Trivial Dead

Oh boy oh boy oh boy OH BOY! Yep, it’s finally ARRIVED!

THE GRATEFUL DEAD GAME is sitting in my lap as I type this. Now lemme tell ya: this purchase was a controversial one. Take a peek at what my wife had to say about it all on her blog earlier today:

A few months ago, M bid on and won a Greatful Dead Board Game. I think he paid a lot for it, and paid even more to have it shipped overseas. It came today and after seriously trying to hide it from him, he found it and opened it. He is threatening to make me play it. When I told him no, he said that he would then force (*name deleted) to play it with him. I miss her but you know, maybe it’s a good thing she’s in America right now! Though the idea of (*name deleted) beating him at this game is a satisfying idea.

The box says Ages: Adult. Haha…don’t they mean Acid Casualty Boomer? The goal of the game is to collect little tickets while you move a dancing skeleton around a collage of off-their-head dancing Dead Heads printed on the board.

Already M is looking at the cards going, “Man, these questions are super hard.”

And this just proves my theory– with all their lip service to love and light, hippies are the most hung up, retentive and controlling people. Ever.

(Have you ever seen a Head open their suitcase of live Dead cassettes? Did you try to touch them? Do you remember what happened? I rest my case while simultaneously dating myself)

If I must play it, will try to make this into a drinking game. For the good of the marriage.

Sheesh. I’m sure (well, pretty sure) she’s just taking the piss. Hell she’s the only one in the marriage to’ve actually seen THE DEAD play live, and multiple times at that. In the Bay Area no less! Yeah she’ll NEVER live that down.

BUT ANYWAY, the only problem I can see is . . . well you sorta need TWO OR MORE DEADHEADS to play. One Deadhead + clueless participant (willin’ or otherwise) just won’t cut it. Said participant would no doubt lose her pretty, everlovin’ mind after like 2 questions as the questions are, well, super hard. Here’s a sample question: “Creditors repossessed Pigpen’s organ in San Francisco in the 1960’s due to the band’s outstanding debts. Did or Didn’t?” Uh, yeah.

So who else is gonna join in to play? I promise, I’ll go easy onya.

Vinyl Deluge

Now I admit I’ve been known to complain loudly about the sorry state of used record hunting in London. But lately, the tides down on the Thames have shifted for the better. Once again, it’s raining second-hand records ’round these parts! Here’s a rundown of a few LPs I scored for 99p in recent weeks:

1. ASGÆRD “In the Realm of Asgærd” (Threshold Records UK, 1972) – Almost passed over this one, thinking it was one of them early KING CRIMSON LPs I’ve consciously overlooked for the past quarter century or so. But then it hit me: just who the fuck are ASGÆRD? I don’t know what an ASGÆRD is, and I’ve never, ever heard even a peep about this ASGÆRD record before. Perfect reason to buy it! And low and behold but this is decent folk/fantasy (rather than classical/symphonic) prog rock in a lighter URIAH HEEP vein. They do lay the vocal harmonies on thick, but they don’t go overboard with the mellotron and they ain’t afraid to rock out (albeit politely), so I’m happy. Oh and they do a song about Austin Osman Spare wherein they “kiss the cloven hoof.” Yes there are still little treasures buried deep within this fair isle.

2. JUDY HENSKE & JERRY YESTER “Farewell, Aldebaran” (Straight Records US, 1969) – Is this even on CD yet? It’s a winner fr sure, all the way through to the end. A real ZAPPA gal, this Judy H. was – in the sense that she saw nothing odd in belting out a ball-busting JANIS J. blues number back to back with a sweet flower-pop jingle tailormade for the second STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK LP, and then: follow it with a harpichord-drenched misery ballad that RICHARD HARRIS coulda made a bundle on as a follow-up to his “MacArthur Park” cash-in. Yeah it’s these kinda juxtapositions (non sequiturs?) that the Straight Records crew always excelled it. Hard to pick the best, but I’d say that’s the Chinese cowboyisms of “Raider”, which sounds like something that coulda brightened up one of them later MOBY GRAPE LPs. If only the GRAPE had thought better of LA.

3. THE RUNAWAYS “Live In Japan” (Mercury Records Japan, 1977) – I’ll be honest: when I reach for a RUNAWAYS disc, half the time I’m thinking not of a album, or a song, or even a riff. I reaching for an image. Like those vaguely creepy portraits of the gals on their first LP that Kim Fowley labeled with their ages. Nuts! Or the amazing cover photo on this record. Here THE RUNAWAYS are looking more like 70’s Japanese kiddie superheroes (I’m thinking Himitsu Sentai Go Renjā) than anything hard rock. But hey this was Cherie Currie’s last stand, so it’s gotta be hard, right? Well, not exactly. I know Joan & co. got lumped in with the punker thing at the time, but sonically speaking, here they come across as THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY trying to bang out THE SWEET songbook. And that, dear Cherie, is not a good mental image.

4. GEOFF & MARIA MULDAUR “Pottery Pie” (Reprise/Warner Bros. Records US, 1970) – Now this was a coincidence, seeing as I’ve been saturating my ears with GEOFF’s kinda-recent work (The Secret Handshake & Beautiful Isle of Somewhere from the ’90s) as of late. No this ain’t Geoff & Maria’s best – that would be their gorgeously lazy Sweet Potatoes LP – but it’s still damn, damn fine. It’s got their recording of “Brazil”, around which Terry Gilliam based his great flick of the same name. It was produced by Joe Boyd. It features lotsa tasty Bill Keith pedal steel. And oh! It’s got Geoff’s voice – one of the 100 Essential Musical Keys To Spiritual Enlightenment – prominently exhibited for all to oogle. I couldn’t ask for much more.

5. ORNETTE COLEMAN “Who’s Crazy? 2” (Atmosphere Records France, 1979) My copy is beat, but so what. These were further soundtrack recordings that THE ORNETTE COLEMAN TRIO (O., Dave Izenzon, and Charles Moffett) made for soundtrack to the Belgian flick “Who’s Crazy?” back in ‘66. And even I, a guy who burned out his jazz receptors way back in the early ’90s, can tell: this is hot. The trio format stripped what little fat there was from Ornette’s early ensembles and left his harmolodicisms to float up into the stratosphere like wispy dollar bills set aflame with a trusty Zippo lighter. Though Dave I.’s bowing bass does help ground everything in something thicker than the muddy banks of the Mississippi. This record could potentially rekindle my once-mighty passion for all things jazz. Rhapsody Films has reissued amazing footage of this music being created in real time, ca. ‘66 – I’ll definitely have to see that sometime soon.

6. THE WHO “The Ox” (Track Records UK, 1970) – aka Backtrack 14, this is an odd comp. of ’60s WHO songs all penned by John “The Ox” Entwistle. The fact that he also sings all over these swinging, musichall-ish tunes helps me forget I’m actually listening to THE WHO for long stretches. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think this was some weird SMALL FACES rec I somehow missed out on back in my inexplicable fascinated-by-Ronnie-Wood phase. My pick is the creepy “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” but none of this is what I’d call embarrassing. Anybody out there wanna try and get me interested in The Ox’s 70’s solo career?

Crawlin’ Through Space

As the 80’s turned into the 90’s, no local LA action captivated me quite like Eddie Flowers‘ CRAWLSPACE did.

My personal context for all this began while in college at UCSB – a difficult year by all accounts. But it did mark my first experiments with LSD and psychedelic mushrooms, spurred on by a wonderfully friendly fella who later got FUCKING MURDERED by fascist pigs at a GRATEFUL DEAD concert at the L.A. Forum. Yeah all this before I’d ever really been properly introduced to alcohol or pot. Go figure! These experiences did change me – at a deeply felt, sub-molecular level. And they’d also change what I’d come to look for in music.

It was around that time that I saw CRAWLSPACE live. They played with CLAW HAMMER – and maybe Rich Coffee’s THEE FORGIVEN? – at Be-Bop Records & Fine Arts in Reseda, summer of ‘89. Only about 30 of us there, but when the lights went down, the drums started pounding, the gtrs started circling, and Eddie started a-nasallin’ . . . well, we all knew we were witnessing voodoo acid improv madness of a highly-rarified caliber.

But on to the records.

No disrespect to what came before, but in my estimation the improv-rock heyday of CRAWLSPACE had it’s roots in the “August/Africa” 7″ 45. Unlike their protometal beginnings, by this point they were slowing things down, letting their rhythms breathe, thus encouraging deeper consideration. They were also layering additional coats of sludge over the face of their always-feral riffs. And with “Africa”, Eddie’s lyrics were already pointing toward concerns of a headier, spiritual nature.

With their Crawlspace = You 7″ 45, you had a true force to be reckoned with. The cover, featuring the dreamy image of a DREAM SYNDICATE-era Kendra Smith nodding out, is a dead giveaway. Sure the A-side (“Solitude Smokestack Head”) was a great cruncher in that heavy-but-loose style of their late 80’s work, but oooooh man the flip . . . “Ocean=You” is Thee Dark Stuff. Here instrumental interplay overtook garage-rage as the guiding force around which things coalesced. It was on this recording that they began stretching things out past the 6 minute mark. And it was on this record that the lyrics began to sh-sh-sh-shatter and reform in an assbackward, nonsensical but totally intuitive way only the close proximity to something potent (like LSD!) can give rise to. This aesthetic approach formed the basis of their attack for the next 4 years.

The Sphereality CD followed, and for me, this was the ecstatic pinnacle, the peak of the trip. It was that moment when the rock core was still powerful but the tastebuds were flowering and neuronpistons were firing into all 11 dimensions at once. At the time, it hit me as the logical continuation of what SACCHARINE TRUST had got up to on their beautiful We Became Snakes LP, had those boys been steeped in middle-Euro prog rather than jazz. 4 long tracks, the longest being 32+ minutes! Up to then, I’d never experienced anything so exploratory made in the name of heavyass, postpunk rock. The twin-gtr attack – courtesy of fighter pilots Mark McCormick and Keith Telligman – is unfuckingsurpassed. And this remains the only record I ever planned and executed a psychedelic mushroom trip around. (The fact that said trip was a real bummer ain’t really relevant here. What I’m getting at is: this CD is powerful enough to get mortal men to bow down during psychedelic experience. I sure did.)

After this came the God-Zee 10″, which acknowledged SAC TRUST comparisons – as well as White Panther Party allegiances! – with the inclusion of a really wiggy version of Ornette Coleman’s “Dancing In Your Head”. These are apparently from the same sessions as Sphereality, and sure sound it.

There were some interesting 7″ 45s and cassette releases in between, but the next major release would be The Exquisite Fucking Beauty of Crawlspace on Majora Records. This, for all intents and purposes, was their last stand. Drummer Bob Lee, though outta the band at the time, swooped down to rejoin for this one last, gone set. By this late date, Eddie’s ditched The Word almost entirely, choosing instead to loudly mumble his own, very personal language. It’s got a desperate sadness to it, like he knew this particular trip was dying, making this album kinda bittersweet. But oooooh so gorgeously rockin’.

And then . . . it was over.

Now Eddie and co. would continue tirelessly recording throughout the 90’s, but they’d leave rock (almost) entirely behind, diving instead headlong into the world of free-improv sound collage/creation. Much of that may be good/great, but I can’t comment – I fell away into other concerns as well. Though re-visiting that vast body of work is still high up on my list of Things To Do Before I Die.

But all of sudden, in 2006, the rockin’ CRAWLSPACE was back! Well, not exactly: sure they were playing like they’d never played their respective instruments before, and the whole shebang sounded like it was recorded on a C-60 – but WHO CARES! Hey they was doing SAINTS and DEEP PURPLE and PATTI SMITH and frickin’ O. REX covers and such. Naah no Bob Lee in sight, but this was nuts and these nuts I can understand.

Wait long enuf, and it all comes back around.

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And after all that, I gotta admit I’m one fella who wouldn’t be blogging today (in this manner/fashion) without reading many, many of the published words Eddie lay down in mags like FORCED EXPOSURE and on the backs of recs like THE LAZY COWGIRLS first in the 80’s. How he always manage to insert his erect middle finger into whatever the hell he was on about was a talent reserved for the kings. Though lots of others followed, he’s the first I’d read who comfortably straddled a deep appreciation for the violent musical expression of things like STOOGES & BLACK FLAG with the heady, exploratory jam-building of 60’s/70’s things like THE GRATEFUL DEAD & THE MAN BAND. In fact, I’d reckon that word “jam” appears in more Eddie-scrawl than in that of any other rock scribe on this planet! In the end, it’s his hyperbolic enthusiasm for rockin’ that I’ve unconsciously aped all down the goddamn line. Yeah the LSD did me right, but so did Crawlin’ Ed’s prose.

We’ll always loves ya, CRAWLSPACE, at Pig State Recon. Now go Space-Truckin’ for us, once more.

8-Tracks and a Shiner Bock

What I listened to on the TX leg of recent my USSA holiday (detail here):

Man, 50-something Hill Country hippies are just the best.

Southland Implosions

I was back in SoCal for a week this month – first time in two and a half years! While there, I spent some time cruisin’ freeways and highways and byways through those geographies known as the South Bay, San Pedro, & Long Beach. While at it, I got to wondering: has anything musically meaningful gushed outta these once-hallowed grounds since the 80’s?

In the intervening years, I’d come to believe them areas to be, in the words of Mr. David Tibet, “DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD!” Oh sure, I too heard all about bands with names like PENNYWISE, F.Y.P, and SUBLIME. But somehow, those yahoos just did not equate with meaning in my jaded mind. And I do not think I was the only local harboring such beliefs.

But as I’m still jetlagged, I’m feeling gracious. What follows is an attempt to reevaluate three turn-of-the-century comps that give an indication of what these three areas – each of which, at various points, I’ve called home – stood for when my wife & I up and jumped ship to the UK 3 years ago. Me, I didn’t give this stuff so much as a nod (much less a wink) at the time, but, in the spirit of fair play, I’ve come to back to really listen.

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The Bay After (Raw Power Records, 1999) – The concept is obvious: 19 “nu skool” South Bay punker acts take on 21 “O.G.” South Bay hardcore tunes. And the results? Well, they depress the everlovin’ shit out of me. To think that at one time such inspired – nay, genius! – HC punk rock like BLACK FLAG, THE DESCENDENTS, RED CROSS, CIRCLE JERKS, hell even THE NIP DRIVERS once ripped forth from these zip codes still puts a big, shit-eating grin on my face. That UTTER CRAP like this would eventually follow, well, that’s one for the mystery books.

Hot tip: don’t ever go and do a straight cover of a BLACK FLAG or DESCENDENTS song with a clueless drummer in tow – you’re begging me to turn your music off. And that’s like a full third of this disc. Those bands who set their sights on less-ambitious groups like THE CIRCLE JERKS, NIP DRIVERS, RED CROSS and WASTED YOUTH [ed. note: since when were them West LAers a South Bay band?] at least have a fighting chance. The original stuff relied on rage/aggression as much as anything musical; kids of any generation oughta be able to replicate that. Outta this lot, WAR CALLED PEACE takes the cake – but wait, they feature singer Roby Rogers, who was an allumni of an actual early 80’s South Bay HC band, CON 800. So again, the old guys win. Only Mikey Theodore’s FISHSTICKS do anything fun with the material – but here, it’s with unreleased demos you probably never heard by the aforementioned CON 800, so you won’t be able to tell anyway. Watt does bob up playing old MINUTEMEN tunes with something called AGROKULTURE, but it feels like a vain attempt to legitimize things: too little, too late.

Can something this bad be blamed entirely on bogue concept? Does it speak more to the way many of these once-diverse, vibrant beach towns have been gentrified beyond all recognition? Maybe, just maybe, commodification of subculture leads invariably to SHIT.

Triskaidekaphobia (S.A.D. Cassettes/Recess Records, 2001) – I can’t say this is my favorite, but it is the most interesting of the lot, as the San Pedro terrain this maps has always been the most ornery and uncompromising of the these three areas. This collection sounds & feels homegrown/homebrewed, which gets my thumbs up from the get-go. And this documents crosscurrents that not only the punkers, but the metallers, experimentalists, and the aging ganja-rockers (yeah that’s you, Watt) will get a kick out of. Bill Bowman’s VIDA-sideproject, THE FARMERS (imagine that! A VIDA sideproject!) sounds tight, as does the overblown leslie organ that newcomers THE LEECHES base their garage madness around. The ubiquitous Watt sounds powerful doing a STOOGES cover with a trio called WE GO SPEEDRO, the F.Y.P guy sounds less annoying in his TOYS THAT KILL – and Pettibon did an eerily compelling cover. Craig Ibarra, who publishes The Rise and Fall of the Harbor Area fanzine, curated this with real affection. Gotta love that folks other than me were still groovin’ on a post-SST wavelength at this late date.

Long Beach Blvd. (Skunk Records, 1999) – I lived in Long Beach in the late 90’s/early 2000s, and avoided any/all LBC tattooed white-guy dub action like it was Anthony Kiedis’ stillborn child. And this collection, not-so-subtly referencing the Beach Blvd comp. on Posh Boy from ‘80, sprang from that fetid womb. But this comp’s ok, really it is! That’s probably cause Mudd (drummer of the original FALLING IDOLS) put this together. It starts really strong, with the reformed SECRET HATE doing songs found nowhere else. And those sound as eccentrically rockin’ as they did on their great Pop Cult Vomit CD from around this same time.

Somebody smart went and did a cover of a CREWD song, but I gotta admit the more rote-sounding stuff in the middle loses me. And just when I thought it was over . . . in swooped THE PIVOT FOOTS. These guys’ wry, lounge-punk stylings got me hooked and laughing but good. Could totally imagine them being a hoot and a half live someplace like Alex’s on Anaheim after a couple of those nuclear gin martinis they specialize in there. Yeah maybe I shoulda gone out more back then. If this comp. had only included the equally absurdist VANDALS-do-hotrod-music of DEL NOAH AND THE MT. ARARAT FINKS, I’d say it’d be a winner fr sure. As it is, seek out the individual CDs by SECRET HATE and THE PIVOT FOOTS, pretend you just ditched a nasty speed habit at Redgate Rehab facility out near Terminal Island, and get ready to live Long Beach Allday, everyday.

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Now I must admit, that really wasn’t too hard on my ears. Just don’t ask me to reevaluate Nu Orange County punker nonsense any time soon. I ain’t got the stamina.

Do You Remember When You Still Had Hair?

CELEBRITY SKIN: my kinda pop superstars, indeed.

Some fool once noted that CELEBRITY SKIN marked “that point at which 80’s underground camp/freak consciousness rose to meet the average BAM magazine reader on terms she/he could comprehend”, and I’m gonna haveta agree. Call me glamfag, but their sloppy n wildass playing, hooks-up-the-butt tunage, and wry, SPARKSian humour spelt a little AM gold in my book. That they wore lamé clown pants and green dreads all around Hollywood shouldn’t be ignored either – I reckon them to be some of my last fashion heroes of the 20th century. They played dozens of shows around LA in the later 80’s/early 90’s with like-minded dayglo body/hair painters DEATHRIDE ‘69, MOTORCYCLE BOY, PIGMY LOVE CIRCUS and the always mediocre JANE’S ADDICTION. But the closest I ever got to seeing them live was in a short performance included in the shitty 80’s romantic comedy “Rich Girl” – anybody else see that? Gary Celebrity singing in a bunny suit. Perfect.

Genesis P-Orridge wore a CELEBRITY SKIN t-shirt at PSYCHIC TV’s Easter ‘88 gig that I attended at the Variety Arts Center in LA, and between songs he gushed about “this great new Don Bolles teen combo”. Yeah not unlike PSYCHIC TV, the CELEBS almost succeeded in complete and utter world domination – well, in/around LA clubland anyway. While drugs and death cut their creative stride prematurely, somebody named Courtney Love was hiding in their equipment van all along, studying their every move, wishing she could be as cool as them. Don told me that it took heavy legal pressure for Ms. Love to eventually fork over even a tiny payment as compensation for appropriating their name wholesale for her hit record & tune.

To my immature mind CELEBRITY SKIN, the band, will always stand as THE GERMS psychoparty (un)consciousness all grown-up-wrong and stuffed into neat 3 min. pop songs. That they originated out of Pat Smear’s VAGINA DENTATA in the mid-80’s and somehow roped in homeless Don Bolles to bash for em, then not long outta SILVER CHALICE & 45 GRAVE, ain’t no mere coincidence. But when you note that Rob Ritter (ex-BAGS, GUN CLUB, SILVER CHALICE) roadied for em, and Geza X produced it all – well, this was a Masque club reunion by anyone’s measure.

Their best ever recorded moment was also their first: “Radiation Man”, preserved forevermore in sadly muted, poorly mastered form on the long-forgotten Tantrum compilation LP. KXLU DJs played a sonically superior, radio-cart version of this throughout the late 80’s, no doubt in response to my pestering phonecalls requesting they play it again, “and this time, really really loud!” It sounded like vintage DAMNED ripping through REDD KROSS’ “Linda Blair”, and to this day still gives me chills. Later work on the Triple X label is uneven, but the best of it – like their straight cover of ABBA’s “S.O.S.” and the supersweet “Poisanna” – are well-worth searching out too. Though you angry punker types are gonna bum hard on the happy, radio-friendly CHEAP TRICK powerpoppin’ of it all.

Whatever, them shitty Triple X masters are positively cryin’ for a proper reissue. Any takers?

Check em out:

“Radiation Man” (from the Tantrum comp. LP, Cocktail Records, 1989)

“Poisanna” (from Good Clean Fun, Triple X Records, 1991)

And OH SHIT. Just now stumbled on a held-held vid of them performing live in the late 80’s at Hollywood High School – doing what is, hands down, my favorite song of all time! I’m over the mooooooooon!