Pylon Sounds

I finally decided to host this site myself....the full story is located here:

http://www.lastdaysofmanonearth.com

Update your bookmarks/favorites..whatever.

The web pages will exist for a short time here but I am planning to remove them as soon as I scavenge all the images off of them.

My buddy Kopper has a new blog. Check it out and if you leave a comment, tell him Joe sent ya. Its located at http://www.troubleinrivercity.com/. Howz about a little Iron Fist to commemorate?

My buddy Neal has a new blog up called Willfully Obscure. Its a doozy and is located here: http://wilfullyobscure.blogspot.com/. How about a little Wonderwall?

Finally, The Crewd have a myspace page. Stop by and give a shout out to Long Beach! It's at http://www.myspace.com/thecrewd. I couldn't find any Crewd videos so how about some new noise for real people?

The song The Plugz did on New Wave Theater was much more indicative of the more polished rock sound of thier second album "Better Luck". It was a great LA-type song entitled "Hey Elizabeth" Regardless, I still wanted to hear the punk stuff!!!

I next heard The Plugz on the Repo Man soundtrack where they did an amazing version of "Secret Agent Man" in Spanish entitled "Hombre Secreto" It actually sounds better in Spanish and I love the original. But alas...later Plugz again.

So, finally in the early 1990's, I got to hear thier first album from 1979 which was entitled Electrify Me. It was re-released on Restless Records for a very short time. Imagine my suprise when i found it in a cutout bin. It instantly became one of my favorite albums ever and I have played it at least a million times since that fateful day.

An early version of The Plugz with Joe Nanini courtesy of Break My Face

One of the factors that contributes to the overall unique-ness of The Plugz is that they were from East LA instead of Hollywood. The main man behind the band was Tito Larriva and he definitely added a Los Angelino element to the sound. It is more upbeat and celebratory than a lot of punk LPs at the time. On "Let Go" for instance, Tito and the band reference a lot of old school dances like the Freddy, the Watusi and the Peppermint Twist in the middle of the song. If you are looking for something super-hardcore this ain't it. If you are looking for something to play at a party...look no further.

Its hard to believe now, but in the late 1970's the LA punk scene was disregarded by a lot of hipper-than-thou types In NYC and elsewhere as being a rip-off of the British Scene. This of course, was completely untrue. Avoid hipper-than-thou types at all costs.

Classic LA Punk Photo courtesy of Alice Bag

Think about it....bands like The Bags and The Dickies were clearly influenced by the more cartoonish and slapstick elements of the entertainment industry, which is certainly part of the local LA culture. Bands like The Flesheaters and X were informed by wild western mythology as well as the secret, hidden (at the time) subcultures of the 1950s...all parts of the LA myth. Bands like the Crowd were inspired by the beach and surf culture. It goes on and on. All of these influences combined to create a very unique scene. In fact, the LA punk scene was the most removed from hippie subculture of any US scene in the 1970s. This is why LA was set to be the birthplace of hardcore...There was no hippie residue. it was already ground zero.

So anyway, I digress...

The Plugz were influenced by the sights and sounds of East LA. It informed thier music and made it all the more unique. You can hear it obviously in The Plugz cover of "La Bamba" but if you listen closely you can feel it running thru the whole album.

So bring this over to the next BBQ you attend. Play it at full volume. If any hipper-than-thou type starts being an ass...smack em for me, will ya? Remember, we're not lost...we're just desperate...

The Plugz - Electrify Me

1. A Gain - A Loss
2. The Cause
3. Electrify Me
4. Satisfied Die
5. La Bamba
6. Adolescent
7. Braintime
8. Wordless
9. Let Go
10. Infection
11. Berserktown

Seriously, if you want to read up on the LA scene and visually see for yourself what was so unique about it, check out Alice Bag's online resources. Not only is she an uber-swell individual and the singer in one of the greatest punk wrock bands of all time, but she is also the keeper of one of the greatest online collections of vintage punk info around.

The answer is maybe that Philly did not have as much of an identifiable sound and look as these other towns. It also had no singular independent label to rally around like a Dischord or a Modern Method. It basically just had a slew of great bands, many of whom were featured on this great 1982 compilation. The quality of the vinyl is a little crackly but hey, whatcanyado?

YDI - Enemy For Life, I Killed My Family: YDI were a cool band. They definitely had that mean, gnarly East Coast sound. I Killed My Family is a bit silly but Enemy for Life fuckin' rips.

FLAG OF DEMOCRACY - Murder Castle, Suburban Cowboy: No doubt the best FOD tunes I have ever heard. These tunes blaze! Murder Castle has got a great breakdown. Way better than the FOD track on the flipside comp thats for sure!

BLUNDER BOYS - Conspiracy, I'm Afraid of the Night, Middle Class Morals: Average at best hardcore with a rather annoying singer. Originally went by the name "Crib Death". One of the lesser bands on this comp.

LITTLE GENTLEMEN - No Justice - No Law, No Crime - No Flaw: Another mediocre tune. The Little Gentleman were pretty prolific and went on to release a seven inch and two full length LPs. Another one that doesn't do that much for me.

AUTISTIC BEHAVIOR - TV Messiah, Power Head: Brilliant manic hardcore with a slight Cali edge to it. Power Head reminds me a bit of a real intense Saccharine Trust track. Good shit! Did these guys ever do anything else?

RUIN - Proof, Love Dog: Quality-wise Ruin were head and shoulders above most other bands. I wrote them up earlier so I wont go to into it. These are some of the earliest recorded Ruin tracks and they had yet to develop their fully realized style. Even in their embryonic form, Ruin were a great band though and these two tracks kick off side two with a great jolt of dharma-tinged HC.

INFORMED SOURCES -Right & Wrong, Dense Pack: OK stuff. Kinda west-coastish. The vocals are a little flat but the playing is very tight.

SEEDS OF TERROR - Brain Down, Straightedge: When it first kicked in I thought it sounded like The Urinals! Basically, it has the same production value as the first Urinals 7 inch. Quality-wise the tracks are nowhere near the quality of The Urinals. OK stuff.....

McRAD - Inflation Dub, Ejected: Super early McRad tracks preceeding the Dominant Force EP. Inflation Dub is a great reggae-tinged hardcore track. Ejected is just a classic old school HC track. McRad is still going strong today!

THE HEATHENS - Oohleigh at Great Adventure, My Twin From Hell: Amazing shit. Tight as hell spazz-core. Kinda like a trainwreck between Stark Raving Mad and Deep Wound and the Minutemen. Fuck! Who were these guys?

All in all, this is a super-tight set of US Hardcore made at the height of the moment in 1982. Quality wise, I think it is as good as the Master Tape, Flex Your Head or This Is Boston Not LA. I wonder why it does not have the same reputation as those comps?

Thanks to George for hooking me up with this comp too. I'm hoping that we have some Electric Love Muffin coming soon!

This one is a real treat. It's a demo from 1986 that was seriously making the rounds when I was down in Tulsa at the close of the 1980's. Chronologically this would be the next thing N.O.T.A. did after the classic blue self-titled Rabid Cat LP. After this, I believe they broke up and Jeff went on to play in Crimes Against Humanity for a few years before reforming N.O.T.A.

The real crime against humanity of course, is that this demo has largely gone unheard by fans of 1980's hardcore and N.O.T.A in particular. Frequent visitors to this site already know where I stand on N.O.T.A....I think they were one of the greatest punk/hardcore bands ever and I believe they symbolized the true D.I.Y. spirit of the era better than most.

I am also a big fan of Jeff Klein's hoarse, everyman vocals. So when a friend of mine loaned me this tape in 87, I was real resistant to the idea of Jeff stepping away from the mic. Clearly, my worries were unfounded cuz Dave "the Butcher" Scum fills the vocal role insanely well. I don't know who Dave is/was but his vocals on this demo are friggin' crazy!

Musically, there's a shift towards a class of '77 style on the songs No Chance and New America. Both of these tracks ended up on later N.O.T.A recordings. The standout track however is World Behind Bars which kinda resembles Stark Raving Mad or something similar from the Southwest.

All in all, this is classic sun-baked mid-80's hardcore from one of the best bands ever. Check it out.... and don't bitch about the fidelity, it's a 20 year old tape!

No Chance
World Behind Bars
Listen
New America

I gotta give some thanks to Big Al for hooking me up with this. I never thought I would hear this one again. Big Al has probably the most comprehensive collection of N.O.T.A. around and has been steadily sending me N.O.T.A. stuff for a while now. All of it is good and some of it is friggin great. The Give Em Enough Dope LP especially is much better than I expected. Jeff's lyrics have a real skid-row desperation and humor to them that makes them entertaining.

So here's a couple more goodies courtesy of Big Al:

Hellhole (from the Hellhole 7inch EP)
Punk Torture Night(from the Punk Torture Night 7inch)
Disconnect Me (from the Give Em Enough Dope LP)
Pawn Shop (from the Give Em Enough Dope LP)
Cut The Shit (Live)


Also check out the N.O.T.A. myspace. It's where I got these photos.

Like the bands I listed above, Your Food had a crack rythm section in Charles Schultz and Wolf (not a punk rock name) Knapp. Each Your Food song follows a similar pattern with Charles and Wolf creating a unique rythm which they then repeat over the duration of the song. John Bailey then adds some seriously noisy guitar scronk over the top of it. The whole effect can be very reminiscent of European post-punk (LiLiput comes to mind) until you hear Doug's Psycho Killer fa-fa-fa-vocals sung in a distinctive Louisville drawl which automatically transports you back over to this side of the Atlantic.

So...."Poke It With A Stick" being Louisville's first punk LP, shot to the top of the nascent college radio playlists, correct? Umm, no...they were too wrapped up with Ultravox in 1983.

...and that's a shame too cuz "Poke It" is a great record and seems strangely timeless when you listen to it (unlike, say Vienna by Ultravox). The key songs on it are the three that were on Bold Beginnings; Leave, Don't Be, and Here as well as Foreign and the uber-cool Cool. In fact, the only throwaway is the last song Order which is a poorly recorded live track.

If you are interested in the entire 3 year Your Food saga (82 - 84), I highly recommend going to the Your Food myspace. Doug tells the tale much better than I could and it is an incredibly entertaining read, especially for anyone who has toured in a shitty van.

I have also included the early demo tracks that feature Tari Barr on drums. Because the Your Food sound was so set by its rythm section, these songs sound different and more rooted in Velvets-style droning. A couple of them were revamped for the classic lineup of the band and it is neat to hear them in thier embryonic form.

If you have been reading the comments on some of the other Louisville posts you know that Wolf moved to New York and became a North Jersey hillbilly. Doug has also been around the site and is currently playing guitar in the excellent band Minnow who are opening up for Slint in Chicago on July 14th.

I have a bunch of other Your Food obscurities that I have been rockin' out to. If there is interest in the comments, I'll definitely make a second Your Food post down the road.

Your Food - Poke It With A Stick

Leave
Foreign
Baby Jesus
Cool / Cowtown
Pop
Corners
Don't Be
Here
Order

Your Food - Early Demos

10/4
Leave
Dismal
Baby Jesus
It's Okay

The photos used on this site are from the excellent Louisville Punk Archive.

This is before I discovered punk rock records, pot-smoking, booze-drinking, cigarettes and teen angst. All I cared about at age 11 was the females... Girls and funky old school music. Funky old school music and girls.....

Hmmmmmm.....How about a set of old school rap music featuring lady MCs?

Vicious Rap - Tanya "Sweet Tee" Winley (1980)
Lady B - To The Beat Y'All (1979)
Xanadu & Sweet Lady - Rocker's Choice (1979)
The Sequence - Tear The Roof Off (1981)
Lady D - Lady D Rap (?)

and of course...

Funky Four Plus One More - Rappin' and Rockin' The House (1979)

The other day I got this CD from the uber-cool Noise Pollution Records label outta Louisville, KY. It's called Bold Beginnings : An Incomplete Collection Of Louisville Punk 1978-1983 and it's right up my fuckin' alley.

To those who don't know about the Louisville music scene, it has always been strangely cutting edge and arty for a town of its' size and geographical location. I talk about the history of the town a bit in my !!! post. The fact is, there are many places in the US twice the size of Louisville that have never produced a Squirrel Bait or a Rodan or a even a Your Food for chrissakes.

In more "cosmopolitan" cities like Boston, NYC or San Francisco, punk rock was considered, at it's begininnings, a form of rock-n-roll. Bands like The Heartbreakers, The Nuns and The Real Kids were playing rock-n-roll and they knew it. The audiences knew it too and the entire vibe of the early punk sound in these cities was, to a degree, based around returning to something that was lost in all of that awful high-minded 1970's prog. CRIME for instance, billed themselves as San Francisco's only Rock-n-Roll band and that completely speaks to this point.

Here in the middle of the country, punk was never and would never be considered a form of rock-n-roll by anybody. If you wanted to listen to rock-n-roll you would listen to Led Zeppelin or Sabbath or AC/DC. Punk was even more marginalized here than on the coasts. Consequently, a lot of cities out here skipped that whole rock-n-roll thing altogether because it was inconceivable that we could be or were playing rock-n-roll.

Oddly enough, what that meant is that cities like Indianapolis, St Louis, Columbus and even Chicago produced bands and scenes that were less connected to the rock-n-roll tradition. The scenes were often smaller and more polarized against the outside community at large. Judging by this CD, Louisville was certainly similar although in some ways, much more productive.

So Bold Beginnings starts with Louisville's first-ever punk band No Fun and right away you know you are in the full-on midwestern art-punk zone. Each song by No Fun follows a similar pattern; repeated garage chords with barked vocals by either Bruce Witsiepe or Tony Pinotti. Tara Key, who was an integral part of the Louisville scene and went on to form the great Homestead act, Antietem, played guitar in No Fun and shares vocals on my favorite song by them; "Evasive Measures".

To say that No Fun is a revelation to me is an understatement. This was recorded in Louisville in 1978? Apparently, it was from a demo and all I can say is No Fun needs an entire CD retrospective.

Next up are The Endtables, who many of us became aware of from the Bloodstains Across the Midwest comp. The Endtables were fronted by a dude named Steve Rigot who carried the Gary Floyd flag, both in terms of size and gender-fucking. Musically though, The Endtables were something else altogether, mixing really weird guitar progressions with Steve's David Thomas-style vocal approach. The resulting sound reminds me of a lot of bands but still sounds totally unique.

Tara Key's next band, The Babylon Dance Band follows. They seemed to be Louisville's great punk hope, getting writeups in The Village Voice and such. Excellent stuff, although it is hard to follow The Endtables and No Fun. Blinders follow and if any band on this comp sounds traditional it is them. With that said, Blinders mixture of punk rock and rockabilly sounds closer in spirit to The Dicks than anything else. The Dickbrains follow with some poorly recorded live tracks. This is a shame cuz they sound pretty good and I would have liked to have heard Cathy Irwin's (of Freakwater fame) first band with some better fidelity.

This is followed by Malignant Growth who were a really gnarly bunch of hardcore dudes from Shively, a blue collar suburb of Louisville. The three songs included on this comp are all from the Master Tape Volume Two compilation put out by Paul Mahern and that's disappointing cuz I would have liked to have heard some other stuff by these guys. They were definitely an over-looked band in the midwestern hardcore scene and had a lot going for them. Another band that deserves a full retrospective!

Another great band on Bold Beginnings is the band Your Food who completely have flown under my radar. Apparently they released an LP called Poke it With A Stick on Whoredog Records in 1983? Does anyone out there have this? I would love to hear it. The three songs on this comp are all from it and they all have that jagged weirdness to them that I eat for breakfast. Time-wise they would have been contemporaries of bands like Pylon and I can definitely see these two bands sharing a stage.

Looking at the pictures in the 16 page booklet that accompanies Bold Beginnings, I am reminded of how gender-equal the early punk scenes in a lot of cities were. Certainly, Tara Key, Cathy Irwin and other women helped get the ball rolling in Louisville. Outre personalities like Steve Rigot also added a lot to these scenes. Once the hardcore dudes took over, a lot of the experimentation that grew out of this diversity disappeared. I don't know if that was the case with Louisville though. Bold Beginings ends in 1983 as arty as it began in 1978 with Skull of Glee.

The next acts I am aware of from Louisville were Squirrel Bait and Antietem, who were pretty damn creative and unique as well. After them the floodgates opened with the Louisville scene. Even in the early days, Louisville punk rock was better than most. Check out Bold Beginnings and find out. It's even better than a "hot brown".

Track Listing:

No Fun - She, Evasive Measures, Answer
The Endtables - White Glove Test, The Defectors, They're Guilty
Babylon Dance Band - Baby Boom, Comes Change, Pulling Away
Blinders - This Isn't My Mother's Car, Honey Hush, It Won't Last Long
The Dickbrains - Walk Away, Decay, Tell Me About It
Malignant Growth - Hopeless, Killing Time, Tired Of Life
The Monsters - Monster Jam, Fedished
Strict-9 - Rock In The Suburbs, I Like Your Mother, Self Destruction
Your Food - Leave, Don't Be, Here
Skull Of Glee - You Are The Animal, Cannibals Gone Wild, Men

For more information, check out the Noise Pollution Records website. Bold Beginnings also has its own myspace page with some more songs available for listening. Noise Pollution has a myspace as well here. How about The Babylon Dance Band? Your Food? Antietem? Catherine Irwin? For a great resource on old Louisville punk go here. I got a lot of my old photos from that site. Another good one is here.

More Left Arm / U-Men - Dig It A Hole

I will not be posting anymore info on Left Arm here on this site other than an occasional sentence or two that will link to the new Left Arm blog. This just ain't the appropriate venue in my opinion. So, if we do win the poll on Wednesday, there will be a big write-up on it there with a link to it from here.

Feel free to visit us when you can at http://stltardcore.blogspot.com/. Right now there is a nice gory picture of my mangled hand on it.

Which of course makes me think of the U-Men. How fucking cool is this one!



Punk Zine Archive / FEAR - Beef Bologna (SNL)

Recently on the TIRC Message Board, I got some interesting news. Namely, an online archive has been released of old MRR, Flipside, Suburban Voice and Heart Attack back issues. It's a pretty amazing project. I mentioned in my Jet Lag post that I would like to see all old zines eventually archived online...the more obscure the better. But ya gotta start with the big boys and these were it. I was never much of an MRR fan but the Suburban Voice and Flipside stuff is killer. Shit, the MRR stuff is pretty killer too to be honest. Check it out here:

http://www.operationphoenixrecords.com/archivespage.html

Rumour has it that they are looking for volunteers to help transcribe the text and make the zines searchable. In the meantime, how about some Beef Bologna?



Joe Stumble Myspace / Fibonaccis - Purple Haze

Around the same time that I started this blog, I also started a MySpace account. It languished in obscurity in cyberspace for quite a long time. I never really *got* this whole MySpace thing and to be honest with ya, I still don't get it 100 percent.

But a while back some local folks discovered me on there and my page seems to have grown exponentially since then. So if you have a MySpace site, add me. I am hoping to use MySpace as a way to announce special posts on Last Days as well as some Left Arm related shit.

C'mon...all the kids are doing it.

http://www.myspace.com/joestumble

In honor of all this groovy social networking shit how about some Fibonnacis with the definitive version of Purple Haze:




Web Report / B-52s - Private Idaho

So I recently went to my web provider to check out my stats and I thought some of you might be interested in what I discovered. We are six months into 2007 and here are the top tunes on LDOMOE:

Mr Freeze - Dr Know 831 hits
Undercover Rokk-n-Roller - Teezar 847 hits
Bakkstage Pass - Teezar 855 hits
She Gots a Gun - Drunk Injuns 898 hits
He Was a Big Freak - Betty Davis 902 hits
Sperm Bank Baby - Black Randy and the Metrosquad 923 hits
Theme from Shaft - Black Randy and the Metrosquad 963 hits
In Time - TSOL 989 hits
Dedicated To The Press - Betty Davis 1625 hits
lastdaysofmanonearth homepage 1699 hits

My peak month was April when I had 14,830 unique visits although May was a close second with 14,374. This was a major spike up in usage from March which was around 9,000. Now here is where it gets real interesting....

The top level domains of visitors to this site are .net (11,293 hits) and .com (5,907 hits). This is to be expected. Most of us spend our time on the internet at .com and .net sites and most of us are hosted on a .com or .net server. However....

The third most regular top level domain is .cn which is China. In fact China makes up for almost as many hits as my .com visitors at 5543 hits. This completely amazed me. So I looked into my top referring pages and sure enough, my number one referring page by a landslide is http://www.online.tj.cn/ . Somewhere in there is a link to Last Days.

This spike in usage in April seems to correspond with the rise in popularity of Betty Davis as well which means that I believe there are a shitload of Betty Davis fans in China visiting Last Days. All I can say, is I hope China is also somewhat responsible for the Teezar hits as well. The thought of introducing Teezar to China is truly inspiring.

So I asked my sister's husband, who is Chinese, to help me write out a big hello to China but he wouldn't help. I don't even have the language pack on my computer. So if you are in China right now, and you can read this...Rock On! How about some old school B-52's with Private Idaho?

So...Imagine yourself as an adolescent in 1983. C'mon...indulge me here.

It's 1983 and your parents are in thier mid-to-late-thirties. Maybe even thier early thirties or forties. Regardless of exactly how old they are, they lived through the 1970's and may even remember the heady days of the late 60's. They are boomers through and through. And with thier boomer status they feel they have seen everything, done everything and thought of everything.

You wanna listen to black music? That's cool...you can borrow thier Jazz LPs or Donna Summer LPs. Overthrow the state? How nice...just like Patty Hearst! You will grow out of it. Sex? They remember when Deep Throat played at hip mainstream theaters. Drugs? Do I even need to address this one?

They have a lock on popular culture. Prince is recording his Paisley stuff. When did Wonder Years with Fred Savage come out? It's all a blur....bleargghhhhh!

SO what was the one thing that could really piss off your parents and the dominant ideology of the day? How about this....

Yes, Casey Royer from the back of the first Adolescents LP. This was everything your parents feared in one simple photo. Check it out! The guy is pockmarked and drug addled looking. His hair is vaguely aryan which is reinforced by his swastica spraypainted on his sweatshirt. He looks nihilistic and ready to kick your ass.

At this point boomer-mom (or dad) would undoubtedly start to retch. "Ughhh...everything we worked for...all for this?" Then they would look at the song titles...

"I Hate Children!!! Get this shit out of my house."

At which point you get to deliver the much cherished, uber-rare "boomer-slam".

You say, "I thought your generation was all about freedom of expression but you are dictating what I can or can't listen to! You people are hypocrites!"

You bolt out the door. Adolescents records in hand and you invariably end up at one of your buddies' houses where you hang out in the basement smoking weed, listening to Kids of The Black Hole and ripping on the Me Generation. Maybe later in the night you go destroy private property or something...who knows? The world's an oyster.

And what does this have to do with todays post? Well Casey Royer went on to form DI. the seminal Orange County band. He moved up from behind the drumset and became the singer which is really where he shoulda been.

DI was an amazing band in the mid-to-late-eighties but they suffered from a few things. First of all thier albums were incredibly poorly packaged. No flyers or lyrics or anything. Second of all, they recycled the same songs from album to album which just screamed "lack of material". Third they were too late. By the time they started really spreading the word the SoCal thing had waned and in its place was the dreaded posi-core. The Adolescents first album came out at the zeitgest. The DI albums seemed retro when in reality the corpse wasn't cold yet. Look at the other bands on this flipside cover. Notice anything?

Another element that hurt DI was the perceived reactionary element to thier lyrics. Guns for instance. Was it pro-gun or anti? They weren't telling you. And as the post-Ian Mackaye kids got increasingly politically correct, DI seemed in poor taste.

Except to me. I always loved em. I get a perverse thrill out of offending uptight people and Casey never dissapointed me....except they needed to not recycle songs. The albums are all still in print but here is a sampler of the first three. My favorite and the one to start with is Horse Bites Dog Cries which contains thier best versions of Hang Ten In East Berlin and Guns as well as the amazing Youth In Asia.

Team Goon - 1982 (Buy Here)

Rock And Roll Part II
Nuclear Funeral
The Saint
Richard Hung Himself
Guns
Venus De Milo
Reagan Der Fuhrer
Purgatory


Ancient Artifacts - 1984 (Buy Here)

O.C. Life
Purgatory II
Stand Up
Eringzo
(I Hate) Surfin' In H.B.
Falling Out
Hang Ten In East Berlin
Wounds From Within
Spiritual Law


Horse Bites Dog Cries - 1987 (Buy Here)

Pervert Nurse
Youth In Asia
Hang Ten In East Berlin
Obnoxious
Johnny's Got A Problem
Little Land
No Moms
Imminent War
Guns
Spiritual Law
Stick To Your Guns
Living In The U.S.A.


Casey and co are still kicking it today. They were recently on Monster Garage. They recently did a benefit for Brent Liles' family who, by the way, is taking some heat from a moron on KBD Records who recently discovered The Maids and is now a fuckin' expert on all things punk. Whether you are hearing these records for the first time or revisiting them ....DI effin' wrules..

Live, !!! put on an amazing show. The members all play different instruments so it is relatively difficult to talk about the "bass player" or "drummer" or whatever. However, a typical !!! show generally has numerous people on stage; a bunch of them banging away on percussion which any fan of late 70's NYC funk will appreciate. !!! is unapologetically a dance band and they are all about the beat in the same hypnotic way that a band like ESG was.

With that said, there are some consistencies. Tyler Pope generally holds down the bass end, while Mario Andreoni plays an incredibly unique style of guitar. The two frontmen are John Pugh and Nic Offer and they couldn't be more different. John Pugh has a higher voice and generally approaches the tunes more melodically while Nic Offer is the great showman and approaches the songs with more of a rythmic punk style. His vocal style is more prominent on the recordings than Pugh's, but I believe the combination of the two of them help make !!! so unique.

Seeing them at Headliners was more intimate than at T&G where I was way in the back. I got almost up to the stage and !!! put on an amazing (although short) show. I would say that overall it was better than the T&G experience except for one thing. Pugh was not present and taking over for him was a female singer. I don't know her name but she did a great job filling in. However, they seemed much more conventional with her and I am hoping that Pugh has not quit the band or anything. I was talking with a group of folks after the show who had seen them in Bristol, England last year and the consensus was definitely bring back John Pugh! Anyone who knows more about this, please fill in the blanks.

Besides this, !!! put on an amazing show and they were well worth the 4 hours I spent in my car. At the end of the concert this guy from Lexington walked over and started talking to us.

"Fuck! Those guys are great", he said. "I am generally a person who does not like to dance and more to the point, I don't like people who dance at shows."

"You mean like ravers and clubbers", I responded.

"Yeah...I hate that shit. But I was shakin' my ass all over the place. I made a goddam contradiction of myself. I gotta go home and think about this one."

I think that about sums it up.

KooKooKa Fuk-U - From thier 2001 Self-Titled Debut
Hello, Is This Thing On? - From 2004's Louden Up Now
Break In Case Of Anything - From 2007's Myth Takes

!!! are touring for thier latest album Myth Takes. Personally, my favorite LP so far is thier 2004 release on Touch and Go, Louden Up Now which straddles the line between artfullness and funkiosity. Check out thier website and myspace too for more info.

I think the poseur comments came from the fact that DEVO had scored a big hit with Whip It. Much like Mexican Radio though, Whip It was some pretty subversive stuff for popular audiences. Again I ask, do you think mass audiences could handle something like Whip It or Mexican Radio today?

Regardless, at that time it was very important not to sell out and by courting popular opinion DEVO made the crucial error. Saying you liked DEVO in 1982 was basically like telling everyone you were an idiot...so I kept my DEVO fandom in the closet throughout my adolescence. Especially when I was trying real hard to be punk-n-all.


Sometime during the 1990's, the spin on DEVO changed and they began to get viewed as a seminal new wave post-punk band....which is what they were/are. Part of this newfound cred came about due to the releases of Hardcore 1 and 2 on Rykodisk. Another part of it came about due to the popularity of grunt rock and its predecessor, grunge.

See, one of the engines behind DEVO-hatred in the 1980's was this need for some sort of perceived authenticity. The 1980's were an incredibly fake time full of lots of feelgood nostalgic bullshit. In the 1980's it became really important to fans of independent music not to be perceived as fake but to be real.

As the era waned we got what we asked for and more. There was "authenticity" in spades with all of those flannel dudes. This DEVOlved into the mid 1990's grunt rock and y'all-ternative phenomenons which effectively killed popular rock-n-roll music.

Don't kid yourself. We live in the post-rock era now.

So at some point around 1991 some of us were getting real tired of the same old grungy "authentic" shit and started looking back in our record collections at bands that were more eccentric and offbeat. Ryko releases 2 CD's of early and unreleased DEVO tracks coincidentally at this exact moment and BAM! DEVO is OK to like again.

Listening to these DEVO tracks now, I can say with hindsight that they are not as great as I had perceived them to be in 1991. There was always this "Revenge of the Nerds" vibe with DEVO and it is most perceptible on these early tracks (Soo Bawls, Buttered Beauties and Ono come to mind). In hindsight, I believe "Are We Not Men" is the DEVO high-water mark.

But some of the tracks on here are amazingly cool and should not be missed by any self-respecting post-punk fan (Midget, Auto Mowdown and Uglatto come to mind). This has been out of print for a long time and is fetchin' high prices on Amazon. Also check out the DEVO official site. It's great!

DEVO - Hardcore Volume 1

Mechanical Man
Auto Modown
Space Girl Blues
Social Fools
Soo Bawls
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
Jocko Homo
Golden Energy
Buttered Beauties
Midget
I'm a Potato
Uglatto
Stop Look and Listen
Ono
Mongoloid

So I was doing a guest spot on Scene of The Crime a few months back and as I was wrapping it up, who the fuck walks in but none other than Tim Mize, the lead singer of my all-time favorite St Louis hardcore band Laffinstock. Now if you have paid attention on any of my other St Louis hardcore related-posts, you know that the Laffinstock demo represents the friggin hardcore Holy Grail for me. I seriously never thought I would hear it again and then last week, what arrives in my mailbox? A package from Tim Mize containing the Laffinstock demo and some unreleased stuff


So does the demo stand up to the test of time? Hell fuckin' yeah it does. Now, I am fully aware that it is difficult for me to be unbiased about this stuff as it was basically the soundtrack to juvenille delinquency for me as a teenager, so lets study it objectively and scientifically. Let's take a look at the first track, played endlessly by me and my delinquent buddies back in the day. "Fucked Up For Days" was at face value, very similar to the prevalent NYHC style of its time (1987). But take a listen again...

The song moshes along after a Dennis Hopper Blue Velvet quote more in the Drunks With Guns tradition than any NYHC band. Then the break and it speeds up wicked fast and the lyrics kick in. But is it about "scene unity" or some fuckin' bullshit? No! It's about being fucked up for days. Then Tim asks you for a beer and it goes back into the mosh which you now realize has a lot more in common with Wonderful Subdivision than it does with Break Down The Walls. I have now concluded after my scientific analysis that this track kicks ass.

What was great about Laffinstock was that they took everything that made St Louis unique during the hardcore era (which lasted longer here than in most places) and wrapped it up into one big powerhouse of a band. They took the heaviness of Drunks and combined it with the speed of White Suburban Youth and added the humor of Ultraman. Look at the banner from one of thier Bernards shows with Tim in the wig. It looks like a fuckin' sign outside a pizza joint. Might as well say St Louis' own Gooey Butter or something.

They were the last great hardcore band for me. The fact that they were local was irrelivent. By this time the scene had really degenerated into posi-core and neo-naziisms. I moved away to Tulsa between the demo and these extra tracks and did not return for many years. In Tulsa I discovered Am Rep and Sub Pop and the game was pretty much over for me as far as hardcore was concerned. Looking back, what started in 82-83 for me with the Dead Kennedys and The Circle Jerks, ended for me in 87-88 with Laffinstock and Ultraman.

So, listen to the songs. They are a perfect combination of black humor, misanthropy, brute force and adrenalin, which at its best is what the St Louis sound was all about. They took these local traits and combined them with obvious outside influences like Fang and The FU's to great effect.

It'll sneak up on ya. This stuff fuckin' rules.

Laffinstock Demo

Fucked Up For Days
What Now?
Empty Threats
Laffinstock

Unreleased Tracks recorded at Webster University

Empty Threats / Fucked Up For Days
What Now?
Untitled

Oh Yeah....Don't complain about the sound quality. These are 20 year old demo tapes. What do you expect? I dunno why they recorded the same songs twice. I know they had more songs. Who cares. They are great songs. Tim now has a radio show on KDHX. Rumor has it he plays hour long sets of The FU's on occasion.