I Am The Dootz and I've Got Acne....

Straight outta Maryland came The Dootz onto The Train To Disaster compilation.... He wrote a song rhyming bus and pus..... But that's all I know. Read Robert Hull's Pop Krazy post and learn:

...This radical sound, born in the early '80s, was downright psychotic to the point of being transcendental. It was the creation of one David Frey Johns, who had spent most of his life singing to records in his room and wailing in friends' showers, hoping one day to be heard in a social context.  

As a child David Johns was called "Duke" by his father, a nickname that eventually evolved into "Dootz." "My dad and I used to sing together when we went to church," the Dootz once told me, "but we had our own version of 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' Everybody else was singing it the right way....

...In the '80s, the Dootz began making tapes at the Sonny Huckle Studio in Falls Church, Virginia.... Those underground recordings (not available online, but only on broken cassettes)* still bear witness to the Dootz's commitment to the tradition of getting gone. Included are uncontrolled, battered versions of Bill Parsons' "The All American Boy," Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash," the Troggs' "Wild Thing," Doctor Ross's "The Boogie Disease," and the Standells' "Dirty Water." Further, as if defying the ever-impending Apocalypse, the Dootz performs the craziest cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" ever conceived by any mortal. 

Two songs were eventually culled from these landmark sessions and released as a single on the Sky label.... "A.C.N.E. (I've Got Acne)" and "I'm the Dootz," both original tunes recorded in one take and composed on the spot. On both songs, the Dootz shouts and howls from the pit of his soul, revealing a naked hysteria and an unrehearsed moment of being.... The Dootz told me back then that he hoped "A.C.N.E." would become a million-seller--but he would gladly settle for a regional hit....  - Robert Hull, Pop Krazy

*Hey pizzaface! Tapewrecks will continue to seek the salvage of any of those cassettes from the analog deep!

"A Steamin' Stew of Mutant Spew" - The Deadly Spawn Compilation

  

Somewhere outside you here a cry

A new commotion in the sky

A new generation's shouting out loud

I'm born in the USA and that makes me proud

Well skip the flag and all that

Cause being a fungus is where it's at

We'll be glad to ruin your perfect lawn
With the fungus from our spawn

The Velvet Monkeys

In 1985 we were getting fed a healthy diet of neogarage and psych from the grownups (Bill & Carl) over at the Web of Sound record store. ...The Scientists, The Nomads, The Lime Spiders, The Chesterfield Kings, The Hoodoo Gurus.... The Real Gone was slurping it up and recorded a live demo for Bill and Carl that found its way into the hands of Rick Noll, creator of York, PA's Bona Fide Records. Rick apparently liked it enough to include us on his followup to The Train To Disaster compilation if we re-recorded a song or two. So we borrowed a 4-track machine from friend and local punker Ray Rhythm, and laid down Bells Are Ringing, one of Dave's post-Vietnam era social protest songs.

Many of the bands, including ours, had already broken up and/or were playing with some combination of The Left and The Skeptics before the record even came out in 1986, but it sure caught a moment in time. The A-side had all the big(ger)-name acts, or at least the bands that made an appearance on another compilation by that time. We made it onto the flunky B-side, but we were in dang-good company nonetheless. Where The Train to Disaster was a strange disjointed mess, in the best way possible, The Deadly Spawn was a solid batch of songs from some not-so-solid bands.


A-Side

The Brood

The Velvet Monkeys - Rock Party (Washington DC) All we want is your girlfriend's love!
Monster Rock - She Lied (Frederick, MD) - members of The Left and The Skeptics.
The Brood - Writing on the Wall (Portland, Me)

Thee Fourgiven

The Creeping Pumpkins - Better Off Without You (Pompton Lakes, NJ)
Thee Fourgiven - The Wrong Side Of Your Mind (Hollywood, CA)
Liquid Generation - I Love You (Seattle, WA)

The Dusters

The Dusters - Everytime (Frederick/Hagerstown, MD) Another Left/Skeptics project. They opened the Hasil Adkins show in Lancaster that year.

The Skeptics

The Skeptics - Legend of the Headless Surfer (Frederick, MD) from the Worry Beads cassette. Drummer Stephen Blickenstaff also did the monstrous cover art and the cover of the Cramps Bad Music for Bad People.

The Real Gone

B-Side
The Subterraneans - Hammer of Love (Frederick, MD)
The Real Gone - Bells Are Ringing (Lancaster, PA)
Mutant Drone - Harvest Time (Richmond, VA)
Scattered Limbs - Walk Without Me (York, PA) made their only public appearance with James "Rebel" O'Leary at his birthday party at the local Goodwill.
No King - Restless Soul (Washington DC/Hoboken, NJ) featuring Rudi Protrudi of Tina Peel and The Fuzztones on harp.
The Turnups - Egypto-Tek (Harrisburg, PA) One of Central PA's first punk bands, circa 1980, with and without Billy Synth.

FlexiDisc
The Voodoo Love Gods - Bad Seed (Hagerstown, MD) Another Left spinoff featuring one of the Subterraneans
The Stump Wizards - I Don't Want You Anymore (Camp Hill, PA) Hear their first cassette here.

Added to the Dutch/German pressing on Resonance Records:
The Broken Jug - Son of a Gun (West Germany)

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

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 (York, PA)

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