We could be having a lot more fun... ...........hanging out in a wax museum.... Penal Code (Lancaster 1986)

In August of 1986, the remains of The Bodies and The Real Gone briefly stitched together a band in my parents' basement and called it "Penal Code" in honor of the local top 40 cover band known as "Color Code." We managed to slop through one or two practices and catch it on this old eaten cassette. The elements of Jack Lord's Hair were all there, and we even wrote a couple originals, including the brilliant Wax Museum.

I got my knife
I got my axe
I got my rack of baseball bats
We could be having a lot more fun hanging around in a wax museum
Whack off the head
Go rolling in the aisle
Come on baby won't you make me smile
oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah

I got my knife
I got my axe
And all the kids got baseball bats
We're gonna have have a lotta fun hanging out at the wax museum
Whack off the head
Go rolling in the aisle
Come on baby won't you make me smile
oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah

99th Floor
Trash
Bad
I Wanna Be Your Dog
Vicious

Mark - vocals (The Bodies)
Tommy - drums (The Bodies)
Rex - guitar (Last Knight and The Real Gone )
Tom - bass (The Real Gone)

Vegetable Man ....... Syd Barrett

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.

A Date with the Velvet Monkeys

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.

More Monkeys on The Train to Disaster and Deadly Spawn comps, and the Colors single.

Don Fleming is currently the executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, and is leading the digitization project of Alan Lomax's Sound Recordings.