NEWS

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I Love German TV

There's a thread over on I Love Music where folks are digging through the YouTube site and finding gems of old music footage. Some of the coolest comes from German TV shows- like this one which clearly establishes the Monks as the most crazy-ahead-of-the-time thing ever:

(here's a direct link if the embedded players lock up your browser)



And this Birthday Party appearance (dir link) with Tracy Pew rocking the pirate shirt:



And this impossibly offensive music video from Nina Hagen- Heroin and Hitler all at once! (Link)



Actually, I think Germany has laws against this sort of thing, so I wonder what country did air it.

Part of the appeal here is that all these things seem to have been taped off TV when they first appeared, and have been laying dormant on Betamax tapes for 25 years, waiting to be shared. I was in middle school when Saturday Night Live had The Specials as the musical guest, and I had no idea what to make of all the hopping around with machine guns. I was very disturbed, and I remember trying to explain it to a friend. "The way they were jumping, I think there was something wrong with them! I don't know what they were called." My friend suggested it might be Devo. 'Cause Devo were really strange and stiff. Nowadays, Devo is all about rocking the middle schoolers. I wasn't watching SNL on Halloween, when Fear got punk banned from SNL for a decade.

Anyways, before I get too excited about continental television, there's this Jodie Foster performance which surely violates several clauses of the Patriot Act. And then there's this disco-Apache thing which appears to have been made under the influence of chugging Mazola corn oil straight up.

posted by bendy @ 1/31/2006 03:41:00 AM [permanent link]

I hope you realize that I'm now going to waste my entire day on YouTube. Good thing i don't have much work right now.

Hey, y'all need to play a gig when I'm not out of town or otherwise engaged.

said Lisa B., at 1/31/2006  

I've only managed to watch links that the I Love Music people dug up. I can't imagine what other riches are in there or forthcoming. It's an answer to the frustration of "oh yeah, Cheryl's ex-boyfriend had a tape of that...I saw that once"

It's amazing how crappy video transfer and choppy streaming is completely sufficient to quell years of not seeing Cheryl's ex-boyfriend's video collection.

BS will be playing again soon!

said bendy, at 1/31/2006  

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Naomi Peterson and SST

Joe Carducci, who worked at SST Records during it's prime, wrote this memoir of Naomi Peterson recently. He learned in May 2005 that she died back in 2003. If her name rings a bell, but you are having trouble placing it, she was the photographer for SST Records.

She took all those tiny photos I'd stare at in fanzines and album jackets when I was a teen. I'd try to discern something about the people who made this frayed and life-changing music; they all looked so ordinary. I remember hearing Zen Arcade, and staring at the crayon-scribbled silhouettes on the cover, and thinking these must be some tough looking guys. And then, a few weeks later, I saw my first Husker Du gig. The audience was all spikes and leather but the guys on stage couldn't be more ordinary. Or loud. Greg Norton's handlebar moustache was totally confounding. I felt like I was just catching up to this hardcore thing in 1984, and here I saw it was already mutating into something else.

Perfect Sound Forever did a nice history of the SST label, and the last page is a very good round-up of the lesser known bands. The writer mentions how good Slovenly were- I don't have any discs myself, but I do remember liking them. They're totally out of print now. The sound was out of place in the late-80s: a monotone Joy Division/Interpol vocalist, and icy guitars. But that's pretty up-to-date these days. They were five years too late or 15 years too early. They looked like hippies, and so did their album art; SST was a confounding batch of punks for sure.

The article Perfect Sound article fails to mention Lawndale, though. Lawndale was a witty instrumental band, surf oriented, but like Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet a few years later, they didn't stick to a retro sound. Sasquach Rock has a blending of Brubeck's "Take 5" with "Whole Lotta Love" that was a cool novelty track. An SST band that was five years too early. 'Coulda been contenders with the flamey-shirt greaser crowd of the 90s.

But my favorite lost SST band is Opal. Happy Nightmare Baby is a little classic of sleepy psych. Kendra Smith's vocals sound bored and sensual at the same time, rather like Trailer Bride's Melissa Swingle. The music is slack and dreamy too, but doesn't get melodramatic the way Mazzy Star tended to be; after Smith left the guitarist started Mazzy Star.

The T. Rex comparisons are obvious the first time you hear "Rocket Machine"

Opal - Rocket Machine

...it's those cellos, or fake cellos. But this song drags and sighs in a way that Marc Bolan never did. This song turns over, roused from an afternoon nap, and starts kissing you.

All three of these artists deserve to have their work available. Carducci sensed that SST was the Sun Records of its day. And twenty years after the fact, SST is still alive and as bizarre as Sun was in the Seventies. They seem to have become a Decline of Western Civ version of Rockabilly Orion, content to nurse the Black Flag and Minutemen legacy. Those bands' recordings are kept available; but you can't get them on iTunes or eMusic. And you can't get the back catalog at all. With so many of the folks involved lost, like Naomi Peterson, it might be hard to make all this music accessible again. It should be heard.

posted by bendy @ 1/08/2006 01:56:00 AM [permanent link]

UPDATE: here it is, Jan 14th, just a few days after I posted this, and SST is starting to put thier catalog up on eMusic. Way to go! Hope they can figure out how to do that back catalog.

said bendy, at 1/14/2006  

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said Anonymous, at 9/10/2006  

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Take your date to a blackstrap gig.

It's usually intersting looking over the logs for blackstrap.org, and seeing what search terms lead folks to this page. Two amusing ones this morning:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=link+wray+lyrics

Link didn't sing a whole lot, since he was missing a lung. I can think of the song "Hidden Charms" and that's about it, if you don't count some sinister laughing and such.

There was also this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=cool+date+ideas+durham

We're the perfect band to take your date to! Infact, I had my first conversation with my future wife at a gig for these guys. We're at least as romantic as them. Though we probably dissapointed the websurfer from Saudi Arabia who was looking for "wimp naked butt women photos" The government might cut of his, um, good hand if they found out what he was looking for.

We're planning to have our first gig since the fall in Feburary, with our new bassist and more than a few new songs. Bring along that hottie and let us scare 'em.

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Ghost Riders World

I dunno about the best song ever, but this page full of Ghost Riders in the Sky versions is a pretty definitive rundown of one of the best melodies in country and western. It was written by a park ranger, which seems appropriate.

My Xmas gift this year was a set of 78 RPM records from the 1940's; someone's lovingly organized collection, stored in 6 fake-alligator skin binders that look like photo albums. And that how LPs became known as albums I suppose- 'cause people were already storing their discs in these things. Whoever assembled the 70 or so records in this collection had three versions of Ghost Riders; the Sons of the Pioneers, the Vaughn Monroe and the Burl Ives version included on this page. There's no other folk stuff or anything similar to Burl Ives, so they must have really loved this song. Going through these records is gradually giving a glimpse into someone's life. For some reason, I have a hard time picturing a 1940s version of a record nerd into Country music- I think of those habits as being confined to jazz fans until the LP era.

Anyways, the page has a ton of great versions. I don't have a copy handy, but the Trashman did a excellent take that falls somewhere between the Ventures and the Dick Dale version. And then there's this rough take from Radio Birdman. Radio Birdman were an Australian band that stumbled across the punk sound in the mid-70s, before it was even called punk. They drew from instro surf as much as the Ramones took from the Beach Boys, and their best cuts have hardly dated at all.

Radio Birdman - Ghost Riders.

posted by bendy @ 1/03/2006 07:34:00 AM [permanent link]

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