...tapewrecks...

Hotlegs.... .....Neanderthal Man...

2012-02-28T17:46:00.001-05:00

This is a funny scratchy single I picked up at a thrift store last year just for the title. Turns out the song was an accidental hit record in 1970 when I was just learning to walk upright and use tools.

Story goes, they were just messing around with layering drums on a new 4-track machine and started on this ditty. They intended for the vocals to be super low, to accentuate the drums. And at the end of the recorder solo, they hit a piece of sheet metal with a hammer, which blew the cutter head while the record was being mastered.

Apparently, when you add Italians, you get this:

Leave My Grandpa Alone!... ..... .....James "Rebel" O'Leary & Family... ...York, PA's Finest Country Band and my Vinyl Salvage Operation......

2012-02-25T23:44:00.003-05:00

James "Rebel" O'Leary and the Texas Rebelettes have gotten a lot of snarky crap on the Internet since grandpa James passed away about lacking talent or enthusiasm, but I can sympathize with his grand-daughters' responses:

"That is my damn grandfather. I don't see any of you on TV, and at least they tried to make something of their lives unlike any of you people." -Vicki O'Leary

I only got to see The Rebel once: at his annual birthday party in York County, Pennsylvania. It was in a big hall full of people who all came to hear him play; family, friends, country music lovers and kids like me who just had to check this out. I never had seen a live country band, and everyone was having a good time. That's all that mattered.

Life with my grandfather was awesome. Shame you missed the fun. -Faith Ann O'Leary

I bought his record that day. A 45 with two original compositions that he happily signed.

At some point in the intervening years, cities, and apartments, I left the single too close to a radiator and warped the edge making the first 30-seconds like a little ski-jump that sent the tone arm flying to about the second chorus. The unplayability made it a good candidate for a drastic rescue attempt. I gave it about a 40% chance of surviving the operation, so before proceeding I recorded what I could get out of it:
South Bound 81 (warped edge)

I'm a plain old music man

Just lookin' for fame

They call me country

But Rebel is my name!

I-81 is a about a 500-mile drive through the Appalachians from York County to right about Knoxville. Then you make a right towards Nashville.

Rebel Star (warped edge)

Before I totally destroyed my Rebel 45, I tried my quackery on one of my kids' warped Sesame Street records (with permission). So I sandwiched it between two large pots that I had warmed the oven. First attempt at 190 degrees had little effect. Second attempt at 250 flattened the obvious warp but left the surface slightly warbled. Success! ...Well, sort of. It was now playable with some weight on the needle to keep it crunched down in the groove.
Sesame Street - Would You Like to Buy an O? (post-semi-successful dewarping)

So, figuring this was the as good as I could do, I repeated the procedure with the Rebel single. But I added a second pot on top to see if it would smooth out the warbles, and went outside to ride bikes with my daughter.

On return, I pulled the cooled pots apart and found my Rebel record squished into a blobby oval. Aaww failure!
Rebel Star (post-failed dewarping)

But, back to the real James "Rebel" O'Leary. I argue that he could sing and was probably more authentic than the glitzy Nashville acts he sang about. Just give a listen to A.P. Carter, the real grandfather of country music. By today's overproduced commercial standards, he may sound flat, but there's a real tradition in that style of singing. And the Rebelettes' guitar and pedal steel sound great together! Country music, and all music really, has it's roots in families and friends with improvised instruments, self-taught styles, and real jobs in the daytime. The O'Leary family is part of that tradition and I hope they pass it on. More importantly perhaps, he did sing. I feel lucky to have seen a little part of it, so right on Vicki: "LEAVE MY GRANDPA ALONE!"

If you have a playable copy of the South Bound 81 single, please send me the tracks. I'd love to post them to do grandpa the justice he deserves.

Addendum: Thanks to Tom Casetta from Scratch, Pop & Hiss for sending two unscathed rips of the Rebel single off of the Only in America, Vol 2 compilation. I love that tentative pedal steel intro!
South Bound 81
Rebel Star

James "Rebel" O'Leary

(193? - 2006)

The Skeptics........Worry Beads (1985)

2012-02-18T21:11:00.004-05:00

The Skeptics were/are out of Frederick, Maryland along with a small herd of bands that found a place on York, PA's Bona Fide Records' Train to Disaster and Deadly Spawn compilations. Worry Beads was a great little tape that made it around the tristate area (we really called it that before Dr. Doofenschmirtz).

Idle Time
The Holstein Saga
Expanding and Contracting

Their later Snallygaster LP was released in Europe, but never saw the light of day in the USA.

In their own words:

The Skeptics write, record, and perform songs about dairy cows, serial killers, quantum mechanics, flooded limestone cavities, specters of U.S. presidents, decapitated surfers, and girls, girls, girls.

Andy McCutcheon and Dennis Crolley are still making music and Stephen Blickenstaff is making some fine monster art.

The Skeptics: In a World of Their Own documentary by Keith Chester
Bona Fide Records Blog review of the documentary and history of The Skeptics' Snallygaster LP.
This has been another fine selection from Rustle Noonetwisting's magic box (of tapes).

The Train to Disaster............... .......Bona Fide Mid-Atlantic Oddity

2012-02-12T15:11:00.001-05:00

From the jacket:

Hi Folks! There's a new sound rising up angry in the sky. There's new voices crying they're not afraid to try! These bands won't shut up and won't be ignored. They believe in music--but not the type that James Watt likes. The music is loud, harsh, and maybe even crude. But it's real! here are 13 mirrors of reality--worlds that most people would rather not acknowledge. The world is not all jelly beans, Ivory soap, and two car garages. Neither is this record!

This is one of those weird records that comes out of some guy's mid-state living room with the back stock sitting next to the TV set in boxes ready to mail out to the rest of the fanzine-reading world. Rick Noll tells the story best on the Bona Fide Records blog:

Hey, does anybody remember the early 80s?? I sure do. Fresh from my success as a bargain bin diver which got me into selling old vinyl, I soon turned to local PA garage bands, and influenced by Nuggets, Pebbles, and my pal Billy Synth's Psychedelic Unknown comps, I got the brainy idea to start a little label that would send some light on deserving local bands. Bona Fide Records was born and in 1982 our first LP, a 60s comp, The Return of the Young Pennsylvanians was released. Although mostly unknown at the time, now bands like the Centurys, Loose Enz, Shaynes and the Flowerz are known to garage collectors around the world. Even though I was a heavy collector, the modern scene also intrigued me and I was a fan of the many punk, new wave, garage and experimental bands of the time. Especially I was impressed by the Harrisburg scene in which Billy Synth and the Turnups deservedly reigned as kings--though they weren't always treated as such. Billy and his pals the Turnups released their own swell records on the band's Cracked Records and I was hooked!

I was also impressed by the growing DC scene and in particular the sonic mayhem of the Slickee Boys with their psychedelic outfits and their frantic adrenaline filled live shows. So I got another brainy idea! Why not put out a comp of current bands who could actually benefit from such a release? So "The Train to Disaster" was hatched and naturally I asked my pals Billy and Kim Kane of the Slickees for help....

Normally, I'd just post my favorites, and I surely like some more than others here, but what I really love about Train to Disaster is the disjointedness: mostly 80s, one 70s, one from Austria, mostly guitars, some synthesizer, a few drum machines, amateur psych, but not all retro -- that you can only get from the whole record. So here it is!

The Lone Ketamine Millipede - Frogs in "Our" Town (Harrisburg, PA)
Billy Synth & the Turnups - The Mask (Harrisburg, PA)
Ben Wah - Gnats Ahoy! (York, PA)
mystery track
The Beatnik Flies - Fantastic Light Show (Bethesda, MD)
The Slickee Boys - Nagasaki Neuter (Bethesda, MD)
The Velvet Monkeys - World Of (Washington, DC)

The Dootz - I'm the Dootz (Hyattsville, MD)
The Left - You're So (Hagerstown, MD)
George Brigman & Split - My Cherie (Baltimore, MD)
Yard Trauma - The Little Girl Who Left (Tucson, AZ)
Ronnie Urini & the Last Poets - Alice in Wunderland (Austria)
The Mad Violets - Acceleration (New York, NY)
Donovan's Brain - Derailment (?)

More:
Bona Fide Records
Billy Synth
The Slickee Boys
The Velvet Monkeys
The Dootz
Return of the Young Pennsylvanians
James Watt

Los Torogoces de Morazán....... .........Combat Rock (El Salvador 1981)

2012-01-28T22:32:00.000-05:00

In 1995 I picked up a hand-copied cassette of Los Torogoces de Morazán from a street vendor in San Salvador who was scraping by, like many Saladorans, in the informal economy. Just 3 years earlier, after 70,000 dead in 12 years of war, government death squads and military massacres, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) signed peace accords with the US-backed government and transitioned from guerrilla insurgency to political party.

Los Torogoces

Is that Paul Simonon on the right?

Around 1981, when Los Torogoces recorded the songs on this tape, the Clash was recording Combat Rock and Rock the Casbah was soon to be all over commercial radio in North America. The tropical guerilla dreamscape of that record lacked the punch and political message of earlier records (that I hadn't heard yet). A product code "FMLN 2" was on the sleeve (their previous record Sandinista! was "FSLN 1"), but their revolution was superficial. The only specific reference to any real-world clashes came from Allen Ginsburg's spacey side-babble in Ghetto Defendant: "...Guatemala, Honduras, Poland, 100 Years War ... TV re-run invasion, death squad El Salvador...."

Toda Centroamérica (All Central America)

Still, I believe (Joe Strummer at least) they probably felt some earnest solidarity with people struggling for justice, or equality, or respect, or a voice -- be they union workers, guerrilla fighters, or bored suburban kids. So I have to give them some credit for subliminally raising my 13-year old consciousness to issues outside of my little world. Let's be honest, I didn't even know El Salvador existed at that point.

Combat Rock sounded cool, but I had little notion of what a real armed revolution meant, and I really had no idea a band like Los Torogoces de Morazán was living their struggle, broadcasting the resiliency of the Salvadoran people from a liberated mountainside:

"...June, 1981 in the most difficult time living in our country, El Salvador. Twins were born in the mountains of Morazán: LOS TOROGOCES DE MORARZAN AND RADIO VENCEREMOS. Arisen out of a need to solve two serious problems: One, how to keep not only the fighters but the entire population informed about the situation of the war. Two, how to raise the morale of the fighters and to demoralize the enemy...."

Venceremos (We Will Overcome)

"...The radio director saw a bird perched on a branch and asked what bird it was. 'It's a Torogoz' he said.... 'We liked the name because we identified with the Torogoz,' says Sebastian ... 'it's a bird that takes care of its family, helps its partner and their young until they grow. So are we....'"

Soy combatiente del FMLN (I'm a Fighter in the FMLN)

"...In times of peace, and in the midst of impending war, Los Torogoces held guerrilla dances and took the opportunity to record their songs in the primitive studio of the radio, located in the town of Perquin, Santiago (the main transmitter of Radio Venceremos)...."

Los fusilitos (Little Rifles)

"...Little things were born... from the hearts of the people and the need for revolutionary action...."

El beso de sapo (Kiss of the Frog)

Andrés Mejía Barrera (Arturo)
Benito Chica Argueta (Sebastian)
Cristóbal Chica Argueta
Carlos Enrique Consalvi (Santiago)
Ricardo Ventura (Caramel)
Esteban Álvaro

"...Los Torogoces de Morazán performed during the twelve years of war uplifting and accompanying the fighters not only in times of relative tranquility, but also in combat, thus four of the singers gave their lives in combat...."

Las casas quemadas (Burned Houses)


A government soldier poses after the reoccupation of Morazán

Sebastian still performs the music of Los Torogoces de Morazán.
The FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes won the presidency in 2009.
........So far, no Washington Bullets.

Thanks to Los Torogoces Facebook page and Amherst College's Experience of War Project for the quotes and photos in this post.

There's more on Radio Venceremos there, as well as at at Retazos de Memoria Histórica.

The music is from Canto Nuevo Para Todos (I lost my copy of the tape a long time ago).

La Música Callejera Pt. 9 .............. .....El Salvador

2012-01-21T22:19:00.000-05:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

SAN SALVADOR
...32) The capital city dominated by sounds of traffic with musicians and market vendors struggling to be heard over the techno din of an electronic horn and light show. It seems like every brightly airbrushed bus and taxi is screaming for attention with horns like party noisemakers that blip and beep different tones and notes....

La Música Callejera - El Salvador

Próxima estación: Nicaragua

El Camino Cha Cha Orchestra...... ........(San Francisco January 11, 1997)

2012-01-11T20:58:00.000-05:00

Not long after my girlfriend and I got engaged (which wasn't too long after we met), we went out to a show on at 16th and Valencia in what used to be a firehouse. I forget what the place was called at that point, since it changed hands a few times, but it had a really high ceiling and I'm pretty sure I saw the Del Rubio Triplets in the same space a few years earlier.

When the 11 pieces of El Camino struck up with obscure classic 50s mambo, we elbowed each other and said "That's it!" and started dancing. After the show we hauled the trumpet player off the stage....Yes, they would play our wedding! That was that. I don't think we even had a date set yet, to say nothing of a venue, caterer, cake, or flower arrangements. I hadn't even asked my brother to be best man yet. But we had the band.

All the other details eventually fell into place. Friends and family joined us from Pennsylvania, Florida, Mexico, and points between. Of course, Rustle Noonetwisting was there with his grabadora (seemingly recording every significant event in my life). The band struck up this time in the neoclassical Green Room in the San Francisco Civic Center with our first song, learned just for us: Agustin Lara's Solamente una vez. Then we cha cha'd until they told us we were out of time on the room, and the bride and groom were supposed to leave first anyway.

El Camino Cha Cha Orchestra (18:00)

That was fifteen years ago y todavía tenemos el mambo.

The Real Gone ............... ..................(Lancaster 1985-86)

2012-01-09T23:03:00.000-05:00

By 1985 punk rock had rumpussed through Lancaster unnoticed by all but about 15 people. The hardcore scene was in full stage-diving swing in nearby Philly, and a 60s garage punk revival was seeping into town on slabs of vinyl and college radio. Those few Lancastrians who did catch The Blame, The Bodies, or the Impossible Years at the Back Room, or maybe even the Noise Fest, all seemed to know one another and many of them became key players in the next episode of local underground music.

The Real Gone, on the other hand, was a mashup of unrelated small town parts. Rex was the Camel smokin', vintage toy collecting, flying-V playin' guitarist, and around for that early punk scene. Steven was the college radio DJ with the Woody Allen t-shirt. Dave was the towney, stillwater singer-songwriter, downing 16-oz Knickerbockers. I was the still-in-high school, Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt-wearing new wave bass player.

Steven put up an ad for "drummer seeking a band" at State of Confusion, the local punk rock shop....

Steven: “I was a student at nearby Millersville State. Millersville was very conservative politically and musically except for a handful of people that knew the then-secret handshake of underground punk-related music. Millersville and Lancaster in 1984 were terrible places for original music of any kind – bands were expected to play top-40, metal, or MTV-new-wave cover songs to keep assorted sorority sisters, frat boys and puffyshirted club denizens dancing and drinking. At best, a band could get away with playing one or two of their “originals” before some moron shouted them down with “play something we know!” After the Tom Paine’s shows ended in the early 80’s, for the next couple of years from ’83 to early ’85, all Lancaster (and most of central PA) had were nightclubs that booked such bands, plus the occasional visit from some touring incarnation of Foghat.

Through our college radio station and some friends in Philly, I knew about the new culture of independent records, regional scenes and little shows in oddball college towns. This got me excited about listening to and playing rock music again after years of disillusionment with arena rock. We had colleges in Lancaster, so it followed that we could have our own regional independent scene, right? Sure. With the typical hubris of a 21-year old, I set out to start a band that would do nothing less than upend the existing musical order of Lancaster. I didn’t know any of the 15 punk rock people in Lancaster at the time, but it seemed like I might find some like-minded people at this tiny storefront that sold Sid Vicious t-shirts called State of Confusion. So I put a sign up there and at Stan’s Record Bar.

That got Rex, Steven, and me piling into friend Doug's freezing Akron, PA garage in December 1984. We started off doing Rezillos, Clash, and Yardbirds covers and found we clicked well enough to write some songs and put out another ad for a singer.

Enter Dave:

I spent many years in the basement just writing songs like "No No," which I don't remember where they came from, and finally I met a band that didn't just say "We'll call you." -Death Frisbee interview 1985

There was about a 12-year spread in age between me and Dave, with Steven and Rex somewhere in the middle. Dave showed up to audition with all these songs and little understanding of the punk rock aethetic. Meanwhile Rex and Steven bonded over jokes about progressive rock and heavy metal that went right over my head since I had no points of reference to the early seventies save my parents' Abba 8-tracks. But we all shared a desire to make something original, and our strange combo promised to defy common musical sense.

Steven: I was intrigued that Dave had been writing these songs at home for himself for years, waiting for someone to discover him. Most of his songs had little to do with any current musical trends or topics – I mean, some of the lyrics had 1973-ish phrases like “the population pill” and spoke of Nixon and Vietnam in the present tense. But they had great melodies and chord changes with (perhaps unintentionally) elements of punk rock, psychedelia and power pop. There was just no outlet for something like that In Lancaster at the time. He seemed lost in time – similar in some ways to guys like Bobb Trimble or Kenn Kweder. I think we were attracted to his outsider-ness, not to mention that he was sitting on a boatload of songs while the rest of us had zero experience writing. In retrospect, it’s pretty improbable that the four of us got together at all.

Now we just needed a name.

Rex: Laura Cotton, fabulous proprietor of State of Confusion, found this marvelous bracelet at this flea market. And it had all these hip sayings on it, and one of them was "Real Gone." Later, on that same day, we were watching the Dobie Gillis Show. Maynard G. Krebs was, like, elated with something and he said, "Hey Dobe... That's real gone!" And we said, "We are too!"

-WIXQ interview 1985

That spring, our first gig at Bob's pig roast in York, PA was a near disaster... Bob's review: "You just don't flow."

We didn't. But by our second show at State of Confusion in June we had it a little more together. The store had just moved into bigger digs and became the only alternative (before alternative was the mainstream) in the face of the powers that were the preps, the hessians, and the Loop cruisers (the four blocks the local kids cruised around in their Chevy Novas every weekend night).
Secret of the Shadow (The Revillos)
4 Times Over (No No)
Get Out

The songs were fairly restrained at first, and we recorded a demo that sounded completely bland compared with our live set. When Web of Sound records opened up in Lancaster we started picking up more neo-garage sounds like The Nomads and The Lime Spiders. The Web's owners, Bill and Carl, had sort of managed The Bodies and did some organizing of local shows, so we recorded a sloppy live demo for them that eventually found it's way into the hands of Rick from Bona Fide Records.
Violence Is Golden
Bells Are Ringing

Then the Chameleon opened up in the former Tom Paine's Back Room space and became the only club in town to promote original music. I doctored the '69 on my driver's license to look like a '64 and saw lots of great shows there. We played on off-nights when we weren't likely to drive off too much business.

Dave was definitely the wild element in the band and we all started pushing faster and noisier. Then Dave would come partly unhinged and start speaking in tongues in the middle of a song. Sometimes it sounded incoherent and sometimes it all tumbled together in moments of insane brilliance.
Don't Tread On Me (Steven singing Kit & the Outlaws)
Girlfriend
Love Is Strange (Buddy Holly)
Fred
They Talk

Best of all were the all-ages shows that were organized by local folks who just wanted to bring good music to town, sponsored by Death Frisbee, Web of Sound, Bona Fide, Punk's Not Dead, Desperate State, and others. These were mostly the same folks who were energized by those early sparks of a local punk scene. Anyone could rent a fire hall, rec center, American Legion, or Moose Lodge and put on a show as long as you didn't put curse words on the flyers.
U Usta
Last Time Around (The Del-Vettes)

Other original bands that cropped up around the same time: The Red Roosters, Briggs Beall, The Combat Hamsters, Kenny Gross's Suicide, Nobody's Fools. There seemed to be a new groundswell of bands, regular places to play, and supportive audiences who were just happy to hear something different.

Steven: By 1986, Lancaster had three independent record stores, at least one club where it wasn’t a hanging offense to play a full set of original music, all these little shows at fire halls and such, and several adventurous radio shows on the 2 college stations. There were still plenty of lousy bands playing INXS covers (or Foghat version 17), but by '86 we also had Hasil Adkins at the Moose Lodge, the Chesterfield Kings and The Stump Wizards at the Chameleon and some scrappy local young’uns playing their own songs. Was it all due to the Real Gone? Of course not, but we at least had some role in getting the ball rolling.

Some pretty basic philosophical differences started to take their toll:

Joy: What are your future plans?
Rex: Basement Tapes
Tom: Just kidding... Right Rex?
Dave: I'd like to make enough of a living with the band so I could go full time and not have to work 8 hours a day.
Steven: I don't think that will ever happen.
Rex: [facetiously] Pardon me?
Tom: I don't think that will ever happen.
Rex: Hey get rid of this guy!... I hope to pursue a career in Shakespearean theater. And if I can't do that I'll open a body shop.
- Death Frisbee interview 1985

Dave's earnest songwriting and serious desire to make music-that-mattered was a real strong-point for the band. His songs are the one's that have some substance and hold up pretty well over twenty years later.

The last show we played was opening for the Velvet Monkeys at the Enola American Legion near Harrisburg organized by Bona Fide Records for bands on the upcoming Deadly Spawn compilation. The set ended with us getting cut off for time, and we're remembered to this day for the dumb on-stage argument and near fight between Dave and me. We were real gone for sure.
Underneath and Up Above
Advice
Song 22

The Deadly Spawn on Bona Fide Records

Members of the Real Gone went on to play in many other bands including Jack Lord's Hair, The Oogies, Charms du Crane, The New Regency 5, Blue, Rocknoceros, Mud Pie Sun, and The Chelsea Squares.

Black & white band photos by Laura Cotton

Hasil Adkins at the Moose Lodge!.... .......................(in Lancaster 1986)

2012-01-06T23:10:00.000-05:00

Chances are, if you're reading this blog, you were probably at the Lancaster Moose Lodge on the evening of June 28, 1986. But for those unfamiliar with Hasil Adkins, he recorded dozens of records in the hills of West Virginia on his home 2-track reel-to-reel from the 50's on that were completely ignored until the Cramps covered She Said in the early 80's. After 30 years and several reissues of his recordings, the Haze was launched into the national spotlight, albeit it was a very underground fame he enjoyed with a cult of fans that credited him as a psychobilly pioneer. The Haze was the real thing.

Web of Sound and Bona Fide Records, brought Hasil to Lancaster. Carl from the Web, already the size of a bear, became an official Moose so he could rent the place out. The local rockabilly act the Red Roosters opened up along with the Dusters from Maryland, who were made up of ex-members of the Left and the Skeptics. So it was a damn good show from the start, and Rustle Noonetwisting had his trusty tape recorder and camera along as usual to put the spectacle down in the annals of Lancaster music history.

Hasil Adkins got on stage at the Moose Lodge with his cowboy hat tied under his chin, guitar in hand, and sat down behind a drum kit. He really was a one-man band. According to Norton Records liner notes he said, "I can't have no band. I like to change to different chords and can't expect nobody to follow me."

Right off he started thumping out the bass beat and a hi-hat with his feet and bashing the cymbals with the headstock of the guitar (mind you that's the same headstock containing the tuning keys). Hollered, hooted, shrieked, whistled, crooned, cooed, jabbered, yodeled, and yes, even sang some pretty notes into the microphone.

Ho!
Hey, Howdy!
It's good to be in Lancaster.
Yeah, I bought my second guitar out of this city along time ago.
My second guitar comes from Lancaster city....

I'm glad to see you all out here tonight.
Thank you for comin'....

...It's called Punchy Wunchy Wickey Wackey Woo

You got any special songs you wanna hear....?
Which one?

No More Hot Dogs

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Come on baby, don't you be late
I want your head, I want it tonight
Cut your head of at half past eight
I'll have it on my wall about a half past ten...
...
Hello baby.
This ain't no rock'n'roll show ha ha ha ha!
This is me back again cause I need another head.
...
Just like I said, I'm gonna cut your head off
And you can eat no more hot dogs!

She Said
Why's don't I tell you what it is?
I wen' out last night and I got messed up
When I woke up this mornin'
Shoulda seen what I had inna bed wi' me
She comes up at me outta the bed
Pull her hair down the eye
Looks to me like a dyin' can of that commodity meat....

4

5

I got a new one coming out.... It's called
She'll See Me Again Well I hope she will anyway, you know.
[Listen carefully to Hasil's special tuning. I'm pretty sure it hasn't been published in Guitar Player magazine yet.]

7

Can anybody do The Hunch?
You can?

Have you got any more you wanna hear?
Chicken Walk!
...Quiver yourself from head to toe
Do your stuff wherever you go
Do your stuff upon the floor
Do your stuff wherever you go
Come on baby, do the chicken-chicken walk....

Peanut Butter Rock and Roll

You got anything else you wanna hear?
[More divergent guitar tuning.]
I Need Your Head
Hello baby
This ain't no rock'n'roll show....

12

I got about one more tonight. Then I gotta leave.
13

We want the Haze!

After the show, I took my copy of Out To Hunch up to Hasil Adkins for an autograph, which he was more than happy to oblige. Sounded something like this...He said:

What's your name?
Tom.
How do you spell that?
T-O-M.
Alright, here you go.

The Haze was the real thing.

Songs & Stories of the Justice League of America

2011-12-27T21:59:00.000-05:00

My little brother had this record when we were growing up. For some reason I put it on in high school and was treated with these great cornball pop superhero theme songs. The record was on Power Records from 1975, so I was always puzzled about why the songs sounded so retro. But it made the campy interludes on quite a few of the tape compilations I made for friends through college.

I held on to it all these years and gave it to my daughters along with a cool classroom phonograph, believing as I do that children should be taught early to handle their records by the edge and to gently cue the needle.

Just last week, my fave DJ, Dave the Spazz played the Justice League Theme on WFMU, so I went upstairs and pulled it out of the girls' record collection (still in pretty good shape). According to the mighty Internet, the record was originally released in the mid-60s by Tilton Records and contained three additional songs that I never heard. There are no credits on the sleeve, but apparently the whole thing was written and produced by Arthur Korb. No idea if he's playing, singing, or doing any of the voices. So here are the complete songs from the Tilton release:

The Theme of the Justice League of America
The Wonder Woman Song
The Plastic Man Song
Metamorpho The Element Man Song
The Aquaman Song
The Flash Song

Thanks to the Power Records blog and Way Out Junk for the tracks. Get the complete songs and stories there.

That's the Bag I'm In...... ...............Back from the Mass Grave

2011-12-18T22:01:00.000-05:00

Out on assignment, our own pith helmeted Rustle Noonetwisting dug up the following on one of my favorite songs. The Fabs' That's the Bag I'm In first grazed my ears in 1984 with its rerelease on Volume I of the Back from the Grave compilations, and it's one of the key songs that sparked our interest in 60s garage punk. As Dr. Noonetwisting discovered, in surrounding strata there were a few more treasures in that grave!

Mr. Tomsun,
Here is my report:

Greenwich Village songwriter and folksinger Fred Neil wrote "That's the Bag I'm In" early in the 1960s but apparently didn't release his own version until his second album in 1966. But, I just discovered today that another Greenwich Village folksinger Casey Anderson was apparently the first to put it to record in 1962.

Fred Neil 1966.

Billy Lee Riley 1966

Richie Havens 1966

Our pals The Fabs 1967 with National Safety Council video (I wanna shake rortydog's hand for thinking of this).

HP Lovecraft 1967 - Moving into the heavy psychedelic Jeff Airplane direction.

Kin Vassy 1969 - Moving a bit too close to Blood Sweat and Tears territory for comfort. He also played in Kenny Rogers and the First Edition!

Buzzy Linhart 1971 - Now we're getting heavy, man.

Thankfully the covers seem to have stopped after this because I don't think I could handle a Uriah Heep cover of this song.

Uriah Heep did not cover "That's the Bag I'm In."

The Fuzztones 1984 reenactment of The Fabs' take, with big hair and chicken bones.

The Swamp Rats......... ...............Blasting the Garage Canon

2011-12-08T23:12:00.001-05:00

¡¡¡When I posted the Crude PA comps and read that The Creations' 1965 cover of Love is Tuff was by Pittsburgh's Fantastic Dee-Jays who changed their name to The Swamp Rats in 1966, it didn't occur to me that that sedate tune would be by THE Swamp Rats who did the absolutely psycho version of The Sonics' Psycho featured on the first Back from the Grave compilation that inspired my love of obscure garage bands back around 1984!!!

[breathe]

Yep, that's them. And that's not all. They managed to do violence to a whole set of the best rock and roll tunes out there, most of them familiar covers but with a few obscurities I remember from the garage revival of the 80's.

Love Is Tuff is one of their few originals by the early bassless trio, The Fantastic Dee-Jays. Fight Fire is by The Golliwogs before they went and changed their name to Creedence Clearwater Revival (what were they thinking?).

The Swamp Rats added a bassist and a heavy dose of nastiness to The Sparkles' No Friend of Mine. The Kinks' 'Till the End of the Day has a particularly mean sound too, like it was played with bass chords or a seriously down-tuned guitar. And She's Got Everything, which may prove mathematically to be the best pop song ever (more about that later), sounds like it was sung with gobstopper in mouth. Hey Joe is just hilariously frantic and had me dancing around the kitchen. The beautiful original I'm Going Home is followed up by what may be their most protopunk song of all, another original worthy of Stooges worship, Hey Freak. Last of all is a song I usually can't stand because it's been so overdone. But this might be the best massacre of Louie Louie ever. That screeeammm after the guitar solo shreds my ears, and warms my heart.

By 1967 they were history, but not before setting a standard for the likes of The Chesterfield Kings, The Fuzztones, and their hometown fellows The Cynics in the 80's when these songs all came back faster and fuzzier.

The Swamp Rats 2003 reissue

on Get Hip Records

The Blame ... Who Gets It? ..................(Lancaster 1979)

2011-11-16T23:11:00.000-05:00

So, who really brought punk rock to little Lancaster, PA? A couple of years before The Bodies sparked the local scene, there was a band in town that seemed to be playing a mix of punk, new wave, and whitey reggae at Tom Paine's Back Room and even CBGB(!). The Blame had a lone B-side called Little Girls (in Hollywood) that hints at that punk influence, so they just might deserve the name!

Guitarist Jeff Coleman tells the whole story:

The late 1970's was an exciting time. In Lancaster, we were just hearing the music that had been coming out of NYC and London for the past several years- what they called punk and New Wave. The basic idea was- do what you wanna do, make the music you wanna make, anything is possible.  

Glenn Redcay had been playing some terrific guitar in Big Red, but it was time for something new. Glenn gave up the guitar and picked up a cheesy red bass- time to start over.   Steve Patton [drums] heard London calling too. He was more involved in the politics than the rest of us- for Steve it was a revolution, man! Guy Debris had been playing blues guitar, but some of the guitar players in the New Wave scene really impressed him and the nastyness of punk was fun. I was excited by the different ways to write and the new sounds to play and the idea that we could do this ourselves. We all got together to change the world.  And maybe we did.

We did covers of the Clash, the Police, the B-52's, the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, the Cars, Gang of Four and even the A's "Parasite". By the end we were doing around 16 original songs a night.

The single was recorded by the original lineup early in 1980 at Atlantic Sound Productions in Marietta. It was one of those "500 records for $595" deals, which included 8 hours for recording and mixing both sides — generous!

One highlight of our career was playing CBGB twice — on Sundays, when they would have a dozen bands or so file through. Still, it was a thrill, even though we drove home that night in sub-zero weather in my panel truck without any heat (Kept warm for a while with blintzes).

Late in 1980 Steve bailed and was replaced by Blair King on drums and vocals. Normally we played a place in Lancaster called the Back Room, which we "owned" for a couple of years. We did play the Village once or twice, one time following a "male review" show, which was about the strangest gig ever. Played the Silo in Reading, which was a disaster — it was too early there for new wave/punk. We shared the bill with the Sharks once or twice. There was friendly competition between us in Lancaster, but of course, the Sharks went on to rule central Pa. for a while. They had a hit with a song I wrote called "You Make Me." It earned me about $50 from airplay around here. The Blame never made the jump into the club circuit due to lack of a PA and lack of management skills. But we did sell all our records, and were the punks in town for a while.

Jeff was later in The Fender Twinns, and has recorded hundreds of local musicians in his homegrown Steam Powered Studio. Steve went on to play rockabilly with The Red Roosters. And Blair continued to book original bands at Tom Paine's Back Room and formed the new wave band Color Code.

You can hear The Blame doing Bob Marley's Kaya and a live new wave track called World of Our Own on the Steam Powered Studio website.

Thanks to Reesa Rooter Marchetti and her Relive the 80s site for the audio track and quotes.

The Jags.....Lost and Found Record .....(Philadelphia 1978-79)

2011-11-08T22:43:00.001-05:00

As a Lancaster teen, one of the pretty-local bands that I really liked was Philadelphia's The Impossible Years. I was too young to see them at the Back Room, but they had a few tracks loaded on NAB Cartridges at WIXQ (those shitty sounding one-song 8-track tape type things that radio stations used for their jingles) so they got a good bit of college-radio airplay well into the mid-80s.

Tapewrecks roving reporter, Rustle Noonetwisting, (who was one of the college DJs playing the IYs back then) discovered a batch of YouTube videos titled "The Jags (1978-79)" by Impossible Years' singer/gutarist Todd Shuster. Says Rustle, "...This guy was hitting 'em out of the park from day one. I didn't even know the Jags had any recordings prior to becoming the IYs until yesterday...."

Neither did I. But that's probably because they didn't, aside from live tapes. Todd recreated these lost tracks in his home studio in 2010 and 2011. But dang they sound good! Great melodies and smart lyrics that became the hallmarks of The Impossible Years, but true to the stripped-down sound of The Jags and other pop/punk bands of the time. Had The Jags made it into the studio in the late-70s we would have had an indisputable classic record, but these tracks are such a fresh blast I can hardly complain.

A lost record found:

Adults Only
3-Minute World
Denise
Don't Tell Me
Has Been
Look 'Em In the Eye
Legal Matter
I Agree

And while I was still listening to Abba on my parents' hi-fi about an hour west, says Todd:

We started playing in March of 1978 as The Jags. It was the classic story of hearing the New York and English bands of 1977 and being inspired to play music again. We played local clubs opening for a lot of the bands that passed through Philadelphia....

The Jags, sadly, didn't play much outside Philly. At the time, there weren't many people or clubs that would even be associated with this kind of music. We did play a very odd show with the Plasmatics at Irving Plaza in NY, Xmas week of 78. ...Our set went well, right up until the end when Charly, our bass player, told the audience that "soon they would see Wendy and her wonderful tits." Their manager, who was a pretty scary fellow, looked like he was going to have us killed and told us to get out of town fast.

We also played a show at the 9:30 Club in DC with our friends The Shades, a band we played with at our first gig (July 4th, 1978 at Artemis, 20th and Sansom). The Shades became good friends who also shared an incredible bill with The Jags at the Hot Club with The Cramps, another band we played with a few times and with whom we were very friendly. A truly great band! All three bands were really great that night.

We were slated to open for Sid Vicious at Artemis. The week before was when the story broke about Sid killing Nancy. We were told that the show was still on, but the story became so hot that the club owner received death and bomb threats. Unfortunately, it was the gig we never got to play. We did get to play with X, the Mumps, and the Outcasts, which featured Jerry Nolan and Arthur Kane [ex-New York Dolls].

...A year later, when we heard a single by an English band also called The Jags, we decided on the name The Impossible Years.

I have fond memories of the very early days, when the bands from both NY and the UK seemed inspiring and exciting. That's what drove me to make proper recordings of songs that are still very special to me.

Thanks to Todd Shuster for the audio tracks and for dredging his memories. Still images from Todd's Jags videos. If anyone has photos, flyers, or any other artifacts of The Jags, we'd like to add them here!
More about The Impossible Years at the ModPopPunk Archives.
.....................Stay tuned for more wreckage from The Impossible Years and Todd Shuster!

La Música Callejera Pt. 8 ...Guatemala

2011-11-08T21:25:00.000-05:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

GUATEMALA

...28) A marimba band of two boys, their father, and grandfather in the Parque Central of Quetzaltenango on market day. 29) A school marching band. The bass drummers swinging the sticks on ropes around their wrists in fancy style. 30) A song at the Fiesta of San Miguel for masked dancers dressed as conquistadors and toros. 31) Quiche music at the shrine of San Miguel....

La Música Callejera - Guatemala

Próxima estación: El Salvador

The Warm Jets ................... ..................(Philadelphia 1978)

2011-11-06T23:03:00.001-05:00

I was only nine years old and oblivious in 1978 when The Warm Jets recorded I Love It about squooshing cockroaches and were playing in the legendary Hot Club in Philly. But about an hour west of there, I was committing suburban bugocide with my friends collecting hundreds of Japanese beetles in a bucket and gleefully dumping them into the central air-conditioning fan on the side of the house, sending iridescent beetle-bits 15 feet into the air raining down all over us. There was hours of hilarity and fun in this carnage. So on one level at least, I was right there with them, but I was still a few years from dancing the pogo. Go Go With Me

Originally a punk rock duo in much the fashion of Philadelphia’s very own Flys, The Warm Jets consisted of two young musicians eager to play and be heard. (E.Gadz on electric guitar; Hugo Crust on acoustic guitar and vocals). In the summer of ’78, with the help of Lee and Roid, along with their now sounds program as WXPN radio station, the duo sent in a tape of a song called "I Love It". Although a crude recording, (allegedly manufactured in Mr. Crust’s bedroom), the song received much support and at one point reached 6 on "The Now Sounds Top Ten", proving that there was indeed an audience for this type of minimalistic music. -Russ Goetz, drummer, from The Warm Jets MySpace page

Here Come The Warm Jets

Russ plays in Kamakaze with ex-members of another Philly punk band, Pure Hell.
Their complete live and studio recordings are available from Italy's Rave Up Records.

Reesa & the Rooters .............. .......................Suburban Wives Club (Philly & South Jersey 1979-83)

2011-10-17T23:16:00.001-04:00

When the 70s and the 80s collided in mid-air. Reesa and the Rooters came walking out of the wreckage in primary colors.

In 1978, my younger brother, Larry Laskey, and I would often jam on acoustic guitars to create moody songs with lyrics inspired by the news. When friends Bob Jay and Donny Buckley joined on electric guitar and bass, I booked us in a South Jersey tavern as Reesa and the Rooters, a blues-pop, semi-acoustic group.

We added a drummer and continued to gig around Philadelphia and Jersey. I hand-lettered and cut and pasted graphics on all our literature, as well as putting up hundreds of posters and sending out mailing list postcards.

After Larry switched to electric guitar and I started playing a Farfisa organ, the local media dubbed me “the queen of the new wave scene.” Cherie Rumbol, a cohort who played in South Jersey club bands, came in to replace the original bass player and to add another voice to the mix.

The band and its music fit perfectly into the blossoming new wave scene in 1979. Except for some suburban clubs where people just didn’t get it, our audiences dressed up with skinny ties or spiked hair and came ready to pogo or slam dance.

In October 1980, a new version of the mythological jerk appeared on the Rooters’ first and only record release, “Ultraman in Surf Villa,” backed by the punk-rock anthem “TMI.” I was always a natural on stage, but it was my natural knack for promoting that helped push the single into a college radio hit.

My performances were a reflection of my hippie past that included running offstage into the crowd, as well as tumbling around while singing and playing organ or guitar, or checking my makeup in a compact mirror.

Cherie exuded a quieter, more demure sexiness as she sang lead on such songs as “Ultraman in Surf Villa” and “Pierre.” The latter was Larry's vision of Marie Curie, whose husband discovered radium.

After nearly three years with the Rooters, and frequent artistic differences between me and my brother, I started writing songs on my own. “Guru Eye,” based on an article about Mao Tse-tung’s wife, was the first original tune we performed that had been written sans Larry.

That summer, Cherie and I jammed in Philly with drummer Ann Frances at an outdoor concert. We clicked immediately, and decided to put together Suburban Wives Club as a Rooter side project. But almost as quickly, the Rooters broke up.

SWC performed some of the Rooters songs, although in a more minimalist fashion. I set aside the Farfisa and concentrated on guitar to record Guru Eye as our quick-and-dirty single, b/w Casual Cat at a Laundromat. Since we were a trio, I couldn't go out into the crowd much but I still did crazy stage routines, even getting Cherie involved in musical calisthenics during "Fat Thighs." -from Reesa Marchetti's website.

Reesa and the Rooters put out a brand new 4-song CD in 2008 and is recording a new release. Look for live performances and more info at the Reesa and the Rooters website and Reesa's Relive the 80s Philly band website.

Thanks to Billy Synth for telling me about The Rooters!

Billy Synth............ Mama Don't Allow No Technopop Playin' Around Here..... (Harrisburg 1970s, 80s and beyond)

2011-10-16T02:05:00.001-04:00

Billy Synth calls for a new Tapewrecks category: "Beat of His/Her Own Drum." Critics might turn their nose up at technical skills or unorthodox style, but the band plays on, either oblivious or not giving a shit, with a small number of devoted friends and fans who appreciate what they do. The rest of us only catch on much later.

Billy has his own original style embracing the synthesizer as an implement of mayhem in Harrisburg a few years before the great proliferation of PA punk began around 1980 and most other synthesizer bands were playing crappy MTV pop. Mama don't allow no technopop playin' around here. Nooo way.

Billy has established his garage punk cred as the creator of the Psychedelic Unknowns series of 60s garage compilations, and the mysterious force behind Frog and Rabbit Records and the Pennsylvania Rock Archives, so his own bizarre sounds come from the deepest recesses of mid-state vinyl junkiedom.

I hadn't heard from Billy Synth for years until a few months ago, while sifting through the Frog and Rabbit catalog, I was jolted once more by that unmistakable voice. Some vocalists sing from the throat and others from the chest. But Billy seems to sing from the large intestine. I knew this had to be the same fellow. Sure enough. He was 16 when Billy and the Starjets recorded You Changed in the early 70s.

Then he changed. What came over Billy?

...when I bought my Arp Odyssey synthesizer. We first had a group called Blue Ice... we began as an early '70s "classic" rock band, because we were hippies and that's what we grew up with....

Blue Ice (1977)
Power Play

...Then, when "new wave" came along, I liked it and left Blue Ice to form a more punk-like band, the Janitors.... I hooked up with Bernie, the original "punk rock janitor" (yes, he was in another punk group AND a janitor!).... That didn't last long, really, even though we did release a few EPs... After a year or so, I got back together with Blue Ice (with new drummer Joe Gear). They had already "gone punk" themselves and changed their name to the Turn Ups, so it was all-cool again. When we recorded our first LP, it was like Stevinyl-guitar, Billy-synth, etc., and that's how I got the name....

Billy might have started one of central PA's first punk rock bands around 1978 with The Janitors. They released a couple of EPs around 1978 but I haven't been able to find any of the tracks.

...There were actually quite a few "new wave/punk"-type bands around here then. We played shows with groups such as the Sharks, the Late Teens, Reesa & the Rooters (Philly) and the Slickee Boys (DC). There were a few nice venues to play, such as the Metron, Rumpelstiltskins, the Landing... Also, an annual pig roast! ...I can't remember how we first connected, but Bernie & I from the Janitors went down to see Half Japanese with our instruments, and when we got there, we just started playing. I mean, it was 1, 2, 3, 4, and we all started playing ANYTHING. No rehearsal, no NOTHING! That's how it came out. Sooo strange!

The Janitors and Half JapaneseHartzdale Drive Destruction

I first heard The TurnUps on Bona Fide Records Train To Disaster comp, and then I found Billy Synth & the Turnups Disorderly Conduct (1983) at a record swap in York County.

I'm So Sick of It
Music Is Forever
Madison Shuffle
Pushin' Too Hard

Billy's later bands included the Traces of Thyme (early 90s)
Oh Jane
and the Windowpaynes
Sweet Pea/Hooray for Hazel
And finally, Billy Starboy and The Tyme Machine's homage to the beat of different drum entirely - a cover of Lancaster's Joey Welz doozy:Rockin' In America

More from Billy Synth & Many Friends!

And even more: Alien X 117 Good stuff! Stay tuned for more wreckage!

The Red Roosters ..... (Lancaster 1987)

2011-10-09T16:51:00.001-04:00

At the DeLux Diner...Chrysler Imperial courtesy of Bill and Carl, Web of Sound Records

The Red Roosters were Lancaster's rockabilly revampers featuring saxophonist Lars Espensen who went from the US Marine Corps, to the Roosters, to playing with the fabulous A-Bones. He's the only Rooster I knew, but he wasn't the main singer, and I remember the bulk of their songs being pretty clean-cut rockabilly with some Johnny Cash here and there. They were the opening act for the historic Hasil Adkins show at the Moose Lodge right after he was rediscovered by Norton Records et al. The two songs I have on tape are from the Punk's Not Dead show on WFNM. Lars and and local punk goofballs Jack Lord's Hair were in the studio offending the morals of a few Lancastrians that evening. Unfortunately, that's all I have on The Red Roosters, so if you have any wreckage to share, please chicken-walk it over our way!

John Augustine with Lars, March 1987:
Mr. Moto / Psycho Macho / interview

Steve Patton-Drums
John Harlan-Bass
Phil Risser-Guitar
Lars Espensen-Sax

Thanks to Sophy DiPinto for her photos!

Lars went on to playing honky tonk in Brooklyn with The Gowanus Canal Boys and is currently in Tuscaloosa with The Original Snake Charmers.

La Música Callejera Pt. 7 ... Oaxaca

2011-10-05T23:59:00.001-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

OAXACA
...Oaxaca was a special part of this trip to say the least. People, culture, food, music, landscape and all were wonderful of course, but I missed this girl in San Francisco that I left on uncertain terms. After two-months corresponding via fax machine and finding letters waiting for me lista de correos in every town I stopped, we reunited at the Oaxaca airport and spent two weeks together that left me all starry-eyed. ...23) El año se la va by a guitarist in a restaurant on the zocalo in the capital. 24) Two guitarists outside a museum. 25) Trumpet and drum players in the market. 26) A Catholic funeral procession outside the Zapotec ruins in Mitla. 27) Back in the capital, mariachis in full charro regalia play a song for and me and my girl....

...A year and a half later, we had our wedding in SF.... and Solamente una vez was our song.

La Música Callejera - Oaxaca

Próxima estación: Guatemala

The Baker Street Irregulars......... (Lancaster 1966)

2011-09-28T21:30:00.000-04:00

Original Post, June 2011:
The Irregulars might have been the bad kids in town that WLAN wouldn't play. I can't find anything about Largo Records or the band except they had a really trippy sound for little-old Lancaster. If the date is correct they were pretty happenin' with that first big wave of psychedelic music. It Don't Mean Nothin' comes complete with space sounds, and their nearly 5-minute version of Bo Diddley's I'm A Man is just bananas.

It Don't Mean Nothing

I'm A Man

(Largo 5002)

Thanks to Spin the Groove and The Rock and Roll Cellar for hipping me.

...........................................................

Addendum from the Depths, September 2011:
Man, this band barely escaped deep analog obscurity. The tracks survived, thanks to a single and couple of compilations and blog posts, but there was nothing else to go on until Steve of The Baker Street Irregulars happened upon this Tapewrecks post and answered a few questions about the band and the mid-60s Lancaster music scene:

To say I was surprised is a vast understatement. Where on Earth did you ever find a copy of the one and only 45 ever recorded by the Baker Street Irregulars?? 

I am one of the 3 members that formed the BSI back in '65.  I was living on Stonemill Road in Lancaster at the time. The other two members were from Landisville, bassist/singer Jim Hohenstein and drummer/singer Miles Harriger. We were high school kids at the time. I worked part time at the Colonial House of Music.  That's where I met the guys.

It was a different world back then, in so many ways.

Oddly, Jim, Miles and myself all had different favorites. Jim was into bands like the Mamas & Papas, and the Association. Miles was strictly British, Rolling Stones and the Beatles in particular.  I was more into oddball groups like the Illinois Speed Press, Paul Butterfield, and the Yardbirds, and was also into flamenco and jazz. Howard Roberts was probably my biggest influence at the time, though you'd never guess it based on the licks on the BSI record. But I had spent some time in Greenwich Village, and in San Francisco, so the psychedelic sound was no stranger to me.

I remember the Couriers, and I believe there was some affiliation with Mariani's Music. There was a music spot called the Hullabaloo. Lots of local groups played there, often opening for bigger-name acts.  We opened for The Fantastic Johnny C once.

[Interestingly, for Lancastrians anyway, The Hullabaloo was located in Manheim Township and was owned and operated by Ed Ruoff and his wife, parents of Rich Ruoff, founder of Chameleon Club, the main venue for original bands from the 1980s to to the present day.]

Largo Records was owned and operated by a guy named Wilhelm Hess. Jim's dad was a doctor, and knew Wilhelm from his college days. He hooked us up.  The "studio" was in a barn, halfway to Willow Street. He had a Revox 4-track, and a single Neumann microphone. The additional guitar tracks were added afterward because Wilhelm was not satisfied with the 3-piece sound. The effects were "high tech" for the time (hard to believe!!).... I had an Echoplex, a Vox Wah-Wah, and a Gibson Maestro Fuzztone, a 1961 Telecaster, and a Fender Super Reverb amp. What I wouldn't give to have my old Tele back again!

The bastardization of "I'm a Man" was two-fold: the song was way too long, but Wilhelm insisted he could edit it easily. Instead, he sped it up to shorten it!

We played Franklin & Marshall frat parties often, and other local venues. There was a place out on Route 30 called The Host that we played often. But the band was short-lived.  After high school, Miles and Jim went off to different colleges, and I was headed to Nam.

[The Baker Street Irregulars were featured on both the Pebbles (1998) and Gravel (2007) garage band compilations.]

I wonder where they even found the record. I had a few copies, and much other music memorabilia, but all was lost in a fire in the late 60s.  A single Polaroid picture of the 45 survived.... my only real evidence that the band ever existed.

Miles drowned himself over a broken heart in a lake near Charlottesville Virgina, autumn of 1968. What a waste. Despite my best efforts, I've had no luck finding Jim. Upon news of Miles' death, I tried to contact him, but his family had moved. I even traveled back to Pennsylvania to see if maybe one of his neighbors knew where they went.  One told me "maybe Texas", and another said "maybe Maine", but for me it was a dead end search. No Google in those days.

[Jim did, in fact, move to Maine, where he is active as a church leader.]

Thanks to Steve for sharing his memories!
If you remember The Baker Street Irregulars, the Hullabaloo, or any of the happenin' Lancaster music scene from those days, please help salvage the history!

The Embarrassment............ ...........Retrospective (1984 cassette)

2011-09-23T23:34:00.000-04:00

1992 - Deep in post-college wandering mode; somewhere between Guatemala and the coast of California; in a Subaru that needed a new CV joint, I took up an invitation to visit my friends, Peter and Tracey, in Lawrence, Kansas. With small bits of my fingers and half the engine sitting in Peter's driveway, I had only a Chilton manual to guide me back. So with good friends, and good music, I stayed most of the summer and got a job to pay rent. At some point, between nightshifts at the junkmail factory sorting crap by zip-code, I picked up this swell red tape of horny pop-punk. I had ventured far into Embarrassment territory.

Sex Drive
Sexy Singer Girl
Woods of Love
Time Has Come Today
Casual Man

Once I got the CV joint in and most of the Subaru back together I Traveled West playing that tape the rest of the way to San Francisco.

The car got towed by the city that fall, and I ended up staying there for 11 years, 3 occupations, 1 wife, and 1 daughter. And the tape made it back to Philly with us.

The other songs were rereleased on Heyday.

CRUDE PA. ......... Volumes 1 and 2

2011-09-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

These two PA comps from Distortions Records come loaded with great garage rockers and wild wreckage. Fantastic organ on the girl-knocking Pat Farrell track. My hometown Lancaster scene-stars The Couriers and Philly's The Snaps have been covered before on this blog, and The Nomads deserve induction into the Tapewrecks Hall of Fame for a could-be teenage Johnny Thunders singing some great vitriolic loser lyrics.

He's taken you down way past low.
And I can hear him laughing
from up above.
And I hate him!

And who can argue with Thee New Generation?

Well girl you don't know what you do to me
Even when we're holding hands
Now we're alone for eternity
And I want to hold more than your hand!
So come come along with me
See how much fun it can be
Everybody watch me doing the stupidity!

The Starfyres also really knock me out with their simple guitar jing jing running through the whole song dropping into a lovely if your ever down by the sea, take a look for me....

Crude PA Volume 1 (1990)
Side 1

Pat Farrell and the Believers - Brand New Baby (Hamburg)

The Conductors - She Said So (Williamsport)

The Soul Generation - I Can't See You

The Couriers - Feelings (Lancaster)

The Changing Tymes - You Make It Hard (Philadelphia)

The Sands Of Time - Come Back Little Girl (Philadelphia)
The Scholars - I'm Gonna Make It (Philadelphia)

The Effects - I've Been Told (Philadelphia radio ad)

The Bitter End - If You Want Somebody

Side 2

The Snaps - Polka Dotted Eyes (Philadelphia)

J.C. and The New Tones - Love: Human Emotion

The Nomads - Point Five (Philadelphia)

The Nomads - I Need Your Energy

Facts Of Life - I've Seen Darker Nights (Philadelphia)

The Iron Gate - Feelin' Bad (Philadelphia)

Thee Young Generation - Ruby Tuesday (Ohio?)

Thee Young Generation - Stupidity

The Starfyres - Captain Dueseldorph (Lansford)

Some solid wrecks on Volume 2 too. Love is Tuff is a mopey cover of Pittsburgh's The Fantastic Dee-Jays, aka The Swamp Rats. The MW Lads ad came on a cardboard record in cereal boxes!

Crude PA Volume 2 (1996)

Side 1

The Wilde Things - Can't See The Sun

The Wilde Things - My Life Is Black

The Undertakers - Little Girl

The Bats - How Could You Have Known (Narberth)

Glas Managerie - Natasha (Coatesville)

The Creations - Love Is Tuff

The Effects/The Gass Co. - MW Lads Records on WFIL (Philadelphia radio ad)

Side 2

The Savoys - Only So Much (Camden, NJ)

The Savoys - Got To Say Goodbye

The Loose Enz - A World Outside (York)

The Rising Tydes - Artificial Peace

The Rising Tydes - Don't Want You Around

The Chosen Few - Staircases, Places And Time

Strawberry Tuesday - Return Of The Walrus (Reading)
Mysterious Clown - Mysterious Clown

And if it's the last thing you do - get the Walrus!

Distortions Records of Bala Cynwd, PA is now affiliated with Funkadelphia Records and is still reissuing extremely rare garage and soul on classy-looking vinyl.

The Crude PA records are out of print, but I got my tracks from Paradise of Garage Comps. I hear the original liner notes are excellent. I'd love to see a scan or if you have any other info about the bands send it my way.

For more Pennsylvania garage band wreckage, check out The Return of the Young Pennsylvanians and Frog and Rabbit Records.

The Effects scans are from Garage Punk Forums.

L.Sid.......... from Mercury to Jupitah

2011-08-25T00:01:00.051-04:00

Dedicated to Markus's family and friends.

From the first time I met Markus, I was affected. "Wuuauoah," I wish there were a way to put that voice onto paper. -Therese Joy Madden

When Markus moved into our flat on Valencia Street he livened it up with his kaleidoscopic spirit. He wore a furry vest and knickers and whatever pattern or color happened out of the laundry. He said he didn't believe in colors not matching, and he mixed three or four different types of cereal in his bowl every morning. We had fun times that year. We didn't know he was coming apart at the seams, except that he occasionally woke up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder because one of his arms had come out of its socket, or he'd be vomiting so loudly that he rivaled the Fog Horns in San Francisco Bay.

Markus Cook was more than a fixture on the San Francisco bike messenger and music scene. He was an organizer and a mobilizer with resounding vocal chords that needed no help from a bullhorn. He had an infectious personality and an irrepressible drive to build community among the people he touched, from shared meals at our little Mission flat, to mass bike rides in SF, to global messenger solidarity. He published a zine of bike messenger writing called Mercury Rising and was a major force in the creation of the SF Bicycle Messenger Association, which, short of a union, was able to create some unity and advocate for the thousand or so couriers pedaling the streets for a living.

How about hosting the next Bike Messenger World Championships here in SF in the summer of '95? Wouldn't it be cool to get to know messengers from everywhere? It's going to take a couple of dozen people who are ready to take on a major project for the next year-and-a-half, and a lot more people to help out later. Though I'm still reeling from CMC '93 and L.Sid's Berlin to Berlin Tour, I'll gladly join the effort if it comes together. I think this town needs to be overrun by a thousand bike-freaks as much as our world-wide tribe needs to be solidified by another gathering. -Spokes, by Fur (Markus), Mercury Rising, December 1993

As I lay drugged and listless in my bed at General the day after my shoulder surgery, my roommate came in and told me he had just seen a group of Western Messengers on their way to visit a fallen sister who had her pelvis broken by a car. Damn, we keep those hospitals busy. This got me thinking about what the SFBMA is and what it could be. We spend thousands every week at the same few bars. If a couple hundred people siphoned off a mere 5 bucks a month and dumped it into some kind of emergency fund thing, that would be $12,000 a year, to help people and invest to keep our fund going.... Might work, I dunno... could strengthen the messenger community in a variety of ways. - Spokes, by Fur, Mercury Rising August 1994

San Francisco Bike Messenger Association: Broken Bones Fund

L.Sid was another outlet for Markus's philosophy and unstoppable energy, with its mashed up confusion of musical styles, instruments, and pseudo-political, absurdist, sci-fi subject matter. Just like all of his activism, Markus was a key organizer, but never dominated the action. He pulled everyone together and created a vehicle for each person to shine at what they did best, to the benefit of everyone involved. He'd go boinging around the stage while the band diverged into stratospheric jazzy solos, occasionally barking lyrics and props to his bandmates. He surely vied with James Brown for "hardest working." At one show he was flailing around the stage and suddenly fell screaming after dislocating his arm (again). After a rush to the emergency room to get it popped back into place, he was back on stage to finish the set within the hour.

L.Sid released Alive 1995 on cassette, complete with intergalactic radio interference; from a show at the Covered Wagon Saloon. Sunflowerz is from a studio session at Mindfield, included on Pothole, an SF bike messenger band compilation.

Photo by Bluoz

Public Service Announcement
Sunflowerz
Jupitah
Dallas, Texas
Medium Rare Frankenstein
Vigilante 4:35

Sadly, Markus died of a heroin overdose on January 3, 1996 after struggling for several months to to get clean.

Markus Cook was a politician, a poet, a great orator, and a loyal friend. As far as 'front men' go, I would put him right up there in the same category as David Byrne, Iggy Pop, and Joe Strummer. I recall one day, we climbed up on a giant billboard near Bernal Heights, and shared some 'medicine' and philosophical talk. At one point, he looked down on the panorama and said, "Someday...I'm gonna miss all this."
Moral: Live every day as if it were your last.
Rest in Peace, brother. -Jack Chandler

With The Germ at KUSF

L.Sid 1994-96
Markus Cook - Vocals and Guitar
Jack Chandler - Sax
Chad - Sax
Timmy Hesla - Baritone Sax

Carl Prescott - Guitar and Trumpet
Lou "Luigi" Decolator - Drums
Billy Wig - Bass

Earlier members:
Adam Kahan - Bass
Matt Broiler - Guitar

Jack played in The Wellsprings of Hope and Tim Hesla's Big Band and currently plays in Ice Age Jazztet. Tim played in Necropolis of Love and The Wellsprings of Hope, and his Big Band of course. Chad was a founding member of Polkacide and currently plays in The Gallimaufry Orchestra. Billy was previously in Boston's Hell Toupée. Carl is playing with Smokestaxx and Montalban Quintet. Adam later formed Orson County Line. Luigi played in Derailleur and The Converse All Stars. I just learned that he died in a house fire in 2009.

More info from Sector L:
Here's the full Alive 1995 cassette posted on It Crawled From the Vault (Thanks Bluoz!)
An extended article about Markus in SF Weekly: Mercury Falling
Moving Target Magazine: Messenger Hero #4
Moving Target Magazine: The Markus Cook Memorial Award
Video interviews with Markus
Messenger Memorial: Markus "Fur" Cook
Messenger Memorial" Lou Decolator "Luigi"

To My Little Brother,
This wasn't supposed to happen. Your life was not meant to end this way, this soon. This was not your destiny. There are too many things you still have to do.... And I'll never understand why.... - Kim Camille Cook

Noise Fest with Helsinki 5 and RAW .........................(Lancaster 1982)

2011-08-22T01:04:00.015-04:00

Dear Mr. Tapewrecks:

For years, I made the case (albeit only in rambling discussions with myself) that The Real Gone were the first 1980's underground punk/garage band in Lancaster to write and perform primarily original material, and therefore should be credited with starting the true underground Lancaster music scene of the 1980's. The Bodies didn't really count because they were largely a cover band, but let's give them an honorable mention. The Sharks and other Village New Wavers (besides being a bad joke as far as I was concerned) were just part of the Pennsylvania Musician cover band scene, except they did U2 covers rather than Molly Hatchet covers.

So all along, I figured the history went something like this:

Couriers/Shaynes (1966/67) --> The Great Void of the 1970s ---> The Bodies (1981) ---> nothing ---> The Real Gone (1985) ---> Nobodys Fools/Kirk and the Jerks/Jack Lord's Hair/Substitute (1986) ---> You know the rest, for better and worse.

However, when you asked about the Bodies a few weeks ago, I got curious, searched around and found out about a band called the Helsinki 5 and some F&M-based bands from 82-83 that involved a fellow named Ted Adams, some other F&M and Lancaster people, including a future Pavement member[Mark Ibold], and ...our pal Paul Barros! [proprietor of Alexia Books] -Rustle Noonetwisting

......................................................

May 2, 1982 was a relatively strange Sunday in Lancaster, PA.

Bob Yokum, a DJ on Franklin and Marshall College's radio station, organized "Noise Fest" with featuring several college bands a local group of teenagers called Helsinki 5.

Al Boyd: The Noise Fest, I recall, was held at F & M in Spring of 1982. I'm not sure how we got invited to play there, but I think it had something to do with knowing Pancho and Ted, who were F & M guys that happened across us and liked our "music." It was a bizarre evening and I remember that this may have been our first show in front of an actual audience. We brought a significant amount of jelly beans and ended up eating them as well as tossing them at the audience. That was a smart thing to do (not), but I guess part of our shitty teenage attitude at the time, from having listened to the Pistols, the Clash, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedy's with a bit too much frequency.

I think our set lasted no more than thirty minutes...at that time we may have only had six or eight "songs", which consisted of 1. turn on the drum machine, 2. pick a beat, 3. act like you're playing guitar and bass, 4. sing/talk the vocals. I recall being applauded...I guess the audience didn't know any better.

Helsinki 5:
Bill Allison - Vocals
Al Boyd - Guitar and homemade synthesizer
Joe Wood - Guitar

Joe Wood: There was one problem, none of the three had any musical background, save the odd piano lesson when we may have been eight years old. What Bill, Al and Joe were able to put together was a clashing cacophony of noise, which prompted Joe's mother to comment that "it sounded like music coming from the frozen tundra."

...the name "Helsinki Minus Five Below Zero" was suggested by Bob Yocum. He had thought of the name while reading world weather reports from a teletype machine. Helsinki -5° was born.

The May 2nd show features H5 at their rawest moment...as the three band members present the music in a disjointed cacophony of clashing music. This tends to happen with you have three musicians all trying to lead, not listening to each other, and playing what is best described as three different songs at the same time.

Do the Todd
About F.A.C.E. (Lies)
Vinyl Graveyard

Al Boyd: I think we kind of came in to our own when we played a show at Tom Paine's Back Room some time later.... Our Gang of Four influence was really on display, and that's the musical direction that I had always envisioned, since we were all pretty versed in the injustices of the world at that point and had a healthy disrespect for our government. I think that was my last show and Bill and Joe carried on the group in some form or another when Joe moved to Philly and attended Penn University.

Joe Wood: Helsinki 5's third and final live performance took place on October 30, 1982 at Tom Paine's as the opening act for Philadelphia's The Impossible Years. Bill came down with a severe cold and was unable to appear on stage. This led to the temporary addition of Bob Yocum on bass and Pancho on guitar, with Joe filling in on lead vocals. Bob and Pancho's musical abilities proved to show that Helsinki Five's melodies actually had potential. Especially since Bob and Pancho musically played with each other as opposed to H5's normal practice of playing against each other.

Computer Failure

Liverpool is Just as Cool (If London Drowns)

...................................................

RAW:
Ted Adams
Pancho Artecona
Pete King
Paul Barros

Paul Barros: We began, if I remember right, by spray-painting three t-shirts, each with an individual letter to spell out RAW, which we'd wear when we played (if we changed positions, we could also spell WAR - but of course, that name had already been taken).

I know that for Noise Fest we prepared some backing tapes that we were going to play along with for some of the songs. Some technical problems kept the tapes from being audible to the audience or us. Ted played drums and guitar, Pancho played guitar, I did what I could with some individual drums, clarinet and assorted percussion things (maybe even harmonica). At some point, Pete King and Bob Yocum joined us for a couple of songs. The event itself was great. Helsinki 5 were especially good. Pete King, Bob Yocum (who'd both played together in 1.3) were involved in Aerlingam, R. Mutt and Dr. Benway. Dave McKinney (who had played bass in 1.3) was also involved in one or the other of these two bands. One of them played behind a canvas on which was projected a film....

Advertisement
Andy Griffith Theme
Larry Knowlton Lives at 122 Lampeter Road

After RAW, Ted and I were in a band called OSS (also included Josh Roberts, Bob Yocum, Tim Finefrock)...

Ted Adams: These "bands" were in large part an excuse to do some underage drinking and make noise. Some of the musicianship is rather poor because we took turns on instruments we didn't know how to play.

More info and music by Helsinki 5 from Joe Wood
More info and music by RAW from Ted (E.C. Adams Photography & Art)
Thanks to Nathan Pease for posting the flyers.

If you were around Lancaster in those days and remember the bands, clubs, music stores, record labels, or any other part of the scene, please help us salvage that history!

Street Music of Java

2011-08-10T23:53:00.001-04:00

I borrowed Street Music of Java on cassette from the San Francisco Public Library in the early 90s and I was so taken with it, that when I went traveling in Mexico and Central America a few years later I took a tape recorder with me instead of a camera and collected La Música Callejera. Those voices and guitar melodies just socked me and helped confirm that the power and beauty in the music that I most love doesn't require an expensive recording studio to bring out. And the noise of the street pushes these tracks over the edge into the sublime.

Hai Cium Dong (kroncong batawi)
Jasli Jali (kroncong)
Asoi (kroncong)
Kuda Lumping (dangdut)
Ing Ing (langgam jawa)

This tape is way out of print, and my cruddy dubbed copy is just about worn out, but I found the whole thing up at End(-)Of(-)World Music and Maemaipleng writes it up with a lot more knowledge than I could:

Released in 1990 by the label Original Music, Street Music of Java is an joyous romp through various infectious forms of music played by small street ensembles in Java. Not all the styles are strictly Javanese but the music consistently fun and beautifully performed, full of hoarse female voices, scratchy violin, buoyant drumming. There's also plenty of that very Indonesian-sounding guitar playing.... often sort of a blend of old Portuguese colonial influences with kacapi playing.

Featuring various ramshackle forms of familiar Indonesian popular and folk styles, each song on this compilation feels like a hit single albeit minus any studio frills. You'll hear the Bollywood-informed dance music known as dangdut whittled down to an acoustic ensemble with near-shouted vocals, replete with gleeful outburst of laughter. There's also some languid keroncong (very Portuguese-sounding) numbers with enough of grit to them to differentiate them from the myriad adult-contemporary recordings of keroncong out there. Dry throated crooning voices sing sweetly weaving themselves "pitchy" yet quite ornate violin lines, atop the trademark interlock plucked parts.

The highlight for me is the folksy dangdut track "Kuda Lumping". With a lilting bounce in the drums, the loosely-strung twang of a cheap guitar and tambourines offer some rapid rhythmic propulsion. Meanwhile the shrill squawking vocals dance along the line of the song's ridiculously catchy and playful melody. Strangely I'm left with the thought that you could almost hear an Indonesian version of the Slits covering this song plugged-in!

James T. Rao's Tape Recorder Microcosmos

2011-08-04T17:59:00.006-04:00

Microcosmic Rule #1 - Most things sound better played backwards.

Electric Fish Life 1
For Evergreen House

If you search "James T. Rao" on the Internet you'll find a chemistry professor in Hyderabad, India, and a few cassettes on a Wiltshire, UK tape label by some inexplicable citizen of Connecticut, USA. We are concerned with the latter James T. Rao. He's been recording songs in his bedroom since at least the mid-80s and, despite remaining almost completely unknown, somehow got hooked up with Acid Tapes in the UK and put out a half dozen albums on cassette. More recently he's shown up as Jim Rao and Orange Cake Mix, but he's remained reclusive despite releasing a steady stream of music.

Microcosmic Rule #2 - Sing about your vegetable garden a lot (but stop short of gnomes).

Tao Window

Zinc Treasure

My Island

Schizo Blues

Heaven Smiles on You and the Dress You Wear

Microcosmic Sister

This is where I just deleted several lines referencing other well-known artists of the past, but the list started getting long and pompous, so let's just say you might find some obvious comparisons here. Enjoy them! Rao's songs might sound somewhat derivative at times, but in such an unassuming way, that you can hardly gripe about it. Each cassette has common threads that run through the tracks that transform them into cohesive albums; not just collections of songs.

Microcosmic Rule #3 - Wear out the knobs on your tape recorder by interstellar overdriving the tracks back and forth.

Fragments of a Soundtrack Mind
Indian Smoke Ring
Be There Then
What Will Happen Now
Treehouse

She Always Dreams Without Me
Taking Pictures of Broccoli
Just a Feeling
Dreams for Sail

Okay, so that was a reference. I couldn't help myself. Wearing headphones while listening to a James T. Rao tape makes you dizzy. There are nice trancey numbers with collaged song fragments, overdubbed random spoken words, and sound effects. Those pre-digital sloppy tape cuts between songs and sounds may have been accidental at the time, but have become an elemental effect of the 80s home recording underground. The last tape is two albums in one, put out by Root Beer Floats as their first (and possibly last for all I can tell) release. It came on a recycled cassette with a few super pop songs that that jump right up into your face out of all the reverby, psychological veggie soup.

Microcosmic Rule #4 - There are no rules in the Microcosmos of James T. Rao.

Acid Tapes has transferred James T. Rao's cassettes to CDr format; available through Rainfall Records & Books.
Jim Rao is still recording and releasing music as Orange Cake Mix.

Thanks to Rustle Noonetwisting for lending me these tapes.

NUCLEAR WAR and Lancaster County ....... .....................Thirty Years After

2011-07-28T18:47:00.025-04:00

Is there a Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile somewhere with the coordinates N 40:02:24, W 76:18:23 already entered into its guidance system?

This isn't exactly a music post, but it fits in with my exploration of things from my hometown that had a particular impact on me. So here's a track to set the mood while you read on. Press the Play button:

Sun Ra Arkestra - Nuclear War (1982)

I think about all the fear-mongering going on today and the ways that fear has been used in the past. What has changed? Growing up in the 70s and 80s there was a lot of really scary stuff in popular culture that got me simultaneously freaked out and fascinated: Big Foot, The Loch Ness Monster, Project Blue Book, In Search Of...the Bermuda Triangle (and others), Creature Double Feature, Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, Ronald Reagan....

I was 10. We lived close enough to Three Mile Island to evacuate in 1979, but before we left town, my friends and I would run up to the windows and scream, "I'm melting!!!" and crumple to the floor quivering in make-believe agony.

If that wasn't enough to set a maudlin stage for my teen years, my father is a physician and was Lancaster's county coroner at the time. His beeper would go off at all hours of the day and night; usually to treat the living, but often to go and pronounce someone dead. I overheard some pretty horrific stories of victims of fires and auto crashes. He never went into detail, but I would catch just enough to set my imagination off (the baby under the wheels of the Mack truck makes me squeam to this day). I'm sure dealing with one or two dead people at a time was bad enough. So dad, what would happen if there was a nuclear war?

In 1981, dad brought home the newly released NUCLEAR WAR and Lancaster County, by local sociologist Donald B. Kraybill and chemist John P. Ranck. It was published by Physicians for Social Responsibility to counter the "Duck and Cover" and fallout shelter stupidity of earlier decades. The book views the nuclear threat as a medical issue "citing the first principal of the medical profession — that doctors have an obligation to prevent what they cannot treat." It sets out to evoke fear of The Bomb, but not in the same way that fear was used in early cold war propaganda: to rally general anticommunist fervor or to scare people into stockpiling canned food. But rather to really scare the complacency out of us Lancastrians by describing in minute detail the total obliteration of our own land, friends, and families. Talk about driving it home! It was part of a global campaign to disabuse the public of the notion that a nuclear war was winnable, or survivable and to mobilize people at a local level to demand a reversal of the arms race. Physicians for Social Responsibility won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for their efforts to prevent The Final Epidemic.

At age 12, I was already somewhat convinced that the world was going to end in AD 1986 because of some vague prophecy by Nostradamus brought to me by a grave and turtlenecked Leonard Nimoy. This was also right around the time The Day After was aired on ABC and I just knew Ronnie really hated the Russians. He was surely going to push that button before he left office!

It turns out, I had reason to be concerned. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1980 moved the Doomsday Clock to seven minutes before midnight because of a shift in weapons technology and military strategy from deterrence, toward first-strike capability making "limited" nuclear war "thinkable" for the first time in twenty years.

The Soviet Union and United States have been behaving like what may best be described as "nucleoholics"--drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively "the last one," but who can always find a good excuse for "just one more round." (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

So, the book asks, What if a 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead were detonated in the air over Penn Square in the center of Lancaster City?

LANCASTER'S FINAL MINUTES

A luminous fireball with temperatures of 27 million degrees F., as hot as the center of the sun, forms in the air 6,000 feet above Penn Square. Because the day is clear, the scorching heat of the fireball burns skin and starts small fires as far as 12 miles away in Manheim, Ephrata, Strasburg and Bird-in-Hand. As far a 50 miles away in Coatesville and Shippensburg the fireball feels much hotter than the noonday sun.

Nuclear Attack High-Risk Areas

Lancaster was/is a primary target. It's mostly known for "Pennsylvania Dutch" culture, tourist industry, and Amish farmland. However, RCA made infrared-sensing equipment at a plant near my house, and Hamilton Watch Company made bomb fuses in Lancaster plants. The Defense Department had upwards of 50 contracts with businesses in and around Lancaster city making it a likely target in a full scale nuclear exchange.

The book divides the effects into five categories: blast, heat, fallout, radiation, and electromagnetic pulse. Then describes the immediate effects of the bomb in concentric regions.

Region I - The City of Lancaster

Within 1 mile of Penn Square, the overpressures range from 20 to 30 psi and the accompanying winds rage nearly 700 mph.... Two and a half miles from downtown, the winds slack off to a mere 300 mph.... The only buildings standing are some reinforced concrete structures on the outer fringe of the region such as parts of Park City Mall [Oh thank God! oh wait...]. Although the reinforced shells are still standing, they are gutted and damaged beyond repair. At best the three hospitals, Lancaster General, Lancaster Osteopathic, and St Joseph's are ragged skeletons poking up through heaps of rubble....

Hiroshima - 70 times smaller than a 1 MT bomb

Practically all of the people within this region are killed instantly or die shortly after the blast. Although some persons are killed by the sudden intense overpressure, most die as they are crushed by buildings or hit by flying missles of bricks, glass and furniture. Persons downtown who survive the powerful blast are fried by heat, killed by nuclear radiation or trapped under the rubble.... Many in bomb shelters are trapped and suffocate.

In short, life as we now know it in the center of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country ends....

If any group of people in the county would have a chance of survival, it's the Amish, since most live far from town in Region IV and beyond, and they're less dependent on the modern infrastructure. And if you've ever seen a barn-raising you get a sense that, if anyone could, they would rebuild. The house I grew up in, on the other hand, was in Region II, and would have looked similar to this one.

Region II
Residences four miles away from Penn Square near Willow Valley Square, East Towne Mall, Neffsville, Rohrerstown and Millersville would experience overpressures of 5 psi.... People in this region without shelter receive third degree burns from the heat of the fireball as well as flames from the fires... there is spontaneous ignition of clothing.... The danger from immediate nuclear radiation is gone since gamma rays generally do not travel this far.

The usual estimate of fatalities for this region is 50 percent.... But in contrast to Region I, a larger proportion of deaths here result from flame and burn injuries.

The devastation and ruin of Region I and Region II combined covers about 50 square miles.... For all practical purposes these two regions are desolate and uninhabitable.

The book goes on to the outer regions, details the medical effects, the shortage of medical care, an incapacitated emergency response system; the delayed effects from fallout, agricultural damage, social and psychological disruptions; and long-term genetic and environmental changes resulting from a full scale nuclear war. You get the idea. My dad the county coroner...? ...if he survived, would have nothing to work with and no one to work for.

It's a motherfucker.

NUCLEAR WAR and Lancaster County concludes with a diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis for The Final Epidemic. I never read this far when I was a kid. But now, thirty years later, even with the Soviet/US threat in remission, the Doomsday Clock is poised at six minutes before midnight! With today's different threats and fears the diagnosis has changed somewhat, but much of Kraybill and Ranck's prescription has maintained it's potency:

...world stability depends on a more equitable distribution of the earth's resources. This means that American national security lies in relieving hunger, disease, poverty, and misery throughout the world rather than securing ourselves against the coming assault from the have-not nations by enlarging our arsenals or by playing one nation against another. Nobody loves the bully and all will turn against him when given the opportunity. Our nation will be great by being humble and charitable and by evoking the best in others by example....

What does all of this have to do with Lancaster County? We believe that world events are not entirely beyond the control of the people.... We must make sure that our government is spending our national resources wisely and consistently with the best qualities of the American character....

There's something fundamentally true about these conclusions, regardless where you fall on the political spectrum. If they push that button...you can kiss your ass goodbye-goodbye!

So whatcha gonna do...about your ass?

Vegetable Man ....... Syd Barrett

2011-07-27T01:22:00.006-04:00

I'm starting a new post category: "I can't believe I never heard this before." So just bear with me if you have. I won't spend a lot of time on critical analysis.

I've loved Syd Barrett for a long time and somehow never heard his version of Vegetable Man until today. I guess it's never been officially released. I first got the song on the Jesus and Mary Chain single years ago. And I just now heard the Soft Boys' version. So I finally dug up Syd's Vegetable Man and found some other wonderful tapewreckage from the sessions he was recording for Pink Floyd's second album. He'd be coming pretty unhinged and getting booted from the band right around this time.

Some lovely eaten and warped tape here for your listening pleasure:

Vegetable Man
What a Shame Mary Jane
Swan Lee

From the Vegetable Man Where Are You? bootleg.
Salvage your wreckage here.

The Punk Starts Here ... The Bodies....... (Lancaster 1981-82)

2011-07-13T08:37:00.002-04:00

Art by Erik Levy, From a t-shirt screened by Jim Tesnar

I was going into seventh grade in 1981 and punk rock was just entering my consciousness. There were stories about this band of older guys called The Bodies, but by the time I could have gone to their shows, they had broken up. We tried to catch up wearing spiked hair, safety pins, skinny ties to school and doing the pogo at dances. My mom thought we looked cute. We started bands and put on shows before we even knew how to play instruments. The Bodies faded into legend as "Lancaster's first punk band" without ever releasing any original material but they were probably the first band in town doing anything like it, and they really could play their instruments! Along with all the others who got involved, The Bodies helped to ignite a strong little punk rock scene that became my teenage home.

Tapewrecks is proud to dig up The Story of The Bodies...

...as told by surviving band members and their friends:

The Bodies:
Tommy Bang (a.k.a. Tommy Leanza, drums)
Johnny Scrotum (a.k.a. John Bear, bass)
The Englishman (a.k.a. Dave Albert, guitar)
Gumby (a.k.a. Mark Gamber, vocals)

Johnny Scrotum

Johnny Scrotum: We started out playing Kansas, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Boomtown Rats and other mainstream crap. The original name of the band was George and the Dragons. I think we only practiced for a few weeks before George moved on. Tommy brought Kenny Gross to practice one day and we immediately gelled with him. Kenny had a large number of songs he had written, and we began playing a bunch of his stuff. A couple of his song titles were “Mental Illness” and “Fart Stains.” Kenny was a talented musician, but he also had a serious drug problem. Tommy caught him shooting heroin in the bathroom of his parent’s house, which is where we jammed. Kenny had just purchased, found, or stole a female manikin which he used as a microphone stand. Once the heroin kicked in, Kenny took it upon himself to dry hump the naked manikin on the front yard. Tommy and his family lived in a typical suburban neighborhood and even a stupid kid like me knew that was messed up. At this point we all knew that Kenny was not going to work out long term. He was too much of a mess.

Gumby: Kenny was a nice guy and extremely talented with some great songs but he had a bad drug and alcohol problem. One night Kenny stole a car, got drunk and hit a woman on Oregon Pike and that sent him to jail...

JS: One day at practice, I remember Tommy throwing on a Rezillos album, we listened to “Flying Saucer Attack” a couple of times, played it, continued on to the next track, so on and so forth until we knew the entire album. Tommy would sing (if you could call it that) so that we could hold it together. This is how the focus of the band began to change. Never Mind the Bollocks was the next album we focused on, and a practice or two later we had that album down. I think I may have a few seconds of this train wreck on tape somewhere. Now we just needed a frontman.

Gumby

G: ...and they started to audition new singers. Obviously I got the part and the band went from a "harder sounding Sharks" [a local new wave band] kind of thing doing a mix of Kenny's originals and stuff like Joe Jackson to balls out punk with the occasional "new wave" song thrown in for good measure.

JS: As I recall, Mark had been hanging around Tommy’s place when we played. When word got around that Kenny was out and we needed a singer, Mark wanted to give it a shot. He sang a couple of Sex Pistols songs and he was in. Mark proved to be an excellent front man, although he would occasionally drop the mic and have to retrieve it from the mosh pit… as I recall, it usually didn’t go well.

Laura Cotton (friend and photographer): I remember seeing Mark and Tommy walking around at Park City [Mall] sometime in the summer of '81- Mark had a safety pin or something like that in his face, and I thought they were the coolest thing I had ever seen in person! Later that day, we were told by someone that they were in the Bodies, a band that would be playing at Tom Paine's Backroom that night. My sister and I decided to take our chances and try to get in, although we were about 14 and 17 at the time. It certainly was no big quiz to get in and we became a part of the 'scene' there such as it was. I had a Canon TX camera that my Dad had bought me for Christmas, and I fancied myself an artist, so I started bringing my camera around and photographing the shows. I don't remember much else- we were all drunk.

G: Our first show was at Tom Paine's Backroom, which would later become the Chameleon. This was my first band and I remember getting on stage for the first time and snapping into a really uncomfortable sobriety. The music starts and as the time approaches when I have to sing something, I draw a total blank. Then the words just started coming out of my mouth, at least close to being in tune, and it was like I was outside of myself listening to all this happen. I'm not sure how long that lasted, maybe a few seconds or a minute or a song or two but it was the oddest thing. Then I kind of settled down and while I always got nervous before a show, that never happened again.

G: We probably owed most of our gigs to Blair King, who ran the Backroom and booked us fairly often. He was in one of those late 70's "new wave" bands, [Color Code] and may have fancied himself a "punker" so he liked us.

Blair King: My dad owned Tom Paine's and I ran the Backroom for a couple of years. They were a great Sex Pistols "tribute" act and tore up Devo's "Girl U Want" as well. I remember going to Tommy's house to audition them and hired them on the spot. In my opinion, their front man was BETTER than Mr. Rotten live.

"Malcolm" by Erik Levy

G: Bill Tormas, of Web of Sound fame, was the band's "manager"...whatever that meant...and Erik Levy [Kim Su] did the band's artwork and came up with the band mascot, Malcolm, who's mohawked head sat on Johnny's bass amp.

G: I can still close my eyes and picture Tommy's "Blow me, pal!" pin like it's in front of me. We were interviewed and played on Millersville [University] radio fairly often. One of my favorite Tommy moments was when we were on the way to the radio station and I had a swastika in my ear. Two girls passed us in the hall and as they passed one half whispered to the other "Did you see what he has in his ear?". Tommy does a Tigger bounce into this girl's face and in his loudest, most obnoxious, punk rocker voice yelled "YEAH, IT'S A FUCKING SWASTIKA!". I thought the girl was going to piss herself...good times!

Tommy Bang

G: And let's not forget when Tommy threw Tormas through the window of his own house when they lived on Fairview. That was freakin' hysterical! I don't remember much but I do remember some good stuff!

Tommy Bang: He did not actually go through the window!!! And I sure as hell didn't throw him...I mean really...Bill was a big guy back then...

G: LOL....ok, cool. I had vague memories of him having to come back in from outside but that's probably just blurred memories running together. I know I passed out on Bill's mom's lap because I didn't hear the end of that for...oh....10 years?

G: To the best of my knowledge, out of 3 full sets of songs, we had three whole originals and I don't think the band lasted in public for a full year. I remember doing Sex Pistols; Bad Brain, Teenage Lobotomy and We Want the Airwaves from the Ramones; Policy Story from Black Flag; I Kill Children from Dead Kennedys; One More Time from Joe Jackson; Girl U Want from Devo; Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head (Kicked In Tonight) from the Rezillos. Bodies originals were Riker's Island Addict", Punks in PA, and Skull Fucker. We usually played for a pretty good crowd and people seemed to like us but if you play other people's songs and you suck, you're idiots.

John Brubaker skanking

G: One of my favorite shows was at the Lititz Rec Center. The kids were slam-dancing and the guy that ran the place thought it was a fight and he turned off the power. Carl [Wolfe] apparently threatened him and the power went back on and the show continued. At one point I announced the next song, "WE'RE DOING POLICE STORY!" The song starts with guitar feedback for a second, then the band kicks in and I belt out the first line "This fucking city....is run by pigs!" and as I'm getting out the second half, I lift my head and see that the back of the place is lined with Lititz, Warwick and PA state police. "Aw shit, we're in it now". There were some arrests made outside and so on but the cops saw the kids slamming, knew was it was and didn't bother them or us. It was one of the longest 15 seconds of my life.

JS: I knocked the calluses off my fingertips during the first set and began bleeding, by the end of the a second set my bass was covered in blood and my fingers were killing me. Someone had some super glue and I used it as instant skin.

G: The last show was July 4th of whatever year it was at the Backroom. Tommy decided he had enough and "broke up the band" which John and Dave decided meant he quit. They asked me to stick around but I wanted to go in another direction, like back to school, and declined and, as far as I know, that was that.

JS: I was bummed when Tommy decided to leave. I do remember Tommy telling me some time later that he regretted leaving. I think given some time, we could have developed our own stuff and done some things. I also think we could have better utilized our young following and did more all age shows. We had a strong high school following, as we were all teenagers ourselves.

JS: The Englishman and myself practiced with a new drummer a couple of times, but I was returning to high school that fall and trying to get my act together so I told them I was no longer interested. I started playing for a heavy metal band the following year and continued playing through college, and during my teaching career. I eventually left the music scene in 1993 as my first child was about to be born.

Dave Albert - The Englishman

Kenny went on to write hundreds of songs, played in the Psycheholics, Future X, the Thunder B Band, and had a brief solo act called Kenny Gross' Suicide. Sadly, he died of a heroin overdose in NYC in 2004. Dave Albert "the Englishman" apparently also died some years ago, but I don't know the details. Mark Gamber went on to sing for Jack Lord's Hair and The OOgies. Tommy Leanza continues to drum and currently plays in The Sleeping World. Laura Cotton continued her photography and, with her sister Sue, opened State of Confusion, a punk clothing and accessory store and friendly hangout for anyone who didn't fit in anywhere else. Erik Levy aka Kim Su is a tattoo artist and played bass in Blackeyed Susan. Bill Tormas and Carl Wolf opened the Web of Sound record store and promoted dozens of shows in and around Lancaster. Blair King moved to Florida and formed the Beatlesque tribute band. Tom Paine's Backroom changed hands and became Chameleon, Central Pennsylvania's biggest club for original music. Dozens of original punk, hardcore, and garage bands sprouted up in Lancaster from the early-80s on.

TB: omg Mark.. we should keep in mind that all this BS is being documented on FB 4eva... we may NEVER live this stuff down now!

G: Yeah...but it was what, 30 years ago? Even going by the line in The Terminator "In 100 years who's gonna care?", we're a third of the way there!

This wreckage was rescued from Johnny's basement, but there are rumored to be other tapes out there.

Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight
Anarchy in the UK
Did You No Wrong
Bodies

Thanks to the band members for all the memories and to Laura Cotton for her photos!

If you were around Lancaster in those days and remember the bands, clubs, music stores, record labels, or any other part of the scene, please help us salvage that history!

LiLiPUT - Die Matrosen and Eisiger Wind (1980 and 81 singles)

2011-07-09T23:52:00.002-04:00

LiLiPUT hit me with quirky surprises in just about every song...way after they were long gone.

Die Matrosen

Eisiger Wind

La Música Callejera Pt. 6 .............. Estado de Puebla

2011-07-08T18:00:00.005-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

CHOLULA
...20) Rockets explode, vendors hawk squeaky toys, and the congregation of La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Remedios sings María madre mía. The bells toll as the procession descends from the 16th Century church that the Spanish built on top of the 2300 year-old ruins of Tlachihualtepetl, the world's largest pyramid.
La Música Callejera - Cholula

CUERNAVACA
21) A blind couple plays Las gaviotas and another song in the zócalo.
La Música Callejera - Cuernavaca

ACATLÁN
22) An off-duty mariachi sings for some very wasted friends as they talk to this gringo and sing along. He plays professionally in Cuernavaca on weekends....
La Música Callejera - Acatlán

Próxima estación: Oaxaca

Frog and Rabbit Records ................ Pennsylvania Rock Archives

2011-06-19T11:32:00.001-04:00

My search for hometown wreckage brought me to the mysterious Frog and Rabbit Records from Dellville, PA (pop. 8,703). They reissued 45s in tiny runs of some pretty whacked-out Pennsylvania psychedelic recordings from the 60s and 70s. Some are Frog records, and some are Rabbit records. I haven't figured out the band/species relationship. Nor am I sure who the humans are behind the label, although there is significant evidence pointing toward Billy Synth from the Turnups and the curator of Psychedelic Unknowns series (It's all out of the Harrisburg area, cut and paste artwork, Billy and the Star Jets, and there are only a few people as steeped in twisted, rare psych as Billy). But this has yet to be confirmed or denied. For now the label seems to only exist as a ReverbNation page "We're just here posting past Penna rock for the ages...." was the only reply I got, but thanks for the salvage operation!

I'm telling you, you have never, ever been kissed
'Till you've gazed into polka dotted eyes

The Snaps from the Philly area have a song catchy enough to make WFILs 1966 top-ten but I never heard it until now. I love the hair-flipping beat and the faintly Captain Beefhearty timbre of the singer's voice. Creation's Disciple put out two really unusual sounding sides with interesting bass lines. The double-timed Psychedelic Retraction has a fabulous title, but the lyrics are pretty standard, rabidly girl-hating 60s punk fare, made up for on the flip side with the longing I'll Remember and just the sweetest little guitar break. Ognir and the Night People gives us a prototypical punker done really, really well. Then Frog and Rabbit hop right on into the 70s with a lot of bad acid psych and prog rock, but The Reflection stands out among the rest. I'd be curious to know the date on this record. Sounds like either they were channeling The Stooges I'm Sick of You, or Ron Asheton caught a show by the Lebanon Community Theatre at some point prior to 1973.

The Snaps - Polka Dotted Eyes (Philadelphia)
Creation's Disciple - Psychedelic Retraction b/w I'll Remember* (Northwestern PA or New York?)
Ognir and the Night People - I Found a New Love (Coal Region)
The Reflection - Into the Sun (Lebanon)

Stay tuned for more Frog and Rabbit wreckage by Joey Welz, Billy Synth, and The Magic Mushrooms!

*I'll Remember downloaded from Spin the Groove

Papi, can you turn off that music and play Chicken Street?

2011-06-18T16:00:00.002-04:00

My 6-year-old daughter's favorite song is Chicken Street, by The MC5. She plays it over and over and walks around singing,

Chicken Street, it's got that beat.
Chicken Street, where all the kids peep!

The MC5 - Shakin' Street

Barbara Manning Back in the Day .............. 28th Day and World of Pooh

2011-06-15T19:56:00.039-04:00

“It might take me 10 years to do it, but I’m gonna be a rock star.”

28th Day

Rock star? Could be, but maybe Barbara Manning is just too humble and friendly to pull it off. She makes friends everywhere and seems to form rock bands or collaborate with a good number of them. She's cut albums on Matador Records but turns down interviews with glossy media that want to dress her up. Because it's all about the band.

Q: If Spin or Rolling Stone asked you to do an interview now, would you?
A: If they would do it with the band, or if I could talk about the band endlessly. It has to be seen as a band or I'll get really bored. I don't want to be alone all the time... my biggest desire as far as music goes is to be in a band where I am not the leader, not the focus, where the audience looks at the whole band rather than me. -Stay Free (1990s)

I got to see the SF Seals and Barbara's solo shows a few times in the 90s, opening for her Aussie and Kiwi friends Dirty Three and Tall Dwarfs in San Francisco. And she was often in the audience at other shows, without any airs despite being a hot indie item by that time.

Most of that buzz has died down, but recently I've been listening to Barbara Manning through her Radio Detour show on hometown Chico, California's KZFR. It's like a window into her brain, her vast knowledge of music "off the beaten track," and her somewhat inept control of station DJ equipment. She always blows my mind with obscure, influential, and really good music, and makes me laugh with her self-effacing banter and dead-air, wrong-speed, which darn button do I press? goofs.

Barbara's first two bands both existed before she joined up with them, but she quickly became a key part of their sound and songs. Cole Marquis and Barbara "Bobbi" Manning were learning to play guitar and bass, respectively as they went and they shared vocals a la John Doe and Exene and even a bit of The Go Gos This Town on Stones of Judgement. And despite Cole's modest words, they played quite well.

We were so green in the beginning, we could hardly play, but we all believed in what we were doing. We were having fun, and we didn’t hold anything back. We made up for the lack of skill with energy, fear, alcohol and faith. -Cole

There may not be more genuine singing than from two people romantically tied. Cole and I naturally jumped into each other’s songs, overlapping and responding.... The lyrics were often about each other, as if it were the only way to have our feelings heard. -Barbara

...Barbara’s frustration with one recording session culminated with her screaming at the top of her lungs during a vocal take of “Burnsite” in an effort to deafen me in the control room.... -Russ Tolman (record producer)

How do I explain it? We were very young. It was our first band. We thought we were the best band in the world. We started to hate each other. Isn’t it only natural? -Barbara - Chico News and Review (2003)

World of Pooh

San Francisco's World of Pooh picked up Barbara where 28th Day let her off, bringing an edgier sound with more distortion in some places and more Batsy New Zealand pops in others.

And just to start in true Tapewreckage spirit, claim some pre-band Bobbi and her sister Terri singing a Bee Gees tune:

Run to Me *

28th Day (1983-85)
Burnsite
Holiday
Stones of Judgement

World of Pooh (1986-1990)

Someone Wants You Dead
Somewhere Soon
Scissors

Other bands Barbara Manning has been in:
The Tablespoons/SF Seals, *Glands of External Secretion, Snowmen, The Go-Luckys, The Sleaze Tax, Champion, Rocket 69

...I always wanted to be in a band, ever since I was a child. I always knew.

Barbara Manning will be playing HERE in Philly on June 29th! (Hey, you want to start a band?)

La Música Callejera Pt. 5 - Puebla

2011-06-05T16:54:00.002-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

PUEBLA

...On the busy commercial streets, wherever money flows in the capital of Puebla there are musicians on every block trying to scrape by. 15) A family strolling, papá with trumpet, mamá with tambourine, and niños collecting tips. 16) A melody on guitar and mandolin by an elderly blind couple. 17) Down the street a saxophonist and drummer play a staccato danzón. 18) Still farther on sits a blind man playing maraca with his sighted wife playing guitar. 19) And yet another blind woman stands in the doorway of a stone building singing from her heart as people walk by her. Not realizing I had stopped to listen, she laughs as I thank her....

La Música Callejera - Puebla

Próximas estaciones: Cholula, Cuernavaca, y Acatlán, Puebla

Mikey Wild and the Mess

2011-05-29T00:38:00.000-04:00

Mikey Wild died the other day. He made himself a fixture around South Street and Philly punk long before I came poking around the scene in the late 80s. I really knew I was back in Philly when I ran into him about three years ago at the Record Exchange, where I ALWAYS saw him 20 years earlier. He wrote songs, played gigs, recorded records, made art, and had a very supportive and protective group of friends and fans. Despite a mental disability, he was a real showman proud of the unique abilities he had. I never saw him perform, but I picked up his first single when it came out in 1988 and, I have to say, he always seemed happier than his angry punk songs would suggest. But then again, angry punk songs make me happy too. Right on Mikey.

I Hate New York

Die Die Die

Mikey's Obituary

The Shaynes (Lancaster 1966-67)

2011-05-21T23:56:00.003-04:00

These handsome young men recorded at least three singles on Pee-Vee Records in 1966 and 1967. I first heard them on the 1983 Return of the Young Pennsylvanians comp. Pee-Vee was run by Charles Miller aka Pancho Villa and put out many doo-wop, garage, and prog rock singles from 1964-74. Butch King (front, center?) was the singer.

You Tell Me Girl b/w Mo-Town Workout (Pee-Vee 140)
From My Window b/w I'll Always Be (Pee-Vee 142)
Valarie b/w Let's Go Steady

Sources: Bona Fide Records, WFMU's Rock and Soul Ichiban, WFMU Fool's Paradise

If you were around Lancaster in those days and remember the bands, clubs, music stores, record labels, or any other part of the scene, please help us salvage that history!

The Couriers (Lancaster 1965)

2011-05-15T00:54:00.001-04:00

I spy Alfred E. Neuman!

The Couriers recorded only one single on Lancaster's C.V. label after winning a contest at the "Moose Hall."

We didn't exactly disappear after "Stompin' Time". We were supposed to cut two more 45's as per our informal contract with Chuck Raymond and Pancho, who awarded us the opportunity to make records after we won a Battle Of The Bands at Moose Hall in Lancaster. We never did cut those other two sides, but, for us as a band, the experience of recording and releasing "Stompin' Time Again" was a wonderful thing. It even got to #8 on the WLAN Top 60. I still think it sounds great to hear it, and I've always thought it sounded less "local" than most of the records cut by Lancaster bands, with the exception of The Shaynes, who I thought cut two very cool records themselves.... - Steve Kurtz, Couriers vocalist

Is that the same as the Moose Lodge that the Web of Sound record store rented out for local bands and Hasil Adkins in the mid-80s? And they made WLAN's playlist, woo-hoo! Apparently local bands playing original music were able to get significant airplay on the big commercial radio stations in the 60s. The rules were a little different then.

Stomping Time Again
Feelings

(Music, photos, and quotation from Garage Hangover)If you were around Lancaster in those days and remember the bands, clubs, music stores, record labels, or any other part of the scene, please help us salvage that history!

The Crystalaires.... ...(Lancaster 1959)

2011-05-10T23:17:00.001-04:00

The reformed Crystalaires (after the accident).

The only info I've found on this group is from Daddy C's Youtube channel, but it's a fascinating and terrible story so here it is:

The Crystalaires were a group from Lancaster, PA and were the hottest act in town back in 1959. On May 25, 1959, while coming home from a gig in Reading, PA, they were involved in a serious car accident that claimed the lives of 4 members of the group. Earlier that evening they were informed by their manager that King Records, out of Cincinnati, OH, offered them a record deal and wanted them to come to Chicago to re-cut "Nobody Nowhere" for national release. In July of 1960, Stan Selfon, of Stan's Record Bar in Lancaster, released the 2nd version of the tune (complete with bad splices in the master tape), on Sound Souvenir No.1. The proceeds (in part) were intended for the families of the deceased members to raise money for their headstones.

Nobody Nowhere

photo by M. Fitzgerald

The Stan's Record Bar connection is interesting. I bought my first records there in the early 80s and always wondered who Stan was. The store goes way back and it's still there at 48 N Prince Street! The accident must have been big local news, so if anyone has access to Lancaster newspapers on microfilm it would be interesting to read the articles and obits.If you were around Lancaster in those days and remember the bands, clubs, music stores, record labels, or any other part of the scene, please help us salvage that history!

La Música Callejera Pt. 4 - Mexico D.F.

2011-05-07T23:39:00.003-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

MEXICO D.F.

After Zacatecas and Guanajuato, the streets of Mexico City were a swirling vortex of noise and activity. But curiously, I encountered relatively little music. True, the city is a locus of Rock en Español, and I never made it to Plaza Garibaldi, the Grand Ole Opry of traditional mariachi, but there was a lack of everyday buskers eeking it out on the street. I'm not sure if there were legal restrictions or practical issues that discouraged musicians. Or maybe I just didn't make it to the right places. ...14) I was fortunate to happen upon this rattletrap marimba, drum, and gourd conjunto hauling their instruments on their backs from bar to bar and competing with the sounds of passing traffic.

La Música Callejera - México D.F.

Próxima estación: Puebla

The Home Recordings of Linda Smith

2011-04-27T23:37:00.003-04:00

Back around 1990 the home recording scene was a globally scattered bunch of people who taped music on four-track recorders, dubbed cassettes, xeroxed covers, mailed them to magazines with tiny press runs -- Factsheet 5, Unhinged, File 13 -- and traded with others doing the same. This was wonderful pre-Internet artistic democracy at its best and a swirl of indulgent junk at its worst. So when you found something good, it was a real prize. Linda Smith's cassettes were a quiet little jackpot.

I found the process of recording all my own tracks much more interesting and satisfying than rehearsing or playing live. The 4 track cassette recorder allowed me to to find another way of making music, a method more akin to painting a picture. Writing songs became a more immediate and personal experience. -Linda Smith, from The Living Archive of Underground Music

Linda released her tapes on her own little label called Preference. I loved her first three cassettes. Early on, her songs had 60s girlbandlike pop arrangements all stripped down and minimal with her own backup vocals, and a nice cover of Jackie DeShannon's Put a Little Love in Your Heart for added emphasis. Later on her songs developed a slightly moodier tone that's hard to categorize, bringing in creative percussion and sounds but keeping the poppy tunes, at one point, Figment of Your Imagination, reminding me of the Dixie Cups' Iko Iko, and what sounds like a toy organ making for a dreamy time. All of her songs are available at her new website: The Home Recordings of Linda Smith.

The Space Between the Buildings (1987)

What Elanora Told Isabella
Put a Little Love in Your Heart

Do You Know the Way...? (1988)

Idea
Confidence

Love Songs for Laughs (1990)

Imaginary Conversation

No More
If One Day

Put It In Writing (1991)
Put it in Writing
Figment of Your Imagination
Lonely's not the Word

The Original Sins ...................Skeletons in the Garage

2011-04-23T22:19:00.040-04:00

Anytime The Original Sins came down the turnpike from post-steel town Bethlehem, I went alone because I knew I wouldn't be good company. I'd just be one of those fools having a freak-out up in front of the stage. Not a good date really.

They rode the lines between 60s garage punk, 1970 Detroit rock and roll, and the Paisley Underground but for their complete rejection of 80s production values. Picture JT screaming at the sound guy at the Khyber Pass pub in Philly: "GET THE FUCKING REVERB OFF THE VOCALS!" My God, just listen to the switchbacks on Get Right Back between the la-de-da bubblegum hooks and Iggy Stooge shrieking-in-tongues wah-wah mayhem.

These tracks are from the Skeletons in the Garage CD: live rehearsal takes and b-sides from between 1986 and 96.

There are moments when we're playing live when everything is just so on, so right, that it doesn't matter if I'm out of tune, or I blow a chord or forget the words--the music is driving and we're just in the backseat enjoying the ride.... -- JT

Possession
Can't Get Over You
The Other Day
Ego
Get Right Back

The band has long since broken up, but you can still witness Brother JT going off the deep-end with his solo albums, collaborations, and current shows. Scroll down and spend a little time with his kooky Rockology 101 videos and have a little freak-out at home.

Alice, Linda, & Sybil ............. Hawaiian Honeymoon Thrift Find #1

2011-04-18T10:16:00.005-04:00

I promised some traditional Hawaiian music, so here we go with a little personal background, some random asides, and a mini-primer:

Genevieve and I thought we were choosing the quintessential honeymoon destination. We figured we might as well go to Hawaii while we were still on the West Coast but my key frame of reference was still the Brady Bunch's tabu-tiki episode. Fortunately about that time, my neighbor/installation artist/Hawaiian shirt collector, Rae Culbert played me a compilation of Hawaiian music from the 1930's that completely wowed me with falsetto voices and country-swinglike guitar rhythms. I all but forced him to give me that LP and set out to find more.

As it turned out, we steered clear of the cities and resorts and spent our time on the Big Island and Kauai. We hiked the trails, and I sacrificed my wife's sweet blood to evil mosquitoes while they barely touched me. We geekily read Hanahana, an oral history of Hawaiian and Japanese workers in the 20's through the 40s. We booked our rooms one night at a time and we stayed at the historic and humble Manago Hotel in the town of Captain Cook that was an built as a stop for itinerant workers; although we had a bed instead of a tatami. We drove on roads that the rental car agency said were off-limits and realized why when we a sign that warned of "overhead artillery firing." Apparently the US Army still uses Hawaii for target practice. We ate lots of lau lau and strawberry papayas. I don't think we saw one record store the entire time, but we spent as much time in thrift stores and flea markets as on black sand beaches and found a dozen or so vintage Hawaiian records in all their scratchy glory.

"Traditional" music, like luau pork and everything else in Hawaii, is hapa, a mixture and exchange of cultural styles and influences which was not always as harmonious or peaceful as the music now suggests. Hawaiian religious chants were blended with haole Protestant hymns sung in falsetto, the guitar of the Mexican vaqueros was adopted into the slack-key style, and the Portuguese bruguinha became the prototype for the ukulele. The last monarch, Queen Lili'uokalani composer of Aloha Oe, the most famous Hawaiian song, continued to write music while under house arrest by a gang of US planters demanding annexation and free access to Hawaiian land and labor. The music that developed in the islands became hugely popular in the US and around the world starting in the 1930s and absorbed mainland jazz and popular influences as it became more commercialized. In turn it had a huge impact on mainsteam US music, particularly country. Just listen to those steel guitar yodelers like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.

The Alice Fredlund Serenaders, the Halekulani Girls, were a Waikiki hotel act in the 1950s and 60s. They played traditional Hawaiian songs with occasional novelty numbers thrown in, but they were the real deal.

Hoe hoe na wa'a
Sweet lei lehua
Hu-i e

La Música Callejera Pt. 3 - Guanajuato

2011-04-14T10:52:00.012-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

GUANAJUATO
This colonial town is brimming with music on every corner plying the tourists and locals alike.
...8) The bus onloads a guitar trio just long enough to play a bolero or two before the next stop. 9) An elderly blind singer asks, "Un ayudita jovenes...?" 10) An organillero with a hand cranked calliope. 11) A músico playing guitar and harmonica walking the long line of tourists at the mummy museum. He has a little bucket hooked on the tuning keys. [bizarre story here: A 1833 cholera epidemic killed hundreds of people who were hastily buried in the cemetery; a few were even still alive. A law required the families to pay a tax to keep their relatives in the ground. If they couldn't pay, the corpses were disinterred and stored in a warehouse. It was found that many were naturally mummified by minerals in the soil. When the mummies began attracting tourists, cemetery workers began charging for admission, and eventually El Museo De Las Momias was built.] 12) An old lady belts out Flor morena. 13) La malagueña by a guitar trio accompanied by the cathedral bells working the outdoor cafés and resaurants....

La Música Callejera - Guanajuato

Próxima estación: México DF

Vem quente que eu estou fervendo

2011-04-14T00:22:00.012-04:00

"It's So Hot I'm Boiling"

Nalva Aguiar can shimmy.

Here's the original by Erasmo Carlos e seus Tremandões

Vem quente que eu estou fervendo (from Garage Hangover)

The Return of the Young Pennsylvanians

2011-04-10T00:04:00.007-04:00

The Shaynes of Lancaster

Uh oh. It struck me that in the mid-80's when I was into the neo-garage scene, those original 60s punk bands that I thought were so ancient at the time were really less than 20 years out. Now we're another 25 years further along, and I feel old.

Rick Noll started Bona Fide Records in the living room of his York, PA apartment and has been putting out obscurities from the PA/MD/NJ area since 1983. He's a true, homegrown, sporadic, one-man record company and a big supporter of local bands as long as they were true to certain basic tenets of rock. On albums like The Train to Disaster and The Deadly Spawn he brought us quite a few new bands in the garage punk arena that had a big impact on me. My favorites, like The Left, The Velvet Monkeys, The Skeptics, and The Stump Wizards, took a pill from the garage, surf, and psychedelia of two decades past without subscribing to the full blown retro dogma. I was at Rick's place in 1985 listening to a test-pressing and pried one of the last copies of The Return of the Young Pennsylvanians from him. This was among the earliest of the 60s garage reissue comps that inspired a whole new crop of Prince Valiant haircuts.

The Return was the second of two similar albums released in 1982 and 1983. I don't know anything about Pennsylvania Unknowns, but I present to you a battle of the Penna 60s punk band compilations:

Flowerz-I Need Love Now (Reading)
The Scholars-I Need Your Lovin' (Reading)
The Hides-Don't Be Difficult (Pittsburgh)
Pat Farrell and the Believers-Bad Woman (Reading)
The Bends-If It's All the Same To You
Joe Frank and the Knights-Can't Find a Way
The Combenashuns-What'cha Gonna Do (Bethlehem)
The Loose Enz-A World Outside (York)
The Starlites-I Can't See You (Reading)
The Shandells-Chimes (Harrisburg)
The Centurys-Endless Search (Lebanon)
King's Ransom-Shadows of Dawn (Allentown)
The Bentleys-Now It's Gone (Allentown)
The Colors of Night-C-O-L-O-R-S (Philadelphia)
The Loose Enz-The Black Door
The Loose Enz-Easy Rider
Fred-A Love Song (Harrisburg)

The Shaynes-You Tell Me Girl (Lancaster)
The Loose Enz-A Better Man Than I (York)
The Down Children-I Can Tell (Philadelphia)
The Centurys-Hard Time (Lebanon)
The Centurys-I Can Tell
The Dogs-Don't Try To Help Me (Philadelphia)
Flowerz-Flyte (Reading)
Flowerz-Talken About Love
The Shaynes-From My Window
The Bounty Hunters-The Sun Went Away (Philadelphia)
The Bounty Hunters-Somewhere
The Bucaneers-I'm a Fool (Philadelphia)
Bright Image-People In the Town (Philadelphia)
Kindred Spirit-Blue Avenue (Johnstown)

Both compilations are available at Paradise of Garage Comps.
Check out the garage band known as The Young Pennsylvanians, from Japan!

Radio RASD - ShortWaveMusic #2

2011-04-06T22:26:00.003-04:00

This transmission was posted on Myke.me/ShortWaveMusic. See my intro to this fascinating site here.

From a signal originating in Algeria, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has claimed the independence of Western Sahara from Morocco since 1976. Here the transmission, picked up in New England, sends a beautiful voice determined to be heard across a sea of atmospheric traffic.

Radio RASD #2

The original posts on Myke.me:

ShortWaveMusic - Radio RASD #1

ShortWaveMusic - Radio RASD #2

ShortWaveMusic - Radio RASD #3

The Scientists - Rubber Never Sleeps

2011-04-01T23:03:00.007-04:00

This is a tape of live songs that I dubbed from a dub of a dub and wore out in a paint splattered boombox working as a fix-it man. There's a good downloadable copy and write-up here so I won't go on about it except to point out mysterious shift in sound between the upbeat early songs and the darker creeposurfer dirges they developed in the early/mid-Eighties which I attribute to Los Saicos Devolution Hypothesis.

1979-80

Frantic Romantic
Melodramatic Touch

1982-84
Swampland
We Had Love

Los Saicos Devolution Hypothesis: Anthropsychomusicopological Diffusion, Multiregional Primordial Soup, or the Return of Ancient Space Travelers?

2011-03-27T11:45:00.004-04:00

It remains a mystery to scientists (lower-case "s") how a small band of Peruvians in 1964 could have devolved to such heights of primitivism as Los Saicos. Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, I posit alien intervention or total bodysnatcherization. This type of monstruo-sludge could never have been dredged up by the ancestors of the highly sophisticated Inca Empire. Could such primitive sounds from the Anglophone world have filtered that far south via border-blaster radio and vinyl? The kids in Lima were certainly listening to the Beatles and the Stones, but did they know The Trashmen, The Rats, The Sonics, or Screaming Lord Sutch? The sound of Los Saicos would suggest that they had suffered prolonged exposure to either Surfin' Bird or atomic rays, however the fact that they predate The Cramps by at least 10 years leaves me convinced of the latter; resulting from the intervention by an extraterrestrial culture. Or was it the same aliens hanging around since the Nazca Line days? If earthly in origin, Los Saicos would have had to have devolved their South American swampy horror-rock sound spontaneously and parallel to the paleolithic sounds being generated in North America and England in a reversal of the debunked multiregional theory of the parallel evolution of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus. Sapiens did not do the nasty with Neanderthals everywhere! This, of course, leaves the missing link: Did Los Saicos read early manuscripts of the Celestine Prohecy and "vibrate" to another dimension? Or did they catch the Kon Tiki back to Australia in 1982 and abduct The Scientists?

Demolición
Cementerio
El entierro de los gatos
Fugitivo de Alcatraz
Salvaje

The rest of Los Saicos 45s are downloadable from Dr. Schluss' Garage.

Kirk and the Jerks ... Volume I ...... (Lancaster 1986)

2011-03-19T00:01:00.014-04:00

Kirk lived a few blocks away and I used to listen and trade records with him and the Jerks in his basement bedroom. His mom would stomp on the floor when we got too loud.

(thud, thud, thud)

The band included Dave and Kirk from Nobody's Fools. Kirk moved from drums to vocals and Dave's little brother Eric took over on bass. They sped things up but stopped well short of hardcore keeping to the melodic songs with super hooks and backup harmonies - sort of move from '77 British to '78 Dead Boys with the Peter Brady Time to Change sound.

I'm gonna walk around tonight
When it hits the streets I'm gonna...
Walk around until daylight
When it hits the streets I'm gonna...
Fight to be the man I am
When it hits the streets I'm gonna...
Find out if I'm a man
When it hits the streets tonight!

(thud thud thud)

Who Cares If Tomorrow Comes
Too Many Times
Guts for Glory
Hang On To the Dream
Let's Make a Revolution
When It Hits the Streets
Flame Thrower Love

The Jerks were also the backing band for Ray Rhythm. After the Jerks, Dave and Eric formed Mystery City. Eric formed the Stiletto Boys featuring Rummager of the Velvet Monkeys on drums. Mark joined Substitute. Stay tuned for more.

La Música Callejera, Pt. 2 - Zacatecas

2011-03-17T22:23:00.009-04:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995

Read the series introduction here.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

ZACATECAS
...6) Una callejonada de tamboraso clangs through the streets every night with a party in tow. The invited guests wear a little ceramic cup on a cord around their neck that receives regular refills of tequila. The rest of us just tag along for the fun. This party crashes you! Here they're playing the standard El mariachi loco and latest craze La Macarena. 7) This accordionist plays with his wife and children at his side in the evenings. During the day the young boy returns to play alone....

La Música Callejera - Zacatecas

Próxima estación: Guanajuato

Pineapple Princess!

2011-03-11T23:40:00.012-05:00

A little bit Barrel House Annie, a little bit Henry Rollins, a lot twin-distorto ukulele. What more could you ask for? Digging through the file cabinet in search of a receipt for the tax man, I found an old copy of Kiss My Pineapple, a wonderfully irreverent ukulele zine put out by Beth and Pamela. If I were to segue from punk rock to traditional Hawaiian music (now look here!) I would certainly go through these lovely ladies I was lucky enough to see live a couple times in SF's late Chameleon Club.

Now where's that dang receipt.

Roll Out
Chinese Food
We Suck
Na Moku Eha

I'm not making this up. Check their website here.

The Stump Wizards

2011-03-05T19:25:00.010-05:00

The Stump Wizards brought a whole new retro sound to my high school ears in 1985 with their irked garage punk via the Flamin' Groovies 3-piece sound updated with some mosshy parts and doubletimed rockouts for the kids to slam to. They drew a pretty diverse crowd of punkers, metalheads, and 60s garage fans from around Central Pennsylvania playing as we did in those days in rented American Legion halls and Moose Lodges. The almost off-key vocals and sometimes upside-down beat sounds like they were barely holding it together. That and solid songwriting made them some of the best music going. This was their first demo tape that I know and they released a number of records afterwards. Bassist Eric Vermillion escaped suburban PA to play with post Velvet Monkeys members in NYCs Gumball, and guitarist/vocalist Jack Chiara went on to play with Australian ex-Radio Birdman members in Deep Reduction. Not bad for a couple of Camp Hill kids.

Why
Sometimes
Michelle Psalm 16
Tomorrow Night
Slow Death
I Don't Want You Anymore

The Dils - Sound of the Rain

2011-02-27T00:10:00.006-05:00

The Dils opened for the Pistols, in 1978, wrote melodic, political punkers like Class War, never recorded a full album, but left us with this beauty. The Sound of the Rain is available on a few Dils compilations and they polished up and re-released it as a Rank and File tune in 1984.

The Dils - Sound of the Rain

De Tlatelolco a Tlatelolco ............. (y Tunéz, Egipto, Bahrein, Yemen, Libia, Marruecos, Siria....)

2011-02-20T22:30:00.016-05:00

In 1968, as the eyes of the world focused on Mexico City in anticipation of the summer Olympics just weeks away, students marched peacefully calling for democracy and revolution. Thousands had been arrested. By October the 2nd, some ten thousand crowded the Plaza de Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, surrounded by police and army and helicopters and tanks. Shots were heard, fired by government agitators at the troops to justify the suppression of the protests. Troops opened fire on the crowds and rampaged through the night. By dawn dozens or hundreds were dead. By noon, the plaza was scrubbed clean and the Olympics started on schedule a few days later.

I know very little about this record. Just that it was performed and recorded in 1979 by Teatro Mascarones de Cuernavaca to keep the memory of the massacre alive. I picked it up at a garage sale in San Francisco in the mid-90's, only vaguely familiar with the events of 1968. The musical pieces included here are in the nueva cancion folk, protest style. The first two are sung by members of Teatro Mascarones and the last one is by Angel Parra, of the first-family of Chilean nueva cancion. The performance picks up the continuum of oppression from the Spanish Conquest, to Mexico 1968, to the ongoing suppression of the truth by the ruling PRI party, which remained in power until 2001.

Un lugar - Javier Sánchez
2 de octubre - Víctor Sanen
Mexico '68: Homenaje a los estudiantes mexicanos - Angel Parra

Para que nunca se olviden

las gloriosas olimpiadas

mandó a matar el gobierno

cuatrocientos camaradas....

...Pero esas manchas no salen

ni con jabón, ni con agua....

So you never forget
the glorious Olympics,
the government ordered the killing
of four-hundred comrades....

...But these spots will not wash with soap, nor with water....

Los Mascarones - De Tlatelolco a Tlatelolco

More info here: Mexico '68: A Movement, A Massacre, and the 40-Year Search for Truth - Radio Diaries
Massacre in Mexico by Elena Poniatowska

And here: Al Jazeera

Demented Ionosphere - CCR via Shortwave

2011-02-12T22:24:00.019-05:00

What happens when you send a 1968 hit record by Creedence Clearwater Revival through a shortwave transmitter in 2001, skittering off the ionosphere at nearly the speed of light, to be caught by an antenna halfway around the planet? Maybe nothing, or like a tree falling in the forest; it never really happened. Or a listener might hear noise and keep turning the dial. Nothing again. But one guy hears music, stays on frequency, lays it down on tape, and posts it on his blog in 2005. We have ShortWaveMusic, my favorite blog in the cybersphere in 2011.
Myke Dodge Weiskopf records transmissions in his travels for ShortWaveMusic,

a lifelong documentary series which preserves the sound of music (and/or musical speech and noise) as heard via shortwave radio.

My long-term goal is to tell the story of shortwave broadcasting in the early 21st century by capturing the extraordinary and varied ways in which people continue to communicate by radio, despite the advent of newer and more glamorous technologies.

He has a keen ear for music and finds the real art and interest in the synthesis of human sounds and natural phenomena happening over our heads (An Alan Lomax of the atmosphere?).

Here, we put Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s agonizing white-boy garage-band blues choogle through the space-wringer, and emerge with something much more palatable and progressive: Vive le instant avant-garde!

His blog is a fascinating read, peppered with radio jargon and descriptive phrases that challenge you to figure out their meaning by listening to the tracks.

Try some of these:

propagation decay
phasing
ionospheric placebo
skywave-ricocheted code throttle
fading
teletype chirp
heterodyne
data squall

This transmission of Suzie Q is twisted almost beyond recognition. I listened to the original just for comparison and because I could hardly believe my ears - especially the distorted tones of the guitar solo warbling vocals in the middle. It sounds too intentional to be natural, but humans could never have done this.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q via shortwave radio

A Date with the Velvet Monkeys

2011-02-09T23:27:00.020-05:00

Everything Is Right
(1981 Cassette)

I had this very tape playing as moood music for an almost semi-romantic moment when my machine gobbled it during my favorite song. We spent the rest of the date trying to unwrap about 30 seconds of Any Day Now from around the capstan and talking about US intervention in El Salvador. It was really hot.

Some of the songs on the cassette were rerecorded on the slightly more polished and reverby Future LP in 1984. Parts of both were re-released by Shimmy-Disc in 1988 as Rotting Corpse au-Go-Go. I posted here the grittier cassette versions, commercial breaks, and the fragments of live songs that were left off the Shimmy LP. Despite the chewed up part, this version of Any Day Now has the best vibrato keyboard ever (but if someone out there could rip an uncrumpled copy for me I'd be very grateful).

Everything Is Right
Any Day Now (eaten)
The Vox Wah Wah Pedal!
Velvet Monkeys (live)
Velvet Monkeys
You’re Not There (live)
True Believers (live)
Velvet Monkeys (live)

August 2011 addendum: New Wreckage Recovered!
Don Fleming remastered Everything is Right through Instant Mayhem Productions. It's now on CD on Thick Syrup Records and downloadable here. The whole album is really worth checking out. There are some additional live tracks and a super cool cover of The Ventures' The Creeper with drum machine!

Here's the recovered, remastered, uneaten Any Day Now.

La Música Callejera, Pt. 1 - Chihuahua

2011-02-06T00:01:00.010-05:00

Street Music of Mexico and Central America
July-October 1995
With a single bag and a handheld tape recorder I stretched my savings out for 4 months traveling second-class, staying in the cheapest rooms, and taking home sounds for souvenirs. Inspired by Alan Lomax recordings, and a tape from the public library called Street Music of Java, I recorded music in the streets, buses, trains, cafés, and zócalos along with all their glorious noise. At the time, it enabled me to be with people and places without having a camera in front of my face. Sometimes I taped discreetly and at others I set the machine on a table and let it run. I edited it down to one tape and made copies for friends and family. Listening to it now brings back memories better than any photo album ever could. I'll post all 90 minutes and liner notes, in parts, by location, until I get to the end of the tape - and the trip.

Dedicated to street musicians making a living peso a peso.

CHIHUAHUA
1) The train took me southbound through the Sonoran Desert, then northeast through the Copper Canyon, open windows on the passenger cars, no light at night except for the lit ends of cigarettes, attached to a long line of freight cars also carrying passengers; migrant workers returning home. Spent one night half-sleeping on a station platform with the metallic roll and crash of coupling boxcars. 2) José the tap dancing harmonica player doing El Rancho Grande. 3) A conjunto of blind men. 4) La banda del carro rojo, a narcocorrido by Los Tigres del Norte, done in an original style. 5) My little friends Luisa and Miguel making a meal of chicharrón y coca-cola....

La Música Callejera - Chihuahua

Próxima estación: Zacatecas

Nobody's Fools (Lancaster 1985)

2011-01-15T00:22:00.013-05:00

While most of the teenage punkers were thrashing to hardcore in 1985, these three were paying homage to the melodic old-school. Joel, Dave, and Kirk were connoisseurs of the 1977 sound, trading records, and writing songs in the style of the Clash, the Dead Boys, and Stiff Little Fingers with lyrics growling for freedom from life's struggles. There was something amusing about 14 year-olds practicing in their parents' two-car garage songs about social strife, prostitutes, and bloodshed in the back alley. If any of us in our suburban township had ever seen a back alley, the blood that was shed was probably from our knees on a Big Wheel. These songs are from Nobody's Fools first tape, packed with 24 songs, recorded on a boombox and a RadioShack 4-channel mixer. They may have just been learning to play their instruments, but Nobody's Fools did it in style, cranking out dozens songs with hooks to pogo to.
Joel went on to become Jet Silver & the Dolls of Venus, and Kirk and Dave formed Kirk & the Jerks.

Man with a Gun
The Kids Aren't Dead
Don't Put Me in Bondage
Emergency
Stop and Go
Suzie Q
She Does Tricks

The Five

2011-01-14T21:25:00.004-05:00

What's a tapewreck you ask? Just to set the parameters a bit here, I'm reposting this standout song from the outstanding Garage Hangover site. The Five, I Don Care If It Rains All Night...an example of my favorite kind of wreck...virtually unknown, rescued from a bin, just learning to play, off rhythm, out of tune, recorded kind of badly, but the song knocks me out. Simple, sweet lyrics belted out at the top of the kid's lungs...if you're here to hold me tight... And that sloppychoppy guitar...It's a feeling, man. You dig?

The Five - I Don't Care If It Rains All Night

Die Hacke Experience & the 3 Suns of Califorinia

2011-01-01T17:54:00.015-05:00

My friend George picked up this compilation tape during our college year in Rome: Sleep? West Berlin 1984. Aus 7 Landern der Welt was a staple of my mixtapes for years, until I lost the tape. Apparently the work of Alexander Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten, my limited threshold for dreary industrial music had me reaching for the ffwd button, but when the fiddly, friendly Three Suns guitar and xylophone kicked in behind the scraping metal and vacuum pumps I got happy again. Twenty years later it reminds me of the frenetic clunks, thuds, and music of imaginary play that emanate from my 6 and 9 year old daughters' bedroom when they get going. Are they enjoying themselves or killing each other?

Die Hacke Experience & the 3 Suns of California - Aus 7 Landern der Welt

The entire tape can be downloaded here.

The Sinister Lampshades (Lancaster 1983)

2010-12-30T20:38:00.033-05:00

The Sinister Lampshades was my first band. In 1982 or 83 we recorded on our friend Harry's reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was a "portable" unit from the 60s with tubes and it weighed about 50 pounds. We all had cassette recorders that might have sounded better, but it was so much cooler to use that big old machine. It seemed more like a recording studio. I think Harry had about 4 reels that we taped over several times because we didn't know where to buy new ones and we used up a fair amount of tape making burp and fart noises.

Originally, when I was in 6th grade, the Sinister Lampshades was more like a group of friends.... I got the name from my brother Gil's classmate, a dude named Tim. Seems he was a big Zappa fan, and used to recite lyrics and so forth. I came up with the Lampshade cartoon character and the original theme song. I still have the original lyrics in a scrapbook somewhere. -Greg S.

Then Greg and Mike invited me to join (if I could get a bass). We played a number of backyard parties, school dances and a battle of the bands against heavy metal OSIRIS.

We got utterly destroyed in that 2 way battle of the bands! They had a stage that took up half the gym, pro light show etc.We were playing through practice amps. lol! The student council gave us a sympathy booking at some dance later on. - Mike S.

Strangest of all, we played a Christmas banquet for the 103rd Battalion of the Pennsylvania National Guard. My father was commander and paid us $50. Some of the covers we played were pretty mainstream: INXS, Billy Idol, Tom Petty, Prince, but some must've seemed pretty out there to that unsuspecting audience: The Cramps, The Clash. On listening back to those reel tapes, it's the originals that stand out.

Twisted feelings - about the world
Twisted feelings - about that girl
Twisted feelings - about wombats
Twisted feelings - about Siamese cats
Twisted feelings - about FREAKS!
Twisted feelings - You know we hate those freaks
Twisted feelings - about destruction
Twisted feelings - about 3 kinds of destruction

Twisted Feelings
Seizure
Ode to the Mel

Greg later played in The X-Cellerations and Animation.
Mike is currently playing solo.
Tom was in The Real Gone, Jack Lord's Hair, Rocknoceros, and is currently in Mud Pie Sun.

Tapewreck #1 - The X-Cellerations - Magic

2010-12-27T01:45:00.018-05:00

I inaugurate this blog with the track that inspired it: the spectacular crash of a tape recorder desperately trying to capture a 1984 practice by the X-Cellerations in Lancaster, Pennsylvania leaving the beautiful remains of The Cars' "Magic." The X-Cellerations were a new wave cover band formed by Greg of the Sinister Lampshades and recorded on Harry's dad's reel-to-reel(see next post), but I can imagine the oil congealing in the bearings as Harry frantically tries to keep the tape turning with his finger.

Twisted under sideways down
I know you're getting twisted
And you can't calm down

The X-Cellerations - Magic