Music-related rants from a self-styled underground music snob/scholar/freak. Topics range from late 1970s punk rock, pre-WWII delta blues, 60s garage punk, wild-ass rhythm & blues, sugar-coated 60s girl group pop, early 80s UK D.I.Y. post-punk, and more. You can comment and be a part of the action! Let a hundred insular record-collector voices bloom!
Mom, if you’re reading, I’m only repeating the name of the band. Things were different in the 70s, mom. You remember. So here’s Side A of a 45 that everyone needs to hear and then hear again. Best as I know it – and you can find a lot more detail in an issue of Ugly Things from a few years ago (sense a pattern this week?) – the FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS were an out-of-time, out-of-their-element, outcast bunch of freaks on the island of Oahu, making an unholy din & some wild-ass psychedelic punk rock in the late 1970s. At least a couple members were Japanese. I found a copy of this 45 in the late 1980s at a San Francisco metal store called “Record Vault”, after seeing Byron Coley namecheck it in passing (yet with glee) in an old Forced Exposure. Good enough for me. I sold it on eBay a few years back for far less than anticipated. I think it’s still awaiting full discovery by the populace at large, and I’m posting it here to do my part. Wow. Clear the room, you’re gonna need the space.
One of the more wacked records I’ve been turned onto in recent years is this raspy, tuneless 1965 single from a Rochester, NY act called THE CHURCH MICE. I first heard of the record when it was pictured and briefly discussed in Johan Kugelberg’s Ugly Things feature on “primitive shit rockâ€Â (which I in turn wrote about here). A little research on the web brings me IT’S GREAT SHAKES which will tell you far more about the record – and why it’s important that you hear it – than I ever could. Finally, even crazy old Julian Cope got into the act and wrote up a piece on the ‘Mice and about the even more bent offerings from Armand Schaubroeck that followed this release. Schaubroeck is a real cult figure that I haven’t quite cottoned to just yet, but this 45 certainly leads me merrily in that direction. Easily one of the 1960s’ strangest pre-punk records.
I used to listen to a lot of reggae and dub at the end of its golden era in the early 1980s, via college radio shows like Spliff Skankin’s on KFJC (great nom de plume, Spliff!) and Doug Wendt’s commercial show “Midnight Dreadâ€Â on a commercial San Francisco station called “The Quakeâ€Â. I always took to the dub stuff the most – the sinewy, echo-laden headcleaners from the likes of the Twinkle Brothers and King Tubby – but I got way deeper into obscure rock music and dropped all reggae & dub when I headed off to Bob Marley University, aka UC-Santa Barbara. It took probably 15 years before I was ready to take up the flag again around 1999, and when I did, it was dub only for the most part – to this day I have an aversion to most (not all) vocal reggae post-1970 or so.
Oddly enough, it was two chapters in an out-of-print book called “The Secret History of Rockâ€Â that got me going again; the chapters were on Tubby and Lee “Scratchâ€Â Perry, and they totally got my interest piqued. A friend then bought me AUGUSTUS PABLO’s “King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptownâ€Â and that was all she wrote. For 8 years I have been a dub collector, I guess you’d say, if collecting means amassing a library of CD-Rs burned from others & from Soulseek, and CDs actually purchased with real cash money at great dub-laden stores like Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz, CA. A lot of my pals think that dub is kinda lame, or reeks of the reggae that they learned to loathe, and I guess I understand. I’ve been there. Yet the form, which to my ears truly existed in its top guise from about 1972 to 1982 (or thereabouts), is as wild, wacked and unpredictable as many of the rock bands we frequently revere. I’m going to post what I could very legitimately argue are 3 of the top dubs of all time. If you’re newly interested in the genre, I hope this is a portal to another dimension for ya. If you’re an old dub hand, well, then you probably have these already, but it can’t hurt to listen to them again right now at top volume, right?
The TOUCH-ME-NOTS are a great husband/wife guitar & drums duo from Oakland, California who are working hard on rejuvenating the long-dormant genre of “Ozark punkâ€Â. You might recognize this form as having formerly being the province of acts like ’68 COMEBACK, WALTER DANIELS and smaller players like Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Feathers. They’ve recently attracted some deserved attention for their stripped-down, bonzai tear-it-up style, which essentially consists of a loud twangy, toothless racket, with the occasional side trip into Lieber/Stoller & girl group territory, made by two of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. They’ve recently released their debut 10â€ÂEP “Sheldon Munnâ€Â on France’s Yakisakana Records, as well as a second 45rpm disc on Nasty Product. I’m solidly in their camp, & hope you will be too. Here are 3 samples for your listening pleasure:
I stumbled across this bootleg SCIENTISTS single many years ago & reckoned it was an official release, all the more so when I took it home and promptly christened it one of the top Scientists records ever, right up there with “Blood Red Riverâ€Â and “This Heart Doesn’t Run On Blood….â€Â. “There’s a Monster in Meâ€Â, the song, is among this early/mid-80s Australian group’s high-water marks – total screeching swampland gutter blues – and why it never made it to an official release is a mystery for the ages & the sages. The B-side is a barely-different version of “You Only Live Twiceâ€Â, but it wasn’t anything special so I’m refraining from posting it here. Friends who saw the Scientists last year in England at the All Tomorrow’s Parties fest reported that it was like a 1983 Perth punk rock picnic come to life, like 20-some-odd years hadn’t passed or nothin’. And what’s this I hear about the BEASTS OF BOURBON touring the US this year?
Anyway – dig this squealing bit of god noise, and let me know what you think.
What can I say about these two – I just quickly uploaded the two songs I consider to be the creme-de-la-creme of 1960s girl-group pop music, and now I wish to share them with you. DIANE RAY‘s “Please Don’t Talk To The Lifeguard” first reached my eyes on the Boyd Rice-curated “Music For Pussycats” compilation, and I’ve since found the song on at least two other CD collections – so it’s out there if you need it. Total teen trash. Love it. SUSAN LYNNE‘s “Don’t Drag No More” will tear your heart out and turn your insides to slush, such is the power of its baleful warnings. I beseech you – learn these songs, master them within your head, and tell five friends this instant how important it is that they download them from Detailed Twang. Thanks.
Back in the 80s I used to read Gerard Cosloy’s CONFLICT magazine so intently that his bands, the ones I’d never even heard, often became my bands, and since he incessantly and most often deservingly hyped up the ones he dug, I knew their ins & outs pretty well. One I always wanted to hear was DIG DAT HOLE. They were often described in Conflict’s pages as being a wild-ass BIRTHDAY PARTY-inspired antecedent, very much in the same school as some other great bands of the day like the Laughing Hyenas and Pussy Galore. They actually imploded even before they got a 45 out the door, and all that ever existed from them was a single cassette tape (pictured here) and an aborted LP, neither of which I’ve heard in their entirety. The story I got from the interweb says that 2 of the guys moved to NYC and quickly started COP SHOOT COP. They were interesting for about ten minutes in 1990, weren’t they?
So here it is in 2007 and I’ve procured a solitary song of theirs from the cassette and aborted LP called “A Similar End”, and – whoa. Absolutely fucking scorch. This has aged like a bottle of fine barleywine, and blows away a fair majority of the musical landscape between 1987 and 2007, wouldn’t you say? Wow.
Hey, I know this isn’t a pic of the band or their album – I can’t find THE WHITEFRONTS’ 1985 album “Roast Belief” in my cluttered garage (actually I’m too lazy to look), so you just get a pic of this lovely honking bird instead of a scan of the record. It’s also rare enough that there’s virtually nothing about it online. Who were the WHITEFRONTS? Well, when I started college at UC-Santa Barbara in 1985, they were sorta my hipster cousin & his pals’ favorite local band down there. I never got to see them; I think they graduated or got kicked out or something around ’86 and moved to San Francisco, where they gigged around for a bit and then called it a day a couple of years later. My cousin used to play me some great “cassette tapes” of their stuff, which ranged from Velvet Underground-inspired freakouts (like the track I’m posting here, the fantastic “6 Buses” from the “Roast Belief” album) to Hawaiian slide guitar weirdness to hippie bongo workouts to Meat Puppets-style fake hardcore punk. And lots of genres and styles in between. When you hear this track, perhaps you’ll wish to start the Whitefronts revival with me?
I just don’t have time to put any real thought into writing about “cultural” stuff these days. The no-look-hand-pass mp3 blog thing is incredibly easy – post the song, write some inane text and boom, there you go. Yet here’s an attempt to provide a bit of a peek into some films I watched over the past month. Perhaps there are some titles that you recognize. Perhaps, like me, there are some that you will enjoy. Please allow me to continue:
DESPERATE MAN BLUES – I was so excited to find a DVD documentary about legendary record collector Joe Bussard that I bought this thing without knowing a thing about it, & after watching it I’m glad I had the gumption to do so. The DVD’s actually two docs in one – one made by an Australian crew a few years ago about Joe & his foibles, and another similar one made by heroic archivists Dust-to-Digital just last year. If you have a place in your heart for the thrill that comes from rescuing some incredible pre-WWII musical artifact from oblivian (which Bussard has built an entire life on) or from hearing it, then this snapshot of a true American giant is for you. A-
THE DEPARTED – Watched this the night before it took the Oscar for best picture so I could say I’d seen at least a couple of the films that were up for the award…..like just about everyone, I dug it. For a 2 and 1/2-hour movie, it moved quickly & played like a great thriller, and I thought the concept of setting up the two different “rats” in the Boston police force and playing them against each other was pretty clever. Even Leonardo DiCaprio was great. Good one, Martin. I’m not sure that guy’s even made a movie I can remember since “GoodFellas”, and the only thing I remember about that one was the whole funny-like-a-clown bit….. B.
PAN’S LABYRINTH – Believe the hype – very enjoyable, fantastic dazzler about a young girl who escapes her mother’s shacking up with a sadastic fascist military commander during the encroaching Spanish civil war by inventing an alternate-but-parallel below-ground reality, full of spooks both comforting and terrifying. Much more violent and creepy than I’d anticipated, which was all well & good. Very well done, just don’t take yer little ones. B+.
DEATH OF A CYCLIST – I ventured to a historic San Francisco theater to watch the revival of this 1955 Spanish film directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, about an adulteress and her lover who mow down a cyclist on a back road, and then spend the rest of the movie writhing with guilt. I was a little taken aback by the horrifyingly moralistic way the film wraps up, and the syrupy strings & weeping melodies that came up during every dramatic moment made me feel like the film was more 1945 than it was 1965, if you know what I mean. I guess I was a little disappointed, but that Lucia Bose was quite a dish. C.
THIS IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPH – THE MISSION OF BURMA STORY – For Burma fans only, is what I’m recommending. A documentary on how the band made their way back to live & recorded action a few years ago, very well done & with some outstanding archival footage as well, but maybe lacking any sort of broader theme beyond “Mission of Burma are back and isn’t that great?”. B-.
TALLADEGA NIGHTS – Absolute garbage, full of clunking jokes and bizarre non-sequiters that go nowhere. Only thing I laughed at were “Ricky Bobby’s” redneck kids, but this one was snapped off about two-thirds of the way in. Excruciating. D-.
Mom, if you’re reading, I’m only repeating the name of the band. Things were different in the 70s, mom. You remember. So here’s Side A of a 45 that everyone needs to hear and then hear again. Best as I know it – and you can find a lot more detail in an issue of Ugly Things from a few years ago (sense a pattern this week?) – the FUCKIN’ FLYIN’ A-HEADS were an out-of-time, out-of-their-element, outcast bunch of freaks on the island of Oahu, making an unholy din & some wild-ass psychedelic punk rock in the late 1970s. At least a couple members were Japanese. I found a copy of this 45 in the late 1980s at a San Francisco metal store called “Record Vault”, after seeing Byron Coley namecheck it in passing (yet with glee) in an old Forced Exposure. Good enough for me. I sold it on eBay a few years back for far less than anticipated. I think it’s still awaiting full discovery by the populace at large, and I’m posting it here to do my part. Wow. Clear the room, you’re gonna need the space.
