For me, the great fourth wave of punk rock washed upon the world’s shores in the very late 1980s and continued on well until the 90s. This of course was the era of the CHEATER SLICKS, THE GORIES, THE OBLIVIANS, SUPERCHARGER and all the sick young kids more inspired by the first wave (1965-67) than by the second (1976-79). With the possible exception of the Cheater Slicks, the bands most near & dear to my ears during this time were Rob Vasquez’s two incredibly unsung & lost-to-time bands THE NIGHTS AND DAYS and THE NIGHT KINGS. The latter got a little bit of attention for a few months when their album “Increasing Our Highâ€Â came out on Steve Turner (Mudhoney)’s Super Electro label, a label that was itself an imprint of the larger Sub Pop records. But finding fellow NIGHTS & DAYS fans in the late 80s/early 90s was a fool’s game, particularly if one lived outside of the band’s hometown of Seattle, as I did. Only record-collecting lunatics knew about the band, and given that their two 45s on the Regal Select label were in editions of 500, until they get reissued, that’s likely to remain the case.
I’d like to do my part in helping move the NIGHTS AND DAYS revival along by providing you with an opportunity to hear (and download) their second 45, “These Days/Lookin’â€Â. This came out in 1989 on Regal Select records from Issaquah, Washington. It is a full-blast wall of sound, with mammoth hooks and enough melodic tuneage (particularly in the case of “These Daysâ€Â) to generate instant-anthem status. At one point in my life I published an entire magazine devoted to my favorite forty-five 45s; this barely missed the cut then, but would not now, with the benefit of ten more years of hindsight and critical filtering. I know that at some point that some label will rescue the compleat works of Vasquez from ignominy and issue a 2xCD that will knock your socks off your ass. Until then, please enjoy what I believe to be his many bands’ absolute peak.
Active from 1964-1967, this North English combo deserve more than its ” Lemmy Kilmeister’s first band” footnote. With their taut 40-minute sets and clerical airs, they were favorites of the Northern dance club scene, though the lack of original material limited their options. A late move to London to record for Shel Talmy didn’t change the world, though theirs’ surely turned more moddish and they found hipper writers to cover. The band’s appealing confidence shows in the title track, a startling rearrangement of the Who’s then-unreleased “The Kids Are Alright” replete with tinkling keys and falsetto call-and-response vocals, and on the irresistibly twitchy “Say Mama.” Stay tuned till the closer, “Little Rosy,” an unreleased Ray Davies tune performed with properly Kinksy abandon.
I’ll admit, I thought the Australian 70s/80s punk goldmine had long been tapped. Ever since I bought the “Bloodstains Across Australia” comp LP & then sold it back (because I thought at the time that it had nothing in the league of The Victims, Razar, Rocks, Psycho Surgeons et al), I counted myself fortunate to have ingested & mentally tagged every great Aussie punk 45 of the golden era. But that’s before I heard this great new compilation from Dropkick Records – and specifically, the band the YOUNG IDENTITIES. Their “Positive Thinking” 45 from 1979 is one of the most raw, crazed & wacked-out punk rock singles of any era, totally in league with the MENTALLY ILL and sharing many of the same fine traits (like an unglued singer with a whiney. nasally voice + a bass player who seems content to hit the same chord over & over as fast as possible). You get all three tracks from that and their other single too, plus some great stuff from JUST URBAIN (“Burning” is fantastic), the BODYSNATCHERS and SECTION URBAIN. Ironically, several tracks were on the “Bloodstains” comp I didn’t like, which proves again the wisdom of age. For some reason there’s the nearly-hideous Bauhuas ripoff band called KICKS on here too, 8 of the 26 tracks in fact, but you know how to use the skip button, dont ya? Here’s what Dropkick has to say about this compilation, just so you know:
Shake Records and Savage Music (essentially the same thing) was the label run in Brisbane during the late ’70s by David Holiday and Peter Miller from Just Urbain, and Rod McLeod from the Young Identities. The first release orchestrated by this brains trust was the Cigarettes and Alcohol” 7″ from local heroes The Leftovers. With no-one within earshot waving chequebooks at them, and having caught the DIY bug, they had nine releases in all, eight 7″s and a live cassette. Roll call: Just Urbain, Young Identities, Bodysnatchers and Kicks.
The bands here are among the most primitive, inept and snotty DIY noise to be found in Australia at the time. The singles sold out their tiny hand made pressings (usually 100 to 200) within months and quickly became highly sought-after. These days they are next to impossible to find. Almost the entire label’s output is compiled here (save a few songs from the Kicks cassette), complete with plenty of band photos, flyers, artwork and lengthy recollections from Messrs Holiday and Miller.
I say it’s a great one, and seriously, if you don’t hear that Young Identities stuff you’re going to the grave with only a life half lived.
Victor Bravo is a stripped-down garage rock juggernaut of Collin Frendz on fuzzy guitar and echoey howl-at-the-moon vocals and Dan Collins on twitchy drums. Tracks 1-3 are terrific, swaggering snot-nosed anthems in the tradition of rural pissed-off teens from 1966 on. “Binge” is an irresistibly Dionysian release, though “Sarbanes-Oxley” (named for the 2002 corporate accounting reform act) is hardly a typical lowbrow theme. Closes with the throwaway sneer of “Toxic Tornado,” weakening the effect of the rest of the EP. The band is now based in NYC, but has roots in Maine that I hope they keep watered.
All I seem to have to do is to save up a few tiny items for one of these collections of trivia and the very next day I find a bunch more. Almost immediately after pushing the “publish” button on the last batch, I was walking around the ‘hood and found a new Nike painting. But that’ll have to wait…
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Meanwhile, it’s that time again, and for the first year in recent memory the Potsdamer Platz public transportation is open for the Berlinale, Berlin’s once-mighty film festival. Two things I never do is go to the Berlinale and read the pitiful excuse for an English-language magazine here, the Ex-Berliner, but I do get a kick out of their sadsack music editor, David Strauss, and he’s gotten the no doubt unpaid job of blogging the Berlinale for them. It could be fun to read, and so if you’re interested, I suggest you click here.
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Last year, out of nowhere, I got a two-Euro coin that looked like this:
The building is the Holstentor in Lübeck, pretty much the symbol of that city, and seeing it on the back of these special coins was, in fact, the only way to see it during much of last year, because the real thing was covered by scaffolding. Just why Germany would choose to change its coinage design only a few years into introducing it I had no idea, but last night I was in some seedy dive or another, and got this in change:
It took me a bit of surfing around to find out that this is Schwerin Castle, representing the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and to find an explanation, rendered in the stiffest possible English translation. Basically, the various Federal states of Germany take over the annual presidency of the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, and get their own coins as a perk. Germany’s the only country doing this, which is further proof that a lot of the Euro system was designed by them. Why else would we have a 20-cent, instead of a 25-cent, coin, not to mention the tiny, confusing 2-centers?
Of course, what they’re really really good for, these special €2 coins, is making cashiers — especially outside of Germany — hand you your change back and tell you it’s not good.
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Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of “French” cafes around town? There must be a dozen of them which’ve sprung up in the past six months, particularly around trendy areas like Weinbergsweg, Kollwitzplatz, and so on. What’s really weird, though, is that there’s nothing particularly French about anything but the wine they offer (and that’s usually not so hot), and the ones that pretend to have a little deli section don’t seem to have a clue what French food is. One I’ve got my eye on, though, is just down the street from me on Torstr. In the former Döner Kebap joint that had the weird poem about children being the future of the world on its wall, someone’s opening something called Bandol, and they’ve been installing vintage meat lockers and a blackboard wall for writing the menu, plus diner-y chrome stools — and two huge TV monitors above the door. Or that’s what it looks like from the street. We’ll see (if “we” can afford it, that is) what it turns out to be. Meanwhile, though, to date it looks like “French” is the new “Mexican.”
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Places We Won’t Be Dining: Spotted on Marienburger Str.: Pizza Pimp.
(Note: I wrote the following on my old blog AGONY SHORTHAND in April 2003. Had mp3 blogs existed then, I would have uploaded the track for you. Now that they do, I am “repurposingâ€Â this original content):
I was 12 years old in 1980, and had had some limited exposure to what was then known as “new wave”. Punk was still something I wasn’t ready to fully tackle, given that the bands & audience actually spit on each other — or so TIME magazine said — but I was definitely extremely curious. Anything that might sound “punk” or “new wave” sounded it might be really fucking cool, so armed with a rudimentary knowledge of what it actually might sound like (having heard Devo and the B-52s, I was certainly an expert), I would tune in to various FM dinosaur rock stations and see if I could find any. These stations, which at the time normally played a mix of horrible AOR like Journey, Styx and the Eagles, were being forced by program directors to play some of this new shit, because everyone said it was “about to break”. So you’d often hear some crap power pop trotted out as punk/new wave or my favorite, “modern music”. And believe me — and many others who’ve testified to this fact — kids in my suburb, at least, used “punk” and “new wave” interchangeably and almost always as a negative, and the main epithet hurled at kids who dressed like funny new wavers or hardcore punks was ALWAYS “Hey, Devo!!”.
So my plan was to write down the names of the performers and songs that sounded new wave or punk, and then I’d go look for the records at the mall. The first thing I heard that was definitely new wave to my 12-year-old ears was LOU REED’s “Vicious”, from the “Transformer” LP, but when I saw the cover at the Wherehouse or the Record Factory or whatever, I decided it probably wouldn’t be any good. The wisdom of youth! It was a blast, though — this was how I discovered ROXY MUSIC (“Virginia Plain” — totally new wave), among others. But the big eye-opener was finding college radio. In the area south of San Francisco was (and still is) a great college station, KFJC. It was there that I heard new wave song after punk song after new wave song, but I’ll definitely remember the first one I ever heard and loved: “Motorbike Beat” by the REVILLOS. Trouble was, I didn’t write it down — but the song stuck with me, and stuck with me, for years.
Once I found out it was the Revillos, sometime in the 1990s, their comedic image as “wacky space people with ray guns” totally turned me off (even though I like the REZILLOS first LP, and it’s essentially the same band), so I never tracked the 45 down. An ill wind of nostalgia swept over me recently, though, and I bid for the 45 on eBay — and won. And you know what? It holds up. It’s a top-flight corker, this song — ultra-frantic, rockabilly-tinged punk with dueling male & female vocals, squealing motorcycle sounds, and just a can’t-beat-it FUN vibe that’s not contrived or too loony to listen to. It was really nice to have it back, 23 years later, since I hadn’t heard it since 1980. The flip “No Such Luck” isn’t half bad, either! What about the rest of their stuff? That goofball space thing still has me pretty wary…..
(Here we are back in 2007 again…) I since learned that most of their stuff was OK, but that this is still their crown jewel. Understand and accept that it’s probably closer to the B-52s themselves than it is to, say, The Cramps, and if you’re cool with that, then here’s the song for your listening pleasure.
Steve Douglas produced and Perry Botkin arranged the sole, baroque 1968 album by this obscure L.A. trio whose lush harmonies and folk-rock jangle suggest they were paying close attention to Love and Buffalo Springfield. Too sing-song earnest in spots, on “The Best of It,” Thorinshield come off as clueless dopes in the face of a bad girl’s attitude. But on a spaced-out fantasia like “Prelude to a Postlude,” the romantic observations only get more charming as they’re repeated ad infinitum, while the backwards guitar and glee-club vocals on “One Girl” sound like a cool lost Merry-Go-Round track. Overall, a sweet and summery discovery. Bassist Bobby Ray would go on to record the cult fave “Initiation of a Mystic” in 1970.
In compiling Bobbie Gentry’s two hard-to-find 1968 LPs, the Australian Raven label has done a service to the American south and its slim yet significant feminist swamp rock scene. Fresh from the breakout success of the strange, symbolic “Ode to Billy Joe,” Miz Gentry crafted in “The Delta Sweete” a fascinating song cycle about the discordant strands that tied the new south to the old. Although recorded in Hollywood, the mood is pure Delta, with colloquial spoken asides, steamy arrangements and big mama Bobbie’s tough, soulful and sometimes sleepy voice central to the proceedings. But while the disc starts off in a rich and funky groove, it soon veers into a distinctly personal brand of psychedelic pop that’s among the most original and lovely sounds crafted in that fertile year. Several of the originals rely on dream and sleep imagery to conjure an otherworldly, haunting air that’s just unforgettable. As good as “The Delta Sweete” was, it flopped, and the consummate pro rushed back into the studio in London to remake herself anew. The more modest “Local Gentry” unfortunately drops the sexy blues standards for maudlin Beatles covers, a minor misstep along the path to duet success with Glen Campbell. But there are still some great moments, with the gently sociopathic “Recollection” and the dark humored “Casket Vignette” especially effective, so fans won’t mind having it slotted onto the single CD. Also included are covers of “Stormy” and an interesting take on Donovan’s “Skip Along Sam” that riffs off the “Casket Vignette” arrangement.
I’ve only had a second or two to look over this new website called SHIT-FI.COM, but they’ve captured a slice of the microscenia zeitgeist that warms the cockles of my heart. That is – off-putting, poorly-recorded accidents of history that in themselves became influential musical masterpieces. Think MIKE REP & THE QUOTAS, the ELECTRIC EELS, the first GERMS single. I think it’s important to read both their manifesto and their shit list of worthy recordings, many of which I’d count among the greatest sounds of all time. And as you can see on their home page, they have a very classy logo. Hear hear!
First off, the reaction to my last post was very interesting: I got an e-mail from David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula, thanking me for the “review,” and noting that, as he mentions in the book’s introduction, there were threads of the story which he just couldn’t wedge in to the narrative as he was telling it. As an example — also mentioned in the introduction — he cites the history of Chinese cooking in America, which isn’t mentioned at all.
He’s right: once you start a story, it goes where it wants to go, and if it’s going to be readable, you have to make sure there aren’t too many digressions. And, as Kamp said in his note, both Edna Lewis and John Thorne lie outside the narrative he was writing. (He also noted that he’d eaten at Gage & Tollner under Lewis’ regime, but, unlike me, his table had gotten a visit from the grand lady herself, checking up on things. I am officially jealous.) As for Raymond Sokolov, he tried to get an interview with him, but they kept missing each other. This kind of thing happens, too.
As for me, I told him that this piece, like pretty much every post on this blog, was written and edited in an hour or less, which is a discipline I maintain in case I ever wind up with a serious writing career again. And in my case, I left out one of the threads of my argument, which was why I’d mentioned Bill Bruford’s book Heat at the top of the post: that besides the Food Network honky-tonk I mentioned, the other current trend seems to be towards a kind of connoisseurship that takes the ability to make good food out of the hands of ordinary people, be it through the kind of perfectionism Mario Battali practices, or the sous-vide fad or the weirdo-cuisine trend of El Bulli and so on.
Finally, Kamp mentioned that he was familiar with my writing, because of what he called “a morbid affliction of mine”.
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Not as morbid, of course, as this news about a German Chinese restaurant. It’s pretty obvious — well, pretty obvious to those of us who grew up around organized crime, anyway — that some of the “Asia” restaurant phenomenon here is about more than the bad food they serve. One guy I knew said it was an immigration scam: since Germans can’t tell one Asian from another, successive waves of workers pass through the restaurants using the same set of ID cards.
It’s obvious that something’s going on a lot of the time: people who remember the original White Trash Fast Food club on the corner by my house probably wondered why the Chinese motif, but that was because it was the Kaiser des Chinas restaurant before that, ornately decorated, with room after empty room. You never saw anyone in there, and the one person I knew who’d eaten there asked me if I had. When I told him no, he just said “Don’t.” (And he was German).
And then, one day, it just closed. It sat there, empty, for over a year. When Wally and his crew took it over, he showed me the kitchen. “These people left so quickly that they left the spices still measured out,” he said, pointing at a row of porcelain bowls with various powders and shriveled remnants in them. That was when I remembered having found a bunch of waiter’s wallets in the trash outside my house and wondering how in the world they’d gotten there. Still, nothing like this has happened here yet.
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Following up on the last set of crumbs, it should be noted that the good voters of Berlin actually went for the renaming of a stretch of Kochstr. as Rudi-Dutschke-Str. a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes the good guys do win, even if it’s just a bit of harmless symbolism.
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And following up on another crumb, I want to report that the Yum Mee bánh mi sandwich joint up at the top of Friedrichstr. is doing a pretty good job. I think the baguettes could be crisper, and they use some kind of margarine instead of the homemade mayo the place I was introduced to them in Honolulu used, and of course they don’t use shredded green chiles because they’re scared of frightening the Germans. Turned out the guy who actually puts your sandwich together speaks pretty accent-less American English, although he’s apparently never been there, and he interrogated me pretty thoroughly last time I was in there about my opinions on his product and my experiences with bánh mi in America. I told him he should add Vietnamese paté to the menu, but he wasn’t sure Germans would go for it — and he may be right. He is, however, about to add tiger prawns to the bánh mi side of the menu, which should be good. And, as lagniappe, as they say in Louisiana, his co-worker taught me how to say pho correctly. I’d been saying something like “phaw,” but it turns out to be more like “pheu.” Now if someone here would learn how to make that right…
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I recently discovered that there are so many refugees from Brooklyn’s hipster enclave, Williamsburg, here in Friedrichshain that they’re calling it Friedrichsburg, but that is not why Deutsche Post issued this stamp this year. Really.
For me, the great fourth wave of punk rock washed upon the world’s shores in the very late 1980s and continued on well until the 90s. This of course was the era of the CHEATER SLICKS, THE GORIES, THE OBLIVIANS, SUPERCHARGER and all the sick young kids more inspired by the first wave (1965-67) than by the second (1976-79). With the possible exception of the Cheater Slicks, the bands most near & dear to my ears during this time were Rob Vasquez’s two incredibly unsung & lost-to-time bands THE NIGHTS AND DAYS and THE NIGHT KINGS. The latter got a little bit of attention for a few months when their album “Increasing Our Highâ€Â came out on Steve Turner (Mudhoney)’s Super Electro label, a label that was itself an imprint of the larger Sub Pop records. But finding fellow NIGHTS & DAYS fans in the late 80s/early 90s was a fool’s game, particularly if one lived outside of the band’s hometown of Seattle, as I did. Only record-collecting lunatics knew about the band, and given that their two 45s on the Regal Select label were in editions of 500, until they get reissued, that’s likely to remain the case.
