it clear they should be.

-Josh Rutledge

Jim Croce- Life and Times (ABC, 1973)

2010-06-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

Although he attended high school in the late ‘50s and college in the early ‘60s, my dad was never too hip to the rock n’ roll. His early ‘70s vinyl collection contained no Beatles or Stones, no Chuck or Buddy or even Elvis, and certainly no Stooges or MC5. He’d sit in his den and play his records, and as a young child I’d be subjected to the likes of Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Peter, Paul & Mary. When Dad would show interest in contemporary music, it was always some random act of strangeness, like the time he came home with a copy of Meat Loaf’s Dead Ringer or plucked my Men at Work LP out of my bedroom in the spring of ’83 (“What’s this teen rock?”). When I took an interest in Ritchie Valens as a teen, he played me his Trini Lopez version of “La Bamba”. He’d have heated discussions with my younger sister during her hardcore phase, perplexed as to why Richard hung himself and why anyone would be guilty of being white. In recent years, he’s become intrigued with Robert Plant’s bluegrass recordings, but has yet to hear Led Zeppelin. Yet while I was an intuitive enough child to sense that the old man generally had taste for shit, I was there anytime he played Jim Croce. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was my first-ever favorite song. As a pre-schooler, I was known to sing “Speedball Tucker” in public. I knew it then, and I know it now: Jim Croce was the balls!

Jim Croce was the alpha male of early ‘70s singer/songwriters. Just look at that ‘stache! He could have kicked the asses of James Taylor and Paul Simon, both at the same time, with one hand tied behind his back. He could have sent John Denver running for the trees with one nasty stare. Unlike Harry Chapin, he didn’t write contrived sentimental bullshit for weak-minded conformists. Unlike David Gates, he had testosterone running through his bloodstream. Cat Stevens may have written better ballads, but not by much, and Croce whooped his butt when it came to the edgier, blue collar side of the singer/songwriter genre. His singing voice was nice but not extraordinary. What he could do, though, was write a fucking song. Almost never in the annals of the singer/songwriter genre have we heard a better storyteller, and his melodies were as perfect as they were simple.

While it doesn’t contain either of his adult contemporary radio staples “Time in a Bottle” or “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)”, Life and Times for me is the ultimate Jim Croce LP. This was the Croce album I grew up with, the one I heard so many times in my dad’s den, the one I’d play on my very own turntable a few years later. It had a gatefold with lyrics inside, and I can still see myself at six or seven years old, barely able to read, studying those lyrics thoroughly, my nascent intellectual development forever altered by these tales of barroom brawlers, outlaw truckers, roller derby queens, and quarreling couples. Co-produced by Tommy West and Terry “Talkin’ Baseball” Cashman, Life and Times epitomizes the age when AM radio was king - when soft rock actually rocked and even sensitive men were manly. There are ballads present - good ones, in fact (like “Alabama Rain”). Yet it’s the rockers that carry the day. Croce had cut his teeth playing bars in rural Pennsylvania and later worked in construction and truck driving to support himself. Life and Times is heavily influenced by both his mixed genre bar show repertoire and his real-life blue collar experiences. It’s a little bit country, a little bit rock n’ roll, a little bit folk, and a whole lot awesome.

Croce, a native of South Philadelphia, started playing in bands in the mid-‘60s while he was a student at Villanova University. He eventually formed a musical duo with his wife Ingrid, and the two scored a record deal with Capitol. They relocated to New York City, put out an album, and toured relentlessly for a couple years. Unhappy with the music business and life in the Big Apple, Croce decided to return to Pennsylvania, where he worked manual jobs and even joined the U.S. Army for a time. In 1970, Croce met the brilliant guitarist Maury Muehleisen, and the two would soon begin a musical collaboration of legendary proportions. Muehleisen’s playing brought out the best in Croce’s writing, and Croce eventually found himself with a three-record deal with ABC. In 1972 he recorded both You Don’t Mess Around With Jim and Life and Times. Released in January of ’73 on the heels of the massive success of You Don’t Mess Around with Jim (which produced two top ten hits including the #1 smash “Time in a Bottle”), Life and Times was no slouch either. Opening cut “One Less Set of Footsteps” was a Top 40 hit, and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was Croce’s second #1. Croce finished work on his third album for ABC, I Got a Name, just eight days before he and Muehleisen died in a plane crash on September 20, 1973.

“One Less Set of Footsteps” is one of the most upbeat sounding breakup songs ever recorded, and it’s classic Croce storytelling – a couple in crisis, a relationship fractured, and the man, he’s ready to walk (not that I actually understood the “one less pair of jeans on your door” image when I was six!). With its sing-along chorus and simple driving beat, it’s a great tone-setter for Jim Croce’s most “rocking” album. “Roller Derby Queen” might be the most underrated of all Croce tunes, replete with that classic “Round and round, oh round and round!” vocal hook and typically humorous lyrics (“Well she might be nasty/She might be fat/But I never met a person/Who would tell her that/She’s my big blonde bomber/My heavy handed Hackensack mama”). 5’6” and 215? Sounds like Croce and I had similar taste in women! “Speedball Tucker” is a flat-out rocker – if you heard it today you’d probably call it “alt country”. Another catchy chorus, another great story – this time of a truck driver who defies nature and the law, and ultimately gets brought down by the latter. And who doesn’t love “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”? Perhaps at six I liked it best because it had a cuss word in it, but there’s just no denying the perfection of the tune at every level. This is one you simply can’t resist singing along with – and people of all ages will always love a tale of a classic bad guy. Leroy Brown - now this dude was a seriously bad:

Now Leroy, he a gambler/
And he like his fancy clothes/
And he like to wear his diamond rings/
On everybody’s nose/
He got a custom Continental/
He got an Eldorado too/
He got a 32 gun in his pocket for fun/
He got a razor in his shoe

Seriously, that might be the greatest verse of poetry ever written by anyone! Sure enough, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown inevitably meets someone even badder, and like all great stories this one has an awesome ending. The softer songs on Life and Times, while not of the caliber of Croce’s best-known ballads, are top-notch nonetheless. Album closer “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” is kind of a reverse image of “One Less Set of Footsteps” – tender, pretty and boldly optimistic that lost love can be regained.

Ever notice that the oldies radio format no longer exists? The stations that used to play Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Beatles, Stones, and Elvis now feature Elton John, Billy Joel, Chicago, and America. If they play any Beatles, it’s late Beatles. It’s as if 1962 or ’57 was so long ago that it no longer registers. The target audience for Crosby, Stills, and Nash is the babyboomer population. The target audience for Dion and the Belmonts is…apparently dead. I often hear one of those nouveau oldies stations while I’m at the gym, and never once have I heard Jerry Lee Lewis or the Dave Clark Five or Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon. But nearly every time, I hear something by Jim Croce.

It seems there are a whole lot of babyboomers just like my old man.

-Josh Rutledge

Scorpions- Blackout (Mercury, 1982)

2010-06-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

A little-known fact about me is that I have never ridden a bicycle. Many find this hard to believe. What did a kid do in an early ‘80s summer without a bicycle? Could he exist? Could he enjoy a proper boy’s life? What did he do all day? Well, I can tell you, precisely, how I spent the typical summer day of 1983. Out of bed around noon – eat breakfast and watch MTV, hoping they’d maybe play something by Judas Priest or Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark”. Go listen to heavy metal records. Play the radio. Go to the pool. Have dinner. Play more records. Read the Daily News sports section. Watch the Phillies game. Watch Carson and Letterman. Fall asleep listening to the radio. Lord knows if I’d had a bicycle, my life might have turned out far differently. I might now be a doctor or lawyer. I probably wouldn’t be blogging about old records at age 39. I might be the kind of guy who does things, like fishing or camping or tinkering with cars. But then again, maybe I would have gone out on my bike and gotten abducted by pedophile clowns, never to be heard from again, and you, dear reader, never would have been reminded how awesome Teenage Fanclub was. You just never know. Charles Foster Kane had Rosebud to remind him of his idyllic childhood. Me, I’ve got a Scorpions LP.

Blackout might not be the greatest album I bought during my middle school metal phase, but it’s up there. And more so than any other record, it represents my entry into full-fledged heavy metal fandom. I bought it after the last day of school, 1983. I had just completed sixth grade. I felt free, elated, eager for summer and all it had to offer. Already a fan of AC/DC since Grade Four, I was itching to get into metal so I could be just like those cool-ass delinquent degenerates at school who wore Iron Maiden t-shirts and rocked jean jackets even in the May heat. My first attempt to make myself a metalhead was a massive flop: a purchase of Van Halen’s Diver Down, which was WAY too tame to satisfy my pubescent power chord bloodlust. But on my second swing, I hit it out of the park. Blackout was everything I desired, and then some. A couple weeks later, I’d walk into Listening Booth at the York Mall and buy Quiet Riot’s Metal Health and Def Leppard’s Pyromania. My conversion was complete.

Blackout was the last album Scorpions did before they went full-on mainstream. It almost always works out that a band’s best record is the one prior to its commercial breakthrough. It’s on this type of release that you can usually hear a group flirting with the qualities that eventually garnered it widespread popularity, yet without losing the edge that made it a cult band in the first place. That is most definitely the case with Blackout. The hook-laden choruses, slick production, and penchant for power balladry that would pay off a couple years later were already in place, but Blackout is a really fucking HEAVY album. It’s balls to the wall thundering metal music- melodic, yes, but metal nonetheless. And when you’re 12 years old and yearning for that sort of thing, nothing’s better than guitars heavy enough to floor skyscrapers and drums pounding so hard that you can feel it in your bones. Changes were happening to my body – I was becoming a man and living under the influence of unprecedented hormonal surges. That Blackout provided the power, aggression, and alpha male swagger I subconsciously craved is quite a testament to its metal credibility. That it still sounds awesome 28 years after its release, though, is even more impressive. Love at First Sting, sellout or not, remains a worthy listen, and 1980’s Animal Magnetism is kind of a classic. But Blackout is the best Scorpions album, or at least the first one I’d buy if I were you.

Sure, sure, sure: you could argue that 1970s Scorpions, with guitar virtuoso Urich Roth on lead, was the band’s strongest, least cheesy incarnation. But I like a little cheese – not a lot, mind you, but just a little, enough to make it fun, and it was ‘80s Scorpions that really embraced the rock god mythos – right down to the spandex pants, powerhouse twin Gibson guitar assault, and woman-objectifying music videos. Matthias Jabs, Roth’s replacement, was a less studied, more “rock” player, and his blistering leads are all over Blackout, perfectly complementing Rudolf Schenker’s blazing, wall-shaking riffs. The album storms out of the gates with the monster title track, so fast and furious that it could have been a Motorhead song, diminutive singer Klaus Meine summoning the vocal power of a giant. It’s a sonic kick in the teeth, pure and simple, and for sure the 12-year-old Josh Rutledge had never heard anything this hard or heavy on record before! Superb power ballads “You Give Me All I Need” and “No One Like You” (a top 70 hit in the States) let you catch your breath before “Now!” and “Dynamite” blast your ass into next week, giving way to the almost power pop of “Arizona” and the Zeppelin-esque epic sprawl of “China White”. These dudes had the formula down pat – the just-right mix of full-throttle rockers and hard-hitting (check out the solo on “No One Like You”!) ballads, with a little classic rock grandiosity to ice the cake, all of it tied together by big hooks, triumphant guitar wanking, and a charismatic front man. Apparently the songs on Blackout were demo-ed while Meine was recovering from throat surgery, and Don Dokken of all people actually filled in on vocals! No disrespect to Dokken, but it’s fortunate that Meine recovered. Blackout would not have been the same without him!

We all know what happened to Scorpions after Blackout – three million copies sold of Love at First Sting, a top 40 hit with “Rock You Like a Hurricane”, a clichéd mega live album, a slow decline culminating in the embarrassing political ballad “Winds of Change”, a return to a “heavier” sound on the poorly-received Face the Heat, a clichéd collaboration with the Berlin Philharmonic, a clichéd unplugged album, an obligatory return to form on 2004’s Unbreakable, and, currently, a “farewell” tour that is expected to last through the year 2013. All told, Scorpions have been it for an incredible 45 years (41 with Meine on vocals), released 18 studio albums, and sold over 150 million records. Not many bands in the history of rock can boast that kind of longevity. And even if the Scorps have been past their peak for decades, their output as a whole is pretty underrated. Blackout can rightfully be called a classic of heavy metal. It still holds up today while so much of what seemed killer back then now comes off dated and laughable. Why? The songs were great, and it really fucking rocked. That’s the secret recipe for good music. I knew that when I was 12. Why do so few bands get it these days?

-Josh Rutledge

Teengenerate - Smash Hits! (Estrus, 1995)

2010-06-17T06:53:00.001-07:00

What if I told you the best strawberry dessert in Tidewater, VA can be found at a sushi restaurant in downtown Suffolk? Taste testers from The Virginian-Pilot recently awarded a near-perfect score of 98 to the Wonton Napoleon. Here's how the newspaper described the sweet treat: "The stacked dessert on a plain white plate combined fried wonton squares dusted with cinnamon sugar, mascarpone mousse, fresh sliced strawberries from Bennetts Creek and a strawberry sauce. The corners of the wontons were bent upward, evoking the image of an Asian tea house." Sensuous statements, for sure, but I have yet to sample the WN. The reason? I'm a cheapskate of the first order. For less than the eight dollars required to wage an after-dinner war at the place that forgot to fry the fish, I can fire my gourmand guns at the nearby Baron's Pub. Meatloaf Mondays! Taco Tuesdays! Burger Wednesdays! Pizza Thursdays! Still, I should set aside a Friday to dig my bayonet into a Wonton Napoleon. People swear it's worth the 45-minute drive from the strip mall-laden lands of Chesapeake and Virginia Beach. Surely, I can manage the two-songs distance between my home and the WN. If those two songs are 96-X playlist poop from bungholes like Muse and 30 Seconds To Mars, however, beware of the inglourious basterd! I'll slice off your goddamn ears for radios and sprinkle them with cinnamon!

What if I told you Teengenerate are the best band that's ever come from Japan? On Smash Hits!, Fink (vox), Fifi (guitar), Sammy (bass) and Shoe (drums) blend tasty ingredients that are every bit as lip-smacking as those found in the WN. Combining the primitivism of '60 garage gods The Sonics, the 24-hour raw power of The Stooges, the 1-2-3-4 spontaneity of the Ramones and the for-ourselves frenzy of punk obscuros, this comp of assorted singles plays like the record collection of Rob Gordon's dreams. Wanna hear boss takes of Aussie greats Fun Things ("Savage") and Radio Birdman ("Burn My Eye")? Your Foster's is waiting at the bar, Mick! Ready to try some UK flavors from The Pretty Things ("Midnight To Six Man") and The Reaction ("Talk Talk Talk Talk")? Mr. Belvedere will be down with your Scotch eggs and black pudding in a jiffy! In the mood for American grub from The Zeros ("Wild Weekend") and Nervous Eaters ("Just Head")? See ya at Nathan's on July 4th, hot dog! Championship vinyl, no doubt.

Quote from Fifi: "I don't think I am a musician. I'm an enthusiastic music fan playing with a bunch of friends. That's it."

Yo, Specs from Suffolk and Lookers from Norfolk: Y'all interested in a tune that'll burn down the house quicker than David Byrne with a blowtorch? Try the Teengen-penned "She's A Dumb" at your next bonfire. G-damn, this scorches! Take the 'Mones with their stoopid fun, drown the Beach Boys fixation in John Stamos' bathtub and add the rehearsal-like quality of a Stooges bootleg. What you get is the biggest berry on T-Gen's Wonton Napoleon. "I Don't Mind" is another juicy fruit worth extracting. If Chuck Berry (Ha!) hiring The Real Kids as his backing band for a free show on the 24th Street stage in VB sounds like a plan, make it come together, Hannibal! The best thing ever from Belgium besides waffles is an incredible punk-rock combo called The Kids. If that band's the main course on a breakfast dish, T-Gen's "Sex Cow" and "Let's Get Hurt" could be the sausage and bacon.

What if I told you that on my way to finally surrender to the Wonton Napoleon, I will play Teengenerate's version of a classic track by The Vibrators? Hell, "Yeah Yeah Yeah"!

-Gunther 8544

The Beltones- On Deaf Ears (TKO Records, 1999)

2010-06-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

A common perception of The Beltones is that they were really good Stiff Little Fingers sound-a-likes. I never really bought that. While it can’t be denied that main ‘tone Bill McFadden was a huge SLF fan who sounded a whole hell of a lot like Jake Burns vocally, this Ft. Lauderdale (later Gainesville) band had WAY more going for it than that. In fact, out of the thousands of punk rock releases I heard in the 1990s, the first Beltones CD easily rates as one of the ten best in my book. Never did this band claim to be groundbreaking, and its lifetime output was limited to one proper album and four 7” singles. But within that small, stylistically familiar body of work lay enough heart, soul, guts, and timeless hooks to put almost any band to shame. McFadden had the gravelly Burns growl down pat, but he was his own artist all the way, imbuing the hard-edged punk style with the emotional depth and clever turn-of-phrase of a true poet. And boy, could he ever write a catchy punk tune!

The TKO Records issue On Deaf Ears pairs the great Beltones EP “Naming My Bullets” with re-recorded versions of the band’s earlier 7” tracks. By the late ‘90s, McFadden had really come into his own as a writer, and this collection eschews typical “street punk” fare in favor of far weightier topics. McFadden’s narrative voice speaks to the beer-swilling everyman in all of us but pushes deeper to the core of the soul - articulating not just rage but also sadness, despair, fear, frustration, life lessons learned, and the anguish of unspeakable loss. One of the four or five songs in the history of popular music that has truly made me cry, “Let the Bombs Fall” is about the death of McFadden’s mother. Just reading the lyrics is a powerful experience, but the impassioned vocal delivery makes this heart-wrenching tune all the more devastating. No song ever has more perfectly conveyed what it’s really like to lose the person most precious to you:

So don't you tell him that your goddamn life isn't fair/
Cuz you don't like your clothes, your car or your hair/
He's a mama's boy who ain't got a mom anymore/
So run and hide cuz he's gonna start an all-out war/
But then from nowhere, he feels a gentle hand on his shoulder/
And suddenly all the murder leaves his mind/
No one knew a fragile life/
Like the woman that his father used to call his wife/
And for what it's worth no one was as kind/
So let the bombs fall, cuz buddy I don't care/
Kill 'em fucking all, man/
Kill everybody each and everywhere

Intense, eh? Elsewhere McFadden sings about more atypical punk rock topics: friends’ drinking problems (“My Old Man”, “Casualty”), the toll that growing up can take on friendships (“Shoot the Shit”), the misery of domestic bliss (“Insipid Sedentary Girl”), and the boiled-over frustrations of everyday life (“Naming My Bullets”). Even on cover songs, he gets creative, revamping the Newtown Neurotics’ “Suzi is a Heartbreaker” for the Internet age. And anyone who’s ever hovered over an alcoholic beverage and plotted revenge against a wicked world will relate to “Fuck You Anyway”:

Tonight is the night that I come unglued/
No longer will the beautiful people walk the streets/
And smile while I sit and stew/
Been waiting all of my life just to give it to you/
Gonna pay back all you generous souls/
And when I'm done you motherfuckers will all be through/
Just kidding, please forgive me/
Didn't realize that the whiskey would hit me so quickly/
I'll just grab my death and be on my way/
Didn't mean to wreck your evening/
Don't you worry 'bout me cuz I'm only bleeding/
And before I go there's just one last thing I wanna say...

Musically, On Deaf Ears rips fast and hard, but with a ringing guitar sound that keeps the melody in tact even at a breakneck pace. With a distinctive, earthy touch, the Beltones struck a similarity in sound to contemporaries like the Swingin’ Utters, early punk groups like (pre-Nazi) Skrewdriver, and of course the mighty SLF. At a lean 10 tracks, the disc is truly all-killer, no-filler. One could maybe contend that the truly definitive versions of most of these songs were the original 7” takes, but who can argue with the convenience of having all those assorted tunes on one CD? As much Lemmy as Jake Burns, the McFadden vocal style didn’t just have the tone – it had feeling! Everything about this CD suggests a band going all-out, playing and singing every last note as if it meant everything. Minimalist production values, not always a good thing in music, really work here to conjure the feel of a live band bringing it like it’s the last show it’ll ever play. I know that hardly anyone plays CDs anymore in this age of downloading. But if you do, On Deaf Ears is one of those titles that you won’t want to take out of your player. Running just 19 minutes, it will always leave you wanting more. Isn’t that the single best thing you can say about a piece of music?

In 2001, the Beltones would finally get out a proper album, Cheap Trinkets, which is of course worth owning if you’re the sort of person who likes good music. As far as I know, the band has not recorded anything since, and officially disbanded in 2005. But wherever Bill McFadden is right now, I hope he hasn’t stopped writing songs and making music. He was and will always be a major talent.

-Josh Rutledge

Drivin N Cryin - Great American Bubble Factory (Vintage Earth Music, 2009)

2010-06-01T06:00:00.001-07:00

Once again, I owe my fandom of a great artist to the best radio station in the history of Tidewater, VA -- 92.1 WOFM. Drivin N Cryin received major attention on the left-of-the-dial band, with tracks from 1989's Mystery Road getting the most cheek pinches and ass grabs. "Toy Never Played With," "Honeysuckle Blue," "Malfunction Junction," "Straight To Hell" among others joined key cuts from Scarred But Smarter (1986) and Whisper Tames The Lion (1988) to give the somewhat snooty a proper curtsy with these fine gentlemen from Atlanta. (To the writer in Catharsis whose poison pen slammed The Smithereens: Screw you and your Yo La Tengo!) When WOFM switched over to the syndicated Z-Rock in 1990, it was 98.7 WNOR's turn to carry on DNC's brief-but-beloved tradition. Though not as generous with sharing the booty, the AOR spot's adequate rotation of the title song from Fly Me Courageous won over the not-as-sophisticated readers of Rockflash. Indeed, the tune contained enough cowbell to satisfy the sons-of-a-bitches in Nazareth, the reaper-fearers in Blue Oyster Cult and the production demands of Christopher Walken-as-Bruce Dickinson. After acquiring all three releases on cassette (I wouldn't join the world of CDs until 1992 or so), I dubbed each of them for my college bud John. He liked DNC well enough to accompany me at The Boathouse for the Norfolk date on the Courageous tour. I was so engrossed in head-banging along to the band, a couple of preppy pukes nearby were mocking my movements. The crowd was a bit light in comparison to other shows I'd attended there (PiL, The Connells, etc.), but my future amigo Kenny enjoyed the killer set with John and me. One regret: I wish I'd taken my brother Mike along for the ride. Anyone who blasted "Catch The Wind" and "Powerhouse" on a surf-stickered boom box certainly deserved a ticket. Don't cry for him, though, 'cause the man's got something over his older sibling. Mike has seen REM in concert; I have not.

DNC share an outline on the U.S. map with the boys from Athens, but their differences at the plate are as pronounced as Hank Aaron and Ty Cobb's. If Peter Buck is the guy selling heavy metal records at a yard sale, the members of DNC are the ones handing him the cash. Wait, are those Soul Asylum's Hang Time, Meat Puppets' II, Skynyrd's Nuthin' Fancy and Led Zep's III wedged in the middle of the milk crate? Here's ten Washingtons from DNC's Kevn Kinney, Peter. That should be enough for a couple sandwiches down at Walter's BBQ. Kevn's funny-but-cool voice expressed the concern of having side dishes with your dinner, so take five more bucks for Neil's Rust Never Sleeps and Bob's Highway 61 Revisited. Enjoy the fries and slaw, PB. Done reading that stack of paperbacks from the likes of Harper Lee and Hemingway? KK wants to know if they're worth a cherry pie and a chocolate shake to you. Pete, have fun pullin' pig. DNC's got a gig.

Kevn quotes Springsteen in "Detroit City" ("I went out for a ride and I never got back"), but his heart's hungry for a Motown miss who's built like a (pink) Cadillac and crazy about The Stooges and MC5. A cool chick, no doubt. However, if I had the keys to the Fleetwood and $12,000,000 in Amoco allowance, I'd ride the 10th Avenue back streets to Baltimore, Jack, and ask a female friend if she'd like to go next level with me. Have the "Midwestern Blues" got you down? Though it would be awesome to have you and 300 other mouths in the unemployment line join me and the Oriole Bird at Camden Yards, please move to a town where you don't have to perform the same work as your father. Also, tell your mama not to wake you from the dream of hugging a pillow and pretending it's a woman. "I See Georgia" is where you've found freedom as a truck driver. Rock on, B.J. and your bear! When parked for the evening, Gladys Knight, Dave Dudley and Dolly on the juke should keep the whiskey and cold rain company. Try to catch the Braves on an off day, 'cause Heyward's been a stud so far. Every relationship is one "Ricardo on the beach" from being over. Once the 12 million's in the gas tank and the Caddy's in an impound lot, "The Hardest Part" is keeping the Charm in the City. If you're a man with a sponge in your hand who throws away green bean cans, that could be the Key for her not to move West. Speaking of Florida, "Preapproved, Predenied" has lines that read like "Good Times" ("I gotta work two weeks just to pay my rent/I gotta work three days just to keep my lights on/I gotta work two days just to get to work/I gotta work one day just to pay the fines"). The "hand-me-downs from Goodwill racks" and "off-brand soda from the corner store"?

Sounds like a Charm.

-Gunther 8544

Joe Jackson- Look Sharp! (A & M Records, 1979)

2010-06-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

Rockwriters, in their vainglorious quest to bring order to the universe, love to pigeonhole. Take Joe Jackson, for instance. Was there a single review of his first album that didn’t mention Elvis Costello? Even today, with a legendary and eclectic body of work to his credit, ole’ J.J. still finds himself lumped in there with Costello and Graham Parker, as if all three were not unique artists but rather separate arms of the same machine. Isn’t having your best-known song covered by Sugar Ray enough punishment for one lifetime?

True enough: Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson were both English, nerdy-looking, lyrically bitter, and exceedingly gifted at the craft of the three-minute pop song. But to backhandedly credit Jackson as a worthy imitator of Costello isn’t just unfair – it’s plain wrong! Personally, I don’t think Jackson ripped off Costello in the slightest. Look Sharp!, if you really listen to it, owes as much to Jackson’s pub rock roots as it does to the new wave fancies of the late 1970s. The playing and production give the record a cleaner, harder-hitting sound than the typical new wave or skinny tie power pop title of the day. And although Jackson’s memoir made it clear he was no huge fan of punk music, the supercharged “pub rock on speed” feel of Look Sharp! is kinda, sorta…punky!

We can generously say that the young Joe Jackson was not endowed with movie star good looks. While every other band or artist of the new wave pop style was posing for his/her/their own album cover photos, Look Sharp!’s cover art is a picture of a pair of shoes. But while Jackson’s average Joe (no pun intended, I swear!) image may have been a detriment publicity-wise, it was a huge asset for his artistry. Much or most of Look Sharp! is about the woes of not getting the girl. And rarely on record has said theme rung more true. We could never really believe that Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction. But Joe Jackson getting rejected by girls? Joe Jackson envious of those happy, loving couples? We could totally buy that! He was one of us! These songs, they aren’t just bitter – they positively bristle. The claws come out and dig they do into cold-hearted ex-girlfriends (“One More Time”), the douche bag who does get the girl (“Is She Really Going Out With Him?”), the blissfully married (“Happy Loving Couples”), hot chicks and the evil they do (“Pretty Girls”), and even love itself (“Fools In Love”). With lyrics ranging from pained (“Tell me one more time/That love was only my illusion”) to cynical (“Fools in love/Well are there any other kind of lovers?”) to just plain caustic (“Don’t talk to me about women’s liberation/They already got their right/Just where it hurts”), Jackson sure doesn’t hold back. He rightfully earns his “angry young man” rep, occasionally opining on social issues (“Sunday Papers”) but mostly venting a lifetime’s worth of romantic frustrations. When he sings “If looks could kill/There’s a man who’s marked down as dead!”, it’s so utterly convincing that it sends chills down the spine. Is it any wonder Mark McGrath couldn’t pull off that line? He’s exactly the type of guy Jackson was singing about!

But make no mistake about it: Look Sharp! is by no means a downer. Working with one of the best pub/new wave backing bands of its time (Graham Maby has got to be one of the two or three or four best rock bassists ever!), Jackson channels his pent-up frustrations into an upbeat, high energy joyride of an album. Not quite power pop, not quite punk, not quite mod, not quite pub rock, but perhaps a little bit of each, Look Sharp! is pure pop adrenaline from the first jagged guitar strains of “One More Time” to the final tick of “Got the Time”. Of course it will appeal to fans of classic period pieces like This Year’s Model and Squeezing Out Sparks, but at the same time it’s the unique work of a distinctive artist - a man with a point-of-view, singing voice, and way of writing a song that are entirely his. He would go on to a lengthy and musically diverse career, including forays into jazz and classical music and an extraordinary return to pop form on 2003’s Volume 4. But never has he been able to top his debut. That’s not a knock on the man’s achievements. It’s just that Look Sharp! really is that good.

-Josh Rutledge

Autograph - Sign In Please (RCA, 1984)

2010-05-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

Finally, I'm able to explain the "Russian Confusion" that plagues these L.A. sleazesters like German troops trapped in a Moscow blizzard. In 1985, Soviet art-rockers Avtograph participated in the Live Aid music festival. Despite not being able to make the trip in person, their performance was simulcast from a stage in the USSR. Avtograph's ELP-meets-King Crimson exhibition appreciably assisted in the feeding of hungry children, but audiences on two continents didn't exactly join hands in the soup kitchen. Roughly five minutes into the set, the BBC mistakenly switched to footage of berry pickers in Bulgaria being interviewed for a documentary. Avtograph's profile was soon exiled to Siberia, but the tainted juice from the spoiled fruit would squeeze the memories of music fans many years after the Cold War.

Turning to the Stars 'N' Stripes signature, Steve Plunkett (lead vocals/guitar), Steve Lynch (lead guitars), Randy Rand (bass/vocals), Keni Richards (drums) and Steven Isham (keyboards/vocals) chose their band name after hearing Def Leppard's "Photograph." The runner-up pick? Krackatoa. When a demo tape caught the attention of David Lee Roth, Autograph were selected to open 48 dates on Van Halen's 1984 tour. Two months later, the band inked a deal with RCA in the dressing room after a show at Madison Square Garden. Flying back to L.A. to work on the debut album proved to be an easy task, since Autograph had been playing most of the songs from it on tour. The last track written for Sign In Please? If you've seen the opening credits for "Hot Tub Time Machine," you should be able to name that tune within five notes.

Reaching #28 on Billboard, "Turn Up The Radio" was an enduring anthem for rockers of several stripes. Whether you were a Def Lep pyromaniac, a Van Halen jumper or a Night Ranger motorist, the chances you skipped out on work/school in order to crank the knob up to 11 and beyond were greater than seeing the Celtics and/or Lakers in the NBA Finals. Steve Lynch's eight-fingered soloing won him an award in a popular guitar mag. Bet some mean mimicking was done on brooms and brushes! Songs like these benefit from the hugeness of glossy production and upfront synths. I've heard the demo version on the Missing Pieces collection, and the in-your-face attitude on all fronts was sorely lacking. My brother Brian, not normally a huge fan of this style, would undoubtedly rank "Turn Up The Radio" on his list of the 250 greatest songs in the history of music. Like Ratt's "Round And Round" and Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock," it makes an instant impression and causes repeated abuse of volume buttons.

The video for "Send Her To Me" features a bevy of teased-out babes coming out of a wooden box and joining the band on stage. Weird fact: Steve Plunkett is the writer and performer of the theme to the 7th Heaven TV show. In lieu of galloping groupies, I would like an order of Jessica Biel. Have you ever seen her do a cartwheel or the splits? It'll change your life! Song titles don't come any clumsier than "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend Isn't Me." Here's a lyrical moment that's equally awkward: "You know it makes him feel so bad/To know her kids want to call me Dad." For the mom in a mini-skirt, I'd suggest choosing the chap who gives the children more cheddar at Chuck E. Cheese's. Until today, I had no idea that Steve Lynch was related to George Lynch (Dokken) in a brotherly way. Perhaps they could hang out with Merrill Lynch on "Friday" and attempt to sell the hooks from the song to 38 Special. In "Thrill Of Love," the ageless recipe is "Human equation: A + B." But what if you're part of a 27-person orgy? Do the letters become lowercase?

Maria Sharapova is a Russian who talks like an American. Nikita Koloff is an American who talks like a Russian. Beware of Bulgarian berries.

-Gunther 8544

The Simpletones- I Have a Date (Re-Force Records, 2002)

2010-05-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

Nearly as unconscionable as Maxim leaving Christina Hendricks (who should have been #1 with the other 99 spots left vacant) off of its 2010 Hot 100 was the OC Weekly’s list of the 129 greatest Orange County bands of all-time completely omitting The Simpletones. Come on, man! Major points to y’all for putting the Adolescents in the top spot, but where’s the love for the Simpletones? I like the Stitches as much as the next guy, but isn’t #23 a little high (Smogtown would have been a far better contemporary choice)? And why are Lit and The Offspring on there? Did they think they were making a worst-of list?

If you start naming all the most underrated and overlooked bands of first wave punk, you turn to California and the list starts to fill up fast. While not as good as The Gears, or as important as The Dils, or as influential as The Crowd, The Simpletones may have been more underrated than all of the above. And considering that they were kind of a precursor to what would be later termed “pop-punk”, albeit with an authentic early punk edge, the Simpletones merit a special place in history. It’s absolutely shocking, then, that their music has not been kept in print. Immortalized on Poshboy’s 1979 Beach Blvd compilation, the Simpletones are loved by punk record collectors but completely unknown to the more casual fan.

I can’t tell you for sure if The Simpletones were an influence on the Descendents, but I’ll bet you a six-pack that Milo, Bill Stevenson, et al owned Beach Blvd and played it ‘til it wore out. While a number of bands beyond the sea were incorporating melody into the punk rock sound, the Simpletones were one of the only punk groups of their era to be overtly “pop” both in sound and sensibility, wearing a Beach Boys influence on their sleeves and writing songs about girls. But while these lads were typically hormonally-driven teens with designs on the fairer sex, they weren’t nice, clean-cut kids…they were punks! If the Beach Boys in the ‘60s typified the bright sun and innocent fun of Southern California life, the Simpletones were like their wayward sons a generation later – going to school high on drugs, chasing girls with all sorts of diseases, and unable to really enjoy the beach because of all the smog polluting the air. And although the band’s anthem “California” reads lyrically like an early Beach Boys song, it’s sung with such disdain and irony that it leaves no doubt that these kids believed they lived in a shithole. As redolent as “Tiger Beat Twist” and “Kirsty Q” may be of Dick Clark approved teen idol rock n’ roll, this was not your grandfather’s beach band. “I Have a Date” is so wholesome and cute on the surface, but you just know that this date is going to end not with a kiss on the front porch, but rather with a sordid coupling under the boardwalk or a drug binge at some stranger’s house. And like the Ramones, whom they clearly emulated, the Simpletones were not against using the three-minute pop song as a vehicle for twisted social commentary. Note the black-humored environmentalism of “Dead Meat (Killer Smog)" or the way-ahead-of-its-time statement “TV Love”.

Released eight years ago by the German imprint Re-Force, the 22-track I Have a Date gives you EVERYTHING the Simpletones recorded in their short time together – the Beach Blvd tracks, the “Kirsty Q” 45 (which was Poshboy #2 – how’s that for historic?!), and all sorts of outtakes, which if not quite first-rate, are still a hell of a lot of fun (e.g. “Nasty Nazi” and a disco rendition of the Dickies’ “You Drive Me Ape”). Featuring three different lead singers but held together by the songwriting and guitar work of Jay Lansford, these songs just sound like late '70s Orange County – the half-spoken vocals that manage to convey boredom and anger, the melodic sensibility that’s practically imbedded in the Californian’s DNA, the chip on your shoulder that can only come from having to watch wide-eyed tourists frantically descend upon the crap town that you cannot wait to leave. As such, these songs have as much in common with the Adolescents or early Social Distortion as they do with any modern pop-punk band you could name. The best of these songs – “I Like Drugs”, “I Have a Date”, “Don’t Bother Me” – are as classic as anything in the annals of punk rock. Considering that dozens upon dozens of lesser bands have been given the full reissue/anthology treatment, it seems high time for I Have a Date to return to print. In the meantime, happy hunting. Land yourself a copy of the 1991 CD reissue of Beach Blvd, and that'll do you just as well!

-Josh Rutledge

Pretenders- self-titled (Sire Records, 1980)

2010-05-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Having carried on the Pretenders for close to three decades as a quasi-solo act, Chrissie Hynde has had a fine career and left us with a number of outstanding, even classic songs. For my money, Hynde has the best singing voice in the history of rock, and she’s a kick-ass guitarist and gifted songwriter to boot. But what’s unfortunate is that few people remember the original Pretenders, a far different group from the one that gave us “Don’t Get Me Wrong” or “I’ll Stand By You”. For before Hynde became the queen of American adult contemporary rock, she was fronting one of the greatest bands to come out of the English punk/new wave scene of the late 1970s. Drug abuse literally killed this band, and after two excellent albums Hynde was left to pick up the pieces and carry on. Even a huge Hynde fan like me has to admit: without James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon, the Pretenders were never truly the same.

Lead guitarist Honeyman-Scott died of a drug overdose on June 16th, 1982. Just two days prior, bassist Farndon had been kicked out of the band for excessive drug use. He too would OD, passing away in April of ’83. It’s impossible to know for sure how different later Pretenders recordings would have sounded if both men had lived, and it’s probably pointless to even wonder. Instead we can just be grateful for the two albums and one EP the original Pretenders did leave behind. In particular, that debut is a stone cold classic. There are plenty of bands out there with the longevity to have produced decades’ worth of material, and most of them would gladly trade all that quantity for one album as quality as the Pretenders’ first.

Formed in 1978, the Pretenders were comprised of Akron, Ohio expatriate Hynde and three Englishmen: Honeyman-Scott, Farndon, and drummer Gerry Mackleduff. Martin Chambers soon took over on drums, cementing the classic lineup that would play on the first two Pretenders albums. While not a “punk rock” album per se, the Pretenders’ debut is way punkier than a lot of records from that same era that are considered punk. What it has going for it, still, is that it captures one of the finest and most unique bands of its time at its very best. There are elements of punk and new wave in the mix for sure, but in a lot of ways it’s just straight-up rock n’ roll and pop – imagine a female-fronted ‘70s Rolling Stones with Television’s guitar stylings and The Who’s bass lines. Hynde’s voice hasn’t faltered with age, but back then she had the attitude, and she had a proper rock n’ roll band behind her to synch with all that sex and sass that came so effortlessly out of her mouth. Has there ever been a person in rock who was cooler than the 1980 version of Chrissie Hynde? No way! Yet this was no one-woman-show, as the band’s inspired playing (especially Honeyman-Scott’s outside-the-box guitar work) lifts legitimately great material to an even higher level. The record somehow manages to sound both distinctly late ‘70s-ish and completely timeless, reminding us that what made the new wave movement so great was not a particular sound but rather an explosion of talent and creativity. Long after the world has lost interest in the countless imitators, copyists, and third-rate knockoffs that cashed in on the new wave jackpot, people will still be listening to, and loving, the sterling slab of originality that is the first Pretenders LP.

“Brass in Pocket”, for good reason, has been in heavy rotation on at least one radio format since the day it was released. What’s baffling, though, is that classic rock playlists don’t include even more songs from Pretenders. Nearly every track on the record could have been a hit, and even the five-minute-plus “deep cuts” had the stuff to forever rule AOR radio. Perhaps the best two songs on the album, “Precious” and “Kid”, could not be more different – the former a smoldering fuck-you to closed-minded middle America, the latter a beautiful, vulnerable pop song completely devoid of irony or attitude. And while “Precious”, with its driving beat and off-the-charts ‘tude, is the tone-setter for this album and this band, “Kid” is probably the greatest Pretenders song ever - its melody infectious, Hynde’s vocal poignant and mesmerizing, and Honeyman-Scott’s guitar lines as flawless and pristine as a summer sunset. In the same vein, and just as lovely, is a remarkable cover of The Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing”, another high mark in the remarkable singing career of Chrissie Hynde.

What’s so pleasing about Pretenders is that songs like “Kid” and “Stop Your Sobbing”, so unlike anything else on the record, nonetheless manage to fit in perfectly. The group tries a little bit of everything, and it all falls into place smoothly. You want clanging, edgy new wave (“The Phone Call”)? You want “musicianship” to rival Rush (“Space Invader”)? You got it! While so much of the critically acclaimed femme-punk of the new wave era was either unlistenable rubbish (The Slits) or not even remotely punk (Patti Smith), “Tattooed Love Boys” is the real deal, brash and street-smart and power-packed to the end. “Private Life” is what The Police would have sounded like if they’d been any good. Built on one of the catchiest bass lines ever committed to tape, “Mystery Achievement” is a satisfying, slow-building epic of a rock song, and to this day the vocal gives me chills.

Anything that would have been considered “gimmicky” about the Pretenders in 1980 is irrelevant today. In our current social climate, there’s nothing revolutionary or even provocative about a female musician playing against traditional gender roles or espousing sexual frankness. Yet Pretenders, a full 30 years after its release, sounds as great as it ever did. Critics who pegged Hynde as some sort of feminist agenda-pusher were overanalyzing big-time. She never saw herself as a “woman in rock”. She was a person who rocked. Her greatness came not from her gender, but from her talent, charisma, and attitude. Her lyrics were sharp, honest, and bold. Her songs were well-crafted, unique, and impossible to get out of your head, especially after repeated listens. Her voice was as beautiful as anyone’s yet as tough as they came. All of that talent is evident on anything she’s ever recorded for the Pretenders, yet it shines brightest on this great first LP. It is not just one of the best debut albums ever, but also one of the greatest all-time rock albums, period. Respect!

-Josh Rutledge

The Troggs- The Best of The Troggs: The Millennium Collection (Island/Mercury, 2004)

2010-05-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

The 20th Century Masters compilations put out by the Universal Music Group, while never close to comprehensive, are affordable and usually spot-on in their track selection. If you’re looking for ace B-sides or obscure album cuts that could have been hits, forget it. But if you just want the best-known songs of, say, Chuck Berry, The Jackson Five, or even Night Ranger, you could do a lot worse. One band that was perfect for this series was The Troggs, who could never beat contemporaries like The Who or Kinks if you compared their best 20 or 30 or 40 songs. But if you just go by their best ten songs, The Troggs were probably as good as any ‘60s band besides the Beatles and Stones. Lean and mean at just 11 tracks, and largely comprised of the group’s incredible run of UK hit singles from 1966-67, this particular best-of supports my argument that The Troggs are one of the most underrated rock n’ roll bands of all-time.

The Troggs formed in 1965 in the southern England town of Andover. Fronted by Reg Presley, notorious for his primal vocal style but highly underrated as a songwriter, the band was reputed to play a live cover of “You Really Got Me” that was even better than the original. A demo of this cover landed in the hands of Larry Page, who was managing the Kinks. A year later, Page, no longer working with The Kinks, would sign on to manage The Troggs. Page had produced some demos for The Kinks during their 1965 American tour, and this experience would allow him to make the most of The Troggs’ affinity for “You Really Got Me”. Serving as band manager and record producer for The Troggs, Page helped fashion the band’s raw, crunching guitar sound, which was somewhat of an anomaly in 1966, when mainstream rock was shifting away from the simplicity of the British Invasion and moving towards psychedelic and baroque pop complexities. The band was two years behind the times, and it must have seemed more like 20 given how quickly music was changing. In spite of that or maybe because of that, The Troggs would dominate the pop charts that year, hitting the UK top ten four times and scoring #1 singles on both sides of the pond.

“Wild Thing”, composed by American songwriter Chip Taylor (Angelina Jolie’s uncle!), had flopped for The Wild Ones in 1965. But a year later The Troggs made it their own, turning it into a thumping masterpiece of fuzzed-out three-chord rock n’ roll, replete with an ocarina solo and perhaps the heaviest guitars ever heard on record at the time. Having missed with their debut single “Lost Girl”, The Troggs would suffer no such letdown this time around. “Wild Thing” shot to #1 in the States, and peaked at #2 in the UK. And they were just getting started! Followup “With a Girl Like You”, an upbeat British Invasion throwback, topped the UK charts. The brazenly sexual proto-punker “I Can’t Control Myself” was another UK smash, going all the way to #2. And to close out 1966, The Troggs would once more crack the Top Ten with “Any Way That You Want Me”. In ’67, the band struck again with “Give It To Me” (#12 UK) and the eerie, brilliant Stones rip-off “Night of the Long Grass” (#17). Branching out from their garage/British Invasion signature style, the group really hit the jackpot with the ballad “Love Is All Around”. Hitting the airwaves at the height of flower power, this pretty number made the top ten in the UK and the US. It was the band’s last big hit (although they’d continue to make records for years!), and probably rates historically as the very first “power ballad”.

Like any good Troggs comp does, The Best of The Troggs corrects the American misperception of the band as a “two hit wonder”. It includes all seven of the band’s ’66-’67 chart smashes, plus the killer B-sides “From Home” (the flip to “Wild Thing”) and “I Want You” (the flip to “With a Girl Like You”). The only truly essential song missing is the band’s ferocious version of the garage rock standard “I Can Only Give You Everything”, left off in favor of the ballads “Little Girl” and “You Can Cry If You Want To”. The rock guy in me could do without any of the ballads, and would prefer another early B-side like “Gonna Make You” or the proto-glam of 1970’s “Lover”. But come on – you can’t properly represent The Troggs without including the ballads (Just ask REM!). And the ones here (especially “You Can Cry If You Want To”, later covered beautifully by The Muffs) are pretty fantastic as far as ballads go, their overt sappiness matched by truly magnificent melodies.

The Troggs may not have had the sheer quantity of great tunes to rival the A-listers of ‘60s British rock, nor did they have the underground “garage” cred of American acts like The Sonics and Standells. But if you asked me to name the one band from the ‘60s that sounded the most like punk rock, I’d say The Troggs. If “You Really Got Me” is the root of all proto-punk, then “Wild Thing” and “I Can’t Control Myself” took it a step further. The Troggs didn’t invent rock n’ roll, but probably played it more primitively and salaciously than any band had thought to before. The MC5 were huge fans, and even covered “I Want You” on Kick Out The Jams. That the group took to a three-chord “caveman rock” ethos at a time when every other band out there was trying to be “progressive” was not lost on Troggs fans The Ramones, who’d do the very same thing a decade later, forever changing music in the process. But while it’s very easy to get lost in the “importance” of The Troggs, this was not one of those “critics’ bands” that you appreciate for its influence but hate to actually listen to! The Best of The Troggs, or any Troggs comp for that matter, is an absolute treat for the ears. Take in its well-selected blend of pounding proto-punk, sunny British Invasion pop, and top-notch ballads, and within the hour you may find yourself lobbying to get The Troggs in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame!

-Josh Rutledge

The Spits - s/t (Nickel And Dime, 2001)

2010-05-08T13:44:00.001-07:00

Being married to a wonderful Big Beautiful Woman is something I wouldn't trade for every great album in the world. Can T. Rex's The Slider compare to a shared meal of mini cheeseburgers with my sweetie? Get that thought outta the Buick, MacKane! Is KISS' Dressed To Kill better than the sight of my baby in a summer dress? Take that suggestion on a permanent getaway, Ace! Jeff Dahl's Ultra Under versus wrapping my sleepyhead under the covers? Go dig Iggy's dirt, dude! Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation or the girl of my dreams who's a daily reality? Carry yourself back to the sprawl, Kim! Is The Feelies' Only Life more important than our promise to love each other for life? Not on Lou's cursor, Glenn Mercer! The best thing about my wife? She lets me keep the music in a spare bedroom! Kids? To us, that's a punk band from Belgium. Too many of my friends' better(?) halves have forced their mates into arrangements of dumping their collections in dark storage
units. If your woman resembles the Christine character from CBS' "Yes, Dear", please go along with her Jack Rabbit request. Sure, being apart from treasured vinyl sucks harder than Les Claypool's band, but the trade-off's tremendous. "Christine's" shiny hair will feel softer in your hands than a clean copy of Underwater Moonlight. Her lips and tongue will amaze in ways greater than hearing Exile On Main Street on a $30,000 turntable. Conversely, if you're constantly hen-pecked by a fowl creature who could double as Marcy D'Arcy's twin parakeet, take your records and run, Jefferson! Go to Peg. Go to Kelly. Go to the nudie bar. Be like Steve and leave that dirty bird in her nest. Let the scrawny sparrow lose another wedding ring down Zorro's pants. Frankly, Jefferson, Marcy ain't worth ostrich spit.

Talking saliva, Seattle's The Spits would have nary a problem with using the Space Needle to poke out Ms. D'Arcy's eyeballs. If your ears weren't filled with a sticky lubricant that the keyboard robot (labeled R2 WD40 in the pic I've got) uses to refresh rusty parts, perhaps they'd hear nods to the Ramones, Screamers, and Black Randy And The Metrosquad. However, lifts from punk legends are only part of the story. Remember 24-7 Spyz? No? Well, leave it to The Spits to jog your memory back to 1989. Under the handle 24-7 Spits, they use dreadlocks, shorts, and shoe polish as means of paying tribute to the thrash-funk gods. If Nell Carter were alive today, she would smack every member of The Spits. Or sit on them. Perhaps she REALLY wanted to hear "Grandma Dynamite"! Given that break, the band would modify Nell's ass prints into mohawks, fake mustaches, sunglasses, and sleeveless denim vests. Two cast members of "Reno 911" are smiling and offering their services as seamstresses. Every band needs one. Ask Elton. When asked by an interviewer whom he'd turn into a robot, guitarist Sean said, "My ex-girlfriend. If I could turn her into a robot so I could reprogram her to say stupid shit when I wanted to hear it instead of when I didn't want to hear it." On why he doesn't skate, the robot replied, "I weigh five tons. It's kinda hard to stay on a board. I keep breaking them." Regarding relations with a band mate's ex-girlfriend, bassist Aaron said, "Yeah. I slept with one of Sean's ex-girlfriends. Knowingly. She wasn't really a girlfriend, though. More like a fuck buddy. So I've dipped the familiar, yeah."

At Norcom High School in Portsmouth, VA, the "Dropout" rate far exceeds the statewide average. To combat this, the lowest grade a student can receive on a quiz or test is 50. In band classes at the school, songs write themselves without the handling of instruments. The Spits are insanely jealous. At one point in 1986, all I wanted from my mom was money for a Hosoi skateboard. She wouldn't give it to me. These days, I only "SK8" with my nephew's finger toys. While attending Churchland Junior High School, a classmate of mine misplaced his retainer in the lunchroom's trash. Shortly afterward, he 86'd himself. Had the boy had more forgiving parents, he wouldn't have had to "Die Die Die." I greatly miss my "Black Kar." It was a 1987 Chrysler New Yorker. It had a sunroof. It had an Intellivision-like voice module that said things like, "Your fuel is low." It was a babe magnet. Betty White will be hosting an NBC program this "Saturday Nite." Betcha two dollars there'll be a "Golden Girls"-related skit. There should be more information about Rue McClanahan in the papers and magazines. I'm sure you agree with me on this. Studies show that more people fret over losing their "Remote Kontrol" than losing touch with a friend or loved one. I've watched a total of roughly five minutes of "Grey's Anatomy." The scene I saw was lesbian in nature. It was sorta hot. When my wife's not in the room, I become "Tired And Lonely." It sucks hugging a pillow and pretending it's a woman. "I H8 Pussies"? You gay? You ball? You rode the pie? "Suzy's Face" is the one Joe Namath wanted to kiss. Don't blame him, but I'm more of a Shelley Smith/Linda Cohn kinda guy.

Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude for the many blissful years of matrimony. I love you, random issue of Over 40 magazine (pages 56-61)!

-Gunther 8544

Kix- self-titled (Atlantic Records, 1981)

2010-05-07T06:49:00.001-07:00

“They were a band that was ripped to shreds on Beavis and Butthead at the height of grunge pc overkill, yet still managed to nail the number 5 spot with their debut album in Chuck Eddy's obviously inconsistent book Stairway To Hell - The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums In The Universe. The book is inconsistent, of course, because KIX should have been higher on the fucking list!”
-Adam Turkel

Kix’s debut is not only one of the most underrated hard rock albums of its time but also one of the most unique recordings to ever be lumped into the “hair metal” category. Surely informed by the obvious forebears (AC/DC, Zeppelin, Priest) but also strongly influenced by early Cheap Trick, the New York Dolls, and the burgeoning new wave pop movement, Kix infused smarts, humor, and lots of pop hooks into the hard rock form. Based out of Hagerstown, Maryland, the group gigged the mid-Atlantic relentlessly in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, its live show so dynamic and entertaining that a few kids from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania sought to copy it to a T. Those kids were Bret Michaels, Rikki “Rockett” Ream, and Bobby “Dall” Kuykendall, who would proceed to “borrow” Kix’s look and moves, form a band called Paris, relocate to California, re-name themselves Poison (which happens to be a Kix song title…Hmmm), and make millions doing an inferior version of the act that had so enthralled them. So not only do we have Kix to thank for indirectly begetting quality TV like Rock of Love Bus, but also we have the band’s music to enjoy. Unlike so much of what was passed off as “metal” in the big label money-grab of the 1980s, Kix still sounds great when you put it on!

So big was the underground buzz on the hard-touring Kix that the group not only secured a major label deal but also had the opportunity to work with Tom Allom, who’d produced Judas Priest’s British Steel and Def Leppard’s On Through the Night (and sound engineered all the early Black Sabbath LPs). And while it wouldn’t be accurate to list Kix as one of Allom’s signature jobs, the production does beef up the band’s pop leanings. It does sound a little like Allom was trying to jam these square pegs from Maryland into the round hole of British metal, but the band’s quirks shine through anyway. “Atomic Bombs” kicks off with amped-up, wall-shaking power chords; but just when you’re ready to start banging your head, the song quickly transforms into something that could have been an In Color B-side! Like his contemporary Tom Keifer, Steve Whiteman could really fucking sing, his voice a powerhouse blend of Robert Plant and Robin Zander, his style cheeky and sly like Bon Scott. With Whiteman’s voice, and a fine slate of songs largely penned by bassist Donnie Purnell, Kix had the stuff to be a different kind of band. And Kix is a different kind of record! From the slamming adrenaline rush of “Kix Are for Kids” to the pure new wave of “Heartache” to the almost-punk of “The Kid” to the epic storytelling of the classic rock staple (well, it is my hometown!) “Yeah Yeah Yeah”, Kix is all over the place here, in an entirely good way! “Contrary Mary” sounds like The Knack covering The Beatles with AC/DC’s Young brothers sitting in on guitar. “The Itch” is completely stupid, perhaps even moronic, yet so fun and wildly infectious that it implores you to push the repeat button. Could all of this killer material have benefited from a slightly less "metal" production? Perhaps. But who cares?!

Kix, in spite of finding itself smack dab in the midst of pop metal’s commercial blowup, was never quite photogenic or pandering enough to cash in. Legendary is the tale of the band going out to California and having to open for Poison, watching in disbelief as the crowd went wild for this crap band that had cloned their act down to the letter. Label pressure for a “hit” record led to slightly ill-fated tweaks like the use of “professional” songwriters on 1983’s new wavey Cool Kids, the enlistment of cheesy hair metal producer Beau Hill for 1985’s Midnight Dynamite, and the 1988 release of the horrific power ballad “Don’t Close Your Eyes”(a #11 chart hit my senior year of high school!). Yet in spite of its employer’s relentless attempts to turn the band into a saleable hair band cartoon, Kix managed to make one good album after another, its talent and hard rock authenticity impossible to subdue. The strong sales of Blow My Fuse (#46 Billboard) and Hot Wire (#67, in spite of coming out just as Nirvana was delivering glam metal’s death blow) may have ultimately rewarded the folks at Atlantic, but to its credit the band never veered from its blend of classic hard rock and new wavey pop. You can spin the roulette wheel of Kix titles, and anywhere you land, you’ll win. But the place to start is the first album. Just ask Chuck Eddy!

-Josh Rutledge

The Automatics- self-titled (Mutant Pop Records, 1996)

2010-05-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

While the majority opinion of pop-punk in the ‘90s is that 99.9 percent of it sucked ass and even the best of it paled in comparison to the bands it copied, I went WAY in the other direction as a reviewer back then. I probably hailed 90 percent of it as great and the rest being still ok, reasoning that even a fifth-rate rip on The Ramones was far better than even the best emo, straight edge hardcore, or silly mohawk punk. 14 or so years later, I must admit I was too generous. When’s the last time I honestly had the urge to listen to a Connie Dungs disc? How about those After School Special singles I thought were so hot? I guess they were not. That said, a lot of my Clinton Era favorites really do hold up well after all those years. Love Songs for the Retarded by The Queers just might be THE gold standard for the pop-punk form. Anything by the Beatnik Termites is a must-buy in my book. I still love the hell out of Parasites’ Punch Lines. And while I may have given A-grade reviews to several titles that I wouldn’t even bother to sit through today, the first Automatics album at worst slips to a B+.

There were two things that put this Portland, Oregon trio near the top of the ‘90s pop-punk class. Number one, they went back to the source for their inspiration. They weren’t aping Screeching Weasel or Green Day. They drew their sound instead from the first two Ramones albums – rarely a bad thing in my book. Number two, the two Jesses (Kimball and Sutherland) were genuinely talented songwriters who understood the perfect simplicity of early rock n’ roll. Compared to the typically polished ‘90s pop-punk offering, the Automatics’ self-titled CD comes off raw and lo-fi. Rather than obscuring the consistently great songs and energetic performances, this actually highlights them. The band could have re-cut this album a thousand times in a better studio with a bigger budget, and not once would they have been able to top what they already had.

The Automatics is one of those albums that you can just put on, and you’ve got yourself an instant party. It’s total fun from the first note, mixing Ramones-ian thunder with bubblegum’s high spirits (they cover “Chewy Chewy”!), a dash of Angry Samoans fuck-off ‘tude, and a dancy garage-pop vibe a la The Hi-Fives. The hooks are all over the place, and the melodies are more infectious than Chlamydia on a college campus. It’s a delirious, fast-paced romp, 17 songs having flown by in less time than it takes you to watch a Family Guy rerun. Yet it all comes off with a totally ballsy vocal delivery (something quite rare in the ‘90s pop-punk specimen), and the tough, scratchy guitars kick way harder than anything that was coming out of Sonic Iguana studios at the time. With song topics ranging from personal dissatisfaction (“My Life Is Shit”) to good girls gone bad (“Prom Queen”) to general misanthropy (“Hate The Human Race”) to lusting after lesbians (“She Likes Girls”), there’s something here for everyone. “All the Kids Just Wanna Dance” will make you wanna, uh, dance, and “I Can’t Cope” is as good of a straight Ramones rip as the Riverdales or Head ever did.

Who knows if you’ll ever see this particular disc in your travels? There were probably only a couple thousand of these ever pressed, so it’s not like you can just find it anywhere. But if you do find it, given that the whole world has apparently forgotten The Automatics ever existed, it’ll probably be tagged for less than five bucks. Money well spent, I say! The Automatics is everything punk should be: simple, stupid, sloppy, silly, sometimes in poor taste, and so utterly listenable that you’ll wear out the disc before you ever grow tired of it. Let's steal!

-Josh Rutledge

Cock Sparrer- Shock Troops (Razor Records, 1983)

2010-04-30T07:03:00.001-07:00

Cock Sparrer’s Shock Troops was probably the first great ’77-style punk album that wasn’t made in the '70s. It arrived, in fact, a full six years after 1977, and by then all the first wave greats had either broken up, changed their sound, or simply started to suck. Punk music, so fantastic in its early years, had taken a very wrong turn. Hardcore and anarcho-punk were taking over. Melody was suddenly out of vogue. The rockin’ influence of the Stooges and New York Dolls was barely detectable in the happening punk sounds of the day. New bands were aping The Exploited; old ones were experimenting with new wave or things far worse than that (see “Clash, The”). It would be a massive understatement to say that 1983 was not one of punk rock’s greatest years.

Cock Sparrer, if it had been commercially successful the first time around, surely would have gone down the same road its contemporaries traversed: one or two good albums, one or two somewhat shitty albums, and then some unfortunate foray into post-punk or dub or goth or metal or blue-eyed soul. But luckily for us, Cock Sparrer failed miserably in the '70s. Its two singles on Decca Records sold about 12 copies combined. The group recorded a full-length album that no one had any particular interest in releasing (it would remain unheard for almost 20 years!). Having been slugging it out since its mid- '70s origins as a Small Faces influenced pub rock band, Cock Sparrer had had enough and called it quits in 1980.

Then, in an odd occurrence, the burgeoning Oi! movement took a liking to Cock Sparrer’s working class punk sound (most notably, “Sunday Stripper” appeared on Oi! The Album). Suddenly, there was a “market” for Cock Sparrer. The band reformed in 1981 and returned with a vengeance, its formerly glam/rock tinged style now evolved into straight-up powerhouse punk. One year later, the group released its classic single “England Belongs To Me”. Unlike the two Decca releases, this single was not met with indifference. It garnered a lot of attention, some of it negative (the British press took it upon itself to point fingers at the band when certain unsavory elements of the right wing co-opted this catchy, patriotic number). B-side “Argy Bargy” was a beast of a tune as well, and there was no stopping Cock Sparrer at this point. Having escaped a certain decline by sitting out much of the late '70s and early '80s, the band was ready in 1983 to deliver a classic 1977 punk LP.

And what an LP it was! With its sing-along choruses, boisterous Brit-accented vocals, and proud working class bent, Shock Troops would prove to be a standard-bearer for the street punk/Oi! sub-genre. But its moderate tempos, Buzzcock-ian guitar leads, and melodic style were throwbacks to punk’s first wave, songs like “Where Are They Now”, “Riot Squad”, and “Take ‘Em All” arriving just in time to assuage the thousands of earaches brought on by punk’s new breed. The disillusionment of “Where Are They Now” (“Six years on/and they've all gone/Now it's all turned sour”) may be social and political in nature, but it could just as easily be musical. Yes, indeed, it had all gone sour, the great, fiery idealism of, say, Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash, or Chelsea already a distant memory, replaced by the tuneless monotony of hardcore and thrash. But Cock Sparrer had arrived to take punk back to where it had come from, armed with big, catchy anthems and melodies equal to the message. After a couple of spins through the aforementioned tracks or equally ace tunes like “Working” and “I Got Your Number”, you could easily assume that Shock Troops is not a studio album, but rather a best-of collection! “England Belongs To Me” (not included on initial pressings but present on any version of Shock Troops you’ll find) is not remotely fascist – if only “America the Beautiful” were as catchy and inspiring!

Cock Sparrer would release another fine album, Runnin’ Riot in ’84, before calling it quits in the wake of so much misplaced negative media attention. But since the mid-'90s, the band’s been going strong non-stop (the most recent long player Here We Stand is probably the group’s best in decades), with original members Colin McFaull, Steve Burgess, Steve Bruce, and Mickey Beaufoy all remaining on board. But really, the ONLY Cock Sparrer title you need is Shock Troops. No fan of ’77 punk (or good music, period) should be without it. It’s one of those discs you can put on, and no matter who’s with you, people are gonna be like, “Hell yeah! Shock Troops!” Song after song, you just can't help singing along and pumping your fist, your soul stirred to go out and kick some ass! It’s very easy to abuse the term “classic” while writing about music, but in this case it’s no stretch. If you’re trying to name all the no-doubt-about-it classic punk albums, Shock Troops HAS to be one of ‘em!

-Josh Rutledge

Turbonegro- Apocalypse Dudes (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1999)

2010-04-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

There are exactly ten opinions that are so universal and indisputable that they can officially be considered facts. They are:
1. More cushion is most definitely better for the pushin’.
2. Mike Ditka is God.
3. Dick York was the better Darrin.
4. O.J. did it.
5. Virginia is for lovers
6. Cheerleading is not a sport.
7. If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man.
8. Kmart sucks.
9. Burger King should never have changed its fries.
10. Apocalypse Dudes by Turbonegro is the greatest album of all-time.

While the first nine items require no elaboration, it is necessary to categorize the two types of individuals who might dispute #10.

First, there are those who’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Apocalypse Dudes. These people are merely unfortunate, not personally flawed. They may be partially at fault for ignoring the recommendations of others or failing to investigate any music outside of the ten songs in the current Top 40. But in most cases, they can be saved. They can go out and buy Apocalypse Dudes, discover its joys, and go on to live a happy and fulfilling life. In some rare cases, an intervention is required and a friend or family member will have to buy the album for them, and perhaps even physically force them to listen to it. Even when that happens, the results are generally positive.

Far more doomed is the second category of unbelievers: those who know well of Apocalypse Dudes but nonetheless dispute its preeminent place in the annals of recorded music. Some of these people have suffered significant head injuries at some point in life; others were subjected to soul-scarring traumas such as extended encounters with circus clowns or Hoarders marathons on A & E. And then there are those who lack either a sense of humor or good taste in music, both of which are prerequisites for the proper appreciation of any Turbonegro album. The non-fan of Turbonegro is generally a sorry sort - the kind of person who scares children, regularly uses the word “cunt”, and masturbates to pictures of Ann Coulter. In many cases, he’s beyond helping. The only hope for this individual lies in a rigorous program of therapy, diet, hair care, excessive drinking, sword fighting, heavy weightlifting in the company of homosexuals, and multiple long weekends spent listening to the Dictators, Ramones, Alice Cooper, the Stooges, and KISS.

What can we say about Apocalypse Dudes but that it rocks like no album has ever rocked? Somehow no band prior had managed to combine the distinct ingredients of first wave punk, glam metal, and 1970s guitar hero hard rock – or if it had been done, it had never been done so awesomely! Imagine if Spinal Tap had listened to punk rock, received from the rock gods the talent for immortal songwriting, and taken their guitar wanking to an even higher level. Then they would have sounded like Turbonegro! Yet for all of its over-the-top flair, absurdist humor, and homoerotic posturing, Apocalypse Dudes is not a joke album. This band – Oslo, Norway’s greatest contribution to world culture – was more than just a gag. Behind the schtick were absolutely incredible songs full of melody and hooks. From the epic prog metal send-up “Age of Pamparius” through the thunderous anthem “Rock Against Ass” to the not-so-subtle “Good Head”, the material is as impressive as anything ever heard on a hard rock album. Laugh all you want at a song title like “Rendezvous with Anus”, but can you argue that it’s not a perfect rock song?

Rather than a parody of cock rock’s worst excesses, Apocalypse Dudes was an improvement on the form – what you would get from taking the silliest music known to man and somehow making it awesome. From open to close, this album aspires to nothing besides rocking to the maximum, and that it does. Everything is big: big hooks, big production, big guitars, big drums, big vocals. Euroboy, with his perfect fusion of the technical skills of Van Halen/Malmsteen and the soul of Johnny Thunders, may be our generation’s greatest guitar hero. On vocals, Hank Von Helvete is like Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and Rob Halford all rolled into one. It’s amusing, maybe even gimmicky, that the group’s dressed in sailor hats and matching denim, that they have really awesome mustaches and would like you to believe that they spend their spare time trawling for hot men to fuck. But take away all of that, and you still have the greatest album of all-time.

So of course, once you’ve recorded the greatest album of all-time, are you not doomed to spend the rest of your career disappointing your fans? Yes and no. Granted: Turbonegro will NEVER make a greater album than Apocalypse Dudes. The circumstances that led to the conception and recording of this masterpiece were once-in-a-lifetime type stuff, a rare convergence of pure talent with divine intervention and a determined vision to do something that had never been done before. That said, there is no such thing as a bad Turbonegro album. You can lay down $20 for a copy of Party Animals or Scandinavian Leather and know that you'll get your money's worth for sure.

But for a copy of Apocalypse Dudes, you could not be blamed for selling your soul.

-Josh Rutledge

The Bobbyteens - Not So Sweet (Estrus/Screaming Apple, 2000)

2010-04-23T11:05:00.001-07:00

Crossing lo-fi trash punk with ‘60s girl group melodrama, the poppy Glitter/Gilder side of glam rock, and the super-slutty bomp-bah-bomp of Nikki and the Corvettes, The Bobbyteens were, on paper, the perfect rock n’ roll band. And on record, they were even better! Powered by wonderfully sloppy musicianship and the strong pipes of the very sexy Tina Lucchesi, The Bobbyteens were one of the best bands of that great garage/punk scene circa the late ‘90s/early ‘00s.

Having already delivered a fantastic debut LP and a number of killer singles in the late ‘90s (“Firecracker” still makes my list of the 20 greatest rock n’ roll songs EVER!), the Bobbyteens kicked off the 2000’s with their best album, Not So Sweet. A full ten years later, I don’t find myself regretting a single word of the acclaim I heaped upon this title when it first came out. Instead, it seems I may have not praised it enough! I should have promised purchasers an enhanced sexual prowess and guaranteed fortunes. I should have warned people that if they didn’t buy the album, bad things would happen. Clearly, we can now look back and attribute historic ills such as The Iraq War, the rise of reality TV, SARS, tramp stamps, Paris Hilton, meth addiction, Dr. Phil, Nickelback, ironic trucker hats, texting, Hurricane Katrina, Miley Cyrus, and the Great Recession to the sparse sales of Not So Sweet. Shame on all of you!

Like The Donnas, the Bobbyteens were initially assembled by Darrin Raffaelli. Unlike The Donnas, the Bobbyteens actually got better after severing ties with Raffaelli. A virtual all-star team of ‘90s San Fran/Oakland garage punk (Lucchesi was in the Trashwomen and Count Backwurds; bassist Danielle Pimm had played with the Trashwomen, Count Backwurds, and Brentwoods; guitarist Lisa Schenberg was formerly in the Spastics; and Russell Quan had drummed for the Mummies, Phantom Surfers, and Count Backwurds), the Bobbyteens hardly needed a mentor. Not So Sweet is the poppiest and “cleanest” sounding item in the band’s catalog (hence its release on the German power pop imprint Screaming Apple), but if you’re expecting slickness or refined musicality, you’re barking up the wrong tree! This is primitive, 4/4 rock n’ roll – fun and catchy and amateurish in all the best ways. This is what The Runaways could have sounded like if they’d thrown out the metal influence and fed themselves a steady diet of Ramones and Dictators.

It all kicks off with “Liquid Love”, one of the least subtle sex songs ever penned. With the tone clearly established, the album unfolds as expected, with more odes to scoring with boys (“Blind Date”) and the joys of low-brow culture (“Late Nite TV”), moments redolent of the Shangri-Las (“Do You Want Me”), and cover selections appealing to both our basest instincts and the music geek in all of us (The Rubber City Rebels’ “Young and Dumb” and the Hershel Almond doo wop oldie “Let’s Get It On”). Not So Sweet is nothing revolutionary or unique, but it’s an absolute blast and a must-own for anyone who proclaims to love rock n’ roll. Quan, in his own way, is probably as great of a drummer as Keith Moon or Neil Peart, and Lucchesi’s powerhouse vocals really soar on numbers like “I’m Alright”.

The Bobbyteens would strike again in 2004 with another great effort, Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’, which turned out to be their last album. If you have any taste in music at all, you ought to go buy EVERYTHING the Bobbyteens ever did! Spend as much money as you have to! You won’t be disappointed! Unless, of course, your idea of “rock n’ roll” is Daughtry, Kings of Leon, or Vampire Weekend. In that event, I’m going to blame you in advance for the next decade’s worst atrocities: asteroid collisions, dog flu, the Iran/Israel Nuke Fest ‘13, the Jonas Brothers emo album, Martian invasion, the McDonald’s McLiverwurst, All About Steve II, the ill-fated thawing of Ted Williams’s head, the complete obliteration of California, two Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl wins, and the election of Sarah Palin. Rock on!

-Josh Rutledge

Ritchie Valens- self-titled (Del-Fi Records, 1959)

2010-04-21T11:42:00.001-07:00

If all he had been was the first Chicano rock n’ roll star, Ritchie Valens would already be a massive figure in music. If all he had been remembered for was his tragic death in the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens would already be an immortal figure in rock n’ roll. But Ritchie Valens was far more than the answer to a couple of trivia questions. Ritchie Valens was one of the greatest rock n’ rollers of the 1950s, one of the most glistening stars of that most golden age. And although his lifetime’s recordings were laid down in less than one year, he managed to leave behind more great music than most artists could produce in decades. Ritchie Valens, not issued until a month after the rocker’s death, is a terrific, exhilarating rock n’ roll album. If there’s anything lacking about it, it’s that it only hints at what could have been had this 17-year-old boy not departed this world too soon. But sadly, there’s no helping that. And the bottom line is that just for the classic singles alone, Ritchie Valens is one of the most essential rock n’ roll albums EVER.

Richard Valenzuela was a high school student living in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley in May 1958 when he auditioned for Bob Keane, a producer and record label owner who’d already struck it big with Sam Cooke. Keane, who was looking for artists for his new label Del-Fi, had been tipped off to Valenzuela, the “Little Richard of the Valley”, and caught one of his live shows at a movie theater in San Fernando. Keane signed the teen to Del-Fi, and Ritchie Valens was born. By July, Valens was recording songs at Hollywood’s famed Gold Star Studio, working with the best session band money could buy. Backing Valens were the likes of Earl Palmer (drummer for Little Richard AND Fats Domino - now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), Carol Kaye (who’d later make herself a legend playing bass on classic songs like the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”, the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer”, and the Grass Roots’ “Midnight Confessions”), and Renee Hall (a frequent bandmate of Palmer’s whose six-string Danelectro bass would give “La Bamba” its distinctively thick bottom end). Recorded first were the hard-hitting Valens original “Come On, Let’s Go” and the Leiber & Stoller number “Framed” (a 1954 hit for The Robins). Issued within days of its recording, the “Come On, Let’s Go” single was a big hit, reaching #42 on the charts, and by the fall Valens had quit high school to concentrate on his career. In the latter months of 1958, he would appear twice on American Bandstand, shoot a scene for Alan Freed’s film Go Johnny Go! (doing the sizzling Little Richard rip-off “Ooh! My Head!”), and record the rest of his debut album. He’d also reach staggering heights of success with his second 45, “Donna” b/w “La Bamba”. Both sides would chart – “Donna” going all the way to #2, and “La Bamba” peaking at #22.

Much is known about the death of Ritchie Valens on February 3, 1959 – the day the music died. What’s not as universally acknowledged, some 51 years later, is how bad-ass Valens’s music still sounds! If Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Little Richard were the top tier of ‘50s rock n’ roll, Valens is right there at the head of the second tier, and his influence on what was to come in rock is without question. With its aggressive instrumentation, hard-driving beat, and gloriously raucous guitar solo, Valens's rock n' roll interpretation of the Mexican folk tune “La Bamba” may have been the first “garage rock” single. John Lennon admitted that “La Bamba” was a massive influence on the Beatles’ guitar-heavy version of “Twist and Shout”. Jimmy Page once offered, "Valens was my first guitar hero and I played that bridge to 'La Bamba' a thousand times." And no less than an authority than Lester Bangs traced the existence of punk rock all the way back to Valens:

"Just consider Valens's three-chord mariachi square-up [on 'La Bamba'] in the light of 'Louie, Louie' by The Kingsmen, then 'You Really Got Me' by The Kinks, and then 'No Fun' by The Stooges, then 'Blitzkrieg Bop' by The Ramones, and finally note that 'Blitzkrieg Bop' by The Ramones sounds a lot like 'La Bamba.' Twenty years of rock and roll history in three chords played more primitively each time they are recycled."

Ritchie Valens is, of course, highlighted by “La Bamba” and the beautiful slow-dancer “Donna”, written about Valens’s real-life girlfriend (Bangs called it “one of the classic teen love ballads, one of the few which reaches through layers of maudlin sentiment to give you the true and unmistakable sensation of what it may have been like to be a teenager in that strange decade”). Hard to believe both songs were on the same single! “Ooh! My Head!” may be a copy of Little Richard’s “Ooh! My Soul!”, but regardless it was one of the hottest rock n’ roll tracks of the ‘50s, replete with throaty, soulful vocals and blistering guitar work. The smoking opening cut “That’s My Little Suzie” (a posthumous fourth chart hit for Valens) is less flagrantly Little Richard inspired, while “In a Turkish Town” is a surprisingly tender turn towards the crooner rock that was just coming into vogue at the time. Even some of the filler is choice stuff – you could not go wrong with covers of Robert and Johnny’s 1958 doo-wop hit “We Belong Together” or the Larry Williams classic “Bony Moronie”, especially given Valens’s impassioned treatment of the material.

Del-Fi would go on to release a second Valens LP, Ritchie, compiling the scraps of what remained from the young man’s recorded output. The album’s best tracks have made their way onto the host of Valens compilations that have seen the light of day over the decades, and truly one cannot go wrong with any Ritchie Valens collection. What’s wondrous is that Valens’s music was so uplifting, so spirited and exciting, that it obliterates the sadness of his life story. Listening to Ritchie Valens, you don’t dwell on the sadness of his early death or the tragedy of what music lost when he was killed. Instead, you’re filled with joy and hope by this incredible music - these raw, high energy tunes that can make a bad day good and a good day even better. If you can make it through “La Bamba” without wanting to get up and dance, you may need to check yourself for a pulse.

-Josh Rutledge

The Suicide Commandos - Make A Record (Blank, 1978)

2010-03-26T10:42:00.001-07:00

Common names are often shared by notable figures, but it's usually obvious which person is more known by the Average Joe. For example, John Smith was one of the Jamestown settlement's founders in 1607. Most folks know that his head was saved on the chopping block by Pocahontas, but are you aware it was Smith who gave the New England region its name? In the same part of the United States 375 years later, John Smith, a kicker for the NFL's Patriots, scored the only points in a 3-0 victory over the Miami Dolphins as time expired. The contest would later be coined the Snowplow Game. OK, John Smith was an easy pick. Hell, it's used on samples of credit cards. What about a handle like Adrian Peterson? Oddly, the APs to whom I'm referring are employed by the National Football League and play similar positions. The one starting for the Minnesota Vikings is a Pro Bowl running back who holds the single-game record for rushing yards (296). On the Chicago Bears, AP might as well be in the WPP. Switching sports, Chris Osgood has hoisted the Stanley Cup three times as an ace goaltender for the Detroit Red Wings. Back to Minneapolis, Chris Osgood is held in high regard as a founding father of that city's punk rock history. Feel sorry for Osgood, because his band's tag is also upstaged. Suicide Commando, AKA Johan Von Roy, is an electro-industrial musician from Belgium with 5,245 fans on Facebook. Headed by CO, The Suicide Commandos have 106 FBers singing their praises.

Make it 107. Joined by Steve Almaas (bass/vocals) and Dave Ahl (drums/vocals), Chris Osgood (guitar/vocals) put forth two singles ("Monster Au-Go-Go" and "Match/Mismatch") in 1976. The following year, SC recorded Make A Record's fifteen tracks at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis. Memorable gigs at the hometown Longhorn Bar led to several cross-country tours. A fruitful friendship with Pere Ubu blossomed for SC in January 1978, when the newly constructed Blank Records released both bands' debut albums simultaneously. If this ain't an art-punk's wet dream, call me Colin Newman with a towel.

Speaking of Wire, that UK band's 1977 masterwork is a towering template for Make A Record. Indeed, SC's song lengths (often under two minutes), jittery vocals, and jagged musicianship tap heavily on the fabric. Though Minutemen and Urinals backers would be quick to debate, Make A Record is arguably the best salute of Pink Flag that's been done by an American band. Please don't think I'm calling SC a tribute act, though. Chris Osgood's massive riffing suggests a duel between Chuck Berry and Johnny Ramone on a stage blanketed in nerve gas. Also, a sonic kinship with fellow Midwesterners Devo and the aforementioned Pere Ubu keeps SC's passport tucked away in Ahl's drum case.

DA's sticks pound the snare, but your previously distant roommate Charisse is busy "Attacking The Beat." Because you've never seen her moving in a club before, the vision of the "Little Petite One" in a short skirt compels you to join the lovely Latina on the floor. Dancing in the dark? On the ceiling? For you, Charisse, I'd feign fandom of Bjork and Lionel Richie. To impress the lady, you glue the clippings of your gray hair onto your face. Talking in an accent similar to the man from the Dos Equis adverts, you tell Charisse about the thirst for her tongue in your mouth. Unfortunately, she bites off your nose and spits it into a beer glass. Discussing reattachment surgery with "Mr. Dr.", he lets you live. Why? So you can pay the bill. Sense of smell regained, you exit the love nest and find the wispy woman at the stove tackling tofu, tuna, and taco sauce. The lunch shows Charisse cares a lot, but you think she's "Semi-Smart." More proof of a sliced IQ is given, when "She" tries to convince you that one of The Monkees is named Peter Dork. Charisse's sweet love (juice) offsets her lack of music trivia, so you go back to kissing her (lips). The morning after, she leaves you with nothing but a plate of dirt. It's better than the tofu taco salad, for sure. Still, you miss the one who's done you wrong and wonder if Charisse has heard this song. Walking away from the abandonment, you see a thing that makes you frown. It is Charisse's nightgown. Neither black nor brown, the memory of her makes you drown. You're left with no choice but to "Burn It Down." That goes double for the apartment. Luckily, the fire station is across the street.

The Suicide Commandos. A band by any similar name...

-Gunther 8544

The Pagans- Shit Street (Crypt Records, 2001)

2010-03-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

“The Pagans were as unwrought, impudent and gnarly a buncha rock'n'roll bedlamites as America's ever spewed outta its queasy underbelly."
-Mark Trehus

Of all the “classic” punk bands, The Pagans are perhaps the most under-appreciated. Never able to get a proper album out during their first incarnation, the red-hot Cleveland foursome nonetheless amassed enough killer material between 1977 and ’79 to allow for the legendary posthumous compilation Buried Alive. Even more definitive, the Crypt Records issue Shit Street compiles the entirety of the original Pagans’ studio cuts with a 13-song live set from August of ’79. If your list of top-tier class of ’77 bands doesn’t include The Pagans, you ought to give Shit Street a listen and get your pen and paper ready. You may need to do some revising.

Unlike many of their contemporaries who formed in the wake of Sex Pistols hysteria and more or less copied the formula, The Pagans were making punk rock music before anyone knew what to call it. The Hudson brothers had been playing in bands together since 1974, years before “Anarchy in the UK” was even conceived. Perhaps they were influenced by the true first punk song, “I Got a Right”. More likely they were influenced by Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-1970s - a crumbling blue collar city on the verge of bankruptcy, ridden with a perennially losing baseball team. Most likely they were influenced by extremely large quantities of drugs and alcohol. Whatever the case, the resulting music was on fire. As snotty as their fellow Clevelanders the Dead Boys, no less unsavory than those rotten Pistols, as sonically destructive as Iggy and the Stooges, and more lunkheaded than the Ramones and Dictators combined, The Pagans were the archetypical first wave punk band. And although their influence on modern-day sub-genres such as “punk rock n’ roll”, “garage punk”, and “snot-punk” is unmistakable, there has never really been another band that sounded quite like The Pagans.

Shit Street has all the songs you know (or ought to know!): both sides of the “Street Where Nobody Lives”/ “What’s This Shit Called Love” 45 from ’78 (one of the greatest punk singles EVER!), the gloriously awfully-recorded 1977 classic “Six and Change”, the blistering, demented “Eyes of Satan”, the Denny Carlton penned shaker “Boy Can I Dance Good”, the Cleveland manifestos “Dead End America” and “I Juvenile”, and the tasteless proto speed punk of “She’s a Cadaver” (surely the Angry Samoans were fans!). And although a handful of the studio tracks were either too hastily recorded or simply not as inspired, the best stuff here absolutely kills. From the very opening notes of “What’s This Shit Called Love”, you know you’re hearing something extraordinary, Tim Allee’s thick, stabbing bass lines and Brian Hudson’s abusive drumming laying the ground for Mike Metoff’s guitars, which growl like alien destruction machines. And then in comes Mike Hudson with his powerful, wailing vocals, and forget about it! Try to name some punk singers better than Mike Hudson. Come on, try! You won’t get very far.

The live cuts capture The Pagans in their natural habitat, the fabled dive Pirate’s Cove, and give you a tiny taste of what it would have been like to have caught these guys in their prime, when they gigged relentlessly, drank heavily, fought internally, trashed hotel rooms, and delivered the goods on-stage to the delight or horror of whomever happened to show up that night, their raw, streetwise brand of rock n’ roll arriving at least a decade too soon for any kind of recognition from the “respectable” world. And once Cheetah Chrome and Jimmy Zero join the fellas on stage for bang-up renditions of “It’s All Over Now” and “Search and Destroy”, you’re gonna wish so badly that you had been there! The Pagans were soon to break up, and they'd come back to life a few years later and turn out the not-unworthy Pink Album. But come on, man. There's nothing like early Pagans.

Welcome to Punk 101, kids. I assume you've all bought the first four Ramones albums and burned your blink-182 t-shirts. Very good. A's for all of you! Your next assignment: start listening to The Pagans.

-Josh Rutledge

The Prostitutes - discography CD (Pelado Records, 2000)

2010-03-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

The mid-to-late '90s was one of the greatest-ever eras for punk rock music. Sure, this was a time when an incredible volume of absolutely terrible bands sprung forth out of garages and basements the world over, the hidden path to the underground having been blown wide open in previous years by the likes of Nirvana and Green Day. Punk bands were everywhere, and they couldn’t all be awesome. But with the bad came the good, and boy were there ever some great punk bands circa ’96-00! And in this age when groups like The Humpers, Stitches, U.S. Bombs, Teengenerate, New Bomb Turks, The Rip Offs, The Queers, and Swingin Utters were at their best and mightiest, one little band from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania ruled over all: the fuckin’ Prostitutes!

Amidst the vast and incessant shitstorm of uninspired revivalists, generic thrashers, banal bar bands, pointless imitators, cartoonish Mohicans, talentless noise-spewers, drunk-punk retreads, Warped Tour whack-offs, wannabe rock stars, washed-up oldtimers, third-rate Ramones clones, clichéd sleaze-rawkers, fashion-happy mediocrities, straight-edge grunters, riot grrl screechers, nu-skate wastes, prettyboy posers, pseudo scumbags, suburban skankers, post-grunge opportunists, Epitaph hacks, retooled headbangers, p.c. crust-slingers, and intolerable emo wankers that passed for “punk rock” music in the 1990s, a select few bands left behind recorded legacies comparable to the all-time punk greats’. One such band was The Prostitutes, who set the standard for obnoxious/trashy/“snotty” punk rock in the late ‘90s. They were the most compelling and authentically degenerate band of their time and style. Their music was unabashedly primitive yet seemingly inspired by a rare, twisted genius. No punk rock n’ roll group since has even come close to topping the ‘tutes.

Hailing from the festering environs of Harrisburg (perhaps the only state capitol in the U.S. that can rightfully be called a “dead-end town”), the Prostitutes lived their music and affected no pose. They were chemical-abusing, people-hating, fast-living, going-nowhere miscreants who played music that was real, raw, dangerous, and true. They were poster children for a generation of failures and fuck-ups left behind by the American dream. They were holdovers from the pre-’94 era of punk, when calling yourself “punk rock” was tantamount to commercial suicide and a sure pathway to disrepute and societal rejection. Songs about heroin, hangovers, and extreme family dysfunction reflected their true experiences - not some put-on notion of what punk music was “supposed” to be. At a time when much of the burgeoning “underground” rock of the day seemed tailored for the approval of the good-looking, mall-shopping masses, the ‘tutes made music that spoke to the damaged souls who roamed the dive bars, meth labs, and halfway houses of downtrodden America.

The Prostitutes were the archetypical snot-punk band of their day, but their peculiar brand of deviant rock n’ roll was not traceable to any obvious influences. The Pagans and G.G. Allin & the Jabbers were probably their primary precursors, but one is just as likely to hear traces of Crime pugnacity or Humpers swagger in now-classic songs like “Rock N’ Roll Outbreak” and “Suburban Trash”. Songs like “Rich Spoiled Brat” and “Fashion Victim” burned with a smoldering intensity that recalled the hottest and fiercest of the early LA punk bands. But unlike so many of their contemporaries, the ‘tutes didn’t sound like they were imitating other bands. Punk rock for them was not an easily-copied musical formula but rather a base outlet for the expression of boredom, despair, unsavory thoughts, and misanthropic rage. This was a group that oozed fuck-off attitude of the nastiest variety. But attitude was just part of the equation. They had the chops too. Singer Kevin McGovern was probably the greatest punk vocalist of his day, his voice raspy, enraged, and full of genuine madness. Behind him wailed a trashy, brilliantly-crude rock n’ roll band, a reprobate wrecking crew that handled those essential three chords as if they were grenades that needed to do some damage in a hurry. And although the ‘tutes’ music wasn’t the least bit “pop”, it did exude a supreme tunefulness in the grand tradition of the best '70s punk. It’s hard to find punk tunes catchier or more memorable than “Suicide Is Fun” or “I’m Tired”.

Lyrically, the Prostitutes were keenly attuned to the debauched, drug-addled realties of life on the wrong side of the tracks. With black humor and a perverse intelligence, McGovern snarled like the poet laureate of suburbia’s seedy underbelly, songs like “Living Wreck” and “No Good” quickly turning into anthems for outcasts, dropouts, and derelicts everywhere. Choice lines from “Rock N’ Roll Outbreak” (“You look real ugly tonight/at least you’re doing something right”), “Suicide Is Fun” (“And then when she slashed her wrists on Wednesday night/That’s when I knew that she was out of sight”), and “Teenage Girls” (“I hear teenage girls like to be alone/I hear communists like to sit by the phone/I know they like everything I am/Give me action, put a bullet in my head”) demonstrate the sick brilliance working inside McGovern’s mind. 1997’s Can’t Teach Kids Responsibility, the band’s first LP, is full of songs articulating the frustrations of a messed-up pariah embittered by the phoniness of society and doomed to a life of alienation and drug abuse. “I’m just a fuck-up/in a fucked-up world,” McGovern sings on “Living Wreck”, and no punk lyric has ever been more honest or accurate. Throughout the album, he sinks his skewers into oppressive authority figures, poser punks, and the small-minded assholes next door, his supply of venom seemingly inexhaustible. “22”, released in 1998, is a definitive statement of youthful disaffection, made all the more convincing by McGovern’s choleric vocal delivery. “I’m 22 with nothing to do,” he cries. “I’m surrounded all day by people like you!” Coming from a lesser singer, such sentiment may have seemed trite. Coming from McGovern, it’s a stinging indictment of a hollow, conformist society. An essential Prostitutes track, “22” is a musical firebomb hurled at respectable America.

The original Prostitutes’ recordings are now out-of-print and probably difficult to obtain, but I’d urge the uninitiated to make the effort. The best place to start would be the discography CD released by Pelado Records in 2000, which collects all the band’s singles, the entirety of Can’t Teach Kids Responsibility, and two cuts from the first Pelado comp (one of which is the must-have “Suicide Is Fun”), all recorded between 1995 and 1997, that classic period of the punk revival. In addition to his incredible Inversions project, McGovern has revived The Prostitutes a number of times with new band mates, and the current, Los Angeles based incarnation released a new album a couple years back called Kill Them Before They Eat.

So many punk bands in the ’90s were transparently formulaic, their music mere imitations of yesteryear’s greats, their songs lacking the urgency and conviction that are supposed to define punk. The music of the Prostitutes, on the other hand, was anything but a copy of other
bands’ genius. It was more like a compulsion, a destructive mission born out of the deepest, darkest place in man’s soul. More so than any of their contemporaries, the ‘tutes were convincing. Reckless, ornery, and defiantly radio-unfriendly, they embodied Pelado’s “punk rock that’s real” ethos. Sure: no band’s music can destroy the fabric of society or cause physical harm to the world’s collective douche bags, dickheads, posers, and phonies. But I love to hear groups that play like they’re single-handedly capable of obliterating everything and everyone they hate, solely through the power and fury of their music.

And that, in a nutshell, is why The Prostitutes ruled.

-Josh Rutledge

The Zombies- Odessey and Oracle (CBS Records, 1968)

2010-03-22T10:19:00.001-07:00

Leaving CPR training this past Friday, I got into my Honda Civic and discovered that my CD player was showing no signs of life. I tried to push play – nothing happened. I tried to push eject – nothing happened. An error code flashed before my eyes. All attempts to revive the faltering machinery were to no avail. My copy of The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle was stuck inside the busted player, seemingly destined to an eternity mired in the purgatory of mechanical malfunction. Never again would I hear the dulcet tones of this copy of a musical masterpiece. I reasoned that this was karmic retribution for the time I intentionally ran over a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A with my Ford Escort. I even considered writing a formal letter of apology to Thom Yorke.

More so than any ’60s band save The Beatles, The Zombies laid the template for early power pop with their sublimely-crafted array of beautiful melodies and lush, majestic harmonies. And while they had evolved eons past the realm of simple pop by the time they recorded Odessey and Oracle, said album is the first Zombies title anyone ought to buy. Intertwining the psych and baroque pop genres with the group’s British Invasion roots, Odessey and Oracle is distinctively late ’60s-ish yet utterly timeless. So of course it was released to zero interest from the record-buying public.

Nearly a year after its April 1968 release (and well after the band’s breakup!), the rapidly-tanking Odessey and Oracle was revived by the surprise hit “Time of the Season”. Arguably one of the greatest hit singles of the ’60s, this #3 U.S. smash precipitated a cash-in reissue of the LP. Newcomers to the Zombies experience will be surprised to see that this particular track is the album’s very last song – it wasn’t supposed to be the hit! That there are other, earlier songs that showed obvious hit potential is a testament to the strength of the record. Conceived, written, and recorded at a point in music when the “album” was still a new concept and lesser bands filled out long-players with covers and throwaways, Odessey and Oracle offers a depth of riches that’s quite rare for its time. Just as importantly, it embraces psychedelia without succumbing to its excesses and flaws, its trippy textures and dreamy soundscapes illuminating the melodies, not replacing them.

Having lost their record deal with Decca, The Zombies decided to call it quits in the spring of 1967. Aiming for one last visionary hurrah that would redeem the group as true artists, The Zombies went to CBS A & R man Derek Everett and secured a one-off record deal. And as they say, the rest is history. Recorded cheaply and hurriedly without any interference from producers or label execs, Odessey and Oracle sounds beautifully focused, with the emphasis remaining on the songs and the self-production coming off celestial but not bloated. There are minimal, if any, overdubs, and the sophistication of the material is nicely balanced by a genuine “live in the studio” sound. Making great use of the mellotron, acoustic piano, minor key shifts, and Colin Blunstone’s rich, plaintive vocals, this imploding band with nothing to lose ended up making one of the greatest and most influential long players in the annals of English pop. It’s just such a pretty album – and I don’t think a single LP in all of popular music has ever made better use of harmonies.

And what about the songs? “Care of Cell 44”, the first-ever rock song about a man with a girlfriend in prison, boasts harmonies that Queen probably admired - and one of the catchiest melodies ever committed to vinyl! Gorgeous, symphonic stunners like “Changes” and “Maybe After He’s Gone” hint at the album the Beach Boys could have made after Pet Sounds. “Beechwood Park” is picture perfect psych-pop, but with a decidely English bent – way closer to Village Green era Kinks than to anything coming out of San Francisco at the time. With its peppy feel, circular harmonies, cheeky lyrics, and radio-friendly chorus, “Friends of Mine” brings to mind the Paul McCartney side of the Beatles (which I actually prefer – so sue me!). And let’s be real – “Time of the Season” is the business! What kind of crack were CBS’s UK execs smoking to not be won over upon first contact with this magnum opus of psychedelic soul? Legend has it that Blunstone and guitarist/songwriter Rod Argent almost came to blows in an argument over how this song was to be sung. Thank God Argent prevailed!

So today I started driving to work, and a spring miracle occurred. My presumed-dead disc player had, as if by magic, revived itself over the weekend. I pushed the eject button. The error code vanished, and out popped my treasured copy of Odessey and Oracle, which I immediately snatched and returned to the safety of its environmentally unfriendly jewel case. It will live to spin again, countless times, to my listening delight. So fuck Thom Yorke – Kid A still sucks!

-Josh Rutledge

Lemonheads - It's A Shame About Ray (Atlantic, 1992)

2010-03-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

The other night, I went and saw Evan Dando play solo at The Double Door. Before the encore, Nash Kato came out and told the crowd to give it up for one of the best singer/songwriters of our generation. After my 5^th $6.50 Stella, I was willing to go the distance with the rest of the crowd on this one, even though I didn’t think Evan realized that he had played a few of his songs twice! I found that quite endearing, knowing that it was Evan, and he had probably been whoopin’ it up with Nash all day!

I remember getting It’s A Shame About Ray a few weeks before my friend Emily and I went and stayed a weekend by ourselves at her cabin on some lake back in Michigan. Although it was not the heavy rock stuff that I was listening to at the time, I absolutely fell in love with this album. The melodies were so amazing! I instantly picked up my acoustic guitar and learned how to play along with IASAR. That whole weekend was spent listening to this album, raiding Emily's parents' liquor cabinet, smoking cigarettes, playing along to the tunes on an old acoustic guitar, and falling off canoes. Such a great weekend!

This is easily one of those albums that you can put on and play from front to back and throw back on and play over again. I know that I do! I honestly can’t say that there is a bad song on IASAR. Alternative pop near-perfection! Evan’s songwriting was right on the mark when he penned this album, with its witty lyrics and simple-yet-catchy melodies. What’s great is that Evan is a simple singer/songwriter who lays out what he has to sing about and puts it to the perfect tune, whether it’s an acoustic ballad or something with a bit more backbone to it.

IASAR starts out with “Rockin’ Stroll.” When I hear this song, I imagine a baby in a stroller singing this tune in his head. If only babies were that awesome and could sing along with Evan...

“Confetti” is the next track, which is my favorite, since, well, it was the easiest that I could play on my guitar way back on that weekend! And I love the lyrics to this one: “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve.” The music behind the lyrics to this one accompanies it just perfectly…complete synchronicity.

The record label had a problem with one of Evan's song titles, so he had to change it to “Buddy” from "My Drug Buddy", as it refers to him and his drug buddy going out to score. But, Mr. Record Executive, it’s such a pretty song! And it’s just some of the same stuff (they) got yesterday. And Evan loves his drug buddy. You definitely hear way worse these days. He was so 1992!

After a few more drug reference numbers, you get to the last two songs on the album that happen to be covers, the first being “Frank Mills” from the musical Hair. Just Evan and his acoustic. It's such a beautiful version! To me, it really shows his emotional vocal range. “Tell him Angela and I don’t want the two dollars back/Just him.”

Being a longtime artist who finally became popular, I’d be pissed if my big hit were a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” It's not a bad take at all. In fact, the Lemonheads do a fantastic job of it! But, come on. The people didn’t recognize their other great works like Lick and Hate Your Friends, but now you get noticed for this track? Yeah, I’d go and develop a crack cocaine habit, too. Well, maybe I wouldn’t go that far.

We fast forward to 2010 and see that Evan is still alive and kicking, playing solo gigs, and is still doing the Lemonheads! He forever has rotating members of great musicians who will always tour with him. Notably, on the last tour, Evan had Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson of the Descendents/ALL backing him (I could kick myself for missing that one!). He has settled down and found himself a nice model to marry. This past year saw the release of an all-covers album entitled Varshons with my favorite being GG Allin’s “Layin’ Up With Linda.” But that’s for another review.

-Angie Granado-Wehrle

Material Issue- International Pop Overthrow (Mercury, 1991)

2010-03-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

Alright, I’m just gonna say it: Material Issue was the best power pop band there’s ever been. Period. End of story. Done. You doubting me, son? Tell me who was better! Shoes? Nah…they were all pop, no power. Cheap Trick? A greater band overall, sure, but not really power pop. Ditto for Big Star. Raspberries? Even their best albums were half filler! 20/20? The Beat? They probably had better debut albums, but after that…not so much. If we go by the textbook definition of power pop, as per All Music Guide (“a cross between the crunching hard rock of the Who and the sweet melodicism of the Beatles and Beach Boys, with the ringing guitars of the Byrds thrown in for good measure”), Chicago’s mighty Ish was not only the genre’s most emblematic band, but also its best.

It wasn’t until its third album, Freak City Soundtrack, that Material Issue captured the hard edge and big rock energy of its live show on record. But for anyone seeking the best introduction to this extraordinary band, International Pop Overthrow remains the mandatory starting point. With the first three songs featuring girls’ names in their titles, and only one of 14 tracks exceeding the four minute mark, the battle plan is clear before you’ve heard a single note. This is classic power pop, and as such it exhibits a perfect simplicity that masks its considerable artistry. Given the familiar melody-driven style and well-worn “songs about girls” motif, it would be all too easy for one to dismiss these songs as formulaic dreck. Some rock critics already have, and as punishment they will face an eternity in a fiery hell, where there are no cute chicks or record shops, and “Party In the U.S.A.” plays 24/7. Sure, it's pop. And no, it didn't overthrow anything. But to sell this album short is to deny the distinct gifts of one of the finest singer/songwriters to ever pick up a guitar, one James Walter Ellison.

With a singing voice so pure and plaintive and unique that it feels like you’re listening to your best friend, Jim Ellison infused these simple pop songs with rare emotional depth and profound insights into the human condition. He was hardly the first man to write pop songs about broken hearts, infatuation, and unrequited love. But I can think of few others, ever, who’ve done it better. His melodies were gorgeous and instantly memorable. His lyrics were touching and truthful and sometimes so unbearably REAL that they could break your heart in ten words or less. And if the pop singer’s greatest task is to summon up all that heartbreak and longing and loss and despair and tortuous relationship woe of a short lifetime and somehow make the listener FEEL it, then Ellison was the king.

Recorded over a two-year period at Short Order Recorder, with Jeff Murphy in the producer’s chair, IPO has the sonic sensibility of a Shoes album. The recording is minimalistic, demo-like, and devoid of the power trio’s live oomph, forcing the songs themselves to the forefront. And what songs they are! Most pop bands would kill to boast a career best-of with as many “hits” as this humble debut. The college radio staple “Valerie Loves Me”, a jangly slice of melancholy as haunting as it is hummable, isn’t even the best track! “Li’l Christine” and “Out Right Now” would have been pop radio smashes if pop radio actually played radio pop. “Very First Lie” starts off like standard ballad fare, then surprises, musically and lyrically, in all the best ways. Listen to “Diane” once, and it’ll be stuck in your head all day.

Material Issue would follow with Destination Universe, a brighter and equally hit-packed gem of an album. And Freak City Soundtrack, with its glammy arena feel, rocks it up without abandoning the plot. But IPO is Ellison’s master work, its tales of love and longing as beautifully rendered as a film or a collection of short stories. Even the funniest lines (“You're only breaking my heart/But that's the very best part” or “And I'd write this down if I only had a pen/And I'd skip the lonely part”) come from a sad place in the aching heart. The painful truth about “Valerie Loves Me” is that she doesn’t love him, and never will, and our protagonist’s only consolation probes the darkest realms of the adolescent heart:

Valerie's lonely in an apartment down the street you know/
And her hair has turned so grey/
But she's so happy, for the memories she has you know/
She can believe in the day when love was on a string/
And she could have that anything she ever wanted/
But she can't have me

And leave it to a soul as wounded as Ellison to catch you off-guard with a sudden, unexpected turn that nails the flawed essence of boy-girl relations:

I'd like to wake up with you early in the morning/
Or stay up late just playin' records on your phonograph/
I'd like to get to know your mother and your father/
Maybe just once pretend to be somebody's better half/
And I would like to tell the very first lie

Considering that Jim Ellison took his own life a mere five years after the release of International Pop Overthrow, there’s the temptation to hear him as a specter, eerily pining away from the great beyond. But there’s nothing spooky about any of the band’s recordings. Ellison sought out to make fun, enjoyable music, and that’s exactly what he did. If IPO is anything, it’s warm, reassuring - its songs reminding all of us who’ve suffered from love’s great agonies that someone out there felt our pain and managed to articulate it so beautifully. Laden with melodies that will never leave our brains and harmonies that could have fallen from the heavens, this is one of those albums that everyone ought to own.

-Josh Rutledge

Danko Jones - I'm Alive And On Fire (Bad Taste, 2001)

2010-03-06T10:33:00.001-08:00

I must say if I were a man (and not just any rock-n-roll man), I would want to be Danko Jones. A bad-ass, balls-out, fuck-your-girlfriend-in-your-own-car rock-n-roller! I am jealous of this man, as early in his career, he had the same credo as I believed in when it came to playing: all touring, no recording (I hate to record. Ask my past bands!). Luckily, this man blessed us with not only countless tours, but also multiple amazing albums that made it so hard to nail down just which one to write about when they all bleed sex, confidence, and above all, rock-n-roll…The Mango Kid style!

I’m Alive And On Fire, Danko’s second full-length release in 2001, offers a collection of singles released from 1996-1999. So the best thing about this album is that you can’t clump it together and talk about it as a whole, as all of the tracks just stand out on their own.

It carries, most notably, a track from the first EP entitled “Sugar Chocolate” that as soon as I heard it, I was in LOVE!!! Pure and simple, this is WHITE-HOT!!!

Now if you want some chocolate with your sugar/

Some cream with your coffee/

Some butter with your scotch/

You can call it cocoa butter/

Or you can call it white chocolate/

But, baby, I just call it delicious

For being a three-piece outfit, Danko and Co. push the rock ticket further than most arena rock bands these days. And to see them live puts their recordings to shame! Eight-track studio recordings can only capture so much power that this band has over a crowd. Danko gets on stage, and it’s the best rock show you’ve never seen! Girls are screaming his name, and guys are wishing they had the rock power that he has! It makes me think of what a KISS show at Cobo Hall back in the day would've been like.

A personal favorite of mine off this album is “Cadillac.” Simple drum beat with a guitar riff reminiscent of AC/DC…to the point and no frills (This is why AC/DC are GREAT!!!). And the words Danko offers to you, ”I keep the backseat for lovin’/I like to drive up front/And then we're makin’ out/I keep your boy in the trunk." Of course at this point, he is licking the neck of his guitar…OW!!!

Anyone who doesn’t know who Danko Jones is or own any of his albums needs to get up right now and go to your local record store and buy anything from him! Borrow it from a friend, download from iTunes, or however you kids get music these days! I personally guarantee that you will dig what you hear. If not, come find me, and I’ll convince you face to face that you’re crazy and you know nothing of true rock-n-roll! This is the best export that Canada has sent us in quite some time…besides hockey players. Just remember, as Danko says, “You can call me The Mango Kid, but your girl calls me 'baby' ”.

-Angie Granado-Wehrle